Weeds

I am sitting right now in one the first places I ever had the chance to eat out in London when i moved in. The first couple of weeks I was not leaving in my current house. I was in a youth hostel in Pimlico, in Belgravia Rd, very close to Victoria Station. This is it, Pimlico Fresh again, and I just witnessed on the funnies things of the week.

I was seating by the window, when a couple of Spanish guys were looking for a place to sit, and quietly I made them some room as I was perfectly understanding every word they were saying. But when the place emptied a bit, I sat in the communal tables to have my space, and let's be honest, to have a nearby socket in which to plug by phone as it drains of battery for tethering the internet connection to the iPad.

Two friends seated in the table in front of me, but one of them, his voice was disturbingly, as being the living embodiment of Darth Vader, if it wasn't for a) him being a hipster and b) blonde. I want to think he had a massive party last night and as a result, his voice has the deepest darkest pitches I have ever heard in my life, not counting Bon Jovi's vocoder, but never mind.

A group of middle age women siting besides me just called one of the waitress attention: 'Excuse me, excuse me! There is a very strong smell of Marihuana coming from that corner!!!'. The whole cafe just looked at the corner where two women were having their own conversation. All eyes were on them but they realise they   were talking about the actual corner. Amazed, the one facing the public, looks at all of us confused and waving some jazz hands she replies with an accent: 'Hey, I am Dutch but I'm not smoking!' and the whole cafe laughs effusively.

By the way, the couple sitting in front of me just asked for a piece of carrot cake that has more icing than cake, but still, I'm tempted to put my most innocent face and ask them for a scoop of it to try. It really looks amazing.

Darth Vader has baby pink socks.

After a quick look from the counter, two of the waitress went outside to examine the source of said intoxicating substance. Left, right, they don't see anything. And all of a sudden, an invisible wave of the allucinogic plant slaps us in our faces, like somebody would be right in front of us smoking. The group of ladies, still horrified about the fact that somebody has smoking a spliff near the premises cannot understand how the source has not been found yet.

But I started the morning running away from the Jubilee festivities. I didn't miss last year Kate and William's wedding, pretty entertaining environment at Hyde Park, but this barely springy weather plus the constant threats from TfL to avoid the public transport in zone 1 at all cost has really put me off this year. I considered attending todays parade, but for the sake of a potential cold and somebody stepping on my feet, I still headed south to Sloane Sq to the Saatchi Gallery. Almost a dozen of galleries free of cost kept me entertained while the hordes of people started clearing the tube, on time to my way home.

The photographies from Katy Grannan were impressives. Are the ones which are portraying the whole Out of Focus exhibition. Brilliant. 

Heartbroken boyfriend maybe? (Marlo Pascual)

Octopus Face (Yumiko Utsu)

Good Old Lizzie (Chris Levine)

And the canvases from Ana Tzarev, a Croatian artist. It was not really the pieces themselves what I liked, but physically them. It all consisted on different flowers in big canvases using big blobs of oil paint, so my engineering and stingy mind thought inmediately: what is the cost of each of these pieces, just by their paint cost? I am pretty sure that is a fortune, plus imagine the finger pain after squeezing all those thousands of tubes. Let's make an estimation:

Winton Oil Paint tubes: 6 GBP average

Dimensions of each blob: 1x1x1 cm (approximate) 

Volume of each blob: 1 cm3 = 1 ml

Number of blobs in 10x10 cm of canvas = 100 blobs = 100 ml

Dimensions of canvas: 2x2m = 200x200 cm = 40,000 blobs.

Let's not be exaggerated and round that to 20,000 blobs. 

Still, that equals 20,000 ml.

Each tube is 200 ml, therefore, it is needed 100 tubes of paint.

100 tubes x 6 GBP = 600 pounds worth of paint (+ price of canvas).

Amazing. I loved it. 

Massive -undetermined material- flower in the middle of the room. Not that I would put it on my living room, but big enough to be amazing.

Then I arrived at this very disturbing room, (I don't really remember which floor), a display by Richard Wilson kept me for 5 long seconds ridiculously confused. There was a very strong smell of crude oil, due to some of the parts proceeding from old oil installations. It was very weird, it was an empty room and some kind of channel on the left. Looked like the room was filled with water, dark water, or maybe oil because of the smell. Then I thought it was a very deep room, and in the middle, they had laid a mesh to avoid visitors falling into the pit. And finally I realised that it was a giant mirror and what I saw reflected it was the actual ceiling.

After feeling completely stupid for taking me so long to realise about it, I took a photo of myself to celebrate my discovery (and left the room quickly to avoid intoxication with the crude fumes).

Hello!!!

Disturbing but very cool.

Not to bore anybody, I think Saatchi was great, I liked almost everything. Excuse my incompence to write about art, it is really not my field.

I hope I still find some other little unexplored gems around the city soon. But that is going to be another story.