Our eighth number is live, packed with timely news of eurozone finances and a dispatch from a remarkable baseball World Series, some news of the timeless Tracey Emin, and a report on how actor Kurt Russell might have wanted his children to walk upside-down with shoes on their hands.
In any case, I (we) hope you enjoy our new issue.
- Matt (The London Report)
Contents
- Family hazy on details after Europe wrestles with eurozone crisis
- St Louis is the land of rally squirrels: A letter from the London Lynx
- A sort of twenty-first century King Midas: Tracey Emin and ‘Love is what you want’
- Brow-beaten, or Scarface
- ‘By that, of course, I mean “I’d like my offspring to put their shoes on their hands and walk upside-down”’
Family hazy on details after Europe wrestles with eurozone crisis
LONDON — A local husband and wife were unsure of the results from the day’s meeting of the European Commission, the group tasked with resolving a looming eurozone crisis.
‘Have you been following the news about the Euro today?’ the man asked. ‘I totally missed it, just had a busy day at work today.’
‘I didn’t see anything about it,’ the woman said.
The deal, which is summarised on the BBC News website, addresses Greek debt, a bailout fund and bank recapitalisation.
News of the deal pushed shares higher in European stock markets.
The husband, wife and their little boy had enchiladas for dinner.
St Louis is the land of rally squirrels: A letter from the London Lynx
This post originally ran on 26 October, in anticipation of the sixth game of the 2011 World Series. St Louis won that game, an ‘unbelievable’ contest. The following night, they won the seventh and decisive game.
This story ran sketch of the London Lynx, a (dethroned) rally squirrel and Albert Pujols is by Miranda Summers, graphic artist extraordinaire and editor of the world’s greatest sock-based blog.
Update
I have relocated to St Louis, a lovely city in the heart of the United States that is also at the epicentre of an explosion of squirrel enthusiasm. It seemed like a good fit for me — my life is guided by a strong sense of squirrel enthusiasm.
As you may recall, earlier in the month I signed off from my link-collecting duties at The London Report pledging to focus on eating squirrels, which is what many lynxes do. But in addition to my squirrel-based pursuits I’ve developed a hankering for post-season baseball, something the St Louis team has excelled at so far this season, thanks in part to rally squirrels. As I gather, the team and its fans are motivated to win by seeing a delicious squirrel.
I can relate. Ever since arriving in St Louis I’ve focused on squirrels — and, to my surprise, have made several friends among those delicious creatures. I’ve learned a lot from them. For starters, they feel like they’re misunderstood by the public, few things are as delicious as a ripe acorn, and sometimes they (squirrels) enjoy being eaten.
The World Series so far and in the future
Just a few days ago in the World Series’ third of a possible seven games, St Louis slugger Albert Pujols crushed three home runs in a single contest, tying Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson for the World Series single-game home run record. The Cardinals won that game, but have lost the next two. Right now, Texas leads the series, 3-2, and need just one more win to earn their first World Series title.
But that won’t happen. The Cardinals will prevail. As illustrated above, I predict that Pujols, perhaps the best player of his generation, will hit four home runs in tonight’s penultimate contest.
(Regarding the drawing above, in baseball terminology, ‘shagged’ means to collect baseballs that have been hit a great distance. I’ve not spoken to Albert Pujols but a number (0) of baseball superstars I’ve spoken to don’t know what ‘shagged’ means to British ears.)
Squirrels on the pitch
In addition to Pujols’ heroics, the Cardinals will win tonight thanks to rally squirrels.
What are rally squirrels? as far as I can tell, are regular squirrels with little tiny Cardinals uniforms on them.
The first such squirrel rocketed to fame earlier in the month after tantalizingly running across the St Louis Cardinals’ baseball field just before an opponent threw a pitch. Most rally squirrels seem to be toys, but there are also some real squirrels dressed in the handsome Cardinals jerseys.
At a nearby park, I saw several squirrels wearing tiny uniforms, playing games of baseball in the park with the aid of tiny bats fashioned from sticks at tiny acorns used as baseballs. I watched three innings of their contest — they’re better at baseball than I expected — before eating them.
A note about the rally squirrels’ taste: Usually after eating something I want to take a nap but rally squirrels taste as delicious as other, non-rallying squirrels, yet impart an urge to win a baseball game. So I challenged a game of amateurs to a match of baseball and I won by forfeit — the opposing teams ran away after seeing the determination in my eye or perhaps they were frightened of being so close to a lynx.
In any case, thanks partly to the rally squirrels, the Cardinals have advanced to the World Series, the best-of-seven championship of American baseball against the Texas Rangers, which, sadly, is an almost squirrel-free team. I don’t see how they’ve gotten this far.
A sort of twenty-first century King Midas: Tracey Emin and ‘Love is what you want’
Today, Jon Tindale reports on Tracy Emin’s recent retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. (Also read Jon’s earlier posts on gardening, and public protest and Gleeks’ sullen devotion.)
LONDON — By the time you encounter this review, Tracey Emin’s massive exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, ‘Love is what you want’, will have closed.
While it’s unusual practice to review an art exhibition after it closes, Emin’s work is regularly on display across England — an exhibition with Louise Bourgeois opened in Bristol this month — and by this stage in her career, most of us have encountered her work and have an idea of what to expect. She has a reputation of being an artist who wears her heart on her sleeve, and this career-to-date retrospective reads as an unapologetic autobiography of her frequently traumatic life.
Upon entering the exhibition, I was ready to discount everything Emin has done as a tiresome and adolescent cry of self-indulgence. And yet, it’s hard not to admire her sheer volume of ideas.
She’s a sort of twenty-first century King Midas but instead of gold, everything she touches turns to art. There are blankets, neon signs, films, furniture, mouse traps, embroidery, ash trays and sculpture. She even transformed the financial bonds market into art by allowing people to invest in her to the sum of £50 or £500 — another clever subversion and probably in hindsight a better investment than most of the stock market.
She rebels using craft blankets that include stories recounting her teenage isolation in the broken seaside resort of Margate. Emin claims to put writing at the heart of all her work but it’s hard to reconcile this when so much it is trite and adolescent. For example, this line from a blanket, ‘Whenever I see the sign KFC + Colonel Saunders I always think of home’, is supposed to be a poignant homage to youth. Yet could have easily have been written by a semi-literate twelve-year-old, rather than a self-indulgent artist.
In the same room, ‘Knowing my enemy’ is a full-scale, dilapidated pier of broken and fragile planks of wood. Its purpose is to tell a personal story of a safe place described by her father in a letter — a place unreachable from Emin’s broken pier. It also nicely encapsulates the broken and lost beauty of Margate and the increasingly common sight of broken piers in British seaside resorts.
I’d wanted to see the film of Emin being interviewed by her mother, but too many people were swarming around the screen. I settled for ‘Love is a strange thing’, a crude film of Emin being propositioned by a dog on a bridge. This a classic ‘girl meets dog, dog makes indecent proposal to girl, girl rejects dog, dog accuses girl of being judgemental’ sort of tale. It might be profound, but I doubt it.
And despite the downright awful watercolours on display, there’s no doubt the woman can draw. She is more than able to transform a few fragile lines into a vulnerable nude.
Emin is a one-woman factory of contradictions, recycling her experiences and everyday junk into Emin-themed memorabilia. Sometimes it’s fascinating, sometimes it’s downright awful. But she’s certainly resourceful and throws nothing away, appropriating everything from childhood plaster casts of busted limbs to her old comfort blanket. But it’s not always easy to see value in some of what she produces.
As Emin continues to plunder her traumatic life, one wonders what unpredictable twist Emin’s art will take next. It’s hard to say. A blood soaked donkey ride across Margate beach maybe? Or a lucrative deal with TopShop to sell underwear with motifs of menstrual stains perhaps? Or maybe she’ll pick up some brushes and knock out an old fashioned painting.
Brow-beaten, or Scarface
LONDON — An editor of The London Report, an online newsweekly heavily reliant upon hastily drawn sketches, is fine after accidentally himself in the forehead with a kitchen cabinet door.
The minor collision resulted in a small gash on his forehead. (A sketch of the injury and eyebrow is below.)
‘It was a complete surprise’, said the editor. ‘I was planning to open the cabinet, seemingly as I had 100 times before, for a glass of water. I didn’t even think I hit myself so hard but I realised a few seconds afterwards that I’d cut the skin just above my eyebrow’.
Upon reflection, the editor said that he probably was standing in a place other than where he usually stood when opening the cabinet. Also, he opens cabinets with more force than necessary.
The cut is expected to leave an impressive scar.
‘By that, of course, I mean “I’d like my offspring to put their shoes on their hands and walk upside-down”’
As I helped my twenty-three-month-old son get ready for daycare earlier this week, he picked up one of his shoes and put it on his hand. He got a big kick out of doing that.
It reminded me of a magazine cover I’d seen several years ago. It was Parade Magazine, which is a general-interest magazine that appears in the chunky Sunday editions of newspapers across the U.S. (and possibly in other countries).
The issue my son’s shoe-on-hand reminded me of was one that featured the actor Kurt Russell. On its cover — which I tried to approximate above but failed to accurately draw Mr Russell’s face — he smiled as he leaned against a fence. The headline was ‘I wanted to do things differently’.
I was amazed by that title and I figured that it meant something genuinely different, like he and his partner Goldie Hawn had taught their children to put shoes on their hands and walk around upside down — not just as a trick but as their normal way of moving around their home, school, and everywhere else.
Then I realised that that headline meant something more normal about raising a family in Hollywood. That’s a fine pursuit but it would have been a much more interesting story if he had gone with the shoes-on-hands approach and really done things differently.
This week when I pulled the shoe off of my son’s hand and slipped it onto his foot, I realised that, now that he’s almost two and accustomed to walking upright, it was probably too late for me ‘to do things differently’ with him.
