Like most journalists, I am largely fueled by coffee – to the point that I do actually have my own cafetiere in my desk drawer at work – but getting a well made coffee in a cafe. is one of life’s great pleasures. Via the blog of Lantana, a lovely new cafe near our offices, comes this link to a map of the UK showing the best places to get good coffee. It’s particularly strong on London, listing excellent places such as Flat White (where the picture was taken), Milk Bar etc.

It's very black

Took the shot above yesterday at Tate Modern, and it’s the first one I’ve got from the iPhone’s camera that I’ve been really happy with. It’s from Tate’s excellent Mark Rothko exhibition…

Part 1: Overheard at Mark Rothko
Well, I say it’s excellent, but that’s if you like Rothko. If you don’t, it’s fair to say it’s not going to change your mind about him. It’s not like there’s a secret room of photo-realistic portraits or delicate watercolours in the middle of it. Despite the fact Rothko is one of the few 20th century artists to be widely known, plenty of people there seemed annoyed, offended and upset by what they found. Best exchange I overheard was a father leading his 10 year old son through the rooms, at pace, saying:

“Right, so the last room was the purple and black series. This one is the grey and black series. You see the difference?”

In close second:

(Man, looking at a massive canvas that’s absolutely covered in paint) “Well, it’s not really painting, is it?”

Part 2: The Camerabag iPhone app
You do get some interesting people at exhibitions. Families with babies that literally look like they’ve just come out of the hospital, perplexed French tourists and people who appear to have dressed solely to look like cliched art fans. It all makes for great photos, but unfortunately you have to contend with the gallery guards and the no photography rule. This meant the SLR was out, and the iPhone was in. I’ve written about the iPhone’s camera before, and as it’s not brilliant, I’ve tried out a few apps to see if they could improve it. By far the best has been one called Camerabag; it’s cheap, regularly updated (most of the bugs have now gone) and allows you to apply a series of filters to pictures you take with the camera. The idea is that the filters mimic certain camera styles – Lomo, Polaroid, monochrome etc – and it’s easy to use, and as you can see from the picture I took at Tate, allows you to get a bit more out of your phone pics. Well worth the £1.79 cost. For more, check out the Camerabag Flickr group.

Previously on the Wired Jester:
Art: Visiting Tate Britain’s Holbein exhibition.

Today I had to visit Harrods to buy some presents for relatives and friends I’ll soon be visiting overseas (don’t ask me why, but they all want Harrods tote bags); while there, I spotted this monstrosity – an oversized armchair made from minced up teddy bears.

Children walking past it were both fascinated and shocked. This is not surprising given that it looks like someone’s taken several armfuls of cuddly bears, chucked them in a rubbish compactor, mashed them up good and proper, and then stretched their furry little pelts over a threateningly large chair.

More pics of the monstrous Chair ‘O Bears after the jump.

Sunday: Went to see the Sleeping & Dreaming show at the Wellcome Collection on Euston Road. The entrance, complete with austere-posh cafe by Peyton and Byrne, is open and airy in a way that recalls the Great Court at the British Museum, but the overall effect is overall, nearer, newer, far less grand. Same goes for the gallery space itself: it’s not as crowded as other London museums seem to be at weekends, and the exhibition itself strikes a good balance between curios and context, and serious and silly. Well worth a look, especially as it’s free to get in.

Each issue of Custom PC is produced on a four week schedule, however, because of Easter and Christmas, every now and then we end up making a magazine in less time – these “three weeker” issues are always a bit mental, but the upside is that they create a few five week ones – and it’s the perfect time to take a bit of holiday. As a result, I’ve got all next week off, but since the Jesteress still has to go to work, I’m going to try being a tourist in my own city. So what’s on the agenda?

1. Going to see St. Paul’s. I ended up on a bus going past there a few days ago, and remembered I’ve never been inside. Time to set that straight.

2. The Hogarth show at Tate Britain. London’s big museums put on some fantastic shows, but they do tend to get very crowded, so seeing one while everyone else is at work will be fun. According to one of the freebie papers, there’s also a show at the Haunch of Venison by French artist Philippe Parreno; it contains video of a Victorian automaton, which I’d love to see.

3. Lots of reading. David Mitchell’s latest, Black Swan Green, has just come out in paperback, and I’ve also got Don Quixote on the go, plus a pile of other bits and pieces, including Michael’s Frayn’s The Human Touch, and one on the history of language entitled Empires of the Word.

4. Some more photography with my D40. According to the BBC Weather forecast, it’s going to be nice and sunny all week…

I’m currently spending my weekends house hunting, and roving far and wide in search of prey. Criss crossing the capital, I realised on Sundays, you can park on Waterloo bridge, so stopped the car and grabbed this shot of the Thames and the city.

How on earth/how in hell do you get tickets to Pecha Kucha in London? Twice in the last month I’ve had the e-mail come through, gone straight to the site to buy tickets only to find they’re all gone already. Very frustrating, because it looks really inspiring.Not that I think I’ll ever be invited to do a presentation at PK, but the Delicious Pecha Kucha presentation creator is still a very cool little toy. Give it your Delicious user name and it will create a PK presentation using your last 20 links. Explaining it to yourself is an interesting challenge – can a bunch of links that only have their place in time tying them together be made into a coherent presentation?

[link via Jean Snow]

[This was originally posted on Treacle Down, my London blog]

Finally made it to Tate Britain’s ‘Holbein In England’ exhibition, which I’ve been desperate to go to since the end of the Summer! It was brilliant, but because pretty much everyone is on holiday at the moment, absolutely packed.

This meant it was difficult to get up close to the drawings, but
sidling through the masses to get to the front was absolutely worth it;
Holbein’s preparatory sketches were the highlight of the show.
Beautiful and luminous, they manage the strange trick of revealing
their workings as drawings, while also seeming incredibly natural and
realistic, to the point that his later portraits have such inscriptions
as: ‘Add but the voice and you would wonder if his father or the
painter created him’. So you can look at a drawing, and see how Holbein
used pink paper to provide ready-made flesh tones, the way he used
chalks for shading of skin, particularly around the cheek and lips, and
the ink lines that he deployed to capture the eyes in incredible
detail, including tear ducts and eye-lashes – but what you will also
see is a face so real and human that he or she seems to occupy the same
space as you are in. This strange effect reminded me of Shakespeare (he
and Holbein were only a generation apart, with Holbein dying in the
1540s, and Shakespeare hitting his stride in the 1590s); Shakespeare’s
plays are full of reference to the illusions of drama and the stage
(and to the power of illusions and images throughout life), and yet by
acknowledging the limits of reality and ‘real life’, they seem only to
represent this world more truthfully.

The Holbein exhibition finishes on the 7th of January; however, the
National Gallery has his amazing painting, the Ambassadors in its
permanent collection. If you’ve not seen it, go as soon an possible. It
does not disappoint. John North’s ‘The Ambassador’s Secret’ is well
worth a read for background on Holbein, his times, and the painting.
And if you want to see what I mean about Holbein’s sketches, have a
look at the Tate’s site, here.

[Image: From the Tate site,
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543) George Nevill, 3rd Baron Bergavenny (about 1532–5)]

  Clue 10: 2012 – What are you going to compete in? 
  Originally uploaded by Sifter.

It’s near the end of the month, so that means I’m broke and prone to moaning about money. It is an unpleasant habit I’ll admit – though I think it’s better than, say, public nose-picking – and it’s a habit made all the worse by living in London. It’s all to easy to use the money thing as an excuse for not getting out, and so losing that sense of participation and ownership which really binds you to a place.

A couple of weekends ago, I managed to snag some free tickets to Shoot Experience’s ‘Shoot London’ event, something which was fun, and also really made me feel more connected and involved with London as a city, providing a neat antidote to my moape-ing tendencies.

Shoot Experience is a photographic treasure hunt; working in teams of four, you’re given a sheet of clues (10 for our event), and have a set amount of time to solve them and take one photo for each. Seven of the clues were ‘fixed’, in that they referred to a specific item or place, and three were ‘open’, thematic clues that you were free to illustrate as you pleased. At the end of the day, you submit your camera’s memory card to the judges, and there are prizes for each clue – pretty good ones, too, like books, watches, iPods etc.

It was a lot of fun. The weather was brilliant, which obviously helped, but the concept itself is a great one; there’s just enough competition to give the day some urgency and make you want to take good photos, and obviously, you’re in a group with friends, too. But it was the pinging around London I most enjoyed; it was exciting, even a bit liberating, because instead of skating along the surface, taking the tube to work, or just going to a shop, you were digging at the city, looking at it, really interacting with the place.

All our team’s pics are up on Flickr, here, and if you do a search on Flickr for ’shootexperience’, some of the other teams’ photos are there as well, and some coverage has appeared on other blogs. Shoot costs, but you do get prizes – there’s a Flickr group which does something similar for free (but without prizes).

My partner (hereafter the Jesteress!) was so impressed she’s even started working with Shoot Experience on their new website. A great day, and well worth a go – there’s plenty of future Shoot events coming up.

A few years ago, I went to UEA and did an MA, the Creative Writing One that is pretty well known and has turned up quite a few good writers (Kazuo Ishiguro etc). As student-writers, we were encouraged to keep notebooks with us at all times. Possibly this was to prepare the majority of us for glorious careers as skilled phone message takers/office dogsbodies rather than literary superstars, but the reason we were actually given is that it’s a good thing for a writer to be observant and sensitive to things going on around them, and to never let life go unnoticed. (This is a good thing for anyone, to be honest).

As a result, I have lots of little notebooks filled with bizarre fragments of sentences. I have saved text messages on my mobile phone for when I haven’t had a notebook with me (one of which reads ‘mobile phone screens in the dark, like stars, each a far off galaxy that wants to communicate’, which I like very much, but do not have a clue as to its meaning.) When it comes to online life, a notebook isn’t always practical, but Delicious has proven to be very handy. I add stuff to Delicious like crazy (full list of stuff is here) , but I don’t go over it too often. So I did that this lunch time, and added a few more links to the side panel.

All are worth checking out, but in particular, the London Review of Breakfasts is very good. They didn’t think much of Kalendar, a hip new cafe that’s opened close to my house which I’ve yet to check out, but the write up of Wetherspoons at Stansted Airport is very funny:

“[The breakfast is]… eaten quickly, and it’s surprisingly good although everything on the plate has the same texture: mushy and soft. It’s not Rembrandt, it’s not even Damien Hirst. It’s more Rolf Harris; simple, accessible and easily digestible.”

I’ve also finally added Yahoo’s Tom Coates’ blog, Plastic Bag, a favourite across the blogosphere which I’ve been checking every so often for ages, and Going Undergound, a blog about the Tube, which has a good post about the ‘voices of the tube’ here:

“Emma Clark who is the voice of the Victoria, Bakerloo and Central Line also gets a bit tired of hearing her voice but being Miss Mind the Gap had it’s
moments. In an brilliant interview with b3ta, she said: ‘You should have heard the multiplicity of ways they made me say ‘Marylebone.’ Mahree-lee-bone. M’ree-labbon. Mary Lob-on. It was bleeding hilarious.” She also admitted that there were some spoof recordings to pass the time “Me and the producer did record some spoof announcements after the LU suits had left the session, purely for our own amusement. Stuff like: ‘The man in the green coat is sitting in tramp’s piss.’ And ‘Passengers are reminded that reading ‘Captain Corelli’s f**king Mandolin’ is strictly prohibited.’ “