london

so london was great. flying to luton is annoying because the flight takes 40 minutes but then the bus ride into the city takes 80 minutes. staying with my uncles was enjoyable; it was good to see them again. mostly i just walked around the city and stopped at a few cool things. i saw most of the tourist highlights. i saw all of the cultural artifacts the british have stolen from other parts of the world in the british museum (way to go, guys). the tate modern was cool, with some impressive contemporary stuff including a tall room with an installation by anselm kiefer. i am almost getting tired of impressionist/early modern art being so revered and holy. it is tiring to squint at pissaros and cubist picassos for so long. there is other shit out there. the pop art exhibit to me was trash except for damien hirst's twins piece. they also had a john baldessari retrospective that blew me away. he was expressing a lot of ideas and manipulations in art that i like too. where the pop art exhibit was a packed mass of humanity, the baldessari galleries were quiet and empty and with much better work. i walked around camden, southwark, chelsea, battersea, soho, hyde park, regents park, hampstead, canary wharf, and the bank street area. accidentally stumbled onto james stirling's poultry street post-modern ship building. saw the AA (wasn't impressed). walked across abbey road. walked through neave brown's alexandra road housing development. had an amazing lunch at a vegetarian south indian restaurant in soho. enjoyed walking through hampstead heath at dusk with my uncles, having a pint at a bar where karl marx used to get wasted, and then dinner with my uncles' international friends. i know it was a good trip because at the end of each day my feet would throb because of all the kilometers i had consumed. it was a fantastic weekend. again, check the flickr for all the photos.

in other news i am getting ready for my mid-term presentation in my studio so i'll be putting in the hours now.

also found a practically free fare to barcelona in december, so i'll be visiting for about 4 days. the fare was 0.02 euro roundtrip but there was a 10 euro debit card processing fee making for a grand total price of 10.02 euro. it will cost about 3 times that just to get to the airport in eindhoven. oh well.

last night i went to a hip-hop open mic night and concert in utrecht with my friend sander. it was alright; the main rapper was some guy named BLS from LA. the median age for the dudes in the house band was probably 17 and they played simple hooks like 50 cent's find-me-in-the-club-bottle-full-of-bub beat and the first bar of "people make the world go round." some decent ableton-enabled hip-hop production too that was a mix of prefuse 73 and more ambient clouddead beats. anyway it was fun to see hip-hop in a basement club in a small european city. ok, now back to work.