September, 2010

  1. None of this nonsense

    September 13, 2010 by ms. xandra

    I do not know what is going on with coffee in this country.   Half of the coffee shops don’t have just plain old coffee, only espresso-based drinks.  Ok fine.  But if you order a cappucino, you get a milkshake.  Ok, maybe not a milkshake, but something really milky.  Too milky.  And if you order a latte, you get a pint of hot milk with a teaspoon of espresso in it (basically).  And then there is this thing called a flat white, which is clearly bullshit because supposedly it is a cross between a cappucino and a latte, and supposedly it has less foam than either except that it also supposedly has more foam than either and it’s from Australia or New Zealand or something, and there are all these articles from the Guardian from, like, two years ago, that are all like “Flat whites!  They’ve arrived!  From the antipodes!  The coffee drinker’s coffee!  For those fed up with milky cappucinos, this is the drink for you!” except that the flat white is milkier than a cappucino and, as Tanya has pointed out several times, it is really just a PROPERLY MADE LATTE.

    So I have been drinking flat whites, even though they also have TOO MUCH MILK largely because I want to solve the mystery.  And I am no closer to solving the mystery because HERE IS WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED YESTERDAY:

    I was on my way to a Vintage Clothing Fair and popped into a Costa to get a coffee for the walk.  I ordered a flat white for investigative purposes.  And the barista handed me a cup of steamed milk.  Full stop.  Just milk.  With no espresso in it.  So I was like “shouldn’t there be coffee in this?”  and he was like, “oh,” and made it again.

    So later this week I am going to go to Flat White, which is the coffee shop in Soho that started all of this nonsense and I am going to order a flat white, a cappucino, and a latte and figure this out once and for all.  I am putting my money on the possibility that I will just get three cups of the exact same thing.

    OH, to be back in Los Angeles where I can get a tasty cup of hand-poured coffee delivered to me by a surly hipster in a funny vest!

    PS:  This post is tagged CTHULHU because obviously the flat white is the beverage of choice of the devourer of worlds.

    Category Coffee, CTHULHU | Tags: | 1 Comment

  2. Look! I remembered this post I wrote about Westminster Abbey five days ago!

    September 13, 2010 by ms. xandra

    Oh what a day, what a day! What an excellent day!

    I am really trying to pack it in while I’m here. Mostly, my days look like this: I get up, I have breakfast (you get to pick six items from the buffet – but what counts as an item is hilariously inconsistent. 1 item = bowl of cereal with milk. 1 item = piece of cheese. 1 item = slice of salami.  1 item = 2 hash browns [thus making it possible to go up to the buffet and order 12 hash browns, please, which I have yet to try] BEST ITEM = Pain au chocolat. Another consequence of the 6 items rule is that my hoarding instinct kicks in and I get down to the breakfast room and I’m like “MUST GET SIX ITEMS” regardless of how hungry I actually am. So, while at home, breakfast would probably be yogurt, granola, maybe a banana, here breakfast ends up being yogurt, granola, banana, apple, pain au chocolat, bacon. And so I never end up eating all of this, but I hate wasting things so I bring them upstairs to my room “for later,” and have thus begun curating an ever-expanding collection of increasingly wrinkly apples on my desk), and then after eating my six things, it’s off to the library we go, where I either listen to a few hours worth of oral histories, or I dig around in British music magazines from the 60s, where I have discovered FASCINATING THINGS, like, apparently the British thought the Temptations were a girl group until they actually came to the UK in 1965? I have seen them referred to thusly in two different reviews. Also, Beatles coverage is wonderfully Ringo-centric, which makes sense, because, as much as I joke about Ringo being the best Beatle, he actually was the most popular one and got the most fan mail. Ringo Starr quote of the day, from a 1965 article about his recent marriage, and he mentions that his wife can’t cook: “But I can cook corn flakes!”

    Anyhow, it is pretty easy to get completely sucked into all of this and turn into a hermit woman unless I set myself a time limit (which is necessary for sanity) and so around 1-2pm I usually leave the library and spend the afternoon adventuring, and today I had the best adventure of all!

    I went to Westminster Abbey, even though I had decided that I wasn’t going to go to Westminster Abbey because it costs a resentment-inducing fifteen quid. But then! I read about the Westminster Abbey Undercroft Museum, which is very small, and contains an exhibit of funereal effigies. So, statues and wax figures of dead monarchs that were made to have, like, standing around at the funeral service and afterwards. Which is weird. Really, really weird. But awesome. So I went and saw the funereal effigies of various monarchs, and then I went and saw their real tombs, because they are all there, in the Abbey, just kind of scattered around in no particular order whatsoever, stacked on top of each other and in the walls and in the floor and, let me tell you, TLC needs to do an episode of Hoarders there. Can you imagine it? TLC host: “Why do you have all of these tombs?” British Monarchy: “Look, I just really like tombs, ok?”   TLC:  “I think you are collecting these tombs to distact you from your own emotionally bereft existence.”   So I got to be in the proximity of the mortal remains of Richard the 2nd and Edward the 3rd and Elizabeth the 1st and her estranged sister Mary, who is, perversely, buried in the same casket as she is with an inscription to the effect of “divided in life by ideology, but together FOREVER IN DEATH!!!!” but with less caps lock and exclamation marks.

    There are also various famous people in the Abbey, so I got to see the resting place of my old pal George Handel, the only classical composer other than Liszt who I can still stand after surviving a Bachelor of Music degree. And Chaucer’s there, and Dickens, even though Dickens didn’t want to be buried there because it’s such a ridiculously pompous institution of the monarchy and the establishment. But apparently Queen Victoria wanted him there, and thus he is there because she was Queen Victoria.

    There are also all of these little memorials to people who aren’t actually buried there but who make the British Empire look good. The MOST WONDERFUL ONE OF ALL, was Noel Coward’s, which read “Noel Coward, something something about him being witty (I paraphrase), BURIED IN JAMAICA.” Good for you, Noel Coward.   Of course you’re buried in Jamaica.   I’d wanna be buried in Jamaica, too. I hope you’re buried in Jamaica, pickled in rum.

    The biggest difference I’ve found between churches over here (ie: Europe, UK) and back home is that the churches back home aren’t actually full of dead people. Here, they are. They’re in the floor. And they’re in the walls. And (in Catholic churches, mostly) sometimes there a little bits of dead person on display (this one church in Antwerp had a scalp of St. Something or other. And this other church had a weird cabinet full of tiny glass windows, and when you got close, it turned out that behind each tiny glass window was, like, a bone scraping or a hair or a tooth from dozens of different saints). I like to remind myself of this when I’m walking around these places, because I find it so novel and interesting. “Right now the walls around you are full of peoples’ BONES!” “All of these tourists are walking on top of DEAD WEALTHY 15th CENTURY LORDS!” I say these things to myself, in part to see if I can freak myself out, but also because I’m weirdly captivated by this closeness with death that we don’t seem to have anymore. I feel like people used to die in much more vivid, frequent ways than they currently do in the Western world, and now we treat death with kid gloves. But the Abbey was such a weird monument to the dead, and you’re literally surrounded by them, so I find it impossible to just think of it as a site of religious devotion, because it’s much more a site of weird, fetishistic and extravagant acts of remembrance on the part of the ostentatiously wealthy. I wonder what the queen thinks about when she goes to Westminster Abbey. She was crowned there, and generations of her ancestors are buried there, and (I don’t know if she’ll be buried there, because I don’t know that they bury people there anymore but) I’m sure they’ll have her funeral there. Maybe she just tries not to think about it.

    And so then, I went to another church (St. Martin in the Field) and had lunch in the crypt! Like you do. But this one was less creepy because it wasn’t full of gaudy tombery and bits of it have been converted into gallery space and it’s been modernized in lovely ways, and so as I sat in the crypt eating my bread and butter pudding and drinking my Victorian lemonade, I imagined what it must have been like when people hid down there during the blitz! Because they must’ve. I also think about that every time I take the tube. The London Underground is far more deep, and closed-in and rabbit warreny than any subway system I’ve ever used so even just tromping through it can be pretty evocative.

    Anyhow, lunch in the crypt was great, and then I walked to Buckhingham Palace to visit my head of state and passed the Canadian High Commision on the way, which, dissapointingly, didn’t have a Tim Hortons in it because I was envisioning a fabulous scene in which I bought a cup of shitty coffee and enlisted a dapper British lad to take a picture of me drinking it in Trafalgar Square in front of Nelson’s column, because that would have been SO FUNNY, don’t pretend it wouldn’t have been.

    And then I bought a pair of sensible shoes because I completely wore through the sensible shoes I brought for walking around in and they’ve been starting to give me a back ache. And EVERYBODY here has these fantastic little oxfords! And so obviously I had to get fantastic little oxfords so that I can be as chic as a Londoner.

    I also need to tell you about: the Dennis Severs House, which was amazing and lovely, but difficult to put into words; Maison Bertaux, which was also amazing and lovely; and umbrella stores.

    Category Uncategorized | Tags: | No Comments

  3. Exceptionally wise things I have heard British children say:

    September 11, 2010 by ms. xandra

    On life goals:  “Mummy, if I become a really, really, really good ballerina, I’ll be able to leap over the River Thames!”

    At the Tate Modern, on the merits of contemporary art:  “Grandma, why do you like these things?”

    Category Uncategorized | Tags: | No Comments

  4. Current state of affairs (or: wither the humble jalapeno?)

    September 11, 2010 by ms. xandra

    Aaron:  I went to Jons* the other day looking for rakia** andthey had some!

    Alexandra:  Neat!  I went to Tesco*** the other day looking for salsa and they didn’t have any!

    Aaron:  It’s probably just as well.

    Also, I forgot to tell you the story of the time Tanya and I thought we were going dancing a couple of weeks ago, only we got to the bar and NOBODY WAS DANCING, and the DJ was being That Guy, The One Who Only Plays Ultra-Obscure Northern Soul and Ignores the Fact that the One Time He Played a Supremes Song Everybody Actually Got Up and Danced, and I ordered us a margarita at the bar because it was listed prominently on their cocktail menu.  It took two bartenders almost 10 minutes to create this margarita, while consulting a recipe book, and then they served it in a martini glass rimmed with table salt.  Oh well.

    *LA-based grocery store chain that carries lots of Asian and Eastern-European food products

    **Balkan liqueur, hard to find outside of Balkans

    ***Major British grocery store chain

    Category Adventure, Food | Tags: | No Comments

  5. Things that I like about London!

    September 3, 2010 by ms. xandra

    1.  Secret hidden wonderfulness:  Today I went to Notre Dame de France, a French Catholic  church just off of obnoxious, awful Leceister Square and in it were amazing murals painted by Jean Cocteau!  It was tranquil and lovely and the murals were strange and beautiful.

    2.  Omg shoes:  There is a Vivienne Westwood shoe retrospective in the basement gallery at Selfridge’s and I went today and it was fantastic.  But I am never going to Oxford street again because it is obnoxious and awful.

    3.  Flowers:  So many lovely gardens to hide from the obnoxious, awful crowds!  Tanya and I basked in Regent’s Park yesterday because London is having what seems to be its annual allotment of sunny days RIGHT NOW so I am going to take advantage while I can.

    4.  Theatre:  Tanya and I saw many a play!  We saw the twenty thousand and somethingth performance of The Mousetrap and we saw the 39 Steps and we saw The Habit of Art at the National, prefaced by a picnic with Pimm’s, and I’m going to see the very first play written by a lady ever to be staged at Shakespeare’s Globe, which is horrifying.  I couldn’t decide if I should go out of principle (because, on principle, I support attending things made by girls and women because attendance at such events will ideally lead to more productions of things by girls and women) or if I should refuse to go out of principle (because how offensive is your theatre that it waits until 2010 to stage something by a woman???)  but ultimately decided to go, partly out of principle, and partly because the show (Bedlam, by Nell Leyshon)  sounds very, very good.

    5.  The British Library:  I was so terrified that the librarians would be mean to me and not let me listen to the recordings I wanted to hear and would deny me a reader pass and that I’d have to have a sad month of doing nothing but eating tea and crumpets and drinking warm beer, alone.  But they are all lovely and helpful and I have been getting so much done!  Thank goodness.  And also the library cafe has excellent scones.

    Category Adventure | Tags: | No Comments