Snappy Snaps have finally stumbled upon the secret of all marketing. A stupid dog in a hat. Nice one, you photographic specialists, you.

Argggh. It’s all so wrong

Walking along the streets of Soho of a Wednesday night after a sterling Lebanese dinner, I was reminded of the depiction of Greenwich Village in Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’. The main streets (Greek, Frith, Dean, and Wardour) which stretch away from Old Compton Street like tines on a fork, are festooned with sultry lights of myriad colours.Curiously, Soho is a lot less cluttered than I remember it being a decade ago. The Village in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ was filmed largely on a soundstage (although partly on location in London including Soho strangely…) and perhaps this is what makes me make the link between the two locations. There is something stage-like about the restless avenues – as though the pavement has been set for the playing out of bizarre dramas. Every shopfront offers a different sideshow for your delectation.

I have always been struck by the strange adjacence of Soho’s opulent refinement and its meretricious abandon. You can look into a dazzling eatery, marvel at the fortune of its guzzling patrons. Then you notice that, but a metre away, the neighbouring establishment is a simple yet ominous door with a hand-written sign advertising: “model – young, curvy, and sexy” followed by an arrow pointing towards a rickety set of stairs leading down to the underworld. I imagine the girl at the end of the tunnel is being falsely advertised. It’s going to be “old, staunch, and angry”.

Anyway, we were strolling down the glittering streets last night, enjoying the wafts of espresso and the champagne cackles from the bars when we noticed this cool shop which was still peddling its wares at 9:30.  Its walls were dressed with antlers, clothes for aspiring nu-rave bands, and rakish interior-designers, whoever the fuck that might include. Coincidentally, they had a replica of the penis-statue from Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’: a nice touch by the proprietors.

As I walked in, I was aware that I was about to judge the shop by the music it was playing. Unfair, but inevitable. I was taken aback by how avant-garde the choice was. Dispersed chuckling and snappy interjections from a digitized male voice. I was about to aske the sales-assistent about his eclectic music-taste when I realized that he was busy chatting to his mate on Skype, which was being piped over the shop’s loudspeakers. Close thing.

Things took a pleasant if absurd turn when we were having a natter with the shopkeep. He brought his skype-mate into the conversation, who seemed to have some detailed knowledge about a certain pair of shoes we were perusing [we were actually sniffing it, because apparently it smelled sweet like a My Little Pony]. I could not tell if the man on the other end of the computer was bullshitting, though, because he was clearly very stoned.

Over the miracle of ip video telephony, he proceeded to show off his latest discovery – a perfume dispensed by an aerosol which stained you bright blue for about ten seconds, then faded to invisible. At that point I wondered if I had become stoned. Somehow. Maybe it was sniffing the shoes. He stood there spraying himself temporarily bright blue all over. I remarked that he must smell incredibly powerful. He said that some people pass out because they get so carried away with the spraying.

Anyway, I would reccomend Kokon To Zai on Dean Street for its thrilling shoes and conversation.

After more strolling, party-location scouting, and bumping into a friend of mine wearily awaiting an exceptional hamburger in Garlic and Shots, we caught the tube home.

I used to love Soho, then I grew sick of it, then I feared it, then I liked it again, now I love it again. Like Kubrick’s vision of Greenwich, it is a dreamlike place of weird frolics and fantasies, tingling incitements to the id. A fine place to sleepwalk.

Check out this natty graf I found in the seedy back alleys of notorious Chiswick:

Text reads:

…And so his liver slipped away, ever distrusting,

He felt he would one day make his mark.

A prince of aesthetics, a creature

Of slim frame

Full of endorphin.

… BEHOLD JESUS

Make of this what you will. I instantly decided that I quite liked it. You can probably work out a lot about the author of this apocryphal text by the fact he uses block capitals (be they small and messy), aggressively crosses out his mistakes (wants to conceal his mistakes, and boldly applies the word ‘aesthetics’ in graffiti, spelled correctly. As we all know, all proper graffiti has to have spelling mistakes and references to private parts (eg ‘My cock smels of apples’ – see critique by Quentin Bumboy in Viz magazine some years ago).  However, all we get is internal organs. I think the ‘liver’ lets it down a bit. Perhaps ‘foreskin’ would have been more apposite. The author is clearly not worried about pushing the proverbial envelope.

The prophet must have had this particular wall in mind – it is black like a school blackboard, so he must have especially made sure he had some chalk in his back pocket before he left the house. Unless he was transporting some for an unknown reason and was spontaneously inspired. Was the school reference intended? If he had planned this graf, I would not be surprised if he had pre-written the message, which makes me feel he does not have much else on. Says the guy writing the blog about it.

Is Christ risen as a nu-rave trendy? Has he taken too much pill and his liver gone for a walk? Is he still Jewish? Is it hard being called Jesus in this day and age, or does it help him blend in with the Hoxtonites all the more?

I think if anything have proved that this is a work of deep complexity and originality, shocking us into action with the morbid grasp of our own zombie-ish conformity. It therefore must be a Banksy.

I’m not so sure that soft cream marble was the right choice of material for the floors of the spangly new toilets at Westfield. Lino would have at least been cheap to replace when stained brown with bladder drippings. Yuck.

[Is anyone else alarmed by my proclivity for sanitational photography? It is a bad habit, methinks]

So the biggest shopping centre in Europe has opened on the doorstep of many a bemused West Londoner. We all knew it was coming. I loved the cranes hovering over the building site for so many years. But nothing could have prepared me for the epic scale of the place when I visited in the flesh today. It is vast. It is opulent. It is bizarre.

It is also heaving with just about everyone. And that is perhaps the most bizarre thing about it. Surely we are in the onslaught of an economic collapse? Not according to this lot:

The Westfield has a lot which commends it to shoppers. It has every sort of shop from a Valentino boutique to a Halifax; it is bright and airy; the shops all have very high ceiling heights which really make it feel quite spacious and less claustrophobic; there is an endless choice of places to eat; all in all it is likely to make good on the centre’s backers’ hopes that Westfield will be the most impressive shopping location in Europe.

But it is so surreally indulgent, so staggeringly vast that it must be a grand experiment to see what happens when you give consumers everything they want. And those consumers were certainly biting off all they could chew. A momentum of buying ran through the mob.  You could sense in them the thrill of the purchase (taking the place of the thrill of the hunt in the modern world).

But this is not the future. This gargantuan shopper’s heaven is a monument to the economic mindset of yesteryear. It was conceived, planned, and constructed during the boom years when everyone seemed to believe they could have everything for nothing, that they could borrow five times their salary to buy a house and get some spending money on top, that they could mortgage their houses and spend the money on luxuries intending to pay it off as house prices rose higher; credit card and debt consolidation companies alike did a roaring trade; the bankers laid down stomach-churning bets on the international casino with money they did not think about eventually having to repay; people massed up enormous debts on snowballing 0% a.p.r. credit card transfers; building societies joined the mortgage rush and Gordon Brown borrowed as much as he possibly could either a. to make public services look well funded or b. to put the British economy in a desperately weak position.

The recessional momentum has not caught up with us yet. We are not feeling the pinch properly even though we know it is coming. And in a few months time when the dark times have started to set in, what will come of the Westfield centre? Will it be deserted or will credit cards flash out of wallets and shine forth upon those crowded malls? Will we have built  Jerusellem in the Shepherd’s dark Satanic bush?

Maybe it won’t look like such a good investment then. Who knows? From the sheer bloody-minded faith in credit-fuelled consumption on display at Westfield today, maybe the British public will spend its way out of recession. Hmmm. 

A lot of the locals would be happy to see the whole place fall into a great chasm. At least the view would be better than looking on to a big fat corporate wall. Look at that banner (H&F is the local council). You have to feel sorry for them…

London is an aspirational place.

Londoners live tough lives, I would say. Costs are high. Public transport ineptitude is high. Tension is high. We have a lot of civil servants on our cases, from commissioned traffic wardens to bicycle police. We are squeezed for space. Houses are expensive. Food is expensive. Beer is really expensive.

But Londoners for the most part do not give a shit. Brits and foreigners alike flood here en masse year after year, raising the temperature even higher. Why? Because the streets of London, though we scoff at the sentiment with supersubtle irony, are paved with gold.

We desire so much of our lives in Britain. London is the ground zero of desire. Of course the dream comes in many different flavours. Perhaps one wants tabloid celebrity and to live in a fat mansion in Hampstead or Chelsea. Perhaps, if one feels they are above commercialism, one wants to be adored by broadsheets and live in a ramshackle bohemian mansion in Stoke Newington. If New York is the Big Apple, then London is the Fat Pie, and everyone wants a slice. It is probably an eel pie.

Londoners spend so long crammed inside small flats dreaming of expansive gardens and parties to have in them. Lacking an estate, the many parks of our fair capital take the brunt of our exterior relaxations. And when the sun comes out it is fucking war.

Some Londoners regard a nice spot in their local park as a subclause in the tenancy contract of their home. They do pay an extra £500 a year just to be five minutes closer to the park, so perhaps they have a point. People can get a bit tetchy over space in some parks.

Parsons Green used to be a pretty quiet sort of place. If you watch the old west London police dramas from 20-30 years back, you will see Fulham as a somewhat deprived working-class backwater. Now the area is full of blond young lads and lasses looking for a taste of the good life, hoping to follow in their parents’ footsteps up the golden ladder. Parsons Green addresses are a big part of that good life. If you live there you have on-your-doorstep access to the wealth of exorbitant cafés, outrageously priced gastro pubs, deliciously good schools, and of course the rolling expanse of Parsons Green itself. Well, it is actually quite a small park, but this fact seems to have escaped the hordes of sunbathers and boozers who descend upon it as soon as there is a hint of a shadow. [I have to add that there is a poncy pub on the edge of the Green,  known unofficially as the Sloany Pony, which sells mediocre grilled burgers to park-goers at extortionate prices. I am sure they use organic meat.] 

There is of course nothing you can say against people looking for a nice bit of greenery  and fresh air. But this park becomes as crowded as a nightclub. It is about as peaceful and relaxing as a visit to casualty. People just don’t want to miss out. 

Free festivals cash in on this impulse to seek out big outdoor spaces. I have myself attended two of these this Summer: The RISE festival (Finsbury Park) and Stokefest (Clissold Park). They are fun but perhaps could do with being a little bit less completely overrun.

When you think about it life is going to be tough, or at least take a lot of effort, in a city where people even relax intensely. 

Anyway, here is a list of things I have seen people doing in parks this summer:

1. drinking from a leather hat

2. laughing purple as their dogs fought brutally

3. giving away holy books

4. simulating sex

5. singing Oasis improbably loudly. It really was impressively voluminous

6. playing cricket with a traffic cone and a (half full) can of beer

7. lying down, drinking, talking, and generally relaxing

8. flyfishing (see below)

I think the black plastercast completes the image nicely.