The Tube Speaks to Me: Subway Posters of London

I am not a copywriter, but I am a student of language, particularly the stuff that conducts people through everyday life.* So it is one of my favorite things, when traveling in a country that mostly speaks the same language that I do**, to see how the culture talks to its people. And one of my favorite ways of gauging this is through the way that a country’s ads try to reach and manipulate people.

The London Underground commissioned a cartoonist with an achingly cute style to illustrate some common subway travails and how one might deal with them. (My friend who lives there, however, did not think very highly of being told in doggerel verse how to handle being a person of the most minimal self-responsibility.) I love the art, even if I do think it’s unfortunate that people were getting dehydrated on the tube often enough that a budget was created to be remind them that water is helpful.***

On a hot train, Alice felt so low / Faint and shaky from head to toe / She thought, "Next time I oughta / take along a bottle of water."

I also think that ‘stache here is being extremely brave. I’d like to think I’d be a super helpful person in this situation, but it’s not just a culture of familial ties that cause things like this to happen.

While we were there, there was also a series of posters entreating subway riders to investigate the exotic within the city’s boundaries.

If we hadn’t had such a short stay in London (marred by a wayward bag, courtesy of British Airways), I might’ve been swayed by this one.

Cartoon guy in red, hugging an alpaca for all it's worth

I’ve actually touched an alpaca, and I know it’s not quite like this, but I still want to believe it’s like nestling your eager little face into a nest of clouds.

And then there’s this one, which seems like it may be a trap. I’ve seen Torchwood. I know better than this.

London wants you to board a UFO. Tell London no thanks.

In researching this poster series, I found that you can buy these alongside the many, many other posters sold through the London Transport Museum. Meaning that, if I can free up a tiny bit of wall space, I very well may end up looking at this every day. By the way, if someone can tell me what an iconic Denver dinner would entail, I would be very interested to hear it.

The subways are lined with ads, of course. Posters for music festivals with headliners I’d never heard of, ads featuring celebrities I was only vaguely familiar with due to the lingering aftereffects of being a teenage anglophile, and brands that seem too well represented for them to have stayed so firmly on the other side of the Atlantic. I was content to let them blur into noise, taking them in as I could. I only took a picture of this one.

This freaky ad comparing a bleeding eye to gums that bleed when you brush your teeth. Augh!

And to that copywriter, I just say… point. I have no argument there.

Which is, I suppose, successful advertising wherever you are.

*One title for this: UX writer. Need one? Talk to me!

**And it’s a thing I lose out on when I travel in a country where English isn’t the first or second or third language used in official communications. I have a real love of handwritten signs on store doors and bus stop closure signs. However, it does force me to focus on other things, and I get a different picture of a place because of it.

***Particularly while on a continent that so thoroughly eschews the public water fountain. But that’s a tale for another day.

People Who Are Not Having a Good Time at Bruges’ Memling Museum

It’s easy to go to Europe and get total Beautiful Antiquities fatigue. Between the towns and cities full of centuries-old churches, museums stocked with the riches that come with living in an old country, and the availability of these things to willing American tourists, you can become a particular kind of jaded. Truth: I realized on this trip that I actually am not all that interested in visiting old churches. They are beautiful, yes. And if there’s a certain local mythology going on, as there was in both Bruges and Brussels (more on that later), you learn about another aspect of the place you’re staying more viscerally than you could otherwise. But when I see ornate churches, lavished with riches and made with decades and centuries of labor from the faithful, I only see ruined lives and bent souls, both in the past and now. All the carved wood, stunning sculpture, and ancient gilding in the world can’t get me past that.

But the Memling Museum… that is a different matter.

The Memling Museum collects art, history, and medical paraphernalia from across the 800-year history of this hospital/nunnery/cradle of fine Flemish art.

I promise this makes sense.

Hans Memling was an adopted citizen of Bruges, and he created stunning commissions for, among others, the curiously flourishing nuns and priests of Sint-Janshospitaal.* So the museum collects some of Memling’s works, some of the tools used for palliative care of pilgrims who appeared in Bruges feeling poorly, and other artifacts from the hospital’s long history.

I was enthralled.

You should go, if you get the chance. But in case you don’t, here’s a thematic tour. I give you: a selection of people who are having a bad time in art in the Memling Museum.

Detail from Portrait of Francois de Wulf, anonymous, 18^th century. The rest of this painting depicts a man who would like you to know he is quite skilled and prestigious, looking at us to reassure us of this and paying not nearly enough attention to prodding this child in the eyeball. Sorry, child. It wasn’t easy being a pilgrim in the 1700s. We get pairs of things for a reason, I guess.

Opthalmodouleia, das ist Augendienst, Georg Bartisch, 1535-1607. This is a page from a book meant to instruct you of something. Mainly, it instructed me that I should take a moment to be glad that I was born when I was. But I’m always glad of that.

Detail from The Anatomy Lesson, Anonymous, Bruges, 1679. Surrounding this man: a bunch of other men who look disinterested as only Flemish paintings of aristocrats can make a person look.

Intermission: GIANT FREAKING KIDNEY STONES, OH MY GOD. Not included: an explanation of the long, wonderful lives the people who produced these went onto live.

Hans Memling’s Virgin Nursing the Christ Child. This is one of the centerpieces of the museum, and for good reason. I draw. I make art. But I’ve never worked in oils, and the colors they can produce still stun me. I stood in front of this for a good minute, drinking it in.

But I have an inescapable truth for you.

Neckboob.

And that is why Our Lady here is included in this roundup.

Detail from Magi, the Circumcision, and the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Anonymous, Flanders, 16^th century. I like this painting because our focus here has the distinct look of someone going, “Uh, hey, can we have a word? There’s more going on here than I signed up for.”

Detail from The Good Samaritan, Anonymous, Southern Netherlands, 16^th century. At least we know this fellow has better things waiting for him on the other side. Of the story, not the great rift between the living and the dead. That too, I suppose, considering the theme of the museum.

And, finally, St. John Altarpiece, Memling, around 1479.

Ah, you hate to see that.

We didn’t make it to the Groeninge Museum (though I very much enjoyed reciting Rick Steves’ transcribed versions of how to properly pronounce said museum’s name), but we made the right choice. The Memling Museum, with its wonderful collision of ghastly history, transcendent beauty, and peculiar local history, was one of the highlights of the whole London-Brussels-Bruges trip for me. I was a bit surly on my day in Bruges, but the Memling Museum made all the tourist-dodging and other bits of sourness utterly worth it.

Though having cause to dash across a museum, whisper neckboob to someone you love, and dash back away… well, that is a balm for the spirits too.

*That is: in which I learn that not all people who dedicated their lives to Christianity took a vow of poverty! Because wow, those were some hefty commissions. My favorites: triptychs where the central panel depicts a pivotal moment of Christian mythology… and the two outer wings contain portraits of the priests, nuns, and monks who commissioned the works, staidly looking on as St. John is beheaded or someone important gets circumcised or something of that nature. And, in case you didn’t catch the likeness, many had their names painted above their depictions. I learned many things that day.

On London

No one knows which side of the stairs to walk on. Not ever. Not even with the friendly KEEP LEFT signs at the top and bottom of each flight of stairs in the Tube. Not while entering and exiting buildings either. No one, ever.

It must take a particular kind of fortitude to deal with the influx of confused foreigners, if you are a person who lives in London. All you want to do is go into a museum. All you want to do is walk up a flight of stairs from your subway ride without dealing with an obstacle course of would-be shoulder-checks.

No one knows. I never figured it out. I tried to do as the signs said, as the traffic would indicate, but all I ever did was dodge, a leaf on the wind.

I Had My Boobs Scrubbed by a Professional

Here’s a thing I forget about Manhattan.

Everyone is so slammed for space that the markers of luxury in most other parts of the country – palatial lobbies, building facades made just so, empty nooks left unfilled just so you understand the sheer wealth going on here – well, they’re not an option. The language of luxury reads differently in New York.

Which is why this sign, which would read as a kind of chintzy place of dubious quality in Seattle…

…is actually a really lovely, swanky spa.

Alas, this is where the pictures end. Cameras aren’t welcome in closed spaces where women are padding around swaddled in towels and bathrobes.

My sister from another mister and I have a tradition of taking advantage of couples deals at spas. We’ve done it in Sonoma, Arizona, and Renton, and now: Manhattan. And that is how I found myself kinda naked, semi-naked, and then pretty nearly close to naked on a plastic-covered table a mere few feet from a friend I’ve known for, at this point, slightly more than half my life.

I’ve been curious about Korean scrubs for a while, largely via the Seattle-obligatory thoughts of going to Olympus on my birthday. And my friend is my girly ambassador.* These two facts came together to find us, gently speckled with Manhattan dirt, wandering into a spa and wrapping ourselves in those strange towels with the elastic and velcro that fastens right above your boobs.

Oh, also: disposable underwear.

After we were swathed in towels and shod in too-big shower-style sandals, we sat awkwardly by a glassed-in manicure room, sipping cucumber water and sweating gently beneath our poly-blend towel dresses. Busy spas – the kind I like, anyway, when I go in for that kind of thing – have a kind of factory feeling. One person checks you in, one person hands you your garb, one person points you toward the water bar, and then another person fetches you with a gentle mispronouncing of your name for the actual reason you’re there. There’s something comforting about being just another body to a professional. When a spa swaths that central reality in too many layers of new age music, polished floors, and whispering attendants, I feel uneasy.

The stairs, bordered with strips of black sandpaper, were steep and curved in a quick u-shape, hard to navigate when you’re a little tall, a shade ungainly, and wearing sandals that are approximately seven sizes too big for you. Even so, we were quickly ushered into a large, tiled room that reminded me of the kind of communal shower experiences I never had in high school.** One shower curtain hung from the ceiling, obscuring the view from the door. The rest was open, all tiled walls, ceiling, and floor. And two water-resistant looking tables.

Have you ever experienced the boob towel? It appears in many guises. If you have ab work done by a massage therapist and you’re a woman, you’ve experienced the boob towel. A medium-sized bath towel is folded lengthwise into thirds and then placed gently, euphemistically over the most central part of your breasts so that everyone involved can act like you’re not actually topless. These common fictions unite us.

They’re pulled apart fairly quickly, however, when the woman scrubbing you moves it up and down before finally giving it up and moving it away entirely.

Here’s something I learned that day: all of you needs to be exfoliated. ALL OF YOU. I thought that this kind of thing would focus on the legs and arms, and maybe the back and other parts of us we can’t reach so well. No no. Here are some surprise areas I had thoroughly buffed that day:

My ankles
My armpits
That groiny area my friend describes as the bikini line
The less intimate areas of my ass
Every part of my boobs that doesn’t fall into the nipple provinces

And THOROUGH. At one point, I decided to count how many times my scrubber went over certain parts. She was a thorough woman, and I honestly lost count. Eight times? Twelve? I don’t know. Apparently I had an exoskeleton when I walked in there. I didn’t when I left.

I get massages on the regular, but I occasionally feel awkward about spa-like activities with an element of servitude to them. Pedicures, for instance – I feel awkward having another person sit at my feet. But this woman’s hands were so strong and sure that there was no question of who was in charge.

Spa technician: 1

Boobs: 0

And my faith in my own security in my body: assured. Because if you’re not 100 percent awesome with that, you will find out somewhere between when you climb nearly naked onto a plastic table and when the technician places a towel over your eyes and starts the surprisingly long process of exfoliating your jugs.

*Girly ambassador duties: helping your neglectful friend go bra shopping, introducing your curious friend to the wonders of Sephora, and endlessly helping your confused friend parse out relationships.

**I skipped gym. I’m still relieved.

Measures of Time in Fremont

In early November, I will have lived in Seattle for ten years.

My first full-time job was in Fremont. I was a mediocre-to-lousy office manager. I tried hard. Just not in an area where my considerable efforts can really do much good.

When I walked this part of the Burke Gilman every day, the dinosaurs only had ivy on their ankles. Leafy legwarmers. This is the only naked part left.

This is what ten years of ivy looks like.

Human growth and change… well, that’s a little harder to measure.

Sometimes You Want to Go… Where You Can Bite the Head Off a Bread Turtle

We were walking through Fisherman’s Wharf, trying to figure out exactly where we would be eating fish for our dinner. (Most of my friends are not pescetarians, but the best of them are just as fish-loving as I am.) Suddenly, my friend stopped and said, “The bread at this place always smells sooooooo good.”

I asked if he’d had it before; he confirmed he had not. I knew my mission… particularly when I saw this:

WHAT.

So, yeah. Boudin.

Excuse me: BOUDIN.

I spent three summers in a tourist town, and it left me, in the immediate aftermath, extremely leery of anything targeted at tourists. A surprise pleasure in the last few years has been giving into these tourist-oriented honeypots sometimes. Turtle bread is not for normal people. Turtle bread is for visitors.

Turtle bread is for ME.

And not only that:

Bear bread.

Gator bread.

Seasonal bread. For Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day and… January Crab Jubilee. (Of course, we all know that March is crab jubilee time.)

Cable car bread, for… funsies.

I don’t even have a remark for that last one. It’s just smart, like the bread roll wreaths at Le Panier at Pike Place Market. (Confidential to Le Panier: you need more pictures on your website. Your bread is too pretty to present solely in words.)

Soon after, we ended up splitting chowder from a bread bowl, so my turtle remained whole until I got home, when I ate it with some leftover broccoli-potato-cheese soup. My friend’s? Didn’t actually make it even a block from the bakery intact. Because yes, the sourdough at Boudin smells so good that sometimes you’re compelled to ignore the cuteness of your roll and do a full Ozzy Osbourne on your bread turtle as your friend is still digging in her bag for her camera. And that’s just as it should be.

Everybody to Dolores Park

There’s a quality that places I like have in common, and that is gratitude when the going is good. In Boston, I saw it in the pale, uncovered bodies that would starfish across the grass in the Boston Common and the Public Garden when the sun emerged and the temperature began its first languorous reach toward 60 degrees. It happens in Seattle too – the weather gets juuuuust good enough, and there’s suddenly a preponderance of sunbathers in Cal Anderson and kayakers in Lake Union.

San Francisco has it easier than us in the winter, I think (or it did in the very last days of it last weekend), but even if this day wasn’t remarkable, it was sure as shit seized. Look at that. When we first walked up to Dolores Park, I looked around for the stage, because I’ve never seen a park crowd like this that wasn’t summoned by some kind of music festival. But no: it was sun, and blankets, and picnics, and the joy of being a bit stoned under the sun (overheard: “Could I light my joint off your joint?”), and the very real pleasure of being in a small grassy area with a bunch of people who came there for the same reason as you.

Here’s my park plan for you, which I recommend because it worked for me. Set out into the city, aiming for burritos. Get waylaid when you pass, by happenstance, an HONEST-TO-GOD ZINE STORE. Buy the new Optic Nerve and a copy of Murder Can Be Fun, restricting yourself to that for the sake of next month’s rent. Keep on going; get in a long line for a burrito at Taqueria Pancho Villa. Be very very clear if you don’t want meat – and you probably only need a baby burrito, not a regular one. Take that and your quickly sweaty cup of horchata (or bottle of Jarritos, if you swing that way) and wander to Dolores Park.

Gasp at the crowds, and spend a long moment wondering if maybe you should find some other grassy incline to recline on in some less-popular park. Spot a shady patch under some shedding palm trees; go for it. Smile at the bold woman in the bikini and the fuchsia party hat. (Later, you’ll see her in that same getup in the portapotty line; your amusement will be replaced by concern.) Smile at the guy sitting, clad all in black in the full sun, playing the quietest accordion in the world, like he was transported from 1920s France, but his sound was left behind.* Say no thank you to the well-shod woman in the black-and-white dress who offers you brownies from her basket. (Your companion may chide you for telling the woman selling pot brownies to go away, so don’t answer too fast.) Discuss how curiously European the whole scene is, down to the unconcealed alcohol. It’s all so very civilized.

I hadn’t been to San Francisco in about three-and-a-half years; too long, and I forgot (or never fully discovered) just how much I like it there and why. For me, it has the variety and intensity of New York with the, I don’t know, West Coastiness of the West Coast. Ambition and groundedness. Or so it seemed on the Muni as I spent my time staring at people, as I always do.

That afternoon, we saw men with tiny dogs, and we saw families with children who will grow up to be weird and worthwhile. Young women in full flower having very good days that will warm them in their dotage. A woman in a stellar brown dress selling cookies (“Pot-free,” she quickly assured us) and Rice Krispy treats from a basket.** And this guy:

So far as I’m concerned, this guy is freaking Merlin. He brought his bag… of rainbow ukuleles… to Dolores Park… for all to purchase and enjoy. Canonize this man.

So go to Dolores Park. Or go to Cal Anderson Park, Volunteer Park, Central Park, Forest Park. The beach. Find a warm-enough day and go outside where the people are and remember what it is to be a person, the same way pets only know themselves when they have another animal to play off of. We are made for the sun and grass, and for being next to people we love on a grassy hill on a day with a fine breeze and a faint, persistent smell of high-quality California weed.

And always, always buy something from the woman with the basket.

*Or maybe he traded his accordion’s voice to the sea witch for legs, I dunno.

**It’s a killer business model and a pleasure to behold once, let alone twice.

My Trip to Florida, in Pictures Texted to My Neighbor

Steak n’ Shake of Pensacola, after I arrived eight hours late at a different airport than scheduled. (I went for the chocolate banana shake, because I appreciate the classics.)

The same. I had the veggie melt, which was quite nice after I denuded it of tomatoes and onions. Continue reading →

La Push, Washington; Low Season

Winter settles fairly evenly across the middlest part of the Midwest. One part is cold and snowy, so most of it is, and the rest will be soon enough if it doesn’t immediately fall under the same blanket. There might be a difference of 20 or 30 degrees, but all the temperatures end up south of the freezing point eventually, so it doesn’t matter so much.

Washington isn’t like that. There are snow-clotted passes and temperate Sound- and ocean-bordering areas and this middle part that’s apparently part desert, and winter settles unevenly, uneasily across the state. After moving here, I realized the whole grunge/layers look was just a simple adaptation to the Seattle weather. These things are revelations when you’re from the outside. Continue reading →

People I Saw at the Nine Inch Nails Show, Part Two

Let’s continue what we started, shall we?

This guy hasn’t worn this hoodie since 1998, but I bet he’s still wearing it as I type this. He had the look of a man who’d rediscovered something vital.

This couple will be tipping the sitter tonight, because they’re having their best night in a long time.

Enid Coleslaw made an appearance.

There was something almost architecture about this dude’s hair, as if he had the potential of taking an eye out with one of those stalagmites if he wasn’t careful.

Best. Mom. Ever.

There were a lot of these kid-sized NIN shirts floating around! Another favorite was the woman pulling a new Nine Inch Nails shirt on over her old Lady Gaga shirt. I would like to think that she had like five more shirts on under the Gaga shirt, each one from a show she’d seen at Key Arena in the previous months.

What have we learned from this? Well, I’ve learned I need to go out and doodle people more often. These were all done from memory, as I didn’t think to take something to the show to draw on. You? I would guess you’ve learned that you missed a rad show. Or that I devote a considerable amount of energy to not appearing to stare at people, even though I perpetually am.

P.S. A friend posited that Regretpants from last post was having the shifty britches feelings that can come with doing ecstasy. The more you know!

A Brooklyn Blog that Sometimes Travels

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