LIE BACK AND THINK OF ENGLAND

Up till two weeks ago it had been seven long years since I'd been back to London and boy oh boy was I looking forward to going back, even if I had to do (yuck!) work in the form of a conference presentation to justify it. I returned to Indiana on Sunday from nine long days in that city on the Thames, suffused with visions of pubs, street art, corgis, markets, fashion hijinks, sandwiches, dear old friends, and familiar places as seen from the top of a double-decker bus. I forgot to bring my camera (though I had the one in my phone) so the pictures below could be better, but I think you'll get the idea...

Lord Nelson at Trafalgar Square from the National Gallery.

One of the kitties I saw every day.

Who taught the hippies about street art?

The Strand, near LSE and the Courts of Justice.

Outside St. Paul's cathedral where I attended a service so as to get out of paying the $22 entrance fee. Sorry about that god.

St. Paul's and the Millenium Bridge from inside the Tate Modern.

Beautiful Gerhard Richter abstracts at the Tate.

One of the Rothko paintings in the Seagram's room - one of my top ten favorite rooms in the world. I sat here listening to Radiohead and cried with happiness.

Currently "missing" Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's "Sunflower Seeds", more than 100 million hand-painted and hand-fired seeds filling the Tate's Turbine Hall. Beautiful and sad.

A cheerier sight: a girl with a tiny wee top hat affixed to her head sketching dead birds pinned to the wall. I love modern art.

Bridget Riley's To a Summer's Day.

Another favorite room: Soviet propaganda posters from the museum's collection.

Sunset over the Thames.

Spitalfields market from a church yard in my old neighborhood.

Having coffee in the urban environs of Carrie's neighborhood.

I was irate upon first seeing this Chihuly sculpture at the Victoria & Albert museum but it has since grown on me (a little). Still, does the only thing from Seattle in the collection have to be this?

Medieval castings at the V&A.

So much art nouveau/arts & crafts; it's almost as if they are readying themselves for Mark Siano's 2012 Olympics visit.

A highlight of my day.

Triple portrait of Charles I, 1750, and a clear predecessor to those eerie school portraits with both profile and front-views. If only Chuck I here had posed with his chin in his hands it would have been perfect.

South Kensington

Museum of Natural History

Making faces at La Porchetta

THANK JEEBUS THAT IS OVER WITH

Carrie loves getting department store makeovers, and I have to admit I kind of do too

She also loves napping in parks, being called "Dr. H", and taking pictures that give the illusion of semi-paralysis of the face

Me, I just like sandwiches

And gaping at consumer goods

And savory pies

And gin/grapefruit sorbet

And the way that springtime sunny days in Britain fill every available green space with bbqs, open containers, and very happy people.

My my that was nice. Now just ONE MORE cup of tea and I'm totally going to start writing my dissertation...

THE FOUR CABALLEROS

In the beginning, there was Nick & Nora, and they provided avian company to my father in his new home in Colorado Springs and it was good. Then came Craig's List, and it delivered unto my father a "parakeet mansion" of enormous dimension (and containing many new perches and toys) and lo, it seemed empty with only two parakeets inside (besides, they wanted a new roommate to split the heating bills). And so PetSmart begat a third bird, Asta, and feathers of a new color joined those already sailing through the air following the nestlings' frequent flyovers. These were the three caballeros and they chirped and tweeted and chortled and frolicked and when their cage was covered they shut the hell up and rested.

But hark, trouble in the menagerie! Asta's arrival threw off the alpha/beta order of the universe and the chirping turned rancorous. The wildly popular "keetcam" even had to be pulled offline due to the effect of violent images on at-risk youth. There was nothing to do but add a fourth budgie to the mix, though this could only occur after a color consultant made a careful assessment of how best to achieve aesthetic congruity in the cage. Finally, Topper the Grey was procured, and harmony prevailed once again.

And now, from my cacophonous bunker in Colorado Springs, I present to you, for the first time ever, your guide to The Four Caballeros:

NICK, "the gregarious one"

Representative sound: warble with staccato chirp

Likes: swings, chewing on rope, throwing things off cage

Dislikes: squirts of water

Pecking order: alpha when outside the cage, zeta within

NORA (/NORMAN), "the peacemaker"

Representative sound: vibrato chirp

Likes: millet, classical music

Dislikes: bad jokes

Pecking order: beta

ASTA, "the nervous nellie"

Representative sound: high-pitched warble

Likes: heated perches, the sound of dish-washing

Dislikes: visiting parrots, hats, vacuum cleaners

Pecking order: beta

TOPPER, "the homebody"

Representative sound: allegro chirp

Likes: broccoli, mirrors, a roost of one's own

Dislikes: leaving the mansion, human fingers

Pecking order: alpha within cage (especially at snack time), zeta outside

APPETITE FOR CONSTRUCTION

Perhaps it was that whole growing up in a cult thing but I've always sought ways to stretch and warp the symbols that define us and confine us; believing that infinite meanings can be creatively produced from the cultural matter that is so effectively manipulated by powerful people to make us believe or make us want. "The absurd," writes Camus, "is the essential concept and the first truth", to which Reggie Watts has added "Absurdity holds the key to surviving in reality."

I read an article once about 20th century Polish movie posters and the tradition of creating bizarre and frequently disturbing images that are little, if at all related to the film they represent (some of the posters are incredible and a helluva lot better than my postcards, you can browse a few here). Writing about the poster for Luis Bunuel's satirical The Phantom of Liberty by Wieslaw Walkuski, Michael Atkinson makes the following observation:

Walkuski's canvas is an eye-seizing monster on its own, but as a movie poster it acquires a secondary vein of significance--its accord with Bunuel is indecipherable but not necessarily absent, and thus between the two artworks lies a secret, and an implicit expansion of the signifying range of both.

I'm smitten with this idea, and keep it closely in mind when I make postcards, hoping that the secret they contain will bring amusement or inspiration to their recipient.

And now, as requested, here are a few of my constructions of the last few months. Now go out and make some of your own!

One of these things is not like the other

Serious people

Animals with intentions

Barbies and Beijing real estate

Talking Heads take Rajasthan