Happy Easter!

Here's a postcard I found at the Christkindlesmarkt in Nuremberg (seasonally appropriate, I know. The Christmas ones are even cuter). On the back:

221 Osterkarte, um 1900

@Verlag L. Däbritz, München
Alleinvertrieb ART H. Hilscher
Printed in Germany.

Adventures in London, part 3

(A view of St. Paul's from the Millennium Bridge.)

On Seanan's day off we went to the Victoria & Albert. I spent the most time at the fashion exhibit, which was of course fantastic, although it was pretty hilarious to see a pink velour hoochy tracksuit behind glass like it was some precious artifact. When you go to the V&A you must have lunch (or at least tea) in the cafeteria, which is full of splendid tilework and stained glass windows featuring clever quotations about food. The other really memorable thing was Elizabeth Parker's needlepoint autobiography, which I feel sure I read or heard about in a blog or podcast awhile back, because reading the embroidery felt awfully familiar.

Then there were incredibly delicious fruity cocktails at Beach Blanket Babylon in Notting Hill, which were worth every cent of £9. (Just don't pay by credit card, because the waiter will try to confuse you into leaving a bigger tip than he deserves.)

The next day I went to the National Gallery expressly to see Venus & Mars (not that I didn't see a lot of other amazing paintings too—being able to view The Ambassadors in person was a really cool experience!), and then to the Royal College of Surgeons Museum, which is the final resting-place (er—of sorts) of the 'Irish Giant', Charles Byrne. (I'd recently read The Giant O'Brien by Hilary Mantel, a fictionalized account of Byrne's life as a professional oddity in London. Very well written, of course, but stinkin' depressing—his "friends" were all sitting around waiting for him to die so they could sell his body to John Hunter for an exorbitant price.)

Now to the meat of this post: the magical print shop that is T. Alena Brett on Cecil Court, off Charing Cross Road (there's no website). Thousands of odd or otherwise special little antique prints, most of which are £3-5. I can't say enough good things about this place, or its owner. The building has a fascinating history as well—a long time ago it was a barber's shop, and as a boy Mozart had his hair cut there; and in the early 20th century it was a tea room frequented by several of the war poets (Rupert Brooke, et al). The tables were set up along the tiny balcony where I took the photo above.

Above: the Christmas window display at T. Alena Brett. Below: two of the prints I bought, 'Princess Fiorimonde' and 'Fair at Westminster in the Fourteenth Century'.

The Cloisters

I'm in New York all this week, and taking the opportunity to do a few things I don't usually have time for when I'm only up for a night or two. I can't remember if this was my third or fourth visit to The Cloisters, but at any rate I love being able to pretend I'm back in Europe for a few hours. It was gloriously warm and sunny out, entirely too spring-like for late November.

The Bonnefont Cloister and herb garden.


These ladies have always been my favorites of the collection. They're early 16th-century reliquary busts; here's a better photo.

One of many spooky characters carved in the capitals of the Cuxa Cloister.

Tomb effigy of a knight in the Gothic Chapel.

(I'm skeptical.)

Adventures in Berlin: the Kunsthaus Tacheles

Guess what—I'm going back to Germany next week! Just for a week this time, to Bavaria, and I am really excited for the Christkindlmarkt in Nuremberg. I have five or six blog entries left for the first trip, so I'd better finish it up already. I'll schedule the last few to appear while I'm away. (I'm also trying to wrap up a draft of Petty Magic to send to my agent, so most of these last entries will be pretty much photos only.)

Last week I posted a video clip of the unusual disco ball at the Kunsthaus Tacheles, definitely one of the coolest/weirdest spots in Berlin. Artists moved into this bombed-out department store after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it has bars, a café, and a nightclub as well as artists' studios.

You walk through an archway (handmade jewelry for sale beside an old van covered in graffiti, and set into the wall above are majestic stone figures dating to the building's first act) and out into an open sandy space with car seats set around picnic tables as well as random sculptures, all from found materials, like so:

There is graffiti on almost every surface, especially on the stairwells that lead to the studios and galleries upstairs. Alas, none of my interior or nighttime photos are good enough to show you.

This courtyard space felt like a playground for those of us who will never consider ourselves grown-ups.

Something else I didn't get a picture of was a huge rocket-shaped metal thingie in the yard that had a metal ladder (like you'd see inside a submarine) leading up to a dark round opening near the top. I told some of the people on our pub crawl (I had been there earlier in the day, and so could speak with authority) that it was known as The Vomit Rocket, and that they should climb up the metal ladder and do what they must, but fortunately nobody had had that much to drink.

But my favorite part of all was in a hallway upstairs: a full-sized "photo booth" fashioned out of cardboard, with space for both the artist and his subject to sit. Along with a very modest price list, a sign read (in English):

Choose Your Master:

—Cranach
—Michelangelo
—Picasso

(And there might have been a couple more, I can't remember now.) I only wish the artist had been in attendance.