The Original Scroll - And the Only Word I Had Was "Wow"

120 feet went on the typewriter, never stopping tlack tlack tlack of black ghosts hunting paper until they are set free. Three weeks went on the coffee, or what it stood for, bebop rapsody of black liquid down the throat, down the veins, down out of the fingers and into the typewriter, hitting the unexperienced paper with memories of“it”.

51 years after those three weeks, the original scroll runs inside its glass shrine at the British Library, aged and yet untouched in its essence like the road that wrote it. It's the late published, first written version of On the Road, the very novel that opened my life to the Beat Generation, the “ fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars” and “it”.

I hit the road with Robert Frank and “saw the best mind of my generation starving hysterical naked” and followed my own Dean and Neal. Stumbling on my typewriter, I travelled along the road, went out of the map, left the path, lost myself and found the road again. The road is always there, beyond the walls of your mind, behind the bricks and ill-fitting automated lives on the edge of sanity.

Still typing, still on the road, and still looking for “it”.

The manuscript scroll is at the British Library until December 27.

The Devil Wears Prada, Six Years After

KT Tunsell singing “Suddenly I see/ this is all I wanna be” while all the clackers and Anne Hathaway get ready for work at the beginning of The Devil Wears Prada is my motivational hymn. I can't help smiling, my heart warms up and I get so much determination and confidence I could stab a dictator with a stiletto. Maybe it's because the movie is about getting where you want at any cost, or because I became attached to it when I decided that following my instinct was the only way in life.

I found myself watching it again last night (in search of a motivational hymn?) and thinking about how 2006 it is. It's still charmingly timely, but there are a few things that changed in the past few years... or maybe I couldn't notice the discrepancy until I gained some real life experience.

I'm not talking about the revenge of size 6, Valentino's retirement from fashion or the end of the Harry Potter's saga; I am talking about attitudes. The Devil Wears Prada is the story of a girl, with a national prize for student journalism and some  editorial experience at a University magazine, who gets a low paid job at the most famous publication in the world. Her parents feel sorry for her, because she is late with her rent and because she doesn't get to write articles.

Pardon? Paid. Job. Well credited publication. This sounds like heaven to me! Or to thousands of other girls like me, with a Master's degree and very grim options for the future.

In 2012 you don't even look for a job that you're not going to get, you apply for one month internships or one week work experiences with only travel and lunch expenses paid. If you're lucky. And you feel very grateful if you even get one, at any publication, PR agency or crappy press office. Of course then you need a part time job to pay the rent. And anything you manage to get your hands on is temporary, like a cheap perfume. Truth is, you don't expect anything else.

When we all watched the movie the first time in 2006, we felt sorry for poor Andy crying in Nigel's office and thought it was mean of him telling her that “Andy, be serious, you're not trying. You are whining”. Then of course Andy really tries harder and gets where she didn't expect to. The question is: are we still ready to kill ourself trying? Do we still believe in goals or is this status quo turning us all in hopeless automats?

Finally, the no plan B situation. Having a plan B is handy when plan A fails, and we know life rarely goes as planned. But hasn't this cliché become a bit overrated? When asked to fetch the Harry Potter unpublished manuscript, Andy calls Christian Thomphson, who tells her to come up with a plan B and she prontly replies “It's Miranda Priestly we're talking about, there's no plan B, there's only plan A!” Andy's committment to do the impossible to succeed is a bit crazy, but definitely admirable. Are we so determinate to follow plan A, or are we too used to scroll down the alphabet till plan B, C,... Z?

We are all Andys, just in a worse economic situation. We should all fight like pirates and believe like martyrs if we are smart like her. We should be able to deal with Mirandas. Miranda Priestly might be a tough cooky, a boss from hell, the Devil wearing Prada, but what we all want is to have a boss. Or to be one, eventually.

The I Think Project VII

Mr Brainwash

In London, you might be walking towards Tottenham Court Road station on your home, and run into the Beatles looking at you from above a bandidos style handkerchief. A black wall, four coloured handkerchiefs, and four pairs of unmistakingly iconic eyes. Above them, the Queen in her best attire, holding a spray can. I could lie and say I knew exactly what that was, but I didn’t… until I got closer and read “Art Shoe Fri – Sun 1 – 7 pm Free Admission Mr Brainwash”. I turned the corner and followed Kate Moss’ portrait calling me like a siren to the entrance. It’s not until I entered the Old Sorting Office that I remembered the central page of a magazine, fluo paint, Chaplin, “Life is beautiful”…

They’re all there, from Darth Vader to Elvis and Madonna, the icons of pop culture stolen from Andy Warhol and painted over, ironically modified, used to convey messages. “Life is beautiful” “Never, never give up” “Follow your dreams” “Love is the answer” “Art is all over”…

We are familiar with Andy Warhol and his iconisation of pop culture, but Mr Brainwash pop is something else. Where Warhol celebrates, Mr Brainwash is thought provoking, he gets the public’s attention through the icon’s allure, and then he instills an idea into the familiar image. And he celebrates too.

Icons are exaggerated, overlapped, in an ironic tangle of powerful and puzzling. The Beatles use the Kiss’ makeup, and Kate Moss face smiles from a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, Chaplin and Einstein share the same painting.

The Englishness of the exhibition is emphasized through national celebs, black cabs (splashed with pink), and Union Jack coated Campbell Soup cans. The UK is under the magnifier in a funny, slightly sardonic way.

My personal favs are the music black&white portraits made with vinyls. Beatles and Stones sharing a wall and facing Elvis, while Dean Martin’s version of Buonasera Signorina caresses colours, visitors and fame.

This is not a report. This is my pleasant surprise while discovering that the past is not sucking up the future, but newness can still be pursued, in art, thought and society. Ideas are not dead, brainwashed, prefab. Mr Brainwash is here to tell us that “If everybody thought the same nothing would ever change”.

One Cake a Day – Brighton Edition

My stay in Brighton was only two days long, but it was literally as sweet as the four days cake olympics in Dublin. The motto is “more chocolate, less boredom”, and will soon be followed by “more sport, less heart and weight related problems”. This post brings me back to my childhood dreams of Hänsel and Gretel's marzipan house. I strongly believe the Grimm Brothers inspired dark beauties such as the Schwarzwald and the Sachertorte.

Choccywoccydoodah

How much chocolate can you imagine in the same plate? Well, they'll give you more! Sit on a heart-shaped couch, listen to catchy Disney classics, from the Jungle Books swing to the Aristocats's jazz, and forget calories count. A lavish portion of chocolate surrounded by chocolate and topped with chocolate is at the basis of the menu. And if raspberry finishings and cream are the guests of honour at this cocoa feast, just indulge in epicureism for a, alas too brief, moment. Then visit the shop at 24 Duke Strret to admire the chocolate sculptures (as seen on TV) or buy some edible souvenirs.

Not to miss: Choccywoccy cake.

Where: 27 Middle Street, Brighton, East Sussex BN1 1AL 

Angel Food Bakery

The name refers to the fact that their cupcakes probably come from Heaven. And they sell the ingredients and the materials to realize them, and also teach you how to bake them... real pro guardian angels! The place isn't big, but once you're lost into tasting, nothing else matters. Take the cooky and cream cupcake for example: you start with an Oreo on top, and who doesn't love Oreos? The cream is consistent but not heavy, delicious but not too sugary, and if you think the base is the most boring part, you'll be surprised by a chocolate touch. Looks like the staircase to Heaven is paved with cupcakes!

Not to miss: Cooky and cream cupcake.

Where: 20 Meeting House Lane, Brighton, East Sussex BN1 1HB

A Curious Invitation

The Last Tuesday Society's two day Halloween mask ball will launch A Curious Invitation by Suzette Fields. Contents: the forty greatest parties in literature.

How fun would it be to sneak into a novel right when the party starts, to leave after a few pages and enter another one, and then another, and another one more. I suppose we could at least try a few, starting from some Classics… shall we?

Still from Baz Luhrmann's Great Gatsby (2013)

The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald
"In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars."

The Twenties were pretty much about partying: Charleston, embedded dress, no financial crash on sight and Prohibition Laws, which just made drinking even more fun. Gatsby embraces all of this by throwing all night long parties in his luxurious villa. I honestly think this is what makes the book: who the hell cares about the fact that he did all of this to get close to his beloved Daisy, that she doesn’t leave her cheating husband and that he dies more or less as a consequence of protecting her? Nobody really, but we all remember the champagne, the tux and the Rolls-Royce as if we were there.

The Master and Margarita by Mihail Bulgakov

“ 'Dostoevsky's dead,' said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.

'I protest!' Behemoth exclaimed hotly. 'Dostoevsky is immortal!’ ”

The most fascinating host in the history of literature is the Devil, here disguised as Professor Woland; which counts as a costume and makes him even cooler. The guests are all deceased sinners, they don’t show up before midnight and the orchestra is directed by Strauss. What is very very wicked is the fact that this scene was inspired by a real Spring Festival held at the residence of the US Ambassador in Moscow. Literally a hell of a party.

Illustration by Lynn Hatzius

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thakeray

"I have heard from ladies who were in the town at the period, that the talk and interest of persons of their own sex regarding the ball was much greater even than in respect of the enemy in their front."

What should you do if you live in Brussels and it is the eve of the battle of Waterloo? Get wasted and dance! This is what the Duchess of Richmond thought, and Thackeray can’t but tailoring this to the story of socialite Becky Sharp. Too bad the party was crashed by news of battle.

Macbeth by Shakespeare

“Fortune, on his damned quarrel smiling, Showed like a rebel's whore.”

It could be written a whole article only mentioning parties in Shakespeare. It is quite logic, since he wrote more than the average person could possibly read in a lifetime. My all times Shakespeare’s favourite is Macbeth and I’d like to call this episode ‘dinner with the murderer’. What is worse than an uninvited guest? A dead uninvited guest, whose assassination you ordered. So when Macbeth joins the banquet, he finds sitting at his place Banquo’s ghost. The play also constitutes the first written record of the word ‘assassination’ in the English language. The devil’s in the detail.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

“It’s always tea time!”

Madness, a nice hat and nonsense conversations: the Mad Tea Party is the party. Timeless is the best of times.

Counter-lobotomy

Author Charlaine Harris posted on her Facebook page the cover of the last novel of the Southern Vampires Mysteries, Dead Ever After, to be published in May 2013. 

The books are better known as the Sookie Stackhouse series, and for seven years they were known only to fantasy porn geeks. Then in 2008 HBO made them into a TV series called True Blood, which at the moment has covered the first six books and aired the fifth season last summer. Today True Blood is a most seen on the channel, and it is watched not only by fantasy porn geeks. How the hell did this happen?

Still from True Blood credits

The Southern Vampires Mysteries portrays a society very similar to ours and implicitly criticises it through the literary strategy of dislocation, in this case reached through the fantastic element. Since the first chapters of the first novel Dead Until Dark, the casual observations of the narrator protagonist hint at drug, sexual disease, the power of media and religion, violence, conscience and ignorance. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

The setting in the small fictional town of Bon Temps, Lousiana, implies terrible accent, square minded people devoted to bar talks, affected religious prissiness and scorn of anything a bit out of the ordinary. Vampires coexist with humans thanks to the invention of a synthetic liquid called Tru Blood. This doesn’t mean the undead completely stopped feeding on people, or that the latter consider vampires their equals: they either despise them as nature abominations, (illegally) sell their blood as drug or aim at their überhuman sexual skills.

Discrimination is a constant towards vampires, and it is further explored when other supernatural creatures are introduced. Werewolves and other wereanimals, fairies and witches disguise their identity for fear of human judgement, and after a while you start wondering if there are ‘normal’ people at all and what normal is. Sookie herself is considered crazy because she can read people’s mind, and not acceptance makes her see her gift as a disability. Also, all the characters, the main ones as the minor ones, have secrets to hide, which makes the whole scenario a big fat lie. There’s no such thing as a simple trouble-free life, even for rural Southern flowers.

Still from True Blood credits

The concept of authority comes up in many different variants, from the influence of religious and political institutions, to the monarchic order of the vampire world, more similar to feudal Middle Ages than 2012 America. Or, is it there any difference? Fear, control of the masses, manipulation of laws make men miserable, not fantastic creatures.

Vampires’ lack of conscience and cruelty are driven by nature, yet some of them oppose to this nonsense. Werewolves embody mob mentality, with the pack master ruling and expecting loyalty from his pack members. Fairies symbolise the evil rotting the insides of a beautiful creature. There are no heroes, many villains, and a lot of shades inbetween.

During all this turmoil and the unhappy incidents, all the characters deal with family, love and friendships, showing the hypocrisy but also the strength of bonds. These types of relationships are almost unified in that between a vampire and his maker, also implying that procreation is an act of love and not of selfishness. The human side of humans and not humans is as prominent as their dishuman side.

Between the end of a love and the start of a new war there is also time for a laugh. And when you don’t laugh with the characters you laugh at them: sometimes they are so silly, it is too easy to mock them. And probably this is how clever critique attracts the average reader through light-hearted adventurous stories you dedicate yourself to non to think too much. Charlaine Harris sweetened the medicine of social criticism with the honey of sex, thriller and fantasy.

But maybe I’m overthinking this, I see conspiracy where there is only food for the masses, this is just entertaining fantasy to distract people’s mind from real life. To quote the fifth book of the series, Dead as a Doornail, “Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.”

The thirteenth and last book of the Sookie Stackhouse series

One Cake a Day – Dublin Edition

Avoca, we all agree.

Eating cake everyday is extremely unhealthy and addictive, so don't try this at home!

...Try this in Dublin! If you get the chance to spend four days in Temple Bar, I mean in the Irish capital city, you MUST try one lovely café per day. (Not) only for girls. Sweet up your to-do-list with these four names.

Picture by Laura McKee

The Queen of Tarts

The name is mouthwatering, the cake display is lavish, old style and absolutely stunning. The cakes are bakery royals, proud on their high thrones, in your plate, and until the last chocolate crumble. You might as well feel like bowing at it before eating it.

Not to miss: carrot cake. A giant slice of bliss covered in icing.

Where: Cork Hill, Dame Street, Dublin 2

In front of Dublin Castle; a coincidence?

Picture by Laura McKee

Foam

My friend defined the place “hippy”, I would rather say LSDesque. Bright colours, artsy patterns and an eccentric mix of sofas, table cloths and decorations welcome you to this picturesque café in an improbable street. The shades make you feel like you had too much sugar the very second you walk past the threshold. The bathroom is as amazing as the rest of the place!

Not to miss: tea selection (to accompany the cake). Try the smoky lapsang: absolutely inhebriant!

Where: 24 Strand Street Great, Dublin 1

Near the Ha' Penny Bridge, north side.

Café Irie

Cosy café ideal for breakfast, lunch or dreamy escapes. Follow the butterflies upstairs and read about arts events in the city. I don't know if it's because it's on the first floor, it feels a bit like being in the tower of a fairy castle. And it might be the case, considering Dublin mythical heritage.

Not to miss: hot chocolate with marshmallows and chocolate flakes. Perfect for those rainy Irish afternoons.

Where: 11 Fownes Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2

Near Temple Bar and the Institute of Photography, upstairs a vintage clothing shop (loved that too!)

Avoca

They started out weaving in 1723, and now they have a shop full of clothing, stationary, books, homeware, topped with a café. All the cakes look so breathtaking, it was really difficult for me to choose only one. The waiters are friendly, the service is perfect in the detail, and what's better than shopping and eating in the same place?

Not to miss: variety of chocolate cakes and carrot cakes. I went for the almond and pear one. As I said, everything is delicious!

Where: 11-13 Suffolk Street, Dublin 2

Near Trinity College and Molly Malone's statue.

A tiny spoiler of the bathroom foyer at Foam Café. 

Just one last note. If you are Italian and want to order cappuccino in Dublin, get ready to thin foam indiscriminately covered with cocoa. Alas, Italians do it better!

Curiouser Magazine

Results are out, my MA Fashion & Lifestyle Journalism at UCA Epsom is over and this is my final hand in: Curiouser Magazine. And now I'm a blogger without a laptop, since mine didn't survive the hand in. MIA.

Cover illustration and illustration for the article Bipolar Writers: Deep Darkness and Blinding Light by Mischa Sy Lee cargocollective.com/whenyellowmeetsgrey

Illustrations for the short story White by Caterina Bianchetti caterinadisegna.blogspot.com

Editor’s Letter

Dear reader,

This is the first issue of Curiouser magazine; please allow us to introduce ourselves. 

We love books. We love literature. We love stories. We love writing. We love reading.

We are “curiouser and curiouser”, like Alice in Wonderland would say. We think books are the weapons of revolution. We think they teach us how to speak and not what to say, how to think more than what to think, to imagine and create instead of living in a world created by somebody else, to ask questions and challenge answer

Follow the Cheshire Cat, turn the page, go out of the map, start a revolution.

BE CURIOUSER.

The Editor

Free Pussy Riot

London in Creative Writing - The Boxpark

Quiet Pop Up Claustrophobia

White – the sky. Black – the boxes. Yellowish – the wooden square.

Black metal boxes encapsulate shops and colours, to protect them from the weather, the silence and the industrial colours outside. A wooden square with wooden tables and trees makes the natural artificial. Grey and brick red buildings embrace the place.

Pop art portraits hang outside the boxes. Pop colours, pop faces, pop forms. Pop atmosphere inside the boxes: consumerism lurking in T-shirts made in China next to Amnesty ethical boutique. Pop overpriced pumps imprisoned in spaces without women to wear them. Pop food and pop clothes nourish stomach, happiness, art and shopaholism.

Pop primrose drenched in bored decadence, the melancholic voice of Lana del Rey flows into the next track. Nobody is here to notice, only some spare Tuesday morning’s wonderers.

Pop up mall of pop dreams without dreamers.

boxpark.co.uk

The I Think Project VI

The Dead Marshes Effect in Writing

It is different from being stuck. When you are stuck you have some (hundred) cups of tea/watch an episode of Sex&the City/do your nails […] but eventually you start writing. Your idea is temporarily roaming in your mind, not willing to lie down in a logic position that would allow you to capture it with your pen (or keyboard).  This is so common that it is taught during Journalism classes at University.

The Dead Marshes Effect is a different way of being stuck, more dangerous, overwhelming and disturbing.  If you open The Lord of the Rings you will find a description of this cosy place located in lovely Mordor:

“Cold, clammy winter still held sway in this forsaken country. The only green was the scum of livid weed on the dark greasy surfaces of the sullen waters. Dead grasses and rotting reeds loomed up in the mists like ragged shadows of long forgotten summers."

Nobody would like to be stuck in a similar place, not even Dracula.

Kind Gollum led Frodo and Sam here on their way to destroy the Ring and accidentally forgot to mention the candle lights floating on the pool surface. They are a sort of Sirens’ song that attracts visitors towards the corpses luring under the water, with the purpose to make them fall, sink and die. Tolkien didn’t make things easy for Frodo.

For a writer being stuck in the Dead Marshes means that he not only has no clue about what will appear on that damn white page, he is not even certain he can see it through. He is not sure his Muse still loves him; he is not sure he should be doing that; he is mesmerized by the light coming from the computer screen and forgets he is a writer at all.

As if you could. Juvenal wrote that “many suffer from the incurable disease of writing, and it becomes chronic in their sick minds” and the Romans were very wise some 2000 years ago. This illness is much more powerful than any deadly light, swamp or supernatural creature whatsoever.

If you find yourself in the Dead Marshes, don’t look at the candle lights and follow Sam. It will take a bit more than having a cup of tea, but if you love writing, you will sort it out in the end. It is the only case outside Disney movies in which love will save you. There are already too many books around, but someone might be just waiting to read yours.

Brick Lane, Sunday 17 June

Hsu Chiui – Naif

What do Paris and Taiwan have in common? Refinement. The finest European fashion and the care of the oldest Oriental tradition.

Hsu Chiui was educated at the ENSAD in Paris, after a degree in Fine Arts in her native country. Her art is a melange of these two experiences.

She doesn’t waste material. She uses small pieces techniques on big pieces of cloth and she adapts the cutting to the matter. As a result her line is cutting edge but also backed up by history.

The technique is the traditional indigo dyeing, developing a peculiar shade of blue. The design are the mountains in central Taiwan. Hsu Chiui uses this skill in her garments and in the huge waves designs.

Indigo was once really precious because the blue colour was otherwise difficult to reproduce. Today it can be synthetic, but Hsu Chiui uses only natural indigo that comes from plants grown in certain farms in Taiwan.

What do Paris and Taiwan have in common? Feeling. The romantic allure of Paris in the rain and the Oriental thought that starts from the heart. How do you feel? Hsu Chiui starts her inventive process from an emotion, she explores it and then synthetize it into her art. Because her creations are a melange of Paris and Taiwan, but also of fashion and art.

Hsu Chiui is a designer for her brand Naif and also a painter.

Hsu Chiui with Jerry Yen (CampoBag)

Hsu Chiui and the other Taiwanese artists will showcase the product of their London creative experience in a pop up catwalk on Sunday 24 June in Brixton.

Irma Pellegrini

“I was in Brixton park, thinking ‘How am I gonna pay my rent?’ when I saw the leaves falling down from the trees and the people holding their umbrellas.”

Recycled materials and natural colours in a design that is always different. The eternal renewal of seasons and the feeling of  being just like a leaf in the wind. People caught in their daily London life, who through the magic of art are unified with pieces of nature found elsewhere.

“This comes from Spain.

This comes from Vienna.

This falls down only at the beginning of autumn.

This is very special. It comes from a fig tree I used to play with when I was a child. My family had to sell the house and the new owners wanted to cut the tree and I kept a piece.”

This is Irma Pellegrini. Memories of her native Argentine infuse intensity into her work. The warm colours of autumn and of South American sunsets, the pathos of leaving your land and the strength of floating in the English rain.

“In London if you have an idea you can do it.”

Irma Pellegrini at Sunday UpMarket, Brick Lane

More wood carvings at the Sunday UpMarket in Brick Lane and irmapellegrini.com

Bring Art Go: Creative Exchange in London

Brick Lane is a catwalk of fashion, multiculturality and bohemian life for Londoners and tourists, a window on the artistry seething in the East End. For this reason it has been chosen as the location of an exhibition showcasing the work of 12 Taiwanese creatives for the first time in London.

Their skills belong to Illustration, Fashion, Jewellery, Embroidery, Handcraft, Product Design and Interior Design and they are here to know us, make themselves known and get inspired. The name of the pop-up event is Bring Art Go, embodying the concepts of origins, skills and sharing. It takes place in Brick Lane on Sunday 17 June from 11am until 5pm at the Sunday UpMarket.

This exhibition is part of a 13 days project in collaboration with the London Printworks Trust set up by CampoBag, a company based in Taipei. During this journey the Asian artists will collaborate with 12 English artists to share views on identity, imagination and creative process and shape new products.

The experience develops from Friday 15 June until Wednesday 27 June. The grand finale is a pop-up catwalk on Sunday 24 June in Brixton, other artistic hub in London, summing up the achievements of the designers. The purpose of this exchange is to create a space of multicultural and interartistic inspiration and improve oneself through extremely different approaches derived from a different cultural background, in contrast with the current alienating financial globalization.

The mission of CampoBag is:

Bring art to people

Make everyone’s life better

Add value to business in art.

Poster Design by Mischa Lee

For more information on CampoBag visit campobag.com/en

London in Creative Writing - The British Library: Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands

Cultures’ Clash

An exhibition about literature in a library is a lovely redundancy, like writing a poem in Montparnasse. The exhibition Writing Britain at the British Library is a necessary tautology.

The room seethes imagination, Britishness and vacuum packed paper.  Stories and notes and images stimulate our memory of past afternoons spent with the eyes on the pages, while we lived many days before the sun would set. The darkness sleeps on the walls, like it did when my child self used to read at night before going to bed, falling into Arcadia following a painter of words. Some still think creativity cannot be learnt.

“The exhibition is over” is announced. Literary culture stops at 5 pm to let our minds sink into British drinking culture. While the library shuts the gates, the pubs stretch their alcoholic arms towards us. Too bad that at the price of the ticket you can barely have a Pimm’s.

The exhibition Writing Britain is at the British Library until September 25.

The I Think Project V

London in Creative Writing - Tate Modern: “I’m here but nothing” by Yayoi Kusama

Reasonable Folly of Polka Dot Splinters of Light

The room is soaked in a blue shadow studded with fluo polka dot stickers: blue, green, red, yellow. The blueness lays on the TV, the sofa, the table, the chairs, the glass on the table, the shelves, the books on the shelves, the floor. The polka dots are splinters of light originated from the tail of a nuclear comet – that’s why their colours don’t fade even after reaching the ground.

I sit on a chair and I wait for them to cover me, but they don’t come. I don’t feel uncomfortable because everything in the room is entangled with polka dots, I feel uncomfortable because I’m not. I am a dark shadow in a world of coloured spots.

This folly created by an obsessive red-bobbed manga character looks really balanced to me. Light and darkness, colours and blueness, even the equidistance between polka dots. This is an intriguing-but-not-creepy kind of folly, the reasonable folly that can be canalised into a piece of art.

Yayoi Kusama will be at Tate Britain until June 5.

The I Think Project IV

Hunger Issue 2 Summer 2012

Summer means hunger: sun, strawberries, sex. If your hunger encompasses inspiration, culture and the unexpected, then have a bite of the summer issue of Hunger magazine. Photography, journalism, fashion, music, arts, beauty are first class, like a champagne glass in the French Riviera. Just they are much edgier, like a champagne glass in the French Riviera with Iggy Pop in the Seventies.

What’s in this champagne then? Circus artists, crows and doll heads. A jewellery photoshoot where jewels are all the models wear. An interview with Monica Bellucci, an insight in the Borough of Art – the East End, haute couture as seen by designers who are “a cut above”. And this is just the first glass.

The editor’s letter clearly reminds us why we are always hungry: “I love you for having faith, for believing that print isn’t dead and that magazines are still worth the paper they’re printed on.” As worth as, let's say, champagne in France?

Indulge in your hunger.

Clerkenwell Design Week

Who: 3 exhibition locations plus 40 showrooms, music, talks, events... an itinerant theatre and a pop up bar!

What: interior design, architecture, graphics, visual and concept creativity

When: 22-23-24 June

Where: Clerkenwell, London

How: free (online registration)

Why: inspiring, eclectic, cutting edge...a nice stroll in the sun in a beautiful part of London

Venue 1: The Farmiloe Building

Southbank Centre

Etsy

Venue 2: Museum of the Order of St John

Solar Tree by Ross Lovegrove

Venue 3: House of Detention