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walking west

Saturday, August 12, 2000

here i am in the talk zone of the millennium dome, trying to type out a post on a crummy touch-screen without a working shift-key (but hey, lower case is kewl, d00ds). yes, for twenty quid a head you too can try out this futuristic internet thingy. fun, eh? actually, the dome isn't too bad. a bit like expo '88 in brisbane. i'm giving up now... this is like tapping out morse code on a mirror.

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Friday, August 11, 2000

Did you know that a year's production of Kit-Kats from Nestlé UK's York factory would stretch around London 350 times? No wonder the M25 is always gridlocked.

Those 'enough to outstack the Eiffel Tower' comparisons always seem too arbitrary to me. Why not something a bit more appropriate? Say, a year's production would stretch around an average consumer's waistline 350,000,000 times, or 35,000,000 if they ate them all? Or five minutes' worth of Kit-Kats would outstack several thousand vials of insulin?

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Somehow I expected the Millennium Dome website to be a bit more... well... glamorous? Big? Futuristic-looking? Tenty?

[12/8/00: Oops, wrong site. This is the official one. That'll teach me for trusting Google.]

Still going to see the Dome tomorrow, though. Actually, today; I'm posting this at midnight, after an evening out with an old friend, sampling the joys of London streets in summer. Amazing what a difference an extra eight hours of daylight, a cosy 20-something degrees and an absence of grey slush underfoot makes to this town... before this I've usually seen it in winter, like most northern-bound Aussies visiting it over their summer break.

Still, it could use a few more pitiful-looking beggars, gaping potholes in the pavement, ancient Renault 4s and Citroen 2CVs dashing madly about, and people speaking French and Malagasy everywhere. And where are the people selling small piles of peanuts for 100 francs (1p)?

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Thursday, August 10, 2000

A little something I'll have to finish reading before I hit SF: Anat Rafaeli and Alona Harness, 'Validating Your Merit in Letters of Application for Employment', in the beautifully-named Journal of Mundane Behavior. (No, it's not a hoax.)

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Wednesday, August 9, 2000

I'm still in London, spending some happy hours visiting and talking with family and friends. It's an intermission of sorts, between the other-worldliness of Madagascar and the down-to-earth business of looking for work in San Francisco. Don't worry, it all comes together in the final act.

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It turns out that you can't walk over the Millennium Bridge to the Tate Modern, because that sterling example of fin de siecle engineering is a tad on the wobbly side and closed for structural modifications. So I wandered along from the Southwark tube instead; and a fine experience it was. Outside, it's a giant brick with a chimney. To get inside, you walk down a wide front ramp to a modest row of glass doors, expecting to enter a foyer of similar height—and pass through them into one of the biggest spaces imaginable, opening up before you in one glorious instant, all dark industrial shadows and bright natural light. It's a wonderful architectural trick, so much so that it's hard for any of the work in the galleries to match its impact.

The collection itself is the kind of overview of 20th century art that the old Tate simply didn't have the room to display, meaning that London at last has a museum of modern art to match New York's, in a space as impressive as the Guggenheim or SFMOMA. All the big names are there, along with the names you've never heard of (but then, they've been hung in the Tate Modern, and all you got was this lousy t-shirt).

Refreshingly, the temporary exhibition of 23 installation pieces was more interesting than the standing collection. I enjoyed Anish Kapoor's imposing monoliths, James Coleman's slide-show, Jeff Wall's gust of wind, Julian Opie's Volvo and Cornelia Parker's frozen explosion more than the Rothkos, Warhols and Picassos.

Maybe that's because some of the old faithfuls are starting to show their age—literally. It struck me while looking at the browning newspaper of Dada and the yellowing acrylic of Pop (and not for the first time) just how short-lived so much twentieth century art will be. See it now, before it's crumbled away.

And why not see it at the Tate Modern. It's big. It's shiny. It's got a huge sculpture of a metal spider in the main Turbine Hall, guaranteed to induce unpleasant Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders flashbacks in people of a certain age. And it's the biggest thing to happen to the London gallery scene in the fifteen years I've been visiting the city.

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Monday, August 7, 2000

I thought I'd avoid jetlag this time around, since London is only two hours behind Madagascar, but Northern summer time is messing with my body-clock. Even at eight or nine p.m. it's still light outside... so now at 12.30 I'm still awake. Waking up at noon didn't help.

Had post-exposure rabies shot number 4 today (on day 18 instead of day 14, but who's counting). I fronted up at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel and was told that it would be quicker to catch the tube to a private MediCentre at Victoria Station than to wait for anything to happen there. One lengthy tube-ride and brief consultation later, I was the proud owner of another 5 ml of VeroRab, a spot band-aid, and a receipt that reads 'Rabies, 34 pounds', which is certainly the least I've ever paid for a fatal disease.

In that brief sojourn I was reminded that I really do like London a lot... and that it really is insanely expensive. Nothing in the ice-creams fridge at W H Smith's cost less than a pound. That's 2.6 of my Earth dollars. Or nine thousand Malagasy francs, which even at tourist-price would fetch about three or four kilos of bananas, or fifteen baguettes.

A pound here buys about what a dollar does in Australia. My brother says, 'Yes, but it's okay when you're earning pounds.' Well, yes, when you're earning pounds as an IT exec. When you're earning 10 thousand a year as a new graduate in some low-level office job, your standard of living would be... about the same as that of a part-time burger-flipper in Sydney or Melbourne.

But at least entry to the new Tate Modern is free, so tomorrow I'll wander over the Millennium Bridge to have a look at it.

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Sunday, August 6, 2000

I was going to add more, but just realised that I've been awake for the past 48 hours (since 2 a.m. on Saturday in Antananarivo); caught about two hours' sleep on the plane from Jo'burg, right through the screening of High Fidelity, which I wanted to see, but not through My Dog Skip, which I didn't (and so of course did). It's fun looking around the web again, but—and this may shock you—it hasn't actually changed that much since early July. (Except that my dad built a website while I was away, and my mate James, who I'll be seeing here in London, has started a weblog. And he's seen High Fidelity.)

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Hi. I'm back.

In our last few days in Madagascar, Jane wondered what we would tell our friends about the trip. I suggested probably not much. After all, how do you convey the sense of a place where the plants, the animals, and the culture all seem so strange that every detail demands your attention? A place where the average income is US$25 a month? A place where handling banknotes is a health-hazard, getting change from a note worth US$4 can take several minutes, and changing a US$100 travellers' cheque can require the bank staff to open up the safe to pay you? A place where you can see some of the world's rarest primates, and see the trees they live in being chopped down ten metres away—by desperately poor villagers collecting wood to make charcoal to cook their meals in their one-room mud hut? A place where everything gets recycled, from the smallest pill-bottle to the tiredest 2CV, not for ideological environmentalist reasons but out of necessity? Hit a work colleague with that lot and they'll wish you'd gone to Disneyland instead.

I'm in London, staying with my brother, a high-flying IT executive. He showed me his small new digital voice-recorder, barely bigger than a pen, which cost a hundred pounds. I showed him a lamp made out of a recycled light-globe, with the innards removed, the bulb turned upside-down, and a base and cap made from pieces of recycled cans welded together with solder and a candle; you pour petrol into the bulb, put a wick in the cap and fit it onto the bulb, and then light the wick; it cost 1,500 Malagasy francs (probably about 3 times the local price, because we were rich foreigners), which is about 17 pence.

Madagascar was the twentieth country I've visited, and I've never been anywhere quite like it. We didn't want to leave; we both want to go back one day. Assuming that we don't contract malaria when we stop taking the doxy, that my post-exposure rabies vaccination is effective, that our tests for bilharzia six weeks after possible exposure are negative, that we don't contract Lyme's disease or bubonic plague from miscellaneous bug bites, that our spines recover from several long trips in small passenger vehicles packed with fifteen to twenty people, and that our bout of salmonella poisoning has no lasting effect.

I've been trying to write it all down. I'm not finished yet, and I have other plans for the end result, so I don't know how much I'll be writing about it here. Anyway, life goes on, and there are other, more web-related adventures in store, which would make better fodder for this log. There's a reason why it's called Walking West.

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Old West