Winter in Winnipeg, Sunshine in London

Marcel Dzama's Last Winter Here, 2004

The Goth Posse is in York today, for the wedding of the year: sarcaustick and thirstypixel. Kevin and I wish you both the very best! You must all be quite drunk by now; I hope everyone is having a wonderful time.

Maybe some of the wedding's good vibes drifted south because London woke up today to a beautiful sunny day. We left the apartment early, for a greasy breakfast at a local diner and a bus ride downtown. It wasn't even 11am and Oxford Street was already teeming with people. I couldn't help myself: I bought Arcade Fire's new album Neon Bible (music very chart unfriendly for something so heavily described as "going mainstream") and a french copy of Irène Némirovsky's Suite française. Our real goal, however, was to visit a Canadian illustrator's exhibition just by Bond Street tube.

Marcel Dzama's exhibition at Timothy Taylor Gallery is called "Moving Picture". Marcel is from Winnipeg; his characters and drawings are based on a mythology he created as a child, when he spent long winters indoors: cowboys, bears, femme fatales, terrorists, monsters, kings and so forth. The exhibition is free and runs until the 13th of April; two rooms carry his illustrations, sculptures and a 20-minute video called The Lotus Eaters (based perhaps on the poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson?)

The Lotus Eaters is played in a dark cinema room. A large creature sits on one of the chairs, and it took me a few seconds to realize it was a sculpture. At the back, a rhino-humanoid creature sits by a piano, as if it's playing it. The video is filled with subliminal-like messages and nightmare scenarios, accompanied by a soundtrack that reminded me of the Italian mafia. Both the video and the illustrations on the walls hint at pulp classics -- from superheroes to The Wizard of Oz, nuclear-age paranoia and 70s children television. Everything is humorous and DIY. We left the exhibition wanting to come home and shoot our own videos, create our own comic books.

We concluded our trip by stopping at the Photographer's gallery for cranberry & grapefuit juice, and a slice of carrot cake. Prams and couples circled our table, jostling for a free spot to sit down. The white walls carried large black & white photos by Walid Raad of a war-torn Lebanon, with colourful circles and paint dashes added to the composition. The unease in the photos stayed with us as we took a cramped tube train home. Luckily, as we arrived in Mile End, the sun was still out and the first episode of Dallas did not suck too much.