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Saturday, September 27, 2008

Adieu Shipp's Tearooms



I had not returned to Shipp's Tearooms since that post about good value, informal tea houses a while ago, so last Thursday, finding myself in the vicinity of Borough Market and with a couple of hours to spare, I decided to treat myself to a cuppa and a cupcake. But once I got there I discovered they had ceased to trade because of problems with their lease. Nooooooo!!!

It is a great loss for the London tea circuit as I can't think of another establishment that is half as pretty and unique. The owners told me the idea for these tea rooms came out of a desire to put their extensive collection of antique tea sets and tea things in to good use. As they are now unable to continue trading, this entire collection of amazing hand painted tea sets, and all sorts of fine bone china and glass tableware must go. If you are into collecting teapots and tea cups, forget the Portobello market and head straight into this place. You won't be able to resist taking home a vintage tea cup or two.

For more information visit: www.shippstearooms.co.uk

Sunday, September 21, 2008

101th Post, 101 References...

Kenneth MacMillan's Rite of Spring (Picture source: The Telegraph)

... from the first 101 pages of Alejo Carpentier's swansong novel: The Rite of Spring.

Yep, that's one cultural reference per page. There are many more in fact but I daren't refer to the more obscure or double citations (Luisa Miller anyone? I googled and found it's an early Verdi Opera based on a Schiller play), some of which have surely passed me by.

Coping with the overwhelming amount of name dropping in this 500 page novel in part explains my reduced blogging mode these days. Why so many you ask? Apparently, Carpentier's idea was to write a truly "baroque" novel, full of twists and turns, highly ornate and equal parts fiction/essay/autobiography.

Whether he also intended to leave his readers with a "Dummies Guide to the Intelligentsia" is unclear, but hemorrhaging one name after the other does make us lose focus from the central plot: a love story between a Cuban architect and a Russian dancer who meet during the Spanish civil war and end up playing a central role in the Cuban Revolution. But "The Rite of Spring" is also a story about obsessions written by an obsessive mind. And that's why I simply must finish reading this book one day...

Lewis Carroll
Igor Stravinsky
Tchaikovsky
Goya
Robespierre
Paul Eluard
Picasso
Van Gogh
Duke Ellington
Louis Armstrong
King Vidor
Hubert Robert
Tolstoy
Tomas de Torquemada
Toulouse Lautrec
Maurice Chevalier
Cecil B. de Mille
Julio Antonio Mella
Nikolay Gogol
Ortega y Gasset
Marcel Prevost
Marcel Proust
Marcel Duchamp
Holbein
Leonardo da Vinci
Diego Velazquez
Diego Rivera
Beethoven
Mondrian
Georges Braque
Cezanne
Chardin
Juan Gris
Napoleon Bonaparte
Guillaume Apollinaire
Duke of Berry
Carpeaux
Prokofiev
Georges Balanchine
Sergey Diaghilev
Salvador Dali
Jean Cocteau
Brancusi
Le Corbusier
Robert Desnos (not to be confused with Robert Doisneau)
Chopin
Watteau
Wagner
Mahler
Ivan Goll
Rimbaud
Comte de Lautreamont
Marquis de Sade
Victor Hugo
Hyeronimus Bosch
Edgar Allan Poe
Baudelaire
Jules Verne
Giacometti
Gustave Moreau
Hegel
Marlene Dietrich
Luis Bunuel
Josephine Baker
Andre Breton
Serge Lifar
Lenin
Man Ray
Rabelais
Tristan Tzara
Shakespeare
Julien Brenda
Rodolphe Berger
Karl Marx
Django Reinhardt
Benito Mussolini
Camille Claudel
Anton Webern
Fritz Lang
Franco
Gabriel Garcia Lorca
Cervantes
Goethe
Franz Liszt
Lucas Cranach
Walter Gropius
Paul Klee
Kandinsky
Schiller
Johan Sebastian Bach
Leni Riefenstahl
Sigmund Freud
Heinrich Himmler
Hans Wieland
Verdi
Charlotte von Stein
Lazlo Moholy-Nagy
Dante
Friedrich Nietzsche
Heidegger
Novalis (or Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg)