Consider this fair warning, Gang, the internet at our hotel in Westmimster is dodgy at best. Getting posts up May take some doing and authorizing commenters may also be slow. Hooray for internet problems!

 

So to pick up where we left off, international business class is some fancy flying! Everything you expect the experience to be, we got a very nice (and not at all Seinfeld-esque) dinner and breakfast, pillows and real blankets, even Bose noise canceling headphones. Neither Jim or I slept well, even with lay flat seats but I guess short of having your own plane nothing makes it not uncomfortable somehow.

 

But no time for lollygagging, there is traffic to sit in.

No seriously a lot of it.

Really a lot. The cab from Heathrow was a real London black cab and the driver was a real London cabbie but I have never seen traffic like this and I lived in New York! Even the cabbie was getting infuriated, and there were some questionable “not quite still yellow” lights being run. But we lived!

(Yes I know my eyes are closed, but it’s all I have of the two of us. You people know what my eyes look like. Look at the nice Banksy art and deal)

 

Today we headed via tube (not at all infuriating) to Shoreditch, north of the Thames and bordering on the Financial District in London. Like Harlem or the Bronx, it’s long been a home of the undereducated, lower class and therefore a prime ground for artists needing cheap accommodation. Like both the Bronx and Harlem it’s been going through a gentrification period which makes all the art we saw even more surreal.

 

Our guide, Dave, a photographer and scholar of street art explained the difference between street art and graffiti so: Street Art, he said is created for the benefit of the viewer. Often subversive or carrying a political or social message it is a work of art meant to be interpreted and interacted with by the audience. Graffiti is made for the benefit of the artist. Normally consisting of a name, tag or other identifying mark, it’s a big declaration that the maker was “there” – a way of declaring themselves kings of a neighborhood.

 

Shoreditch is pretty well covered in street art. Sign and lamp posts are marked with stickers, like artist business cards announcing the presence of street artists from around the world, walls are covered in layer after layer of art as new pictures, stencils, and paper appliqué works are layered over the old. That’s one of the unique things about gone street art, it’s by its nature ephemeral and fleeting. Art lasts days or weeks, sometimes years and sometimes minutes and Dave pointed out several works that hadn’t been there earlier that week. Once it’s up, unlike a gallery, the artist has no control over what happens to it and art is modified and often obliterated by the artists who come along after. (And often building owners and the municipality – though many artists have permission, most don’t making the act itself illegal and that alone is a statement against authority.)

Tomorrow, (if we can make the internet work) it’ll be tales of terror, beheading, and pretty stones. But one it is time to crash!