VauxhallVelcraux

Nature is committing a crime against nature when you have to wear a sweater and a jacket in August unless it's a high altitude in the southern hemisphere. All the same, it's goddamn delightful to be in London. Now that Tony Blair and his jetpack have given way to a new gouvernment, a couple of backbenchers welcoumed me at Heathrouw with a lei made of doner kebabs, but I was so jet lagged I waved them off, which was stupid because all other foodstuffs in this country are slathered in my bete-noire, mayonnaise. It's the British National Substance.

Anyway, I met up with my friend Rachel, whose family lives in Queen's Park, in West London. Together we tore through the West End, which is where NYU's housing and academic building were when I was here in 2001. I wanted to get the nostalgia done with first. We walked by where I stayed six years ago and I didn't recognize the building. The first thing I noticed is that way more Londoners dress like me than do New Yorkers. There's this thing called "New Rave" where obnoxious bright colors are totes mainstream (kind of like the Scissor Sisters, who aren't just for L train homosexuals after all). Even the cops get behind it.



Even though Paramus, NJ is pretty good, being home to "Leather!" and other such emporia of middle-class catastrophes, I found a store in Queen's Park that's got a mirrored dresser with some flowered patterns cut into the glass in a frosted fashion. The store's called "Ooh!"



I've almost been run over a few times. I'm kind of an aggressive pedestrian, Elliott has plucked me out of harm's way on at least three or four occasions and it's just my instinct to look left first when crossing a two-way street. So I'll most likely be dead within days, mowed down by a Lilliputian car that gets 20 deciliters to the furlong. A cab almost hit me and I noticed Dawn French was in the back seat with Ruby Wax. I ran into a pub while walking back to Rachel's because it had started raining, and wound up peeing in a trough next to Terry Gilliam. V. S. Naipaul elbowed me in the jaw while boarding the tube at Marble Arch and I saw Margaret Thatcher humming as she filled a shopping trolley with inorganic, cage-entombed eggs at Tesco. I'm really disappointed that no one has bothered to introduce me to Prunella Scales. I'm like, "Hello? American! Bring her to me."

You run into ambient celebs a lot because London is kind of like NYC, LA and smushed altogether. Sometimes they come to you. Bob Geldof came to the door soliciting a few quid for coalminers who have been striking since 1984. I said, "You looked better with your eyebrows shaved and throwing a TV at that groupie. Here's 50p." That's about the equivalent of a dollar. The exchange rate was $2.05/pound last week but today it's $1.98 because the chavs who had been able to swing a second home in Scottsdale are starting to get foreclosed upon as we enter "the last throes, if you will" of transnational capitalism.

Tomorrow I'm going to walk to some canal for an obligatory hour before saying fuck it and blowing a paycheck on jeans and shoes exactly as I swore I wouldn't do. I should have taken more pictures, but it's been raining so much that all I can offer is an aerial shot of Jones Beach.