When I'm Older I Want to be Just Like Banksy

I am still in London. Remarkably, it is sunny today. And yet, here I am on the blog. I spent the last few days being hosted by a Chilean man named Tito. He lives in a South London apartment full of feathers, books, masks, thin willow branches, onion peels, the illusion of sunlight. The apartment is just around the corner from some very fancy building where Charles Dickens grew up, before his father was thrown in the debtors' prison that used to be across the street from what is now Borough tube station. The area looks updated enough to me. I guess things have changed a lot, and not only for Charles Dickens. Someone I met in the Tate Modern reminded me that the newer buildings around London likely got created because of bombs, and this certainly changes the way you look at a place.

Tito is wonderful. He is literally full of wonder. He loves curiosity for its own sake. He studied metal work in Chile and worked for a long time as jeweler here in London, until the mainstream jewelry companies made it almost impossible for independent craftsman to get any business. He wears a goddess of silver, and he tells me he created it because the objects we encounter all the time are too full of masculinity: 'See, this cooking pot. Made by a man. The window there. This building. Your pants.' His passion is Mayan mythology. He told me wonderful abbreviated versions of the creation stories, stories that actually take entire weeks to tell. It made a huge difference that he loves these stories so much. I couldn't help loving them too. We sat in his kitchen with its yellow shiny tablecloth and the yellow light on the yellow walls full of pictures and postcards, and talked in yellow for nearly three days straight.

But not really three days straight, because there was the Chinese Dragon dance performance. Tito has worked for years with a group called Mandinka that puts on carnival events and gives workshops in different carnival crafts, like mask-making and costume design. They are taking part in the Thames Festival this weekend, a huge event with parades and merry-making on a very large scale. Tuesday evening, Mandinka put on a little preview show, for the festival's sponsors and coordinators, of the performances they will do this weekend. Tito invited me to Monday's rehearsal, and I went. We learned how to create the dragon itself. It will be fifty meters long, which apparently the longest dragon the UK has ever seen. Then we were taught, by a Chinese man who judges dragon performances in Beijing, how to carry the dragon and make it dance. This is really very difficult and it has to be said that I and the British people were horrible at it. We practiced for five hours before we had sort of almost gotten down one or two of the basics. And the following evening, we just dove right in. There were costumes and makeup and everything. I felt like I was a little girl again, getting ready for a dance recital. It was familiar and completely strange, and I just kept laughing every time I realized 'This is where I am right now. This is what I am doing.' It felt really nice to have simply fallen into something so unexpected. It meant I had been open to it, open to whatever.

Here I am getting makeup put on. Scrappy, as you can see I still have my hair.


Here is the front of the dragon in the studio where we practiced. Happy, isn't he?

* * *

And on to a different kind of art. Yes, this is definitely the land of Banksy. The first piece I saw was just around the corner from Owen's flat. The one with the children raising the flag of Tesco. There is a picture of it on Banksy's website. Tito took me to see his work in Waterloo. Banksy, whose work I've followed for a years, and whose identity is still completely unknown (I love this), set up an exhibition of grafitti art earlier this year in a car tunnel that wasn't being used. Huge, beautiful murals covered the walls. Then people came and graffitied over the original artwork. It is hard not to be sad about this, though Tito says this is the nature of the thing.