One of my all-time fave races. I love the sand chaos of Koksijde and I love the intense racing period over this time of year. And I also love deeply Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado slowly coming back to her best after a very long illness and injury. With all the young ones coming up, she does not get enough love. UCI World Champion, European U23 Champion, Netherlands Champion, 1st in DVV Trophy and Superprestige, and 2nd in UCI World Cup, all in the same year and all when she was twenty-one.
I’ve been waiting a long time for Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado to ride like she did in 2019 / 20. The pandemic and all the shit it intensified wasn’t good for her. And this season, she’s been riding like I remember, the one who won the World Championships. It’s more than a week since that first win, and she did it again at Superprestige Merksplas, leaving everyone in the mud behind her. Still and always my favourite rider.
Gala opening for Dries Van Noten at Paris Fashion Week. My Gala. That Dries. Antwerp Six Dries. I’m very in love with all this. I want to steal all the clothes and shoes.
My favourite orange hexagonal airport is closing this week, almost a decade after the original date, making way for the highly blah, much delayed, extremely suss new airport south of the old Flughafen Schönefeld which opened in the middle of a pandemic.
Living in Wedding, we could get to the airport in a few minutes by bus — even quicker for the taxi drivers who knew the tree-lined shortcut along the canal. Yeah, it was old and creaky, but drop-off to boarding was the quickest and chillest of any airport I’ve been in. Coming in to land from the east across lakes and city I’d read the ground finding Wedding and Uferhallen as we descended. Even getting to the south of Berlin was lazy easy, bus to Hauptbahnhof and M41 to Kreuzberg and Neukölln.
Before this terminal was built in the ’60s, before it was a military airport and one used during the Berlin Airlift, it was home to the Royal Prussian Airship battalion. And before that, the artillery range when the Exercier Platz der Artillerie got pushed west into the Jungfernheide forest from near what’s now the corner of Seestr. and Iranische Str. (which had a different name back then).
Unlike the beautiful Tempelhofer Feld, which has so far avoided necrocapitalist property seizure and ‘development’ and remains an open field like it’s been for hundreds of years, Flughafen Tegel has had the money class salivating along with the government. And being Berlin and Germany, we know they’ll ruin it like they did Potsdamer Platz or the new Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg. It’s what money does.
I first flew from TXL in late-2008, I think, going to London and Whitstable. No photos of that except a grainy one of me returning at night, and I remember hating coming back to face a hard winter and poverty. A year later, Dasniya and I flew early morning to Brussels to work with Roméo Castellucci on the Wagner opera Parsifal. Deep geologic layers of frozen snow and air cold as sharp knives.
Remembering my favourite airport this week as it comes to a close.
My fave cyclocross rider for the last couple of years, probably my fave rider full stop, Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado. And one of my favourite races, the very sandy, very hilly, very intense Koksijde. I was screaming when she opened the gap in the last sand section towards the end of the last lap, after five laps of head-to-head with a quartet of the best, screaming even louder when Lucinda Brand cooked the last hairpin (though I wish she hadn’t). Mad good racing and loving Ceylin taking her first World Cup elite victory, especially at Koksijde.
Glamour to me isn’t wearing fancy clothes or all the make up or perfect hair. To me it’s is the process of putting your heart and soul into something to be the very best version of you that you are physically and mentally able to be. It’s not always about the result it’s often about the perseverance and dogged determination that to me is glamour. So guys this is what my glamour looks like!
I’m also down with the fancy clothes and make-up and hair, but Helen Wyman on glamour is my motivation lately. Also Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado, Marianne Vos, and Katie Compton.
Keeping things orderly here. Last week of my Naarm / Melbourne trip, Monday 26th March, I got myself along to NGV National Gallery of Victoria for the 2018 Triennial and weird European art.
A few pieces of European mediæval art I saw on my very wrecked, post-season, post-bumpout afternoon in the NGV National Gallery of Victoria. Considering how long I lived in Naarm / Melbourne, and considering I spent five years across the road at Victorian College of the Arts, I’m pretty sure I went inside a total of maybe once, and that for a special exhibition which I can’t remember — the permanent collection and the building itself I never wandered through. Mainly ’cos I wasn’t into museums then.
So, mediæval European stuff, ’cos I am into it. Weird to go to Australia to see bits and pieces of back home. I was looking for Saint Mauritius (of course), because somehow I got it in my head they have a rather nice painting of him. Didn’t find it. Might not be on display. Didn’t find it on their website either, but that’s a horror to search so … Did find exactly one Biblical Magi / Heilige Drei Könige / Aanbidding der Wijzen (it’s from Antwerpen, let’s go with that last one), very buried in the bottom right corner of a retable, which I shone my phone light on to get some illumination to photograph (then butchered it in Photoshop — is not my best work).
The first room, with the wooden sculptures reminded me of Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu (still one of the best mediæval collections and museums I’ve seen), but the dissonance of German next to Spanish next to Italian next to Flemish made for an odd journey. A small collection, lack of space, prioritising newer art and temporary exhibitions can justify the jumble somewhat, yet it proposes a strange, fantastical idea of the history of Europe, a Europe that is monolithic, singular, consistent. Yeah, I’m spoilt here. I can go to small cities like Magdeburg and see a thousand years of history from just that region of central, northern, Germanic Europe all in the original church, and the depth and detail imparted shapes a massively different reality for Europe’s history.
But still, they have a Hans Memling, some Dürer etchings, and a pile of other works that are pretty solid examples of what was going on in Western Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. The German pieces are solid and heavy and dark; the French all flowing in International Gothic style; the Italian ramping up for the Renaissance. Most of the pieces aren’t brilliant, though pretty much all are solid pieces by renowned artists, and nothing is of the poor, regional copies that litter museums over here. And occasionally there’s a work I’m frankly surprised got out of Europe, which speaks of the kind of money backing the NGV.
Favourite piece? Jaume Cascalls’ St Catherine, from around 1350 in Spain. Not just because she’s my favourite saint, patron of unmarried girls, spinsters, archivists, jurists, librarians, mechanics, scholars, and fucking knife sharpeners.
Gala Moody once again getting the pervy fetish down on the first pose of the day.
Two more Adoration of the Magi from Gemäldegalerie’s In Neuem Licht exhibition. The first, a copy after Hugo van der Goes’ Die Anbetung der Könige vor dem Stall im Hügel from around 1500 (or maybe more like a copy of Gerard David’s early-1500s copy of van der Goes’ now lost original, though this one’s narrower and missing a couple of figues on the left — either way, done around the same time). The second, the Meister der Crispinus-Legende’s Die Anbetung der Heiligen Drei Könige panel from the Straußfurter Marienaltar, from around 1520. Van der Goes did one of my favourite works in the Gemäldegalerie, Die Anbetung der Hirten, as well, the gallery has another of his, the Monforte altarpiece Der Anbetung der Könige. Meister der Crispinus-Legende I’ve never heard of, but does remind me of some pieces in Magyar Nemzeti Galéria in Budapest, I saw on my eastern Europe jaunt a couple of winters ago.
(These photos were taken when I’ve been not so inclined to spend days editing scores of images, nor to agonise over photographing under crap light — and the lighting in In Neuem Licht is on the crap end — so they’re both not really up to my usual standard, but on the off-chance I don’t go back to photograph these pieces properly, they seem to be the only easily findable images of these on the internet.)
