No, Kabbalists Don't Do it Better

This past Saturday (which I would have blogged about sooner but the internet SUCKS here), most of my friends had tickets to Fashion Weekend (right after Fashion Week, when all the big designers have runway shows that only celebs and other rich people get invited to, London has a weekend with up-and-coming designer runway shows that the hoi polloi -- people with a few hundred or so to drop on fashion instead of a few thousand -- can buy tickets to). I wasn't dying to go so I decided to save my money for something else, and ended up going on my own little excursion into a neighborhood of London called Shoreditch. It's a really cool place, with tons of restaurants and shops and markets and a really cool, young vibe.

I didn't just go to walk around; I actually had a few things I wanted to do that were luckily all in the same area. First, I checked out a sample sale on Brick Lane (which is apparently the best street in London for Indian food, though I wouldn't know because I hate spicy stuff) and then walked just down the street (how convenient) to this exhibit that I read about months ago back in the States and was excited to learn I'd be in London for. This organization had a bunch of Madonna's stuff, including costumes from her films and music videos and tours, and they put them on display with some other memorabilia of hers/pertaining to her from her career. It was a really quick little thing, but it was cool to see her uniform from A League of Their Own (they also had a lot of stuff from Evita, which I've never seen), some of her cone-bra corsets, and the wedding dress she wore for the Like a Virgin tour. The most exciting thing was her dress from the Material Girl video. They had the pink dress and jewelry she wore, which were set up on display with a necklace that belonged to Marilyn Monroe.



There was also a t-shirt that said "Kabbalists Do it Better," because Madonna thinks that's a religion, even though it's not (especially in the current form, which is just a commericialized money-making/wasting scheme by some family who decided to get rich off of a Jewish study). They also had an MTV VMA of hers and an MTV movie award, though I can't for the life of me think of which movie she would have been given anything but a Razzie for.


After Madonna, I walked down a creepy side street to the Women's Library, where they were having an exhibit on women's magazines (I know, perfect!). It was obviously focused on British women's magazines, but they still had stuff on Cosmo and Marie Claire, because those (and Glamour) are in the UK too). There were some really old "magazines" from the 1700s, the first women's magazines that were actually like books, and some international versions of Cosmo. And this, a giveaway from a magazine in, like, the 50s:


I also saw some funny stuff around Shoreditch while I was walking from place to place. There was a restaurant called "s&m," which I thought was purely coincidental and not meant to be a theme restaurant, a store called Duke of Uke, which sold ukuleles, and official looking building with a door labeled Fruit Exchange. I passed a man peddling magazines, yelling, "The big issue, ladies and gents," in an accent that reminded me of Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (pre-makeover, of course). Then, nearing the Tube station, I saw a large glass case in the middle of the sidewalk. A bunch of people were milling about it, and my mind immediately went to David Blane. I thought there must be some sort of display, but as I got near it I realized that it was the entrance to a bar. In the middle of the sidewalk. It was really weird, but even weirder because there was a small crowd of people hanging around the entrance, going in and out, at around three in the afternoon.