The Age of Consent

is 16 in Britain, so I don't feel THAT guilty about going to London to see Daniel Radcliffe (of Harry Potter fame) strip his kit off for a full ten minutes in the West End this weekend.


(I do not want to take responsibility for this photo, but I will say that it is pretty awesome.)

He is starring in the play Equus, if you haven't been reading your celebrity gossip blogs recently, and plays a troubled boy named Alan Strang who does some unspeakable things to horses. Randy Harrison, who starred in the 2005 American revival, says of the play: "Equus is one of the most significant English-language plays of the past 30 years. Anybody who hasn't seen it or read it needs to, if they care at all about theatre or literature."

I care a lot about both of those things... but I also want to see Harry Potter naked.

After Friday's expose we are going to see the last leg of The Avett Brothers' UK Tour. They are playing at a venue called The Mean Fiddler on Saturday night and man am I excited. Now if only they would go nude...

Lazy Sunday, Mackin' On Some Cupcakes

Everything is moving so fast these days I can hardly find time to update my blog, much less keep abreast of all that is going on. So, when I say "Lazy Sunday" I am merely making a topical reference to a sketch from Saturday Night Live and not describing my day (to be fair, I am still wearing my pajamas and it is 9 pm, but that is because I live in a small student town where it is perfectly acceptable to schlep to the grocery store in sweatpants and LL Bean moccasins).

BIG NEWS: I am deep in the throes of interviews. Next up: Sotheby's Institute in London.

LESS BIG NEWS: All of my applications are finally in. I am looking towards New York and Charleston for the summer.

SMALL, MUNDANE NEWS TO DO WITH LIVING OVERSEAS: The light is burned out in our bathroom and Scotland has about 436 different permutations of light bulb from which to choose (one is called 'bayonet cap' -- a name that I find unnecessarily violent). I brought the original with me to the store, but no luck. We have taken to showering by candlelight. I can't complain.

I've got heaps of work to catch up on, so I'll try to bring this up to date with the requisite photo tour:18 Howard Place is where the fun at, what can I say? Pancake parties, chicken parties, party parties. We'll take any excuse.

This was the annual "Lauren Makes Us Sit On The Floor" PartyJulia and I spent last Friday walking from St Andrews to Crail (that's 25 miles, folks) along the Fife Coastal Path. We saw lots of things along the way, including a handful of neolithic standing stones. Standing stones are to Scotland what mountains are to Asheville; they are absolutely everywhere. Standing stones don't make your ears pop when you drive up them though, so maybe that's where the similarities end.

I found the Scottish chimney rock and darn if I'm not excited about it! Also, I'm not entirely sure what's going on with my left arm, but I'm pretty sure it's something awesome. The coast of Fife is a relatively exciting place as far as rock formations and creepy, haunted thickets go.

Here is the aforementioned creepy, haunted thicket.
And a sweet rock formation with Julia next to it for purposes of scale.

I love this photo. Gwen in the window, Jamie in the mirror. Welcome to afternoons at our flat; they are very relaxing and often include garlic bread and/or chips and salsa.

Trips to Dundee often include a stroll past this statue. I'm not sure what it's about but I do know that I would like to meet this man in the flesh.

Jamie and I are having the best time. And that's the truth.

It Was 78 Degrees In Chapel Hill Today

Meanwhile, snow fell on Scotland.



This is the view from the sweet window seat in my kitchen.

In related news: this might -- MIGHT -- be the most exciting on youtube today.

Strange British Holidays

... and by "strange" I mean amazing, and we Americans should really look into adopting a few.

Yesterday was Shrove Tuesday, or more simply, PANCAKE DAY. It's basically the British form of Mardi Gras and involves less beads and much more pancake batter. There are also a lot fewer topless women, but I'm sure you knew that already.

[I saw it all at Mardi Gras four years ago... How the time flies!]

Anyways, we all kept our tops on last night at my flat for our own pancake day/Caleb's birthday celebration:

Bridget and I double-teamed the pancake flipping

That's a pretty sweet stack of pancakes, you might say.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CALEB. Here. Eat a pancake.

Isn't that nice -- Caleb was born on Pancake Day. My birthday is on Halloween, so I guess that makes us a pumpkin and a pancake? [Somewhere in Durham my grandmother is saying 'aaaw - my little pumpkin baby!']

I'll end with some fun facts about Shrove Tuesday from our friend Wikipedia:

1. On Pancake Day, pancake races are held in villages and towns across the United Kingdom. The most famous pancake race, at Olney in Buckinghamshire, has been held since 1445. The contestants, traditionally women, carry a frying pan and race to the finishing line tossing the pancakes as they go. As the pancakes are thin, some skill is required to toss them successfully while running. The winner is the first to cross the line having tossed the pancake a certain number of times.

The tradition is said to have originated when a housewife from Olney was so busy making pancakes, that she forgot the time until she heard the church bells ringing for the service. She raced out of the house to church while still carrying her frying pan and pancake.

2. [This is my favorite] Another local tradition, the Pancake Greaze, takes place every year at Westminster School in London. A pancake, reinforced with horsehair (gross!), is prepared in advance and on Shrove Tuesday tossed into the air "up School". The boys at the school then attempt to get as much of it as they can. The boy who gets the largest piece gets awarded a cash prize by the head of school.

Our night ended with full stomachs and a trip to the free BOP (dance) at the St Andrews student union. Eat your heart out, Mardi Gras!

In Other Academic News

I am taking a fourth-year module called "Culture and Society in Modern Scotland" in the School of English. My professor, Douglas Dunn, is a legend.

Read about him here.
See what the BBC says about him here.

The class incorporates art as well as literature, cinema, and theatre. Basically I love it, and I am so happy I managed to get a spot in the class!

I'm off to (surprise!) the library.

Walking 'Round Britain

I love to walk, and I love Scotland because you can walk anywhere; it's a country so criss-crossed with footpaths that sometimes it's faster to walk than drive. Scots don't bat an eyelid about a three or four mile walk, and just about any evening I can look out my kitchen window and watch people strolling by in groups of twos and threes. Some of my best weekends at St Andrews have included all-day walks with Breakaway, and recently Julia and I have started taking our own epic coastal walks (but more on that later!).

It would follow that when I found out my furniture professor of last term was teaching a class called "Walking Art" I was understandably intrigued. This from David:

"Walking as a method of appreciating landscape is a natural part of our sensory experience -- everybody does it or has done it. But it first became an artistic pursuit during the Romantic tradition of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Turner, Constable, Wordsworth and pioneers of landscape preservation such as John Muir contributed towards the alteration of its status. Artists' relationships with the act of walking developed in an unhurried way until the beginning of the twentieth century. After the Second World War, painters such as John Piper and Paul Nash began producing 'mind landscapes' that were inspired by walking and traveling in new and unusual places. In these, the moods and emotions of the artists themselves were projected on to the landscape in a way that was to become influential upon later practitioners of 'walking art.'
In the nineteen sixties, walking itself became the subject matter and medium of a form known as 'land art' -- although some artists, such as Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, have sought to disassociate themselves from this art historical pigeonhole.
This course seeks to investigate the beginnings of walking as an art form and will then proceed to trace its development during the twentieth and twenty first centuries, exploring its assimilation into the current phenomenon of land art."

As you know from the post following my trip to RCA I have a *hard* time with contemporary, abstract, and conceptual art. It just isn't my bag. Give me a Chippendale sideboard and I'm over the moon, but the idea of a bundle of sticks tied up with twine leaves me cold. I would say [with confidence] that 'walking art' falls much further on the side of stick-bundles than Chippendale sideboards, but I'm afraid of leaving university without having some background in contemporary art so I thought I should give it a go. I'm hoping to come away from the course with an understanding of contemporary art and maybe even -- dare I say it? -- an appreciation.

Regardless, we get to take some pretty bangin' walks around Scotland. We took our first walk last week in Northern Fife and I was appointed the official photographer, so here are the fruits of my labour:

Click here to rock.

We're going on another walk tomorrow through a more "planned landscape," so no more windswept beaches for me I suppose. Have I gained an appreciation for contemporary art? It's hard to say. Check back in a few weeks.

The Final Push

If I work on my research proposal for one more day I will lose my freakin' mind. Today is the day; I WILL finish.

Guess what? I am applying for a research masters degree at St Andrews. A few weeks ago David suggested I stay on as one of his graduate students in the school of art history, and since then I have spent every spare moment researching my topic, amassing a bibliography (going on 47 sources), and pacing up and down my kitchen debating the validity of a post-Revolutionary school of Charleston cabinetmakers.

I'm excited about my topic; really, really excited, and I wouldn't mind spending the next year or so developing it. I won't get my hopes up because getting into St Andrews as a postgraduate is difficult-- they only take twelve students a year-- but I'm confident in the strength of my internal recommendation from David and my topic is pretty exciting as far as furniture history is concerned [believe me, it's a non-stop party with those furniture historians, woop woop!]

In other news on the grad school front, I applied for the MA program at Sotheby's Institute in London and got asked to come back for an interview -- hooray! I'm still not sure how I feel about their program, but I like the fact that it is objects-based and in London, so I am happy to go down and have a look around.

Speaking of going down to London: Jamie and I are headed down the first weekend in March and we got cheap tickets to see... drumroll please... DANIEL RADCLIFFE IN EQUUS! Based on the price of the tickets we will probably be sitting out in the lobby behind a pole, but I am thrilled nevertheless. AND, as if it couldn't get any better, the next night we are going to see THE AVETT BROTHERS. Oooh I get a little flutter of excitement just thinking about it. Jamie has never been to London so I am looking forward to experiencing it again through her eyes; it's been a while since I got a thrill from riding the tube or hearing someone say 'Cheerio!' in the street.

OK: I'm packing up for another long day at the library. I will leave you with some sweet pics of me and Jamers from this past weekend. We work hard and party hard in Scotland. And that's the truth.

Helsinki, Meet Caleb

Caleb and I found ourselves in the cheesiest club in Helsinki, Finland (and maybe anywhere in the world) a few weeks ago. We thought it couldn't get any worse... and then they played Backstreet Boys.

[Ok, maybe we liked it. Maybe we really, really liked it. But that's neither here nor there]

So here we are popping our collars and getting down to some BSB with hundreds of 17-year-old Fins. As ya do.

Sneak Preview: Sweden

I finally had a spare moment to sit down and write about my trip, and then I remembered that it's Friday night, I'm young, and I've been working myself to death lately...

So here's a sneak preview of excitement to come; our three days in Sala, Sweden included a trip to visit the crazy neighbor who builds replicas of Turkish mosques in his yard. He only uses hand tools and the colors are "his own fantasy." He led us around the property showing us his work in three different languages; switching seamlessly from Swedish to German to Turkish and back again. Caleb and I fancy him something of a prophet, and whether or not this is the case his life's work is pretty amazing.

I knew that trying to describe my time spent with him would be impossible, so I took a video. Enjoy, and speak on, prophet!

We Be Ballin'

This weekend was the St. Salvators Ball. The theme was "Legends" and Jamie and I went as Audrey Hepburn and Helen of Troy respectively. I was originally going to go as Marilyn Monroe but I had to get ready in about nine minutes and my dress, although white, was around three feet too long; so thanks to a nice leafy bush outside of St Salvators I fashioned myself a little laurel crown and VOILA: Helen of Troy. I thought it might be a little conceited to say I was dressed as the most beautiful woman in the world, so when people asked what Legend I was I mostly just said 'your mom.'

Here are some photos!

The evening began as most evenings in St Andrews do: with a trip to Tesco.
Jamie and I are never far from a photo opportunity.


The Ladies: Jamie, Lauren, and Gwendolegend

Lawrence: A Legend In His Own Mind

Rob's Legendary Harem

I'm completely out of captions that involve the word Legend.
Here's the lot of us. Rob is in the wizard costume.

Ok, one more obvious one: LEGENDS OF DANCE.

Jamie, Steve, your Mom

Legendary seamen?

Oh, I get it. He's Stevie Wonder.

Gwendolegend and I made a stop at the late night kebab shop. As ya do.

Apologies for my LONG overdue post about the last few weeks' travels; I've been absolutely swamped with summer and postgraduate applications... Not to mention, well, going to balls and stuff too. I'll get it up here as soon as I can knock out a research proposal. Psssh, small change!

Be well. love and miss you all.

Opening New Doors, Among Other Things

I'm back! Landed! Countries visited include Sweden, Finland, and Malta. (The above photo was taken on my last day in Malta and is, perhaps, my favorite of all time)

... and I'm EXHAUSTED. We spent last night in Gatwick airport; I started to hallucinate around 6:15 in the morning, at which point I passed out face-down on a bench and nearly missed the flight to Edinburgh.

I've got pages of hastily jotted notes that will eventually amass themselves into a vibrant collage of multi-cultural experience, but for now I have got to get some durn sleep.

But here's a hint of what's to come [I know, hold on to your hats]:

- A thrilling description of the ferry ride from Sweden to Finland. There will be ice floes breaking, bands of praying gypsies, and much lashing about above deck for my part.
- An account of the subterranean workings of Sweden's largest silver mine (with video!)
- A window into Helsinki's thriving night life (also with video!)
- Several pictures of me lounging about in the golden sunshine of Malta, eating grapes, and generally rejoicing in the fact that there is not even the smallest suggestion of snow in the forecast.

Here are two photos, for starters, that do well to suggest the varied climates I enjoyed these past few weeks:

On the road to the VasaMuseet in Stockholm, Sweden.

Waiting for the ferry to Gozo in Cirkewwa, Malta.

Oh, and did I mention that classes start tomorrow?
I'm running ragged, and I love it.