Here's Stanley!

Before making his name as a director Stanley Kubrick was a traditional stills photographer. 

The almost maniacal obsession with composition that he became famous for comes across loud and clear - they're almost too perfectly capturing my fantasy of the Boroughs of New York post-war that I think they might be some mawkish art direction for a luxury brand inspired by Mad Men or Raging Bull...

The Museum of the City of New York has over seven thousand images here

Shoe Shine Boy [Mickey bringing laundry to the laudromat] 1947 

Circus [Balancing act with trapeze artists] 1948 

Walter Cartier - Prizefighter of Greenwich Village [Walter Cartier during a fight] 1948

conspicuous consumption

Spotted in Knightsbridge... we'd just been at one of the excellent Friday Late events at the V&A and I'm not sure the combination of iPhone camera and dwindling light levels are capable of communicating just how retina-shearing the colour was.


One thing's for sure - this owner gives less than a fuck about resale value.

tower of power

The distaff representative of driverchris towers finds it almost impossible to pass by a museum or gallery, they exert a pull on her which is almost primal. This is fine I like a bit of high culture myself although I can start to fade a wee bit after the third or fourth in a day.

The way to preserve amity is to leaven the modern art and ethnographic artefacts with visits to stuff like the excellent tekniskamuseet in Stockholm - an amazing collection of technical engineering in a great location.

So what could be more exciting after some old masters then than a visit to a car storage plant?

Until recently the 'CarTowers' a storage device for up to 800 freshly made Volkswagens was not open to the public. All that has changed.

A special glass, panorama lift takes six guests through the same procedure as one of the 800 cars stored in the CarTowers.

Visitors are taken up 48 metres to the 20th storey by the car shuttle as if they were a regular car – for extra effect the car shuttle swings slowly to the right and then back to the left before safely depositing the glass lift in a specially designed slot on the observation deck.

How cool is that? One for the itinerary of the next European road trip.