Summer Sale Extended!

Usually the August Bank Holiday bookends [see what I just did there?] the summer season and each of us will have personal touchstones that we use to celebrate it; The Charity Sheild match, oysters to start every meal, Notting Hill Carnival... And of course all retailers' heads turn towards the run-up to Christmas. But we don't care about any of that!

Mishmash Bookshop are very pleased to announce that we will be continuing our hugely successful Summer Sale for another two weeks!

We just feel that there may be lots of you out there in Westminster who [despite my twice-a-day leafletting and three months to call in!] havent yet taken the opportunity to drop in and get yourself something for only £2 from our huge selection of paperbacks and childrens illustrated titles. And indeed it might be just the right time to start squirrelling stuff away for Christmas. Piles of it in fact....

So spread the word; don't keep such good news to yourselves. We look forward to welcoming you soon.

Andrew Mishmash

Apart from books ....there's always beer!

Japanese Animated Movies

So I took the Wee Guy to see Howl's Moving Castle at the weekend - remember he is three and a half and it's two hours long - and he enjoyed it immensely. He really loved Spirtited Away too, when we watched it at home on DVD awhile back.

But I'm afraid I just don't get japanese animated films. They seem to be entirely made up of middle, and the opening scenes and denouement are really just there to bookend the random linear narrative structure. So I just think "Is that it?" Or is it supposed to be simply about the skill and beauty of the drawings?

I know there are films that very famously only have a middle - Reservoir Dogs for instance - and I'm not saying I like them any the less for it, but I find it hard to take that kind of spin on animation. Give me Belleville Rendezvous anyday - and it's about cycling too.

I'm also struck that both Howls Moving Castle and Spirited Away are concerned with the central character struggling to regain something that has been stolen from them - youth or their name - and so seem to me to be about situations and our reactions to them. Whereas we in the west are much more likely to see dramatic resolution in terms of the moral learning of the characters - Finding Nemo anyone?

Or maybe - like science fiction literature- its about these very ideas. I really enjoyed the play on the four parallel universes in Howls Moving Castle, the hero physically melting with depressive angst, the continuous interspecietal shapeshifting in both movies. But I felt let down by the almost Pythonesque denouements; the momentary realisation that one character was the same person who rescued another from drowning ten years ago, or is a long disappeared prince from a country that hasn't made a prior appearance in the movie. It just seemed trite, and Thomas Hardy, frankly, did it better.

Somehow I come to the conclusion that it's not about anything other than what the Wee Guy gets from it - some popcorn and two hours of superhero shenanigans; so I feel almost guilty that I have been looking too hard. I can't deny that I enjoyed both films a lot.

By the way the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton is one of the best picture houses in London, and regularly wins awards confirming this, but don't ask for a latte before lunchtime - unless you want it for lunch, in which case you'll be well sorted. How hard can it be? And when I asked if I would be quicker going across the road the girl said "yes probably". Try "yes definitely" honey!

Andrew Mishmash

This is the Station!

This is St. James's Park Station at 55 Broadway. MishMash Bookshop is on the ground floor of the mall inside.

This view is from Tothill Street, and is essentially the view of the approach from Westminster Abbey. Just out of shot on the left is New Scotland Yard, the police station that isn't; and I'm sorry to say that in shot on the extreme right is Basil Spence's horrific brutalist monstrosity 50 Queen Anne's Gate, that was until recently the home of The Home Office. Basil Spence died [of shame no doubt] shortly after it was completed in 1976; and it was that building which prompted Norman St. John Stevas to complain that Spence had now ruined two London parks, having designed the new Buckingham Barracks opposite Hyde Park. Which is probably the one thing I can agree with Lord NStJS about.

By the way you should note how filthy the otherwise stunning 55 Broadway building is. That's because Transport for London are too lazy, mean, stupid and philistine to keep it clean. These headquarters, and the astonishing clarity of their design, once reflected the optimism and pride that the railway pioneers quite rightly had in their project to modernise the very nature of working and living in urban London. And Transport for London have done more to brutalise the legacy of their predecessors than Basil Spence ever did. Thats what I think.....

Andrew Mishmash

Here's where we are...

We are located in the Broadway Shopping Mall, which is a “compact and bijoux” collection of coffee bars and independent businesses on the ground floor above St. James’s Park Underground Station in Westminster.

The building itself is rightly famous as the headquarters of Transport for London, designed by Charles Holden in the 1920’s [I promise a further opinionated blog at some point on the fascinating history of the building and its friezes]. It looks not unlike the monolithic hub edifice in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and was the tallest structure in London when it was built.

This means we are across the road from New Scotland Yard, the most famous police station in the world; we are round the corner from Buckingham Palace, home of the most famous lady in the world; and one minutes walk away from Westminster Abbey, which thanks to The Da Vinci Code is probably the most famous church in the world.

At lunchtime we can set our watches by the chimes of Big Ben, the clock on the Houses of Parliament; we are surrounded by the minor government departments that keep Britain ticking; and we are a stones throw [although I would not advise an empirical test] from St James’s Park, which used to be London’s leper colony.

And so here we are, three hundred square feet of bookselling empire, in possibly the most prestigious and powerful few hundred square yards on the planet. So now all you have to do is come and buy some books…