Brick Lane and Banksy

I tried to like Brick Lane. Really, I did. And I know that street harassment is not restricted to any one community. Really, I do. But sometimes communities play definer, and every time I've had something obscene yelled at me, someone aggressively plant themself in front of me and mouth an obscenity, a tune whistled suggestively at me - 9 times out of 10, it's been by an Asian man. Or, as in the flats off Judd Street, very embarassingly young boys.

So you take all the harassment incidents, plus some street signs in Bengali, a sort of generic "crowded market experience" from any crowded market that's too busy to let you sort out its building blocks and voila! Brick Lane.

Half way through, we noticed with some slight irony that the brown faces had faded out. This was about mid-way through, after the great-samosa shop. Maybe just one or two Asians, but everyone else, not: tourist, Londoner looking for a good deal, salesperson... sort of adding to the feeling that Brick Lane had become a caricature of itself and all it had built itself up to be in its many years as an essentially immigrant community. The mandatory hippie restaurant with psychedelic colours. The mandatory crazy knick knacks on the streets. The mandatory pseudo-craft stores. What was the Real Thing?

Maybe it was the Banksy. We saw just a few, but there's a lot more around London. Such as this:

I liked this article on Banksy in The Guardian where Simon Hattenstone ponders Banksy's branding: like Naomi Klein, he opposes corporate branding and has become his own brand in the process.