Spots, Shops and Ships

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Lower Marsh is a short little street along the southern side of Waterloo Station in Lambeth North. The street is anchored at each end by a Gregg’s Bakery, which seem to proliferate here like Starbucks does… everywhere. The entire north side of the street has patches marked out on it which are rented by street vendors of all sorts.

When we first got here, not knowing which flat to ring, and having no signal for our mobile phones, a gent, Ian, staffing the Wallabooks stall across the path from our door, offered to call for us, and has been a friendly face on the street ever since. There is food of all kinds – Mexican, Moroccan, Indian, etc. – as well as clothes, linens, miscellany. Every day the vendors start setting up early, many of the food vendors actually cook in the stall, having brought raw ingredients, or those slightly prepped. There are grocers set up at each end, near the Gregg’s shops.

We chose, today, to head over to Tate Modern for Yayoi Kusama. We walked over to Southwark along Southbank and Bankside, passed the tourist shrines of The Clink and The Golden Hinde. Tate Modern is in an old power plant (arts centres are a common re-use of these facilities) looming large on Southbank across from St. Paul’s majestic presence.

The show itself was a bit of a disappointment. We knew little about Kusama going in, but the Guardian had raved about the show, so we took it on faith. In brief, her work is compulsive, obsessive, derivative and in some ways exploitative. Kusama herself suffers from mental illness, and has most of her adult life. Inspired by the Pop-Art movement in the 1960s, she took her obsessive works, her “Infinity Net” series and parleyed that into fame through a series of very out, sexually expressive be-in type events: Kusama’s Self Obliteration.

Her sculptural works involve the application of thousands of fabric phalli attached to everything from row boats to couches, suitcases, tunics, shelves… Or macaroni, she liked to stick that to everything in sight, too. Hmm.

Her whole room installation pieces are the most successful in my eyes. She toyed with “Infinity Rooms” of various type, including one filled with typical living room objects – telly, couch, coffee table, lamps – yet covered with the little round day-glow stickers of the type used to tag goods in a tag sale. The whole room is then bathed in black-light. In another of the rooms, lights of varying colour are suspended in chains from the ceiling all around you, as you tread a reflective path between pools of water, surrounded by walls of mirror. The whole effect is quite pleasant and disorienting.

Well, enough of that. Famished, we headed next further down-river to Borough Market where our pockets were thoroughly picked by the various floggers of food all about. We sampled and bought with reckless abandon, coming back to the flat with a lovely Norfolk Hen, humongous baking potatoes, fresh cut sage, garlic, cheeses, prosciutto, cookies, and some of the most pungent licorice you will ever find. (“It’s okay, feel free to spit it out. I’ve seen that plenty.” said the candy seller to the woman who took a sample after I exclaimed how good it was.)

Back at the flat, X cooked up the hen, roasted a tater (one was big enough for two) and I dealt with salad and Brussels sprouts. Oh, what a feast had we! Yowser!!

A little wine with dinner, then off we stumbled down Lower Marsh street to the well hidden entrance to the Old Vic Tunnels, where we were to see The Sea Plays, by Eugene O’Neill. The tunnels are 30,000 square feet of abandoned rail tunnels, storage vaults, and drainage caverns underneath the Waterloo Station. Vast dank catacombs, sprawling for acres. We found a perch in the bar, on an old overstuffed, and waited patiently. Suddenly a team of firemen marched through the crowd. Not fire-engine and dalmatian type firemen, no the men who stoke the fire of a steam driven ship.

Soon, a bell, and we follow down a dark corridor towards the engine room of the ship. The air is acrid and dense with smoke. Bright orange and red light flashes from the great maw of the fireboxes as the men, streaked with sweat, shovel coal into them. The sharp clank-clank of the engine’s fills the air. We’re shepherded further into the ship, till we left gazing into the main hold, a calm night, just some fog in the air.

A sudden lurch signals the arrival of heavy weather, and the entire ship lunges first to one side then the other. Duct work swings down from the rafters as great washes of waves break over the sides of the ship, scuppering the gun’lls. We see a man washed into the hold, tumbling the vast distance from the deck ’till he disappears from view into the dark depths. There are the cries of his fellow sailors as they struggle to rescue him.

Finally, the storm subsides and we’re left in the fo’c’s’le, the men in their bunks, but one lies alone, on a stretcher. He is tended to by his friend and fellow seaman…

That is how dramatic our introduction was to O’Neill’s 1916 masterpiece, Bound East For Cardiff, and it never let up for a moment. The staging was nothing short of brilliant, the acting roundly good, the production values exceptional and the entire experience left the audience gasping for breath, holding onto our seats, and utterly absorbed into the experience of the show. Wow!

Cannot really pick out any particular performance here. It was a tight ensemble of 16 actors for the three pieces. The first act, in addition to Bound included In The Zone, a taught drama involving men on a merchant vessel trying to avoid U Boats during WWII. Act 2 brought The Long Voyage Home, set at port, where just-paid sailors try to find some R&R in a port of call, and some try to escape the sea at last.

One might ask, but what about the inevitable noise form the working station up above?  Well, for this show at least, it is an ever-present but not at all distracting or out of place sonic accompaniment.

We’ll be back to the Tunnels once more this trip. Silent Opera perform La Bohème next week, and we have tickets. Can’t wait!

Master Class

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Quick note here on Master Class with Tyne Daly at the Vaudeville Theatre on The Strand.  We scored two in stalls from TKTS in Leicester Square for half-price yesterday, and found ourselves in the same seats we had for Duet For One back in 2009.  Odd, that.

The show?  Well, a revival, so no new ground broken here.  Daly was stirring in her portrayal of Maria Callas, past her performing years and teaching a master class to aspiring young performers.  Daly’s performance is almost mask work, something which is alluded to in the script when she tells a student, “Always wear the mask.”  Playwright Terrance McNally tells us as much about how he sees opera as he does about Callas herself, and to be quite honest it is the scenes of instruction, Callas one-on-one with a student, which are the most enjoyable.

There are two long scenes of exposition — about her relationships with Ari Onassis or her first husband — which while quite revealing windows into her soul, slow the pace of the show and risk losing the audience.  The instruction, however, is the thing.  In the first act Callas is working with Sophia, a young soprano who lacks confidence.  What is striking about this scene is how much Diane Pilkington, under Stephen Wadsworth’s brilliant direction, is able to get out of the few lines she has.  Through the character of Callas, McNally channels his true love of opera.  He dissects, one after another, great aria, like so many Faberge eggs, revealing that inside, under all that surface beauty, lies all the basest of human emotions.  As he teases through the entrails of the wounded animals he finds inside, we see Sophia gain new appreciation for the words she has been singing but seldom understanding.  Tears don’t just fall, they spring from her face (and ours) and rain down her blouse.

All the singing performers were well within their range and beyond capable to their roles.  Garret Sorenson, as tenor Anthony Candolino (“Call me Tony!”) nearly brought down the house.  Soprano Naomi O’Connel, after nearly losing our sympathy with her obstreperous manner, finds her match with Lady Macbeth’s letter scene from Verdi’s opera.

All in all a good show.  Interesting that our first art exhibit was Big Art, in the form of Freud’s Portraits at NPG, and now our first show is Big Theatre on the West End.  Don’t expect much more of this — we have several more shows booked, but all are off or off-off West End.

Wiring For Freud

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The early bird gets the worm, or in this case the tickets. Following a typically fitful first-night’s sleep in travel quarters, Pawn was first to rise and after breaky of eggy~weggs and a rasher, with croissant and pot of forgettable coffee, was off blazing trails through Jubilee Park (home of the Eye) and across the footbridge to Trafalgar Square, the National Portrait Gallery and the same-day ticket queue for Lucian Freud Portraits, the enormous show (with some enormous portraits of some enormous bodies and some enormous egos) which just opened.

Lucian Freud - Evening in the studio - 1993

“…we tried going to that yesterday too! No luck. Our first ticket is 21 March… too many people in London.” wrote CP, yesterday, when I whined about a lack of tickets via the online ticket site.

Allow me a moment to rant about crap online ticket sites. This one, for NPG, is run by Ticketmaster, who with their monopoly and all you’d think would know how to run such a thing. But you’d be wrong. Their site is crap, and not at all easy to operate if you’re looking for an available ticket to a long-term event. One must keep drilling down into a date, and then back out again, with no opportunity to simply ask, “how `bout the next day?” Crap, utter, useless crap!

So with the gallery opening at 10, and the knowledge that they hold back tickets for same-day sales on-site, I head off and get on queue. Send a message to X, back at the flat (no comment here on her early rising record…). What I wrote was “Queuing for Freud: They’re saying 30 minutes but definitely tickets for today.” but what my inaptly named “smart phone” decided I meant was “Wiring for Freud…” Gotta love technology.

That was at 10:08. Turns out they had let people start queuing at 9:00, so I wasn’t exactly at the start of the queue, but by 10:33 I wrote, “close to counter. Will ask for 12:30 entrance time.” which would leave time for lunch prior to entering massive exhibit of massive portraits of massive people and massive egos. I’d been warned, “130 works! wow. Give yourself plenty of time for that one…” D wrote, jealous of my opportunity.

Lucian Freud - Nude with leg up - 1992

A few minutes later, tickets in hand, I strolled out into the BRIGHT SUNSHINE of Trafalgar Square and took my perch near the Fourth Plinth to wait for X to arrive fresh from her restorative ablutions. Lunch in a strange little diner (“MD’s where we don’t hide our ingredients behind a second slice of bread!”) and then we’re in, in amongst some of the largest canvases of some of the largest naked bodies you’ll ever see.

Lucian Freud - Benefits supervisor sleeping - 1995

Okay, in all seriousness, it was a fantastic show. While it’s easy to joke about Freud’s willingness – hell predilection – to paint large people, that’s really quite beyond the point. What Freud has taught us, perhaps more than any other portrait artist, at least in the 20th century, is how to see the human form for what it is. Freud’s portraits are almost entirely de-eroticized, lacking any prurient aspect and though stylized, fervently true. He will worry a face or a shoulder or… anything, to the point of nearly obscuring it beneath the many layers of paint, but he will pierce through to the core of that thing, and that person whose thing that is.

Lucian Freud - Naked girl with egg - 1980-81

Take women’s breasts, for example. Many painters (and photographers, sculptors, etc.) will pose their female subjects such that their breasts, if exposed, will be flattered, if not idealized. Freud, however, seems almost to strive for poses which show the breast in its most elastic, uncontrolled form. Pressed against the arm of a sofa, or flopped to the side, or cupped atop a sleeping subject’s arm. There is no romanticizing here, “Just paint it like I see it, “ one can almost hear him saying.

But the same fervour for authenticity carries over to all aspects of his portraiture – chins have waddles; foreheads, bony promontories; dimples, unflattering asymmetries; feet, bunions. Freud’s subjects, he tells us time and again, are normal people, just like us. When The Brigadier, 2003-4, sits for 200 hours for a portrait, Freud has him wear the same uniform he wore when he retired, some twenty years earlier after a victorious military campaign. An older man now, the uniform no longer fits as comfortably as it once did. The man cannot breath for these long, repeated sittings, so Freud suggests he unbutton the tunic. The result? The Brigadier’s paunch is prominent, it draws the eye, and what we see is not the idealized heroic figure, but the relaxed, retired and all too human man who lead others into battle and was brave or skilled or lucky enough to make it back in one piece so that twenty years later he could pose for this portrait looking like the relaxed, retired and slightly corpulent man that he has become.

Lucian Freud - The Brigadier - 2003-4

Freud has made us like this man, has found that part of ourselves, our everyman, within this man.

In his early work (which the exhibitors have thoughtfully but not rigidly arranged to make the most sense of an artist who’s work has matured as he has, not linearly but with parallel tracks, echoes forward and back, ripples which reflect off the mileposts of his own life) we see an artist who is working within constraints of the form as society understands it, before he begins to find his stride and his own true path. His wide-eyed portraits of the Girl in a dark jacket posed quite artificially, with unnaturally situated objects at once show him strain against the form of pose meets still life, yet also find new figurative language which suits him. He starts to break away in earnest with some self portraits, “Reflections” which are often truly that, from mirrors.

Lucian Freud - Girl in a dark jacket - 1947

By the time we get to the large commissioned and non-commissioned work for which he is best known, we are looking at iconic and iconoclastic work. There is no more Francis Bacon here, unless he chooses to show us that, there is no more of anyone else – just Freud and his models – even when the model is his dog, Eli.

Lucian Freud with Ria Kirby upon completion of Ria Naked Portrait - 2006-7

Something which merits mention is that until witnessed in person it is hard to appreciate just how much paint Freud slathers on to the canvas in his later work. In Ria Nude Portrait, 2007, the model’s right eye bulges out from the canvas so far she appears, under close examination, disfigured. Of course one doesn’t routinely view the great canvas up close and obliquely, so it may well go unnoticed. Faces, profound musculature, and genitalia are most likely to receive this treatment. I’ve mentioned already how de-eroticized Freud’s work is, and yet genitalia receive much attention under his brush. Women’s pubic areas are almost sculptural, three dimensional, in many of his works. Not surprising, perhaps, given his well earned reputation for prolific appetites, shall we say.

One last note, and then this essay shall close. Freud painted many self portraits, but his sense of reflection seems to go beyond this. When one considers the length of his sittings, into the hundreds of hours in many cases (some canvases took years) it’s easy to understand why he would make himself the subject so often, as he developed techniques or understanding. One thing which struck Pawn, however, is how often his own work figures in his work. He painted almost always in his studio, and often the studio itself is as much a subject as his models. It is not at all unusual to see one or more earlier, or incomplete canvases in a piece. For example, Two Men in the Studio, 1987-9, prominently features Standing by the Rags, 1988-9, made more interesting by the fact that the included painting was not started when the including work was.

Lucian Freud - Two men in the Studio - 1987-89

The Rags, of the latter pieces title, are well featured in both. Freud used recycled hotel linens for his paint rags, a fact which the unobtrusive but helpful exhibit text points out to us.

Lucian Freud Portraits is a exemplary exhibition, and well worthy of the crowds and praise it is thus far receiving. National Portrait Gallery have done themselves proud, and we were much the happier for having seen it.

Down To London – Day 1

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Soot.

Soot and dirt and a general sense of dissipation.

Much can be learnt about the state of a people, a place’s psyche based upon the the state of cleanliness one experiences on the ride in from the airport. Here, London 2012, that sense is one of stress, weariness… exhaustion perhaps. Or was that us?

Fairly uneventful flight over. Hit a patch of turbulence over Greenland sufficient to awaken X from her fitful slumber. Sitting in our separate rows (bless half-full flights) we each completed the in-flight crossword puzzle whilst being buffeted about by the gods of flight and wind. Pawn would like to think his accomplishment more complete, as pen was employed, but truth be told the challenge was minor at best.

Train into Paddington then taxi to Waterloo station where we left luggage at Left Luggage and then wandered the area of Leicester Square and Covent Garden. Crowds were simply mad! Spring half-term break is to blame, combined with Valentine’s Day, to be sure. Swarms of kids and families awaited us in Covent Garden, which kept the buskers all well employed, and surely some pick pockets too. Leicester Square, in contrast, was all hustle and bustle mixed with monumental public works. The whole square is currently larded under works, making navigation even more of a challenge, not to mention cutting off access to the most accessible (and actually fairly nice) public loos.

Not found in Covent Garden is the Cornish pasty booth which used to stand near the northeast corner. Oh well. To the Strand and Pret-A-Manger for a quick sandwich before descending to Waterloo and our flat on Lower Marsh. Landlord is there to meet us, and after a quick tour of the upscale digs we begin to settle in. The flat is very nice. In contrast to many London and New York flats, this one has an abundance of space, wide hallways, wasted space. Two bedrooms, one en-suite. Fancy fittings, nice kitchen, Sky cable. Yikes! We may never need to leave!

Not much more for day one. A trip to Sainsbury Local around the corner to lay in some essential supplies (hm, pleasant enough Pinot Grigio, 2 for £10), sausage rolls from Greggs bakery downstairs and a tea pot and ice cube trays from housewares store across the street. Then up to our lair to munch and plan and surf the vast wasteland that is British telly.

Slumber comes on like a lumbering freight train in the switchyard, and Pawn is bedbound by 8:30. >Yawn<

If Blogs Could Speak

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Further ruminations from the City of Angels.

Thursday 19 January, wandered into The Library Bar around 6:00 or so and found only one seat at the bar. Figured we’d, AofSD and I, manage by trading off on sitting. Shortly, young man, about 30, sitting next to us starts to chat. Nice enough guy, insurance underwriter with frighteningly large international conglomerate. We end up chatting with him for hours, downing martinis (moi) and margaritas (A). After 3 rounds, time for Pawn to drift back to relative safety of hotel.

AofSD stays on with young turk, who by this time has revealed himself to be on the cusp of his 32nd B-day, and to share A’s interest in working out and gourmet cuisine. They muster the where-with-all to stumble over to Ilan‘s where three courses ensue, and further libations, and then to a tequilla bar for even more. AofSD stumbles in to room at 11:15 cursing the hangover he is sure will come.

The morning finds us both working, briefly, before checking out and heading off to BLD for brunch. Traditional eggs Benedict for A and a steak and burgandy Benedict for me. Good, but not as exciting as last night’s turk would have had us believe.

I had planned to try to take in Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2012, at the Barker Hanger in Santa Monica. Turns out tickets were $18 each, plus $13 for parking, and we only had a couple of hours. Hardly seemed worth it, so we headed to the Getty instead. More of Pacific Standard Time, the Southern California joint effort wherein some 60+ galleries and museums reflect on the regional art scene from the mid 70s to the late 80s. While not impressed by the showing at Geffen Collection @ MoCA yesterday, we give it another shot.

The Getty is a spectacular institution, and worth a visit if only for the breath taking architecture and setting. The collection itself is large and comprehensive. We only had time for a few galleries, and largely enjoyed what we saw. The room reconstructions from 17th and 18th century France, etc., were fabulous.  Particularly enjoyed the Narrative Inventions In Photography exhibit

Finally, A needed to return to SD, and so dropped Pawn at the LAX Hilton for the Scale 10x conference. After checking in, wandered down to the exhibit hall to find my firm’s booth. Yikes! I’m very unhappy with the booth design — the banners and such. It’s an embarrassment, like a Monty Hall fever dream or something. The only way I can think of to salvage it is to just explain to people that while we have good tech, our marketing guy has never recovered from a bad acid trip in 1978.

Colleagues want to take an excursion to Venice Beach, so off we go. It was like walking through the Internet; everyone yelling for you to watch them fly their freak flag and applaud their appalling lack of talent, vision, style, ideas… as if blogs could speak.

The other day, Pawn’s friend AofSD asked, reflectively, what comes after jaded. I told him I didn’t know, but I figure that an entire generation of hipsters has ruined their lives by rushing to embrace jaded indifference a good twenty years before they were really due it. Now they don’t even have that to look forward to.

Live from La La Land

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Okay, quick, when were you first in Los Angeles?

I said quick.

For me, moi, Pawn, it’s right now. Got here yesterday at noon PST and already feeling like it’s all just so much already done.

Business, that’s why. Came here for business, Scale 10x. That’s Southern California Linux Expo, 10th year.

Excitement incarnate, right?

Okay, it’s more than that. Pawn loves art, LA has lots of art, and I haven’t seen it all. So, called my old neighbor A from SD and asked if he’d like to join me for a little pre-conference R&R in the belly of the beast. Sure thing, says AofSD and off we go. He picks me up at the airport, and it starts.

First stop is food, Cafe Midi. I awoke at 3:30 CST, arose at 5:30 after trying too hard to sleep some more, and by the time we roll up to the restaurant (148 S. La Brea) it’s almost 2:00 PST. I have Dover Sole and AofSD has a breakfast burrito. I am soon to learn that this is what most Californians have for at least one meal per day; a wad of food you can hold in one hand whilst completing a phone call with the other and pretending you’re carrying on a conversation with your old friend across the table. At least that’s how it feels.

Don’t tell me I’m petty. I’ll walk out on you.

So here I am sitting in a Westin Bonventura hotel room, 23rd floor, with a view of the HOLLYWOOD sign (yes, really), watching Californication on in-room cable, and reflecting on two days of deep immersion. Let me tell you how it works.

  1. Lots of art, so lots of eyeball time.LA has always harbored a real, deep, inferiority complex vis-a-vis the elite, East Coast, New York art scene. This triggered a volcanic uprising about 50 years ago, and no looking back since. Lots of money flows through the hands of the wealth centers here – Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Asian Trade, etc. – and they have made their mark. There is so much money layed down on art here it almost makes you forget that Dubai exists… but it still does.
  2. Deep cultural diversity.New York may be the most cosmopolitan city in the US, but has nothing on LA when it comes to the actual diversity of the sitting population. In downtown LA one can walk a few blocks and cruise from one culture’s deepest, darkest, most embarrassing vices and most shameful fashion crimes, and right into another’s. Korea, Japan, China, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Vietnam… etc. You get the idea. There’s a few square mile area in the fashion district that is like the UN of bad attire.
  3. In NY, people want you to love them, want you to appreciate how hard they work to live, to actually live, in their city, but they don’t think you’re really up to the task. In LA, they just assume you appreciate it, they are so glad you do, and they will only judge you for your lack of physical discipline, diet, tanning habits… I’ll take New York, if you get me.

Hank Moody is no hero, and as such is a perfect role model for a 21st century LA.

Here’s what’s good and bad in LA. Consider this a capsule review which I have carefully crafted to save you the trouble of traveling here yourself.

  • Vivian Maier at Merry Karnowsky Gallery (170 S. La Brea) is da bomb!Vivian Maier has been a favorite of Pawn since John Maloof first started photo-blogging about her. I won’t go into her whole story here, but enough to say that she was a French immigrant to New York, then Chicago, who took to street photography when not working her day job as a nanny. Maloof found her (mostly undeveloped) film in a storage locker liquidation sale while she was in her last year of life in a nursing home. She never showed or sold her work in life, but Maloof has made a minor empire out of the Art Horde she left behind.

  • Naked Hollywood: Weegee In Los Angeles, at MoCA Grand Avenue is hype in its original, unadulterated form.

    Pawn has long known of and appreciated Weegee for his groundbreaking work in crime photography in New York, but knew little of his West Coast work in LA. Fear not, MoCA is here to help. Naked Hollywood is an unapologetic look at this most unabashed, self-promoting, cartoonish character. With hundreds of prints, dozens of original magazines, scores of other photographer’s shots of Weegee… well, it’s just a cornucopia of glamor-hype. Well worth the effort to see it all, and such a great counterpoint to Vivian Maier’s guileless work.

  • Under The Big Black Sun (California Art 1974-1981), at Geffen Contemporary at MoCA is not at all my taste.I don’t know, color me clueless, but I just saw so much self indulgent work in this exhibit that it makes me hope very much that there is really a lot more that California has to offer us from this era than what I saw. There was the occasional bright spot, but so much of this was video-cum-performance-cum-found-cum-documentatary-cum-family-portrait… Jeeze, give me a break! There was more ego-feeding nonsense here than you can shake a very long stick at. Not worth the ten block walk from MoCA Grand Ave. Give it a pass!

Here’s some photos from today’s excursion. Hope you enjoy!

Filming a commercial at Pershing Plaza

 

Window display in Fashion District

Window display in Fashion District

Store front in Fashion District

Sign in Fashion District

Variations on a theme

Sleek and moderne...

So many shops, so little time...

...and one thing leads to another.

Careless Courtship and the Fact Challenged

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John P. Avlon has it right today:

…”Not intended to be a factual statement” is an instant dark classic, a triumph of cynicism, capturing the essence of Michael Kinsley’s definition of a gaffe in Washington: when a politician accidentally tells the truth.
No wonder “people are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke,” as Will Rogers once said and Colbert increasingly embodies. But we can’t keep depending on comedians to be the voices of sanity.
And don’t be fooled. There are real costs to this careless courtship of the lowest common denominator. Without fact-based debates, politics can quickly give way to paranoia and hate. Our democracy gets degraded.
Americans deserve better, and we should demand better, especially from our elected representatives. Empowering ignorance for political gain is unacceptable.
Colbert vs. Kyl and spread of ‘misinformation’ | CNN

Hear ye to that! <emphasis mine>