London Journal – Day 21 – I Feel Good

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I ventured down into Marylebone Lane today for lunch at Caffé Caldesi, a Tuscan redoubt I have passed many times.  I sat surrounded by wealthy folk discussing tracker loan rates and sub-prime fallout while the waitstaff chit-chatted in French an Italian and James Brown music played on the hi-fi.  What an odd juxtaposition.

Had some wonderful salmon with parsnip purée and tapenade.   Yum.

Then a long bus ride to Waterloo on the upper deck, enjoying the sights.  The clouds gradually taking over the sky from the sun.  I strolled the Queen’s Walk to the base of the Eye and took some snaps.

London Eye Stairs

Then back home to do some laundry and pack for Prague.  I must stay in tonight and be a good boy, my flight is early tomorrow.

Ta!

Frank Rich Takes On McCain Mythology

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Over at The New York Times, Frank Rich has consistently demonstrated more forethought and prescience than most of his fellow columnists, at the Times or elsewhere. One of the things I love about reading his columns online is that he understands the medium, and exploits it to full effect. His once-weekly columns are about 2½ times as long as the rest of the Murderer’s Row cohort, but he further leverages that by peppering his columns with links to stories in other press, historical references, etc.

Today’s column is a capital example, where he simultaneously takes on the mythology of John McCain’s rectitude and the futility of his current line of attack on Barack Obama. I particularly like these two paragraphs:

In desperation to land some knockout punch, some McCain supporters, following the precedent of Clinton surrogates, are already invoking Mr. Obama’s race, middle name and tourist snapshot in Somali dress to smear his patriotism. The idea is to make him a Manchurian candidate, a closet anti-Semitic jihadist trained in a madrassa run by, say, Louis Farrakhan.

What repeatedly goes unrecognized by all of Mr. Obama’s opponents is that his political Kryptonite is the patriotism he offers in lieu of theirs. His upbeat notion of a yes-we-can national mobilization for the common good, however saccharine, speaks to the pride and idealism of Americans who are bone-weary of a patriotism defined exclusively by flag lapel pins, the fear of terrorism and the prospect of perpetual war.
McCain Channels His Inner Hillary – New York Times

London Journal – Day 20 – Home Front Readers

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UK readers now make up 10% of this blog’s readership, compared to 50% US.  I at least find that interesting.  Those posts most commonly read by Brits are the theatre and arts reviews.  One of these, of Thin Toes, is now prominently featured on that show’s Facebook page.

Thanks for the attention ladies!

It does make me think that perhaps I should have said more about some of the shows I have seen.  In particular, A Prayer For My Daughter, at the Young Vic.  I mentioned the show, but never said what I thought of it.  I will correct that now.

The script for Prayer, by Thomas Babe, takes us back to a grubby police office in 1970’s New York.  Two detectives bring in a pair of suspects and try to get them to crack while agonizing events are unravelling outside the office and inside the characters.  This is a tense piece, and gives the audience little time to breathe.  The set is perfection; Fourth Of July, and the detritus is all around.  A well crafted soundscape and pitch-perfect lighting complete the illusion.  The peculiar space of the Young Vic studio space is used to its utmost here.

The performances?  Where to begin.  The program says “brings together some of the strongest acting talent.”  True, true.  I give a special nod to Colin Morgan for his performance as Jimmy Rosebud.  He is captivating and lets his character build from within over the length of the show, until he has the other characters, and the audience, completely roped in.  Then he explodes in a tour de force soliloquy in which the force of his blubbered monologue is even more daunting than the weapon he brandishes.  Keep your eye on this young man.

Colin Morgan

My dream show — How about Colin Morgan and Helen Millar in Mamet’s The Woods?  Hand out smelling salts in the lobby!

London Journal – Day 20 – Please Reboot: Diversion Ends

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Please Reboot

Mother’s Day falls on 2 March this year in the UK, so I celebrated by having a bag breakfast in Paddington Street Gardens with a copy of the Independent On Sunday (free DVD of Luis Buñel’s Viridiana today).

On my way from Paddington Street I stumbled across a really nice little market. London is dotted with farmer’s markets every weekend (and some weekdays) and this one in Marylebone had everything you could want. There were bee keepers selling honey and dairymen selling cheeses, butters and creams, livestock keepers selling pork, beef, lamb and poultry, every vegetable and salad green imaginable, the list goes on and on. I picked up a lovely smoked cheese, but otherwise controlled myself – I leave for Prague in a day and a half I cannot fill up the fridge before I do. I will find another market when I return.

I then had a leisurely stroll down to Leicester Square and got a 10th row seat for Insane In The Brain by the Bounce Street Dance Co. at the Peacock Theatre. Along the way I saw the sign above over Piccadilly. Note the mouse pointer lurking middle bottom. This sign needs a reboot.

Then I simply wandered about trying to decide what to do. What did John Lennon say, “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans…” Well, that was my day. I wandered from Leicester Square to Covent Garden where I watched one busker sing opera and another sing James Taylor (quite well). Then up to Hoborn and Bloomsbury and all around there. Back down to The Strand and Fleet Street, and finally back to the Lycium Tavern for a cognac before my matinee show.

Insane In The Brain is a retelling of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, as a street-dance ballet. Highly charged doesn’t begin to cover it. The music is Hip-Hop and loud, the dance is gravity defying and energetic.

The telling of the story is very well done. I haven’t seen the film in a long time and kept finding myself going “Oh yeah, I remember this part.” There was a cute, cheeky bit, during the illicit drinking scene, where they paid homage to Flash Dance and Fame. The send up was effective but well intended too. The audience ate it up. I enjoyed the show greatly.

Well, one does get hungry at these late matinees, so it was back to the neighbourhood and Sunday Roast at The Volunteer. Lamb today, not as good as The Green, not by a long shot, but very cheap and still good. Cauliflower in cheese sauce, I like that!

I’ll end with this street sign I found laying flat on the tarmac

Diversion Ends

London Journal – Day 19 – Sleeping and Dreaming

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I almost forgot to mention my stop at the Wellcome Collection today. Their current exhibit is Sleeping and Dreaming, and quite good. I particularly enjoyed the Traces of Sleep section. One piece, The Sleepers by Nils Klinger, is a portrait of sleep achieved by means of a super-long exposure taken by the light of a single candle while the subject slept. The room was darkened, the candle lit, and the shutter opened. Once the candle had failed, the shutter was closed. The result is a sort of time-lapse photograph of the sleeper (note: this is not the exact piece displayed in the exhibit):

The Sleeper

The rest of the collection is captivating, and well captured in The Phantom Museum, by The Brothers Quay a stop action animation featured in the Museum.

I then wandered down through Tottenham Court to get some lunch and enjoy the scenery. Of particular interest was the scene outside a Scientology office. Scientology is treated here as a dangerous cult and roundly hated. In these two pictures you can see the protesters on the east side of the road and the offices on the west. There are more bobbies here than I have seen in any one place the entire time I have been here.

London Journal – Day 19 – Off West End Theatre

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Okay, a slow start today. I need to take a break.

I decided that I have had enough of West End Theatre. Don’t get me wrong, I have enjoyed all of the big West End shows I have seen, and with the exception of Speed The Plow, I have seen them all for half-price or less. But, I realised that I am enjoying the edgier shows found in the off-West End venues even more. These shows, up till now including A Prayer For My Daughter, Grapes Of Wrath and Thin Toes all have been powerful, well acted and well produced, and I haven’t spent more than £15 to see any of them.

So, this morning I went on line and Googled “Off West End” and found myself at Off West End a website run for this unique theatre community. I used their handy tools to narrow my search to shows which would be going on tonight, and found The Living Unknown Soldier, at Arcola Theatre, a show based on a real event which explores the tenuous line between memory and reality.

The show, like the three examples above, was brilliant. It is based upon a written account of a man who from 1919 to 1942 lived in an asylum in France suffering from amnesia following his service in The Great War. The reviewers have uniformly liked it, and I agree with their take.

The script ably tackles the fungible space between reality and perception, memory and truth, and the pathetic (I mean that in the classical sense) circumstance of the poor man at the centre of this exercise. Throughout the play people try to come and claim this lost man as their own father, son, husband. He has none of it. “I feel like an innocent that you are all trying to pin a crime on” he complains at one point. You are shocked at this, because the woman trying to claim him at this point, ten years into his sad lot, is one you really want to be the one.

It is hard to pinpoint any particular performance, or performer, for praise in this production. This has a lot to do with a production choice made by Simple8, the company presenting this show. The cast rotates through the various characters, especially the soldier. It is quite literally a tag-team effort for most of the show, where one actor will touch and trade places with another and take over the role of the soldier. This is an effort to make the audience not think about the particular appearance or physical characteristics of the soldier but rather to focus on his lot. It is painfully effective.

I will draw attention to Tom Mison who for much of the show plays a reporter sucked into the story, and to Stephanie Brittain for her performance first as an asylum nurse and then for an important part of the action as the soldier, and lastly as a maid who comes to claim her husband despite his abusive past. They, along with Tony Guilfoyle as the long suffering doctor, turn in nuanced and complex performances which help to provide the mortar necessary to hold together this otherwise centrifugal show.

I honestly hope that the BBC gloms onto this show and makes a worthy teleplay of it. The world needs to see this show, and it will only ever happen through a public outlet like the Beeb.

A side note, the theatre, Arcola, is a green space, and this show is the first presented, probably in the world, with a zero carbon footprint. The theatre is equipped with a biomass heating system, a fuel-cell power plant and mostly low power LED based theatrical fixtures. It all worked quite well, and I think this is the shape of things to come.

The next production at Arcola is Double Portait and I will try to attend.

London Journal – Day 19 – Please Look After This Bear

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It has been 50 years since A Bear Called Paddington first appeared, and the BBC are celebrating this anniversary by placing 50 Paddington Bear dolls in train stations across Great Britain with a tag which reads “Please look after this bear” and asking the finder to please call a toll free number and leave a birthday message for Paddington, and telling where they found their bear.

A special presentation on BBC4 just featured these messages, along with Paddington history, interviews with the author, etc. Quite good.

It has been over 30 years since the last Paddington book came out, but a new one is due this June. In a fitting example of art imitating life, in the new book, Paddington Bear is arrested and questioned as to his immigration status.

London Journal – Day 18 – Shrines and Casket Casts

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Leicester Square again this morning.  Score: Stalls, row H seat 5 for Cabaret! I’ve been needing a musical, after all of the heavy dramas I’ve seen of late. Not something too light, mind you. No, some singing Nazis ought to do the trick.

Then back onto the Piccadilly line to South Kennsington to visit the Andipa gallery for a rare exhibit of Banksy. South Kennsington is posh territory. A detached home in Kennsington just sold for £80million if the papers are to be believed, making it the most expensive home sale in the world up till now (not for long, we are assured, there’s a £95m offer in the works nearby). The streets from the tube stop to the gallery are lined with exclusive shops and galleries. The odd piece in all of this is the Michelin House and Beidendum (below) . It is a lovely building, but as if someone erected a grand McDonalds museum on Park Avenue in the 50’s in Manhattan.

This shrine to the bulbous rubberman is charming, in its own way, and the Art Nouveau style is right up my alley. Out of place here, though.

From that shrine to commercial success of a century ago I went to a shrine to commercial success just as unlikely, in setting and style. Banksy is a street artist, a graffiti talent who can do with a stencil, paintcan and boundless wit what few other artists in the contemporary realm can. He can engage a larger public, as Warhol did, but he can provoke them to think and talk about larger issues, something Warhol I don’t think ever really tried to do.

The comparison with Warhol is not incidental, I think Banksy seeks this comparison. He has even cribbed from Warhol in pursuit of his own mark on the world of Pop Art. Where Warhol sought out and craved attention, however, Banksy is so elusive that there is no documentation on who he even really is — no name, no confirmed sightings, and no retail chain of evidence connecting him to the sales of his works.

banksy-flying-copper-signed.jpg

The show was marvellous, there were about 20 or so works in all, none of them direct from the artist but instead from the secondary market. Some are literally pieces of walls removed from buildings. The prices ranged from £10,000 to £250,000 each, and ¾ of the show was sold already, even though it had opened just an hour before I arrived. The piece above (not a photo from the show, but this piece was in the show) was tagged at £25,000 or so. All told there was about $10 million worth of work sold in a few hours, if the gallery folk are to be believed. I heard one on the phone with a reporter, which conversation leaves me in some doubt as to his veracity, however.

Ah yes, shrines. They are fungible things, as my next stop revealed. The Victoria & Albert Museum has two entire galleries devoted to the Cast Courts, which are an oddity in that they are collections of plaster castings of burial crypts, statuary, etc. from various royal courts. So, if you want to admire the replicas of actual historic artefacts, now made historic themselves by dint of their being displayed for so long at the V&A , have at it. This kind of reflected significance is lost on me. Unfortunately, the ceramics, musical instrument and several other galleries were closed for various reasons, leaving the V&A a disappointment for me. Onward!

Oh, but first, here is a passage that struck me, from a replica of a monument for Emily Georgiana Countess of Winchilsea and Nottingham:

I
When the knell rung for the dying
soundeth for me
and my corse coldly is lying
neath the green tree

II
When the turf strangers are heaping
covers my breast
Come not to gaze on me weeping
I am at rest

III
All my life coldly and sadly
The days have gone by
I who dreamed wildly and madly
am happy to die

IV
Long since my heart has been breaking
Its pain is past
A time has been set to its aching
Peace comes at last

E.G.W.& N.

Call me sentimental (big surprise there) I like it. The countess died young, just 39 years, and had suffered the last of them. So, this was her parting gift to her husband. The beautifully sculpted monument by Lawrence Macdonald was his gift to her.

The next stop was the Science Museum and the new Listening Post exhibit. This is a wonderful piece, a visionary synthesis of technology into art. It is an enveloping experience: a machine which trolls Internet chatrooms, forums and social networking sites for words and phrases and then integrates them into sound, light and motion through spoken and written word. It is beyond verbal description, so I will stop there. Chase the link above for more details. I spent about a half hour in the exhibit, and it was time well spent. I attempted to take some snaps, but they are not so good. Go to http://www.fortunespawn.com/gallery/ and search for Listening Post to see them.

LL has asked about the weather here. It has been wonderful so far. Daily highs in the mid fifties F, or 10 – 15 C, and sunny. As a matter of fact, it has been the sunniest February on record, which in England is saying something. Not the warmest, but in the top ten, and dry as well. Today it started to rain a little, only the second time in the 2 ½ weeks I’ve been here.

In the rain I opted for the pedestrian subway back to the tube, and home again for a bite and nap before theatre.

The show? Oh it was good. I will say that the nagging problem with big name theatre in London is the masses of foreigners who have no sense of decorum. I know how absurd and elitist that may sound, but bear with me. The talking, and rustling of candy wrappers, crunching of crisps, etc. during shows on the West End is worse than anywhere else I have ever gone to theatre. Tonight it was the French family behind me on the right, the 20 year old daughter constantly leaning over to her mum and chatting away, despite my frequent shushing, and the German couple behind me to the left, who must have had a three course dinner, and discussed it all, during the show. What were Germans and Vichy doing at Cabaret to begin with? 🙂

Oh, but back to the show. I was pleased, even before the show started, with the staging. The sculpted drop which serves as main drape had the word “Will-com-men” spelt out in three ranks, with the centre of the O a large iris, as in a camera. The play upon which Cabaret is based was itself based upon a collection of stories by Christopher Isherwood called “I am a camera,” and this nod to origins was welcomed (pardon the pun). This particular staging (brilliantly designed by Katrina Lindsay) is very true to the original feel of Isherwood’s stories, very tawdry and served with lashings of gratuitous nudity. In other words, a delightful night out. Now if only we could exclude the Axis Powers from the theatre…

London Journal – Day 17 – Synchronicity

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Eyes On The Prize

After a lovely walk through St. James Park to admire the plentiful daffodils (see http://www.fortunespawn.com/gallery and search for “daffodils”) I happened across the Photographer Of The Year 2007 show, sponsored by Digital Camera magazine.  The shot above, “Eyes on the prize” is one of my faves.  The man in this image is “A street performer who regularly features at the Edinburgh Fringe, known as ‘He Who Wears Red’ (because his upper body is painted red), photographed near Edinburgh Castle at this year’s Fringe.”

Another striking image, and the overall winner in this years contest, is Marta, which I will not display here because it is very hard to look at out of context.  Marta is a young woman who was rejected by a modelling agency, and is severely anorexic.  I was struck by this in part because I knew at the time I was going to see Thin Toes (see below), a play about anorexia, this evening.

The real synchronicity came about while I was on the underground on my way to the theatre for tonight’s show.  I had been lost in thought and missed my transfer at King’s Cross and had to get off at Farringdon and go back one stop.  On the platform waiting for the west bound train, I noticed a man practising with a glass globe just like the one held aloft by He Who Wears Red (above).  The train came and the man was in the next car, but I could watch him through the doors as he continued to practice rolling this orb around effortlessly across his arms, around his hands, all while being jostled by the speeding carriage.  Amazing performance.

So, orbs and anorexics — coincidence or…

Ta!