London: Free for the last time

Last Friday, Mark and I hopped in the car for an impromptu road trip. Our link to a free apartment in London was expiring at the end of the month, and it was our last chance to head down and enjoy the city without paying exorbitant amounts for a hotel room.

The trip was a little long, but nothing compared to our marathon road trips in yesteryear from VT to NYC. Mark scored an excellent parking space a block away from our flat, and we stumbled in and collapsed in a gummy gorgefest-induced sleep.

The next morning, Mark ventured out for a thirteen mile run, while I did about a mile and a half. Surprisingly (or not so...), I still had a some time to kill until he returned. I actually had a lot of time, as Mark got lost (he was supposed to turn around at a bridge which, upon closer inspection of Google Maps, turned out to be a tunnel - easy to miss when you don't typically run underground).

After a quick breakfast, we walked along the Thames to the Tate Modern, encountering a strange group of street performers along the way, and a very crowded boarding platform for the London Eye. At the Tate, we saw their latest exhibit on Rodchenko and Popova. These avant-garde artists were part of the constructivist movement in Russia in the 1920s, and the work was interesting. You can definitely see their influence in a lot of pop art in the US in the 1950s and 60s, as well as much of the Soviet and Nazi propaganda on the 1930s and 40s. Some of the pieces were exceptionally striking, as the artists abandoned paint and canvas as a meaningful medium of art (preferring architecture, textiles, and other three dimensional forms) in a final exhibition, '5x5=25'. The artists used the opportunity to bid farewell to paint - Rodchenko perhaps most dramatically, painting three canvases Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color and Pure Blue Color, to represent the primary colors and the death of painting.

"I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it's all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation." Rodchenko

                      

After a bit of shopping (Mark was a good sport) and a few beers in a pub, we also seized the opportunity to have some spicy Thai food near the flat and head home. 

The only real downside to my Saturday was that my Nikon stopped working - I've started getting an error every time I press the shutter (it sounds like it opens but doesn't close). Pressing it again fixes the shutter but the camera won't take a picture, and the next time I press it the computer gives me an error again. I'm shipping it out to an authorized Nikon representative today, but I have a feeling the shutter needs to be replaced, meaning I won't have the camera back any time soon, and it will probably be pretty expensive. Definitely disappointing.

On the way back, we stopped in Oxford to see the campus. It's beautiful, as you'd expect, built along the Thames and other small rivers, with gorgeous old stone buildings and churches. We also found a little Mexican place and had burritos (though I'm convinced that they got me sick the following evening). Mark has some photos, and we'll post them soon.

Today we head out for a romantic weekend in Wales. Pictures and stories to come!

Art and Culture in London

So believe it or not, our vacation in London was not entirely spent filming each other act alternately embarrassing (see: Mark's NYE dance moves), rude (see: my blatant disregard of the handicap notice on the tube and self-righteous "dickhead" comment to Mark) or obnoxious (see: video of us running parallel to the rest of the Jack the Ripper tour in an effort to get ascloseaspossible to our tour guide; note that this occurred at ALL stops along tour, and not only the stop showed).

In fact, we spent most of our time walking the city and enjoying our location in Zone 1 of the tube for its proximity to museums and must-see locales. We visited the Tate Modern, and paid the fee to see a (crowded) Mark Rothko exhibit of his Seagram murals and many of his other late works. We spent several hours at the Tate, exploring its permanent collection as well, but it was absolutely crazy-crowded - and a marked difference from my last visit several years ago, when I was able to wander the near-empty museum. I hope that we get an opportunity to return in a few months and view the works in a less hectic atmosphere.
We also visited the British museum, which is known best for an ongoing battle with the Greek government concerning the rightful ownership of a number of murals chiseled off the Parthenon. Have to say I sort of agree with the Greeks, though the museum has some printed propaganda to the effect that the Brits saved the murals from irreparable harm after the Turks turned the Parthenon into a storage site for live ammo...

The museum is also famous for its stunning courtyard, and I have to agree - while the museum looks pretty nondescript (though large) from the street, the courtyard took my breath away. What else is this museum known for... ah, yes - the Rosetta Stone. We saw it...(or, at least, a part of it)

Have I mentioned that the museums were really crowded over the holidays? Craziness, and I have to think it was a bit worse this year, with the weak pound making it more affordable for people from all over Europe to come into the city.

We also walked around the city, visiting Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Parliament, St. James Park... A picture of Trafalgar is below:
Big Ben:
We also visited the British library near King's Cross, and though I don't have any good photos of the inside of the library, it was stunning. It was bustling with students performing research and citizens enjoying the amazing collection of works spanning centuries of literature in England and beyond - we saw the Magna Carta, 1st editions of Shakespeare's plays, illustrated bibles produced in monasteries in 800AD, scrolls from ancient China, and the list goes on. The library itself is a modern building built around a center tower for the stacks of books, with floors built like platforms around the tower with kiosks and tables for people. There's also an entire section of the library devoted to the repair and recovery of old works, and we were able to learn about how the curators repair ripped pages, reinforce disintegrated, acidic pages and hand-sew destroyed bindings.

Speke Hall and Crosby Beach

Our first weekend in England was filled with trips to IKEA and our local home electronics store, Curry’s, where they're just as incompetent as the people at our local Best Buy in Somerville. But the most important thing was that we got a TV, a DVD player, and a Christmas tree. We also went into the city and saw the Tate Modern extension at Albert Dock, which was pretty neat. Liverpool is Europe’s “City of Culture” for 2008, and it’s cool to see how much they’ve embraced the title.

Our second weekend, we decided to try to explore the area a bit more. Which, for Mark, meant Christmas shopping. I was planning to do all mine online, but I was game and we walked to our local train station to head into the city.

I won’t talk about the next two hours, because they were a blur of far too many Christmas shoppers and bad mall music. Mark was successful and gathered a few gifts, while I paced the cobblestone streets until he was ready to meet back up. But then we wandered about a bit, away from the more commercial downtown shopping district (cobblestone pedestrian-only streets and the biggest mall I’ve ever seen, “Liverpool One”) and toward a hipper, younger area with music, bars, and a bunch of smaller shops. It was nice to find the area, and we had a few beers before heading home for the night.

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We’ve met a few of our neighbors, and they all happen to be “pensioners,” people who’ve retired and can now get tax discounts and ride public transportation for free. They also really like meeting their neighbors, and we’ve been roped into an evening of carolling and drinks tomorrow evening, so that should be… Interesting.

But one of them, John, mentioned that we should visit Speke Hall, a local attraction. I looked it up on Wikipedia the other day but have forgotten any other details about it, beyond it’s proximity to Liverpool’s airport and the Tudor-syle house. We decided to venture out on Sunday morning during a break in the drizzle.

One of the coolest things about England (I think) is the abundance of public footpaths. On nearly any street, you can see these small signs pointing out to public ways across properties ranging from churches and private homes to large farms and land trusts. It makes me look forward to having Miller here.

Anyway, we found one of these footpaths leading to Speke Hall (there was also a road, but that’s too easy). We spent an hour or so walking about the impeccably groomed grounds before exploring the adjacent woods, eventually ending up on a well-worn path atop an earthen wall. Elevation is key here, because it rains nearly every day and all of our other paths were waterlogged and muddy. Anyway, this circled around the property, eventually bringing us to the airport. A little weird, but we took some pictures and then headed back to the car.

We then drove through Liverpool to the mouth of the River Mersey, where it meets the Irish Sea. This is a heavily industrial area, filled with busy docks and some pretty rough areas. But there is also some gentrification in spots, and some efforts recently to set up parklands. Mark had heard about an art installation nearby, so we parked the car and began walking toward the shore as the sun fell (it was about 330pm).

The artwork was amazing and a bit haunting. The artist, Anton Gromley, made a cast of himself and produced 100 identical iron statues. These are placed along three kilometres of barren coastline, punctuated only by razor clamshells and urban detritus (read into that as you will). On the horizon are enormous wind turbines which, in the evening haze and fog, seem eerily futuristic, like the imagined coastline in a Philip K Dick novel. And then you notice all these solitary figures, their gazes fixed at the sea, as if waiting for someone to arrive. I don’t know if the installation is meant to be so sad, but it seemed so to me.