9-8-10 Internet Cafe, Baker St, W1 Ah, this is more like it. A grey sky, but the Tube is running. It was a trip walking with the pack yesterday...crawling traffic, so walking was actually fastish. Particularly the St Giles area, where they are making some kind of huge new transport mecca for the 2012 Olympics, I am told. Its unrecognizable from Foyles on up to Tottenham Court Road, and the whole of Oxford strees seems to be barely two lanes. So yesterday, with the Tube strike, it was really mobbed. I found myself whistling as I marched along with the throng...bankers with their coats under their arms, moms and nannies with prams, and a bunch of bicyclists wobbling along on the Barclay rental scheme. Actually, the Barclay bikes weren't in that much demand, it seemed tome. And I witnessed one of the issues i've wondered about in such a lockup based scheme without humans...what to do when you want to leave a bike and allt he lockup docking stations are occupied? Seems like an idea opportunity to combine high tech and social welfare by hiring entry levels to staff a lockup...but I havent dont the numbers, and it rarely works out for social welfare on numbers alone.
So traffic if roaring by. By the way,t he discrete hooting and klaxon of emergency vehicles you may remember have been replaced by the noisiest systems ever...they have it all, flashing blue lights, wailing sirens, hoots AND klaxon noises...all generated by chips that can be on the smallest official motorcycle. But most police are still un armed, and Sala says they look cute in their little kevlar vests and bowlers.
We set off for the Tate's via bus and river taxi...and of course did none of the above. Bus to Marble Arch went well, but the first 3 busses from there didnt even stop they were so mobbed. So we walked into Mayfair, coming by chance on Grovesnor Square, which now has a statue of Ike standing in the middle of what used to be a perfectly good street in front of the American Embassy. The embassy itself is temptingly low slung compared to others around it...i remember trying to calculate how big a RC aircraft it would take to crashland a diversionary device on top of it, during the time we were protesting the Vietnam War. Now they make people cue outside to go through security...no wonder we are so loved.
Further along it rained a few felines and canids, and we had predictably chosen not to bring anti rain gear. But it was a passing sh ower, island weather, and from then on the day was fine...even sun later. We turned in at the Academy of Art, and had breakfast at the restaurant there...sala loved her croissant and the poppyseed lemon muffin was among the best i;ve eaten, so even without the Sargent and the Ocean exhibit, there was no mistake. And the exhibit was great, if you fancy waves, boats, beaches and/or John S Sargent's painting. Apparently the family travelled continuously, and his sketches of rigging on board the steam and sail boats that Cunard was running at the time are amazing. So, too, the finished products submitted to various formal salon competitions...my favorite being the wake of the boat during a storm; the ship is caught int he moment of coming up the backside of a large following sea, so we can see the tumult of the ocean , the bubbly wake of the boat under propeller power, and almost feel the ensuing slide, dip, and then vertiginous lift as the huge mid ocean storm swell catches the entire boat and hurls it forward into the next trough. And he is so very specific; another oil painting catches the vertical 'pop' of white water when the bow wave of a powered vessel slaps against the face of an oncoming wind wave. Also exhibited, the sketches, studies, and final products of oyster fisherwomen onthe beach in Concale Brittany. And he was, I think, about 20 atthe time.
We wandered out into a newly dry and sunlit courtyard, which y ou will recall has one of those modern fountains...this one with colums of water a few feet high gouting up out of granite, with a really well camoflaged 'french' type drain system containing the outflow before it goes too far, but after it spreads appealingly across the rather rough granite blocks. Just after Sala wandered quietly through, a pink clad female child disovered the assemblage, and actually embraced one of the insubstantial bubbly pillars in her ecstatic joy.
We turned left down Picadilly, and continued. Lured off course by a courtyard of stalls, and I bought a Buffon hand colored print of a Great Back Back Gull for probably what the entire book once cost..and a beached whale for John. We soldiered on, so yes there is a picture of Sala with cupid, which I cant resist attaching. Lunch was at Yo Sushi...for a sushi fix...and found it edible and efficient as a way to drop £15 on not much protein. Eastward, make Eastward, and we were finally rounding the corner of Haymarket, and scooted into the eddy created between the Sainsbury Wing and the National Gallery proper. Why struggle to cross a river when a paradise of art is right there on your side? For the next several hours, we learned about Fakes and Mistakes...a show on how paintings are fixed, faked, fooled with and generally not always what you think they are. Then we went to inspect the one (1) Vermeer and wallowed in so many views of virgins and dragons that I lost count. Thats when you know its time...when the virgin and the dragon are merging into one incredible optical experience. It was time...we split up...Sala to Liberty House, and myself to walk back to Baker street by way of Foyles (they had just gotten the graphic novel of Heart of Darkness, which I wanted, and did not have Pitchblack, the great graphic short novel by Youme Landowne, so i made as much fuss as i could about the need to stock it). And then, the march home, accompanied, it seemed, by half of London.
We took the newly reopened Tube (the Bakerloo at least was open) to Kilburn Park, and then walked up the Kilburn High Road past mostly halal food shops and among black and brown faces to theTriangle Theatre. This is an area that we looked for lodgings in back in 1867, and ultimately did not look further because it felt mostly white at the time. The Triangle; What a good idea, a venue with two cinemas, a alive theatre , and a large cafe. A part of it is named James Baldwin workspace, but wasnt tenented or explained. But the next feature is a series of and by afghan performers and culture...and they have a big kid outreach...perhaps approaching Destiny Arts in Oakland, my favorite cultural success. It was Tiny Kushner, which we had not seen at the Berkeley Rep, and this production was directed by Berkeley's own Tony Taccone. I thought the sketches were quite brilliant...waiting for the 189 on the High Street afterwards . Sala said she wanted something a bit more in theatre...but you ( and I) will have to wait to find out just what that might be.
Today...again th e Tates. Rain expected, but the Tubes are running!"
best Alan
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