London

My last day in London. Travelodge, being forever helpful, won’t let you leave your bag at the hotel for the day so you have to either carry it around with you or rent a locker at Euston station. At least my feet and my legs didn’t feel as bad as they did the day before, so it’s off to my usual haunt for breakfast, along the Thames to the millennium bridge and Tate Modern.

I will always find Tate Modern and it’s contents completely fascinating and I'm not entirely sure why. Most of the items inside you couldn’t really call art, they aren’t the kind of pieces that you can stare at for ten minutes and see something new for that length of time. It’s more a case of the logistics of making it and setting it up in the gallery. The turbine hall contained the How It Is piece at the far end. You cannot possibly call it art at all, it is just a huge shipping container that is open at one end. It hasn’t been sculpted or moulded by hand in any way it has just been manufactured. You can walk up the ramp and go inside but there is nothing to see, it is completely black. You can hear kids running around, banging on the walls and screaming but that’s it. Possibly that is the point, how much more black could you get! There is a great sign near it which forbids flash photography in the exhibit.

I certainly wasn’t going to walk around carrying my bag so I left it at the cloakroom, purchased a ticket for Pop Life and started to wander. Pop Life was more interesting than the other exhibits, I think that most of the other stuff is static. The kind of pieces that can’t be moved because of their size and weight. One gallery contains a VW camper van and a huge metal slab that is hanging from a girder that mustn’t have been moved in years. Lots of cool stuff by Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, a piece or two by Anish Kapoor and a few items by Damien Hirst that I hadn’t seen before. The strangest of which was not the white calf with gold hooves in a gold framed tank but something much more alive. I was walking around one gallery and saw two young ladies, both blonde, both identically dressed and both twins. Strange to see twins that are dressed the same, surely that is just something that parents do to make their lives easier. Once they get a sense of independence, possibly around the age of 5 or 6, they want to dress differently. Anyway, I didn’t see them again until I was near the Damien Hirst exhibits, when I saw a member of the public talking to them. They were just sat on two chairs about 6 feet apart, any closer and it would have just looked strange. Later when I walked around for the second time they were just talking to each other. I think the description of the ‘piece’ just said Dixie Jo, but I may be mistaken.

It is such a great place that I always contribute the required amount at the cloakroom for looking after my bag and also at the donation boxes on the way out.

Back over the Thames again and down the Embankment, past the Houses of Parliament to Tate Britain. Again leaving my bag at the cloakroom. I did consider going to see the Turner Prize 2009 exhibits but after seeing them in Liverpool a few years ago I decided that paying for the privilege isn’t really worth it, unless you know what is being shown and have some appreciation of the artists. The other items were just as interesting, exhibits by Bridget Riley, Gilbert & George and some huge paintings by David Hockney. The other stuff I'm not really a fan of, the old masters I'm not all that interested in. Some of the oil paintings are interesting because of their size and the detail that goes into them but even the works in the Turner galleries, for me, weren’t worth more than a passing glance as I walked past.

Downstairs for a sandwich £3.50 and a cappuccino £2.20 and to collect my bag. The shock at paying so much for a butty and a drink made me forget to make a contribution. Oh well.

Walking back, in the general direction of Euston station, I had to stop off again at the Apple Store to see if they had any Magic Mice in stock. They were still just selling the Mighty Mouse that I had seen the other day, but I did get to try one on a new iMac and was quite impressed, both with the size of the iMac and of the new mouse. It just didn’t look as if they had any in stock.

My train back wasn’t until 8:00pm so I did have an hour or so to kill beforehand.

Pondering the events of the past few days I don’t think stay in London again. The expense of an overnight stay is too great, that and the lack of rest because you never sleep as well in a strange bed, just isn’t worth it. The journey from home to London is just over an hour and a half on the train. Booking in advanced the trip there and back only cost £30, even a return to Manchester costs about £15 and that’s only about 25 miles away. If there is something in the capital that I want to go and see I can book a ticket ahead of time and go down on an early train and return on a late one. It just isn’t worth staying over.

London

Considering that my last holiday was back in September 2006 I think I've done well to last this long. There was a few years when I would always go to London and spend 4 nights or so in a hotel spending the days wandering around, visiting galleries, museums and generally soaking up the culture. Then I think one year I went down, which is always expensive for just one person, and didn’t really have any thing in mind to go and see. I must have seen it all. Any visits after that had to have a purpose, Nine Inch Nails at the Astoria or the opening of the Regent Street Apple store.

Over the last year I've kept a list of places that I'd like to visit if I paid a trip to our nations capital. That list grew quite large so a 4 night stay was planned for October, my favourite month for such trips.

The train to Euston arrived at about lunchtime but the Travelodge reservation said that check-in had to be after 3. I arrived about an hour early having walked down Tottenham Court Road carrying my bag. With there being a queue at reception I thought I would be fine to check-in early so that I could leave my bag in the room. No such luck. Had I paid the extra for an early check-in? No. It might have been helpful of them to check to see if my room was ready, instead it was a case of having to pay an extra £10 to check-in an hour early. My room could have been ready and waiting for me but instead I had to wander around waiting until after 3 to check-in. Not the best of starts but there you go, rules are rules. They also won’t let you leave your bag so I had kill time carrying it around with me.

I wandered towards Trafalgar Square and Saint Martin-in-the-Fields, managed to get lost a little, then made my way back to the hotel to check-in.

Once I'd dumped my bag in the room it was back to Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly to the Royal Academy of Arts where Anish Kapoor had an exhibition.

The person who sold me the ticket, £12.00, asked if I was aware that the gallery closed at 6. Yes, I had checked the closing times the day before on the web and it was only 4 now so 2 hours should do it easily. I knew what was coming, more or less, as I'd seen a video on the BBC web-site. The most interesting pieces were the ‘wax train’ that went through two doorways and the ‘wax cannon’.

At one end of the ‘wax train’ line there was member of the galleries staff who had a broad cockney accent who was saying to a few inquiring visitors that it was made of wax, a wax type substance. It certainly can’t have been sold wax as it would have been too heavy to move. Apparently it takes an hour to move from one end of the line to the other.

I did manage to see the ‘wax cannon’ being fired, which is primed and loaded every twenty minutes. Over the length of the exhibition it will fire 3 tonnes of this red wax into a blocked off doorway. It’s amazing that the gallery allowed it. The building must be old enough to have a preservation order on it and the doorways, and the plaster moulding in the cannon room, were splattered with this red wax. Let’s hope it doesn’t stain. The other exhibits, piles of coloured powder (or were they?), piles of blobbed clay/mud, the horn and the dimples where really nothing to get excited about. I think I must have been in and out in less than an hour. Bargain.

From there it was off to M&S for something to eat and to queue up for 15 minutes in the quick checkout area with some apples and a drink. Then with the sun slowly setting a quick walk in, and then out of, Hyde Park walking down Park Lane. A wander around the Hard Rock Cafe store then around Buckingham Palace, down the mall back to Trafalgar Square and back to the hotel.

When I'm Dead All This Will Be Yours!

When I'm Dead All This Will Be Yours!When I'm Dead All
This Will Be Yours!

  • Joe Teller: A Portrait by His Kid, Teller
  • Teller

Being such a fan of Penn & Teller buying this book was an easy decision, but instead of learning more about Teller, the magician and the person, this book is about his parents, more specifically his father. It reads as if it's based upon a visit that Teller made to his parents house in Philadelphia. His Pad and Mam start to bring out boxes of letters, photographs, cartoons and other artwork that has been kept over the years. This starts Joe and Irene reminiscing about their youth, Joe's trips around the country and how they met. The book includes lots of cartoons that Joe had drawn, hoping to make a living from it, and oil paintings by both Joe and Irene. The Kid, Teller, even tries his hand at painting to see if the artistic gene has been passed down to him.

Looking back at my grandparents the only psychical records we have are albums of photographs. As far as I know none of them kept journals of any kind. When they died all their tales and experiences passed on with them. But for the next generation all they'll need to do to find out what Uncle Carl got up to is to do a Google search or look at photos on flickr. The question is would they want to?

The Air is on Fire

The Air is on FireThe Air is on Fire

  • David Lynch

A review for a book that I haven't read.

David Lynch created an exhibition for the Foundation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris from March to May 2007. As well as being a film director, for which his fame is well known, David also sketches, paints and photographs. This all seems to have started from an early age and must have been something that his parents obviously encouraged.

The book includes two CDs of audio conversation that art critic Kristine McKenna had with David Lynch discussing the art work. Of course they are constantly mentioning in the page numbers, so that you can follow along with the book open, and also because very few of the pieces have a title. What I wondered was if the book hadn't been published how would they know which art was on which page. Anyway, it's this hour and three quarters of chatter that bring the art to life. In the book the work isn't described in any way other than it's size and the occasional title. Nothing to note the time period that it was created in.

Lynch has used many different types of media. Post-it notes (you'll recognize the shade of yellow on the book's cover) of different sizes, used match books, serviettes from coffee shops, index cards, plain paper, lined paper, notepad paper, then later canvas when money permitted. It's amazing that all this was kept and catalogued. Some sketches on note paper still had names and phone numbers.

As you can imagine the work is quite dark, very much in the same vein as Francis Bacon (who gets a mention in the audio). Also included are stills from all of David Lynch's films, yes, even Dune. These just seem to be taken by the set photographer and look like standard publicity stills. Photos by Lynch himself are shown towards the end: old German/Polish factories, nude women and snowmen.

If you're a fan of David Lynch, and art in general, then this is a fine book to add to your collection. I've been hoping that the exhibition will eventually come to London. After Paris it didn't seem to tour anywhere else until this year when it opened in Moscow. There's certainly hope yet!