Passing Clouds

Dear and patient readers,

My cappuccino and computer are sitting with Carmen’s at a high table overlooking Main Street. Our things match; they are comrades just like their owners. I’ve eked out this blog for as long as possible. Finishing it means a new sort of blank page will open up, the scarier kind. Time for a new project. Not yet, not yet. Still dawdling in London, or rather, walking quickly to dethaw my toes and keep up with Aria, who walks at “London speed” now. I’ve still got my Morogoro walking rhythms, slow and steady, though no longer sweaty.

Down to the last Friday of my journey, I spend the weekend at Dave’s flat dropping in on the lives of others, playing catch up, grabbing at references, stashing away accents and street names and origins and acquaintances. I’m staying in one of the uppermost rooms in the tall and lanky flat—what Dave would look like if he was a building—with my own bed and extra blankets. I sleep in my clothes anyway because I have poor central heating (See? I’d make the perfect English house). In the mornings and late at night, I press my face against the cold window pane and pretend I’m an English girl at the height of Beatlemania. . . or a contemporary of Samuel Johnson’s in the eighteenth century. . . or maybe even John Donne’s muse. Sigh.

Friday, at St. James Church, Picadilly, waiting for the lunchtime classical recital to begin. It’s free. The pianist is going to play Brahms, Bach, Chopin and Debussy. He emerges and, of course, looks twenty years old at most. He plays without sheet music and seemingly without fear. With enough practice, I suppose you eventually calm the leg twitches and hand tremors—a point I never reached in my piano performing days. I preferred the Halloween recital to competitions because bulky costumes (one year I was a caterpillar) made the mistakes for you. This Picadilly Kid, however, needs no costume. He’s showy but not pompous and he plays pieces that have the vista of white-haired heads nodding. As the only person within a decade of his age, I decide he and I will share a loaded look after his encore. He’ll read in my eyes that I loved playing the piano and sometimes cried when the chords spread their beauty like soft rakes inside my chest but I was also lazy about rhythm and refused to sing the notes along with my teacher whose house was and likely is still draped in swaths of fusty cream and stacked in the living room with awesome picture books that taught me what Hebrew school wouldn’t about Jesus. And his eyes will say to the mesmerizing girl in the third row, I know you think I don’t make mistakes and usually I’m as accurate with the keys as I am when I pluck my threatening unibrow but I fumbled near the opening of the Chopin and started to breathe like a rattled horse and somehow no one heard because I continued to bang away and noticed through the eyes peaking from beneath my armpits that you were almost crying from the beginning and propping your gloved hands beneath your chin and fanned in red behind your head like the music had made you a queen.

I donate 3 pounds on the way out and then wander the shops for the afternoon, a neurotic journey of shoddy mathematics and questionable logic. I will spare you.

5:20 PM. All shaky. Too much coffee? The anticipation of home? It’s been ten days and I’ve almost filled this new notebook. That’s alone time for you. And compulsion. The more I practice, the more it flows—not so much a product as a secretion.

January 29

Out last night with Aria and Dave, Jamie and Jenny, Seb, Jennifer, Alice, I can’t remember the others. Tired today and slightly confused, I wake up and and listen to Jamie play guitar in the room below, Neil Young. After a sleepless night trying to get warm, and worrying that I might be a reptile, I’m back to mammal heat and not yet ready to evolve out from under these covers.

January 31

I’m going home. I’m going home. Last night I took a sliver of a sleeping pill and then fretted for another 5 minutes over whether I would then sleep through my two alarms, set for 5:30 AM. I slept in my clothes, as usual, and passed out in a blanket fort perfumed by Dove deodorant and Tanzanian coffee powder, my new and perhaps permanent personal smell. This morning, in the numb pre-dawn, Aria and Dave pad out to the taxi with me in their bathrobes and bare feet. Affectionate, efficient goodbyes in the cold. The taxi leaves and I wave at the pair of them, standing by the gate like a domestic snapshot from another era.

My final weekend was too busy for lengthy writing, and also proved that my solitary museum cruising has rusted my social hinges. Luckily with Aria, my creakiness in crowds is fine. She knows me better than most and understands my quiet moments. I feel carried along by the energy of her various friends, and enjoy ceding navigational responsibility to Londoners.

Rewind to Thursday night (this is how I wrote it, leapfrogging memories) when Aria meets me at the entrance to the Holloway tube stop:

smoggy concrete and railings curled in iron
nightsoaked and fingerpressed.

She’s in full sherpa-mode, with her backpack on and grocery bags dangling. We’re going to make linguini at Dave’s flat. Jamie, like Claire’s Sam, is all wiry, scrawny hilarity. When I meet his girlfriend Jenny, I know I could listen to her accent forever. It lilts and meanders as if the syllables are following a less direct path than the words and their meanings. I daydream that her syllables are hobbits traversing hills painted green on a long scroll... Then there’s Aria’s friend Jen, from Cambridge, like an eighteenth century Romantic beauty, milky skin and a curly red pouring of hair. Her lively eyes and sweet manner are immediately endearing.

With Aria’s laptop balancing on books in Dave’s kitchen, it’s later moved to the top of the fridge, from where it continues to waft Ella and Louis into the seafood linguini. Aria is hilarious in the kitchen. She flails fast like a many-armed goddess. She worries out loud that it won’t be good. Thinking back to some of our meals in Tanzania, I know there’s nothing she could make that I wouldn’t love. We eat our spicy meal in front of the telly. It’s not on but eventually it goes on because the lure of Total Wipeout is too powerful. Not the sort of show I’d typically seek out: reality TV about an obstacle course competition. I’m not sure at which moment I become a fan. Perhaps when one of the contestants introduces herself with a name like “Arabella the Horse” and starts to whinny and trot. Or it’s when everyone tries to dodge a wall of randomly punching fists. Pure delight.

We watch the wipeouts and talk until bedtime. I fall asleep to Seb’s guitar. The combination of post-New Year’s and a rough patch with his girlfriend have prompted some resolutions. Write some new songs and get fit again. “I used to have, like, an 8 pack up to here,” his hand hits just below his neck, “And cleavage. Man cleavage.”

Listening to Nirvana, Come as you are, perfect for returning home—as I am. Not much wiser than when I left, though I’ve learned to trust in my own spontaneous action. I’m returning hardened, but only slightly, like a day-old bagel. Ah, how quickly one forgets the bucket shower.

Friday night, Aria and I wolf down delicious burritos and chug our Coronas so we can make it in time to Movimientos, a movie and dance event in Dalston before the entry cost rises by £3 (Though Aria and I can only aspire to one day be as frugal as our fathers, we’re making good progress.) Dalston is a district of East London. Aria’s London is North and East. I think, my London is eighteenth century London.

We reach the club, Passing Clouds. I imagine an entry without bouncers, just a keyhole door through which I step, Alice-like. Inside it’s impossibly huge, like the magical endlessness of Mary Poppin’s carpetbag. A field of wildflowers beckons and all of a sudden, sleep pulls me down by sleeve and I lie there to watch the clouds pass. Because the only ceiling there is the sky. What actually goes on at Passing Clouds is just like this, or perhaps a nightmare version of this, according to the whims of the drug you’re taking. Since I only ordered a few “rum and tings”—rum and gingerbeer as it’s known in the Jamaican bars—I see a nondescript building, remote from any other pubs or clubs from what I can see, and within, like the sudden fanning of a peacock’s feathers, two floors of vibrant colour, fluorescents, potted plants, shag carpet, luscious draperies, all manner of plaid, polka dots, petals, disco balls, tall lamps, squat lamps, a wooden countered bar, sofas and armchairs and chaises clumped upstairs amidst gossamer curtains, all strewn with people dressed for the excess of the roaring 20s. The lower floor is like the basement party your grandmother who lives upstairs doesn’t know about—or doesn’t hear because she’s deaf. No wonder I feel so at home! The upstairs, with all of its jostling kitsch and warmth, a refuge from the dark sparse dancehall on the main floor. It takes longer to get comfortable in this crush, but once I start dancing (to Explosive Nzakomba and Fathers Grasp as I later find out the bands are called) everything suddenly turns easy. From faster electronic into funk into reggae, my body adapts. Dancing reminds me that I’m alive and lets me forget words. I am, for a little while, without the words to describe any neuroses. I’m just a rumbling slink and thump. No need to split my heartbeat from the room’s beat. Grins for everyone.

We wait a long time, twice, for infrequent buses to get home. The heat and the euphoria from the dancing wears off, and morphs into the jig of the freezing. Bouncing, tapping, turning in circles, I lose track of Aria and her friend Alice’s conversation, contribute a word or two to the beat of my feet, which are numbing toe by toe. It takes me till nearly 5 am to warm up my cocoon and I don’t leave it until close to 11 the next morning, amazed that I could have yearned for a snowbath in Morogoro.

(A fuller account of) Saturday, January 29.

We have a long “lie-in”, something the Brits I know seem to do very well. By noon, we’re all happily eating scrambled eggs on toast, cooked by Jamie, and drinking tea. I rarely sleep in. Whether I’m traveling or at home, my mind starts to bustle at an early hour as coffee pulls me out of bed by its tractor beam. Thus I’m surprised at how much I enjoy this prolonged morning ritual. Around 2:30 Aria and I go for a walk, past the giant football stadium, to a park called Thistle Park—except that it’s not actually called Thistle Park, it just sounds that way to me—to see if we can spot the deer reputed to be romping there. Today however, the deer elude us, like mythical beasts, nowhere to be seen in a park that is partially (and perpetually according to Aria) under construction. We do see some adorable dogs, the waddling hot-dog sort.

In an area called Stoke Newington, we have coffees and cake at a cafe. At the neighbouring table, a little kid with a glowing blonde head of curls has chocolate and jam all over his face. Aria asks him if it’s the best thing he’s ever eaten. Yes, he grins big. Then, What are you going to do when it’s done? Go for a walk. We do too, but only get as far as a few nearby antique/consignment stores, which the Brits call charity shops, and I get a dress, for cheaper because of a hole in the back.

A chilly walk back and then out later for Turkish food. Seb and I treat to say thanks to our weekend hosts. On the way, Jamie and I somehow get separated from the group and lost, near an overpass and a block of restaurants and pubs crackling like it’s a Friday (it’s Sunday). Our restaurant, when we find it, is packed with people and lanterns, the latter hanging everywhere like stalactites. We order my favourite kind of meal: one requiring the dipping of bread into spicy things. What do we talk about? There is a lot of gentle teasing, the requisite talk about relationships and possible unknown common friends, questions from me about various London quirks, and deliberations over ordering more food (we do). It’s England, so we obviously take the long way home via two pubs, The Fullback and The Old Dairy.

“These are as authentic as you get for pubs,” Aria informs me. “Tourists don’t usually make it this far.” I get a flash of Aria as Indiana Jones, motioning me closer to edge of a sublime cliff. The Fullback is like a barn. The Old Dairy is like a horseshoe. Apart from watching the hordes and their legions of pints, I am transfixed by Dave’s drunk friend John, who swears creatively and tells mildly offensive jokes about being Jewish. Later, it’s a sweet sight, him tottering down the street beside Dave, cackling and kicking at gates.

Sunday, January 30.

My last day in the UK and the last day of this particular adventure. It starts more quickly than Saturday but not by much. Aria and I leave at noon for her favourite daytime London activity, the Columbia Road flower market and the food stalls on Brick Lane and nearby Spitalfield’s. It’s toe-numbing, jeans-shredding cold but a tiny bit sunny. I like these times the best, when it’s just Aria and I. We do equal parts reminiscing and analyzing our current lives. The flower market is jammed with buyers and smellers (I’m a smeller) and cockney-accented sellers touting the charms and cheapness of their orchids, pussywillows, cacti and heaps of other flowers my mother could identify blindfolded.

The food stalls are magnificent and we circle the savory pavilion twice before settling on the Sri Lankan booth, though I was tempted by the Japanese pancake. It’s spicy and involves a few mystery vegetables, which are some seeds short of a zucchini and the colour of suntanned parsnip. Aria has a moisture crisis from the salt and craves water for the rest of the afternoon. Obviously, it is still me that has to pee with geriatric frequency.

More ambling together, getting presents for friends (wooden salad servers) and a necklace for me that reads “Curiouser & Curiouser” on its pendant. After studying Alice’s Adventures Under Ground in school, I’m always on the lookout for curious sights and bottles advising me to drink them. (Just the other day, in fact, I was given a candy called a White Rabbit by Melinda, who had just painted my fingernails in “black-red”. My last manicure was likely for Grade 12 prom but it seems I’ve maintained the nails of a teen. Holding my hand, filing my already-short nails, she asks, “you have boyfriend?” No, I say, and laugh ruefully like an aging pirate. “You are nineteen?” I think for a second about my post-Master’s joblessness. “Yes,” I say, “Financially.” I am keeping the White Rabbit wrapper as a talisman. It represents the paper trail I am on, the academic white rabbit I’m chasing—all the way into a PhD program.)

We round out the day with the pub: The Ten Bells, reputed to be the pub where three of Jack the Ripper’s victims supposedly downed their final pints. I meet AJ, a friend of Aria’s from Harvard, and Carrie and Jen are there again. Five of us huddled at a table the size of a hubcap; I feel like we should be plotting a heist instead of flipping between tales of Harvard and Cambridge and the intricacies of London’s neighbourhoods. Aria: Islington, North London. Dave: Holloway Road. Carrie: moving to Kensington (maybe). Jen: I imagine she has a time-travel commute to make whenever she comes to town since I’m convinced she’s renaissance royalty and lives in a country manor. A.J.: Bloomsbury, but that’s a guess. Dalston and Finsbury Park is where the pubs and Passing Clouds are. It’s soothing to go through the neighbourhoods in my head, seeing how many I can remember. As a journeyer, I’m only passing through this city of cities. I disperse like ink spilled on to London’s map, living each day on the Tube, on my feet, in galleries, on the street.

After homemade pizza and some Family Guy with Aria and Dave, I call a taxi for the morning and the operator calls me “love” and reminds me to “get a nice sleep”. In the morning, there’s a note from Jenny outside my door, saying goodbye and telling me to enjoy my first bath at home. People are good, I think, and thump my bags not so quietly down the staircase of the sleeping house.

During my Amsterdam stopover, I get the same food, same coffee, in the same cafe as my last two times in Schiphol airport. The one with blue and white patterned napkins and crispy mini waffles. I buy new headphones. I visit the washroom (more than six times). I think nothing of wandering around with my neck pillow hung around my neck (I think it makes me look like a medieval duchess). I make friends with a man from Manchester in the line for the plane and during the flight I pass his seat a few times and we nod like old buddies.

Just over five hours to go until Vancouver. The portly French men beside me are deep in conversation and deep into the free wine. I get elbowed and start to fume, silently. As is the Canadian way, I interrupt with a sorry to make a peace offering of gum. We start to chat and they’re quite sweet. They’re in the shipping business and about to spend two months in Vancouver. “We are excited,” one says. “But our wives are not!” I tell them I’m returning home after nearly four months away. And sushi. I tell them to have sushi.

Wat ga jij doen met de Ene Ring?
(What will you do with the Ring? I watch the animated Lord of the Rings with Dutch subtitles and it’s like I’m six years old again. Not only does this movie stand the test of time, it’s become creepier with time. I turn it off half way through with a shudder and think about cuddling up to the French man, arm rest be damned.)

Even with all of the writing I’ve done, I’m bursting. I know I won’t be able to communicate the whole of this to anyone, that after a few months, no one will ask about it anymore, swahili will float further and further away from my tongue and the dog days will stay outside the fenced edges of my photographs.

Suspended still, “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”, a good song for travel. It crackles and soars while the real engines rumble. Shaking guitar and strange horns, ragged waves that glint with sorrow. The album is about Anne Frank’s life, not something I knew at first. Windy ghosts singing backup “soft and sweet.” A song for daydreaming on a green field, a song for burials. Both dance and dirge. The last verse: “What a beautiful face I have found in this place/ That is circling all round the sun/ And when we meet on a cloud I’ll be laughing out loud/ I’ll be laughing with everyone I see/ Can’t believe/ How strange it is to be anything all. . .”

About to land, twenty minutes to go. Listening to PJ Harvey’s “Big Exit” I’m on our Marrakech balcony again, above the avenue of pink hotels, breathing in the smog and stares and bleating horns.

This is my big Exit/Entry time, the end of some uncertainties and the beginning of others. There’s no real break from the adventure. I feel like I did on that first flight, the same hugeness in my heart, thrilled to be alone—though far from lonely because of the manic curiosity that spurs me to talk to everyone and write constantly. In fact, I wouldn’t mind staying aloft for a few more feature film cycles, trying to put my big feelings in this little book, listening to my insomnia songs from Morogoro, the ones that murmured to me while my mosquito net flapped open and the air pressed in thick.
Now the plane is nosing through a thicket of clouds and the cabin dozes. Even the French men are asleep, their heads leaning together in a gray arch. My reading light the winking eye of a small moon.

I press pause.

I want to wind rewind unwind it all—all of it—until it’s wound into every sinew and synapse and I’m ready to go home.

All my love,
Shacs with a Pack

giant eye winking & old loops rerouted

I’ve been running lately. It’s funny how much harder it is to sweat once you’re no longer in Tanzania (or, come to think of it, in grad seminars). Walking anywhere after 9 in the morning made me sweat like a swooning marathoner. We joked that the heat made us crazy but we weren’t really joking. Now that I’m home, I run my old loop along Wallace to 11th, up to Blanca and home with a small detour through the forest. I know I shouldn’t even step a toe in there when I’m alone, but I can’t resist it when it’s sunny and the leaves are dappling the earth in golden shadows. And my favourite bird is calling for its mate (still don’t know which bird this is). At one point, I run across a park. Down the hill and past the broken water fountain to the open grass where it opens up huge. The trees nudge the skyline like they’re trying to get warm. The air is cooler but otherwise I could be on the walk home from teaching HBC in Morogoro. We’d walk through this dusty open field all scuffed warm and copper with the sky like a giant mural of blue, dramatic clouds gathering like on a biblical ceiling fresco. Once or twice it rained and whirled the dust into mud. The field I run through at home has always been special to me. The expanse that makes me switch my music off, breathe easier, and look up and around me and my eyes always snag on the design of the trees and rooftops against the sky. It’s my portal now. I pretend it’s a magical field that matches up with the field in Morogoro. Like a giant eye, fringed with grassy eyelashes, winking to the sky. It blinks and I’m somewhere else.

Back to January 28. Leaving Dave’s (Aria’s boyfriend’s) flat this morning, after listening to a bit of Cardiff Seb’s guitar, I felt once again intrepid and free. On my own, my fake leather laced boots gobbling up the sidewalks. Seb, I like. He was visiting Dave and Jamie (one of the other flatmates, and one of Seb’s best friends) for the weekend after breaking up with his girlfriend. He was up late and early to play guitar and work on his songs. Good distractions from heartache though I think he was the one to call the whole thing off. Beer works too and the weekend promised plenty of that. I felt bonded to Seb since we were both guests for the weekend, hanging out in the flat when everyone else had gone to work. When he’s not writing songs, he’s an ER surgeon. He gave me some good advice about my neck. “Just relax! On the couch, there, yeah. Let your head drop back.” Funny how hard it was for me to do.

Out and about:

Rastran, the dreadlocked Every Child canvaser who I stopped to talk to near Lower Marsh Road. He was so thrilled that I stopped to hear his pitch in the midst of the freezing wind. I was thrilled to meet someone named Rastran.

The older men beside me in a cafe talking about their favourite fruit! I just about died.
“Fresh lychees! Yeah, in Mauritius. On the side of the road, pennies a peaload.”
“Me, it’s bananas for dessert. You split it, wrap it in foil, put on the B-B-Q and it’s gorgeous. Have it with a dollop of ice cream or something.”

Royal Academy of Art, Modern British Sculpure exhibit.
--What is British? What is modern? What is sculpture? Not so simple to answer all of a sudden.

The wall blurb about Lyten’s cenotaph and Epstein’s human figure banners quotes the sculptor’s “fundamental choice between abstraction and figuration”. I think of J. Hillis Miller’s “The Figure in the Carpet,” an essay about the fundamental bind catching the artist: from a seeming infinity of material, how to choose which line to follow? “The writer must act as his own father, in an act of self-generating which is at the same time a self-mutilation, an act of surrender and sacrifice.”
Speaking of fathers, the human figure banners also make me think of defying authority with my Dad in the Ufizi gallery in Florence when I was 15. Photography was forbidden so I stood guard and we timed our picture-taking to the rounds of the security guard. It was all for Michelangelo’s unfinished human figures.

Walking into the next room, I am suddenly Aladdin in the Cave of Wonders. It’s more of a hall than a room and full of pieces from times as disparate as 1932 (Betty Rae’s “Mother and Child”) and 1350 BC (“Baboon wearing a Feathered Hood Carved in Low Relief,” Egypt). The Baboon and the Betty Rae are next to each other, in fact. Collapsing time and passing it together.

Incredible how soft stone can look, how gentle; or how the simplest curves or indents make a woman, or a family (Henry Moore’s “Family,” 1935).

There’s a late 19th Century totem pole from Canada! Hello!

Leon Underwood’s “Nucleus” is a cream marble orb of noses, eye creases and angular necks.

“Sekhmet,” a granite statue from Thebes, 1350 BC. So, Sekhmet. How have you made it this far only missing your elbows and a bit of your staff?

“Gudea, King of Lagash,” 2130 BC. Looking beatific.

Kennington’s “Earth Child” is a friendly sculpture: a smiling dragon curves around the child’s feet. He or she sits in an earthy palm, yes, from the back you can see the massive fingers, like trunks.

In the room with Jacob Epstein’s exalted hulk “Adam”, there is a sign explaining the presence of a bench. I love it. It says:

“Our bench is here to offer temporary repose to a wilting public. It is a copy of one that fulfilled a similar function a quarter of a century after the creation of “Adam,” when it disrupted quite a different aesthetic occasion of Anthony Caro’s solo Whitechapel exhibit in 1963.”

I decide to wilt for a moment and check out “Adam”. Well, well. You are burly and naked, arm’s pulled back and hands pinched towards the sky like you’re waiting for something (or someone). A good firm stance and a stony penis flung to one side.

Haha, and of course you’re sharing a room with Henry Moore’s minute but seductive, “Snake”.

Room #4: The Establishment Figure

Alfred Gilbert’s “Jubilee Monument to Queen Victoria” is flanked by three sculptures of “idealized males” the wall tells me, created by sculptors who later became Presidents of the Royal Academy. Queen Vic dominates the room. Much larger than life size, she’s heavily adorned in skirts and jewels of stone. Imagine coming face to face with such a colossal representation of yourself. I guess for the Queen, it would have been routine.
The three males are: Philip King’s “Genghis Khan” who looks like a purple reindeer, Leighton’s “An athlete struggling with a python” (naked of course) and Charles Wheeler’s “Adam,” also with the upturned hands but with a smaller penis than Epstein’s “Adam”. But it’s all about scale, right?

New room (not sure of the number)

Barbara Hepworth’s “3 Forms”. Simple, peaceful, resting globes. Patient eggs.

“Pelagos,” a curled wood piece, like a shell. Blueish white inside and strung with musical wires, stitched in. A harp in a shell. Or a harp inside an ear.

Henry Moore’s “Reclining Figure”, 1951. I sketched my version of this one in my notebook--my reclining figure looks like it has an ass for knees, no head, and impossible elbows, but I promise the real thing looks elegant.

The next room contrasts the old ceiling of the Royal Academy, gold-trimmed vaulted, with an installation of hanging rectangles, transparent screens and wires like a downtown sky.

Room 9: The Persistence of the British Landscape
I love this title. Instead of a landscape that resists human efforts to mold or control it, this landscape is steadfast, doggedly existing, and changing in unpredictable ways. If it is persistently British, the picture of a typically “British” landscape is an elusive and changing thing.

There is Keith Arnatt’s “Self-Burial,” which I think I’ve seen somewhere before. Arnatt (or some other self) is only a head, a golf-tee in the middle of a forest clearing. Odd that he’s not on a beach. An earthy burial seems like less of a caper than a sandy one, a more serious attempt at mock death. I wonder who buried him. I wonder how long he stayed put. What bugs nibbled. If this is his greatest fear. If his will and testament calls for cremation. Perhaps he hopes to be reincarnated as weasel.

Most of the pieces in this room make me feel the measurement of space or land. Yellow and blue floor slats. A long white line of crumbled stone. Brick red ashy debris on a wall. A meticulous stack of “junk”. Rose Finn-Kelcey’s “The Restless Image--A discrepancy between the felt position and the seen position. Self Portrait.” Is the essence of the self-portrait, then, trying to represent yourself to the world as you imagine it sees you? Or, perhaps, to declare to it who you are, what stuff you’re made of, and eclipse the projections of others with your own? To see oneself in the act feeling—it’s a tough one. On a black and white beach, Finn-Kelcey’s self-portrait shows her in a handstand, with her pleated skirt billowing sideways, fanned out like a shell. Two free-floating legs ending shoes with laces round the ankles, two bare hands. Her face is hidden.

The next room (Towards Sculpture as Image) starts with a stench and gets grosser. It’s thanks to Damien Hirst’s “Let’s Eat Outdoors Today”, two black-framed, glass enclosures, alive with black flies. In one, an abandoned table, lots of scraps left uneaten; in the other, a slab of raw meat on a barbeque. Underneath a table is a cow’s head. And judging by the smell, it’s no simulacrum. But this is the “Sculpture as Image” room, and these claustrophobic cells are fairly sordid representations of an outdoors meal. We do not really see a meal in action a pair of twisted before and after shots. Nothing is really consumed, or even cooked, from what we can see. The only consumers are the flies. At this point I ask myself, as I often do with English papers, “Hm, what interesting details. But so what?” The so what usually requires one to go bigger, make macro claims, something I’m usually shy about doing. But this is my blog and I can do what I want. Hirst is famous for a diamond-incrusted human skull, which fetched $100 million or so on the market. When it comes to his sculpture, it’s hard not to be conscious of the real materials, whether they’re diamonds, an circa 1800 skull, or a rotting cow’s head. In this case, an artificial outside contains the evidence of a meal that resembles, in its materials, a scene characterized by raw, unwanted, rotting flesh. I wonder about the current state of the art industry. How much harder it is to make work that shocks. Is this the main aim in art these days, to shock, to be a bit gross? Perhaps my initial reaction to Hirst’s piece as nasty and sordid says something about me (of course it does). I’m a consumer and the joke’s on me. He gives me a rotting cow’s head and her I am getting my mental knickers in a twist over it.

Last room is “Value Systems”. Three pieces to talk about: One, Gustav Metzger’s redeployment of third page girls, the “pornography of journalism” plasters one wall. Two, Sarah Lucas’s “Portable Smoking Area”--I tried to draw this contraption in my notebook, according to my art skills it looks like a chair sitting underneath a butcher’s knife, but the real thing is just a container that seesaws down over the chair. It’s balanced out by two weights on the other end, justice weights. Three, John Latham’s “God is Great #16” books frozen in the process of being hurled through a sheet of glass.

This is all long overdue, I know, and still undone. One more post to come after this, the whirlwind of my last weekend in London.

Much love,
Shacs

A spot for me: there's hope yet for this Romantic...

Dear readers,

It’s officially springtime in Vancouver and I’m still holed up in mid-journal January. This groundhog wants to sleep for a while longer, dreaming of galleries in England and frosty walks through Hyde park.

January 26, continued.

Across from the National Portrait Gallery, my first afternoon stop after my Mapplethorpe morning, I’m sitting on a high stool in yet another Pret a Manger. It’s relieving to be stationary for a minute, people-watching, and writing without that pesky over-the-shoulder editor. Funny who attracts my attention and who doesn’t. Attraction--so wonky and selective. Strong and interesting features blur into personality and humour as I imagine meeting these strangers, how their eyes would change when they laugh or tell a story. Old people and teenagers are especially good people to watch, though I’m curious about what everyone carries—shopping bags, purses, and umbrellas, to-go coffees, a nurse’s ID. Shoes: Doc Martins or similarly laced boots are everywhere. I like to watch for feelings I know well: holding something special, a birthday present for someone; the treasuring of one’s phone after a longed-for message arrives; that look of effortful control, in the street, trying to look passive and impassable even with a shitstorm brewing in one’s head. The man to my right just moved on to his pudding. Did you know the British refer to desserts as puddings, in general? No wonder I was confused last night when Dave announced that there was pudding and brought out store-bought slices of cheescake.

National Portrait Gallery
[only visit #1 since I’m coming back tomorrow]

Dame Paula Rego, “Portrait of Sir David Hare”. She comments on the lamb Hare in the portrait, which peeks out from behind his armchair: “The things I couldn’t get into David’s face I put into the sheep’s face. . . it goes well with him and looks after him.”

The head of Isabella Blow: “a spotlight transforms an amorphous ball of stuffed animals and other objects into a vivid silhouette of Blow’s head.”

A huge arresting photograph of Sir Paul Nurse, nobel prize winner for his work on genes that regulate cell division. Photo by Jason Brooks. It captures every eyebrow hair and the moistness of his wide eyes.

The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize Exhibit

“Jonathan,” a teacher in Uganda. Red and white school regulations on the walls behind him, and rubied gold Old Masters light fills the room.

“Lara,” a teen in Buenos Aires, slouched on a low concrete bench, back to back with a large man who seems to be made solely of back.

“Jack,” a big-eared kid in his backyard, cradling his new pet tortoise (named Devon). He stares at the camera with big eyes, grey and deep like the sky above him.

“Good morning, Vietnam,” market workers dressed in gentle hospital-issue blue, all women, sitting together before the day begins. Trust, familiarity, love, at its freshest and most unveiled in the early morning.

“Doki, I. Hungary,” the photographer’s cousin, 98 years old. A white comb slid into her hair. Elegance that reminds me of my great grandmother, Sybil, who we called Gammy Sybil. I remember her beautiful old Calgary house, with its twin beds in the basement where I tried to nap but couldn’t because I was staring at the Japanese dolls on the dresser (I’d read a thriller in which similar dolls did unspeakable things). She dressed impeccably. We drank tea out of cups that were (still are) family heirlooms. She had soft, speckled hands and a grainy sweet voice.

The next photo, “Untitled, Dresden 2010”, is printed in black and white, on old photographic paper, with added oil colours--red for the girl’s soccer jersey, mint for the grass. She’s deaf and non-verbal, the caption says about the girl. Why does it glimmer differently when I read that? I imagine that the grass is humming itself green, into a colour she can hear through her feet.

“Alix,” a ripped jeans, red-laced sneakered teen, leaning against a farm fence after school one day. Ethereal. The sunset and her face--she could be a Boticelli.

“The Tragedy of Hope,” the conflicting attitudes of mothers and daughters when it comes to relationships. In the photo, two women sit at a kitchen table patterned with flowers. One [hands open, palms questioning] is “naive expectation” while the other [one arm crossed, one fist at her chin] is “resigned disappointment”.

Some of these photos are so crisp and intense they startle me into dumbness. Or at least--I can’t write, I can only look.

“Tony Blair #1” looking captivated, gritty and terrified.

“Portrait of my British Wife” Second prize, awarded for intimacy. In soft light, she sits in a peasant top. No pants, just nonchalant open legs. Shadows of the window blinds roam over her legs.

“Tic Tac and Tootsie,” twins, homeless at 19, became prostitutes addicted to prescription drugs. Locked with the camera, feral eyes with scraps of red. Dyed hair. Where are they now, I wonder? After photos like this, what happens? After the granting of permission, a few flickers of the shutter, I guess that everyone parted ways, maybe peeking back but mostly following the pavement.

[I’ll add one, from home. It’s on a bookshelf at my Dad’s house, a enlarged photo of my Grandpa and an infant me. I spent a good ten minutes looking at it the other day and, not to my surprise, cried. Grandpa is looking at me, on his lap, this frilly pink thing. He’s holding me as if I’m fragile--not like a doll but like an unknown gift. So he’s looking at me, smiling, with his eyes too, through big black square glasses that remind me of mine. I’m staring at the camera, as intensely as a baby can, and there’s a tiny wrinkle in my forehead. I can’t believe that little person, the size of a lap, was me, that I must still get a version of that look on my face. I miss Grandpa, his phone calls ending in “lots of love”, his Winnipeg apartment, the oranges in the morning, his stories about people he’d known-- the best descriptor being “she was a mess”. His gesturing hand, enthusiasm for butter and salt, and shoe guards called “rubbers”. We talk about his habits still, and have a fun and easy time of locating them in my Dad’s way of being.]

January 27

I don’t think I could have had a better start to my day. At the Cafe Nero at the corner of Wilton Road and Belgrave, where I came yesterday too, the barista remembered what I ordered, “small cappuccino again?” He grinned at me and now I can’t stop grinning. Not because he was flirting but because it’s so nice to be remembered. So, what to do today? Maybe the British Museum? The Tate Britain? Back to the National Gallery? It’s a day for the classics, I think.

Later, at “Ev” near Waterloo station. Without a doubt, one of my best meals in London yet! For 3.95, I got three amazing Lebanese dishes and FREE BREAD. Went to two really neat antique stores on Lower Marsh Road-- “Radio Days” and “What the Butler Wore”. In the latter, I shivered into a dress with a red sash and busy blue and white print while chatting to the owner who sat on the other side of the curtain. If I had more garden parties to attend at home, I would have bought it. I keep hearing these loud rumblings outside and I can’t tell if it’s from the construction site or if it’s thunder or--AHA! It’s the overground train! Oh, brrr. I don’t want to go outside again. I’d rather roam the underground like a ninja turtle than walk outside much more today.

3PM. All quiet at the Tate Britain this time of year. They’re in the midst of changing special exhibitions at the moment so nothing to tempt me to pay for anything! Just a massive permanent collection beckoning, “I’m free and full of Turners!”

William Blake and physiognomy

“[there] is not a man who does not judge of all things. . . by their physiognomy; that is, of their internal worth by their external appearance.” --John Caspar Lavater. The exhibit reads Blake in the context of contemporary trends in physiognomic science (or pseudo-science... “zodiacal physiognomy” sounds a bit mystical)

I’ve never seen these paintings of Blake’s before. Colour prints finished in ink and watercolour on paper. Chiseled cartoonish nudes, bronzy figures and cut-out waves of flame and water. Engravings too, like “Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims”. Apparently, Blake considered engraving to be a clearer way to convey expression. Of the “Cantebury Pilgrims” piece Blake says, “The characters of Chaucer’s pilgrims are the characters which compose all ages and nations. . . consequently they are physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life, beyond which nature never steps. . . . The painter has consequently varied the heads and forms of his personages into all Nature’s varieties; the horses he has also varied according to their riders. . .” Maybe this is where we get the idea that dogs and their owners inevitably come to look like each other. [My Mum is in luck because her new dog is such a cutie. Now that I’m home, Sam, my stepbrother, and I, often admire Ginger’s golden fur and powerful back legs, which we refer to as her “ass-legs”.]
Blake’s watercolour illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy remind me of tie-dye, psychedelics, and comic books.
Blake was curious about phrenology, even if he doubted its rational explanations for artistic ability, preferring a more mystical origin for creativity. Nonetheless, I’d be pretty thrilled if James Deville the phrenologist wanted to cast my head as “representative of the imaginative faculty”...

From Court, Country, City: British Art 1660-1735

Jan Griffier I, “View of Hampton Court Palace”. A bright but heavily clouded sky dominates the scene; the symmetry of the palace overwhelmed by weather patterns. The painting once belonged to a Jewish banker who was shot by the Nazis in Dusseldorf in 1937. His wife and children fled to Brussels two years later and went into hiding. The wife was forced to sell the painting. She survived the concentration camp at Malines (was sent there in ’44) but rejoined her family in Britain after the war. The painting was only recently recognized by members of the family and a case was made to the Department for Culture, Media and Sports Spoilation Advisory to have the painting returned to the family. It was settled that the Tate has legal title but the family has a moral one.

Twentieth Century art

John Latham, “Belief System,” charred books and a lightbulb welded to a black and white canvas.

Another cyclops, Eduardo Paolozzi’s, a stressed bronze, two-legged machine, all wheels, shafts and clumps of welding.

Francis Bacon’s “Three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion”. All my journal says is: “Eugh. Claire would appreciate.”

An older man with a sketchbook helps me figure out this bizarro inversion mirror: “Go right up close! Right up close! See, you’re upside down until you’re right-side up!”

Inverse, Reverse, Perverse.

The Romantics

No unified movement, no single narrative--art defined by conflict. Turner, Constable, Blake. Constable portrayed himself as a half-fawn. He believed poetry and painting to be “sister arts”. Painting was, for him, “another word for feeling”.
The exhibit includes several Wordsworth quotes, like what he says about being at home at Grainsmere, “this individual spot . . . Made for itself and happy for itself”. Ahh, like me in these halls of paintings. John Crome’s “Slate Quarries”, Turner’s “Bacchus and Adriadne”, Constable’s “Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath, with a boy sitting on a bank.” Constable was a trendsetter in that he often painted on the spot, instead of only sketching his subject and painting later, indoors.
I love the room called “British Landscape: Photography after the Picturesque”. I subtitle it in my head, Hope for Romantics Yet.

Before I forget, back in the modern/postmodern wing, I followed the sounds of haunting and soaring classical singing to a circular room with a mosaic floor at one end of the hall. On one wall, a slow motion video projection showed people walking out of an “International Arrivals” at the airport. For a minute, I talked to a man, a Londoner, about the music, the sort that makes your chest hurt. I stood against the wall for a long time, feeling whole and engaged, like a perfectly tuned instrument. I watched the arrivals, so slow I could see a yawn and a hair flip coming a miles away. I couldn’t write, I dropped my bag. Music like that, it washes over me and smoothes me out like a river stone. I felt like crying with relief and a sense of huge loves and longings. How lucky! To have this feeling, of bewildered, visceral, loveliness. I thought about Carmen’s talk on Wordsworth’s busker, what she said about the penetrating power of sound.
I watched others in the gallery, gravitate towards the International Arrivals room once they heard the music. I pretended I was a part of the power it exerted.

There’s more to come, patient readers. My travel journal is very adamant that I unfold its contents at a sleepy pace...

Love,
Shacs

Library Lollygagging and Mapplethorpe Mirrors

Dear readers,

I’m dawdling, I know. I’ve been home for a while now, long enough to torment myself about my unhatched career and chop off more of my hair. But I haven’t caught up to myself yet. Part of me is reclining somewhere in the middle of my third travel notebook, the slither of a red thread reminding me that I’ve only made it so far. It’s possible that emotional jetlag is lingering in my system. When a nearly forgotten Swahili word jumps to life again, I apologize to it: Sorry for my neglect, exquisite word for woman [mwanamke]! But you see, no one would catch you if I threw you into the conversation storm here. You’d be gobbled up by blank stares. Sometimes I start to rummage for my camera when I’m walking around and have a moment of grief when I realize it's in a drawer at home, batteries exhausted. Being on the bus is confusing, like when I look out the window and see a neon sign or a storefront that makes me think I’m in Lisbon or London. More than once the morning light angling under the curtains tells me I’m in Morogoro, where it was almost always sunny. The odd time, I wake up at night and, heart racing, scroll through several locations before settling on Vancouver, my head like a demented airport Arrivals/Departures screen. So, time to spin it again!

The British Library

If there was ever a good moment for lists, it’s now. In one of the permanent collections, The Sir John Ritblatt Gallery, I slobber over: The Canterbury Tales, Landsdowne MS, ~1410, Samuel Johnson’s Journal of a Tour in North Wales, 1813, Jane Austen’s writing desk!, Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Virginia Woolf’s notebook for Mrs. Dalloway, The first page of Pinter’s first typed draft of The Homecoming, Handel’s Messiah, Beethoven’s tuning fork, and Haydn’s publishing contract (55 new works over a 5 year period!). I love the scattering of unreadable things amongst the books--like the tuning fork and the writing desk. They kept quiet company with the creators. The things that witnessed and facilitated creation are now like memento mori.

[So peaceful in here, the low light and deep purple carpets make me want to sleep. Rest in the companionship of my books.]

After nearly pausing for a nap, it’s appropriate that the next item I see is a draft of a lecture of Freud’s, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming”.

Jonson, Middleton and Marlowe plays, the first modern edition of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 6 volumes by Nicholas Rowe in 1709--he’s the first to divide the plays into acts and scenes and add lists of characters, Henry VIII’s prayer roll, the Gutenberg Bible, 1454-5, the Korean Tripitaka, 1248, illuminated Indian manuscripts, sacred Jewish texts, including the lovely 14th century Spanish “Golden Hagadah”, the Dering Roll, which is the oldest surviving English roll of arms, and an oval mappamundi from around 1350-- “a map of time as well as space”.

Without intending to, I make some cooing noises at the Lewis Carroll section, even write OOH! in my notebook. One of my favourite papers during my Master’s was on three versions of the Alice story, and the way each incarnation of Alice becomes more self-conscious of its public status and materiality. The first version was written and illustrated by Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, as a gift for Alice Liddel; the second version was for wider release--Carroll expanded the story and Tenniel did the illustrations; and, nearly forty years later in 1890, there is the Nursery Alice, which clips the story down and adjusts the storytelling voice to mimic a mother narrating a picture book for her child. I was especially interested in scenes pertaining to the exchange or reading of undirected letters, which are absent from the first version, present in the second, and omitted in the third. Seeing original versions of Carroll’s “Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter Writing”, and the funny little Postage Stamp Case are therefore totally thrilling for me. Not to mention the endless Alice adaptations: A Russian Alice, a Guiness Alice and a Dali Alice. Wild.

Next is Beatlemania. I hog the glass for a while here, smushing my face as close as possible to these verses penned in “John Lennon’s hand”. This, I imagine, is how pilgrims felt about holy relics. There’s a lyric in Harrison’s hand on the back of a paper with directions to Brian Epstein’s countryhouse in Sussex. McCartney’s “Yesterday,” handwritten--I like his wide “y”s. “Ticket to Ride”, written in Lennon’s capitals, perhaps inspired by a day trip Paul and John took to Ryde on the Isle of Wight, or a reference to the Bill of Health given to enable women to work in the red light district of Hamburg (where Beatles played in their early days). Lyric for “A Hard Day’s Night” on the back of a card to Lennon’s son Julian. An untitled verse by Lennon beginning, “I remember a time when everyone I loved hated me. . .”

Next, I stroll through The Rime of the Ancient Mariner exhibit and all I want to do is curl up and read Coleridge and Wordsworth and talk to Carmen (who never tires of the Romantics, ever). The current exhibit is called “Evolving English: One language, many voices”--in other words, Lauren’s Personal Heaven.

It begins with the Germanic languages brought to Britain by settlers from the Continent in the 5th and 6th centuries. Old Anglo-Saxon English was shaped in part by Viking invaders (8th and 9th centuries) and the constant presence of Latin. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, French became the main source for new words and we see Middle English by the 15th century.

I snort at an inscription on a medallion from Denmark, found in Suffolk: “this she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman”. Now that, my good viking, is a present. I pass Beowulf, and Sir Gawayn and the Green Knight on the way to the section on “Everyday English”. This huge room isn’t so much chronological as thematic; Swift’s Polite Conversation sits beside Pinter’s draft for a mobile phone conversation in a play, which is next to one of the earliest Valentines ever written (1477), rounded out by some of Austen’s secret code.

Concern arises in the 18th and 19th centuries about the preservation of “proper” English (there is fretting about the extent to which it borrows from other languages). There are all sorts of grammar and elocutionary advice texts, such as Henry Alford’s A Plea for the Queen’s English (1864) and John Walker’s lessons for Scottish, Irish or Cockney Londoners. Another panel discusses text message conventions. Yup, the British Library is hip alright.

Part of a wall is devoted to mass communication. DON’T LAG! FOLLOW YOUR FLAG! Shelley’s handwritten draft of The Masque of Anarchy. Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. I start to write down, “Note to self, read Finnegan’s Wake,” and then stop. Instead, I write “foosterfather”.

I learn that a systematic study of dialects in Britain does not gain momentum until the 19th century, though individuals had shown an interest earlier. I peek through glass at the archive box of supportive quotations for the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. They even have the only surviving copy of the first edition of the first edition of the English dictionary--Robert Cawdrey’s A Tale Alphabeticall (1604)! But then of course they do.

Party Factoid #1: Shakespeare was the first person on record to use some 1800 words. “Hunchbacked” appears for the first time in Richard III. (And yes, you’re right, we probably don’t go to the same parties).

Party Factoid #2: John Wycliffe, in his English bible, is the earliest known writer to use “abominable” to describe other people. Now that I know there may be snowmen lurking in Wycliffe’s version of things, I will certainly read it.


My British Library notes end and things take a personal and bodily turn: “Jan 25/11. It is kind of nice that my period has arrived more or less when I was expecting it.”

I go on to ramble matter-of-factly about traveling light, how I want to get my hair cut, and whether or not I’m going to go to the Royal Academy the next day. The man sitting across the aisle--well. You know when you get the feeling someone is staring at you? So you stare? And then you don’t know who started it? I’m on my way to Cambridge for the day so I fantasize that this man is an English professor of the long 18th century. I wander down the PhD road and then pull up short, the horse skittering. I don’t know what I want to do. So I write down the return train times for the late afternoon and head to Fitzbillies where I’ve been recommended by both Aria and Sam to have some tea and a scone. I like Cambridge so far. It feels smaller than Oxford (it is) and the streets are narrower and flanked by higher walls. It’s almost biblical. While I’m waiting for my order, a bearded fellow with an American accent asks me if my name is Linda. I almost use one of my many favourite lines from Pretty Woman: “What do you want it to be?”. I later eavesdrop on the couple at the next table, trying to figure out if they are, in fact, a couple. And even later: now that, my dears, was a scone. Ideally, it would have been cheese but “fruit”, i.e. raisin, is perfect too.

In the Cambridge Press bookstore I flip through a few books, ones that I remember Miranda recommending to me. They cost upwards of 40 pounds each and weigh something similar so I buy a purple book bag instead.

Back in London, on my way to meet Aria. Waiting for the tube, it’s a whole other world down here. Different air streams and random blasts of heat. The flows of rushing people as unreadable and brisk as cars.

Jan 26/11

The Alison Jacques Gallery

Robert Mapplethorpe: Night Work (curated by Scissor Sisters)

Fluorescent orchid pasted on black.
Sleeping man guarded by a slinking coyote.
Naked man holding up a star
Fiercely drawn pencil crayon curves around the seats of two portly people, in 1920’s finery. He’s delicately clutching a candycane; her eyes are blacked out and a pig trots towards her. It’s a like a funny dream (and even funny dreams are always a touch sinister).

Three red arrow-shaped mirrors, in different combinations of red and mirror. In my red coat, I feel included.

Man’s face and man’s hand on a skull-topped cane. His eyes are so wide I can’t tell if he even has eyelids.
Another skull, this one holding a bone in his jaw. Gabriel Orozco also has this fascination with skulls. Damien Hurst disciples?
A self-portrait? Legs crossed and he’s staring at me, with one hand clenched on his kneecap. Aware of his joints. Feet in slippers adorned with golden crowns.

Black sound equipment cases, one larger one propped against the wall. In the middle, a silver lattice leans. Three black stage lights throw its backwards words, “The End”, in shadow. I think of “End of Love” in Oxford. This is an end after the takedown. “The End” in storage.

A nearby TV--an old boxy Sony--shows a dark-haired woman (Patti Smith) touching various objects on a petticoated floor. Eyes wrenched and shut, “I cannot stop believing that I have the right to communicate with God.” Stuttering, she pokes at her tongue, calls for God . . . God. . . stop hissing at me,” calling beyond her white bunker. It’s claustrophobic with a faint sound of bagpipes. “Shhhhhhh,” she says. “I can’t get away from language.” Shackles on her feet.
“How . . .art thou. . . fallen from heaven. . .”

I don’t think I get it. But maybe we never quite get each others’ private madnesses about God.

“Talk too much about the work and it loses some of its magic,” Mapplethorpe says in a video in the next part of the gallery, which is down the street. Footage of New York in the 60s, 70s and 80s, Mapplethorpe’s slick yet revealing photographs and his posse of fellow artists and muses. All around him when he gets his nipple pierced in 1968, like he’s the people’s king on a dais.

Along one wall there are nine “pictures,” which are in fact only segments of text, framed. The text is sexually explicit, all featuring men except for one (“A photo of a young pre-school girl with her genitals exposed”). It’s a weird effect, to be made so aware of how, when we read, we see without seeing.

“Psychic Studies” is a large criss-crossing star mirror. My body is in its compartments.
“Mirror”, a mesh-covered mirror. Again, it’s like I’ve been pressed into little squares. Reminds me of when the Moroccan man compared me to fresh, white cheese.
All of these mirrors make me wonder, if I could be so lucky to be one of his subjects, how would Mapplethorpe capture me? He may have already.

On the way out I pass the title photo for the exhibit: two hands, clutching shiny leather-clad buttocks. And a final skull, this one penciled in wisps, barely there.

To the end of love,
Shacs

My Day with Orozco and the Yellow Schwalbe

Dear all,

[From Jan 24]
At the Union Theatre Cafe
The sweetest man just made a cappuccino for me. “Sugar, love?” He poured a shake of white sugar into the cup and pulled the espresso shot while singing along to song about a hometown. The singer is worried he won’t recognize it when he returns.

[Now, at home, I recognize my town even though parts of it are trying to trick me. Like the construction craters where there used to be houses.]

“My money’s running to you for some reason,” a stubbly and balding man with a jumble of teeth says to me and bends down to get the 20 pence that’s dropped near my foot. “You must be lucky or something.” And I feel lucky today, I do. I checked my bank account online and I’m not quite as broke as I thought!

I imagine the content of my own eavesdropping. . .

It was Chris’s grand plan, just a right brainwave it was, “Bacon or sausage Bagel & a hot drink”, £2. Other cafes, they’ve got morning deals for this and that and we’ve gotta keep up, yeah? In the morning here it’s usually regulars anyway who don’t mind one way or the other but for snagging new eyes and tummies--well. We need a deal. So we thought and thought and Tom, who works stagecraft at the theatre said Why not the frog breakfast, croissant & coffee? No that’s everywhere, I said. How about bacon. I know that’s what I’d always pick. And when they read it, they start to smell it in their heads. People want a choice, though, Chris says. What about bacon or sausage? On what, Tom frowns. A bagel, says Chris.

On the walls, “British Blondes till the 6 July” and old play posters, ribbons of paint with theatre name and Greek drama masks. U2 playing on an ipod. Racks of sandwiches, hand-wrapped in saran wrap. Van Morrison on the speakers now. Crisps. A sign for 90 p flapjacks and no flapjacks. I watch a mug left steaming beside an ashtray. Cars and bikes and the rumble of the overground. I like how the cafe is open to the winter air. Nice to work with the seasons in mind--steaming milk in the winter wind.

Gabriel Orozco at the Tate Modern

What does Gabriel Orozco like? He likes “replanting things in new contexts” to discover the wider meanings things carry. He likes “the symbolic within everyday life”. He likes “transience” and “ephemerality”. I want to know how he likes his coffee. If he likes to watch television or go to sleep with socks on or an eye mask. No matter what I do, I’m always intimidated by the living artist exhibited in a gallery. Like he or she might come walk around in disguise and eavesdrop on gallery-goers or peek into my notebook, and say, Now that’s not what I intended at all--but it’s not all about what I intended, anyway, and glint a smile at me and saunter off. Hah! If I could be so lucky.

“My hands are my heart”: a photograph and a mould of clutched clay--heart-shaped.

These fingerprints of cities
remind me of psychologists flash cards
oil on paper, layered deep
shadowed like bones

A human skull, designed with black chequers, the skull of a jester in a room of obituary banners. Obituaries like:

“Built empire on optimism.
Helped make tastier tomatoes.
Pioneer in typography.
A Backroom French rightist
Ascertained moon’s makeup
Nicknamed Dr. Strangelove
Colorful writer and crusader on behalf of wine
Cerebral croquet champion
Chief cantor of Berlin’s Jews
Burlesque star famous for her bubble baths
Much more than just a hall of famer
Socially prominent communist
Eccentric even for England

I think for a second about what mine would be. Romantic, who laughed at her own jokes.

“Until you find another yellow Schwalbe” tells this story in photographs around the room: A pair of yellow scooters meet and roam the city together like sheep in love. Nuzzling up to poles and trees, always waiting for each other. Kickstanding in front of street cafes, driveways and flowerbeds. Always in a bit of shade, and always on cobblestone. Here’s one in the sun--they make their one small shadow together. One acquires a sticker, a decal of a raised hand. Sometimes other bikes appear. Has it been the same yellow bikes all along? Would I know if one had been switched? In one photo, one of them is wheeless. Like it’s crippled or kneeling. Later back up and running as a man in red zooms past them on a black bike. I realize that as the scene has progressed, the camera approached first from the front, then from the side, and now from behind. As though the scooters have run us over and now they’re getting away.
Last photo: three yellow scooters.

Older ladies to me: “So what do you make of all this? Do you know what it’s supposed to mean? You’re young!”
me: “You could tell your own story about the scooters maybe. It’s about what you make of all of this too.”

“Recaptured Nature,” a black lump described as “vuclanized rubber”. I like the sound of that.

“Four bicycles (There is always One Direction)”. A scandalous embrace of cycles. Enough wheels for four but not enough handlebars. All fused together and totally repurposed because the wheels can’t take the new structure anywhere or they’d run into each other!

“La D.S.” a modified Citroen DS, elegant but freakish, it’s squished to look like one of those hot-dog dogs or a greyhound with its too-narrow head.

“Elevator”. An elevator cabin squats in the exhibit room. No shaft, just the floor, and an ever-open door.

“Empty shoebox”. Exactly as titled. Hmm, and yet this one causes the most discomfort for me. What, exactly, should I be doing here? I think about slipping my foot inside it, wearing it as a hat or measuring its shadow. A security guard does something I’ve not been lucky enough to see in gallery so far--she walks over and in her surgical gloved hands, picks it up! And moves it over a few inches. My guess is that she wanted to centre it better on top of the orange tape on the floor. From her post across the room, she must have sensed that something was not quite right.
I also enjoy the sniggering from two French ladies passing the shoebox. They don’t stop for a closer look and I take this as my cue to move on. Measuring a shoebox shadow? Jesus Lauren. I recall the astoundingly surefooted dismissal that two of Claire’s Oxford friends make: “Modern art? Post-modern art? Rather banal and pointless, on the whole.” I couldn’t disagree more even though the shoebox frustrated me. But isn’t it silly, the art that squawks “Look at me! I’m art too!”? Why does Orozco get to plant a shoebox in a gallery and have it puzzled over as art? I can’t help loving him for doing it. At the very least, it’s worth the price of admission just to watch peoples’ reactions. But it gets me thinking about the way things in a particular space sit there together: the elevator, the squished Citroen, the tangled bikes, the white shoebox. What do they have to say to each other? Forget about us. I mill around hoping to eavesdrop on what a stranded elevator has to say to a shoeless shoebox.

Reaching the next room, I realize, Holy shit! I’ve totally lost my marbles! Likely they’re back in that elevator, rolling around.

“First was the Spitting,” is, apparently, ink, graphite and toothpaste spit on graph paper. Graphing his loogies. How tasty. Luckily, “First was the Spitting” isn’t followed by “Next was the Shitting”...

More graphing, altering bank notes and travel receipts with colourful ovals. Everyday slips of paper are capable of all kinds of wildness.

A wooden chessboard populated only by knights. A tree imposed upon by invisible circles, which eclipse bits of the blue/red and blue/red/gold circles. Pure design.

Security guard is doodling or doing sudoku.

“Carambole with Pendulum” billiards. A suspended red ball swings back and forth, grazing the billiard turf every time. Telling time by the red ball.

“From roof to roof,” a photograph of a view of a rooftop entirely covered with rain puddle and a few giant ripple circles and the reflection of a cloudy day and trees.

“Yielding stone image”. It’s the yield stone from earlier, here photographed as at it rolls (or sits) on a street grate.

“Traffic worm”. How did you get in there? A clay worm clambers through miniscule traffic.

“Crazy tourist,” Ahahaha. Yes. Old bare wooden market tables. We tourists will snap at anything.

The knobbly ass of a skinny horse. “Awful,” splutters one lady behind me.

“Showerhead”-- a microscope’s gaze of germy dots.

“Dial tone”--cut and pasted phonebook pages on Japanese paper. Perfect for Sam.

In this room overlooking the Thames, puddles of silver adorn frayed scraps of huge industrial tires. Spaced neatly, the fragments are still as organized as tire tracks. The silver only dribbles, like wax, on one part of the formation. The rest is left alone. A forest after a fire. The laying out of possessions after a death or many deaths. A kind of ceremony for a dead tire, a respectful display for something that no one usually thanks. If you have a spare, you don’t think twice.
Car tires burning, emblems of rage and dissent. I wonder, to what extent do art galleries enforce a sense of peace? Or if not peace, the sense that the event, whatever it was, is over?

The last room:
Pelvis, torso, head and arms in terracotta fired clay and terracotta with carbon. After the black tire wasteland, these remnants are eerie. I know they’re clay but my skin prickles as if they’re bone.
Also in the room is “Lintels,” tatters of dryer lint hung on clotheslines, shed over the course of many dryer cycles. They look like skins. Sketches on the wall are dirty graphite, like smudges after a fire.

Outside the exhibit room, surrounded by student groups and other tourists, I take down a few notes from a filmed interview with Orozco that’s playing on loop:
You can have a strong experience and present it without showing off. . . .Through the work you can help people enjoy realty and everyday life with a little more intensity. . . . I think good art makes a person feel individual and conscious. . . it should take concentration to understand.

Up next, The British Library, a trip to Cambridge, and a night out at Passing Clouds.

Love,
Shacs

You may call me Lady Intrepid--and I shall wait for you in my Breakfast Room (not to be confused with my Billiards Room).

Dear ladies and blokes,

If I go by what my journal says, I’m passing through Slough on the way to London Paddington Station. If I go by what my senses tell me, I’m back in Vancouver, wrapped in the odd quiet of residential streets, familiarity, and clean air. This past week has been wonderful and nerve-racking. Leaving for four months has made it clear to me that I have no specific career aspirations except to write. Wearing the same mangy clothes for 4 months has made it clear to me that I need intensive showering now. And the assortment of papers, gallery brochures, transit tickets and other flattened articles (an Azam juice box, a tiny Arabic Clorets package) now spread out on my floor tells me I need to make a scrapbook as soon as possible--or take a long hard look into my pack-rat soul. Home is the same and not the same: my Mum has a new dog with a funny long tail, my Dad is ready for Facebook 101 lessons with me, and there are new light switches in the kitchen (totally weird when I’m groping around in the darkness of my jetlag). I learned to jumpstart a car the other day. This might be the beginning of my hardier, handywoman future in Vancouver. For the safety of all, I’ll still get a day job. Somewhere in London I asked myself, in anticipation of coming home:

Am I intrepid or impulsive? Merely or merrily noncommittal?
I am the same as I was before. Triumphant about mundane feats. Mad for detail. Smirking at the photos I take. Shy and crushing on the world.

But let’s get back in the swing of the story.

On the train to London on January 20, I miss Claire intensely and worry about her. She picked up a harrowing germ in Morocco and could barely hug me goodbye. I just don’t want anything to compromise her pubbing lifestyle for too long. I check into my hotel near Victoria Station, which is run by the charming Patel family. I find out later that Mrs. Patel was actually born in Tanzania! I love my basement room because it’s all mine. I don’t even mind the smell of hot onions and sewage that often and inexplicably vents through it. I meet Aria for a late sushi dinner in Islington and we start to catch up. I haven’t known the world without Aria in it. We’ve been best friends since the age of three. Even with our university years spent in different parts of the world, every time we hang out we discover new similarities. In August, we realized that we’re both masochists when it comes to hot sauce, using it on everything and ending up in tears. This time, we found out that as babies, we spat out the same first word: moon. We’re both more love-driven than career-driven (though not without our perfectionistic streaks). I relate to her like a sister. We’ve got this bond, made of Camp Miriam, countless Shabbats, Point No Point, sleepovers, tennis lessons, and now Spitalfields market. Sometimes I still call her Archie Comics.

My first full day in London begins in a coffee shop, which sits in the shadow of a formidable war monument near the Buckingham Palace grounds. I think, how could you live and work here and keep your head down? Wouldn’t you be heartstopped every block by all the history and grandeur? Part of the fascination of travel for me is marveling at the purposeful pedestrians who know the city like they have maps tattooed inside their skulls. The maps I’m fumbling for at stoplights with my hands cracking from the cold are there, fluttering under their eyelids.

The Urethra Postcard Art of Gilbert & George, White Cube Mason’s Yard Gallery

Two floors, all filled with framed collages of postcards, 13 of the same per frame, arranged to form an angulated version of the sign of the urethra (a dot in the centre of a circle). Gilbert & George chose manipulated this symbol, which was used by theosophist C.W. Leadbetter (1854-1934) to accompany his signature. “Each picture, in one sense, has created itself according to the compositional principle of thirteen identical cards arranged to form [the sign of the urethra, angularized]”. Every exhibit varies slightly because the selection of the works is “automatic”. Gilbert & George have produced thousands of these arrangements but they don’t choose which ones to exhibit.

The postcard formations are bright and too-colourful, replicating themselves like Warhols. Some are traditional postcards--of Big Ben, the London Eye, St. George’s flag. Others are like discarded leaflets-- one proclaims in yellow curly script, “Your needs are my desire/ Your pain is my pleasure,” on a lurid red background, like an advertisement for Chinese take-away. There’s “TRANSEXUAL stunning feminine Very convincing”, “Spoilt for Choice/ Let me spoil you/ I have a/ Dungeon/ Schoolroom/ TV Boudoir/ All in relaxing/ Luxury surroundings”, and “Newest and Bluest 18 Year old. Most Services. Open late”. Advertising people like they’re late night take- away. Food for thought. I think about postcards zipping across the globe, generic images of England; I think about generic images of flyers flooding English phone boxes. People licking stamps and pressing them down, disoriented, because they can’t remember the last time they engaged in the act of postcard. Kind of a sexy, solitary, outdated thing to do, licking stamps.

Institute for Contemporary Art

A flat screen flips through digital slides of Daniel Lichtman’s teenaged diary. Adorable and poignant. Reminds me of the silly things I used to write in my diary, like “there’s so much more to tell you but you’ll be reading about a broken wrist if I don’t say goodbye now!”.

A soundless cartoon dances high on one wall, a spindly faceless black scribble doing everything he can to mutilate himself. Without the soundtrack of grimaces and creaks it would be less disturbing.

There’s a model of a sparrow, sitting on a perch and looking into a dark mirror, which is actually a painted mimicry of a reflection.

“Photocopy of Plastic Sculpture” looks as ancient and noble as Stonehenge.

Thanks to one installation, there’s the sound of water running around the room. In the corner, it’s dripping from a black bin into a larger red one. In front of it is a screen projector, which shows these same water droplets, filmed, against a nighttime gas station scene. So the drops are here and there, real drops and movie rain, sharing the same pattering soundtrack.

Mourning/morning on the tarmac. [Photographer Vasikios Kantas’s “Missed Flight”]

Down a hallway, a scroll stretches with doodles of toads, rabbits, foxes, Cheshire cats in Japanese trees. Alice with a bird, toads chasing rabbits with overchewed quills, dandelion puffs, Alice with a crown.

Nearby is a television, which shows artist Emma Hart getting the ocean’s waves to roll the dice. “It’s me versus the sea,” she says. I like that the sound of the waves shares the hall with the silent scroll, an unwavering banner with no sounds of its own.

Guy Haddon-Grant’s “Narcissus 21” appears to have pulled off his waxen appendages (nose, ear, bits of brain?) and fanned them out in front of him on a mirror.

I exit the gallery for a much-needed bowl of minestrone soup. Real soup. Not a soup-reflection or a soup-postcard. After searching in the cold for a while, I find the Wallace Collection, the 18th century home of Sir and Lady Wallace turned into a museum. With only 40 minutes before closing, I have just enough time to stroll around and think about what it would be like to have so many function-specific rooms. The breakfast room always gets me--I mean, if I want to have breakfast in my bedroom, doesn’t my bedroom then become the breakfast room? Or what if I want to eat it in the billiards room?

Walking the London streets, I try to unlock The Monkey Puzzle, the pub where I’m meeting Aria. I feel quite brave-- due to the combination of being solitary, freezing and on the curb-edge between lost and navigating. Sample inner monologue:

Well hello, you’re quite tall. . . a bit of a freak even. . . . . . . . . . should I take a picture of this building? Do I really care? Nope. Too cold to de-glove . . . . . hm hm hm. . . . are they a gay couple, I wonder? . . . . . . . . oooh, I like her vest, I wonder where she. . . . . . . . Christ, he must be freezing!. . . . I’m freezing. . . . . . . . . . . . . Can people tell I’m a tourist? With my backpack, maybe. . . . OOH! Smells! What could that be? Coriander. . . . . . . time to stop at another cafe, I think.

Jan 22
Lovely lazy Saturday with Rishma, my long-time friend from high school who sounds more than half-English now and is a term away from being a practicing dentist. I tell her I want to go to her favourite places, so we have lunch at the Lebanese place she’s fond of and then, since we fancy dessert, we go to Borough market and buy Velvet vanilla ribbon cake (or something like that), which we have at her flat with tea. I find myself a bit tongue-tied when asked about Tanzania so I prod her into telling me the long version of how she met her boyfriend. I’ll have to disagree with Larry David on this one issue--he detests how-we-met stories, says they’re pointless, there’s no suspense, let me guess, you end up together--but I delight in them.

On my way back to the Patels, I stop out in the middle of Westminster bridge and look into the dark water and then back up at Big Ben, a yellow moon. I’m not even sure where the real moon is, sliver white and tentative. I feel calm but also awash with love and urgency--how lucky am I to have loved ones? The singularly irreplaceable ones in my world. Even the ones I have no claim on, even towards them, I feel affection and gratitude.

Jan 23

In Brick Lane the next day, I have the most delicious plate of Ethiopian food. Shamelessly take a picture. A text arrives in my phone that has clearly lost its way: “Hey it’s dan :P xxxx” and minutes later when I don’t respond, “xxx??”. I feel badly: what if he thought he’d met the love of his life at the pub last night and he/she gave him a fake number? Or he entered it incorrectly in his phone. I text him back and explain that I’m just visiting England and no, I don’t think we met last night--sadly, because he has such a jubilant texting style (ok, I don’t say this last part). Good luck finding who your looking for, I say. Cheers, says dan.

Whitechapel Art Gallery

Claire Barclay’s Shadow Spans, an installation exploring the the urban experience of being observed, the threshold between domestic and public space, and “the relationship between materials and making”. Oooh, binaries! Did I stumble back into school?

Moving through the exhibit, around its tilted black doors with golden knobs and empty sections draped with fabric, I’m unnerved at the prospect of a flimsy curtain between me and the world. These doors don’t guard, they preside. Empty flowerpots perch like birds in black cages. Fingers of black leather curl around a wire net like flowers on a trellis. It’s a different piece every time I take a step. Here’s a fallen door and another sprawl of flowerpots and scattered dirt. Nothing growing here. Only infinite angles. How do I know when I’ve looked enough, seen it all? Before I move on, I notice the pattern on the fabric: brick. Like the brick walls of the gallery. Like London brick. “A space turned outside in”.

A cinematic collage by Stephen Suttcliffe. My favourite part is “The Garden of Proserpine”. A woman’s voice reads the Swinburne poem while young women in flowery dresses playing and falling in mud on a moor. Classical piano rises and falls.

“I am tired of tears and laughter. . . I am weary of days and hours. . .”

I write these lines down, my pen moving in the dark. I wait for the film to loop around and then I write them down again, just to be sure. Eventually I’m alone in the screening room, “Here where the world is quiet.”

More to come.

Love,
Shacs

My Gallery Company: Headless Figures and a "Foreign Bloke"

Dear all,

Jan 31. Amsterdam airport.
I'm back in the same cafe in “Lounge 3” that I haunted on the way to and from Tanzania, struggling with an onslaught of glitch-in-the-matrix feelings. I'm suspended here, free in my anonymity, just another groggy airport dweller with a cantankerous tummy and time to kill. But I’ve also been checked in, groped in security, and have presented my passport many times already today so in this sense, the flying world has me pinned. My nonsensical itinerary takes me from London back to Amsterdam before I fly to Vancouver but I don’t mind--I like the symmetry of returning, again, to this airport. It's like my bookend. And I've got 4 hours with nothing to do but write and sample duty free perfume.

Now where was I? Oxford’s Modern Art Gallery.

Exhibit #1. Thomas Houseago, “What Went Down”

I’ve got my back turned on the big “Baby,” a crouching mass of white plaster, flayed iron scaffolding, bronze-boned feet. Writing with my back turned to see if I can feel its presence, and to see if I can remember. Maybe I’m doing this because I feel sorry for this creature. Without the hanging power of the painting, he/she is vulnerable to our circumnavigating. I can sneak up on him. I turn around and crouch, looking at him now. Why is it a “him”? There’s no genitalia. Not even defined toes. “His” feet clamp the floor like clothing irons.

The other 3 works in the room are plain shapes indented in off-white plaster. Outdone by Baby.

Next room. Many faces/skulls. “Head (Black Hill)” looks like Darth. Oh hello, old friend. Dribbled on the floor nearby is a crumple of bronzy gold, a pre or post-sculptural huddle called “Cave II (Lump)”.

“Untitled (Sprawling Octopus Man)” looks ready to spring, as though he’s rooted only to gather momentum. Not combative just determined, ready. His cheek is a spray of coins.

“Bottle II” has a haphazard skull at its top (reminding me of a night earlier in the week and our valiant effort to remove the crumbling cork from the wine bottle. We imagined swiping at it with a ceremonial sword)

“Biggest Spoon (Outdoor)” makes me want to curl up in its dish, which looks like a futuristic pod from A Clockwork Orange.

“Crouching Figure” is headless. When I was writing about figures in school, I remember defining a figure as something sketched, an outline, a generality. If a figure lacks a specific face, it’s appropriate that this sculpture lacks a face. Furthermore, its head appears to have been torn off, which makes it difficult to ignore that possibility that it may have had a very familiar and special face not so long ago.

“Cyclops No. 1” is cradling his face with one hand--and has only one hand. I can only guess about the other arm since half of him has been excavated.

[The security guard paces slowly around the sculptures, looking. The guards I’ve seen so far usually just stay put so I wonder if I’ve come across the rare guard who looks every day and sees new things in this room]

“Owl Mask III” makes me want to slip my feet into the grooved hollows of his cheeks.

In the bookstore (I don’t buy any books, just write things down in front of a nonplussed cashier), I flip through a book of a Marlene Dumas exhibit called Broken White, held in Tokyo. She says, “The aim of art/has always been the same/ it is to make you/ forget your own name.”

Also, a poem called “Artwork as Misunderstanding”:
There is a crisis with regard to representation/They are looking far meaning as if it was a thing/ As if it was a girl/ required to take her panty off/ as if she would want to do so, as soon as/ the true interpreter comes along/ As if there was something to take off.”

I detest the word “panty,” but otherwise like the poem. It makes me think hard about my kleptomaniac urges in galleries. I can’t take the toggles. Can I?

Film of a series of stage monologues: David Austen’s “End of Love”

I wasn’t sure it was going to begin. I’d groped my way into the pitch-dark screening room, assumed I was alone but wouldn’t have known if someone else was an inch from my cheek. I sat cross-legged on the floor and ate a banana. Waited for my eyes to adjust.

It was all so true it made me sad.

The first monologue, “Dark Angel,” mascared-eyes blinking wide, the woman pierces the theatre dark saying, she doubts that “you” know how it feels to be ravishingly beautiful, to be “ruinously in love”. She doubts and doubts. The next one, a tortured dim-eyed man in a top hat. His eyes belong to someone who’s been crying forever. I thought of Sarah Kane’s plays, of love as torture, madness and apocalypse. I thought about how what I was watching was as real as anything else, the world and its heartbreaks. When I left the theatre and the gallery and went back out into the street, it was busy and bright with mist. I felt lonely; I missed all those “ruptured, raptured”* characters and had trouble writing much more about what I’d seen.

*tattooed on one character’s back

“Taking the waters” in Bath

I leave Oxford on January 16 for a 2 night excursion to Bath. “In Britain are hot springs adorned with sumptuous splendor for the use of mortals. Minerva is patron goddess of these. . .” (Thank you, Solinus, 3rd century AD). Now, you may have heard that it now costs a pretty penny to bathe in the Bath spas, and you would be right. They’ve built a swanky new complex that the walking tour lady pointed out disdainfully. However, there are all sorts of aquatic experiences to be had in Bath. For example, the afternoon I arrive and check in to my hostel--above the chain pub Belushi’s at St. Christopher’s Inn--it is pouring with a medieval vengeance. I wander around into the evening, wallowing in puddles and a tiny bit of self-pity as I hunt down a new brand of painkillers. Still, it’s freeing to be on my own and I find a bookstore with tables and tea. I continue to “take the waters” in Bath when I get back to the hostel and meet the growing pool of rainwater beside my bed. This is the low point of the day. The highlight was a few hours earlier, when I stumbled into Evensong at Bath Abbey (more waterworks):

Thought I’d missed the beginning but they let me in anyway. Better late than never to return to the fold, right? I can’t keep my eyes from watering. Choral singing gets right into my chest. It sounds so old and pure, I feel it piercing through my chilled skin and layers of flesh until it sings inside the marrow of my bones. It makes me want to sing and take deep breaths. . . Night is coming; outside the stained glass it’s glimmering gray. I know all will be okay as long as I have a notebook. It’s strange and new to have no one to meet, no one waiting for me to call.

Dream.
Claire and I decide to find a McDonald’s. They’re nicer in Europe but the one we find is a bit much. It has royal forest grounds stretching out behind it. In fact, it’s less like McDonald’s than it is the Moroccan restaurant of our nightmares. Lights flickering out as wind blows through the deserted patio. Shadows and no one in sight. “Claire!” I yell. “Look over there!” There’s a massive turtle flexing in and out of its shell slouched against a brick wall. “Cool,” she says. All of a sudden, a small dijon-coloured alligator is attacking me. I’m shaking like mad but it won’t let go of my hand. There is no blood. Later, I seem to have escaped and am showing off my war wounds. Someone says, “an alligator, eh?” and I ask how he knows this. “Your hand’s all yellowed and bumpy,” he says, as if this is something everyone knows--that alligators don’t draw blood but only bleed their hue into you.

Poem.

On the run when we talked. Around the corner
in the green cafe, all wood and warmth inside
except for the chills beneath my plaid.
We are full of bad ideas.


Bath, January 17 and 18.

On my own, I achieve just the right mix of activities. Coffee consumption, galleries, walkgin, writing, and hunting for good deals on meals. The morning walking tour leads me to a statue of Bladud, the mythical British king who learned to fly (the placard doesn’t elaborate on this point). In the 18th century Bladud becomes popular again, and is frequently depicted as a swineherd. Not sure why I find Bladud so compelling. Perhaps because he is patron of the druids and associated with the oak tree, which takes me back to a paper I loved and toiled over in the summer). I learn that a “ha ha” wall--such as the one skirting the grass in front of the houses along Bath’s Royal Crescent--is one that dips down toward the middle to ensure that the view of the green isn’t compromised. At the overpriced but cool Roman Baths exhibit, I check out replicas the of the ancient Roman temple, the ruins of which are in the museum’s basement. Glass walkways take me over old graves and bathing pools and good old Solinus reminds me that in Minerva’s temple “the eternal flames never whiten into ash”. Things look a tad worn to say the least but if eternal flame can mean cheesy kaleidoscopic projections, I guess I’ll take your word for it, Solly. A sculpture of Minerva’s head looks fine from the front and kind of emptied out at the back. A couple thousand years and only short a bit of scalp? Not bad.

I love the selection of old curse requests. It was common for Romans to cast these papyrus scraps or inscribed stones into the pools for Minerva to read. My favourite: “Docimedis has lost two gloves. He asks that the person who has stolen them should lose his minds and his eyes in the temple when she appoints.” I appreciate that the museum has left some of the curses unopened too. They also have a collection of miniscule gemstones with engraved images, thrown away or lost by bathers. According to Seneca the younger circa 60 AD, and many others, a trip to the baths was not at all like a calm touristy spa: “Picture me with a babel of noise going on all about me, at a public bath-house."

The next morning, in Cafe Nero, after coffee, trail mix and Syndol, I head out into a perfect sunny day with a vague plan to find a tower with a lookout over the city. I never find the tower but I go on a picture-taking romp up into a residential area, through a park built after landslides in the 1810s demolished the area. I take a Bar-Mitzvah’s worth of pictures, up past an elementary school at the top of the hill and brick homes with upholstery inside that matches all of my imaginings of British interiors. Crisp morning light and I could see my breath. Monty Python moment: descending a narrow lane and finding out it is called “The Shrubbery”. I meet the owner of a cafe called The Walrus and the Carpenter as I stop to take a picture of the sign. “It was stolen once, you know. But we got it back. Hooligans took it all the way to Bristol but we got it back.” He tells me he’s been to Canada and piloted even piloted a small plain over the Okanagan.

At the Victoria Albert Gallery (more like being in a 19th century home than a gallery).

Bath in the 19th century? It was “the workshop of the world”! With woolen mills, cabinet makers and engineering companies and new railways in the 1840s, Bath was hopping. Prince Albert even visits in 1843 (though he doesn’t make it any further than the train station). The main floor displays a random assortment of antiques, from a candelabras and tattered books whose covers remind me of old Nancy Drews to a “needle douche”, a shower from the baths that I thought was a torture chamber of some kind.

A room for David Tress, a local artist featuring a collection titled “Landmarks”:

Churches encroached upon by spatters of black, clogging the frame. Reminds me of the drug-drenched scene in Five Easy Pieces. Paint globbed so thick in parts that I think it might scratch the glass. Only paint but it could be embedded rope or nails. Slash, slash. Does Tress paint with a clenched fist?
These buildings look like the desolate house at the Morning Side hike in Morogoro, in the mists, in the midst of graffiti grabs.

A large canvas, black, grey, white charcoal, the tones of historical photos, of officaldom. A marsh or a riverbed? I start to think about when my Mum was a young woman. Did life, love and travel baffle her as much as it does me? The canvas dips at the bottom; not a perfect rectangle after all.

I get sidetracked on the way to the second floor by the 17th century landscapes and portraits lining the staircase. I wonder if the public scene depicted by Bie’s “Campo Vaccino” is what Dali plays on in his freaky dreamscapes. Instead of peasants, soldiers, dogs and fountains, he tips the players of our dreams into the daylight, letting them sturt around, feathered, hybrid, the raggedy detritus of myth. Not that these 17th century scenes are the benchmark of reality. The light is glowing and gentle, the right tones for a light opera. Given the way I felt after seeing “End of Love” in Oxford, confessions made in “stagelike time”* may be just as real.

*from Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour).

Oil paintings upstairs: “The Foreign Bloke” by Rex Whistler. Two blokes in a room--a pub?--with daylight brightening the hand of the foreigner. Or is he not the foreigner? Certainly he looks crooked and sinister, and as if he’s wearing a mask or a prosthetic nose, but why foreign? I wonder if he’s supposed to be Jewish. The other fellow is wearing a bowler hat, a smooth contrast to the peaked forehead and clownish curls of his counterpart. Trying to look unmoved by the foreigner’s gestures. Neither has finished his drink.

A smudgy painting: a triangle woman with a backcombed mane spilling around her almond face. Titled “The Artist’s Wife”. What is she holding? Inspiration in her hands? The table near her is a tear drop with even smaller drops of blood in its palm.

I’m finishing this on the floor of my room at home. I’m home! Luckily there’s more material to glean from my journals so there will be a few more blog installments... Shacs has yet to unpack.

Love,
Shacs