Theresa had to go off to work so today I was on my own in London. While I’ve had a small list of required purchases for some folks back home I had no real plan. The Tate? The Portrait Gallery? Harrods? Who knew where the day would take me. I just knew it would again be fun to spend some time seeing the London beyond Big Ben and Parliament.
I headed off to Knightsbridge, with a quick stop at Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guard, to poke around some shops (no buying going on with the pound making it so expensive here). I had been given a very important request to buy a handbag by my friend Rosemary. She asked that if in the area I stop into Harvey Nichols. I went and scoured the store for the non-existent handbag which hopefully is a good thing given the continual economic crisis in which the Dow dropped below 10,000 for the first time in 4 years.
Being in Knightsbridge did give me the opportunity to head to the food halls of Harrods and have lunch and some indulge in some of the amazing desserts they have there. After getting some shopping in I needed to balance it with some culture so I quickly headed to the tube and made my way to the National Portrait Gallery (http://www.npg.org.uk/live/index.asp). I highly recommend a stop here as it is an interesting, manageable museum which had many interesting portraits labeled with fascinating bits of history. I even saw Earl James Balfour’s (http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/scotgaz/people/famousfirst5.html) portrait which for those of you at NASDAQ may know is an ancestor of one of our former colleagues, Charles Balfour. The Earl was at one point Prime Minister of England.
Today I took the opportunity to walk over to The City and see one of the inspirations for my book…yes book. Some of you know I come from a long line of authors including my mother, grandfather and great grandfather (amongst many other creative relatives). I decided a while back that it would be fun to begin writing a mystery. I’ve always enjoyed reading them and given that writing should somehow be incorporated in my blood it has become a recent activity of mine. The big joke of course is that I will skip publishing the book and take it right to the movies so I can support the current life I'm leading of running around the world. So in my book I’ve incorporated a portion in London which surrounds an office in the Gherkin building (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_St_Mary_Axe). The Gherkin is shaped like a bullet and soars above the skyline. With a murder mystery a bullet shaped building couldn’t be anymore appealing.
Tuesday took me to a completely different cultural locale than the National Portrait Gallery. I decided to settle my eyes on some modern art at the Tate Modern (http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/) on the other side of the Thames. I took the tube over and entered the massive building with a bit of trepidation. I thought about how I didn’t really understand modern art and questioned why I was going there. It ends up that I have an affinity for much more modern art than I had thought. I greatly enjoyed portions of the museum and came to realize that I like Cubism (I didn’t even really know what that was until this visit). I came to the conclusion that modern art, just like more traditional, really holds beauty in the eye of the beholder.
Of course there was still a heck of a lot that I didn’t “get” as I wandered around. There was a room with a sign that warned that the contents had sexually explicit material in it…so of course when you see a sign like that you have to dare to go in. I did and quickly exited after seeing a video displayed on the wall in which an old man was dancing with, as the Brits say, his wanker tucked between his legs. There were large pieces that were just one solid color that I thought I could paint and other rooms in which I couldn’t figure out what was art vs. not. At one point I paused to stare at a door thinking that it was art until I realized with some embarrassment that it was truly a door to another room.
All in-all the museum brought back some pleasant memories. With many students and their sketch books I was reminded of my grandmother. The genre of art reminded me of talking with my great aunt Gloria Brobeck, an avid and talented modern artist. And then my a great memory came back of our old family Volkswagen van…you know the predecessor to the mini-van and home to many a hippie. We took many fun family trips in it during my childhood and one in particular with our friends Bea, Bob and Nancy where we drove to Baja California for a whale watching expedition. You might ask what made me think of this…it was the art installation by Joseph Beuys called The Pack from 1969 (http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/beuys/room6.shtmin) which there was an actual VW van. The van had a number of sleds, torches and blankets coming out the back which represented the fact that while modern advances moved people around well in an emergency you sometimes had to go back to the basics. Our green VW van got us all over the place but certainly we had our moments of pushing and pulling to get it through places it wasn’t meant to travel!
Now I’m back at Theresa’s and packing up to head to Paris first thing in the morning on the EuroStar through the chunnel!
