Katie And Dive Do London Pt.5

Yay! We're still at it, pounding the streets of London, mile after mile.
Never try to walk the feet off a swim team girl; it just can't be done. Katie is as fresh at the end of the second evening as she was when she stepped off the train the morning of the day before.

Having left the Miró exhibition and wandered across Piccadilly Circus we reach the bottom of Haymarket and turn aside into Waterloo Place, where Katie photographs a statue of someone (there are so many statues there that I can't remember who it was) with whom she shares a birthday.

The statue behind her celebrates a famous episode where a woman dressed in some sheets defeated some soldiers in silly hats by throwing quoits over their rifles … or something.

Anyhoo; it's mosaics we are hunting now and the next one on the list is just behind this chap standing on his column.
Oh, looky! Trafalgar Square! We can play tourists!

The mosaic we are looking for is located on the third landing inside the entrance hall of this building: The National Gallery.
It is "The Awakening of the Muses", a marble mosaic by Russian artist Boris Anrep, installed in 1933.
This mosaic has a link to where Katie is staying in her chic little Bloomsbury hotel as Anrep was chummy with the Bloomsbury Group and used his friends as models in this mosaic.
Melpomene is - oddly - Greta Garbo, but the others are Bloomsbury folk, including Virginia Woolf as Clio and Clive Bell as Bacchus.

Unfortunately, as we enter, a uniformed security flunkey is bellowing "NO PHOTOGRAPHY" at some hapless and quivering tourists so we shrug our shoulders and go look at the mosaic anyway.

Never one to willingly obey authority - especially when it's shouty - I sneak off a shot from behind a column but it is too blurry and turns out to show mostly legs.
Well; nothing ventured, nothing gained: I approach the friendliest-looking security guard, a nice middle-aged lady who shakes her head and tells me that nobody is allowed to take photographs.
Hoorah for nice middle-aged ladies, as she follows this by dropping her voice and telling me "If there's no-one looking I can't see it will do any harm … Be quick!"

So Katie and I take sneaky photos from opposite ends of the landing, the nice security lady watching out for the shouty guard. Hopefully both photos will give a decent account of the mosaic.

This is the view from the front door of The National Gallery, looking across Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall toward Parliament (you can make out Big Ben in the distance).
We'll be heading back that way in a few minutes, but first let us enjoy the square in the sunshine.

As we walk down the gallery steps Wren's church of Saint Martin greets us on the left and it appears we are not the only ones revelling in this wonderful weather.

One sign that it is indeed October is the fact that the fountains are not full of drunken tourists.

I do like this shot. The fountain looks good backlit … and Katie looks good in any light.

I still can't believe all this glorious sunshine! Woohoo!

Looks like that statue is destined to appear on Katie's blog before much longer.

Yet another gratuitously touristy photograph. Katie with Nelson's Column … and a particularly filthy London bus.

Old Horatio's been given a wash and brush-up lately; usually he's covered in pigeon poop.

Hokay … Some back-story: Earlier, Katie stops to photograph a Murphy's builders' lorry (her surname shows her part-Irish ancestry) and I regale her with the history of Irish navvies (navigators) who came over to build the canals, stayed to build the railways and who now run our building industry in a charming manner not unlike that of Tony Soprano.
So everywhere we look there are Murphy's builders.
This one is on Whitehall at the entrance to Horseguards.

And this is the entrance to Downing Street. After decades of trying to blow it up, the Irish are now renovating it.
Ah, the dividends of peace …

In tomorrow's post we shall gaze in awe at the astonishing mosaics inside St.Paul's Westminster, London's Roman Catholic Cathedral.
Normally we would not be allowed to take photographs in there but they are currently undergoing some major building works and the place is filled with scaffolding and … you guessed it … Murphy's builders.

See you there.

Katie And Dive Do London Pt.4

We left Katie at Big Ben about to cross Parliament Square where she would encounter someone wonderful …

A great man needs a great gal and this is a pretty good combination.
Abe Lincoln in the distance behind Katie's shoulder nods his approval.

Here's the great man himself at the unveiling of his statue last August and here's a link to my photo post of the event should anyone need a reminder why racism is not welcome on my planet.

So … The sun is out, the sky is blue, let's hit the parks and enjoy the fresh, crisp October air.

Regular blogpals will be all too familiar with this backdrop.
The bridge across the lake in St.James's Park takes me from my office to the heart of St.James and Piccadilly, regular lunchtime haunts so I walk across here rather a lot.

The view one side takes in the Parasite House … but who cares what's in the background when Katie's in the foreground?

… while the other side leads to Horseguards Parade, Downing Street and the Eye just across the river.

For anyone who may not know, If you amble from Parliament Square into St.James's Park you can walk the length of the park and cross at the top of The Mall into Green Park, then walk across that and enter Hyde Park … miles and miles of lush greenery with lakes and trees and flowers and beautiful places to wander and sit. And all right in the heart of the West End.
It's where I often come to de-stress.

And now Katie has come to visit and has brought us this glorious sunshine! Yay!

We take a stroll along Piccadilly to pick up lunch and stop at Fortnums to admire the hampers (Lynn, stop drooling) and to pop in and buy some of their glorious tea (Katie now has a swish Fortnums bag to match yours, Mme).

Something else regular readers will be familiar with (and indeed Mme and MB) is sushi and sashimi bought from Yoshino and eaten in the beautiful surroundings of Green Park.

Why sit in some dingy basement restaurant or in a crowded sushi bar when you can breathe the fresh air and enjoy a view like this with your lunch?
It is the perfect day for al fresco and we sigh at the beauty of it all as we demolish our yummy food in the dappled sunshine under the spectacular plane trees of Green Park.

Then we head back across the grass toward The Ritz and Piccadilly, refreshed, replete and now hungry for more culture!

Halfway along Piccadilly is the arched entrance to the courtyard that conceals the Royal Academy.
And tucked away on the top floor (again, regrettably with no photography allowed) is the delightfully light-hearted and very French exhibition we are heading for.

In what must have been a lifetime of pure pleasure, Parisian art dealer M. Aimé Maeght befriended the greatest artists of his generation and built up the marvellous collection housed in the Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght in Saint Paul, some of the gems from which we are about to enjoy ourselves.

Greeting us as we enter is a wall-sized Matisse, followed by a roomful of beautiful Bonnards but the main exhibition concentrates on Joan Miró's bright and gloriously exuberant paintings, contrasted with George Braque's dark late cubism, while filling the gallery space between the walls (and over our heads) are slender and elegant Giacometti figures and the wild and wonderful mobiles and sculptures of Alexander Calder.

The overriding sensation in these wonderful rooms is of pure joy and a playfulness that would never be guessed at from simply looking at pictures of these works in art history books.

A lot of the exhibits are from the personal collection of the Maeght family and include outrageously light-hearted paintings and sculptures I have never seen in any book and the sheer fun of it all is almost shocking!

In amongst the displays are videos of the family's home movies including film of the artists working and chatting and eating and a lovely little vignette of Mme. Maeght and Alberto Giacometti dancing around the studio to an old gramophone.
Marvellous!

Neither of us have ever seen a Calder painting before - only being familiar with his giant mobiles - but here are a veritable feast of them and they are real eye-openers; together with tiny mobiles, sculptures and light-hearted sketches.

There is a strangely disturbing book by Braque featuring on its cover what appears to be a false breast and - lo and behold - on reading the accompanying notes we discover that Braque purchased a box of seventy of these breasts from the United States military where they had been used (get this) to boost soldiers' morale during wartime.
Next time you meet a WWII Veteran, ask 'em about the boobs.
The world can be a wonderful place if you peer into the odder nooks and corners.

Close to my own heart, Aimé Maeght published a myriad of limited edition small press books featuring works by his favourite poets and artists, carefully chosen and beautifully executed. Many examples are on display here and I'm afraid my rare book lust gets the better of me and I go into hyperactive two-year-old mode.

We leave the exhibition with faces wreathed in smiles. This really is a feel-good show and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to see a side of modern art that is often hidden (as well as a stunning display of pieces from post-war Europe's very best artists).

And so, with a song in our hearts and a spring in our step, Katie and Dive head off down Haymarket, turning left at the bottom to find … well, we shall discover that tomorrow!

On the way, Katie goes "Oooh!" and dashes into a shop, emerging with something that is not apparently available in the States; a chunky Yorkie Bar with "It's Not For Girls" written on the side.
Which she promptly demolishes beside what has to be the pinkest sari I've seen in many a moon.

Check back tomorrow, Katie fans. We crammed so much into two days that I still have enough photos for three more posts!

Katie And Dive Do London Pt.3

4:40AM on Wednesday morning and I wake just a few seconds before my alarms but missing this morning is my usual wail of anguish, which has been replaced by a big fat grin and a "Woohoo!" as I throw off the duvet and head for the shower.
No work today! It's Katiefest! Yay!

If my train is behaving I should be at Katie's hotel around nine o'clock for our second day of pounding the streets of London in search of fun, culture and mosaics.
The interweb tells me my usual train - inevitably - will be delayed so I dash around like a mad thing, hurling on clothes, grabbing my camera and driving to Norwich in nutjob GTA-style to catch the early train, on the way drying my hair by sticking my head out of the window.

The early train gets through okay which results in me sauntering around the charming Georgian crescent toward Katie's hotel at around ten to nine just as she - by delightful coincidence - steps out of the door to test the air and decide whether or not she will need a coat.
Catching somebody by surprise and watching their unguarded expression as they recognise you (the split second before they can plaster on a smile) is a great way of gauging how unwelcome you are and seeing Katie's face light up will keep me smiling all winter long.

Knowing she was in Lara Croft mode, the night before I had scoured the web for London mosaics and made a hit list.

First up was just around the corner and one tube stop away: Eduardo Paolozzi's gloriously trippy transformation of Tottenham Court Road underground station.
I'll just post this taster as Katie has taken loads of photos for a series of "Mosaic" posts (coming soon to Katiefornia … Don't miss it).
For anyone who doesn't know the station the entire thing, from platforms to surface, including the escalator tunnel is covered in strange and wonderful mosiacs and it is well worth a visit when you're in London simply to stand and wonder just what on earth Paolozzi was smoking at the time.

From there we wend our way to the river (whenever anyone visits me in London they find themselves walking alongside the Thames and across the Westminster parks a LOT) and Katie gets an eyeful of the Eye, which she will be riding the next day with Rose.

And looking the other way, who should we see peeking over the Embankment wall? None other than good old Big Ben …
I know, I know: if the pedants would stop screaming at me for a moment I can assure them that I am well aware it is just the bell itself that is called Big Ben; the tower is actually known as "The Clock Tower Of The Palace Of Westminster".
Well bollocks! Like everybody else I call the whole bloody thing Big Ben and will continue to do so.

Here's a way of making Big Ben look gooooood … Photograph it with a chic Berkeley girl on a sunny day.

Here's where it all goes wrong: The Houses of Parliament, infamously anagramised by Old Dive to become "The House of Rampant Lies" (s'true; check it for yourself).

Right across the street from Big Ben is Westminster tube station, where Katie and I - following Dante and Virgil - descend into "The Hole", the seemingly never-ending and gloriously infernal escalator ride into the roiling bowels of the earth, passing Hades on the way down (don't forget to wave; you never know where you might end up) to the deep, deep platforms of the Jubilee line extension.
This brand spanking new (well, fairly new) and exceedingly fast tube line (known as the "jubbly", much as the Waterloo and City line is known as the "drain") is the quickest way from Westminster to London's aptly named financial and banking sector, the Isle of Dogs, where we shall be rooting around beneath Canary Wharf hoping to bag a wonderful series of mosaics.

While we're on the subject, the bankers have another poetically named DLR train station just next door to Canary Wharf; one that should really have given us warning of where our money has gone … the station is called Mudchute.

One whizzy and hi-tech tube ride later we surface several miles downstream at Canary Wharf's mega-spiffy new station, a must-see for any visiting architects or indeed anyone who simply wishes to point and laugh at bankers.

1 Canada Square, known to Londoners simply as "Canary Wharf" (a similar but much smaller tower block beside the train line out of Liverpool Street station is known locally as "Canary Dwarf").
My train ride gives me a great view of this building and in the evenings the sunsets reflect off the metal façade and turn the whole thing into a gorgeous pinky orange confection. It has a huge glass pyramid roof (not visible from down here), like a mega version of the Louvre pyramid and you get some truly awesome sky reflections off it.

In a wise and prescient move they built London's financial centre around the old docks so that stricken financiers can safely jump from their skyscrapers and merely go "splash", rather than "splat".

Katie knows someone who works in the CityGroup building behind her. We decide that they have enough woes on their hands without seeing smiling, happy people on vacation so we leave them alone and hunt mosaics.

We are heading for Wharf Walk, a pictorial history in mosaic that guides us through the Jubilee Place mall beneath Canary Wharf.

Between 2000 and 2002, boffo mosaic artist Emma Biggs painstakingly installed this beautiful stone and glass mosaic series illustrating an eclectic range of the goods and wares that passed through the original dockyards of the East India and West India docks just outside.

The London Basin was for hundreds of years almost solid with sailing ships bearing goods from the farthest reaches of our glorious Empire to be consumed in the slathering maw of the Great Wen.

Read Dickens (especially the pursuit and death of Bill Sykes) for a stinking, slimy, festering, mud-spattered, smoke-blackened, shit-encrusted, scratch-and-sniff depiction of the area in its hellish heyday.

Wading gloopily across the current financial pismire, possibly the best use for the Financial Times is to rip the thing up and wear it, like this elegant lady posing with Katie.

Halfway along the Wharf Walk the aroma of freshly ground coffee grabs us by the nostrils and drags us - not entirely unwilling - into Nero's.

Cappucino for Katie; Americano for Dive (black, of course).
It seems - in addition to our money - that the bankers and financiers of London can not be trusted with glasses and our free iced waters come in paper cups. In the Norwich branch they keep a stock of glasses in the freezer, thick with frosted ice and give you your water in those; much nicer.

Much to the relief of the planet's remaining chelonia, most tortoiseshell is now made from plastic.
We didn't used to simply tear off their shells and throw the rest away; my Victorian copy of Mrs. Beeton's Household Management lists several delicious chelonian recipes.
She helpfully gives figures for how many terrapins you will need per person/pie and delights in such handy hints as "Be sure to break the turtle's legs before putting it into the pot as otherwise it will struggle manfully to liberate itself".
Remember that the next time you cook one.

Here's one for Peahen.

I'll leave you today back in Westminster with a tiny Katie photographing a … er … big Big Ben, and incidentally attracting an admiring glance from the guy in the striped teeshirt.

In tomorrow's post, Katie and I will be hitting the parks as the sunshine gets serious.
Expect eye candy (and I don't just mean Katie).

Katie And Dive Do London Pt.2

So, put on your walking shoes and come along with Katie and me as we continue our amble through the delightful squares and backstreets of Bloomsbury.

As I said yesterday we were making our way from her hotel to Tate Modern to see the much anticipated Rothko exhibition but then Katie revealed that she was on a Lara Croft style mosaic hunt, so as we were but a hundred yards from the British Museum we moseyed on in there to head for the Roman rooms.

London is a great place to tear up your plans and improvise your itinerary on the fly, which is just what we did for the rest of the trip and it was much more fun that way.

You've seen so many of my British Museum posts (including some only recently with the delightful Mme and MB) that we'll skip the Rosetta Stone and the usual suspects … yadda, yadda, yadda … and only allow ourselves to get sidetracked by my superstitious habit of always visiting my favourite horsie in the Elgin Marbles Gallery, here being introduced to Katie.
You'll notice that Katie bought a shiny, waterproof bag "specifically for London". A wise move, though it didn't take her long to bring sunshine to our grey city.

Ah, Mosaics!
We would be eating most of this lot the next day.
The seafood; not the mosaic - that's just a little too crunchy.

As it turns out, the best mosaics are between the Roman and Greek wings in the stairwell.
Like so many people I have passed these dozens of times and never really stopped to appreciate them.

Not any more!
I had with me an expert mosaicist and enjoyed a wonderful, two day crash course in the history and techniques of mosaics from a fantastic teacher.
Here Katie demonstrates how to look completely … er … sane beside a mosaic of Phobos (fear).

I shan't post all of the mosaics as we photographed dozens of them, but I'll be sending the CDs of all of them to Katie so she can do a special mosaic series of posts (she knows so much more about them than I).

Fortunately for us the BM allows flash photography, otherwise I think that scary, fanged monkey thing on the wall behind Katie might have attacked us.

You simply must click on this one to enlarge it.
We'd left the British Museum and had reached the Thames. Wandering along the embankment we stopped beside Cleopatra's Needle and I turned and snapped Katie gazing up at it with the Houses of Parliament in the distance.
Only when I downloaded the photographs did I notice the girl with her finger rammed up the sphinx's nose. Hee hee.

Here is our heroine much further along the Embankment at Saint Paul's. We were crossing the Wibbly-Wobbly Bridge and getting all excited at the prospect of our imminent Rothko-fest (justifiably, it turned out).
I know this is a classic touristy shot but it is a classic for a reason.

As we were attempting to take another classic touristy shot with Tower Bridge in the background, the weather finally decided to listen to the forecasters …

… and things got a little blustery and wet.
So we legged it pronto into the shelter of Tate Modern.

We were not allowed to take photos in the Rothko exhibition, which is a great shame as it is truly awesome.
It was a pure delight to be able to experience something as glorious as this show with a person who was equally as excited and knowledgeable and who could appreciate just what we were seeing.

I scanned this from the catalogue. It shows some of the Seagram murals in a smaller room at the Tate when they were trying to sort out the hanging arrangements and of course doesn't do justice to the monumental final hanging in the big room.
Back in '58 (when Old Dive was born), Rothko was commissioned to paint a series of vast murals for New York's Seagram building on Park Avenue.
These ended up never being installed and on his death nine of them were bequeathed to the Tate with some cryptic notes on how they might be displayed.
A couple more went to Japan's Kawamura Gallery and to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. They disappeared from public view and into legend; a holy grail for art lovers around the world.

It has taken decades to prepare and arrange just the one central room in this show. It displays eight of the Tate's nine Seagram murals together with those from Japan and Washington.
Katie and I spent most of the day in there, gazing, open-mouthed with wonder at these legendary and monumental masterpieces which are never likely to be seen together again in our lifetime.
To say the experience was awesome doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. This was a once-in-a-lifetime event for two people who were only too well aware of just what it was that we were witnessing.

At the Tate show, in addition to the Seagram room there are eight more rooms full of late Rothko paintings including 1964, No.1 - Black on maroon which I must confess got me more excited than any painting I have seen in decades.
I was totally blown away by it and spent ages absorbing every last detail. Inevitably this scan looks nothing like it. The real thing glows from within and looks like it is miles deep.
The black central panel is underpainted with several layers of reds and the longer you look at it the more it glows and the deeper it becomes. The maroon - almost black at first sight - is rich and velvet-textured with smaller, careful brushmarks and the whole thing draws you in hypnotically.
It is hugely powerful and almost erotically intense. I could have stood in front of it and gazed forever.

The Tate is excellent at background material and a series of natural, infra red, ultraviolet and x-ray photographs of sections of various paintings helped to demonstrate Rothko's technique, emphasising every careful brushstroke as layer after layer of colour was built up so that even his black on black paintings glow with a shocking intensity.

We stared at them for hours, drawn in by their beauty. It was an epiphany; the closest a Godless heathen such as myself can get to a spiritual experience. These pieces are stunning and simply must be appreciated in person.

Wonderful as the other eight rooms were, we were drawn back again and again to the central gallery to experience the Seagram Murals in all their glory.

I cannot say it forcefully enough. If you get even the remotest chance, go and see this exhibition before it closes on Feb 1st next year! You'll only get one chance in this lifetime and believe me it is worth it.

Afterwards, we sat in the balcony coffee bar gazing across the river while the storm battered and lashed Saint Paul's on the far bank, our minds still reeling with wonder at what we had seen; chattering away like excited kids.
Katie lost a wrestling match with a shortbread wrapper. Boy, that shortbread did not want to be eaten!

And then we were off into the wild, grey weather, heading west for the V&A, where a cool exhibition of Cold War art and design awaited our eager perusal.
We had spent so long with the Rothkos that we didn't have time to pop across the street from the V&A and see the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum but the links will take you to earlier posts I did from there so Katie can see what she missed.

It was Katie who spotted this spiffy Dale Chihuly glass sculpture in the foyer. I hadn't realised he had a piece in the country; the last time I'd seen one was a few years ago when he made a temporary installation for Kew Gardens.

The Cold War exhibition was great fun! Again, no photography allowed, however, so poo on the V&A curators for that. You'll have to make do with my description.

I often say it because it's true: I miss the Cold War.
There was a kind of romance to knowing that every minute could be your last.
If you want a good chuckle (and an hilarious photo of mum, Phil and me), take a look at this post and read about our own little contribution to Mutually Assured Destruction and what the Cold War was actually like to live through.

The exhibition brings it all flooding back. I'm like a kid in a candy store; Katie (who is too young to remember) watching bemused as I repeatedly point and yell "We had one of those!" and "Woah! Cool!" at just about everything.

Tricky Dicky looks so young in that 1959 debate with Kruschev about … er … kitchens. I bought myself a new kitchen pinny with the two of them on it and Kruschev's slogan "We Do Not Have The Capitalist Attitude Toward Women" Hee hee.

Oh, my! I almost blew hundreds of pounds on a signed sketch by Ken Adam of his design for the War Room in Doctor Strangelove (which of course was showing on one of the many screens).

There were so many cool things! From gloriously kitsch household appliances, through East German cars (the wonderful VEB P70 coupé in immaculate condition) to spacesuits and plastic and metal minidresses and artworks and videos and Saarinen chairs and early computers and plastic crockery and propaganda art and a 1964 Cuban movie made to entice Russians to emigrate that Katie had actually once sat and watched (¡Soy Cuba!).

To wander through this tacky Commie wonderland of my childhood with an übercool Berkeley chick was Heaven on toast with chocolate sauce.

And of course there were lots of postcards in the shop which Katie devoured. Keep checking her blog for them!

Much, much more tomorrow … when at last the California sunshine catches up with Katie and we hit the sights!

Miss it and I'll slap you.

Hard!