Category Archives: Travel

London Journal – Day 14 – Surveillence Society

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One sees the signs of the surveillance society everywhere one looks in London. This pre-dates 9.11 but has magnified dramatically since then. Here is a 2002 era poster:

Here is an even more sinister appearing poster I found yesterday upon leaving Sunday Roast at The Green:

Watch Your Neighbour

Seems this is a popular poster to photograph, as a Google search turns up these other images:

Watch Your Neighbour

Turns out this was just a clever guerilla marketing campaign for the Australian soap opera “Neighbours” which moved from the BBC to Channel Five. Oh well.

London is a very monitored city.  In the Greater London area there are literally millions of CCTV cameras, all either controlled by the authorities or available at their beckoned call.  Here’s a shot from Oxford Circus:

Oxford Square cameras

The pole to the right houses a camera in that globe.  This is a common sight on London street corners, you often see clusters of these robotic cameras in one place.  A careful look inside the decorative spheres reveals that they, too, house cameras:

Oxford Circus cameras

In the subways, both pedestrian and tubes, they are on every stairway, escalator, hallway, platform and plaza.  Everywhere you go you are being watched, recorded sampled, and biometrically profiled.  All in the name of counter terrorism.

Do I feel safe?  Yes.  Do I feel violated?  You bet.

London Journal – Day 15 – The Scary Days

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Yesterday it was The Woman In Black, today I am following Werewolves! These are the scary days!

Saw The Woman In Black last night down in Drury Lane at Covent Garden. This show, in its 18th year, is all about scaring the bejeezus out of the audience. It is basically a very well told ghost story of which we watch the developing dramatization. Various gimmicks and effects are employed to shock and frighten us. Well, my first fright was seeing that fully a quarter of the audience were third and forth form students (think American high school junior and senior) . They were quite rowdy, carrying on before the show, and I feared for my enjoyment of the show. They did calm down well once the show started, and I will admit to feeling proud of them for their constraint. They did shriek a lot during the scary bits, but what can one expect.

The show was a treat. It is morbid and a very depressing story, but well done, and a rollicking good time. Next to me were a 20 year old girl and her auntie. The auntie kept telling me how they were both the wimpiest people in their family, and should not have been allowed to come to this show together. They had themselves worked into a twirl before the show even started. On the other side were a young couple who had actually moved back a row during interval. When I asked why they pointed forward to the couple in front of their previous seats and said, “Getting away from the lovebirds.” Ha!

Today I went and got a seat for opening night for the revival of Noël Coward’s “The Vortex” at the Apollo. This regular morning trip to Leicester Square is routine now, but today I found a nice little Italian café which has been in the same locale since 1888 and had a cappuccino and brownie while I waited for the Photographer’s Gallery to open. Raul, over at Heading East tipped me off to a good show there, Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008. My favourites were the John Holt slide show of his 1970’s trip through the poverty and racial and class tension of the American south. Quite moving.

One of the refreshing differences between the Photographer’s Gallery and most public galleries is the actively maintained and well presented and staffed Print Sales facility. One can browse the portfolios of dozens of the highest calibre professional photographers, including those in exhibition, and buy prints in a variety of sizes, even custom, framed, etc.

A free admission, I was glad to drop a few pound into the collection box. The place was swarming with art students, all furiously writing notes about the photographs. Whenever I see such a thing I am reminded of a quote variously attributed to Frank Zappa and Elvis Costello: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

The swarm of art students was so thick that I actually left the galleries and strolled Chinatown for an hour waiting for them to leave. It was a nice interval, and I found the restaurant I would return to for lunch after the gallery: Lee Ho Fook.

Warren Zevon fans may remember this place from the lyric to the popular Werewolves Of London:

I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain
He was looking for a place called Lee Ho Fook's
Going to get a big dish of beef chow mein
Ah-ooooo, werewolves of London
Ah-ooooo
Ah-ooooo, werewolves of London
Ah-ooooo

So I had myself a big dish of beef chow mein and came home to read up on Prague and prepare for theatre tonight. As it’s opening night, curtain is unconscionably early, at 7:00. Getting to the West End for a 7:00 show will be a nightmare on the tube, so I may well just walk.

Ta!

London Journal – Day 15 – Opening Night

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vortex.jpg

I haven’t ever attended a big-time opening night before, and I guess I should have waited near the rope line to see the celebrities I wouldn’t have recognised (since they’re all British) but since I had spent £15 for a first row Dress Circle ticket I was able to walk down the red carpet myself (yes, I’m not making this up) and past the gawking fans, and into the theatre and into the bar where, herded like sheep to slaughter, I waited for the opportunity to take my seat.

When I did so my immediate neighbours pointed out Peter Hall, the director, in the 8th row, and his minion seated around him. One made this quip, “I see the press have been given seats on the centre aisle. I imagine that’s so they can go for another drink without disturbing anyone.” True enough, the centre aisle was lined with serious people with laps covered in notebooks writing away. I’ll read all about it in the morning.

I have been to see a lot of shows at this point, and for many of them my seat mates have been pairs of men. I don’t think they’re all gay. It just seems that it is very acceptable here that men may go out together to the theatre, dance, what have you. There is a much greater freedom for people here, in public, to show affection for others of the same sex. It is quite common to see people walking arm in arm down the street or through a museum, and I’m not referring to couples, just friends. It is refreshing.

Anyway, the gentlemen to my right were such a pair, while to my left was a young Tony Blair wannabe constantly thumbing away on his Blackberry during interval. Across the theatre, in a box, was a quite old man with an attractive younger woman. One of the men to my right said, “Do you think that’s decoration or staff?” to which his pal replied, “Oh, staff, definitely.” It was at about this time that the woman in the box donned her jacket, covering her plunge neckline and ample bosom. Our attention turned elsewhere.

The show, The Vortex by Noël Coward, was quite good. A tense drama from 1920’s society, it starred Felicity Kendal – a favourite of telly dramas and sitcoms. She turned in a good performance, as did Dan Stevens as her son. Nothing earth shaking, but a good night out.

Oh, and the director had left the house before curtain call, which he did not join.

London Journal – Day 16 – The Earth Moves

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There are reports form Greenford to Marble Arch and Abbey Road that at precisely 01:00 a quake hit Great Britain. I felt nothing here, sitting on the futon pile. I guess I have something to be happy for.

Update: The earthquake, which at a 5.2 on the Richter scale was the most powerful trembler to hit the UK in 24 years, was centred in Lincolnshire and struck at 12:56 am. I really didn’t feel a thing, as I was sitting low to the floor on a folded up futon in a lower ground floor studio. People have reported feeling their beds move, and one chap in Lincolnshire awoke to find his chimney had tumbled into his bed chamber.

London Journal РDay 16 РCr̬me de Brie

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Crème de Brie is wonderful stuff. This is the heart of brie without the rind. It is sold by Coeur Lion in little tubs and is great for spreading on biscuits or using in recipes. Yesterday I made the most delightful scrambled eggs with it, here’s the recipe:

2 large eggs (I use free range – happy food and all that)
1 large pat butter (1.5 Tbsp)
50ml milk (3 Tbsp)
15 ml (1 Tbsp) Crème de Brie
2 salad onions (scallions) finely diced

Melt butter in medium frying pan and when at heat, sauté onion in it till translucent (add a dash of salt to speed this up). With fork, briskly mix eggs with milk and brie, do not beat, just mix very well. Add egg mixture to pan all at once, and once it starts to set, draw spatula from outer edges of pan towards the centre turning egg in process. Proceed until egg is done to your liking.

Yum yum!

London Journal – Day 16 – Stumbling Through Stepney

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“My name is Aleck Bernstein and I am 46 years old. I was born in the borough of Stepney, London, England on June 19, 1922. My father, Harry, was a furrier, self employed, and some of my earliest recollections are of wandering through the workroom and seeing skins being stretched, cut and sewn. The workroom was situated on the 1st floor of the house in which we lived till l940. The house was a massive brick built 4 story row house. The house and most of its neighbours had been built in the late l9th century as residences for clipper ship captains.”

So begins an autobiographical folio my father wrote in 1969, when he was roughly my age, and it serves as my guide today as I leave the Whitechapel tube station and wander back in time.

First I need to navigate the present, and it is a very different one than my father ever knew. The district around Whitechapel, Stepney Green, Stepney, Bethnel Green and Mile End — in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets — is now mostly populated by immigrant families from the Near and Middle East. Going east from Whitechapel one sees Moroccan, Egyptian, Afghan, Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, etc., almost like a map of that region shrunk down small and splayed over the Tower Hamlets, each ethnicity seems to have carved out a distinct area for themselves. I know it is not that cut and dry, but it appears so to an outsider, which I decidedly am.

A marketplace spills onto the pavement by the station in brightly coloured scarves and pashmina, vegetables and fruit, toys and appliances. Stalls are ill defined and the vendors are all touting their wares in so many tongues that it all blends together to my ears. Just a street market lullaby lolling the tots in prams to sleep while their mothers haggle over the goods.

I pass an ancient facade, an alms house for aged sailors and their widows and orphans, built in 1695. It stands in stark contrast to the market place I have just passed.

I spy a sign across the street which sums things up to me, “Halal Chinese Buffet Opening Soon” it declares:

Just past the restaurant I see a sign for Stepney Green Road, and that takes me closer backwards in time. I veer to the right.

I will not find my father’s birthplace here:

“In June, 1940 I returned to London having graduated from school, and it was while waiting to enter Medical School that the Battle of Britain air war started. Just before I was due to start school the house was badly damaged during a heavy night bombing attack concentrated on the London Docks. None of us were hurt but we had to be evacuated from the house and spent the remainder of the night in a shelter.”

They had survived by hiding under the basement stairway, escaping with a wheel barrow of their most important possessions, and never really lived in the house again. So I won’t find that house, but there are some survived the raids, and I can get a sense of what it looked like. Here’s one now:

The other thing I can do is explore his old haunts:

“I was the youngest of three brothers and indulged in the usual boyish pranks in my free time from school and Hebrew classes. As a boy, one of my favorite pastimes was to explore London. We lived on the outskirts of Chinatown and close to the London Docks. We were also not far from the Tower of London (within the boundaries of the borough) and The City. All of these, then, provided many sites to visit and explore, usually on foot.”

The City, the historic city limits of London defined by the old siege walls, is today’s financial district, and I have already been there to shop on Petticoat Lane and such. The Tower of London I have already seen. That leaves the docks (that Chinatown being long gone, subsumed into Whitechaple). Off I go, then, to the docks.

My experience of the docks is necessarily limited to those I can explore in today’s security context, which means the very public docks at Limehouse. Here are views from Narrow Street, a tow way along the banks of the Limehouse Cut and northern embankment of the river Thames. This is all posh shops and diners now, but is still a working tow way (see sign):

The Limehouse basin is now a hot district for condo style development, which spreads all the way down the Isle of Dogs to Canary Wharf. Quite a change from even a decade ago. Here are some of those developments:

After taking a few snaps of the visage of St. Elmo atop Our Lady Immaculate Catholic church I am ready to take my leave of this cathartic venture and traipse off towards Mile End station.

This is where the stumbling part comes in. I am doing a frightfully poor job of finding my way to the station. My handy pocket maps don’t cover this area, it not being “Central London” after all, so I read maps at bus stops and try to figure it all out. I take far longer than I should but this is some sort of penance, I am sure, and I soldier on and I do persevere and I have gotten home!

So, did I find my father? Of course not. I knew I wouldn’t, and that was hardly the point any more. I know where he is, all I was looking for was to get a sense of where he was. What was his world like, what were the things and places that shaped him into who he was and that, in a generational trickle down, had helped to shape me. Did I find that? I think I may have, but I will not know for a while. I found my stubbornness, I got that from him, when I insisted that I would find my way home. I found my inquisitiveness as I explored his old sites of exploration. I found my sentimentality, not from him, as a shell of a building could bring a tear to my eye or a simple view of the Thames could transport me back over seventy years to when he gazed across that same expanse and dreamt the dreams that would one day culminate in…me.

mysnap2.jpg

See there, I have found me, which is really why I am here. All of the rest is just trappings and excuse. I have come here to find myself and I am beginning to feel that for the first time in a long long time I am hard on the track for that.

When I look at a well trimmed rosebush I will see my father. When I recall Ohm’s Law, which he taught me over the phone over three decades ago, I will recall his patience. When I hear a light and lilting English accent I will hear him. He is with me always, and now I have been to at least part of his London.

There, I have written what I must for the night. I have reports on tonight’s theatre which will wait for morning. Today started with an earthquake which I didn’t even feel, and it ends with a recognition that one can be moved and shaken up from within as well, perhaps more profoundly even. That’s a quake I most certainly felt.

London Journal – Day 16 – Grapes Of Wrath

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Vince Martin (Pa) in rehearsal

Last night I attended a performance of The Grapes Of Wrath presented by the theatre troupe of Only Connect, a local charity, at their new theatre in a converted chapel near King’s Cross station in northeast London. “Only Connect! Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted” wrote E.M. Foster in Howard’s End, and Emma Kruger took those as her watchwords when she started Only Connect only two years ago.

Now, after having staged three productions with inmate casts and crews within the walls of HMP Wormwood Scrubs and HMP Holloway, Only Connect are producing their first show with post-release personnel, along with members of their families and community. The result was a spectacular demonstration of what can come of good will coupled with good deeds, and offers hope not just for these ex-offenders and their families, but for a society who welcomes them back rather than shunning them.

The script is an adaptation by Frank Galati of the famous Steinbeck work, originally produced in 1990 by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Co., which they in turn took to Broadway and Tony Award glory. It is heavily abridged, as you might imagine. “It’s quite shocking, they’re in California already. It takes up this much of the book.” said the gentleman in front of me at interval, holding his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. Large swaths of the narrative are axed outright, but it is an evening at the theatre, so this is inevitable.

The theatre itself is an old church, taken over by the charity just this year. They have done an imaginative job converting it into a performance space, using a scaffold of pipe and laddering to provide the suggestion of structures and a loft over the stage occupied by a five piece combo and a chorus of at least 6 vocalists. The musical accents are pivotal to the show, and well done indeed.

The cast, some of whom gained release just days before rehearsals commenced, have only had four weeks rehearsal. In some places this shows, as does the relative inexperience of some of the actors. This is more than made up for by the sheer weight of the piece, and the strong sense of relevance to these people’s lives. When a man you know full well has just found freedom takes the stage as a character who has just gained his own, you cannot help but feel the pathos.

To a standing ovation after the curtain calls had ended, Kareem Dauda (Rev. Jim Casey) said “To be free and on the outside and doing this in front of you people it’s just amazing!”

Kareem Dauda (Rev. Jim Casey) and Anthea McKenna (ma) in rehearsal

Was it great theatre? In the sense of a highly polished performance which draws the audience in and persuades them that the actor up on stage is really the character in the story. no. In the sense of taking the audience to a place of understanding and empathy, and through performance transforming all of those involved, actor and audience alike, resoundingly YES! I have years of theatre production in my background, and have rarely been as moved by a performance as I was last night.

I hope all the best for Only Connect. They have had a spectacular run so far, not just with this show, and sell out crowds every night, but with their successful series of productions, acquiring their own home, and even with the development of their program. An example: many of the post-release members of their cast have lived together the past month in their new Caledonian Road group house, along with production staff. Only Connect literally meet their members at the prison gates upon their release as part of a comprehensive resettlement effort. This attention to reintegration is the hallmark of a successful programme.

For more information on Only Connect, or to make a donation, please visit them at http://www.onlyconnectuk.org.

Alarming Numbers

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There was a lot of national stress here in the UK this past week when it was announced that the country has used up all 86 thousand prison beds.  MPs asked the judiciary not to send so many offenders to prison, but to look to alternative sentences instead.

Meanwhile, over in the US the headline today is that with a prison population of 1.6 million souls and another 700+ thousand in local jails, 1 of every 100 adults in the population of 230 million is now incarcerated.

Given that the adult population of the UK currently stands at about 50 million (according to CIA estimates) that means their percentage is 0.17% of the adult population incarcerated, or one in 581.

What a frightening set of statistics!

London Journal – Day 17 – Thin Toes

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paperdolls.jpgI’ve just come from the Pleasance Theatre where I saw the Weaver Hughes Ensemble production of a new play by Laura Stevens, Thin Toes. I say keep your eye out for more from this talented playwright and from Helen Millar, the lead in the cast of three women.

Hellen Millar Casting PhotoMs. Millar has appeared in television and film, and can be seen in the film Chemical Wedding due out this Autumn. In Thin Toes she plays Andrea, a talented acerbic young woman hell bent on destroying herself through anorexia. Her performance was engaging, moving, riveting and nuanced.

Sitting in the small performance space with only about twenty or thirty other people, the theatre in the round presentation meant that we all were within feet of these actors and yet they neither dialed down their performances nor acknowledged the audience in whose laps they were nearly sitting. In such an environment it is easy to detect small flaws that a more typical theatre setting might disguise.

The script is artful, with realistic and complete dialogue, an unromantic treatment of the disease and the damage it does to friends and family — in this case the caring, almost clingy friend Lucy, deftly played by Elizabeth Bichard and Andrea’s mother Meg, a self-centred artist well played by Camilla Simson.

It is Millar’s performance, however, which rises from the good to the sublime. She grabs your attention and while she is on stage you cannot look away. As her character wastes away she makes you believe it — six months of emaciation in 90 minutes — and her bold, in your face depiction of a destructive young woman seeking power over her own life puts me in mind of the stellar performance of Katrin Cartlidge in Mike Leigh’s Career Girls.

But she is possessed of an intensity far greater than Cartlidge ever achieved in her short career. I’m made to think of a young Jodi Foster, both by the virtuosity of her performance and her visage. A particularly moving scene is one in which, while Lucy forces Meg to face that Andrea may well die, we see Andrea sitting cross-legged cutting paper dolls. She silently cuts a linked pair of dolls, and then carefully trims away all but the thinnest remains of the arms, legs and torso of one. She is left holding up this pair of dolls, one normal the other anorexic (see photo at top). This all unfolded with Andrea sitting a mere 3 feet in front of me.

Update: Here is a CNN story which features this play, and includes some video of it.

London Journal – Day 17 – Synchronicity

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Eyes On The Prize

After a lovely walk through St. James Park to admire the plentiful daffodils (see http://www.fortunespawn.com/gallery and search for “daffodils”) I happened across the Photographer Of The Year 2007 show, sponsored by Digital Camera magazine.  The shot above, “Eyes on the prize” is one of my faves.  The man in this image is “A street performer who regularly features at the Edinburgh Fringe, known as ‘He Who Wears Red’ (because his upper body is painted red), photographed near Edinburgh Castle at this year’s Fringe.”

Another striking image, and the overall winner in this years contest, is Marta, which I will not display here because it is very hard to look at out of context.  Marta is a young woman who was rejected by a modelling agency, and is severely anorexic.  I was struck by this in part because I knew at the time I was going to see Thin Toes (see below), a play about anorexia, this evening.

The real synchronicity came about while I was on the underground on my way to the theatre for tonight’s show.  I had been lost in thought and missed my transfer at King’s Cross and had to get off at Farringdon and go back one stop.  On the platform waiting for the west bound train, I noticed a man practising with a glass globe just like the one held aloft by He Who Wears Red (above).  The train came and the man was in the next car, but I could watch him through the doors as he continued to practice rolling this orb around effortlessly across his arms, around his hands, all while being jostled by the speeding carriage.  Amazing performance.

So, orbs and anorexics — coincidence or…

Ta!