August 25, 2004
LONDON -- A stressful, but ultimately uneventful, day of travel brought me from Spain to England. The Madrid airport, at least on the day I visited, was one of the most chaotic I've seen. I stood in line for nearly an hour to pass security, which was frustrating but not unexpected. What surprised me was when, having gotten past the checkpoint, I walked only for a couple of minutes before coming to a second security checkpoint. To make a long and boring story short, I had allowed about two hours between getting to the airport and getting on my plane, and it was only barely enough. Reaching central London from Heathrow airport was, thankfully, much more straightforward. I had been out late-ish the previous night and finally gotten my tapas, or at least one tapa, so I kept things simple for my first night in London: a trip to the supermarket furnished me, finally, with some reasonably-priced peanut butter, which I was very happy to eat with bread and bananas as I watched some of the Olympic competitions at the hostel.
For my one real day in London, I began with an attempt with a couple of fellow hostellers to go to the Dali museum on the south bank of the Thames. I didn't feel a strong desire to go, having just seen an exhibit of Dali stuff in Madrid, but I was told it was free and I was planning to hang out on the south bank all day anyway. Thus, when it turned out to be expensive rather than free, I wasn't too crushed. We tried to take a look at No. 10, Downing Street, but predictably it was fenced off from the public. We parted ways, as one of my companions had to catch a flight and the other wasn't as interested in walking as I was, and I wandered through Trafalgar Square on the way to my first true destination, the Tate Modern. Delayed halfway there by a rainshower, I stopped for lunch. The rainshower having not stopped, I made a series of mad dashes during the moments of lesser downpour, finally arriving at the Tate.
The Tate Modern museum is one of two progeny of the old Tate Gallery, which split in the very late 90's into Modern and British segments. The Modern half was installed in a renovated power plant, which still shows many signs of its industrial past; the old turbine room contains what I believe was the original heavy-duty crane, now used to lift in the heaviest of the Tate's sculpture offerings. The organization of the museum is interesting too. Rather than going for the traditional sorting by artist, by chronology, or by country, the Tate Modern chose (with, I think, no small measure of irony) to group its art according to the classical hierarchy: history painting, nude portraiture, landscapes, and still life. I spent nearly four hours at the museum before closing time, viewing temporary exhibits of busts throughout the modern era as well as Cubism, and took excellent free tours of the still life and landscape sections, but hardly even got to peek at the portrait section, and got less than that from the history paintings. The museum will definitely merit a return visit. Highlights in still lifes included Scrapheap Services, a stark portrayal of what modern society does to its citizens, who are represented by paper cutouts that are fed into a shredder, and also a time-lapse video in the memento mori room that showed a bowl of fruit rotting into dust in the space of about five minutes. In landscapes, the most striking were a room that had a late Monet facing a highly abstract contemporary piece not so different in appearance, but surely very different in intent, and a very effective, moodily lit presentation of several of Rothko's enormous color fields.
My other activity of the day was to attend a performance at Shakespeare's Globe Theater. I bought a "groundling" ticket for standing space, and it was the best five pounds I spent in London. The view was fantastic, the rain finally let up (but not before I had purchased a plastic poncho with my last two pounds), and the play was superb. The evening show was Much Ado About Nothing, and the serious parts were acted with talent, while the humorous lines were deliverd with gusto and much absurd capering, as I believe the custom was in Shakespeare's own time. Worn out and happy, I subway'ed back to the hostel for the night, having put a fine end on a fine trip.
A final note to the reader: it is entirely possible, and indeed my intention, that I might post some of my photos on this site. Keep an eye on the blog main page for details. Realistically, if it doesn't get done in the next two weeks it's not going to happen at all, but you never know.