Tubewhore (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} tubewhore) wrote,@ 2006-11-20 18:51:00 |
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| Entry tags: | art projects, baker street, southwark, st pauls |
Thursday in London -score three stations done.
A plan emerges. There are slides posing as art rather than just carnival silliness over at the Tate. Plan is to met up early and go whizzy whizz as much as possible. We decide that walking to the Tate from St Pauls will both collect St Pauls and allow us to play at Cybermen along St Paul's Vista. Sadly this second objective scotched by the inconsiderate building of a bridge, so scenes like this:
are gone forever. But then, after the recent reboot to the series, Cybermen aren't Cybermen anymore. If they ain't from Mondas they just don't count, she says, nailing her nerd colours to the mast. Dejected I hum the Tomb of the Cybermen theme as we cross the bridge..."brr buh buh brr, buuuh buh buuh", lovely creepy brass.
Sigh...
Part of the point of this project is to see bits of London I've never had reason to visit before, but in this case it was a case of the ghosts of London past. Maybe it was the mood I was in, maybe it was just winter coming on, but the autumn wind seemed to be stirring up leaves, litter and maudlin thoughts. St Paul's is the closest tube stop to Cheapside which was the first place I ever stayed in London at a seminary at the tender age of 14 - bizarre and quiet place full of student priests; huge rooms with gorgeous wood floors and austere kitchen. I had the strongest remembrance of making up a instant packet pasta meal from the emergency supplies my mother had dispatched my off with, stirring it in an old aluminium pan and feeling very grown up about it all. That, and being woken early by the bells of St Pauls very early my first day in the city. And of course this is the City of London proper.
It's also the first time I'd looked across St Paul's Vista in twenty years. I'd been there aged 17, before I moved to London, with my then boyfriend. He stood on one of the street benches and declaimed loudly to the world that the roses beds, then in full bloom, were for me, all of them, in perpetuity. He was very theatrical and my first love. Now the Millenium Bridge is there and the roses have all gone. I am aggrieved that my permission wasn't sought before my roses were uprooted.
As for the boyfriend, he managed later to turn the giving of flowers into something eerie and unsettling. He was charismatic in the way that The Master is charismatic; dangerously so. I have seen him literally charm birds from the trees and make them sit on his fingers - wild birds, this is. He was also violent in many ways. It was unsettling to feel a sudden remembrance for a time when I was in love with him and thought he was heroic and marvellous. To remember being so very young, when all love was new, making me feel old and cynical. Is it ever safe to remember there were good times?
At the Tate there is text to explain the art of going down the slides:
"For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a ‘voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don’t have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend."
In other words, it's fun to slide down the tude yelling 'wheeee', but you also feel a little queasy. T'was also a little bumpy, and I feared actually puking on the biggest one, but comforted myself with the thought that being in head-to-toe pvc and rubber at least I was easily wipe-clean.
After some too-ing and froo-ing, our party then headed to Baker Street via the Jubliee line at Southwark in the gathering gloom:
to be proper tourists and visit the surprisingly entertaining Sherlock Holmes Museum . Much giggling and trying on of hats.
I met up with
primitivepeople for the first time and gave him some books I had scavenged for him. In return, he took pics for me. We had failed to met up earlier in the day, so I had also bothered some tube workers in hi-vi jackets for photography help just in case I didn't managed to get back again. I'd stood and watched several sets of tourist take pictures of the stature of Holmes outside the station, so here's my slant on the same subject.
And I love these markers of the original fabric of the station:
On one of the older section of the station, bleaching out underflash as ever...
After supper in a small deli/sandwhich shop, and sitting in the pub discovering a startling six-degrees-of-seperation event between
artnouveauho and webofevilwe wandered to our various homewardnesses...three stations further along towards target.
