British Election Tomorrow

Thursday is the election.  All members of parliament are up for election and the vote will determine the next prime minister.

Yet I've seen very little sign that there is an election going on.  There was this small sign in a window near our hotel. 

We saw this one for the conservatives yesterday in the countryside of Essex about an hour out of London to the west. 

Saturday afternoon, while visiting a distant relative for tea, a Liberal Democrat (Lib Dem is what the announcers call them) candidate for local council came to the door.  He was asking for her vote and he also had the MP candidate down the street if she wanted to talk to him.  No, she wasn't voting Lib Dem.  She's for Labour.  He wanted to know the issues that were important to her.  But she said she didn't have time, she had guests for tea.

He pointed out that the Labour Party candidate was not even from here while the Lib Dem candidate lived on the next street over.  (You don't have to live in the district you represent.)

The newspapers and tv have lots of coverage.  Pickles is the chair of the Conservative Party and the local candidate from Brentwood and Ongar where I am in Essex now. 

And even Simon Cowell has a word on the elections.

The polls have the Conservatives ahead, but not by that much and with both Labour and the Liberal Democrats with significant percentages.  They say 40% of the electorate is still undecided.  If the Conservatives cannot get an outright majority, it seems that Gordon Brown (the Labour Candidate and current Prime Minister) will continue as Prime Minister until a coalition government is formed.  Whoever wins, our host thinks that a lot of services people here are used to will be cut. 

Visiting with Friends

Monday was a bank holiday in England. The temperatures were 10°C below normal range - so
instead of being in the high 60s F they were under 50 F (10C) and the wind was constantly
tugging. And down into the 30s at night.   But the sun was out.

 SA, a Pakistani civil servant friend, who is in town for two weeks, met us at the hotel accompanied by a former student of his K, who also graduated from the same program as my son in Singapore.

We walked around Russell Square, sat on the bench for a bit, then decided it would be a lot warmer in the Penn Club where we were staying. We solved all the problems of the world over a couple of hours.

At three Gene Dugan picked us up

and gave us his special walking tour of London. Gene,m formerly of Anchorage, now has an Irish passport along with his US passport and is standing (not running) for election to the local council as a Green Party member. The elections are Thursday and I'll try to do a post on them as well. Gene is the second local council candidate we've met.

Our tour included the Greater Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) for children whose patron saint is Peter Pan. James Barrie left them the rights to Peter Pan when he died.
[UPDATE:  February 17, 2011 - GOSH emailed a new web address link which I've added.  It would be nice if others did that when they change the url.  GOSH, Thanks.]

Gene worked here for a while and showed us the gem of a chapel in the hospital.
Although they have chaplains of many denominations, the chapel is clearly oriented towards Christians. But it is beautiful.

We stopped into one of the many betting shops. I just wanted to see what was inside. There are also casinos here.

We did have to check out the Ethical Society.

Gene's tour included a few big name attractions as well as the quirky.  We saw the Tower of London

 Which had signs in more languages than I'd ever seen before.  But not Arabic which I thought strange.

(Double click to enlarge the photo)

 Then across the Tower Bridge to South London, where we saw some kids  taking advantage of some architectural features perfect for making leaps on their bikes.

Eventually, we made it to Gene and Jay's home, where Jay was waiting and we had a delightful
dinner and conversation that we were sorry to break off, but they had work and school in the

morning and we had a train to catch. We're on the train now as I type, but there's no wifi so I'm
not sure when I'll get to actually post this. There was sun out this morning, but it's grey now
again.

We're headed to visit with Doug who visited us in Anchorage in 2008. Doug and I first met in
Amsterdam when I was a student in Göttingen. We traveled a bit together the following summer
in UK and then I visited him again on my way back from Peace Corps Thailand when he was
teaching English in Uganda. Our reunion two years ago after almost 40 years went well and
we're looking forward to spending a few days with him exploring outside London.

 [It's Wednesday already.  I finally gave up on making the wifi work and so I'm doing this from Doug's computer.  Nice afternoon enjoying nature and small town England.  But the level of traffic is, for the roads, pretty high. More later.]

Pfeiffer's The Saints - West Germany v. England 1966

In 1966 West Germany and England played in the championship world cup game.  This was just 21 years after the end of WW II and it was a big game.  The outcome was controversial with questions about the ref's call. 

Paul Pfeiffer recreates the event is a huge piece we saw at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin last week. 

The video is short, but gives you a better sense of this piece than I could describe.  And one has to assume, that with the popularity of football (soccer) around the world, this is art for the masses. 

It said that the sound in the original video of the game wasn't good enough, so he hired about 1000 Filipinos in Manila to recreate the cheers of the crowd and combined the original with the new sound recording. 

Underground Lessons

Being new somewhere, I feel like a little kid. Everything catches my attention. Everything is unexpected. I'm constantly trying to orient myself. Where am I? Where am I going? How do I get there? Every tube station is a new adventure.

I started out with the notion that the subway system in London is great. You can get anywhere. Plus there are great maps at the station exits and on street poles all over London that show you the neighborhood. But I'm also noticing that we're doing a lot of walking underground.

Some of the stations are shiny new.  And the escalators work.


But lots of them are shabby.  You walk through narrow tunnels way underground.

We basically follow the crowd up and down stairs, around corners, hoping that next train platform isn't too far away.











Down the stairs.





















Then up the next set.

People with disabilities haven't got a chance here.  Fortunately, J's foot bone break is minor and the doctor said she could use it.  But we tend to go a little slower than normal which is fine. 

At Russell Square, you have to take an elevator to get up.  There are emergency stairs.  It says there are 175 steps and not to use them unless it's an emergency.  The first night, after what seemed like a long wait, but probably wasn't, we followed two other people up the stairs.  175 stairs is a long way.  The Juneau practice on the hills and steps was great preparation.

So last night we waited and took the elevator.

Besides being written overhead, the words echo over the speaker.  "Stand Clear - Doors Closing."  And the Italian tourists near us copied the crisp British pronunciation as if they were repeating after the teacher and smiled in recognition of the words.


J did that in Berlin as M taught her "Aussteigen links"  "Bleiben zuruck."  Which gets us back to the beginning of this post.  When one is in a totally new environment everything seems new and one's brain is open and working.

I began questioning why we were spending so much time walking around like rodents in holes in the ground.  This seems so bizarre.  But I'm sure Londoners never think that.  They just take it for granted.  That's how they get around.  And if I stayed here three months or more, I'd stop thinking and just do.

And because the trains don't take you directly where you want to go, you go much further by train than you would as the mole runs.  (Probably moles don't run as straight as crows fly.)  I was starting to get the hang of figuring out which bus to take.  They really are well marked on the bus stops.  And you can see the neighborhoods in a bus.  But  might well be stuck in traffic, which gets people back underground.  But on this three day bank holiday weekend, the Jubilee line is closed, so you have to go back up and catch a replacement bus.

Tonight, we needed to go from Marble Arch (on that single red horizontal line in the middle on the left below Bond Street - left of the perpendicular gray line) four stops along the red line to the right to Holborn and then changing (doing all that scurrying through gerbil mazes) to the blue line and going up one stop to Russell Square.   That seems a ways, but how long would it take to walk? Fortunately, we also have a street map.

Oxford Street goes horizontally just below the middle.  Marble Arch is just above that green park area on the far left.  Sorry I cut it off a bit.  That is also where Hyde Park Speakers' Corner is.  More on that later.  Just above Oxford from the left to the right is Seymour, which becomes Wigmore which becomes Cavendish which becomes Mortimore which becomes Goodge as it dead ends where there is a big pink area (the University of London on top and the British Museum below) and the green rectangle is Russell Square.  So we walked instead and it only took about 40 minutes.

But we're convinced that the walking involved in catching buses and subways is one reason we saw far fewer overweight Germans and now British people than we see Americans.  They are forced to move around more.

Cultural Appropriation and the Power of Museums and Art Questions

We broke down and bought an umbrella today.  The last two nights we got home in the rain.  While it's not that hard most of the time, it is pretty steady and we're walking around a lot.  They say the good weather we had in Berlin was in London too, but now it's chilly (high 40's low 50s - 8˚-12˚C) and the wind smacks you on the face with one gust while it robs you of your warmth with another.  By 3pm the rain had left, but the wind stuck around.  The British Museum was jammed.







I'd been thinking about the meaning of all the Greek and Egyptian pieces that are here and the controversy about whether they should be repatriated, but thought perhaps the museum has some books that touch on that subject.  The bookstore was a little better and the woman working there found me several interesting books to look at. 

This first book - Christine Sylvester's Art/Museums:  International Relations Where We Least Expect It looks directly at art and museums and their political consequences.  The opening chapter makes it pretty clear she's thinking what I'm thinking.  The museums play a huge role in shaping how we think.  Of course, I was already musing about this when we were walking around Arlington National Cemetery in Washington DC and how this subtly or not so subtly reinforces the sacred place that soldiers hold in the United States.  "We're against the war, but we support the soldiers."   Soldiers hold a hero place in the US these days so soldiers who go bad are excused through war related stress or termed the exception.  The underlying story is that soldiers keep our way of life safe and you question that story at your peril. 

In Berlin I was musing about the Egyptian and Greek treasures being there and not in Egypt and Greece.  I've heard it argued that if these objects hadn't been taken and so carefully preserved, they'd be gone.  Perhaps that is true sometimes.  A lot of Yupik pieces that were taken would have disappeared forever - it was part of the cultural tradition to let them naturally be recycled.  After all, a couple of hundred years ago, they didn't know that thousands of years of traditional activity was going to end and these objects and the knowledge of how to make them and what they meant would soon end.  But I also saw the Ellora and Ajanta Caves in India and they make much more sense where they are than inside a building in London or Berlin.

But I also began spinning another thought as I looked at the incredible pieces in the museums.  How can so many of the British see these works of art and still look down on the rest of the world as less civilized or less competent than they are?  Is it

• the need to be better than others to feel better about oneself?
• that they see this and say, "We defeated these people so we must be the best"?
• that 'art' is seen as frivolous compared to technology?
• that not enough Brits have been to the British Museum?  

Those are just a few stabs at understanding this.  And why I felt I needed to find out more about the topic.  Normally, I'd google, but I had the British Museum two blocks away.  I have to read these books, but I skimmed today, and let me whet your appetite.  Here's Sylvester's first page of the first chapter:

And here's the beginning of Young's conclusions:

He makes the distinction between cultural appropriations and object appropriations. That's reasonable on the surface. But what about cultural appropriations not for art, but for commerce? Should GM have paid for the name Pontiac? He has a chapter on Cultural Appropriation as Theft. I'll have to read that to see if he covers this.

By the way, I bought two copies of both the books. Even without buying the books, I think Young would agree I have the right to use the ideas as part of a discussion of the ideas.

Curry Wurst - This is for Paul

A friend in Juneau insisted I have a curry wurst for him in Berlin.  So this is for you Paul.

London is keeping us busy. It's raining, but that's no big deal. But we have things to do, so I'm going to keep this short. Will try to add in more as I can.

Kiefer's Hoffman von Fallersleben auf Helgoland

I first saw Anselm Kiefer's work in the downtown LA Museum of Modern Art. These huge, dense, dark heavy paintings sunk their hooks into me, so CS, I did know Kiefer before this week, but only through chance. In any case, I was pleased to see him again. I realize that the folks out there who need things to be very straightforward and obvious might not see the point of all this. But music doesn't have to be literal and usually isn't. Visual artists may want to create a mood rather than an object.

(Yes the jet is his too.)  Hoffman is the big work in the back.  I didn't say painting because it's much more than a painting as you can see below.

Hauseneptun helps us understand this title:  

The poet Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben stayed on Helgoland in the year 1841 and wrote here "Das Lied der Deutschen". This became first the national anthem of the "Weimarer Republik" and later those of the Federal Republik of Germany.

Here's Hoffman much closer.  In person, it does appear as though there is a boat on water and we're looking up at it from way below.  At least that's what I felt.

St. Paul's Cathedral from Tate Modern

We met some friends from Anchorage who've moved to London for drinks at the Tate Gallery bar that has this spectacular view across the Thames River to St. Paul's Cathedral.  The top picture is the bar with the Cathedral in the background.  The rest are pictures from where we were sitting as the sun went down.

The Worst Condition is to Pass Under a Sword that is Not Your Own - London Art Rabarama and Rakowitz

I've given up trying to say anything or give more than even a glimpse of what we're seeing. Don't have time. Papers today do say that Prime Minister Brown's calling a constituent a bigot when he didn't know his mic was still on means next week's election is the Conservatives' to lose, though the Liberal Democrats are a close second.

We saw these two Rabarama sculptures in the Moor House lobby as we passed by yesterday.

The Worst Condition in the title is the name of this exhibit below in the Level 2 Gallery at the Tate Modern.  It looks at the Iraq war and weapons and images both Western and non-Western. 

This exhibit is made up of text and pieces.  This text is for Tom Begich. (Turns out his blog suggests he's in London too.)[Update: Tom emailed to say he did get to see it and reminded me it was his brother Nick who's the HAARP expert, not Tom.] (You can double click this to enlarge and read it.  It's legible, but you have to work at it.)  The [Update: this is the post that got cut short when I lost my internet connection. This exhibit combined these drawings/stories and pieces like the masks and the swords to push the mindbarriers we have about war, Iraq, and literature.]

Who is Joseph Beuys? Berlin Brain Expansion

You walk into the Flick collection at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin and you are see these two pictures first.  The dark one caught my attention.  These are both by Andy Warhol. 

 So I took a closer image.  The colors are all wrong, but you get a sense of it.  It's of someone named Josephy Boueys .  

In the other wing there is a mind stretching exhibit and one of the artists is Joseph Beuys.  My understanding was that he made this video (below).  But is he also the person in the video.  Are the two pictures of the same man?  I'd say yes, but I wouldn't put big money on it. 

There's more of his stuff.  This is Strassenbahn (streetcar). 

Closer.

More Strassenbahn.

More Beuys work.

And more.

By now you are wondering about my sanity.  But those of you who come here regularly do so because you know I'm going to put up stuff that is totally out there.  I don't understand this stuff.  I'm embarrassed to say I never even heard of Beuys.  But I live in Alaska so I have some sort of excuse.  But this all got to me.  I need more time to digest it.  

I probably should have bought the book, but we're trying to pack light.  At the very least go to the link and read a bit more.  We're in London now and I want to go out and see London, so ciao.