Ars Britannia

My goodness, the National Gallery is absolutely massive. I'm going to have to make a return visit there, simply because I didn't get to see and enjoy it all. After four hours, art fatigue began to set in.

Trafalgar Square is a fine sight, when you're not taking shelter from flocks of pigeons. I made my way out to the island in front of Nelson's statue and spire, and felt very hemmed in by the traffic surrounding me on all sides.

I got a bit confused with the tube system and decided to hop on over to Leicester Square until I got my bearings. There I came across a fantastic alleyway full of used book stores. One of them was giving away free calendars, to one of which I helped myself. There was a store, Pleasures of Past Times, specializing in theatre that I went into, but I had to leave in short order because the shopkeeper was going off to lunch. We got to talking a bit about Shakespeare--among the collection are programs for old productions--and he encouraged me to go see Twelfth Night. He had to kick me out, but he gave me his business card, which uses the word "twixt" when giving his lunch hour. I'm going to try to make it back there tomorrow and see how much one of those programs costs.

Outside the Leicester Square station a guy hawking maps was barking, "Anybody lost? I've got information!" As soon as I start feeling lost trying to find my way back, I just used him as a reference point.

Around 7 I took off to wander the city. The police were set up in Bayswater station, and later, I saw, around Soho. I don't know why. I got off the tube in Oxford Circus, and in my travels covered ground in Soho, Westminster, Covent Garden, and ended up in the Leicester Square station after munching on some garlic bread in an Italian restaurant that was playing the Pulp Fiction soundtrack.

London is striking in the frankness of its sexuality. I defy anyone to show me a payphone that isn't covered in stickers advertising sex hotlines. The magazine racks all have bare breasts displayed on the top racks, and Soho has a whole strip of "Licensed Sex Shops." It's a nice change from American puritanism. As if a couple of bippies are going to bore a hole in childrens' eyes.

I love the tube system now, and it confounds me that America is so behind in its public transit.

Living Space, or the Lack Thereof

Our room in the Berjaya Eden Park Hotel is a curiosity. The three of us guys, the only male students on the trip, are put into a room not much larger than the others. The beds are not high off the ground enough to put our suitcases beneath them. We've ended up emptying suitcases out and putting the contents under for easy access, and the suitcases into whatever obscure corners we can find.

Our window boasts a glorious view of the hotel's numerous air conditioning units.





The bathroom is, in keeping with the rest of the city, cozy. The sink is a tiny little thing, which will make washing our clothes an interesting experience. The bathtub has three knobs, one for the faucet, another for the shower; the middle third is a mystery to us and has numbers to boot.

Apologies for the sporadic pictures. They take time to upload, and time is money.

Proper London, yaar

If I could use one word to describe London, it would be space-conscious (the hyphen makes it one). Everything is jam-packed together: the housing units, with their little back yards, the streets especially; I had a brief scare on our bus when another came straight for the lane we had just been in-- they share lanes.

Waiting to Exit

We have been in the Boise airport for four hours now, three longer than originally scheduled. The jet had to undergo maintenance, more maintenance than we had anticipated, and we're sorry for the inconvenience. We've been rerouted to 2:15 flight to San Francisco, instead of Chicago as we had originally planned. That'll take us only maybe two-and-a-half hours; we'll spend several more hours waiting around in San Francisco, and will be departing for London at 7 o'clock Pacific Time. We should arrive at around 1 PM London time tomorrow.

In the interim I've chatted, checked my email, talked, read a magazine, conversed, read the first scene of John Fletcher's Valentinian, exchanged cordial words (with my mother), and updated this blog. I also made a sketch of our grounded plane.

To break up the monotony of waiting, we have grasped for novelty by finding humor in the names that have come up over the intercom. Among them were a Mr. or Mrs. Dingledyne, Ferrari, and Gay...le. Yes, we are that bored.

There's been talk of us receiving vouchers to compensate us for the delay. Given that we've already gotten vouchers to make up for the precipitous price drop from when we purchased our original tickets, we may yet end up with enough money to go on another trip down the road.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Hello and Goodbye

I'm gone in a few minutes. And so it begins.

Wilkommen

I suppose now that I've given out this page's URL I ought to write some kind of proper introduction.

But I'm too busy for that (and I've already written about myself, at least as far as my similarities to President Obama go).

Welcome, friends and family. I'll have regular internet access for most of the trip, so check back often for updates, photos, and musings on my progress to and through London and the surrounding towns.

All's Well That Ends Well

At first I felt like a tool for feeling bad that a marvelous Orwell enthusiast tour guide, Peter Powell, had died almost a year ago. The only reason I felt sad was because it would have been amazing to meet and take a tour from him and now I would never be able to.

But then I saw that he was aged "39 or 40." That was a colorful exaggeration of his, but he still looks in that picture to have had a lot of vitality still left in him.

(now I feel bad for feeling glad that I have a legitimate reason for feeling bad, in case anyone is keeping score, which might be so in a few days' time when I open the floodgates)

Fallout

It suddenly occurs to me that one of the worst possible side-effects of the Gaza strikes would be Egypt's withdrawal from its peace agreement with Israel, given the mounting criticism it's facing from its own people on the issue of the Gaza war.

Bailing on Bailouts

Really, enough is enough. The financial sector and the auto industry? Understandable. $700 billion with no strings attached was obscene, but there was no doubt these industries were key enough to the economy that they needed some help weathering the storm. But retailers? The porn industry? I know as a yet-unaffected college student I don't fully grasp the impact of this economic crisis, but let's be real: we're in a recession, a bad one. And in a recession, business recedes. Sad, but true. Trying to make it otherwise with these endless bailout requests is only going to put our government deeper in the hole and worsen our problems later on. What we're looking at here is death by a thousand self-inflicted paper-cuts.

Some economic belt-tightening will anyways be instructive in how many of these companies should have been acting in the first place.

And now for something completely disturbing

I previously talked about being unsettled by the strange graffiti animation previously, and perhaps I spoke too soon. Alan Moore's From Hell, just finished today (yesterday) ended up being one of the most disturbing works I've read in awhile. I knew it was violent--it's Jack the Ripper, after all--but was taken aback by the final murder, of Mary Kelly, to which an entire issue is devoted. I react to media violence based on its context and am usually not bothered, but this was almost nauseating and prompted desperate thoughts of "will it never end?" Congrats twenty years after the fact to Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell (whose cross-hatched, spattered art lends a symbolic weight to the proceedings that no literal re-enactment--especially not the travesty of an adaptation of a few years ago--can hope to accomplish) for such an affecting piece of art.

In trying to articulate my own "theory" of art, of drama, what-have-you--in short, an explanation of the why my work is what it is--I find myself coming back on attempts at representation in art, by which I mean literal representations of an issue or event in a given medium.

None of my writing, for the screen and the stage, is naturalistic. I don't take an extreme, Samuel Beckett-lite absurdist route, and I always grapple with issues of motivation. But the behavior of my characters, whether it's in speaking entirely in iambic pentameter or committing genocide on people of a certain hair color, is not something you would ever see in the real world, even amongst the craziest of crazies. In those given examples, it's actually a heightening of a characteristic that already exists. The best explanation I can think of is that in dealing with issues and ideas, art (or at least my art) works best when naturalistic representation is eschewed in favor of symbolism, or a warping of reality into something more extreme. Since we all interpret events differently, what better way to communicate that interpretation than by presenting not as it literally is, but how I see it?


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

This sounds totally ridiculous, but this post was spurred by the video above, one Andrew Sullivan's Mental Health Award Nominees. I have no idea what, if anything, it's trying to say. But the bizarre imagery on display in the graffiti freaked me out much more than anything I saw last night in the first two parts of "House of Saddam" (which nonetheless looks like a pretty good mini-series) last night. I think the very unrealness of the animation is what makes it so unsettling. Live-action representation of the extreme can never fully succeed, it seems, because the real is attempting to recreate, in a fictional context, real horror. An animation, because it is, voices excluded, wholly removed from the real world, operates in its own context outside of regular reality. This is why Peter Weiss, in his forward for The Investigation specifically warns against trying to re-enact both the Auschwitz trials and the atrocities described. Nothing can possibly do them justice, and so we reach for symbols and gestures to illustrate the horror.

I could write a play directly addressing some issue burning a hole in my mind, but I don't. For one thing, most straightforward, "issue" plays don't interest me and come off just in concept as extremely preachy. I prefer to make the situations even more extreme, absurd, grotesque, in order to highlight their folly without having to spell it out. Religious fundamentalism, and much of religion, aspires to supremacy but is intellectually impoverished; what better way to illustrate this than to re-enact a particular religious atrocity with the characters speaking the kind of heightened language of their holy books employed to beguile others? Even with the linguistic and dramaturgical benefit of the doubt the vacuity of the religious (fundamentalist) case is there for all to see.

This isn't to say I don't enjoy naturalism. If I didn't, I'd have to skip most cinema, even drama. But for me, addressing ideas, which are themselves intangible, is best done by symbol and metaphor and employment of the unreal. Attempts to manipulate the real world for such an end will never be fully successful. For me, anyway. Better artists seem to do quite well.

Court of Appeals

Buried in this New York Times story about five 9/11 planners trying to get an easy death sentence was this nugget:

For the first time, the Pentagon arranged for relatives of 9/11 victims to travel to Guantánamo to attend the session. A group of them, who spoke to reporters afterward, said they were struck by the extensive rights accorded the accused men.

This is a cheap emotional appeal, designed to stir up memories of 9/11 and divert the focus from not just the questionable legality of these military tribunals, but also the torture that was used to extract information (at least from Khalid Sheikh Mohammad), a fact that isn't mentioned in the article at all. What happened on 9/11 was awful, but it in no way qualifies anyone to be an authority on the "extensive rights" given to the prisoners.

The Tempest is Music to My Ears

Elliot Goldenthal is set to score his partner/wife Julie Taymor's adaptation of The Tempest, which will hopefully be out next year. Goldenthal is my favorite film composer (his Alien3 work is frightening stuff, and Titus has an amazing eclecticism), and while it was a given that he would do the soundtrack--he's worked in conjunction with Taymor for years--it's nice to see it in writing and confirmed.

"In the Future, Everyone Will be Famous for 15 People"

Via Andrew Sullivan, we have a post from Arianna Huffington about the deepening of the financial crisis, and using blogging as a means of coping.

I suppose this is as good a time as any to unpack my reasons for starting this blog, and for (so far) doing little to promote it. I've always had strong opinions about politics, and think that at least once in awhile I can dress my opinions down in some fine caustic wit. I'd wanted to blog for awhile and even did so at ProgressiveU in a scholarship competition, but there were guidelines on content and length, and so it felt like a lot of essay writing with little of the conversational tone that my favorite blogs contain. Eventually I stopped because it was just too much work. I did have an occasional audience, though.

I myself am not sure why I haven't told all my friends to come visit my blog. A large part of it is probably insecurity (note the qualifer 'probably,' itself denoting my uncertainty). Blogging is rather geeky and narcissistic, and on some level I don't want them to know. On a more deeper level, I would like to enjoy some level of anonymity, which is hard when the only people who know your page exists are the people you interact with in the real world every day. Finally, perhaps a part of me doesn't want this to be read. Oh, it's in the public and so I'm not going to say anything too shaming, but it is putting myself out on a limb, and I would prefer the people who visit this site do so out of an interest in what I'm saying, and not as a voyeuristic means of peering into my mind. But it is nice interacting with people. At the beginning of last (school) year I was tapped to moderate at ProgressiveU, but I turned the offer down because I was too busy. I may inquire about offer after I graduate. What else am I going to do?

Yes, another reason for starting this is the vain hope that I get noticed and someone will eventually want to pay me to bloviate. And with the future so uncertain, I figure I might as well start sending out some feelers and making the most of my skills (opinion writing, cartooning, playwrighting/acting(/directing?) to see if something sticks. Unfortunately my skills lie in the arts, which are always the first to suffer financially, if not creatively, during an economic downturn. It's a hell of a time to join the job market, but at the end of this year I'll be financially and academically tapped out, and need some time to recharge. Joe Strummer once said the future is unwritten, but in this case it is more so, in part because our leadership of the last eight years has been illiterate. Writing is my greatest strength, however, so I guess I am most qualified do something about it.

What He Said

Juan Cole said it much better than I did.