Monthly Archives: September 2021

Confuse, confusion: Curate, curation

I tend to listen and watch the news these days much less than I used to.  I get about four minutes in Hebrew between 6 and 7 in the morning followed by a few minutes on the TV with breakfast a quarter of an hour later and that more or less does me for the day.

These days, I’m more confused than ever.  It’s not just that I can’t figure out whether the numbers of people with Covid infection, with serious Covid infections, with serious Covid infections and on ventilators, and those dying from Covid are rising or falling or if one feels the need to travel outside one’s country of residence whether one needs to test before departing, after arriving, quarantine for a few days of whatever.   All this is difficult enough as definitions and rules seem to change just about every other day.

It’s just that the news in the UK over the past couple of days seems at first glance to contradict what we were being told in the weeks before that.  A week ago the news headlines were full of global warming and the large quantities of carbon dioxide in the air that seemed to be the source of all out problems.  However, over the past two or three days — in the UK, at least — the dire warnings concern increased wholesale prices of gas, leading in turn to the shutting down of plants that manufacture carbon dioxide, a compound apparently of utmost importance to the food processing industry, which, say the doomsayers, will lead to food shortages in the near future, a possible implication being that in addition to dying of Covid, people will start suffering malnutrition — and this is the UK in 2021.  Well, my confusion stems from the fact that I now cannot tell whether there is too much CO2 or too little CO2 about, and if it’s the latter, I can’t fathom why the stuff can’t be distilled from excess that we’re constantly told appears to be in the air.  Make up your minds, folks!  Much too complicated for a simple mind like mine.

The week started and finished with what is oft referred to by some as “culture” with Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement sandwiched in the middle.  At the beginning of the week, I took myself off to the British Museum to see the exhibition “Nero: The man behind the myth”.  Nero is someone about whom I knew little more than zilch other than that “he fiddled while Rome burned” and my abiding memory is of Peter Ustinov in Quo Vadis from 70 years ago.  It wasn’t exactly an exhibition that left me with a feeling of utter exhilaration and although it was interesting, I felt that it hardly justified the entry fee that the British Museum deemed fit to charge.

The visit began, as things sometimes appear to these days, with a shuffle along in a queue prior to being approved as “Covid-passable”.

Off to view Nero @ The British Museum.

As I had arrived at the museum early, I was granted access to the building but had to pass time viewing what was on show for free.  The Polynesian house materials were interesting, to say the least although I’m not sure that these are what I would like to greet me when I come home every day.

Also on view while I was awaiting Nero (or while Nero was waiting for me) was the Lion of Knidos, which, we were informed, weighs in at over 7 tons and was carved from marble that originated from a site near Athens, and “came from” an ancient tomb in Knidos in south-west Turkey.  There was some additional information about the tomb and other burial chambers contained in it.  However, there was no explanation about when and how this heavyweight lion found its way from the Aegean Sea to Bloomsbury.

Finally, the time came for me to check up on Nero, 1,950 years after his suicide.  On entering, almost the first thing I came across was this brief synopsis of the short life of the young emperor.

As I read the blurb, which read that:  “[He] had to steer a vast empire through a period of great  change.  Faced with conflicting demands and expectations, he adopted policies that appealed to the people but alienated many of the elite …”, I couldn’t help thinking of another [not-so] young ruler in another part of the world and at a different period who might one day face a similar situation within his own party.  Given that following Nero’s suicide there was a brief period of civil war during which between June 68 and December 69, there were four emperors—Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian—who ruled in quick succession, one can only hope that when BoJo’s end eventually comes, his Praetorian Guard will have done a better job than Nero’s in protecting him, that the succession will be more peaceful and that the citizens of the United Kingdom will be free from similar bloodletting after he goes (not that he’s planning on going anywhere at the moment).

On this visit of personal edification, I also discovered from viewing the head of Emperor Claudius that was on display that there was only a slight resemblance between Claudius and his alter-ego Sir Derek J-j-j-jacoby.


 

 

 

 

Then the following day, I decided to take myself into town to view what is called “The Marble Arch Mound”.  While there, I overheard somebody describe the name as more like the title of a sex novel than an artificial and temporary part of the urban landscape only to hear in the next sentence that she admitted to suffering from sleep deprivation when that thought came to mind.

The Mound is a viewing platform that has been described by some as “London’s worst tourist attraction”.  This man-made monstrosity was commissioned by Westminster City Council and cost about £6m, at taxpayers’ expense, of course, which is apparently almost double what is was forecast to cost when the idea was dreamed up by City Councillors and their advisers.

I initially became aware of this thing while listening to a BBC radio news item a few weeks ago.  It reported that Westminster City Council had decided not to charge people a £5 entry fee before they remove the structure in January 2022.  It had ostensibly been erected in order to attract tourists back into the West End. This, of course, is something of a misleading joke, because all you can see from the top of the Mound is a partial view of Marble Arch itself, the entrance to Marble Arch Tube station and some buses going up and down Park Lane.

None of this justifies the 130 steeper-than- usual steps to the summit, so in my humble opinion, the people in charge seriously needed to warn all rather unfit 76-year olds of that hazard before they started the ascent (the steps are actually so steep that it felt like there were 330 not 130).

Even without a £5 entry fee, there’s no doubt in my mind that the Marble Arch Mound is currently the leading candidate to be the biggest rip-off in London, an issue with which I was in complete agreement with an Irish couple from Athlone who had journeyed in from their residence in outer South London to do exactly what I was doing.  Perhaps if Westminster Council had made it 200m taller, it might have been worthwhile trying to reach the top but then we might have to have been catapulted to the summit.  There was a rumor that there was a lift (elevator) but I didn’t manage to find it and it wasn’t advertised.
However, I have to admit that on the way down I was told by one of the attendants that I hadn’t reached the end, as inside the mound (for like many things these days, a one-way system is in operation), they had a darkened space with lights that formed geometric shapes. This is where visitors can experience Lightfield—a one-off light exhibition designed and put together by an outfit called “W1 Curates” and it was infinitely more interesting than the rest of this bloody blot on the landscape!
The innards of the Marble Arch Mound

 

Lightfield (1)

 

Lightfield (2)

 

Lightfield (3)

And what else this week?

Returning from Marble Arch, I photographed the sign below at Goodge Street Underground Station.  I’m not quite sure that it was meant to convey because as everybody knows men always do this and not just in London but everywhere they go!

A couple of years back, I photographed this sign in Hampstead village and noted a couple of posts ago that the same dyslexic sign writer who could not distinguish his O’s from his Q’s had also been at work a little further up the street.  However, either someone else saw what I had seen or someone who reads my blog decided to take the law into his (or her) own hands, and to hell with the tiles.

And I love the wording in the sign below.  It seems that good manners appear to work as it’s difficult to find a bicycle (or anything else) chained to the railings.  Then again, it might be that the offending vehicles were forcibly removed!

I’ve always been fascinated by the James Smith & Sons “Sticks & Umbrella” shop on New Oxford Street and am amazed that I’ve never photographed it before.

And as for signs … it took me a while to figure out what was being advertised here.  I always thought that a curator was a person in charge of a museum or library or something like that.  So I looked up “to curate” in the dictionary and understood it “to be in charge of selecting and caring for objects to be shown in a museum or to form part of a collection of art or an exhibition” or “to be in charge of selecting films, performers, events et cetera to be included in a festival” or “to select things such as documents, music, products included was part of a list or collection…”  Apparently, this is a place where customers are allowed to make their own salads or can tell the person behind the counter what you’d like in yours.

 

And on the same street, another individual asleep in a cardboard box with a sign explaining to passersby that his life is a bit of a mess at the moment but that it wasn’t always that way — and meanwhile, he’d appreciate any help he can get.

At least he looks more comfortable than the guy below on Primrose Hill Road who sits on the same bench, day in, day out, looking just as uncomfortable each time I pass by.

 

Then, on Primrose Hill, I watched this little canine who kept his eye on the ball over and over again and concluded that he must be making a pitch to be picked for the English cricket team an outfielder.

 

Finally, the week ended as it began, fittingly, with some culture — a concert at Wigmore Hall …

… and a play at Hampstead Theatre.

 

 

 

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Figs, Sausages, and Kermit the Frog

What does one do when one has decided that four hours or more in a synagogue on Jewish New Year is beyond what one can take at this particular stage in one’s life?  Well, besides visiting friends and relatives and eating far too much, one can sit at home and read.

This year, I managed two novels—both of them novels and not works of history although either might have been perceived as just that.  The one, The Vixen,  by Francine Prose is based on the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were sent to the electric chair in 1953 for passing American atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.  The story centres around Ethel and is told by a young Jewish editor for a New York publishing company, a Harvard graduate refused a recommendation by his Harvard mentor to pursue graduate studies at the University of Chicago, and who has been given the job of editing a dreadfully conceived and awfully written novel about the affair, which, he discovers was composed by his uncle, his boss’s secretary, and his boss, who is a CIA operative, as was his Harvard mentor.  He — and the woman who was to become his wife and who had been formerly employed by the same publisher—both believe that Ethel was set up and are amazingly given a free hand by the authors to edit (i.e., rewrite) the novel and manage to have it published in its re-written form to the ire of the CIA and the detriment of the publishing house, which is forced to destroy remaining copies of the book and eventually goes bankrupt .  Compulsive reading and all 319 pages read in a single day.  Ann Sebba’s new biography of Ethel, the woman executed allegedly for espionage, now awaits.

The second novel of the holiday season, by Elif Shafak, someone who has become one of my favourite authors, was her latest, The Island of Missing Trees.  It is a novel about a “mixed marriage” involving two Cypriots, Defne, a Turkish Muslim woman and Kostas, a Greek Orthodox man, who have lived in London with their 16-year old daughter, Ada, born when they were in their 40s.  As the story develops, one learns that they were two teenage lovers who would meet at a taverna owned by a gay couple, one Greek and the other Turkish, the only place in Nicosia where they could meet in secret and in the centre of which, growing through a cavity in the roof, is a fig tree.  And as the story develops, Kostas flees to London in 1974 at the outbreak of the inter-communal violence on the island and the invasion of Northern Cyprus by the Turkish army, compelled to do so by his mother, who has already lost two sons that year.  He leaves only to return after a 25 year absence as an academic botanist of some repute where he meets Defne again.

But it is the fig tree that witnesses their hushed meetings and their silent, clandestine departures and the fig tree is there, too, when civil war breaks out in 1974 and Nicosia is reduced to rubble, and when the teenage romance suddenly ends. But almost 30 years later, Kostas the botanist returns, looking for native species but really searching for Defne who he finds through a mutual acquaintance and they decide to marry and to live in London. The taverna has been destroyed but the fig tree remains and they return to take a clipping from the fig tree, put it into their suitcase and smuggle it bound for London.  Years later, the fig tree in the London garden is the only knowledge that Ada has of a home she has never visited, as she seeks to untangle years of her parents’ secrets and silence and find her place in the world.  In this, she is helped by the arrival for a visit in London of Meryem, her mother’s recently divorced elder sister who takes it upon herself to inculcate her heritage into her niece’s consciousness.

Much of the story is related by the fig tree and that is what makes the story magical, for the fig tree has heard and seen everything over a period of almost half a century, and in the course of doing so describes all the living things that have visited the tree over the years — butterflies and moths, mice and birds— and discusses the differences between fig trees and other tree species, asking the question in one way or another of whether plants as well as animals have memories.  For that is what this book is about.  It’s a novel about memory and remembering, just as Ms. Shafak’s previous book, 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in this Strange World, about a murdered sex worker in Istanbul whose body was found in a filthy bin by a group of four scavenging teenagers, is in the end a book about friends and friendship.

However, on the first page of the book, as I started to read, I sat up quite suddenly.  This was because, in another life, I was a geographer and I wish I could have written what Elif Shafak managed to write in just 61 words:

“A map is a two-dimensional representation with arbitrary symbols and incised lines that decide who is to be our enemy and who is to be our friend, who deserves our love and who deserves our hatred and who, our sheer indifference.

Cartography is another name for stories told by winners.

For stories told by those who have lost, there isn’t one.”

The Island of Missing Trees is such as well-constructed story and is beautifully written.  Every now and then, there is something that the reader reads that either strikes a chord or that you’d never thought of before, such as this, which appears on p.34:

“It is a curse, an enduring memory. When elderly Cypriot women wish ill upon someone, they don’t ask for anything blatantly bad to befall them.  they don’t pray for lightning bolts, unforeseen accidents or sudden reversals of fortune.  They simply say: ‘May you never be able to forget.  May you go to the grave still remembering.’“

 

And now from the sublime to the ridiculous.

One morning last week, listening to the BBC news headlines on Radio 4, we got the following story after which I discovered that it had also appeared in the newspapers.  In the Sunday Times, it appeared under the headline: “Too much sausage, not enough dog” and it concerned the announcement from the Kennel Club, that arbiter of standards in the canine world, that as dachshunds have become more popular, their sausage-shaped bodies and stubby legs are getting too long and they are moving too close to the ground as they are being being bred shorter and longer, presumably to meet popular demand.  As a result of this lack of canine consideration on the part dog breeders, guidance has been updated with the Kennel Club providing new rules to breeders in order to give the sausage dogs more ‘ground clearance’.  So if dachshunds had been suffering, they need suffer no longer.  Help is on the way!

The Kennel Club said the rise in popularity of dachshunds had created a trend for the dogs to be as long-bodied and short-legged as possible, because the exaggerations were ‘perceived as cute’

And then I decided that even if I am not in synagogue, I might one day be called upon to blow a shofar, a ram’s horn, an instrument which is tootled several times during the synagogue service on Jewish New Year.  I once tried to get a sound from a clarinet and failed miserably so I thought a master-class might be due—and as a result of my search and research, I have been schooled in the art of shofar-blozzing.

Last week, I took myself to Tate Britain to two exhibitions — one by J. M. W. Turner and the other by Mark Rothko.  I always find Turner’s painting and especially his seascapes and his use of light stunning …
… but I have a problem with Rothko, whose work I first saw years ago at an exhibition at Tate Modern.  I couldn’t make head nor tail of it then and I wasn’t any better off last week in that regard.  Some years ago, I remember watching a documentary on Rothko where he seemed to spend much of his time in his studio looking at his paintings.  Were I to spend several hours a day looking at large canvases ranging from black to deep mauves, purples and blues, I think I might have become somewhat depressed and on learning that the artist committed suicide, I wan’t entirely surprised—although I imagine that there might have been other factors involved, too.
But then there are others who don’t pay too much attention to what’s around them and just get on with their job!
The gallery operates a one-way system during these corona times and I lost my way looking for these two exhibitions but I managed to find a Tate employee and asked how to get there and the answer I got was: “Turn left at the Epstein and then continue straight.”  So I did just that.
Exiting the gallery and walking across Lambeth Bridge before turning to stroll along the river to Waterloo Bridge, I discovered that tourists have not quite entirely vanished from the London scene.  They’re there but it seems that there are fewer of them.
And then, on reaching Waterloo, and taking the bus back home, I noticed that there are just so many things to remember to do and not to do — and to take heed of — on a London bus.
And while on the bus home, a new passenger got on and sitting opposite me, she seemed to drift into deeper and deeper thought — and not necessarily happier thoughts, it would seem.
The view from Primrose Hill one morning last week was misty, to say the least …
… but I found that the notice that has appeared at each of the entrances to the park to be disturbing.
Still, during daylight hours, there’s room for everyone …
… as indeed there seemed to be the case in Golders Green.
 
And then, one morning early last week, while walking northward along Finchley Road from Golders Green Station and looking across the street, I thought I had finally discovered bliss …
… only to find as I jumped for joy and then skipped a a few steps further on that it was nothing more than a place to treat any injuries should I have had the misfortune to fall while jumping for joy!😅
One day, I will eventually get around to photographing the many personal notices attached to the benches on Primrose Hill and Hampstead Heath.  Not all of them are as lacking in modesty as this one, though.
And then last week I passed a street sign directing me to the place pictured below and thought for a few seconds that it might have been rented out by Facebook as a place where friends can actually get together in person.
And walking around Hampstead, where there are English Heritage plaques aplenty (Henry Moore is few doors up the street and Piet Mondrian is on the opposite side), a new one was installed last week.  I had no idea that the Muppets were anything but American but it turns out that they were conceived in Hampstead, where their creator, Jim Henson, lived.  And the result? Another new plaque, of course.  Quite what The Muppets might have to do with English heritage is a bit beyond me but who am I to question the decisions of those wiser than me?
Finally, two pictures from Friday morning.  I took this one near South End Green at 08.50 hrs. of a seemingly homeless couple on the pavement amidst the dirt and squalor of Hampstead before the street cleaners arrived (they were on their way).  Yet I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing.  And this is post-Brexit London in 2021!
Finally, when one is out with a camera, one is constantly on the lookout for things that stand out (at least I am!) — and here was one of them!
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