The fox and crane

This time around I'm staying in the Docklands, hard-by the glistening towers of Canary Wharf. In part this is for reasons of comfort - trendy apartments are readily available at low rates in many of the new buildings that were thrown up in recent years here. The bankers who were supposed to occupy them stubbornly refuse to leave the classier old-world swank of Mayfair, sweaty commutes on the Jubilee line notwithstanding. It's not surprising that they haven't moved out here - there is little to speak of besides bank headquarters and after-work watering holes, and a vast subterranean mall embracing the Docklands Light Rail, the Underground stop, and the basements of many buildings, ensuring that you can emerge in the morning from whatever train brought you hither, put in a full day's work including lunch and, in many bankers' cases, dinner, and leave in the evening without ever having set foot outside. It is about 20 minutes from central London, a strange, overbuilt, under-occupied exhurb which somehow holds the greatest financial minds of Europe. It is a miserable place to live, but alright to visit. Especially - and I acknowledge the lack of compassion in this sentiment - in times like these.

Besides its promise of cheap rents and fancy bathroom fixtures, the Docklands boasts a close proximity to the centre of the days' action, European headquarters of Citigroup and Merril Lynch and the erstwhile Lehman Bros. In part I was drawn by a strange and unsavoury rubbernecking impulse, and a sense that the daily dramas that have pitched up on newspapers' A1s would be manifest and ever more dramatically drawn on the faces of those around me. This is not to mock or belittle the misery that all of this is causing - I'm far too vulnerable (as, sadly, are we all) and hopefully too thoughtful for that. But I did want to observe it all.

There isn't much. I was anticipating some amount of hang wringing, some theatrics, some despair. I was expecting the five stages of grief. I was - I won't say hoping - under the impression that some of the despair and horror that is evidenced in the more apocalyptic quotations in the Journal and the Times would reveal itself, that people would live, that there would be life in their lives. Instead, everything is subdued, everone is resigned. Confusion reigns, but panic has retreated. Bankers used to walk around these parts with eyes firmly forward and arms jauntily swinging. Now their gazes are furtive and hesitant, and their limbs are limp. Everyone seems a bit embarrassed. Everyone is dying not to be seen.

The day's end comes early in Canary Wharf, particularly on Fridays, when people start their drinking promptly at five and are usually gone by seven-thirty. At nine o'clock last night I went scrounging for some dinner and found most things closed. I wound up at a large supermarket with a single open checkout aisle queued with a mixture of credit crunchers and construction workers. On my walk home, hefting three bags that were strangely heavy and uncomfortable, I walked past one of the more hopeful construction sites on the South Quay, five minutes' walk and across a bridge to the centre of development. It had your typical blue tarpulin, warning cones and concrete barriers. There was a fox amongst them. The light wasn't great and I thought at first maybe a cat, but then he came out of the shadows to try to cross the street, bushy tail and snout, red coat, and something dead in his jaws. He found that he couldn't cross, turned round and slunk back into the mess of big-wheeled earth moving vehicles.

Concrete jungle, stone fields.

A stone's throw from my hotel, just south of where the west end musicals start lighting up the streets, you find St. Martins-in-the-Fields, a church in the C. of England which has, somewhat bafflingly to me, developed a serious side-business in putting on concerts and serving delicious food in its crypt. It seems like a pretty good business model, given the location and the beautiful 18th century building, and one can hardly complain, as the proceeds help support the church in its good works, which include notable programs for the homeless and hard-done-by.

I went this evening for dinner and a concert of Baroque music (Vivaldi, Handel, Bach and Pachelbel). I made a few notes.

1. The website makes absolutely clear, the 'Café in the Crypt' is, fact, in a proper Crypt. It encourages you to take time out of your meal to peruse the gravestones that line the chamber. I find this creepy. But somewhat comforting, once I get past that creepiness.

2. Prior to the performance there was a standard announcement regarding cell phones, etc, but with this charming addition: "Rest rooms are located in the café, but it's too late now, so you'll have to wait until intermission."

I suppose, if I'd had to go, I wouldn't have found it so funny.

3. There is no stage. The performers are on the same level as the audience, who sit in pews. To be seen, I suppose, the violinists and viola players stand - something I've never seen otherwise in performance. It makes for an odd and, to me, worrying picture. I do enjoy, at concerts, the movement of ther performers, swaying, lifting, bearing down - nothing ostentatious, mind you. But it's one thing when they're sitting down. Standing, the freedom of movment is a bit too much. Somehow it called to mind an image of mushrooms, come alive and on the move. I worried that someone would lose an eye.

4. Programs cost £1.50, and few people shelled out (I certainly didn't). This only exacerbated a classic problem with orchestral concerts: no one knows whether a pause in the music marks the end of a movement or the end of the piece, and consequently everyone looks around in a panic, before beginning to clap half-heartedly, and then stopping as the musicians start playing again. Fortunately the conductor picked up on our confusion, and would give a little bow to his players when the piece was well and truly done.

We still screwed up (not me!)

5. The church has a new window at one end of the nave (yes, it's not a cathedral, but apparently it's still called a nave, so sayeth my ticket). You can see a picture and read a fairly silly article about it here. I admit, I didn't recognize the cross imagery at first, which makes me feel rather dull, but perhaps I can be forgiven because in the gloaming the distorted grid becomes far less prominent and the egg-like shape at the centre seems to light up and draws the eye. And all along I was thinking about whether it made sense to reimagine religious symbols, whether it was even possible. The egg as an evocation of the divine didn't work for me - it seemed too pat, too much like what a human thinking about God might think about, but my point is, anything that we might contrive would, necessarily, seem contrived. But then, when I was looking for photos so I could post this, I realized that, yeah, it's a cross after all. Silly me.

There's a better picture here.

Notes on commuting.

It was a week full of train trips - somewhat exhausting on my first few days back here. I made a few notes, mostly in transit, and mostly on transiting. Here they are:

One.
Rushing out of the Underground this morning to catch my entirely-too-early train, I passed by a man with a coin-box raising money for a cause, singing out like a doggerel, 'Please help the disabled, help the disabled please.' He had the sort of accent you would find in a movie set in some unspecified Ireland of the past and aimed at an American audience - light, lilting, brogueish but entirely comprehensible to these delicate ears. Hurrying past, with tickets to buy and, oh please, a cup of coffee, I didn't get a chance to look at him, but let my mind conjure an image from one of those films, a broad-faced whiskered man with pouchy cheeks and glum expression but bright and shining eyes. Probably wearing a flat cap. And a vest.

When I returned at the end of a fairly long day I was surprised to find him still there, and more surprised to see that he was bald, with a long thin face and spectacles.

Two.
The escalator I rush up to get from the underground to the train station proper is lit from below, I'm talking below the steps themselves, as though they put a bright neon light somewhere amongst the gears and pulleys that drag people up into the world. In general I would say this light serves no purpose, just a low weak gleaming along the edge and cracks of each step. It barely shows through. When the steps break configuration, though, for instance at the top where they go from being steps to being flat, the gap between each segment momentarily opens, and there's this brilliant burst of light from below. It is a cheerful thing in the mornings.

Three.
A commonplace, but today during rush hour I was standing huddled by the doors of an Underground train on the Northern Line when a woman walked on amongst the throngs that join at Tottenham Court, well into her pregnancy. There were no seats. She walked up to the center pole and grabbed hold, and in the meantime I and every other man of a certain age scanned the carriage, thinking surely someone would see or sense that things weren't right. It was not to be. All sitting had their heads buried in a book or one of the free papers they give away throughout the city, and where ignorant of the situation - while all of us standing could not help but notice and had nowhere to look, so after our passes around the carriage proved fruitless we just looked at each other, and shared the embarressment in our eyes.

At the next stop a young woman got up from her seat to leave, saw the pregnant woman and said, "Oh God, I'm so sorry - I didn't notice."

Over there, over here.

Her Royal Highness's Custom agents use sniffer dogs at the exits to the baggage claim - no paperwork, no declarations, but instead beautiful black Labradors who lob their accusations with gently licking tongues and baleful eyes. They must be trained to detect all manner of contraband, but I suspect their skills are most often used to sniff out nothing more explosive than a crateful of mangoes (Incidentally, there is a book out now, a well-reviewed one, called A Case of Exploding Mangoes, which is not what I meant, but deserves a mention). Mangoes were what got a fellow Indian stopped, the last time I came in, the dog sitting sadly and licking the outside of her suitcase, and the customs official coming up and saying, good naturedly, "Okay, what is it that smells so delicious?"

As much as I admire all manner of professional dog, and like to think that somehow they understand and take pride in their work, this business of having them uncover food - that subsequently must be destroyed - is a little disconcerting. I imagine the drudgery, the dread despair they must feel, upon uncovering yet another sweet or savoury destined not for doggie stomach but for dustbin.

Anthropomorphism

Over here, when the train gets to the end of the line, they say, as they do in the states, that it is 'no longer in service.' However, they preface it with 'This train has completed its journey,' which I think is a pleasant image. I see my old Thomas the Tank Engine, panting into the station, its journey done, its race won, its service to the world needed no longer.

Camera-happy.

Speaking of train rides, I took a fairly brief one the other night to meet an old-old friend. To get to Waterloo Station I followed a route along my long-ago commute, from when I worked in London over one summer - over the Thames and past the Royal National Festival Hall and past the IMAX improbably placed at the nexus of some underground tunnels. It's probably better that I show you.
A view of the London Eye from the walkway I took to cross the river. This was not the same bridge I crossed as a wee tyke - that's Waterloo Bridge, and this is called something like the Royal Jubilee Pathway, running alongside train tracks (the Hungerford Bridge)

Said train tracks, with train. Graffiti on the right side of the brick wall said something like "French Touch Rust". I couldn't tell you why.

The stairs leading up to the Golden Jubilee footpath. The footpath was completed in 2002, in a prize winning design from some folks you can look up (including the WSP Group, about which I believe there is a New Yorker article worth reading, somewhere out there). One thing I find notable about British urban design in this period, and it's true here and in the Millennium Dome - about which much more to be written - and it's true to some extent of the Eye, is how spindly and insect-like it all is. In the picture you can see one of the peaks that lines the footpath, seemingly a vaulting feature, reminiscent of a suspension bridge but on a pedestrian scale - but for all its angle and its threadbare wires, it seems sadly lacking in majesty to me. The Millenium Footbridge connecting the Tate Modern to St Paul's across the Thames eschews this under-committed lightness for solid metal piping, though that doesn't seem to keep it from swaying.

In Canary Wharf there are more examples of the weakness for white wires, especially on footpaths. Perhaps sometime I'll take a trip out there.

Our walk quickly lands us in the very solid architecture of the late 1970s - the concrete cubes of the National Theatre, which is on the left here. On the right is the British Film Institute. Ahead is one of the many overhead pathways that link the buildings in this strange complex of culture. It is striking in completing this walk how much of it is above and below street level. There's something surprising about looking up and seeing humans walking around, unaided, in the sky.

This picture was a scramble and I'd hoped to take it ten seconds before, when four suited men were crossing over.

Roughly at the center of the shot you can see the rounded top of the IMAX cinema, which is where we're going next.


The IMAX theatre sits like a shiny button amongst the circuitry of the city streets At this point in our walk, cars go up. We go down.

It's a pretty straightforward network of walkways down there, but somehow I recall it being strangely confusing and a bit terrifying, returning from my summer job on late nights. Perhaps it was the presence of decrepit buildings such as the Royal Waterloo Hospital for Children and Women, seen here. I believe it closed in 1936, and if I ever write a horror film, I will set it there.

Amongst the many curiosities of the IMAX - its association with the relatively staid and repertory-driven British Film Institute, its strangely central and yet out-of-the-way placement - its arboreal surroundings are of particular fascination for me. As seen here, they evoke some sort of botanical paradise, allowing green-tinged light to filter down through the canopy of leaves. And on the left you can see lots of ads for the Batman movie. Which I hear is really awesome in IMAX.

Really, really awesome.

The way this works is, you take that little tunnel to the IMAX, and then you take this one away from it. On its walls you can find the poem Eurydice by Sue Hubbard, in a fairly fanciful piece of public art. Walking past it twice a day, I never read it through - stopping to do so seemed antithetical to the rush-rush ethos that, in my youth, I longed for as a hallmark of adulthood. Certain verses caught my eye, though. "Sour night-breath," which you could almost make out at the start of the third line above. "Steel tracks lead out out / past cranes and cremetoria," earlier on. And, towards the end, "the sun feathers my face / like your once eager kiss" - though it occurs to me now that eager kisses are not often feather-like.

Finally, the arrival, at a grand station which, for all this solid stone at its entrance, is strangely drafty inside. It lacks a proper roof, covered instead with a folding wave of translucent panels, so that you don't know if you're inside or out. Birds fly about, and the half-gray light is a little disorienting.

Postie enters post-post phase.

As indicated in this morning's intrepid mobile post (all me! all the time! and don't forget - all wet), I took the train today. It's not uncommon for companies headquartered in London to have ops subdivisions in the rings of smaller cities that crest concentrically away from the capital. This ring thing is for real, by the way - check out the M25, aka the Ring Road. So at various points in time I find myself trudging to one of the outpost rail stations on the edge of Central London, to spring from hence into the great wilderness beyond. The rides are invariably pleasant - even if Richard Branson's trains feature less legroom than his planes, you see some amazing things out the window. This afternoon on my return I entered a short tunnel (say 15 seconds at speed) in a torrential downpour, the rivulets of rain obscuring the grayed-over countryside, and emerged in a land of sunshine, peace and tranquility.

The scenery is gorgeous. Though somehow I think the word scenery is cheap, and takes things down a notch.

The vistas are gorgeous.

The landscape is gorgeous.

The rolling hills, emerald fields, bejeweled rivers, houses of old, cows, sheep, goats, mares, stallions, ponies, rocks, airs, clouds and cock-tailed robins are gee- gee- gee- gee- Gorgeous.

Sorry. Can't get it right. It's real pretty. I'll try to take a picture sometime.

Here's the point of this post (long day, was supposed to be a simple straight-forward observe-click-laugh but I'd forgotten that when I'm tired I suffer from the lexical incontinence of drunk investment banker). The best part about traveling through England by rail is passing towns the names of which beggar the imagination. Thus begins this online journal's (pretentious? but I hate the word blog) first series, which will continue at any point when I find myself with absolutely nothing to say.

The first town is...Leighton Buzzard!

I haven't really come up with a format for these things yet. My initial thoughts are: a description of the provenance of the extraordinary name, entirely redundant since it will inevitably be cribbed from a wikipedia page that I will already have linked to; and, second, an interesting or noteworthy news item from the town and/or its vicinity. Thusly:

Leighton, well, that's common enough, I knew a Scott Leighton once, there are plenty of them, and Leytons, too, and possibly Laytons, which might allude to a history of name-by-trade, a la Goldsmith or Fabian. The Leightons probably laid tons of stuff for a living. Like Masons (oops, there's another).

Buzzard is the interesting bit, though, and that, that is most likely a corruption of Busar, as in Theobald de Busar, the town's representative, whose name may have been attached to the town the good Dean of Lincoln (I actually don't know whether he was good) to distinguish it from the other Leighton within his good diocese (lots of building going on at this time and in this place, busy busy busy).

As to the rest: ta-da.

Two quick things

First, I still haven't learned to carry an umbrella with me every time I step out the door here. Still.

Second, I just got off the tube at Euston to find the station being evacuated, due to "a reported emergency", under the guidance of a soothing uninflected male voice on repeat. It was a very sedate process of removing ourselves from presumable harm - I imagine the average pace through Grand Central on a normal day would have left us far behind. There wasn't even any show of ire, at the fairly significant disruption of the morning commute. It was a calm, effective, workmanlike evacuation, and I haven't figured out what I think about it yet.

On a train now, shooting away from London. M-blogging! The web needs a better lexicographer.

War, briefly

This Russia/Georgia thing is freaking me out a little. As a rule I'm going to go light on the politics in this space, because:

1. I don't know all that much
2. There are plenty of other, better sources for that kind of thing
3. Fantasizing that I understand policy/global diplomacy/the art of war seems SUPREMELY arrogant and disrespectful and self indulgent. With most of what you find on here, you'll know that it is an entirely ill-informed (occasionally ill-formed) opinion on things that, for the most part, will have no impact at all on your life. (Not that the goings on in Gori necessarily will either - if they do, that probably spells big trouble). World affairs demand a more reasoned, resourced approach, and in fact, I think, discussing them at all implies that you've taken such an approach. Which I haven't.
   

So, briefly, here's what's freaking me out.

It seems like this escalation (now perhaps tamping down? I heard on BBC that Russia was pulling back, but they kept citing some sort of faxed news source [further brackets - these exist? still?] in a mantra of non-accountability), this escalation, I say, is designed to force the West to put up or shut up - and to instruct the rest of the former Soviet sphere on how much Western support they can expect for their nascent independent democracies, by example. And I have no idea what the right response would be.

In search of lollipops.

Pictures. Phenomenal.

Seen here is the pretty striking view from my window these days, at about 7:46 this evening, when the last of the day's rains had given way to sunshine. That white arcy bit on the left is the London Eye, an immense sort of ferris wheel (observation wheel, I suspect they call it), that's been lofting people into the sky since 2000. I had hoped that the rainbow would be concentric with it, but clearly it's not. Out-of-frame on the right (I'm not so great at this photography stuff) you would see Big Ben & Parliament, as well as a large dome that I earlier mis-identified as belonging to St. Paul's (not so great at map reading, either).

I hadn't noticed that the rainbow marks a boundary between the appearance of light and the appearance of darkness. Does anybody know what causes this? Is it an artifact of photography or a phenomenon in the world? And, you know, what is reality, anyway?

Pretty rainbow, though. Right?

On the reanimation of insane kings

I'm trying this mobile blogging thing largely out of a desire to keep posting with some regularity. Please forgive my clumsy thumbs their typos.

I just started reading The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, on which more later, perhaps after I figure out what exactly I can make of it. For now, I have two observations from having read the fairly straightforward Introduction (I always read the Introduction, unless I fear it might give away the plot. Since this book has no plot, I figured I was safe. Does anybody else do this? Show of hands?).

So.

1. I am once more saddened by the fact that I don't have a middle name. In this case, because my eventual biographer will be unable to follow the first paragraph of the work in question (the summing up paragraph, the broadly drawn arc of triumph, or of tragedy) with a prosaic sentence along the lines of "Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa was born in Lisbon on June 13, 1888." Somehow, that seems to me the most tiresome convention in all of literature. I should mention, Jessica Sarbo gave me an unofficial middle name in 6th grade, when I complained about it back then. "Churchill." Perhaps she was overly taken by alliteration. She was very pretty, so I went along with it, but I don't feel particularly beholden to it now.

2. Biographers, particularly academics, always find the wrong things interesting. Hence the following sentence, sliding through the text and off the page and never to be heard from again: "This conservatism, together with his mystical monarchism, his espousal of Sebastianism - the belief that the mad sixteenth-century king, Sebastian, would someday return to lead Portugal into glory - rendered him politically suspicious." Just politically, huh. Not any other kind of suspicious. Clearly.

London Advertisements

They've got a number of video ads here, in the Underground. I'll try to get a photo at some point (the only thing this blog is missing, besides words, is pictures). I should specify, they're not always, or not even often, dynamic ads, but they are static images presented on video screens, generally beside escalators in series as one ascends, or descends. I saw a fairly good one where a bit of movement (a bug? a car?) was tracked to the pace of the escalator, so as you ascended this virtual companion ascended with you, hopping from panel to panel and crawling through each. The fact that I can't remember what it was nor what it was for is more a reflection of me than the ad's effectiveness, I think.

But as I say, most of them are not moving, they're static, just like posters, except they can be updated really quickly. British Airways is relying on this ability to run a series that smells (okay, looks, but they actually don't look similar) like Microsoft's new Vista campaign in the States. In MS's case, of course, they combat Vista's bad reputation by inviting 140 skeptics, none of whom have used Vista, all of whom have heard others grouse about using Vista, to participate in a 15 minute demo of Mojave, Vista's successor. The skeptics are duly impressed and inevitably astounded when it is revealed that Movjave was really Vista all along. The ad has been criticized by slate as well as others for being disingenuous - after all, the point of an Operating System is not to work well when experts use it, it's to work well when grandma uses it.

In BA's case, the burden they're trying to shed is the completely botched opening of Terminal 5 at Heathrow, dedicated only to BA's flights and by many early accounts a horror. The most striking story from those first few days of chaos had to do with the efforts to connect luggage with its rightful owners - having scrambled everything up, apparently they decided that the best way to get it sorted was to send it all to Italy. One is reminded of efforts by 19th century Englishmen to recover their health in the drier, more hospitable continent. It is quite likely that things have improved a bit since April, but convincing people of this may very well be difficult, as the Times is reluctant to publish headlines along the lines of "T5: Everything Hunky- Dory". Hence the ad campaign, with the main message that "T5 is working" and the reliance of up-to-date information to prove this. So you have ads in the morning that will say, "Yesterday, 90% of flights from T5 were on time", which sounds, I don't know, pretty good I guess. Ninety percent, 9 out of 10, these are real numbers, statistics! But on some days, all you get is a picture, a photograph of something that happened at T5, and when it happened. A boy ate a slice of pizza, 12:30pm yesterday. Two women walked somewhere, 7am. And I'm not sure what these are supposed to say about the terminal's effectiveness. There are people in it, true, which is good. Not many though. In these shots, everything looks clean, functional, and quite empty.