Triplé Bridge Triplé Doublé Bus

The title of this post is for Danny and Jonah especially. In order from closest to farthest, Southward Bridge, London Bridge, Tower Bridge. (Yes, London Bridge is quite boring looking. The iconic bridge across the Thames is Tower Bridge.) Going across London Bridge are three double-decker buses.

Training for Cab Drivers

London, it turns out, has particularly exacting standards for its cab drivers. Aside from high ethical standards (a criminal background can disqualify you from becoming a cabbie), drivers must know the streets and major landmarks like the backs of their hands. To pass their qualifying exam, potential cabbies must be able to identify the shortest or most reasonable route between any two points in London, identifying every cross-street  and major building or address along the way. To learn the city, prospective cab drivers (called "Knowledge Boys") scoot around on little mopeds with maps of the city. We have seen a number of them out studying, though at first we didn't understand what we were seeing. Here's one we saw today who has paused to consult the "London A to Z" - the same atlas we use to get around.

St. Paul's

St. Paul's is the absolutely enormous cathedral in the heart of London, designed by architect Christopher Wren. Wren designed many of the iconic buildings in London after the great fire of 1666 (before then, London buildings were mostly of wood). Happily, Wren worked in stone and, despite other fires, many of his buildings are historic landmarks today.

We were not allowed to take pictures in the building, but here's one shot of the exterior. Mind you, this is a modest side-view:

Prior to visiting St. Paul's, I knew of it only from the movie Mary Poppins. I was pleased to see that feeding pigeons on the steps of the church continues today, though I did not see a woman selling birdseed for tuppence-a-bag.

Surrealist Street Artist

By the way, the building in the far background (across the water) is the Tate Modern.

Guildhall Art Gallery

Our last stop today was the Guildhall Art Gallery. One of the most interesting parts of the museum, however, was not the art but the ancient Roman amphitheater in the basement. Scholars had long suspected that Roman-era London ("Londinium") had its own amphitheater, but there was no archaeological evidence until 1988 when the site was excavated in advance of the construction of the museum. Now, the remains of that amphitheater are part of the exhibit. There isn't much to see in the way of ruins (a few piles of rubble), but I was amazed at the exhibit design which allows you to imagine what the amphitheater might have looked like while showing you exactly what remains.

The Golden Hind

Most will remember that in the late 16th century, Sir Francis Drake circumcized circumscribed the globe in his fifty foot clipper ship. The name of that ship was the Golden Hind and it's tethered on the south bank of the Thames, near the London Bridge underground station. For those who haven't recently been reading arcane English translations of Song of Songs, a hind is a doe.

Tate Modern

Making the rounds of London's free museums, we hit two today. The first was the Tate Modern which is housed in a former factory on the south bank of the Thames:

Inside looks pretty much like a factory, too, except that a huge amount of the space is empty. I don't want to know what their annual heating costs are:

A slightly more cheerful and lively part of the museum:

Since I don't find modern art reliably attractive or even comprehensible, I find a good tour guide is essential for a modern art museum. We went on two tours.

TOUR 1: SURREALISM

Paul Delvaux's Sleeping Venus was painted in 1944 in Brussels while the city was being bombed by Germany. He later explained that the goals was to express the anguish of the moment. He chose a sleeping Venus as the subject because it formed such a stark contrast with that anguish, making the painting all the more poignant. When this painting was exhibited in 1946 in NYC, it was deemed obscene by the US government and seized.

Salvador Dali's Mountain Lake (1938) depicts a lake that Dali's parents used to visit to find comfort after the death of their first child (who was also named Salvador). The lake is shaped like a fish. Interestingly, in this photo of the painting, it looks more like a fish than a lake. But in the museum, where the colors appeared much darker, it looked more like a lake than a fish. The disconnected phone hanging in the foreground apparently alludes to the negotiations between Chamberlain and Hitler over the German annexation of the Sudetenland.

Max Ernst's Forest and Dove, 1927, depicts the artist as a bird trapped in a simultaneously enchanting and menacing forest. Apparently, Max Ernst pioneered three painting techniques: frottage, grattage, and decalomania. Frottage is the fancy word for the technique used in pencil rubbings. Grattage is the technique of layering paint thickly and then scraping away top layers to reveal colors underneath (essentially what we called "scratch art" in grade school). Decalomania is the technique of blobbing ink on a paper and then folding the paper in half to create two symmetrical blobs. I'm proud to say that I mastered all three techniques in nursery school. What a prodigy!

TOUR 2: MUSEUM HIGHLIGHTS

Henri Matisse's Portrait of Greta Moll, 1908. I'm guessing I like Matisse so much because I grew up south of Baltimore, home to the fabulous Cone Collection.

Bridget Riley is an artist who experiments with optical illusion. This painting is simply a series of black-and-white wavy lines. But the experience of looking at it (warning: may induce a headache) is difficult to explain. To begin, the lines simply will not hold still. They vibrate, no matter how hard one tries to hold them still nor how long you look. In addition, in the presence of the original painting, one has the illusion of color in the apparent troughs of the waves. The painting is entitled "Fall" and was completed in 1963.