Art Nouveau Ho

I went to see The Passenger at ENO the other night and left feeling flayed. It's a good new opera, but horribly depressing. ENO seems to be on a Nazis Everywhere kick at the moment.

In other news, I was on a bus today with a posse of schoolgirls who were (predictably) playing music out loud on their tinny phone speakers. In these cases, I fight down my own swiftly-redlining annoyance by watching everyone else's blood pressure skyrocket. Oh, and it was rush hour. Joyful.
( Cut for swearwords and improper use of adjectives )

I am only an adopted Londoner, and everything that needs to be said and written about the current situation has been, or will be, done by wiser heads than mine. So what I'll talk about are the past and the future.

My hometown, Washington DC, still bears visible scars from a riot that happened in 1968, four years before I was born, on the news of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Five days, thirteen deaths, injuries in the thousands. I read back through some of the old news stories last night.

The London riots have been larger in numbers than the King riots, not so well armed, and more focused on looting than on pure violence. The racial element is less relevant-- news reports have been describing a fairly mixed crowd. It's a socioeonomic action, not a political one. The long-term results, however, may well be similar.
( More thoughts below )

- Watching my friend Pete strut his stuff as an operatic dog in The Doctor's Tale at the Linbury,

- A spectacularly marvellous weekend with woodlandwildman, who has a way of enlivening my home whenever he's about.

- Time spent with lostinavebury and other fine people;

- Saturday night's White Mischief extravaganza, at which the Wildman was doing Victorian photography, Professor Maelstromme was selling shiny objects and the worthless love-slaves of Fetishman Comics mounted a fine display;

- The Dead Victorians, back from hiatus and sounding mighty fine. Likewise Professor Elemental, tip-top emcee and genuinely good soul.

- Iolanthe at Wilton's Music Hall with a splendidly talented all-male cast! I did enough G&S at university to become thorougly bored with it, and this is one of those rare productions that actually make it fun again. Do see it while it's on.

Right now I am not packing boxes.
( I am posting to LJ instead. How very emo )

Contracts have been exchanged and the paperwork is in place. All being well, at month's end I'll be lady of this:
( Photos below )
I've been driving my friends crazy by being unable to shut up about how cool it is. (Sorry, guys: I definitely owe you a drink and/or crash space whenever you like.) But this will be where I live and work for as long as I'm in London, I think, and I am ridiculously excited about it.

I got back to London this morning, and I have to say the weather feels positively balmy compared to the past week in DC-- extremely cold, with a biting wind like Odin's own surgical knife. Factoring in the windchill, it was well below zero Fahrenheit (that's fuck-off cold, Centigrade users! See, I know [zero = freezing] has a certain logic, but [fuck-off cold] is a much more elusive measurement, neatly pinned down by the Fahrenheit system.)

speedlime and I went to see a movie the other night. Afterwards, I emerged from the building with one sleeve damp from having washed my hands. By the time we got to where the car was parked, my sleeve was crisply frozen. Fuck-off cold.

I was impressed, though, by the sight of snowbound Britain as my flight landed today. As I type, there are flurries falling in London, but not quite settling-- in the centre, at least.

I was going to try and fight the jetlag, but a hot bath and some comic books suddenly look like a much better idea. Abnormal service will resume shortly, true believers.

A Good Day, according to the standard definition, is a day on which you:

-- have lunch at the little Saturday food market in the square (but the line for coconuts is way too long. Damn.)

-- get the Tube to Outer Wherever for an audition, noticing that even though it's a weekend the Tube is functioning and gets you there on time

-- find that the audition is in a very large, very nice house full of friendly people

-- have a little time beforehand to wander around the garden (pleasant, flowery)

-- sing decently well for people who appear to like it, and have a pleasant chat afterwards

-- on way back to Tube, make friends with a large and playful ginger cat

-- have a smooth journey home, and notice that Help for Heroes is having a bake sale outside the station and cakes are 2 for 1

-- reflect that there's a birthday party tonight and buy ridiculous amounts of cake

-- notice that, improbably, the food market in the square is still going! And now the line for coconuts is much shorter.

-- COCONUT LOVE (this is all fattbuttsheep's fault)

-- prepare to attend mothninja's birthday celebrations, noting that there may well be Bloodshots.

-- Skål för fan!

Edit (some hours later): There were Bloodshots. There were many Bloodshots. So very many. And now there is a very pretty full moon. This is definitely a Good Day.

Those who hang out with me know that I chronically overuse the word "awesome."

I've heard it argued that "awesome" should be held in reserve for things that genuinely inspire awe-- that people who use "awesome" to describe, say, colourful socks would find themselves vocabulary-impoverished when beholding, say, a sunset in the mountains.

Yesterday, something happened that made me feel a mixture of ohmygodohmygodohmygod shock and OHMYFUCKINGGODTHISISSOFUCKINGCOOL fascination and !!!!!!!!! sheer saucer-pupilled joy.

Through an odd set of coincidences, I have a friend who's a curator of maps at the British Library. I'd normally never have dared do this, but I emailed him at the behest of my visiting antique-map-obsessed mother and asked if he might have time to show her a map or two.

Tom met us, smiled a mischievous smile and said he had some rather special things to show us. He led us up to the map library, which is full of large tables on which large maps may be unrolled. He got out some early printed maps-- a Frisius, a book of Ptolemaic maps compared with "modern" ones from the 1500s -- and then he got a vellum scroll out of a very long rectangular box and unrolled it. (On the library tables, they have little weights that you put on the edges of old vellum scrolls to stop them rolling up again.)

On the scroll was a very plain hand-drawn map in black ink, mostly of the countries surrounding the North Atlantic: Europe, Iceland, Greenland, Nova Zembla, the east coast of North America. It also had an island called Estotiland out in the middle of nowhere, as well as a Northwest Passage past the Pole. The coastlines were drawn in much greater detail than one would find in a printed woodcut map. The whole expanse was cris-crossed with a fine warp and weft of precisely-spaced latitude and longitude lines about half a centimeter apart. At the North Pole, one could feel a slight indentation in the vellum where the fixed foot of a compass had pierced it.

"This is the map drawn in 1580 by Doctor John Dee," said Tom.
( in which King Arthur conquers the North Pole )

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of going to the Kew Bridge Steam Museum with monochrome_girl and a crowd of truly excellent people. At intervals we crowded into small, sunlit rooms and craned our necks to watch as the enormous machines which once supplied all of London with water were fired up. If you look that way you see the controls: brass handles, dials, knobs; the sighing exhalation of steam as the pressure is released and the long pistons begin their inexorable slide--
it was not about sex.

Look that way and you see the pump itself: there's a rumble, a groan, as mechanism rises and the giant shaft, 90 inches in diameter, is exposed, glistening with moisture, then the machine sighs as it sinks home--
it was not about sex.

Look up and you see the great balance itself: two stories above your head, long enough to fill a room, two enormous cast-iron brackets are bolted together on a central fulcrum. The pressure of the steam draws one end of the giant device down; when the pressure is released with a hissing sigh, the balance slowly tilts the other way. What you get is this enormous sense of power, of weight, as the balance descends and the lubricated pistons slide and the huge pump--
it was not about sex.

I will confine myself to remarking that among the geishas of Kyoto, the loss-of-virginity rite of passage was known by the term Mizu-age, which translates as "raising water." Kyoto is on a river; they'd have had a lot of experience with pumping...

The other amazing machine I've seen this week was at an exhibition on sleeping and dreaming at the Wellcome Collection with the ever-lovely fracture242. The exhibition itself is a bit scattershot, but in a cabinet full of alarm clocks and waking-up devices I found this: an alarm clock which greets the morning by lighting a candle with a flintlock. Yes, it's a black powder alarm clock. I don't know how many of these were made, or how regularly they were used, but you've got to hand it to those Age of Enlightenment types: only an Enlightenment genius could invent something as monumentally stupid as an alarm clock that can set your bed on fire.

My mother arrived in town today, so I took a cab over to her hotel to have breakfast.

On the way there, the cab driver heard my accent and asked where I was from. He said "I'm going to Las Vegas in a couple of weeks. Me and the lads, we go over there once every two years. Just us, and no women! It's great!"

He went on to tell the following story:
One of his friends had had heart surgery a few years ago. "He's divorced, and been celibate for three years, so me and the lads, we figure it's time to test the old ticker out." The friend shouldn't do anything too strenuous, he said, so they were going to procure him the kind of entertainment that involved him "just sittin' there." They knew a lady, you see, a talented lady who would perform this service. "Then afterwards, he's gonna get a bit of a surprise. See..." the cabbie lowered his voice, "This lady, the one we plan to introduce him to... is not a lady."

"She's not gonna tell 'im till afterwards, you see! Then we'll see how good the old ticker is!"

So he told me, and I told the blogosphere. My work here is done.