Last from London

Well, for now anyway...

One last photo montage video from London.  It's a little longer than the others, but it's split into two parts, so that may help.  Think of it as an A Side and a B Side.

I had to resort to YouTube for this, but I was able improve the resolution a bit.  Enjoy.

A lot of this is pretty self explanatory - don't think you need me to say much about Big Ben, Westminster, the Houses of Parliament, or Richard the Lionheart.  I do want to mention, especially for the Rodin fans out there, the juxtaposition of the Burghers of Calais in the shadow of Parliament (as opposed to casts I've seen at the Rodin Museums in Paris and Philadelphia, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, all of which I have since found were cast after this one in London).  The placement in Victoria Tower Gardens is poignant in that these French business leaders and legal authorities are shadowed by one of the most important legislative structures in the Western World; and it calls to mind their story - offered as a sacrifice to save the citizens of Calais from Edward III's siege of their city.  (Remember Edward III's hunting palace from an earlier post, and the last video?)

It's worth mentioning are a couple of light art pieces from the Tate Modern that were as photogenic as they were engaging:

• Lis Rhodes' Light Music was the setting for the shots that come near the end of the first song.  It was part of the Tanks portion of the Tate Modern - which is amazeballs and you should definitely go there.  I think that Light Music has closed up and moved out of the space, but we were lucky to catch it while we were there.  The projectors practically dared you not to walk in and interact with the light.  Luminous and irresistible. 

• The sequence about halfway through featuring two light tables in the room with white walls is made up of shots of an Alfredo Jaar piece called Lament of the Images.  He's looking at the way people can be so saturated with media images (and words) that they can be blinded by the excess: so many images flood ones view that one stops seeing the content of what is actually being shown.  That blindness is revealed in that installation (as I interpret it) by the light that floods the room as the light tables spread apart (the tables become a light source, illuminating the people, objects, and walls themselves, but the light itself ceases to be an object of attention), and conversely by the darkness that pervades when the tables close in together (the beams of light become focal, but the darkness literally prevents one from seeing around it).  Beautiful, simple, this piece had a powerful, magnetic draw, and I also enjoyed the lucky arrival of a school group when I went back into the room to grab these shots.

Also part of the Tanks was Suzanne Lacy's The Crystal Quilt.  My photographs don't remotely do justice to the complex power of that brilliantly feminist activist piece [which had the added interest, to me, of having originated in Minneapolis, a city (and a landscape) dear to my heart, woven into this contemporary art exhibit in London].  The video embedded in that link does a better job, but if you come across an exhibition of The Crystal Quilt anywhere, you really owe it to yourself to check it out.

And I can't sign off without mentioning the shots from the Churchill War Rooms - including the color-coded phones, his cabinet meeting room, and the map room complete with a caricature of Hitler penciled into the middle of the Atlantic.  Fascinating. 

And then undercutting any sort of heightened thoughts or reflections on the living memory of War in London, and how vastly it differs from a sense of war in New York, we have shots of the Sherlock Holmes pub which I took for my Sherlock-fan nephew, Mols getting ready for her kayak final test in her wet suit, and shots of our time in Shoreditch/High Street.  All of which was fantastic!

As for the music: why can't Rudie fail?  Just because.

Potential vs. Accomplishment?

Gotta admit I didn't see this coming.

In the wake of the announcement, on the other hand, this aspect of it is entirely unsurprising.

It's Giuliani Time

Ah yes, our beloved former mayor was in the news a bit last week, as he spent some time in New Hampshire working on the foundation of his candidacy. Not a bad idea: the early-primary Granite State is an important place to campaign. But then he goes ahead and says things like this:

"If a Democrat is elected president in 2008, America will be at risk for another terrorist attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001… Never ever again will this country ever be on defense waiting for (terrorists) to attack us if I have anything to say about it. And make no mistake, the Democrats want to put us back on defense!"

Oh Rudy, you're cracking me up! The only thing you left out was a shot about the whiff of pot and patchouli pouring out of their elitist Ivy League Mansions as those dirty peaceniks invite the terrorists in to plot America's downfall.

I think he may as well go straight to Orwell to find the phrase that expresses the Truth that every Republican Presidential Candidate seems to know:

'War is Peace.'

But you gotta hand it to the guy, don't you? Balls like that are hard to come by. It's interesting to me - he clearly was in a provocative mood, and the Dems definitely took the bait. The Democratic Party has been circulating petitions to get him to back off. And Clinton, Edwards and Obama all voiced objections. Mission accomplished for the Rude Man. On Sean Hannity's radio show, he said, "I was trying for a home run but I think I got at least a triple, meaning I have got the three leading Democratic candidates attacking me."

Ooooh - attacking! That's what's going on. Because what Giuliani was doing when he said that stuff about the Democrats sitting back and waiting for the planes to fly into their living rooms, well, that was just being friendly.

And speaking of our 'beloved' former mayor, perhaps this is a good moment to recall that on September 10, 2001, New Yorkers were ready to throw Giulani out on his ass.