London

Stanley Kubrick at the Design Museum

Being the adventures of a ~~young~~ man whose principal interests are films, hoarding and camera lenses.

Stanley Kubrick was a hoarder of the kind that gets you onto a TV show along the lines of Trapped under My Receipts is my initial impression when I walked into the Design Museum’s summer blockbuster exhibition of his work. And unlike people that shove the plastic-bag equivalent of a Russian doll under the sink, this is stuff that allows admirers to see how his mind worked and how he made his masterpieces. In 2007, the Kubrick estate gifted his archives to University of the Arts London, and much of the material on show comes from this collection, which has been on a world tour for years.

What this exhibitions shows is a level of detail to his work and an explosion of creativity that is remarkable to behold, from his early days of his career as a photographer up to the very end. The pieces on display tell a story of a man obsessed with research and a perfectionist of the highest order. This exhibition gives as much space as is possible to every film, but it’s such a rich archive and such a strong collection of film history that you’ll find bottlenecks wherever a particularly interesting artefact lies.

Kubrick’s passion for research is shown in the pre-production for Napoleon, a film that has never been made. There is a library of books that Kubrick collected on the man, index cards covering every day of his life as well as costumes and a draft script. Seeing the demanding shooting schedule would be enough to give anyone a migraine, but Kubrick had to go one further and arrange for 10,000 soldiers from the Romanian army to be on hand for the shoot. That’s a cluster headache right there.

There is brilliant pre-production on show for Eyes Wide Shut where Kubrick and his team scouted locations to make his own version of New York in London; photos of Commercial Road are stitched together to create a panorama of London to help Kubrick figure out what he could use. It’s fascinating enough as a snapshot of the capital over twenty years ago. Another item was a map of Manhattan with London street names written over the top. All of this, plus elaborate sets made in Pinewood, are the lengths Kubrick would go to so he could pop home at night after a long day’s shooting and to avoid getting on an aeroplane.

There is correspondence between Kubrick and colleagues which demonstrated his level of control over every aspect of his work. Seeing the designs that Saul Bass created for The Shining was exciting; Bass enthusiastically writing about the latest designs and how one in particular stood out and had the office abuzz. That design was the one we all know – the strange horrified baby inside a giant letter T. Other options were far less memorable and on one of them, a giant hand in the snow with Danny’s tricycle in it, Kubrick wrote “hand and bike are too irrelevant.”

Other gems of correspondence show that Kubrick upset Christians on a regular basis (one was upset with A Clockwork Orange but took no issue with Rosemary’s Baby) and good, honest Americans who were outraged by Dr Strangelove, not to mention Lolita. In some instances, we saw what Kubrick wrote back to them and he was courteous but also slightly bemused as to the concerns of these people. There was something delicious in his reply to an angry letter about Lolita, describing it as a film that had already been shot, as if they’d wasted a stamp on their outrage. A letter from Ireland announcing yet another ban argued that soon, in Dublin, a cinema may be able to screen his work and that it would be worth the wait to have it shown there. The only thing missing was a Father-Ted style “down with this sort of thing” photo with original placards.

Kubrick was interested in pushing technology wherever possible – for Barry Lyndon, he used a lens designed for space exploration to enable him to film using just candle light and had to use candles that burned rapidly but very brightly. They sucked oxygen out of the room, perhaps leaving the actors close to asphyxiation but the end result is a stunning film that merits having an ambulance at the ready. 2001: A Space Odyssey had some incredible tricks up its sleeve that would now be made digitally including front projection of the scenes set in Africa, the stargate scene which used slit scan technology and the gravity on the space station made using what looks like a hamster wheel. The technical complexities of this film is covered in enough detail to keep geeks happy but not so much that your mind explodes.

As I moved into the section of the display about The Shining, there were considerable shivers up my spine when I saw some of the props; Danny’s Apollo 11 jumper especially got to me. It’s so tiny, and such an apt thing for a vulnerable boy to be wearing while his Dad is on the rampage in a hellish hotel. Close by were the sheets of paper that Jack wrote his epic novel on with country-specific versions of “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” It’s “Never put off until tomorrow what can be done today” in German and in Italian it’s “The morning has gold in its mouth.” Yet again, this attention to detail marks Kubrick out as something different and other images even show his desire for the snow on the ground to look just the way he wanted, not too ploughed and not too wild. By the end of the exhibition, I realised that this is the first large-scale exhibition I have seen on a movie director and I hope there are more to come. But for now, this is as good a starting place as any other and it’s an exhibition in love with Kubrick’s film as well as his mind.

Walthamstow Wetlands

“It’s a pleasant day, I’m 35, what else am I supposed to do?”

Inaccessible to all but fisherfolk for 150 years, Walthamstow Wetlands has finally opened to some fanfare and much quacking after £8m of improvements. My first view of this enormous new open space, spanning 211 hectares, is via the Maynard Entrance on Forest Road, a ten-minute walk from Blackhorse Road tube station. This entrance gives you access to the northern reservoirs which are some of the largest and least picturesque on the site. Lockwood Reservoir is a great expanse of water, which you climb an embankment to get to. Up top, you can see clear views for miles and walking around the perimeter of this would take at least twenty minutes or so. To the south you can spot the clusters of skyscrapers at Canary Wharf as well as the city, giving a perspective on the landscape of London as much more than just urban sprawl. As an internationally important site for birds, I expected to see more but in attendance were swans, coots and moorhens in abundance as well as ubiquitous gulls and a few herons.

The landscape undergoes something of a transformation once you cross Forest road and into the sites’ main entrance. Here you can walk to the renovated Engine House which just a few years back was a partially derelict building. Now it’s a stunning visitor centre with a brand new 24-metre tower housing 54 swift nest boxes as well as space for bats and a café serving your standard “how much?!” cups of coffee and snacks. That said, the Wetlands is free to visit and is open 7 days a week so I’ve no business complaining and they don’t have security strip-searching for contraband snacks.

The Engine House

The central reservoirs really show off the beauty of the site, with two hectares of new reedbeds planted which helps encourage lots of wildlife playing hide and seek. In making the site accessible to visitors, many tiny jetties have been installed to sit on, stand on and fish from. It’s easy to get lost amongst the foliage and listen out for the bird song alongside the occasional whine of a police siren. If you are after genuine serenity, you’ll need reminding that the site is close to Tottenham, on the edges of Walthamstow and still very much in an industrial area of London. Richmond Park it ain’t, but there’s something enchanting in the Wetlands where nature abounds amid pylons and chimneys puffing out the pollution that is making our air toxic. This is a surprisingly peaceful patch of London though, especially when you experience the full size of the site.

Pylons and birds

Aside from the obvious birds I can recognise, don’t ask me what specific brand of bird you’ll spot because that’s where I fall down. When I was at uni in Exeter, I regularly went to areas laden with fowl and lived with a naturalist who knew her birds. All that knowledge is now lost to time but the Wetlands may yet bring some of it back. When I thought “bird over there with long beak” was a cormorant, I was entirely wrong. As a 35 year-old, it’s entirely appropriate to learn about birds, especially when a nationally recognised reserve has just opened on my doorstep. It’s not like I’m going to go clubbing.

So, the wetlands. It lives up to its name, being extravagantly wet. And it being east London, there’s an Andrea Arnold-esque beauty in how industrial lands combine with nature to create something surprisingly peaceful. Another win for Walthamstow and a marvellous new amenity for the people.

Tate Modern – Switch House

The ziggurat

On a visit to Tate Modern a few years ago, my mum reeled out the line that she could make the art on display in front of her. I recall it being some sort of dystopian metalwork thing. My response was what you’d expect from a loving son… “Well, you haven’t made it and you’re not a famous artist so…” which ended that conversation. Without a doubt, art galleries can be difficult places, where the art can seem distant, elitist even. But when they succeed, galleries can become meeting places for people, places to wander about and relax in a stimulating environment. And don’t get me started on the bookshop at Tate Modern.

Tate Modern has redefined the idea of what a modern art gallery can be, and with 5.2 million visitors in its first year, Tate Modern showed there was an intense appetite for a new space for art. Even in 2015, it remains a blockbuster of an attraction, the fifth most visited attraction of its kind in the UK, with 4.7 million visitors.

Tate Tanks

A blockbuster it may be, but when I first saw the designs for the Tate Modern extension, I had to suppress a scream, because on paper it just looked a mess hurled up with no thought to the surrounding environment. With time I have come to love the new bold statement. Starting with the outside, the ziggurat shape is not some fevered dream of the architects as much as it a realistic use of the space available; there are still turbines generating electricity within the old power station and over-priced, under-nice flats have sprung up around the Tate Modern, making the new structure seem like “like a defensive watchtower” in the words of Oliver Wainwright. Unusually, the new structure is built of brick, 336,000 of them, demoting glass to mere strips slashing the buildings surface, yet allowing the interior to feel bright and spacious, which is an impressive feat.

The bright interior is filled with exciting spaces

Heading into The Tanks, an underground cavern where oil used to be stored, there is a genuine sense of excitement at what has been accomplished. Being given the gift of grit and industry, the architects have finished the space off as rough-hewn as imaginable. Above one doorway is a set of concrete steps, leading nowhere. The walls are uneven and the concrete seems to have retained scars from its former use, dank stains are everywhere. The Tanks are said to be the world’s first permanent space for video installation and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Primitive is nine videos set in Thailand. The videos are not seemingly in order and all play over each other, creating an uneasy viewing experience made somewhat surreal by cushions strewn across the gallery floor. People lay down, some looking up at the ceiling, others switching position to see what’s happening on another screen. Couples are inter-twined and a sense of calm pervades.

Cushions and videos inside the Tanks

Robert Morris Untitled

There’s also a massive room filled with interactive art, my favourite being Robert Morris’ Untitled, a series of glass cubes that reflect the room around you, perfect for photography.

The grand staircase leading up to the new floors is reminiscent of Tate Britain’s new staircase. Where Britain’s staircase is a marble wonder with intricate art deco detailing, Modern’s staircase is of gorgeous twisting concrete. You are led up past one of the endless, excellent, shops to the new collections on levels 2-4 where you can appreciate just how much new space there is. I was surprised to see works that were so immersive; Ricardo Basbaum’s Capsules were little nap stations but one couple also took it upon themselves to start spooning, which is one interpretation of the artist’s intention. But also, they could just not.

Capsules

Staircase of dreams

What is particularly impressive about the new levels is that the rooms are so vast and open as well as lit from above, so any future re-hangs can take place with maximum flexibility. Coming across a pile of bricks on the floor, I was struck by my mum’s argument that she could have made the art. Carl Andre’s work, not called A pile of bricks, but Equivalent VIII was controversial when the gutter press got involved, but here it is displayed again, looking like a pile of bricks. Is it art? I guess if someone in art calls it art, it is art.

Chicken Feet

On Level 3, we encounter a load of Chicken Feet by Meschac Gaba, which I must have loved because I took a photo of the artist’s details as well as the picture of the feet. Perhaps I just enjoyed the colour. But if my tone suggests I am losing interest in the art, it’s just down to fatigue. I always get gallery fatigue about 90 minutes into my excursions. With that in mind, it’s straight up to Level 10 for the 360-degree viewing platform. A great new addition to every Londoner’s favourite past-time of looking out over the city, the viewing platform offers outstanding views of St Paul’s, the existing Tate Modern tower and excitingly, right into the glossy flats opposite. I spot a man looking dolefully at a bucket in the sharp corner of his living room. He has become art, and is paying a fortune for it. Luckily for the rest of us, visiting the Tate is free and the new extension is a great new addition to London’s cultural life.

Man and Bucket

View from the top

March for Europe

If I had followed through on my plan to write a “Brexit diary” chronicling the tragedy that has befallen the UK and civilisation, I would have become pretty exhausted pretty fast. In meteorological terms, a year’s worth of news fell in a week and the showers continue over a fortnight later. We are sodden. The diary would probably look a little like this:

Thursday 23rd June: I hope this weather doesn’t put people off! Nigel Farage is roaring away on the telly about remain voters being “soft” because he’s such a hard boy – he even went to fee-paying schools, so hard, so in touch with everyone. I bet Gordon brown will be the one to save us yet again. Oh, Gibraltar! Oh, Sunderland, you’ve crossed me. I will never visit you. I never was going to anyway.

Friday 24th June: ….. Ohmygodwhatjusthappened?

Queen’s Birthday flags meet the EU flags

And since that exceptional unspooling of everything that has made Britain the country people thought it was; reliable, a safe pair of hands, good in a disaster, that’s all gone out the window. In its place, we’ve seemingly become a shrieking shack of racist bile, of protectionism, of people quite openly saying their lives were shit, so economic meltdown wouldn’t exactly affect them, of a country almost too neatly split along lines of being comfortably off and those unhappy with their lot.

Brett is the result of a surgeon telling the patient to do all that ails him, before the sober realisation that in the end, something’s going to go wrong. As the surgeon’s scalpel cuts into the patient, it turns out the tumour isn’t nearly as small as imagined. The tumour has spread everywhere. The surgeon, not liking the result of his goading, runs and leaves the split-open patient to a whole bunch of devious surgeons who not liking anything approaching hard work, also run away.

There’s something bad on the table, the tumour is a mess and a sticking plaster isn’t going to fix anything. That’s Brexit. And looking around, the patient realises it has to heal itself, cos nobody else is coming to the rescue.

Parliament Square

Unexpectly, I am sanguine about Brexit. Obviously, it is a gross act of self-sabotage, bought on by a Prime Minister too obsessed with power for his own good. In fact, Prime Minister’s are famous for going mad at some point in their career. It’s around the sixth year of power. Blair took us to war for his sixth year madness. On madness, Cameron said “I’m not saying all prime ministers necessarily definitely go mad or even go mad at the same rate.” Brexit is Cameron’s madness in full throttle; his entire plan was to rescue the economy, and his last roll of the dice led to the most damaging shock to the economy in my life. How much wiped off the world stock market in the first few days after Brexit? That’s £2,000,000,000,000.

Dogs like the EU

There are positives, and they shine out like a diamond in a cow pat. There was the peaceful, almost-joyous March for Europe which I went to on the 2nd July, along with up to 50,000 other people. The rally seemed deadly quiet at the Hyde Park Hilton, but as we slowly weaved our way towards Parliament square, you could sense momentum building up as well as the genuine feeling that we could add something to the national debate. I am not naive enough to think we’d get to Parliament and the vote would be overturned, but the march was offering positive, peaceful protesting that was something akin to a mass counselling session after the shocking bereavement of the Brexit vote. Perhaps like me, people were getting out and stating their feelings for the first time ever, or at least since the Iraq war. It is the easiest thing to tweet a picture of a protest you are not at, but to get out and march is something different altogether.

It is an act of positivity in a country that has felt like an ugly place to be. Odd then that London positively glistened as we marched towards Parliament, knowing people were launching racist attacks on other because the national mood seemed to give this despicable behaviour a hall pass.

The gorgeous St Jame’s Palace

Being able to traverse London’s roads in a convoy of people gave me a chance to see at close quarters how beautiful the city is. London will always be a wonderful place to walk around and here we were, the 48%, the metropolitan elite, walking down Piccadilly, St Jame’s Street and onto Pall Mall. It makes sense to guide people down the less populated routes of central London on a Saturday, but if people in the country felt ignored and left out, this route is only going to bring back the point that the country is in them-and-us mode.

Central Methodist Hall

But I mentioned positives, and there are more. Austerity is now being talked down as something a bit daft, after Osborne unleashed his budget-apocalypse, we don’t have to worry about Boris Johnson or stabber Gove as Prime Minister’s, there may well be attempts to engage the vast swathes of the populace who feel forgotten and, oh, Nigel Farage might not be on the telly with his scabby populism. We’ll deal with Andrea Leadsom in time – the UK might have voted for self-destruction, but we certainly didn’t vote for her type.

And above all else, London remains a tolerant, beautiful city full of joy. It might be a bubble, but it’s one I am happy not to pop.

Green Park nap time

London is beautiful even in the apocalypse

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