Category: London

The RSC’s Antony and Cleopatra at the Barbican

GodDaughter One’s Mum and Dad are members of a theatre-going gang, who take it in turns to organise for them all to go to the theatrical performance, about every month or so. Tonight it was Antony and Cleopatra by the RSC, at the Barbican. But GodDaughter One’s Mum was otherwise engaged, helping out with a jewellery show done by GodDaughter One’s Sister, so I went to the Barbican instead.

As so often, when I really pay attention to a Shakespeare play (and if you are seeing it in a theatre there is not a lot else to be doing), I learned a great deal about it.

I did not catch every word. Much of the support acting, especially by the young men playing various Roman soldiers and messengers, was decidedly school-play-ish, to my old eyes and old ears. These brand-X guys simply did not fill the auditorium properly. Since we were at the back, we suffered. Nor did it help that I for one could not see their faces properly, from that far away. But Antony and Cleopatra were both pretty good, as was Enobarbus. But honestly, only the music came over loud and clear.

I will be investigating this play further on the screen. YouTube offers this, which looks like it could be pretty good. I quite like north American accents in Shakespeare, given that it probably sounded more like this originally than it sounded like modern Posh English.

As for DVDs, this and this both look promising. Also: cheap.

Back in the Barbican, Josette Simon as Cleopatra yanked the verse around a lot, but that all added to the impression of her being a force of nature. Antony, played by Peter Byrne, was a very prosaic figure by comparison. I especially like the line in this Guardian review about how “Simon is excellent in the closing passages suggesting that Cleopatra is living out a fantasy of an idealised Antony”. Yes. So, best of all might well be a DVD of this RSC production.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Christmas is coming

Indeed:

Photoed by me in Oxford Street this afternoon,

Like I said: perfunctory.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Busy

Yes it’s a busy time here at Chateau BMdotcom. I have a meeting here this evening, for which I must now prepare, but, preparations are not helped by the fact that the two biggest supermarkets in my vicinity, Tescos Warwick Way, and Sainsburys Wilton Road, are both now shut, so that they can rearrange themselves, refurbish themselves, in time for Christmas presumably. (And in order to take our minds off the fact that the prices of everything are now shooting upwards.)

This is bizarre. Couldn’t they collude to take it in turns to shut, rather than colluding (I assume) both to be shutting at the same time? I am too busy, doing such things as trying to think where I will be going instead to buy food for this evening, to be able to expand here upon this peculiar matter. Let’s just say it’s lucky for capitalism that I really like it. If I didn’t, this might have tipped me over the edge into full-on Bolshevism, at which point I might have become the straw that broke the camel of capitalism’s back.

After tonight’s meeting, I then have a succession of pre-Christmas socialisings fixed, for over the coming weekend and into next week. All very nice and everything, but a struggle to keep track of, and to fit other necessary things around. Which is why postings here have been a bit perfunctory of late, and why that may continue for a few more days.

Or, it may not. Because actually, the urge to blog is, for me, hard to estimate the strength of beforehand. Often, I think, the feeling I feel when busy that there are Things I Must Do, causes me then to avoid doing these Things by instead … blogging.

Right now, for instance, I am supposed to be preparing for this evening. But instead …

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Leadenhall Market

Yesterday I showed a photo that I actually took yesterday, rather than last year or last decade. And today I’m doing the same. I’m showing you another photo that I took yesterday:

That’s the inside of the domed roof in the middle of Leadenhall Market in the City of London. This is another of those photos which is a lot easier to take if you have a twiddly screen, such as I always now have.

Here is the next photo I took, to show you which place I mean:

To me, one of the odder things about Leadenhall Market is that all the enterprises plying their trade in it would seem to be obliged by the house rules to proclaim their names in the exact same style and size of lettering. This is not what you get in most shopping centres, which is what this place basically is. But, fair enough: their gaff, their rules. And although in one sense this is uniformity gone a bit mad, in another sense it is variety, because this is not something you see very often.

It is clearly a recent thing, and Wikipedia confirms this:

Between 1990 and 1991 the market received a dramatic redecoration which transformed its appearance, enhancing its architectural character and detail. The redecoration scheme received a special mention in the Civic Trust Awards in 1994.

Ah yes. Commercial, you understand, but not too commercial. The subtle business of not being too businesslike.

I passed through this place on my way to Monument tube, having been wandering towards the City and its Big Things from the Bethnal Green area, enjoying the last daylight of a very fine yesterday. Of which maybe more here later, and of which maybe not more here later. (This blog is also not very businesslike.)

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

EXCLUSIVE IT LIAN LOUNGE, DIN G & BEDROOM FUR ITURE

It’s been a while since there’s been any horizontality here. (That isn’t the most recent piece of horizontality here, just one that I happen especially to like.) So, allow me now to correct this, thus:

Click to get the bigger original.

It’s a shop just off Lea Bridge Road, opposite the station. Photoed by me almost exactly one year ago.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Cranes and horses

Indeed:

Tilbury, September 2013. That’s what a BMdotcom wildlife photo should be. Creatures, yes, but also cranes.

At around that time, I made a series of trips out to London Gateway, London’s new container port, which is just downstream from Tilbury. Here‘s a recent report of how London Gateway is doing, which also has further news about animals in the area:

The £1.5bn construction saw a staggering 350,000 animals moved off site into new habitats. At one stage DP World’s office building on the site homed tanks of great crested newts before they were moved into newly created ponds.

However, the horses in the above photo were not disturbed, because they were just outside Tilbury. London Gateway is further down river. It was only several hours later that day that I set eyes on those cranes, from a great distance. Despite the gloomy weather, it was a great day. The photos bring it all back.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Fewer Big Things then

Busy day. Busy evening. So just a couple of quota photos, both taken a little under ten years ago, just before Christmas 2007.

First, Guys Hospital, looking as good as it ever could:

At first, all I was thinking was: artistic impression. But it also has interesting info in it. No Shard. Which got me noticing another, at the time very commonplace photo, of the Gherkin. Also interesting info in it. No nearby Big Things. There it stands, in splendid isolation.

I also photoed lots of photoers that day, and have so far showed you only some of them (LINK TO THE OLD BLOG). There are several more good photoer photos deserving of resuscitation, all with impeccably concealed faces, but these will have to wait.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A different sort of Remembrance photo

I took this photo out in the Epping region, while walking about there with a friend, in the autumn of 2015. And I believe that even when I took it, it seemed like a modern take on Remembrance Sunday and all that. Death in a major war, although itself no doubt often a very solitary experience, is experienced by the rest of us, especially as events like World War One recede into history, as a vast collective, shared, catastrophe. It’s the scale of the death, the sheer numbers, that hits home. And much poppy imagery reflects this, for instance in the form of all those poppies that were recently planted around the Tower of London.

So this poppy photo perhaps suggests the individuality and isolation of military death, when fighting on behalf of a country like ours, now. Your son dies. But nobody else for miles around is suffering in the same way. You’re on your own.

The yellow of the surrounding flowers suggests cowardice, which I dare say is how some bereaved people feel about their loss: that everyone else is scared to get stuck in. But there the metaphor probably breaks down. I certainly think that the people of Britain would be more than ready in the future to fight another big war, if they thought it made sense.

But it was a striking sight, nevertheless.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The face of a seagull

I’m not much of a wildlife photoer, if only because others are so very enthusiastic about it. Nature beautiful. (Hu)Man-made world ugly. Those are the cliches, and bollocks to them. I prefer to celebrate, with my photoing, the human-made world, often by noticing how “natural” (that is non-centrally-dictated) that human-made world so often is, especially in a complicated place like London.

But I do keep trying to photo non-human creatures in case I get lucky, and about once every other blue moon, I do get a non-human photo that strikes me as worth showing here.

So, for instance, earlier this year I was photoing Big Things with a seagull in front of them, mostly to illustrate how recognisable these Big Things are, despite being out of focus. Recognisable to me anyway. Thus:

On the left, a seagull lined up with the Spraycan. On the right, the same seagull lined up with the Millbank Tower. But then, when I lined the seagull up in front of Big Ben, I got this, which strikes me as, you know, quite good:

Click on that to get my original photo, with blurry Big Ben behind being clearly recognisable. But here is a case where the photo I photoed of the actual creature seemed more interesting than the Big Thing. Because this seagull happened to be pointing its face straight at me, I got a view of a seagull face that I for one don’t regularly see. The beak, because pointing straight at me, is taken out of the picture, and the head that remains looks more like that of some kind of fluffy baby seal or some such thing. But with bird legs. Scroll up so that you only see the head, and it hardly looks seagullish at all.

I was going to add a photo of a squirrel to this posting. I even checked that I was spelling squirrel right. But this squirrel photo, which I took about two minutes before taking the above seagull photos, although quite nice, had no architecture in the background. It was just a squirrel, in a tree.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The title and the blurb for a talk I’m doing in January

Yes, as I often do, I am doing the first 6/20 talk of the year, in this case of the year 2018, for Christian Michel. He calls them 6/20 because, with only rare deviations, they happen on the 6th and the 20th of each month. My talk will be on the January 6th.

At the meeting on the 6th of this month, Christian asked me to send him something in writing about the talk I would be giving, and to finalise its title. Here is what I just sent him:

“The causes we identify and the causes we identify with”

My background is not philosophy; it is political disputation. My talk will not be an exhaustive philosophical explication of the nature of causes and of causation; rather will my talk be about how causal arguments are deployed by those arguing about politics, in particular by those of us with highly developed ideological prejudices.

It will be about how such persons often especially like a “root cause”, even though causes typically deploy themselves in teams rather than in isolation.

It will be about how the causes of events – of good events and of bad events – which we ideologues choose to pick out, from the hubbub of multiple causes, and celebrate or denounce are choices which are conditioned by our general ideological prejudices.

Among other things, I expect to be comparing ideological arguments with the arguments that happen within failing marriages.

This is more in the nature of a memo-to-self, to get me going on the necessary preparation, than it is an advert. But if you want to attend this or any other of these meetings but don’t know how, get in touch.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog