Liverpool

My recent acquisition of a book entitled "Art Galleries of the World" has stimulated me to go further afield in order to tick a few more off. Liverpool being not too long a trainride away offered three more ticks in the book (if they're not in the book, they're not getting visited) and therefore warranted a visit. Kieran lived there for 2 years and was therefore an appropriate guide. We embarked on a sunny Friday afternoon.

After a brief bombthreat-related delay at Euston, with which K was somewhat bemused,



we were on our way, next stop: European Capital of Culture 2008.

Checked in to our hotel, we headed out to town, joined by a fellow backpacker, from Perth of all places, called Michael. After a few warm-up rounds with the assorted hordes of revellers, most of whom appeared to be on stag or hen nights, we headed to the waterfront in search of a slightly more discerning crowd.

The redeveloped waterfront is very nice: maintaining some of the old world charm of Liverpool's mercantile and industrial heritage, without all the pollution and filth.

The legendary superclub Cream closed its weekly event at Liverpool's Nation nightclub in 2002 (for debatable reasons, mainly associated with the decline of weekly "superclub" nights in favour of special event, tours and festivals); the Cream brand is still massive and utilised by its owners to promote festivals, clubnights, albums etc worldwide. There is now a bar at Albert Dock called BabyCream that "continues the legacy", i.e. maintains steady profit stream... Good fun despite my corporate cynicism.

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Up bright'n'early, and it was a beautiful day.

Moseyed by the Mersey;

visited Tate Liverpool (another crass attempt to extend profitability by exploiting a recognised brand :) - see discussion of cream above) - good exhibitions of Henry Moore and Robert Raschenberg though, and inn-ter-rest-ing exhib of Bruce Nauman.

This impressive Art Deco construction is in fact a chimney vent for the tunnel under the Mersey.

Waterside icons: the Liver birds on top of the Royal Liver Building and a statue outside the Port of Liverpool building.

Met some cool locals whilst waiting an inordinate time for our publunch.

I pity the fool who doesn't want to come to Reflex nightclub on their hens or bucks night after drinking 44 Seven Sins-themed novelty shots at the nearest funpub.

Albert Dock very pleasantly refurbished.

Umm, what can i say? The guy in the wheelchair obviously did something to offend somebody - and was sent to sleep with the muddy-mudskippers.

Classy name for a dance event. Where do i get tickets?

Out on the town (at Babycream again, as i recall)

I doubt that they party this hard, even at Scouse Nation...

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Up at a civilised hour, courtesy of strange roomfellow at hostel who muttered continually to us and later himself (we could hear him through the bathroom door) "Breakfast til 9:30, and off to see the Town Hall and Concert Theatre

Walker Gallery - fab collection, especially of PreRaph and other victorian era painting.

Trained it out to Port Sunlight (one of the world's first "manufactured" towns, built by Lord Lever, who started a soap company (Sunlight Soap) which was the progenitor of Unilever, to house his employees). He built the Gallery as a memorial to his wife; his employees subsequently paid tribute to his enlightened industrial relations practices by erecting a memorial to him nearby.

The gallery was really good: big range of stuff, with highlights being topnotch Burn-Jones works.

This is the Superlambanana, a recent addition to the cityscape, courtesy of Japanese sculptor Taro Chiezo. There will no doubt be more public art installations as the city takes it crown as European Capital of Culture "Make Art Great in 08!"; it will be interesting to see how things develop over that time.

Sated, we headed back Sunday arvo; all the traipsing round art museums had finally put a smile on Kieran's face (that, or the fact that it was over...)

I spend my whole life in London

My metropolophilic side is taking over: apart from the obligatory office time during the week (those sudokus don't solve themselves!) and a few trips to the gym for gun-sculpting, most of my life seems to be spent in the train to and from Olde London Towne. A general overview & certain highlights follow.

Trip to East End to MJs new digs:

Dinner in Hoxton. Kieran admits defeat at the hands of his fish.

Post dinner boogying (all in the one entertainment complex - mighty convenient!)

Taxi discourtesies

Bar fun in Battersea

Sprang up for a bit of Borough markets, and a trip to the London dungeon... funny, but probably not worth the effort, to be quite honest.

Seeking cultural redemption, went to Tate Modern to drink wine and coffee on the balcony for 90 minutes and look at paintings for 15.

Snuck back to Cambridge and was dragged kicking and screaming to the Pickerel and so on and so forth...

Had a bit of an incident on my bicycle the following week:

And here we are the next day, where we can see some fine scab formation and an increased swelling of the upper lip, trout-pout style.

Not one to be held back ny a few injuries, met up with Dad and Amanda in South Ken the next weekend. Tate Modern with Dad - Albers & Moholy-Nagy exhibition again.

Moseyed past Hanover Square, as featured in "Mr Norrell and Johnathan Strange",

on way to drinks with KnA, for their friend Nishali's birthday - it was a dress-up and I went as Charlie Chaplin.

British Museum to see Rosetta Stone, Mexican carvings, marbles, mummies, etc

Surrealism exhibition at Hayward Gallery focussed around the publishing efforts of one Georges Bataille. Then to dinner with KnA - a bloody impressive bangers'n'mash, might i add.

Next weekend, dinner with Dad and Amanda in SK, out for drinx with Ant to celebrate his end-of-work in Pimlico. Modernism exhibition at V&A museum - very very good exhibition! Saw Blue Man Group. Out to Garlic and Shots in Soho. Run round Kensington Gardens next morning. Visit to Queen's Gallery.

Next trip down: Saw Hybrid DJ with KnA at Inigo.

Next trip down: Talk at Chicago GSB, then dinner with Tam and Ben.

Next trip down: Job interview & Constable exhibition at Tate Britain

Next trip down, some weeks later:Dinner with Tam & Ben

then Summer Exhibition at Royal Academy

Also saw Modigliani exhibition. Here's the amazing Damien Hirst sculpture in the forecourt:

Pierre Huyghe and Kandinsky exhibitions at Tate Mod with MJ. (I got busted for taking this shot...)

Managed to sprain my ankle on Piccadilly near the RA (see, art appreciation is an extreme sport) and thus spent entire next day lolling on MJs couch. My one amusement in convalescence was seeing Kieran mid-haircut (sorry K - i just had to post this) - suffice to say he looked much better once the job was finished.

Quick trip down for job interview & visit to Museum of London - very interesting history of the city with lots and lots of maps.

Went down the next weekend with Cousin Emma and her boyfriend Ben.

Here they express their professional aspirations of one day performing at Wigmore Hall:

Wallace collection for Rococo art and, more importantly, dress-ups:

Lunch at Hyde Park

Outside Buckingham Palace

Reading from the scriptures of Secret London on Cleopatra's Needle:

Tower of London:
Tower Bridge

As if that wasn't enough, we also squeezed in a beer at Bankside, a visit to the Tate Modern, dinner at Southbank, and not one but two bottles of wine on the train back to Cam. After all that busy-ness, we needed to wind down with a quiet drink in a quiet bar,

followed by a light supper.

Two weeks later: summer exhib at RA again, Constable at Tate Britain again, Kandinsky at Tate Modern again, Kokoschka at Courtald Institute and "Rebels and Martyrs" at National Gallery. I won't bore you with jpgs of paintings - you can look them up on relevant websites if you're really keen.

So, in conclusion, a lot of trips to London, a lot of art exhibitions, a fair bit of carousing.

Los Tigres en Espana

This weekend was prophetically laid out by Senor Clowntana in his invitational email in March. Photos and comments attest to the uncanny accuracy of his original predictions (which are italicised).


Gentlemen,

A mission has fallen upon you: conquering the north of Spain in a 48 hour escapade. I have mentioned it to you four at some point or another that we could make a brief incursion into Spain. The attacking plan is pretty hardcoreand very little sleeping will be involved. Baseline is:

Friday: we arrive at Vitoria at 4ish. A friend of mine is reopening a gastronomic society that night in Pamplona, you can imagine what this will entail. Before dinner we can have a wander around Vitoria and then drive to Pamplona with a friend or go straight to Pamplona. Accommodation for that night is unsorted, which means we’ll sleep wherever we can.

Check-in at Stansted.

A welcome to Spain by one of it's most upstanding and accomplished ambassadors.

Welcome to sunny spain.

The party team.

Museo de Bellas Artes, Vitoria. Saw some very nice Goya etchings there as well as some good local paintings.


Geddit?? Museum of Arms!

Interesting approach to drying one's washing.

Town square, Vittoria-Gasteiz.


Pintxos.

Dinner, Pamplona.


Partaking in the local traditions...


Tigers.


Making lots of new friends - this is shortly before I reviewed my drinking levels (and my dinner hahaha) in the bathroom.

Saturday: get to San Sebastian early and see the town. It’s beautifuland we’ll go for proper tapas and a bit of beach if it’s sunny. That night accommodation is sorted at a couple of friends’ dwellings and if we’re not feeling destroyed from the previous night I think we should experience a typical cider restaurant and local taverns. There is also a famous outdoor museum by Chillida which you might want to visit and several cultural sites with gorgeous views.

Well we did get to SS pretty early after a curious series of events involving, amongst other things, a sausage, a nonexistent plate of Poulpe a la Galicia, some local constabulary and a liberal approach to seatbelt usage. Anyway, we got there and that's the main thing.

Out and about in SS.

Funiculare.

View over San Sebastian harbour.

Coooool rock formation!

Chillida sculptures.

Pondering the art, as I like to do from time to time.

Baroque church

Pintxos bar #1

Beach at night

Getting our feet wet as the wave came in.

Contestants, Bachelor of the Year, Regional finals, San Sebastian.

Bar #3.

Bar #4.



Some poor innocent fitties who happened to grab the sordid attentions of Ben and Stas... and my camera.
Hmmm, not quite so spectacular. The highlights are near my chin.

Iggy dancing like nobody's watching.

Nightclub (establishment #6 - arrival time 4:15 am; spain rocks so much more than england).

Sunday: if we have time we can finish seeing a few bits of San Sebastian or just catch a bus straight to Bilbao. I don’t know that city very well, but we can walk around the main parts and visit the Guggenheim – cultural icon of our time, according to Matt. Then head to the airport and die…

Even after our big night, we were up at the crack of dawn to make the most of our last day in Spain.

Time for a bit of breakfast - why not enjoy it at a roadside cafe, or just on the side of the road, in the gutter.

This is one good bocadillos.

Ready to depart San Sebastian.

Navigational deliberations in Bilbao.

The Guggenheim!

Jeff Koons 'Puppy'

Senor Tigre is excited!

Bounding down the stairs with art-inspired joy and enthusiasm.
The Russia! exhibition was really good. We made it to the airport on time and, despite them being significantly larger than the handluggage limit, didn't have to check our livers into the hold. Bit of pintxos, bit of art, bit of history, bit of culture, bit of bread, bit of sauce: all in all a rocking weekend!

London XV

Kylie and Anthony's housewarming drew me Londonward once again and, never one to pass up an opportunity, I got out and about. First stop photographers gallery,

moseyed past concert on at Trafalgar Square,

strolled along the Victoria Embankment

then to Hermitage Rooms to see exhibition of Byzantine art, thesis being that the Byzantines carried the classical tradition through the otherwise dark ages while the rest of Europe descended into pagansim, looting and chaos. Went to Tate Modern to see Albers and Moholy-Nagy exhibition.

It was fascinating - they both had such a huge influence on modernism, and everything that that has entailed and affected, especially design and layout of things like ads, posters, furniture, appliances, logos etc.

Headed to KnAs for their "H is for Housewarming" party. I went as Hermes

It was a good theme that managed to lure out a harpy, horny housewife, Hugh Hefner, the Hulk, hula girl, a ho, some hippies and Hannah (Daryl, from Kill Bill 2 - cryptic...) - good work team!

Even the dude at the convenience store got into it, offering his Hand.

Woke feeling undeservedly OK, brekky w MJ then walked through Battersea and along Thames. Went to Gothic nightmares exhibition again at Tate Britain twice (already given my two cents worth on that one...). Stopped at Audley End house on the way home. Situated on the Cam, upriver from the bridge, it used to be a royal palace and has been an ancestral home of the Audleys, Suffolks, Braybrookes since it was first built in the 1600s.

The gardens were designed by Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, so nicknamed due to his habit of telling clients that their gardens had "great capabilities" - an inspiration to gardeners, real-estate agents and advertising copywrighters the world over. His approach involved "the utmost care to give the impression of a romantic natural scene. Everything was meticulously contrived to give a sense of informality, of natural beauty, though of course nothing in the garden was natural at all." One could cynical but it does look good.

All very bucolic and historic. Interestingly, the Temple of Concord, on the hill overlooking the house and gardens was built to celebrate George III's recovery from his first attack of insanity. It was recently discovered that his madness stemmed from porphyria, triggered late in his life by high arsenic concentrations in his blood. Of further interest is the fact that he started the Royal Academy which I visited in the last installment of my blog. What fascinating turns my life takes...

Back in Britain

Having recovered amazingly quickly from the flights back, I threw myself with gusto back into life in Cambridge. My officemate, Victoria's birthday was that night, so for a present we got her a book, "Freakonomics" by Stephen Levitt (he has a cool blog), which i read that afternoon to make sure it was OK. It was. The party was a corker too.


Went to London next day to have a quick look at London marathon, catch up with MJ & go to the Royal Academy,

to see the Jacob Ruisdael exhibition. Which was excellent. He was a really seminal painter of landscapes, who paved the way for the Constables, Corots and Monets who fully explored the possibilities of the genre.

Japan & Australia & Japan

It turned out, when booking a flight to Australia, that the best deal i could get involved flying via Japan.

Arriving at Kansai, I had a few hours between flights & managed to get out of customs giving me an afternoon in Japan that I hadn't really been expecting - quite a surreal inclusion in the journey!

It wasn't worth travelling all the way into Osaka in the time I had so I trained it to a town called Kishiwada where I was told I could see a castle. Moseyed around checking out the town and port areas,

It was cherry blossom season.

They're pretty big on cutesy imagery in the pokemon, hello kitty style. Even the rubbish is cutesy.

Kishiwada Castle was really cool.

It was built in 1334 by Wada, one of Masashige Kusunoki's clan, and was the base for Nobukatsu Okabe, whose regime lasted for 13 generations until the Meiji era.

It was also known as Ibuseyama-Chikiri castle for its alleged resemblance to a chikiri, a tool used to warp wind.
The original castle was burnt down in the 1800s and a smaller version rebuilt on the same site, though i guess the moat and island structure is original.
There was a cherry blossom festival on with food stalls and lanterns and whatnot, which was cool to wander around.

Lots of people gather in the evenings to enjoy the cherry blossoms and have a meal together.

Had some amazing grilled molluscs - very tasty and tender!

I was pretty whacked after staying up during my flight redoing all the algebra from our paper so i had a few moments quiet repose by the moat before going forth on my mission to buy some beer from a vending machine, one of the hallmarks of Japan's advanced civilisation.

I couldn't find any beer vending machines, though there were plenty selling cigarettes and some selling Bubble Man!,

but thankfully the supermarket was open, so i could trundle out the few remaining skerricks of my five hard years of Nihongo studies. Wakaramishita ka? Iie. Shitsurei shimashita.

Fortunately the international language of commerce is easier to participate in.

Went for a bit more of a stroll, checked out a temple,

and zipped back to airport.

A litre of Asahi had me on the way - subsequent enthusiastically-received complimentary Kirin Ichibans on top of existing exhaustion was enough to knock me out real good for most of the flight - having three seats was very helpful - so i felt reasonably ok flying into Brissy

for extra inconvenient stopover before last leg to Sydney. I must say i was relieved to note excellent weather and I even got a bit choked up seeing the harbour bridge and opera house and so on. Into Surry Hills and straight to Boy Charlton pool for much-needed sunshine.

then to the old fave, AGNSW, for the Archibald & Wynne prize exhibition.

Emailed back to UK the fruits of my plane-flight algebra labours then Reggios pizza for dinner. A fantastic return to Sydney.

Returned to AGNSW for Self-portrait exhibition, then lunch with Mark & family & caught up with Maddy, Grant & Rebecca in Newtown in the evening.

Busy week: presentation at UNSW, Brett's birthday, mussels at bungalow 8, revisit of old dining staple - the great $5 steak, visit to MCA.

Then off to Melbourne, to see Mama, Mum and Paul for Easter. Went to Melbourne Museum,

(this is me and the commonwealth games mascot, Kaku)

Pissaro exhibition at NGV International,

HMS Cerberus

(check out this totally gross foam - boy did we have some fun rolling around in that!)

(Victorian weather less reassuringly Australian than New South Welsh)

saw cousins Kate & Molly,


NGV Australia

and the old favourite, Charmaignes Ice Cream (but only cos we'd been good little boys).

It was really good to see Mum and Mama and moderately good to see Paul (i'd seen him more recently, you see, which mitigated our respective enthusiams)

Back to Sydney for one quick day about town,

went to S.H. Ervin gallery and MCA,

and wandered around Rocks snapping away at cliched icons (below, not above, sure - we're icons but we are never cliched).

then like that my time was over. Flew back via Japan again. This time I had an overnight stay, though this was at a hotel at Kansai airport which wasn't quite as authentic and amazing as Kishiwada. Still, I managed to down a few Asahis, scored a dinner that looked a little something like this:

(compare the price with that for room service - what an outrage)

and lived out the vending machine beer dream!

Here's my obligatory mispronunciation/translation joke photo.

I had a good time in Japan and it really fired up my enthusiasm for travelling there again, next time for a fair bit longer - maybe I can tie it in with a side-trip to Itary.