Storming the Castle

All of the cool kids have unicorns in their family crests.

THE NEW WASHER/DRYER ARRIVED TODAY.

I toured Buckingham Palace a few weeks ago.  Actually, a couple friends and I went the day I moved here.  I was trying to think of ways to stay awake that afternoon —jet lag always seems to descend around 4pm when you’re coming from the States— and I realized there’s probably no smarter solution to the problem of remaining conscious when you’re running on 1½  hours of sleep than putting on your classiest pair of jeans and wandering around where the Queen lives.  With this (unequivocally brilliant) idea, and two tired friends semi-reluctantly in tow, I set out for the palace with only luck and my unreliable inner compass as guides. (OK—I also had the ‘Maps’ app in my iPad, but no wifi, so really that doesn’t count.)

I live just under 2½ miles from Buckingham Palace, so the walk should realistically have taken about 40-45 minutes, but thanks to some not inconsiderable confusion resulting from London’s splendid penchant for changing the name of a street every few blocks (an affectation of being a city that’s over 1,000 years old, I suppose), it was an hour and a half before we found deliverance in the form of the shining golden beacon that is the Victoria Monument.

The Palace offers audio tours in just about every language imaginable, including Klingon, Elvish, and Baby Talk.

By royal standards, and certainly by comparison to the grandeur within, the outside of Buckingham is rather modest.  Massive, definitely, but not in the grand, breathtaking style one might expect of a palace exterior.  I appreciate that level of unpretentiousness. Tré Britannique.

We took pictures of the gate and the guards within, and after 45 minutes of waiting around, we made it through security, had our phones turned off, and cameras checked in (they weren’t allowed inside, alas).  I was allowed to keep my purse with me though, because security could tell I was harmless. (It’s my sweet disposition.)

We ascended the grand staircase and began the most interesting tour I’ve ever been on since that open top bus tour in Montréal when my shirt flipped over my face courtesy of a rogue gust of wind and the poor decision to stand for a photo as we drove atop a busy highway overpass.  Put another way, the Buckingham Palace tour was as delightful as accidentally flashing dozens of French Canadian motorists was humiliating.

The audio tour was a superb accompaniment to the next couple hours of slack-jawed admiration for John Nash’s architectural genius, and the incredible amount of history, priceless art, and stateliness the monarchies managed to fit in there.  We walked through the Throne Room, the Ballroom, various Dining Rooms…all of which are considered public “State Rooms” when the Queen is not in residence at the Palace (like most of us, she usually summers in Scotland).

“And since we don’t want to detract from the whole point of the music room, which is to say the chandelier, let’s just go ahead and shove that piano all the way over to the side…perfect.”

My favorite room is the music room.  It’s a giant, semi-circular expanse with an enormous chandelier (surprise), and giant french doors that lead out onto the back lawn and gardens.  I’m including a photo from Picasa, but no picture does it justice. When you’re actually standing in there, you can see all the green from the windows beyond.  This is probably crass, but it reminded me of the scene in Beauty and the Beast where Belle and the Beast put on the Ritz and dance as they’re serenaded by the clock and the candle and some plates. I’m just now realizing how totally bizarre that story is.

Just beyond the music room is the actual formal dining room, though plenty of other rooms are used for that purpose. The room is long and rectangular, with massive windows lining one side, and on the other are five or so oil-on-canvas paintings of nobility that preceded the current monarchy.  The décor is almost overwhelmingly red, except the ceiling, which is white and intricate, and trimmed with gold detail. The Queen loves entertaining in this room, and she likes to inspect it herself before the guests arrive, according to the man on the audio tape.  She also likes to go over the seating arrangements to ensure that everyone is comfortable. If, while inspecting the seating arrangement, she happens to glance out of one of the windows, she will see the sprawling green lawn that was bombed by the Nazis during the Second World War, when her father was King.  As the story goes, King George VI and his wife generally remained at the palace despite the worry that it would be a target (which, evidently, it was). It has also been said that after the bombing occurred, they went around to make sure no one has been hurt, and to survey the damage.  Pretty epic.  Not even Winston Churchill stayed at 10 Downing Street during the war.

The Palace Dining Room. Elbows OFF the table.

Oh, Churchill! I forgot to mention I also saw the underground rooms where Churchill led the war. That deserves it’s own entry. Stand by.

Back to Buckingham: Once the tour was concluded, we were led to the back garden/yard area.  It’s a massive lawn flanked by many beautiful trees and flowers.  Contrary to what I would have expected, the “garden” section is rather wild-looking, sort of like a park.  I’m sure it’s very well-tended, but it doesn’t appear to be heavily manicured; there is no suggestion of an unnatural facade, which I rather like.

Of course from there, we were ushered into the gift shop, where for an exorbitant amount of money, you can buy washcloths and tea sets and pens with crests on them or, if you’re like me, you can buy 15 postcards for £2.

There’s even a royal ice cream stand. No, you didn’t misread. Royal. Ice cream. Stand. As in, a stand where you can buy an ice cream cone that is presumably ‘royal’ by virtue of being sold at Buckingham Palace. When we passed it, I stopped and did a double-take to make sure we weren’t at a theme park—Buckingham Palaceland or something— we were not. They actually sell ice cream at Buckingham.  I hope you appreciate that as much as I do.

Upon exiting the premises, there was a booth where we could have our tickets validated for the next year, meaning when the State Rooms are open, I can go back in for free for the next 300-something days. And that’s awesome, because I’d definitely like to return.

So now that you read all of that, long story short, the moral of the story is this: the best cure for jet lag is to tour a palace. You’re welcome.

Regally yours,

AC

Tate Modern

If you have always wanted to see boxes with lights in them and scrap metal hanging from a ceiling in the SAME building, look no further than Tate Modern!

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be stoned but aren’t stupid enough to follow through, or if you haven’t had a nightmare in awhile and are feeling nostalgic, then I highly recommend visiting Tate Modern.

On the ground floor, there are a couple exhibitions which are easily categorized as interactive. They all have the same tone, and they produce, on the whole, the same unsettling feeling. For example, there is one room that is totally in the dark save an old fashioned film projector that flickers like a reel has just ended, sort of like seeing a strobe light through venetian blinds. The entire room is filled with thick smoke that smells very distinctly like chalk dust. It feels like walking through a black and white world. But the eeriest thing about that room is the other patrons, because their striped, flickering shadows are visible here and there in the smoke as they walk around.  It immediately evokes those old Hitchcockian horror scenes when shadow of the villain first appears in the fog.

Tate Modern has, to the best of my knowledge, six floors, and I visited all of them.  The ground floor was by and large home to the best exhibitions save a piece or two on other floors. I came to a room that had a huge line (or queue, as they call it here) of people waiting to see what was inside three long, rectangular, wooden boxes with peepholes affixed to them. I waited twenty minutes to finally get a turn and see…a different colored reflector light in each of them. Imagine looking at a bicycle brake light through a telescope, and you get the idea. I was pretty pissed. The majority of the works I saw were like this, with one splendid exception, a piece called “Tree of 12 Meteres” by Giuseppe Penone, an artist who took two enormous industrial, rectangular beams of wood and retraced the natural knots left in them to carve out reliefs of trees. It’s made out of what was once a real tree, then turned into a wooden beam, and then carved back into a real, different tree in the round. It is awesome, and somewhat hyperreal, to recreate natural beauty from something man took from nature.

Giuseppe Penone’s “Tree of 12 Meteres” (1980-2). Easily one of the coolest works housed at Tate Modern.

The rest of my two hours at Tate Modern were spent trying not to outwardly convey my disappointment when looking at other pieces (Let me put it this way: shredded aluminum hanging from the ceiling was one of the more impressive works.)

I admit I’ve always more or less struggled with learning to appreciate modern and conceptual art. Often I find it so vague and lacking in any sort of tenor that it is, to me, essentially non-art. Something that is so self-aware comes across as condescending and trying too hard at the same time. A paradigm of non-art. Maybe that’s the point. But I tend to correlate visual art with some sort of aesthetic; I’m not saying it has to be expressly beautiful, but at least in some way relatable.  I don’t think that’s asking too much; I’m not petitioning for concrete meaning, or even an explanation— just throw me a bone, a point of reference, something. A huge part of appreciating art is finding a way to connect to it. I cannot relate to a clumps of gray play-doh hooked to the ceiling and scattered all over the floor. The closest thing I can liken that to is cat litter.

Fortunately, I was rewarded for pressing on when I reached the sixth floor and discovered it was not an exhibit at all, but a bar and café with a stunning view of the Thames and London. Visiting Tate Modern is worth it just for that view.

View of the Thames and St. Paul’s from the café.

Having said that, admission to Tate Modern is, understandably, free. It costs £1 for a museum map, and there are ample places to donate more, if so inclined. I also stopped by the gift shop to pick up a couple of postcards, which are reasonably priced by London standards. All things said and done, it was an afternoon well-spent for about £10, when I count the tube fare. You can’t beat that.

Millennium Bridge: Slippery and made of metal, but the view is worth the risk of breaking your neck.

Walking back to the station from Tate Modern was my favorite moment, because I had to cross the Thames via the Millennium Bridge, a slippery metal pedestrian overpass that offers stunning vistas of the river, the city, Tower Bridge, and the looming and beautiful dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. I caught a nostalgic whiff of Central Park in the winter when I passed a vendor selling roasted nuts.

I would have gone to St. Pauls but admission is a little pricey and I had to allow extra time to get ready for a party in Marble Arch. Also, I had to find Marble Arch. So I’m saving St. Paul’s for a day when I can dedicate real time to appreciate it, plus everyone I know who has visited it has made a point of stressing how bewilderingly beautiful it is.

Until then—

Non-artistically yours,

AC