Welcome to London

Ahh, London. Hello again, my darling. I've missed you.

I can't explain what I love so much about London. It's a huge, busy, noisy city, unbelievably vast and completely apathetic. And yet, somehow coming here feels a little bit like coming home.

To my complete lack of surprise, I was drawn to the City and the South Bank--this summer's old stomping grounds--as soon as I dumped off my stuff at my hostel. It was full dark by the time I accomplished this, although still fairly early; the overcast sky was that curious shade of muddy purplish-orangish-grey that all city skies seem to have in common. I emerged from the familiar St Paul's Tube stop to behold the monolithic white edifice towering impassively, unchanged by my six months' absence, over the scuttling lines of traffic at its feet. I turned my feet toward the river, occasionally looking back to see the majestic dome rising over the dark shapes of its lesser neighbors, which stared at its gleaming pillars with unblinkingly envious yellow-green eyes.

Over the Millenium Bridge I went, now huddling into my coat against the cold instead of sweltering in the summer heat. As usual, the Thames was flowing serenely by, illuminated by the glow of the still-bustling city. To my left, the round tip of the Gherkin poked up among the more conventionally-shaped buildings, and off in the distance to my right, around the bend in the river, I could catch a glimpse of a curved row of blue lights high in the air: surely the London Eye. At the other end of the bridge, instead of turning my steps to the Globe, I headed towards an enormous but singularly unattractive square brick structure sporting a high tower: a former power house, now the Tate Modern.

Why the Tate Modern? Well, RFS recommends it, for starters. I'd wanted to go in the summer but hadn't got around to it. Also, on Saturdays it's open till 10pm, and it was already past dinnertime.

This is how I found myself standing in an enormous industrial building, looking at art displays that...well. It's modern art. What did you expect?

Perhaps most face-palmingly painful was the feature exhibit, entitled "Sunflower Seeds", which was an entire section of the bottom floor covered about half a foot deep in sunflower seeds. No patterns, no special designs, just millions of sunflower seeds. But wait, it's better--they're not real seeds, but fake. Not just fake: handmade, individually painted ceramic sunflower seeds. Millions of them.

It's supposed to represent something about the nature of uniqueness, and something about China (it was a Chinese artist who "made" them, although from the video they showed, it seemed that he kind of supervised and got a village to do all the actual work for him), and something about mass-production and the human soul. Or something. Mostly my reaction was in three stages:
1. "Is that just a really ugly carpet that everyone's looking at?"
2. "Holy shit that's a lot of fake sunflower seeds. Bet that took a while."
3. "Why do no modern artists ever do anything useful or constructive with their time?"

Pretty much the whole museum was like that for me. The amusing bit was the three-step process of incredulity and hilarity upon seeing the "artwork" for the first time, utter bafflement and confusion upon reading/hearing the entirely over-exaggerated analysis of its deep inner meaning and bold confrontation of the concepts of space, or sexuality, or time, or whatever, and then the absurdity that leaves you no choice but to walk away shaking your head. Highlights of WTF:

• A giant American three-way plug made out of mahogany, hanging from the ceiling (and I do mean giant), which was supposed to challenge the inherent eroticism of everyday objects (?!?!)
• A small, spindly tree carved out of a beam of wood, to find the younger tree within
• A large piece of white cloth curved around a glass beaker, with no explanation
• A piece of white octagonal paper glued to the wall, to challenge our conception of space and what makes a painting
• A video of a naked woman dousing herself in blood and then rolling around in feathers
• And a whole bunch of framed, honest-to-goodness museum pictures that "boldly experiment with shape and color" that all looked to me like various arrangements of blocks and lines painted by fifth graders.

Although my favorite bit was about a painter with a genuinely interesting painting (this one, if you're interested), featuring a rather creepy girl in a shadow-filled room; you don't notice until a second too late that she doesn't have eyes. Anyway, the funny bit was in the audioguide, which said that this Bonnard guy (he was French) would carry paints with him, and whenever he mixed a color he particularly liked or just came across one of his canvasses and decided he didn't like it the way it was, he'd just whip out his box o' colors and change stuff. Apparently, he once got a friend to distract a guard at a museum (no info on how, but I assume it involved cross-dressing or something) so that he could sneak in and change his own painting.

Anyway, having used up a week's worth of WTF?!?!, I staggered wearily back to the hostel where I now sit. The plan is to relax somewhat tomorrow, since this is, after all, my vacation, and then visit the British Library and British Museum on Monday. On Tuesday, I get to see Stephen and hang out with him for a couple days, then I'm flying off back to Germany to hang in Hamburg.

P.S. I'm surprised to find that this is the first time I've used the label "WTF". I feel like that should've happened already. Oh well.