Exhibitions & theatre
Today has been another tidying and sorting day. I've spent large swathes of it getting distracted (I found a folder of fanfiction I'd written out by hands at various points... some of which actually ended up online but a lot didn't *g*)
However I did manage to remove another full carrier bag of stuff for charity shops and a bunch to rubbish/recycling too (though I can't quite bring myself to get rid of the coconut shells from K's wedding because who knows when you might need to make pretend horse noises?)
The last two days were exhibitions and theatre though (this post could get long but we shall see!)
On Thursday I headed off to the V&A for a couple of exhibitions I've been wanting to see.
Opus Anglicanum : Masterpieces of English Medieval Embroidery
As ever with popular exhibitions at the V&A my main issue with this exhibition was just that there were FAR too many people in there. It was worse than usual though because of course everyone wanted to get as close as humanly possible to the embroidery to see its incredible detailing.
Still. It really was incredible and with a bit of judicious jumping out of order I got to see most of the pieces I most wanted to and was able to spent a bit of time trying to really understand the different stitches using a video they had and a very helpful lady who was going round explaining things to her friends :-P
The church vestments were by far the most beautiful pieces but the fact that they had the Black Prince's surcoat (from his funeral achievements) absolutely took my breath away even if you could mostly see the shadow of where the embroidery had been.
The colours and the detail and the sheer skill on display absolutely took my breath away and I only wished I had more time (and more space!) to really appreciate everything.
Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear
The benefits of getting free entry to exhibitions is you don't feel like you HAVE to give them lots of time if they're not giving you much back. This exhibition had a lot of interesting items of clothing in it but I felt like a lot of the cases were just collections of semi-related items and I really didn't get a feeling for the "history". Everything was sorted by theme rather than by age which didn't help.
Maybe I was too tired? I quite liked the area upstairs where they showed how lingerie design had influenced fashion either subtly or by becoming outerwear. But it wasn't what I'd expected?
I think that was my problem with this exhibition- it was quite good but it wasn't the one I thought I was seeing!
I did consider the 60s exhibition too but it looked very busy and I wanted pancakes so I left at that point and headed to the Kensington Creperie for a delicious (late) lunch
I then, in my infinite wisdom, decided to walk to the Museum of Brands in Notting Hill. It was a nice walk really, or it would have been if it wasn't raining all the way there. I had that wonderful moment where, barely 5 minutes from my destination, I felt the water trickle through my shoes and simultaneously start soaking from my coat cuffs back up my jumper sleeves.
Still Hyde Park is quite pretty even in the rain when you have it to yourself!
Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising
I really liked the Museum of Brands. The main part of their display is a time tunnel from Victorian goods and the very earliest recognisable brand names right through to three, frankly terrifying, cases with One Direction, Frozen and Minion merch.
It's a strange trip through nostalgia and even before you hit packaging you recognise (I'd forgotten what Quality Street looked like when I was little!) you start spotting names you know or products start to appear (like the chocolate bars above). I also liked the little islands of royal memorabilia from various weddings, coronations and jubilees. It was interesting to see which products were made with special branding.
I also very much liked this poster which looks HIGHLY unlikely.
They also have an area with various products throughout their lifespan (Cadburys drinking chocolate has changed a fair bit but After Eights hardly at all!) and a more in depth look at the Johnnie Walker brand.
They also had AMAZING chocolate brownie in their cafe.
And then I caught a tube to Baker Street for pizza and wine with
seiyaharris before we headed off to the Hampstead Theatre to tick off another member of Les Amis ♥
Platinum @ Hampstead Theatre (downstairs)
(just lets get this out of the way, if anything George Blagden is more attractive in person and he had this slight flush on his cheekbones throughout and every time he picked up a guitar and sang I forgot how to breathe a bit... thankfully the rest of the cast were so good none of this distracted from the play itself but good GRIEF)
Siân Thomas, Lara Pitt-Pulford and George Blagden as directed by Adam Penford... not quite sure how we could have gone wrong with this one *g* It's a play about a mother and a daughter really with Simon acting as the catalyst between. Siân Thomas is Martha, a folk singer who wrote one great protest song and Anna (Lara Pitt-Pulford) is her daughter, always a bit in her shadow and a bit resentful of her absentee mother. Simon comes in to interview Martha and everything goes from there.
It's a simple idea and was at its best in the various confrontations between characters and in the moments where they used real protest songs.
The real weakness, I fear, was in its last scene because the most interesting action (or change of heart at least) happened offstage between the penultimate and final scenes and that was kind of irritating. I mean also it's got one of those romances that largely seems to come from proximity but then again with people as attractive as Lara and George that seems fair :-P
It might have been a simple play and production and there might be shallows contained within it but it was still very charming.
Incidentally I would have 100% said that George Blagden had been in the West End before if you'd asked me but apparently this was his professional stage debut so what do I know!
*takes a deep breath*
After a VERY cold wait for a train on Thursday evening I'm afraid I decided that staying inside on Friday morning was a much better plan than heading out so I only managed 2 of my 3 planned exhibitions but still that means 5 in two days which seems plenty :-P
I started at the British Library who always put on a good show.
Maps and the 20th Century : Drawing the Line
Took me a while to get here but I'm very glad I did. I love maps (who doesn't?!) and I think if my feet hadn't started complaining I could have spent all afternoon in here. It starts with maps of war & then of peace before moving on to more commercial aspects but the exhibition also touches on why maps have become so ubiquitous and just how useful they can be.
There was an incredible map for tourists to Hiroshima just after the bomb and, even more precipitously, a map and guidebook to First World War battlefields written in 1917!
I was surprised, given the way the exhibition as been advertised, there wasn't more about GPS and the tension between being on or off a map (though that came up a fair bit in the war section I suppose). But then again there was MORE than enough to look at without it.
They even had this map Tolkien drew on graph paper to help plot the timings of LOTR:
There was also a work of art I very much liked called My Ghost by Jeremy Wood which you can see here. It tracks every move he made on the ground (in white) and by plane (in yellow) from 2006-2016 and it's absolutely fascinating. As was the map of the exhibition with hot spots showing where people were currently standing.
It's on for another 6 weeks if anyone's in London.
After that I walked around the corner to the Francis Crick Institute which I've wanted to visit since it opened after watching it get larger and larger alongside St Pancras. There's a very definite, separate, entrance for visitors which involved a revolving door that started moving as I approached... slightly creepy.
There's a little exhibition area though and a nice-ish cafe and I was glad I went even if I do now want an excuse to see more of the actual building.
How Do We Look? Francis Crick Institute
Here's the Institue incidentally in case you haven't seen it. It does look slightly alien somehow.
How Do We Look? is an exhibition in which various scientists have picked one image or piece of film/animation that is central to their research. Each piece has the image/film and some information and then a recording of the scientist explaining why they picked that image/film and what their research is.
I was mostly fascinated by the molecular motors in All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, 2016 but there was a lot to read/see/here. It was almost too much, particularly for a non-scientist I guess? Though I more or less followed everything I read or heard. I just needed to sit down more!
Thankfully a lot of the recordings are on their website here so I can follow up on some of them.
And that was Friday! After that I came home and read quite a bit and watched some TV and then read some more and then we're back to today.
It's been a pretty successful week off really and tomorrow we're off to see my sister because it was her birthday today so that should be nice.
This entry was originally posted at http://morganmuffle.dreamwidth.org/1391279.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
However I did manage to remove another full carrier bag of stuff for charity shops and a bunch to rubbish/recycling too (though I can't quite bring myself to get rid of the coconut shells from K's wedding because who knows when you might need to make pretend horse noises?)
The last two days were exhibitions and theatre though (this post could get long but we shall see!)
On Thursday I headed off to the V&A for a couple of exhibitions I've been wanting to see.
Opus Anglicanum : Masterpieces of English Medieval Embroidery
As ever with popular exhibitions at the V&A my main issue with this exhibition was just that there were FAR too many people in there. It was worse than usual though because of course everyone wanted to get as close as humanly possible to the embroidery to see its incredible detailing.
Still. It really was incredible and with a bit of judicious jumping out of order I got to see most of the pieces I most wanted to and was able to spent a bit of time trying to really understand the different stitches using a video they had and a very helpful lady who was going round explaining things to her friends :-P
The church vestments were by far the most beautiful pieces but the fact that they had the Black Prince's surcoat (from his funeral achievements) absolutely took my breath away even if you could mostly see the shadow of where the embroidery had been.
The colours and the detail and the sheer skill on display absolutely took my breath away and I only wished I had more time (and more space!) to really appreciate everything.
Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear
The benefits of getting free entry to exhibitions is you don't feel like you HAVE to give them lots of time if they're not giving you much back. This exhibition had a lot of interesting items of clothing in it but I felt like a lot of the cases were just collections of semi-related items and I really didn't get a feeling for the "history". Everything was sorted by theme rather than by age which didn't help.
Maybe I was too tired? I quite liked the area upstairs where they showed how lingerie design had influenced fashion either subtly or by becoming outerwear. But it wasn't what I'd expected?
I think that was my problem with this exhibition- it was quite good but it wasn't the one I thought I was seeing!
I did consider the 60s exhibition too but it looked very busy and I wanted pancakes so I left at that point and headed to the Kensington Creperie for a delicious (late) lunch
I then, in my infinite wisdom, decided to walk to the Museum of Brands in Notting Hill. It was a nice walk really, or it would have been if it wasn't raining all the way there. I had that wonderful moment where, barely 5 minutes from my destination, I felt the water trickle through my shoes and simultaneously start soaking from my coat cuffs back up my jumper sleeves.
Still Hyde Park is quite pretty even in the rain when you have it to yourself!
Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising
I really liked the Museum of Brands. The main part of their display is a time tunnel from Victorian goods and the very earliest recognisable brand names right through to three, frankly terrifying, cases with One Direction, Frozen and Minion merch.
It's a strange trip through nostalgia and even before you hit packaging you recognise (I'd forgotten what Quality Street looked like when I was little!) you start spotting names you know or products start to appear (like the chocolate bars above). I also liked the little islands of royal memorabilia from various weddings, coronations and jubilees. It was interesting to see which products were made with special branding.
I also very much liked this poster which looks HIGHLY unlikely.
They also have an area with various products throughout their lifespan (Cadburys drinking chocolate has changed a fair bit but After Eights hardly at all!) and a more in depth look at the Johnnie Walker brand.
They also had AMAZING chocolate brownie in their cafe.
And then I caught a tube to Baker Street for pizza and wine with
seiyaharris before we headed off to the Hampstead Theatre to tick off another member of Les Amis ♥
Platinum @ Hampstead Theatre (downstairs)
(just lets get this out of the way, if anything George Blagden is more attractive in person and he had this slight flush on his cheekbones throughout and every time he picked up a guitar and sang I forgot how to breathe a bit... thankfully the rest of the cast were so good none of this distracted from the play itself but good GRIEF)
Siân Thomas, Lara Pitt-Pulford and George Blagden as directed by Adam Penford... not quite sure how we could have gone wrong with this one *g* It's a play about a mother and a daughter really with Simon acting as the catalyst between. Siân Thomas is Martha, a folk singer who wrote one great protest song and Anna (Lara Pitt-Pulford) is her daughter, always a bit in her shadow and a bit resentful of her absentee mother. Simon comes in to interview Martha and everything goes from there.
It's a simple idea and was at its best in the various confrontations between characters and in the moments where they used real protest songs.
The real weakness, I fear, was in its last scene because the most interesting action (or change of heart at least) happened offstage between the penultimate and final scenes and that was kind of irritating. I mean also it's got one of those romances that largely seems to come from proximity but then again with people as attractive as Lara and George that seems fair :-P
It might have been a simple play and production and there might be shallows contained within it but it was still very charming.
Incidentally I would have 100% said that George Blagden had been in the West End before if you'd asked me but apparently this was his professional stage debut so what do I know!
*takes a deep breath*
After a VERY cold wait for a train on Thursday evening I'm afraid I decided that staying inside on Friday morning was a much better plan than heading out so I only managed 2 of my 3 planned exhibitions but still that means 5 in two days which seems plenty :-P
I started at the British Library who always put on a good show.
Maps and the 20th Century : Drawing the Line
Took me a while to get here but I'm very glad I did. I love maps (who doesn't?!) and I think if my feet hadn't started complaining I could have spent all afternoon in here. It starts with maps of war & then of peace before moving on to more commercial aspects but the exhibition also touches on why maps have become so ubiquitous and just how useful they can be.
There was an incredible map for tourists to Hiroshima just after the bomb and, even more precipitously, a map and guidebook to First World War battlefields written in 1917!
I was surprised, given the way the exhibition as been advertised, there wasn't more about GPS and the tension between being on or off a map (though that came up a fair bit in the war section I suppose). But then again there was MORE than enough to look at without it.
They even had this map Tolkien drew on graph paper to help plot the timings of LOTR:
There was also a work of art I very much liked called My Ghost by Jeremy Wood which you can see here. It tracks every move he made on the ground (in white) and by plane (in yellow) from 2006-2016 and it's absolutely fascinating. As was the map of the exhibition with hot spots showing where people were currently standing.
It's on for another 6 weeks if anyone's in London.
After that I walked around the corner to the Francis Crick Institute which I've wanted to visit since it opened after watching it get larger and larger alongside St Pancras. There's a very definite, separate, entrance for visitors which involved a revolving door that started moving as I approached... slightly creepy.
There's a little exhibition area though and a nice-ish cafe and I was glad I went even if I do now want an excuse to see more of the actual building.
How Do We Look? Francis Crick Institute
Here's the Institue incidentally in case you haven't seen it. It does look slightly alien somehow.
How Do We Look? is an exhibition in which various scientists have picked one image or piece of film/animation that is central to their research. Each piece has the image/film and some information and then a recording of the scientist explaining why they picked that image/film and what their research is.
I was mostly fascinated by the molecular motors in All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, 2016 but there was a lot to read/see/here. It was almost too much, particularly for a non-scientist I guess? Though I more or less followed everything I read or heard. I just needed to sit down more!
Thankfully a lot of the recordings are on their website here so I can follow up on some of them.
And that was Friday! After that I came home and read quite a bit and watched some TV and then read some more and then we're back to today.
It's been a pretty successful week off really and tomorrow we're off to see my sister because it was her birthday today so that should be nice.
This entry was originally posted at http://morganmuffle.dreamwidth.org/1391279.html. Please comment there using OpenID.