The Hammam will Rise

Having escaped to London on my own yesterday, I am escaping to my masseuse this morning.

Masseuse, a woman who massages professionally.

I will  rest while she pummels me and stretches me and gets my circulation going.   Like a  hammam without  water.

The Ottoman Empire will return.    The war will start between Turkey and Greece and then spread to Europe and North Africa and throughout the Med. 

Then the hammam will rise throughout the Western world.

Piranesi at The British Museum

Two Piranesi drawings

I went to the British Museum today to see the drawings of Piranesi.

Piranesi was born in Venice in 1720.    He did most of his drawings in Rome having gone there on a commission from the Pope and more or less stayed.  He undertook a lifelong work of recording the antiquities of Rome. 

He was a would-be architect whose designs were mostly fantasy  based on buildings he saw in Rome with odd columns and staircases superimposed here and there where they shouldn't have been.

 Although never asked to, he once said that he would like to design a new universe.

 He recorded the antiquities of Rome in over 400 etchings and drawings and his work is still used as a valuable record.  He also did a series of, strange drawings of  imaginary prisons.

This exhibition is to celebrate his 300 birthday.


I was fortunate enough to also find an exhibition alongside Piranesi of etchings and drawings by Manet  and Pissarro and  Berthe Morisot which fits neatly in with my Impressionists History of Art course.

A Manet drawing at the races.

I treated myself to morning tea and cake in the restaurant on the third floor, a nice ambiance and a  peaceful oasis away from the crowds.   A bit more expensive than the cafés on the ground floor but worth every penny.

I came home after that;  I can only do and enjoy one thing in London these days.

Sunday Sketch

A sense of sadness pervades me this weekend.  Just a cloud of sadness which I hasten to add is not to taken as  feeling sorry for myself, but sad for reasons such as this country and the downward spiral that we are  in where we  will one day have a powerless government because the  judges will have taken over.   We are not so very far off this.

A virus with a name that  is nothing more than a cold or flu and may thin out a few elderly people  has made the whole  the world go mad (except for me and Boris Johnson and Donald Trump (I've got nothing to lose,  you think this about me anyway). The sooner it has spread everywhere the better and then life can return to normal and we can travel, keep schools open, stop isolation for a cold that we haven't got and stop wiping our noses on our sleeves.

Priti Patel is not going to lose her job, please be to God pour forth, I beseech thee,  because of some over paid civil servant 30 years in his job who doesn't like being told what to do by an Asian Indian female minister after he didn't like being told what to do by Roland Rudd's sister when Roland was such a sweety for the Labour Party  and was finally  pissed off  that he didn't get  Diane Abbot or Emily  Thornberry to play ball with him.     The sooner he goes the better and let him go to an employment tribunal and cry his eyes out.  Plenty of people do it everyday for not being given vegan rights to decree what the company pension scheme  is  to be invested in  or making the wrong gestures behind the photocopier or having a door opened for them which is sexist, so go for it Rutnam, you don't look like the sort of man who would be behind the photocopier, although on second thoughts it was usually the  pathetic, weedy men like you who lurked who didn't get enough at home.

Missing mum

Saturdays are ok if I can find a lecture or exhibition to go to but if nothing comes along I am stuck here on my own for the day.    This is one such Saturday.    I have been to my brother's house to feed his cats.  That's it.

I don't like going into the city because it is full of Saturday shoppers and I don't enjoy shopping without a purpose, ambling around,  or without my mother.   For many years my mother and I used to go shopping  together on  Saturday mornings, like mums and daughters do,  and I still miss it even though she has been dead for 14 years.

For a long time after she died I could not go into John Lewis  because I associated the shop so much with going there with her, all my life even back to school days when long before it was John Lewis and was a family run department store it was a place she would take me to for a special treat -  afternoon tea for her and an icecream for me after school, just the two of us, no boys.  I still find sitting having coffee in the café very odd without her.

Do you miss your Mother?

During the time that Peter has been gone I have missed her more again because I have been without Peter, without a job and without her.    At other times when I have been doing different things in my past life and things have gone wrong she has always been there.   Not anymore.  There are lots of things I wish I had said to her, and asked her.

JoJo Rabbit

A very cold winter's day, I am wearing double layers of everything in the house tonight. 

I went out to see this film.


JoJo Rabbit is a comedy about Nazis,or a satire on anti hate or a spoof on Nazis.    Strange film  to sit down and think that's what I'll do as a film director isn't it?

    There is nothing that I can say like I might say  "this film is about a German woman  who hides a Jew in the loft towards the end of the WW2"  that could make you understand this film without seeing it.      There is nothing about it that lends itself to normal description.

It is actually described as a comedy but really I couldn't say I laughed.    It is satire, black comedy, spoof.

JoJo is a small, serious, boy who is a good Nazi and he has an imaginary friend who is a larger than life Hitler who reminded me of Jim Broadbent as Slater in Only Fools and Horses.

JoJo has a mother who reminded me of Helga, in 'Allo ' Allo but not playing on the side of  Helga .    So you get the drift.

JoJo gets a bit hung up over being a good Nazi and nothing else will do and his "Hitler" friend (played by the filmmaker in fact and camp)  visits him to talk to him from time to time and make sure JoJo does the things that all good Nazi children should do.  JoJo has imaginary conversations with him.    He goes to Hitler youth camp but gets in the way of a grenade and ends up mildly invalided out so to speak.  He also doesn't want to kill a rabbit when in camp  and for a good Nazi this is really much too squeamish.  He is not a happy bunny you could say.

Then he finds the Jewish girl in the attic at home  and this does not rest happily with him. His mother wonders how she got such a funny little boy as a son.

A series of things happen of course  and JoJo is forced into a corner and  eventually has to confront his blind nationalism  when his "friend" Hitler appears to him. 

The film was directed and written (based on a book by someone)  by a New Zealander, Taika Waititi, and filmed in and around Prague and reading the credits at the end it would appear that all the extras used in the film were Czech people, and  if seen in isolation, one would think one had  just been watching a foreign film with subtitles.

I enjoyed the film and it is superior to Parasite for me in many ways, both satirical with messages but the message in JoJo is much clearer. 

 There are lots of gems to watch out for and to savour.

Learning

Very wintry here today.    Bitterly cold

I went out to History of Art this afternoon.  It was quite cold waiting for the train in the biting wind but I am not particularly bothered by cold weather.     The early morning rain and snow had cleared away and the sky was blue.

The class today was very good and we went through those less well known Impressionist artists that did not make it big time like Manet and Monet and Renoir and Cezanne.  The class was participant-led  and we each gave presentations of the work we had carried out  in our own time and the artists we had discovered  from the First Impressionist exhibition in 1873 who did not go on to become as well known and  famous as the others.    I presented on Guillaumin who I wrote about here the other day.    The only female in the first show was Berthe Morisot and is worth looking at because she did some amazing work.  She was friendly with the impressionist artists and met Manet in the Louvre and  went on to marry his brother.   Her work was also presented in class today.   We also looked at Cals,DeNittis, Lepic and Sisley.    We spent a brief moment  imagining  these artists meeting in the Louvre, which is what they did, and pictured them chatting and drawing and copying paintings.

I also presented on Whistler,  as an extra, because he  moved between London and Paris but never got totally immersed in Impressionism but was on the edge and knew the Impressionist artists and was  friends with Baudelaire, the art critic and poet, who was also close friend to Manet and Courbet and Whistler  painted at Biarritz and Brittany before returning to London and transferred his love of water to painting the Thames. 

I was late home so bought some sandwiches at the station for tea as I cannot be bothered to prepare anything when I am late home.

We agreed today that the best place for an outing would defnitiely be Paris to the Musée D'Orsay where we might see some of the paintings we looked at today.    But we will have to make do with the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge.

It is interesting that three years ago I considered doing a Masters in History of Art with a  course fee of £9000.  What a good thing I didn't go ahead with it. I enjoy these classes with a teacher from the Masters course who teaches freelance for £80 per term and I have no doubt whatsover that we receive more teaching and more satisfaction and input and I have learned more than I would have done on a Masters course.     This is my third year of learning and my favourite course was the one we did covering Modernism, the Bloomsbury set,  art, literature, and film and music.

In fact if I were to ever pay to study at university it would be my delight to study Philosophy rather than History of Art but the chances of that ever happening must be zilch now.   I would have to go in at BA level and three years at £9000 per year for which I can find no reason to  justify spending that kind of money.   I might as well continue as I am and when the courses finish carry on reading the subject in my own time.

Tomorrow is a free day and I intend to go to see a film and relax on my day off.

Free

The river as I walked back to the railway station tonight.   

One river,  one person,  one sky, one moment in time.