London

July 9, 2011

Blue morning after the alternating squalls of yesterday.

I’d forgotten that as I walked from Kings Cross Thursday, I passed the Lord Mayor (the chain around his neck and the attendants made me think he was the Lord Mayor) placing a wreath on the spot where terrorists blew a bus up some years back. I stopped and watched because nobody else was watching. No American politician would do such a thing without the assurance of a crowd.

Headed to South Kensington yesterday to go to the Natural History Museum, but the crowds were tremendous, so I resorted to my old friend the Victorian & Albert (where there were no dinosaurs to draw the throng). I sat in the café, which I love, writing a blue streak, then out in the garden until I was driven away by squalls of rain. Lingered in Covent Garden. If you sat in a café you had to hold the sugar and napkins down against the wind. Went to the Royal Opera House to find an opera to hear next week, but instead got a ticket for Rufus Wainwright’s Judy Garland concert, something it had never crossed my mind to pursue. I didn’t pursue it; there it lay in the way. Royal Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial in the rain. Remembered last being there with Lou Fishback and Mark Meachum, my crush of the time, young men–exactly my present students’ age–footloose in London.

Napped, and then walked to the Old Vic, where I thought I was going to have to argue for my ticket to Richard III, as no ticket had come in the mail or to the Russell. Turns out that I had bought a ticket online from a bogus Finnish company, London Westend Box Office, which does not exist and sold me tickets for seats which do not exist. The man at the desk was very patient, and wondered why I was taking it so well. Turns out that a man thus hoodwinked before me had spent 350 pounds apiece for two tickets. I assured the box office manager, Mr. Dominic Byrne, that no such thing had happened to me. One ticket for the sold out house had been returned, and he sold me that. This was the best seat in the house, two rows from the stage, dead center. I had time before the show to get acquainted with the neighborhood around The Cut. I like it. Lively, gritty. Gave a prostitute four pounds not to sit with me at Nero’s.

Kevin Spacey’s Richard III is, for the most part, sold out and wildly desired. It was a solid production, assuredly, and yet not innovative or really extraordinary. Spacey’s Richard was a man who had succumbed since childhood to tantrums and, as an adult, was amazed and gratified when his growing power and menace made them work his will. Spacey was adept at getting the audience on Richard’s side, with sidelong glances and conspiratorial mugging. It was full throttle throughout, from mf to fff, no subtlety, but a satisfying bluffness. Walked home one of my favorite walks, over Waterloo Bridge, to the Axis Bar of One Aldwych, the elegant venue where DJ and I took refuge on New Year’s Eve a few years back. I drank shockingly overpriced vodka and watched the artistry of the bartenders, who squirt citrus peels in the air to the sides on the glass, I suppose to impart the subtlest hint of fragrance. The bartender gave me a shot of some new many-times-distilled vodka to drink, and it was blue fire.