Monopoly Pub Crawl

25th September 2010

On the one hand this meeting had a slight strain of "we're too old for this" running through it. Our youthful days of putting as much alcohol as humanly possible into ourselves and then seeing what happens have passed. We have explored those territories; they hold nothing new or exciting for us, only dehydration and regrettable mornings. On the other hand was maturity and practicality.

The day started on Fleet Street at the delightful  Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.  It is one of a number of pubs in London to have been rebuilt shortly after the Great Fire of 1666. There has been a pub at this location since 1538. While there are several older pubs which have survived because they were beyond the reach of the fire, or like The Tipperary on the opposite side of Fleet Street because they were made of stone. We particularly liked this pub and was a great starting point.

First beers of the day. There's something repulsive about having alcohol before lunch, so we were a little later than others and commenced our day at 12.30pm.

From here we set off to The Wellington which stands on a corner of the Strand opposite Waterloo Bridge and was built in 1903.  By the time we arrived around 1pm it was overflowing with people. We had one beverage here and then moved onto the next.

Remarkably discipline is required to get the whole route in, which we lacked. Instead of spending 15-20 minutes in each pub, we spent a good half hour to an hour.  The other sensible thing to do would be to have halves all the way round. David thought a little differently than me and started out on Pints and then slowly adapted to the idea of half pints.  By the time we got round to our third pub, the hunger was setting in, so we decided to exit Convent Garden and try for a lesser expensive area and have lunch at The Chandos off Trafalgar Square.

After several rubbish pubs we decided to change our course and head over to Angel.  However, on our way over to Embankment Station we had a detour to Gordon's Wine Bar.  A little gem that is definitely recommended.  You enter through a rather grubby looking doorway in Villiers St, The Strand and down some very steep steps.  Once inside, you walk into the candlelit cellar  dug into the rock under the street. There's old posters and newspaper cuttings on the walls going back decades. There's no beer, no spirits, just very good wine, and sherry and port from barrels behind the counter.

We then proceeded along to the Aldgate Exchange in Whitechapel which, has had some sort of interior makeover and now looks like somebody's Ikea kitchen, all friendly and squeaky clean..

The Hamilton Hall, on Liverpool Street while beautiful, was an absolute shocker. Packed to the rafters with people, another expensive pub with nothing much going for it.  From here a few of us were getting peckish and stopped in at McDonald's for a cheeseburger to carry us through to dinner as it was 9.30pm. We then jumped on a bus and headed to the Red Lion in Angel - our 8th and last port of call.  From here we went across the road and finished the night on margarita's and burritos.

Here's Looking At You

Exposed: Voyerism, surveillance and the Camera - Tate Modern, London.  We managed to catch this exhibition in it's last week.  I'm so glad we made it. Exposed offered a fascinating look at photographs made on the sly, without the explicit permission of the people depicted. With photographs from the late nineteenth century to present day, the photographs presented a shocking, illuminating perspective on iconic and taboo subjects.

Entering the first room of the exhibition we were met with enlarged shots from Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s series Heads. The images were taken from great distance when pedestrians in New York unwittingly tripped automatic lights diCorcia rigged on the side-walk. The text accompanying the photos told you that one of the artist’s subjects took legal action against him, with the court eventually ruling in diCorcia’s favour. In the rest of the “Unseen Photographer” section it had images taken through buttonhole cameras.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia - Heads

By sequencing “Celebrity & the Public Gaze” as the next section, the curators ask visitors to consider whether the rules are – or should be – different for the famous. On one wall there were several of Ron Galella’s photos of Jackie Kennedy, one (“What makes Jackie Run?”) in which she is actively fleeing the photographer. On an adjoining wall Marilyn Monroe’s dress billows as she poses atop an air vent. There was a vibrant candid shot of Jack Nicholson also; which dominated one wall showing him swinging a golf club at the car of a driver who had just cut him off.

The next two sections of the exhibition were the most challenging: sex & death which contained journalistic images of death and violence some awful images of suicide, execution and lynching. It included images such as Tom Howard's electrocution of Ruth Snyder, from 1928, and Eddie Adams' haunting photograph of a Viet Cong officer being executed in 1968.

The final section, “Surveillance,” was perhaps the weakest.  These were largely pictures taken automatically, or single frames from an automated recording; simply in terms of composition, colouration and focus, you can tell that there is no human interest in their production. As a result I felt detachment from these last photographs where the majority of what had preceded had engaged me.

My favourite piece of the exhibition would have to of been by the photographer Shizuka Yokomizo who sent letters to strangers asking them to stand alone in their living rooms for a specified ten minute period of time when she would photograph them from outside.

Shizuka Yokomizo - Stranger

The most disturbing piece was Kohei Yoshiyuki's 1971 series,  it was originally shown in Japan: in a dark room where visitors had to use torches. However, for this exhibition it was shown in a dark hallway. The images were taken at night with an infrared camera and show straight couples having sex in Tokyo parks and gay men cruising for sex – all the time surrounded by others looking on, gawping.  My original thought was - "Only in Japan", I'm sure others will agree.

Throughout the exhibition I sensed a lack of interest in narrative. The images on display were taken quickly or secretly (or both), with the aim being to capture a single, true moment. The act of doing this removes that moment from its context and allows viewers to wrap their own story around it. Every invasion of privacy with which we were confronted with is simultaneously an invasion of our privacy and our invasion of someone else’s.