Out in London

I’d forgotten. It’s been years since I’d jet off somewhere on a plane and I’d just simply forgotten what it’s like to fly, trapped beside some old guy whose leg touches yours but with whom you never made eye contact for 9 hours, whose elbow is not only taking up the entire armrest but also ever so slightly and annoyingly sticks out into your side of it. Years since I’d felt that odd feeling when that person seated behind you fiddles with the seat pocket attached to the back of your chair literally dozens of times during the flight, and each time it can’t help but feel like a surprise soft graze across the top of your buttcrack. I’d also forgotten that flicker of disappointment you get when you finally turn around at the end of the flight to see who’d been seated there doing that only to discover that it was just some random stranger and not, in fact, Daniel Craig, like you’d hoped.

Anyway we’re here now, in London. We were headed elsewhere but when we discovered the National Gallery was nearby I made the executive decision that we were going in there immediately to see the Caravaggio paintings (the museum is free), and I took a photo of this beautiful basket of fruit in his painting Supper at Emmaus. See how it juts off the edge? It’s inviting the viewer in with that precariousness. We want to push it back on the table for safety. (Or to put it another way, we want Daniel Craig, to just ever so gently, graze the edge of the basket with his hand the way he might tuck things into an airplane seat pocket.) An art historian I studied said that where other painters keep the viewer at a distance with their formal compositions, Caravaggio removes that virtual velvet rope when he lets things hang off the edge like that. 

Then we walked in the opposite direction of, well, nearly everyone, because they were off to see a parade with the Queen for her Jubilee celebration while we were headed to Shakespeare’s rebuilt outdoor globe theatre to see Much Ado About Nothing. I know what you’re thinking but I don’t care because I am a bard nerd and IT WAS THE COOLEST. It wasn’t a normal stage at all but had a runway style section that protrudes out at an angle where like in Shakespeare’s day, the ‘groundlings’ audience members stand in the dirt; paying just 5 pounds to see the show (and many get to be a part of it, since the actors often talked to them during the play, brought them on stage, or once even rode a motorcycle through them to enter the scene). In keeping with the theme of this blog I feel I should tell you Daniel Craig was NOT in the play but has acted in theatre productions of Othello and Macbeth in the past and he was probably busy protecting the Queen in the guise of James Bond today