Jan 30

Today I went to the Design Museum. It was pretty good. Lawry gave me her membership card so I could get in free. It was mostly furniture, and a room of fashion design. That part was the best. They had an inspiration board where the artist had collected all of these magazine clippings, and photos, and fabrics and paintings etc to get his collection theme. I liked it. Then I went to yoga again. Nisa is a good instructor, I've been feeling much better since I've been going.

Feb 2

I got up this morning and went downstairs for breakfast. Gill and Al were down there and they asked me if I wanted an egg. So I said sure, and it was a soft boiled egg. I said I have never eaten one and they thought that was totally absurd. It was pretty good though.

I went to the Photographers Gallery today. It was decent. It wasn't very big though. There was one big collage in the entrance that I really liked though. They had a contest where people upload their images to their website and then they pick the best 300 or something. The subject was "What Scares Me." So it was all this dark serious stuff. There were lots of abstract blurry photos of people in the night, and cemeteries, and weird clowns, and angry animals, etc. I thought it was really good.

Then I walked around China Town for a while because it was just right next to the Photographers Gallery. It was really interesting. After that I went to the National Portrait Gallery. I just went into one wing of it because by that time I was pretty tired. I really liked it a lot though. I went into the special exhibition. It was from a photography portrait contest and they were exhibiting the finalists. There were something like 4 or 5,000 entries and they chose 50 or so to display. It was really good. The artists were everything from professionals who worked for magazines and commissioned by celebrities, to self taught students. There was information on the artist and the subject which I really liked. One was of a soldier fighting in Iraq. She was 19 and from OKC. Another was of Amy Winehouse in a pub. Another was a rape victim from Sudan and her children. Another was of a kid fishing. It was great.

Feb 5

Today is what they call pancake day. We call it fat Tuesday. They thought it was crazy that I wasn't making a pancake to eat for dinner, but I said I have never heard of it.

Feb 9

Today I went to the museum of childhood. It was interesting. Mark suggested that I go see it because it is not too far from where we live. It only takes about 25 minutes to get there. It compared toys from all different time periods and all different regions of the world. It was interesting to see how all kids basically like dolls, automobiles, puppets, doll houses and imitating their parents with toy plates and toy lawn mowers etc. The vast majority of all toys are variations of these.

Then I went over to the Hayward Gallery. I had to pay 5 pounds to get in but it was good. They don't have a permanent collection but their main exhibition was called laughing in a foreign language. It was funny art from all around the world. It was all kinds of stuff, film, sketches, statues, photography, etc. My favorite part was this guy had to travel a lot on planes for work. He started getting ideas about what he could do that would be completely harmless but in an airport would be very suspicious. The first thing he did was instead of luggage he brought three pieces of wood carved in the shape of luggage and when he tried to bring them on the plane they totally freaked out on him and x-rayed them and tried to pry them open and kept him for about 2 hours. The next thing he did was to carry a walking stick that was wrapped in copper wire. They actually confiscated that after trying to get it open but it was solid wood so they never could. Then he carved a huge hat out of wood with an x on it. He wore it on the plane but the pilot would not start the plane until he took this big wood hat off. He also wore a tool belt but put candy bars in the tool holders. Again they freaked out but he ate about four of the candy bars and they finally let him get on the plane. Once he wore a construction workers uniform on the plane and the stewardess told him that he was making the other passengers very uncomfortable. Anyway it was just a bunch of good funny stuff.

There was another floor of Alexander Rodchenko. He was a famous photographer. It was pretty good.