This was a pretty pleasant day all in all … at least for me. John had some issues.
I had some coffee in the morning and looked out at the swans in the river by Jerry and Vicki’s house.
They live on the River Brent, a small tributary of the Thames that was incorporated in the late eighteenth century into a part of the Grand Union Canal, an artificial waterway that connected London and Birmingham. At one point, the canal carried most of the goods in between the capital and the country’s largest manufacturing center. Brentford was not only one of many locks on the canal, but it was a particularly important one as taxes were levied here on the goods carried. There is a plaque near our friends’ house that explains this system and how gauging locks worked.
I had not been to church in a couple weeks, so I decided to head into central London to hear one of the city’s most famous church choirs, the men and boys choir of Westminster Cathedral. This is the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Westminster, and probably the most important Catholic churches constructed in Britain since the Reformation. It is constructed in a supposedly neo-Byzantine style, though it really just looks Victorian.
The inside is dominated by the high altar with its baldacchino. It was not easy to get a picture on Sunday morning, so I nicked this one from the internet.
The service this day celebrated the dedication of the church 108 years earlier. The service was largely a novo ordo mass in English, but odd parts of it were in Latin. The choir was obviously really good, but the acoustics were pretty bad even sitting pretty close to the front. I am glad I went, but doubt that I will be back.
Things did not go so well for John. He decided to go to a meeting in Richmond, not all that far from Brentford. He usually uses Lyft at home when he needs a ride, but only Uber is available in London. He did have the app on his phone, and it worked fine to get him to the meeting despite the usual wretched London traffic. But when it was over, the app stopped working for him. I figured out later that it had an old AMEX card as the payment method, so I am not sure why it worked the first time. He kept calling me trying to get me to fix it, but that was not easy to do over the phone. Fortunately, he sent a picture of himself sitting in front of the Mortlake Cemetery to Vicki and Jerry came and picked him up.
I had some time to pass before meeting up with John. I had a bowl of pretty bad Ramen near Victoria Station. I walked along the Embankment towards Trafalgar Square, thinking I might stop in at the National Gallery. But when I go there, the area around Nelson’s monument was jammed with a crowd waiting for a free performance, so I just decided to keep walking. I walked up Charing Cross towards Leicester Square, but it was almost as insanely crowded as Trafalgar Square had been. There was a Soho neighborhood fair in the old Saint Anne’s churchyard, the burial spot of William Hazlitt among others, and briefly looked in at that. I continued on towards Piccadilly. Regent Street had been completely shut down for a street fair. It was mildly interesting. I noticed with some dismay that all the shops there are exactly the same ones that you would find in any high-end shopping mall just about anywhere in the world. How sad to come so far just to find J. Crew and Ralph Lauren!
About this time, John called to let me know that they were at the theater. We had tickets for Brief Encounter. I had read about how this theatrical adaptation of David Lean’s cinematic adaptation of Noel Coward’s play mixed live action, including music, and film, and I was interested to see how it all worked. Although a production of the Old Vic, It was playing at the Empire Cinema, itself a vaudeville house that had been converted into a cinema. When we entered there were a group of people singing on the stairs.
What we did not fully appreciate then was that all these “ushers” were actually members of the cast. Brief Encounter was great, though I cannot imagine it working so well outside of this setting. At first I could not quite out what exactly was going on in the play as it seemed to be just a campy sendup of the Lean film. But as I watched I had a better sense of what Emma Rice, the writer and director, was trying to do. Basically, Rice is using most of the text of the Lean film in order to deconstructed it much as Jacques Derrida and his disciples did with other classic texts. The film version is a powerful endorsement of middle-class values. The two main characters Laura and Alec fall in deeply in love after a brief encounter in a railway station. Unfortunately, both are both married and although powerfully attracted to each other, they resist the temptation to consummate the affair. Both Lean and Coward seems to suggest that the pair are partly tragic but also heroic for refusing to compromise their marriage vows. As deconstructionist approaches generally do, Rice’s version rather turns this on its head and the pair are more or less shown as absurd for their unwillingness to engage in a sexual encounter. Rice expands the text of the film to include much more about the minor characters who work at the station, all working class people. The people, the manager of the cafe and her assistant, and a love interest of each one of them, are depicted as full of healthy and well-expressed sexual energy in contrast to the repressed middle class. They become the de facto protagonists of the story.
Yet, as Andy Warhol famously said, "Nothing is more bourgeois than to be afraid to look bourgeois.” Despite Rice’s attempt to rebel against Lean’s middle-class values, her lower-class characters are flat projections of the bourgeois rejection of bourgeois values. Just as D. H. Lawrence was fundamentally unable to see the working classes as anything other than projections of his fantasies about an ideal unrepressed sexuality, Rice never gives her characters a true life of their own.
I tried to talk about all this after the play. After the word “deconstructionism” people stopped listening to me. That’s why I keep a blog.
After the play, Jerry drove us to Chiswick. He has a new Mercedes convertible, and it was wonderful to drive through Kensington with the roof down. We had a somewhat disappointing meal at a brasseries there.
Tomorrow, we’re off for an adventure in Bristol!
