Beer with subtitles

Summertime, that is, not an inter-galactic battle spurred by the long-forgotten rivalries between two ancient races.

Yes, come this morning, I’m offcall; the sun comes out; stays out; it’s warm enough for wearing only a light jacket to work. A gentle breeze crossing MacMahon bridge. Same on the way home and, at 8pm, it’s still bright. Joy of joys! Looks like things are getting better: it’s officially summertime and summer is actually coming.

Then, when you thought things couldn’t improve, the New York Times reports on a new production of an almost-forgotten and never-recorded Leonard Bernstein musical. A new Bernstein musical?! How many days have that?!?! That’s a damn fine way to usher in summer.

…novelty of technique and radiance of form do not begin to compensate for unholy material. This holds true from “Birth of a Nation” to “Kill Bill”…

David Thomson, “The Whole Equation”

This dense, thorough and fascinating book is full of memorable quotes and passages (not the least of which is the brutally frank Nicole Kidman chapter) but the one above – which articulates perfectly my own feelings towards the “Kill Bill” movies, which I have liked less and less since first viewing – remains my favourite.

This blog primarily serves as a place to post my least worst photographs. Because of this, I like to provide reasonable-sized (400 pixels wide or long, depending on the orientation) thumbnails inlined in the article, each of which each links back to the photograph in its original resolution. Wordpress actually doesn’t allow you configure thumbnail sizes but you can hack a PHP file for a (fixed) custom thumbnail size. Additionally, you can increase the picture size threshold for which pictures will have a thumbnail created.

This involves two simple changes to wp-admin/includes/image.php:

• Locate the wp_create_thumbnail function and edit the value of $max_side. This blog uses a value of 400.
• Search for wp_thumbnail_creation_size_limit; it’s one argument to a function that calculates the maximum picture size that will be considered for creating thumbnails. The default maximum size is 3 * 1024 * 1024, i.e. 3 megapixels. This is quite small, especially for panoramic pictures, and I changed the 3 to 10 without issue on my virtual server with 128MB RAM.

This can go a long way towards making a photo-centric blog, like this one, a lot prettier.

UPDATE: No sooner have I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 than I discover you can now configure thumbnail size from the GUI; the option is well hidden away in Site Admin -> Settings -> Miscellaneous.

As the title suggests, I’ve just spent ten days in London. Somehow, despite all the travel in recent months, I completely neglected the hulking great world hub situated just 50 minutes from Dublin Airport that is London. What started out as a simple long weekend with the sole aim of getting away from Ireland over St. Patrick’s Day and visiting an ex-colleague eventually morphed into a working holiday incorporating all that plus a fruitful couple of days in the London office (and yet another couple of days sight-seeing).

A stay of that length hinted at what it might be like to live and work there – and I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a secondary aim of the entire trip. Is ten days enough time to make such an important decision? Well, the friend I’m visiting needed just two long weekends before packing up and moving work, study and life to the city; I personally needed a lot less time to decide that New York was the place for me. A kind of “love at first sight” for between a person and a city. Since I’ve often heard it said that London is the only city comparable to New York – how would London compare for me?

Interestingly, I came away with the same two concerns as I harbour for Dublin:

1. transport
2. rent

I found London transport wonderful and frustrating in equal measure; wonderful for existing at all, for never waiting more than two minutes on a tube and, seemingly, reaching everywhere but frustrating for being so cramped (the northern line at rush hour scares me) and expensive – £16 for the Gatwick Express, £1.50 for even the shortest of tube rides. Lastly, taking South West Trains on Good Friday is a decision I’m still recovering from. As for rent, well, hotels certainly proved expensive and anecdotal evidence suggests that rent is at least as bad as Dublin.

However, on the bright side, at least they have a transport system…and at least your rent affords you a stay in a city with something to do. Which really makes up for everything. All the things we did in just ten days will keep me blogging for weeks, from West End shows to Hampton Court to the National Gallery. My feelings are that – once you could live somewhere to minimise your travelling time to work – London would be an absolutely brilliant place to live. Moreover, on reflection, I find New York with the exact same problems: it’s expensive and everybody living there hates the transport system. You’d put up with it, though. Put like that, I can only say that I’d love to live in London, too.

What we did:

THURSDAY 13TH

• Fly over

FRIDAY 14TH

• Westminster
• Imperial War Museum
• Tate Modern

SATURDAY 15TH

• Victoria and Albert Museum
• London Eye
• Dali Museum

SUNDAY 16TH

• Shopping around Bond Street
• Handel House Museum
• Camden market

MONDAY 17TH

• St.Paul’s Cathedral
• National gallery

TUESDAY 18TH

• Shakespeare museum
• Science museum

WEDNESDAY 19TH

• Work
• Pub and Wagamama

THURSDAY 20TH

• Work
• CD/DVD shopping in Oxford Street

FRIDAY 21ST

• Hampton Court Palace
• The Magic Flute, Duke of York Theatre

SATURDAY 22ND

• Shopping in Covent Garden
• Fly home

I had already taken the London Eye some years ago. I try not to revisit things I’ve already seen on holiday, however, my travelling companions hadn’t yet taken it…and you don’t really come to London without doing it… It is brilliant – albeit expensive – and, besides, a damp and dreary day made for almost no queue.

London not only contains some of the best museums on the planet but the best free museums on the planet. To top it off, it also turns out to have the best free late opening museums on the planet. Super mega triple jackpot; London is the restless traveller’s paradise. So far, after a lazy start, we’ve already popped into the houses of parliament, ambled around the Imperial War Museum and now we still have time left to inspect the Tate Modern, open until 10pm on Fridays and Saturdays.

Tate Modern houses one of the biggest and best collections of modern art in the world and had actually been top of my list of things to see in London. Aware that modern art is not to everyone’s taste (although these people are clearly wrong) , discovering that it opened late was a blessing: should worst comes to worst and it’s not a popular choice then at least we didn’t come here at the expense of doing something else we’d both enjoy. All parties agree to give it a try. Sure it’s free! What else would we be doing!

First exhibit is in the famous Turbine Hall; we’re confused at first, mistakenly thinking there’s nothing on here right now. Then we notice the crack in the floor and the small crowds of people peering inside. It’s hardly the most impressive exhibit we’ll ever see but I’m open to most things…not a good start for skeptical newcomers, however! We spend the next while perusing the permanent exhibitions; I’m happy as a bee flitting around the place…a few I liked:

• Magritte’s joke comic strip “Man With a Newspaper”
• Meredith Frampton’s super-realistic “Portrait of a Young Woman”
• Jackson Pollock’s “Summertime: Number 9A”

There are also two temporary exhibitions in progress:

• A Juan Muñoz retrospective, with no less than 14 rooms containing his installations and sculptures. I wasn’t sure about this at first at all, opening as it does with a collection of small iron sculptures, however I was quickly won over by “The Wasteland”, an installation featuring a small bronze figure seated on a balcony over a patterned floor. Together with “Two Ballerinas”, I was put in mind of David Lynch’s uncanny ability to combine the absurd, the unsettling and the hilarious. “Many Times” is unsettling in a quite different way: comprising 100 figures with 100 identical heads but 100 different poses, the viewer is suddenly outnumbered by the exhibition. There are groups, cliques, loners, couples and unseen marvels on display here. We are part of the exhibition; we are excluded from the exhibition. For me, it is for some reason really remarkably and uncannily like I am back in Japan…a stranger in a friendly but alien and indifferent place…

  

  

• I’m less wowed by the Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia exhibition but that’s not saying much; I felt Muñoz was the best exhibition I’ve seen in a long long time. Here, I’m particularly taken by the early works. Names are sadly forgotten now, however one of them was Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase”.

Overall, a wonderful experience. The museums does have all the standard modern art clichés – huge canvasses painted red, unpainted framed canvasses with a hole cut through them and all that other stuff that was maybe fun the one time – but it has so much more, too: the surrealists, the minimalists, the futurists; the sculptures; the installations; brilliant colours and startling shapes. There’s a little something for everyone and it would be hard work indeed to come away completely unsatisfied. If nothing else, you’ll see the best modern art has to offer; make your mind up here.

A very pleasant flight, complete with two free miniature bottles of wine; another positive British Airways experience.

On arrival in Victoria, the hotel is close to the station and has free internet, as promised. It’s going to be a fun few days.