It's been some time since I've last written in this here blog--two weeks, but really, who's counting besides me?--but I've been quite the busy guy. My parents, my brother, and my grandma were here last weekend, which made for good fun. With their help, it was the first time I considered myself a 'tourist' in London, taking pictures of the telephone booths, which at night become plastered with escort ads and by morning are gone; posing with the Royal Guards, who are every bit as serious as their reputation leads you to believe; entering most souvenir shops, with their must have refrigerator magnet replications of the Big Ben and Buckingham Palace; going to Harrod's, a huge department store that has EVERYTHING; and participating in a day-long bus tour, which was pretty neat. It took us to St. Paul's Cathedral, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, Westminster Abbey, a boat cruise along the River Thames, and we got to see the changing of the guards. The latter is such a spectacle. It's an old tradition, dating back to the time of King Henry VII (1485-1509), and it seems like not much has been updated. They change guards every two days, and when they do it it requires an army of guards wearing big black long fuzzy hats called Bearskins, which resemble Butt Head's hair, prompting my brother and me to dub them the 'army of Butt Heads.' Each guard carried an instrument as well, so not only can they kick your ass but can do so to the beat of a drum.

Butt Head, for comparison

The real deal

Being the resident Londonian, I took them to a few museums throughout the weekend. We went to the Tate Modern and laughed at Paul McCarthy's video installation. It consisted of five videos playing simultaneously, each of which showed the 'artist' either jumping whilst naked and flopping his wiener around or wearing panties and shoving things up his butt or covering himself in ketchup or some such liquid. Silly and stupid, yes; art, I'm not so sure. And as an aside, art in video format never translates well. What critics deem 'transgressive' and 'shocking' just comes out making the 'artist' in question looking like a complete ass. The other mediums work well because they're just moments in time, fragments of a scene you may not know the beginning or the end of, hence they're lasting power (or so I think). While films are also a series of moving images, they at least don't try to realize surrealist ideals or confront personal demons by defecating on the floor and then eating it.

Art?

Anyways, I digress. We also checked out the Natural History Museum and saw the dinosaur exhibit, which I somehow missed the first time through--I'm not sure how; it's a big room filled with dinosaur fossils--but nonetheless was really cool. And then on Monday we saw Wicked, my first proper show in London. I'm not a big fan of musicals, but this one I liked. It's the backstory to the The Wizard of Oz, told from the Wicked Witch's perspective who, as it turns out, is quite nice. It was a good show, and it left me with an urge to check out some of the shows London theatres have to offer, specifically Avenue Q. I know nothing about it, but the fact that it's an all puppet cast definitely bodes well.

The left thigh bone of a Apatosaurus, a 75 foot 20-30 ton plant-eater

Not a dinosaur, but the cutest little Fennec Fox I ever did see

My parents left the next morning, and later that night I saw Wire, the seminal British post-punk quartet. Their whole ethos and attitude can be summed up with vocalist Colin Newman's opening remarks to the crowd, "Yeah, we're Wire and all that shit." Later on, someone in the crowd requested a song, to which Colin responded with "No fucking chance...wouldn't know where to begin," and to which bassist Graham Lewis added "You've more chance of seeing God." Pretty fucking punk. Cool attitudes aside, it was a very good show filled with a nice collection of new and old material, and not one, not two, but three encores! They would play a song or two and then leave, to only come back out and play another song. Mike and I thought this was pretty funny. The venue itself (Cargo) was good as well. The stage wasn't too high, it's a nice, big room, and the sound was tight. The Fall is playing there April 1st, so I think I'll check that out.