Before I left London, Sebastian and I visited Wapping, a little neighborhood on the Thames. Wapping was once the home of sailors, boat-makers, and those nautical types. You can imagine the men. Grizzled and grimey, they would dock the boats and bend, pull, yank and twist until everything was tied up, stowed and latched. And then, climbing ashore, they would head into the pubs, pounding glasses, throwing back their heads to let the ale slide down. They laughed.
The painter, James McNeill Whistler also lived there for a period of time. I came across Whistler's work while helping Sebastian with a presentation on Debussy when we first arrived in London, three years ago. But that's part of a longer story.
On this particular dreary day in January, we went to see Annie Leibovitz' exhibition, Women: New Portraits, commissioned by UBS. It was opening weekend and the line outside the was long, but UBS kindly had three gentlemen making espresso drinks and hot chocolate -- for free. The Wapping Hydraulic Power Station could have been an extraordinary venue, but the arrangement left the content gasping for meaning. There were three large gridded screens, forming "walls," with the fourth wall made up by a long line of portraits and notes, push-pinned to the canvas (this fourth wall was the most interesting). But to view the images, visitors had to file into this square and shift focus from screen to screen, as one woman faded into the next. On the third screen, the Queen looked on. While in some ways, it was powerful to see these giant portraits of women filling the space, it felt empty, with all of us standing there, staring.
We later visited the natural wine bar, Victualler, where the owner let us taste all the wines by the glass.
