Glasgow'd!
Jan. 30th, 2005 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieWe flew into Glasgow on Thursday afternoon. I thought, "Oh, what a great chance to get a bird's eye view of the landscape of the country!" Naturally, this being England, it was cloudy the entire way up there, except for a clearing just as we approached Glasgow. That clearing was nice, as it allowed us to ooh and ahh over the snowcapped mountains, and made me feel vaguely like I was going to Arizona again.
Typically, my first impression of Glasgow was, "OMG, they all talk like Beckett! Wahahahaha!" Well, the driver of our shuttle from the airport to the hotel did, anyway. His voice, not just his accent, sounded like Beckett's, and I got much stifled amusement out of it. Yes, I am a sad, sad little fangirl.
However, I'd still like to forget the day up until about 3 in the afternoon because of girly things. For the sake of TMI, let's just say thank God I was wearing very dark blue jeans that day. (Also, why the hell don't they sell the mega-gigundo absorbency pads in Britain? Why? My life would be so much easier if they did.)
Anyway. We got in around 2:30 in the afternoon, so after a stint in the bathroom sink for me, we decided to go for some lunchy-type goodness. We found a diner-like place whose cottage pie put a nice coat of grease on my stomach, and which had reeeeeally good sticky toffee pudding. Not that I've ever had any other sticky toffee pudding against which to judge this one, but it was damn good anyway.
We went to the ever-so-suspicious-sounding "Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre" that night; you reach it by going through a shabby door and up some stairs that look very sketchy. But it was so not at all like it looked like from the outside! It's not a "theatre," per se, but rather a large collection of machines/art made of scrap metal that do things to music. I cannot express how awesome it was. The place was run by the Russian emigres who made them, and it seemed very...Russian. Like Tim Burton goes to Russia. This stuff would not have been out of place in The Nightmare Before Christmas. Oh, and the woman running the show while we were there reminded me so much of Olshanskaya, it was scary.
Friday morning, we got up bright and early to go take pictures of all the pretty, pretty neoclassical architecture in town. Ooooh, pretty. We'd planned to get started on required activities at ten, but of course nothing opens until 11 on Fridays. Urg. So we spent some time in Borders...I got the final book in Philip Pullman's trilogy after having blazed through the first and second ones earlier this month. Good stuff, but it's getting so weird. We had to go to the Gallery of Modern Art for class; I have to say, the most interesting thing about it was the exterior, which had columns up the wazoo. Columns make me happy. Tacky modern art does not.
We took a train to New Lanark for the afternoon, which was nicely bucolic. The only thing that would've been better would be if we had had more time; we left at 1, the train ride took an hour, the walk from the train station to the site itself took another half hour or so, and then we had to leave at 4 to catch the train, so we really only got an hour and a half there. It was fine for those who wanted to just see the buildings, but I'd kind of wanted to go up to the big waterfall on the River Clyde (tallest one in Scotland!), which was a thirty-minute hike. But the whole place was still pretty neat. You approach it from around a hill--you round the bend in the road and there's this gorgeous river valley filled with huge, elegant, sturdy brick buildings. The sun was shining on it just right as we got there, and it was so inspiring. If I were an orphan in the 1820s, I'd want to be sent there.
Overall, the whole thing reminded me of the Shaker village in Kentucky we went to a couple years ago, but it wasn't done quite as well; the historical interpretation was lacking, and there weren't all that many buildings open to the public. Still, lovely landscape and architecture, and certainly worth the trip.
We saw a horrible "independent" production Friday night that I think was a satire of British and/or American immigration procedures, but I'm not sure. It kind of reminded me of The Master and Margarita if M&M were a play and had all the religious references excised. And were weirder. For the love of God, no more weird avant garde theatre!
Except, of course, there was more weird theatre. Or really, not weird, just incredibly infuriating. Saturday afternoon, we took trains to Edinburgh (yeah, again) to see Look Back in Anger, a play which, in its original decade of the 50s, could've spelled one GIANT LEAP BACK for the nascent women's movement, but I'm guessing didn't, as I hadn't heard of it in connection with such. But, yes--jackass of a husband verbally abuses his wife, she finally runs off, he falls into bed with the friend who encouraged her to run off, wife comes back, friend leaves, wife grovels at man's feet (literally) and he takes her back. What. The. Hell. Done well, sure, but lord. LORD. I amused myself by imagining how lovely it would be to slowly dismember the husband character, but that was a better afternoon that would've been better spent doing just about anything. Ugh.
The morning was kind of fun, though; we had pancakes at a lovely tea room and toured the Glasgow School of Art, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's most famous building. Fun times, even though you couldn't take pictures. :(
This morning, we investigated the McLellan galleries, which, for an art museum, was pretty neat. I can't handle too much art all at once, to be honest, and this one was nice and manageable. There were a couple Pre-Raphaelites (wheee!) and a really neat picture by James Paterson called The Last Turning, Winter, Moniaive, where the water in the river looked just like glass.
And then it was time to get on a plane and go home and play with my pictures, which I will be uploading shortly. :)
Typically, my first impression of Glasgow was, "OMG, they all talk like Beckett! Wahahahaha!" Well, the driver of our shuttle from the airport to the hotel did, anyway. His voice, not just his accent, sounded like Beckett's, and I got much stifled amusement out of it. Yes, I am a sad, sad little fangirl.
However, I'd still like to forget the day up until about 3 in the afternoon because of girly things. For the sake of TMI, let's just say thank God I was wearing very dark blue jeans that day. (Also, why the hell don't they sell the mega-gigundo absorbency pads in Britain? Why? My life would be so much easier if they did.)
Anyway. We got in around 2:30 in the afternoon, so after a stint in the bathroom sink for me, we decided to go for some lunchy-type goodness. We found a diner-like place whose cottage pie put a nice coat of grease on my stomach, and which had reeeeeally good sticky toffee pudding. Not that I've ever had any other sticky toffee pudding against which to judge this one, but it was damn good anyway.
We went to the ever-so-suspicious-sounding "Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre" that night; you reach it by going through a shabby door and up some stairs that look very sketchy. But it was so not at all like it looked like from the outside! It's not a "theatre," per se, but rather a large collection of machines/art made of scrap metal that do things to music. I cannot express how awesome it was. The place was run by the Russian emigres who made them, and it seemed very...Russian. Like Tim Burton goes to Russia. This stuff would not have been out of place in The Nightmare Before Christmas. Oh, and the woman running the show while we were there reminded me so much of Olshanskaya, it was scary.
Friday morning, we got up bright and early to go take pictures of all the pretty, pretty neoclassical architecture in town. Ooooh, pretty. We'd planned to get started on required activities at ten, but of course nothing opens until 11 on Fridays. Urg. So we spent some time in Borders...I got the final book in Philip Pullman's trilogy after having blazed through the first and second ones earlier this month. Good stuff, but it's getting so weird. We had to go to the Gallery of Modern Art for class; I have to say, the most interesting thing about it was the exterior, which had columns up the wazoo. Columns make me happy. Tacky modern art does not.
We took a train to New Lanark for the afternoon, which was nicely bucolic. The only thing that would've been better would be if we had had more time; we left at 1, the train ride took an hour, the walk from the train station to the site itself took another half hour or so, and then we had to leave at 4 to catch the train, so we really only got an hour and a half there. It was fine for those who wanted to just see the buildings, but I'd kind of wanted to go up to the big waterfall on the River Clyde (tallest one in Scotland!), which was a thirty-minute hike. But the whole place was still pretty neat. You approach it from around a hill--you round the bend in the road and there's this gorgeous river valley filled with huge, elegant, sturdy brick buildings. The sun was shining on it just right as we got there, and it was so inspiring. If I were an orphan in the 1820s, I'd want to be sent there.
Overall, the whole thing reminded me of the Shaker village in Kentucky we went to a couple years ago, but it wasn't done quite as well; the historical interpretation was lacking, and there weren't all that many buildings open to the public. Still, lovely landscape and architecture, and certainly worth the trip.
We saw a horrible "independent" production Friday night that I think was a satire of British and/or American immigration procedures, but I'm not sure. It kind of reminded me of The Master and Margarita if M&M were a play and had all the religious references excised. And were weirder. For the love of God, no more weird avant garde theatre!
Except, of course, there was more weird theatre. Or really, not weird, just incredibly infuriating. Saturday afternoon, we took trains to Edinburgh (yeah, again) to see Look Back in Anger, a play which, in its original decade of the 50s, could've spelled one GIANT LEAP BACK for the nascent women's movement, but I'm guessing didn't, as I hadn't heard of it in connection with such. But, yes--jackass of a husband verbally abuses his wife, she finally runs off, he falls into bed with the friend who encouraged her to run off, wife comes back, friend leaves, wife grovels at man's feet (literally) and he takes her back. What. The. Hell. Done well, sure, but lord. LORD. I amused myself by imagining how lovely it would be to slowly dismember the husband character, but that was a better afternoon that would've been better spent doing just about anything. Ugh.
The morning was kind of fun, though; we had pancakes at a lovely tea room and toured the Glasgow School of Art, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's most famous building. Fun times, even though you couldn't take pictures. :(
This morning, we investigated the McLellan galleries, which, for an art museum, was pretty neat. I can't handle too much art all at once, to be honest, and this one was nice and manageable. There were a couple Pre-Raphaelites (wheee!) and a really neat picture by James Paterson called The Last Turning, Winter, Moniaive, where the water in the river looked just like glass.
And then it was time to get on a plane and go home and play with my pictures, which I will be uploading shortly. :)
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no subject
Date: 2005-02-01 01:16 pm (UTC)I think it is what makes it work, because you're just reading this fantasy story and then all of a sudden he starts talking about all these horrible things that happen to children, but you don't really realize what he's implying at first. I don't know how to say it, exactly, but it ties into one of the reasons I like Hitchcock so much - he implies, rather than explicitly states, and you can do so much more with implications. So Pullman can imply on many levels, including his impressive fantasy one.
Harry Potter's different entirely, because Rowling never removes Harry completely from the Muggle world. He's always aware his actions affect everybody, and that magic isn't an out. Magic, in some cases, might represent parts of reality and help Harry cope, but it's not an implication for anything the way the daemons are an implication for the souls we can not hide. Harry's great because of Rowling's story-telling abilities and characterizations.
I read Paradise Lost in college, and, unfortunately, don't remember too much of it, but I do remember really enjoying some parts.