Author: Lee Hausman

 

Throughout my travels over the years, I have been in many places where pickpockets are said to be operating. Some places even post signs along the sidewalk saying so. I have been known to carry my money in a small “boot wallet” clipped inside my trousers; sometimes even attached to a retracting steel cable! And yet, I have never encountered a pickpocket until yesterday.

 

I suppose living here and getting out of tourist mode has made me a bit lax. I generally tool around Reading with my wallet in my back pocket and don’t think much about it. Yesterday, coming back from a business appointment, I experienced a fine London subway tradition: the service interruption. Interruptions from fires, maintenance work, equipment failures, electrical problems, etc. are so common that stations have electronic and whiteboard signs that announce today’s failures as they occur. So it was that in mid-ride, finding one subway line suddenly without service, I and hundreds of other riders had to change to an adjacent line.

 

The platform and then the cars when we boarded them were jam-packed! So tightly packed were we that standees, like myself, had no need to hold onto an overhead or vertical bar for balance. We were immobilized against the packing peanuts of our fellow riders. So there I was, Sardine Man, train in motion, when I suddenly felt a quick pat of my back pants pocket where my wallet usually lives. It took me a moment to recognize the sensation and realize, by the time a second and then a third pat had occurred, that this was not a grope but an actual grab for my wallet. But I was stuck: I could not turn my body to see behind me nor raise my arms due to the press. It occurred to me to yell “Pickpocket” but what would that accomplish? It was already too late.

 

My wallet, with all its valuable cards and money, all its irreplaceable pictures and charms, and some really hard-to-replace stuff, like my Virginia driver’s license, remained safely in my front pants pocket with my hand shoved in on top of it. I don’t remember doing it, but I know as soon as I spied a crowd assembling on the subway platform, I relocated my wallet to the front pocket and place a guarding hand in over it. This is another one my automatic traveler’s habits and, in retrospect I’m really, really glad I developed it. How frustrating would it have been to feel someone take my wallet but be unable to even turn around to confront them?

 

I think I’ll inventory my wallet tonight and remove a few non-essential things, then be a little more careful around Reading in the future. Just in case.

 

 

 

London’s Tate Modern museum is a cavernous, industrial-seeming building on the banks of the Thames. I have never much liked the building itself, both for its architecture and located as it is equally inconveniently distant from three tube stops. Nonetheless, I went to see the Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia exhibit there recently.

 

These three wackos were key figures in the history of modernism. Famous for creating the post-WWI Dada movement in New York and Paris in 1915-20, they became friends and influenced each other’s work.

 

Early on as painters they experimented with cubism and produced strange, scandalous paintings that substituted shapes for flesh, in works that resemble multiple-exposure photography. Check out Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Later abstractions produced blobs of paint on colored backgrounds.

 

One of their signatures was to challenge the prevailing notion of what constitutes “art”. The foundation of Dada-ism is “anti-art”. Duchamp was famous for entering a mass-produced ceramic men’s room urinal, The Fountain, in an art show. Man Ray created rayographs by laying objects on photo paper and exposing them to light. Picabia, collected fast cars and created transparencies, paintings in which multiple images overlay and show through each other.

 

They worked in paint, sculpture, mechanical objects, photographs, and film and their careers spanned decades. No chilly artist’s garret and soul-sapping anonymity for these guys: they were famous and influential and lived and worked into the 1960’s. One of Duchamp’s best-known works is L.H.O.O.Q. – an image of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and goatee added. Picabia’s work even graced the cover of Vogue magazine.

 

And they were fun guys. For example, Picabia wrote a film script, featuring Duchamp and Man Ray playing chess, among other things. The resulting movie was shown during the intermission of a new opera and its stated intent was to get the audience to go home. A lot of modern art leaves me cold but I enjoyed the sheer whimsy and bravado of these works.

 

The Tate show itself was well-organized, with over a hundred pieces, and nicely annotated. The audio guide (a very worthwhile expense) included recordings of comments on the works by the artists themselves – a very personal connection. You can see a lot of the exhibition here.

 

It was interesting to see that some their works, painstakingly created “the old fashioned way” with materials then available to them, are the predecessors (and possibly the foundations) for digitally-created images and videos we see today. “Solarization”, layering, and video scene quick-cutting are but a few examples. One wonders what these artists could have done with modern digital tools or if they would have had any impact at all in today’s visually overloaded world. If the show travels to the U.S., I recommend it to you.

 

Incidentally, one of the principals of the Dada movement in Berlin after WWI was an artist named Raoul Hausmann.

 

 

 

The bookstores are jammed with books about all things English that oppose, imitate, irritate, or amuse the American sensibility. I have before me one of these (it was a gift); a book that lists supposedly naughty British place and street names. Here are a few examples:

 

A village named Horton Cum Studley and another named Bishop’s Itchington. Making you smile?

 

How about Wigley Bush Lane or the town of Penistone? Surely Green Dick’s Lane gave you a chuckle. No? How about Hardon Lane or Slutshole Lane?

 

Well, they didn’t do anything for me either. I thought the whole book was quite a reach. Or maybe, after two months here, my sense of humor has been Anglicized.

 

More proof that you can make a buck selling just about anything.

 

 

 

I was walking along through town one day and happened to look down at a discarded empty pack of cigarettes on the ground. Something about it struck me as odd, unfamiliar. Ah, yes…

 

Now here’s a picture of a typical US pack of cigarettes. Notice that the tobacco warning label, which I’ve helpfully outlined so you can find it, is tucked away on the edge of the pack, where your fingers will likely cover it when opening the pack. This has not changed in the last 20 years.

 

The text is one of four different messages such as “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy.”  I guess it complies with US law but it’s clearly designed to not get in the way of the important stuff, from the tobacco industry’s perspective: making loads of money while addicting and killing millions.  

 

      

 

But now here’s what the empty pack I saw on the ground looked like. Huge difference. The tobacco warning is simple and hard to miss. 

 

Recent studies seem to indicate that relatively complex and wordy messages in the US warning label don’t have much effect, but the larger British, Canadian, German, Autrailian, etc. warnings do. Many countries, but not the US, have revised and improved their warning messages several times over the last decade.

 

 A 2005 study found that half of all smokers in the US read at the 6th Grade level or below. Now that’s scary all on its own!

  

 

 

 

   

  

 

After August of this year, the UK warnings will be made much more graphic, with actual large, nasty images on the pack, like this one (I decided the image of the rotted teeth was just too horrible to show).

 

  

The UK and other countries are obviously really serious about getting kids and new smokers to reconsider the habit; too bad the US isn’t.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Back in the States, I was a big fan of NetFlix and watched a movie from them almost every Saturday night. I was disappointed to find that they have no branch in the UK, but when I arrived here someone told me about LoveFilm, which offers a similar service.

 

Note that it’s "LoveFilm" not "Love Films", so get that idea of an adult movie service right out of your mind. It is, instead, a NetFlix clone in almost every respect but the payment currency. Here are the two web sites:

 

 

    

 

 

So I was keen to sign up! However, it was not to be, at least not immediately. As I may have mentioned before, some UK websites will not take payment using credit cards that are not issued in the UK, and LoveFilm.com is one of them.

 

I talked with their customer support folks but it was no good. I can, however, use my debit card once my UK checking acocunt is ready, which should be in another week or so. Then Saturday night will be movie night once again and I can resume trying to make a dent in my mile-long list of movies to be seen.

 

 

 

 

As a result of St. Patrick’s Day falling on a Monday, it was "St. Patrick’s Weekend" here in the UK. So what was it like, compared to the same event in the US?

 

On Sunday, the very popular rugby team, London Irish, played a match at the local stadium. They brought with them hordes of fans; absolute mobs of them disgorged from the train station and flooded through town, wearing all manner of green clothes, jackets, and hats. I happened to be up at the station and got first-hand exposure to them. Amongst the unusual paraphanelia I noted were little fake leprechaun beards worn by quite a few.

 

Did I mention that this is all taken very seriously? At the rugby stadium, which sold out (22,000+ fans) for this party, something called The Guinness Village is set up and a serious effort is made to set a record for the number of pints consumed. The news reported that a very fine time was had by all (except perhaps the team, which lost the match). Surprisingly, the town was not torn up or damaged as far as I heard, so this was a polite, well-behaved mob of noisy and very enthusiastic fans. 

 

On St. Patrick’s Day itself, I decided to get over to the nearest Irish pub, O’Neill’s, around 2 PM, for a quick pint and a look at the festivities. Just a fast in-and-out, then back to work. As it turned out, however, it was actually around 8:30 PM when I left for home, clear evidence that I had a very fine time!

 

In the US, you order a Guinness and you get this black, bitter stuff that’s never suited my taste. Here, there are three flavors: Guinness, Guinness Extra Cold, and Guinness Red. The latter is smoother and more like my favorite, Cafrees, so I’ve become a Guinness Red fan overnight. O’Neill’s itself is a very nice pub, with plenty of room and a terrific staff. There were a lot of revelers, to be sure, but it never became oppressive and it was never packed wall-to-wall the way American bars are on St. Patrick’s Day. 

 

I met three sisters, Erin, Lorraine, and Katrina, sporting "FBI" badges (Full-Blooded Irish), and Sala, a high-school French teacher from Algeria. The sisters were really wild, dancing and hooting and having quite a ball. The whole place seemed to know the lyrics to all the Irish songs the live entertainers played and everyone sang along frequently. Sala wanted to talk very seriously about the choice between Obama and Clinton!

 

I found it interesting that most name brand draft beer is served to you in a glass with the logo of that brand. So the pub has a stock of glassware dedicated to each brand of beer.

 

Here’s how Guinness is really meant to be served: the bartender draws beer from the tap and stops about 1" from the top, then sets the glass aside to settle for a minute or two. Then he or she puts the glass back under the tap again, and using a very thin stream, fills the glass while drawing a perfect shamrock in the foam. The glass is delivered to you with a stiff head on it and the neat shamrock etched into it. A very nifty presentation!

 

One extremely nice thing about the evening was that smoking is no longer allowed in pubs, so I didn’t get a huge dose of second-hand smoke nor did my clothes reek of cigarette smoke when I got home. Quite an improvement over the old days.

 

St. Patrick’s Day was a lot of fun for me and apparently you can’t go wrong with Guinness because I was fine when I got home and had no ill effects in the morning. Or perhaps it’s my 50% Irish heritage at work? Erin Go Bragh ("Ireland Forever")!

 

 

Here are a few photos of the festivities down at the stadium:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The London Times reported today that Brian Grazer, Oscar-winning producer of The Da Vinci Code, American Gangster, and A Beautiful Mind, is looking for a new "personal cultural attaché". This from an email advertising the job: “This person is responsible for keeping Mr. Grazer abreast of everything that’s going on in the world, political, cultural, and musical. They’re also responsible for finding an interesting person for Mr. Grazer to meet every week, an astronaut, philosopher, monk, someone who’s made an impression in their field”. My favorite part: “Mr. Grazer may ask you to read any book he’s interested in and tell him about it.” It’s come to this, folks: the rich hiring others to read books for them. A walking, breathing Cliff Notes for the elite. Go figure.

 

The job pays $80K but don’t get your hopes up. You’ll be competing against others such as Ed Cooke, 26, a philosophy and psychology grad student at Oxford University who recently failed to make the cut. Among his other qualifications, Cooke came in 7th in this year’s World Memory Championships (the winner correctly remembered the order of every card in 54 inter-shuffled decks that he had only looked through once), speaks three languages fluently, and studies the "philosophy of Rugby".

 

 

 

 

Three weeks ago the press here went wild with the story of Shannon Matthews, a nine-year old girl from Dewsbury who never made it home after swim practice at school. The story unfolded in the all too depressingly-familiar way of child abductions: CCTV camera footage examined, hundreds of police scouring the neighboring areas and dragging the local pond, door-to-door interviews with locals, and sad televised appeals from the parents. The effort to find her was massive: more than 200 homes within a half-mile radius of the girl’s home were searched, 300 officers were assigned to the case, and half of the police dogs in England capable of detecting corpses were brought in. As the days wore on, grim reminders from “police consultants” that the chances of finding the girl alive diminished with every passing day were broadcast.

 

I got the gist of what was going on (the media coverage was so large you just couldn’t miss it) but didn’t really delve into the details. Last Friday, 24 days after her disappearance, the story took an unexpected by happy turn with the announcement that Shannon had been found alive and unharmed. Wow – a storybook ending?

 

Maybe not. Today, I sat down with the paper and got the details. The first thing that caught my eye was that Shannon had not been joyfully reunited with her parents after being rescued but was instead now in protective care. The second was that the police found her at the apartment of the uncle of her mom’s current boyfriend. The divorced uncle had recently lost the right to visit his daughters, who live with their mother. The authorities decided that returning Shannon to her mother, 32, who lives with the six other children she’s had with five different fathers and is now dating a 22-year old, might not be the best thing to do. Ya think?

 

Let’s hope the child somehow recovers from the trauma of it all.

 

 

 

Before coming across "the pond" I’d read that business behavior in the UK can be a bit more formal that our relaxed US ways. So I was surprised to see that one flavor of business outfit quite common here, especially with younger guys, is a nice suit but no tie. I can understand a sports coat and no tie but a nice pin-striped suit with a dress shirt and then no tie looks really odd to my eye. Not that I’m a clothes horse or fashion hound in any way, mind you, far from it, but the combination of formality (suit) and informality (no tie) seems more relaxed than a pair of jeans, in a business setting.

 

I went over to Windsor (yes, where the Castle is) last Tuesday to meet with our business accountants and put on my own Navy Blue, pin-striped, Evan Picone suit and burgundy tie and felt quite good about it. I fit right in other there with the CPAs and, who knows, I may just do it more often.

 

By the way, and speaking of Windsor, I’ve always been aware of 3 ways to tie a tie (four-in-hand, Windsor, half-Windsor), but I found that Wikipedia says there are 85 possible knots! Who knew!

 

 

I’ve spent a little more time soaking up Pub Life and even did a little research on pub-review web sites. You knew there had to be several of these sites, right? My favorite site is one about local Reading pubs written by a couple of young guys whose ratings are generally worthless but hilarious. Unlike most restaurant reviewers who are meticulous about their facts, these two often get so toasted that they can’t remember what brews or how many pints they’ve had. Achieving this state alone, in their reviews, equates to having had a good time, which means the pub merits a good rating.

 

There are corporate pubs, parts of well-run national chains, which are OK in their way, and there are more traditional pubs: small and homey, with upholstered chairs, a fire in the fireplace, that kind of ambiance, easily allowing you to believe that the publican (operator) and his family do actually live upstairs. Last evening I was in The Red Lion down the street and the owner’s young daughter (maybe 8-10 years old) was dashing around, in and out behind the bar, clearly at home. The whole atmosphere at a place like this is much more relaxed than at a US bar. Relatively recent no-smoking laws have gone into place, so pubs are now smoke-free.

 

Some pubs just serve drinks and do not serve food at all (reminds me of a few dives I used to frequent in Georgetown during my college days). This sounds to me like a recipe for what the Brits call “anti-social behavior”. Others sell tasty pub food that goes down well with your pint. Some serve lagers with names you’ll know such as Coors, Corona, and Stella Artois (did you recognize that last name, by the way? Stella turns out to be the third largest selling beverage in the UK – right behind Coke and bottled water). Some pubs also sell ales, also known as traditional ales or Real Ale. These are the less fizzy brews, served just slightly chilled (not warm or at room temp, as you may have heard), that are “pumped” up from the basement using a long-handled tap. These are also the ones with the nifty names, such as Tanglefoot, Bread of Heaven, and Dirty Tackle, that I like so much. A pint is $3-5 depending on time of day and the brew.

 

It seems that real ales are in retreat in the brew market and so some folks have banded together to create CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) which boasts 85,000 members. They’ve enlisted pubs across the country to run real ale festivals and to promote the traditional brews. You can check out their web site here: http://www.camra.org.uk

 

Pubs do also serve beverages other than beer, including wine (often from taps), soft drinks, lemonade, alcoholic ciders, and mixed drinks. When you order a “mixed” drink, such as bourbon and water, the barman actually puts your shot into a tall glass and, at the bar, you add water from a pitcher to suit your taste. Remember, all of the ordering is done at the bar in pubs, even if you’re sitting at a table across the room, and it’s strictly self-serve.

 

Stay tuned: more fascinating, semi-sloshed pub observations to come later.