ADIOS LONDON, ALOHA AUCKLAND

Jetlagged reminiscing on where I left, what I experienced and where I’m at.

How London looked from this cyclist’s perspective on Saturday afternoon. I know, unbelievable. Where is the grey and the rain?

So I locked my front door in London at 17.30 on the 26^th January and stepped into my mum’s Auckland apartment circa 15.30 on 28^th January. Outside of time seated on planes I’d spent around 150 minutes in Heathrow Airport and 215 minutes in Hong Kong Airport. Add in the time spent travelling to and from airports and I’d estimate my journey from European winter to South Pacific summer took around 36 hours. Which is remarkable, considering my 19^th Century ancestors (Welsh, Polish, German, English etc) would have spent at least six weeks sailing to reach these islands known to their Polynesian inhabitants as Aotearoa. That said, I hope someone invents teleportation before our world finally becomes uninhabitable…. where’s Captain Kirk? Indeed.

Something else I need to consider: I travelled for 36 hours but appear to have travelled for 46 hours – crossing time zones means I’ve grown older by half a day (or some such). I wonder if, on the way back, I will experience reverse ageing? Not that this matters – I’m reunited with my mum, and this is a good thing.

Reunited and somewhat dazed: I can’t sleep on planes, my insomnia growing ever more gruesome the older I get and the further I travel. I flew Cathay Pacific this time as an alternative to the cheaper Chinese airlines, they always involve several hours at a Chinese airport, then 3 or 4 more at an Australian airport, before the final destination of Auckland. This ensured I was near enough hallucinating when I finally exited into Arrivals. First world problems, I know, I’m just thinking out loud on how exhausting long distant flights are, especially to us insomniacs.

Anyway, my last weekend in London saw Saturday blessed with the most beautiful weather of the winter: blues skies and bright sunshine, temperatures hovering around 7. What to do? Obviously, I got on my bike and off I went. I love to cycle London, but doing so in howling winds and torrential rains does test my patience. A calm, crisp day? Well, I’m enticed to stretch my legs.

I’d originally planned on going to the British Museum to see their Silk Roads exhibition. I’ve long been fascinated by the somewhat mythic status accorded ancient Asian trading routes we now tend to honour under a somewhat fanciful 19^th Century appellation - having trekked across Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Uzbekistan has helped me develop a taste for the history, food and music made in regional hubs along the route (where apparently silk wasn’t even a very popular a commodity).

Unfortunately, a disgruntled ex-BM tech employee used his pass to gain access to the institution’s computers on Friday and wreaked havoc, so forcing the weekend closure of much of the museum. Blows against the Empire? Or revenge of the nerd? No matter, I’ve missed the exhibition (which closes early March). If you have seen it – or plan on doing so – let me know what was on display and how fascinating (or infuriating) you found it.

Then I considered going to Tate Modern to see Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit, the first British retrospective of the late American conceptual artist. That said, as I knew little about Kelley’s art, beyond one of his soft-toy photos had provided the cover image for a Sonic Youth album - I consider SY a) unlistenable and b) amongst the most overrated of rock bands (and this is a very crowded field) - my motivation was Kelley’s rep’ as an acerbic American art brat. As entry was £18, I decided to do a little research. I mean, if Kelley’s art was the visual equivalent of Sonic Youth’s music, then I should stay away.

As art museum’s tend to now advertise their exhibitions akin to sexed-up movie trailers, and The Guardian’s critic got all excited – I never trust his judgement, honestly, this is a guy who once panted over Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde lambs and cows – to get some clarity I watched Robert Dunt’s video review - here:

which made it clear that Kelley belonged to the same art school of often “ain’t-I-outrageous” exhibitionism as Tracey Emin and Gilbert & George. When wealthy collectors/highbrow institutions salivate over enfant terrible artists it reflects late capitalism as ever more infantile – I mean, look at Zuckerberg and Musk – but I best shut up or I’ll begin to sound like Putin and the Islamists who shout about the West being sated, decadent, in irreversible decline.

Anyway, I skipped Kelley but still wanted a destination and, having been alerted that Two Temple Place was opening a new exhibition this Saturday, headed there.

Two Temple Place is an odd building, beautiful whilst aggravating. It was built in the 1890s by the heir to the Waldorf Astor fortune, who had left New York for London railing at how he was not taken seriously enough by Manhattan’s elite, so built a mock neo-gothic/renaissance palace to fulfil his European dreams. Kind of like a cut-price Randolph Hearst (Hearst had real European palaces transported to California and then rebuilt, stone-by-stone).

Cut-price but still alluring: TwoTemple Place is a wonderland of Victorian craftsmanship, overflowing as it is with striking wood carving, stained glass windows, gilded ceilings, stone parapets and much else.

Beryl Cook’s At The Hairdressers. Cook was beloved by the general public and loathed by modern art’s gatekeepers.

Anyway, Two Temple Place opens with a new exhibition every January – which runs for around three months (always free entry) – then reverts to being for private hire for the rest of the year (think film/TV set – yes, Downton Abbey etc – and a place for City bankers to hold dinners). I was first introduced to the splendour of TTP when they housed an exhibition on the impact jazz had on Britain post-WW1. Here the curators gathered the detritus of popular culture back then – 78s, brogues, a dress, paintings, magazines etc – to convey how Edwardian London embraced the hot music emanating from New Orleans. It was an enchanting exhibition in an admittedly striking location.

The current exhibition, Lives Less Ordinary: Working Class Britain Re-seen, attempts to celebrate painters and photographers (and, at the end, a few conceptual/video artists) who hail from + document the British proletariate. The late Beryl Cook has two of her cherry, chubby people paintings here and they glow with joy. The note alongside them suggests a Tate Modern director (surely Nicholas Serota) announced Cook’s paintings - which were very popular with the public - would never hang in his museum.

This inherent snobbery reflects how those championed by the major art museums and galleries are reliant on an extremely small number of gatekeepers to achieve their vaunted ‘status’ as institutionally approved art. Lives Less Ordinary: Working Class Britain Re-seen is, it claims, an attempt to celebrate overlooked, working class artists. Yet this involves difficult territory as the photographers here include Charlie Phillips (Windrush generation West Indians in Notting Hill) and Chris Killip’s photos of people scraping an existence from gathering coal on the beaches of north east England, both of whom have enjoyed a real degree of acknowledgement by institutions and art writers (at least in the last few decades).

Both, I should add, are superb photographers. While Hirst and Emin are from working class families, they went through the conventional art school/dealer gallery/wealthy patronage route, while the artists here are largely those who worked outside it (but aren’t “outsider” artists ie “naive/primitives”). Anyway, this is a huge subject for debate and it’s good that class is being raised again in an age when it often appears that only the offspring of the professional classes can now afford to go to art/drama/dance schools.

Chris Killip’s photo of 80s punks at play in the north east.

There is a lot on display in Lives Less Ordinary: Working Class Britain Re-seen, some of it grab-bag, alongside gems by largely forgotten kitchen sink era painters. That the art and lives of Britain’s more marginalised communities hangs in a building created by an oligarch and used for much of the year by plutocrats is a contradiction that the exhibition doesn’t attempt to address. “A cheap holiday in other people’s misery” as Johnny Rotten once snarled? Not exactly. Although the theme is disconcerting and there certainly will be elements of voyeurism as the well heeled gawk at those with very little.

I had a discussion on FB recently with a chap who, having just been to see the stage adaption of The Lonely Londoners – which I trashed here when it opened a year ago – was enthusing about how the audience (including he and his partner) all rose to applaud at the end. I noted how I was certain the audience was - as when I went - full of the well off, middle aged/pensioner types who can afford theatre tickets but who’d either never read The Lonely Londoners or read it so long ago they didn’t realise what a travesty this adaption is.

These dim bougies were thrilled by the play’s portrayal of young Black men driven to armed robberies and other Top Boy style “ghetto” nonsense that has nothing to do with Sam Selvon’s lyrical, optimistic novel. I imagine they’re the kind of people who listen to a Snoop Dogg album whilst holidaying in Tuscany, believing gangsta rap “is the voice of disenfranchised youth”. Or some such nonsense. Which is a roundabout way of saying, yes, this exhibition is full of contradictions. But unlike The Lonely Londoners, entry is free. And Two Temple Place is a peaceful space where, even if you have no interest in the exhibition, you can admire remarkable craftsmanship. If you happen to be in London then it’s worth a visit.

I thought Corbin Shaw’s flag a brilliant inclusion in Lives Less Ordinary. Far wittier and more thought provoking than Mike Kelley’s overblown attempts to shock.

Sunday was wretched weather wise. The kind of day where you decide to hide beneath the duvet. Unless, like me, you have a plane to catch. As already noted, I can’t sleep on planes. So I stared at the tiny screen embedded in the back of a seat until I felt my eyes might bleed. I saw Dahomey – an imaginative doc’ about Beninese carvings that had been looted by colonial forces in the 19^th Century being and were now being returned by France to Benin. Rather than dry voiceover, the film has the carvings offering their droll “thoughts”, alongside debates being held in Benin by students with an interest in the reparation of such. Its just over an hour long, which is perfect.

I also enjoyed Free Solo, a doc’ I’d heard of when it won the AA for Best Doc in 2018, but not seen. It focuses on Alex Honnod as he attempts to free climb El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. For an obsessive climber who lives in a van and has little interest in anything but climbing and environmental issues, Honnod comes across as a very likeable individual. And his struggles – with climbing and his adorable girlfriend – give Free Solo the dramatic hubris necessary.

I then watched One Love, yes, the Bob Marley biopic that I’d avoided when on release. As ever, the actor cast as the singer is much taller and handsomer than the actual artist (worst ever example of this was La Bamba, where Richie Valens – a stocky, lantern jawed Chicano – was played by a guy who looked like he advertised male beauty products). Still, One Love is far more enjoyable than A Complete Unknown – Bob M having a far more challenging and dramatic life than Bob D. And being a far better singer and songwriter: when I hear Blowing In The Wind I hear a pedantic song by a calculating writer. When I hear Get Up, Stand Up, I hear the sound of a genuine revolutionary (musical+political). One who, in the Barrett brothers, had the world’s finest rhythm section backing him.

One Love’s produced by Rita Marley so Bob’s very public mid-70s affair with Cindy Breakespeare (Miss Jamaica and Miss World) is entirely absent. And Island Records founder Chris Blackwell is portrayed as a posh jerk. Which may be true in how some have found him, but he and he alone ensured that Marley would reach an international audience. So this is rather mean spirited. Anyway, One Love’s no masterpiece but, at 107 minutes, it doesn’t overstay its welcome and works as in-flight entertainment.

Next up was the weirdest in-flight entertainment I’ve ever seen: MaXXXine. This is a 2024 horror movie set in LA in 1985 where porn star Maxine Minx auditions for and wins the lead role in a horror movie. But her best gal pals are all being murdered and a sleazy private investigator is attempting to abduct Maxine. I’m rarely at ease with horror/slasher films, but I couldn’t stop watching MaXXXine: its so extreme, both in tone and humour, and Mia Goth is very convincing as the harder-than-nails heroine. As a satire of Hollywood/LA it will take some beating (Tarantino’s tepid effort doesn't come close). And as a gore fest, well, I hope I won’t watch anything as brutal for a good, long while.

After MaXXXine I watched Summer Of Soul a couple of times just to reduce my anxieties. I must write here about SOS at some point, so do remind me if I don’t. I likely watched a few other films and stopped them when I felt my interest waning (I recall one being The Bike Riders, which was abysmal). Cathay Pacific have the largest film library I’ve ever encountered on an airline. Sadly, no current Oscar nominations – I’d like to see A Real Pain and The Substance without going to the cinema. Speaking of Oscars, its good to see Soundtrack To A Coup D’Etat is up for Best Doc while the most enjoyable film I’ve seen in recent months – Wallace & Gromit: Vengenance Must Fowl – is up for Best Animated Feature. Not seen Fowl? A gem and a very witty, inventive one.

I think our plane landed around the time I watched 19-year old Stevie Wonder work his magic in SOS for the third or fourth time. What a remarkable artist Wonder is – then and now. And his 60s singles remain underrated, with too much focus being on the 70s albums. While its a contradiction to describe a superstar as ‘underrated’, Stevie’s never got the kind of in-depth analysis Dylan and The Beatles and Joni Mitchell et al get. I know, they’re white but still…

Auckland Airport is refreshingly compact and I breezed through it – last time I was so jet-lagged I couldn’t recognise my own bag (admittedly, a black wheelie bag isn’t very distinguishable). Mum, expecting me to take ages, hadn’t arrived and, when she did, she promptly forgot where she’d parked the car… Which is quite easy to do, Auckland Airport being surrounded by acres of car parks. So I stood beneath the scorching South Pacific sun in my European winter gear and thought of how I may be exhausted and I may be sweaty but, yes, I’m happy to be wandering around car parks with my lovely mum as she goes “I counted 12 cars from where I parked it so it might be this one…”. Kiwi updates will follow once the jetlag fades!

The only good thing about jet-lag fuelled insomnia is it allows me to see the sun rise across the Manukau harbour.