Sound and Vision: March 2010

It’s strange how easily you forget a whole world outside London exists, a world where you can walk everywhere easily, where it’s rather quiet, where almost everyone is ‘British’ , where there are no red double decker buses and where you can’t understand a word people are saying. It makes you think of London as a bubble, a cosmopolitan bubble of noise, business men and women, rushing, long distances, tourists, too many things to do and see, expensiveness and racial diversity. At the same time, once you’ve lived in London, you realize that nothing can measure up to the city and the life you led there, except maybe if you move to New York or Los Angeles.

I quite enjoyed my 5-day break (last week) in which I went on holiday to Liverpool and Manchester, as I spend the days in a sort of lonely happiness, wandering around the cities and exploring on my own. Surely in the evening you miss someone to talk to, or to go out with, but other than that it’s very relaxing.

Liverpool seemed a fairly small city to me, it has some nice museums and it’s pretty quiet. Let’s say Oxford on an average afternoon seems busier than Liverpool. The Northern accent, especially the Scouse in Liverpool, is horrendous. The whole time my conversations with Liverpudlians were somewhat along the following sentences: ‘excuse me?’, ‘what?’, ‘I’m sorry?’ and ‘Pardon?. Some other small things I found strange were the buses; Liverpool has the same hideous green Arriva buses as in the Netherlands and obviously no red double decker buses. Silly how easily you get used to those. The people also seem more British... and by British I mean chavvy. Every 2 minutes you will spot an 'orange faced girl' as I like to call them, girls who have so much make up on their faces appear to be orange. We have them in London as well, but up north they are more noticeable somehow, as the population mainly consists of working class people, whereas London has more well dressed business people and a lot of racial diversity, and tourists as well.
Something else regularly spotted: fat women smoking cigarettes.... while pushing a stroller with a child in it.....

I spent the first day in Liverpool exploring the centre a bit, just strolling around streets and shops, and I visited ‘The Bluecoat’, which is a rather unimpressive arts centre, and ‘FACT’, another arts centre which exhibited a cool project by a Dutch artist named Renzo Martens, called ‘Episode 1’, as a part of FACT’s ‘MyWar: Participation in an Age of War’. It questions the morals, motives and implications of the news media during wars, something that has connections with the theme the great Joris Luyendijk also wrote about in his book ‘Het Zijn Net Mensen’ (translation: ‘Just like people’), though Renzo Martens’ film was there before Luyendijk’s book came out.

Here an excerpt from the FACT guide:
‘In Episode I, Dutch artist Renzo Martens asks his audience to contemplate the motivations behind personalities who provide a documentary view of a war-torn world. Holding a camera up to his face, Martens waltzes with shameless exhibitionism through refugee camps, UN headquarters, and devastated cities. He subverts traditional expectations by preying on vulnerable people asking them repeatedly, ‘What do you think of me?’. The reactions are both comic and hostile. In one of the penultimate scenes, Martens is confronted by an NGO worker who asks him, “What do you want? Images of starving babies? Tears?”. “I want tears”, he responds. In this anxious moment, the filmmaker’s personal affection with the conflict becomes apparent – unravelling the hypocrisy of the global media system, and the humanitarian efforts that rely on it for survival’.
More details about it Here

As the Beatles are still one of the greatest moneymaking devices for the Liverpudlians, a visit to the famous ‘Cavern Club’ on Matthew Street can’t be left out, where the Beatles played many gigs in their early days.

In the evening when I went back to my hostel, where I had booked the cheapest room: an 8-bed mixed room, I meet one of my roommates; a fellow Londoner (originally Australian of course, nobody you meet from London is British) who went up to Liverpool just for a match and would only stay one night. He leaves for the match, and I go to a pub where I buy the cheapest dinner and beer during my time in England so far: 3.50 pounds for a meal and 1.60 for a pint. After a while I go back to the hostel, as sitting in a pub on your own is not that fun, even when you have a book. I read some more, have a chat with my two Spanish roommates and eventually fall asleep.

When I wake up the second day I notice some other beds are occupied by 2 guys now as well. Later I meet them, they’re Italian brothers who came to England for the match (who comes to England for Liverpool-Portsmouth anyway?). They wanted to go to a game in London that night as well, but eventually they didn’t find tickets. After a satisfying breakfast in the hostel’s dining hall I ‘hit the road’ again, firstly heading to the Oxfam shop, where I had laid my eyes on some analogue cameras just the day before, I ended up buying two, hoping I will get them working at some point.

The next stop is the Albert Dock, Liverpool’s most interesting attraction in my opinion. I noticed a duckmarine, some weird boat/car thing, that goes both on land and in water, but I decide not to take a ride as it’s probably expensive. For this reason I also skip ‘The Beatles Story’ (8 pounds for students, oh come on).
What I do visit is Tate Liverpool, which of course in no way compares to Tate Modern, but they had a nice sculpture exhibition called ‘This Is Sculpture’ (very creative) curated by Michael Craig-Martin, featuring works like ‘Lobster Telephone’ by Dalí, ‘Face Of Statues’ by Margritte, ‘Fountain’ by Duchamp and some works I had already seen before at Tate Modern 2 years prior, among them ‘Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank’ by Jeff Koons. Some of the other artworks featured were by Max Ernst, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore and Francis Bacon.

I also paid a visit to the International Slavery Museum, which I have mixed feeling about… it seems somehow too political correct, and like saying: oh we apologize for exploiting these people by building this museum, even though we’re glad we did it because it made us a wealthy nation.

The weather today was great, so I sat on benches by the water enjoying the sun as well. I wanted to visit the Liverpool Life Museum, but it was being renovated, so I walked around some more and then went back into the city and visited the Walker Art Gallery, which featured a lot of old paintings, but also some modern work, by David Hockney for example.

That evening I wanted cheap dinner, so I went to a kebab shop down the road and while I was eating I had a conversation with the guy behind the counter, a psychology student at the University of Liverpool. After that I went back to the hostel and fell asleep quite early, as I was knackered.
The next morning however....

CLIFFHANGER!

#2 will follow soon, and pictures will follow at some point as well, not sure when.