Blog: Art / Click / Eye

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On Tuesday myself and The Picture In My Frame had one HECK of a cultured evening in That London. I feel now I can pretty much not BOTHER doing anything intellectual until Christmas and STILL have fulfilled my BRANE QUOTA!

It all kicked off after work at The Serpentine Gallery, where we went to see To The Light, a big retrospective on Yoko Ono. The John & Yoko In My Bag had been to see it before and was RAVING about how FAB it had been, so we went again... and she was NOT WRONG. It's weird with Yoko Ono - she has the public image of being the weird, annoying one in The Beatles Story, and yet her art is a BEAUTIFUL, JOYOUS thing that leaves you GRINNING. As The Concept In My Art said, it could SO easily tip over into being TWEE, but it's so open-hearted (and mind opening too) and so ready to SMILE that you can't help being made happy by it. My favourite part of the whole visit was walking in to look at Ceiling Painting. As a Beatles NUT I know the whole story of this - basically, John Lennon went to see it, clambered up the ladder, clasped the magnifying glass and expected to see something snide or patronising, but was astonished/won over to see it said simply "Yes". As we walked in a small child was running up to a parent with a huge GRIN all over his face. "It says YES!" he said, "Someone told me!" He was DELIGHTED, and indeed so were we.

We also saw another small child walk round "Amaze", a perspex transparent maze, and walk BANG straight into a wall. I felt that LARFING (quietly, around the corner) was PART OF THE ART, right? AND I went and did a SMILE for the SMILE piece, it was GRATE!

Then we ZOOMED back into town to Broadcasting House, where we had tickets to see the recording of two episodes of BBC Click on the World Service. We'd been to one of these live shows before and had thoroughly enjoyed it, but this one was AMAZING. They were talking - at high speed - on a DIVERSE range of subjects, including future uses of technology, an end to planned obsolescence, new forms of music, the nature of human essence in creativity and... well, ALL sorts. To be honest I think beforehand we'd been most excited about Martyn Ware from The Human League being on the panel, but the whole lot of it was a MASSIVE BRANE EXPANSION. The music episode is on the iPlayer now, I think, with our other one in a couple of weeks - it's well worth a listen, it features people THINKING and SPEAKING about it!

Once THAT was done we zoomed over to Embankment, and settled ourselves on a seat to watch the London Eye Olympic Twitter Positivity lightshow, where apparently the positivity of twitter towards the Olympics/Paralympics is somehow measured and... er... translated into a lightshow. I'm not sure how it works but it WAS very impressive, and it flashed and whizzed around for half an hour or so while we sat discussing the INTELLECTUAL TOPICS that were now flashing and whizzing through our BRANES. It struck me at one point that there didn't seem to be anyone else around who'd specifically come to watch the lightshow, knowing what it was, and that maybe the two of us were the entire live audience. I wonder if we were?

EXHAUSTED now by all the CULTURE we retired to Tibits Restaurant (where we go A LOT) for our tea, also some BEER. It had been a KNACKERING, but bloody brilliant, night out - when you live in That London you do have to put up with a lot of noise and pollution and expense, but BY GOLLY you can't half get some AMAZING evenings out of it if you know where to look!

posted 6/9/2012 by MJ Hibbett

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