Logical Rain: or, the rain in Japan falls...

Sometimes the unintended visits to a place turn out to be the highlights. Although I am here in Dresden on another mission entirely, there is inevitable free time. So having never been to the Japanese Palace on the other side of the Elbe, it was pleasant to while away an hour in the rain.

Yes in the rain. It started with a video  of the Japanese monsoon; lingering shots on industrial landscapes, cityscapes, suburbia, all silent except for the rain. Remembering Whitacre's Cloudburst made me think of rain's musicality. The bursts of forte staccato on a tin roof, the murmuring pianissimo on leaves; an entire orchestra of musical possibility.

Traces of London Life: Refusing to Despair

Despair in all its forms have been troubling me in the last few weeks. It's sad to see someone you care about come apart at the seams and know that you can only help by staying away. I've never suffered the true despair that comes with mental illness; my despair has been caused by very natural causes suffered in the course of life. Change. Loss of love. Death. All terrible but all possible to overcome with the right outlook, contrary indomitable spirit and very good friends to help you through the impossible times.

Strange Creatures at UCL

Yesterday took me to my first pop up art exhibition. And it’s going to take some beating in terms of both the art and the venue. Far away from the commercial luxury of the west end and the soulless white cube spaces of east London, there is nothing ordinary about the Grant Museum of Zoology.

The website tells us that it is the ‘only remaining university zoological museum in London [and] houses around 67,000 specimens, covering the whole animal kingdom. Founded in 1828 as a teaching collection, the Museum is packed full of skeletons, mounted animals and specimens preserved in fluid. Many of the species are now endangered or extinct including the Tasmanian Tiger or Thylacine, the Quagga, and the Dodo.’ It isn’t a large space but even without the non permanent art, there is more than enough to keep the non biologist enthralled. They have embraced interactive displays and social media so that visitors can get involved about the role of science in society and how museums should be run. The highlights of the collection for me were the skeleton of the dugong, the video of the artistic bowerbird, skeletons in the gallery and the brain coral (helpfully tagged with ‘not a brain’). The whole galleried space is crammed with curios and reminiscent of a renaissance cabinet of curiosities.