Friday, Oct. 26, 2012 11:29 a.m.
Walked all the way from home to Pace Gallery near Green Park using slightly more than 1 hour. Checked TFL and found that I could walk to Whitechapel Gallery and Crouch End with the same amount of time. So I can reach many places in around one hour on foot which is great for exercise and saving money on transport and knowing the city better! If I am really hardcore I can even add an hour more to reach the South Bank. The Rothko/Sugimoto exhibition at Pace was okay. I think Time Out's comment is very fair. These are Rothko's last paintings - all black and grey and very bleak, some appear unfinished. Unlike Sugimoto's long-exposure misty seascapes which tend to draw you in, these blacks of Rothko appear to be more like walls rather than spaces of depth. Also visited Richard Hamilton at National Gallery. Nothing much I could say.
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Almost 2am and I just finished the transcription/translation half an hour ago. So I have been using these intensive 10 hours of work to escape... AGAIN.
I have been feeling the limit of my languages these days. The key is not how many words I can recognize and understand, but how many words I can actually use. You can claim knowing a word only when you can master it, but it's not until 2 days ago that I found myself never having used the words like 'encapsulate' which are not really uncommon. Even when translating a piece of news from English to Chinese, it was not until handing it over to the editor that I realized how limited my Chinese was (I was told that 高企 was Hong Kong language!?).
Are we destined to be inbetweeners?
And, I have just noticed that the greengrocers on the other side of the road sells fresh mushrooms. I bought some lovely chanterelles today. Lovely. They got dried figs from Greece and Turkey as well - not for me but these could be great gifts for mum. The people there seem nice so I will go back again to explore the shop a bit more. |