<3 The Tube and etc.

Hello!

Today was another theatre day - went to my theatre class and then had a play to go to tonight with 3 hours before hand to kill. I saw in the free trashy london newspaper that the Transport Museum was having an exhibition about posters for the tube so I decided to go. The Transport Museum is one of those places that I've always made fun of in my head when I hear it mentioned, but it turned out to be really cool, it's all about the tube and how it started etc. There's a place where you can pretend to drive a train like a video game (I was pretty horrible at it, I kept passing up the stops or not hitting them.) Also I learned about a man who was involved in the creation of the underground (I believe "shady" is the term the sign used). He came here because he had previously been in Chicago doing shady business with the streetcars there and they were about to arrest him and somehow he made it over here to try the same thing with the tube. Fun links to home. The poster section was really cool, too. I also really liked the part about how the map that we still use today (and that influenced all other public transportation/train maps) was created. It used to be geographically correct and therefore confusing but someone (an engineer draft person, not even a designer) figured out that no one really cared where you were as long as you knew how to get there therefore the maps are just straight lines with dots on them and intersect where they connect. Also a lot about the famous tube logo. This was one of my favorite posters - couldn't find a bigger one to post here but you can kind of see it.




In other news, we read Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte in my Women Brit Novelists class and the teacher played the song by Kate Bush for us, which was apparently a pretty big deal here in the 70's but not in America. It's pretty much the most awesome thing ever so I suggest you watch the youtube video. My friends here and I love it. I was watching it/practicing the dance for it last night while my roommate was washing something in the sink in the bathroom and I was particularly inspired by the "window" part of the dance so I went in to show her and she saw me and SCREAMED and knocked over our trashcan. So I think I'm pretty good at it. I'm going to be Kate Bush as Catharine for Halloween so stay tuned for those pictures.

What else... The play I went to tonight was called A Disappearing Number from the theatre company Complicite. It was very different - lots of projections and going forward and backward in time, it was about math and things so numbers were floating around everywhere. It was very good and unlike anything I've ever seen. And I saw some really weird shit interning at the MCA. But the difference between some of the stuff I saw there and this was that even though this play was weird and different/unconventional, I never was like "hmm I wonder how much acid the playwright and director were on" when watching this one. Not so with previous plays I've seen. This was very tastefully done and wasn't being weird just to be weird.

Tomorrow I'm going to Statford to see Shakespeare things with my Shakespeare class. Another post this weekend!