Ashfall, Part 2

Window Shopping at the Louvre
So when we left off on this here, Eddie and I were collapsing in our hotel rooms after a very long day full of unexpected surprises on the way to London Book Fair.

One bank
I got a pretty decent night's sleep, and I had one goal for my morning in Paris before we headed off to catch the Eurostar. I wasn't in Paris if I didn't go to the Seine, which looked close enough for a round trip walk if I kept about my business. Down by the big department store and the opera house, stop at one chocolatier that's been around for 80 years then on next block see one that's been around for 90 years and realize you picked the wrong one. Down to the Louvre, walk along both banks of the Seine because I don't want anyone to think I'm slighting the left or the right bank or vice versa. Emerge near big old buildings and think "gee, I bet Benjamin Franklin visited some of these."

Another bank
It was a wonderful and delightful morning, in part because of the unexpectedness of it.

We then found our way to Gare du Nord and checked in at the mobbed counters for the Eurostar, with all services booked until some time the next day or day after at this point because everyone was trying to take the train. It was while reading newspapers in the departure lounge that some of the joy of the experience started to fade, as it became clear that the ash cloud which diverted us wasn't just a one day thing, and that I'd gotten a lot of chocolates to give away at our table at London Book Fair to people who might not be coming if things didn't resolve themselves pretty quick like. This did not make me happy.

Tilt your head; my luxury "tip up" seat between cars on the Eurostar

But there wasn't much time to mope with my eagerly anticipated first ride on the Eurostar about to begin. But we were in for a surprise, which explained why we had to go through a staffed check-in gate instead of the automated. Our very expensive first class seats weren't seats in the actual train. No, we were luck to get "tip-up" seats, the jump seats in the entry vestibule between cars. Kind of like being told that your first class seat on an airplane was the jump seat next to the galley door. It wasn't quite as bad as all that, because we did get to sit in actual seats for the first leg of the journey to Lille, where more people would be getting on and we'd be getting the boot. And it was a very nice meal service. And it certainly made for a train ride to remember.

Eddie enjoying the meal service on board the Eurostar in our first class accommodations
I've always been a fan of high speed rail in theory, and I loved partaking of it in practice. The train moved slowly until right around DeGaulle airport when it finally heads off on its own dedicated tracks, and then it speeds along, my does it speed along. In the US we're lucky to match the speed of cars on the interstate, here we just zoom by. The countryside was beautiful, the French landscape as full of churches as the British landscape can be of castles. And churches.

Peter V. Brett signing at London's Forbidden Planet
Alas, the Book Fair ended up being pretty much the debacle I'd started to fear it might be when I was reading newspapers at Gare du Nord. Peter V. Brett had come up a little before us, he was one of the last planes to land at Heathrow before it was shut down and we got to Europe just before the European airspace closed pretty much completely. My second employee Jessie Cammack was supposed to come out the next day and never made it. All in all, two thirds of our appointments cancelled. And we got to sit around the Fair during the downtime wondering if/how we might ever get home.

Thanks Emma/HarperUK for getting us the artwork and John Berlyne at Zeno Agency for designing these nifty signs, which more people will see on blog than at the ash-interrupted London Book Fair
Because Peter was out in support of the UK launch of his Desert Spear, which we knew would be big, and because the book has in general been quite big on a global basis, we decided to show the flag by taking out some signs in the Rights Centre, and also by having a meet and greet for our sub-agents and Peter's publishers in attendance at the Fair to meet with Peter at a Russian restaurant a short walk from the Fair. Hardly anyone to look at the signs, and we had 12 people for our big event instead of 35, which was very deflating. But those who attended had a very good time, and I would recommend Nikita's in London to anyone looking for some good Russian food and drink.

In the end, UK airspace reopened in time for Peter, Eddie and I all to return on time on our originally scheduled flights, but in ways good and bad it was a week to remember.

home sweet home

I'll do more posting later, but let's just say quickly that the London Book Fair trip was interesting. I made it, we were on some of the last planes to Heathrow that weren't turned around, but we got to go to Paris/Charles De Gaulle instead and when we were able to book Eurostar didn't take advantage of the 7-hour bus ride the airline was offering. And the cloud lifted in time for us to go back to NYC on our originally scheduled flight. But 2/3 of our appointments cancelled because they could not make it to London.

British Cinema

I saw 3 movies while I was over for London Book Fair in April.

In The Loop (Sat. evening Apr. 18, 2009, Odeon Kensington #4, 1.5 slithy toads) was a British movie that had gotten some decent reviews.  I decided to go in part because I'd walked by the Odeon Kensington on every trip to London without ever actually seeing a movie there, and I decided it was high time.  In that regard, I was able to peek in to the big screen (#3) and see that it is a very nice and very big balcony theatre that will be worth keeping in mind for the future.  I wasn't sure I should go because this was a late show on the same day as my castle walk, and I was tired.  And in that regard, In The Loop did not help keep me awake.  It's a political satire spun off from a British TV show.  A cabinet minister puts his foot in mouth about the war in Iraq.  The media minister scolds him.  Efforts to improve situation only make it worse.  Minister is exiled to DC to a study committee on the war.  Only makes things worse.  The media minister curses up a storm wherever he goes, he's modeled after some minister in the Tony Blair cabinet but maybe for us in the US think of a minister who's Dick Cheney talking about Pat Leahy or Rahm Emanuel with his famous temper and then taken not just to 11 but to 18 on the dial.  Most of the laughs (and not just to me but also the handful of other people in the audience) are from this one character's abundantly foul language.  Otherwise, I don't want to say it's bad, but it's not very good either.  It's just a little flat, the occasional chuckle or wry observation but badly in need of something more.

I've had good luck seeing movies at the Odeon Covent Garden, what used to be the ABC Shaftesbury Avenue.  In fact, I believe the very first movie I ever saw in London was the delightful comedy East is East in 1999 at this theatre, and Arlington Road is another film I quite liked which I saw here.  So let's add The Damned United (Sun afternoon. Apr. 19, Odeon Covent Garden, Aud. #1, 3 slithy toads) to that list.  This is a sports movie with an excellent pedigree that is unlike any sports movie you might have seen in the US in the past 30 years.  Michael Sheen, who plays David Frost in Frost/Nixon and Tony Blair in The Queen, here plays Brian Clough, a British football (i.e., soccer) coach who gets his dream job taking over the Leeds  United team from his arch-rival, well-played by Colm Meaney.  The script is by Peter Morgan (also Frost/Nixon, also The Queen) and director Tom Hooper did the highly regarded John Adams mini-series for  HBO.  So as I said, good pedigree, and I should also single out Timothy Spall who adds wonderful supporting work as Clough's right-hand man and Jim Broadbent is in the cast as well.  So we all know this script, new coach takes over from arch-rival and it leads up to the big game where the new coach goes up against the old coach and wins dramatically.  And since I wasn't familiar with Clough's real-life story (and this movie is adapted from a novel based on Clough's story by David Peace, said novel all over bookstores in the UK), I kept waiting eagerly for the movie to tick off all of the sports movie cliches I am so fond of and so used to.  The big moment when the new coach goes up against the inherited players and makes the team his own.  But you know what, that's not what happens.  Clough fails miserably, the holdover players mutiny, management sides with the players, and several weeks into the season Clough is booted off the job and forced to beg his right-hand man whom he'd abandoned to take his dream job to re-up on their pairing.  It's not really a sports movie at all but rather a fascinating character study of a man in need, who has to have someone or something to balance his insatiable drive and lacking that drives himself off a cliff.  It's an excellent movie.  I don't know if it will come to these shores, but if it does you should seek it out.

My final UK movie would be a treat no matter how the movie was because it was playing on the main screen at the Empire Leicester Square.  This is one of the nicest movie theatres in the world, I feel safe in saying.  It's a somewhat small scale version of Radio City, with a huge huge screen and wonderful sightlines and excellent sound.  There are multi-colored lights in the auditorium that cycle thru so you can just admire that while you wait for the movie, and then as the film is about to begin the lights in the auditorim give way to a twinkling firmament above the screen.  I love going to this theatre.  It is a true Cinema Treasure.  The movie was State of Play (Wed. eve. April 22, 2009, 2.5 slithy toads).  This is a well-acted and well-made thriller with a frisson of old-time All The President's Men excitement and lots of appeal to a newspaper sentimentalist such as myself.  The ending starts to tie itself up in a few knots too many.  But Russell Crowe good, and Ben Affleck, and Helen Mirren, and Rachel McAdams, and Jeff Daniels.  I could find quibbles, and I'm giving this only a moderately favorable rating instead of a very favorable one, but bottom line is that it is well-acted, it does entertain, and I would say to see this when it comes out on video.

If I were in London today, my ambivalence about seeing Terminator Salvation would resolve, because any movie you have even the tiniest desire to see, when  you can do it on the big screen at the Empire you want to do it because the evening will be a special occasion regardless.  I love the Empire.

getting there

The past couple of years for my London Book Fair trip I'd taken Eos to London, one of the three business-class only airlines across the Atlantic that went belly-up from late 2007 thru summer 2008, Eos just a couple of weeks after I got back last year.  This year I flew business on Delta, choosing them largely because they were offering a 5PM flight back for the price other airlines charged for the 10AM return from Heathrow.  The late departures are very popular with the road warriors who can do a full day of business in London and then head home and the airlines charge accordingly (though now it looks like they're happy to take less money than you might think any time of the day or night; I'm checking American right now and finding what a year ago would have been shockingly low prices if I wanted to go back to London in June).

Delta seems to have taken lessons on schedule updates from Amtrak, which has this nasty habit of pretending that a NYC to DC train won't be delayed because the same train coming down from Boston is running 35 minutes late, and so it was that even though Delta 001 is a continuation of a flight from Orlando albeit with a change of planes for the Florida passengers, Delta pretended that the scheduled 90 minute delay for the flight from Orlando would have no effect on our departure.  Not until we got to the airport 2 hours before, and then just after we've checked in they finally decide that yes, the incoming flight really will be late and then push our ETD back by 90 minutes.  I am assuming they were waiting to see what time the flight actually left Orlando so they'd know more precisely what time we would be able to leave JFK, but unless they were willing to strand all the switching passengers in NYC if that flight was really really really late, wouldn't it have been nicer for them to have admitted sooner that whatever time we left, it wasn't going to be on time?

Delta has two shabby old terminals 2 & 3, so I was happy to find out that even though we checked in at terminal 2 that the Heathrow departure actually left from the nicer and newer international terminal 4 (you could go thru security at terminal 2 and take a shuttle across the tarmac), which has more shopping and eating and long wide concourses that are good for exercising.  I used part of the "unexpected" delay to walk around outside, and was glad to discover you can actually walk between terminals 1,2,3,4&5, which is the new Jet Blue terminal. I did not have time to walk the far end of 5 to see if the path continued onward.  I have no idea if or how you could walk from the terminals to the rest of the world thru the spaghetti of access roads, but at least I know there's this walking route for outdoor exercise if delayed in the future. I did have time for my first in-person glimpse at an A-380 jumbo jet, with one of Emirates parked beside terminal 4.

Eos used the Emirates lounge, which Eos termed the best in NYC, and they may well be right.  It had a full hot buffet and lots of space.  The Sky Team lounge in terminal 4 had only a soup and two hot dishes, though both of those were at least tasty, and then some cold stuff and the usual plentiful array of beverages and etc. etc.  Not at all bad, but not Emirates.

Delta did its best to board the passengers starting at JFK so we could welcome the people moving over from the flight from Orlando, many of which seemed from the accents as they slowly filtered in to be families from South Africa who had been visiting Disney World by way of Heathrow and JFK.  The last of them got on maybe 10 minutes after our announced delayed departure time, and we got lucky to the extent that we had a very short taxi time (either a smooth day @ JFK or we were now leaving after the peak evening taxi delays) and no circling once in London and were less than an hour behind getting to London.  This was my first time doing normal trans-Atlantic business class instead of the more first-classy Eos.  I couldn't really get comfy in my seat for sleeping though it was large enough and reclined near flat, perhaps because as my assistant Eddie told me later I didn't take advantage of the leg extension part of it.  The food was OK.  The one thing I really missed from the much larger personal space on Eos was a cubby near my head to put some stuff in for the flight, so you don't have to unbuckle to reach the seatback pocket or a stowed briefcase beneath the seat that's a decent difference in front.  The passport control line was rather longer than I'm used to in London, but that meant no waiting the other side for the luggage.  Since we were staying in west London I decided it would be about as quick to take the Picadilly line for not very much money as to take the Heathrow Express for rather more money and then still have to get along to the hotel.  Other than having the heaviest rain of the day exactly during the walk from the tube to the hotel we arrived in OK time, and I pressed a little on getting rooms that were ready and for me on my preferred side of the hotel so we could freshen up and get to work.

The Bank Job

Seen at Regal's Kaufman Astoria Stadium 14, auditorium #6, Monday evening March 17, 2008, 3.5 Slithy Toads, at least

Edited and possibly over-edited to within an inch of its life, this caper film is based on the true story of a bank robbery in London in which a group of thieves tunneled into a safe deposit vault and escaped with several million dollars of loot. The film ties this in to dirty pictures of Prince Margaret, a Tunisian black power activist, the uprooting of many Scotland Yard cops bribed by a porn kingpin, and more As with many movies based on true stories, my curiosity regarding the extent to which any of it is true battles with my desire to enjoy the movie as a movie and ignore any and all questions of its veracity.

It's definitely a movie that grows as it goes. The beginning was too me a little too brisk, a little too flashy, a little too much work honestly, as it introduces all of the many players bang bang bang. And there are many, many players. Half a dozen robbers, MI5 or MI6 types, politicians, cops, and more. Even worse, and this perhaps may be the movie's biggest flaw, it introduces all of these people and makes hardly any of them interesting. They're all pretty much just there. And the actors have all kinds of weird face shapes and weird voices and sometimes a lack of much charisma. I watched them all in the first 20 or 30 minutes and felt as if this movie had been created as a British Film Board employment project, to provide jobs to the second tier Brits who somehow hadn't yet found employment in a Harry Potter or Narnia movie.

However, it's energetic enough that it carries along in spite of the hollow center. The complications after the robbery, true or untrue as the case may be, when the robbers find out just who it is they robbed, are intriguing enough. And if you don't really care about the Jason Statham character or any of the others all that much, there's still a kind of literary Stockholm Syndrome at work. You're there in the theater for two hours or so, you've invested enough in the characters, there's that human gene that makes us want to listen to and tell stories, and you end up identifying with the lead characters because you don't have strength enough to resist and withhold. I know this doesn't sound like much of a rave, but I read enough books and see enough movies which fade as they go along, where the creative talent doesn't even have enough core strength to benefit from this effect, that I do mean these remarks as a positive. Not the biggest positive, but when it all comes together at 11AM at Paddington Station, I was rooting for the good guys.

The porn king is played by David Suchet. A little bit of a sidetrack to direct your attention to a movie he was in ten years back called Sunday. This is an interesting thing that's most notable for being one of the relatively few films to be filmed in my neck of the Queens woods, or at least filmed in my neck of the Queens woods for something or anything more than the waterfront view of Manhattan. It's a quirky and odd beast, and I wonder if I saw it again now if I would find it an ode to Queens past because the area sure ain't what it was ten years ago.