T A B L E_T A L K Does the Windy City have too much testosterone? Discuss this and other aspects of Chicago in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Into the heart of China By Joshua Cohen Two English teachers glimpse the realities of rural life (05/12/98) Road Warrior By Brent Gregston Insider's guide to Brussels (05/11/98) Sex and the salaryman By Dave McCombs Changing fortunes are altering one of Japan Inc.'s most cherished relationships (05/08/98) Road Warrior Dawn MacKeen Airfare roulette (05/07/98) Mondo Weirdo Come back soon An ambiguous encounter in Switzerland (05/06/98) Browse the Wanderlust Postmark archives		__THERE'LL ALWAYS BE A LONDON .|. PAGE 2 OF 2 Even the old gray Times has acquired an ingenuous, rose-tinted outlook: Its report on the Parole Board's refusal to free murderer Reggie Kray, half of the monstrous Kray Twins -- the psychopathic, sword-wielding '60s gang lords of the East End -- is almost weepy when it tells how Kray's hopes have been "dashed" and he won't be able to "settle with his new wife in East Anglia ...where he planned to run a recording studio." (Boo-hoo!) Reggie Kray's disappointment notwithstanding, life seems good in London nowadays, or at least the possibility that it can be is under serious consideration by the city's inhabitants. That's why I'm a little shocked when some thug shoves me aside one morning on the steps of my hotel, the Royal Garden next to Kensington Palace. "You want to move now," he whispers gruffly. "Yeah, you bloody wanker," I'm about to say, "and you want to stop using that goat cheese toothpaste." But I don't because suddenly there's a flurry of activity and a whole flock of edgy security types -- blue-suited sleeve-talkers with cryptic-looking lapel pins -- comes pouring out of the Royal Garden's revolving door. Cameras click, walkie-talkies squawk and police escorts in fluorescent chartreuse jackets rev their motorcycles meaningfully. In the middle of the mob is Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto. He looks tired and worried, and who wouldn't in his position? The Japanese economy is in a power dive headed for hell and threatening to take the rest of the world with it (he must lie awake nights wishing he were Tony Blair). What's worse, a grumpy, tousled Jacques Chirac, the president of France, is now standing next to me on the steps waiting impatiently for Hashimoto's dark blue Rover Sterling sedan to move on so his dark blue Rover Sterling sedan can pull up, and they can all go through the same choreography again only in reverse 10 blocks away, where the Asia-Europe meeting is being held. Once we get the world leaders on their way, a black cab pulls up and I climb in. My time's short in London so I take cabs everywhere, even though it gets expensive. As I ride, I keep a running list of pub names -- the whole reads like a guest register for a mate-swapping mixer on Noah's Ark: The Dog and Duck, The Elusive Camel, The Essex Serpent, The Falcon, The Greyhound, The Griffin, The Grouse and Claret, The Intrepid Fox, The Magpie, The Jugged Hare, The Old Red Lion, The Peacock, The Polar Bear (not to be confused with The White Bear), The Porcupine, The Rat and Parrot, The Stag, The Hogshead, The Nag's Head, Queens Head and Artichoke (winner in the surrealism category), The Antelope, The Cat and Canary, the always comforting Friend at Hand (somewhere near Russell Square, I think) and overall winner for the most lyrical moniker of the bunch: The Moon Under Water. As we drive past the Prince Albert Memorial (now undergoing restoration and sheathed in scaffolding, it resembles nothing so much as a Nebraska grain silo), the cabby and I exchange a few pleasantries before he asks, "California, isn't it? Your accent?" "You got it," I say. "Good ear." And off we go on the subject of accents. "They're all trying to change them now, you know, it's the fashion," he says. "We have a new one here in London. They call it the Estuary accent. You hear it in people like Emma Thompson -- middle- or upper-class folks trying to sound lower class. Even the queen has changed her accent. If you ever listened to her early radio addresses, she sounded all high-pitched and like she had grapes in her mouth and now, you know, she doesn't at all. It's quite the fashion, you see." London must have some of the world's most erudite cabbies. "This is Westminster Bridge we're crossing," he says. "Have you heard of Wordsworth?" Have I heard of Wordsworth? How charming. Should I take that as a compliment, or simply acknowledgment of the fact that I'm a Californian and therefore a feather-headed, illidurat twit? I let it hang, knowing that I've got a bloke at the wheel who can fill silence quickly and without my assistance. "Wordsworth wrote a poem about this bridge in 1802, about the view from it," he continues, not waiting for me to answer his question. "Do you know it? Lovely really." And he proceeds to quote the entire poem (flawlessly, I later discover) while a cloudburst makes it impossible to see what Wordsworth got so fired up about. In any case, it starts like this: Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty; This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent bare ... "It's a monstrosity," the cabby tells me. He's talking about South Bank Centre, the massive architectural calamity perched next to the Thames at the end of Hungerford Bridge. We've just pulled up in front. The Centre is a giant concrete arts and theater complex built in the 1960s. The cabby is right. It's magnificently ugly. One building is the Hayward Gallery, where I'm about to catch the last day of "Francis Bacon: The Human Body," a major retrospective of paintings by the artist -- he died in 1992 -- whose emotionally ferocious oils make the work of Hieronymus Bosch look like Muzak for the eyes in comparison. The show has attracted over 120,000 people in its two-month run. As I walk in, there are about 400 waiting in the ticket line, all of whom glare at me bitterly as I skip up to the will-call table, collect my previously purchased ticket and leisurely saunter into the gallery, glancing back just once with a guess we've learned a little something about planning ahead haven't we now smile. They all look back at me with a consolidated interstellar death beam, but it's too late, I'm already inside. Bacon's work is majestic and wrenching -- famously so. But the dazzling nightmare solemnity of his subject matter -- the screaming popes that most people know him by, and the anguished figures, some based on the early sequential photographs of Eadweard Muybridge -- is lightened and made bearable, even beautiful, by Bacon's eloquent use of color. Standing in the middle of a room surrounded by his giant gilt-framed canvases makes it possible to imagine what the woodcuts of Japan's ukiyo-e period might have looked like if they'd been conjured in the nether world by an Irishman under siege from the hellhounds. Still, though Bacon's imagery is often grim, it can also be funny, bittersweet and bawdy in the street opera sense of Kabuki. Often the paint is applied so sparingly that there is a distinct Shroud of Turin effect (if the Shroud could shriek), as if the faces or figures were photographically blasted onto the canvas the way silhouettes were imprinted on the walls of Hiroshima by the flash of the atomic bomb. However, the detonation in this case took place inside Bacon's ground zero brain. "I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them," he once remarked, "like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of the past events as the snail leaves its slime." And they do. Ironically, or maybe not, in the cab on the way back I read an article that might have amused Francis Bacon. An artist named Anthony-Noel Kelly, a nephew of the Duke of Norfolk, has just been sentenced to nine months in jail for stealing human body parts from the Royal College of Surgeons and using them to cast sculptures covered in silver and gold. According to the Daily Telegraph, Kelly made off with "three heads, part of a brain, six arms, 10 legs and feet and sections of three torsos ... One leg, nicknamed Hopalong, was kept in a tower room at his family's estate in Kent." I hop out of the cab at the Victoria and Albert Museum mostly because on the British Airways flight from San Francisco the lovely sky-blue Valium I took to lower me into Limboland had no effect whatsoever. Consequently, I stayed up late sipping luscious claret and watching "Mrs. Brown." I now feel a certain obligation to the royal couple to give their collection at least a cursory going-over. Time's running out, but there is one small object I must see at the V&A. It resides in a poorly lit glass case in the Fakes and Forgeries Gallery. For reasons I can't quite articulate, this specimen sums up what is so fascinating about fascination and the obsessive acts of those who become fascinated, and the charlatans who prey on them. The V&A's Fakes and Forgeries has a variety of counterfeit paintings and ceramics and items of supposed religious significance that are not what they appear to be. Some are hundreds of years old, and most have been executed with nearly as much craft and artistry as the originals. Two-thirds of the way through the gallery, I find the one I'm looking for. It was the Wordsworth cabby who told me about it. He was adamant that I see it. I'd mentioned to him that I was interested in unusual collections. "Well then," he said, "you'd like my collection." "What's it a collection of?" I asked him. "Spurs. Spurs of historical significance. I've got over 300 of them. Even have a few from the U.S. Civil War." "Really." "Yes, but this one I'm telling you about, I'd love to have. I go see it sometimes. You ought to take a look if you have the time, really ought to." And I have and now here it is in front of me, just beneath the glass -- a tarnished metal spur embedded in a branch. The spur itself is authentic. It was found on the battlefield of Agincourt, where, during the Hundred Years War, the vastly outnumbered English under the command of Henry V defeated the French in October 1415. Sometime in the 19th century some idle, imaginative fellow decided to soak a tree root and bend it around the spur, but why? To imbue it with greater drama perhaps. To give it a more direct link with the violence and speed and person-to-person savageness of battle. Or maybe just to heighten its appeal as a way of upping the price to a collector. Finding the great centerpieces of history is relatively easy. But it's these little oddities from the fringes of history, flotsam and jetsam from the peripheries of human drama, that seem to get hold of certain people. The cabby, for example. "How did you come to collect spurs, of all things?" I'd asked him. "Well, I started as a lad, you see. Like my wife said to a friend of ours who asked the same question, 'I reckon if it wasn't for some of Jimmy's spurs here, a lot of your big historical battles would never have happened. The horses would've just stood there looking at each other.' " The cabby laughed and I laughed and I think that even Jacques Chirac, who was just walking in the Royal Garden Hotel as we drove up, was laughing. However, the reason for Chirac's laughter, it turned out, was that he'd just spent part of the afternoon drinking pints and shots at a pub. But Mr. Hashimoto, who I passed in the lobby, was not laughing. SALON | May 13, 1998 Douglas Cruickshank is a frequent contributor to Salon.