I’m going to take you through a day here at Cambridge! I’ve picked a day where I was ahead on work, so hopefully this is more interesting than “I’ve spent the entire day in the library.”
8am – 1pm: Trip into London, Tate Modern
I got up early to take the train into London – I’m still impressed by the public transportation throughout the UK. People that spent more than a certain amount on a ticket for this train into London were refunded because the train was 10 minutes late – that’s in stark contrast to the MBTA where you should consider yourself lucky if your train shows up within the hour.
I’ve been at King’s Cross Station a couple times now, and I still love to just look around. It’s absolutely gorgeous.
King’s Cross Station
As long as you avoid the line that sprawls from platform 8 to 11, it’s really lovely.
I took the Tube to Tate Modern, a famous museum of contemporary art in south London very similar to the ICA in Boston. Even if you aren’t that interested in the art, there’s a great view over the city.
View of London from Tate Modern
There’s exhibits all throughout the building, the landing of the elevator on the second floor has this really pretty hanging polyhedron made of mirrors that reflects the light.
I think this is by Alexander Calder?
Alexander Caleder inspired this sculpture of the International Space station, constructed out of metal in such a way that it acts as a functional antenna. For a 10 minute period every day, the encrypted data sent back from the ISS can be heard. Apparently voice transmissions could be heard plainly at one point, but are much less common now. I couldn’t find anywhere when this 10 minute window is, and I was not lucky enough to hear it. It’s still a really cool sculpture, especially with the overhead lighting casting shadows on the white walls of the otherwise empty room.
Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla – Ten Minute Transmission
Keeping with the theme of radios is Babylon, a tower of radios each tuned to a different station. It’s supposed to act as a ‘tower of incomprehension’, and you definitely get a sense of that when you walk into the room to just a mass of sound. If you walk really close and focus, you can hear fragments of BBC broadcasts or some recognizable music, but in general it’s just incomprehensible. The idea of the sculpture, in line with the biblical allusion, is especially potent now in the information age with rising extremism and polarization in a time when communicating is easier than ever.
The random aspect of radios was really popular in aleatoric music, like in John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 Radios or his Water Music, which I did a performance of.
Cildo Meireles – Babylon
I also enjoyed the artwork on display by Chris Burden and Joseph Beuys – I recognized their names from some performance art I’m familiar with – Chris Burden is famous for performance art based on personal danger, like Shoot, where he was shot in the arm in a gallery or Do You Believe in Television where “he sent an audience to the third floor of a building — where television monitors showed them the ground floor — and then lit a fire on the ground floor”; and Joseph Beuys is famous for similar performance art, like locking himself in a room with a coyote for three days.
Although not nearly as extreme, Chris Burden’s Five Day Locker Piece was at least motivation for my 34 hour performance of Satie’s Vexations (which you can read about here, if you’re curious).
I didn’t spend as long in Tate as I expected, so I decided to walk back to King’s Cross. This turned out to be a bad idea, as it turns out my GPS coverage isn’t that great in London, but hey I got to see more than I would’ve otherwise. I love the green spaces in London, parts remind me of Comm Ave in Boston with the trees lining the roads in the center of the city.
1pm – 2pm: Research
I’m trying to get a research position for the fall, so I’m writing up a short kind of please-accept-me-even-though-I-haven’t-taken-that-specific-class-yet proposal.
I wasn’t thinking about switching from Engineering in the first place, but how much of a relief I get when switching back to math over writing dissertations definitely makes me more confident in not switching.
2pm – 6pm: Classes and Readings
I wanted to reread an act of The Winter’s Tale for today’s Shakespeare lecture, then had two lectures back to back.
6pm – 7pm: Piano
The chapel at Pembroke is usually pretty empty in the evenings, so I practice on the little upright they have in there. Today it was particularly empty so I could practice for a while.
Pembroke College Chapel
I’m not practicing anything in particular at the moment, it’s just a nice way to unwind.
7pm -11pm: Dissertation
I’m really glad I decided to write on a day where I was ahead on work because there’s really not a lot to say about it. I worked on my Shakespeare dissertation on the plurality of identity in The Winter’s Tale, which is just riveting.
Note about Time Management
This is probably uninteresting to most people, but I’ve spent a lot of time tinkering with calendar software and wanted to share my current setup. I’ve used Google Calendar since freshman year of high school, and it’s definitely the easiest to use out of the box, but as I’ve used it more I’ve found it lacking a lot of helpful features of other software. This past year I’ve been tinkering with Kimai which is free and open source software (so this isn’t an advertisement). It’s a pain to setup comparatively, requiring a server to host (a local Apache hosting is fine for personal use), but this requires a little familiarity with SQL and PHP which I did not have going in.
This day laid out in Kimai
After a couple days of reading through Apache error logs and PHP modules failing to load, I’ve managed to almost completely switch to daily use of Kimai. Because it’s open source, if you’re willing to put in the time you can modify or add really anything you want. Frankly I was really motivated to switch from Google Calendar because of the easy out-of-the-box color coding, which is fantastic. At some point, I’d like to actually host my Kimai setup on a server so I can access it on my phone. Google Calendar definitely has the advantage in native cross-platform support, which is mostly important for phone notifications personally.
