Mosaics and Tracey Emin

I decided to go out on the town yesterday. I needed some exercise and after a couple of days at home I was ready for a change of scene. So after breakfast I got on the tube and went down to the Tate Modern.

As I walked to the museum from the Southwark tube station, I wound through some little back alleys and found myself in a pocket park off Gambia Street. It featured a couple of mounds or berms, paved with stones and inlaid with little London-themed mosaics like the fox above.

And here's a Jersey tiger moth. I loved those little mosaics. There were about two dozen of them and I could have photographed them all.

I got to the Tate just as it opened, and went first to the Member's Cafe and had a coffee and croissant. I was the only one in the space for a while, sitting by a window overlooking St. Paul's Cathedral and the Thames. (One of my retirement goals is to use my Tate membership more often!) Then I wandered downstairs to see the Tracey Emin retrospective.

Although Emin is quite famous in the UK, I'm not sure I'd heard of her before I moved here. One of her best-known artworks is "My Bed," above, an installation featuring not only her bed but the detritus of everyday life one might find in a bedroom -- underwear, Kleenexes, condom wrappers, slippers, a stuffed dog, a vodka bottle. Its suggestion of intimacy and the squalor of our deepest private places is quite striking. (Behind it is a separate piece in neon, "It's Not Me That's Crying, It's My Soul.")

I came away from the show with a much better understanding of Emin and her work. A lot of it is focused on the sheer brutality involved in being a woman -- the judgements from the men in her life, sexual violence, pregnancies both real and imagined, abortions, body image, illness, aging and death. I'm making it sound dark and bleak but Emin tackles these subjects with vigor, dominating them through energetic painting, sculptures in wood and bronze, photographs and written pages, and bright appliquéd fabric blankets bearing messages. I found it both interesting and energizing.

After the Tate I walked up through St. Paul's, around the cathedral and through Farringdon, Gray's Inn, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury and Marylebone to Baker Street station, where I caught the tube. Above is Doughty Mews, a picturesque little street near Coram's Fields. As you can see, we did get some sun yesterday. Today is supposed to be pleasant though cloudy, so hopefully I can open some windows and get some fresh air into the house.

I see that Trump critic Rep. Thomas Massie lost his Republican primary in Kentucky to a Trump-endorsed challenger. Along with Sen. Bill Cassidy's loss in Louisiana, this shows how thoroughly some voters remain under Trump's spell. I don't understand it at all. Granted, we're talking about two of the most conservative red states in the country, but this seems like a bad sign for the midterms and it's stunning to me -- stunning -- that any voters still support Trump's agenda. I feel like I'm living on another planet, and maybe I am. Maybe there are things about living in rural modern America that I just don't get -- not just because I'm living in England, but because I have resources and advantages that others don't. I'm not sure. All I know is, I am mystified once again by American voters.