Adventure of the month

As hella-cool as the Banksy exhibit was, it still left me with most of the day to roam around the small city of Bristol. This would have been a very fortunate happenstance had there been anything else to see or do in Bristol, or to put it more accurately, anything that I wanted to see or do in Bristol. I, however, had already peaked with the exhibit and was ready to move onward and forward, or to put that more accurately, 13 miles to the east. That is where one finds Bath, an ancient Roman city built up around a series of hot springs. The area around the former public and private baths is so well-preserved, that it has earned the entire city the honor of being named a UNESCO World Heritage City (leading one local woman to comment that now if she wants to as much as open her window, she now needs to get permission from the city council). The majority of visitors through the centuries have come here to partake of the supposedly curative powers of the springs. I had not packed a swimsuit ...

All-around talented graffiti artist and rabble-rouser Banksy once wrote "When you go to an art gallery, you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires." Fortunately for his legion of fans, at some point, this viewpoint seems to be have segued into more of an 'if you can't beat them, join 'em" approach, albeit, one with a decidedly Banksy-ian twist. In the past years, he has begun surreptitiously placing his works in such well-known museums as the Met, the Tate and NY's Museum of Natural History. He claims it is simply a short-cut to the time consuming process of having his work accepted by the museum. Now, in conjunction with some very publicity-savvy curators, he has temporarily taken over the Bristol City Museum and made it his own. From the museum's own account, a Banksy representative approached them with the offer of an exhibition funded entirely by the artist and presented as a gift to his hometown. In exchange, t...