webcowgirl

This was such a great weekend that I'm hoping I can make it my "Groundhog day" and just do it over and over, or preserve it in amber so I can enjoy it at my leisure.

Friday was Pinter's Moonlight at the Donmar Warehouse with dreamsewingmiko. Not only did I get a really engaging, intelligent play, but I got four hours with someone who's company I really enjoy. Lots of girlie bonding time and catching up and discussing plans for the future, like the Jerez flamenco festival and that trip to Patagonia I'm dreaming of (after seeing the article in the New York Times). On top of it we had Mexican food at Lupita and then gelato at Scoop, and the weather was amazing.

Amazing weather was the theme for the weekend as shadowdaddy and wechsler and I went to Colchester (awesome ruined monastery!) to canoe on the River Stour with Nomad Sea Kayaking. Not only did we get a lovely paddle on the river (with flowers blooming everywhere!), we saw some gorgeous country, literally right out of (or in) Constable paintings, and we had so much fun afterwards we went and took a walk down the banks of the same river, from the Dedham boat house to the Fen Bridge to the town of Dedham. It was a gorgeous little wool town that looked like a movie set. Then it was taxi to Colchester, nap to London, taco making and Alhambra. Really, it was such a nice, nice day and evening.

Sunday was London time, starting with the recording of the "As Yet Unnamed London Theater Podcast" that I'm getting involved in. It was nice talking shop about shows with people that I mostly know, and much easier (if less social) than meeting up in a pub. Then it was off to the Southbank for the London Chocolate Festival with exedore. We had a nice visit with each other and wound up sitting around in the sun doing nothing at the Victoria Embankment besides admiring the tulips and talking BS - we both had time to kill before seeing our next people of the day. I tried (once he left) to squeeze in the "British Art in the Age of the Comet" at the Hayward, but either it wasn't very exciting or the sun was just too awesome for the gallery to compete.

At any rate, next stop was Euston to pick up Lisa Crispin, a very nice lady I met at a testing conference last year. I took her and her husband to the Wellcome Collection to see the Dirt exhibit, which was a nice collection of narrative, medical specimens, literature, and some nice fresh art (includingn a piece by Bruce Nauman). I thought it was fairly thought provoking but am afraid I had to rush through the last room due to running out of time! Then we headed over to Angel to see the puppet theater version of the Tempest they're doing in conjuntion with the Royal Shakespeare Company. People, do not be mistaken: this is not a puppet show, it's a cut down version of the Tempest with world class actors that just happens to have puppet versions of Ariel and Caliban (most appropriate ways of depicting them, I think). Tickets are only £12 and it's a STEAL at the price, I tell you, a STEAL. Buy yourself some tickets while they're still available and go go go. I think it's probably suitable for 8 and above (it's about 90 minutes long, no interval) - I haven't had time to write my review up yet but I was embarassed by how little I paid.

And then it was home and a nice long chat with my new roomie and dishes and laundry and MAN I was tired. What a great weekend it was though! I had fun, I was happy, all my self doubt and self loathing were nowhere to be seen ... Where is the amber that it's hidden in? All I have is a few photographs ... but at least I can share them with you. Just imagine our terror as this pirate-captained boat bore down on us as we headed upstream ... yes, the weekend was just that fun.

At page 614 of Vanity Fair. I was too busy to read much today, though. First thing I did was spend some time writing up last night's trip to see Shunkin at the Barbican. Mental abuse, puppet sex, codependence, self-disfigurement-it was essentially perfect and I wound up not feeling so resentful about the extravagantly priced tickets.

Review done, I headed out the door at noon and met up with wechsler at the Market Coffee Shop in Spitalfields for lunch; then we wandered around a bit killing time before our scheduled tea time at the Teasmith shop. We were given about six kinds of tea paired with various sweets - it's all a bit of a blur though I remember Pi Lo Chun and whisked Matcha among the options.

After this we found ourselves with an hour on our hands and I was able to convince W to go in search of a few of the locations of Surround Me, a multi-sited art installation consisting of recordings of 17th century songs projected in 20th century locations, done in such a way to create the strange feeling of standing put while time moves backwards around you. I'd found one a few weeks back on my ill-fated trip to meet shadowdaddy for a movie at the Barbican: as it turns out, they are only "on" during the weekend. So it was a Saturday and we were in the city, so off W and I went off to Tokenhouse Yard, Change Alley, and then the northern underside of London Bridge to soak up some intense atmosphere. It was really very great, even though it was a bit disconcerting that most of the music was on a 10 minute loop, with a great deal of that being silence; but to be honest it made for a better effect having to wait and having all of that lack of noise surrounding it. I have two left to have heard the set; no real reason not to go tomorrow, I think, since they are only on during the weekends. I did a video recording at two of the spots:



Done, we headed to Gipsy Hill and lolliepopp's house, where we spent the next four hours eating, drinking, and playing Rock Band. It was a good night, really, and the day had a lot of good bits in it, including a very happy moment while I was watching the sun set over the river and hearing the echoes of John Dowland floating up to the bridge.

Oh, I was a happy, happy girl sleeping until nearly 11 o'clock today, straight through my hostess's departure and well beyond, as I was a bad girl and did not go to bed until 2 last night. Such pain and no actual theater blogging was done! I wound up having to hustle my ass to get out to the Folk Art Museum, though (skipping breakfast altogether - I wound up getting a Philly cheese steak at a food truck near Rockefeller Center), as I had a 2:30 Date With Destiny (or rather with koaloha).

The Darger exhibit (my icon is a picture by him) itself was quite small, and I actually was kinda aggravated by the captions. So much of what they had to say was based on the authors' trying to interpret Darger's emotions about his life: "he liked little girls because he wanted to have a family" "these were very sad because he was a lonely man" "he collected art because ..." I mean, really, they had NO IDEA how he really felt about anything - none of these people knew him personally, as near as I know the only person who has ever been interviewed and even kind of knew him was his landlord, and I'm positive he did not talk to her about being traumatized by being orphaned as a child. I also found the entire assertion that he was an "art collector" most spurious. I mean, people put shit up on there walls pretty much everywhere, that does not make them "art collectors." (Hmm, maybe I should go back and come up with my own ideas about the works and possessions of his on display - the Folk Art museum runs a scholarly stipend to study Darger and I could probably say more than these people.) He did, however, make collages and then frame and hang them, and they were cool. There were also two or three full panels of his Vivian girls work on display, and they were most enjoyable, especially as they had some of the source work also on the walls.

The rest of the museum was: two floors of quilts (I liked the hollyhocks quilts but this is not my area of enthusiasm); a floor of representations of people: and ... hmm, carved duck decoys, weathervanes, etc. I blazed through the gift shop and then ran over to my hotel; they did have my computer plug there. Then it was BLAZE BLAZE up to Lincoln Center. I arrived 10 minutes late but all was well and I got a tour backstage at the Koch Theater. Highlight was seeing Ashley Bouder rehearse; lowlight was ... well, there wasn't one, really, and as an extra prize I got a pair of tickets to Saturday's matinee. Yay!

Afterwards koaloha and I went to Old John's Luncheonette, where she had a salad and a burger and I had a slice of real New York cheesecake. And a vanilla shake. Yum. Then she headed out and I went to the Barnes & Noble to kill time before the show (and get the new William Gibson book, 50% off hardcover) and have a cup of tea. 6:30 and back to the Koch, where my brother in law appeared fairly close to time, then in for the show. It was only a two hour deal as it was the big gala, with all sorts of folks in fancy clothes and paparazzi to take pictures of them; sadly, the dances were kind of dumbed down to suit them (in my opinion). I enjoyed Balanchine's "Tarantella" and "Western Symphony" but could have skipped the first two pieces.

The good news about it being done by 9 (in time for the suits to have some kind of fancy hoo-hah after the show) was that it left us time to go have dinner in Chinatown: Congee Palace, here we come! I was unable to resist a $5 lychee martini on top of my also very cheap dinner. We had a good visit then headed back to Brooklyn for the evening. So overall, a good day!

I spent yesterday in a boat being toted from island to island in Croatia's Elaphite chain. The first, tiny island we passed looked like the setting for The Tempest: wind swept oak trees, flowering thises and that's, with some giant agave plants to add to the otherworldliness. It wasn't that it looked bizarre; it was just so very Mediterranean, and not piney. It was cool.

Higlight of the trip for me was, not the swimming on Lopud (which was nice, with super clear water and few people) but the Thyssen-Bornemisza modern art there. I'll look it up later but the exhibit was something like "My horizon" or "Infinite Horizon," and was a dark room with a narrow band of LED florescent type lights seamlessly around the room. I walked up into it from a ramp during a bright bit and fumbled my way to the center of the room, where I watched the colors slowly changing and the room getting darker; suddenly all the lights fused together and I was no longer in a box with four walls, I was staring into infinity _with a horizon line_ everywhere I turned; it felt like a circle now. I got a little disoriented. I could hear Amy leaving and walked to where I thought the exit was; suddenly the horizon line was wobbling madly and I felt dizzy and thought I was going to fall over. Then I realized I had just, in fact, walked to within about 4 inches of one of the walls, and the wobbling was caused by my walking. So really, a very cool exhibit & really glad I made the effort to see it. The little hermit crab that crawled out of the shell I picked up off of the sandy sea bottom, he was cool, too. (I did put him back.)

I want more art. I am thinking that I will have to look at getting some when I go to Seattle. But when I see David Kroll's paintings at the Grover/Thurston Gallery, and Darren Waterston at Greg Kucera, I think that my income has in no ways kept touch with my tastes.

Two years ago, on my birthday, Michael Manning posted this picture on his LJ page (metalweb):




which I later bought, because, to me, it really represented me, greeting the sun on my birthday, the longest day of the year. (Or, indeed, saying goodbye to the New Sun, as per his commentary.)

This year, for a birthday present from shadowdaddy, the print was framed. In our old house, we couldn't put pictures on the wall, so there was no point framing it (not that we could afford to at the time; buying this was an exercise in hope and patience, but Mr. Manning was willing to wait for me). But now it's ready to hang and we can enjoy it regularly instead of just when I dare take it out of its envelope. And I opened the package early so I could show it off to people tomorrow

I'm kind of excited. I'll settle down in a bit.

First, there's a three day event this weekend, "The Big Draw," taking place at the Wellcome Collection and other sites, that I'm pretty excited about.

The website says, "Drawing on Life' is a free interactive festival celebrating drawing and life, with leading artists and scientists, in a jam-packed programme of events and activities exploring what it means to be human."

Doesn't that sound like fun? I'm especially interested in "Paper Diseases: the Little Theatre of Disease and Desire presents a theatre of bodies, bones and operations; a stage on which diseases perform, where quack doctors and grave-robbers play the hero and bodies are excavated, dissected, investigated, formed and re-formed through drawings, animations and paper cut-outs." "Snails in Art, the Art of Snails and the Joy of Camouflage" and "Deadly Pretty Things" (aka draw your own flow-in-the-dark disease) also sound like fun.

I can really only go on Saturday due to plans on Sunday and, er, work on Friday. Does this sound interesting to anyone else?

Second, this quote from Proust is perfect for autumn: "The patches of white in beards hitherto entirely black rendered the human landscape of the party somewhat melancholy, like the first yellow leaves on the trees when one is still thinking one can count on a long summer, when before one has started to enjoy it one sees it has already turned to autumn." (Finding Time Again p. 235.)

I decided to switch gymming this week to Thursday and Friday and went to the British Museum to try to catch the end of the American Prints exhibit at the British Museum. Well, I can make it there, but somehow I can't manage to get all the way through anything, ever. This time I managed the middle third of the exhibit, which was great.

While we were there, the weather went from sunny and mild to windy and wild, and we just barely made it in the door before the rain started dumping down. Now it's sunny and cloudy again. God, living on an island is wierd.

Note to self: buy the album on which Jordi Savall is playing the Karl Friedrich Abel "Prelude in re mineur" - they just played it on the Baroque music station on LastFM and it was great.

I spent dinner reading an article I've been holding onto for a while with the cover teaser of "Rachel Cusk on the dangers of telling the truth about motherhood." What were these truths? I had to know. And it was a really engaging read, enough to pull me back to it as soon as dinner had been eaten and the plates cleared away. One of the things she noticed was that she was basically being censored by other women, who weren't okay when what she said about her feelings went against the party line on what was an acceptable thing to say about how being a mother made you feel. While I enjoyed a lot of what she had to say, I found this bit especially resonated with me. Why is it that it's so often other women that try to put the brakes on what comes out of women's mouths? Why are they the forces of conformity? Is the price of sisterhood learning how to "put up or shut up?"

Tell me, oh (female) hive mind: has this been your experience?

I've been moody today. I've even come up with a name for the thing that's been causing my moods lately. I'm going to call it The McGuffin. The McGuffin hasn't gone away, although I thought I saw signs of its demise not too long ago ... it's apparently wormed its way into my brain and will now just kind of twitch now and then when something sets it off. I look forward to it dying permanently, but I now realize this may not happen for another three to six months, or longer. Meanwhile I've got yet another pile of poo added to what I've been toting around inside my head to make me act irrationally and obsess on stupid things. Yay!

So the McGuffin was bothering me as I set out today. I was angry about running so late and making shadowdaddy and wechsler sit and wait for me while I tried to find an outfit to wear (a lack of summer weight pants was making this difficult for me). But after we'd made it to West Dulwich station, of all things, Carter's Steam Fair was set up! It was full of beautiful, restored, gilded giant toys that had calliope accompanyment and silly signs on the sides. The swing even blew out a huge puff of steam every time it went backwards. It was great!

Suddenly I was eight years old and the world was full of wonder. I ran around looking at all of the rides, laughing and pointing and realizing that rather a few of them would make me feel quite ill. The carousel was playing "The Lambeth Walk," a song I wouldn't have recognized a year ago, and I felt so proud of myself for being able to grow a little into the local culture. We stopped in the arcade and played some of the silly, old-fashioned machines. I went for the fortune teller, my obsession since reading American Gods. I got the same one I got last time: "Your hand denotes a firm and determined character, one that can be led but not driven .... Very sincere, but too independent to please most people whom you meet." Yep, it's like a badge of pride and yet a knife in my heart - that ever so accurate fortune of mine - I should just change my LJ user description to say what it says on the card.

I can't really explain how much this cheered me up. We didn't actually ride any rides or play any more games, but trotted off to the Dulwich Picture Gallery to see the Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s to 1950s exhibit (ends tomorrow). This was a very nice exhibit - good representations of the realist, substantially landscape-type work produced in the 1850s right up through Calder and Rauschenberg. I also really enjoyed the artists' description of their art, and the assertion of the need to develop an American identity for art, one which "embraces the world as it exists today" - a philosophy I feel most art forms should pursue, especially the performing arts. We also got to see an exhibit of photographs from China done at the very beginning of the 20th century which I found fairly interesting (reminded me of Song of the Fishermen as well as the Chinese opera I've been watching). We actually were finished in good time - the exhibition hall is rather petite - and had an opportunity to sit down and have tea and scones. It was lovely.

Afterwards it was off to meet natalya and lovingboth up at St. Pancras, with a short stop at London Bridge to wrangle some dinner fixin's (stuffed duck breast at a 30% discount, go heavy bargaining me!) and an opportunity for the McGuffin to take control again (boo). I finally got home at 7:30, popped the food in the oven, and we ate at 8:30 ... and now I'm so tired. So tired! It seems like I really burn the candle at both ends based on how long it takes me to get my engine restoked over the weekend. And I say this, and yet I read that the some Russian ballet company is coming to London in late July and I'm all going, "Oooh! Ooh! How many of the shows can I see?" (the answer is two, but I only really want to see one). I can tell I'm going to put myself in an early grave, but, God, getting there is really fun, except for the sleep deprivation.

I just won a prize from work (two tickets to see an art exhibit at the National - "Van Eyck to Titian: The Renaissance Portrait," which isn't even on until October) for correctly guessing the changes made in this picture. I'm going to make it a little harder and not say how many changes there are or what they are, but ... how many changes do you see between the top and the bottom picture (the bottom is the original), and what are they? Comments disabled until we have a winner. (And apologies for the poor image quality, but it's exactly what they gave me to work off of!) Otherwise stupid chipper for a Monday, not that I'm complaining.
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