This blog has been far out at sea all night, as Ted Hughes would never have said. They made a rather cutesified children’s cartoon out of one of his books, over here in the US, and they show it every Christmas on TV. I am still waiting for a similar treatment to be given to The Bell Jar.
Anyway, I have been reminded of Wind in the literal rather than the metaphorical sense for the last few days, and I haven’t had much time to post. And my mother-in-law’s beloved cat died: 1, 2, 3, and the weather has been horrible for days and days. I’ve just wanted to sleep and hide. But Spring will come though a thousand Februaries march against it, and already perhaps the daffodils are pushing through the earth.
Frida Kahlo: I said I’d tell you what I thought about the Frida Kahlo exhibition. I think you should go and see it if you can. I’ve loved Kahlo’s work for a long time, but it isn’t often you get the chance to get up close to so much of her work and see it at close quarters, and there were some periods in her life I’d seen nothing from (I particularly loved some of her later work, like Moses, because I love really complicated artwork). One thing I’d rather have seen– perhaps this is merely a symptom of my being uncultured– is prints of the pieces they hadn’t got the originals of (What the Water Gave Me particularly wasn’t there). Perhaps that’s just what I need to buy the exhibition book for.
As to the actual discussion and commentary the museum provided, while it was certainly very adequate, I noticed a particular bias towards some of the important influences on her work at the expense of others. In particular, they talked a lot about how she wanted to have children and could not, and how later she saw her pets as her children, and the world, and Rivera. But while they discussed how this came out in her work a good deal– and showed how it came out in the paintings in ways I’d never seen before– it was rather at the expense of discussing the influences of her bisexuality and her Communism on her work, which were dealt with rather briefly. By comparison, some other exhibitions have brought out these themes rather more directly.
The museum also had another exhibition of the work of Juan Soriano, which is also worth seeing (especially since it’s apparently the first exhibition of his work in a major museum in the US), but there’s less to see there. (I wouldn’t have noticed so much had it not been for the Kahlo exhibition that, despite the ways Soriano works sexual themes into his work, they mentioned only once that he was gay.)
Shirts: I have received a GNOME t-shirt in the post: thank you to the Foundation. This brings the number of tech shirts I have to four: a Google shirt which I unfortunately left in England when I emigrated, a Summer of Code shirt from last year, a Freshmeat shirt that Eric sent me, and this one. I should post photos of me wearing each of them (though not a photo of the imaginary metacity shirt).
Nargery: I know not all of you read the Metacity blog, but I would like your feedback on this discussion of session management. Would you like the ~/.metacity directory to disappear? Who should ensure that applications’ windows are correctly positioned on restarting: the window manager? the toolkit? the applications themselves? nobody? Let us know!
Link soup:
- Rehearsal for a ballet about vampires. Generally vampire things are very horrific or very erotic. This is the latter.
- Bohemian Rhapsody, as a flowchart.
- AD&D insurance
- Someone has posted her experiences of being on the verge of suicide, in case they help people whose friends or family are facing depression to understand. Triggers abound, obviously: 1, 2.
- If version control systems were airlines.
- My much-loved Chumbawamba have released their new album, which is called “The boy bands have won, and all the copyists and the tribute bands and the TV talent show producers have won, if we allow our culture to be shaped by mimicry, whether from lack of ideas or from exaggerated respect. You should never try to freeze culture. What you can do is recycle that culture. Take your older brother’s hand-me-down jacket and re-style it, re-fashion it to the point where it becomes your own. But don’t just regurgitate creative history, or hold art and music and literature as fixed, untouchable and kept under glass. The people who try to ‘guard’ any particular form of music are, like the copyists and manufactured bands, doing it the worst disservice, because the only thing that you can do to music that will damage it is not change it, not make it your own. Because then it dies, then it’s over, then it’s done, and the boy bands have won.”
- A poem about a midday mass on 2001-09-11. (“Ordinary time” is the name of the church season which covers September.)
