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.

I want to get through all of this online gallery of Walker Evans, but I can't just relax and do it at work today ... trying to get some stuff done before I go home. I was attracted by this article about a new exhibit of how postcards influenced his photography that's on at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's really cool and I wish I could go.

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.)

Stained glass - St. Catherine , I think.

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've never really thought of sheep as an accompaniment to world-class sculpture - but at the Yorkshire sculpture park, Henry Moore and woolly critters go together like socks and shoes. Speaking of which, I'm really glad I didn't wear my sandals today, even though we're having spectacular weather - sunny with a bit of a breeze blowing the fluffy clouds over the arch of the big, blue sky. The air smells like roses and clover - it's just gorgeous and it's making me feel glad to be away from the city.

We're picnicking in the park now, a suitable activity for the 4th of July, I think, though it would benefit from homemade ice cream or perhaps some strawberry shortcake. Our fireworks tonight will be listening to Emma Kirkby sing, though truth be told it will be hard to top last night's concert!

Happy Fourth to everyone, and gkr, sorry to not be seeing you tonight.

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.

Tonight shadowdaddy and I were lucky enough to get to the Tate Modern to see Gavin Bryars and his ensemble perform "A Man in a Room, Gambling," a piece based on a spoken word performance by Juan Muñoz, whom I'd never heard of before tonight as I am a cultural clod. shadowdaddy happened to read about the performance randomly online, and as we have been a fan of Bryars since we heard his Titanic piece on WNYC's New Sounds back in the day (by which I mean back in the day when they actually broadcast music on WNYC, as well as back during that very short year in which we lived in New Jersey), we decided to make the effort to see the show.

The concept was pretty cool: as I read it, it was spoken word about a person's thoughts during the course of a night of gambling, or, as described in the program, "strategies employed in card games." In fact, it turns out the spoken bit is about how to cheat at cards, starting with three card monte, then dealing from the bottom of the deck, how to "fake" cutting the cards, and how to hide a card you've palmed after the hand is over. Hah! According to Mr. Bryars, Muñoz's thought was that the various pieces were supposed to be little one off radio slots, rather like "The Shipping News" (for Americans, imagine that poet of the day thing Garrison Keilor does), that stood by themselves but had an air of strangeness to them, meant to be heard as you were going from one thing to the next. In between, there was a piece called "The North Shore," a piece Bryars made in honor of his friend Muñoz, whom he described as "a great artist and a good bloke." It was built off of one of the pieces from the Gambling series, though I couldn't tell which one.

My review of the show was ... well, Bryar's music can be very difficult for me to put temporal order to. One minute you're doing one thing, one the next, and while I might hear little themes that I sort of briefly recognize, or hear stylings that I enjoy, I find it difficult to string it together in my head. This is where listening to a CD can really help, because you can build it up over and over until it makes a structure that you can comprehend. Live music is so very here and now, a series of seconds taking place one after the other, that it can be hard for me to feel like I'm moving rather than just having sound images flashing at me, one after the next. Baroque music isn't like this. That said, the narrative provided by the voice, which called up very striking visuals and was even sequential and goal oriented, was a good companion to the music. And I liked the music, but modern stuff just isn't as easy as earlier stuff.

Conclusion: well, I guess I need to go see who this Muñoz guy is and why Bryars thought he was worth collaborating with in the first place. The exhibit at the Tate goes on through the end of April, so there's plenty of time. And if YOU'RE interested, if you click on the link, you can listen to Juan giving away the trick to dealing from the bottom of the deck.

Oh yeah, and listening to this show tonight, I thought that I can't ever move back home again.

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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Today we were somewhat blowing with the wind. During our discussion at rosamicula's last night it came up that I was interested in seeing the Millais exhibit at the Tate Britain; I woke to discover Miss Micula had offered to guest butterbee in to the exhibit. So off we went, at the late, late, post-cleaning-up-the-house hour of 1:45 (but I felt much better for having all of the wrapping paper and presents out of the living room and also for having made little roast beef sandwiches for us to have for lunch).

The exhibit was nice, especially when you consider that all four of us made it in for eleven quid and the price of a round of heavily doctored cups of tea (shadowdaddy is not recovering gracefully from his cold - I imagine it kicking and screaming from its position deep within his sinus cavities). The first two rooms were mostly filled with the paintings of his I've seen a million times before - Ophelia, Mariana, Christ in the House of his Parents, The Order of Release, Autumn Leaves - the really pretty paintings I'm so fond of but .... well, let's be honest, which occasionally have a touch of schmaltz to them. (I still like many of them quite a lot, and enjoyed seeing new works I'd not seen before, such as "Love," pictured, and the studies for many of the paintings I was very familiar with.)

The "schmaltz" factor seemed to more and more take over as the exhibit wore on. I was happy that he found love in Effie Ruskin, but once he had eight kids to feed, I guess he threw artistic purity out of the window in favor of commercial success. Sappy sweet kiddie portraits, random decorative romantic "scenes," society portraits ... the middle three rooms ("The Boyhood of Raleigh," "The Ruling Passion," bleah!) were full of what looked like the kind of crap you need to crank out to keep the bills paid.

That said, the last room was full of lovely Scottish landscapes that he painted when he ran away from London society and went to live "the life of an English gentleman," which apparently involved a lot of hunting and fishing and hiding in little huts for seven hours a day painting water pouring over volcanic rocks. Unfortunately I was a bit too tired by this time to really appreciate this art and just wanted to sit down and have some more tea and recover a bit.

Afterwards, off we went to Liverpool Street Station to meet spikeylady and enjoy a christmas tour through the Dennis Severs house. All of the house was lit by candlelight and in each room it appeared the occupants had just left - leaving behind a half eaten softboiled egg, a whiff of perfume, some overturned crockery, etc. I found it all quite charming but felt like a little bit of it was passing me by! Apparently the whole house was the artistic project of Dennis Severs, who died some years back, but like my last trip to see a Punchdrunk production (in this case Faust), I felt like I was just a little bit behind getting what was holding it all together. But it was neat, anyways.

That said my big fun was having dinner afterwards at the Nazrul Restaurant on Brick Lane. Of course, the whole thing was an experience, with every damned restaurant having a shill outside trying to drag you in and make you a paying customer. I was insistent that we find a place that had an "English menu" with fish and chips on it so butterbee could have something utterly unspicey to eat, and managed to escape from the clutches of many proprietors based on needing to fill that criteria (one offered to bring us some from down the street while we ate, which was really just OTT but had me say, "We may be back!"). But we were convinced at last and settled down for a nice dinner (with fried fish, and with the discount I'd been offered elsewhere carried over to this one - 20% off plus free drinks :-) ). It was YAP YAP YAP for about two hours or so and then we all called it a night and slunk back home after getting some sweets down the street (burfi and that fried honey pretzel thing, yum!) and passing through some of the Ripper haunts we'd visited when we did the tour. It seems like we didn't do much today but we are all now very tired.

65 words

Touch Typing online

And now, cake! ("Cake!")

The bike ride to Hyde Park was really great. Walking around in the leaves in the park was also great, and I noticed that, because the foliage is a lot thinner, you can see the views of the park better. There were a lot of people out and it was ... I don't know, I felt like I could feel the pages of history passing by me, if that makes any sense, even though with the girls picnicking out of their plastic Sainsbury's bags and the Muslim woman walking by talking on her cellphone it was all very here and now. We got a snackie snack at the pavillion next to the Serpentine and ate it while watching people puttering around on boats on the lake.

Matthew Barney at the Serpentine gallery: God, that man is always good for a laugh. Anyone that has to explain their art that hard is just trying to be deliberately obtuse. I found the video of him bouncing off of a trampoline so he could make little marks on a wall just a big fat ball of comedy. He does make me wish for my beloved Clyfford Still with his belief that people who will understand his art will and that he didn't need to sit around and explain everything. Matthew Barney desperately needs a little more mystery in his work and a little less, "Hey, this is the digestive system! Get it? The digestive system! I'm consuming and excreting!" Somehow it all comes off a little Bart Simpson, though I quail to think of what he would do with industrial quantities of Vaseline.

We made it home in good time (conclusion: I won't be biking to work, it's too far for me to go with a time deadline) and raced to the grocery stores (they close at 5!) to get the ingredients for tonight's dinner. I'm apparently a shopping whiz now as I made it in and out in thirty minutes. Now we're folding laundry and watching the internet go up and down and waiting for the roast to finish up. I'm serving it with a side of slightly Italian not-exactly turnip greens, which will be made with a bit of hot pepper; I think it will be very good.

What will we be doing this time next year? Got only knows. I am amused that today is the birthday of both trishpiglet and motomotoyama, who perhaps have far more in common than I might have ever expected of two people born on the same day. Oh, those Scorpios!

Outsider art

Right, sleeping in was achieved by all, and no one made it into the living room until 11:30. That is what I call getting the weekend off to a good start (after a Friday that included a trip to the Bricklayer's Arms, duck salad with orange dressing, and wechsler whupping me and J at Cartagena). I put in laundry (to have an appropriate shirt for today's nice weather), made breakfast, took a shower, then hit the reset button and took a nap.

Now it's time to go see art - the Keith Arnatt exhibit at the Photographers' Gallery and the prison art exhibit at the ICA. We've altered our plans and will be going to booklectic's for games tonight rather than going to robot_mel's housewarming (apologies, but I thought skipping crowds was my better bet), then tomorrow is Cornwall (which reminds me of the Corn Palace in South Dakota but probably shouldn't)!

Well, I was busy enough trying to get my workshop together that I utterly forgot to get some painkillers before it started, partially because I was isolated on a college campus which had no open stores and I had no idea where I should go, or time to do so. The results was that walking back down the many staircases with my suitcase was an incredible pain in the ass, and I do not mean this metaphorically. It was like someone was jabbing me in the coccyx with a rusty, slightly blunt dagger.

The heavens smiled on me, however (possibly since they couldn't manage to lay off the rain thing) and I saw the glory that was booklectic and her dr_d, who had READ MY POST and offered us and our bags a ride to the station. He even looped around to let us of at the side that we were actually leaving from so we didn't have to go up and down the rather steep staircase over the tracks. God, I was (and am) so grateful, and here's to whinging on LJ. I don't know if the ibuprofen I got at the Cardiff central station later actually helped, but I did drop like a rock once I got on the train to London and that was it for the next two hours other than a bit of reading Land of the Green Ginger, as recommended by ellen_kushner.

The workshop went over really well. People were quiet but I was told later that it was because they were actually listening to me, and after I was through with the yapping and then the demo bit, about a third of the people stayed behind and made use of the DIY materials I'd brought. Thanks to my able assistants shadowdaddy and spikeylady, and to my own private cheerleading section of trishpiglet and babysimon. I was shocked to think that any of you actually thought I had anything to talk about that wasn't already old hat for you guys but it was really great to have you there and the feedback afterwards was good, too.

When it was done I was both sweaty and ravenous (nerves?), so I went back to the flat and polished off the previous night's leftover curry and then took a shower. I don't think this is the part of the day that really wore me out - the lack of sleep due to stabbing tailbone issues gets that award - but I think the nerves were running pretty high.

Good things to look forward to: I am buying this work by Michael Manning, metalweb. Rest of site generally not work safe, this image uh ... not if you work in a bank. It's farewell to the sun and for me it represents my birthday. We're also looking at some plays and dance stuff for September, the part where we don't have guests - the Orlando Bloom play (say Thursday), Christopher Wheeldon's Morphoses group, Alvin Ailey, and Hofesh Schechter in September, and "Peter Brook does Becket" at the Old Vic. Let me know if you're interested in any of these, though I might do a last minute post before I buy my tickets. The Orlando Bloom play, we're just looking to do half price day of show on Thursday, so let me know if you MIGHT be interested.

Oh yeah, and provided I can get confirmation that they've got approval for the wages we discussed for my new job, I want to give notice tomorrow. God, that will feel good. I'll send an email to the HR guy reminding him about that right now. Sweet freedom, I can smell you now! And Ibuprofen, I think I can smell that. I'm going to take some more and go to bed and finish The Land of Green Ginger, which will mean I've finished two books in one weekend (and am now ready for Harry Dresden the next).

Saturday morning we set out at 11:30 to see the exhibit in Notting Hill I'd read about in the paper a few weeks ago, but were quickly turned back by a call from the curator letting us know we'd missed our entry slot and would not be allowed in (drat). So we made a quick u-turn and headed to the train station and the quick shot to Waterloo and the Hayward, where there's an exhibit up by Antony Gormley. You know the one: the ads have this sort of foggy room pictured on them, and the bizarre statues that are on top of the buildings nearby are a part of it.

Well. The good bit: the foggy room was really cool. Two steps in and you can't see the door anymore; inside the walls, the space seems infinite. You can tell other people are there by their voices, but you can't see them (much less your feet) until they are within a foot of you. Basically you see a dark area, and then it has color, and then it resolves into someone saying, "Excuse me" as they've almost run into you.

shadowdaddy and I had a great time in this part of the exhibit. Two steps back and he'd disappear, then I'd tiptoe away, giggling, and see if I could sneak up on him. On my own, I tried to see if I was managing to go in the direction I thought I was (is this the south wall? the north wall?). At one point, we were playing Marco Polo, which was making me laugh and laugh. We had lots of fun.

The rest of the exhibit was ... let's start by saying odd. There were all of these casts of his body, some of them sort of stapled to walls, other hanging from the ceiling upside down by iron cables. Then there were sort of these negative casts of his body, but set up so they were cages with an open space where the body would have been, like African fetishes, or a reverse iron maiden. To be honest, they all looked a little pervy somehow, like giant bondage toys - suspension bondage mummy cases and giant mesh prisons in which a body could only find one way to contort itself.

But the more I looked at these things, the more I thought they were some of the most pretentious, egotistical twaddle I have seen in twenty five years of looking at modern art. Gormley's exhibit, at its heart, is about ME me ME me ME ME ME, my body, my nose, my butt, me in a ball, me standing up, me stapled to the wall, me standing outside, ME ME ME. It really got aggravating when I realized that it was simply impossible to see it as being a generalized human form as there was not a single female figure represented in the entire exhibit. No, really, I might as well have been looking at casts of Antony's penis, because his self-obsession was so utterly and puerilely focused on his own magic self. I would have found it so much more honest if it had really been a bunch of SM toys and not such an altar to his own vanity.

But wait! There were other people represented in the exhibit, in the work called "Allotment II." The exhibition pamphlet said of it, "The individual units that congregate to form Allotment are derived from the vital statistics of real people aged between 18 months and 80 years. Besides the height and widgh of their bodies, thirteen other precise measurements were taken from each of the 300 volunteers." And what did he get out of these? Little cement blocks. Yep, that's right, Antony Gormley is represented by anatomically correct body casts; the rest of us, in his art, are little faceless rectangular blocks of cement, with holes for our eyes and mouth. It was really pathetic.

I left in a hurry to escape from the pretension and return to the world of people and light, where the sun was shining and people from a hundred different cities were walking down the banks of the river and beer and friendship and laughter were waiting for me. We went to the Borough Market, bought venison sandwiches and a delicious slab of cheese (and nice cider), had a sit down at The Rake, then trotted off to Walthamstowe and the lovely company of countess_sophia. We napped, we ate, we drank, we enjoyed a walk in the forest and sunset in the garden, we played Cartagena (I've apparently lost a pirate), we laughed a lot, we pondered the great mystery of Relationships then had more wine. It was great, one hundred percent Live Life Now, and a wonderful antidote to the art exhibit as well as the rest of the week. Rah!

The Tuesday edition of The London Paper had references to several art exhibits I'd like to see. The first is Someone Else's House, an exhibit built around the traces of previous occumpants in a new home (a theme of ongoing fascination for me). It's over August 4th, so I might try to catch it rather soon.

The second one is a photo exhibit by Keith Arnatt that's, um, somewhere (can't figure out what a WC2 is, but here's the website). I mean, really, what is it about me that would make me see an image like this one and go, "ooh! Ooh! I want to see the rest of this guy's stuff!" but, well, what can I say, I see that picture and I see Diane Arbus and I see WeeGee and I see the same sad slipping of the past that occurs when I go into a house and see the wallpaper that a long-ago resident specially chose as the one most likely to make their baby's nursery a happy place. So I'll be sure to see it, next Saturday, I think.

( A second image. )

It's raining like mad again, though not as bad as yesterday. Clearly it's time for some more tea and a bit of housework.

I'm a bit tired - couldn't sleep last night and resorted to melatonin at around midnight. I'm planning on leaving work early three days in a row - wish 5:15 didn't seem like early, dammit!

I made a little progress on the cleaning last night - got the winter clothes stuffed under the bed in a bag, emptied the clean laundry bin that's been waiting for over a month. At this rate you might be able to see the floor in the bedroom by Saturday evening, which will still seem like a miracle.

The trip to see art was a bit of a bust, at least at the Great Eastern hotel, where the exhibit had closed on Friday! (The Metro got it wrong, which almost made keeping the article pointless.) I was re-reading about the "stories written on blankets one page at a time" and getting sad about what we'd missed. We did see what was left, but it was just drips and drops. Alas.

On the other hand, the sound art exhibit at Kinetica was AWESOME. All of the art was interactive ("Put on a wristband, then touch someone else who's wearing a wristband") and I got to play a theramin! They're having a talk on Wednesday with Martyn Ware (described on the site as "80s pop icon as co-founder of Heaven 17 and The Human League") introducing the artists. shadowdaddy is going to that if anyone wants to go with him, but I have to go to a tech talk that night. We never even got to the upstairs gallery; we must go back!

Home and we had a wechsler over for dinner, which was an Italian feast of prosciutto and melon/bread salad/tagliatelli with butter and parmesan/some vegetables. This was followed by more wine and a game of Euchre. All in all, it was a good day and a great evening.

Well, it was a really good night singing songs at trishpiglet's house tonight. 1songstress was great, really a pleasure for me to see in action - I felt a bit like I'd brought a ringer, she's such a brilliant singer! Fortunately we did some duets that sucked ("Funkytown," "Take a Chance on Me"), and "Baby Got Back" went down in flames, so we were in no way making people feel like it would be too hard to follow us. It was also nice to see thekumquat, ellbie and nickmc, werenerd, some_fox, and co-host babysimon ... you guys all rocked out! I know that a night doing karaoke with friends wasn't exactly the brilliant London nightlife scene you'd hear about in the magazines, but it was definitely exactly what I moved here for - a night with good friends, enjoying each other's company and being silly and supportive all at the same time.

Our big excitement ("ooh, visiting London, must have Experiences") of the day is going to the James Turrell exhibit, which, for the uninitiated, was projections of light against walls, or of holes in walls and light showing with no perspective at all. Though I'm in no shape to explain his art (there was some drinking at the karaoke, not that I need Dutch courage to sing), I did get a couple of great reactions from little kids at the exhibit. So, James Turrell as seen through the raw eyes of the under-five set.

Kid one: (walks up to blue screen on wall)
Me: (walks up to the blue screen)
Kid one: (slowly puts their hands closer, closer to the elevated screen ...)
Me: (watches. Will she leave a spot on the wall?)
Kid one (as her hands pass through the screen into the hole that is actually where the light is coming from): SCREEAAAAAAMMM!
Me: (laughs hysterically)

Kid two (about four, walking into a dark room with another hole with light shining out of it): It's so dark.
(pause)
A bit too dark.
(pause)
I prefer the other one.
(leaves the room) (this one was good enough that I wrote it down)

Oh, what did we do the rest of the day? We left the house at 1:30, we wound up at Debenham's at about 4:30 (slippers were purchased), and gave up on shopping just in time to miss the cafe's opening hours. Then we hit Clark's (all cute red ballet flats now sold out), BeardPapa's (today's flavor: capuccino; total purchase: three puffs and three hot teas), then some place about half a block closer to the Tottenham Court Road tube that sold sparkly hair crap that 1songstress and I were able to avoid like magpies on tinfoil. I got a red diamante giant hair clip and tiny red diamante ornamented bobby pins; 1songstress got three actual buttefly clips in white and opal and some butterfly hair dangly. All in all this made us late for getting to Tooting Broadway, but it was a good evening anyway, and no one was mad at us for being late.

Good bus ride home in the magic 270, some talk about family matters, along the lines of WTF mom, WTF our aunt, WTF the other cousins, WTF women who think they can do nothing but be pretty and expect someone else to take care of them.

*yawn* Decidedly feeling good about living here. :-) I like that I'm sitting here getting my hair braided. Night, all.

I want to talk about my really great evening and the fine (and cheap) place we went for dinner (Shalimar in Brick Lane, great meal for two for 11 pounds) ... but what I really want to talk about is photography. So. An essay, like I used to write back when I wrote.

There's an exhibit up right now at the Barbican, In the Face of History, that I think every photographer should see. It hit for me on a few of those ongoing questions about photography: what makes photography great? What makes an individual photographer's work notable? How is photography quintessentially different from other art forms? - and gave me some ideas about answers to those questions, and, most importantly, inspiration to Make Art.

Photography has had problems since its inception with whether it is an art at all, because, in truth, photography was created to document, faithfully, the reality that our eyes perceive. In the late 1800s the Photo-Secessionists decided that they would try to make photography "art" by manipulating the image, or, if you prefer, making it worse than a clean, focused mirror of what the eye sees. They put vaseline on the lens, they shot out of focus, they printed on heavily textured paper that just couldn't get all of the detail that the negative was utterly capable of faithfully reproducing. (I once heard Bill Jay say they were later dismissed as the "Fuzzy Wuzzy School of Photography," and, even though it's a very cruel moniker, it's not entirely undeserved. In fact, it's totally deserved, but I love their pictures anyway.)

This dichotomy between "is it or ain't it art" has continued today, getting, I think, worse in the age of the digital camera. I keep seeing what I see as two different approaches to photography that mirror the original split: is it about making art or is it about making a faithful image? The faithful image school tends to be a more "masculine" arena, more Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, focused on the perfect shot, and the perfect set of equipment (and production techniques) needed to get that image. I feel, however, that this (to my mind) obsessive focus on tech and technique skips the vital element of the content of the photos and the ultimate making of (what I can't help but see as) art. I see piles and piles of people out there cranking out photos and fussing over their lenses and color balancing and yammer yammer blah blah blah (lots of magazines out there for these folks), but they are NOT talking about art to me.

I start from the presumption of art, and then I looked (tonight) at a group of photographers and thought about their practice and what made each of them artists. For photographers, it seems that the oeuvre is the thing, and to understand how an individual saw the world, you want to see many of their photos. One person shows images from a studio he does not dare to leave; another, portraits of people whose inner lives he cannot understand; a third, nearly microscopic images taken while he was a soldier. Each of them left me with insights into the artist, but, more importantly, things for me to think about caused by the generally pleasant assault of so many pictures.

But which of these images are compelling? Compositionally, many of them are doing interesting thing; but I was faced with the tyranny of the label! Art, I like to think, does not need a "label" to make it enjoyable or understandable; in fact, I often prefer to avoid reading the information next to displays in a gallery in order to have a purer appreciation of the work. But ... photography is utterly contaminated by being pictures of things at a certain place in history! It can barely get away from the labels! Sure, Westie's green peppers and Stieglitz's nudes break free of time and place, but when you are looking at the work of Henryk Ross, how can you not go, "Ooh, secretly made photos of Jews in the Polish ghetto that were stuffed in a can and left behind when he finally ran for it!" I hated that I was being (as I felt) emotionally manipulated by these declaration of time and subject. Couldn't I just enjoy the images as they were?

Well, heck, you know, I think I just have to accept that this is part of the medium, that it is affected by its ability to document transience and historicity. Some images go beyond this; but some images are, in fact, far more moving because they grip on to their point in time and refuse to let go. And thus we have the dark and gorgeous shots of Brassai's Paris, with its prostitutes and lesbian couples and transvestite sailors; Anders Petersen's pictures of the poor habitues of a sleazy bar in Hamburg; and, again, the shots of the Polish ghetto. If we accept that this ability to be stuck in time is a part of the power of photography, then art may in fact be created by loving and obsessive documentation of what it means to be here, now, in a time that will not be forever. Christer Strömholm, I believe, is the artist who said, "Photograph what matters to you," and I think that this passion very clearly comes through in these photographs. So I, in order to create art, should photograph the things that are happening at this moment, the people and the life that matters to me; and somehow, in the struggles of composition and balancing light and dark and pattern, I think that this will create art, an oeuvre worth remembering, far more than 5000 perfectly lit pictures of quaint New Mexican towns or spiral staircases or seashells could ever hope to do.

At any rate: see this exhibit. And go, people, go make art, and don't beat yourself up because you don't have the best lens out there or the spiffiest camera. You can make objects of lasting beauty with what you have right now. I went to the museum tonight, and I know that what I say is true. (And the narrator in Remembrance of Things Past got a stiffie tonight - how could I not share that, too?)