Plans--I makes them.
Jan. 14th, 2010 02:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losI just got rid of 150 emails from my gmail in box. I still have 130. I feel like this is a good resting point, however, and I can do more tomorrow, in addition to finishing the ludicrously complicated spreadsheet of English phone plans that I've begun in hopes of making the Best Possible Choice. I emailed five new people and sorted out all the flat-related stuff I still have to reply to in aforementioned inbox. Tomorrow I have got to get money out--I'm thinking of making a quiche lorraine for dinner. Also I should do round two of CV revising, send it to my aunt and dad, wait for it to come back and then email it out to all and sundry on Friday. Friday's also Sorting Out Bank Accounts day, and this weekend's Figuring Out Prescriptions and Doctors.
If I've been ignoring you, oh world, it's largely because I've been disgustingly busy. This isn't even a full summary of Shit That Needs Done. I'm going to feel guilty so much as reading and looking at my writing until I've 100% settled the job, flat and other necessaries. If I think about it I get really worried and it seems cyclical and huge, but I've made a good beginning on everything above, and so really I shouldn't be as neurotic about it as I am.
On happier news, for the moment I'm at the lovely![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aralias's. I managed to waste today in a fugue of jet lag and laundry--poor show, Erin. But aralias made me stir-fry, and there were still M&S mince pies in the cupboard, and we played St. Petersburg and Dominion, both of which were new to me and the latter of which made me oddly nostalgic for Magic the Gathering. So really rather a good day, even if I'm fretting and the John Barrowman Robin Hood panto we wanted to see, which promised to be so fabulously ridiculous, looks to also be fabulously popular and fabulously sold-out.
Also, have an art show reaction post from earlier this week, in New York. And you thought I could only have feelings about End of Time Part II...
Four days ago I went to the Whitney museum with Jenna and her friend Suzzie. You don't have to click any of the below links, I'm including them more for myself.
The Whitney (http://www.whitney.org/ --v. famous here, but possibly English people have never heard of it) only does one or two artists' exhibitions at a time, and currently it has a Roni Horn two-floor exhibition and a big exhibit specifically focused on Georgia O'Keefe's more abstract stuff--beyond vaginal flowers and the dessert pieces, etc, though there's still an intense female sexuality to a lot of her abstract imagery. I liked her somewhat better after this exhibit than I had before--the colors and the organic/natural shape vocabulary were more appealing and varied than I normally think of her stuff as being.
The Roni Horn, however, was the more interesting exhibit. The series of Thames photographs with footnotes on the nature of water, the nature of this particular river, and its history as probably the world's most popular place to drown oneself was so good Jenna and I crawled around the gallery, trying to read every scrap of text on the pieces. It was highly essayistic, reminiscent of Anne Carson's treatment of water or a big poster-essay that hung on John D'Agata's office wall, on which an essay flowed around in swirling scraps of interconnecting, discrete sentences--like leggo blocks. The text alluded to other work without being overly self-conscious and irritating (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_1_43/ai_n6203256/). The photographs were melancholy and haunting before, but made compelling by the way Roni processed them (http://water.pulitzerarts.org/artist-statements/horn/) (http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AOD%3AE%3A106692&page_number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1&imageID=1). I would have enjoyed the series more as a book--more suited to careful reading/private reception at my own speed.
But I do like museums--the typical uncrowdedness, the quiet, the quality of light. The way things are isolated against white walls and glass, so that I can appreciate them in a way I don't normally--I sometimes think I could enjoy the undeniable sensory beauty of a shiny crinkled up crisps packet, of anything at all, in a presentation like that which presents something in a way that arrests your attention and lets you just experience and think about that experience, divorced of anything else. I like the controlled art of or thematics driving and underlying the construction of exhibits, the hint of victoriana curiosity cabinet prissyness, the informative display cards, the lines at the ticket booths that show people respect art, despite the American tendency to hate find all intellectualism pretentious.
I don't like the OVERLOAD that comes form painting after painting to the point where I can no longer appreciate discrete works, where everything blurs together in a glut of MUST EXPERIENCE CULTURE!! (which seems to be about cramming education/prestige into a child or oneself or something, and misses the point that it's supposed to be /enjoyable/, that it's supposed to make you think and feel, rather than supposed to be crammed into a person like drilling Latin vocab), but I like afternoons at museums--one, two, two and a half hour strolls through galleries and then out into the sun again for coffee, or home for dinner. But I don't like going alone, with no one to speak to about things, no one to experience it with or to tell me what they thought, so I'll either have to wheedlearalias into short trips which she may not even like, or I'll have to make a Museum Friend or three in London.
If I've been ignoring you, oh world, it's largely because I've been disgustingly busy. This isn't even a full summary of Shit That Needs Done. I'm going to feel guilty so much as reading and looking at my writing until I've 100% settled the job, flat and other necessaries. If I think about it I get really worried and it seems cyclical and huge, but I've made a good beginning on everything above, and so really I shouldn't be as neurotic about it as I am.
On happier news, for the moment I'm at the lovely
aralias's. I managed to waste today in a fugue of jet lag and laundry--poor show, Erin. But aralias made me stir-fry, and there were still M&S mince pies in the cupboard, and we played St. Petersburg and Dominion, both of which were new to me and the latter of which made me oddly nostalgic for Magic the Gathering. So really rather a good day, even if I'm fretting and the John Barrowman Robin Hood panto we wanted to see, which promised to be so fabulously ridiculous, looks to also be fabulously popular and fabulously sold-out. Also, have an art show reaction post from earlier this week, in New York. And you thought I could only have feelings about End of Time Part II...
Four days ago I went to the Whitney museum with Jenna and her friend Suzzie. You don't have to click any of the below links, I'm including them more for myself.
The Whitney (http://www.whitney.org/ --v. famous here, but possibly English people have never heard of it) only does one or two artists' exhibitions at a time, and currently it has a Roni Horn two-floor exhibition and a big exhibit specifically focused on Georgia O'Keefe's more abstract stuff--beyond vaginal flowers and the dessert pieces, etc, though there's still an intense female sexuality to a lot of her abstract imagery. I liked her somewhat better after this exhibit than I had before--the colors and the organic/natural shape vocabulary were more appealing and varied than I normally think of her stuff as being.
The Roni Horn, however, was the more interesting exhibit. The series of Thames photographs with footnotes on the nature of water, the nature of this particular river, and its history as probably the world's most popular place to drown oneself was so good Jenna and I crawled around the gallery, trying to read every scrap of text on the pieces. It was highly essayistic, reminiscent of Anne Carson's treatment of water or a big poster-essay that hung on John D'Agata's office wall, on which an essay flowed around in swirling scraps of interconnecting, discrete sentences--like leggo blocks. The text alluded to other work without being overly self-conscious and irritating (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_1_43/ai_n6203256/). The photographs were melancholy and haunting before, but made compelling by the way Roni processed them (http://water.pulitzerarts.org/artist-statements/horn/) (http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AOD%3AE%3A106692&page_number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1&imageID=1). I would have enjoyed the series more as a book--more suited to careful reading/private reception at my own speed.
But I do like museums--the typical uncrowdedness, the quiet, the quality of light. The way things are isolated against white walls and glass, so that I can appreciate them in a way I don't normally--I sometimes think I could enjoy the undeniable sensory beauty of a shiny crinkled up crisps packet, of anything at all, in a presentation like that which presents something in a way that arrests your attention and lets you just experience and think about that experience, divorced of anything else. I like the controlled art of or thematics driving and underlying the construction of exhibits, the hint of victoriana curiosity cabinet prissyness, the informative display cards, the lines at the ticket booths that show people respect art, despite the American tendency to hate find all intellectualism pretentious.
I don't like the OVERLOAD that comes form painting after painting to the point where I can no longer appreciate discrete works, where everything blurs together in a glut of MUST EXPERIENCE CULTURE!! (which seems to be about cramming education/prestige into a child or oneself or something, and misses the point that it's supposed to be /enjoyable/, that it's supposed to make you think and feel, rather than supposed to be crammed into a person like drilling Latin vocab), but I like afternoons at museums--one, two, two and a half hour strolls through galleries and then out into the sun again for coffee, or home for dinner. But I don't like going alone, with no one to speak to about things, no one to experience it with or to tell me what they thought, so I'll either have to wheedle
aralias into short trips which she may not even like, or I'll have to make a Museum Friend or three in London.
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Date: 2010-01-14 09:28 am (UTC)