(no subject)
Tuesday was the really excellent Hollywood Costume exhibition at the V&A, with ”pondhopper”. It was surprisingly busy, with no online tickets left, but when I got there at 10 there were plenty of tickets, and not much of a queue, so I had time to check out the new furniture gallery, which is beautifully set out and includes, among other things a nice picture of my old japanning teacher. The Hollywood exhibition was huge but fascinating. After the third of a series of huge rooms, I was exhausted, and convinced that I’d seen the whole of an excellent exhibition, and I would quite happily have gone home, before we noticed the sign saying “exhibition continues” There were four huge rooms, all crammed with stuff; not only the iconic costumes (everything from Chaplin’s little tramp to Dorothy’s dress from the Wizard of Oz, to Pirates of the Caribbean), but a lot of very interesting stuff about costume selection and design. It hadn’t occurred to me that even completely CGI characters need costumes, and that physical costumes had to be made for the characters in Avatar. I’m hoping to get another look at all this before the show closes. Afterwards, we walked up to Harrods and looked at the very pretty Christmas window displays, then I crawled home and slept for most of the next day.
The rest of the week was spent beavering away at christmas presents and more sock monkeys*, and sorting out an evening dress for the g-d, who is off to a posh work do with the new boyfriend. A masked ball at Longleat, no less, with my green satin shawl and a mask constructed from a strip of black lace, as in the film Marie Antoinette (very effective this).
On Friday I got to the Wellcome Collection’s Death exhibition with the g-d and got to meet the new boyfriend, who is lovely, and (presumably in the first flush of love) has gone out of his way to sell some of the monkeys at his workplace. The exhibition was, well, interesting, but remarkably depressing. I had hoped to see some of the jollier personifications of death, like Terry Pratchett’s or Neil Gaiman’s or some of those jolly Mexican skeletons, but the the collection (all belonging to one, rather odd, man) concentrated on the more traditional version, who may grin a lot but who has no detectable sense of humour. Afterwards, we cheered ourselves up by looking at the history of medicine exhibit, and then eating cake.
*This monkey thing is getting a bit out of hand. This week, for the second time in a month, I picked up what I thought was a pair of clean socks, rolled into a ball, only to find that one had already been cut up to make a sock monkey.
The rest of the week was spent beavering away at christmas presents and more sock monkeys*, and sorting out an evening dress for the g-d, who is off to a posh work do with the new boyfriend. A masked ball at Longleat, no less, with my green satin shawl and a mask constructed from a strip of black lace, as in the film Marie Antoinette (very effective this).
On Friday I got to the Wellcome Collection’s Death exhibition with the g-d and got to meet the new boyfriend, who is lovely, and (presumably in the first flush of love) has gone out of his way to sell some of the monkeys at his workplace. The exhibition was, well, interesting, but remarkably depressing. I had hoped to see some of the jollier personifications of death, like Terry Pratchett’s or Neil Gaiman’s or some of those jolly Mexican skeletons, but the the collection (all belonging to one, rather odd, man) concentrated on the more traditional version, who may grin a lot but who has no detectable sense of humour. Afterwards, we cheered ourselves up by looking at the history of medicine exhibit, and then eating cake.
*This monkey thing is getting a bit out of hand. This week, for the second time in a month, I picked up what I thought was a pair of clean socks, rolled into a ball, only to find that one had already been cut up to make a sock monkey.