Why I have spare glasses all over the house . . .
I was rummaging in my junk closet, looking for some Kraft paper to wrap a parcel, when I knocked a wooden clothes hanger off the bar. It hit me on the bridge of the nose (don't worry, I'm okay), and managed to break the plastic frame of my glasses right down the middle! Fortunately, they're just cheap readers, not expensive prescription glasses.
After mailing the parcels and dropping a few things at the dry cleaners, I went over to the Smart Museum to see the exhibit, Echoes of the Past: the Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan. As not infrequently happens, I'd been intending to go, and suddenly realized it was the penultimate day! It's a fascinating exhibit. These stunning pieces were carved into the rocks of the caves in the 6th-century, and remained intact until the beginning of the 20th, when Buddhist art became collectible and the caves were vandalized to obtain sellable items. The exhibit includes a number of pieces from the caves, but also has digital reconstructions. More here.
(As it happens, the exhibit is traveling to the Sackler Gallery in Washington, and will be there while the BookCrossing Convention is taking place. I'll definitely want to go to the Sackler; they will also be having exhibits on the Shahnama, on Whistler and the Victorian Craze for Blue-and-White, and a couple of other interesting sounding ones.)
What I hadn't realized was that the Smart was also showing the David Wojnarowicz video, A Fire in my Belly, that was removed from the National Portrait Gallery after a bunch of idiots who probably never even saw it got all upset over one image of a crucifix crawling with ants. Apparently, a whole slew of institutions are now showing it, thus once again proving that censorship is the quickest way to disseminate that which is censored! It's actually rather difficult to judge quality of the video itself, which is made up of quick cuts between a wide variety of images, including a lot of archival footage, because it is unfinished. It's disturbing, but it needs to be. After all, he's raging about the AIDS-related death of a friend.
They also have a new piece in the reception area, the first of what will be an ongoing series. It's a huge and gorgeous ink drawing by the Chinese-born artist, Bingyi, called Cascade, that evokes traditional Chinese landscape paintings. If you go to Bingyi's website, click on "Projects", "2010" and then "Cascade", you can see more about it.
Last night I went to a great concert, Allen Toussaint with Don Byron (sax & clarinet) and Nicholas Payton (trumpet). Mostly stuff from their album, The Bright Mississippi, but other pieces as well. Symphony Center was rockin'! Gosh, I do love New Orleans jazz. I'd missed dinner because a friend came out to the courthouse to file some documents and we went out for coffee/tea, and I got home just in time to change and head to the concert. So afterwards I went to the bar at Rhapsody (in the Symphony Center) and had steak frites and a couple of glasses of Malbec.
I see I haven't mentioned the Lyric Opera production of The Mikado. I could have done without it. Not that it wasn't well-done, but a) I'm not a Gilbert & Sullivan fan, and b) Lyric Opera isn't the house for G&S. However, Stephanie Blythe was wonderful. A friend has pointed out that updating this to the '20s is a bit odd, as the Mikado would be the Taisho emperor and Nanki-Poo would be Hirohito. I don't think the production team caught that nuance.
After mailing the parcels and dropping a few things at the dry cleaners, I went over to the Smart Museum to see the exhibit, Echoes of the Past: the Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan. As not infrequently happens, I'd been intending to go, and suddenly realized it was the penultimate day! It's a fascinating exhibit. These stunning pieces were carved into the rocks of the caves in the 6th-century, and remained intact until the beginning of the 20th, when Buddhist art became collectible and the caves were vandalized to obtain sellable items. The exhibit includes a number of pieces from the caves, but also has digital reconstructions. More here.
(As it happens, the exhibit is traveling to the Sackler Gallery in Washington, and will be there while the BookCrossing Convention is taking place. I'll definitely want to go to the Sackler; they will also be having exhibits on the Shahnama, on Whistler and the Victorian Craze for Blue-and-White, and a couple of other interesting sounding ones.)
What I hadn't realized was that the Smart was also showing the David Wojnarowicz video, A Fire in my Belly, that was removed from the National Portrait Gallery after a bunch of idiots who probably never even saw it got all upset over one image of a crucifix crawling with ants. Apparently, a whole slew of institutions are now showing it, thus once again proving that censorship is the quickest way to disseminate that which is censored! It's actually rather difficult to judge quality of the video itself, which is made up of quick cuts between a wide variety of images, including a lot of archival footage, because it is unfinished. It's disturbing, but it needs to be. After all, he's raging about the AIDS-related death of a friend.
They also have a new piece in the reception area, the first of what will be an ongoing series. It's a huge and gorgeous ink drawing by the Chinese-born artist, Bingyi, called Cascade, that evokes traditional Chinese landscape paintings. If you go to Bingyi's website, click on "Projects", "2010" and then "Cascade", you can see more about it.
Last night I went to a great concert, Allen Toussaint with Don Byron (sax & clarinet) and Nicholas Payton (trumpet). Mostly stuff from their album, The Bright Mississippi, but other pieces as well. Symphony Center was rockin'! Gosh, I do love New Orleans jazz. I'd missed dinner because a friend came out to the courthouse to file some documents and we went out for coffee/tea, and I got home just in time to change and head to the concert. So afterwards I went to the bar at Rhapsody (in the Symphony Center) and had steak frites and a couple of glasses of Malbec.
I see I haven't mentioned the Lyric Opera production of The Mikado. I could have done without it. Not that it wasn't well-done, but a) I'm not a Gilbert & Sullivan fan, and b) Lyric Opera isn't the house for G&S. However, Stephanie Blythe was wonderful. A friend has pointed out that updating this to the '20s is a bit odd, as the Mikado would be the Taisho emperor and Nanki-Poo would be Hirohito. I don't think the production team caught that nuance.