Tangents

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Last time I traveled abroad: May 2019 - Cancún - wedding celebration for my friends David and Josh

Last time I slept in a hotel: February 2020 - Lexington, Kentucky - wedding celebration for my big brother and his husband

Last time I flew in a plane: July 2019, returning from the Amherst Early Music Festival

Last time I took a train: same

Last time I took public transit: October 2019, Nashville, when I last took my old car to Markee for an oil change. I was able to pin down the month because Music City Transit had just been discontinued, which I learned while stomping across downtown in high heels.

Last time I had a houseguest: January, when big sister Suz and Uncle Harry stayed with us on their way from Detroit to New Orleans.

Last time I got my hair cut: January. I'm hoping to get another one before I have to renew my license, but if not, that's what sponge curlers and heated clamps are for.

Last time I went to the movies: February 29. Agrippina, live in HD. I was definitely one of the younger people there.

Last time I went to the theatre: January. Wendy Whelan and friends - contemporary dance at TPAC.

Last time I went to a concert: January. Reginald Mobley - countertenor recital at Blair.

Last time I went to an art museum: I was last in the office on March 13, the day after we opened Jitish Kallat: Return to Sender and Mel Ziegler: Flag Exchange. I sang at the Tennessee State Museum in December but didn't have time to look around. Maybe Cookeville's Doll Museum and History Museum with Rae, earlier in the fall? ... Oh, wait, I think I poked around the Country Music Hall of Fame some afternoon in January. (Life has been hectic. The winter was a blur.)

Last time I sat down in a restaurant: February - Chinatown, after Agrippina

Last time I went to a party: February - brunch hosted by big brother and his sweetie

Last time I played a board game: Um.... I legit do not remember. Maybe with someone's kids a few years ago. The last time I cleaned a board game was in November 2014, my last month of sanitizing toys as a volunteer at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital. The last board game I enjoyed reading was a hilarious mailer from Lucia | Marquand titled So ... You Want to Publish an Art Book. It was shaped like an ampersand and started with these spaces:



This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/162411.html.

Today's subject line comes from Sarah Arvio's translation of Federico García Lorca's "Love Sleeps in the Poet's Chest."

Lorca is mentioned several times in the materials for Monsters & Myths, the Surrealism show that opens to museum members and the media in 90 minutes. (I'm dressing for it between checking off a few more items on the Workflowy...) Many of the artists in the show fought and/or fled Fascists and Nazis.

detail from Joan Miró's NIGHT SCENE

Earlier this morning, I dipped into the anthology Staying Alive and lingered with Stephen Dunn's "Sadness":

... I had sad stories of my own,
but they made me quiet
the way my parents' failures once did,
nobody's business
but our own, and, besides, what was left to say
these days
when the unspeakable was out there being spoken,
exhausting all sympathy?

[Standard "Hound of Heaven" caveat here: quotes do not represent the whole, and I adore poems I don't agree with.]

This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/154796.html.

This week, y'all. (In)substantial pomp and circumstance on larger stages notwithstanding (the BYM: "Dude, you have got to watch Bill Clinton with the balloons. I want balloons!" Hee), there were deadlines and revelations galore.

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this morning's harvest, which I'll be taking to a cousin and an aunt

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/135293.html.

So much happening in Nashville today. Assorted friends and colleagues were at either the Southern Festival of Books or Frist Center events, especially in relation to the Shinique Smith show. My Twitter timeline seemed to be checking in from either Oktoberfest or the Grace Potter concert. I was tempted to walk to the trunk show hosted by my yoga studio (especially on hearing that hot whiskey cider would be served), and equally tempted to stay home and nap, since I'd stayed up longer than I should've rereading a Lee Bros. cookbook.

But I had reserved a spot in the free 9 a.m. screenprinting workshop at Plaza's Hands On Creativity day, so that's where I went after breakfast. The hands-on part of that session involved applying glow-in-the-dark ink to a t-shirt, which is now on my ironing board upstairs, awaiting the heat-before-wearing/washing step. (Note to locals: there are workshops and demos on various topics through Sunday, too.) To my relief, the group opted for the skull-with-flowers design rather than the four-leaf clover pattern. The rep warned that the blue ink we selected would not glow as intensely as the original practically-invisible-in-daylight formula, but I was willing to make that tradeoff, especially since it sounded like the latter might register as yellow (which, no thanks. I have plenty of dingy-looking shirts already).

While at the store, I also picked up a copy of Huis Clos, a new paper I'd heard some buzz about. The "What's It Like to Bike That Pike (Volume VII: Murfreesboro Pike)" column was both fun and informative enough read for me to see if the earlier installments were online, but I've come across only an abridged version of the feature on Hillsboro.

After a stretch of housework, I went back out to Charlotte Pike, dropping off dry cleaning and picking up twenty pounds of rice at K&S, along with a sack of snow pea leaves. Chinatown and Lucky Bamboo have both been out of those greens the past few times I've attempted to order them, so spotting them was today's winning-the-shopping-lottery moment. On the way home, I stopped at Sweet 16th for kung pao quinoa and an Elvis mini-bundt cake.

After lunch, it was back to Plaza for the Gamblin workshop, which involved 2- and 3-D color wheels as well as extended discussions about layering and opacity/transparency:



The take-home samples included a bottle of Galkyd Lite, a bottle of Gamsol, and a tube of Torrit Grey. A new pair of products of particular interest: solvent-free gel and fluid, which are sufficiently non-flammable that artists can bring them onto planes.

On my way out, I spent a couple of minutes at the Winsor and Newton table, where there were markers and blenders to play with. On my way home, I stopped at Woodland Wine Merchant, where today's tasting was from their barrel of Eagle Rare. Its smell? Glorious.

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Upper Rubber Boot's prompt 27 for 100 Untimed Books is "dog-eared." That entry is over at Vary the Line.

Prompt 28 is "water":



This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/119372.html.

My stop at Cheekwood Saturday afternoon had been a maybe on my list. I'd gone to an intense dress rehearsal in the morning, and was torn between wanting to sleep for twelve hours and wanting to enjoy a change of scene.

The sun shining and a dining discount won out: I stopped at 360 Bistro for lunch (white port, scallop-grapefruit salad, fig cheesecake, and tamayokucha tea), where Colombia vs. France was on the TV, and then said hi to the black pepper plants...



... and the tree-hugging statues (Purcell on a back, Schubert around a neck, Monteverdi at a waist, Mozart on a hip...)



... and enjoyed part of documentary not only on the screen but reflected in a nearby door:




This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/107808.html.

Michael Kimmelman, in a November 30, 1997 NYT review of Jenny Uglow's Hogarth:

This extravagantly detailed biography by Jenny Uglow is less a book of art history than a history of Hogarth's milieu. Much of his character, and the book's, is encapsulated in the colorful story Uglow recounts of a woman named Mary Tofts, who claimed to have become so obsessed with rabbits after failing to catch several of them in a field she was weeding that she suffered a miscarriage and began to deliver animals and animal parts. Fashionable medical men verified her story, among them a certain Nathanael St. Andre, a Swiss who was Anatomist to the Royal Household and a teacher of fencing and dancing before he took up surgery, who announced that he had personally delivered her of several rabbits.

This put Londoners off rabbit stew for a while. Then Mary conceded the hoax and St. Andre was forced to make a public apology. It was the sort of ripe event that Hogarth, like any tabloid cartoonist today, couldn't resist: absurd, bawdy, a perfect opportunity to skewer self-proclaimed experts like St. Andre and his fellow quacks, and also to strike a blow against mystification, which Hogarth despised in all forms, whether from doctors or politicians or art critics. His print "Cunicularii," or "The Rabbit Warren," sold briskly.

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/103384.html.

I wasn't expecting to like this show much (it's at Cheekwood through January 4), but there are some great pieces in it that I'd like to see again, time permitting. I'll dig up the rest of my notes later, but the one I'm enthralled with is Jacob Lawrence's The 1920s . . . The Migrants Arrive and Cast Their Ballots.

In the meantime, one of the guards at the entrance to the Color Garden has some backup now:





This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/94403.html.

What with the holiday and the rain, and the current main attraction a night-time thing, I pretty much had the local botanical gardens all to myself all afternoon. (There was a group of three people outside who weren't staff.)

The original plan had been just to hit the trails for an hour, for exercise. But the rain somehow made everything seem brighter and deeper and more of itself.

( cell phone snapshots behind the cut )

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/55757.html.