Sunday, October 7, 2007

and i was heading up north, to a place that i know, eating well, sleeping well

+ I had a really nice afternoon with Alice today, starting with coffee and pastries (kanel lyx, a regular cinnamon roll, for me, and a sort of interestingly spiced variation on a cinnamon roll for Alice, called kardemumma something, so obviously there's cardamom in there but I don't know what else) at Vurma, the cozy little cafe half a block away from my apartment. Then we went to Skeppsholmen to the Moderna Museet, which is just a beautiful, fabulous museum. We saw a show of paintings by a Swedish "concrete-abstract" painter named Olle Baertling who I guess did most of his well-known work in the 50s and 60s. They weren't my favorite paintings ever but they were quite striking, and there was a short video about him and his work that made it a lot more interesting. The work is mostly triangles of bright colors separated by black lines that appear straight, but apparently the lines are actually curved and this has something to do with the colors receding? There were interesting quotes in the video from Donald Judd and other American minimalists/conceptualists - I guess Donald Judd liked Baertling quite a bit - so getting some of the context was helpful. Apparently Baertling firmly believed in art being separate from "the compromises made in society" and believed that artists should focus on a real sense of inner spirituality - which makes him sound awfully Modernist but it seemed more nuanced than the way I'm describing it.

There was also a show of photographs by a Swedish photographer, Lars Tunbjörk, and I liked some of them a lot although overall a lot of the images had quite a dark feeling. His work reminded me of a strange cross between, like, Stephen Shore, Larry Clark, Jeff Wall, and Philip-Lorca DiCorcia (or "PL" as my Columbia photography professor called him...). It was the sort of hyper-real color photographs that I love, with a lot of bright colors, overexposure, and eerie night lighting, and the subjects ranged from snow to houses to seedy people, all in Sweden.

It was fun to see their regular collection too, they have some pretty Hiroshi Sugimoto seascapes, and a four part Uta Barth photo series that I actually thought was really boring even though she is one of my all-time favorites, and Matisse's "Apollon" as well as a pretty Moroccan landscape painting of his. In the description of the Moroccan one it described Matisse's goal for art to be "enjoyable, happy, and harmonious," which seems like a good goal to me.

Also, there was this little room with these ornate chandeliers covered in pretty-colored mesh/gauze type fabric, and sadly there was no image of them in the exhibition brochures or postcard or anything, but they were just gorgeous. They're by a Swedish artist named David Svensson and if you look at the "Illuminators" under the "Works" section of his website you can sort of get the idea but they're not nearly as nice as the ones at the museum.

And, of course, I bought lots of pretty things at the museum store, including these cute cards:





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It's a bit hard to see but the cake says "meringue."

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+ Now I really have to work on my Yale secondary because I've gotten nothing done today. At least I submitted my Brown one last night, and the UCSD and UCI ones the night before. I don't have much time now though because I'm having dinner with this guy named Catalin who I met at the party I went to with Tracey on Friday. He's Romanian and just moved to Stockholm to work at Ericsson (I think that literally half of the people I've met in Sweden work either for Ericsson or for Sony Ericsson, which apparently function as quite different companies), but he spent the last seven years living in Amsterdam and then in Geneva where he got his PhD in computer science and worked at CERN, the huge amazing insane particle physics accelerator that spans the border between France and Switzerland. The fact that I now know someone who worked at CERN makes me very happy, even though he's not actually a physicist or anything. Anyway, I was happy to have a "science friend" to talk to at this party and tonight we're going to check out this Italian restaurant near Odenplan.

+ Finally, while I know this wasn't intended for public viewing, Jake made this video for me of the new barn that the Oakland Animal Shelter just bought. He's there as I write this helping with the clean-up so that they can start moving some animals in there. I don't know what the story is with this barn but it's right by Fairyland on Lake Merritt, hence the footage at the beginning to set the scene, and to me Fairyland seems like possibly the creepiest place in the entire world. But, the point of this is that there are MINIATURE GOATS there, and I have told half the people who read this blog about the miniature goats so now you can actually watch minutes and minutes of them walking around and eating and being cute. I guess they found the goats wandering around Oakland and brought them into the shelter, and now they're living at the barn which is a much better place for them than the regular shelter. It would be difficult to describe how we came up with this without sounding completely nuts, but Jake and I have a running joke about how our cat Benji (a girl) wants one of the goats to be her boyfriend, and we just found out that that goat (the one who Megan holds up in the video) is PREGNANT with BABY MINIATURE GOATS. This is too much for me to handle. Without further ado, here is the video .

1 comment:

tracey said...

Phoebe! I also know another guy who worked at CERN! In other news, I think you are really nice! And we should party together again soon, preferably without absinthe.