I can’t believe it’s over a week since I last blogged! It’s been an eventful week here in lizardyogaland, what with the sunshine tempting me outdoors most of the time to write and dream and practise poems and garden; and what with my father-in-law not being too good which means that most days, Thing has been over in Loughborough. We have to make time tomorrow though because it will be our 23rd wedding anniversary!!! We haven’t made any coherent plans but I guess we’ll find something good to do. On Wednesday, however, as it’s my birthday (not quite 60 yet)
(long pause for sobbing into hands…
Oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god)
we are going for a meal and then to the cinema – the Phoenix, a proper cinema unlike these huge megaplex places which feel like supermarkets and where they shove you so full of adverts and trailers and thrust popcorn and enormous fizzy drinks into your face until you feel ill. I shall tell you about the film nearer the time – but it looks really good.
In the meantime I’m feeling slightly alone and small. This morning was good – we went to Tomatoes and did the crossword as per, with Tony who’s my crossword buddy. More and more people have been joining in with this though and at one point I vacated the table to get a cuppa only to find my place taken by a usurping wannabe crossword-completer!
Errol, how could you?
So after that I came home and straight out to mooch around the local Arthouse scene, where local people open up their houses to exhibit local art. There was some good stuff – pottery, sculpture, painting (mostly painting) and crafty things and I had a chat with an artist who based his images on graphics and then transposed the ideas onto canvas using oils; an interesting mix of modern and traditional. And in all the houses there was not one thing which struck me as bullshit – no lengths of yarn stretched across the room and entitled ‘Blue Day’ or something much less sensible.
There’s a lot of art I like although not being a particularly visual person it can be an effort to look at it sometimes. I like Grayson Perry a lot though. He has a series on Channel 4 about extreme masculinity, where he goes into environments which are hyper-masculine (cage fighting, the floor of the Stock Exchange, that sort of thing) and then produces some art about it. The interesting thing was that after the Stock Exchange visit which he decided was all about men trying to prove themselves, he produced a giant penis – but the penis was quite rounded. So it looks as if he can’t be hyper-masculine even when he tries. Anyway, here’s the programme:
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/grayson-perry-all-man
Other artists I like are Anthony Gormley, Anselm Kiefer and Louise Bourgeois. Hang on, those are all sculptors, aren’t they? I think they are…
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 