Saturday, April 08, 2006
You know you shouldn't have Skittles for breakfast; Item number 1 in an occasional series....when, while making lunch, you fill a saucepan with cold water and before putting it on the stove add Fairy Liquid instead of salt.
Admittedly I had been thinking that I need to do some washing up, as that was the last clean saucepan, although my washing up bowl is currently filled with whatever detritus the Victorians chose to build roads out of.
Which reminds me; anyone know when the Grand National is? Four-ish I think, but after missing the Boat Race I'm trying not to miss this.
You know you shouldn't have Skittles for breakfast; Item number 2 in an occasional series.
...when you recreate the discovery of Smash. Steam filled potatoes dropped onto oven doors end up quite well aerated, and quite well distributed.
And why is Smash made by Cadbury's? Is there a Walls-style* crossover that we should be aware of?
* They make sausages and ice-cream. I wonder how they make it so creamy.
But I think they've stopped making milk out of pigs now, and instead use the ever delightful partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (and if you wanted to be really happy, look up trans fats).
But moving on, and so repeating myself. I went round the Albers and Moholy-Nagy exhibition again last night (first time was with Dan, this time was with parents, so couldn't really say I wanted to go home to watch Green Wing).
The photography is still the best bit, except for the Ladybird style London Underground posters explaining how the doors and escalators work on the Tube (both from the V&A - might have to investigate what else they have), and the naively old fashioned map of air-routes, in which the London to Newfoundland and beyond route is predicted (and in recent days I've managed to find a Northern Line train which displayed the Jubilee Line as ending at Charing Cross and had the DLR terminating by the foot tunnel to Greenwich).
And once again I was struck by how typical some of the design was, and found it very easy to dismiss as of its era, until you realise that era didn't happen for another 20 years. Wars are odd and do odd things.
It took my mother commenting for me to figure out that Nuclear and Nuclear II are actually sequential images (they're mostly abstractions, but it makes sense to view them as during and after. They also have more detail in them than is obvious and than I noticed last time).
Oh and Dan, the random clear perspex dangly thing, in which I could see an elephant, is apparently a woman, Leda, being raped by a Zeus as a swan.
Parents: useful for the remaining clues in the Guardian crossword and Greek myths.
What else did I like?
- The early glass works, which are basically Tiffany meets Mondrian.
- The practical stuff: so font designs, the stuff which verges on advertising, basically anything with beauty and function.
- The slides (the projector was broken last time), taken by Moholy-Nagy, which show the same level of absurdity and interest in the inane as my photographs tend towards.
Other comments:
- Yes, some of it does look like primary-school art, or possibly GCSE art, depending on who you ask (the photograms, and endless plays on negativising lines).
- Yes, some of it does look like the diagrams from a biochemistry textbook.
- Yes, some of it does look like it ought to contain Cassiopeia.
Anyway, there's more on Moholy-Nagy in the Guardian (guess which artist I found more interesting out of the named pair) and on Wikipedia.
I've just discovered that you can see much of the exhibition online. I could even go through all of room 6 repeating the facetious comments I made. Unfortunately, much of this does look like the result of boredom in Geography, or other doodles. See if you can find the regatta.
And that's about it - meaning of course, that there's probably a lot more I could say, but probably shouldn't.
Anyhoo,
