Eating parties

Yesterday Work had a lunchtime pizza party to 'celebrate' the firing of a management guy who'd been there for years and years. It was a light-hearted occasion, made so mostly by the fired man , a popular figure, who in his speech ripped gently into the company and mentioned a bunch of people who'd been fired in various re-shufflings already. It's a good thing I don't visualize a future for myself there because I don't have one - that was sobering. The pizza was good though.

There was also a drinking party for the fired man after work, which I didn't show up to because I had to hurry home to cook for a little dinner party here. It wasn't quite our first, but it was our first involving local people, so that was exciting and nice. People here are so personable, but not supine - it's easy to disagree with them in a friendly sort of way. I like it a lot.

Had a dream that I was yelling at a group of fighting girls who'd got a lawyer in to sort out their troubles. I was insisting that the economic model of the anglo-saxon legal systems meant that no lawyer was ever going to want to sort out a problem and any resolution they arrived at with his 'help' would be a pure accident. Woke up and thought about that, hoped it wasn't true, thought it probably was.

The Triumph of the Passion

Last night I watched The Triumph of the Will and The Passion of the Jew back to back. The F-word was quite excited about The Triumph of the Will, pointing out its influences on modern propoganda and how undated that made it - how its tricks had been exploited - and also how people in the German backwaters must have felt when they saw it in the cinema, how they'd just be so impressed by the movement and decide to join it.

I wondered how many of the people in it were dead ten years later and wondered how many of the people in the crowd scenes had just showed up to all those parades because television hadn't been invented yet and there was nothing else on that day. Mostly I wanted it to end. Maybe I have no attention span, but not even Leni's loving, lingering shots of hot genetically pure men could keep me interested in all the hours and hours of Nazis and towns and banners and blah blah blah. I don't know what all the fuss is about, unless it's to get old twats back into The Guardian.

Obviously, The Passion of the Jew was much, much, much better. I think the F-word enjoyed it more because the poor bastard has actually had to sit through The Passion when someone he was visiting rented it, but for myself I don't know when I've laughed so hard.

I found myself an easy way out

I have given up The Fatal Shore as a bad job and now I'm reading An Anthropologist on Mars. This represents a huge improvement in my quality of life and I'm wondering if I hate Robert Hughes: he's far too sloppy a writer and organizer of thoughts and references to be useful or smoothly enjoyable academically, and he uses too many big words to be widely popularly accessible, which in my head looks like being clever for the sake of it and not being clever for the sake of passing the cleverness on. But whatever. He built a career out of it so it must be working, and when I think back hard I remember his enthusiasm made his art books really nice to read.

Anyways, An Anthropologist on Mars is fucking terrific and organized at this point, which is, mind you, only about sixty pages in. The first case study is about an artist who loses any relationship with colour after a brain injury and the little exploration of colour given in it in neurological terms is so very interesting.

Never so sugary

Went back to the instrument museum with my mum, who is visiting, and managed to get through the whole thing because we started early. That meant we got to go to the yummy and reasonably priced restaurant on the roof - delish though too salty, like all 'classy' food. Got to listen to my fave thing again - let's see what YouTube has in the way of that - not much. Oh well. Look out for the Ivory Coast horns when you go. Got to see and hear the glass harmonica too. So can you, because YouTube sucks less for that. Enjoy.