Interests Meme
May. 31st, 2008 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
exhilarationHi, new friends from the multi-fandom friending meme. I point you towards my Introduction Post if you are having trouble remembering exactly which new addition I am, amongst all your new additions from the friending meme. I am the one who still wishes Earth 2 hadn't been cancelled and would slash myself with Kaylee any day.
I have been meaning to do this other meme for a day or two now. Today is as good a day as any. I tag anyone who wants to play, not just new peeps.
Comment on this post and I will choose seven interests from your profile. You will then explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.
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yoursetcetera chose: 1950s kitchen appliances, amedeo modigliani, carnivale, installation art, post-apocalyptic speculation, sandro chia, and victorian door knobs.
1950s kitchen appliances
This is stuff I'd like to collect - 50s stuff is pretty available if you know the right flea markets and stuff. I have a very, very sad collection currently - I have an egg cooker, that I can't use cause, um, it's toxic (lol that is the problem with those lovely colors, see) and I have a hand mixer that has an aqua handle, and I have this fabulous mini-popcorn maker that is just adorable but... I never make popcorn, so it's just for show, really. I'd love a coffee percolator, but, again, percolated coffee is gross, the world has so moved on to better brewing methods... funny, I guess, how I get this homey nostalgic feeling for a decade I never experienced...
I'm a collector at heart, you see. This stuff isn't that rare, and I like the aesthetic of it.
Amedeo Modigliani
He was one of those tortured souls, you know, having fits and destroying his own artwork, drinking himself to oblivion, making spectacles of himself in public, but all the while painting these hauntingly desolate portraits that grew and grew and grew into his very own easily identifiable style. If you see his work, you'd say, ah, that's a Modigliani. He died young.
He became disillusioned with school. I became disillusioned with school. He left to pursue his true interests in life, and succeeded in being extremely self-destructive, but all the while painting the same thing way after way after way.
I like looking at his world through his eyes in his paintings. I saw them for the first time in the Brandywine Museum in Philadelphia and kept coming back to them, and then read the little card as was like, "huh, how about that, he's Italian." And I've been interested in him ever since.
Yeah, I am interested in art. But sometimes the people who create that art are infinitely more fascinating.
Carnivale
I love the idea of wearing a mask, becoming someone else, disappearing into the crowd, being whoever you decide to be but just for the night. Obviously I'm not the only person out there who is entranced by this - the tradition is old - 500, 600, 700 years old, maybe more, and it goes on still today, all over the world.
It's creepy and dark and scary and beautiful all at once.
Post-apocalyptic speculation
People ask me if I really want to live through something like that, only to die of radiation poisoning a few weeks later. Obviously they're missing the point - the fall-out shelter shields you from the fall out that would otherwise kill you. You - I - none of us have absolutely any control about when doomsday will come and where it will hit (and that's not an if, that's a when. You think the world as we know it is going to go on indefinitely? Of course not. Just take a look back at history. Nuclear or not, something, someday, is going to happen) and you don't get to choose whether you survive it or not. But you DO get to choose what you do in the aftermath, if you ARE a survivor.
And I'm all for surviving.
And I find it all fascinating, what authors and movie-makers and creators can dream up when it comes to post-apocalyptical anything.
And on to...
Installation art
Why is installation art one of my interests? Because it is... I'm interested in it because art is always moving and changing, of course, just like the world and the people in it, but also because there's this fierce undercurrent in the art world of everything being new and reinvented and not like it was that's been going on... oh, since the very beginning of everything, I'd say. And I like that.
Sandro Chia
This guy is not an artist who's work I saw first, researched, and became fascinated with. He didn't live through that romantic turn of the century (other century) hey-day and he wasn't one of those tortured souls who drank himself into oblivion and right on out of the world. Nah, he's somebody who's heyday was, oh, you know, when I was a little kid, in the eighties, in Italy, they were called the "three Cs," Cucchi, Chia, and Clemente. I studied them in art history when I got older, but I knew who he was before that.
I've pretty much spend my life being surrounded by artists and art lovers, so, yeah. And when I was a kid, (kid meaning, elementary and middle school) if I wanted to study contemporary art, well, there was plenty of information out there on the neo-expressionism movement, and I always remembered Munch's "Scream" of course, everyone knows that painting and print in all it's incarnations, but then there was also Cucchi and his skulls, and I remembered that too. And so later, when I got older, I researched and remembered a whole lot more about those Italian transadvantgaurdie painters who were so big in the eighties.
And then along comes this dude, Sandro Chia, and his publicist and all his groupies and a whole freakin' swarm of media, and what is this omg!new work of his but his own freakin' name all over some very ordinary paintings.
But that was just my first impression, see.
I still stick to the same thing I said before: people who make art are fascinating.
Victorian door knobs
When I moved to Philadelphia - years ago - one of the first things I did with myself was go to South Street, and one of my favorite shops on South Street was the Eyes Gallery. I mentioned it in another post, I think, I said everything in it reminded me of Frida Kahlo's artwork because there was so much Mexican stuff in there. The store is pink stucco and mirrors on the outside and the first time I was in there it was a little different than it is now, but not by much. Anyway, I totally fell in love with the atmosphere of the place, and in the basement, at the bottom of this horrible, unstable, rickety, TERRIFYING spiral I-wish-I-was-a-staircase, was this huge table filled with vintage door knobs. Seriously. There was all kinds of other stuff down there, folk art and Mexicana stuff and carnival glass and other vintage-y things, but there was also a table full of doorknobs. Some of them had stickers on them labeling them upwards of fifty bucks, but some were only a few dollars, and I found this heap of doorknobs quite endearing and bought a few and...
...the collection started! I went to a few flea markets, here and there, in all my traveling, and if there was a doorknob that looked Victorian to me, I'd pick it up. I lost a few along the way, but a few made it back with me, too.
I don't have those doorknobs anymore, not the ones that I bought, but, see, even that is a kinda cool story, cause I'd put them on my bedroom door and stuff so, mine and Daniel's old place in Philly has got an old Victorian door knob on one of the doors. I could have taken it with me, of course, but I liked the idea of leaving my mark on the house. Some other friends of mine have one of my doorknobs on one of their doors (if they still live in that condo...) cause I stayed with them for a while. My bedroom door at my parent's house has a doorknob of mine, and so did my bedroom at my grandparent's house.
And that left me with... one doorknob. But see, the other house of mine, not the one I live in? The one that was old and falling apart and freakin' condemned? Full of VINTAGE DOORKNOBS!
My last doorknob from the Eyes Gallery in Philly (and I was just there and there is no longer a table heaped with old doorknobs...) is on the bathroom door in my upstairs of this house. All the doorknobs I took from the other house are in a box in my bedroom. When, someday, the other house is finished and live-able, all the doorknobs are going back to the place they came from.
Cause I think that's awesome and I like them.
I have been meaning to do this other meme for a day or two now. Today is as good a day as any. I tag anyone who wants to play, not just new peeps.
Comment on this post and I will choose seven interests from your profile. You will then explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.
yoursetcetera chose: 1950s kitchen appliances, amedeo modigliani, carnivale, installation art, post-apocalyptic speculation, sandro chia, and victorian door knobs.1950s kitchen appliances
 |
Things that are awesome about this stuff: Nifty colored - aqua is a big one, but there are nice bright reds and fire oranges and sunshine yellows and seafoam green and baby blue - all with that lovely chrome detailing. Then there's the stuff that is all chrome, or chrome and glass, or chrome and black... Not gonna break - these things are fifty years old or more, and still work. Stuff I bought two years ago I've long since thrown out cause... yeah, it broke. Plastic? Cracks. Steel? Not so much. I am a sucker for cutesy and kitchy... 'nuff said... |
This is stuff I'd like to collect - 50s stuff is pretty available if you know the right flea markets and stuff. I have a very, very sad collection currently - I have an egg cooker, that I can't use cause, um, it's toxic (lol that is the problem with those lovely colors, see) and I have a hand mixer that has an aqua handle, and I have this fabulous mini-popcorn maker that is just adorable but... I never make popcorn, so it's just for show, really. I'd love a coffee percolator, but, again, percolated coffee is gross, the world has so moved on to better brewing methods... funny, I guess, how I get this homey nostalgic feeling for a decade I never experienced...
I'm a collector at heart, you see. This stuff isn't that rare, and I like the aesthetic of it.
Amedeo Modigliani
> |
While Christian and Satine were singing about "Freedom, Beauty, Truth, and Love" in Paris with Henri Toulousse-Lautrec at the turn of the century (the other century) Modigliani was an art student in Florence, Italy, doing the art student thing, livin' it up in the lifestyle I was so jealous of a hundred years before my time. You know, smoking hash and drinking absinthe and skipping class and all that, all in the name of making great art. I wish I made art. He did make art. I feel we have a bond. |
He was one of those tortured souls, you know, having fits and destroying his own artwork, drinking himself to oblivion, making spectacles of himself in public, but all the while painting these hauntingly desolate portraits that grew and grew and grew into his very own easily identifiable style. If you see his work, you'd say, ah, that's a Modigliani. He died young.
He became disillusioned with school. I became disillusioned with school. He left to pursue his true interests in life, and succeeded in being extremely self-destructive, but all the while painting the same thing way after way after way.
I like looking at his world through his eyes in his paintings. I saw them for the first time in the Brandywine Museum in Philadelphia and kept coming back to them, and then read the little card as was like, "huh, how about that, he's Italian." And I've been interested in him ever since.
Yeah, I am interested in art. But sometimes the people who create that art are infinitely more fascinating.
Carnivale
 |
Almost every country in the world has a carnivale season - even in the United States we have Mardi Gras, but, here in the great and wonderful US of A, you cannot wear a mask if you are, I believe, over the age of nine... ? I think it's nine. When I say I am interested in "carnivale" I mean specifically the carnivale season in Venice, Italy. I love costuming, and some of the most lavish and intricate costumes I've ever seen are part of the Venice carnivale. |
I love the idea of wearing a mask, becoming someone else, disappearing into the crowd, being whoever you decide to be but just for the night. Obviously I'm not the only person out there who is entranced by this - the tradition is old - 500, 600, 700 years old, maybe more, and it goes on still today, all over the world.
It's creepy and dark and scary and beautiful all at once.
Post-apocalyptic speculation
 |
No, I don't have a fall-out shelter in my basement, but that's only because I don't have a basement. Survive a nuclear blast like Indy in "The Crystal Skull" by climbing into the lead lined aqua-and-chrome 1950s fridge that I wish I had? No, of course not. Build my own fall out shelter if necessary? You bet your sweet bottom I would. Everyone should know how to build an emergency fall-out shelter. |
People ask me if I really want to live through something like that, only to die of radiation poisoning a few weeks later. Obviously they're missing the point - the fall-out shelter shields you from the fall out that would otherwise kill you. You - I - none of us have absolutely any control about when doomsday will come and where it will hit (and that's not an if, that's a when. You think the world as we know it is going to go on indefinitely? Of course not. Just take a look back at history. Nuclear or not, something, someday, is going to happen) and you don't get to choose whether you survive it or not. But you DO get to choose what you do in the aftermath, if you ARE a survivor.
And I'm all for surviving.
And I find it all fascinating, what authors and movie-makers and creators can dream up when it comes to post-apocalyptical anything.
And on to...
Installation art
 |
So, installation art is art that is specific to the place it exists in. I don't mean a painting that was painted specifically for a certain room or wall or space. I mean a piece of three dimensional art that is not a free-standing sculpture but an entire space. This picture, that I got from google images, just like all the pics in this meme, is an Andy Goldsworthy piece, and he's kind of like the guru of installation art. |
Why is installation art one of my interests? Because it is... I'm interested in it because art is always moving and changing, of course, just like the world and the people in it, but also because there's this fierce undercurrent in the art world of everything being new and reinvented and not like it was that's been going on... oh, since the very beginning of everything, I'd say. And I like that.
Sandro Chia
 |
Ok, so, Sandro Chia has taken to scrawling his name all over his art work. That's like, "his thing" these days. I've said before that I used to work in an art gallery, I think. Actually I have worked in two, and one, several years ago, showed his work, and I was like, wtf is this, he's already famous, he's already this huge name Italian painter, and he's got to sign his name scrawling over the canvas and the frame larger than the actual subject of the painting? How completely egotistical can one guy be? |
This guy is not an artist who's work I saw first, researched, and became fascinated with. He didn't live through that romantic turn of the century (other century) hey-day and he wasn't one of those tortured souls who drank himself into oblivion and right on out of the world. Nah, he's somebody who's heyday was, oh, you know, when I was a little kid, in the eighties, in Italy, they were called the "three Cs," Cucchi, Chia, and Clemente. I studied them in art history when I got older, but I knew who he was before that.
I've pretty much spend my life being surrounded by artists and art lovers, so, yeah. And when I was a kid, (kid meaning, elementary and middle school) if I wanted to study contemporary art, well, there was plenty of information out there on the neo-expressionism movement, and I always remembered Munch's "Scream" of course, everyone knows that painting and print in all it's incarnations, but then there was also Cucchi and his skulls, and I remembered that too. And so later, when I got older, I researched and remembered a whole lot more about those Italian transadvantgaurdie painters who were so big in the eighties.
And then along comes this dude, Sandro Chia, and his publicist and all his groupies and a whole freakin' swarm of media, and what is this omg!new work of his but his own freakin' name all over some very ordinary paintings.
But that was just my first impression, see.
I still stick to the same thing I said before: people who make art are fascinating.
Victorian door knobs
 |
I would like to collect 1950s kitchen appliances. Hey, I would like to collect Venetian Carnivale masks and original Modigliani paintings, too, lol, but I DO collect victorian and vintage door knobs. |
When I moved to Philadelphia - years ago - one of the first things I did with myself was go to South Street, and one of my favorite shops on South Street was the Eyes Gallery. I mentioned it in another post, I think, I said everything in it reminded me of Frida Kahlo's artwork because there was so much Mexican stuff in there. The store is pink stucco and mirrors on the outside and the first time I was in there it was a little different than it is now, but not by much. Anyway, I totally fell in love with the atmosphere of the place, and in the basement, at the bottom of this horrible, unstable, rickety, TERRIFYING spiral I-wish-I-was-a-staircase, was this huge table filled with vintage door knobs. Seriously. There was all kinds of other stuff down there, folk art and Mexicana stuff and carnival glass and other vintage-y things, but there was also a table full of doorknobs. Some of them had stickers on them labeling them upwards of fifty bucks, but some were only a few dollars, and I found this heap of doorknobs quite endearing and bought a few and...
...the collection started! I went to a few flea markets, here and there, in all my traveling, and if there was a doorknob that looked Victorian to me, I'd pick it up. I lost a few along the way, but a few made it back with me, too.
I don't have those doorknobs anymore, not the ones that I bought, but, see, even that is a kinda cool story, cause I'd put them on my bedroom door and stuff so, mine and Daniel's old place in Philly has got an old Victorian door knob on one of the doors. I could have taken it with me, of course, but I liked the idea of leaving my mark on the house. Some other friends of mine have one of my doorknobs on one of their doors (if they still live in that condo...) cause I stayed with them for a while. My bedroom door at my parent's house has a doorknob of mine, and so did my bedroom at my grandparent's house.
And that left me with... one doorknob. But see, the other house of mine, not the one I live in? The one that was old and falling apart and freakin' condemned? Full of VINTAGE DOORKNOBS!
My last doorknob from the Eyes Gallery in Philly (and I was just there and there is no longer a table heaped with old doorknobs...) is on the bathroom door in my upstairs of this house. All the doorknobs I took from the other house are in a box in my bedroom. When, someday, the other house is finished and live-able, all the doorknobs are going back to the place they came from.
Cause I think that's awesome and I like them.
