which_chick | (no subject)

Yesterday I did the kimono thing which, interestingly, also featured a very good pork sandwich (up on York Road past the fairgrounds, right hand side heading north, look for the pig on the roof) and a trip to the chichi yarn store o' gift certificatey goodness. I like yarn stores. They're just way too much fun to wander around in. Mom picked out some yarn for a felted bag (she keeps glomming mine) and I picked up some Addi turbos and a pair of bamboo needles in sizes suitable for socks-on-two-circulars (next project after the SKP) and for doing the felted bag that the yarn was purchased for.

The kimono thing was interesting enough, but it was about modern-day wedding kimono and how they drew from samurai tradition, so had little to offer in the way of interest for the geisha book. Geisha wear kimono differently than people do for weddings. It's a whole different thing. The neatest part of the presentation was how they dressed someone from the audience (chosen to be suitably skinny and short) in wedding kimono and accessories by an actual trained dresser. That was useful to watch.

We also spent some time looking at the ceramic stuff in the Walters (where all this was held. Mom's a member or whatever so gets cheap tickets to stuff) which she was rather amused to discover I viewed as the rough equivalent of Precious Moments figurines for previous generations. Honestly, the number of cutesy figurines and popourri holders they had there was mind-boggling. Also, specially for the French: Please explain why you take a very nice idea, say, a clean, simple Japanese scene with a Buddha guy in it, and festoon it with about three hundred feet of gilded gold glittery stuff. I'm not getting it. Are you all trophy wives? I want one like hers but with MORE GOLD LEAF. Perhaps this was this a grand joke on the part of the artists where they were like "No, dude, no matter how much glittery gold festooning I do, they are not going to say it's too much. There is no such thing as too much glittery gold festooning for these people. They're the fucking French aristocracy. Nothing but a revolution with heads in the streets can stop these people. Here, look. I'll do one that is completely over the top and I bet it will be one of our best sellers..." Magpies and jackdaws, the lot of you. *sheesh*

Also, to the guy who had the sideboard/mantle/whatever made out of wood -- that was some very impressive carving, there. Seriously, it was skillful and, for lack of a better term, lifelike. I just think that maybe dead birds (quail and woodpeckers) and dead fish and dead foxes and stuff weren't the best choice for the decorative theme. They're kind of, well, dead. Not decorative. Dead. I understand that you were going for a hunting-trophy theme, here -- that's what the little museum card said -- but I'm not getting it. Representations of live animals make prettier decorations than dead ones, mostly, and while I can at least understand decorating your hunting lodge with, say, parts of actual dead animals that you actually killed in the process of hunting, I cannot really grasp why you would want ~~bad plaster imitations~~ er. carved wooden representations of dead animals that hadn't actually been killed by you or anyone else because they're representations and not the real thing. It's not like you can tell the story of the great hunt where you pursued the, uhm, death-like representational carving of two foxes over hill and dale in a thrilling, epic chase with the ringing sounds of the hounds and the thundering hooves and the way that steam rose off your horse's body in the cool of the morning as he soared gracefully over tricky and frightening jumps that gave half the club's usually-adept horsemen an opportunity to go dirt-surfing. It's a fucking carving. I am SO not getting this.

Oh, and I liked the snuffboxes. And the black vases from the greeks or the romans or whatever. Those were nice. And I will never, ever, ever get tired of looking at nicely-carved marble asses. It's a thing. The heinies of classical sculpture can amuse me for *hours*.

Finally, I present for your amusement Green Jesus With Frightening Six-pack (it is probably called something else in real life but if I had to name it, that's what it would be called):

Given my feelings about carvings of dead animals as decoration, you can probably connect the dots for how I feel about dead gods-made-flesh as decoration... but there's no excuse for badly-drawn dead gods-made-flesh. None.

Going to a museum with me is an educational experience, really.