My Brushes with Culture

April 7, 2010

Ordinary Life Close Up

We went to see a neat photography exhibit last week. A guy walks around with his camera, looks at basic everyday scenes, then finds something zoom-worthy. After he’s taken a close-up of a particular segment, it’s not only unrecognizable, but fascinating. (Who knew a painted yellow arrow on pavement would have such interesting patterns?)

His website doesn’t actually give you the original scene, so it doesn’t look nearly as impressive as it would if you could see where the pictures came from. But if you want to look, go to www.photosbychris.pingbot.com.


November 1, 2009

There was an EXCELLENT exhibit at the art museum here last summer. A woman uses spools of thread to recreate masterpieces—upside-down! And then you look through a crystal ball, and the pictures turn out right-side up and totally awesome! (They don’t look like much with the naked eye.) We got “The Last Supper” and some Holbein stuff here (and the detail was incredible!); but from the film they ran, we saw that she has actually done cool stuff like Spock, McCoy and Kirk as well. It was so amazing I went to see it twice.

The artist was trying to make a point about the brain and perception; but most of us just liked the nifty pictures.




January 10, 2010

I attended a simulcast of an opera ("Der Rosenkavalier") from the Met in New York yesterday. They show it at the multiplex. So, not only can you bring popcorn into the theater (I was tickled to see the little old ladies with their big buckets of popcorn at the Opera), but they showed it in the theater closest to the Ladies' Room. So no long waits at intermission; and since everybody's wearing typical movie attire, i.e. jeans, nobody holds up the line wrestling with pantyhose or other hazards of fancy dress. (Remember jumpsuits—the worst thing to happen to the bathroom line in the history of bathroom lines?)

Also, should you wish to leave at the second intermission, having had enough fun for one afternoon, you've only paid a fraction of the price, so you only feel a fraction of the guilt.

I confess I dozed off for about five minutes and so missed a sentence, but nothing I couldn’t catch up with.