So, what have I been up to? The day before yesterday I travelled to Porto Alegre (the state capital) with a group from my school, to visit a big art festival thing and a book fair. It was about a 7 hour bus ride away, so we slept on the bus two nights in a row so that we could spend the whole day in Porto Alegre. I say slept, but that's a bit of an exaggeration. It was a nice bus, as buses go, but no bus is ever going to be an ideal sleepng place, especially not with 40 teenagers on it. (There is a time and place for a screaming competition. On a bus at 3 in the morning is not it. Just in case anyone was wondering.) The day was spent wandering around art galleries and the book fair, which was nice, but exhausting. It was cool to see some conceptual sculpturey stuff (i've missed talking pretentiously about art :p ), though nothing particularly stood out. By the end of the day the more important question became 'is this a work of art or a convenient place to sit?' But Porto Alegre is a beautiful city, and at the end of the day we visited a mall and i watched Thor 2, which was fab, so no loss there.
We were allowed to take photos of the art throughout, but I finding taking photos in a gallery weird and somehow disrespectful, so this is the only one I got. And now thinking about it, it was a kinetic sculpture, what I hoped to achieve by taking a still photo of it I don't know. But I really liked it.
Yarn bombing! (I am so annoyed at this photo. Or more accurately, I am so annoyed at blogger, which will not let me rotate, however hard I try, and forced me to create a google+ account in the attempt to rotate it and then that still didn't work. So I give up in despair and you'll all just have to rotate your heads intead.) EDIT Hey look, it fixed itself. Now it's just weirdly squidged. You can't win...
Then on wednesday evening we had our school halloween/day of the dead party. For this we had to decorate altar thingies celebrating famous dead people. So this is my groups one for Elvis Presley.
Pretty mueseums
And parks with art in
Then on wednesday evening we had our school halloween/day of the dead party. For this we had to decorate altar thingies celebrating famous dead people. So this is my groups one for Elvis Presley.
My only actual contribution was the skull, but it was fun.
In which Sophie was wearing makeup, an unheard of, and probably unrepeatable event. Sorry, it's a terrible photo, but I thought there should be some evidence.
Other than that life has just generally been plodding along like life tends to do. There a good days and boring days and bad days, and I suppose I'm learning stuff, though I wouldn't necessarily be able to identify what. I feel like now that I've been here for 3 months i should do some kind of post about where I'm at, and how I've grown a person and whatever, but I don't know if that's simple enough for me to articulate it in a simple blogpost, and I have my doubts about what should be on the internet and what shouldn't. That's all for now I guess. Sorry it wasn't all that long after all.
You write well. I was laughing several times during your post.
ReplyDeleteIn NZ, the tyranny of distance is that we're so far from any other country. It seems that in Brazil, the tyranny of distance is that you're so far from anywhere else in the country that you want to go to.
Ever since I noticed how at Princeton a sculpture/fountain/pool became a skateboard bowl when they drained it for winter (NOT with the blessing of the university, but they had troubles preventing it) I've been much attracted by the idea of dual purpose art. Art that you can skateboard on (or, if I tried it, art that you can fall on while a skateboard departs rapidly in the opposite direction.) Art that children can climb on. (There used to be a sculpture at the bottom of Queen St in Auckland like this - again NOT with official blessing.) You've just given me a whole new category - art that you can sit on.
Yarn bombing is something I only just found out about, because I'm interested in security and cryptography. Have a look at this one:
http://io9.com/it-took-four-miles-of-yarn-to-turn-this-tree-into-a-kni-1448195859
Did you manage to understand Thor in Portuguese? Or was it in English with Portuguese subtitles?
I've just got invited to join a weekly board gaming group, which is cool. I've been often going to the board gaming club, but a smaller group of people who don't change as much in a quieter room is more my style. (But I wouldn't have got the invitation without going to the club.)
We had a mini-conference for two days at the end of last week. I was talking about hybridization, so I had a slide showing a phylogeny of eagles, horses, lions, gryphons, pegasii and hippogryphs.
I've just finished a significant rewrite of a draft paper, so I'm feeling happy to have that out of the way.
Any progress on the maths puzzles?
Michael.