Kandinsky never liked blue

We had a quiet night last night, listening to La Rocque 'n' Roll and cutting out for the scrap books. I actually scanned in the first page of my first scrap book at the weekend but I forgot to upload it to the website. It was a micture of the front page of the catalogue to the first exhibition at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool which was on surrealism and various random cut-outs all joined together with oil-pastel. Hopefully this is enough to describe it until it eventually gets posted. The surrealism exhibition was the subject of a great deal of ridicule in Liverpool; lots of down-earth-Northerners getting upset about the waste of money and of course they have a point. I like a lot of modern art but I am annoyed that so much gets paid for it. The Oak Tree was especially contentious. The Tate replied to all this criticism by opening up an exhibition for local people to create their own surrealist art. It was just as viable as all the Kandinsky/Dali etc. from the first exhibition. Bearing in mind it seems possible to term anything as art, even an act that takes a few seconds or just a weird concept from the back of your mind, surely it must be possible to define the act of not charging any money at all for a piece of art as a piece of art in itself. Of course this may backfire because people will pay any amount of money for some things - see here for proof.

This new office has a quite different ambience to the old one. There is a continuous low thump somewhere inside the cavities which sounds like a pump of some sort. As we are on the third floor, we can't be getting flooded so I wonder what it is. Let me go and have a look..... No luck! It is the sort of noise which retreats as you get closer to it. When the rest of the people in the office arrive, I won't be able to hear it. Aha! I have just located it. It is one of the ceiling fans which appears to be loose and its casing is oscillating. It looks dangerous to me. It could fall off and decapitate someone. It will be reported. Apart from that, it appears to be quieter here. There is of course the fact that we are higher up and unable to hear a lot of the 'ground traffic'. I stayed in the Hotel Pennsylvania once, on about the tenth floor and it was really weird to look down at all that traffic and all those people without actually hearing a thing. I love the advert in the link - "2200 rooms - 2200 Baths". My room might have had a bath but the TV didn't work, not that I think I missed anything. We always used to get the idea that there were hundreds of TV channels in the US but I think I only got five in any of the hotels I stayed in and that was only one more than we had in the UK at the time (Channel 4 had been going for six years then but Channel 5 was ten years away.) The one thing I didn't see in New york which I really wished I had done, was Grand Central Station and that is only because of "By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept". I only read this beacause I read Necessary secrets - some of the Journals of the author Elzabeth Smart. BGCSISDAW is nothing like the journals but they are both compelling. Reading BGCSISDAW is like being beaten by a breeze block wrapped in several hundred layers of velvet. It reminded me of Bonjour Tristesse but that maybe because they are the same size. I think they were together in the bookcase for a time. I could only read them in short bursts as they are purple in the extreme.