May 31, 2010
Gizmo
Anyone would think I had some kind of reluctance to post, these days. Not true, exactly, but at the same time also not exactly false. There seems to be so much bound up in the act of blogging that the sort of casual throwaway silliness that might once have sufficed now won't. That stuff goes on Facebook instead, or very occasionally Twitter. Not that anyone has any expectations of this place -- not, frankly, that anyone is even still reading it -- but somehow it carries some awful sense of obligation for me, something I should be doing but just don't get around to, like phoning my father. Although under the circumstances I'm not skimping on the latter.
Anyway, this is my last chance to scrape a birthdayish entry in the right month, so here we are. I am typing this on my major birthday present, Aglaia, who arrived somewhat after the fact due to Apple's schedule juggling, but is very delightful for all that. I have BlogPress set up, but on this occasion I'm just using Safari and MT's ordinary web interface, which is a lot more plausible here than on the iPhone. Various other things are either not yet sorted out or, perhaps, may never be, so this will be a relatively no-frills entry. Photo uploads, for example, are off the cards right now. In any case, what a very pleasing gizmo this is.
Going back to the day itself, a very nice time was had generally, and in particular at Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & co's wonderful Babel, third part of the trilogy that started with Foi. Coming so soon after primero, and likewise a return to form, this was another reminder of just how great the C de la B family can be. Unlike primero, Babel was largely shorn of the old rawness and pain and anguish, operating at a mostly more intellectual level -- including a serious but also very funny lecture on neuroscience. There was a lot of shifting around of Antony Gormley's big metal frame boxes, which occasionally seemed a bit faffy but unreasonably often became something astonishing and transcendental. The performers, many of them familiar from the previous episodes, were powerful and assured, and really the whole event was one of the best things I've seen in ages, vastly superior to the weak middle segment Myth. I wanted to go straight back the next night and see it again, but alas could not. I really hope this show is going to make return visits.
Other stuff: I liked a lot Chris Morris's suicide bomber comedy Four Lions, though it mostly made me want to cry much more than laugh -- really quite heartbreaking. I skated with Matthew in Hyde Park on what may turn out to be the one proper day of summer. Later we went dancing at Ku Bar (Saturday options are extremely limited, it turns out, at least if you don't fancy meth-fuelled Vauxhall barns that don't even get going until 4), which would be the first time I've done such a thing for a geological age were it not for a drunken visit to the same venue a couple of weeks before to round off an evening toasting the departure of CoMPLEXer Alex, off to postdoc at UPenn. I enjoyed it a lot more the second time around, though I'm not sure I'll be making a habit.
And finally: work, schmirk. Obviously a major contributor to my ongoing blogging failure, it's the usual rollercoaster ride from bright hopes to pits of despair and back; let us say no more about it.
Posted by matt at May 31, 2010 9:58 PM