Un Bijou Chatette

1. Conversations while one or both parties are brushing their teeth.

2. Conversations in which one or both parties are affecting ridiculous accents.

3. Conversations from opposite pavements of a busy road.

4. Underwater conversations.

5. Yelling across from opposing upper-story open windows.

6. Confusing simultaneous Skype and IM conversations involving 3+ parties.*

7. Conversing whilst tied back-to-back by villains/pirates.

8. Conversations whilst one or both parties are standing on their heads eating nougat.**

9. Conversing whilst half-asleep/tipsy.

10. Conversations about the best kinds of conversations one can have.

*I really love this kind of conversation, but I'm told that everyone else finds them infuriating.
** This one is courtesy of Garon. I've never tried it, but it seems the sort of thing that he might do, the scamp.

Big Iron Comfort Blanket

So, my visiting Reedies have all gone off on their separate ways, and Kai Baby Kai has left and I won't see her for weeks, and I am bereft. I have been moping for several days, which is therapeutic in its own way, but I've worked out what I really need. Yes, that's right! The Iron Giant, the 1999 animated movie inspired by the Ted Hughes children's book. (I know that's totally what you were going to say.)

Seriously, I love this movie a lot. Criminally underrated upon release, fun for all the family, sweet and wonderfully animated and funny and moving... I usually avoid things that are emotionally rich and convey lasting and valuable life lessons; I really have no patience for that personal enrichment through the arts crap. I am prepared to make an exception for The Iron Giant because it's so adorable. It's what I need right now to heal my wounded soul. Ok, enough angst and hyperbole, here are some entirely random stills from the movie:

Hogarth: Wow, my own giant robot! I am now the luckiest kid in America! This must be the biggest discovery since, I don't know, television or something!

Mansley: Two nights ago, at approximately 1900 hours, S.A.T com radar detected an unidentified flying object entering Earth's atmosphere, losing contact with it two-and-a-half miles off the coast of Rockwell. Some assumed it was a large meteor, or a downed satellite, but my office in Washington received a call from someone reporting an actual encounter with the object. This is no meteor, gentlemen. This is something much more serious.

Hogarth: Welcome to downtown Coolsville! Population: us.

Dean: There are two kinds of metal in this yard: scrap and art. If you gotta eat one of them, eat the scrap. What you currently have - IN YOUR MOUTH! - is ART.

Iron Giant: No Atomo... I Superman!

Hogarth: Can you talk? You know, words? Blah, blah, blah, like that? Can you do that, blah, blah, blah? Iron Giant: [very rusty] Blah, blah, blah. Hogarth: Well, you get the idea, anyway.

I desperately want to see this movie now. And also make everyone else I know watch it. Luckily, by a strange coincidence, I just ordered it off Amazon. Hooray!

Five Angels For the Millenium

For some reason we've been talking a lot about Tate Modern lately, I guess people have been going or thinking of going. I really want to visit Tate Modern again, including to see that big crack down the floor of the Turbine Hall which represents something or other. Anyway, I was reminded of one of the best pieces I've ever seen in Tate Modern, a Bill Viola installation called Five Angels For the Millenium. (I'm guessing he made it about 8 years ago.) Five large screens of video projection in a very dark, large room, showing bodies rising or falling from water, moving incredibly slowly. There was sound to go with each, sounding like the quiet rushing of water, or distant waves, or water drops. The effect was fantastic, very tranquil. Looking at the pictures now, it seems like it ought to have been quite eerie, but it really wasn't.

Departing Angel

Birth Angel

Fire Angel

Ascending Angel

Creation Angel

Ok, that's it. Where's my ticket to Tate Modern? Or any big gallery really. I want to go spend a ridiculous amount of time in an art gallery, and read every single label in the entire place until my fellows are bored stupid and furious with me.

ETA: The five angels are now in a gasometer in Germany. How cool does this look?

Ropes and Pulleys

Recently I saw the fine movie Stardust. It was fun and nicely designed and followed the happy and inoffensive rules of fairytale. Robert De Niro was in it as a camp captain of a dirigible sailboat contraption, which sails through the stormy skies capturing lightning. This zeppelin ship was one of my favourite things in the film:


How cool looking is that? It reminded me of Heath Robinson, with all that rigging and the air of improvisation. So, here are a few good Heath Robinson illustrations:

The Professor's Invention for Peeling Potatoes


Romantic Possibilities in Modern Flats


The One Piece Chromium Steel Dining Room Suite


Stout Members of the Sixth Column Dislodge an Enemy Machine Gun Post on the Dome of St.Pauls

Love it. The use of pulleys and twists and props; the endless, ingenious, utterly useless complexity of each contraption. I also relish the opportunity to use the word 'contraption'. The next illustration is one for an edition Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven, contraption-free but nicely twiddly, dark and gothic.

The Night's Plutonian Shore, 1900