(no subject)

[solitary_summer]

Nice day, for the greater part.

Blue sky, with heavy white clouds driven across it, strong wind, but warm for the season; everything still almost incongruously bare, buds only just coming out. Faint garlic smell of Bärlauch, a few violets... white trunk of a plane tree against the deep blue of the sky.

The museum itself... the kind of art you feel you should like, but can't, quite. Especially with his work from the 1910s and 20s there's something mannerist, almost too smooth for my taste about the artfully contorted bodies - too artful to really convey pain or any other emotion. In exhibition context it also tends to become a little repetitive... maybe slightly reminiscent of Tamara de Lempicka's paintings.

And yet... Studie zum hl. Sebastian, clearer and less mannerist than most, body suspended in space; Die Erkenntnis, not unoriginal; Ikarus, slightly too... (obvious?), the fall, already touching the waves, but still straining to look up at the sky... but not bad; a Christ on the cross, the face tilted up in agony (towards god?) and invisible to the viewer, interesting.

Some of the portraits are more immediately touching, but portraits, if I've no connection to the subject, generally don't interest me much.

A cast of Hanak's pietà in the garden, and I'm struck again with the curious composition... the way she displays the body, barely touching it at all, as if ready to cast it off, almost suggesting she doesn't want to have anything to do with... what? this male world of killing and torturing and dying for causes??


[Watched Smallville, Accelerate, not bad and really quite creepy. Then again, I'm easily creeped out by small children, dolls that come alive & such. There's another thing about Smallville besides the doomed-from-the-start gay subtext that gets at me every time, and that's Lex's relationship with his father. That family friendly US mainstream TV would come up with a father son relationship lifted straight from ancient greek tragedy is almost more... subversive is maybe too strong a word, but I can't think of any better, than the tongue-in-cheek queerness. The way Lex reacts to the most casual touches, the visible stiffening, the pointed looks... Watching almost hurts, because it's too close to the feelings I experience sometimes, when all those twisted issues and suppressed anger make me hate it when my father (who obviously isn't the evil Luthor type) touches me at all, a hand on the shoulder is enough to almost make me flich, wanting to scream at him. I know it's unkind, because he loves me in his way and doesn't want to hurt me, but I can't help it sometimes. I can't be forgiving.

Anyway. Smallville (or Andromeda, for the matter)... Is there such a thing like subtextual complexity? Catering to the Clark/Lana teenage fan crowd on the surface and slipping in all those psychological issues and complex themes of power (ab)use, conscience, love, obsession, the relativity of good and evil... *shakes head* B5 is a complex story with complex characters and when I see complexity I can be reasonably certain that MJS intended for it to be there. With Smallville, or, again, Andromeda, I am never sure what has been intentionally put there, perhaps by writers/producers/actors frustrated with the mediocrity of it, what is there simply because human life is complex, however much you try to ignore it, and what is merely my imagination and need to complicate and dissect everything. It's frustrating to someone as over-analytical as I am.]




... also, strangely blank and disinterested after I've cried myself out.

Took me long enough, but I finally could at least tell my mother that I probably won't continue paying university fees for the next semester, seeing as I effectively haven't done anything for the last year or so. All those issues of self worth, self respect... more about that later maybe, I'm too tired and too empty at the moment to talk about it.

My mother is supportive, but she isn't the problem, she's the pragmatic, go-with-the-flow one, it's all tied up in my non-relationship with my father, and I can't even imagine talking to him about this, just as I'm unable to face Prof. B. (my sometime ersatz father figure).