I had been thinking about getting more BPAL when mousekinn had a sale of her BPAL fragrances to finance medicine for her sick kitty. It was a perfect opportunity to try new scents out!

( talking about the scents I got )

In the past I have rarely worn perfume but I often use scented lotions or shower gel or candles or bath salts. In actually wearing a scent I worry about overwhelming the senses of people around me. But I really like when you are putting on a lotion and big clouds of the scent waft up, and if you use it before bed a few times then you will get into bed and faintly smell whatever it was. I am actually considering mixing some of my own body oil and scenting it with some of the perfumes that don't last long on me. The best ingredients for body oil are really cheap, and it would be fun to do. I saved a glass bottle which used to have body oil in it just for this purpose.

Getting more into perfume and smell is a little like exploring painting for the first time, looking at works of art in a medium I have been taking for granted. But concoctions of scent, like foods where different flavors have been carefully balanced, are strange as works of art. Visual media is constant, real, tangible, and we can close our eyes and view it again in our mind's eye. Music is real in the sense that it does have a physical existence, but a necessarily fleeting one. However, if you know a musical piece well, you can replay it for yourself countless times and hear it almost the same as hearing it in person, so in some sense you can carry a musical piece with you using only your mind. But while scent and food have a corporeal existence, we cannot remember them accurately. You can recognize the taste of orange or rosemary or milk, but if you imagine them, you cannot re-taste or re-smell them in your mind. To me, that gives them a poignancy and immediacy different from other media.

I am not the sort who often creates photoessays, but then again I am not the sort who often finds an abandoned piano on my walk to work. I knew I wanted to take pictures of it, its water-swollen keys and misaligned hammers. The cover for the keys is gone, as is the panel that usually covers the soundboard. And then it snowed.

( no more words )

Hey, remember when I talked about making wall scrolls? Well, I forgot to post a picture before now, but I actually did that.

wall scrolls, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Basically, I picked out the posters and ordered them. We bought the fabric from IKEA, dowels (for the top and bottom of the scrolls) from Home Depot, and spray adhesive (thank you Chih for telling me this existed) from an Utrecht art store. Ben helped me a lot with putting them together; we hemmed the sides with spray adhesive and tacked the dowels into the tops and bottoms, then cut a little hole for a nail to go in on the back. I am really happy with how they came out; I think we finished the last one in early December. Our next big home project will probably be to build some cat furniture.

As anyone who's been to a museum with me can tell you, I love impressionist painting. And I've always liked JMW Turner, the English painter who arguably was an impressionist long before the actual movement began. The Tate Britain has a huge collection of his paintings, an entire wing devoted to him, because he gave them all his unfinished and unsold canvases upon his death. Jeanine and I saw and loved this collection in London, and when I saw the article below in this week's New Yorker, I thought I'd share it with you, along with some of his paintings. The analysis of the paintings is inspiring, but even more so if you can look at them as you're reading.

The first Turner painting I ever saw, in AP US History: Rain, Steam, and Speed
A postcard I sent to Ben: Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth
Described in the article:
Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying
Staffa, Fingal's Cave
Regulus
The Battle of Trafalgar
The Field of Waterloo
Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons
Disaster at Sea
And one I have in postcard form on my desk: The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up

( the patriot )

My mom is visiting me here in Philly for the first time in a couple of weeks, and naturally I want her to really like my house. Thus I am spearheading the initiative to actually decorate the big blank wall in our dining room. I also have something to gain from this, since when we eat I am looking at said wall. I have a big framed print hanging in the same room already, which I don't know the painter of, but I believe it's Chinese. The reason I am fairly into Asian art is simple: around when my parents first married, they bought and cheaply framed a lot of Japanese print posters, mostly Hokusai and Hasui. When they divorced, they split the prints, and so both of my Los Alamos homes have a lot of that style of art in them. I like it, and I especially like it in long fabric scrolls with a beautiful painting in the middle. I'm looking at making my own scrolls from dowels and fabric, getting some posters off the internet, and affixing the posters to them. But I'm trying to decide on three prints that would go well together. Here's what I'm looking at:

Hiroshige: Plum Garden over Shin-Ohashi Bridge
Hiroshige: Snowy Landscape
Hiroshige: View from Satta Saruga
Hasui: Moon at Magome
Hiroshige: Sudden Shower

I'm currently leaning towards the first three. There are some that I like but feel weird about getting because they are actually prints hanging in one of my parents' houses, like this one.

After a frustrating week at work last week, on Friday I finally got some great news, that the cryostat I'm working on finally does what it's supposed to. And then in the evening I flew out to Indiana, to spend the weekend staying with Jeanine and Andrew in West Lafayette. It was a blast!

First thing Saturday morning we went out to the farmer's market, to buy meat and berries and egg noodles, and then headed over to Samara, a Frank Lloyd Wright house in West Lafayette. It's still owned by the original owner, and lived in, and occasionally he opens it for tours and talks given by extremely enthusiastic volunteers. The talks were interesting, and the space inside was just beautiful. It was one of the last houses he built, and thus free of many of the engineering problems that plagued earlier projects. And something that must have helped was that his wife, an interior designer, worked with the owners to do a lot of the color and decoration inside, though Wright designed most of the furniture and put many motifs in that are repeated in windows, hinges, linens, room shapes. What I really loved was the living room, huge and stylish and accomodating, with all sorts of seating: long cushioned benches, couches and chairs, hassocks with small cushions, steps, a coffee table that split into six stools. Everything was modular, everything was cantilevered, everything was open. Two walls were taken by windows out to trees and brick, and there were curtains covering the posts so it looked like a wall of glass. The corner was solid glass, held together by glue. And the fireplace was incredible, massive and brick but floating in the air, dramatically lit. The rest of the house was cool, but it was catered to the couple living there, who wanted big open spaces for entertaining but private, small spaces for having their bedrooms and bathrooms, so the ceilings in the rest of the house were so low I could touch them with my elbows. The hallways and doors were tiny, to give you the sense if you wandered into that part of the house from a party that it was private and you didn't belong. But then in the smallish bathrooms, huge lofted ceilings with skylights were raised up above you, so you didn't feel you were peeing in a closet. The showerhead, though, was about 5'3". The kitchen ("workspace", Wright called it) was nice and airy but had a minimum of easily usable counter space, because of big imposing cabinets right over many of the counters that probably helped the short-ish denizens. But many vintage 50s appliances. And the landscaping outside was excellent, Oriental (for lack of a better word... the decor mixed Japanese and Chinese art with abandon), and matched by the style inside. I'm not a big fan of Wright furniture, much of it is too ugly, but he had some great stylistic ideas, like using an obi as a runner for the center of your dining room table, and china with off-center colorful geometry meant to hide lipstick prints on cups. Apparently he designed every last detail for the house, left the plans with the owners, and as they got more money over the course of their lives (the house was built 50 years ago), they had more of the pieces made. It was really amazing to see.

Then we had lunch, and I went to the Victoria's Secret sale yet again to help Jeanine with bra-shopping. We went home, Sam showed up from Bloomington, and we made dinner. We then left for the Wolf Park, where you can see wolf packs up close and howl with them, and hear a lecture which is not that informative and clearly designed for children. But the wolves are really cool, and the park volunteers can enter and interact with them, and they also have several foxes and a herd of bison. And when you go at night, to howl with them and hear them howl, you have the pleasure of watching fireflies dance over the grass when dusk sets in.

On Sunday we lazed around more, made scones, watched the first Harry Potter movie, walked around the garden plots that married graduate students can plant things in, played gin, and eventually went to Indianapolis so I could come back here. I was especially glad to spend the weekend with friends because Ben and I are in the middle of our apart-time; he's been gone seven weeks and will be gone another six. This means I'm not in as high spirits as I've been, for whatever reason, and it was nice to see people to help me take my mind off that. Especially people I miss. :)

One of my friends from Los Alamos, Ken Nebel, is trying to make it as an illustrator for children's books. He's got a portfolio that those of you into the arts should check out, and the rest of you too. I really like his style, and jfyi he can be contacted by e-mail to sell prints. :)

This weekend so far has been mostly errands, chores, or various things that needed to get done, with some fun stuff thrown in.

( saturday: immunizations, museum, dead like me )

( today: christmas presents, decorating )

I am really excited about this project!

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is great!

When I visited Penn, several different people mentioned it to me as a great cultural center in Philly. Ben and I visited it today (me for the first time, him for the first time in a long time), and it's a really nice museum. Fairly large, and since we live here we moseyed through parts of it, not trying to see everything because we know we can come back. They had a very interesting modern art section, with a lot of great paintings, and an interesting selection of colonial American furniture donated by people who lived in Philadelphia. I really enjoyed their collection of Thomas Eakins paintings. We also ate a nice picnic outside, baguette and hard salami and Dubliner cheese. Yum.

The best part, though, is that the student yearly memberships for this museum are only $35 a person, and it includes special exhibition tickets and a membership to the Rodin Museum. We are both so getting a membership. There are lots of wings that we didn't explore, too... they seem to have a huge European collection, including some 1850-1900 stuff that we saw a little of and looked great.

( a little about European museums )

In an article in the NYTimes about makeup, they give the following statistics:

"In a 2004 poll by the market research group Mintel, 64 percent of American women said they sometimes use foundation, compared with 47 percent of French women; 81 percent of Americans use lipstick compared with 70 percent of French women and 59 percent of Americans use blusher, compared with 43 percent."

81% of American women wear lipstick?! Good God! I think the whole thing is kind of ridiculous. I know some of you women wear small amounts of makeup regularly, in a tasteful way, and that isn't so bad... I dunno, I've never worn any makeup regularly. I've done it on occasion for very nice outings or for performances on dance team and in ballroom (required for the performances), but as a day-to-day thing, it's too much effort. I also like to wash my face some during the day to get rid of dirt and oil, and if I had to reapply makeup... bleah. It isn't like I have particularly great skin either. I prefer the French emphasis mentioned in the article of taking care of your skin and trying to make it look good on its own. It can nearly go without saying that I think it looks a little tacky to wear unnatural-looking makeup.

Of course people try to make themselves look their best, which is why we have so many types of clothes, hair products, etc. I guess I feel that smearing colored products on one's face on a daily basis goes too far. The gender inequality chafes at me too.

EDIT: Now that I've alienated my female lj friends, most of whom use makeup, let me add that this is more my personal feelings. I've always had an aversion to makeup, and am sort of figuring out why in the discussions in the comments. But don't think that I am disappointed in you personally for wearing makeup. :P

I think I see my navel piercing kind of as the black hair of my senior year of college. You see, my senior year of high school, I dyed my hair black with some friends of mine, because it was something I wanted to try, and something I didn't think I'd have the balls to do (if you'll excuse the expression). I also did it, I think, because I was kind of unhappy with the way things were, and I wanted a change. It was shortly after breaking up with my first boyfriend, and I think somewhere in my brain, I was hoping he'd see me as attractive if I did something kind of drastic. So I dyed my hair black, permanently by accident, and then waited for about a year for it to grow out enough that I could cut all the black off. The black hair looked fine, and the two-tone hair I had while it grew out was kinda cool... but it was also silly, I think. I was happy to see it go because I'd reaffirmed my love of my natural hair color.

My belly button piercing was done for some of the same reasons... something I'd always wanted to do, and something that took balls, for me at least, because I was very afraid of the actual piercing process. And something to do at a time when I was really anxious about my life as it stood; I was still waiting for graduate decisions, having no idea what would come next. I think that now, while I don't really regret it, I see that I was fine without it. I'll definitely keep it for a few years, but I can see myself getting sick of it, or getting pregnant and removing it, and never putting it back. I do like the way it looks, though. :) What surprised me most about it, though, was that most people reacted negatively to it. I expected mostly neutral reactions and a few negative or positive, but most of what I heard was things like, "why did you do that?" or "ouch". Only a few people told me anything positive, and I don't think I really got a neutral response at all. It did help me realize that I didn't really care what people thought of it, because I really like the way it looks. And I had the chance to teach Ben that not all belly button piercings are infected all the time.

Overall, I'm happy I did it. It looks cool and it was a neat experience. Plus I'm pretty much done with piercing, I think. I changed the jewelry for the first time today, from the pink jewel they put in when they pierced it to a medium-dark blue jewel. And let me tell you, when people say a navel piercing is hot, they aren't picturing you in the women's restroom with a pair of needle-nose pliers, trying to torque your way through five months of slowly accumulated belly button cruft.

Sorry, I know that wasn't sexy. But I'm nothing if not honest.