Election Sunday

Went to IMMA yesterday to see the Georgia O Keeffe exhibition. Still love her paintings, the cloth like desert warmness of them - even though they also always remind me of snow in Taos New Mexico where I lived in 1984. Saw the work of two others artists there too, photos of Thomas Demand and paintings by Alex Katz. Liked both a lot. The Thomas Demand work made me look forward to Berlin where I'm visiting in May.

Bertie called the election yesterday, so I'll be out of the country on election day and (worse) the day of the count. Not that bothered about missing the election but really pissed off at missing the count. Should have thought of all that before I booked my trip. Oh well, I'll observe it from Berlin.

It was strange to have the election called on a Sunday morning – apparently the president was leaving for America and had to sign the Dáil dissolution order before she left. Waking up and unexpectedly listening to a slightly over excited RTE special news programme was a bit disconcerting. No “Sunday Miscellany” today then. You’d think it was September 1939 again, that fine Sunday that Chamberlain declared war on Germany! Still, the end of an era. Took this photo in the grounds of IMMA.

God and the City

Another great quote from AA Gill in today's Sunday Times : "It’s only in a city that God really understands how to organise nature." He's talking about cycling by the river in London but what he says can be applied to many cities. As usual, in his funny provocative and OTT way he hits the nail right on the head.
"If this were the country, I’d never be able to get near the river. There would be a Passchendaele of barbed wire, seeping drums, decomposing agricultural machinery and miles and miles of agri-business megafields with an odd bit of brutalised hedgerow. The only thing skulling the river would be a skeletal sheep’s corpse. The countryside is nature’s scrap yard. You need a park to see the true symbolic beauty of Gaia’s bounty, and London has the greatest parks of any city — certainly far better than any bit of unmade, raw, grubby, poisonous, dung-and-pesticide countryside."
The full article (masquerading as a restaurant review) can be found here
The photo is from today's New York Times
(another city and another park as Spring arrives in NYC)

the who?

reminds me of 1970s. Still love it.

the Sopranos in 7.5 minutes!

LA Stories

a very good piece by Steve Gillmor about friendship, the 1970s and LA :

"LA is somehow feeling more like the 70’s now than in decades. I hated the 70’s at the time; a rough mix of post-Beatle depression and chalky outlines around the body that was the revolution. Thank god the revolution was over, but thirty years to wait for the wisdom that comes from enough mistakes to convince you of your own mortality"

more here