sovay: (Rotwang)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2016-11-01 09:29 pm

That's when we knew he was outside time

Rabbit, rabbit!

I spent most of my day at the deCordova with my niece who is nearly three years old. The museum itself was closed for winter hours, so we walked around the sculpture park while I read out all the signs to her and took pictures, a few of which have made it from my mother's camera to my computer.



Charlotte exploring, companioned by the walking stick she found in the first stand of trees, her partner-in-adventure Batty Bat, and, at a decent distance, the expedition photographer. We thought while she was walking on them that the irregular flags of granite that wind through the woods were part of Carlos Dorrien's Little Red Riding Hood and Other Stories (2000), which only seemed appropriate.



Charlotte at the gates. (Beacon by Stephanie Cardon, 2015.)



I just liked how the sky looked through the cables.



Taken by the expedition photographer's mother.



Charlotte rampant!

I am very happy that Paul Matisse's Musical Fence (1980) is still in place. I remember it fondly from my childhood, along with the interactive musical sculpture in the Kendall T station (Kendall Band (1987). I watched it stop working over the years; I hadn't realized there was a student intiative to restore it. Go, MIT. It's one of the best memories of my subway-riding childhood, the others being the view over the Charles River from the Longfellow Bridge—which I still enjoy—and the time my father took me to see the implosion of the Traveler's Insurance Building in 1988). It took some demonstration by me before Charlotte was comfortable hitting the aluminum pipes with a stick of her own, but after that she wouldn't leave it alone. I explained how shorter pipes produce higher pitches and longer ones lower; I asked her to guess if the next pipe would sound higher or lower based on its height and I think she got the idea. I'm not sure how much she understood about overtones, but she did like the idea that she could stop a struck pipe from humming by placing her hand on the metal. I'd like to take her to Matisse's Charlestown Bells (2000) next. I like that she enjoys art.

I had an unexpected windfall in a used book store earlier this afternoon, while waiting for my mother and Charlotte in Arlington Center; I have been reading the collected prose of Marina Tsvetaeva which [livejournal.com profile] rushthatspeaks got me as a birthday gift, so when I saw a bilingual Anthology of Russian Women's Writing, 1777–1992 (ed. Catriona Kelly, 1994) in the Book Rack, it seemed thematically contiguous and I pounced. I am feeling cautiously optimistic about my library. I have moved another four books out of storage into my office to unpack and shelve.

Most of yesterday was spent on writing for Patreon with a surprise publication in the evening, but it was not a bad Halloween. We ran out for candy in the late afternoon and had exactly four trick-or-treaters, but they were the cast of Super Mario Bros. 2 as portrayed by four six-to-nine-year-olds, almost entirely genderswapped and minus Mario, so it was worth it. The pumpkins are extinguished, but still on the front steps. We watched a movie after dark and it was a doozy. We do have kind of a hazardous amount of candy left over.

[identity profile] yamamanama.livejournal.com 2016-11-02 01:37 am (UTC)(link)
I've heard about the student effort to restore the Kendall Band but I don't know any details about it.

The DeCordova is great and so are the cast of Super Mario Bros 2.
Who was the fourth kid, Wart?

[identity profile] handful-ofdust.livejournal.com 2016-11-02 03:42 am (UTC)(link)
I was sick as hell but ended up watching Demons 2 and then Demons, and being fascinated to realize the one is considerably crazier than the other. Of course, I guess that if you'd never seen Demons you'd have a hard time figuring out what was happening in Demons 2, but it's not like it'd really make MORE sense even if you had. Plus, Demons 2 has that hilarious scene of rich teens dancing happily to the Smiths.

[identity profile] handful-ofdust.livejournal.com 2016-11-02 05:09 am (UTC)(link)
Italian horror movies by Lamberto Bava, Mario's less talented son. They're marvellously incoherent and yet weirdly effective. Part One takes place in a movie theatre and involves demons stepping out of the horror movie the audience is watching; by Part Two it's enough to be watching a sort of...documentary? about the area of town where this all took place for demons to come stepping out of the TV set and straight into some teenaged diva named Sally's birthday party. They then spread out and infest the whole high-class apartment building, possessing a dog, an eight-year-old and a bunch of bodybuilders who seem to spend their lives working out 24/7 in the building's gym. A pregnant woman is later chased by a weirdly cute second-generation demon who jumps out of the eight-year-old's back like a living tumor/muppet with shark-teeth; it pursues her through her apartment until she traps it behind a murphy bed and pours weed-killer onto it through a hole in the mattress.

[identity profile] asakiyume.livejournal.com 2016-11-02 12:08 pm (UTC)(link)
Yay Charlotte rampant! And that first photo--beautiful. If you wear a fuchsia-colored coat and step on the stones in the right pattern.... you know the outcome!

And yay for restoration of Kendall Band. I'll tell the tall one; he'll be pleased.

[identity profile] asakiyume.livejournal.com 2016-11-02 09:26 pm (UTC)(link)
I told her it was going to be folklorically okay. I love that you had to. There's a child who's learning the right stuff early.

Did he also used to play it as a child?

I don't know if it was working in his childhood; I think so, but I have memories of Cambridge from so many periods it's hard to be sure. He just is interested in anything that has to do with the T and has a fondness for... oh wait. I only just now realized I've got it all wrong. I'm thinking of the **light** sculpture a t**Porter** (though I do remember the sound installation at Kendall). But it's Porter that he's got a special fondness for. I think every time he goes there he goes up the down escalators.

[identity profile] asakiyume.livejournal.com 2016-11-04 02:29 am (UTC)(link)
I love those gloves. I think they're varied enough that I think of them as the lost gloves of all the people who hurry up and down those escalators. I love that they're shiny where people touch them.
gwynnega: (coffee poisoninjest)

[personal profile] gwynnega 2016-11-02 06:31 pm (UTC)(link)
I've only ever read Tsvetaeva's poetry, not her prose. The Russian anthology sounds terrific.

[identity profile] martianmooncrab.livejournal.com 2016-11-02 09:35 pm (UTC)(link)
it seemed thematically contiguous and I pounced.

Yeah You! the thrill of a successful hunt! Even if you didnt know you were hunting...

[identity profile] aphrabehn.livejournal.com 2016-11-04 05:26 am (UTC)(link)
Decordova is one of my favorite places in the state. I haven't been in years, truth be told, but I spent a lot of time there in my teens and 20's. We used to sneak in well after dark and sit by the pond and just be. It was wonderful. I should go back soon though I imagine it's a little more difficult to roam at night than it was back then.