Paris Couture and other art

Paris Couture and other art

The Museum of Fine Arts has a special exhibition of Paris couture from this year’s spring collections. I went yesterday afternoon. The show is not very large, but the garments from Dior by Galliano are couture at its best. I stood and wept, looking at them. Nothing else in the room touches the genius in these designs. They are so far beyond the edge that they’re as if they’re from another world entirely, and that, to me, is what Paris couture at its best does. Everyone else will show variations of plausible clothes that actual humans could wear, work within the restrictions natural to fashion design, NY, Milan, and then, Paris happens, and someone like Dior or YSL or someone else or all of them will do their stuff, and it’s a pure wind of absolute artistic freedom that blows everything else away. There’s no Yves Saint Laurent in this exhibition, one of the only design houses that comes near this visionary work, IMHO; no Miyake, some Chanel, some Lacroix. The exhibition catalog doesn’t have pictures of the Dior, as far as I could see, so to see it, you have to go. And it’s worth going.

The writing I’m doing is finally going in a sort of flow. I’m attempting the NaNoWriMo challenge – a 50K word novel written entirely between Nov. 1 and Nov. 30, for those who haven’t heard of this thing – and even after not doing any writing at all for far too many days, I’m at last going along and letting it happen. Unlike the other stuff I have to let happen, this is a joy, mostly. And it is also fundamentally something that I control, another big draw for the control freak, here. Er, 40% control freak, I mean. I’m using the story to work things out in my own head—kind of fantasy as therapy and discovery. I have come to hate simple subject-verb-object sentences. I write a lot of them. It occasionally drives me bonkers. There, I’m doing it again. Argh. I’ve spent so much time typing on my laptop that I have sore spots on the heels of my hands where they rest on the keyboard. I’m cranking out each thousand words with the same intensity of effort as swimming laps. I love swimming laps, on those rare occasions when I do it. I also hate it; it’s hard, and exhausting (but it’s really good, too). Erm, it has not escaped my notice that my respite from writing the novel is...writing a blog entry. Crap.

The daily exercise is still working out for me (god, sentence structure bugging me again, ack, caugh, splagg). As long as I do my situps and leg lifts, my knees don’t hurt. This is, as you might imagine, a powerful incentive. Hopefully the weight will stabilize soon. I feel fairly good physically, a bit like a sharpened knife. The strength in my legs helps.

41,420 survivors, it says, as Battlestar Galactica begins, and the music is so haunting that when that’s on the screen, I get choked up. The original show was pretty cheesy, and I still half-expect it to be the same cheesy thing it was in its previous incarnation. But this is about what happens to people in extreme situations, how they maintain a society, how they live with themselves, how they continue to find meaning in their lives. What does torture really do. What makes an election meaningful. When is it acceptable to execute people, and for what crimes. Whoo hoo, something not unbearably stupid.

No coffee plant pix today - soon, though; I'm posting remotely from MIT's graciously offered visitor wireless network, and I forgot to bring the camera doohickey.