Sunday, October 29, 2006

Now That's What I Call Art!

On the first day of our recent visit to Paris we revisited the Musee d'Orsay. This is housed in an old railway station that is itself a work of art. It's amazing to think that the authorities were at one time thinking of demolishing it to make way for a giant hotel. On the lower levels of the museum there are some amazing examples of sculpture while the upper levels contain the impressionist and postimpressionist paintings that Wosog and I really like. Wouldn't it have been nice to bring home a little Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, a Renoir or a Van Gogh? Unfortunately, security arrangements at the museum meant that all we could take were photographs, but a guy can dream, can't he?

To me, this is real art: in total contrast with the pathetic modern "sculptures" etc we saw at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in April. These and other examples of modern art, such as those we struggled not to giggle at at the Modern Art Museum in Barcelona, to me have no more artistic validity than paintings made out of toast and marmite.

But then, I am a Philistine....

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Back From The Dead


Wosog's Little Friend
Originally uploaded by Son of Groucho.

I'm not a very disciplined individual. I find it difficult to concentrate on one subject for long. Bearing that in mind, it is probably surprising that I have managed to keep blogging for 2 years. Recently I've had pretty severe "blogger's block". There is also the small matter of "real life getting in the way". Once you get out of the habit of posting, it's really quite difficult to get back into it again, but I'm going to make a concerted effort to do so.

As a start, I present this intriguing picture of The Bold Wosog confronting a plucky little ghost in the Catacombes de Paris recently. What happened next was reminiscent of a episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Wosog may be small, but she's not phased by a bit of ectoplasm.

There will be more of our Paris trip, including visiting the dead, both above and below ground, in future exciting episodes of The Voice of Reason.