Old people

I don’t normally blog in the morning, much less on a Saturday morning but it has been raining since last night, and I was woken up early by the sound of rain failing against my window today….

I spent a good amount of time yesterday watching the videos in this site http://www.lifeadvicefromoldpeople.com/. Seth Menachem takes his video camera out on the streets and collects life advices from old people. I had a similar thing going on back when I was in Vietnam. A week before my flight, I came across this interesting story – a conversation between an MBA and a beggar about the fine art of entrepreneurship. Then I thought it would be fun if I can talk to someone from a different live.

A few days later I met Van, 72, a well-aged homeless when I was having breakfast.  I asked him if he would like to sit and talk with me, he said ‘yes’. We talked for two hours about his life, where he came from, how did he get to where he is…A loyal consumer of opium back in its day, he talked passionately in favor of legalizing mood-altering chemicals, but he despises people who depend on these things. He was, as the cliche goes, married but wasn’t happy. He said it was an one-night mistake and time was different then, he can not just walk away. His wife loved him dearly, but he was the kind that is more happy when he is in love than to be loved. And there is really no nice way to say this, he smacked her around. I wished him well and gave him some money when we parted. May be I will see him again when I am home. Life has many ways of testing a person, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen all at once. One of a few memorable highlight of my vacation.

Here is the history of modern art in three paragraphs from my favorite article this week.

Impressionism - painting outside of a studio with quick, loose brushstrokes to capture an evocative impression of their subject. Van Gogh was an Impressionist but wanted to express how he felt about what he saw so he distorted the subject. This helped to lead to Expressionism practised by artists from Edvard Munch through to Francis Bacon. The Fauves (wild beasts) expressed themselves by painting with bright colours. Jackson Pollock did it by throwing or dripping paint on a canvas. His paintings were abstract -- Abstract Expressionism.

Cezanne was very important. He began as an Impressionist but then started to look at a subject from two different perspectives to represent how we see. Picasso and his friend Georges Braque were very impressed and started to paint subjects from lots of different views. This is Cubism. Marcel Duchamp was a Cubist but then changed art for ever. He said the idea is more important than the medium and refused to stick with the limited choice of canvas or stone. So he chose everyday objects and called them art because he had altered their context. This led to Conceptual Art where the idea becomes the medium.

The Dadaists were very cross. They blamed the horrors of the First World War on the Establishment's reliance on rational and reasoned thought. They radically opposed rational thought and became nihilistic -- the punk rock of modern art movements. Dada plus Sigmund Freud equals Surrealism. The Surrealists were fascinated by the unconscious mind, as that's where they thought truth resided. Piet Mondrian thought he could paint everything he knew, felt and saw by using two lines placed at rectangles and three primary colours. This was called Neo-Plasticism and was inspired by Cubism. So was Futurism, which is Cubism with motion added. Vorticism is the same as Futurism, but British. The Minimalists might represent the real truth because they weren't trying to represent anything. Performance Art is Dada live.

Someone posted this text conversation on a forum I visit daily. Have a laugh, people. That is your new definition of a relationship.

A: was it more than 30 minutes?
B: ya
A: then you're in a relationship

Hello friends, how are you?

-k

Bonus. If you want my advice this weekend. Do not go and see The Final Destination.

Comments

[lily]

I like Gompertz's article and your story with Van VERY MUCH!!

xx