talktooloose

Very good weekend. After about 10 days of feeling unwell, my body finally seems to have shaken off the virus which made it a good weekend altogether.

There was incredible food, mostly cooked in Snake's new obsession: the pressure cooker. Weekend highlights include a (ready for it?) pig's foot stew and the best coconut rice pudding in history as well as red cabbage in raspberry balsamic.

Sunday morning, we made our first trip to the museum as new members. The membership is a bit of an indulgence for a year but it will allow us to do what we've always wanted to -- go into the museum for an hour at a time without feeling like we've wasted a lot of admission money. We love to go into one room or exhibit and really concentrate then split. So we'll do that many times this year. We saw an excellent temporary exhibition on Italian Art and Design in the 20th Century which showed very good linkages between artistic movements and political/social ones. I confess to a weakness for the monumentalism and futurism, despite the way it dovetailed so neatly with fascism.

I loved the optimism and verve of a lot of the design including the original Olivetti typewriters and the myriad coffee machines. One painting that blew my mind was this one from 1939 by Tullio Crali:

I was also very taken with some of the fashion items and I think a desire to become more knowledgeable about couture is growing in me. Uh-oh.

After the museum, we went to the liquor store and ogled pretty things. Then I went to the green grocers with the dog by way of the park where we played tug of war with myriad sticks and ran around like idiots.

Movies for the weekend:

The Devil Wore Prada: Heinous! Hypocritical! The only—ONLY—good scene was Meryl Streep explaining to the disdainful heroine how exactly the colour of the craptastic sweater she was wearing moved from the world of couture down the ladder to Walmart.
Who Killed the Electric Car?: No surprises but some great quotes and a sense of real waste. The EV1 was a lovely and necessary piece of human design which was (literally) crushed by oil-stained hands. The oil industry and its friends are the enemies of humankind. Hilarious American perspective: NO MENTION of mass transit at all even by the people striving for greener transportation.
The Middle of the World: Small, lovely Brazilian film about a poor family (two parents and five children ranging from 1 to 15) travelling across a thousand miles of Brazil by bicycle to reach Rio de Jenairo where the proud father is sure he will find a job to support his children as a real man should. Along the way, they find warm hospitality and violent indifference. It is a picture of poverty which makes the viewer aware of the degredation of the lives of millions without diminishing their spirit or allowing us to feel we are superior.