Friday, May 07, 2010

Veni Vidi Vici



In our house in Northridge, above the ice machine, there's a special feature pointed out to us when we bought the house long ago. It's a slide projector shelf set up so you can show slides of your travels when guests come for dinner, while they're still stuck at the table.

The Power Point presentation of its day.

"Hey, why's everyone leaving so soon?"

Faced with 600+ pictures from our trip to Italy I hope I have the good sense not to pull out the slide projector here on the blog.

We saw some great art, really great art, first in New York at the Frick and the Metropolitan, and then of course in Italy.


This parrot painting was in New York.

In Italy there are way too many paintings of John the Baptist's head on a platter. People, please! Or of Judith doing the same thing to Holofernes. Why did artists think this was something they should paint?

The platter paintings were especially awful because the whole concept of Italian eating in restaurants is based on course after course, platter after platter, and they never let you start with dessert so we never reached that course.



This was the only dessert we ordered during the trip, and it was at an obnoxious restaurant in NYC on the lower east side. The waiter was a bully and we only ordered this so called "Baked Alaska" because they seemed to have an "eat it or beat it" policy in effect and we wanted to yell at our friends a little longer. It wasn't really Baked Alaska which is meringue baked around ice cream but they can get away with calling it that because they're so hip and the restaurant is so noisy no one would hear you if you complained anyway.

The first picture is an Etruscan sculpture. More on Etruscan art later. No, you can't get up from the table. Sorry.

4 comments:

Linda Davick said...

This is so entertaining and there's no chance we're going to get up from the table.
We want more.

p.s. Loved the signs on the last post.

Namowal (Jennifer Bourne) said...

I had no idea there were so many paintings of John's head on that infamous silver platter. Maybe everyone thought "I'll paint something shocking! That'll make me stand out!"

Pile Girl said...

Yes, we want to hear more about it! And I love that sculpture of the dog with the toga.

booda baby said...

That is so funny - dinner theater gone bad. I honest-to-god love other people's pictures, as long as they bring a story along. My jury's still out on whether the digital ability to take 5 million photos has helped/hurt that story telling part ...

It's the most often heard complaint about Euro-art museums - acres and acres of religious art. Jeeeezus. It sure took us a long time, didn't it, to get over doing art that people already wanted or commissioned. Where's the fun in that?

And finally, yay for you, giving NYC eatery a little slap for bad attitude and mediocre treats. I'm pretty over spending money so they can keep up their hip factor. pft.