What I did on my Weekend... (OMG I'm 30!)
Sunday was by 30th and so I spent a lovely weekend celebrating.
Saturday started when oneplusme arrived at ours and together with kludge we headed into London to meet up with zellieh, fruufoo, mikej_uk, morganmuffle, jhava and DarkSatanic at Waterloo. Obviously because I was trying to organise things we hit immediate problems because the trains between Soton and London were screwed up and half the underground was closed down. Still we managed to get everyone together at Blackfriars to discover the place we were planning to get food was shut (doh!). At which point we decided that transport being what it was we would head straight to the Barbican and get food there while we waited to meet up with spaglet and pinkdormouse. In some ways I think this actually worked out well as I was the only person who knew everyone and it gave people a chance to get to know each other a little.
Having managed to get everyone into the same place we headed up to the Seduced exhibit. Most people seemed to be taking it deeply seriously, except for us naturally although kludge did overhear one young lady saying to her objecting boyfriend "if you can't laugh at naked people what can you laugh at?" Amusement aside, it was actually an interverting exhibit. The layout was mostly historical with the ground floor being given over to more historical art while the upper floor was devoted to the more modern period (1960s ->).
The 'historical' area had section devouted to Greco-Roman (straight, gay, chan, hemaphrodite, orgy), Chinese, Japanese (scary genitalia and tentacles), Indian (amazing detail on the costumes, jewellry and decorations, amazing lack of anatomical posibility), Renaissencce classical motifs (bestiality from her Majesty's private collection), Persian (straight, gay, circle-orgy), Kinsey stills slideshow and some other stuff but it did get to the point where it was a little hard to differentiate with the shear amount of various body parts. I find if read too many NC-17 fic in a row and the sex just sort of blurs out and becomes meaningless - clearly the same it true with pictures.
It was slightly amusing to see warning notices of certain specific areas - really by the time you were that far into the exhibition you had already got the general idea of what sort of things you were likely to be seeing. I think the warnings were for the areas with photographs/real life images rather than drawing.
Upstairs focused on named (and known) artist including Mapplethorpe (wonderful use of light and shadow and Ouch!), Warhol, Picasso, someone redoing and undercutting Warhol and a wonderful installation which combined Bjork's 'Prayer Of The Heart' with intimate photographs four(?) couples by Nan Goldin. By intimate I mean everything from in flagrante delecto to family/household scenes. My favourate image came at the end of the set involving one of the couples. The couple were fully clothed, hugging and you could only see the face of one of the two people but he seemed so happy. The love in the shot was just so visible and beautifully touching. In the previous parts of the exhibit there had been many emotions from esctasy to boardom (one young lady was trying to read with a very 'just let me know when you are done because you are making the paper bounce' expression) but it was really the first time where it was very much images of lovers rather than people having sex. I know I am a sucker for the whole twue wuv thing. It was a lovely note to end on.
Having made it around and feeling a little 'cocked out' as kludge put it we headed back towards home. Between the fascination of the exhibition and the transport we were a bit late getting home but luckily blondiebunny had gone over to ours early and was able to let clarehooper and alisdairo in and provide them with tea and company until we got back. The evening was rounded out by friends from dance classes/NPL/LGC, Guitar Hero and Singstar in the front room and conversation and Looping Louis in the back room and kitchen. People stagered away in the small hours until fruufoo, spaglet and DarkSatanic and I called it a night around 3am and found somewhere to pass out.
Sunday morning was mostly taken slowly with tea, crumpets and DarkSatanic's continuing his tradition of using my brithday to convert people to Cities. After everyone headed off to brave the transport system, kludge and I wandered over to my parents for a birthday dinner and ended the evening watching Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Torchwood with them on the BBC watch again.
All in all it was a wonderful weekend and great to see people. I just wish someone would event the teleporter so I could see everyone more often. Thank you to all the people who helped make the weekend what it was and for all the best wishes, cards and presents.