Grrr.
Why “Grrr,” you ask?
“Grrr” because it’s 5:30am and I woke up about half an hour ago with my heart racing like I’d just run the 100-yard dash in world-record time and of course I can’t go back to sleep, so I’m up and I’m not going to get to sleep again ’till at least midnight, the thought of which exhausts me.
“Grrr” because I’ve been working on a film festival and the projectionist just came by yesterday to test out his equipment and as it turns out the projection area is about 1/2 the size it should be and now I’m left scrambling either to find a new lens for the 16mm projector (about as likely as finding a set of eight matching absinthe spoons in the “ear” pattern in mint condition lying in a Tiffany-blue bag on my doorstep this very morning) or to move some of the screenings to a smaller venue.
“Grrr” because there are two houseflies circling my computer and I keep trying to spray them with the compressed air I use to dust my keyboard, hoping it’ll freeze ’em just like that fly-nap stuff my friends used to use in biology class but of course, like most of my schemes, nothing interesting happens.
On the other hand…I finally located a scan of one of my favorite paintings. The one and only time I went to France, I was roaming the Musee d’Orsay (which hosts one of the world’s largest collections of Victorian art) and I stumbled (almost literally–Victorian art can be painfully boring at times) into a gallery completely dominated by Jean Delville’s The School of Plato, an outrageously lush painting of twelve scantily clad, sylphlike men, languidly lolling at the feet of an equally willowy Plato, who bore a striking resemblance to most modern depictions of Jesus Christ. It was weird because, like, (a) it was totally gay, (b) it was totally blasphemous, and (c) it was hanging in a major museum and was therefore validated as one of the premier pieces of Victorian art, like, ever. Which makes me pause and say, yo, Victoria, wassup wit’ you and your obliquely lovesexy regime? Women were closing their eyes and thinking of England, but men got to pierce their dicks and lollygag half-nekkid with other men? Y’all was some freaks, indeed….
Anyway, I didn’t have the chance to get a postcard of the piece, but I thought, no biggie, it’s a major painting in a major museum–I’ll find one eventually.
Wrong.
Either the painting’s proven really difficult to reproduce, or (my guess) the museum’s not quite ready to vaunt it as a prize collection piece, because it’s an impossible-to-find image. It’s not even featured in most of the Musee d’Orsay books and catalogues I’ve happened to come across. So when I found it the other day almost by accident, I was pleasantly surprised.
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