not.in.paris

We went to Oxford yesterday: all four of us.

First of all, we walked out to see some of the colleges, which didn’t interest me in the slightest but which everyone else discussed with gusto because my brother’s applying to Oxford and wants to know which colleges to apply to.

Then we went to the Pitt Rivers museum and looked at the textile exhitibiton that was there and then at some of the other exhibits. I found the writing equipment stuff to be quite interesting.

After that, we ate lunch in Blackwell’s (I swear that the cafe there must be my favourite cafe place on earth) and then looked around. I bought two books: The Black and the Scarlet, by somebody I can’t remember, and Se7en 7Ies (on the cover the second 7 is upside down, so it looks like an L) by James Something. Haven’t started either of them yet.

After that we went to the Modern Art Oxford and saw some exhibitions there. First we saw some photographs by Ansel Adams. I wasn’t that impressed: they all looked like he’d got a lucky shot (obviously it’s more than luck for him to have that many ‘lucky’ shots, but it didn’t feel that way) or that it only looked nice because he was photographing pretty things. What’s more, all the photos were of pretty national parks: I’d have liked to have seen some variation!

Here’s an example:

There was also a thing by Mircea Cantor, which was undoubtedly the most pretentious art I’ve ever seen. The exhibiton consisted of three things: a peacock and a peahen in a giant cage, with a giant cage inside it, with another cage inside that; a photograph of a tree with a wooden thing on it; and a carpet suspended from the ceiling. What the fuck does it mean? I have no idea.

The one thing I did quite like was the work by Katie Paterson. It consisted of: a phone number in neon letters on the wall (when called, you get the sounds of ice at the Vatnajökull glacier melting) and a piano playing Beethoven. However, this was no ordinary Beethoven: this was Beethoven that had been beamed into the moon and then sent back, with some bits of it being absorbed by the moon, then played on a piano where the keys went down and the sound came out but there was nobody sitting there. All good fun.

And now it turns out that one of my best friends arrived in Oxford just as we left and went to see most of the same places.