I was invited by Liz and her local boyfriend, Henning, to go out for his birthday last night. We went to the Hit Club, which was in the basement of an old municipal building. i don't understand why, but the skaelskor night spots love to be well lit. it's like hanging out in your parents' basement, you can see everyone and everything and there's no mystery. Besides that, most of the people in the bars look like they're either 15 or in their 40's. i suspect a lot of the people closer to my age must have left to go to copenhagen long ago. It's so off putting to be in such a well lit place when you're used to bars being loud, dark places.
I ended up meeting an Irish guy from Derry, named Connor, and we talked about politics and religion and generally chewed the fat. Him and the group he was with are here in Denmark for 3 weeks as a part of a college project. they actually played as a band for the bar (they're music students). He gave me a bracelet made of stones that had little lacquered-on pictures of the virgin mary, then later he gave me his other bracelet, which was a rubber "1Life" bracelet, like the live-strong bracelet things back in the states. I asked him about the bracelet with mary, because he just randomly put it on my wrist. he said it brought him comfort, so i tried to give it back, but he said he didn't need it anymore. he was a lot of fun to talk to. It was interesting to hear his interpretation of the protestant-catholic war and how he felt about it.
Today, i cleaned my bathroom and the room i'm staying in--swept and mopped the floors, opened the windows to let the fresh air in. it was a very nice day, cold but a tolerable kind of cold. I figured i'd go ahead and get it done before meaghan comes back. it'll be a nice surprise for her.
I helped make dinner again last night. My partner, Anna, made lentil soup and home made buns, and i made a huge pot of cabbage. It was great that we had so much food, because our guest artist Richard Launder showed up a few weeks early. We all signed up for meeting times to discuss our work with him. I've never had such an amazing talk with a visiting artist before. He was so insightful and would glean so much from listening to me talk. He understood what i was talking about, and just had a million different suggestions about all of it. They weren't suggestions like, "i think your work could be better if you changed how this looked", but more like he listened to my complaints about working and started suggesting alternate methods of how to get what i want. I didn't have to feel like i was ashamed of using my personal vocabulary when talking about my work-- he understood and actually enjoyed it. As of tomorrow, i'm going to get another type of clay, and start throwing pieces to create sculpture with. I hadn't really considered it as an option because the other times i had done it, it just looked crappy. Talking with Richard reminded me that it was because i was still stuck thinking like a potter, and that i need to think about the wheel as a sculptural tool, not a tool to make finished pieces. I had the same issues to get around when i first started making handbuilt sculptures--i kept making flat bottoms, but since i had to keep working in that vain, i figured out a solution to get 3d forms. I just have to wrap my mind around the idea of making individual components to create a whole composition.
We also talked about art destruction theory by gustav metzger, which apparently is the root of people smashing guitars on stage. Apparently, Pete Townshend was in a class in college with Metzger as his teacher, thus why he smashed his guitar on stage. i was completely unaware of the theory.
Dinner tonight is wild hare. I've never had it before, and it was great watching Melina carve up the hares. They still had their tails! a few pieces of shot fell out while she was carving the second hare, so i'm going to have to be easy about chewing it to avoid breaking a tooth. It smells awesome, and has been cooking all day. She soaked it in milk over night, i'm assuming to help ease the gamey taste.
until next time.
UPDATE: I found one vertebrae and one buck-shot pellet tonight during dinner (which was amazingly tasty), and Richard had his lecture tonight, which was amazing as well. besides ceramics, he does gorilla performance art as well as recorded performance art.
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