March 22nd Spring Equinox, which means Bunnies, Budapest and Bela!

March 22nd

Spring Equinox Surrealism

There's a TV in the communal kitchen which is often on... as I was making lunch today I noticed Robin Williams as Mork from Ork in red spandex with a large silver triangle making The Fonz do mime against his will! I thought: wow, that's rather surreal... and then, about the time my thai stir-fry was ready I watched Mork from Ork kiss Ritchie Cunningham! Awesome t.v. moment! and for surreality it beats out the oddness of watching Arnold Schwartzenegger dubbed into Hungarian whilst in a hotel in Budapest that was fromerly an insane asylum after travelling for 24hours...


Squillion: one of my favourite Jude-isms. A squillion: the opposite of nano


Real fluffy, hoppity-hop brown bunnies have recently appeared around town... their arrival synchronous with the appearance of a young woman in purple leggings, orange hotpants and a yin-yang painted mime makeup. She likes to wander and waft around – a sort –of off-key cirque du soleil escapee, ethereal-lunatic styled fashion-victim who belts out Celine Dion songs while rhapsodizing with the elements and draping herself over benches along the Promenade. There’s no space on the beach unmarked by tourists and their dogs.
It must be Easter in Wales.

Well, I should get back to working on my thesis outline! Only seven weeks left of this semseter, and there's quite a few things to wrap up... then there's the grad show and then the summer semester which will mostly be studio work and my thesis.


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Back from Buda pest!

School of Art Budapest trip March 9-March 15th 2008

Most of me is back -I think I left bits behind -about half a year's worth of lung health and a good portion of my diet. It was impossible to order sensible food from menus in Hungarian –even items on the vegetarian menu had bits of chicken, eggs, sour cream and sausage bits dropped into it. ‘Lost in translation’ was good excuse to eat goulash! The food was good… totally calorific!

It was a nightmare getting to Budapest –bus not showing up, storm of the winter hitting, second bus showing up, but making sound like asthsmatic hamster –eventually crawling along the side of the highway at 4am, massive lorries hurtling through the darkness looking threatening and impressive in their size and speed… eventually limping the bus in to a highway pit-stop with overpriced triangular food, fluorescent lights and large clocks which ticked away the minutes until our flight left –without us –and then another seven hours- before we re-routed (all 50 of us) to a different airport to catch a flight on a cattle call Ryan Air Flight… and to arrive in Budapest at the overly institutional looking, former insane asylum converted to a hotel -a full 24 hours after we’d supposed to have begun our journey in Aberystwyth… I’d been awake for over 36 hours by that point and everything was a little cartoonish.

Straight jacket for one and straight to bed!

Budapest was FANTASTIC once we made it there. Budapest was a feast for the senses!

I went to museums and galleries, I saw Egyptian, Italian and Eastern European Art works from various millennia centuries. I saw palaces, churches, and saw a contemporary ballet performance in the State Opera house and sat at the burgundy velvet balcony staring up at the painted inner dome. Best moment: when the Harley Davidsons ridden by real bikers roared onto the stage and carried away the prima ballerina. You just don't see that everyday!

I viewed castles, monuments, bastions, sculptures, tiled roofs and walls pockmarked by shrapnel from WWII. I walked across red carpets, on marble stairs, in gutters, and alley-ways, up hills and on the last metro-train of the night.

I ordered what I thought was hot chocolate and discovered the joys of 'drinking pudding'

I learned to say ‘thank you’ in Hungarian in a number of tones which implied: thank you! As well as ‘sorry, I don’t speak your language!


Budapest was an impressive array of architecture, ornamentation, statues, gargoyles, statues, the dirty Danube, relatively reliable transit, no buildings built higher than the domes of the parliament buildings

smog, soot, exhaust... amazing art collections housed in incredible buildings, 40' high statues of women, caverns, turrets, domes, public bathing houses which were cool to visit –but I stayed out of the ‘People Soup’ while three of the Quartet (each of us representing a different decade) visited the baths I wandered around by myself was amused by getting hot drinking pudding in a cup when I thought I was getting hot chocolate, looked at public art, saw mistletoe growing in trees, admired castles, gazed from a safe distance at horrifically ‘new fangled’ modern buildings, tromped around a moat… and under the leafless branches, off the beaten path, under an ivy-splashed stone wall I discovered the neglected bust of Bela Legosi!

Poor Bela.

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FROM WIKIPEDIA:

Béla Lugosi (October 20, 1882 – August 16, 1956), was an iconic stage and film actor best known for his portrayal of Count Dracula in the American Broadway stage production (1927), and subsequent film (1931), of Bram Stoker's classic vampire story.
Lugosi, the youngest of four children, was born as Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó in Lugos, at the time part of Austria-Hungary (now Lugoj, Romania), to Paula de Vojnich and István Blasko, a baker. He was raised in a Roman Catholic family, [1] and had a sister, Vilma. Lugosi started his acting career on the stage in Hungary in several Shakespearean plays and in other major roles. He began appearing in Hungarian silent films under the stage name Arisztid Olt. During World War I, he served as an infantry lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian Army.
Lugosi died of a heart attack on August 16, 1956 while lying on a couch in his Los Angeles home. He was 73. Rumor has it that Lugosi was clutching the script for "The Final Curtain" a planned Ed Wood project, at the exact moment of his death. [3]
Lugosi was buried wearing one of the many capes from the Dracula stage play, per the request of his son and fifth wife, in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Contrary to popular belief, Lugosi never requested to be buried in his cloak; Bela Lugosi, Jr. has confirmed on numerous occasions that he and his mother, Lillian, made the decision. At his funeral it is reported that Peter Lorre looked over at Vincent Price and asked, "Should we stick a stake in his heart just to be sure?"

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Poor Bela! –after snapping a couple of pictures of Bela I was instantly treated to an internal soundtrack for the rest of the day of all the Peter Murphy songs that were once part of my audio immersion that have been stored… somewhere in my audio archive. It’s been awhile since I had Bauhaus and Murphy on heavy rotation on my cd player, but evidently I have an internal musical archive that is extensive. Upon returning to Aberytwyth I poked around online and did some Bela research …and then moved onto Peter Murphy and Bauhaus. I’d still listen to Peter Murphy read a phonebook, or even a tax form.

http://www.petermurphy.info/intro.html


Perhaps because Wales is wonderfully disconnected and occasionally navel-gazing in its focus culturally speaking, and because I’m a student without TV, an established social network (we’re all transient here, it seems,) and other excuses, I had no idea that Bauhaus has just launched a new, and its last, CD Go Away White on March 4th, 2008. What was I doing during this momentous event hmmm…working at the Art School from 9:30am-6:30pm.

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfmfuseaction=blog.view&friendID=34133313&blogID=338078373

I wonder what the ‘incident’ was that caused the band to decide to not tour the album and to just call it a day.

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