museums epitome of incomprehensibility For the contents of Dream_Amsterdam, it helped that I was looking up Amsterdam museums on Thursday evening, and my host family had talked about seeing a Salvador Dali exhibit (tomorrow!) and then the Van Gogh museum but it was already "ausgebucht" (booked up). Two quirky ones that I probably won't see, but it was fun looking them up: Katzen Kabinet consists of cat art and knickknacks, while the Pianola Museum is all about mechanical pianos. What we saw today: the street art museum called Straat. It made me feel full of...I don't know. Wanting to create something funny and subversive, like writing "epitome of incomprehensibility" with thread and taping it to the wall of the Pine Beach bus tunnel. Why? Because! I did write it on a bench and scratched in on the wall. But mostly I wanted to look at what other people did. It's cool how there were places where people were allowed to collaborate. In different places around the warehouse, which used to be a shipyard, walls encourage graffiti. And then in some parts there are artists' workshops, printmaking shops... Gaaaah. So much to see and absorb. My pictures won't do it justice, but there's a mural at Straat called something like "from weak to hero" where a wild-looking brown-eyed woman is having deer come out of her head. These are her thoughts: weak-seeming - stereotyped as weak - but actually swift and strong and vital. 230520 ... e_o_i edits *scratched it on the wall...and I mean on the wall in the street art museum, not on a tunnel in Dorval, magically, from a distance. 230520 ... e_o_i Today we saw the exhibit on Dali and the architect Gaudi, which wasn't quite what I expected - there were animations of their paintings projected onto the walls and set to music, at a place called Fabrique des Lumières. For the section on Dali, parts of his movies were included as well - I recognized Un Chien Andalou and the animated Destino (I think that's what it's called - it's the one he did with Disney, weirdly enough). While this was cool to watch, I think I preferred the street art museum, because I got a chance to wander around and take my time. ... Also. On a poster, I saw that there's a medieval torture museum next to a flower market. 230521 ... e_o_i Okay, so food in Basel, Switzerland is horrendously expensive, but the regular collection in the Kunstmuseum Basel is free, free, free!!! Today I saw originals by Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall. Also two by Paula Modersohn-Becker, someone my prof. Gerlinde was enthusiastic about - one of the first female modernist painters in Germany. My favourite parts were the surrealists and impressionists. I guess I like new things, if new = about a hundred years ago. Fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? Less relation to it, and many of the religious paintings were repetitive. Yet: "I liked Hans Holbein the Younger's goth phase." I said this to my classmate Grace. Didn't quite qualify for unusual_sentences, but she laughed. 230604 what's it to you? who go blather from