darkness and light

The February 2007 exhibition from Visual AIDS and The Body is especially good. All of the exhibits are available at http://www.thebody.com/visualaids/web_gallery/index.html. Maybe it's the darkness in general or from the Rilke quotation in the curator's statement. I am a fan of Sunil Gupta and enjoyed the Tim Greathouse photos in this portfolio ... though they're pretty bleak. It's my melancholy side -- being Gemini, I have sides you know. As a kid, I was moody and probably relish the melancholy at the same time a coworker asked for some of my speed the other day. You know, the speed (aka adrenalin) that usually keeps me running too fast, accepting too many assignments, wanting to see and do too much. But hey, as someone said: I can sleep when I die.

Christie had asked me to find the negatives of the photos from our 1999 trip to the gardens North of Rome. I was somewhat horrified to see that a couple of the photos (one shot of Orvieto cathedral and one of the Pozzo di San Patrizio) had started to deteriorate. The photos are in sheets in an album I got from one of the archival suppliers but of course the container cannot compensate for endangered objects. Still, it was wonderful to see the photos and think again of that trip. Christie and I are probably doing birthday dinner tonight with Janet so we'll dream and try to scheme.

I knew I shouldn't have picked up the phone when Sonny called to ask for help with his résumé. Even though I said "no money," that means "not cash for my pocket" in Sonny-speak. No wonder I'm in a bleak mood. And he knows how to work the weak side: he asked if I didn't want to go see the new show at the Bronx Museum of Art when more importantly he wanted me to get the camera and violin out of the pawn shop on 149th Street. And art does make me weak: the new building of the Bronx Museum of Art, by Arquitectonica, is quite fine. The outside is more distinctive than the inside but it's pretty good and they integrated the older spaces rather well with the new part.

There's been a really interesting conversation on the MARC and arlis-cpdg lists about buildings as names. More precisely, buildings as something other than subjects. I started the conversation when I was thinking about the German/Austrian proposal for an added entry for place of conference/event, publication/distribution, or thesis conferral. When we use place in 710 in MARC, it is usually the place as a stand-in for the jurisdiction. The German/Austrian proposal is for place as venue. This was parallel to the art cataloger's desire to use a building as venue. The conversation has veered over relationships (bibliographical and beyond), FRBR objects, comparisons of AACR/RDA/MARC and other schema, parks as venues, and CPSO's ruling on parks and agencies.

So I'm trying to look for the light ... but someone recently reminded me about the joke that the light at the end of tunnel may be the train coming your way.