|
|
10:54 p.m. - July 06, 2002 But then again, Howard Menken is dead, so there's really no point in trying to capture the music styles of The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast. As great as Mulan was, the music was okay at best, or rather, not as memorable as the other two movies I mentioned in this. (note: in this Mary Shelley documentary, they have this woman dressed up as Mary Shelley and this actress is "Mary Shelley." That's just weird and disconcerting to me. By the way, yes, I have read Frankenstein. I am not a fan of it because it bored me. And hee-hee...they had this "section" of the documentary that is entitled, "When Mary met Shelley". Now, that's just funny.) Anyway, strange to me that this isn't what I wanted to write about when I clicked on "Add an entry". Well, I was just going to write about Deutsches Museum, which I visited today. It's huge. Huge, huge, huge. There are a bunch of cars, airplanes, boats (they even had this cool little niche that was made to look like part of a cruise liner). The museum just went on forever. But what I wanted to write about was the special exhibit, The Two Faces and it was kind of neat because they found a way to make an art exhibit all science-y. So, they started off simply, with prints and sketches of portraits, then by the end of it, computerized techniques for portraiture and digital photos. So I did see my Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann face-colleges (Hausmann is a jerk, by the way. Hannah Hoch was the only female artist in the Berlin Dada group, and she was only allowed in that elite, chauvanistic group because she was having an affair with Hausmann. He treated her like dirt, basically abused her and if I remember correctly, marginalized her role in the group--she was not given an active role, like the other male artists. Anyway, Hoch is now a well known artist. So there, Hausmann, hah!) Ahem. Okay, anyway, there were several neat animated portraits--first of all, they were so realistic. I'll start with Elle. She was in this huge room, and basically one person at a time can go in this room. You know that feeling sometimes when you walk by a painting, and the eyes of the subject posing in the picture follows you from one end of the room from the other? Well, Elle was like that. Only since it was an interactive portrait, her eyes literally followed you. The woman before me lasted about 30 seconds before she got creeped out. I went in to see if I could stay in there longer and I did fine...then all of a sudden, Elle was looking straight at me and then her face started coming in closer. I freaked. It was like seeing a jumbo monster head coming straight at you to make a meal out of you. The other woman and I laughed uncomfortably while admiring the realism of the project. The other one was not scary. It was a touch activated screen with this bald, realistic woman (remember, it's a portrait). You'd touch the screen and she'd react. If you touched her ear, she'd shake her head. Her eye, and she'd blink. One cheek, she'd laugh. The other cheek, she'd make a kissy face. Her lips, she'd kiss. That sort of thing. It was a lot of fun to see what she'd do. I'm sort of amused that I'm calling these computer creations "she." But then some people name their cars or guitars, and they are always "she." Today I also cleaned up a little bit (though my room is still a cluttered mess, but what do you expect from one who is packing and getting ready to move home?) I'm also starting to take down my pictures and clippings and comics from the walls, so I can feel like I'm actually cleaning my room out, and so I can get it all over with. That's all I care about at this point. I think as hard as moving from one place to another is, it's even more difficult when one has to move from one country to another. What a pain in the neck...
|