Saturday, May 08, 2004

Blogging from On the Road (where are you Jack Kerouac?). This is being written from the departure lounge at Arlanda Terminal 2. Free internet access due to a system failure and me ringing the 24 hour help number and they providing me with an access code for 1 1/2 hours free time online. This trip is looking good from early signs.
Last night I took the bus from Umea to Stockholm arriving at 6am...walking the city streets while the wasted party people from the night before made their ways home...spoke to a few who seemed to be very loved up on something :)
I walked over to the beautiful Skeppsholmen...really a stunning place..and waited for the Museum of Modern and Contempory Art to open...slept in the park there beneath the new foliage upon the oaks and had dreams filled with the bird songs around me....awoke at 10am when the Museum of Modern Art opened...A great little collection they have on show..it's free and the rooms are spacious. It is not a particularly diverse collection and Pablo Picasso seems to be thought of as the highpoint in modern art (I can understand this position...but they were selling books on Mark Rothko but had none of his work in the collection)
I watched an hour of the Andy Wahol film Chelsea Girls....What can I say- It was made in 1966 and runs for three hours and fifteen minutes. Big Brother and the other doco-soaps owe more than the proverbial 15 minutes of fame to Andy Warhola...Chelsea Girls is the more intensly engaging, more sophisicated parent of doco-soaps with the added element of Art. Two screens, creative camera work, use of both color and black and white with an honesty that blows Big Brother (excuse the pun) out of the bedroom. Visit the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and see it!
The final joy of the museum was Giorgio De Chirico's Le Cerveau De L'Enfant (The Brain of the Child) painted in 1914...I read about this painting for years from Breton and Deuchamp and then last year I learnt it was actually in Sweden.....It is a piece of work I will have to think about for a while as it was really a bit of shock to see it...
After the museum I went to a once favorite haunt Saturn Return but was severely disapointed to see that the posure club culture seems to have infiltrated there to the expense of what was once a trance journey for all...irrespective of looks or orientation.
Finally I placed 5 copies of my CD in Multi Kulti music shop....a really fine establishment and really nice people. Then lunch at the Hare Krishna restaurant and to the airport where I managed to sleep 3 hours. Here is a cheap electronic copy of The Brain of the Child:



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