That's what they had trained all the parrots to say in Aldous Huxley's "Island." It was a pretty neat idea.
Anyway, here and now I'm back in Paris but still on vacation, so I went to see an exhibit I'd been reading about that was showing at la Musée Guimet. This is one of the best museums in Paris for Asian Art anyway, but the current exhibit definitely adds some high-tech "spice." It's a set of paintings and videos and art instal- lations by a guy named Rodolphe Gombergh. He uses the radiography images that the museum creates when it "looks inside" its sculptures to get clues about how they were made, and then he turns them into art. Sometimes he creates paintings based on the images, other times he takes the radiography images them- selves and integrates them into video projects. The showpiece of his current exhibition there, when you first walk into the room it's situated in, appears to be an almost psychedelic video of colorful, beneath-the-scenes looks into several of the Buddha sculptures that the museum owns. It's neat just as a video, but it gets neater. When you walk a little closer to the images playing on the big-screen TV, suddenly another set of images appears. Hovering in midair about five feet in front of the screen is a second movie, this one in the form of 3-D holographic images, of the same Buddhas. You can walk right up to them. You can look through the hologram images of the Buddha to see the background images of the Buddha. You can walk up to the Buddha and try to touch him. You reach out and grab and you grab empty air. You get all intellectual on the Buddha's ass and try to walk around him, to see him from another angle, maybe catch a clue that way. Doesn't work. He blinks out of existence the moment you try any of that tricky stuff. Finally, you realize that the only way to truly apprec- iate the foreground Buddha is just to relax and hang out in the optimum viewing spot and and appreciate the foreground Buddha as he dances in front of the background Buddhas dancing in the video. To really get into the piece, you pretty much have to be here and now. It's a really kickin' piece of art. It made me smile, and it made me think positively of FFL, and of all the cool, weirdass conversations that we have here that sometimes provide the same reminder. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/JjtolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
