Log-Rolling My Own Trumpet

This was a pleasant surprise.

Yukinori Yanagi (1959- )

A Japanese artist who lives in America. His most famous artwork is a large network of connected perspex boxes, each filled with coloured sand to make a picture of a particular country's flag. This being done, Yukinori let loose the ants, turning the installation into a vast ant farm. The sand carried from box to box, the flags broken down, the metaphor clear.

I like more, I think, the series of Wandering Position drawings (I think this one's from 1996, but it might be 1998) in which Yukinori locked himself for several hours each day in a large perspex box in the company of a single ant, whose movements he followed with a red crayon. Surprisingly, the ant didn't draw the flag of Japan. Wahay, capillaries! More information here.

Look what I found!

A dictionary of French argot. It came up when I was looking for the definition of sous-maquecée, a phrase that appeared in a book I was reading. Who says you learn nothing from Eric Ambler?

Correspondences

I was boiling myself some pasta tubes for lunch, and they came out a bit crunchy.

Lithotripsy

Back again to the hospital for a lithotripsy, to have shockwaves spacked at my groin in order to dislodge or shatter or otherwise incommode the grumpy kidney stone that dwells there. This time the machine didn't work: the nurse tried turning it on and off again, and it still didn't work. It is not a pleasant feeling, when attached to a drip and stark naked under a few tonnes of x-ray / ultrasound machine, to see the operator remove her shoes, stand on a revolving office chair so that she can reach the top of a filing cabinet, and take down the instruction manual. A feeling of general unease only heightened when she then blows the dust off it. But all was well, and I had time to think about what the sound of the shockwaves was actually like. The rather Gogolian simile I came up with was that they sounded rather like a self-willed child hammering nails into a tin tray in order to create some form of art which you will then, as a parent, have to accept with a smile and display in a prominent position, even though it ends up resembling not anything close to art, but rather your best tin tray with a bunch of 6d casing nails hammered into it in seemingly random positions. But then again, the drugs were pleasantly strong.

The Visiting Card

An absolutely fascinating and evocative small exhibition (one fairly cramped little room) of nineteenth-century Spanish visiting cards at the Museo Lázaro Galdiano, which we visited for the first time today and which represents the current maximum comfortable walking distance for the three of us. If other points on the circumference of this circle are as enjoyable, then we're in for a treat. Although, I imagine, the diameter of the circle will gradually decrease over the next few months.

Current Favourite Artist

The Master of the Large Foreheads (fl. c. 1500)

Banel Nicolita (1985- )

Slightly out-of-date information here. The interesting thing about him is that he's one of the very few professional footballers with a Roma background.