Other visiting friends

I meant to blog last term about a couple of other high school friends who visited me last term. Mimi Harris (who I hadn't seen since my ten-year high school reunion in October 2004), who overlapped with me both at Beverly High and a couple of years at Hawthorne elementary school, went to London on business in November, so I hopped onto the train and went to London to hang out with her and one of her friends (who hitched a ride with Mimi during a layover in New York). This is the day that I finally came to understand the glory of the "mind the gap" meme (I really want to get one of the shirts with that...), and I also created my own meme when we visited the Tate Modern. In one of the abstract art sections (I can't remember the official name of the general type of art in that section of the museum) was a painting that consisted of a brown background with a few orangish stripes. A nearby picture by the same artist had the same background and a single orangish stripe. I was pondering how little effort this took and how pointless this was (and was also reminded of a brilliant scene with John Malkovich in a recent indie movie in which he was an arist and a teacher as a prestigious art school), and every so often when I was ranting about how pointless this picture was, I reiterated (in defense of my opinion) the line, "But it's just a fucking stripe!" OK, so this probably doesn't seem particularly funny at all with the above description, but it became a meme (at least for the day) and was funny then. Or at least I thought it was funny, and the my companions got at least some amusement out of my caustic commentary. I guess that made the painting worth it after all (given the enjoyment that ranting about it gave me), but I still think that that particular piece of "art" is pointless.

Late last term, Maria King (opera singer extraordinaire) took the train down to Oxford to hang out with me for a few hours. She came down from London, which she was visiting from her temporary (few-month) home in Germany. She's now back in her regular home in New York City. Anyway, we hung out for a while and had fun.

Hmmmm... I think that this blog entry would have been much better if I had written about it several weeks ago the way I intended. Ah well, the important message is the following: I hung out with my old friends and had fun. I look forward to a lot more of that!