Areas of Unrest

13 May 2007 - Arts Week

I did all sorts of arty stuff this week. Tuesday night was Speakeasy, which I made it to for a change. I was lukewarm towards the theme ("The Morning After") but Loren Niemi was one of the featured tellers and I find his material interesting. The open mike tellers were rather disappointing. One first-timer told a rambling and pointless piece about alcohol poisoning, for example. Another person had some very funny material, but didn't quite pull it together with an ending. The greatest revelation of the night was that a woman who tells there often and has the foulest mouth around is an ordained minister.

Then, Thursday at lunchtime, Chris and I walked over to Artomatic. We particularly wanted to see the peeps dioramas from the Washington Post contest and those were conveniently at the entrance. We wandered around maybe half of the other exhibits. I tend to like the photography best, though there was also some intriguing glass sculpture. I liked maybe a quarter of what I saw, which is par for the course at an unjuried show. Maybe all of the really great stuff was up on the 8th floor, which we never made it to.

Finally, I went to a poetry reading on Thursday evening. That's not something I would normally do, but I found the idea of a joint reading by the poets laureate of the U.S. and England to be an interesting idea. The reading was at the Library of Congress, which is always a pleasant place to go and was free, so why not? Donald Hall (the U.S. poet laureate) has written some poems I like and the final piece he read (about a man on his 200th birthday) was quite nice. Andrew Motion (the British poet laureate) read poems by a few up and coming British poets, as well as his own. I particularly liked one called "Phrase Book" by Jo Shapcott, as well as a piece by Simon Armitage. I was also impressed at how many people were there - more than I've seen at any previous event I've been to in that auditorium.

I suppose that the story swap I went to last night at Bill's also qualified as an arts event. As might some shopping for needlepoint supplies, as I want a small project to take with me while traveling. That's about it for weekend activities. I'd planned to do a lot of things, of course, but a few late nights inevitably take their toll and most of my weekend was devoted to the art of the nap.