I am loving the new design for my blog site. It makes me look competent, professional and rather shiny. This, of course, is utter nonsense and just shows you what good window dressing will do. It’s the blogging equivalent of ten tons of tit tape and an air brush, but I love it anyway. It hides the fact that I am sitting here with a huge spot on my chin covered in toothpaste and my hair piled on top of my head with one of the kid’s scrunchies thinking: ‘It’s probably time I made the effort to put on some proper clothes (and not my jogging bottoms, rather than my fairy outfit, I hasten to add). Don’t you just love the anonymity of the internet?
For all you know all of this blogging could be an elaborate tissue of lies. I could be a twenty one year old chinchilla breeder called Mitzi with hair extensions and twelve inch nails. I’m not, by the way. The nails thing would make it almost impossible to type anything, certainly not in the same room as the keyboard anyway. And as for the name Mitzi. I would have long been in prison by now for murdering my deluded parents for saddling me with what is in effect the name of a small dog that lives in some Louis Vuitton luggage.
I am a bit slow to experiment with technology and it has taken me this long to work out that there are hundreds of lovely templates available in the Wordpress archives. I had a wonderful time last night when I should have been boning up on the world of Renaissance Art, trying them all out for size and taking them for a test run. For some reasons I am drawn to all the ones with black backgrounds which look very technical and important. Unfortunately, due to my deteriorating eyesight I couldn’t actually read any of the text on them, and then I decided that my mother would complain as well, so I binned that idea after staring longingly at it for some time.
It’s amazing how much you can do when you’re putting off other things. I also decided that as you can customise the picture at the top of the site that I would. I had no idea how to go about it. It is, it turns out relatively simple. It took me an hour to find this out, along with much cursing and wailing. This is because the instructions fail to take into account that I too am relatively simple. Anyway. I did want to upload one of my own pictures, but I only really have pictures of the family on my p.c. and as much as I like to destroy their dignity and privacy by writing about them, I do draw the line at people actually being able to recognise them in the street. Just in case one of my regular bloggers turns out to be a psychotic axe maniac with a penchant for butchering small children in their beds. I did have an excellent picture of Jason pointing at a huge poster that says ‘Safety First!’ and looking very wise and strokey beardy, and I think he can defend himself from axe murderers so I gave it a go. Unfortunately it was the wrong dimensions to fit the available space and although I could size it, for some reason I could only get it to give me a picture of his ankles. His ankles weren’t very inspiring, love them though I do, so I abandoned that idea.
Then I thought about my cousin Tom, who is a graphic designer and who comes up with brilliant ideas. Unfortunately by the time I thought about him it was about 11.00 p.m. and I didn’t really think he would appreciate a call from a frantic me, asking him to whip something up which expressed my deep nature and delicate soul in the next five minutes. He is an undoubted genius, but probably not at eleven o’clock at night. I am going to mail him and ask him later though, because I think he will do a brilliant job and it will be the icing on the undoubtedly delicious cake of my new virtual makeover (grovel, lick, spittle, grovel).
Then I remembered that you can sometimes get free images from Googling and that they might have something that would do. I found a lovely site and some quite nice pictures, and they said that I didn’t have to sign up, or tell them my thoughts on the situation in Eastern Europe, or who I think will win the next Eurovision song contest, I could just have them. I was very impressed and picked one. It then gave me lovely instructions but said that the one catch was that I had to insert a hyperlink saying how fabulous they were. I managed to load the picture with relative ease, but it then took me another twenty minutes to do the link, which you will now find in my blogroll as I still can’t do text hyperlinks at all. It is the next thing on my list of things to learn so that I can carry on avoiding learning things about Italian art.
So, I hope you like the site. It’s a bit spangly, it’s a bit new, but remember, it’s the same old bollocks content, so rest assured that’s not going to change. In fact, due to my insane interest in blogging at the minute, it’s likely to go from bad to worse. Hey ho.
Despite my best efforts to avoid any real intellectual work, I am making headway with the Vasari book, mainly because the number of books I need to review has started stacking up again, and I still have to read that book that Caron lent me six months ago. Also, I’m so bored of Vasari that I am actually reading it so that I can just get the damn thing over with and move on to something else. Remember I said yesterday that it promised to be racy and full of thrill packed gossip? Well, it has picked up a little. That’s probably because I’ve actually managed to read 210 pages instead of forty pages, sheer volume alone must account for some gossip being inserted between the interminable lists of paintings.
Remember: ‘I go there so you don’t have to.’ So here is what I have found out so far:
- Paolo Uccello got very cross when he was working at a monastery where all they fed him was cheese. One day he got so cross that he ran away and refused to come back until they stopped feeding him so much cheese.
- Filippo Brunelleschi might have been talented enough to vault the Dome in Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence but he was an insufferable prig who was always being mean to his so called ‘friends’. Apparently he pulled a hilarious stunt with ‘the Fat Man and Matteo’, but we are never privy to the details (presumably much like the Monty Python joke, it was so hilarious it would have killed you on contact). He also did a cunning ruse with an egg which was so exciting I can’t possibly relate it here.
- Donatello was too lazy to look after his farms properly. They never tell you that in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
- Piero Della Francesca was excellent at painting peasants leaning on spades.
- Antonella Da Messina was exceptionally good at varnish. In fact he revolutionised the world of varnish. He did this by stealing some revolutionary varnish recipes from a bloke in Brugges. How noble.
- Fra Filippo Lippi actually was quite exciting. He ran away from an order of monks so he could pursue painting and shagging. He got kidnapped by a bunch of Barbary pirates and was kept in chains for eighteen months until he did a portrait of the pirate king and they let him go. One of the Medicis locked him in a room to try and make him finish a painting he had commissioned. He got so overcome with lust for loose women that he tore the bed sheets into strips, knotted them together and escaped through the window so he could assuage his heat filled loins. He brought an entire convent of nuns into disrepute when he ran away with and impregnated one of their order. Generally he was not the Messiah, he was a very, very naughty boy. Good on him I say. Apparently he wasn’t very good at painting hands though, so he quite often covered them up with bits of cloth. Fair play. Apparently L.S. Lowry was crap at horses, particularly their legs, which is why, if he ever felt the need to put a horse in his pictures, they are always behind walls. It’s why my paintings are all painted black. I’m crap at everything so I just paint them behind a large, black tablecloth.
- Lots of painters, according to Vasari, were total nobodies who were all employed as sheep and goat herders and then were miraculously discovered by troupes of roving art Svengalis who were out on a picnic and happened to spot their artistic talent. They did this, not because they were herding their sheep in an artistic manner, but because they were so possessed by the power of art that they drew in sheep pooh with their crooks and stuff. The hills around Florence must have been awash with artistically stifled goat herds and picnickers with a keen eye for perspective during the Renaissance.
- I have worked out that when Vasari goes; ‘It was so beautiful that I have no words to describe it’, that he probably didn’t actually see it at all and can’t be bothered to make something up in case someone blows his cover. Lazy, lazy, lazy.
So, there you have it. The highlights of the Italian art scene during the Renaissance so far. I’ve got another three hundred pages left to read, so if anything else exciting crops up, I will be sure to let you know. You can write and thank me later when you’ve dazzled some bright young thing at a dinner party with your encyclopaedic knowledge of the cheese hating ways of Paolo Uccello and consequently made beautiful love to them all night long. It’s all down to me, me, me.
Other things that have been happening in my tiny world are as follows:
I found out more about the delights of Tallulah’s farm trip, mainly through earwigging furiously. Here is the conversation between Tilly and Tallulah over dinner on the night of the fateful farm trip:
Tallulah: ‘I saw loads of animals at the farm Tilly.’
Tilly: Supremely disinterested. She knows all about farms already. It’s no big deal to a nearly nine year old: ‘Did you?’
Tallulah: Looking for a rise: ‘Yes! I saw some piglets this big.’ Gestures with thumb and forefinger to twenty pence size.
Tilly: Clearly couldn’t care less and is not at all impressed by the idea of midget pigs: ‘Yeah?’
Tallulah: Thinks: ‘And, and we saw some birds in a cage and it was really sad because they couldn’t fly. They were all brown and they had spots on, but I don’t know what they were called.’
Tilly: Interested now. This could be her chance to shine and show off her superior knowledge of all things bird/animal – In a patronising voice: ‘Are you sure they were birds Tallulah? They could have been moths or something.’
Tallulah: Looks incredulous: ‘Tilly! Don’t be stupid. Of course they weren’t moths. They weren’t moths because they had beaks. Moths don’t have beaks. And they had little clucky feet and circles. I JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY WERE. O.K.?’
Tilly carries on eating her tea, saying nothing in the hope that the subject will be forgotten as quickly as possible, and trying to look as if she were only trying to trip Tallulah up, and not that she really did think they were moths.
I am wondering if what Tallulah saw were some battery hens. They don’t tend to keep battery hens in farm parks though, due to it upsetting people and Jamie Oliver coming round and shouting a lot. I’m not going to ask because I don’t want to spend the next three weeks explaining in minute detail the nature of battery farming. I’ve already had to do this once with Tilly during a particularly miserable period of her insisting on eating chicken nuggets. It made both of us miserable and didn’t stop her craving chicken nuggets. Tallulah, with her obsession about death, which has been dormant for some time now, would undoubtedly milk it for all it’s worth, and I’m in too fragile a state of mind to cope at the moment.
Oscar has learned to say ‘shhh!’ and put his finger on his lips. He doesn’t really know why, but it is very cute and he is doing it mostly for comic effect. He did hit the nail on the head beautifully last night at dinner though, more by luck than judgement.
Jason and I were just finishing our dinner and Oscar demanded another banana for his fourth pudding (yogurt, chocolate egg and the first banana). I wondered if he was just mucking about, but he was quite insistent on receiving another ‘nana’ forthwith, so I gave in. He then broke it in two, waved it round his head with a flourish and dropped half of it on the floor. He looked at me and said: ‘Uh oh!’ I said; ‘Never mind. Just eat the other bit.’ He took one bite, and chewing noisily threw the rest at the washing machine. He looked at me and said: ‘Naughty!’ and then made a very solemn face just as I was about to tell him off, pursed his lips, put his finger to it and said: ‘Ssshhhhh!’
I tried not to laugh, dear reader, I really did. For laughing at such matters undermines the whole fabric of the disciplinary procedure and means that you’re making a rod for your own back later on. Unfortunately I caught Jason’s eye whilst I was trying to be very stern. He wasn’t trying to be very stern, and we both dissolved into fits. Consequently Oscar now thinks all he has to do is say: ‘Ssshhh!’ to be absolved of any heinous crime he may care to commit. As the lovely song says: ‘There may be trouble ahead…’
