Rhode Island Illustrated

So I'm back from Rhode Island with..... 219 pictures. LOL. Three points:

1) There's nothing to do there (we ended up at a tourist attraction called 'Starbucks' where I started laughing because I saw a bunch of Brown Uni kids doing a crossword.. and ended up sitting there doing it myself for 1.5 hours). This is my first time seeing a real house since I left Toronto.
2)Amazing art gallery- the highlight of the trip

3)All the guys are straight and real nerds. :o

LOL. It just crosses my mind every time I leave New York- no more tight jean boys with Chanel glasses and large tote bags!

Robyn and I took the Amtrak to Rhode Island and lo, it was snowing... to make matters worse, two stupid boys were playing on the tracks and our train had to stop for 20 minutes to make sure they were okay. I amused myself by watching bits of Marie Antoinette and I just made the funniest discovery. You know I'm a nerd when I've been pressing the 'pause' button every two seconds. Well I was watching the 'Shoes and Cake' chapter and paused it to examine a pair of shoes when I saw this:

LOL.... do you see what I see? I literally tripped out (and I never use that word :P). Why is a pair of Converse sneakers in an 18th century, French Rococo film??? I had a silent freak out on the train and made Robyn watch it. Now I'll have to show my roomie when she comes back. I wonder why they did that. It's hilarious though because I've been watching this scene at least twenty times and I never noticed that until now. What the frick?

Yeah after that I watched 'Zhou Yu's Train'- this very figurative movie about a poet who writes a poem for a girl he likes and she falls in love with her poems over the poet etc. It's an abstract film starring none other but the great Gong Li..... I watched it because I was on a train. LOL.

So when we arrived at Rhode Island it was snowing.. A LOT and we weren't sure where we were going so Frodo and Sam had to trudge up Mt Doom to find shelter.. Hehe. Look what got caught in the snow. I thought it would be a nice creepy picture to take:

Yeah we stayed at a bed and breakfast. It was really really nice:

The highlight of my trip was the RISD art gallery. There was a special exhibition on foliage, floral and birds within Japanese and Chinese prints which was inspiring. I also got to see the most extensive Japanese kimono/textile collection I have ever witnessed in my entire life. It was heaven. Haha.... and then while passing by a window, we spotted this strange glass room with a ton of paper hanging so we went to look at it. It was a senior project done by an industrial design student at RISD. It's basically an interactive piece of art: she cut up paper into flowers and foliage and strung them up from the ceiling. It was so much fun taking pictures.. It must have taken her ages to cut all these flowers and string them up. It was beautiful though:

Robyn looking up and me being stupid and me being too tall was obscured by paper and 'fontage'.
I was also intrigued by another work by a student which he called 'There Was a Man Who Made a Tree Just so that He could Chop it Down'. I like it. It reminds me of deforestation. The one on the right was one of my favourite pieces from the illustration department- it was painted on clear film. The artist calls it 'Conscience': the way she applied the colour to display the delicate texture made the painting look ephemeral. I loved it:

We tried to wander around but there literally was nothing to see- but we did get Joseph something: Shakespearean Insult Gum.

HAHAHA. I wonder if it tastes like 'spearmint'.

We also stopped by the Brown's bookstore to see what art books they had... I fell asleep reading a book on artists and the meaning behind self portraits. On the way out of the bookstore to eat at an old fashioned diner (very good for very cheap), my eyes fell on this book within the 'literature and culture' section:

I couldn't believe my eyes. It was a total impulse buy but whatever. I didn't read the back cover well enough and assumed it was for the industry only to find out it's more of a critical examination of the standards. I've read almost a chapter- it's interesting. It makes the claim that fashion encompasses the trends in philosophy (that we 'choose' what theories appeal to us: "Fashion naturally also exists among academics and intellectuals. They have to do with subjects are 'in' and which are 'out', which approaches are 'sexy' and which are not. It would be naive to believe that all this is governed by completely rational considerations, since it is just as much a question of constantly shifting taste." p15). Whether this is true or not, I'll have to read on. More posts to come on this book- which so far is a lot better than that Christian book - he actually studied history and dress historians and philosophers like Descartes and Immanuel Kant.