Comings and Goings, with Feeling.

'Don't get me wrong. If I come and go like fashion.' - The Pretenders, Don't Get Me Wrong.

Yes, I'm crushing on Chrissie Hynde again.

Crushing crushing crushing. Love the videos and the lyrics. Love this video most of all. Don't we want someone to do that for us?

Yesterday morning at 10 am I ran 7 km on the treadmill today listening to her sing.

When I was done I listened to 10,000 Maniacs sing Verdi Cries, and shed a little tear for the man in room 119.

Afterwards, in solitude, I sat in the steamroom and listened to the water drip off the end of my nose while I watched the ends of my toes. 

I sunk into the herbal bath. I was alone so I could float on my back, pretend to be a fish and gulp air with only my nose and mouth above water while the lights changed colour beneath me.

I showered, and I washed my hair. I talked to a Englishwoman who has lived in the Netherlands for 38 years and no longer speaks English. I made some phone calls, did my face, dried my hair.




For lunch I had coffee, a baguette with ham and cheese and a glass of water and conversation, because I shared a table.

Then I went to the Cobra Museum to see their current exhibit - the China Now exhibition.

I like art. I visit a lot of exhibitions with my museum card.

I see lots of stuff every day that passes me by on the Internet. I visit design and style blogs.

But wow.

Nothing prepared me for the overwhelming intensity of this exhibition.

It's colour, passion, anger and lust all in one. Mostly anger.

The artists whose work is exhibited feel.

Really feel.

And you can't help but feel with them.

My favourites:

• A video installation of a wok, with ingredients being added, the burners being turned up high and when the lid is lifted a different cityscape in the lid. Portrayed on nine different screens, nine different dvds produce nine different images and as you watch you see the cityscapes appear briefly. The way the room is laid out your eye darts from one to another and then just as you change focus you miss the view on the lid.
  
• A video animation of 'night-time' with overtones of death and pain so strong that I almost started to cry.
• A ceramic installation of everyday objects cascading from the ceiling into a pile. White and pure and ordinary. And not at all ordinary. Hats, phones, hammers, pistols, teddy bears, shoes.
  
• An all-white painting of pagodas that seemed to gleam as though there was a light inside it.
• A painting of a mother and child whose eyes shine incredibly bright with tears while the rest of them fades to an almost impressionist-background of blur. The sadness.

The most disarming facet of the exhibition was the use of colour, bright technicolour.

It reminded me of when I was little.

Living in a socialist country, we had lots of toys made in China. But as usual, people always want what they can't have. We wanted western toys because the colours were less vibrant than the Chinese toys, more natural, more lifelike.

I always thought it was a dye or a chemicals thing, that maybe the cheapest dyes were the bright ones. Now I'm not sure.

Maybe we see colour more brightly than the artists do? Maybe it's just more or less rods and cones?

Whatever, it's charming and original and breath-taking.

I had a whole year's emotion in one day.

Now I don't need to feel anything at all until 2009.