Icon drawn by the wonderful and talented Petimetrek. It's what you like that makes you interesting, not talking about what you don't like. - Taliesin Jaffe, The Wednesday Club
- That’s a kind of critic’s question or an academic’s question….. What it’s actually about is what happens in the play. That’s what it’s about. I’ve been asked that about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern now for about forty years and the answer is it’s about two courtiers of Elsinore. …
One doesn’t write these things so that there is a secret ‘aboutness’ which the audience is supposed to guess or arrive at. That’s not how it is. It’s a storytelling art form. You’re telling a story. It’ll chime this way or that way for people who are listening to the story…. [I]t’s a story about some characters and a story that is trying to hold your attention. If it succeeds, that’s what it’s trying to do.
My partner and I have a running joke with a friend. Every time he goes on holiday we increase the quantity of beans in his flat.
The first time we bought ~30 cans of kidney beans and hid them around the house like some Easter egg hunt thing but with beans.
The Second time we bought ~6kg dried white beans and hid those in various places. Nearly every receptacle that could safely hold beans became the home of beans. My personal favourite was emptying an oat milk carton, very carefully washing and drying it, filling it with beans and then just putting it back among several other cartons.
He went on holiday again a couple of weeks ago. Obviously there is an expectation of bean-based shenanigans. And obviously we have to beat our previous efforts.
Our friend has (had) a mosaic on his wall of the famous Marilyn Monroe Pop-Art by Andy Warhol. He made the mosaic himself. Over the last couple of weeks we have spent hours and hours assembling a frame, drawing up a pattern and gridding out a 70 x 70 frame and gluing an untold amount of beans to it. I have spent over 21 hours gluing beans to a frames.
For the last couple of days I ended up going to bed at 5:00 am because I lost track of time whilst experimenting with which types of glue works best with different beans (I now have *opinions* on this, y’all). The day of our friend’s return we spent the morning and afternoon grouting the piece and wiping it down and wiping it down again and wiping it down again because grout is just like that. In the evening we went to install the mosaic, just a few hours before his return. Here’s a comparison between the original and our clearly superior replication, and the new piece installed in its rightful place.
I will never get over how weird it feels to have tragic and emotional chapters of your life where you just also still go to work, and the grocery store, and see funny videos online all while feeling such paralyzing fear and heartache
