I love museums but I'm almost as fascinated by the other people as by the art and artifacts. Today I read in the Arts Section of The New York Times about a photographer Thomas Struth who took pictures of people in museums looking at art. And then inserted some of them in the Prada among the paintings for one show. Hey...I had that idea. Lots of times I get one of us in the picture, too. But sometimes strangers as here in MOMA in 2005.I finished shredding a bunch of old financial stuff from the eighties and early nineties today. I always think I will keep stuff organized, discard it at just the right time and then it ends up jumbled together in a box. There was almost nothing we needed to save in the box but it needed sifting through to be sure of that. And some things needed to be shredded. Although many accounts were defunct and financial institutions had changed their names, etc. a depressing number of things had signatures, driver's license numbers and even Social Security Numbers.
I did find a report from an EEG I had 1990 after having an unexpected faint. They didn't find anything. I decided to save it, though. "The predominant waking activity is a well-organized admixture of 10-11 per second occipital alpha with some intermixed low to medium voltage fast." At least my brain waves were once well-organized.
Slowly stuff moves to the thrift store piles. Including some of the stuff that I saw receipts for in those credit card bills from the twenty years or so ago. And as I decide to keep books I wonder when I will have the time to sit down and enjoy reading them. I have been doing a better job of reading the papers that show up since our subscription to The Wall Street Journal lapsed. (FFP has renewed it now, I think.) As a consequence I have been reading a book I found and decided was a keeper. Memoirs by Tennessee Williams. Published in 1972 it is a stream of consciousness remembrance and diary of what was going on at the moment. I seem to have bought it at Powell's during a trip to Portland. Believe I'll keep it even after reading it. What a name dropper he is!
I suppose that maybe I'll look back on the downsizing of 2007-2008 as something that I did execute on, however slowly and painfully.
