Last Weekend

Sunday. Off to Tiffany & Co., where we were helped by an associate reminiscent of über actress Uma Thurman. Then it was chic and tony Robson Street for some chow at celebrity haunt Cin Cin. The sign on the door said Open at 5:00PM, so we improvised and lunched at the IDIBC award-winning Tropika instead. We sat across from A-List news anchor Mi-Jung Lee. The afternoon ended with a jaunt over to the VAG for the Monet To Dalí exhibition.

Since I'm on a roll dropping names left and right, Suzanne Vega owns one of my B&W prints. I have an autographed copy of Hans Fenger's The Langley Schools Music Project, and happen to know somebody who once got Sarah McLachlan's husband upset by accidently sitting on his jacket at the Juno Awards. And when people say "Les Miz", I know they mean Les Misérable, that's how "in" I am.

Toodle-loo for now!

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On a more serious note, I would recommend the Monet to Dalí show. The paintings and sculptures are the real things, on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art. I was especially thrilled by one of the side rooms: flanking Rousseau's Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo were a Max Ernst and a Dalí (see paintings below).

The exhibition catalogue, good as it is, is no substitute for looking at the originals, more like frottage. The Matisses hanging on the walls were more vibrant than the reproductions of them in the book, for instance, and a sense of scale is altogether lost in printed form—Dalí's The Dream is physically rather small, requiring very small strokes and a steady hand to render the tiny background figures, something not apparent to the reader.





So yeah, it's worth the trip down there, if not just for the people watching.