Strange Brouhaha

Saturday, February 04, 2006

Bitching About Stuff

I find it amazing and kind of sad that every single time we go to the boondoggle, I come out with something new to complain about. Granted, last time it was that I smelled like an onion, but it was still something. It probably says more about me than it does about the Overture Center itself.

One of the exhibits at the galleries was called "Miss Annie Mae's Hats," a fascinating exploration of the black church hat tradition. There are some really nice hats in this collection, all of them owned by one woman, who wore them to her church in Milwaukee over 70 years. It was really neat, and I don't even like hats. The exhibit is arranged in a big wave in the middle of the gallery, with each hat on its own roughly-human-high stand.

The thing that I want to complain about was the part of the exhibit created by a textile specialist at the University of Wisconsin. She selected eight of the hats to research and write about, and each of those hats was given a plaque on the wall, with a writeup and photograph. Now, I'm not smart about this kind of thing, but in each case, the photograph was basically not color-matched AT ALL to the actual hat. They were some of the worst photographs I've ever seen: I couldn't find the hats in the exhibit until Savannah pointed them out to me. I wish there were examples on the net somewhere, but there aren't. I offer two: one of the photos was of a dark brown and light tan appliqued felt hat...except the actual hat was black and khaki! The way the exhibit was arranged, I was able to get very, very close to the hat, and it was definitely black, not a dark brown. The other one I remember was a photo of a garishly ugly pink hat, and the original was a very nice muted burnt orange. Perhaps our more photographically-inclined friends can explain this--how does this happen? In the modern age of digital photography, isn't something like this pretty much deliberate? It was kind of shocking. If I was the milliner I'd be upset. Heck, I'm not the milliner and I'm upset.

The other complaint I have is about the show we saw. Actually, as I said to Savannah, it wasn't actually a show, it was a bunch of performances. This was a dance concert, and each piece was separated by dead time for costume changes--in one case, the costume change was longer than the piece itself! Can you imagine Shakespeare with three to five minutes separating each scene? Or a symphony with three to five minutes separating each movement? The company that we saw really needs to plan a coherent concert, not throw together a loose collection of performances.

Oh wait...there is one other thing. There were three performances at the boondoggle tonight, and each one of them had intermission AT THE SAME TIME. Who schedules this?

1 Comments:

  • Laziness, pure laziness. Getting color-matched photos out is, at this point, trivial for someone who has their work flow set up correctly -- and it don't take much to set it up correctly.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 3:25 PM  

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