We went to The Lighthouse on Sunday, Glasgow’s design and architecture museum. I love The Lighthouse, the way it’s hidden away in the back streets of the city centre, the way the staff always want to know where you’re going, the millions of escalators, the shop filled with expensive wonders and designer geek stuff and the restaurant right at the top where you get lovely crumbly shortbread free with your coffee.

Anyway, we took our dad (yes, I realise my dad visits a lot – there’s one reason for this and you spell it I-K-E-A) since he’s an architect and we wanted to see the Contemporary Japanese Posters. The posters were pretty cool but, really, once you’ve seen the one for Ueno Zoo, the rest don’t look so great:

We didn’t brave the hundreds of stairs to the top of the Mackintosh tower this visit (exhausting but worth it for the best view of Glasgow outside our bathroom) but we saw some newspaper photographs of the year and sat in the mobile cinema (which was pretty dull, sadly) and then spotted a fantastic little exhibition of self-assessment forms called Everything in Moderation. The idea is you take one home and keep track for a week of your eating, drinking, excercising and leisure habits and then tally it all up at the end to see what you learn and then take it back in to display with the others. I’ve got mine stuck up at home to fill in each evening but I doubt I’ll remember to bring it back in. Which is a shame as I enjoyed looking at the ones there. I’m also ashamed at quite how amusing I found the one that someone had filled in as Darth Vader but it was done with such detailed care and seriousness that I couldn’t help it.

Also good (good meaning fantastically tremendous) was Spirited Away which I have been looking forward to for EVER but I’m glad I waited to see it in the cinema with an audience who were totally into it. Sadly the dubbed Disney version but actually really well done unlike the crappy Princess Mononoke one. Anyway, it’s a total Alice in Wonderland tale of Chihiro who wanders into an abandoned amusement park (what were you thinking?!) and inevitably ends up trapped in the spirit world with her parents turned into pigs and has to get a job in a bath house to free them and get back home. Not the most exciting of plotlines but it’s all really a context to bring in the wonderful characters. The spirits range from creepy to ugly to cute to hilarious with my favourites being the sad-masked No Face and the return of the soot sprites from Totoro as coal carrying slave spiders but really there’s not a single character that didn’t have me enthralled, one way or the other. I can’t wait to see it again. GO SEE.

Posted: 09|17|03 at 2:21 pm. Filed under: art and design, film and video.
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