art /painting
This is Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose, 1633 by Francisco de Zurbarán. I think it is beautiful and sexy and I can look at it for a really long time before I get bored (which is rare for me I have the attention span of a gnat). 
This is Venus Envy by Heidi Taillefer, it is a bit new and I found it on boing boing. I love the artists description of what she was trying to say with it. Sometimes I read critiques or even abstracts and find myself really turned off by the pretension but not here. Taillefer genuinely enhanced my appreciation for this painting in her pitch. Plus I feel like it belongs in this blog with the whole fertility bent and also it is arresting of itself.
I am aware that it is uber pedestrian to love Waterhouse but I do. It cant be helped! I love this painting (Hylas and the Nymphs John William Waterhouse (1849-1917)) for two reasons. Firstly I am a romantic and I love the paintings of the romantics for their warmth and drama and poetry. Secondly because I look a bit like most of the Waterhouse women and for some bizarre reason my wonderful and now deceased Mother-in-Law once asked quite innocently if this was a picture of David and some of us girls. hahaha - My Mother-in-Law was an extremely proper, pious, and deeply christian woman and to this day I can't imagine how she thought (a) we would do that kind of posing or (b) why she seemed so fine with that idea.
art/writing
I found Seamus Heaney through his Beowulf translation. I love Beowulf and in his introduction Heaney made the point that we rarely appreciate stories the way they were meant to be enjoyed. We read Beowulf when it was meant to be heared we read Shakespeare instead of going to plays and that we especially bewilderingly do this in an academic setting. We take people who aren't really interested and force feed them the least accessible versions of wonderful things. This is all paraphrased of course but it hit me hard. Immediately I checked out all these DVD's of Shakespeare plays from the library and i put down my Heaney translated copy of Beowulf and went out and bought the audio version. Boy was he right!
After that I had to go find some of his original work. lol I didn't even know that he had been Poet Laureate! The first Poem of his that I read was Digging read it (read everything you can) here . He is so vivid. He is so right and so melancholy and so viscus and I always feel calmer and more appreciative after I read his work.
I am a book worm and there is a link to my Goodreads account in the side bar. I have lots of reviews and recommendations. I love Tolkien best of all but recently Neil Gaiman is gaining quickly to the number two spot. Lately I have been reading a lot of Cheever. The thing I want from books is escape and intelligence and something better than myself.
art/music
This is probably the place to put a top ten music list but I can't bear to slice music up like that. I grew up with music all around me and I still am surrounded by it still. I live with ear buds in my ears. I married a guitarist. I sing way more than the people around me probably like. I was in in choir as a kid. All of that is sort of tertiary. Music is the thing that I find most essential apart from the regular Maslow's stuff. I very nearly need it. Musicians that I love in order of era: Josquin de Prez, Bach, Puccini, (on a personal though not necessarily musical level Liszt and Paganini and on a musical and definitely not personal level Saint Saens) Then skip a great while with a bit of a break for Rhapsody in Blue and Vive en Rose to the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull over to Korn and Daft Punk and lately Amanda Palmer .
I can't really do justice to any of these artist in description so go listen to them and read about them and maybe you will get what I love about them.
I don't really watch t.v. and not many movies.
So that is me
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