The (sort of pirate) pulse of the poster art world

Some of you may remember that when I quite recently got it into my head to make modern art icons, a few of my topics were Matisse's cut paper collages, the paintings of Hilma af Klint, and paintings by the art instructors from the Bauhaus.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, I discovered first that Ikea's current assortment includes several large Af Klint posters, and then that H&M Home is currently selling both Bauhaus posters and Matisse cutouts posters. For a second I was weirded out at the apparently staggering coincidence, but then I remembered...

...I got all three of these interests, originally, when I was browsing designs on Redbubble that are popular in the "Art" and "Art history" tags. (I got a bunch of stickers and then some cloth masks last fall.) This made me feel a bit silly.

But the question remains: where did they get it? I mean, I don't think Ikea and H&M got these trends from Redbubble, so I assume they represent trends in - poster art, or something like that, more broadly. Interior design perhaps? But what I don't know is what kinds of primary sources or whatever the Redbubble sellers have been plugged into that have informed them of this. I mean, and also the Ikea and H&M designers. Maybe there's a place somewhere where people are upvoting and downvoting vintage posters??? Maybe it's an obscure corner of Instagram. Maybe it's a social networking site I haven't heard of. I'm really curious now.

Thoughts on the conclusion of Severance s1 (spoilers)

I enjoyed Severance up to the end. Great plot and acting and all that. Fantastic visual design.

I had no idea from the Tumblr gifs I saw before we watched it that the guy from Parks & Recreation was the main character; it sort of looked like an ensemble show? But he's so much the main character that the entire CGI credit sequence is images of him going through like... a high-tech sort of James Bond title sequence visualization. He's not as awful as the generic white male protagonist often is though, or else it's just that there's enough screen time for other characters. I didn't really mind it (much).

The plotting out of the various little cascading coincidences in the individual and overall plots was beautiful, and the various little reveals were pretty good, I think.

I was expecting, however, ( spoilers )

three great things

• Good news! I had been checking the city's health portal for updates and the last one was in early March (something like, "we've received a small amount of this third vaccine..."), but today I decided to just check anyway by trying to book a time and there were some open slots for Moderna! So we'll both finally get our third shots on Friday (the first ones were all Pfizer).



• Even better news: in my desperation for something to read I recently reread that Avengers university AU where Tony Stark is an engineer and architect and Steve Rogers is a younger architect who wants to date him, and for some reason the story embedded an image of a sandwich that one of the characters texted to another one and the sandwich was a "caprese" of fresh mozzarella, tomato, basil, arugula and pesto on... it was probably ciabatta actually. Well, I instantly texted Wax that I needed to eat this sandwich so we bought a single beefsteak tomato and a single ball of lactose-free fresh mozz last night, along with a bag of breadrolls and some little potted basil and arugula. And we had them for dinner tonight, and oh wow, SOOOOO GOOD. Amazing that it's been so long since I've eaten this - why? I'm an adult, I can buy these things when I want!



• Not news, but it was funny: Saturday night before Easter I actually dreamt that my parents, sister, favorite aunt and uncle+cousins, and maternal (Catholic) grandma were visiting us in Turku for Easter (for some reason). We took them to a street fair (that doesn't exist) that was like an American county fair, except the parking lot was one GIANT ballpit full of cars, and somebody had hidden corpses wrapped up in sheets in among the balls, which I discovered like... by accident halfway through the dream, only then it ended up not being scary. I guess my subconscious changed its mind about switching genre to a murder mystery; instead my uncle came out to the parking lot to look for me, I said I was looking for a jacket, and we went back to ride a ferris wheel and buy cotton candy.
  
  Then we all left to go to the Catholic church for Easter for the benefit of my grandma and favorite aunt, and since I don't actually know where the Catholic church is in Turku, we got lost a lot while my brain kept changing its mind about where it might be. But eventually it decided on a totally fictional Byzantine-looking basilica, having an Easter service even though it was nighttime by then, and the Easter service was in the form of a "traditional Easter pageant", but in the dream the traditional Easter pageant wasn't the story of Jesus's death and resurrection; it was a parade of children dressed as different animals carrying various types of plants and flowers, interspersed with children dressed as Jesus, the virgin Mary, the prophet Elijah (a character in Pesach who appears when the children leave the room to search for the afikomen, if you leave the door unlocked for him, and drinks the glass of wine left out for him), and various saints I didn't know. Each of the human characters had a couple of random lines to read. Everyone was satisfied with this Easter service. Then I woke up. This totally sounds like something a UU church would do, by the way, although it's not one ours (my childhood one) specifically has done.