Rainbow High

I made my family watch Evita with me last night. There were awesome songs that weren't on the soundtrack my family's had since the movie first came out...so I did some research on iTunes and found the COMPLETE soundtrack. Right down to people yelling in the movie theater at the beginning. When there's almost no spoken dialogue in a movie, you might as well put the whole thing on the soundtrack, right? Right. Madonna was a great casting choice.

So besides the incredible music, I love Evita because Eva Perón was a fascinating person. She's not an ordinary Cinderella story at all. You can't put her into just one category. In Evita, her husband Juan is given the line "she is a diamond."  She was more than just an actress, a philanthropist, a politician, a woman of questionable chastity. She's certainly not the saint Argentina believed her to be. She was tough as diamonds, but not as durable. I agree with her own description of herself: "I am a rainbow." She was colorful, larger than life, not what she seemed, and fleeting. (She only lived to be 33.) I'm going to do a little more research to find out more about who she really was. I told a friend a condensed version of my quest: I'm trying to figure out whether she was a dumb gold digger who was brainwashed into being her husband's puppet or a brilliant gold digger who knew exactly how to get into power.

Pop! Goes My Heart

There's a Pop Art gallery at the Spori. As a former wanna-be humanities major, I couldn't help but go. I'll probably go again. I love the definition of Pop they had in the gallery: "popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, witty, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business."

This one is one of my favorites. It says something about fame. It can take someone BEAUTIFUL and CONFIDENT (see black-and-white Marilyn below) and distort them beyond recognition. It's still flashy and bright and pretty in a way, but it can't come anywhere close to the original. It's just Pop Art. It's popular now, but you can just throw it out when you're done.  It's a dime-a-dozen. I noticed something while researching for this post: Warhol picked probably the worst picture Marilyn ever took to create this screen. Another downside of being famous: you can't pick out the bad shots.

Sven's take on Warhol. Yep. A new icon.