EXPOSITION 3

It's as if Glasgow's Kelvingrove Museum's 'curators' have been handed a big slice of the outrageous council tax paid by its citizens only to go on a massive speedball 'n' Smirnoff all-weekender before deciding how their venerable establishment can be jazzed up.

It's not enough that Glasgow's councillors allowed this fine city to be cleft asunder by a filthy great motorway, before letting the dreaded Design Squad in at astronomical cost to make it a laughing stock with slogans such as Prestwick Airport's 'Pure Dead Brilliant' (accompanied by the cartoon drunk) and other repeatedly naff and pointless rebranding iterations.

Anyway, back to Kelvingrove. It was a consolation visit a couple of weeks ago after disappointingly finding the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University closed at the weekend for repairs.

The entire museum and gallery, set in an impressive building located in beautiful downtown central parkland, has been converted into the biggest tackiest kids' play park ever conceived. You'll think I'm exaggerating again: trust me I'm not. This time it's far more than even the usual unholy riot of Helvetica, stoopid discovery areas, interactive screenery, huge purple banners and other redundant signage, or the dysfunctional ambient lighting.

They've lowered all the paintings to somewhere around waist height and added mindnumbingly condescending descriptions along the lines of 'can you spot the crow in the tree? do you know what a 'halo' is?' - spelling and grammatical inconsistencies galore. Some of the randomly-distributed paintings are even surrounded by graphics and gaudy text boxes and coloured captions with their own individual lighting, all but making the picture itself invisible. Other exhibits actually have special children's crawl spaces incorporated underneath. The gift shop sells nothing but tacky cuddly toys, Scottish souvenir tat, and bubble-blowing liquid - no books, no prints, and but a handful of postcards.










See, kids don't give a fuck about Dalí or Matisse or Goya or transgender politics or global warming. They just want to play. I respect that. Give them what they want: a fantastic genuine new play park or take them to McDonald's for a Happy Meal.

EXPOSITION 2
EXPOSITION 1

SHORT BREATHS 5

Tectonic plates
'petty gossip'? I wonder how many priests, from their pulpits at services this Easter, and as representatives of the world's biggest child sex ring (second only to the UN and other international relief agencies), will be quoting from Matthew 18:6: "But whoever shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."

Noumenon 
it was very nice of someone to think to include me at nndb.com, even though I'm not entirely grateful about being openly described as being 'straight', and even less an 'atheist' (on the latter point, sadly also labelled thus in the otherwise excellent Micro-bionic)

Play park
while a visit to the Hunterian in Glasgow last Saturday was thwarted by their being closed at weekends for roof repairs, the best cultural alternative seemed to be Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum - epic mistake, full gory report to follow in EXPOSITION 3












Great White Death
the new vinyls should be delivered any day now from Germany, which is most exciting - the cut sounded absolutely delicious