Mimosa Mumbles: Fill & Download for Free

I was doing my internship in a spa-hotel for the first time in my whole life. I’ve been working there before but never full time on the reception.In that hotel they have a tiny bar connected to the reception like many hotels here do. and the customers waiting in the bar are at the responsibility of the receptionists.One day my co-workers were busy with some paper work and a disabled man walked at the bar. It was my SECOND DAY at that place and I was not supposed to even be alone. Well anyway my co-worker left and told me to handle the customer. He seemed fine with his motor skills, like walking and using hands but he couldn’t talk well.He asked for coffee and I started making him one. I told him the price and asked if he wants milk. Then he starts repeating something to me and I cannot hear him well. I repeat all I’ve said, including the price. I get that he’s asking something about the price/the order with louder and more aggressive voice again and at this point I get a bit scared because he seemed a bit off and angry. I repeat the price and that it’s coffee that i’m making. For some reason he didn’t get my words and he started yelling from the bottom of his stomach about the price and cursing how I don’t understand anything and I’m a stupid bimbo who doesn’t answer to him. I say that the price is exactly what I told him and that I’m going to serve it to his table. Then he shuts up and mumbles something and goes away with his coffee.I was so embarrassed and scared, everyone in the loby was starting at us and I had no idea what to do.Forever traumatized by that. I just tried to hide every time he came back.

I’d begin answering this question by pointing out that both Picasso and Bonnard were participants in a defacto centuries-long project art historians refer to with this or a similar name: The Western Art Historical Narrative.All that means is that beginning with the end of the black plague in Europe in the late 1200’s, visual art in the western world developed from stiff, pattern-infused religious icons, through the Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, and a series of other waves of development, each building upon or reacting against the previous, until you reach late Modernism in the 1960’s and 70’s, when this development essentially comes to a screeching halt at either Pop Art or Conceptual Art, depending on which art historian you ask.Picasso’s role in this long-term development was pivotal. Along with his friend Georges Braque he developed a movement called Cubism, which was really another way of seeing and thinking about the world. It’s considered to have taken off in the year 1912, and was, as you likely know, hugely influential.Cubism comes in two flavors: The earlier, more intensely detailed version, Analytical, and its later, looser and more colorful version: Synthetic.Pablo Picasso - Aficionado - 1912 - An example of Analytical CubismPablo Picasso - Mandolin and Guitar - 1924 - An example of Synthetic CubismAll of which brings me to Picasso’s gripe with Bonnard. Take a look Picasso’s Mandolin and Guitar, above. It’s decisive in all its aspects. You might disagree with his placement of a shape or his use of a color, or even the waviness of some of his contours. But he’s not disagreeing with himself as he executes the work. Each of those marks seems confident. No stumbling, no mumbling. You see no hints of Picasso thinking things through, reconsidering, covering up earlier thoughts as he discovers the work — although these things did in fact happen over and over again in his process. He covers his footprints.Another interesting point: when you see this painting in person you become aware of its brushstrokes, but they’re really secondary to what Picasso is doing in the work. In some ways this painting might well have been executed using cut paper, or even silkscreen. While it isn’t always the case in his work, often it seems as though Picasso uses brushes and paint simply because they’re what comes to hand for him, and they aren’t all that essential to the resulting image.Now let’s take a gander at a painting by Bonnard.Pierre Bonnard - The Studio with Mimosas - 1939-46Bonnard is all about discovering the work in the process of making it, and letting you see the process. See for example the head at lower left. What’s that about? Did he think at the last minute he’d add someone who was hanging around the house, but they didn’t stick around long enough? Is this a decision he made and then backed out of? Why is he letting us see this?Consider also how important the paint brush is here. The Studio with Mimosas couldn’t have been executed with cut paper, or stained glass, or any medium other than some kind of colorful smeary stuff and some kind of tool to smear it, in this case oil paint and brushes. The tool used is as key to the outcome of the work as the colors chosen.Check the shapes going on in the landscape outside that window. How carefully considered do they seem? Once Bonnard makes a decision, he doesn’t lock in it place with those hard edges Picasso uses above. He leaves the final call to the brush stroke’s edges and wheresoever they incline.The waviness of his contours, his very loose brush handling, the way so much seems to be decided by the kind of tools he uses, all come together along with a sense of color that owes a lot to Impressionism and Postimpressionism, to create a different effect entirely than Picasso appears to have been interested in during the main part of his career. An effect that seems almost to shift and move visually as you examine the work. Nothing seems locked down or locked in place.It’s easy to see why Picasso reacts as he does to Bonnard’s work. But in the end his judgment is irrelevant, because Bonnard stakes out a strikingly different territory of painting than that which Picasso claims. Picasso calling Bonnard’s paintings indecisive and therefore not painting, is much like a Spanish chef calling a French chef’s food not spicy enough, and therefore not food. Each artist’s work arises from adjacent but different universes of thought, experience, and culture.Bonnard might equally have called many of Picasso’s paintings too solidified, too graphical, or too machine-like.One final note: return for a moment to Picasso’s painting Aficionado, above. How about all those murky and indecisive moments in this painting from 1912? It’s pretty easy to see Picasso’s process, all his back-and-forth decisions, in this and in many of his Analytical Cubist works. The same mid-career, Synthetic Cubism Picasso that took issue with Bonnard’s indecisive process would probably also have thrown out much of the work of early-career, Analytic Cubism Picasso.Which only goes to show that artists change in their work and their opinions.Images are from various online sources, used without permission.

There was a…dude? Lady? After all these years I’m still trying to figure it out. Some days, they were male, some days outrageously female. They were considerably older than my high school friend circle, pompous as the day is long, a decadent spendthrift, and had high society aspirations. (The family patriarch was a bus driver and the chameleon of his middle child would never have been accepted among the cotillion crowd except as a janitor.) D often invited us over for afternoon tea, brunch, or a wacko game of Boutique Shopping where they would lay out clothes and accessories bought on one of his freak days, and play-act at being an obsequious clerk. D had the attitude that they were grooming us for polite society.They set out brunch one fine morning. In addition to the mimosas that corrupted the youth of their guests, there was a savoury side dish consisting of white rice, wild rice, green beans and mushrooms, seasoned with something vague and unidentifiable. We starving sophomores ate up and teased D to tell us their kitchen secrets because in all honestly they were a fairly decent cook. D played coy and mumbled something about their grandma’s old potluck standby and deftly changed the subject, no doubt another polite society trick.I had to go through the kitchen to get to the washroom and found the secret staring up at me from the wastebasket. Grandma’s potluck standby was several packages of a Birdseye frozen rice dish, baked instead of prepared on a stovetop. I dismissed it, saving D’s secret and pride, and went upstairs to watch a grown adult play shopkeeper.