In Danger of Waxing Lyrical

The following is a fictional blog entry by an Elf called Luca, who, as of December 2010, has taken up residence on Earth in the hopes of evading his past. His entries are all tagged LucaDafeldr for ease of viewing, should you wish to catch up on goings-on.

Randon doesn't live in this village. When he kept turning up he was originally here in pursuit of works of graffiti, which his sister is taking photos of for a college project.

(Whenever I try to type 'Randon', somewhere between my brain and my fingers the message gets corrected to 'Random'. I keep having to key back to change the M to an N.)

He lives in town but on the urban hillside, up a few roads and then a steep flight of steps tucked into an alley. The house at the top is long and low, the doorways inside too short for the current century. It was divided into three once but according to R the previous batch of artistically inclined students decided to turn it into a commune and so there are now yawning holes connecting it all into one. It feels a bit like a burrow.

The main chamber to the far left of the burrow is painted a frankly lurid shade of pink (I don't know if it this was also the last residents' idea) but thankfully it doesn't continue upstairs. Randon's room is maroon and he is painting a rambling and sometimes abstract mural across the sloped ceiling, which he invited me to add a bit to. I haven't yet; I need to give it some thought and come up with a good design.

He works in an art gallery situated all the way down the hill, at the far end of the high street. He says the most enjoyable part is provoking the gallery's visitors into articulating an argument in defence of the works they like.

I find what qualifies as 'art' surprising and enchanting. We were taken to see art sometimes, when I was at school in my home world. It almost always featured people. People posing heroically/tragically in stone, people looking grim on canvas. I think the other types of artists, who in this world take their turn in the galleries, must there have been disguised as ordinary carpenters and potters and tailors. And possibly madmen, in some cases.

- Luca