Lego is AWESOME!! Minivader is currently building (and has been since 6:30) god knows what in his room (though it sounds starwars based) and this happens most weekend mornings. I still have loads of lego left that I put into a big bucket for him. We also have a hell of a lot of the newer sets that need rebuilding…. Still once the weather gets crappy that’ll be a great weekend…. I really wanted the lego delorian, and millennium falcon and the b-wing and tbh all of it! Daftvader aged 37and 3weeks
On a related note, despite being an avowed Lego fan, I’d never gotten around to seeing the movie.
Saw it at the cinema yesterday – superb film, with brilliant jokes and lots of lovely touches (especially the crack in the eighties spaceman’s helmet).
I’ve spent the weekend making solar panels (out of cheap broken cells) to match the battery packs of the motor sets (usually 9v 800mA).
As a bonus, we found that the older motors (80s and 90s) can be used as generators, so we’ve created a car that when you brum it along, LED headlights come on 🙂
Maybe not great value as a playset or compared to getting one of the bigger sets in a sale but it’s definitely one of the best sets for ages for “big kids”.
It looks awesome, the minifigs are great and it’s a good build as well (loved the way they did the sloped side windows, very clever!)
The scale of the Lego carpets, and the painstaking labor from dozens of assistants required to execute it, recall his masterpiece Sunflower Seeds, an overwhelming collection of hand-painted porcelain ovals installed in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. (As with the cordoned-off Sunflower Seeds, Ai had to place limits on this work too; he wanted visitors to walk across the Legos, but Alcatraz’s administrators said no chance.)
But the franker hero worship of Trace – verging on agitprop, really – is light-years away from Sunflower Seeds’ sensitive metaphoric evocation of 1.3 billion Chinese. It’s as if, in the years since his detention, Ai has given up on metaphor. He sees art less as a means of self-expression and more as a global lingua franca. Contemporary art, in his view, requires and perhaps even creates an audience committed to liberty. Presenting his art in a prison amplifies that goal twice over.
Trace, the show’s most ambitious work, consists of six large carpets of Lego blocks that depict more than 175 prisoners of conscience, past and present Photograph: Mae Ryan