21 December 2014 - What. The. F***?

Yep folks, still here, finished up my class where I made this copper & brass cuff bracelet:

And this ring:

And a few other things that I haven't taken photos of yet.  Please note these aren't to the same scale; the bracelet is much bigger than the ring.  I made them to fit myself and the weirdest thing about my anatomy is that I'm missing a gall bladder.  Well, I'm really not missing it, per se, good riddance to that little bastard.

I got older last week.  We went out for dinner, nothing exciting. 

What I REALLY wanted to post about was this photo which I found online today:

I have NO idea what is happening in this photo, but I want in.  I Googled it and all I could find was other blogs whose writers clearly found this amusing, but also didn't know anything about it.  I mean, that's obviously a large box on a dolly with the Jolly Green Giant's penis on top, but where is this happening, and why?

16 November 2014 Still here!

Hey folks... just wanted to let you know this blog is still active, but due to a class I've been taking for the last two months, I haven't really had time to have any adventures.  It'll be over in four more weeks though and then I can get back to giving you my spin on things that interest me.

In the meantime, I'm taking requests for where to go next.  The only limit is, due to time and budget restraints, it has to be a 2-hour or less drive from Boston, MA.  What would you like to see us explore?

12 September 2014: Peabody Essex Museum, Salem MA

On our last trip, I compared one of the paintings at MFA Boston to one they used to have at the Peabody Museum (now the Peabody-Essex Museum) in Salem.  Once again, I posted some of this on Twitter as we went through the museum, and now I've had a chance to sit down and add more photos & commentary.  It was even less like I remember it from school trips than last time I visited.  Even though there's a lot of really cool stuff, it's also somewhat disappointing that everything I originally loved from this place is gone now.

Today we're going to the Peabody Museum for my blog. Tip: It's in Salem, not Peabody.  It's only yards from the Museum Place Mall, home of Cinema Salem, which has three regular-size auditoriums and one that they call the screening room - which is basically a large storage closet with eighteen seats and a DVD player with the hugest TV I've ever seen.  The regular auditoriums show first-run movies which are usually better than average as far as multiplex fare goes.  The screening room has smaller independent films, foreign films, documentaries, etc.  I've never seen a bad movie in the screening room, ever.  They have a café and more popcorn toppings than you can shake a stick at.  If you're in town, make it a point to go. See whatever's in the screening room.  You won't regret it.

 

As for where to park, the museum doesn't have its own parking.  There's a lot outside the mall by the cinema entrance, and if you go around the corner, there's a garage above the mall.  The mall itself only has a handful of shops and a few places to eat but not a regular "food court."  Also: if you park in the garage, take the elevator. The stairs smell like hobo pee. So does the elevator, but you're not in it as long.

I wish this sign was posted there.  I found it online with no attribution.

 

 On entering, we were greeted by this sweet Studebaker, a custom-made one of a kind. Almost makes up for the lack of shrunken heads - almost. 

 



 After purchasing our tickets, including a timed entry for Yin Yu Tang: A Chinese House - an actual house, brought to the US and reconstructed in the museum's courtyard.  It doesn't look that impressive from outside, but the inside is beautiful, with carved wooden screens and its own courtyard with stone koi ponds.  Of course there's no photography allowed, but there are images of bits and pieces on the museum's website.  I did get a few photos of the accompanying exhibit inside the museum proper.  Most of these are from the medieval era, but the last one is from the third century BCE.

 You'd have to listen to Hank Williams for *days* to drink enough to get this ship in a bottle.

This RMS Queen Elizabeth is practically big enough to sail on. If you're really short, at least.

I take back what I said about them getting rid of all the whaling paintings. This appears to be whaling with cannons.  Yes, I realize they're probably really firing harpoons, but since you can't see that, I prefer to envision cannonballs.

Eagle & Salmon blanket, by Don & Trace Yeomans, Native (Métis & Haida) contemporary artists from BC.

I took a couple more photos from the same exhibit:

Sorry about the glare in the photo of the masks.  The case is near the entrance to the exhibit, which means it's getting the full light of the lobby/café plus the sunlight from the courtyard.  The detail on the bracelets is amazing.  Maybe if I keep taking silversmithing classes for the rest of my life, I might eventually be as good as this.

Recreation of the first private ocean-going yacht in America, Cleopatra's Barge. Note preparation for ample libations.  As beautifully appointed as this room is, the only way for me to not be seasick is a) in open air and b) for the boat to be moving fast.  The best trip I ever had was in Ireland, returning from Clare Island.  The water taxi that brought us out had developed engine trouble, so the captain arranged for two teenaged local boys to take us back in a smallish inflatable boat with twin outboards.  We covered the four miles to the mainland in less than ten minutes - half the time of the ride out.  The boat was actually going airborne over some of the bigger swells, and we were totally covered with salt spray by the time we got to Roonagh Quay.  That may have been the most fun nine minutes of my entire life.  Plus, check out the Clare Island website.  In 2014, it actually recommends hitchhiking as one means of getting to the quay from the nearest town.  Anyway, all of this is to say that while this setting may have been the epitome of yachting luxury in its day, drinking below deck is just a recipe for disaster as far as I'm concerned.

And a model of the yacht itself:

I don't recall a lot of other ships' figureheads with a guy's face on their crotch... She looks rather harsh, too, don't you think?  Like this maybe really represents her holding the guy's severed head by the hair or something.  Whatever you do, don't get in this ship's way.

Part of a series on the burning of the Luxborough Galley: a warning not to toast your slave cargo with flaming shots.

Pardon the pun in the last post. I swear I only realized what I'd written when I re-read it.

Demonstrating the little-known art of spinning yarn from soft serve ice cream.  Don't tell me that "wool" didn't come from DQ.

Yes, that's Priscilla Mullins letting John Alden know she always goes for the wingman.

After that we saw more Asian art in an upstairs gallery.

When your grandchildren ask why there are no more elephants, you can show them this:

No photography in the abstract gallery. Aww... you know how much I love modern art. /sarcasm/

This bison, with its poorly taxidermied face, is the first thing I've seen that I remember from school trips.  Seriously.  It stares at you with its dead, dead eyes, and you will never forget the horror of looking at its face.  The glare in this photo is for your protection.

Aside: Oh God, it's that annoying Scandinavian hipster couple I kept running into last Halloween.

After seeing all the galleries, we hit the gift shop: new hat and drinking socks. I suspect the hat may become involved in drinking, too.

That hat knows how to party.

After the museum we went grocery shopping. I started unpacking & announced "We more cereal!" I swear the drinking hadn't started yet.  But with my new fancy hat, you know it's going to...

2 July 2014: Museum of Fine Arts Boston

I went to the MFA on July 2 to see the Magna Carta Exhibit (wasn't very busy - it was basically in a secure, undisclosed location).  And I posted running commentary on Twitter, at least until my battery died.  So now I'm sharing the fun.



12:30 PM Finally here! I should have been here an hour ago, but I hadn't driven down this way in a long time so I used the GPS. Big mistake!
 It kept trying to leave me in some random unpacked driveway in the hood. You know it's the hood because there's ODB Liquors.
 I did not even make that last part up. I would have taken a picture but the light turned green.
 *unpaved. Although since there were several piles of gravel, I guess you could also say it was unpacked.

Silver pieces by my ancestor, Jacob Hurd, part of the permanent collection.  I was already designing jewelry before I knew of him, but apparently silversmithing was actually the family business in Colonial times.  Cool, eh?  He also made some jewelry, but is better known for his hollowware and engraving.  While Paul Revere is more famous, much more of Jacob Hurd's work survives.  More than half of the surviving silver made in Boston during the era was done in Hurd's shop, where his sons Nathaniel and Benjamin also learned the trade.  A number of Nathaniel's pieces are also at the MFA; in addition to his hollowware and other three-dimensional objects, he was also skilled at pictorial engravings for printing.  As, alas, I can't find any Hurd silver for sale, nor could I likely afford any that should become available, I settled on a search for a limited edition 1939 book on their work.  A used/antique book store had a copy signed by the author, which set me back a bit, but given the rarity and the fact that copies of the 1972 reprint in equally good condition were nearly as expensive, it seemed like a good investment.

When I was a kid the Peabody Museum had paintings similar to Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley, except they were stabbing whales.  Also, shrunken heads. They had shrunken heads. My favorite part. Those were gone last time I went, what fun is that?  Maybe I'll go there again for this project, but when I searched their collection online, I still couldn't find any of the cool stuff they used to have.  Can you actually just throw out a shrunken head?  That doesn't seem right. 

I spent eight Fridays here in 4th grade as part of a special school project focuses on the Ancient Egyptian collection. Menkaure seemed so huge then. Now he's just kinda big.  He's also known as Mykerinos if you're a fan of Herodotus, or Mycerinus if you've read Matthew Arnold's poem.  He was possibly the grandson of Khufu, and was buried in the smallest of the three Great Pyramids at Giza.  His sarcophagus was lost along with the ship carrying it, the Beatrice, after departing from Malta in 1838; the wooden coffin that was inside appears however to be of later manufacture, and the bones inside have been carbon dated to the early centuries AD - some 2500-3000 years after Menkaure's lifetime.  Since grave robbery was common in Egypt - as much controversy as there is today over stolen antiquities and pieces taken out of various countries during the last couple centuries when they were colonized (or occupied, depending on one's perspective) by European powers, so those bits in museums are just what's left over after the tombs were often pillaged as soon as they were sealed - who knows where the wooden coffin and bones came from, or who they belonged to originally.

 Well, now we know why Paris chose Venus. She's the one with her boobs out.  (Pallas Athena, Venus and Juno, by Hans Von Aachen, German, 1593.  He seems to have used the same models in several paintings, frequently showing full boob, often in the same style dress with gravitationally impossible neckline.  Also apparently fond of pale guys in black robes with frilly white collars - himself if he didn't happen to have a handy emperor or duke laying about.)

In 1693, land went for £65 in silver and £20 in pork. So, it's not just recently that bacon is practically currency.  Kind of makes you wonder just how much pork you could buy with £20 back then, doesn't it?  Well, at least according to this website, that equals $14454.18 cash and $4447.44 worth of meat in today's dollars.  I don't think I've even bought that much bacon in my entire lifetime.

Flying Jesus goes for the original Hail Mary pass.  (It's crooked because I was crooked when I took it.  Sorry.)  The actual title is The Risen Christ by Simone Cantarini, but only because football hadn't been invented yet.

El Greco's St. Catherine: Martyrdom totes gets in the way of shopping at Contempo, you guys.

Seriously, the long, wan face, tilted head, and expression of mildly bemused discomfort... forget the wheel, this model's torture came in the form of standing still for hours when she clearly had better things to do, like getting a latte and talking about the hot guys at whatever the early 17th-century equivalent of Urban Outfitters was.  Oh, and she's fingering that sword so gingerly because when the "thunderbolt from heaven" destroyed the wheel, they beheaded her instead.  St. Catherine, I mean, not the model.  That I know of, anyway.

::sigh:: I'm already going to hell, may as well have fun on the way.

Seriously though - I don't get modern art (there's some really atrocious stuff, like stenciled dogs and seagulls crapping everywhere on a Russian-submarine-grey background that everybody says is groundbreaking and edgy, but it's so big because you know nobody's going to hang that in the living room anyway), but I could look at this ancient-->medieval-->Renaissance stuff forever.  I mean, even the 13th-14th century stuff where the proportions in portraits are all wrong and there's little to no interplay of light and shadow, they were clearly expressing something that they felt was glorious and mysterious as best as they knew how.  They weren't just slapping canned politicism on a canvas and waiting around for people to start talking about it.

Everyone in Ancient Rome had leprosy.

(Not meaning to eavesdrop but is it even ok for someone giving directions to a blind person to say "When you hit the end of the corridor..."?)

I have massive respect for the unknown sculptor who carved this. The chainmaille is flawless European 4-in-1.  Having thrown several chainmaille pieces that I was making across the room in frustration, I can say from experience it isn't easy, and I can't imagine carving it in stone is any easier.

  

Since I'll probably never see Caravaggio's Judith and Holofernes, this Jan Massys will have to do.  That's right, boobs again.  You thought all this time that art museums were stuffy and boring, but there's actually boobs everywhere.

Lucas Cranach the Elder's Vampire Chick Licks Jesus's Hand While Girl In Red Dress Flirts With The Painter.  OK, the real title is The Lamentation, but clearly mine is better.

And Anthony Van Dyck's Man In Hat Plays World's Saddest Bagpipe.   ::sigh::  It's Portrait of François Langlois, but once again, I think my title does a better job of telling you what's going on.  The instrument is called a musette, basically a bagpipe for aristocrats who can't handle a proper bagpipe.

Last but not least, what's a blog without gratuitous food porn?  Dinner in the museum café/wine bar.  Fresh mozzarella: fine.  Pesto: fine.  Arugula: ok.  I draw the line at sticks.

That black stuff all over the focaccia?  I think it's charred rosemary.  Some girls would be able to eat this without even smearing their lipstick.  I ended up looking like I had ants crawling over me, most likely to get at the frangipane tart crumbs.  And next time I order a tart, somebody please remind me that I don't like frangipane.

Irreverent Cultural Tours: About This Blog

I went to the MFA last month to see the Magna Carta exhibit and take photos of some of my other favorite pieces in the collection.  I posted running commentary on Twitter, at least until my battery died.  Since a number of my friends said they enjoyed my slightly subversive take on what many consider to be a stuffy subject, I decided to make it a semi-regular thing, as time and budget allow.  This blog will be a place to collect these experiences and expand beyond a 140-character format.

Why?  Well, lots of places try to make things like art, science, and history fun and accessible in order to encourage kids to learn.  What about the adults, though?  I love the idea of "Paint Nights," where people can get together, have a few beers or glasses of wine, and paint a portrait of whatever the evening's subject may be.  The idea seems to be spreading, and that's great.  But once you've used the social aspect to hook people, where do they go to learn more?  There's literally thousands of years worth of art history waiting to be discovered, but not everybody is enticed by the idea of walking around and reading plaques on walls, and while those plaques will identify the subject and provenance of those paintings and sculptures, they don't say why you should care about them.  Ditto for all those landmarks and "living history" places that are popular places to take children while the adults just hope the kids will be worn out by the end of the day. 

My goal is to hopefully make these subjects fun and entertaining for adults.  Don't just look at a painting, read who the artist was and the approximate year they painted it, and walk on to the next one.  Look at the models' expressions.  What do you think they're really thinking while they pose for the artist's sketch?  It's not just the Mona Lisa - aka La Giaconda - who seems to be hiding a secret.  There could be anything from political commentary to the artist's lust in that religious painting.  Or the perspective is skewed so it looks like something totally other than what was intended is going on.  And history is so much more interesting when you discover real people and places instead of just names and dates in a book.  I hope to use my own slightly skewed perspective to encourage others to see things in a way that maybe they haven't before.

Please keep in mind that although I'm not above making wisecracks and personal asides about the subjects I'm presenting, I do have the utmost respect for them at the same time; it's not my intention to be mean-spirited.  It wouldn't be fun to joke about an El Greco or Cranach painting if they were just terrible artists (that's what MOBA is for, and I love them for what they do).  It's because they've done brilliant works that just happen to have a certain je ne sais quoi that I can find humor while still admiring them.  I hope that by sharing the things I see - both on exhibit and in my head - I'll convince some of my readers that you should see them for yourself, and see what you can take from those experiences.

I'm also always taking suggestions for new places to visit.  Right now due to the aforementioned time/budget thing I'm sticking to the Boston area and day trips from there, but I'm hoping that as we go further along, I'll be able to branch out and maybe do some getaways, too.  It's a very loose experiment, and I'm still working on a list of places to visit in the coming weeks/months.  I don't know where it's going to take us, but isn't that half the fun?