Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Saturday in New York

Tue, 25 Dec 2018 02:36:18 GMT

We had one full day in New York on this trip, and cattitude spent part of it visiting a friend on the Island. adrian_turtle and I met my mother at the Cloisters at around noon. On our way uptown, we'd gotten into line for a Metrocard vending machine when a stranger came over to the line and asked if we had just gotten into the city. When we and the woman in front of us said yes, she handed us each an unlimited-ride Metrocard with four days left on it, saying that she was leaving town and didn't want them to go to waste. The woman in front of us asked "how much?" and the donor shook her head and said "Merry Christmas."

The trip uptown was unremarkable, and I found that I have a good memory for the details of that trip, including the irrelevant ones: I knew we were approaching 110th when the track sloped downward, and then (having lost count of stations) recognized 145th by the color of the pillars supporting the roof.

Adrian was delighted by the Cloisters, including the famous Unicorn Tapestries. This visit what caught my eye most was sculpture and artifacts (including a unicorn-shaped hand-washing pitcher in the room with those tapestries); when we went downstairs to the Treasury, I pointed out the wooden carvings on the staircase we had just descended. We had time to look at almost everything before we decided it was past time for lunch, which we got at the diner Cattitude and I used to go to regularly when we lived in Inwood. The staff has changed and the menu is shorter than it was, but it was basic good diner food, and they still know how to make tea.

Then we took the train down to the Village so we could go to Varsano's, my old favorite chocolate shop, which roadnotes had first introduced me to. I was pleasantly surprised not to have to wait (the Saturday right before Christmas), and we bought lots of interesting chocolate. My mother asked the difference between a lemon cream and a lemon truffle. I wasn't sure and asked the shop assistant; she passed the question to Mark Varsano, who explained and then put one of each on the counter for Mom to taste.

After I'd paid for my chocolate, Mark said something like "I still miss our friend," meaning Roadnotes, and we talked about her a little; one thing he mentioned was her dry sense of humor. I'd been afraid I would have to be the one to tell him she had died, and warned Adrian on our way downtown that I might need my hand held—but it's unsurprising that the same "small town that just happens to have eight million people" feeling that had Mark asking me how she was after she moved to Seattle means he'd gotten the sad news from some other mutual friend.

( here there be politics, but relatively low-stress, I think )

The day involved a lot of walking, including at least ten flights of stairs; by the time we headed back to our hotel my ankles were complaining about the stairs in front of my aunt's building, but my knee and hips were (and are) doing okay.

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back from New York

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 02:14:06 GMT

Cattitude, Adrian, and I just spent a couple of days in New York City, mostly to see my mother. We talked a lot, walked a lot, and ate some good food. Good sushi at a randomly selected restaurant Friday evening, and Ukrainian food for lunch today before we came back to Boston. I had two kinds of pierogi: truffled mushroom, new on Veselka's menu since my last visit, and sweet potato.

I also showed Adrian the Cloisters, and we had dinner last night with my aunt Lea, her husband Dave, and my cousin Janet, as well as Mom.

[I will try to post more later, but want to at least touch on this before falling over. Tonight the cats need my attention.]

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Friends and art

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 19:36:23 GMT

papersky was in town for a couple of days to give a talk at Harvard, and suggested getting together for lunch and maybe a museum beforehand. She had the excellent idea of also inviting nineweaving, and selected the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (at her aunt's suggestion). cattitude and I met Papersky and Nine at the Gardner around 10:30, and then waited around outside because it turns out that museum opens at 11. (I had checked that they were open on Monday, because some museums aren't, but none of us had checked how early on Monday.) It was chilly out yesterday morning, but I was happy to spend some time talking before we went into the museum, as well as during and after.

The second floor of the museum, which has much of the best art, was closed yesterday for unspecified "restoration," but there was enough on the first and third floors, plus a special exhibit on Renaissance books, to keep us busy and happy for as long as we had to spare, given that Papersky wanted to be back in Cambridge in plenty of time for her talk. Nine, who has been there far more often than I have, says the Gardner is the kind of place where there's always more to see, lurking next to something you looked at on a previous visit: Gardner didn't believe in leaving a bit of wall bare that could hold a little more art, or putting ten pieces of glass or china in a display cabinet that could hold fifty[0].

I wasn't quite as taken by the special exhibit as my friends; it may be relevant that I was the only one of us who doesn't know Latin, and the few books that weren't in Latin were in Italian. The exhibit includes an illuminated book of hours, an original of the edition of Dante illustrated by Botticelli, and the first thing ever printed with italics.

The museum cafe had actual interesting food (the tea selections included a rose-flavored Chinese tea that was Gardner's personal favorite); it's not cheap, because it's in the museum, but I'd rather pay $22 for broiled scallops than $15 for a ham sandwich. (Some other day, I'll eat lunch somewhere else, for a third the price, and then go to the museum.)

[0] Gardner's will established a foundation to run her home as a museum, on the condition that everything be left where she'd had it. That means the entire large and somewhat eclectic collection[1] is on display. The museum provides laminated "room guides," each of which identifies the items on one wall of the room you're standing in.

[1] A few items were stolen late in the last century, and are still missing. The places where they should be are indicated within empty frames.

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The Art of Gaman; origami

Mon, 18 Aug 2014 02:12:41 GMT

We went to the Bellevue art museum yesterday, because I wanted to see the exhibit "The Art of Gaman." It's a collection of art made from scrap and found materials by prisoners in the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II; I saw an article in The Stranger and decided it sounded interesting.

Almost everything on display is small; it ranges from practical things like scissors and teapots made from scrap metal, since the prisoners were allowed to bring almost nothing with them, to tiny painted brooches, and dolls made from reused kimono fabrics. The curators provide background where they can, sometimes include pre- or post-War art careers; some of the artists are unknown, or known only in the sense that other work by the same artist is known, but nothing about the artist's life.

This is a traveling exhibit; I don't know where else it may be going, and googling on "the Art of Gaman" found me various articles from other museums and cities where it's been shown over the last few years. It's at the Bellevue Art Museum until October 12. If you have a King County library card, you can get a free pass for museum admission for two. (These are for specific days, but I had a wide choice of dates, including Saturdays and Sundays.)

As long as we were there, we also went to an origami exhibit: this was a mix of naturalistic works, including a frog, a gecko, and a dinosaur skeleton, and geometric abstractions. Some of the pieces were traditional one-sheet-of-paper origami, others used many sheets or combined paper with bits of other materials (the frog was sprayed with something metallic). There's also an example of an origami-inspired plastic tent, and pictures of a space telescope whose design is based on computational origami. Unlike The Art of Gaman, I wouldn't make a special trip for the origami exhibit, but I enjoyed it.

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Burke Museum

Sun, 06 Apr 2014 23:48:39 GMT

cattitude and I went to the Burke Museum of Natural History today. It's a nice little museum, with some pretty fossils, a good exhibit on the geology of the area and how it developed over time (which includes some of those fossils), and some nice anthropological and cultural material, old and recent. I was surprised and pleased by some Clovis points that were found in Washington state in the 1980s, and a little disappointed by the display of a baleen whale fossil: the description makes it sound like the type specimen for its species, but doesn't actually give the species name.

I hadn't expected to be able to see almost everything in a couple of hours (with more energy I'd have taken a more thorough look at the temporary exhibit on Pacific cultures); we'll likely go back at some point, when there's a special exhibit that seems worth it, but won't be joining the museum.

We walked back to the bus through another bit of the UW campus; lots of things are in bloom right now, including what we think was a kind of violet, along with lots of cherries, daffodils, etc. We also saw a patch of shamrock, which I wasn't expecting.

Lunch before the museum was at an Indian restaurant called Shalimar on University Way, selected semi-randomly as we walked past because the posted menu looked interesting and I appreciated that they have a menu posted outside. My goat biryani was excellent roast goat in a bed of caramelized onions and rice that was about as spicy as I can handle (which, admittedly, isn't very, but when she asked about spice levels I said "I need it mild"). Cattitude's fish kurma struck me as overly sweet, and the chai was only okay, but he quite liked the pickle, and I may go back if I'm in the U District and in the mood for goat.

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Five things make a post

Mon, 06 Jan 2014 04:00:28 GMT

Yesterday's discovery is that on a really clear day, I can see Mount Rainier from parts of Bellevue Downtown Park. It was a gorgeous January day, of the sort that I am used to from back east: clear, sunny, temperature in the mid-40s F (7 or 8 C). We've been getting quite a few bright sunny days, which I gather is thoroughly unusual. I may stop throwing on clothes and dashing outside at the first sign of sunlight, if this continues.

I solved the bra problem (which I was grumbling about a few weeks ago). Macy's, unlike Nordstrom, carries the brand I'm used to buying, and Bali makes a few styles of 38C bras that I like, all of them without underwire. (They do make bras with underwires, but unlike some companies they don't insist on that.)

Vanguard last night was fun: Jerry and Suzle hosted, and there was what felt like a fairly large crowd. This may be because it was cool enough that the party was indoors except for a few people who went outside to smoke: a few months ago at Kate and Glenn's, nonsmokers were also hanging out outside. Kate and Glenn (who were taking someone else downtown) gave me a ride to the bus tunnel, so I only had to wait for one bus, and worry less about schedules.

roadnotes came to visit us this afternoon; we had some good conversation, and she took some of our unwanted books home with her. (I have been donating them, a backpack full at a time, to the Friends of the Library, but there are a lot left.)

I took advantage of the monthly free day at the Seattle Art Museum to see the Peru exhibit on Thursday. It was good, but crowded (of course) and I got to feeling that I had looked at enough religious art already (representing a variety of religions at different times). My after-lunch wandering through some of the other galleries was more fun, because more relaxed. In between, I got a light lunch at the Crumpet Shop, a potentially dangerous place—they will sell you a bottomless cup of tea, and it's good tea—and had a nice conversation with someone who asked if she could share my table. I had been about to leave, but we were having fun talking, so I got some more tea and stayed a while.

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238,000 miles is too high for my suspension of disbelief

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 20:46:33 GMT

The American Museum of Natural History is planning an exhibit on the future of space exploration. We are promised authentic old equipment, models, a walk-through diorama of the Martian surface, and information on current space probes.

So far, so good.

They are also offering a "full-size recreation of a lunar habitat" (can you recreate things that don't yet exist?) and a model of a space elevator.

That much is on the web page. The museum newsletter, Rotunda, specifies that this hypothetical space elevator would run from the surface of the moon to about 100 miles above Earth's surface. Passengers or cargo would travel that last 100 miles by spaceplane (which presumably could be launched to connect to wherever the cable is hanging at a given time).

The lunar end of the cable is supposed to be at the South Pole, because there's likely to be water there. That a south pole base makes sense doesn't make it a good anchor point for a space elevator. Yes, there's a lot to be said for a base near the most likely source of water, but that doesn't mean it's a good place to anchor a space elevator.

Furthermore, one of the arguments for building this thing is that it would be a way to get Helium-3 to Earth. Yes, space elevators in the service of nuclear fusion.

The article is by the exhibit curator, Michael Shara, who is described as an astrophysicist. A quick google tells me that his work is on things like the dynamics of dwarf stars. Also, the most recent of the "recent publications" that the museum lists for him is from 2000. He may have been studying engineering and materials science in the decade since, and it's possible that the exhibit will talk about the strains that the elevator cables would need to take, but I am not optimistic. That said, I may go, just for the space hardware.

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Worn out by museum

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 22:11:54 GMT

Yesterday wasn't a good day: julian_tiger woke me early, and I never got back to sleep, including an annoying bit where I started brooding about not getting back to sleep. An afternoon nap helped with the tiredness, but the bad mood lingered until bedtime.

I woke this morning at a reasonable 7:45, feeling quite a bit better. Tea, conversation with cattitude and adrian_turtle, a long, comfortable hot shower, Scrabble, and lunch. Then we went down to the Museum of Natural History, which has all sorts of interesting exhibits and has the advantage of being indoors. We still had the cold walk through the park, but once we got to the subway station, we were indoors until we got back out of the subway at the same station after the museum. (I am inordinately fond of the subway-level entrance to that museum; the museum has been there quite a bit longer than the subway.) I was particularly glad of this because, after a block or so of the walk to the train, my chest was feeling tight--no other symptoms--and I suspect I am not 100% well. Not coughing, I don't think it's worth a doctor's visit, but I may be wrong, given that bronchitis is one of those things where having had it before is a risk factor for having it again.
(I was fine on the walk home after the museum.)

Rather than wearing ourselves out trying to see everything, we aimed specifically for the current special exhibit on the Silk Road. It's nicely set up, with the displays arranged partly by geography: starting at Xi'an (once capital of China) in the east, through Turfan and Samarkand, to Baghdad in the West. It talks about silk, about pottery and glass and spices and other things carried along the way, about camels, about the cities, about different kinds of writing and different things people wrote on (from cuneiform tablets to bamboo slats to papyrus to paper made of hemp and mulberry, and Chinese paper money), about the alternate route by sea. And somehow I was less than impressed, but that may be because my back started hurting halfway through. Cattitude thought highly of the exhibit.

After that, we stopped on the first floor to see the piece of cloth woven in Madagascar from golden spider silk, a very attractive piece meant as both a proof-of-concept of working with spider silk and an attempt to revive weaving in Madagascar. The label there noted that they can't raise these spiders in captivity, because they are aggressively cannibalistic, so they captured spiders, used a specially made devise to extract the silk, and then released them.

While we were waiting for our 2:30 admission to the Silk Road (we got to the museum around 2), we stopped in the gift shop, where I found a small calendar (to keep at my desk) but we didn't find a full-size wall calendar we both liked. We may have to visit a bookstore together. The souvenir shop for the silk road exhibit didn't grab us. So, a pretty inexpensive outing: we have 30-day unlimited metrocards, and a museum membership.

Home, with tea, and I suspect I'm not going to be making an apple crisp this evening.

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