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Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

Ever since I got here, they’ve been predicting an end to the good weather. And every day has been nicer than the last; upper 70s, breezy, partly cloudy, not too humid. People are out on the Mall playing softball, families are having picnics, and if I hadn’t talked to some natives on the subject the other night, I’d have thought this was normal summer weather here. Apparently, it’s supposed to be miserable. I managed to be here during the best summer weather in years.

I haven’t experienced summer like the rest of the world knows it for years now. To me, summer is a blasted wasteland, a time in which to avoid the outdoors, to learn to love air conditioning, to appreciate being at work and to anticipate the coming of fall. Here, it’s the time to be outside, it’s evenings wandering around, it’s fresh-cut grass and softball games. I’d almost forgotten.

Tomorrow, I’ll be back in Tucson, just as the monsoons are hitting. Over a hundred degrees, over seventy percent humidity, a wall of heat just outside every door. The realities of life are coming back to me, too; I’ll need to talk to my landlord about a few things, pay bills, answer mail, all the things I’ve successfully avoided for a couple of weeks now. I’ve wandered the museums in a daze, doing nothing but absorbing beauty for eight or ten hours a day every day, and now I get to find out what I’ve learned.

Will this time end up inspiring me the way that I think it will? Will I be more relaxed with my life than I have? What has this done to my perspective, and what will that influence do?

As I leave for the airport, it’s scorching outside, and muggy. The normal summer weather is back. And in a few hours, or actually twelve hours or so, I’ll be back in Tucson.

What’s next?

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Patterns and fugue

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Apparently, if you’re in DC and are looking for a place to sit down a while, get your thoughts down, and have something tasty to eat all you have to do is wander a block or two away from the Mall and keep your eyes open. I’m in a little cafe that specializes in flatbread sandwiches and salads, enjoying a view of rush-hour traffic accompanied by decent music, free refills, and wi-fi.

I’ll head over to the National History Museum shortly; they’re open late, and I may have given them short shrift yesterday. Plus, I need some souvenirs.

Amazing pattern

Amazing pattern

I spent the day at the Freer, Sackler and National galleries, immersed in the finest artwork from the past fifteen hundred years or so. I found myself fascinated by two aspects of art today, composition and ornamentation. In looking at the exquisite pottery and late bronze work of China and Iran, I found I was stunned by the intricacy of the patterning used. In my foray to the National Gallery, I kept being struck by the careful composition that was involved in the masters’ paintings. And then in the exhibit on royal armor from 15th and 16th century Spain and the paintings thereof, the two themes collided beautifully, and I found myself marveling at the detail in the context of the elegant compositions.

I saw Renoirs and Matisses and Whistlers and Degas and Monets and Manets and the self-portrait by VanGogh, and got to examine the brushwork that went into each. Massive canvases a story tall, tiny miniatures in little cabinets, sculptures and jewelry and weapons of war.

Geometry

Geometry

There’s a fugue involved in post-art-museum browsing, as there is when I’ve been to the zoo. Instead of seeing people as the animals they are, as I do after looking at animals all day, when I’ve been exposed to artwork I see the people around me as art. Every face I see through the window of a car is a portrait; the couple at the next table are telling a story with the way that they’re sitting. The world around me has become luminously beautiful.

I suppose the truth of the matter lies somewhere between the two. We are animals, and we are art.

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Close Encounters

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

Last night I happened upon a few hundred people hanging out in the National Mall; it was one of this year’s Screen On The Green, a showing of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind in the open air, with the Capitol for a backdrop. And in the midst of the gathered crowd, there was Metafilter’s own Mr. MoonPie, waving at me. So I got to join him and his lovely wife and some of the most laid-back people in DC for the screening. I stayed long enough to hear the famous five-note chant ring out across the Mall, and then wandered to the memorials, which I’d heard are best seen at night. Magnificent.

The Washington Monument

The Washington Monument

The plan for today was to wander the Museum of American History, but I found myself thoroughly uninterested. It was bric-a-brack, detritus of the past which was only distinguished by having been touched by the hands that made history. Their magic hadn’t worn off on it, it hadn’t been made any more special by their use. It was just… stuff.

I fled to the National Gallery. I have an insatiable hunger for art these days. Seeing Rembrandt’s self-portrait, being able to look at his brush strokes upon it, the unlikely way in which he used color and texture to create himself on the canvas. This is what matters.

So now I have seen Magritte’s The Human Condition up close. I’ve seen a Jackson Pollock which filled my whole field of vision, dizzyingly. I’ve met Rembrandt’s self-portrait stare, and found it hard to tear myself away. I’ve watched Calder’s enormous mobile rotate slowly above throngs of tourists.

A view from the Portrait Gallery

A view from the Portrait Gallery

I find myself inspired. Possibly overly-inspired; I’ve absorbed an enormous amount of artwork over the past few days, ranging from lunatic crafts to incredibly refined realism, and it’s overwhelming. The most important thing I think I’m coming away with, though, is the motto that’s inscribed over the Throne, the theme of the week: fear not. Do what you want, try things, see what you like, keep refining that process. Learn, expand, create, grow, make, repeat. Play with the process.

Oh, and one more thing I’ve leared. If Mr. MoonPie recommends a restaurant, listen. I had unimaginably good soft-shelled crabs for dinner this evening, at a restaurant just two blocks from my hotel. I’d never have known about it without him. If he recommends a dumpster, I’m eating there.

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Zoomorphic

Monday, July 20th, 2009

One of the better small decisions that I’ve made in the course of this trip was to use my MP3 player during my tour of the National zoo. Mojave 3, Hammock, and Sigur Ros provided the perfect soundtrack to wandering bemused amongst the animals and the humans and their young, undisturbed by the constant and annoying chatter around me.

Lion statue from the bridge near the zoo

Lion statue from the bridge near the zoo

Misanthropic, perhaps, but listening to grade-school field trip explanations of taxonomy gets old after, well, grade school. Instead, I got a few hours of the beauty of nature, accompanied by beautiful music.

Given the opportunity and the means, I will one day acquire a red panda. Just so you know.

I didn’t expect to meet an old friend when I got to the zoo, but there he was. Uncle Beazeley, the triceratops, hanging out in a patch of foliage by the reptile house.

Surprise brontosaurus

Surprise brontosaurus

I used to play on him when he made his home on the Mall by the Natural History Museum, when I was really, really much smaller than I am today. He still looks huge, though. He was apparently moved to the zoo in 1994, and they don’t let people play on him anymore.

The zoo is magnificent, of course, even though a lot of it is under construction and a lot of exhibits are empty. It occurred to met that an unscrupulous parent might easily convince their child that certain animals were invisible to them, leaving the child with a lifelong phobia of unseen predators that everyone else is aware of.

I found myself fascinated by textures throughout my tour. The star-shelled tortoise, snakeskin, the feathers of the kori. I was able to get a few close-up shots, thanks to how the zoo is laid out. Unbelievable how beautiful and complex the patterns can get. I’m hoping to use them as drawing inspiration.

I’m experiencing my usual post-zoo fugue, though. After spending hours wandering amongst animals, admiring their pelts and their musuclature, their feathers and their mannerisms, I can’t help but look at human beings in the same detached way for a while. We’re a strange species. Fun to watch, though.

I find myself drawn back to the National Gallery again and again. I’ve been here for a couple of hours almost every day I’ve been here, and I keep happening upon more exhibits that I never knew existed. The museum is open late, so I tend to wander over here at about the time the other museums close. I grab a drink and a snack, hang out in the courtyard and blog for a while, and then wander through the exhibits, taking my time and marveling at the marvelous.

Which is where I’m posting this from now.

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Things I discovered today

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

I’m much more affected by abstract art, both painting and sculpture, than I realized.

I’ve been enthralled by the paintings of Renee Magritte for a long time, but I’d never seen one in person until this afternoon. In the prints, the paintings look photorealistic. In real life, seen up close, there are slightly misplaced brush strokes, tiny flaws here and there.

Detail of Delusions of Grandeur II

Detail of Delusions of Grandeur II

It doesn’t detract from the works at all, but it does inspire in me a type of hope. Once again, my theme recurs; these giants who’ve lived so long in my mind are emphatically human. And more magnificent therefore.

Sculpture can be funny.

Sculpture can be incredibly moving. There’s a rabbit huddled in a corner of an exhibit in the Renwick gallery, a sculpture called i am no one by Beth Cavener Stichter.

i am no one

i am no one

The more I looked at it, the more I wanted to burst into tears, to comfort it, to let it escape somehow.

The Postal Museum sounds like it would be boring, and it really, really is.

There is a tree of wishes in the Hirschhorn sculpture garden. It’s an ongoing installation, a way of collecting wishes, and sending them to Yoko Ono, of all people. It’s for people who’ve grown out of Santa Clause, I suppose. My wish? I wish we could actually know what it’s like to be someone else for a while.

Oh, and the White House is tiny.

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A small, bespectacled, soft-spoken man

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

There are some magnificent works here at the Smithsonian; works in oil on canvas, works in stone and bronze and gold and silver and diamonds. Works by great masters, trained by great masters, working at the heighth of their powers in a medium refined throughout centuries. So why is it that the one work that’s entranced me the most so far on my tour is made out of hand-me-down furniture, garbage, tinfoil, and cigarette packs?

The Throne

The Throne

James Hampton’s The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millenium General Assembly was built in a garage in northern DC. Hampton was a janitor, who worked on the piece in obscurity, by himself, for over a decade. He considered himself a prophet, referred to himself as a saint, wrote in a code that has not yet been broken, and created ineffable beauty from garbage.

There are worlds within us all, it turns out, and astonishing things come to pass when we let them out, in whatever form they take. Fear not.

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Capitol

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

I am sitting on the lawn outside the Capitol building in the shade beneath an ancient tree, listening to a few hundred Chinese people protesting the treatment of the Falun gong, and sirens. Somewhere in the trees above me is a hawk, just back from an unsuccessful pigeon pursuit. The wind smells like it might rain.

I made it through the conference, a strange conflation of complaints, sales pitches, commiseration and actual contributions. It was less dire than last year, less pervaded with the awful stench of Vegas desperation, and I found myself behaving somewhat socially.

I left all that behind in National Harbor on Chesapeake Bay this morning, though, and got into my hotel in Arlington without event. The old hotel room was spacious and elegant and posh; the new one is compact and modern and posh. I have a seldom-indulged love for hotel rooms; the  feeling of luxurious transition, the sumptuous and solicitous sensation of limbo is addictive. Given the option, I’d live in hotel rooms, and move around every few weeks.

The National Mall is before me, museums arrayed around it, and I have a week in which to take all of this in. I’ve found out how to use the metro, I’ve stocked up my hotel room with the necessary munchies, I even did my laundry before leaving the old hotel. So the preparations are in place.

This is a good way to begin, though. Sitting under trees, on the grass, near the Capitol, watching all the other tourists go by to the sound of church bells and traffic.

The Capitol dome, this afternoon

The Capitol dome, this afternoon

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