chicago: the lazy wrap-up blog post

Yeah, I never got around to telling the rest of my Chicago stories, then this weekend I went to Oregon and now I'm just totally behind. So here, I'm finishing off Chicago with one big post.


On Saturday we went to the Field Museum. They've got a real big dinosaur there.


A highlight of the visit: Chicago's Fluevog store isn't far from Grrrbear's house. It's in an old movie theater. I bought boots. They needed stretching (the guy almost pulled me off the chair getting the left boot off my foot) so I'm actually receiving them tomorrow - Grrrbear picked them up last week and shipped them to my office.


Clockwise from top left: Grrbear's girlfriend, Grrrbear, me.

Saturday night I went to former colleague S.Ball's wedding, the reason for my trip to Chicago. It was in a former billboard factory that now houses some guy's collection of sports cars. The guy also rents it out for events. The ceremony was on the top level, where they painted the billboards (so it had really high ceilings and natural light). Like how I cleverly made this photograph anonymous by shaking the camera? Totally on purpose. Nothing at all to do with the low light.


I wore my awesomest pair of shoes. In fact, I planned everything else I wore around the shoes. The other shoes in this picture belong to two very excellent people from my former employer.

I maxed out on wedding partying at about 11:30 and caught a cab back to Grrrbear's. I got in a little before midnight and was like, hey, sweet, I'm in time for Weekend Update! Stupid central time. Saturday Night Live was just ending.

And that is all. It was a quick trip but good fun.

chicago: the art! art! art!

After lunch, Grrrbear gave me his Art Institute member card, dropped me off at the El station, and sent me downtown. I adopted my normal plan for art museums: keep moving. If I try to look at everything, or even anything close to everything, my brain gets full after the first room and I can't concentrate on anything else.

So I saw all the famous stuff, like this:

which was apparently in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, because everyone keeps asking me about it, but I saw that movie once about 18 years ago and don't remember it at all. Other famous paintings: American Gothic and Nighthawks. But they pretty much looked like you'd expect, and I'd seen Nighthawks on tour a few years ago.

I considered skipping the European art before 1900, 'cause that stuff can be bor-ring, but I decided just to walk through. And I totally fell in love with this St. George and the Dragon from 15th century Spain:

Of course it was cooler in person. (It shows up better here - click on the painting to enlarge.)

When I was in Berlin this February, I went to the Egyptian Museum on a day when my brain was already full (sigh) and I couldn't appreciate anything but the one famous piece. I was bummed about this, because there isn't much Egyptian stuff in D.C. so I don't get many opportunities to see it. So I was excited about the tiny Egyptian room at the Art Institute, and would you look at this adorable chick?

So cute!

big whale

Back to the point of the trip, or one of the points anyway: the New Bedford Whaling Museum. It was so great! The blue whale (above) is one of three skeletons on display. The newest is a sperm whale from the last few years. Perhaps you knew this: Whales are big. The sperm whale room included a display on whale displays from the 19th century and earlier - they used to soak 'em in formaldehyde and carry them around on trains so the common folk could pay a quarter to see a whale. The funniest was a woodblock print from Japan that included a lot of people holding their noses.


Whaling ship models were everywhere - most were the tabletop size you'd expect for a ship model, but there was one half-size model (above). It's pretty big, then you have to mentally double everything. The craziest: the iron hoops near the tops of the masts where crew would stand and watch for whales. The top of the mast is really far away from the deck of the ship. Ok, so first you mentally double that distance. Then you consider that the ship was on the ocean. And that sometimes the ocean is kinda bumpy. Yikes.

There were lots of artistic depictions of whaling scenes. My favorite was a set of dinner plates from Holland that showed an Arctic whaling trip. It included a scene with a walrus and one with a polar bear. Being killed, of course. (Which, if I met a polar bear up close, I'd probably want to do, too. I have a new obsession with this school, where you have to learn how to shoot polar bears before you can venture out of town.)

Perhaps the coolest thing was footage from a 1922 silent film on a whaling ship. So you could actually see them putting out the boats, harpooning the whale, cutting off the blubber, spearing sharks that came up to munch on the whale, and bailing the spermaceti out of the whale's head (ew).

So, whaling museum: two flippers up. Definitely worth a visit.

buh-bye

Last night I walked by the Building Museum on the way to this concert and wondered why all the networks had satellite trucks parked on the street. Now I get it.

awesomely cheesy

I kind of ran out of steam on my vacation blogging, because I never know if anyone other than me is actually interested in my vacation. I mean, I don't want to be boring. But tonight I had dinner with E.C. before rehearsal and she reassured me that it's interesting, even if no one leaves comments. Which is not a blatant plea for comments (although I am not above that) but rather an acknowledgment that some posts aren't really the kind that require comments. Unfortunately, I have no other metric for interestingness, but I'm just going to forge ahead in the hope that what interests me must interest at least *some* other people.

Here's something that interests me: wacky museums. And the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie ("House at Checkpoint Charlie") is most definitely one of these. Checkpoint Charlie was the main gateway between East and West Berlin for non-Germans. The museum opened there in 1963 and loomed over the border until the wall fell. The museum reflects one dude's personal obsession with the wall.

The guy who started it had contacts in the escape-helper community, so it has tons of escape-related artifacts, like cars that were modified to hide people, ultra-lights that flew into East Germany and brought back friends and relatives, and a big old-fashioned console radio that a teenage girl escaped in. And a platform that a family used to escape with a hot-air balloon. And movies about escapes. And diagrams of tunnels. And so much more. There are photographs and writing everywhere you look. Whoever put it together wasn't overly concerned about objectivity, context, or whether one should avoid repeating the same information - even the same photographs - in different parts of the museum (sometimes even in the same room).

Here's a picture. See those two suitcases up at the top right corner? They have a hole cut between them, and a girl escaped in there.


I described the museum to S.Ev as "awesomely cheesy." I think it's too bad that this is the only exposure most people get to information about the Wall, because there are really fascinating and well-thought-out memorials in other places, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. There's nothing like a good wacky museum.

not so old town

Check out the central square in Warsaw's old town. Looks like a nice little square from a few hundred years ago, doesn't it?

Well, it's not. Warsaw got destroyed during the second world war, the old town included. After the war, the government used photographs and detailed plans of the old town to reconstruct it; everything looks old, even from up close, but it dates from the 40s to the 60s. On the one hand, this means the old town is a big old fake - but it's also kind of cool that they put that much effort into reconstructing their history.

I was in Warsaw for less than 24 hours. The coolest sight, which for some reason I took no pictures of, was the museum of the Warsaw Uprising (for reasons that are unclear, they call it the Warsaw Rising Museum). It's a huge new museum with great exhibits, lots of photos and documents and videos and whatnot.

The Warsaw Uprising, not to be confused with the earlier Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was toward the end of the war. The Nazis were about to leave and the Red Army was coming from the other direction. So Poland was like, ok, if we don't establish our own government right this second, we're going to be overrun by the Soviets. (It didn't work out.)

(The Ghetto Uprising didn't succeed, either. Read about the Warsaw ghetto here and the uprising here.)

nefertiti

It's fun to visit famous pieces of art:

The Egyptian Museum has a great collection, and I don't see much Egyptian art regularly, but I was just too museumed out after the Pergamon Museum to spend much time there.

italian teenagers

I was really looking forward to going to the Pergamon Museum, because about 10 years ago I went to Pergamon - it's in Turkey - and it was totally cool. But I always thought, I'm never going to make it to Berlin to see the stuff from here. And voila. I made it to Berlin.

So my expectations for the Pergamon Museum were probably a little too high, and the view of the Pergamon altar (which German archaeologists dug up, brought back, and reconstructed) was obstructed by masses of Italian teenagers. I don't actually know if they're all Italian, but they were various teenagers from various European countries, and they were in my way wherever I went in Berlin. (Not always the same ones, I assume.)

Once I kind of got over the teenagers, the various friezes from Pergamon were really pretty cool.The museum also has a big collection of Islamic art and a few other ginormous things like the Pergamon altar.

It turned out that my favorite part was the Greek and Roman sculpture, which I didn't know I liked. But look at this guy:

What's not to love?

I see you

Saturday evening, before going to this restaurant with S.Ball and the Mr.S.Ball-to-be, I visited the American Art Museum and Portrait Gallery. They have a super-cool giant open gallery devoted to contemporary art, and I stopped in to visit this crazy thing.


It's a circle of floor-to-ceiling strings of tiny LEDs that light up to spell words, spiraling from ceiling to floor (and, I discovered, if you watch long enough, they switch and go from floor to ceiling, then right to left in a circle). It never says anything particularly profound, but it's really hard to take your eyes off of it. Because you always want to know what the next word is going to be. Even if it's never really all that interesting.

art

I went to the National Gallery on Sunday to catch the last day of the Turner exhibit and dropped in on the Hopper, too, which is closing in a few weeks. I had to wait in line about 20 minutes for the Turner, but that was ok because it gave me time to read the brochure. Here's the last bit of the line, in one of the nice garden courts in the National Gallery's west building:


I wasn't really that big on most of the Turners, but the paintings of the Houses of Parliament going up in flames were pretty cool. After lunch, I wandered over to the east wing:


...where the Hopper was. That show was really lovely, but so insanely crowded that I got kind of claustrophobic and had to rush through the last few rooms. I'd love to go back on a weekday before it closes - his paintings are way cool in person.

henry ford

Pretty, huh? Looks a little like England?


Well, it's a cottage from the Cotswolds (17th century, I believe), but it's in Dearborn, Michigan. One of the things I learned last weekend was that Henry Ford had a lot of money. Enough money to buy dozens of buildings and move them to Greenfield Village. Ok, a lot are replicas - some of the Thomas Edison buildings just had "some structural elements" from the original - but it's still pretty impressive.

When J.Vo dropped me off at Greenfield Village, I asked the ticket lady for a ticket, we discussed the fact that I was not a student and not a member of AAA, and she said, ok, that's $25. And I said, wait, I thought it was $20. And she said, parking is $5. And I said, but I don't have a car. And she just stared at me blankly. [Does. Not. Compute.] Ah, Michigan. Eventually we sorted it out, but she was really confused at first.