Homecoming

This weekend was extremely busy. I was meeting up with friends I hadn't seen in over a year and trying to pack so many activities into the two and a half days that I really didn't have much of a weekend. I was at the museums a little bit on Saturday (NatHist) and a lot bit on Sunday (NMAI and NGA and, briefly, Air and Space). The museums have to be one of the greatest things about the District, especially in the off-season when you aren't competing with busloads of school kids.

For some reason Natural History wasn't as crowded as I expected for a Saturday in June. I was very efficiently able to steer my daughter around the dinosaurs, the Hope Diamond, the Hall of Mammals, and the insect exhibit. She loves the bugs. She especially liked the honey bees and was fascinated by the fact that they could get outside the museum through a little access tube. She decided to tell everyone who came near about the guard bees and that the bees were going out to get nectar and pollen and that they'd come back to make honey.

On Sunday, we ate lunch at the NMAI. The food there is easily the best, but prices have always been high and they seem to be even higher than I remember. It's absolutely criminal to charge $3.15 for a fountain drink.

We had four adults and four kids dining and the bill came to $99. I think MoMA is cheaper.

I love the design of the NMAI, but I find the exhibition space really minimal. There's not much there -- a lot of empty space. That's a design choice, of course, and the immense central atrium is wonderful when there's a live demonstration occurring, but when you look at the first floor, there's very little on it beside the cafeteria and the atrium -- they've even taken out the little shop they had and consolidated everything in the second floor shop (which we didn't visit).

Between the NMAI and the NGA, we lingered a long while in the shade of the trees lining the mall and watched the young adults sweat away at their kickball games in the unshaded heat of Sunday afternoon. I don't know if the ball is really deflated or what, but it seemed to me that none of the players could kick it ten feet beyond the infield. And seriously, how the hell do you miss a huge blue ball with your foot?

And to top it all off, I missed the Gauguin show.

Happy New Year, or better late than never.

It's been a week since I was in D.C., but driving down Connecticut Avenue last night around 9:30, I felt like it had been a month. Maybe it's because the train ride from Chicago had been so long -- a seven hour layover in Pittsburgh made it a nearly 24 hour journey -- or maybe it's because we simply ran ourselves ragged on every leg of the trip.

In Pittsburgh, with seven hours to kill, we visited the Andy Warhol Museum, seven floors of fun just across the 7th Avenue Bridge on the North Side. It had been several years since our last visit, and it seems that in the interim the museum has decided that Warhol's work alone isn't enough to keep the museum fresh, and two floors almost completely featured work by other artists (Bruce Nauman and Ron Mueck).

I'm also pleasantly surprised to say that after four days in Chicago, where they put meat in everything from soups to sodas, we were able to get beautiful salads in Pittsburgh, a town not exactly known for healthy eating. Lest my dear readers think I'm knocking Chicago, which is a first class city, I will admit that we hardly went out of our way to find good food. In fact, at least half of the meals were eaten either in the hotels of the MLA or the underground tunnels connecting the hotels. OK, let's be honest...at least 75% of meals were consumed that way.

A quick rundown of the MLA would go like this: saw friends, saw panels, bought or weaseled my way into many books, chatted up a few press acquisition reps, moderated a panel that was surprisingly well attended, given its kiss of death time slot, and finally spent the last few hours in Chicago at the Art Institute. Most of the modern American art is unavailable or scattered throughout the museum, as they're undergoing a pretty ambitious expansion and have many galleries closed. Also, a Jasper Johns exhibit was taking up way too much space. I like some of his stuff, but after two shows at the National Gallery of Art earlier this year, I think I'm Jasper Johnsed-Out for a time. Besides, the show was called "Gray," and featured his grayscale paintings, which after about five rooms starts to overload.

As for New Years Resolutions, I resolve this year to work on publications. That's a modest enough goal, I think.

Midweek day off.

Just to recap: today at 7 p.m. you could catch Richard Russo at Politics and Prose or Brock Clarke at Olsson's in Dupont Circle. Both talks, I'm sure, will be full of dark humor.

In other news, my son was off school yesterday since DCPS was having the parent teacher conference day, and after we received a glowing review of our second-grader, during which we were told he was a "pleasure to have in class," we went to lunch. Then my wife went back to work and I took the child to Air and Space Museum, where I broke down and took him on the flight simulator that the museum has taking up one of their galleries. It is an absolute piece of shit. The screen is fuzzy and the "simulation" is pretty crappy. Half the time it simply appears that you're watching the plane in 3rd person, rather than riding in it (caveat: this ride was the $7 ride simulator, not the $8 "interactive"). I had a more realistic simulation experience at the espnzone, where they've got a roller coaster simulator that costs far less. Seriously, the screen was so old and nasty, the company's name was burned into the screen.

After that enjoyable experience, it was off to the National Gallery of Art, where we managed to see the Hopper show again, this time without a 2.5 year old and the weekend throngs. I am simply enthralled by his watercolors, some of which are huge, and all of which have those same strong lines and contrasts that isolate everything in his oil paintings.

Mystery Shot.

Any guesses?

So how was the weekend?

We went to the Jasper Johns exhibit this weekend at the National Gallery of Art. I was unimpressed, and I like Johns's work. I think the problem with the exhibit is that it's too repetitive: two rooms full of targets, a few more of the "red, yellow, blue" motif, and then some body images. All in all, the repetition doesn't build meaning but rather implies, incorrectly I would add, that Johns is a one-trick pony.

We couldn't resist taking the chance to see the Matisse cut-outs, which are only open for a portion of the day:

Don't worry: I didn't use a flash. I am astounded by the amount of flash photography that goes on in art museums. I'm also astounded that the guards often don't say anything about it, or that museums don't have policies against it (the NGA doesn't bar flash photography, while the Smithsonian's American Art and Portrait Gallery does).

For children, the NGA has a "picture hunt" checklist that asks you to go from gallery to gallery: they give you the gallery number and the artist and painting names, and you go hunt it down. Our son was magnificently happy with this activity, and we went end to end after the paintings. The Shaw Memorial was on the list:

Doing the search made me realize how deep the NGA's collection is. I usually hang out in the late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century areas, so I hardly ever venture to the western end of the West Building. Several of our paintings were down on the western end, though, so we meandered over there to seek out such gems as Sodoma's St. George and the Dragon, which is not to be confused with other versions (for instance, it wasn't the version that our son has seen a million times reproduced to ridiculous size in the NGA concourse cafeteria):

It was a good way to spend a Saturday.