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May. 25th, 2004 10:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
javacatI pretty much had a perfect vacation in Washington DC. I didn't go nuts during packing, thanks to my foresight to phone Sharon for intervention when craziness was looming, and packed 100% appropriately BIG YAY! I was there for a week. I spent one night at the lovely home of also lovely Buffista Raquel, camped near a lake for the next 3 nights (I shipped my gear to Raquel's so I wouldn't have to drag it on the plane, then shipped it back), then moved to the F2F hotel for 3 nights where I shared a room with DebetEsse. The F2F was great, and the museum-ing was fabulous.
http://artwork.barewalls.com/product/framer.exe?ARTWORKID=247
I visited this painting three days worth (a couple of looks each day). I can't believe I'd never seen it or a print of it before this visit to the Nat'l Gallery of Art. I love it. In person, it leaps out from all the other magnificent paintings with its vividness.
http://www.orientalist-art.org.uk/renoir.html
I did a double take when I saw this and thought it was some sort of an early installation. It's in the same room as The Roses (above), making it the spot. It appears to be 3-D viewed in person. It's uncanny.
http://www.expo-cezanne.com/1_3.cfm?id=1967749741
Another that grabbed me that I'd never seen before. Of course I thought of Deb.
After going to the Nat'l Women's Museum of Art, I realized what's so fabulous about the National Gallery of Art is that there are guards EVERYWHERE, and hence, it's just you looking at the work of art. There is no glass between you and the paintings (except for the only Da Vinci painting in America). It makes a HUGE difference, almost the difference between a print and the original. The NWMoA paintings had no-glare glass over them and it was jarring.
Also, I've changed my mind about the NWMoA; I think it's a bad idea to splinter off art because of gender or race or whatever. The art is grouped at the NGoA by era. There's one piece in particular at the NWMoA that IMO belongs in the NGoA in with the Cezannes, Van Goghs, Renoirs, Cassatts, etc.; this one: http://www.nmwa.org/collection/detail.asp?WorkID=2226. Except for it and 2 Kahlo's, none of the other art at NWMoA seemed consequential. I suppose the museum is really for the rest of it - they wouldn't be shown otherwise. It's a shame that something truly great is stuck there by itself, though. The Abandoned Doll should be with its peers at the NGoA to lend and receive context. The NWMoA should have had some Cassatts but I don't remember seeing any. Maybe they're on loan. The gift shop has very good artisan jewelry & unusual/nicely designed gift items.
I loved the East Wing of the NGoA. Will write about that later. The Freer, Hirschorn, and Sackler were okay but paled in comparison to the NGoA, IMO. The Postal Museum was totally eh AND Pitney-Bowes tries to trick you into signing up for every direct mailing list known to mankind, the bastards. The cool stamps aren't curated in an interesting way at all, though I admire their efficient, utilitarian storage.
The Spy Museum was great fun. Ginger had to leave before closing to meet a friend, but I had 3 hours to go through it and hadn't seen it all by the time they closed and threw everyone out. The gift shop was incredible, the little time I had to look at it. It has a huge collection of word games, logic puzzles, brain teasers and books on mysteries and spying, including one I'd like to read that was an espionage variation on the theme of The Worst Case Survival Handbook.
My friend's Louise's father is Henry Ogden, and the Air and Space Museum has an exhibit on the second floor about the first flight around the world of which he was one of the aviators. One of the planes they flew hangs over the exhibit along with other historic planes (it's next to Amelia Earhart's plane). http://www.afa.org/magazine/sept1999/0999around.asp and http://www.firstflight.org/shrine.cfm. I was so thrilled to finally see the Smithsonian exhibit, I burbled out all the extra details Louise had told me to some random man standing next to me. Fortunately, he was thrilled with me. I stayed for a Planatarium show and 3D Imax movie about the Space Station.
The Bartholdi Fountain is something I happened upon while trekking to see the Library of Congress and Supreme Court from the Air and Space Museum. http://www.aoc.gov/USBG/bartholdi.htm It's a hidden treasure - well, hard to overlook but doesn't get much press. The National Wildlife Federation has re-done the garden around it, it's now certified as a backyard wildlife habitat, and it was hopping with birds at twilight. It's a gorgeous garden. It made me supremely happy to see many garden areas around the Mall that were wildlife-friendly, not formal. There's a lovely Butterfly Garden between the NMoA and the Natural History Museum that had placards explaining how weeds & wildflowers are good. The National Zoo had placards explaining the same thing - they are allowing all the non-animal-enclosure land to return to wild meadow or forest state, which is fabulous.
There was a line of people entering the Library of Congress at twilight, which I joined, and discovered that a Bernstein concert was starting soon to which they were giving away free tickets. It was an excellent concert, technically perfect, very amusing & light. I've forgotten the names of the soprano, tenor, and 2 pianists but they were very, very good and very accomplished in their fields, from the program. The tenor was tall, dark and handsome. Both singers were good actors, too.
I walked past to the Supreme Court on my way to the hotel after the concert. I cried when I stood in front of it, thinking about how much good has happened there, and how it has the capacity to correct itself, like Plessy v. Ferguson, then Brown v. The Board of Education. Then there's Roe v. Wade, probably the case that I care about the most passionately. (I tried not to think about what might happen now if Roe came before them again. It would make me cry in a very different way.) I was also thinking about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, then remembered that that was legislation, DUH. I'd just been over at the Capitol before the Library of Congress, where a soldier had let me climb up some steps to look into the construction pit behind it, so turned to look at it and nod in Congress' direction.
Something about DC? There are police and/or soldiers and/or guards everywhere. I've never felt safer at night anywhere. Also, the Metro system rocks. The station agents, to a person, were incredibly knowledgable, helpful, friendly and nice, even though they must get really sick of answering the same questions over and over.
I camped near Reston. The other campground proximate to DC is in Greenbelt. I kind of wanted to visit the Greenbelt Park en route to Anne's to check it out for future reference, but it would have been a hassle to do so. In general, Reston vs. Greenbelt (aka Virginia vs. Maryland) struck me as being kind of like Marin vs. Alameda County. Who knows, though, Greenbelt Park could be like Montclair or Redwood Park. Camping outside DC and taking transit in was fine with me. I liked the drive from the Reston Park to the Vienna Metro Station. It gave me a driving-woodsy-back-roads fix that was a good ingredient to a perfect vacation. It would surprise me to find that it took me over an hour to get to my tent from Dupont Circle or Adams Morgan, though. The frogs were really loud at night. I thought there were cicadas at night too, but someone said the cicadas only sang during the day. Maybe there were crickets, too.
The roads in the DC area are Hell. Examples: the feds and locals fought over the freeway from/to Dulles. There's one freeway from which you can't exit (concrete barracades separate them) literally parallel to a freeway from which you can - none of this marked unless you know to ENTER at "EXIT 9" if you want to get off at any of exits 9-16. Seriously. Then, the city streets sometimes are marked with one name on the east side of the street and a different name on the west side of the same street. Fun to try to find where to turn when you are driving north-south, not! It was a straight shot coming back from Ann's, but there was major road construction en route, so it took me nearly 2 hours to get back to my tent. It was ridiculous. There is nothing in Calif., including in LA, that is as badly marked/signed at the streets, roads and freeways around DC, I swear. I even stopped at a police station to get directions onto the freeway and was given 100% incorrect directions, admittedly from a well-appointed woman walking from her car towards the police station entrance, not an actual officer, but still. By that time, I'd had enough experience with The Hell That Is DC Streets & Roads to know that the directions were wrong, wrong, wrong, and stopped to ask for the kindness of strangers, successfully, from a prosporous looking business in the vicinity before I ended up on the Evil Road of No Exits to Dulles. I talked to a transportation lobbyist about it and he said, yeah. They don't care. They care about the Metro, but not the roads.
Noise Design, KristinT, DebetEsse, Matt the Bruins Fan, and I went to the Memorials at night: Vietnam, Nurses, WW II, a peek at the Korean through a chainlink fence, Lincoln (more tears reading the Gettysburg Address, both being moved, again, by the speech itself and sadness that that caliber of leadership isn't forthcoming from DC right now), and FDR. *Loved* the FDR memorial. Vortex suggested it and I'm so glad she did. I hadn't even noticed it on the maps. It's the only memorial designed to be 100% accessible, appropriately enough. I loved it because it, father of the national park system? the memorial is seriously outdoorsy-nature-beautiful. We could see the Washington Memorial from everywhere, and drove past the Jefferson Memorial. The Vietnam Memorial was amazing. I got a cell phone call in the middle of it though.
I would've liked to go into the Supreme Court and hear one of their free tours, and go into the main hall at the Library of Congress (we were restricted to the concert hall and two exhibits (Ira and George Gershwin and Bob Hope)), but just having seen them was enough for this trip. The Dutch masters weren't being exhibited at the NMoA, except for a Vermeer and a few others in the sculpture area. I remember seeing a huge Seurat at the NMoA when I was a kid but could only find 2 small-sized not that interesting Seurats this time and no other pointellists. Perhaps it was a special exhibit back-when. I spent way too much time on the early liturgical art when I was a kid. Yada yada, it's kind of all the same IMO, though there was this one cool glass and gold reliquery that had what looked like finger bones in it. The early American landscapes and most of the portraits evoke the same reaction in me, except maybe for the Velasquez portraits, and busts of handsome members of the De Medici family. There was one 19th century American landscape-allegorical painter who did a 4 part series on the River of Life that was seriously hearts-of-space trippy.
A couple of things about the East Wing? The building is way cool. http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/East_Wing_National_Gallery.html Also, Pollack & Rothko & O'Keefe in real life are amazing. You just can't see the same things, the depth, in a print. They had a couple of this guy I'd never heard of/seen before, begins with a T, works in giant sheets of lead. Thierry? Interesting stuff. The Hirshorn has one of his too.
The Buffistas Prom was quite fun. I spent the entire Prom outside, taking fashion photos. It was exactly what I wanted to do, and made me very happy. The pics I took with Noise Design's camera are here: http://homepage.mac.com/drewsound/Buffistas/PhotoAlbum43.html. I took almost all photos under F2F 2004 Parts 4, 5 and 6; ND (or someone) took the group photos at the start of Part 4. The Buffistas awarded me a Class Protector medal for my work on organizing the F2F, which I'm not sure I deserved, but am very honored to have received, and sang Happy Birthday to me, since it was indeed my birthday. I'm old enough now to be an age where I thought people were dead by now when I was in elementary school. Weird how that happens.
http://artwork.barewalls.com/product/framer.exe?ARTWORKID=247
I visited this painting three days worth (a couple of looks each day). I can't believe I'd never seen it or a print of it before this visit to the Nat'l Gallery of Art. I love it. In person, it leaps out from all the other magnificent paintings with its vividness.
http://www.orientalist-art.org.uk/renoir.html
I did a double take when I saw this and thought it was some sort of an early installation. It's in the same room as The Roses (above), making it the spot. It appears to be 3-D viewed in person. It's uncanny.
http://www.expo-cezanne.com/1_3.cfm?id=1967749741
Another that grabbed me that I'd never seen before. Of course I thought of Deb.
After going to the Nat'l Women's Museum of Art, I realized what's so fabulous about the National Gallery of Art is that there are guards EVERYWHERE, and hence, it's just you looking at the work of art. There is no glass between you and the paintings (except for the only Da Vinci painting in America). It makes a HUGE difference, almost the difference between a print and the original. The NWMoA paintings had no-glare glass over them and it was jarring.
Also, I've changed my mind about the NWMoA; I think it's a bad idea to splinter off art because of gender or race or whatever. The art is grouped at the NGoA by era. There's one piece in particular at the NWMoA that IMO belongs in the NGoA in with the Cezannes, Van Goghs, Renoirs, Cassatts, etc.; this one: http://www.nmwa.org/collection/detail.asp?WorkID=2226. Except for it and 2 Kahlo's, none of the other art at NWMoA seemed consequential. I suppose the museum is really for the rest of it - they wouldn't be shown otherwise. It's a shame that something truly great is stuck there by itself, though. The Abandoned Doll should be with its peers at the NGoA to lend and receive context. The NWMoA should have had some Cassatts but I don't remember seeing any. Maybe they're on loan. The gift shop has very good artisan jewelry & unusual/nicely designed gift items.
I loved the East Wing of the NGoA. Will write about that later. The Freer, Hirschorn, and Sackler were okay but paled in comparison to the NGoA, IMO. The Postal Museum was totally eh AND Pitney-Bowes tries to trick you into signing up for every direct mailing list known to mankind, the bastards. The cool stamps aren't curated in an interesting way at all, though I admire their efficient, utilitarian storage.
The Spy Museum was great fun. Ginger had to leave before closing to meet a friend, but I had 3 hours to go through it and hadn't seen it all by the time they closed and threw everyone out. The gift shop was incredible, the little time I had to look at it. It has a huge collection of word games, logic puzzles, brain teasers and books on mysteries and spying, including one I'd like to read that was an espionage variation on the theme of The Worst Case Survival Handbook.
My friend's Louise's father is Henry Ogden, and the Air and Space Museum has an exhibit on the second floor about the first flight around the world of which he was one of the aviators. One of the planes they flew hangs over the exhibit along with other historic planes (it's next to Amelia Earhart's plane). http://www.afa.org/magazine/sept1999/0999around.asp and http://www.firstflight.org/shrine.cfm. I was so thrilled to finally see the Smithsonian exhibit, I burbled out all the extra details Louise had told me to some random man standing next to me. Fortunately, he was thrilled with me. I stayed for a Planatarium show and 3D Imax movie about the Space Station.
The Bartholdi Fountain is something I happened upon while trekking to see the Library of Congress and Supreme Court from the Air and Space Museum. http://www.aoc.gov/USBG/bartholdi.htm It's a hidden treasure - well, hard to overlook but doesn't get much press. The National Wildlife Federation has re-done the garden around it, it's now certified as a backyard wildlife habitat, and it was hopping with birds at twilight. It's a gorgeous garden. It made me supremely happy to see many garden areas around the Mall that were wildlife-friendly, not formal. There's a lovely Butterfly Garden between the NMoA and the Natural History Museum that had placards explaining how weeds & wildflowers are good. The National Zoo had placards explaining the same thing - they are allowing all the non-animal-enclosure land to return to wild meadow or forest state, which is fabulous.
There was a line of people entering the Library of Congress at twilight, which I joined, and discovered that a Bernstein concert was starting soon to which they were giving away free tickets. It was an excellent concert, technically perfect, very amusing & light. I've forgotten the names of the soprano, tenor, and 2 pianists but they were very, very good and very accomplished in their fields, from the program. The tenor was tall, dark and handsome. Both singers were good actors, too.
I walked past to the Supreme Court on my way to the hotel after the concert. I cried when I stood in front of it, thinking about how much good has happened there, and how it has the capacity to correct itself, like Plessy v. Ferguson, then Brown v. The Board of Education. Then there's Roe v. Wade, probably the case that I care about the most passionately. (I tried not to think about what might happen now if Roe came before them again. It would make me cry in a very different way.) I was also thinking about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, then remembered that that was legislation, DUH. I'd just been over at the Capitol before the Library of Congress, where a soldier had let me climb up some steps to look into the construction pit behind it, so turned to look at it and nod in Congress' direction.
Something about DC? There are police and/or soldiers and/or guards everywhere. I've never felt safer at night anywhere. Also, the Metro system rocks. The station agents, to a person, were incredibly knowledgable, helpful, friendly and nice, even though they must get really sick of answering the same questions over and over.
I camped near Reston. The other campground proximate to DC is in Greenbelt. I kind of wanted to visit the Greenbelt Park en route to Anne's to check it out for future reference, but it would have been a hassle to do so. In general, Reston vs. Greenbelt (aka Virginia vs. Maryland) struck me as being kind of like Marin vs. Alameda County. Who knows, though, Greenbelt Park could be like Montclair or Redwood Park. Camping outside DC and taking transit in was fine with me. I liked the drive from the Reston Park to the Vienna Metro Station. It gave me a driving-woodsy-back-roads fix that was a good ingredient to a perfect vacation. It would surprise me to find that it took me over an hour to get to my tent from Dupont Circle or Adams Morgan, though. The frogs were really loud at night. I thought there were cicadas at night too, but someone said the cicadas only sang during the day. Maybe there were crickets, too.
The roads in the DC area are Hell. Examples: the feds and locals fought over the freeway from/to Dulles. There's one freeway from which you can't exit (concrete barracades separate them) literally parallel to a freeway from which you can - none of this marked unless you know to ENTER at "EXIT 9" if you want to get off at any of exits 9-16. Seriously. Then, the city streets sometimes are marked with one name on the east side of the street and a different name on the west side of the same street. Fun to try to find where to turn when you are driving north-south, not! It was a straight shot coming back from Ann's, but there was major road construction en route, so it took me nearly 2 hours to get back to my tent. It was ridiculous. There is nothing in Calif., including in LA, that is as badly marked/signed at the streets, roads and freeways around DC, I swear. I even stopped at a police station to get directions onto the freeway and was given 100% incorrect directions, admittedly from a well-appointed woman walking from her car towards the police station entrance, not an actual officer, but still. By that time, I'd had enough experience with The Hell That Is DC Streets & Roads to know that the directions were wrong, wrong, wrong, and stopped to ask for the kindness of strangers, successfully, from a prosporous looking business in the vicinity before I ended up on the Evil Road of No Exits to Dulles. I talked to a transportation lobbyist about it and he said, yeah. They don't care. They care about the Metro, but not the roads.
Noise Design, KristinT, DebetEsse, Matt the Bruins Fan, and I went to the Memorials at night: Vietnam, Nurses, WW II, a peek at the Korean through a chainlink fence, Lincoln (more tears reading the Gettysburg Address, both being moved, again, by the speech itself and sadness that that caliber of leadership isn't forthcoming from DC right now), and FDR. *Loved* the FDR memorial. Vortex suggested it and I'm so glad she did. I hadn't even noticed it on the maps. It's the only memorial designed to be 100% accessible, appropriately enough. I loved it because it, father of the national park system? the memorial is seriously outdoorsy-nature-beautiful. We could see the Washington Memorial from everywhere, and drove past the Jefferson Memorial. The Vietnam Memorial was amazing. I got a cell phone call in the middle of it though.
I would've liked to go into the Supreme Court and hear one of their free tours, and go into the main hall at the Library of Congress (we were restricted to the concert hall and two exhibits (Ira and George Gershwin and Bob Hope)), but just having seen them was enough for this trip. The Dutch masters weren't being exhibited at the NMoA, except for a Vermeer and a few others in the sculpture area. I remember seeing a huge Seurat at the NMoA when I was a kid but could only find 2 small-sized not that interesting Seurats this time and no other pointellists. Perhaps it was a special exhibit back-when. I spent way too much time on the early liturgical art when I was a kid. Yada yada, it's kind of all the same IMO, though there was this one cool glass and gold reliquery that had what looked like finger bones in it. The early American landscapes and most of the portraits evoke the same reaction in me, except maybe for the Velasquez portraits, and busts of handsome members of the De Medici family. There was one 19th century American landscape-allegorical painter who did a 4 part series on the River of Life that was seriously hearts-of-space trippy.
A couple of things about the East Wing? The building is way cool. http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/East_Wing_National_Gallery.html Also, Pollack & Rothko & O'Keefe in real life are amazing. You just can't see the same things, the depth, in a print. They had a couple of this guy I'd never heard of/seen before, begins with a T, works in giant sheets of lead. Thierry? Interesting stuff. The Hirshorn has one of his too.
The Buffistas Prom was quite fun. I spent the entire Prom outside, taking fashion photos. It was exactly what I wanted to do, and made me very happy. The pics I took with Noise Design's camera are here: http://homepage.mac.com/drewsound/Buffistas/PhotoAlbum43.html. I took almost all photos under F2F 2004 Parts 4, 5 and 6; ND (or someone) took the group photos at the start of Part 4. The Buffistas awarded me a Class Protector medal for my work on organizing the F2F, which I'm not sure I deserved, but am very honored to have received, and sang Happy Birthday to me, since it was indeed my birthday. I'm old enough now to be an age where I thought people were dead by now when I was in elementary school. Weird how that happens.