Here is a late night "Jazz Chat," a time to catch up with a friend on a Friday (shamelessly taken from Hamish and Andy). However, since it is not Friday, the music I suggest you listen to while reading the post is not jazz, and I'm telling you what I did instead of engaging you in conversation, the term "Jazz Chat" is entirely a misnomer.
Yesterday, I met with a friend at the American Museum of Natural History. Our visit was so good for so many reasons, because we got to talk and swap ideas more than anything else. Due to a few mishaps using public transportation, we both arrived late, so our tour of the museum was curtailed, but we got in a good number of dioramas. The AMNH could be synonymous with diorama-rama. Oh ho ho ho, I'm sure that joke hasn't been made before.
Apart from being made of taxidermied animals, the dioramas were well-done and informative. The plaques on either side of the frame, though, made for some confusion; if I wanted to know about the bongo, I might have skimmed the plaque on the right side of the exhibit, learning briefly about the plants and perhaps a small mammal in the exhibit, while the information I wanted was on the other side. (Not a major qualm.) The dioramas helped me re-appreciate the biodiversity on our planet, yet still keeping in mind how related we are. Good times.
And today, I met up with some other friends in Times Square. It was about noon and we needed some lunch, so we headed down to SoHo for some Lombardi's, famous for being the best pizza in New York, and grabbed some rice pudding at Rice to Riches; reviews to come. SoHo was certainly a different part of the city; the highest buildings were possibly six or seven floors high, and I felt like I was stepping back in time to the turn of the 20th Century - yet somehow with all of modern convenience. It's energy was slower, a bit more upbeat, but more gentrified than the bohemian it once was.
After filling ourselves sufficiently with tasty food, we hopped on the subway and made our way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I did not get to see Alexander McQueen's "Savage Beauty" exhibit, but did go to some old favorites like the Temple of Dendur of the statue of Diana in the American Wing. I wandered into the furniture and Mesoamerican sections, and afterwards went to the Pacific Islander exhibition for the first time. I was struck by how recently made many of those artefacts are, and how fragile they seem. People may have been creating art like that for thousands of years, but we don't know about them because such pieces couldn't survive that long.
I was also struck by the need for humans to create. There was a bark painting which caught my eyes; the caption talked about aboriginal myths of "the Dreaming" when bird-men walked and created the earth and all things in it. "The Dreaming" gives me chills; it recalls the thought process of creation which humans follow with connotations of subconsciousness, timelessness. Potential.
Anyway, the bark painting, especially, made me think of creation and this urge humans have to create, to make things, to made abstractions and think, no matter where they are or what time period they live in, whether it's a pot from 6000 years ago or a blog post, and everything in between. More thoughts and tentative conclusions to come later.
No comments:
Post a Comment