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walking home from Paris
Saturday, March 2 2002
This evening Gretchen and I walked to the nearby Brooklyn Museum of Art to take advantage of a "First Saturday," an evening when the museum is free and open to the public and features live family-friendly music performances. The music happening when we arrived was some sort of blue grass band. Since everything but the libations was free, lots of people had turned out. Many of them seemed to be there just to be seen, in the unpretentious Brooklyn meaning of the expression. There were also a number of people fully-outfitted in authentic Star Wars costumes. The storm troopers seemed to delight in leaning immobile against walls like statues and then frightening passers by suddenly coming to life. They were there to pass out literature promoting an upcoming Star-Wars-related exhibit.
After a half hour or so, we were joined by Nancy (of Ray and Nancy fame) and went to look at an exhibit attempting to showcase the lives of Jews in ancient post-Moses Egypt. The Brooklyn Museum of Art is not exactly a grade-A museum, so there wasn't really much to the exhibit, and most of it dealt with either Egypt or Jews but not both. Artifacts on display included an 18th Century quasi-religious illustrated Jewish text from Eastern Europe, an ugly 19th Century painting of the Nile, and a tiny hair pin in an enormous transparent display case. At some point while we were there, part of a hanging divider unexpectedly tore loose from the ceiling.
I started feeling increasingly sleepy, the sort of sleepy only a mediocre museum experience can induce, and wasn't revived until we went up to the sixth floor to look at paintings. This was when I realized an interesting positive about B-grade museums: everything in them is unfamiliar. Since such museums can't afford to collect the cream of the artistic crop, chances are low that I will have seen their collections depicted in art history books. This is not to say everything was completely unfamiliar; the Brooklyn Museum of Art does have a number of lesser Georgia O'Keefes and a spectacular little Edward Hicks Peaceable Kingdom. But for the most part I'd never heard of any of the artists before in my life. Tonight I was particularly drawn to modern hyper-realist art and heroic 19th Century depictions of the ruins of the Appian Way.
Don't get me wrong, I'd enjoyed the premier museums of Europe, but there was still something predictable and unimpressive about seeing famous works in the flesh. Once you've had a painting ground into your subconscious, seeing it on the wall doesn't add much. I came back from the Brooklyn Museum of Art with the same exhilaration I feel when I visit any good museum, with the added thrill of actually having walked home from it. In a weird indescribable way, it was like walking home from Paris.
HBO has been broadcasting old episodes of Six Feet Under, and since Gretchen and I love that show but have missed some episodes, we've been taking the opportunity to catch up (and, in my case, correctly sort my perception of the episodes' proper order).
I realized something unusual about this show in relation to another big HBO show, Sex and the City. While Sex and the City seems to portray the lives of Los Angeles-style women living in New York (this wasn't really apparent until they actually visited Los Angeles), Six Feet Under is about New York-type people living in Los Angeles. It seems both sets of characters would be more comfortable if they traded cities.
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