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Escher exhibit
Sunday, December 20 1998
It was a blustery, somewhat chilly Sunday in San Diego. For months now, Kim has been trying to get me to go to the art museum in Balboa Park, San Diego, and today I finally agreed to go.
Soon after we arrived, Kim was beset with hunger pangs, so we sat down to an overpriced luncheon in a breezy roofed courtyard called "The Sculpture Garden." It's directly beside the art museum proper. In San Diego, lots of things that would normally be inside in other places are outside, and there is no indoor alternative. For the most part it's possible for businesses to take for granted the presence of comfortable weather and sunny skies. When the temperature drops below a certain point in San Diego, energy-intensive stop-gap measures are deployed. A example of this is the ubiquitous reflective gas heater. It's shaped like a seven-foot-tall aluminum mushroom and it heats a small area around its base mostly by reflection of infrared waves. Kim and I gathered tightly around one such metal mushroom in the drafty courtyard eating our meal. She had the salmon and I had the (get this!) veggie burger. I was disappointed that my tomato was so anemic that it was exactly the same colour as Kim's swath of fish.
The featured exhibit in the museum was a traveling show of M.C. Escher prints. I don't think I need to add anything to the literature on Escher. Though he lies outside the much-ballyhooed "overall trend in art," everybody I know thinks he was a genius. Sure, some dismiss him as a mere craftsman and others no doubt suspect him of having taken entirely too many drugs. If that happens to have been the case, by the way, it's just yet more evidence for the importance of drugs in the creative output of man. (I can say in all honesty that drugs have contributed very little to my creative output.) There was a good turnout for the Escher exhibit, and for some prints it was difficult to wedge close enough to get a glance.
Another featured exhibit showed the original manuscript by Dr. Seuss for How the Grinch Stole Christmas. We could stand there staring at the wall, reading the whimsical rhymes aloud, at times even seeing the rhythm in the darkness of the letters. It's a dimension completely lost in the post-manual-typewriter age.
Kim and I made the rounds throughout the rest of the museum, mostly looking at the paintings (as opposed to the things that lay in the few sculpture rooms). As usual, I was most inspired by the post-Impressionists. This particular museum had a much better collection of Post-Impressionism than I've seen in other places. The last art museum I visited was probably the Cleveland Art Museum, and that must have been back in 1994.
For some reason, this time I didn't get nearly as sleepy as I usually become when touring museums, but the moment we got out of there, I desperately sought the Land of Nod. We went to Rita's house in Normal Heights for what seemed like yet another in an endless series of post-partem visits. There are the bills that are never fully paid, the packages that never stop being delivered. Everything about Rita is like some sort of Kafkaesque distortion of a children's fairy tale, in this case Hansel and Gretel by way of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. I went through the motions of being friendly to my former landlord (she kissed me on the cheek!) but I needed finishing nails to keep my eyes open.
In Hillcrest at Trader Joe's, I elected to sleep in the passenger seat of the Volvo instead of helping Kim shop. We always have a fight when we shop together, so it was all for the best.
The inspiration of my afternoon spent in the art museum helped to motivate me to work on my latest painting in the evening. Meanwhile, Kim was suffering through one of her cruel hormone imbalances. She was being homesick in about the nastiest way possible.
Speaking of finishing nails, I've been using one to clean my teeth tonight. The other day while I was at work, I found a piece of chicken meat that had been stuck between my teeth for at least 24 hours, and it smelled like the worst halitosis you can imagine. That extremely disturbing experience has left me neurotic about the crap that might be stuck between my teeth.
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