Text 4164, 61 rader
Skriven 2013-09-02 00:24:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: trip 90
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The MIT Museum comes free as a perk of Meridien guestship,
a $10 a head savings. It is cram-packed with many things I
am not interested in, history of robotics, that sort of
stuff, but I was taken by a couple of special exhibitions,
the Rube Goldbergish kinetic sculptures of Arthur Ganson,
and an exploration of holograph art, some of which made
sense to me, some of which I couldn't make 3D (I have
deficient 3D vision). A lot of space was taken with
"objects of everyday genius," the origins of necessities
from the coathanger to the condom; it was pretty interesting,
though physically put together rather inexpertly as if by
(or to be charitable, perhaps for) junior high school kids. 

I was going to lead Lilli down to Charlie's Kitchen, where I
went periodically in the '70s, but Mrs. Bartley's, where I
went periodically when I could afford it, which means mostly
after the '70s, beckoned - the food is better, but it's more
expensive; it's cleaner, but the atmosphere is more artificial.
Both are run by racist assholes, so that's a wash.

She had the regular "bun 'n' burger," which was fine. I got
the Harvard, so called perhaps because it's too big for
its britches, being double meat on the same bun: I pulled one
of the patties and ate a regular burger and then had the
second patty as an encore. You get something like 75c off for
not making them waste a second bun. Oddly, my burgers were
different: one premolded, medium rare to rare, 7 oz I presume
as advertised; the other medium rare, a bit bigger, obviously
slapped together by hand. The meat was not the beefiest but
good enough, plenty of fat.

And then to the Peabody Museum of Ethnography, where she
wanted to see an exhibition of photos of PNG by Stephen Dupont.
I don't know what the fascination of Australians (including one
Glen Jamieson) is with New Guinea, and I don't know what the
fascination of the intelligentsia is with Stephen Dupont. I
really disliked most of his work, finding it shallow and self-
indulgent; some of it was witty enough, though, and the
draftsmanship in his notebooks is quite good, considering that
he chose to be a photographer rather than a pen and paper artist.
I suppose his uniqueness is that in his quest to document the
underbelly of PNG society (which seems to be almost all of it)
he has managed to get people to stand still for portraits who
would just as soon shrink your head as stand still.

By the way, the Peabody is also $10 a head, but this admission
also is good at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, so you
can spend all day looking at cool stuff (the Peabody has what
at one time was a world-renowned collection of native American
"stuff," and the Natural History in addition to the glass
flowers (which we checked out on the way out) offers all the
dinosaur junk you might want as well as bunches of other
attractions of greater or lesser appeal. It's world-class in
a 19th-century world; the art museums, oddly perhaps for a
school where the arts were always secondary, are in fact
world-class, but we didn't have time (I will be going by myself
in September, though).

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