Another good day.
Apr. 20th, 2002 10:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaI spent a long time this morning cuddling and talking with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
curiousangel. Then he headed off to his In Nomine game and I headed down to the harbor for a date with Ben. We decided to take advantage of our date being scheduled during daylight hours, and went off to the Baltimore Museum of Art. I'd never been there, and I was quite pleasantly surprised.
(In the first place, hooray for reasonable security procedures. An extremely polite man hurried up to me as we entered the exhibit: "Ma'am, may I assist you in checking your umbrella?" It turns out that they're not permitted on the exhibit floors (makes sense; they don't want you poking at the art), but what a difference from "Hey, you can't take that in here!" And they turned out to have a locking umbrella rack: you put your umbrella in and a locking cuff snaps around it, and then you remove the key and carry it with you. I was charmed.)
We looked at odds and ends on the first floor: African and Oceanic art, the miniatures room (a dozen perfectly rendered 1:12" rooms depicting the 17th-19th centuries), some American decorative arts, all pleasant enough. But emerging on the second floor, we were awestruck. I'd never even heard of the Antioch mosaics, but apparently in the 1930s the BMA joined several other groups in excavating hundreds of elaborate mosaic floors from the Roman city of Antioch. They're beautiful. Created from tens of thousands of tiny chips of naturally colored stone, they have elaborate borders and patterns, human and animal figures... and not the stylized sorts of figures you'd think would suit a mosaic, but lavishly detailed, subtly shaded, almost three-dimensional. And the details of the excavation process was just as remarkable: they glued a piece of cloth to each mosaic, then dug it out and flipped it over, scraped off the ancient concrete and poured fresh concrete, and then removed the cloth and washed off the glue. We're talking about tens of thousands of tiny stone chips that had to stay in place. Amazing.
We went from there to the Cone Collection, art collected by a pair of Baltimore sisters in the early 20th century. They were major patrons of Matisse throughout the entire length of his career, and the museum is displaying a hundred or more Matisse paintings, sketches, and bronzes. There was also a nice presentation of the lives of these sisters, who - well, I don't want to imply too much, but they dressed mannishly, never married, and the exhibit mentioned more than once that they were good friends with Gertrude Stein.
We spent the early part of the evening on the boat, and then as darkness fell we went over to the Inner Harbor in Ben's dinghy. There's a big waterfront festival going on, people and music and bright lights and all kinds of things happening. Even late in the evening, people are out in paddleboats (some dragon-shaped) with little lights on them. The Constellation, the US Navy's last sailing warship, presides over the harbor, against a backdrop of brightly lit office buildings downtown. We got oysters, clams, steamed shrimp, and Sam Adams beer at a raw bar, and sat on a balcony watching the festival crowds swirl below.
I realized, driving home, that my fun-activity dates are nearly all with Ben. When I seewcg and curiousangel, it's much more likely to involve quiet afternoons or evenings at home. That's not to say that those dates aren't enjoyable, but I should probably try to make sure that I'm more even-handed in how I make plans.
curiousangel. Then he headed off to his In Nomine game and I headed down to the harbor for a date with Ben. We decided to take advantage of our date being scheduled during daylight hours, and went off to the Baltimore Museum of Art. I'd never been there, and I was quite pleasantly surprised.(In the first place, hooray for reasonable security procedures. An extremely polite man hurried up to me as we entered the exhibit: "Ma'am, may I assist you in checking your umbrella?" It turns out that they're not permitted on the exhibit floors (makes sense; they don't want you poking at the art), but what a difference from "Hey, you can't take that in here!" And they turned out to have a locking umbrella rack: you put your umbrella in and a locking cuff snaps around it, and then you remove the key and carry it with you. I was charmed.)
We looked at odds and ends on the first floor: African and Oceanic art, the miniatures room (a dozen perfectly rendered 1:12" rooms depicting the 17th-19th centuries), some American decorative arts, all pleasant enough. But emerging on the second floor, we were awestruck. I'd never even heard of the Antioch mosaics, but apparently in the 1930s the BMA joined several other groups in excavating hundreds of elaborate mosaic floors from the Roman city of Antioch. They're beautiful. Created from tens of thousands of tiny chips of naturally colored stone, they have elaborate borders and patterns, human and animal figures... and not the stylized sorts of figures you'd think would suit a mosaic, but lavishly detailed, subtly shaded, almost three-dimensional. And the details of the excavation process was just as remarkable: they glued a piece of cloth to each mosaic, then dug it out and flipped it over, scraped off the ancient concrete and poured fresh concrete, and then removed the cloth and washed off the glue. We're talking about tens of thousands of tiny stone chips that had to stay in place. Amazing.
We went from there to the Cone Collection, art collected by a pair of Baltimore sisters in the early 20th century. They were major patrons of Matisse throughout the entire length of his career, and the museum is displaying a hundred or more Matisse paintings, sketches, and bronzes. There was also a nice presentation of the lives of these sisters, who - well, I don't want to imply too much, but they dressed mannishly, never married, and the exhibit mentioned more than once that they were good friends with Gertrude Stein.
We spent the early part of the evening on the boat, and then as darkness fell we went over to the Inner Harbor in Ben's dinghy. There's a big waterfront festival going on, people and music and bright lights and all kinds of things happening. Even late in the evening, people are out in paddleboats (some dragon-shaped) with little lights on them. The Constellation, the US Navy's last sailing warship, presides over the harbor, against a backdrop of brightly lit office buildings downtown. We got oysters, clams, steamed shrimp, and Sam Adams beer at a raw bar, and sat on a balcony watching the festival crowds swirl below.
I realized, driving home, that my fun-activity dates are nearly all with Ben. When I see
wcg and curiousangel, it's much more likely to involve quiet afternoons or evenings at home. That's not to say that those dates aren't enjoyable, but I should probably try to make sure that I'm more even-handed in how I make plans.
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no subject
Date: 2002-04-20 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-04-20 09:23 pm (UTC)Miss Etta and Doctor Claribel Cone receive several mentions in the Autobiography. Miss Etta, IIRC, was the one who typed the manuscript of Tender Buttons; Stein related that the work progressed very slowly until they found that she was typing the manuscript one letter at a time, because she’d not been given permission to read it beforehand, and was afraid of inadvertently reading it and becoming conscious of the meaning. (Naturally, it hadn’t occurred to anyone else that she needed to be given permission to read the MS. first.) Once permission was given, the typing went on much faster.
Psst...
Date: 2002-04-21 02:52 pm (UTC)Re: Psst...
Date: 2002-04-21 04:03 pm (UTC)Um. I mean...
Never mind.
Re: Psst...
Date: 2002-04-22 03:00 am (UTC)-nod of arguable dubiety-
-whistling-
Re: Psst...
Date: 2002-04-23 11:31 pm (UTC)-J
Re: Psst...
Date: 2002-04-25 12:24 am (UTC)