Culture without agarvation

One of the hardest things about visiting other cities is remembering that free admission is not the default at 99% of the world's museums. DC's got the Air and Space, the Hirschhorn, the Smithsonian castle, the Museum of National History, the Museum of Natural History (those two are right next to each other; speak clearly when making plans), the Museum of the American Indian, the National Botanical Gardens, and the National Gallery of Art, which is in fact twin museums connected by an underground tunnel. It's a feast of yummy free culture goodness within walking distance of my office.

I go maybe twice a year. Ridic!

Here we are, flirting with spring, temps in the 70s: perfect weather for going inside to peer at art. The current exhibit of Pompeiian artifacts is leaving at the end of the month, so when a friend suggested a get-together this weekend I shanghaied him into coming to the show. We took the long way around, starting in the west building and only eventually getting to the building where the exhibit per se was; this was less a plan than a result of my propensity to get lost and meander. Lots of good stuff before we got to the east gallery: Degas' equine bronzes (the legs are perfect; the bodies are squidged together like rough drafts), a bunch of Paul Manship sculptures (surely Europa shouldn't look so smug?), Herbert Adams' lovely Girl with Water Lilies fountain (water drips from the flowers in her hand into the pool below her feet), Leo Villareal's hypnotic lightwork Multiverse (we smirked a bit at first at its disco fabulosity...and five minutes later were still gawping at it), and a bunch of nautical paintings that inevitably brought Jack Aubrey to mind.

The Pompeii exhibit, which against all odds we eventually reached, was well curated, though a few of the bowls and kraters could've done with rotating stands. I was unreasonably tickled by Cato's criticism that senators were spending more time tending their mullets than their statecraft, and by the little kid who peered at a mosaic of sea beasties and proclaimed, "I see a eew." Oh tempora, oh morays! The great section about the Roman fad for Greek culture included a beautiful bust of Homer, paired with a Pliny the Elder quote about how we long for images of those whose faces have been lost to remembrance (I mangle), and the exhibit wrapped up with pieces showing modern reactions to the Vesuvian eruption. It'll be a cold day in hell when I pick up Bulwer-Lytton's Last Days in Pompeii, if the saccharine goop of The Blind Flower-Seller and Faithful Unto Death is any indication. And despite the museum's best efforts, I still can't name all nine muses ("Clio, Urania, Erato, Terpsichore, and, uh, Scary?") or all of Hercules' labors. Do not pick me as your Trivial Pursuit buddy.

Now that it's finally warm enough that I don't die a little whenever I go out, I'm recommitting to trekking down to local exhibits. Next up: either the butterfly garden or "Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th-Century Chesapeake," depending on how ghoulish I'm feeling. A certain anthro 201 prof took excessive glee in describing causes of death in early Colonial-era settlers in Maryland, and now I kind of want to see the bones.