Museums

Museums are important places everyone should visit, right? If you Google "What are Museums?" you’ll get this quote: “Museums are institutions created in the public interest. They engage their visitors, foster deeper understanding and promote the enjoyment and sharing of authentic cultural and natural heritage. Museums acquire, preserve, research, interpret and exhibit the tangible and intangible evidence of society and nature.” Whoever wrote that should have been well paid for their effort. I couldn’t have written it better myself. There are only a few tidbits of information missing in the above description. It leaves out the part about museums being good places to lose control of your children, overhearing conversations you’d rather never hear, and deciding you’re so tired of standing you don’t care if civilization sinks back into the sea and takes all its custodial artifacts with it. My parents never took me to museums. It was the responsibility of the school system to do that sort of thing, which it did. I remember moth-eaten stuffed animals staring out of glassed dioramas and dinosaurs made out of plaster of Paris. In short, we went where it was dark, scary, and we weren’t allowed to touch anything. Nothing changed until I had children of my own to drag to museums, because it was the responsible parental sort of thing to do by then. Actually, what happened was that we drove them to museums, and then they wore us out until we begged them for the love of G-d can we please go home now. It started when my daughter was in second grade. That’s when she was identified as Gifted and allowed to do extracurricular activities, such as attend art class. It was there that she found her other people, the first tribe being people who wore Italian suits. Her second tribe consisted of artists and people who study artists. We were in Santa Barbara for some reason and decided to take her to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for a few minutes to show her the real deal. My chief memory is of abandoning her in the art gallery in utter exhaustion so we could go outside and sit on the steps, waiting for her to finish studying every piece of art on display. We sat for a really long time, until the museum closed. It’s not as horrible as it sounds, abandoning a seven-year-old in a public assembly room. We knew she was perfectly safe. When we left her, she was inches away from an oil painting, with one hand cupping her chin and the other hand supporting her elbow as she evaluated the merits of the piece in question. Nearby visitors would notice her, do a double take, and start to inch away before she could expound to them in her sibilant lisp the merits of each and every piece of art. After that introduction, we packed sandwiches so we could enjoy a little nosh until the museums told her they were closing the doors and she had to go home. Then came the son, the former Ninja Amerind Soldier whose favorite spot was the Southwest Museum of the American Indian. When he wasn’t giving me heart attacks by leaping from the top stair to the landing in one gigantic bound, he was boring me to death by intently studying every button, nail, arrowhead or tool of personal injury behind the glass displays. Manikins dressed in US cavalry attire were in dire peril of losing a cap or a rifle if I dared take my eyes off my darling boy. In short, going to a museum with him meant focusing on his hands and not where I was going. It’s beginning to sound like I don’t enjoy museums, isn’t it? If the truth be told, it’s rarely been my idea. I just pretended to be interested. Okay, so maybe that’s half the truth. I learn a lot and get excited. Then fifteen minutes later my back starts to hurt and my enthusiasm erodes into inner dialogues that are unfit for public ears. Take, for example, the 1999 exhibit of technological artifacts from Pompeii. What do I remember most of that astonishing collection other than waiting in line outside for two hours? The second thing that comes to mind is the gigantic contraption that looked like a battering ram on wheels. It was actually a bit of engineering genius that measured distance. One cycle of the wheel equaled five feet. Don’t quote me on that; I’m probably wrong. All I remember is that the Romans were very serious about uniformity and imposed their measurement systems down every road they went. The third things were the clay pipes for carrying water. The Romans figured out how to make pipes of uniform size, with a lip at one end and a tapering at the other end so they fit together so well they didn’t need Teflon tape to prevent water leakage. We should be so smart. Most important, though, the one item that remains embedded in my mental list of important trivia, was a cast iron frying pan. If I didn’t trust the Museum Curators to be people of integrity, I could almost swear they hung a weather-exposed Lodge 10” skillet on the wall and called it ancient. When it comes to cast iron skillets, nothing has changed in the last 2,000 years. You have your basic handle, 2” sloped sides, and a pour spout. I’m pleased to think that Pompeiian housewives were able to chase their husbands out the door, threatening to knock them upside the head, just as lustily before Mt. Vesuvius erupted as we can do today. I left the place knowing if it’s good, you don’t have to fix it, not even after two millennia. I mentioned when you’re squeezed into crowded roomfuls of treasures, you sometimes overhear things that strike you to the quick, never to be erased from your memory banks. Let me give you two extremes. First, the chat you wished you’d never heard. “I can put up with a lot of things, but I’ve got to tell you her religion really pushes the boundaries of decency.” “I know! They are so in your face about it.” “It’s disgusting. They’re just such extremists!” By now my innards are starting to dissolve in fear. What religion could they be talking about? Islam? Buddhism? Hinduism? Judaism, and if so am I about to be unveiled and attacked? My fears of being stabbed were unwarranted. It turned out the ladies were Methodists and the misinformed malcontents on their hate list were Baptists. This was an eye opener for me because I had previously believed that Christianity was a lump sum thing. Nope. It turns out that interdenominational infighting is alive and well in Long Beach, as I suppose it is just about everywhere else. On the other hand, as I was standing in the Louvre, gazing at David’s huge painting “The Oath of the Horatii” (swords, soldiers, weeping women), I overheard a California Valley Girl explain the painting to her companions in the most nasal of all VG Speak. “So, like, the thing is, this painting was, like, really different from anything, you know, before. It uses lighting, like, I mean you see how the lighting makes your eyes got to that spot? And you know, the dimensionality, I mean, you see how the men are all so rigid and the women are like, you know, soft and all? And the emotional punches, see? Like strong and sad at the same time? I mean, the thing is you gotta look at the…” Silly me, formerly mocking the ignorance implied by the tonality and verbiage of VGs. That pretty young blonde thing accidentally taught me more about David as an artist than any placard hanging next to his paintings. To this day, whenever I see his work, I hear her intoning in the background, “See, the thing is….” I had this experience when my girlfriend and I were in Paris on a rose hunting tour and we got dropped off at the Louvre for three hours. Three hours. You know what you have to do when you only have three hours at the Louvre? Run. Pick a Pavilion, start at the bottom or the top floor and run. She went left; I went right. We both saw Nike. She was on the Must See List and the Mona Lisa. Otherwise, we raced up and down, in and out of basically the same space and saw entirely different exhibits. However, I won the race because while I was gazing in lust at old glassware, I saw a small group of people slipping through a side door. I slid in behind them and by deceit gained private entrance to the collection of Napoleon Bonaparte’s personal accessories (his razors) and Josephine’s jewels. That’s right folks. My fingernails were digging into the wooden display case and the drool was dripping off my chin as I looked upon the very same earrings she wore when she was crowned Empress. The guard had to pry me away, saying, “Ze Muzium, she iz clozing, Madame. You must leave now.” You can see them—the earrings—in David’s Coronation painting. You can’t miss it if you run fast enough. It takes up the entire wall somewhere in the same Pavilion. I think. A similar event happened at the the British Museum. We had an hour. We ran our separate ways and saw different things. My primary Must See were the Elgin Marbles, the statuary brought back (stolen) from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin. You see, they were the talk of the town around 1817. Everyone who was anyone went to see them. Therefore, I had a burning desire to see for myself what all the fuss was about. I went; I saw; I concluded he should have left them where he found them. Now I’m old and no longer wait in line to look at King Tut’s stuff. That’s not to say I wouldn’t like to; quite the contrary. In a previous mania I was batty about Egyptian history. It’s just that I’m running out of energy. The only exceptions are costume exhibits where I can get close enough to see the seams. You know, if you go to your local museum, the place where your city’s history and artifacts are stored, I’ll bet you can find a few manikins dressed in the clothing worn by your town’s founders. Odds are you’ll be able to get close enough to really study the construction. If you’re really lucky, there will be a display case showing the inside of a woman’s bodice or a man’s tailored suit coat. That’s almost as good as drooling over Josephine’s earrings.