The Museum Was Open

 

I think I’m finally getting the motion down properly on the cross country skiing I attempt.  I had the sun at my back yesterday and I could see my shadow.  There, like a dancer, I could see how the motion wasn’t fluid.  I could approximate what I wanted to see.  Slide longer. Hold that heel-down position for longer if you can.  Hard on the calf, but that’s the point.  In my mind I have a bass line I follow to give myself rhythm to lose myself within.  And this particular afro-beat groove that I have in my head was moving too fast, I realized.  I’d need to slow it way down to imitate the confident Olympiad I saw moving in my mind. 

 

“Into the Afterlife:  Han and Sic Dynasties Chinese Tomb Sculpture from the Schloss Collection,” which I impulse purchased, when I was searching for Six Dynasty work on Amazon the other day, arrived amidst some other packages today.  Turns out Ms. Schloss was a Vassar alum and this show was hosted at the Vassar College Art Gallery, back in 1990, when China wasn’t anywhere on my mind, beyond a vague sympathy for the protesters who were so violently expelled from the Square the previous summer. I checked online and some of this collection was still on display at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.  And indeed, the museum was open to the public, today.

My little one had floated the idea of BurgerFi: can we pick up some burgerfi to go?  Apparently they’re open again.  My wife had asked, we need something to do as a family today.  I proposed we head to the museum and then go across the street to the old Juliet Theater where this burger joint was and grab out to-go meal on the ride home.  I asked the Mrs. to drive and I read most of the book on the way over.  I tried to sort out how I felt about someone of means buying up lots of two thousand year-old funerary objects. I recall seeing an Dynasty objet d'art in the elegant Chinese restaurant at the Miyako Hotel in Shirokanedai.  I assumed they were looted during the war.  What of these objects of the Schloss collection that were simply purchased?

 

We parked and walked up to find what I assumed to be the entrance closed.  A sign on the adjoining building seemed to suggest that no one without a Vassar I.D. would be admitted. But it had said they were open on the web?  Over at the guard house the gent directed me to the proper interest that was outside the main gate.  “You see those towers?  That’s an attempt to represent the Norman architecture of England.”  My daughter looked at me as though she’d heard all this before. 

Inside there were a few wonderful pieces from the book.  One of those remarkable Han towers and a Northern Wei Buddha.  Regardless, it is a marvelous collection for soon I was looking at one of hundred views of Mount Fuji by Katsushika Hokusai, and an Egyptian carving from Abydos where we’d been the summer before last.  Speaking of Egypt, there was a Fredric Church painting of the Nile and a dozen other Hudson River school canvasses, including a Shattuck that looked just liked the sunset my older one had painted out our window.  Not sure how I’d made it through fifty-four globe spins without ever properly bouncing around in here.  What a marvelous watering hole here in my ancestral turf.

 

 

 

Saturday, 02/06//21