Tag Archives: smithsonian

Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project

The hyperbolic crochet coral reef project is extremely cool.

The Smithsonian will be participating by installing a reef in October 2010 and you can participate. There’s a workshop and lecture this Sunday at the Natural History Museum from noon – 4. (rsvp: sicommunityreef@yahoo.com)

You can still participate even if you can’t attend that workshop.

You can contact the local organizers at sicommunityreef@yahoo.com to arrange a local community workshop or you can attend one at Fibre Space on June 24th, from 5-9 pm:

Join our Thursday night “Stitch in Space” every week, starting June 24th to make your own piece to the crochet coral reef. Jennifer Lindsay from the Smithsonian Community Reef will join us on the 24th to help everyone get started. Or you can find your own inspiration at the Institute For Figuring’s Gallery of Crocheted Models. Our reef will be on display in our front window before heading off to the Smithsonian in August to become part of the larger reef project.

Here’s video of a recent TED talk by Margaret Wertheim, co-founder of the The Institute For Figuring, in case you want to learn more (or you just can’t figure out what the hell I’m talking about and why it’s cool).

Places we're not (weekend edition)

Some places we aren’t:

Flashback Weekend in Chicago, featuring a 40th anniversary reunion event for George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman‘s workshop, Working with Our Enemies: Finding Freedom from Hostility and Fear (Admittedly, we were too lazy to go to this. We could have).

The US Olympic Team Trials for Track and Field in Eugene, Oregon. It seemed like a wasted trip since we’re pretty confident that as soon as we tried to run they’d arrest us. We’re old and slow. And don’t do track and field. I hear Oregon is nice, so there’s that, but it wasn’t enough.

Crafty Bastards in Silver Spring.

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival. It’s not that I don’t enjoy being packed into an enclosed area with a lot of sweaty tourists on a sweltering day, who doesn’t love that? It’s mostly that I shared an office with NASA-types in Grad School and I think I’ve probably explored that culture enough, thanks. Some nice people doing cool things, to be sure, but I’m not sure this is a culture we want to share with impressionable youngsters from Iowa. Bhutan and…NASA? I honestly thought that was something made up by The Onion.

I can picture the tent full of post-docs who haven’t bathed in a week, are so jittery from mainlining espresso that they’re speaking really fast and in falsetto like Mickey Mouse yet none of them notices, and have been sustaining themselves by grazing off the olive bar at Shopper’s Food Warehouse. The very idea of that makes me slightly itchy, I think I need to stay in my house today.

FYI: If you go to Folklife and you visit the NASA area and you hear vigorous and heated discussions about RDA, they’re referring to Richard Dean Anderson, star of Stargate not a new kind of rocket fuel.

Also, “DIp” is Klingon for beer.

You can thank me later for this information.

Primal Museum Archetypes

Husband and I went to visit the Buddhas today at the Sackler Museum of Art. We always stop and say hello to Ganesha. We also checked out the Southeast Asian Ceramics exhibit, which we hadn’t seen yet even though it’s been up for months.

The Sackler store was playing some sort of demonic j-pop Christmas/Dance music. We had to leave quickly, the music was blocking our qi.

In our wanderings we also meandered through the National Museum of African Art. I wanted to link to a couple of especially cool pieces in the Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection, but the site crashes Firefox and is giving me an error message in Safari. I’m too tired to figure out the problem. Searching google, I was able to get bypass the Museum website’s splash page and go directly to the section about the masks on display, but there’s no deep-linking. Let’s take that as a sign that you should just go browse the exhibit yourself and pick your own favorites. (Why can’t you go between the Sackler and African Art anymore without leaving the building?)

We also passed through the Freer Gallery of Art to visit their Buddhas. We made the obligatory stop into the Peacock Room on our way out. I’d never noticed it has sunflower-shaped fireplace doohickeys. (I don’t know what they’re called – are they part of the screen? I’m from Florida. We don’t have fireplaces. I could look it up, I suppose. But I probably won’t).

We’ve realized that at any given time, in any museum in the world, there are always five people there. Not the same five people, quit being so literal and/or paranoid. Five representatives of the basic museum-going archetypes. Perhaps they’re Museum Spirits who don’t exist outside the confines of institutional cultural presentations? Who can know. They are: Aging Hippie Woman Anthropology Professor, Woman Wearing Too Much Perfume, The Bickering Couple, and Random White Guy. The museums were all practically empty, yet at each one we kept bumping into incarnations of the Museum Spirits.

Husband pointed out that maybe to other museum goers he appeared to be The Random White Guy. He was smart enough not to point out I could play the role of the Aging Hippie Woman Anthropology Professor, otherwise we might have also found ourselves playing the role of The Bickering Couple.

our long national nightmare is over

Yesterday I had a meeting downtown and took a brief detour through the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery of Asian Art. I was looking at that lovely, serene building with it’s beautiful and dignified collections and it’s noble mission to educate and enlighten in the public sphere and I thought to myself, “You know, Washington really needs more overpriced and tacky shit.”

I’m not really sure how Washington, DC survived all these years without a Madame Tussauds, so you can imagine how happy I was when I opened the Washington Post this morning and saw that the new wax museum is nearing completion in the old Woodies building. I’d heard about this project, but was in complete denial, I think.

I’m relieved that kids will be able to see replicas of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. I’m often worried that they’ll go see the real ones for free. And in some sort of historical context or some such nonsense. The time I save no longer worrying about that can now be blocked off for fretting over the rise of Mike Huckabee. You’re saying “who?” now, but that’s what people outside of Arkansas said about Clinton, too. (Which? Both).