| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
|
 |
|
I would contend that the Biblical art in the Mormon Tabernacle Visitor's Center in Salt Lake City is more of interest. Most of what they had was a special exhibit on calligraphy. There was what would have been a nice piece, a picture of a Rabbi in front of a Hebrew prayer. The artist, however, seemed to have one Hebrew letter consistently painted in mirror image. You really can see everything they have in about ten or fifteen minutes. The centerpiece is a big mockup of Jesus's burial cave with the stone in front. The most interesting thing is a chair imported from China made of a sort of ground stone. Nice dragons. You can get moldings of the same materials in most Chinatowns.
Well we still had some time so we decided to hit The Sixth Floor. Most places that would not have a lot of meaning. In Dallas 'The Sixth Floor' is a phrase they have heard a lot. It is the sixth floor of the schoolbook depository. Lee Harvey Oswald made it famous. As a museum, The Sixth Floor has a lot of the same problems that the Civil Rights Museum had. It is short on articles and long on description. It basically gives a history of Kennedy's election, his time in office, his assassination and the investigation. It did have newsreel footage, but the only real artifacts that come to mind are cameras that took some of the pictures that were used in the investigation. Of course, you can stand and look out the window. I have heard it claimed it was a remarkable shot, but from the window it does not seem that great a distance. You cannot see the line of the bullets directly because trees have grown in. As I was looking out the window a woman with a scowl said to me 'Oswald didn't do it either.' Well the exhibit does not take sides on that issue. It talks about the possible theories and the history of the investigation.
For the tour I got the audio tour with the tape. It is a little better. Of course, the batteries were dying. Did I ever tell you about Luck of Leeper?
After we walk over to the Grassy Knoll. It is just a little bank of grass. There are two or three stands selling booklets on the assassination. I am sure they say that Oswald did not do it alone or perhaps not at all.
On the way back to the motel, Evelyn asks me what I think. Well, it seems obvious that Oswald fired at least some of the shots. We may be able to prove at some time that someone else was involved. It will never be possible to prove he acted alone. You might conceivably prove that Elvis is alive, but you can never conclusively prove he is dead. You could conclusively prove the government is hiding a flying saucer, you can never prove that they aren't. If a statement is non-falsifiable, assume it is false until you get reasonable evidence it is true. Keep an open mind. I am willing to be convinced otherwise, but for the time being I assume Oswald acted alone.
For dinner we did barbecue at a place near our motel called Dickey's. Good, but we did a number on ourselves. We are getting too old to eat huge meals.
We has planned to go to see Mimic after dinner, but decided we were too tired. Our room had HBO and we decided to take pot luck on the evening's entertainment. We lost. It was House Arrest, which neither of us wanted to see. We worked on our logs and took turns sleeping.
Hey, score one for inventiveness. As we stop at various motels we get all sorts of different room keys. Some are standard keys, some are plastic cards, some are little plastic doohickeys. I would like to hang the keys from my key chain but some don't even have a hole. So what do I do? I take a bulldog clip and hang that on my key ring. Then whatever kind of a key I get I clip it with the bulldog clip. It is the fastest way to put it in place and a bulldog clip clips any sort of key I get.
|
08/24/97--Fort Worth, Texas: Museums:
|
Boy, if I thought I woke up to Tinkerbell yesterday, I really woke up to it today. The whole room was flashing. It was sort of like the instant that lightning strikes. Then it goes away for an instant and repeats. What the heck is going on? It was coming from outside. It turned out to be a Medical Intensive Care Unit parked just outside our room. I wonder what it will be tomorrow.
Well we got up, and ate at Grandy's again. Right now we are sitting in a laundromat. I explored the shopping center waiting for the clothes. It seems mostly Chicano but most of the signage is in English and Korean. There is probably a big Korean population in this area.
One of the Chicano guys here doing a wash asked about the palmtop. I told him about it and all the things I do. I wonder what are the chances he would ever get one. A kid over at one side is sitting in a clothes basket. He has a videocassette of Mask. He has taken the cassette out and is banging it on the floor of the basket. I think he works in the video store I rent from up north.
Back to the room to drop off the laundry. Then we head to Fort Worth. There are some unusual looking buildings in Dallas. I guess I am used to dull New York architecture. I have to say that architecture in the Dallas-Fort Worth area is unusual with several very distinctive buildings.
It is an hour's drive to Fort Worth and the Kimball Art Museum. The place is packed in a way that you very rarely see art museums. They have a special exhibit on Monet. Evelyn at first wants to go but it is $10 and has a very long slow queue to get tickets. We decide just to see the main part of the museum. Among the first pieces is a Picasso, 'The Bird Cage. ' Colorful but not too communicative. Parmigianino does a Madonna and Child. 'A Franciscan Friar' by Jacopo Bassano certainly has an interesting face. Most of this is religious art and is probably what we missed in the museum yesterday. I am not sure what this gallery represents and what the pieces have in common. It is a sort of realistic style. 'The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs' is certainly not on a religious theme. There is vanity and gluttony in the eyes of Guercino's 'Portrait of a Lawyer.' A Rembrandt shows 'Portrait of a Young Jew.' But it is only labeled this because of the skullcap. A Rubens shows 'The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula and the 11,000 Maidens.' Another shows 'The Duke of Buckingham.' A Holbein shows 'Sir Thomas Le Strange of Hunstanton.' A Monet shows 'A Weeping Willow.' A Matisse shows 'L'Asie.' This is quite a collection for just the first hall. Gauguin shows 'Two Women' and a dog. Cezanne has 'A Man in a Blue Smock.' More Cezanne and Monet. And the people seem to be really into it. I hear a woman at the side asking her family 'Do I know my Picassos or what?' A Goya shows 'The Matador Pedro Romero.' All told, very impressive. On the lower level we see Asian art. Jars, vases, and rolled landscape hangings. But that's all there is except for the Monet exhibit. Not a big museum but what they have is cherce. It is just masterpieces. My guess is that I have not seen an art museum with a higher average value for the pieces in their collection. Evelyn thinks the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam may have a higher average.
On the way out we are listening to the people behind us. 'I used to tell him, 'We have to go see this movie. It has been getting great reviews.' He'd say 'Is it subtitled? Because you know the rules. If it is subtitled it has to have nudity.'' Sounds sensible to me.
Next the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. The strategy of this museum may be much like the last one, giving not very much, but what is there is what people really want to see.
As you enter the museum you pass an Acrocanthsaurus reconstruction. It is clear that dinosaurs are a big draw in museums. I think Steven Spielberg helped to show that when any science museum that had any sort of a dinosaur exhibit got assistance in playing it up to help promote the film. I think a lot of museums discovered that was what was really drawing people in the first place. I know when I would go to the American Museum of Natural History, that was where I would go first. And they did not even have a very good exhibit. But a bad dinosaur exhibit does more for the imagination than a good exhibit of Amazon beetles. These days science museums really don't dare not have elaborate dinosaur exhibits. Kids today know rock bands and dinosaur species. Paleontology of the Mesozoic is the one field of science that is really healthy.
The first exhibit is dinosaurs found in Texas, starting with a Tenontosaurus, a dinosaur first found in this area, discovered by a boy then seven years old. They make a big thing about how other kids should look for dinosaurs. The exhibit, Lone Star Dinosaurs, makes good use of a limited number of specimens. It is one of a number of museums that let computers do much of the teaching. One quizzes the visitor on a large number of dinosaurs. From a description you had to find the dinosaur from a choice of about forty.History is the subject of the next section. I have to say the Museum of Science and History does not have a whole lot of history, but they had a bit of history that would be of some interest. They have pre-Columbian sculpture including terra cotta statues. They have some interesting approaches. They will look at one theme across cultures. For example an exhibit on containers includes canteens, a mahjong box, a Masai gourd for blood-milk, a sheath for a kris, and several other containers of various types. The problem is that it cannot do much justice to the subject because the subject is so broad. A similar case has various protections from unknown including amulets, shaman artifacts and a bottle of gin.
They have a series of computers running commercial software to play with, but there is not much in the way of instruction or help. I flailed with SimCity for a while, but did not get far. Evelyn got hold of a computer running Internet Explorer and looked up reviews of Mimic. It looks to be okay. Perhaps not great.
They had an exhibit on 'supersenses' of animals. I guess they consider a supersense to be any sense an animal has that we do not or that we have, but not to as great a degree. I guess while we detect red, yellow, and blue, birds detect five colors. This makes them much more sensitive to subtleties of color. Do they see fundamentally different from what we see? Well, probably they do in the way we would see more subtleties of color than someone who is colorblind. So what are they seeing that we are not? Probably nothing we can understand. Try explaining what we see to someone who is colorblind. Snakes see heat from an animal in their visible range. A snake will see the heat coming off from an animal in what would to us be total darkness. Spiders, they claim, actually count the legs of other animals. Sharks feel small changes in magnetic fields.
Following that was an exhibit on the history of medicine and the human body. In the middle was an Exploratorium style hands-on room called Kidspace, but having material of interest to adults also.
We finished off with a demonstration of acoustic science. This was okay, but had little that was unusual or unexpected. The woman giving it looked like a college student and the presentation had few effects that I had not seen in high school physics.
We drove back to Dallas and had dinner at a place called Benavides. We had had Mexican only once. It is my theory that you cannot get good Mexican food in any state that does not have a Hispanic name. Well, now we are in Texas and I think we can get the good stuff. I got a chicken fajita. Evelyn got an enchilada and a tamale. I think I might be the only person in my family (well the one I was born into) who likes Mexican food. Luckily Evelyn likes it. I came out so stuffed I was uncomfortable well into the movie. I used to have a much greater capacity. I wonder if my stomach has gotten smaller?
After dinner we went to see Mimic. |
|
| Copyright © - "Mark R. Leeper" |
|
 |
| Other travelogues by the same author: |
|
|
|
