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May 11, 2006

Visiting my father and Washington, DC

Went to visit my father for his 70th birthday (and coincidentally his last day of teaching at the Univ of MD). Amazingly, he is also selling the house I grew up in quite suddenly and the closing is in less than a month. Was a nice visit and good to see the place and area one last time (although no particular attachment to the house or most of the area really).

I also went into DC for the day while Dad was teaching and had a really nice time. I lived just outside of DC for many years and of course had been to almost all of the museums before but was very different for me 20 years later. Somehow, I had also never before made it to the Vietnam Memorial (built in 1982 in the middle of my time there [particularly interesting after having watched and really enjoyed the Maya Lin documentary a few years back]) or the Jefferson (liked less than the other memorials) or FDR (beautiful space and water features and very different which was nice) memorials which are a bit out of the way. The Lincoln memorial was as powerful as ever - setting, approach, design, engraved words all incredibly done. There were two things I really noticed and appreciated about the Washington center as a whole. First, I don't know of ANY other city in the world that devotes so much of its prime space to the past and memory in the form of museums and memorials. Making this feeling even stronger is that there are basically NO commercial attractions of ANY sort (shops or restaurants beyond the museum ones) in the mall/memorial area. There was also, nicely, very little security anywhere - was actually even hard to find anyone around the memorials to even ask a question of. Both of these factors for me really strengthed my immersion in the place for the day and introspective and retrospective mood. This day made me appreciate Washington much more than I had as a kid.

Was also so nice that the museums were (taxpayer financed of course) free so that I could briefly go in them for 10-15 minutes, more for reasons of memory than really seeing exhibits. The only museum I spent any real time in was the Sackler which had an exhibit on the Japanese artist Hokusai whose work I love. The headline piece was titled Thunder God and is a scroll (so unique as opposed to his wood block prints) which I had never seen before and absolutely adored, even more than his famous "Great Wave". The web version (and a modern reproduction scroll version the museum shop was selling for $375) unfortunately just doesn't do it justice as the vibrancy of colors and contrast just don't come through nearly as powerfully.

Posted by aarondf at May 11, 2006 03:36 PM

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