Cultured

OK, I am now totally cultured. It took two days, two museums, the Hard Rock Café, a bookstore, a piano/flute concert, a slide show about the Civil Rights movement, and a stop at the hat shop … but the result is undeniable. I am cultured.

It’s rare for my partner and me to take a full day off from our various regular pursuits to play. But on Friday, that’s just what we did. She hadn’t seen the da Vinci exhibit, and although I had seen it twice before (the first time alone, chronicled here, and again with a friend who read my rave review here), I was totally game to go again. So after breakfast (our first trip to Snooze. Try it!), we spent Friday morning with Leonardo. This time, I got to see the whole movie, along with some short videos designed for our co-visitors, middle schoolers with ADHD. Their reactions were entertaining—especially their serious discomfort with full-screen shots of da Vinci’s famous “Vitruvian man” (Slip into your 11-year-old sensitivity and take a look). The movie was great. It added layers of historical information that gave an additional dimension to da Vinci’s inventions and his art. We wondered (leave it to two psychologists) whether his extraordinary perspective, his ability to draw physical renditions of ideas that others hadn't envisioned, had to do with some distinctive neurological characteristic. Guess we’ll never know, but it’s interesting to speculate.

Leonardo’s show was less than a block from the Hard Rock Café, so, given my partner’s enthusiasm about all things musical (remember the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?), lunch just had to be there. In addition to the ceiling-to-floor rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia, the café had a continuous video of various rock performances. As good fortune would have it, the loop during our lunch included Bruce Springsteen singing my partner’s currently favorite-in-the-world song, “We Are Alive” from the Boss’s latest album. If you’re into message music, give a listen. (Think symbolically when you get to the part about worms and such.)

Then we were off to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science for the Pompeii exhibit. I had been keeping an eye on this, thinking I’d go for some Wednesday outing. But I’d failed to notice that it was about to close—like, it’s now gone (sorry). My partner was interested, too, so we braved the sinking temperatures and promise of snow to see the last days of Pompeii. The exhibit was really well done, drawing visitors into the daily lives of these folks before that morning in 79 A.D. when Vesuvius came alive and buried Pompeii (and several other towns) in ash and stones. Arguably the most powerful part of the exhibit was the casts of people and animals frozen in the positions they held when the ash and fumes overcame them. I’d seen pictures of these before, but being close the their life-sized reality was another experience entirely.

I was also stuck by some uncomfortable indications of the Roman class system on display in Pompeii. For example, I learned that wealthy folks sent their clothing to the “dry cleaner’s” to get it cleaned and bleached. The bleaching part was done by slaves, who walked on the clothing in pools of urine (collected from passersby and from animals), which served as a natural bleaching agent. And then there was the cast of one person who didn’t escape from the city (only about 1,000 of 20,000 citizens didn’t escape). You could tell he was a slave or a prisoner because the shackles were still on  his ankles. On the other hand, there was the apparent consciousness conveyed by a mosaic that hung in someone’s dining room. It represented death, portrayed as a skull, as the great equalizer that cancels out differences based on wealth and class. The mosaic depicts a level with a plumb line hanging from it; the weight is a skull. Hanging from the two arms of the level, balanced by death, are symbols of wealth and of poverty. I guess it is true that death comes to us all regardless of wealth. But it’s also true that the man with the shackles had no chance to escape, while most of Pompeii did. Well, for the time being. I guess they're all equally dead now.

Death as the great equalizer. Mosaic from a Pompeii home.

 After we left Pompeii, at once fascinated and stunned by the exhibit, we slopped through the falling snow to a coffee/reading break at the Tattered Cover, still Denver’s premier independent bookstore. That stop warmed and settled us enough to move on to our evening engagement: a piano / flute concert. Long ago, I wrote about a lovely evening spent with two women who have used their retirement to pursue their true callings: painting for one and music for the other. The music woman was the pianist at this concert, and she was joined by a flautist who also plays for the joy of it (neither of them was paid for this free concert). Their music was wonderful, and it seemed like it rounded out the day nicely, smoothing the ragged edges from Pompeii and taking me back (musically) to the time of Leonardo, where we started the day. Well, not all of the music was from that era, but the parallel is too good to pass up.

Finally, for a very different sort of cultural experience, on Saturday, we went to a presentation/discussion about a 1965 Civil Rights march in Birmingham. This march followed the famous “Bloody Sunday” confrontation when marchers first tried to walk from Selma to Montgomery and met with violence instead. The march we were there to hear about moved from the African-American section of Birmingham to the state capitol building in that city. A number of folks from Denver and Boulder joined the march, and this event featured their snapshots, turned into slides, and a narration preserved by the Carnegie Library in Boulder. Several folks who had walked that day were at this event, and they added their own recollections and reactions.

Seeing the pictures and hearing the participants’ commentary—in person and in archived form—gave an immediacy to the whole event that I think would have been missing if it had been just a lecture. Imagine marching through falling rain out of the muddy, unpaved streets and meager homes of the African-American section of town into the paved streets and well-heeled business district near the capitol. Imagine being “protected” by Alabama National Guardsmen with confederate flags on their uniforms. Imagine being unsure how (or whether) you could get from the end of the march back to the airport safely. Imagine your relief as you returned to Colorado just 24 hours later—aware, as one of the white marchers said, that your own fear ended when the plane you got home, whereas Birmingham’s Black residents lived with that fear all day, every day.

What more could you ask of a two-day experience of cultural immersion? Let’s see: painting, sketching, and invention wrapped in historical context; rock ‘n’ roll music, complete with nostalgic memorabilia; Roman elegance and death as the great equalizer; leisurely reading with good coffee; classical music performed in a soaring cathedral; and a trip back to a historical moment within my own lifetime.

Oh, yeah. I almost forgot the hat story. My partner has been craving a type of hat that I recently learned is called a “Donegal” hat. She found it between the Hard Rock Café and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Just to cap off the day.