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.

Michigan with a side of Cleveland

If you’ve ever read the newspaper series called “Three perfect days in —,” you might not think that Ypsilanti, Michigan, and Cleveland, Ohio, would ever make the cut. But with just the right combination of events...

It all started with an invitation to a party in Ypsilanti, where we earlier spent a less-than-thrilling year. A former student of my partner’s was getting her doctorate and sent us an announcement of a celebratory party. The three of us had done some fun research and speaking together, and we had become good friends as well as colleagues. We have often said that we came away from Ypsi loving two things: this woman and the flan at a tiny Mexican restaurant there. (The two were not, of course, in the same category of “love.”) A chance to share in our friend’s celebration seemed like a good reason to go back for a visit. So there we were, against all odds, headed back to Ypsilanti.

We flew into the Detroit airport, which set me thinking. I’m always struck by the contrast between this expansive, modern airport and the sorrowful recent history of the “motor city.” Living here just before the recession officially arrived, we saw a small sample of the economic downturn of southeastern Michigan. We also got a big hit of how much that corner of the state is identified with what they call simply “automotive.” The sense of a nearly universally shared economic/vocational identity was so strong that even people whose work was only very incidentally related to cars thought of themselves being in “automotive.” The allegiance to this industry as the go-to job-maker persisted even when automotive seemed to be leaving the state high and dry. When we lived there (2004-5), sales of American automobiles were already on the skids. Plants were laying off, even closing, with whole sections of towns like Flint simply shutting down as a result. Yet, when the state had some money designated for development, they chose to invest in another car manufacturing plant instead of diversifying an economy that looked to be in death throes even then. The automotive industry has seen a bit of a resurrection of late, although the airport still seems deserted, way too big for the volume of passenger traffic it carries. Maybe the city will come back, grow into its airport.

Anyway, back to our “three perfect days …” After a grand, long, leisurely dinner with our friend on the evening we arrived, we were footloose until her party. My partner was trying to arrange a research interview in the area, and once that was settled, we headed off on a field trip to Cleveland.

“Cleveland?” you ask. 

Yup. 

Just three hours down the road and home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame!

It was a nice day trip, three hours of rolling through the farms of the heartland. The radio stations we happened onto offered the latest hog prices and wheat futures, interspersed with country music, religious programming, some contemporary stations, and even an occasional hit of the rock and roll whose story we were about to explore in depth. It was a lovely spring day, the fields were beautiful—dark, damp soil (though without the red of Colorado fields) just showing green shoots. Cows, horses, and sheep were scattered in the fields and barnyards—though we didn't see any of those hogs they mentioned on the radio.

We cruised into Cleveland late in the morning, thinking this would give us plenty of time before the museum closed at 5:30. Wrong. You know how museums are—especially for a deeply devoted music aficionada like my partner and a curious neophyte like me. Except for a very short lunch break, we perused exhibits and watched documentaries (with lots of music included) right up to closing time. I was especially intrigued by a short documentary that sketched the evolution of R & R. It showed post-WWII “American” music—i.e., the music of white, middle-class America, Perry Como, Doris Day, “Your Hit Parade”—juxtaposed with the less visible (to most of us) genres of Black music, jazz, the blues, the spirituals, and white country and bluegrass music—a combination of which gave birth to rock and roll. 

I knew virtually none of this, and now my curiosity is piqued. In order to see the half of the museum we missed entirely or skipped over far too lightly, we’re hoping for a return trip—she for further immersion in an art form about which there is always more to learn and plenty to appreciate; I for another introductory lesson.

Ypsilanti Water Tower, 1890

With the time we had left before the big event, we actually hung out. During these "perfect days," we slept in, with the “Do not disturb” sign on the door. Then, we filled our time with gentle meandering. We cruised around Ypsilanti, driving past our old house and snapping photos of the water tower, pictured here. (Not surprisingly, this water tower has been the brunt of many a joke. It was once draped in a very large sheet of plastic for World AIDS Day, and a nearby pizza shop named “Dick’s” uses the tower for a logo.)  We hung out in coffee shops, my partner working, as is her wont, and I reading We Need to Talk about Kevin—excellent and disturbing. We ate at favorite restaurants: the vegetarian restaurant in Ann Arbor remains superb; the Mexican restaurant in Ypsi was out of the flan we love, a deeply disappointing moment. 

And we serendipitously happened onto the Ann Arbor film festival and grabbed tickets for “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” at the Michigan Theater, one of those old, refurbished theaters that grace many towns—this one comes complete with an old organ and live pre-show organ music. "Marigold" is a must-see film, especially for people who are old, people who feel uncomfortable about old people, and people who will someday become old.

The three perfect days closed with a really nice party for our friend, hosted by her mom and attended by about 70 of her closest friends, plus her two kids and her husband. She’s a wonderful person, so the number wasn’t surprising, and the energy was proportionally high. We got to watch her older son and 8 or 10 other kids playing everything from “perch too many kids on the plastic climbing structures” through “see how much pizza you can fit in your little mouth at once” to “pound each other on the back and see who complains.” The adults had their own pastimes—talking in little knots or around large tables, sipping wine and munching on nuts or balancing plates of food on their laps, firing up the karaoke machine for some homemade entertainment. Another form of music I know too little about.

Now, this may not sound like an exciting vacation, but it was, in fact, perfect. A delightful combination of good friendship, a fun and educational field trip (with bonus information on agricultural prices), good food, a chance to catch up on sleep, a spontaneous movie, and quiet, unencumbered leisure time.

Three perfect days in Ypsilanti, with a side of Cleveland.