Sightseeing By the Dollar

Spring                                                                 Bloodroot Moon

Whenever I travel, I get performance anxiety.  Weird, huh?  Spending the amount of money required for travel makes me want to get plenty of sightseeing in per dollar. But, how much is enough?

Surely walking past the Willard, the Dept. of Treasury, the Whitehouse and out to the Lincoln Monument, then back is enough.  Isn’t it?  How many hours at the museum or paintings per visit is enough?  Does eating in the cafeteria count?

Now I wouldn’t raise these questions at all if I felt I’d done enough, so  you can tell how I’m doing by my own barometer, but I question my barometer.  At home I work most in the morning, usually a couple of hours in the afternoon after the nap, too.  That seems fine to me.  Most of the time.

(Me wondering about enough.)

On vacation though I get up in the morning around 8, my usual time, wander to some breakfast place, then head off for sightseeing that counts.  However, about 1 pm or so, my everyday nap habit reels me in, back to the hotel.  After a nap it’s the middle of the afternoon and doing much else just doesn’t happen until dinner. Which is the big event, then I’m done, not being a drinker, dancer, night outer type.

Anyhow, it’s a very bourgeoisie problem.  Or, it’s not exactly a problem so much as it a perception of value for the dollar.  How much more Babbity can you get?

Ah, finally I’ve written long enough to get to the nub of it.  After my trips the memories and thoughts enjoined during them always enrich my life. Always.  So, it’s not the sights seen, nor the miles walked that matter.  It’s the quality of the time overall and it has been this time and will be next time, wonderful.   All that thinking on power that I haven’t written about yet.  But I will.

This is a guy, just some guy, in front of the D.C. city hall getting made up for a press conference on the front steps.  A very D.C. moment.

 

the wall

Spring                                                          Bloodroot Moon

Hit the museum wall today.  No, not neuromuscular, psychic.  Standing, moving from painting to painting, trying to follow the multiple threads in my own inner discourse.  Plus.  Muscle fatigue from yesterday’s long walk, much of it on concrete.

Together, they moved me out of the galleries and onto Constitution Avenue.  Which, I learned yesterday, is a covered canal from an original scheme to move goods throughout the capitol by barge.  The railroad did it in, the canals lost money, a lot of money, and so, they filled them back up.  What Schumpeter would call creative destruction.  Me, just destruction.

(Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810)

A Durer show opened today, too.  Lots of people.  His work demands such close looking that the crowds made it unfruitful.  I imagine they will calm down in the coming weeks.

In looking back over the questions I wrote down here a few days ago my main interests have popped into clear relief.  I’m interested in the history of ideas from the Renaissance on through today, in particular the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernism, Post-Modernity.  Painting styles interact with these broader philosophical and cultural trends, but in complex ways.

As I move forward in my work with art, I plan to make my history of ideas interests a more central part of my art historical research.  Without going into it at any length I find direct correlations between, say, Romanticism, and my project on Reimagining Faith.  That realization can trigger art historical research.  There are, too, issues of economics and politics at play.

(The-Bard-1774-by-Welsh-artist-Thomas-Jones)

This may be why the museum work had begun to move too slowly for me.  It wasn’t addressing a broad enough range of my interests.  It wasn’t the museum; it was me.