This question is directed primarily toward frequenters of the Boston Museum of Science, but anyone with with relevant information is free to chime in: does anyone know what happened to the murals in the exhibit that the Butterfly Garden replaced in 2005? I think it was called the Sun Lab; it focused on photosynthesis and meteorology, with time for hydroponics and the greenhouse effect. One of the murals depicted the main cloud types in brushwork that would not have embarrassed N.C. Wyeth, culminating in an anvil-topped thunderhead. The other was one of the most pagan things I have ever seen in a science museum: a yellow sun-face turning greener and greener, budding out and leafing, until its rays were a cornucopia of fruit and flower. Obviously, I want to find out they were not destroyed; I like to think they were stored in the basement or some wistful employee took them home. But I have no idea. Do any of you?
Last night I watched Mongol (2007), which I need to show Viking Zen. Genuinely epic, dirt under everyone's fingernails; I completely failed to recognize Tadanobu Asano from Zatoichi (2003) and Khulan Chuluun as Börte is to watch out for. It even has shamanism and the sky-god Tengri in the form of a blue wolf. It is also one of the few movies I've seen that achieves a visceral sense of violence through means other than blood-splatter and crunching sounds—its battle scenes have the kind of physical heft and minutiae I associate with the prose of Mary Gentle and the poetry of Seamus Heaney; a first-person swordfight should be nausea-making, but instead it functions as a shift in narrative voice—and it does not show the audience everything, which unobtrusively heightens the feel of an oral tradition, in which the inlay of a sword and a coat of bride-price sable can be described in ten lines, a span of seven years compressed into a single verse. I am sorry not to have seen its steppes on a big screen.
The kitchen is in such a state of renovation that nothing remains but the floor (which may be pulled up in part tomorrow; there were three compacted layers of linoleum, as there was wallpaper under decades of paint strata on the ceiling. The former owners of our house may have been very nice people, but from upkeep they knew nothing); the dishwasher and oven are junked out on the curb, the refrigerator has been moved downstairs to the summer kitchen. There is plastic sheeting fastened up over the open wall where the archway to the kitchen used to be. It looks slightly quarantine-like, a closed ward in a hospital. I spent my morning painting new boards in the driveway, my afternoon first mowing the lawn and then raking it. I finished just as it began to thunder. I feel like a character in the corners of a Breughel painting.
Last night I watched Mongol (2007), which I need to show Viking Zen. Genuinely epic, dirt under everyone's fingernails; I completely failed to recognize Tadanobu Asano from Zatoichi (2003) and Khulan Chuluun as Börte is to watch out for. It even has shamanism and the sky-god Tengri in the form of a blue wolf. It is also one of the few movies I've seen that achieves a visceral sense of violence through means other than blood-splatter and crunching sounds—its battle scenes have the kind of physical heft and minutiae I associate with the prose of Mary Gentle and the poetry of Seamus Heaney; a first-person swordfight should be nausea-making, but instead it functions as a shift in narrative voice—and it does not show the audience everything, which unobtrusively heightens the feel of an oral tradition, in which the inlay of a sword and a coat of bride-price sable can be described in ten lines, a span of seven years compressed into a single verse. I am sorry not to have seen its steppes on a big screen.
The kitchen is in such a state of renovation that nothing remains but the floor (which may be pulled up in part tomorrow; there were three compacted layers of linoleum, as there was wallpaper under decades of paint strata on the ceiling. The former owners of our house may have been very nice people, but from upkeep they knew nothing); the dishwasher and oven are junked out on the curb, the refrigerator has been moved downstairs to the summer kitchen. There is plastic sheeting fastened up over the open wall where the archway to the kitchen used to be. It looks slightly quarantine-like, a closed ward in a hospital. I spent my morning painting new boards in the driveway, my afternoon first mowing the lawn and then raking it. I finished just as it began to thunder. I feel like a character in the corners of a Breughel painting.
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