So as soon as we got back from Salem, I had to go out to Lexington, because my mother had locked herself out of both the house and the car. All is now well (and my mother gave me a ride home!), but I'm getting around to this post a little later than planned. Everything else about today, however: worth it.
I'm sure I had known before this week, but it had not quite registered with me that Salem is accessible by public transit: it's five stops out from Boston on the Newburyport/Rockport Line. That's forty minutes once you get to North Station. I watched the salt marshes on the way out.
We had a little less than two hours at the museum, so we made a beeline for Turner & the Sea, which I'd wanted to see ever since the museum e-mailed me an advertisement as an enticement to renew my membership. Who knew that worked? Fortunately, J.M.W. Turner kept his end of the bargain. There are five rooms in the exhibit, their collections comprised of Turner's own watercolors, oils, sketches, and prints as well as his Dutch precursors, his English contemporaries, and just a few of his English and American successors, John Singer Sargent included. The difference in styles is best exemplified in the first room with several painters whose names I'd remember if I hadn't left my writing pad in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel's backpack in the cloakroom. They're painting similar events: naval engagements, seascapes with changeable weather, pastoral scenes of shore life. I don't dislike any of them. They are technically well-executed, historically valuable, in Nicholas Pocock's case pretty damn awesome in his representation of a shattering broadside. Their waves look sculpted, stiffer than glass. The right colors, the wrong fluidity. Solid things. Turner's are explosions of spray, deep-churning swells, the dinting haze of rain and cloudy breaks of light, a shell-white glitter of moonlight picking out the tiniest plaits and eddies like scales on the heavy run of a nighttime sea. Even before he fuzzed out into proto-Impressionism, in the early, strictly representational days that knocked the Royal Academy's boots off, his Atlantic is alive, foam-webbed, sliding against its own stormy tides, dissolving into sunsets and the low streak of reflection on a drawn-out mudflat. Everything in his world is in motion, buffeting, billowing, changing as the light changes. And then he does something like a mezzotint of ships in a bright stiff breeze in which every sail and line is precise and distinct as the receding cavern of sun-shafts or the monumental, myth-aggregating Battle of Trafalgar (1822) which takes up one-half of the room in which it's hung in, like a Titanomachy on a temple metope, and there seems very little point in trying to categorize him, except that he plainly loved the sea and that inclines me kindly toward a person even if he was apparently an idiot about his will (two lovers, two likely daughters, no provision for any of them: what the hell, man). This exhibition also introduced me to John Constable, who did wonderful smeared things with rough seas and rainstorms and waves curling over. The whole thing is on display until September. It pays for the travel time.
The other visiting exhibition of interest was California Design 1930–1965: Living in a Modern Way, so we spent most of our remaining time wandering through various evolutions of the future this particular edge of America was trying to realize itself into—inseparably from the lifestyles it was trying to talk itself into affording. I admit I have more affinity for nickel-chrome radios and record covers by Saul Bass than I do for plate-glass houses or the Barbie Look. The ice crusher in the style of a ray gun, c. 1935: also boss. A board game called Boom! . . . or Golden Age! (1950)? Slightly more worrisome. I enjoyed the clip of Walt Disney discoursing on "Our Friend the Atom," illustrating a nuclear chain reaction with mousetraps and ping-pong balls. It is never not going to be weird to see Eames chairs in museums. My family inherited two from my grandparents. One of them lived in the TV room and the other in the kitchen; I thought for years they must have been cheap, because they're made out of fiberglass and wire, not at all ergonomic, and the colors are weird. It makes me wonder what other artifacts were lost when my grandfather went grief-crazy and threw most of their house out. On the other hand, there's an entire aesthetic I'm glad I didn't inherit—I would have had to figure out what to do with it. The whole glassy, spacy, cool look. I like minimalism, but not when it makes me feel like a bad person for keeping a stack of magazines on the exquisitely planed, primary-colored filing cabinet. There were some terribly inefficient coffeepots in this exhibit.
After that we had about fifteen minutes before the museum kicked us out, so we blew through the East India Marine Hall (where I showed Rob the eighteenth-century knuckledusters, still one of my favorite museum pieces), ducked into Maritime Art (I am hoping he posts his pictures of the figurehead with a face like eaten green bronze, smiling calm as a koure through salt-ruined paint and split wood), and briefly persued the gift shop, from which I came away with a heavily discounted exhibition book of Man Ray and Lee Miller (which I had not been able to afford when the exhibit was on view). We ran out into the still-strong afternoon, adroitly avoiding lingering witch-tourists, and had an incredible dinner at Turner's Seafood. We cannot afford to eat there every time we visit Salem. Probably we can't even afford to eat there every other time. I regret nothing about the oyster stew, soft-shell crab, and economy-tanking quantity of mussels Dijonnaise I consumed. The waiter saw my Fraggle Rock T-shirt and became instantly effusive, sharing his personal favorites off the menu, recipes for homemade peanut butter cups, and stories about his dog. We are fairly certain that both owners came up to us at different points during the meal. We only hope we managed to communicate our enthusiasm sufficiently and coherently. We left a note with a lot of exclamation points on the receipt just in case.
I know Rob got some pictures of me by the lighthouse at the end of Derby Wharf, with the sunlight darkening on the sea for evening. The Friendship of Salem was closed to tours. We did not have the time to look for Rob's witch-hanging ancestor, who may or may not be buried in Salem anyway. (Nicholas Noyes, legendarily told by Sarah Good at her execution, I am no more a witch than you are a wizard: and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink. He died of a throat hemorrhage, choking on his own blood. Nathaniel Hawthorne liked the story so much, he transposed it into his own work. We didn't go to the House of the Seven Gables, either.) We watched the sea until we had to catch our train and then hiked back the way we came with a sunset Turner might have appreciated crumbling behind the skyline, all slipper-shell pinks and slaty blues. I was so tired, I lay down on a station bench with my head in Rob's lap; when the train came, we relocated the arrangement onto one of the long three-person seats and I don't remember anything until North Station. Then Lexington, the whirlwind. I'm on the living room futon now with one cat piled under my arm and the other curled against my knee, both grooming themselves and occasionally remembering to knead the nearest bit of me on the off chance I am actually their mother. Warm and living fur, small strong bodies. They knocked over a bottle of seltzer earlier, so they're no angels, but I'm glad we have them to come home to.
I'm glad we had the sea.
I'm sure I had known before this week, but it had not quite registered with me that Salem is accessible by public transit: it's five stops out from Boston on the Newburyport/Rockport Line. That's forty minutes once you get to North Station. I watched the salt marshes on the way out.
We had a little less than two hours at the museum, so we made a beeline for Turner & the Sea, which I'd wanted to see ever since the museum e-mailed me an advertisement as an enticement to renew my membership. Who knew that worked? Fortunately, J.M.W. Turner kept his end of the bargain. There are five rooms in the exhibit, their collections comprised of Turner's own watercolors, oils, sketches, and prints as well as his Dutch precursors, his English contemporaries, and just a few of his English and American successors, John Singer Sargent included. The difference in styles is best exemplified in the first room with several painters whose names I'd remember if I hadn't left my writing pad in
derspatchel's backpack in the cloakroom. They're painting similar events: naval engagements, seascapes with changeable weather, pastoral scenes of shore life. I don't dislike any of them. They are technically well-executed, historically valuable, in Nicholas Pocock's case pretty damn awesome in his representation of a shattering broadside. Their waves look sculpted, stiffer than glass. The right colors, the wrong fluidity. Solid things. Turner's are explosions of spray, deep-churning swells, the dinting haze of rain and cloudy breaks of light, a shell-white glitter of moonlight picking out the tiniest plaits and eddies like scales on the heavy run of a nighttime sea. Even before he fuzzed out into proto-Impressionism, in the early, strictly representational days that knocked the Royal Academy's boots off, his Atlantic is alive, foam-webbed, sliding against its own stormy tides, dissolving into sunsets and the low streak of reflection on a drawn-out mudflat. Everything in his world is in motion, buffeting, billowing, changing as the light changes. And then he does something like a mezzotint of ships in a bright stiff breeze in which every sail and line is precise and distinct as the receding cavern of sun-shafts or the monumental, myth-aggregating Battle of Trafalgar (1822) which takes up one-half of the room in which it's hung in, like a Titanomachy on a temple metope, and there seems very little point in trying to categorize him, except that he plainly loved the sea and that inclines me kindly toward a person even if he was apparently an idiot about his will (two lovers, two likely daughters, no provision for any of them: what the hell, man). This exhibition also introduced me to John Constable, who did wonderful smeared things with rough seas and rainstorms and waves curling over. The whole thing is on display until September. It pays for the travel time.The other visiting exhibition of interest was California Design 1930–1965: Living in a Modern Way, so we spent most of our remaining time wandering through various evolutions of the future this particular edge of America was trying to realize itself into—inseparably from the lifestyles it was trying to talk itself into affording. I admit I have more affinity for nickel-chrome radios and record covers by Saul Bass than I do for plate-glass houses or the Barbie Look. The ice crusher in the style of a ray gun, c. 1935: also boss. A board game called Boom! . . . or Golden Age! (1950)? Slightly more worrisome. I enjoyed the clip of Walt Disney discoursing on "Our Friend the Atom," illustrating a nuclear chain reaction with mousetraps and ping-pong balls. It is never not going to be weird to see Eames chairs in museums. My family inherited two from my grandparents. One of them lived in the TV room and the other in the kitchen; I thought for years they must have been cheap, because they're made out of fiberglass and wire, not at all ergonomic, and the colors are weird. It makes me wonder what other artifacts were lost when my grandfather went grief-crazy and threw most of their house out. On the other hand, there's an entire aesthetic I'm glad I didn't inherit—I would have had to figure out what to do with it. The whole glassy, spacy, cool look. I like minimalism, but not when it makes me feel like a bad person for keeping a stack of magazines on the exquisitely planed, primary-colored filing cabinet. There were some terribly inefficient coffeepots in this exhibit.
After that we had about fifteen minutes before the museum kicked us out, so we blew through the East India Marine Hall (where I showed Rob the eighteenth-century knuckledusters, still one of my favorite museum pieces), ducked into Maritime Art (I am hoping he posts his pictures of the figurehead with a face like eaten green bronze, smiling calm as a koure through salt-ruined paint and split wood), and briefly persued the gift shop, from which I came away with a heavily discounted exhibition book of Man Ray and Lee Miller (which I had not been able to afford when the exhibit was on view). We ran out into the still-strong afternoon, adroitly avoiding lingering witch-tourists, and had an incredible dinner at Turner's Seafood. We cannot afford to eat there every time we visit Salem. Probably we can't even afford to eat there every other time. I regret nothing about the oyster stew, soft-shell crab, and economy-tanking quantity of mussels Dijonnaise I consumed. The waiter saw my Fraggle Rock T-shirt and became instantly effusive, sharing his personal favorites off the menu, recipes for homemade peanut butter cups, and stories about his dog. We are fairly certain that both owners came up to us at different points during the meal. We only hope we managed to communicate our enthusiasm sufficiently and coherently. We left a note with a lot of exclamation points on the receipt just in case.
I know Rob got some pictures of me by the lighthouse at the end of Derby Wharf, with the sunlight darkening on the sea for evening. The Friendship of Salem was closed to tours. We did not have the time to look for Rob's witch-hanging ancestor, who may or may not be buried in Salem anyway. (Nicholas Noyes, legendarily told by Sarah Good at her execution, I am no more a witch than you are a wizard: and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink. He died of a throat hemorrhage, choking on his own blood. Nathaniel Hawthorne liked the story so much, he transposed it into his own work. We didn't go to the House of the Seven Gables, either.) We watched the sea until we had to catch our train and then hiked back the way we came with a sunset Turner might have appreciated crumbling behind the skyline, all slipper-shell pinks and slaty blues. I was so tired, I lay down on a station bench with my head in Rob's lap; when the train came, we relocated the arrangement onto one of the long three-person seats and I don't remember anything until North Station. Then Lexington, the whirlwind. I'm on the living room futon now with one cat piled under my arm and the other curled against my knee, both grooming themselves and occasionally remembering to knead the nearest bit of me on the off chance I am actually their mother. Warm and living fur, small strong bodies. They knocked over a bottle of seltzer earlier, so they're no angels, but I'm glad we have them to come home to.
I'm glad we had the sea.
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