Super Bowl XXXVIII

Lest you thought I forgot:

Go Pats!!!

Quote of the day:

“There are creases beneath the eyes of Charlie Weis, deep as the rings on a tree stump.”

Weis is the Patriot’s offensive coordinator and, come to think of it, he kinda does look like a tree stump. This line is the lead in one of the articles in today’s NY Times sports section. My Boston Globe – newspaper of record today with the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl – never arrived this morning. I will save the rant about my ongoing newspaper delivery problems. (Do they not know that I can just as easily go online for the paper, that having to put on boots and go out first thing in the morning in 5° weather to see if my paper just might be somewhere in the middle of the driveway if it’s there at all… Oh yeah, I wasn’t going to rant.) So let me say it again: Go Pats!

1:50:52 PM      trackback [] 

Sights, sounds and tastes of the Silk Road

Yesterday I finally got up to the new Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. The 200-year-old museum underwent a major renovation and reopened in June with new galleries and a new wing. I’d heard the new space was beautiful and it sounded well worth a trip just to see that. They have a huge collection of Asian art – something I’m not all that familiar with. But one of the things I wanted to see was Yin Yu Tang house, an entire late Qing dynasty house that you can tour. (BTW, the interactive tour on their site is very cool.)

Anyway, when we got up there yesterday afternoon, we had no idea that a big event was going on coinciding with Chinese New Year. There were musicians, storytellers and a classical Indian dancer performing for a crowd in the atrium. We apparently missed cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who is leading the Silk Road Ensemble, “an innovative, 12-day artist-in-residence program exploring the rich cultural and artistic traditions of the historic Silk Road.” The website includes Quicktime interviews with several of the artists explaining their instruments and craft.

We spent awhile watching the performances, then checked out Vanished Kingdoms, an exhibit of photographs taken in the early 1920’s “by the first Americans to reach the mountains and deserts of western China (Gansu) and Mongolia and the great, heretofore, unphotographed lamaseries of Eastern Tibet.” The photographs looked colorized; the website explains that they’re new prints of original hand-colored lantern slides. We wondered how different these places might look now.

We didn’t get in to see the Yin Yu Tang house and only had time for one other exhibit, Men Plow, Women Weave – woodblock prints from China. Besides its Asian art collection, the museum has collections from Africa and Oceana, and Native American and New England art. It’s definitely worth a trip back. The museum closed at 5 and rather than eat early in Salem we headed down the highway into Boston for what seemed like the most logical way to conclude our trip: dinner in Chinatown.

(Image from the PEM website.)

12:53:24 PM      trackback []