There hasn't been much else going on other than work. On 8 July I went to the Pops Gospel Night on the Esplanade, it was a nice show but kind of watered down, not real wailing gospel like I was hoping for, but it was good anyway. I saw this show with with Morganne, it was great fun to hang out with her.
On 20 July I saw _Measure for Measure_ at the Publick Theatre on the Charles. This is a Shakespeare play that I'd never seen before, and it's pretty good. The staging was mostly modern, with the Duke bringing his laptop computer onstage and taking calls on a telephone, and the hookers and pimps dressed Las Vegas style. After the initial weirdness, it worked very well!
After dark, we built a fire on the beach and drummed around it for a long time, with night divers prowling in the cove, dim green chemlights at the surface, and eerie searchlights under the water. The police arrived around 11:15, and politely told us to keep the drumming down (no mention of the fire on the beach, which is technically illegal). So we moved indoors and drummed a while longer. I played didjeridu with the end stuck in a small ashiko (everyone thought this looked funny, but it makes the sound louder ).
When the music died down, some of us went skinny dipping. Swimming in the ocean at midnight is very neat, there are lots of phosphorescent plankton which light up when disturbed, so that you swim through swirling galaxies of flickering stars. Several of us hurt our feet on the rocks, though, as the footing is very uneven. Some folks stoked up the fire again, so that we swimmers could dry off by it, and then we went back indoors. There was a little more mead tasting, and conversation, and we called it quits about 2:30 am, putting seven people to bed in various parts of the house. What a party!
Next morning was bright and beautiful sunny weather. After making an extensive breakfast of pancakes and omelets, some folks took off, and Lyman and I cleaned up the dinghy and launched it, putting it on the mooring. Then we went snorkeling (it was low tide), Lee and I swimming in the water, and Lyman paddling around on a raft.
Folly Cove is one of the most popular spots for scuba diving and snorkeling in New England, and it'll take a lot to describe all the crabs and starfish and sea urchins and kelp and things. I put a starfish on my hand, so I could watch the little tube feet, and it grabbed right on. There's a pool at the west side of the cove that was filled with milky opaque fluid, Lee and I climbed up the seaweed to check it out. We supposed that some local fauna was breeding at that time, and this was the milt (free floating semen). There were lobsters in here too, and crabs duking it out. Fleets of tiny silver fish and brine shrimp wheeling around.
Back home for lunch (crab and guacamole sandwiches!) and Murphy's Irish Stout. I tore open one of the cans to see the little plastic insert thing that makes it "pub draft" style.
Arnie and Helena came by with a bottle of wine, which was very nice. (Arnie is Lee's other steady lover, and Helena is his other steady lover, this is the first time we had the entire line together.) It was good to meet them.
Next day I drove to Amherst to take Sian to the "Words & Pictures Museum" (or the Museum of Sequential Art). This is a great place that is unfortunately closing, this was its last weekend. You enter through a cave labyrinth, which starts out with cave drawings on the walls, then hieroglyphs, and tapestries, leading up to comic strips and graphic novel excerpts. The whole place is a wonderful treasure trove of graphic art and such, with vintage Kirby and Eisner originals, right up through _Bone_ and other new projects. There are full size Ninja Turtles, Alien, Predator, and two of McKean's _Sandman_ covers (multimedia). They say they're going to put it all on the web site, we shall see.
Sian and I had lunch at the Northampton Brewery, with a very nice open air patio, good ales too! We visited the local pagan shop and the Dog Bakery (handmade gourmet biscuits for spoiled yuppie puppies) and Herrell's ice cream, and admired all the shiny machinery on display by the local motorcycle clubs.
Sian took me to U Mass to see her lab too. Bio/chem labs are always fun to roam around in, they have a lot more toys than we computer geeks. She is still shooting at graduating next year, same as me, we're going to race to the finish line!
Sian and her roommates really liked the bottle of cyser I brought. She doesn't like the hops taste of beer. I ought to teach her to brew mead.
Monet was a friend and fan of Sargent's, but said "he's not what we call a true Impressionist." I think I know what he means, because Sargent has a way of rendering the focus of the painting (often the face or hands) in exquisite, photographic detail, in luminous light and almost hallucinogenic clarity, while the rest of the painting (clothes and backgrounds) is a blur of blobs and brushstrokes, which yet convey the texture and substance of the material. It reminds me of the technique in cinematography, of shifting the camera's focal length to bring parts of the scene into sharp focus while letting other parts blur into the background. The French Impressionists, like Monet, seem to render the whole scene at the same level of blurriness, which is fine, but I like Sargent's details better.
His handling of light and shadow is extraordinary too, and I just boggle at the realism of some of his works, the way the people seem ready to walk right out of the canvas, even though they're clearly just squiggles and blobs of paint. He does the same magic with drapery -- I remember my art classes, struggling to capture the folds in clothing, the light and shadow of crumpled fabric, and failing totally! He makes it look so easy.
The MFA offers audio guides, boxes with headphones that tell you about different artworks. Apparently you push the button corresponding to the number on the painting and it talks to you. I didn't get one, though I hear they're very good, and lots of other folks had them. It leads to an odd experience, viewing the gallery while surrounded by dozens of whispering voices (leaking from the headphones of people around me), kind of eerie, like a flock of distant birds.
I saw this exhibit with Terri, a new arrival in Boston from the Taoist Tai Chi Society chapter in Tallahassee, Florida. She's here for a master's degree in occupational therapy at Tufts Medical School, so we commiserated about the grad school blues. Since she's arrived I have introduced her to dim sum and to Indian food. She's very pretty and petite, but I am not assuming that anything romantic is going to happen.
Hope everyone's having a great summer!
Wil