Thursday 30 June 2016

Our Day at the Met Part 1

When I was in High School I painted my bathroom to look like an Egyptian tomb. My mom had a book that I used to pour through and I stole all kinds of images from this little book and painted them on the walls of the bathroom. It turns out that  it was a book on the Egyptian collection in the Met. So here is one of the images that ended up on those walls:


I like this cat cutting off the head of a serpent.


And this Egyptian crocodile figure outside the temple is absolutely beautiful.

 
 I love the period rooms, because I feel like I have stepped into another world at another time.


The Met is particularly spacious and I love some of the expansive areas.



There were some very interesting special exhibits, including one on clothing in the age of technology.

 

The first part of the exhibit I went to was a section in which they imitated flowers with man-made materials.


This one was made out of plastic and it opened with a hinge and then closed over the body of the model. Seems like it owuld be mega-uncomfortable.


There was a video showing the process.


This one must have been an incredible amount of work to make.

 

Here is a close up of the flowers in the gown above.


The next section imitated feathers. The one below was shown in a black and in a white model.


What follows are others in the feather section.





 Obviously these re best enjoyed in person if you can get to the exhibition. Still, maybe you can get an idea of some of the designs from these images.


I wish I had noted the designers for these, but I had limited disk space.





I think these were some of my favorite dresses, but I can't really see me wearing any of them...

 

 I might wear the one on the left above, but with some kind of furry stole.


The ones above and below look very Weimar Republic to me.


The lace here was made of cut leather.




 

You can't tell, but that train is really, really long.
I'll break this here (Mpre dresses to come and some actual art too!

First Day in New York

After I arrived the first thing I did was wander over to St Malachy's, the Actor's Chapel. You could see it from our hotel window. (Love the reflections from the glass windows on the nearby buildings.)


The inside was typical neo-gothic, but I still enjoyed visiting.



The next day we began our New York adventures starting off at a little breakfast place on our way to the Metropolitan Museum. We passed the Brill building with its beautiful architectural detail.


You can probably tell that Violet wasn't too thrilled with her pancakes. They were supposed to be cinnamon flavoured, but the subtelety was lost on her and they didn't give her any butter, so they were sort of boring starch cakes. I had an omelette which turned out to be a theme food for the trip.


We decided to walk to the Met and we passed cool street scenes


I took the above picture for my sister who couldn't come, because she loves the Soup Nazi.  Below is just a nice Urban scene.


 And what is a large city without its pigeons?


Then we headed to the Met through Central park. There was much to gawk at, including buskers and trees and even some interesting places to visit. They have a chess pavillion where you can play chess and register for simuls with grand masters.



There were a few people playing chess outside,


but the buidling was pretty desserted.

 
 We also saw this colorfully dressed man in the park.


There were lots of dog lovers in the park too.


We did eventually make it to the Met where I saw some of my favorite things, but I 'll save those for the next blog.

Weekend Trip to New York

So, I took a family trip to New York this last weekend and thought I's put up a few pictures to show what I saw and experienced.

In the plane I sat next to a lovely woman who was originally from Liberia. She didn't want to sit by the window, so I traded seats with her and that gave me the opportunity to  take some aerial photos.


 As we got close to the city, this is what I saw out of the window. Unfortunately I was once again on the wrong side of the plane to see the city, but I still got a couple of good shots.


And I caught this one by zooming my camera in on the porthole across the aisle on the other side of the plane. I am sort of proud of the shot.


On the runway there was another opportunity to take pictures.


We stayed in a hotel not too far from Times Square called The Time.

The reception was desserted when I arrived. There was this video projection of  kaleidoscopic images and old fashioned telephone, but you had to go up a floor to get to the registration desk.
 

The room was minimalist in tone with dark grey walls.


The bathroom was also dark and understated.
 

The lamps were the most interesting part of the room, lthough that one in the right hand corner, gave me no end of grief as it hung about 4 feet off the ground in the foyer area.  There was no table under it and so I had a tendency to run into the darned thing.


Evidently I wasn't the only one as there were little plastic figures inside the light globe that used to stand in a circle under the bulb.  Someone ran into the fixture one time (at least) too many and so only one figure remained standing. The rest were in a heap at the bottom of the globe.