Month: July 2016

An Afternoon at the Museum

Bradley Farless1 Comment

Another week done. On the one hand, I feel like I should value my time more, but on the other, I’m always so glad when another work week is finished. Sometimes we’re too worn out to do anything on the weekend and we spend most of our time at home, just relaxing. This weekend, we’d made plans to try to get out and enjoy some art. We had originally planned to go to the Guggenheim on Saturday night. I did a little research on their website and found out that if you go between 5:45 PM and 7:45 PM on a Saturday night, you can pay whatever you want for admission, instead of the usual $25 apiece. I don’t mind paying to see art, but I can’t see paying $50.00 (the Met has the same suggested rate for adults, though it’s just a suggested rate) every time we decide to spend an hour or two inside a museum. We’re not tourists, after all.

We never made it out of the house on Saturday afternoon, so when we got ready to go out on Sunday we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art instead. We can go visit the Guggenheim next Saturday, if we’re not doing something else. Our plan was to go to the second floor and look at the 19th and early 20th century European paintings, but we got sidetracked when we stumbled into the “Manus x Machina” special exhibit behind the medieval European art section of the first floor. We were actually heading to the restrooms at the time. The exhibit wasn’t too big so we figured we’d take a look before heading upstairs. It was incredible how many people were in that small area. In a few places I felt like I was wading through the herds of people that are always moving through Times Square.

The dresses on display were way beyond what I was expecting. I didn’t think I would be impressed, because I’m not seriously into fashion, but looking at the dresses on display there, I think I finally understood that sometimes fashion can be art too, as cheesy as that sounds.

Some of the dresses were fascinating:

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Some were terrifying (this one is made with real gull skulls):

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Others were whimsical:

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A few more images in a Flickr gallery:

Manus X Machina//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.jsWe finally found our way upstairs, but immediately got lost in the 1600-1800s era galleries. It wasn’t until we were about to leave that we finally found ourselves looking at Van Gogh, Degas, and Gauguin. After having visited so many times, I got overconfident in my ability to navigate to the area we were looking for. Next time I’ll just download the app before we go so I have a map in my pocket.

I’d hoped to spend 20 minutes or so in the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia gallery, but I think I was being too ambitious considering how late it was when we got there, but there’s always next time.

We polished off the evening with some awesome burgers over at Shake Shack. It was a pretty good end to the weekend.

Keeping Busy, Trying to Be Productive

Bradley FarlessLeave a comment

So, I’m trying to figure out how to blog casually again. I’ve been so busy over the last few years. It’s odd, really. When I’m doing more and theoretically have more to talk about, I have less time to blog about it. So, things have been pretty busy. Besides that, I got so used to writing analytically that I think I almost forgot how to blog and just write my opinion on something. What I mean is, I’ve gotten so used to writing with citations and research that just throwing an opinion out there into the digital void without backing it up seems off. Well, I guess blogging isn’t really about that anyway, though I’ve been publishing a lot of my old essays and research papers here, so I’m going I’m going to try to breathe some fresh life into this website.

Besides trying to figure out how to write a blog post again, I’ve been working full time. I also still have two MA courses left to complete for my MA in History. We also moved recently, so life has been pretty busy, especially over the last two months or so. This is a “do nothing” weekend for us so we can chill and try to recover a bit. The last few weekends we had guests up and we were putting together furniture and trying to get our new apartment organized. That’s not to say it hasn’t been fun, but I guess you have to take a break every now and then to just recuperate.

//This post was originally typed up about 3 weeks ago, but I was having issues with an HTTP error when trying to add images, so here we are today, finally getting this up and off the ground.

If you haven’t gone to see Wicked the Musical, it’s definitely worth the time and money if you find yourself in New York City, or another city where the show is being run. It was really interesting and was a much more complicated take on the Oz story than I was expecting.

Things that we’re interested in doing over the next few months:

  1. Sorting out our diet and trying to eat more healthy again. We picked up a Nutribullet so we can have a quick, fun and easy way to get more fruits and vegetables into our diet.
  2. Find a way to get more exercise.
  3. Go to more Broadway shows. We want to take advantage of where we live by seeing the live shows that we keep talking about but never quite make it out to see. Shows on our list are Les Miserables, The Book of Mormon, The Lion King, and The Crucible.

I don’t see any reason why we should wait until the New Year to try to make some new resolutions.