in which i visit new yawk
Jul. 16th, 2014 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twoelevencthulhia@lj has been visiting new yawk city, and since i haven't seen her in years, i went and met her there. as is typical for visiting friends, my visit was dominated by food and culture.
'course, getting there was half the FUBAR. scamtrak managed to introduce a two hour delay into what was at that point an 1½ trip. the train got stuck just outside of philly station. they claimed it was a "signal error", but the symptoms -- a dull clunk with immediate loss of power and the train coming to an abrupt halt -- suggest the driver attempted to run a down semaphore (red stop light) and the emergency interlocks provided an excellent demonstration of how to use hardware to prevent multiple asynchronous agents from entering a mutual exclusion block.
so, the first order of business in NYC was lunch, which we got at pok pok phat thai. but they had only one kind of meat: mixed treyf (pork and random sea critters what don't have fins). so i got the vegan version of their main entree, but wrapped in an omelet. because i must eat the flesh of animals to gain their wisdom. or something like that.
then on to the met.
we started with colors of the universe: chinese hardstone carvings because it's the sort of artistic insanity i like. these are some absolutely stunning examples of the kind of art we could make relatively easily but don't. that is, these are all pieces that represent years of effort with hand tools, but could be made easily with machine tools. i'd taken some pictures of some of the completely insane ones, but the met has better ones online:
this is a carved hunk of agate:
the white bit looks like it's stuck on, but here's my closer view of it:
nope, it's just very clever workmanship exploiting the stone's banding. it's difficult to imaging how long it took to carve that out. i'm not even sure agate can be worked with steel tools... but these days, a dremel tool would do the job very quickly (much less something better suited to the initial coarse shaping).
a glass bottle, right?
nope: it's carved from smoky quartz. by hand. with a corundum- or diamond-tipped tool. that's an incredible amount of work to do by hand; i have no idea how the bottle was made hollow.
and then an exhibit of chinese caligraphy, since it was between the insane carving and the rest of the museum.
cthulhia wanted to see something japanese, and conveniently the flowering of the edo period was close at hand. that gallery also had this glass deer:
it's life-sized, though you can't tell that from the little picture. i took a couple of detail shots; this one failed to suck:
thence off to satisfy cthulhia's desire for a georges de la tour fix. which reminded us of da vinci, and they happened to have one of his drawings in their exhibition of italian renaissance drawings. i like this study of a man's head, because it seems very modern:
but cthulhia points out that it's undoubtedly intended as a tiny detail in a much larger work.
by that point, the museum was closing. we actually ended up looking at the last exhibit while being chased out of the museum, because it was on the way to the coat room. so, we collected cthulhia's host, julia, and got dinner at turntable: mad for chicken. that featured a beer lava lamp:
the top is full of beer, and the bottom has color-changing LEDs and other suitably groovy nonsense. the whole thing is maybe 20" (0.5m) tall, and it contains about 10 glasses of beer. this, of course, had to be measured empirically, though i had very little of it. (this picture and the next are cthulhia's.)
then we got dessert at the big gay ice cream shop:
because. well, because julia mentioned it and i simply couldn't turn that down. also, my companions were three sheets to the wind, and so practically everything was funny to them.
and then i took the train home -- which scamtrack failed to screw up in any way -- and got home somewhat after midnight. *zonk*
'course, getting there was half the FUBAR. scamtrak managed to introduce a two hour delay into what was at that point an 1½ trip. the train got stuck just outside of philly station. they claimed it was a "signal error", but the symptoms -- a dull clunk with immediate loss of power and the train coming to an abrupt halt -- suggest the driver attempted to run a down semaphore (red stop light) and the emergency interlocks provided an excellent demonstration of how to use hardware to prevent multiple asynchronous agents from entering a mutual exclusion block.
so, the first order of business in NYC was lunch, which we got at pok pok phat thai. but they had only one kind of meat: mixed treyf (pork and random sea critters what don't have fins). so i got the vegan version of their main entree, but wrapped in an omelet. because i must eat the flesh of animals to gain their wisdom. or something like that.
then on to the met.
we started with colors of the universe: chinese hardstone carvings because it's the sort of artistic insanity i like. these are some absolutely stunning examples of the kind of art we could make relatively easily but don't. that is, these are all pieces that represent years of effort with hand tools, but could be made easily with machine tools. i'd taken some pictures of some of the completely insane ones, but the met has better ones online:
this is a carved hunk of agate:
the white bit looks like it's stuck on, but here's my closer view of it:
nope, it's just very clever workmanship exploiting the stone's banding. it's difficult to imaging how long it took to carve that out. i'm not even sure agate can be worked with steel tools... but these days, a dremel tool would do the job very quickly (much less something better suited to the initial coarse shaping).
a glass bottle, right?
nope: it's carved from smoky quartz. by hand. with a corundum- or diamond-tipped tool. that's an incredible amount of work to do by hand; i have no idea how the bottle was made hollow.
and then an exhibit of chinese caligraphy, since it was between the insane carving and the rest of the museum.
cthulhia wanted to see something japanese, and conveniently the flowering of the edo period was close at hand. that gallery also had this glass deer:
it's life-sized, though you can't tell that from the little picture. i took a couple of detail shots; this one failed to suck:
thence off to satisfy cthulhia's desire for a georges de la tour fix. which reminded us of da vinci, and they happened to have one of his drawings in their exhibition of italian renaissance drawings. i like this study of a man's head, because it seems very modern:
but cthulhia points out that it's undoubtedly intended as a tiny detail in a much larger work.
by that point, the museum was closing. we actually ended up looking at the last exhibit while being chased out of the museum, because it was on the way to the coat room. so, we collected cthulhia's host, julia, and got dinner at turntable: mad for chicken. that featured a beer lava lamp:
the top is full of beer, and the bottom has color-changing LEDs and other suitably groovy nonsense. the whole thing is maybe 20" (0.5m) tall, and it contains about 10 glasses of beer. this, of course, had to be measured empirically, though i had very little of it. (this picture and the next are cthulhia's.)
then we got dessert at the big gay ice cream shop:
because. well, because julia mentioned it and i simply couldn't turn that down. also, my companions were three sheets to the wind, and so practically everything was funny to them.
and then i took the train home -- which scamtrack failed to screw up in any way -- and got home somewhat after midnight. *zonk*