Museum Hours

After years of despising art museums as sterile boxes, I've started to enjoy Mia, the art institute here, and I think I'd like to visit other museums to see certain paintings--including ones the toys have re-created.

I could start in New York City (Goya's "Red Boy") and Wash DC (Manet's "Dead Toreador"), but it would have to be a world tour.
I haven't done this painting with the toys yet, but, for instance, I'd love to see Bruegel's "Hunters in the Snow" (1565) up close––it's at Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Art Museum.

Now we have snow again (unlike last winter, weirdly), I was looking more closely at it this morning, thinking how to re-create it.
I'd never looked closely at the skaters. They look so modern.
Hockey sticks!

I will go to the lake this winter, maybe during the next couple holiday weeks, and photograph the ice rink. The figures will look similar.
The most important thing for this re-creation the quality of the light.

The painting reminded me of a movie I'd loved, Museum Hours (2012), about a Canadian woman in Vienna to attend to a dying cousin in a coma... At loose ends, she befriends a guard at the Kunsthistorisches museum. A lot of it is him, the guard, musing on the paintings.

(I remember bink found the woman character so annoying, it ruined the movie for her--but she didn't bother me.)
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I watched a disappointing movie last night--Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine (2002), about guns in America. I'd stopped watching Moore's movies years ago, and this one reminded me why--it's heavy-handed and one sided.
Bam, bam, bam. No nuance.

I turned it off halfway through---BUT, I was glad I watched the first half because there was Timothy McVeigh! Moore interviews the brother of Terry Nichols, TMcV's associate.

I'm almost done with Comfort Me with Apples, the memoir by food writer Ruth Reichl--it also disappoints me. It's as much about her love life as food, and I don't care about that. I mean, it's normal--heard it all before.

But she is inspiring me a little to cook, as I've been thinking I might/should do. Her chapter about eating in Thailand made me want to try cooking Thai food again. I used to make a good Thai chicken soup... There are Asian groceries not far from me that sell lemon grass, galangal (like ginger root), lime leaves, and the like.

Raspberries with Avocado

I made up a really good dessert last night. The food shelf had had perfectly ripe avocados--I only took one, you know they only last a minute––and it occurred to me one would go well with frozen raspberries I had on hand...
I was right! Tart and creamy, and so pretty, pink and green.

Maybe I will enjoy eating food, not just getting high on sugar.

On Weds. Manageress complained that I hadn't brought hot lunch, as I usually do. Ha! I went to the food shelf, and last night I cooked up more vegetarian ("impossible burger") meatballs and spaghetti, and made sauce with oddments of vegetables.

I hadn't brought lunch on Weds. because my friend Volunteer Abby had told me she was going to bring in her annual Homemade Holiday Treats that afternoon. I didn't want to compete for kitchen space.

Abby is an excellent baker, and very generous. She covers the breakroom table with bakery and goodies she makes for people to take home in containers she provides. She must spend hundreds of dollars on the ingredients--for not only the usual holiday sugar cookies and gingerbread, but for sugared nuts; caramel toffees; buttery caramel corn...
She doesn't eat it herself--she just likes to cook, and she is someone who loves--needs, even--to stay busy.

Most people totally love the spread, of course.
But even before this year when I stopped eating sugar (have I mentioned?), I found the onslaught a little disturbing. Though it's all good quality ingredients (real butter), and beautifully and lovingly prepared, it's more of what we at the store already get pounds and pounds of almost every day:
free sugar + fat, in the most seductive forms.

It reminds me of my Uncle Tony, who joined the US Navy at 17 years old, just in time for the end of WWII. He said the Navy would heap piles of individual cigarettes on the mess room tables for the sailors to take as many as they wanted.
"You had all these young men at sea," he said, "you had to keep them occupied..."

My uncle died of emphysema.

To be fair, Abby also brings in fresh fruit almost every week--leftovers from the school lunches where she works--and it often goes uneaten.
An old apple has a hard time competing with a chocolate-dipped pretzel.