Anniversary (Day 1)
Aug. 12th, 2012 12:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aSunday is the twelfth anniversary for Kimberly & me. Since she's been doing well for a while and we've really been clicking lately, we decided to take the opportunity to have some extended anniversary fun this weekend.
Kimberly actually got things started on Friday by bringing home some surprisingly delicious deserts from Walgreens for dinner, but other than that it was our usual groceries and a cheap Friday dinner out.
But today we had plans for a nice lunch and a visit to the Oakland Museum. So, we BARTed down to 12th Street in Oakland and had lunch at Le Cheval. It was tasty VIetnamese food — shrimp rolls for an appetizer, then shrimp and mushrooms in a sizzling clay pot for our main meal. After that we walked over to the Oakland Museum, which is maybe a mile away or so. (I think in all today we walked about 4 miles, on one of the hotter days of the year so far.)
Our main goal at the museum was to see the 1968 exhibit. It was a very nicely done multimedia presentation on the era. There was a timeline for each month, then a lot of other media surrounding it, such as posters, newspapers clippings, and even a few video bits. I think Kimberly & I both fond the video montage of highlights from movies and TV shows of the era the most interesting. It included 2001, The Monkees intro, a totally ridiculous Star Trek clip where the crew is meeting space hippies, and lots more.
[It was easy to find the Star Trek episode just now by searching for "Star Trek space hippies". As I'd guessed, it was a third season episode. It was called "The Way to Eden", and shame on the exhibit people, it actually ran in 1969 (though it was perhaps made in 1968).]
Overall, an interesting exhibit.
We also saw a few other things while there.
First up was a room of protest posters (which was overseen by a pretty overzealous guard who actively blocked the door to the room at points). We discovered that we found recent posters interesting (especially those purposefully done in old styles), but the vast number of posters done in the '60s seemed boring. A totally beautiful art nouveau style poster for critical mass was my favorite.
Next up, we went to a Daniel Clowes exhibit that we'd heard about months ago. I actually ready three of his works — Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Ice Haven, and Wilson — at the time. I found the first to be puerile absurdist crap, while the second two were very interesting indie pieces. Ice Haven was particularly nice for its very non-traditional narrative structure. It was basically laid out like a series of Sunday comic strips, with each page being not just a different point of view, but also drawn in a different style.
Sad to say, the exhibit was boring. Just final pages hanging on the walls. I saw lots of people actively reading these non-sequential bits of sequential storytelling, which led me to believe it was more interesting to people who didn't read comics.
(Note to self: read David Boring, The Death-Ray, Ghost World too.)
While in the art area we skimmed through for things that interested us, as it'd been a while since either of us had been to the Oakland Museum (not since a trip with Kimberly's family, which was probably 1999 or 2000). We were both struck by a set of 15 or so cuckoo clocks on the wall, with sickles and hammers hanging from them. Kimberly just saw the sickles at first and thought it might be something about time & death. I pointed out the hammers and said I was pretty sure it was about communism.
So we went and read the name and description, and it was something like "The Inevitability" and it was indeed about communism. Which just about cracked me up, because this sculpture on how Communism was going to take over the whole world was completed in 1990. Which would be a year before the USSR fell.
It should have been closer to the comic display.
Kimberly actually got things started on Friday by bringing home some surprisingly delicious deserts from Walgreens for dinner, but other than that it was our usual groceries and a cheap Friday dinner out.
But today we had plans for a nice lunch and a visit to the Oakland Museum. So, we BARTed down to 12th Street in Oakland and had lunch at Le Cheval. It was tasty VIetnamese food — shrimp rolls for an appetizer, then shrimp and mushrooms in a sizzling clay pot for our main meal. After that we walked over to the Oakland Museum, which is maybe a mile away or so. (I think in all today we walked about 4 miles, on one of the hotter days of the year so far.)
Our main goal at the museum was to see the 1968 exhibit. It was a very nicely done multimedia presentation on the era. There was a timeline for each month, then a lot of other media surrounding it, such as posters, newspapers clippings, and even a few video bits. I think Kimberly & I both fond the video montage of highlights from movies and TV shows of the era the most interesting. It included 2001, The Monkees intro, a totally ridiculous Star Trek clip where the crew is meeting space hippies, and lots more.
[It was easy to find the Star Trek episode just now by searching for "Star Trek space hippies". As I'd guessed, it was a third season episode. It was called "The Way to Eden", and shame on the exhibit people, it actually ran in 1969 (though it was perhaps made in 1968).]
Overall, an interesting exhibit.
We also saw a few other things while there.
First up was a room of protest posters (which was overseen by a pretty overzealous guard who actively blocked the door to the room at points). We discovered that we found recent posters interesting (especially those purposefully done in old styles), but the vast number of posters done in the '60s seemed boring. A totally beautiful art nouveau style poster for critical mass was my favorite.
Next up, we went to a Daniel Clowes exhibit that we'd heard about months ago. I actually ready three of his works — Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Ice Haven, and Wilson — at the time. I found the first to be puerile absurdist crap, while the second two were very interesting indie pieces. Ice Haven was particularly nice for its very non-traditional narrative structure. It was basically laid out like a series of Sunday comic strips, with each page being not just a different point of view, but also drawn in a different style.
Sad to say, the exhibit was boring. Just final pages hanging on the walls. I saw lots of people actively reading these non-sequential bits of sequential storytelling, which led me to believe it was more interesting to people who didn't read comics.
(Note to self: read David Boring, The Death-Ray, Ghost World too.)
While in the art area we skimmed through for things that interested us, as it'd been a while since either of us had been to the Oakland Museum (not since a trip with Kimberly's family, which was probably 1999 or 2000). We were both struck by a set of 15 or so cuckoo clocks on the wall, with sickles and hammers hanging from them. Kimberly just saw the sickles at first and thought it might be something about time & death. I pointed out the hammers and said I was pretty sure it was about communism.
So we went and read the name and description, and it was something like "The Inevitability" and it was indeed about communism. Which just about cracked me up, because this sculpture on how Communism was going to take over the whole world was completed in 1990. Which would be a year before the USSR fell.
It should have been closer to the comic display.
We picked up some dim sum and some more sweets on the way home (brownie for me, apple fritter for K.). And since then it's been a low-key night.
Kimberly napped, I fixed a flat on my bike. First real flat I've picked up since I got my new super-puncture-resistant tires. It was a very small puncture with a very slow leak, which is good and bad. On the good side, I didn't get stranded in the middle of Oakland on Wednesday night (when I presumably picked up the flat), but on the bad side I had to disassemble the tire so that I could find the flat in a sink. (The leak was too slow too hear.) And me doing work on a bike usually involves blood and grease. It took me two tries to get it back together right, but I think all's well now.
Hopefully, as I'll be biking back to to the colo on Monday as I've been playing hard-drive shuffle with one of the Skotos machines.
Tomorrow: more anniversary, with further travelling.