OUR TRIP TO THE CINCINNATI ART MUSEUM

Friday, November 18 to Saturday November 19, 2005

Those of you who have been privy to earlier narratives chronicling the humble journeys of my wife and me will know that we had a wonderful experience when we saw the art museums in St. Louis and Chicago back in July 2005. Right after that trip, we immediately planned our next art excursion, setting our sights on the much easier Cincinnati Art Museum. This trip was planned about four months in advance and it was rewarding to see it come to fruition.

Friday, November 18, 2005: The Hop, Skip and Jump

Cincinnati being only a hundred miles or so north of Lexington, this was not exactly a long, laborious trip. Nonetheless, Jennifer and I decided some time before that we wanted it to be a leisurely affair, and so we traveled up there Friday night. Neither of us enjoys getting up early or having to rush (and we’re always running late). So it was worth the expense for us to enjoy our Friday evening, sleep in a little the next morning and still get to the museum in enough time to rendezvous with our friends, Courtney and Dan Sharp. I managed to get off work a little early, met with Jennifer at home and we got on the road almost on schedule (as I said, we’re always running late!)

The Big, Fat Hog

Why do some people insist they own the road? Our trip up I-75 was about what one would expect on a Friday evening…pretty crowded. But by and large, I was navigating things okay. Suddenly, a big-ass diesel truck rolled up behind us and proceeded to cram his way up our collective backsides. I figured I was in the middle lane and he could go around me if he was in that big of a damn hurry; I was doing the speed limit, after all. But this truck-driving Rhodes Scholar not only refused to just pass, he had the audacity to honk his horn at me!! I stuck to my guns for a few more minutes, but he just kept honking at me.

The Smithy (1918), by James Roy Hobson (1877-1969) gives a dessicated figure that sparks my imagination for intellectual capacity of the Honking Hog on I-75.

Eventually, I realized that if anyone in this situation was going to be intelligent, I was nominated by default. So I found a way to move over a lane and let the human anal sphincter behind the diesel’s wheel edge on past me. And you know what? He probably gained about a third of a mile on me before being stopped by slower traffic ahead. Did he really benefit? Methinks not. The more we want something, the more we suffer. I win.

All Roads Lead to, uh, a Parking Garage? WTF!?

As we got closer to Covington, the roads got more and more cramped, and IQs began to assume an inverse relationship to the number of cars around us. Gad, I detest driving.

Anyone who knows me any length of time learns this. I hate moving at high speed with other cars only a few feet away. I can’t stand people with a “me first” attitude who will do whatever it takes, including risk their own and other people’s lives, just to gain a foot on you. Following directions is difficult for me, and I despise being lost. Driving is an absolute necessary evil for me; if I could walk at 60 mph, you can bet I would! Unfortunately, I’m also almost the worst backseat driver on the North American continent, second only to my father. Ergo, despite my seething, black hatred for the logistics of travel, I can’t stand to yield the wheel. As I said above, the more attached we are, the more we suffer. It was going to be a rough ride.

So rolling into Cincinnati only confirmed all of my predictions of doom and gloom on the nature of the trip. We slalomed into downtown, already somewhat frazzled, and eager to get this chapter over so we could harvest the true “meat” of the trip. Unfortunately, as I anticipated, we got lost. Actually, we didn’t so much get lost as we couldn’t see where we were going. The teeny little signs on all the street intersections required a monocle the size of a dinner plate, else they couldn’t be read until we’d already gone past them. We found our hotel easily, but coasted past it before we could see the entrance ramp. That necessitated threading ourselves through the warp and weft of one-way streets in order to worm our way back for another go. Well, for some reason, one of the side streets we took routed us out to Mars; okay, it really kept pushing us further away until it dead-ended at a freakin’ parking garage! We’ve never heard of a major artery that stops dead at a garage. At that point, since there was no way to turn around, we had to pass through the gates and enter said garage. There was a guard at the gate who gave us some directions back to our now very remote hotel and then had us sign in as “a turnaround.”

Okay, still with us? Alright, we moved like a chunk of predigested food through a colon until we got back to the hotel…where I promptly drove past it again. *Snort* But this time, I took a bite out of the steering wheel, masticated it into sludge, spat it out the window and did something drastic. Yep, I turned in anyway. Of course, I didn’t realize my error at the time, thinking that there were simply two ways in, and by [insert deity of choice], I was going to get in front of that f**king hotel! As soon as I got into the entrance area, a dark-skinned Middle Eastern guy with a thick accent starting gesticulating wildly, saying, “No, no, you come in the wrong way, you have to turn around!” Figures. Well, there was no way I was going to even try backing into a one-way street to turn around and I certainly had no intention of circling the building again. So I weebled and wobbled the car in little two-foot jerks until I could just pull back to the Middle Eastern guy in reverse. At that point, we were willing to pay any price to make the parking someone else’s problem, and I think the Middle Eastern guy and his partner were just as eager to get my car out of my control. They all but hurled our bags out of there and escorted us inside; I let them do the parking.

The Millennium Hotel

Okay, so we were finally at the hotel. To our delight, the Millenium was a pretty nice place overall. It had a gift shop and an in-house restaurant, plus the rooms were relatively cozy. The gigantic king-sized bed was certainly welcome and there was this neat, huge decorative grandfather clock face hanging over the bed behind us. Best of all, there were no awkwardly placed mirrors before the toilet or the shower, which was a factor on our last hotel stay! One quirk we noticed was that the lighting was dim. I think they restricted every lamp to a 30-watt bulb. It was like existing in Braille. But despite that, I took a few minutes to pull our the trusty travel journal given to us by Courtney Sharp and made a few notes for our forthcoming narrative…which you are now reading. ;)

Jennifer and I had planned to order a pizza on our arrival, because it was easy and we hadn’t had it in more than a month. But of course, a quick perusal of the phone book and a call told us that no on would deliver downtown. [Sigh] The more attached to something we are, the more we suffer for it. Fortunately, all was not lost, for we found that the restaurant downstairs had a pizza known as The Big Bomber, which suited our needs quite nicely…for only $40! Ulp! Food of the gods, that’s all I can say.

After dinner, we grabbed a shower in perhaps the coldest gout of water in my hotel experience. It was like being under a stream of cold potato soup. Still, after the rigors of the trip and a long workday, it felt great to be clean and have my muscles unclamp from their sailor’s knots. Naked is good (from my side, anyway).

Dressed again, our tummies full and our muscles settled, we decided to pay the extra cash and avail ourselves of the hotel’s Movies-on-Demand feature. For those who may be unfamiliar, it is essentially a service of most larger hotels now, in which you can pull up a menu on the television of the latest movie titles, some of them weeks ahead of Blockbuster’s release schedule, and order them right there in your room. There is also a menu of “adult” movies, though Jennifer and I have always stuck to more conventional stuff. Of course, you pay the hefty $12 fee for the privilege, but when traveling overnight, it is often worth it to not have to go back out and find entertainment in the crowded downtown streets. After much debate, we agreed on the movie Stealth and punched in the code. It didn’t work. Multiple times we tried, and still it didn’t work. We became concerned that it was tacking on a $12 cost for every failed attempt and called the front desk. It turns out that out of their hundreds of rooms, ours was one of only two that wasn’t working. [Sigh] Again, the more attached you are to something… They kept promising us they’d take a look and fix it, but eventually, we gave up and told them not to bother. I sat and watched a bit of The Waterboy with Adam Sandler on cable television while Jennifer fell asleep. This chapter had ended.

Saturday, November 19, 2005: The Cincinnati Art Museum

I don’t know if I just don’t sleep as soundly or if the overall strangeness of the atmosphere feeds into it, but I generally have some strange dreams when sleeping in a hotel bed. This one was quite comfortable, like sleeping on a big, flat, semi-soft cloud that smelled like Downy. But toward the early morning, I had strange visions running through my head. One of them was a recurrent theme, in which I dreamed I was working again in the kitchen of Kentucky Fried Chicken. I was a galley slave there for five years, while I was in college. Some part of my subconscious retains those experiences and resurrects them periodically. It was reassuring at least, to find that I could still flour and cook a batch of KFC original recipe…at least in the kitchen as it appeared eight years ago! My other dream was even stranger, because it involved one of our friends; somehow, he’d gotten really buff from pumping iron and given himself one of those horrid mushroom haircuts. Strange!

Rendezvous with the Sharps

After breakfast from room service, we called our Middle Eastern buddies downstairs and had them bring the car back around. Then we began what we expected to be an arduous journey to the museum. To our surprise, however, it was relatively painless and we found ourselves in the parking lot within fifteen minutes. Score one for strategic hotel location. What was even more surprising was that we ran into the Sharps as soon as we arrived…they had apparently gotten there either shortly before us, or right about the same time. As I said, we’re always late. But there we all were, at the Cincinnati Art Museum! The plans of nearly four months had come to fruition.

The Big, Blue Yak and Other Memorable Exhibits

Overall, this was a much smaller museum than either of our previous excursions. Their collection was humbler in all areas, be it European, African, Chinese, American or [shudder] contemporary. So Jennifer and I didn’t find that as much of it reached out and “touched” us the way our earlier experiences did. We weren’t sure if that was exclusively because of the size of the museum’s collection, or because we are now a little more seasoned with regard to art museums in general and looked at this one with a more critical eye. Either way, it still had much to hold our interest. At the entrance, for example, there was a huge, swirled sculpture made of blue, blown glass that hung down from the ceiling. It was very abstract in that it didn’t depict any kind of image, scene or what have you. But the fact that it was made of hand-blown glass was just kind of cool. I thought it looked like coalesced evil or chaos and described it as “the Yak.” Actually, I used the onomatopoeic [Blech!] sound. But a picture is truly worth a thousand words:

The Big Blue Yak hangs suspended from the ceiling.

Neat, huh? ;)

Obviously, I can’t present an exhaustive account of all the exhibits. Anyone interested in that will have to see our enormous red photo album, now affectionately named, “Fat Album” (Hey, Hey, Hey!) But I can present a few of the hightlights:

The Genius of Water (1871) is a beautiful fountain representing Cincinnati's artistic heritage. At this time, the main sculpture is being held indoors while undergoing renovation. Note the perforations in the hand that allow the water to pour forth.

What was new to this museum experience was the volume of pictures available to us. Jennifer and I found that we had to skimp on both of our previous experiences, because of a lack of camera memory. Our trusty little camera could only hold about 130 pictures. That seemed like enough at the time we purchased the extra card, but in a museum, we didn’t want to limit ourselves just to the exhibit…the description card next to the piece was also necessary. Why? For situations in which we wanted to look up further information on the piece later or find a replica for our own wall. Sadly, we have impressive pictures of beautiful paintings from St. Louis and Chicago, but no way to identify them now. There just wasn’t room on the camera for everything and sacrifices had to be made. We vowed that would never happen again, so on this trip, we set forth with a new camera memory card that would hold more than 500 shots.

[ABOVE:] Thomas poses irreverently before a religious painting by El Greco.
[BELOW:] Jennifer and Courtney squat down beside an artistic box.

While we didn’t come anywhere close to using them all, we gave it a pretty good try; our picture tally upon leaving the museum was about 260. About half of those were exhibits, the other half, description cards. But we took more pictures at this one museum than we did our entire time in the city of St. Louis, and that includes the famous Arch!

About midway through our museum tour, we were joined by Scott and Jessica Kustes, Jennifer’s brother and sister-in-law. They added a dimension to the trip in that Scott, at least, had an interest in the more ethnic aspects of the museum. Jennifer, myself, Courtney and Dan are all pretty much European art fans. Courtney and I prefer the chiaroscuro and depiction of radiant light in the 17th century Baroque style, while Jennifer likes the frozen moments of the 19th century Impressionists and Dan seems to enjoy wood carvings and the general ambience of the museum atmosphere. But the Kusti (plural of “Kustes”) led us through relatively unfamiliar territory, particularly the African art. The Africans seemed to do a great deal of woven grass baskets and mats, as well as goddess statues with bullet-shaped breasts.

Jennifer and I do like images of the Buddha or Siva, and we got a few shots of those in the Chinese section. In fact, Jennifer and I would like to have pictures of those respective Eastern icons on our wall and may be using the very images we snapped to do so.

The Pre-Meal Meal at Outback Steakhouse

All good things do come to an end. I cannot say if we saw the entire museum or just got tired first. But we certainly covered a buttload of it, either way. We said our good-byes to the Kusti and set about finding some evening grub. Dan led us to an Outback Steakhouse, where we ordered four good hunks of cow flesh.

Depiction of what Jennifer and I scarfed in hunks at Outback.

Of course, they brought so many soups, breads and other appetizers that by the time the food arrived, we weren’t that hungry. Jennifer and I ended up taking 40% of our meal home, where we stuffed ourselves with it later. It was delish and so worth it! We eventually bid farewell to the Sharps and made the trip home.

And if you stayed with us throughout this entire essay, thanks so much! It was fun yet again!

Ye Ende

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