Day 337/365 - Circling the Bases

This is the mobile that hangs from the ceiling near the home plate gate at Nationals Park in DC. There are four big cylinders with baseball players on them that rotate slowly as a nearby speaker plays "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." It's a cool, artsy element of the ballpark that most people miss because not much traffic passes through the home plate gate. And the people that do pass by tend not to look up.

There were a host of reasons to skip tonight's game: it was a rather chilly evening at the ballpark, there are only a couple weeks left in the season, the Nats are 48-92, they'd lost 9 of their last 10 games, they were playing the defending World Series champs, and they long ago surrendered any hope of making the playoffs. But I went despite all that.

Tonight's game was being started by once and current Nats heavyweight hurler Livan Hernandez (Viva Livo!). It was also the major league debut of Nats shortstop and September call-up Ian Desmond. Desmond had quite the coming out party. He got his first hit and his first home run and drove in four runs, a franchise record for a player making his major league debut. He also made an error on an airmailed throw to first, but atoned for it in the end.

After quickly going down 2-0 in the first inning, the Nats tied it up the third, scored the go ahead run in the fourth, and surged to a 6-run lead in the fifth. Then things got a little more interesting than they needed to in the 9th. The Phillies scored 5 runs in the top of the frame, with the majority of them coming on a pinch hit grand slam by Matt Stairs.

With the Nats clinging precariously to a 1-run lead with only 1 out and runners on the corners, Ian Desmond scooped up a Ryan Howard grounder and started the game-ending double play to preserve the victory for Livo. And that's why you go to games at the end of the season when both the temperature and your team are lowly -- you never know what might happen.

Baseball... it's like a slow motion roller coaster.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 311/365 - Everyday Art

I had an art-filled Saturday today. Although I didn't plan it that way, all three stops on my impromptu art tour focused on everyday rather than 'high' art and, fittingly enough, all three were free. I started things off at the Corcoran Museum, which has free admission every Saturday this month. They are currently featuring a very cool photography exhibit by William Eggleston entitled Democractic Camera. His shots aren't of celebrities or of beautiful, exotic landscapes. Instead, he shoots regular people, ordinary places, and average objects, but the way he composes his shots is what makes them artistic.

It's easy to make an eyecatching shot of an intrinsically interesting subject. It's much harder to do that with a nondescript subject. Eggleston excels at it, however. My favorite photo in this exhibit is a shot he took of the back of a woman's ornate 1960s up-do at the next booth over in a restaurant or diner, but all of his stuff is pretty striking. Next stop on my everday art tour was the National Geographic Society's Explorer's Hall, where they have an exhibit entitled Kodachrome Culture that features photographs taken by American tourists traveling in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. These are not your average tourist summer vacation photos. They were very well done and the place in time they depicted was equally as interesting as the place in the world they highlighted.

Last stop was the all-day Mural Jam that was going on at the Rhode Island Avenue Shopping Center. There is a long concrete retaining wall that runs in back of that strip mall and an organization called Albus Cavus was sponsoring a public art project wherein several local artists were collaborating on painting a massive mural that stretched the length of the wall. A few of the artists were using brushes, but most were wielding spray cans. As you can see from the shot above, however, they weren't just the typical conception of graffiti artists. The things they were able to do with spray paint were absolutely amazing.

Never mind the bread and circuses, give the people art!

(Taken with my Nikon D90)

Day 302/365 - Phillips After Five

Although I've been a member of the Phillips Collection for two years and can get into the museum for free, I'd never been to one of their "Phillips After Five" events until tonight. Turns out they are pretty damn cool.

My evening started off with the Mortified performance piece in the museum's auditorium. If you're unfamiliar with Mortified, it essentially involves people getting onstage in front of a room full of strangers and recounting some of the most embarrassing and angst-ridden moments of their adolescence. Tonight's participants read from their high school journals/diaries, recited old love letters, and in one case sang childhood songs they'd written about their neighbors and friends. It was a hilarious, empathetic, touching, and occasionally cringeworthy experience. Evidently they stage events in cities across the country, so if one pops up in your neck of the woods you should go.

After the show ended, I ventured up to the third floor to check out the "Paint Made Flesh" exhibit, which highlights the way that the development of oil paints lead to greater skill and interest in depicting the human form among painters. The exhibit features a wide range of works from a variety of artists, styles, places, and eras. When I'd finished perusing it, I wandered around the permanent collection to visit a few old friends amongst the artworks, although I was bummed to discover that one of my Phillips faves -- Matisse's "Studio, Quai Saint-Michel" -- had been taken down from display. Don't know whether it's being restored or loaned out, but it was MIA.

From there I ambled on down to the music room to catch the tail end of a jazz quartet's performance. There was a cash bar there, but I had no greenbacks on me so I had to make like a teetotaller. Boooo. I then wrapped up the evening with a late supper and a bit of bookbrowsing at Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe. I guess I'd have to say it was a very yuppified night out. Fun, but definitely yuppified.

(Taken with my iPhone)

Day 248/365 - At Artomatic

Tonight was "Meet the Artists" night at the Artomatic exhibition in Washington, DC and since I hadn't been yet to check out the show, I figured I'd go. Several of my Flickr contacts had works on display and I wanted to see their walls. Going also gave me a chance to finally meet Stacey (who brought delish pasteles), Ramune (who brought yummy chocolate peanut butter crispy squares), Kerrin (who brought zesty tomato and mozzarella skewers), and Lindsay (who brought Kevin -- who, given that he's a Kevin, is naturally a treat in and of himself). It was great to meet all of them and to meet up again with some of the Flickr folks I hadn't seen in a while.

The show itself was quite enjoyable. It occupies eight floors of an unfinished office building and is essentially an artistic free-for-all. There's something of everything there, and something for everyone. Rather more nakedness than I was anticipating, though. Apparently it's fairly easy to get women to pose nude for you. Based on Artomatic, it seems that all you need do is buy a nice camera, tell a woman the photos are for artistic purposes, and then 'bang!' -- her clothes fall off. Too bad I shoot mostly buildings, places, and objects. Just my luck.

(Taken with my Nikon D90)

Day 228/365 - Art and War

I Amtrak'd it up to Philadelphia this morning for a day trip to tour the battleship USS New Jersey and check out the Cezanne exhibit going on at the Museum of Art. It was an interesting juxtaposition of the power of destruction and the power of creation, not to mention the machina and the deus.

When you think about it, creation and destruction aren't opposites as much as they are different points along the same continuum. They're both forms of affected change, ways of altering the world either through addition or subtraction. That being said, art generally doesn't kill or maim anyone -- so the world could do with much more of the former and considerably less of the latter.

(Taken with my Nikon D90)

Day 217/365 - Next?

Bad day for DC's sports teams. The Caps got knocked out of the NHL playoffs in a blowout loss to the Penguins and Nationals' third baseman Ryan Zimmerman's 30-game hitting streak came to an end in San Francisco. Oh well, at least the Nats won for a change.

This is one of the statues in the sculpture garden at the Smithsonian Institution's Hirshhorn Museum of Modern Art in Washington, DC. I stopped by there today during my lunch time walkabout. This piece is called "After Balzac" and it's by a woman who's name I can't recall.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 122/365 - Museum Peace

Late last year they finally finished up the renovations to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and I hadn't been by to check it out since the makeover, so today I decided to go and pay it a visit. It doesn't look much different than it did before. There's a new atrium entryway, but that's about it.

It's still a museum in search of a point. There are some interesting exhibits there, but it's a haphazard jumble of random items. Imagine a museum for cool and odd things you bought off eBay, and that would be the Museum of American History. It's the museum for 'stuff we didn't know what else to do with.'

My favorite part of the museum is still the transportation section with its old trains and cars. And the original star-spangled banner of national anthem fame is always neat to see, even if they won't let you take photos of it. After finishing with the Museum of American History, I ambled over to the National Gallery of Art to check out a couple photography exhibits and a cool lighting display in the tunnel connecting the two wings of the gallery that just about everyone on Flickr had been shooting.

It turned out to be a lot of fun to shoot and I went through the tunnel three times just so I could get the shots I wanted. It was a nice relaxing day for me and great way to finish up the first third of my 365 project.

(Taken with my Nikon D80)