1 post tagged “bored”
I was hoping to see the dig site, but our hosts want to show Dr. Rose the local museum. It was only just erected. The walls are so freshly painted they could make a horse high at twenty paces. I’ve gotten fairly proficient at reading business Chinese, but I can’t even understand a tenth of what these exhibit labels are saying. They are engraved on glass slabs in both Chinese and English. The translation is a mess even by Japanese t-shirt standards. I mourn the waste of a material surface that was once flat, blank, and perfect.
The rest of the entourage loafs about like zombies while our tour guide swoons over a timeworn mortar. I’ve never held antiquity in high regard. That mortar is someone’s discarded cooking tool. It’s not even a very efficient cooking tool. Let me go home and fetch my George Foreman Grill. That shit grills to perfection AND it trims the fat. Put that in your display.
Museums remind me of classical concerts. People go, they respect the show. They’ll try to achieve a deep appreciation for the music, but 80% of them are going to fail. They’ll just blink out one by one, and the most they’ll achieve is the cessation of blood flow in their extremities. When I was little, my friend’s parents would take me to opera and concert performances regularly. I used to delight in surveying the audience, a full house going dark light by light as a jaw went slack here, or a head collapsed backwards there. I felt like I was winning some kind of elimination contest.
If opera survival is a competitive sport, then surely the Japanese art of Noh is its marathon. There are no subtitles and the actors move like slugs. Even the Japanese are unable to understand the archaic dialect that leaks forth from the stage, syllable by painful syllable. When I was in Tokyo, I saw people preparing makeshift pillows before the show even started. One of them was an actor on the stage.
In a museum, the counterpart to the concert-victim is the man staring blankly at a piece of crockery, one arm folded over his chest, the other covering his mouth, brows furrowed. The piece before him is an exotic walnut; if only he could crack the boring exterior and see the sublime mystery that the boys from the ivory tower see! Unfortunately for him, a jug is just a jug. A few moments later the man’s head is bobbing up and down, and before you know it his legs give out and he lies crumpled and asleep on the floor. That’s why these artifacts are encased in plexiglass, to protect our human heritage from falling patrons.
Somewhere in the corner, a little girl with a backpack jots notes down feverishly on a red steno pad, engrossing herself in the content of these display labels. To her it’s just another homework assignment. Adults collapse around her like cheap scaffolding while she inherits history itself.
