02 December

Food.

On Friday was made a pizza, from scratch, whole wheat, adorned with olives, decent tomatoes and Brazil's small, odd mushrooms. I took the lead on baking Howard family chocolate-chip cookies, which, with only brown sugar to be had and glass casserole pans to put them in the oven, became a dark-brown brownie-formatted confection. Enjoyment seemed to be had regardless. The uninitated, of course, did not know what shadowy, Platonic ideal cookie they missed. The pizza was very good.

ACBEU was closed this Sunday, (we were promised that it would be open every day these last two weekends for the purposes of researching and writing final papers, but Clara Ramos has a questionable relationship with the truth) so a previously formed concept of picnicking there (with Trader Joe's peanut butter smuggled into this pagan land) was transferred to the Museum of Modern Art on the bay. The Museum was closed when we arrived, so we ate up the hill from the gate, with a good view of the water and atleast five degrees celcius too many, continuing a streak of cloudy and oppressively humid weather. As we were finishing, the museum creaked into public operation and the skies snuck into a precipitation; both were welcome.

This Modern Art Museuem has what I can only feel is an advantage over many other modern art museums, that of being situated in buildings dating from the 16^th or 17^th century. Being inside the fresh-looking restoration of a colonial building adds much to an exhibit of white folded sheets with various simple pictures and cryptic pictographs painted on them in black. The gap in both time and purpose leads to a surreality that I can only hope such...art packages are attempting, for I know not what other objectives they could serve. Another building, its inside made into a very open wooden space, also possesed walls, to which were attached folded (and un-folded!) pieces of canvas covered in thick layers and gobs of paint. At one artfully uncentral point on the floor sat several pieces of canvas rolled tightly and painted what could be called fire-engine yellow. I know not what flighty, status-quo defying intent inspired the execution of this particular piece, but to my mind it was unmistakable the recreation of one singular moment in the migration of a family of yellow sleeping bags across a colonial-era modern art museum.

All of these canvas-centered works came from a single Italian whose name escapes me. Thanks to world of the plastic arts, allowing the flow of culture across national borders without having to involve the word “globalization.”