T 'n' me do the 'muzee'

Tristan and I made a trip to the ROM on Tuesday, his last day before going to Hong Kong. What a kid, he gets to spend two weeks with one of his many grandmothers at her home in Hong Kong!


Tristan has a new camera to take to Hong Kong, so he got to test it at the ROM. He took many photos of all the exhibits we visited. I told him to be careful of using the flash because if he photographed something behind glass all he would get was a photo of the reflection of the flash. So he was careful about that. He also managed to photograph me on the streetcar from 18" away without blinding me (whew!).

We alternated between stuff he wanted to see (dinosaurs and mummies of course!) and stuff I wanted to see. The Dead Sea Scrolls are in Toronto now, in the basement of the ROM, and one of my favourite galleries, the Triple-AP (Africa, Americas, and Asia-Pacific). Tristan had mixed feelings about those but I think I managed to keep him sufficiently interested for me to soak up what I wanted out of it.

Tristan started to take a photo in the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit but a security guard stopped him. The guard was very nice about it, he carefully explained to Tristan that he was welcome to take pictures of anything the ROM owned, but unfortunately the ROM did not own the Dead Sea Scroll exhibit, and the people who did own it forbade photo-taking for copyright reasons.


The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 in caves around the Dead Sea in Israel, or what would soon become Israel. They have been dated to around 800 BCE (Before Common Era); they are some of the oldest written documents yet found. Some were well preserved in pottery jars, others were disintegrated into tiny fragments on the cave floors. But expert archaeologists flocked to the area to salvage as much as possible, going into those caves with tweezers to pick up every shred they could find. In those days the area was a dangerous battleground, so it was all high drama. But they gathered up as much as they could and attempted to piece the fragments together, like a massive archaeological jigsaw puzzle.

In the 1940s and '50s the methods and technology for preserving ancient documents were rudimentary, and in many cases counterproductive. For example, the scrolls were manipulated in rooms brightly lit by sunshine streaming in from big windows, a disaster for materials hitherto kept in the dark for thousands of years. They bound the pieces together with ordinary adhesive tapes and glues; chemicals leached from those adhesives into the parchment and papyrus fragments, disintegrating them further. So it has been a massive job to recover the scrolls from their initial "preservation" in the 1950s.

Ironically the librarians and original creators of those scrolls used far superior methods and technologies to preserve their documents than we moderns were capable of. The religious community of Qumran had the sole responsibility for storing religious documents created in the ancient state of Israel. They were a sect that put heavy emphasis on physical and spiritual purity, so ritual baths were an important part of the community. They had elaborate waterworks to draw precious water from local mountains into their many baths. They stored their documents in earthenware jars, so another feature of the community was its many kilns to fire the jars. Archaeologists say that in its heyday, Qumran would have had air thick with smoke from those kilns.


The Dead Sea area is hot and dry, the caves in the surrounding cliffs cool, dark and dry. This was a perfect location for preserving almost anything for many millenia. Almost certainly the scrolls were not all created on site, but were brought here for storage as precious religious objects. Writing was a holy activity, only a few trained religious experts would have been able to do it. The written word was about as holy a thing as you can imagine. So it was exceedingly important to preserve written scrolls as well as possible.

The content of the scrolls was almost entirely religious, they contained scriptures of virtually all of our modern Christian Bible (with the exception of the Book of Esther) and many more religious texts outside of the modern Bible. They revealed an interesting biblical secret, that the texts vary and conflict, multiple versions of the same stories exist. Abraham, the father of both the Jewish and Islamic religions, and by extension the Christian religion, is the subject of many stories and legends, often contradictory. For example, according to the Qu'ran Abraham was directed by God to sacrifice his son Ishmael, not Isaac, and Ishmael was the father of Islam. But according to Jewish tradition, it was Isaac, the father of Judaism, not Ishmael that was to be sacrificed.

The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the ROM had actual examples of the scrolls specially preserved and displayed in a darkened room, at the end of a long display giving context to the scroll fragments. I was wondering before I went how seeing fragments of ancient documents was going to be spun into a whole exhibit, but the information about how the scrolls were discovered, translated and preserved, and what has been learned about the ancient community of Qumran in the process was indeed fascinating.


The ROM also had an exhibit about The Ten Commandments that had ended before we got there, but in fact it was still mostly in place. A security guard told me that they had removed the original artifacts but left the surrounding and background exhibits in place. So, according to this exhibit, The Ten Commandments were actually The Ten Words. They were not so much commandments or laws as they were the clauses of a contract or treaty between God and the Israelites.

The language used in the original texts followed the form and content of other treaties and contracts from the same place and time. God states his identity, and then why this contract or treaty is being proposed. The clauses that follow stipulate the requirements for being part of the treaty community. The first and most important of course is recognizing the authority of God in the community. It does not deny the existence or power of other Gods, but simply states that this community must turn away from those other Gods and pay attention only to the one God named in the treaty.

If you want to be a member in good standing of this treaty community, you must follow certain rules, among them being not committing murder, theft or adultery. Honouring your parents is simply good insurance: you look after your parents and your children are likewise required to look after you, and in this way everyone has a shot at a long life.


The last commandment---the one about not coveting your neighbour's wife or ox---is the most interesting, it cautions against even thinking of doing bad things. It shows that in those days religious leaders were aware that Desire was at the root of wrongdoing and must be guarded against.

You can imagine that an eight year old boy, particularly an eight year old boy with no knowledge of holy scriptures would find these exhibits rather boring. However he was quite interested in the many films and I tried to give him a historical context of why this stuff was important.

The Triple-AP gallery is fascinating to me because it lumps together many arts and crafts from all over the world. These are mostly "soft" crafts, artifacts made from wood, fibre, shells and feathers. Consequently most of them are relatively recent, they are made from materials that do not survive well over the millennia. In a previous posting I speculated that we get a biased view of the history of our species when we look at the ancient record of preserved artifacts, they appear to be created predominantly by men and are such things as religious objects and weaponry, even the pottery objects are often ascribed to masculine creative genius. But in the Triple-AP gallery you get to see so much of what women create: clothing, basketry, and elaborate ornaments for both everyday and special occasion use. These are beautiful creations that do not survive the test of time, they do not preserve well. So when we look at archaeological artifacts we often get a very biased view of who was making what.

Sunday afternoon at the ROM

I just emptied my camera of its pictures in hopes of finding one suitable for yesterday's post, and found a bunch of photos I took at the ROM on Sunday.


(Museum subway station)



I totally forgot about that trip!





Isaac and I decided to take Tristan to the Museum on Sunday afternoon.





Tristan wanted to see the Diamonds exhibit but neither Isaac nor I were interested in it, so we hoped to substitute the new Gems and Minerals exhibit instead.

And I wanted to see the Costumes and Textiles exhibit and the Ancient Ukraine exhibit.



I think Tristan enjoyed it, but we stayed until closing time and as we were leaving Tristan said, But wait! We haven't seen the Diamonds yet!


And of course it was too late, the Museum was closing.



Ah well. I on the other hand was completely satisfied with the trip.

Most of my photos were from the Gems and Minerals gallery, I guess I got tired of taking photos after that.



(Malachite, and close-up)


The colours of the minerals were totally amazing. Absolutely brilliant.


And they weren't even gems, they were "just" minerals.



It must be an amazing experience to find these brilliantly coloured minerals in the ground.




(Copper sheet, five feet high)

The Ancient Ukraine exhibit was about a Neolithic civilization in the Ukraine, called the Trypillians (the ROM spelled it "Trypilian", but I found a Ukrainian website that insisted that the correct spelling was "Trypillian").

These people lived in the Ukraine around 5000-2500 BC, their disappearance remains mysterious. They had the huge settlements, the biggest at that time in history, but they were not "cities" in the sense that they did not have separate buildings or structures for industry, governance or religious activities. Just houses.



(Azurite)

And the houses were fairly widely spaced, with little in the way of defensive structures between or around them. The houses were arranged in two or three large concentric rings.



The exhibit showed an aerial photo of a modern farming area, and you could make out the very faint outlines of an ancient Trypillian settlement, more than 5,000 years old.





They had household altars, wheeled toys and presumably wheeled carts, but no pottery wheels. They made quite beautiful large jars without access to pottery wheels, which I think is impressive.

Their diet was based largely on grains that they grew. They did not keep large herds of animals, although they probably kept a few goats.

So they were not nomadic or pastoral, but their settlements didn't last more than a few decades before they moved on, never to return to that location again.

This civilization pre-dates both the pyramids and Stonehenge.

The third gallery I wanted to see was Costumes and Textiles, up on the fourth floor in the Chin Crystal. There are only two galleries up there so not a lot of people go there.

(Amethyst, in basalt)

I think I want to visit that gallery again as by the time we got there I was getting tired and not really taking it all in. Some absolutely gorgeous costumes from previous centuries though. In the very early 20th century the ROM acquired a huge collection of Chinese imperial costumes, clothing only worn by Chinese emperors and empresses.

I guess after the fall of the last Chinese empire in 1905 those costumes were going cheap on local Chinese markets and the ROM saw a deal. They only had one or two of those costumes on display, what looked like silk kimonos with embroidered dragon emblems.


(Wulfenite)

Apparently there were strict rules about who could wear embroidered dragons, and the colours indicated your rank in the royal court.






Next to the Costumes and Textiles gallery was an exhibit that is hard to describe.

Last year there was an art project on the site of an old Tent City in Toronto, what was once a community of homeless people that last for a few years before being shut down by the police. That land has since been filled with big box stores like Home Depot.




For the project they roped off an area and constructed "houses" that artists painted, the art commemorating the homeless people who used to live there. All of those painted houses are now standing in the top floor of the ROM.





(Pterodactyl)

My membership in the ROM runs out at the end of February, I am not sure that I will renew, so I have to get in as many visits as possible before then.







(Tin soldiers)

I think I would like to get a membership in the Canadian Textile Museum next, it's also of interest to me and it's cheaper. I hope to visit there before the end of January as there are a couple of temporary exhibits that I would like to see, of textiles from Afghanistan.

Between the ROM and the AGO and the Textile Museum, these are as far as I am concerned the saving graces of wintering in Toronto.


(Tristan trying out a "chair" in the Spirit Gallery)

Kids at the ROM

On Sunday Isaac and I took the kids to the ROM. We got on the Dundas streetcar near our place, but it was a long slow trip because another streetcar had mechanical problems and the streetcars on Dundas ended up being backed up behind it until someone could come and fix it. But eventually that happened and we transferred to the subway for two stops to the Museum. Isaac and I realized that we had both forgotten cameras, so there will be no pictures for this posting.

There are a couple of special exhibits right now, one on diamonds and one called The Unbuilt Toronto, urban design projects that never happened. We were told at the admission desk that we should go to the diamond exhibit first.

Lately Tristan is especially interested in dressup accessories so he actually was interested in seeing the diamond exhibit. And on the streetcar he found a little glass "diamond" so he especially wanted to take it to the exhibit and see if the one he found was real. However the exhibit was just new and thus very crowded, and it wasn't really geared for kids. I think Tristan got a lot out of it but Phelan got bored pretty quick. So Isaac took Phelan on to the dinosaur exhibit while Tristan and I continued to look at the diamonds.

They had one of the largest diamonds in the world on display, it was over two inches long. But Tristan accidentally dropped his own diamond down a grate in the floor. He was quite upset about losing it and I tried to assure him that it was not a big loss since it was probably fake, but that did not go over too well. He wanted to believe it was real and that he had just lost a real diamond down the floor grate. I was not about to ask for it to be fished out though. After some coaxing we proceeded to look at an exhibit of how diamonds are mined and then I suggested we move on to the dinosaurs.

The dinosaur exhibit is housed in two rooms, we had a bit of searching to do to find Isaac and Phelan. The dinosaur exhibit is much more geared to kids so Tristan was a bit distracted by various hands-on displays and film loops. But we found Isaac and Phelan, and Phelan was clearly enjoying the whole thing immensely. He had told us earlier that he only wanted to see small dinosaurs because he was afraid of big dinosaurs, but he seemed to have gotten over that fear very quickly. He did get to see a couple of miniature dinosaurs though. I chatted for a few minutes with a volunteer lady there about the Museum, and then she revealed that she had a real fossil dinosaur toe to show. I grabbed Tristan and told him he could hold a real dinosaur toe if he wanted and of course he did.

Phelan just wanted to run everywhere. They had a room with a big sandbox full of buried bones, the kids put on goggles and take up brushes to sweep the sand off the "fossil" bones. The sandbox is big enough for many kids to get in at once, and there are rows of chairs around the edge for parents to watch. This kept Phelan busy for quite a while.

I pointed out to Tristan how all the fossil exhibits were colour-coded for real and fake fossil bones; each dinosaur skeleton is built from a mix of real fossils and casts of fossil bones. So we went through the entire exhibit identifying which were real and which were fake. I guess he had fakeness on his mind after losing his fake diamond.

There was still some time left after both boys were satisfied with the dinosaurs, so we offered them a choice, go see the Egyptian mummies or go see the medieval suits of armour and swords. They opted for the mummies, so off we went to the Egyptian exhibit. There are only two mummies on display (there may be more but they are encased in elaborate carved and painted coffin boxes), the rest of the artifacts were of lesser interest to the boys so we still had time to see the armour and swords.

When the boys were still busy with the dinosaurs I went off by myself to see the Unbuilt Toronto exhibit. It was actually just a preview of an exhibit that starts in a few days, consisting of posters describing various projects over the last 150 years or so. Some looked like things that Toronto could easily do without, such as the original Eaton project which entailed tearing down the old Toronto City Hall and an old church. I remember when that happened, and there was such an uproar about losing the old City Hall that the project was seriously scaled back, and the church was saved as well.

But another more recent project, last year, was much more sensible and unfortunately it got canned because the Developers who wanted big highrises got their way. The Ontario Municipal Board is supposed to be a court of last resort for citizens and residents to bring their concerns about ambitious urban projects to the decision makers, but instead it is mostly used by developers to override community protests or concerns. The OMB was responsible for canning the more sensible project, even though the Mayor and all of Toronto City Council were in favour of it, not to mention the local community.

There was an interesting project called Velo City which was an ambitious project of elevated bicycle ways following major commuter routes, that would have allowed cyclists to commute very fast from the suburbs to downtown and back, without having to deal with other vehicular traffic at all.

We all had a great time in spite of lost diamonds and stalled streetcars, and returned home happily exhausted.

When the gods were young, where were the women?

As I mentioned earlier, I attended three lectures at the ROM on Friday and Saturday. One of those lectures was Robert Mason's Of God, Art, Technology, and War: Wirth Gallery of the Middle East. Mr. Mason is a very entertaining lecturer and essentially described the museum collection of artifacts from the Middle East that illustrate the development of various technologies and religious beliefs over time.

Mr. Mason described the development of tool-making from chipped stone implements to bronze and steel weapons, and the development of monotheism by the gradual synthesis of local gods and goddesses into a single Deity.

The earliest settlements often had skeletons buried beneath house floors, family members were buried right inside the home to keep them close. Sometimes they were exhumed and their skulls removed, and then encased in plaster and kept above ground, presumably as a lasting memento of the dear departed. He said that the first temples were actually homes converted for that purpose. So there was a gradual development from ancestor veneration/worship to the veneration of local deities in buildings specialized for that purpose. As settlements coalesced into states and empires, local deities merged into pantheons and ultimately into a single God, with supporting gods, goddesses, angels, saints, etc.

There was some interesting stuff about the origin of cherubs and seraphim. Cherubim were originally (two-)winged guardians of the Torah, perhaps derived from earlier winged human-headed lion-bodied creatures pictured in early Mesopotamian friezes. Seraphim have four wings, and are often represented as four-winged heads. There was one artifact, a kind of ceramic egg with seraphim painted on it. Mr. Mason explained that this was used as a kind of barrier to mice on olive oil filled hanging lamps in churches. Originally they were actually made of ostrich eggs.

The three major monotheistic scriptures of course come from this area. The Torah is thought to be an accumulation of several versions each with a slightly different emphasis, probably written at different times in different areas of present-day Israel. One version is clearly influenced by the Babylonian Captivity, this version includes the story of Noah's flood. Another version was most likely written by priests (Leviticus and Numbers), directing Jews on the proper practice of their religion, right down to the correct measurements of boxes to hold the Torah. There is one version most likely written by early Israelites, and another written by early Judeans (inhabitants of Judah), who were rather critical of the lax religious practices of the Israelites.

The Christian New Testament was put together officially several hundred years after the birth of Jesus. The first Christian texts were letters written by Paul, some of the Gospels were written a while later, and then finally around 300 CE the official version of the Christian New Testament was decided on. The Nicene Creed summarized the belief requirements for being a Christian. There has been some disagreement on the contents of the Nicene Creed, so various Christian Churches have restated belief creeds somewhat differently. There is no common agreement on what it takes to be a Christian, so it is difficult for some Christian sects to worship with other sects in the same place. Too much disagreement on the definition of Christian.

The Q'uran was written during the lifetime of the prophet Mohammed, there was no argument about what he actually said or did not say. There is one simple belief statement of what is required in order to be a Moslem: "There is no god but God, and Mohammed is His Prophet." In spite of later divisions into sects, all Moslems can worship together in any Mosque. There is of course some disagreement around interpretation of the Q'uran, but no disagreement on the requirements for membership.

I came away from this lecture with the rather uncomfortable feeling that all of this left out the female of the species. There was a lot of talk about the development of technology from the earliest times to the time of Mohammed that was largely focussed on weapons development. This seemed to be the most important use of metallurgy (agricultural implements were mentioned but not really discussed). There was a brief look at fertility tokens, figurines of female bodies, and the persistence of female goddesses in the form of Mary the Mother of God and "God's Wife" ( a figure appearing in one version of the Torah), but other than that, culture and religion appeared to be a largely masculine phenomenon in Mr. Mason's lecture.

Where were all the women in this? Squirreled away in tents and backrooms raising the kids and washing the dishes? As an aside, I saw an early cuneiform (earliest form of writing, on clay tablets) collection of proverbs in the Wirth gallery, including one which I can't repeat exactly, but it was to the effect that what is kept secret among men soon becomes public knowledge in the women's quarters.

As I wandered around the Wirth gallery after the lecture, and from there into the adjacent Triple-AP gallery of indigenous arts and crafts around the world, I looked at the art and craft of metalwork, pottery, ceramics, and calligraphy in the Wirth gallery and then textiles, basketry, featherwork and woodcarving in the Triple-AP. Another visitor remarked critically that these artifacts were new, some dating from only a year or two ago (a woven cellphone case, a T-shirt with an indigenous drawing and inscription on it). They somehow didn't seem appropriate in a museum, they weren't old enough.

It dawned on me that such artifacts don't preserve very well, you don't often see textiles from 5,000 years ago, and if you do, they are not in great shape. And these are exactly the kinds of things that were "women's work". When you look at what is retrieved from archaeological digs, so much of it is the kind of thing typical of male arts and crafts. Female arts and crafts tend to be much more difficult to preserve. It is hard to determine who actually made and developed pottery and ceramic arts, it could have been men or women or both. But it is easy to get a distorted view of historical development when you only have half the story. The "soft" arts and technologies are just not well represented.

But looking at surviving indigenous cultures, we get a much better idea of the cultural and technological contributions of women. Housework and childcare are traditional female spheres of work, but so are farming, animal husbandry, textile production, and the production of "soft" religious artifacts and pottery cooking ware. Many male religious ceremonies rely on the use of items produced by women, even though the women may be excluded from the actual performance of the ceremonies.

As Lisa Colombek pointed out in the previous lecture, we come to the museum collections of artifacts with our own contexts and stories, we come away with our own insights and understandings.

The fine art of curating

I just spent the last two days attending lectures at the ROM. The benefits of membership. They just opened another new gallery, nicknamed the Triple-AP (Africa, Americas, and Asia-Pacific), whose theme is the arts and crafts of indigenous peoples of those areas. The lecture series on April 4 and 5 was in honour of the four new galleries that have opened since January, including the Triple-AP (and another gallery that will open next week).

I picked three lectures to attend: Of God, Art, Technology, and War: Wirth Gallery of the Middle East; An Introduction to Darwin: The Evolution Revolution, and Islam in the Wirth Gallery of the Middle East. I visited the Wirth gallery twice after hearing the lectures on that gallery, and also visited the Darwin exhibit before and after the Darwin lecture. So a fairly intense round of museum stuff!

I mentioned a while ago my "ROM rant", a whatever-happened-to-the-old-ROM-that-I-used-to-know kind of rant, and the lecture on Islam in the Wirth Gallery answered that question for me. The lecturer, curator emerita Lisa Golombek, described the history of the Islamic collection from 1965 when she first started working with it until today. She said that the museum went through several philosophical approaches to displaying artifacts, starting with a kind of esthetic approach in which artifacts were arranged in symmetrically pleasing arrays. "Interactivity" meant having cases with drawers full of artifacts that visitors could pull out to view. She said that was very popular.

Then there was the phase in which artifacts had to be displayed contextually, there had to be a kind of storyline or narrative that explained the context for displayed artifacts. A lot of energy went into designing contextual displays, and this inevitably meant that there was not room to display the entire collection, much had to be put away in storage. Not even in drawers to pull out "interactively", just completely out of view. For decades.

How this translated for the Islamic collection was that they designed a three-part gallery depicting a mosque, a bazaar and a home to display religious, domestic and cultural or commercial objects. Artifacts related to each of these settings were arranged as naturalistically as possible. She said that for the most part visitors loved it, they said they came away with the experience of having visited a real Middle Eastern city. Never mind that time periods and regional styles were all mixed up together. However, she said that the one group who did not appreciate this approach was Moslem students. They felt it demeaned Middle Eastern culture and Islam to be depicted in this way, they felt like they were being portrayed as dirty and backward.

After the Michael Lee Chin Crystal was constructed they completely redesigned the Islamic collection to fit into the unusual space of the Wirth gallery in the Crystal. The gallery is odd-shaped and has no vertical walls. They could not hang anything on the walls nor were they allowed to have any display cases touching walls. Everything had to be freestanding. And, they had moved away from the contextual philosophy to yet another new approach. This new approach is in effect the opposite to contextual; provide no story, no context, just put the artifacts out and let the visitors bring their own stories and contexts to the gallery.

Personally I like this approach. I am in favour of having all of the "stuff" out on view rather than being patronized with the Museum's decision on how I should view and interpret it. But, when one walks into the gallery, there does not appear to be any right direction to go, any thematic arrangement. It is chaotic and overwhelming, so much stuff! My own feeling about that is childish delight. So much to see, so much to explore! But I overheard a lot of comments from other visitors about the chaos and lack of thematic direction. This is definitely not everyone's cup of tea.

After the lecture I went to the gallery and searched for particular items that the curator had mentioned. I guess she had given me a context to work with and I went looking for the items that were part of that storyline. But that was only one small part of what was there; after the other lecture related to this gallery I went back again and looked for some of the items mentioned in that lecture. Another context, another story, all in the same place.

I have more to say about the lecture series, but I'll save it for later. This was an intellectual feast for me, and I enjoyed it immensely. My 60th birthday present to myself.

A more detailed view of the ROM

Monday was the first Family Day holiday in Ontario. I ended up going to the ROM again that day. What a line-up! There were people lined up around the block to get in! I would have turned around and said forget it were it not for my newly-purchased membership card, because they had a separate and much shorter line-up for members.

I realized that the place was going to be crowded as all get-out but decided to do it anyway. I actually spent a couple of hours in the museum checking out as many of the galleries as I could.

The Dinosaurs exhibit was, as I expected, the most crowded. Really really REALLY crowded. But I think it will be worthwhile to go back with Tristan, there was quite a lot to see there. I had looked at the information on the web about that exhibit so was curious to see how it looked in real life. On the website the skeleton of the Tyrannosaurus Rex looked rather small, but in "real life" it was not so small. The head was huge! And very toothy.

My summary opinion is that the overall quality is very mixed. It is clearly "a work in progress". Some galleries were well setup and informative and interesting, others not so much. I particularly appreciated the galleries on Egyptian history and European history.

The Canadian gallery was kind of helter skelter, I didn't get a clear picture of timeline or thematic approach there. But I was positively surprised by the paintings there. Works by early Canadian artists depicting the country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And I didn't realize that the Death of General Wolfe was at the ROM, it was kind of neat to be able to walk right up to it and look at the detail of it. Other paintings showed scenes of First Nations encampments with awesome scenic backdrops. The idea was to show both the "Noble Savage" and the amazing scenery of the New World.

The European gallery was arranged as a series of tableaux of household furnishings from the Middle Ages through to the Twentieth Century. It really gave a sense of how things changed in everyday life, although it clearly was depicting the households of upperclass Europeans up until the twentieth century. I cannot imagine that ordinary Europeans had furniture and room decor that spectacular. For the Victorian age, the exhibit description said there was no distinct Victorian style, rather a mix of revived styles from the past, mixed with the beginnings of industrial elements. By the twentieth century industrial and mass produced furnishings dominated. Although obviously in ordinary households that would not necessarily hold true for all Europeans, many would have furnishings of a former era, many would not have the latest and greatest in modern styles. But overall the gallery was informative, and both the timeline and the themes being described were very clear and easy to follow.

I felt similarly about the Egyptian gallery, I could follow the timeline and it was informative. I got a sense of the development of Egyptian culture by following the fairly clearly marked route through the gallery. Although it did take me a few minutes to figure out what direction you had to go in order to get the progression. Of course the small area where the mummies were displayed was about as crowded as the Dinosaur exhibit, clearly the ROM is most famous in many people's minds for its dinosaurs and mummies.

Another gallery I appreciated was the temporary exhibit for Black History Month. This display depicted slavery in Canada, in particular Ontario and Quebec. What I learned was that slavery was officially abolished in Upper Canada (Ontario) in 1793 by Lord Simcoe, as the result of an incident involving the sale of a female slave in Detroit. She was forcibly removed from Ontario to be sold in Detroit, this event was witnessed by a free black man who reported it to Simcoe, who actually acted on it. Amazing. I don't know much about Simcoe and did not have an opinion one way or the other about him, but that hugely ups him in my estimation. There were also posters describing the slave trade and showing the appalling conditions of slave ships. It was a moving display.

A number of galleries are not yet open and according to my ROM floorplan map (online PDF version here), will not be open until as late as sometime in 2009. Signs in various places note the fact that some items on display or soon to be on display have not been available to the public for thirty years. So for the past thirty years, most of which time the museum was not being renovated, they had much of their material in storage. Not for lack of space because that material was available in the 1960s and '70s, but because of stupid curatorial decisions. In my opinion. Well they can't get that stuff out again too soon for my liking. I miss the Early Life gallery, the Gems and Minerals gallery, the old Geology gallery and the Africa gallery.

And I hope they do something to make the First Nations gallery a little less appallingly bad.

My museum rant

I extracted this from an email I wrote to a friend. Since I mention "my museum rant" a couple of times in other blog posts (here, and here) I thought I should reproduce this here. It is not entirely my current opinion, but it certainly was at the time of writing, February 12, 2008.

~ ~ ~ ~

... Last week I went to the ROM and am in awe of how badly it is curated. Unbelievable. One of the best museums in the country and they have completely ruined it.

I used to practically live at the ROM when I was a kid, they had so much stuff to see. Curating in those days meant simply putting it all out under glass and letting you wander around staring at it. Now curating means it has to look pretty, kind of like what you say in your ad. So they get rid of the clutter (aka "the stuff") and display a few items very tastefully with little labels thanking the donors. No explanation, no context, but oh so aesthetic.

Went to see their latest Shapeshifters, Time Travellers and Storytellers exhibit:

"Incorporating evocative objects from the Museum's collections, this thought-provoking exhibition presents eight contemporary Aboriginal artists whose works explore the ways in which past and present continue to merge and shape one another."

This consisted of 3 framed pictures of mysterious relevance, a carved tusk, a set of headphones, a large nondescript rock, and a latter day version of "Nanook of the North" playing in a corner, all housed in a huge otherwise empty gallery. Grrrr!

We visited a couple of other galleries as well but they were not much better. We ate a not too bad Curried Carrot Soup in, not the cafeteria, not the Food Court, but the "Food Studio" (basement cafeteria).

More snow

More snow today. Heard someone talking about how Toronto people aren't used to this much snow all at once, but this is the way it used to be when some of us older types were kids. This is the "keep 'em guessing" part of global warming, just when you think everything has changed forever, it goes back to the way it was before.

Last night I showed Tristan the scarf I was knitting from the leftover yarn of his Dad's scarf. Then I showed him the extra ball of yarn I have from Phelan's scarf, and asked him which he liked better. I said I was going to do two scarves, one for him and one for me, and he could choose which one he wanted. He decided to wait to see how they look when they're done before choosing. Smart man.

I ripped out my wrist warmer once again. Didn't like the way the thumb gusset was shaping up and thought I'd like the wrist part to be longer. I go back and forth on that, started with 2" then decided that 1" was better, now I'm back to 2". It'll be spring before I get it done.

Yesterday I took some photos, a couple of the Portuguese church up the street, one of the new entrance to the ROM (I like the old entrance better)(but enough of trashing the ROM!), and one of the little church kitty corner to the ROM. My grandfather used to play accordion? fiddle? there. I'm not sure which it was, I have two memories of being told what he did but no confirmation for either.

The Portuguese church was too big to fit into a single photo so I took two and superimposed them. Here is how it turned out:

You can see the discrepancy between the two photos on the left side of the picture.

This is the tallest building in our neighbourhood, so you can see the spire and the rose window looming over the houses from quite a distance. The angle of the photo doesn't do it justice, it is really quite large. One day I'd like to go in and see the stained glass of the rose window from inside.

Got a cold

Got a cold on Thursday. Did some snow shovelling in the morning and that pretty much did me in so I had to cancel out of skating with Helen. It was so nice out though, sunny and clear with lots of snow on the ground. Would have been nice to go skating. When I went out to shovel there were half a dozen other people on our short little street out shovelling too.

Everyone tries to do a little more than their own sidewalk. I'm glad Casey got out before Ross did, last snowfall he shovelled the snow for four houses and he's in his 80s. He's already had a couple of bad falls this winter. But Casey got his sidewalk shovelled before he was out, so later in the day he just shovelled his own steps.

I picked the kids up at the day care and we walked home through an alleyway that was not ploughed. Several people were trying to shovel it out. One woman said,"I love snow, but I'm starting to get a little tired of it!" Phelan looked like a tiny walking snowman coming down that alley. About halfway I picked him up and carried him the rest of the way home. He was eating an apple and had taken his mittens off to do that, his hands were starting to get cold.

Today I went to the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) with Beth. We looked at the First Nations exhibit, the Black Star Sapphire from Queensland, and the Shapeshifters, Time Travellers and Storytellers exhibit. All disappointing, the last one especially. I must say, the quality of ROM exhibits has sure deteriorated since I was a kid! When I got home afterwards I launched into a 15 minute rant on how bad it was when Isaac asked me how my ROM trip was. So I won't do it again here. I did buy a family membership though, so Tristan sure better enjoy the Dinosaurs exhibit!

Beth and I ended up having soup at the ROM "Food Studio" (I think this must be the hip way to say "Cafeteria") and spending a couple of hours there just talking. I think next visit we won't bother going anywhere special, we'll just talk.

My cold is worse; having been sick with one thing or another since early December I am giving up hope of being healthy before spring. If then.