Last Day in D.C.

All anybody is talking about today is the shooting at the Holocaust Museum. The first I heard of it was at the National Portrait Gallery. I was asking one of the employees there if they had any of Jackson Pollock's stuff on display. (Mostly because he's one of about three American artists that I've ever heard of, and that's if you include the guy who draws Dilbert.) She was trying to look it up in her computer, but she was pretty shaken up. She said she'd just heard that there was a shooting there, and she'd been there just a couple of minutes before it happened. No Pollock, it turned out.

So obviously I'm not a big art guy. But I'd actually seen some of these paintings in the history books, Sheridan's Ride, Robert E. Lee, lots of the early statesmen of the U.S. There is a very impressive exhibit dedicated to the presidents, and I recognized most of the portraits from the presidents' profiles in the World Book Encyclopedia. They have the profile view of Lincoln that was the basis for the penny, the portrait of Washington used on the dollar... and probably other paintings worth even more than those!

On the top floor of the Portrait Gallery is a section dedicated to modern art. What can I say. Modern art. It's just so... so... modern. Like horizontal, coloured stripes. Wow. How modern. I was really tired at one point, and there was a sofa. I thought about asking the guard if it was an exhibit, or could I sit on it, but I figured he probably hears that one about ten times a day, so I waited until he'd walked past and then sat down. Apparently it was just a sofa.

What did interest me was how some of the works there really grabbed me. So there was one with five alternating black and white lines, like a close-up of a piano. That one was like, yeah, whatever. What a genius -- he actually got someone to pay for this piece of crap. But then there was one with a bunch of black brush strokes in different directions on a white canvas. That one had me looking at it for quite some time. Would have bought a t-shirt of it, if they'd had one.

Then I was off to the National Art Gallery. Yes, they're different. In fact, they got so much darn art that they built two buildings to house it all! There's the West Gallery, and... uh... what's it called... oh yeah, the East Gallery. (So much for art making people smarter.) This one had paintings of dead people by dead people from all over the world! And I'm sure that if I'd made an effort to see any of them, I might have been impressed. But, it's a really big building, and my tolerance level for sightseeing has been diminishing on a daily basis, and you're not allowed to drink Dr. Pepper in the galleries, so I have to confess I basically gave Gallery West a miss and headed for Gallery East, which had more modern art.

Well, mostly East had more crap. Great looking building though. There's a really neat tunnel connecting East and West, photo attached.

My big regret for the day was that I wasn't able to get to see the National Archives. This has the original Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights, Emancipation Proclamation, and probably other stuff as well. (It's a really big building.) But there was a very long wait to get in, my feet and back were hurting, the rain clouds were threatening, and details of the shooting were starting to get out.

The assailant, it turns out, is an 89 year-old neo-Nazi who runs a website dedicated to denying the Holocaust. He entered the Holocaust Museum with a rifle, pulled it out the second he was through the door, and started shooting. He killed a security guard, and talk at the time was that he'd wounded two other people, and was himself shot by security. He'd had a long, illustrious history, which included an incident in 1983 when he showed up at the Federal Reserve Board armed to the teeth, intending to kidnap the Federal Reserve's powers that be, because he thought interest rates were too high. He got some time for that one, but obviously not enough.

So anyway, it was around that time that I'd basically decided I'd had my fill of the American Experience. Love this country though I do, there's no shortage of reminders as to why I could never live here.

Walking back to the subway, I passed a guy busking on Constitution Avenue. He was an older African-American man, playing the trumpet one handed. He had a beautiful, beautiful sound. I listened to him play several tunes, and took a short video clip of him playing which I'll try to post here, but if I can't I'll try to post to my facebook page. I gave him a bunch of money, and I wish I'd stayed to listen some more.

When I was riding the shuttle back to the hotel, I remembered an incident that was reported in the Washington Post in April. One of the staff writers was inspired by a busker's playing (and the commuters' collective apathy) to wonder, what if there was a world-class musician playing in the subway? Would anybody notice? Well, he made it happen. He got Joshua Bell, one of the great violinists in the world today to bring his Stradivarius down to L'Enfant Plaza and play for 45 minutes. They had a video camera secreted away to catch the reaction of the city's commuters.

The short answer is that Mr. Bell gave the $32.17 he collected to charity. Every once in a while someone would stop for a moment, but that was it.

So, riding on the shuttle, I was wondering, maybe I got Belled today. That guy's tone was really good, I certainly would buy an album of his. But no, he wasn't. There were too many things -- like how he'd stop playing to thank people who gave him money -- that make me realize, he's just a guy struggling to get by. I wish I'd stayed to listen, to talk to him and maybe learn something about how he came to be in that position. It certainly would have been more enlightening than anything else I'd seen today.

I've uploaded my buddy to youtube. Here's the link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS62DdNU9Io