Category Archives: Museums

Hats at Greenfield Village, 2010

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It’s been eight years since we took a short trip to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in suburban Detroit. I was looking at the images I made during that visit recently and was reminded that hats played a part.

Such as the Hello Kitty cap, probably bought in Japan, and probably around the house even now. In the background is Greenfield Village’s Herschell-Spillman Carousel, which the girls were waiting to ride.

The museum says, ” Built in 1913, this ‘menagerie’ carousel’s hand-carved animals include storks, goats, zebras, dogs, and even a frog. Although its original location is uncertain, this carousel operated in Spokane, Washington, from 1923 to 1961.”

This colorful cap is definitely still around the house.

I bought it from a street vendor in Bangkok for a few baht and wore it frequently in the tropics, less frequently in the hot sun of temperate summers. The day we visited the Henry Ford, if I remember right, was fairly hot and Lilly must have borrowed the cap from me.

One of the many 19th-century retailers moved to the site of Greenfield Village was a hat shop, where you could try on hats.

Just women’s hats, I think. If there had been a men’s bowler available, say, I would have tried it on.

Two Entertainers Who Died in Unfortunate Air Crashes

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I asked Ann about both Buddy Holly and Will Rogers not long ago. She was unfamiliar with them. That only goes to show a generational difference. As far as I’m concerned, both are visible threads in the American cultural fabric, people I always remember hearing about. But the tapestry is very large and changing, so every generation sees different threads.

While driving from Marathon, Texas, to Amarillo, I passed through Lubbock, a city I’d had scant experience with before. Maybe none, I’m not sure. So I took a short look around. If I’d had more time, I might have strolled around the campus of Texas Tech or visited the American Wind Power Museum or the Prairie Dog Town at Mackenzie Park.

But I only wanted to spend a few hours in town, so I made my way to the Buddy Holly Center.

The center, which is at 1801 Crickets Ave., and a block from Buddy Holly Ave., is a performing and visual arts venue that also includes a small museum dedicated to the rock ‘n’ roll pioneer from Lubbock whose surname was actually spelled Holley. The museum takes up two rooms. Really one and a half, since one room is more about other famous musicians and entertainers visiting the center, such as Sir Paul McCartney, who played a concert there in 2014 (and who, last I heard, owns the rights to Holly’s songs).

Still, I will say that the main exhibit room, which is guitar-shaped, was packed with items and full of things to read. Buddy Holly might have died at 22, and only worked for a few years as an up-and-coming professional musician, but he was busy. He wrote songs, made records, toured constantly, appeared a few times on TV, and somehow found time to get married. Clearly he’d found something he was good at — this new music genre — and went after it with great energy, creating a remarkable output in a short time.

On display are photographs, letters, post cards, tour itineraries, including one for the Winter Dance Party, recording equipment, a microphone, business cards, contracts, performing outfits, furniture, Buddy’s childhood record collection (all 45s), and his Fender Stratocaster, which is the last one he ever played. There’s a lengthy timeline posted on the wall detailing Holly’s life and career, and other one about the evolution of rock ‘n’ roll.

Also on display, oddly enough, are the horn-rimmed glasses he was wearing when he died. Apparently they were in an evidence locker in Cerro Gordo County, Iowa, until 1980. The 750-pound giant glasses outside the center were fashioned in 2002 by a local artist, Steve Teeters, who died a few years ago.

No photography allowed in the museum. The clerk who sold me my ticket, and signs in the display room, were clear on that point. Something about copyright. No doubt the RIAA would release flying monkeys to snatch the camera away from anyone foolish enough to take pictures, and bill him $10,000 per image besides.

You can, however, take all the exterior shots you want, including across the street at an eight-and-a-half foot bronze of Buddy and his Fender Stratocaster, created in 1980 by San Angelo-born sculptor Grant Speed, well before the Buddy Holly Center opened in 1999.  The statue was moved from elsewhere in Lubbock only a few years ago, and now fronts a wall with various plaques honoring 30 years of inductees on the West Texas Walk of Fame.

I recognized only a handful of names on the wall besides Holly, such as Waylon Jennings, Mac Davis, Tanya Tucker, Roy Orbison (who lived in Wink when he was young) and Dan Blocker, whose alma mater, Sul Ross State University, I drove by in Alpine.

The Buddy Holly Center is an adaptive reuse. Long ago, the building was a handsome depot for the Fort Worth and Denver South Plains Railway Co., dating from the 1920s.
En route from Amarillo to Lebanon, Missouri, I made a stopover in Claremont, Oklahoma, not far from Tulsa, to visit the Will Rogers Memorial Museum. Strictly speaking, I’d been there before sometime as a child. But I had no memory of it.

Will Rogers, on the other hand, I’ve always seem to have known about. That’s remarkable for an entertainer who wasn’t actually of my parents’ time — my mother wasn’t quite 10 when he died — but rather of my grandparents’ time. I knew enough about him to go see James Whitmore do his fine impression of Rogers live, including a rope trick or two, on one of the Vanderbilt stages in the summer of 1984 .

Here’s the view of the museum from the back. John Duncan Forsyth designed the original 15,000-square-foot limestone building, though there was an addition in the 1980s.

Will Rogers has a good many more exhibits than Buddy Holly, as you’d expect, considering that Rogers’ career in entertainment lasted quite a bit longer, beginning with wild west shows when that was still a thing, and moving on to all the media available in the first decades of the 20th century: vaudeville, movies, radio, and newspapers. No doubt if Rogers had lived on into the 1950s — he was only 55 when he died — we’d remember an early TV program called The Will Rogers Show.

Before I went to the museum, I had only the vaguest notion of Rogers’ early life in the Oklahoma Territory. I imagined that his origins were quite modest. Probably he was happy to have people think that, but in fact his father, Clem Rogers, was quite prosperous. The museum hints that Clem considered his son something of a ne’er-do-well, slumming as a cowboy and lassoist.

The last laugh was on Clem, who died before his son got into movies or on the radio. Ultimately, Will Rogers built himself a 31-room ranch house in California, which (per Wiki) “includes 11 baths and seven fireplaces, is surrounded by a stable, corrals, riding ring, roping arena, golf course, polo field — and riding and hiking trails that give visitors views of the ranch and the surrounding countryside — 186 acres.”

When the nation loves you, you can afford such digs. Here’s what President Roosevelt said over the radio in 1938 to dedicate the memorial in Claremore: “This afternoon we pay grateful homage to the memory of a man who helped the nation to smile. And after all, I doubt if there is among us a more useful citizen than the one who holds the secret of banishing gloom, of making tears give way to laughter, of supplanting desolation and despair with hope and courage. For hope and courage always go with a light heart.

“There was something infectious about his humor. His appeal went straight to the heart of the nation. Above all things, in a time grown too solemn and somber he brought his countrymen back to a sense of proportion.”

Rogers, his wife, three of his children and one of his grandchildren are interred on the grounds.

Naturally, there’s an equestrian statue of Rogers on the grounds.

It’s now near the tomb. To judge from the ca. 1970 picture I posted a few years ago, the statue has been moved from wherever it was then. The view from the back of the museum:

I didn’t take too many pictures inside the museum, but I make an image of a painting I liked.
It’s by an artist named John Hammer, who lives in Claremore. (More about him here.) I knew his style at once, since about a year ago I saw an edition of Travel Buddy — a coupon book you get at rest stops — that had a painting of his on the cover, a portrait of another Okie of renown, Woody Guthrie.

I picked it up because it was so different that anything you might see on a publication like that. I kept it because I really liked it.

Fort Davis National Historic Site

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The town of Fort Davis, which I later learned is unincorporated despite being the county seat of Jeff Davis County, Texas, has an example of an historic site worth seeing, though probably not worth going to see: Fort Davis National Historic Site. I was there a week ago, after visiting McDonald Observatory.

The place was a military post from 1854 to 1862 — Confederate the last of those years — and again from 1867 to 1891 as part of the string of forts in the region to protect emigrants, mail coaches, and freight wagons.

Fort Davis National Historic Site had about 60,900 visitors last year, putting it at 278th out of 377 Park Service units. About an hour wandering around the grounds was enough to see the standing buildings, ruins, a handful of exhibits, and the sizable parade ground.

Without this sign, there’s little to tell you that the old San Antonio-El Paso Road passed this way.
The odd thing to me is that when Fort Davis was re-established after the Civil War, the U.S. Army kept the name. Sure, Jefferson Davis had been Secretary of War in the 1850s. But from the point of view of the United States government, he had done some questionable things since then. Maybe it’s just an example of bureaucratic inertia.

The Trans-Pecos & Llano Estacado

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Back on April 14, I headed for Texas by car. I spent most of following two weeks in that state, arriving home today. Along the way, I drove 3,691 miles and change.

The main event was the wedding of my nephew Dees and his betrothed Eden on April 21 at Hummingbird House, a gorgeous outdoor wedding venue just south of Austin in the full flush of a Texas spring. An actual warm and green spring, unlike the cold and still brown spring I left in Illinois.

Rain had been predicted for the day, as it often is this time of the year, and there was an indoor pavilion just for that circumstance, but the Texas spring accommodated the bride and groom and wedding party and all the guests by not raining. If fact, the sun came out just before the ceremony, which was picturesque as could be.

I was remiss in taking pictures of Dees and Eden or anyone else, except for a few shots of my family.They’d flown to Austin the day before the wedding, in time for the rehearsal dinner, which was a pizza party in Dees and Eden’s back yard. The logistics of my family getting to Austin were a little involved, but everything worked out.

As for me, I’d spent most of the week before the wedding with my brother Jay in Dallas, arriving in Austin the Thursday before the wedding. The morning after the wedding, a week ago now, Yuriko, Lilly and Ann and I drove to San Antonio, where we all visited my mother and brother Jim. They flew back home that evening, leaving me to drive back to Illinois.

I wanted to return a different way than I’d came, especially since I had the week off from work (the week before the wedding was a work week). So I didn’t pick the most direct route home.

Namely, I drove west from San Antonio to Marathon, Texas, a town of a few hundred people in West Texas whose main distinction is its proximity to Big Bend National Park, which I visited last Tuesday. There are many impressive things to see there, but I was most astonished by the cliffs on the Rio Grande that form Santa Elena Canyon.

The next day I went to the Trans-Pecos towns of Alpine, Marfa and especially Fort Davis. Not far from Fort Davis is the McDonald Observatory, which I’ve had a mind to visit for years. It was cloudy and misty and a little cold when I got there, but that doesn’t matter when you’re looking at impressive telescopes. In Fort Davis itself, I visited the Fort Davis National Historic Site.

The next day, I drove north, through Midland-Odessa and Lubbock and finally to Amarillo, a shift in scenery from the desert of the Trans-Pecos to the high plains of the Llano Estacado. Along the way I made a few stops: the Presidential Archives and Leadership Library in Midland and the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock.

While in Amarillo, a city I had not seen since a brief visit in 1979, I took the opportunity on Friday to see Palo Duro Canyon State Park, which is about 30 minutes outside of town. It’s a great unknown among natural areas in Texas and, for that matter, the United States.

I had enough time that day after visiting Palo Duro — the days are getting longer — to drop by and see the Cadillac Ranch, famed oddball tourist attraction, which is on the western outskirts of town.

This weekend was a long drive home: Amarillo to Lebanon, Missouri, on Saturday (I’d stopped in Lebanon the first day out, on the way to Dallas), and Lebanon to home in metro Chicago today. Tiring, but I did squeeze in two more sites. In Claremore, Okla., on Saturday, I saw the Will Rogers Museum. Not bad for an entertainer who’s been dead more than 80 years.

Today I stopped just outside St. Louis and took a walk around the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. Not bad for a culture that’s been gone for about 800 years.

San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, Before It Was a World Heritage Site

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In late March 2013, the girls and I went to San Antonio. I’m always glad to show a bit of the town to them, and the visit included some of the missions, which are collectively San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. A couple of years later, they became a World Heritage Site, the first in Texas.

At Mission Concepción.

In full, Mission Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Acuña, founded by Franciscans, with work on the current structures started in 1731.
A little more than a century later, it was the site of the little-known Battle of Concepción in the Texas Revolution.
Mission San Jose.

In full, Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, with construction starting in the 1760s, and restored by the WPA in the 1930s.

I forget where Lilly got the small piñata. I think eventually the dog destroyed it.
It’s still an active church.
Mission San Juan Capistrano.
The church building had just been renovated the year before, which accounts for its newish, rather than long-weathered look.

Much of the grounds is open, with a few other ruins.
We didn’t make it to Mission Espada, and I haven’t been back that way since. Maybe one of these days.

The Smart Museum of Art

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I hear that the Northeast got blasted again by late-winter snow and wind. For our part, we did get some fast thick snow for a few minutes today. It was just beginning when I looked out my back door.
Not much all together, but it reached impressive near-whiteout for a short time. Reminded me of a moment in 1980 — I think it was March — when Nashville experienced about five minutes’ of snowy whiteout. I watched it unfold from my fifth-floor dorm window; it was like a giant feather pillow had been opened in the sky. Made an impression on a lad from South Texas.

On Sunday, I tried to time our visit to Hyde Park to see Patience so that we could see something else as well. Namely, the Smart Museum of Art, which is the fine arts museum of the University of Chicago. I couldn’t remember the last time I was there. Sometime in the 2000s, probably.
In full, it’s the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art. The Smart brothers were big-time publishers once upon a time, whose publications included Esquire and Coronet. Their foundation ponied up funds to establish the museum long after they were dead, with the building going up in the early 1970s. It’s a smaller work by architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, who’s better known for the Dallas Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, and the IBM Building in Manhattan.

It’s a small museum. That’s one of its virtues. Also, no charge to get in. Most importantly, the museum has an interestingly varied collection, including 20th-century American works, European paintings from earlier centuries, even earlier works from China, and some very new items.

A number of works caught my eye. Such as “Still Life #39” by Tom Wesselmann, 1964.
A “Thinker.” Yuriko wondered just how many Thinkers there are. I couldn’t say.
“Untitled” by Norman Lewis, 1947.
“#9 New York 1940” by Charles (Karl Joseph) Biederman, 1940.
In a room by itself, we found “Infinite Cube” by Sir Antony Gormley, 2014.
Wow. The sign described it as “mirrored glass with internak copper wire matrix of 1,000 hand-soldered omnidirectional LED lights.” Sounds labor-intensive. We spent a while admiring the thing, which was a different experience each time you moved closer or further away.
I even got a self-portrait with it — accidentally. Ann’s on the other side, with only her feet visible.
Nice work, Sir Antony.

Bayeux Tapestry Odds

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Faux spring no mo’. Woke up this morning to a light coat of snow. Not even enough to warrant shoveling, but snow all the same.

I check the Paddy Power web site now and then, not because I’m interesting in betting, but because its predictive powers seem pretty good. Usually. The Irish bookies got the 2016 election wrong, but they get a pass for that, since everyone else did too.

Last week Amazon winnowed its second headquarters site selection to 20 cities, something I’m following as a professional matter. I was a little surprised to see that the odds favor Boston right now, at 2/1, with Atlanta, Austin and Washington DC next.

All very interesting, but what really caught my attention on the site was, “Bayeux Tapestry Location Display.” What? It’s going to be displayed somewhere outside Bayeux?

Apparently so. At some point in the next few years, at someplace in the UK. Exactly where is the betting matter.

Paddy Power puts the British Museum as the clear favorite, at 1/2, which seems reasonable, but also possible are Canterbury and Westminster Abbey at 5/1. Less serious possibilities are at Paddy Power Tower or “Any Carpet Right store.”

I assume the tower is the company headquarters in Dublin. As for Carpet Right, which is actually styled Carpetright, that’s a carpet retailer with 426 stores in the UK and 138 in the Low Countries and Ireland. Just a spot of fun from the Paddy Power bookies.

The Internet, being what it is, allows me to find out about other things related to the Bayeux Tapestry with ridiculous ease. For example, if I wanted to spend $230, I could have my own Bayeux Tapestry tablecloth, 95 percent cotton and also made in France. Nice, but no thanks.

Palacio de Belles Artes & “El hombre controlador del universo”

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The 500-peso Mexican banknote now in circulation is the largest one I handled during my time in Mexico City, worth about US$26. On one side is Diego Rivera. On the other is Frida Kahlo. Husband and wife on paper money is unusual, but not absolutely unheard of: George and Martha Washington appeared on an 1896 U.S. $1 silver certificate.

I had Rivera in mind on our last full day in Mexico City, which also happened to be New Year’s Eve, and a Sunday. I wasn’t sure places like the Palacio de Belles Artes or the Palacio National, where Rivera murals are on display, would be open. Not only were they open, there was no charge to get in, though I believe that’s always true at the Palacio National.

We arrived at the Palacio de Belles Artes just before noon. It looks like an art palace built before WWI, and it is, partly. Porfirio Diaz commissioned it, and work started in 1904. Enough of the exterior was finished by 1913 to give it Neoclassicial and Art Nouveau aspects. Adamo Boari, an Italian architect active in Mexico, did the exterior.

Worked then stopped because of the Mexican Revolution and wasn’t picked up again until 1932. By that time, any art palace worth its salt was going to be art deco. Mexican architect Federico E. Mariscal designed the interior, and it’s an tremendous bit of art deco.

As fine as that was, though, I’d come to see the murals, and I wasn’t disappointed. To quote from Lonely Planet Mexico, which organized the information well:

“On the 2nd floor are two early 1950s works by Rufino Tamayo: ‘México de hoy (Mexico Today)’ and ‘Nacimiento de la nacionalidad (Birth of Nationality)’, a symbolic depiction of the creation of the mestizo (mixed ancestry) identity.

“On the north side of the 3rd floor are David Alfaro Siqueiros’ three-part ‘La nueva democracia (New Democracy)’ and Rivera’s four-part ‘Carnaval de la vida mexicana (Carnival of Mexican Life).’ To the east is José Clemente Orozco’s ‘La katharsis (Catharsis),’ depicting the conflict between humankind’s ‘social’ and ‘natural’ aspects.”

All interesting and sometimes unsettling works. But what I’d really come to see was Rivera’s re-creation of his Rockefeller Center mural. If it were anything like his murals in the Detroit Institute of Arts, I knew it would be astonishing.

“At the west end of the 3rd floor is Diego Rivera’s famous ‘El hombre en el cruce de caminos (Man at the Crossroads),’ originally commissioned for New York’s Rockefeller Center,” continues LP. “The Rockefellers had the original destroyed because of its anti-capitalist themes, but Rivera re-created it here in 1934.”

Indeed he did, though I’ve also heard it called “El hombre controlador del universo (Man, Controller of the Universe).”
Quite a work. We spent a while looking at it. The polemics aren’t subtle. Lenin is famously depicted, but so are organized workers, or maybe just determined masses.

Capitalism has brute force and decadence on its side.

Why, I wondered, were the capitalist allegories to the left and the socialist ones to the right? Then in occurred to me that they are on their own respective right and left.

In between is Man controlling Science — so presumably capitalism and socialism are at odds over capturing the power of Science toward their own ends.

If you asked me, the man has vacant eyes, as if he’s a scientist pretty much ready to serve whomever prevails, capitalism or socialism.

Frida, No. Leon, Si.

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“This is for the birds,” I said.

There was context for it, but first the setting: we were on the sidewalk on Calle Londres in the Coyoacan neighborhood of Mexico City early in the afternoon of December 29, just outside the Museo Frida Kahlo.

Curiously, besides a street named after London in the area, there were also calles Bruselas, Madrid, Viena, Berlin, and Paris: European capitals. Unlike the part of the Zona Rosa where our hotel was, which had streets named after European cities, capitals and non-capitals: Londres and Berlin (again), but also Roma, Liverpool, Marsella, Hamburgo, Napoles, Oslo.

Coyoacan is a pleasant walking neighborhood, sporting mature trees, sidewalks in reasonably good shape — with not as much pedestrian traffic as in other parts of town we frequented — and large, colorful houses. After a while you do notice that some of the larger houses are essentially walled compounds with iron-bar accents and hard-to-see entrances. Ah well, así es la vida in the big city, if you’re well-to-do.

The most famous compound is the Casa Azul at Londres 247, and blue it is. A deep blue. Like a lot of people, we wanted to visit Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s house. A whole lot of other people, as it turned out. After we got there, we waited a few minutes in one line, only to discover that was the line for people who already had tickets. So we then joined the equally long line to buy tickets.

We’d been advised to buy tickets ahead of time. We ignored that advice. After a few minutes standing in the non-moving ticket-buying line, and with the knowledge that we’d have to stand in another such line eventually, I said waiting was for the birds. Everyone else agreed. No go on Museo Frida Kahlo.

I’m sure the Casa Azul is an excellent museum, but I suspect the real reason for the overcrowding is the movie Frida, which came out in 2002. Her artistic reputation had already been rising, such that Diego Rivera is now her husband, rather than Frida Kahlo being his wife, but I believe the movie kicked it into high gear, the way Nashville has overcrowded the Bluebird Cafe.

Luckily, we had another nearby destination in mind anyway: the Casa de Leon Trotsky. Who could resist that? Not only were Frida and Diego part of the story, it’s got international intrigue, murderous foreign operatives, adultery, a gun battle led by another famous artist, genuine communists and communist plots, and — the crowning event, you might say, an axe murder!

Clearly, Trotsky needs the Hollywood treatment (besides this) if the museum wants to get people in the door, you know, the sort of people who never really heard of that guy Trotsky until they saw that movie about him. Then again, crowds would have drained the fun out of the experience. The Trotsky House wasn’t deserted by any means. A fair number of people were there. But we didn’t have to wait for tickets and crowds didn’t get in the way of free movement around the place, with one exception.

Casa de Leon Trotsky, I’m delighted to report, is quite red on the outside. The present-day complex includes what must have been the building next door at one time, which you enter through and which now has exhibits devoted to the Bolshevik leader. From there, visitors go to a small but very pleasant courtyard with an assortment of plants, walking paths and a few benches.

I don’t know how well tended the garden was in Trotsky’s time, though he did raise chickens and rabbits there. But I do know there was one feature Trotsky never saw himself.
Namely, Trotsky’s grave, where his and Natalia Sedova’s ashes are interred (she died in 1962). Naturally, I couldn’t resist the joke: it’s commie plot. I think I heard that one as long ago as high school, only it was about Stalin’s grave (Lenin and Mao and Ho, strictly speaking, have no graves).

Behind the grave site is the house itself and an attached guard house, for all the good it did Trotsky. The first floor of the guard house has a few more exhibits, including photos of Trotsky at various ages and other family members, as well as a family tree. For all of Stalin’s efforts to murder Trotsky’s offspring too, the revolutionary has quite a few living descendants, including in Mexico, the United States and Russia.

The axe wasn’t on display anywhere. That’s because it isn’t even in Mexico.

The house is fairly modest and solidly built, with thick walls and bullet holes on the outside of one of the walls, purportedly left by the unsuccessful May 1940 attempt on Trotsky’s life led by David Alfaro Siqueiros. We saw some of Siqueiros’ murals later, as one does in Mexico City. That Stalinist episode of attempted murder hasn’t seemed to have harmed his reputation as an artist.

Trotsky had reason to be security-conscious, and the compound reflects it. Besides the guardhouse, which includes a guard tower, the entire residence is surrounded by thick walls. Its doors are heavy and, at least going into Trotsky’s study, re-enforced with iron. I didn’t see any steel window shutters or barbed wire, but I read these were part of the security too. None of that stopped a determined NKVD agent with an ice axe.

The study itself is supposedly the way Trotsky left it: a large desk, a lamp, chairs, papers and books, a Dictaphone, a small bed on which to rest (see the picture here). The floor, I noticed, is painted red. It was here that moving around was a little constrained, since you can only stand in a small part of the room, like in most house museums, and visitors want to see the study most of all. I know I did.

The current setup at Trotsky’s House includes a small cafe next to the guardhouse. We had a light lunch al fresco there, cheese crepes for me, and some of the best orange juice I’ve had in a long time. All in all, a bourgeois sort of meal. I expect the waiter was paid for his efforts and presumably the museum made a modest amount, which it probably needs to keep the lights on.

The museum also features a small gift shop at the entrance, heavy on socialist books and portraits of Trotsky for sale and light on tourist gimcracks, though I bought some postcards there. I doubt that the organization is using any of its budget to foment worldwide socialist revolution.

Museo Nacional de Antropologia

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Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology, the Museo Nacional de Antropologia, is also in Chapultepec Park, not too far from Castillo de Chapultepec. The park was fairly busy three days after Christmas.

Maybe the park is always busy on nice days. It’s a nice park, with a lot of recommend it, including water features.
On the other hand, the week between Christmas and New Year’s is reputedly a fairly busy one for travel within Mexico. Many residents of Mexico City leave for vacation spots on the coast, and people who live in other parts of Mexico come to the big city, so that might have added to crowds at Chapultepec Park and some of the other sites we went to.

Interestingly, the two main languages I heard in passing at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia were Spanish and American English. Not as much British English or French or German or Japanese as I’d expect in a museum of its high calibre. You can’t go into the Art Institute of Chicago on a busy day, for instance, and not overhear Frenchmen and -women or spot gaggles of Japanese in their tour groups.

Maybe August is when the Euro-tourists come in numbers to Mexico City, and the Japanese as well, during O-Bon. Or maybe Mexico City isn’t quite the draw that Mexican beaches are.

The National Museum of Anthropology is a creation of the 1960s, and looks every bit of it. The building was designed by Pedro Ramírez Vázquez — who also collaborated on the New Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, more about which later — Jorge Campuzano, and Rafael Mijares Alcérreca.

This is the view from the back of the sizable interior courtyard, looking at a mammoth example of modernist construction.
The hefty structure perched over the courtyard, which got me thinking about the potential for seismic activity, at least while I was standing under the thing, is known as el paraguas, the umbrella.

This is what the shaft looks like from closer up. A stone umbrella shaft.
The light was poor for photography as I stood under it; this is a better image of el paraguas, through which steady cascades of water rush to the ground. Maybe “umbrella” is a wry Mexican joke on the nation’s uneven infrastructure.

The museum’s exhibition halls surround the courtyard — 23 rooms in all, displaying a vast array of artifacts from all over the country and across millennia, including but hardly limited to such diverse peoples as Olmecs, Zapotecs, Toltecs, Mayans and of course Aztecs (please to call them the people of Mexia), whose hall has a place of prominence at the back.

The museum has possession of more than 7 million archaeological pieces and over 5 million ethnological pieces, so the best any single person, even a curious one, can hope for is an interesting sample. Such as at any mega-museum. I feel like we got a good sample, such as bones and artifacts from the Tlatilco culture, which flourished in the Valley of Mexico around 3,000 years ago.
A Cabeza Colosal of the Olmecs, 1200-600 BCE, found near Veracruz. Colossal head indeed.

Specifically, the San Lorenzo Colossal Head 2 (also known as San Lorenzo Monument 2). To quote Wiki, it “was reworked from a monumental throne. The head stands 2.69 metres (8.8 ft) high and measures 1.83 metres (6.0 ft) wide by 1.05 metres (3.4 ft) deep; it weighs 20 tons. Colossal Head 2 was discovered in 1945 when Matthew Stirling’s guide cleared away some of the vegetation and mud that covered it.

“The monument was found lying on its back, facing the sky, and was excavated in 1946 by Stirling and Philip Drucker. In 1962 the monument was removed from the San Lorenzo plateau in order to put it on display as part of “The Olmec tradition” exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 1963. San Lorenzo Colossal Head 2 is currently in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City.”

A sculpture from Teotihuacan featuring Mictlantecutli, god of the dead.
The people that built Teotihuacan — more about that place later, too — flourished in the early centuries of the common era, but the city was so completely abandoned 1,000 years later that even the Aztecs weren’t sure who had lived there.

Here’s clear proof that ancient Mexico was visited by space aliens, right there in the museum.
He’s wearing a space helmet, after all. What more evidence do you need, except maybe a bottle of Tang? I might be mistaken, but I think images of this very stela appeared in books and TV shows about ancient astronauts when I was a lad, a time when they were fashionable.

The idea lives on. Wrote one Paul Seaburn just last year: “So many statues, carvings, paintings and artifacts from the Mayans depict what appear to be aliens or alien spaceships, it’s hard to argue that all of them either have logical non-ET explanations or are hoaxes.”

I dunno, Paul, I don’t find it at all hard to argue the “non-ET explanations.”

Here’s El Creador, found in Morelos State and dating from the late first millennium of the common era.
Here’s a figure found at the Templo Mayor, a site that’s been excavated in recent decades at the historic center of Mexico City.
Speaking of which, I liked this model of Tenochtitlan.
Finally — among the many, many things in the Mexia (Aztec) hall, is the Mona Lisa of the museum, so to speak: The Sun Stone, famed icon of Mexico.
The Sun Stone certainly had a lot of admirers. I admired it myself. Maybe the Conquistadors did as well, since for some reason they didn’t destroy it, though the stone was eventually buried, only to be rediscovered near the end of Spanish rule, in 1790.

Much more about the Sun Stone is available online, including this article by an academic, Khristaan Villela, based in New Mexico. An artist’s interpretation of the central part of the stone is here.

“Since its rediscovery, the Calendar Stone has been displayed vertically, as if it really were a clock,” writes Villela, who refers to it as the Calendar Stone. “But the form and imagery of the sculpture closely link it to sacrificial altars, upon which the Aztec emperor, probably Moctezuma himself, ascended to sacrifice noble captives to feed the sun and earth.

“The most closely related monuments to the Calendar Stone are the Stone of Tizoc and the Stone of Moctezuma I.” Which happens to be only a few feet from the Sun Stone.

“Both are large basalt disks, with solar imagery on their upper faces,” Villela continues. “But whereas these other monuments display the conquests of Aztec rulers on the sides of their cylindrical forms, the Calendar Stone shows images related to the sky on its shallow carved side.”