During the first week of November 2000 I took a trip to Baltimore and attended the first ICE Conference. Some photos of the conference are posted HERE. It was an interesting conference. Someday I'll post some great photos of the little hotel, the Hopkins Inn, where I stayed... It was practically across the street from the Johns Hopkins University campus. After the conference, on the weekend, Dean Snyder drove John Jenkins and I into Washington DC and dropped us off near the mall. We spent the day walking up and down, visiting the Smithsonian, the Lincoln Memorial, the National Gallery of Art, and so forth. Below are some photographs of our stroll down the mall.
Oh, here's one of me, standing in front of the Smithsonian. Isn't it a fabulous building?
Inside the Smithsonian, there's an underground gallery that you can enter through a little kiosk on the street. Down there, I visited a wonderful exhibit covering 300 years of piano history. They had models and pianos and touchy-feely exhibits. They even had one of Liberace's rhinestone studded grand pianos, and Irving Berlin's lever-controlled transposing piano (the keyboard could be moved back & forth over an octave for automatic transposition!)... But I was also intrigued by this obscure little work of art that I certainly wouldn't have called "Abstract Expressionism", but more like "Dada" at its best.
And here's one of me standing in front of the Washington Monument... Oops, does that sign say "No Standing"? Guess I'd better move on.
And moving right along... I was especially intrigued by the incredible "installation art" on the front steps of the National Gallery of Art. Who would have thought the nation's curators were so progressive! Check out these two photos... Is that a Christo? Or a Warhol? Maybe a Raushenberg?
Ah, is that the Natural History Museum? Hard to tell with all those colorful flowers and jungle foliage... Somewhere I have a great photograph of little birds all sitting in a row on top of the sign that says "Natural History Museum"... They were just so cute!
The Lincoln Memorial is certainly an imposing monument. Inside are some wonderful murals, way high up in the vaulted ceiling. It was too dark to photograph those. But I did get this great snap of Mr and Mrs America looking out over the wide open spaces!
And finally, my favorite picture of all: the Washington Monument... Isn't it imposing?
The best part of the trip, though was coming back to the west coast. The flight out of Baltimore was uneventful. John and I parted ways in Denver since he was returning to Salt Lake City while I was going to San Jose. I spent six hours with hundreds of really irate people in a cramped airplane, sitting on the runway in Denver, waiting for de-icing before we could take off. About an hour and a half into the ordeal, the hot food expired and couldn't be eaten. The pilot quite democratically called for a vote: should we relinquish our place in the de-icing line and go back to the terminal for food?... or stay in line for de-icing with the hope of eventually taking off? Well, the vote was unanimous among the passengers: stay put in line! So there we sat for another few hours on the runway, in a de-icing line while the raging blizzard gradually pooped out into a mild rain. After six hours, we finally got through the de-icing, and two movies, and loads of peanuts, crackers, and soda-pop. I listened to the tower chatter for most of the non-ride. Someone later told me that Denver airport tends to be like that. This is what anthropologists call "participant observation" and I keep kicking myself for not taking better notes.
All photographs Copyright © 2000 Rick McGowan, except the pictures of Rick McGowan which were snapped by John Jenkins so I suppose he has copyright, but I still possess the negatives, nyah hah hah...