If you haven't been to the Museum of Sex in Manhattan yet you're missing out, especially when The Sex Lives of Animals exhibit begins this week. Starting July 24 and continuing through the spring of 2009, the exhibit reveals how sex in the animal world is just as diverse and complex as it is for humans.
Tickets are $14.50 for most, but you'll save a dollar if you're a student or a senior--and who wouldn't want to bring their grandma to something like this? Your entrance fee will grant you access to full-size interpretations of animal, uh, relationships by sculptor Rune Olsen. All giggles aside, the museum does seek to illustrate a part of the animal kingdom that isn't yet totally understood.
So if you're looking for two female monkeys engaging in rubbing, panda bears trying to perpetuate the species or two male dolphins checking out each other's blow holes--then this is the exhibit for you. Sounds lovely, right?
Eero Saarinen is the Finnish-American architect who designed the St. Louis Arch, JFK's Terminal 5, Dulles International's Main Terminal and the instantly recognizable tulip chair. But he never got the praise that other modern architects enjoyed, either because his style was so revolutionary or because he died young, the victim of a brain tumor.
Through August 23, the National Building Museum in DC is hosting the first-ever major retrospective of his career, including documents, photos, models, videos and furniture. We went to check it out a few weeks ago and were pretty impressed. While the whole exhibition takes only about an hour to see, it was very cool to immerse ourselves in the work of a single architect. And, hey, the show is free.
But since seeing drawings and photos is only half the fun of architecture travel, we'll be taking a deeper look at some of Saarinen's most interesting buildings this week. Stay tuned.
To stand before Picasso's magnificent "Guernica" canvas is to be bowled over by the artist's depiction of the horrors of war. But curators at the Reina Sofia Museum, where the painting has made his home since 1992, say the major work needs some major work done--and might even be too fragile for restoration.
A particular problem according to experts is that the painting is too fragile to move, even to its namesake city, while it used to join exhibitions as far away as Chicago and Brazil. It was defaced in 1974 by an antiwar protester who added the words "Kill Lies All" to the painting, though that has since been removed.
Despite damage sustained, the painting is protected not by alarmed glass but just by a rail and guards. You're not supposed to take pictures, though--hence this stealth shot.
The ancient Japanese city of Nara, an hour east of Osaka, might be most famous to us for its map-eating deer, but being an ancient capital means it's also full of historical museums. And we have good news: Getting in to these museums is now going to be free for all foreign tourists.
It's really very simple: The governor of Nara says tourists have told him the entrance fees are too high, so he has decided that everyone who shows a foreign passport can get in for free.
This very friendly gesture starts from August 1 and includes four cultural, art and historical museums in Nara. We also think that the price of Japanese watermelons is too high, so perhaps the nice Nara governor could fix that for us too.
A stolen copy of the First Folio, the first known collection of William Shakespeare's plays, turned up last week in DC when a rare-book enthusiast took it to the Folger Shakespeare Library. In a case of no good deed goes unpunished, the British man is being considered a suspect in the 1998 robbery of the document from Durham University in England.
While not as rare as the Holy Grail (or even Crystal Skulls!), First Folio copies are still relatively rare, and the Folger has the largest collection in the world, with 79 of the estimated 228 left in the world. (A thousand were supposedly printed.) In case you have one stashed under your mattress, it could be worth over $6 million at auction.
Dead tree media not your scene? See one of the First Folio plays, "Hamlet," for free at the Carter Barron Amphitheatre (16th St. and Colorado Ave. NW) this summer with the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Pick up your gratis tickets at the Washington Post office every weekday or at the theater on the day of the show. But leave kids under 10 at the nunnery, as this show contains "sexual content."
They don't have mythical powers either: Six weeks after the release of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," three real-life crystal skulls were debunked by museum experts as modern hoaxes, not Mesoamerican miracles.
Paris' Quai Branly Museum was the first to declare its crystal skull a fake, but the Smithsonian and the British Museum were also taken in by the artifacts, which were claimed to be part of a set of 12 that combined would prevent a Mayan doomsday in 2012. But under a microscope the skulls all bore traces of modern adhesives and tracks from drills and rotary wheels, none of which Central American cultures would have used.
The Smithsonian and British Museum skulls were purchased from the same shady Mexico City-based dealer around 1880. Of course, if you've seen "Indy 4," you know where the crystal skulls really come from... but we won't spoil the (ridiculous) source for you.
The newest version of Madame Tussaud's wax museums opened up in Berlin over the weekend, but just seconds in to the new museum's life, a vandal struck: A Berlin man leaped right into the exhibits and tore off Adolf Hitler's head.
The wax figure of Hitler is now being repaired and the management of Madame Tussaud's is adamant that they'll return him to the exhibition. (The museum says market research they carried out before opening revealed that a majority of Germans wanted to have him on display.)
Ripping heads of wax dolls does sound like a nice way to get revenge over people, though. Only we mightn't target Hitler straight out: there's this rather enticing version of Britney Spears to be dealt with first.
Here's a kick-ass museum plan: A real estate tycoon is bowing to pressure from Bruce Lee fans and seeks to turn the martial arts star's last home into a memorial instead of selling it.
If Yu Panglin's rezoning proposal is approved, the two-story townhouse in Kowloon could become a 30,000-square-foot museum, including training centers and, of course, a movie theater to show Lee's greatest hits like "Fist of Fury" and "Enter the Dragon." Yu reportedly fielded offers of as much as $13 million for the house, but says he will help raise the capital to build and run the museum before donating it to the city.
Don't want to wait? The American-based Bruce Lee Foundation, which has been raising money for a permanent Lee museum, is sponsoring a Bruce Lee Festival in Seattle July 18-20 with the Seattle Art Museum, including a memorial service at his nearby tomb.
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by kjb
