eight, nine, ten

*NOTE: Parents of small people. Some of the photos in this post may be a little scary for children under the age of six.....


after the reprieve of northampton's trees and rivers and lakes and foods and friends, we took to the hills, arriving almost on the vermont border. the out-of-the-way amazingness that massachusetts has to offer is overflowing, and we harvested it to the best of our ability and appetite.
(harmonic bridge, playing traffic in the key of c).
assorted odds and ends of art i had not a clue about led me to what i should have spent the whole time pondering and inspecting and loving.
sol lewitt, beautiful man, beautiful mind. composing symphonies in the very detailed instructions he left for the craftmen/women that would then perform his peices on varying walls throughout the world. the notion of playing a building with color, pattern, line and improvised scribbles hit both of us very hard with its profundity, and the sheer magnitude and scope of his body of work on display in those hills bordering vermont. this retrospective (that will be up for the next 25 years. go see it!)began with lewitt's earliest wall drawings, done just in pencil, describing very simple shapes. the colors and shapes blossomed througout lewitt's life, but as his life declined he returned to pencil drawings (albeit not as simple as the early works, and allowing for a lot more improvisation in the execution)...
way too brief (theme of this trip) visit with the wall drawings and we kept up the momentum south. really fast and intense rain storms through northerly states, gave way to clear views of new jersey, which was surprising in its beauty. native son daniel smith led us straight to the bosom of more friends. well, friend. kristen wagner welcomed us to her adopted city of sisterly love. the next day, early, i fumbled about the streets of philadelphia and finally found myself underneath the I-95, trying to navigate the bowls and lumps and tangled marvelous mess of fdr skatepark. the perma-lost state i seem to live in most of the time left me with only twenty minutes to skate. back to friends, we met up with the newly christened mr. derek forester-dehaan to grrace ourselves with the amazingly informative and stocked mutter museum.

above you will see the colon of a man that did not have the nerves in his intestines that would normally tell him its time to poop. this resulted in it all piling up, his colon expanding and finally killing him. at the time of death, forty pounds of poop (two and a half buckets!) were taken out of the colon and it was taxidermied for our viewing pleasure. so much to take in, the history of conjoined twins, so many fetuses in bottles, a huge skull collection and so on and so forth. had to sneak these fotos, for the security guards enforced the no picture rule with gusto.
(team mutter 09)


we took in more old america (coupled with the older than america america we saw a few days previous in western massachusetts. it is all very startling to see things in our country older than 150 years) and kristin, despite her stance of horrible tour guide-ship, showed us the vastness of the city in a small, way too small amount of time.

an hour west, to the hill country of chester county and the next triplet of days will be up soon and very soon.