Going to the Mall

Notes from Lynn:

Since moving to our nation’s capital five years ago, Bud Liebes spends so much time in its museums that he knows the guards by name. For the emeritus professor of journalism, exploration of museums is a full-time job. Tourists come and go in a town that welcomes every year about 6 million visitors, each with but a day or two to devote to serious gawkery. It takes a relentless retiree to return again and again to the ever-changing shows in the marble palaces of Washington. (The D.C. stands for Displays and Collections. Thanks for asking.)

Now in his mid-80s, the vigorous B.H. Liebes devours the Washington Post and the New York Times. He joins other geezers every day for coffee near his condo in Bethesda, Maryland. He no longer owns a car, so he takes the Metro to the National Mall. He soaks up history, arts, science, technology and lots of lore from the Smithsonian Institution’s scattered exhibition halls: Air and Space, American Art, the Freer and Hirshhorn galleries, African Art, American Indian Art, American History, the National Portrait Gallery. These are free, but for a few bucks the ardent fan can pore through at least a dozen private or nonprofit museums devoted to journalism (the Newseum), women in art, natural history, architecture, crime/punishment, the booming technology of international spies, and many more.

When he bought us lunch in an upscale restaurant near his condo, Bud kept the conversation in a positive direction. He had just returned from Colorado Springs, where he visited his granddaughter, a captain in the Air Force, and his new great-granddaughter. He expressed happiness in sharing his condo with Rachel, his younger granddaughter, who plans to resume her med school studies next year. She took a leave of absence to help care for Bud’s beloved daughter, Michelle, who died of cancer earlier this year. She was only 49. (After retiring more than 20 years ago from San Francisco State, Bud moved to Seattle's Mercer Island with his wife, Georgette, to be with Michelle and his granddaughters. After Georgette's death, he accompanied Michelle when she landed a new job in Washington, D.C.)

And soon he began to collect museums.

Bud is a donor to the Holocaust Museum, but for some reason he hadn’t heard about the little museum that Margo visited, the National Museum of American Jewish Military History. That was surprising – Bud had been a waist gunner in bombing runs over the Third Reich in World War II, but he seldom mentions it. And Bud said nary a word about his years as professor and journalism department chairman at San Francisco State. At lunch, the conversation veered instead to his genuine pleasure in absorbing as much as he can from the plethora of museums in his adopted home town. His future, as it were, is in the past.


Notable: The National Portrait Gallery's exhibition of paintings of the nation's presidents could have been entitled "Men in Black," at least until Dwight D. Eisenhower appears in his Ike jacket and John F. Kennedy is portrayed in swirls of color. George W. Bush's official portrait, painted by a fellow Yale buddy, shows him in shirtsleeves, just a regular guy with his regular-guy smirk.

Un-notable: With its 3 million collectibles in storage and a recently renovated exhibition hall, the Smithsonian's Museum of American History calls itself the nation's attic. Instead, it's a hoarder's nightmare, a hodgepodge of miscellany, with no apparent attempt to sort out the good stuff (an 1840 puffer billy locomotive) from the silly icons of pop culture (Dumbo as a car in a children's merry-go-round from Disneyland).

Quotable: The dictionary defines "socialite," a term coined by the newspapers, as an active member of fashionable society. We were intrigued by the National Portrait Gallery's description accompanying a daguerrotype (at right) of Lola Montez (1818-1861), the free-spirited divorcee who became the mistress of the Mad King of Bavaria and further scandalized the Victorians with her erotic Spider Dance. The museum people cited "her notorious reputation as a courtesan and a cavorting socialite." It brings to mind the deck on an Examiner's front-page headline in the mid-1960s. It referred to Sally Stanford, the victim of burglars who stole her jewelry and a fur coat, as a "socialite." When reminded that she was San Francisco's most famous brothel keeper, copy editor Jack James growled and defended his headline. "If she's got a fucking fur coat," he said, "she's a fucking socialite."

Notes from Margo:

From a distance, it looked like a Native American or Mexican mask, but maybe from a culture I'm not familiar with. As I got closer, it became clear that it was a mask made from very large basketball shoes. I'm sold!! Three of my favorite things: Indigenous masks, basketball, and creating art from everyday objects.

In the National Museum of the American Indian, I suppose I expected baskets, pottery, arrowheads, rugs, etc. And plenty of those were displayed. But upstairs, in the traveling exhibits, was Brian Jungen's work. I turned the corner and was just floored by the beauty, the originality, the skill, the vision. I had never heard of Jungen, who is part Canadian, part American Indian. He makes sculptures of everyday objects – basketball shoes, baseball gloves, golf bags, garbage cans for recycling, beach chairs. (At right are totem poles made of golf bags.) 'Nuff said. You gotta see this stuff.