We celebrated the new year by taking the lad to the movies with a bunch of his friends. We saw Enchanted. For my part, I’m grateful both that we weren’t going to see Alvin and the Chipmunks, and that the movie was sufficiently ironic about its genre. (I’m not a fan of the typical Disney animated features. Pixar, yes.)

The kids were thoroughly engrossed, though. Our son’s good friend could not contain his urge to dance along as the cast frolicked in Central Park. And in the climactic scene– [spoiler alert… the rest will be after the break] More »

Instead of dropping a couple hundred bucks to take your family to see the hyped King Tut exhibit, I’d recommend the Amarna exhibit at the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology as a less expensive and, in many respects, superior way to get your Egyptology fix.

The artifacts in the exhibit illuminate the story of the religious and political upheaval triggered by Tutankhamun’s father, Akhenaten, when he installed a new monotheistic religion in Egypt. Akhenaten may not be quite the celebrity that Tut is–Steve Martin never wrote a song about him. But he’s a more interesting historical figure. The curation of the exhibit at the Penn Museum is informative and well-paced.

The regular Egypt exhibit at the Penn Museum is the real deal-clincher. They have a 12-ton sphinx–the third largest in the world. The stately entryway to Merenptah ’s palace in Memphis was excavated and placed on display here. There’s a fantastic head from a statue of Ramesses II.

And yes, horror fans, there are actual mummies. You won’t be seeing any mummies at the Franklin institute.

This doesn’t even take into account the other excellent galleries and exhibits. Even the cafeteria food is (much) better at the Penn Museum.

Admission to the Penn Museum, including the Amarna exhibit, is $8 for adults, $5 for kids and seniors. Here are a few tips if you decide to go:

1. There are plenty of convenient parking garages, but the Penn Museum is just a block from the University City SEPTA station.
2. Sunday afternoon admission is free during the academic year, but the museum is usually closed on Sundays in the summer. This year, though, the Amarna exhibit and lower Egyptian gallery is open on Sundays for a reduced admission.
3. The gift shop sells inexpensive workbooks related to the exhibits for kids of elementary school age. They turn the museum exhibits into fun scavenger hunts for information. Might not be a bad idea to help keep your young archaeologist occupied.
4. An annual household membership costs less than three admission tickets to the Tut exhibit at the Franklin Institute. It comes with all sorts of perks, including special preview and lecture events. There’s an exciting Pre-columbian exhibit on its way in the fall, so if you think you might want to come back a few times, consider a membership.

We took Pop Beard (my dad) to see the King Tut exhibit at the Franklin Institute yesterday. While the artifacts on display are undeniably gorgeous, I got hit hard by the hype curve and walked away feeling disappointed. (It should be noticed that the rest of the party did not feel this way. Your mileage may vary.)

The exhibit is paced so that you feel like you’re drawing closer and closer to a spectacular revelation of a final punctuating display of Tut himself. First you see artifacts from his ancestry, then items from the period of Akhentaten, who preceded Tutankhamun and is believed to be his father. Then we see an ornate coffinete, which had contained the mummified liver of Tutankhamun. The next hall contains artifacts found in Tut’s tomb: jewelry, shabti statues, a fan, a mace, etc. Finally, you come to a room which shows you items found inside his sarcophagus– a diadem, a dagger, a pectoral (necklace).

At the back of the room, there’s a sign that warns you that there will be no re-entry beyond this point. There was palpable anticipation. Surely this is the spot where we will see the famous death mask from the 1970’s exhibit, or an ornate coffin, something on a large scale to cap off the exhibit! There had been all these larger-than life images promoting the ornate gold visage of the young king.

Nope. It was the gift shop. There you can buy authentic treasures, like Tutankhamun baseballs.

Wish I’d read Jason Coyne’s review of the Tut exhibit before I went. I’m sure we still would have gone, but I would have calibrated my expectations accordingly.

If you’re not dissuaded, I have a few recommendations for those who follow in our footsteps:

1. The Golden Ticket promotion is a much better value than the regular admission. If you agree to go into the exhibit in off-peak hours, you will save a lot of money with the added bonus of being able to move about the exhibit with much less crowding. Regular exhibit entry costs $32.50 per person (plus Ticketmaster fees). For $25 a person, the Golden Ticket allows entry anytime after 4:00, plus a ticket to the IMAX presentation, Mummies, Secrets of the Pharaohs.
2. Admission to the Franklin Institute’s regular exhibits is also included in the package, but note that the rest of the museum closes at 5:00 PM. If you’re taking the kids, go to the museum early in the afternoon to enjoy the fun science exhibits before your movie and tour of the Tut galleries.
3. The Franklin Institute lot is always *&@#! full. There are a number of public lots along 23rd Street between Race and Arch.

As good as it is, I’ve seen Sweeney Todd too many times. But my obscenely perfect wife desperately wanted to go, so her dutiful husband scored her front row-center tickets for Saturday afternoon’s performance. Normally, the front row would be just too close, but when a rabid fan is involved, being close enough to be in the splatter field for blood and spit is apparently an unparalleled treat. Also, there’s the matter of sitting below the incomparable Ms. Patti LuPone as she tromped around in trashy short skirts. I did my best to be a gentleman about the situation.

In brief: I loved the new staging. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I wouldn’t choose to see the traditional, period staging of Sweeney again. (Because my reviews are half-assed, read fellow-Swarthmore-alum Ben Brantley’s NYT review if you want to know what’s so different with this staging.) The rather spare, symbolic set worked very well, although both of us thought that it didn’t work as well in the second act, where some sacrifices were made to accomodate the sparse set and limited assortment of props.

The music, rescored for the ten on-stage actor/musicians, was electric. It’s addition by subtraction. And the actors playing the instruments was well-incorporated into the acting tasks…somehow it made perfect sense that actors were carrying around musical instruments in and out of scenes. More »

No equivocation here: “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character should be a required text for anybody who teaches—in any field—at the secondary or post-secondary level. In truth, it ought to be handed out to every high school sophomore as part of their math and science education. Feynman unabashedly revels in his horndoggery, though, which would make the book too controversial to get by high school curriculum hawks. (If you like the “Revenge of the Nerds” aspect of a famous theoretical physicist cavorting with Vegas show girls, then there are plenty of amusing stories here for you!)

Feynman’s life, as revealed through this collection of his personal anecdotes, was itself a treatise on how to live to the fullest. Feynman does not connect the dots of his adventures and discoveries for his readers. One by one, his funny stories reveal the greater threads of his life: the rewards of intellectual curiosity; the importance of collaboration in problem-solving; and the winning nature of integrity and humor.

Since I was not a science guy in my school days, I had only a vague awareness of Feynman as a famous Nobel prize-winner. You can imagine how intimidating that might make a book of his to somebody who was shamed out of continuing his study of mathematics in college by an extraordinarily bad professor. I read the book on Edward Tufte’s recommendation, who exhorts his audience to consider “What would Feynman do?” as a great way to think about problems, including some ethical ones. (Although on some of the greater ethical issues, Feynman was fond of punting.) I’ve since discovered that Feynman is a legendary hero to many scientists.

Feynman’s achievements and interests extended into many disciplines, including drumming, languages, visual arts, and deciphering Mayan hieroglyphics. The lessons he has to teach beyond specific disciplinary ones may be the more enduring ones. The fundamental trick of education in any field is sparking the learner’s curiosity. One cannot appreciate a good answer until one has learned to ask interesting questions. There’s no doubt that Feynman was one of the most intellectually curious human beings of the 20th century; hence the double entendre in the book’s title. If you’re an educator, an educator-in-training, or especially if you’re a student who feels adrift in your own education, I think Feynman is a great place to start stoking your own fires. He’s all inspiration without an iota of dogma.

Surely You’re Joking… closes with a lovely benediction for scholars, which I’ll pass along here:

So I have just one wish for you—the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and were you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.

Amen!

Thanks to the miracle that is Netflix, I watched Good Bye, Lenin! last night. Back in my days as a DINK, I would have gone to see it at the Ritz in Philly, but nowadays, city trips for such frivolity are constrained by the presence of Mr. The Booch.

Lenin was a lovely, bittersweet, albeit absurd comedy about a son’s attempt to conceal the end of Sovietism in East Germany from his mother. Frau Kerner was a loyal communist, so when she awakens eight months after falling into a coma in 1989, her family is concerned that the shock may be too much for her weakened heart to take. They have to go to rediculous lengths to maintain the facade, out of which springs the comedy.

It’s an interesting story, superbly performed by its cast, that can be appreciated just for its less intellectual merits. For those who like to think deeply about things, it also happens to be rich with parallelisms, which reflect on the tension that can arise between love and truth, as the characters make flawed attempts to give each other comfort by manufacturing stories—propaganda—about the way things really are. At the core, it’s a movie about the fantastic human capacity for self-delusion and rationalization.

A scene of Lenin’s statue being air-lifted to the scrap heap is worth the rental alone. It’s a surreal image, but quite personal in its context, almost as if the bystander is watching an old friend being carted off to an unknown fate.

On a personal note that amounts to nothing more than an interesting anecdote, the movie brought back my own memories of traveling in Germany, including a brief trip to Eisenach (then in the GDR) in the summer of 1987. I remember so vividly a number of the things I saw there. Days before making the trip, I visited one of the fence lines from the West German side, somewhere close to Bad Hersfeld. A great many Westerners gathered at the point where a road simply ended at a fence. I didn’t really know the whole context, but it seemed like something of a regular vigil. Everybody showed up for a brief period at midday, then left. While we stood in silence, staring at a mound that I gathered was an East German bunker, a family with a toddler came out of the last house on the block. The yard of their house was literally bounded by the iron curtain. In what I assumed to be safety training, if not ideology, the mother lowered herself to her child and repeated several times while pointing to the appropriate side, “Ost, schlect. West, gut.” As the father of a toddler myself, I can’t imagine having to raise a child in a place where I had to render such a stark and disheartening assessment of the world on a daily basis.

I had so many eye-opening experiences in just one day behind the iron curtain. I saw an elderly East German man brought nearly to tears by the sight of my two teenage companions buying full trays of pastries that only cost them about a dime each. (Ashamed, I asked if we could just have things wrapped and quietly leave.) I remember a soldier tapping me on the shoulder with the butt of his rifle when I was found perusing a propaganda text on supposed U.S. military atrocities in Grenada. (I also remember coming to grips in that same bookstore with true state censorship—not a single literary work published by a Western author after World War II.) I tried to help an elderly East German woman who had fallen in front of me at the post office. When she saw my clothes and heard my accent, she hurried away from me, limping badly.

There are so many places in the world where people still live under the soul-crushing weight of repressive states. Citizens of wealthy, industrialized democracies are fortunate for the liberties we have; it’s rarefied air. I can only hope that the descendents of today’s Germany, having freed themselves of the terrible yoke of totalitarianism, will never find themselves torn apart or imprisoned within walls again.

It’s always refreshing to find a book that manages to surprise you. I don’t just mean that I like a book with a surprise ending. I mean I enjoy finding myself 100 pages in, flipping pages happily even though I am thinking to myself, “Man, not only do I not know where the story is going, I’m not even sure what genre this is.”

I just finished reading Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings, by Christopher Moore. As a novel, it’s the genetic love child of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Heart of Darkness. But it has literary aunts and uncles, too. The Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy, Gulliver’s Travels, and Gilgamesh are all related. (I’m seeing a picaresque trend here.) Sprinkle in a distant strain of your favorite creation mythology—the Old Testament will do nicely—and you’ll know the novel’s literary heritage. I also spotted minor connections to the movies Aliens and Planet of the Apes in the mix, for those of you who don’t really do literary references. It’s kewl, dood.

At first, I thought Fluke was a work of magical realism. It turned out to be a humorous treatment of a science fiction premise. Not spacecraft sci-fi or post-apocalyptic sci-fi, but present-day, earthbound sci-fi. This is your Kurt Vonnegut sci-fi, without the annoying Kilgore Trout meta-nonsense.

The book is about a team of whale researchers who are investigating humpback whales off the coast of Hawaii. One of them discovers something discordant and seemingly impossible; he photographs a whale with the phrase “Bite Me” written across its tail. Being a dedicated whale researcher, he must know more, more, more. Adventure ensues. A couple hundred pages later the world has been saved from an extinction level event…or has it? If you want a spoiler, go somewhere else.

I picked this book up from a paperback sale table at a local mega-chain bookstore. (Sorry, guys. No free advertising for you today.) I mainly wanted to get Life of Pi, which I did, but the sale allowed me to pick this book up for only a few dollars more. I’ve been feeling readerly lately, so I played a hunch and came up big. It was a fluke, you could say. (Sorry for the pun.) Meep. (That’s whaley boy for “So sue me.”)

I’d recommend Fluke to anybody who enjoys Kurt Vonnegut or Douglas Adams. Moore is just as clever, and not nearly so smarmy as either of those guys. I might also recommend it to others, but I’d have to know more about their tastes. I certainly have to give Christopher Moore another shot, now that I’ve discovered him. Judging from the reviews I’ve read, it sounds like Lamb might be my best bet. It remains to be seen if this will trigger an author fetish for me, as I had for John Irving and Kurt Vonnegut many years ago. I liked this book well enough that it’s certainly a possibility.