museums

there are alot of museums in berlin. in fact, there is a place called museum island that holds a bunch of them. on thursdays, many of these, i guess mainly the art museums, are free from 6 to 10 pm or something. aaron took me to one in the middle of town. i don't remember the name, wanna say it was the gesemtemuseum, which is way off but sonically similar. anyway, it holds a shitload of renaissance and classical era paintings. wow! i mean, a lot of that stuff i don't care for. and seeing what the denver art museum holds from the same periods is unimpressive. but. i mean. they had great caravaggio and rembrandt paintings. they had some awesome bosch. lots of great northern renaissance stuff i'd only seen in repro, including, of course, many overly detailed still lifes. my favorite was the flemish proverbs painting by brueghel the elder. some of you may know it as the cover of the fleet foxes album. fuck that. it's a masterpiece on its own and shouldn't be sullied by indie rock bands who think its kuhl to put a little bit of culture on the front of their cd. seeing it in person was wonderful. it's large--roughly 8 or 10 feet square?--so all those little details that seemed so unnoticeable in the pages of an art history textbook stand out as very compelling. and, ya know, he's a master.

this place was massive. we didn't see anywhere near all of it cause we had to go to the niblock/dreyblatt concert. but wow.

and then a couple days ago, i went to the pergamonmuseum which is on the northern tip of museum island. it seems to be a kind of antiquities museum which was recommended to me by aaron and good ol' d. oppy. the kind of main feature is a reconstruction of the gates of ishtar, which were the northern gates to the city of babylon. pretty cool! glazed blue bricks with lots of decoration, including reliefs of lions and a mythical creature.

my favorite area, though, was the museum of islamic art. the shapes and colors on islamic art are so gorgeous. there were lots of beautiful brass bowls with intricate inscriptions. lots of unbelievably intricate wood carvings of arabic script. and the colors. and rugs. wow! one area was a temporary exhibition of stuff on loan from some rich german collector dude. every sign had quotes from him about his collection and his feelings on collecting. what a douche. oh well. at least he let us poor folk look at his nice things.