Thursday

Sometime yesterday I stopped feeling sick. Maybe it happened halfway through my large Valentine's Day plate of chili middle-neck clams, which were pretty hot even before I spooned all that red stuff all over them. I woke up today feeling good for the first time this week. Sunshine and I were interested in fleeing the house, so twenty minutes before the metro shuttle was due to resume activity again, we bundled up and walked the point six miles to the stop. The going was pretty rugged. It was a sunny thirty degrees, not bad, but many of the houses along the way had neglected to chip up the frozen foot of road-scrapings covering their sidewalk portions. We spent the trek navigating blindingly white curls of ice bank, aiming for the muddy footprints of our predecessors. Then we took the metro to the Chinatown stop which is situated conveniently beneath the Smithsonian American Art Museum* (which shares a building with the National Portrait Gallery*). The reason we had come was to see this exhibit on the extraordinary Joseph Cornell, a twentieth century collagist and filmmaker famous for box constructions (sectioned and shadow-boxed wunderkammer filled with item collage; some examples). Cornell's work is really mysterious and exotic, evoking overlooked treasures on a dusty museum backroom junk shelf, the very thing I find compelling in the work of Dave McKean* or Nick Bantock.* We also ate really fine pan-Mediterranean food across the street at Zaytinya.* After seeing the exhibit, we hopped right back on the metro and headed home again, arriving at the East Falls Church platform just in time to walk back home twenty minutes before our free shuttle service was to resume again. In this direction, the whole walk was uphill, but at least it was dark and windy. [Cavin]