Day 71 - Rain Date

It was a lovely morning, so we lingered over breakfast outside. I then gave Cz a haircut in the garden. It turned out quite nicely. Our long morning outside apparently used up all of the weather gods' goodwill.

We hopped in the car as rain started to pour down. We hoped that it would just be a passing shower, and headed towards Kreutzberg. It was not a passing shower. Accompanied by thunder and lightning, the rain continued unabated. We decided to go museum-ing at the Martin Gropius instead.

Our first stop was an exhibit of Scythian culture. The Scythians were a greoup of semi-nomadic people who ranged from Poland East through most of Russia and Mongolia. They were divided into several disitict tribes, but all of them expressed an amazing degree of sophistication in theior metalwork, horsemanship, and trade with the outside world. Their burial mounds indicate a strict social hierarchy, and the artifacts found in the mounds include both locally-made and imported metal, glass, bone, even leather and cloth goods.

The Scythians were active both before and durng the height of both the Egyptions and the Celts. It is interesting to note just how similar some of the motifs between the cultures are.

In some graves, women were found in full war-dress, and/or the attire traditionally associated with men. There is speculation that these are the Amazons described by Heroditus. Supporting this theory are occasional blond-haired blue-eyed women who appear in the modern nomadic population of Mongolian horse herdsmen. Genetic tests are being run on both Scythian mummies and these living women. Perhaps the Amazons are alive and well, and riding the plains even today.

After the Scythians, we went to another floor of the same gallery to see a showing of Cindy Sherman's photographs. As a photographer, much of her work is focused on subverting the idea of feminine beauty. She is famous both for the quality of her images, and for being her own model. In her younger years, she quoted famous film stills, putting herself in the rolls of the female stars. As she aged, she began emplying heavy make-up, prosthetics, and photographing dolls rather than herself. Cz and I are engaged in lively debate as to whether or not she is a hypocrite for saying that she is subverting beauty when she so clearly employed her own youth and beauty while she had it, but not using herself as her own model as she ages. Her looks are sort of a catch-22. Had she not been beautiful to start, she would have been percieved as simply bitter. As a conventionally beautiful woman, she can be percieved as a hypocrite. Perhaps this debate is what she intended all all along.