Catching up - King Tut, Warriors BBQ, movies

Last week I took a road trip down to LA. I had a great time driving my Prius and hanging out with my friends. Erika & Reaps kindly put me up on Santa Barbara so that I only had to do about 5 hours of driving a day. On the way down I stopped in San Juan Batista and got 3 George hits at the San Juan Bakery. (Yay! San Benito Co. is hard and I only had one hit there before.) Wednesday we did some sightseeing in SB and Reaps grilled steak and fed me a wonderful dinner.

Thursday we drove down to Encino, picked up my friend Linda, and headed to the exhibit...

Okay. The badness of the "King Tut" exhibit. Back in 1922 Howard Carter took over 5,000 objects from the tomb. This exhibit has maybe 50 and they are mostly Ushabtis and other really common grave goods. The advertising uses the "funerary mask" picture of Tut... but one could argue it is really a picture of the canopic jar which held his liver which is the image of the sarcophagus. It is about 10 inches tall. Beautiful, but not very impressive. The only really large piece was a sarcaphagus of his possible grandmother (if they have guessed right about his parentage). If they had said "Exhibit of Several 18th Dynasty Pharoahs and their Relations" I wouldn't have such a bad taste in my mouth. And I admit, I probably wouldn't have taken a road trip to see them.

And the set-up! I had misgivings about the commercial aspects of a for-profit group organizing the tour and such contracting with museums as venues. The entrance was in a tent with lines between cords for each hourly entrance time. Our line for 1pm on Thursday was about 1/2 full and the exhibit was too crowded to see anything. I shudder to think what it might be like on weekends! We shuffled along and were shown a short movie about finding the tomb and then on into a labyrinth of display cases. The artefacts were at about waist height (ADA compliant no doubt) and thus invisible if you were not at the front of the about 8-person deep queue. They had the write-ups at the top of the cases and well as next to the items. So one could shuffle along reading about things you couldn't see or you could stand in place and gradually work your way forward and see the little tiny whatever. The audio tour (beautifully voiced by Omar Sharif) covered perhaps 25 of the 130 items displayed.

My favorite exhibits were:
A chair belonging to one of Ahktenaten's daughters that had these wonderful dancing satyr-like figures (probably related actually to the God Bes but *very* satyr-like) Erika thought they looked like something from Where the Wild Things Are.
A gold crown worn by Tut was really beautiful.
A display showing successive levels of his wrappings showing where various artefacts were found.

We got through it in about 2 hours. As you can see, I felt very unsatisfied. This is a very bad sequel to the 1978 exhibition!

Then we headed over to the Bodhi Tree and enjoyed the shop. Had a cuppa at the nearby Urth Cafe and then headed back to the Valley to The Black Broom (formerly Ravensflight) where I spent too much money on cool witchy things. Having Linda as a native guide meant that rather than going on freeways we went over Mulholland Drive going in and through some other neighborhood going back. We got to see many good views and interesting houses. Much better than following my GPS which wanted to take stop-and-go freeways!

We ate dinner at a Chinese place in Linda's neighborhood and dropped her off at home. We zoomed over for a quick visit with shaktiqueen and her family before heading back to Santa Barbara. We had been on the go for about 13 hours by the time we got home and I just fell straight into bed. Friday morning we lazed about and Reaps gave me a massage (otherwise I would have been a total wreck from all the driving). Around noon I got in the car and headed back to the Bay Area. I can't believe Russell drives to SB at least once a month! I had a quiet evening reconnecting with Russell.

Saturday I headed up to Concord for a BBQ for the Warriors (Exu, Ogum, Oxossi and Ossain) and ate much yummy food. Luckily meat and bread are okay on the acid diet. We had tri-tip and an entire loin of pork! (Plus other inedible things like several chickens and 4 kinds of hot sausages). Exu attended throughout as we did a Yangi-making. My new Yangi is resting with his fellows at the Lubisha getting instructions on how to be a good Yangi. I have a month of find a good basket for him.

I headed back to San Jose and spent the evening hanging out with mr_kurt & Arthur eating dinner, using pool/hot tub and then watching The Incredibles on their big TV. *yawn* Another late night. Sunday was mostly life-maintenance things (and sleep) and going with Russell to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It was much better than the Gene Wilder movie about Willy Wonka. I think they went back to the Roald Dahl material and were more true to its darkness. Johnny Depp was very good and I loved Christopher Lee as his dentist-father. Scary indeed! Danny Elfman had way too much fun with the music. It is worth seeing, even if you hated the first one.