Luke Burbank was nice enough to invite me to discuss Saved By The Bell on his radio show on Friday, so if you’re interested in a discussion of why Screech was so freaky, it’s at the beginning of the 8:00 hour you can download at this link (the May 16 show):

http://www.mynorthwest.com/?nid=140&cmsid=93

I realize it seems like the only things I have time for these days are things spearheaded by other people (I’m sorry! It’s all for the long-term good, I promise! I have not lost interest, only time!), but I very much enjoyed being part of Dave and Tara’s podcast. As the disclaimers over at OP say, we had a few issues with all of us talking over each other, but hey — that’s six very talkative people in one room with one microphone. It could have been much worse.

I’ll try to get to the Survivor finale shortly. I appreciate your patience; it’s just a crazy busy time, and I’m conserving some material in hopes of getting paid for it. Sad, but true. Hang in! Back soon!

Check out the latest feature from the great minds (I am unbiased!) at NPR Music: the Concert At Bob’s Desk series, beginning with a gorgeous and understated performance by Laura Gibson. I personally believe the Concert At Bob’s Desk series is destined for greatness.

Bonus trivia: The camera for this segment was tested with me sitting in Bob Boilen’s chair. BOOYAH!

For those of you who are into this kind of thing, an old project will return tomorrow with the first post in a year and a half. I forgot how much I liked doing that. Why did I stop doing that for a year and a half? Or, mostly, for three years? I do not know. Anyhoo, the rest of you can return to your pop-culture ramblings while we discuss Cardio Party, whether to eat an egg for breakfast, and other surprisingly controversial topics.

I know that a surprising number of you have clicked on the cowboy hat picture. You scamps. I feel like I should tell the whole story.

My mom started agitating sometime in 2006, saying that she didn’t have a good picture of me for the living room. My sister provides a regular supply of family photos with her kids (which is really cheating, because my nephews are beautiful and cherubic and have wonderful partially-toothy smiles). But if you don’t have kids, when do you go in and have actual pictures taken of yourself? Unless she wanted one of me hugging rando Amazing Race contestants, she was sort of out of luck. So when I asked what she wanted for her birthday, weeks ahead, she asked for a real picture. I assured her I would get one. “And I’m going to make this face in it,” I said. And then I made that face, from the cowboy hat picture. And because she kept laughing, I kept doing it: “Hey, Mom, don’t forget what I’m getting you for your birthday! [Face].” (Mom laughs; repeat until bored.)

When I actually went to get the pictures done, I was assisted by a really nice young woman who set me up with a variety of poses, including some that were wildly unflattering to me personally, but some of which were fine. I told her exactly what they were for, and at the end, I told her the story about tormenting my mother with the finger-guns threat. And she said, immediately, “OH MY GOD WE HAVE TO DO THAT.” She added the hat, she rolled down the backdrop, and I actually got myself to make that face in front of a stranger. I bought an 8×10 of that one as well as an 8×10 of the real one I was giving my mom, but the one I had them gift-wrap was the cowboy hat. Which I gave my mom at her birthday dinner. I think it took her about four seconds to realize this was undoubtedly not the real picture she was getting, but oh, they were such a good four seconds.

Other than a little bit of writing, I did nothing this weekend. Well — that’s not true. I took some walks, just to keep myself from feeling like I spent the weekend melting into goo. I had a fascinating Central Park experience in which I marveled once again at the way you can follow a series of wide, gracefully curved paths, feeling like you’re just meandering, and then you can be spontaneously delivered to a spot not far from where you started, as if the park has been perfectly constructed to exist only as a series of walks that will eventually take you home, unless you want something else. I was sure that I had headed generally south and generally east, and I was sure that I needed to turn back generally north and generally west, but then I looked around, and the path I was on was about to merge with the one I came in on. They say that when you think you’re moving randomly through a maze, you’re almost always just turning in the direction of your dominant hand, and this feels like that, a little. You think you’re just wandering, but you get yourself home, which is an odd and very New York sort of thing.

The other remarkable but dangerous discovery of the weekend was S’MAC, where they make custom macaroni and cheese. And they deliver. I was originally supposed to get together with Joe R tonight, but he bailed, so it was just me and some mac and cheese. In order to meet the delivery minimum, I tried two kinds, each of which came in a seemingly normal-sized serving pan, each of which I ate about a quarter of. I tried the four-cheese, which was divine, but even better was the buffalo chicken. I know it seems like that would not be good, but it is ridiculously delicious. Get it with bleu cheese! Oh, lordy. I had to eat it in a very modest amount, because I felt incredibly guilty with every bite. You can tell it’s absolute recreational food — insane to eat more than, like, once a year.

But man, oh man, it is delicious. If I had to live off of one food, and there were no health consequences, there’s a possibility that at the moment, I would select buffalo chicken macaroni and cheese.

You know, when I told you to check out the NPR SXSW coverage, I was doing it out of a combination of loyalty and expectation, but it really did turn out wonderfully. The blog was just bloggy enough without being too bloggy, and if you’ve read any of the blogs that wrote, like, thirty words about each of a hundred bands in the last week, you know exactly what I mean. Not everything deserves a mention, and I think they did a good job of keeping it to the stuff about which there was something significant to say. I do remain shocked at the yearly reports on the horrible sound at a startling percentage of the venues. Is it that unpredictable and/or difficult? I mean, I suppose it is, but…I remain shocked.

But so much of this weekend, when I wasn’t walking in Central Park, eating mac and cheese, or listening to Stephen introduce Yo La Tengo in front of a thousand people at the Austin Music Hall, I was doing nothing. I lay around with my head on a pillow and watched TV. I scribbled ideas in a notebook for things I might write someday. I watched some bad TV, but also some great TV. I watched Inside Man with Denzel Washington. I woke up too early, like always, except this time, I made myself go back to sleep, and the result was my first good sequence of eight-hours-of-sleep nights in…certainly many months, and maybe years. I got up to get coffee; I came home to have an English muffin. I really liked SNL, then fell asleep after Weekend Update.

It was relaxing. It was genuinely, truly, honestly relaxing. I tend to clench my teeth; I tend to ball up my fists; I tend to bounce my knee; I tend to fiddle with things. I did a lot less of this. It was a weekend of breathing, and I could not have enjoyed it more.

I spent yesterday at the Met, looking for a little peace of mind. It was stunningly peaceful, really; so little noise, so many people paying attention to things that aren’t moving, flickering, or talking back to them. I decided to rent the audio guide, figuring with little optimism that I’d make an effort to understand the art. This turned out to be a great decision. I wasn’t sure whether the audio explanations would be condescending or impenetrable, but I figured they’d be one or the other. They aren’t. The Met has done a great job including everything from an eye surgeon explaining what kind of eye surgery might explain the appearance of a young man in a mummy painting to museum staff talking about the care and feeding of particular pieces.

I concluded that the security guard in charge of this enormous stone box (I believe you’re buried in it, as is the case with so much of the Egyptian art) has the worst job at the Met. You can see how it’s not roped off or anything, and that’s the bare carved stone, right out there where people can walk up and touch it. During the time I watched the poor guy (not visible in the picture because he’s behind the lid, sort of), I think about every other person who approached the piece had to be curtly told, “Please don’t touch the art.”

Nobody means to — it invites you to peek inside, so people forget they shouldn’t walk up and put their hands on the edge. If Met employees competed to see who yells at the most people in a day, the only guy who could compete with this guy would be the guy who tells people they can’t take pictures (even without flash, which is the rule in most of the museum) of the real shark preserved in formaldehyde that floats in a huge box up with the modern art.

For obvious reasons, I cannot show you a picture of the shark.

Isn’t this cute? Yes, that’s right. I am declaring this ancient piece of work “cute.” My first thought when I saw it was that you wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if I told you they were selling this at Ikea, or that I’d seen it at Apartment Therapy. One of the things I loved about the oldest things in the place was looking at how little has changed. Most of the jewelry is similar to styles you could see now. We’ve invented so much less than we think we have, where “we” are “people who are alive at any given moment.”

And obviously, we didn’t invent dumb, or grief, or lust, or graphic depictions of lust — I saw a Poussin painting of a woman discovered by two satyrs in the woods while in the act of getting herself off, which sort of surprised me in its bluntness. He lived from 1594 to 1665; I didn’t know that respectable artists with wealthy patrons would paint a nude woman with the hand and everything. I don’t have a picture of it myself (no photography in the Poussin exhibit), but it’s a variation on this piece that apparently lives at the National Gallery in London. Charmingly, the Gallery’s description describes her merely as a “sleeping nymph.” She ain’t sleeping, fellas. (And no, I don’t have a dirty mind — as if you couldn’t see for yourself, the audio guide to the piece at the Met, as well as other discussions of this piece, are much more forthcoming…so to speak.)

Before departing the fact that I am twelve, how can it be that nobody in the description of this particular sculpture is acknowledging the rather territorial grasp of the larger figure on the smaller one? I kept expecting some explanation, and the description is just sort of, “Two figures. One is taller. Let’s move on.” I think this gentleman is going to get a visit from HR about how to behave at the Christmas party.

It’s really amazing how well some of this stuff is preserved, and deeply weird in some cases to ponder how old it is. I will tell you this: it will make you feel small. If there’s one thing this trip was wonderful for, it was perspective. You know what I learned? Even the incredibly powerful people in these societies, all they really got for being so powerful, in the long run, was that they were buried in fancier boxes. People who did something real, people who made art, their work survives, but all you get for having worked your way up the ladder, even all the way to being king, is that your corpse can spend eternity standing guard over all the beautiful and special things you could never have made yourself that you managed to have buried with you.

Food for thought, is all.

Okay, this was hilarious. I saw this while wandering among the medieval sculpture, and I thought, “I am going to send a picture of this piece to my friend Stephen, who has the same hair as this guy. And I’m going to say, ‘Hey, this looks just like you!’” So I wandered over and took the lens cap off and looked down at the plaque with the title of the piece.

Which is “Saint Stephen.”

Unfortunately, the name didn’t come out on the pictures — the lack of flash made all these pictures very challenging and really tested my steady-hand skills — but I give you my word, the title of this is “Saint Stephen.”

(Aha! See him here.)

I found myself wondering whether it was all right for me to conclude that some of the frou-frou French “decorative art” was tacky. Because I don’t care how meticulously made this is; it still has adorable cherubs on it. Which makes it Precious Moments, to me, no matter how hard I try to see beauty. It’s a little overwhelming, because this piece is in a whole room where everything is this color — the other ceramics, some other items, and most definitely the walls. It’s all this same blue, and it’s followed by a similar room in pink. As I was wandering around the museum trying to find my way back to where I was trying to go and retrace my steps, I kept thinking, “Have to get back to the foofy French rooms, have to get back to the foofy French rooms.” I am destined never to be a sophisticate.

This might be my favorite thing I saw all day. It’s in a room full of much more conventional stuff in the Robert Lehman Collection, which is one of the funniest parts of the Met, in my opinion. It’s a great collection, don’t get me wrong, but it’s sort of Art You’ve Heard Of That’s Not Too Hard, for the most part. Van Gogh, Renoir, Seurat, Monet, Matisse, et cetera. You can look at it as a sampler, but you can also look at it as a gift for tourists who want to say they saw art but don’t want to wander past…you know, the shark preserved in formaldehyde. That’s not why it’s funny, though. It’s funny because they have carefully positioned it across from the cafeteria. To me, the message feels like, “If you are giving up on the museum because you are confused, and if you have stopped in for some lunch before you quit entirely, we will now serve you all the Great Art you thought you were coming here to see — all at once!”

At any rate, this is by Giovanni di Paolo, and it’s called “The Creation Of The World And The Expulsion From Paradise,” and the reason I love it is that it was done in 1445, and nothing else from that period quite looks like this. That big circle? Where is that coming from? The audio guide explained to me that the circle has a map in the middle, then rings for air, water, and fire (I think), then rings for each planet, and then the ring with the zodiac symbols, and then the ring that separates us from the divine. But really, what makes it so remarkable is just the appearance of this geometrical thing that looks utterly out of place. Which is what the audio guide said! And I had thought of it myself! I am so proud.

This just killed me. It shows the arrest of Jesus, including the actual Judas kiss. Thanks to the audio guide, I looked carefully enough to see that Judas and Jesus have been given precisely the same face by the artist, which is particularly interesting because this is a choral screen, meant for the front of a church, meaning that nobody would really ever see the face of Judas (who’s facing away from us). Sort of an artist’s moment meant primarily for himself. Also very unlikely to be noticed? As Jesus is being arrested, you can see his hand reach around the back of the seated figure (Malchus) whose ear has just been cut off by Simon Peter and is being healed by Jesus. The act of healing the ear of one of his pursuers is one of those little details that makes the Bible sort of a compelling book, and as the audio guide (thanks, audio guide!) points out, it’s a lovely juxtaposition of pain and forgiveness.

I could do this all day, but I’m going to leave off with this, precisely the kind of elaborate painting I often haven’t been able to penetrate in the past. This particular one, “Samson Captured By The Philistines,” is enormously affecting in person. That’s Samson with his back to you, being captured after his betrayal by Delilah. There tends to be so much emphasis on faces that it’s kind of remarkable how much is accomplished here, as far as showing Samson’s absolute state of torment, with primarily his back and legs.

I was really struck by how many things I saw that were based around two themes: (1) a group of people tormenting or pursuing someone; and (2) a group of people grieving over someone. Obviously, this is partly because of the prominence of these themes in the Bible — Jesus was pursued and set upon; later, he was mourned, as were (so the art says) all the great kings. There are many, many “Lamentation” pieces, showing people bent over the body of Jesus after he was crucified, and in many cases, they’re almost difficult to look at, they’re so evocative. Nothing communicates grief quite like art, is one of the things I took away from yesterday.

[If you absolutely cannot get enough pictures from the Met, the expanded photo set is at Flickr.]