Cyclorama

I've been wanting to do some Atlanta blogging lately, but I never seem to have time. This morning Bart and Colleen and I went to the Atlanta Cyclorama, which was as awesome as you might expect (i.e. super awesome). The painting itself is of course cheesy, and the voiceover that they do for the tour does a little of that Confederate nostalgia thing, but they didn't lay it on as thick as I expected they would (I grew up in Virginia, so). The Clark-Gable-as-dead-Union-soldier figurine in the front? Amazing. I was surprised to learn that all the tchotchkes at the base of the painting were added in the 1930s, since such effects are sort of classically 1890s. But the painting was on tour in the 1890s, so I guess that makes sense. And it's a reminder of the unevenness of the way we periodize media—Frederick A. Lucas talks a lot about cycloramas in his 1920s pamphlet on the AMNH dioramas, for example. It was also, shall we say, sociologically interesting to observe the people who were on this cyclorama tour.

Sooner or later I want to write up something about the High Museum, which currently has some cool stuff on loan from MoMA, but I guess that isn't going to be today.

I may as well throw out the obligatory Americanist point, though: the High Museum has a building called the Wieland Pavilion. Seriously!

In case of fire, people, stop, drop, and roll.

HG: I still can't get over the weirdness of "extreme" as an adjective applied to mammals. Whoever came up with that was some kind of wackadoo genius or idiot savant.

NC: Or a HUGE NERD?

HG: That's kind of a given.

[. . .]

HG: I really want you to take seriously the question of what makes a mammal "extreme" in the cultural imagination.

NC: I smell an article.

HG: Yes.

The curious phenomenon of your occipital horn

The American Museum of Natural History has a vast collection of mollusk specimens, both "dry" (shells) and preserved in fluid. We learn of these collections on a section of the web site dubbed "research"; naturalists who study mollusks might wish to consult the specimens at the museum and compare them to specimens that they themselves have observed. The pages there are practical and text-based. It is the land of the serious.



On the front page of the museum web site, on the other hand, we get something else:



That's right. Extreme mammals!

I like the link in the sidebar: "Extreme Extinction." Indeed.