Mechanical Mysteries & Automatic Wonders ...

In all seriousness, I got to see one of the coolest, most inspired museum exhibits ever today. It wasn't at the Met. It wasn't at MoMA or the Frick or even the Guggenheim. It was at the Morris Museum. In Morristown.

Yes. You read that right.

The Murtogh D. Guinness Collection of Instruments & Automata is one of those things that I don't know if anyone but me would really get lit up by. If you were in the wrong mood, or if you had no interest in turn of the century whimsical machines, you would probably think it was the worst thing ever. But if you're me, and you love Ray Bradbury and Cirque Du Soleil and The Invention of Hugo Cabret and things of that nature, it was heaven, the purest joy I can imagine.

A ten foot tall Orchestrion, which contained a piano, xylophone, violin, and several drums : all automated! It played complex music, and was loud and beautiful and in perfect working order after more than a century. A clown that did a sleight of hand trick. A ballerina who danced. Another clown who sang a song to the moon. So very many dreams in motion! My face hurt from smiling so much! Happily, this is a permanent installation. I will be visiting it again, without any doubt.

The rest of the museum was fine enough as well : a few paintings, a nice period room, some textiles, an actual dinosaur egg ... the usual county museum kind of stuff. None of that could hold a candle to the machines, of course, which is just as well since E got violently sick towards the end of our visit, a rotten combo of headache / dizziness / vomiting. We actually had to go home around 4pm, which is unprecedented for a Wednesday. You would think one of us would have gotten sick on a Wednesday before this, but we haven't.

She promptly went to bed, and I of course came up here, and was pleasantly surprised by several long texts from The Muse. If it had been a normal Wednesday, I obviously would not have been able to reply, so I turned lemons into lemonade and we had a lovely text volley for about half an hour. She loved the poem, calling it "overwhelming beautiful", and we talked all about the situation at the 'Seed. Sure enough, the sparring at the last event did cause her to leave, which broke my heart a little, but she assured me it was not my fault. She's still sick, but is looking to take me out for my birthday in a few weeks, which I am now really looking forward to.

E surprised me by getting out of bed around 9pm. More surprising still, she wanted to eat something. So we actually had a Wednesday coda and went out to her favorite Japanese place, so she could get her sushi. For my part, I had some plain chicken and rice, and really enjoyed sitting in the strange wooden cubicle, on a red pillow no less. For a confirmed junk fooder like me, it was all rather posh and otherwordly. In other words, a perfect ending to a weird yet wonderful Wednesday.