Friday, May 29

Manhattan


It takes us a while to get rolling this morning, though Sonnet up early to meet a rep from Helmut Lang to choose several pieces for her V&A collection. Us, we drive into the city which seems like a great idea until I can't find parking nor parking garage. Duh. We meet Moe and Grace and off to the American Natural History Museum where we see the fantastic Cosmic Collision:

"Viewers will witness the violent face of our Sun, imaged by NASA satellites, that produces enormous ejections of material from our star towards our planet. The resulting subatomic clashes, as streams of charged particles from the Sun strike the Earth's magnetic field, produce the eerie glow of the aurora borealis and the aurora australis that fill the Hayden dome. Cosmic Collisions will also show the creation of our Moon some five billion years ago when a wandering planetoid struck Earth; the violent meeting of two stars at the edge of the galaxy; and the future collision of our Milky Way galaxy with our closest neighbor, the Andromeda spiral galaxy, a cosmic crash that will produce a new giant elliptical galaxy billions of years from now.

Audiences will feel the ground shake beneath them as they experience a thrilling recreation of the meteorite impact that hastened the end of the Age of Dinosaurs 65 million years ago and cleared the way for mammals like us to thrive. Another dramatic sequence highlights a frightening future scenario where humanity desperately attempts to divert the path of an oncoming "doomsday" asteroid headed on a collision course with Earth."

All this and narrated by Robert Redford. Wow.

My photograph from the fourth floor of the museum in the eastward facing sitting area of the Koch Dinosaur gallery.

"Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims."
-- H.G. Wells