I need orange: March 11, 2018 -- parade, PAFA

The morning of March 11 was the only time I saw this. It was relatively early in the day. We're looking east. The sunlight must have been hitting our building, and reflecting off our windows back at the other hotel. I wonder why the reflections are all skinny and tilted.......

When I put this on Instagram, someone said it looks like wisteria. I can see that.........

My better half found a (nearly) random person to play bridge with. The bridge establishment can help you find a partner, but their ability to help you find someone who is actually competent at the correct level of play approaches nil. It is possible to find someone you might like to play with, but not likely. Alas. (This is complicated, of course, by the fact that established players come to national tournaments with a plan for who they will play with. It's not usual for those who know what they are doing to show up without a plan.)

I set out to find something to do.

For reasons unknown to us, the St. Patrick's Day parade was held on the 11th. It went on and on and on, for hours. No floats that I saw. Nor big balloons. Very few bands. Mostly people dressed in ordinary clothes. It seemed very home-grown as opposed to professional. Many groups of people wearing the same sweatshirt (unions, social groups). Many individuals dressed as (I think) St. Patrick. Many dance troupes, from quite small kids to adults.

Only a very few groups were dressed in something really outré. (Note Masonic Temple sign on building, and George W. Hypocrite's back just behind the fancy guy's shoulder. We'll see more of this statue anon.) (Note also sparcity of "crowd" viewing the parade. It seemed like more people were marching than were viewing. This is nice for viewers. But odd.)

These people are way dressed up, and they can play, too. If they had an explanatory banner, I missed it. I wonder who they are......

I was standing right in front of city hall.

Looking just a bit lower than the prev. Our horse guy from the previous morning's look out the hotel breakfast-room windows. Gettysburg. There's a depressing thought for a bright sunny morning.......

This was seriously mashed into the street. Pretty sure it wasn't from this particular St. Patrick's Day parade. Maybe from a previous one?

George and Ben, in front of the Masonic Temple.

These are larger than life size. (Think it's funny that Ben is standing higher than George -- maybe they were relatively the same height as in real life?) Note "rays of light" coming in from the right upper corner..... Neither of these guys was a model of rectitude, whatever they may have thought of themselves........

Pretty pansy in a big planter.

I went to see the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). It is about a five minute walk from our hotel. It is an art school, and has extensive museum space as well.

Bored with portraits of rich pale males; let's look at something else.

Glad to see textiles celebrated, but am not ok with "Let's show a painting of textiles" rather than "Let's purchase and exhibit the actual textiles"..............

Katherine Mangiardi. For Helen, mourning handkerchief. 2012.

This is a tour de force...... Those threads at the bottom have exactly the right amount of drape....

This museum has a lot of "traditional art museum stuff" and some really weird things. Something that appears to be left over from a production of Little Shop of Horrors, next to a very traditional sort of statue.

PAFA has at least two buildings. The two I visited are right next door to each other. This one is older, the other is newer.

I have no idea what this architectural style is labeled, but I'm calling it Industrial Gothick. Note exposed steel beam, with fancy embellished pointy stuff on the supports.......

Closer crop.

It's a pleasant gallery space, with more natural light that some museums have.

Interesting self-portrait in motion. Margaret Foster Richardson. A Motion Picture. 1912.

I wonder if Margaret would have been a really famous painter, in a world where women had equal opportunities....... I can't fault her technique..........

Once upon a time, this is the way art was displayed. Tons of stuff, some easy to see, and some hung higher on the wall. (I've seen rooms twice as high as this one, with paintings hung right to the ceiling. Four or five rows, rather than "just" two.) No museum labels. (Aha -- no wonder so many paintings in museums have little metal labels on the frames of the pictures.....)

(I said there was weird stuff in this museum -- note chair with large ceramic dog and branches holding tons of other kitschy stuff. Prrrretty sure this will not stand the test of time -- will not be found in the art museums of tomorrow!)

Note tablet on bench. You picked up the tablet, found the image of the wall you wanted info about, then tapped the image of the work you wanted to know about.

This painting was way too wide for me to be able to get the whole thing into a pic. It's just to the right of the kitschy stuff in the pic above.

This is a look at the tablet -- first it showed you the ID info.

Then you could get more info about the work. This worked really well, I thought. At least -- when the gallery was empty and you didn't have to wait in line for a turn with the tablet!

I finished in the older building, and moved into the newer one. They had a very large exhibit of the very large work of a very famous portraitist. He works mostly in photography. I'd never been that impressed by his work, but this show had some work I found interesting. Especially one extremely large self-portrait, "printed" in a very interesting and unusual technique involving computer-driven machinery.

Time for lunch. Since this museum was so close to the hotel, I could go back and have lunch with my better half. This was the nicest day we had in Philadelphia. Not as windy as the other days, and probably not as cold, either. Not balmy, by any means, but nicer.

That's city hall, of course, and at left is part of one end of the convention center. In a few days we'll be inside of all that glass, having a look at the convention center.

I took this pic because the road was essentially empty of traffic. The parade was perpendicular to this road, up there right in front of city hall. Why this road was empty I don't know (but then I don't know how the other roads run around here, or what the parade route was....).

So I was taking the pic above, and this young man came and stood right in front of me. For a moment I was annoyed, but this next pic is really much better than the previous!

He turned around and told me he saw me taking the pic, so he had to take one, too. I told him that he'd made my pic better. He apologized profusely. I reassured him that I was serious; he really had made it better, and I was very glad he'd stopped there. We parted on good terms, wishing each other good days.

Light, reflected on a church.