Happy New Year everyone! It’s New Year’s Day, about 6am as I start this. Dan had a 9pm flight to Raleigh last night; I was in bed shortly after that. We long ago gave up trying to stay up until midnight. When I woke up he’d texted me that he landed. All is good with the world.

Yesterday we did the day we’d originally planned with the kids: The Getty Center and The Getty Villa. Turned out we needed reservations for the Villa and it was too late to get them by the time we learned that. But we could get them for Saturday, so we planned for that and Dan came up with the alternate “family history” plan for Friday, which actually worked great and probably better. I had never done any of those things either so it was new experiences for all.

I worked on the blog in the morning in the room and in the hotel restaurant, got it posted just before we headed out. Hope to do the same thing today :)

So what I’m calling “The Getty” is really 2 museums, funded by the same foundation, and very closely related. J Paul Getty (the oil tycoon if you don’t know the name) owned a mansion in Malibu. He had a passion for art collecting, especially antiquities. Initially he just had his collection in his home, which in 1954 he opened up to the public a few days a week because he wanted to share it. But his collection was too big to be enjoyed from just a few rooms in his house. In 1968, on the same property he has a villa constructed as a recreation of the Villa dei Papiri, a Roman country house discovered in the late 1800’s which had been destroyed by the Pompeii earthquake in 79. (Just plain old 79…like 0079.) This opened in 1974 as the J Paul Getty Museum.

Getty died in 1976. His trust kept collecting things. It’s also very involved in conservation and, partnering with UCLA, offers the only masters program on the subject in the country, with all of the labs and equipment to go with it. The collection outgrew the existing museum, and a new complex with built further inland in the mountains. This became The Getty Center, and opened in 1997. At the same time, the earlier museum closed for renovation and reopened in 2006 as The Getty Villa. Today is houses the antiquities collection, and everything else, along with the research institute, is in the Getty Center complex. We did both today. And were fascinated by the fact that both are free. It’s gotta be a heckuva endowment. We paid $15 for parking at the Center, and got a coupon which waived the parking fee at the Villa when you do both on the same day. Pretty good deal.

The Getty Center sits in the hills just north of Sunset Blvd on the west side of the 405. (Uh oh – you know I’m in SoCal when “the” is in front of the freeway name…) It’s nestled in the hills and, while you can walk up to it from the parking structure, we chose the tram instead. My legs have been killing me from the running I’ve been doing in the hotel gym in the morning before breakfast.

Look carefully at the photos of the next 3 paintings. If you had to guess, are they all similar size?

They had a special exhibit on alchemy which we made our way to next, killing a bit of time before the lunch reservations we made for 12:15. The guy below was the first exhibit, representing the Roman god Mercury.

Mercury (Hermes to the Greeks) was worshipped as the “transmitter of scientific and medical knowledge and thought to hold the secrets to the preparation of therapeutic drugs.” Mercury’s reputation as a trickster may have inspired the Romans to equate him with the quirky and mysterious metallic element known as quicksilver. What I loved most about the explanation was the Greeks called him “psychopomp – escort of the soul through the underworld.” I think I need to adopt that.

/

There were several eating options; we went for the fine dining one. And the food was pretty good. Our results with museum food over the years is pretty much 50/50 – sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t. This was a winner.

The photos above and below go together. I’m keeping this whole explanation in tact because it’s too hard to explain otherwise. It was surprising on a couple of levels: one, that a display about color would end up talking about heroin, and two, that Dan’s employer gets mentioned in the process! This is the 2nd time we’ve seen Bayer referenced in a museum, the first time this past August in the German History museum in Berlin.

This is a plasma globe. Plasma is the 4th state of matter (after solid, gas, liquid) discovered in 1879, and which scientists now believe is the most abundant type of matter in the universe.

 Ever since the Louvre in Paris in 2014, we have a running joke about “we’re in antiquities, get ready for lots of erect penises and other displays of bodily functions.” This museum did not disappoint from that perspective. As you’ll see, it might top everything else we’ve seen so far on that front. The above was in the Very First Display case we came across. Something about an ancient parody where a child with a ram’s head emerges from a basket with an erect penis. So there you have it.

This is the Greek god Herakles, or Hercules to the Romans. This was Getty’s first and favorite item in his collection, and the one that inspired the Villa. He wanted everything around it to support the times it came from.

This was a small, ancient copy of a 40 foot enthroned Zeus. For some reason in this museum, I really “got” that the ancient really believed all those gods existed, were real people up on Mt Olympus, and why there was so much art about them.

We’ve seen Roman mosaics before in Trier, Dresden and Berlin, but this exhibit was pretty extensive and we enjoyed it. The detail and the scope is always spectacular. That’s a lion eating a donkey in case you thought it was something else :)

 Dan always likes the mummies. This was interesting in that they’d done a CT scan on the sarcophagus and confirmed that all of the organs had been removed prior to burial. They could also tell that it was a relatively healthy 20 year old man or so, who probably died from a bonk on the head.

 Here we go. There was this whole series called “The Symposium” which is essentially the ancients version of “boys night out” or “what happens in Athens stays in Athens” I guess. Although this looks more like a bowl or even just a plate which high edges, it’s called “Wine Cup with a Sexual Encounter”, and the woman is presumed to be a “professional entertainer.”

“Wine Cup with a Drunk Man Singing”, or, uh, urinating might be a better description. “His young servant is ready to minister to his needs [uh huh, I bet] holding the man’s belongings as well as the jug into which he urinates.” At least the narrative confirmed we weren’t imagining that.

 “The inscription on the vessel refers to the Athenian social practice of men courting young boys.”

Wine Cup with a Man and a Youth Kissing. “The relationship an adult male citizen and a freeborn youth was a fundamental part of elite Greek society.”

And on that note, it was time to go :)

We left right when it closed at 5pm, stopped in Santa Monica for gas, and went to a sushi joint Dan found in Old Torrance which was close to the hotel.

Mine above, Dan’s below: the only difference is I got spicy tuna roll, Dan had a nice variety of sashimi.

And that was our day. We went back to the hotel briefly so Dan could finish backing and I took him to LAX for his sort-of-redeye flight home. He likes to take a late flight back and sleep on the plane, otherwise it feels like he’s losing a full day in that direction.

We had a great visit and he will be back to Sac in late January before he has to go back to Europe again in February. Last week we did some good planning on our next big trip which will be 2 weeks starting the end of June: 5 nights in Istanbul, 6 nights in the southern English countryside. Planes and some lodging are booked, now we start working on the details. Should be a fun trip. (And no, we’re not too worried about Istanbul….)

It’s 8:30am now and I’m headed home. Have a great New Year everyone!