Ursula

glasseye and I went to the Detroit Institute of Arts today. Some photos are here.

( Some highlights... )

I had lunch with hrj, who took me up to the top of the bell tower on the Berkeley campus, and pointed out architecture of various sorts.

Afterward, I wandered downtown Berkeley, bought some galaxy-printed duct tape to temporarily patch my suitcase, which cracked somehow on the very short flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and ended up in the art museum. The best piece in the upstairs exhibit, of Berkeley art, is a very long piece of paper with ink drawings that look from a distance like an imitation of Japanese prints of waves, but turn out when examined closely to have subtle watercolor illustrations of plastic bags and other junk.

In the basement, there's currently an exhibit on the seventeenth-century Chinese painter Chen Hongshu. I was struck by an album of playing cards he drew as a teenager (c. 1616.) Each has a line drawing of a literary character, a gambling forfeit (starting with no coins, or half a coin, and going up to the completely unrealistic 100 million strings of coins), and a description of who should drink a small glass, a glass, or a large goblet in a drinking game. The gallery attendant barred me both from taking photos and from taking notes in pen, but I wrote down a bunch of the captioned translations of the drinking-game descriptions in pencil:

• The righteous and those with bangs over their eyebrows.
  
• Those who cherish flowers.
  
• Those who excel in satires.
  
• The thoughtful and elegant should drink.
  
• Those who disturb other guests or behave inappropriately at a banquet.
  
• Refined substance.
  
• Those with beautiful beards.
  
• The unkempt or the cleanliness fanatics should drink.
  
• Toast to the unassertive ones.
  
• The frank and serene ones should drink.
  
• Those who wear two hairpins.
  
• Skillful strategists should drink.
  
• Those at home in water should drink.
  
• Siblings from the same schools.
  
• Those with disguised appearance.
  
• Those with the same names as the ancients or prone to illness should drink.
  
• Those of noble descent with wide circles of friends, huge goblet for each. Those wearing flower headdress. One cup.