Listing Through Life

With my convention registration, I got a free pass into the City Museum after hours. I’d heard the place was unusual. That’s an understatement.

Much of it was closed off. The first floor was mostly cave, with dark passageways and no directions and lots of things to trip over. There were paths to walk along. There were also holes to crawl through and slides to slide down and tubes to climb up — all with no way to tell what was at the other end. I stuck to the paths.

The part of the first floor that wasn’t cave was taken up mostly by a walk-through whale.

And a cast-iron pig thing.

As I was walking through the dark caves in the City Museum with no idea of where I was or how to get back to the light, I heard two women in the distance, their voices echoing down through the chambers. One said that she’d just gone down a ten-story slide.

That sounded like fun. But I had no idea where it was. I wandered about alone in the dark some more until I came to a narrow iron staircase. A hand-painted sign on the wall said the slide was up the stairs. I climbed. And climbed. In places, the stairs were so narrow I almost had to turn sideways. Police tape blocked off mysterious hallways. There was nobody around. I could see towers of spiraling sheet metal here and there, some of them ending in mid-air several floors up in space.

I finally could go no further up. I crept along a narrow walkway and found a guy standing next to several buckets that were catching rain dripping through the roof. It had the feel of a huge construction project long abandoned. The guy pointed to the start of the slide — an opening about three feet square. I sat on the edge, about to launch myself into the unknown. The ceiling of the slide, made up of cage-like bars, seemed awfully close. I asked if I should lay flat on my back. The guy said I could sit up if I wanted to.

I took off. For the first couple floors, my shoes kept catching on the sides. I tried to find a better position and painfully smashed my left knee into something. I laid back and stretched out, and I took off. The final several floors went by in a hurry. I landed at the bottom, dizzy and glad I’d survived — but almost tempted to do it again. Almost.

Here’s a shot from the bottom. The slide is the spiral back in the corner. The others are shorter slides and decoys to make me think I was spiraling to my death. For the record, the chair went down the slide too. I thought about getting a photo on the way, but it was pitch dark and at any point in time, I could only see about five feet of the slide. And I was moving too fast and trying not to die.

One section of the second floor was filled with pieces of masonry recovered from buildings that were torn down. There was no attempt to explain any of this. Or if there was, I didn’t pay any attention to it.

This pencil picture was not an easy photo to get. At the beginning of the evening, there was a line of people in this room, waiting to sign up for a chance to meet an NFL player. I went back later when the line was gone and waited several minutes until things were clear. I put the chair on the pencil, took this photo and reached for the chair. I had just pulled it out of the way when a drunk woman came flying up from behind me and landed on the pencil, missing the chair and my hand by inches.

The pencil is 76 feet long and weighs 21,500 lbs — the equivalent of 1,900,000 regular pencils. It’s filled with 4,000 pounds of graphite and the eraser is real rubber — it writes and erases.

Here’s a shot from the eraser end taken earlier in the evening.

Union Station in St. Louis, built in 1894, is a very impressive building.

The front of the building is taken up by a hotel that goes to great lengths to inform people that they aren’t welcome inside unless they have a room. The mall in the old train shed is an impressive space. But it isn’t much of a mall. Many of the storefronts were empty, and most of those that weren’t empty were closed — at 4:00 on a Wednesday afternoon. The place was nearly empty.

Inside I discovered the Throne of Love.

And this painting on the wall, although the sign detracts from the mystique a bit.

Two blocks of downtown St. Louis are filled with a sculpture garden. Some of the artwork is fun, some is just there. The brochure states, “You won’t find walls or fences, admission fees or do not touch signs, because at Citygarden you are always free.”

Apparently, the security guards can’t read, because when I placed the Red Chair on a pedestal next to one of the statues, a guard came running out of his post in the pouring rain to yell at me and tell me I couldn’t put the chair there. He was rude and out of line and didn’t back down a bit when I told him I was just taking a picture. Whatever. Otherwise, the garden was pretty cool.

The work on the left, called “2 Arcs x 4 230.5 Degree Arc x 5,” is by a guy who tries to create “art” that is “non-expressive and not subject to personal interpretation.” My personal interpretation is that the sculpture is pretty cool but the author is full of himself.

The bird, titled “Bird.” The artist designed it after observing her own children. Not sure I’d want to admit that.

This one’s called Kindly Geppetto. It supposedly explores the complicated relationship between the creator and his subject.

This hollow head is called Eros Bendato.

Here’s the view from inside looking out.

I took this photo with the little red chair on Wednesday night. I returned three times with THE Red Chair on Thursday, but the first time, during a storm, the screen had an error message. The second time, it had a local TV station and the third time it had the Cardinals game — as did every other TV screen in the town.

The name of this sculpture is “Untitled (Two Rabbits).” The artist covered his rabbits with white paint to create “the impression of marshmallowy lightness.”

You may have guessed by now that my opinion of a given sculpture is based entirely on how well I can incorporate it into a red chair photograph.