Driving downtown to the art museum on Sunday (free admission!) I caught a few minutes of someone's very respectable cover of Mose Allison's song, which totally stuck in my head when I got to the museum and wandered contentedly in the second-floor galleries looking at quilts.
I can't believe the things I'm seeing
I wonder 'bout some things I've heard
Everybody's Crying Mercy
When they don't know the meaning of the word
A bad enough situation
It's sure enough getting worse
Everybody's Crying Justice
Just as long as it's business first
Toe to toe
Touch and go
Give a cheer
Get your souvenir
People running 'round in circles
Don't know what they're headed for
Everybody's Crying Peace on Earth
Just as soon as we win this war
Straight ahead
Knock 'em dead
Pack your kit
Choose your hypocrite
Well you don't have to go to off-Broadway
To see something plain absurd
Everybody's Crying Mercy
When they don't know the meaning of the word
What was the name of that club in Detroit where my friend Eddy and I saw Mose Allison? Eddy was a big blues and jazz freak who, luckily for me, turned me onto Mose and many other nonpop musicians, as well as places like the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor and the ______ in Detroit. Damn, memory, it was only 35 years ago.
It added a lot to the visual experience to have a soundtrack. A good museum is already a multisensory experience anyway, letting the placement of visual art in the gallery move you bodily through the space, letting your changing position in the room change the way the pieces on the wall meet the eye of the beholder, checking out the people checking out the art, humming a tune, seeing if a rhythm develops.
It wasn't a huge crowd, but the show was well attended. Quite a few younger people, a sizeable group trailing the docent who was leading a tour, and a middle-aged couple in continuous conversation with a tall younger man in a clerical collar and a really nice linen suit, eavesdropping on their conversation: (I'm paraphrasing) some people say the best reason for believing the Isaac story is that it's too outlandish to make up.
The quilt exhibit was great, by the way, with lots of variety in materials, design, color, and some stretching the definition of quilt. My favorite was a kind of collage of vegetable images forming a mandala. Gven and her sister and mother enjoyed it too - something for everyone.
In the back of my mind, I was probably still digesting Rev. Susan's sermon about reading the Bible without being intimidated, my favorite anecdote being the Presbyterian minister's account of shaking her Bible study class out of their fear of the text by asking them to imagine they were watching "Leviticus: The Movie."
By a happy accident, we found ourselves in another room adjacent to the quilt exhibit that contained a lot of images of text, including a book whose pages had been cut away into a long continuous paper strip that wound itself into a ball beside the book. I wish I'd thought of that, but I'm glad someone did.
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