I’ll leave you with this moody photograph of the back entrance to the museum. There’s a woman standing in the top right; it’s easiest to locate her by her shadow.

***

Todd and I will be in Florida next week. I’ll be posting about that trip as well as a visit to the Denver Art Museum.

***

Oh, tragedy! Wen Chocolates is closing. I’d probably pine away and die, but I think it will still be possible to order William Poole’s chocolates online.

I am forced to write a wordy post about the Genghis Khan exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, because no one was allowed to take photographs. Some materials in the exhibit were contributed by private individuals, including the body of a Mongolian woman. The emphasis on showing respect for the human remains struck me as unnecessary and odd. Perhaps there was a museum incident I missed?

My only photographs come from the approach to the exhibit, which was on the third floor. Going upstairs in the DMNS always activates my fear of heights; on Sunday I told Todd it felt as if my whole body was fizzing, starting in my belly and going out from there.

This fin whale hangs in the back of the museum: its head points toward the front of the museum, and its tail reaches out to Genghis Khan on his throne, right next to the group of red hat ladies who came to visit.

And here’s a closer view of the entrance to the Phipps Special Exhibits Gallery, which was rebuilt in 2009. Genghis Khan is the first exhibit in the remodeled gallery.

The Museum is seeking LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for the Phipps Gallery project. Construction crews used low-emitting materials in construction, and the gallery is designed to consume less power overall. In addition, 17,254 pounds of materials from the old gallery were reused in the new gallery, saving tons of trash from the landfill. The terrazzo floor covering outside the gallery includes 4,000 pounds of recycled crushed beer bottles.

Getting into the exhibit was a slow process. First we waited outside for the vestibule to clear, and then we waited inside the vestibule. Even so, there were people 2 and 3 deep around each exhibit.

In the vestibule, we received cards printed with a name: mine was Börte, the first wife of Genghis Khan (then called Temüjin). As the mother of his four heirs, she became a powerful woman in her own right, as did her daughters.

Kiosks throughout the exhibit gave snippets of information about each character. Todd complained that his character was just some guy and that the same thing had happened at the Titanic exhibit as well: he was a third-class passenger who drowned, whereas I was rich enough to get a seat on one of the boats.

Whoever designed the exhibit had taken care to promote the contributions of women. Höelün, Temüjin’s mother, survived ejection from her husband’s clan after his murder and kept her 7 children alive on the steppes until Temüjin could begin his ascent.

And one of Genghis Khan’s daughters led an attack in Central Asia.

I had mixed feelings, however, about the note that women played an important role in battles: they killed the wounded and collected the arrows.

Hmm, killing the wounded. Now there’s a noble profession. Yanking arrows out of dead (or dying) bodies is right up there too.

This exhibit rekindled my ambivalence about force. I had a great time taking Krav Maga self-defense classes for 2 years. I still dream of being a modern-day freelance warrior, but then reality, in the form of my inability to do even 1 pull-up, does intrude.

The larger the scale of force, the more it bothers me.

I admire Temüjin for uniting clans who were continually attacking each other; they repaid the favor (which involved killing the clan leaders and promoting their subordinates) by declaring him Genghis Khan, or sovereign ruler. But why should I admire Kublai Khan, his grandson, for uniting China? Why does China need to be united? Why must empires expand? No matter how far we push out the borders, there will always be an enemy on them. Why not just live with it?

I also admire Genghis Khan for supporting all religions and encouraging the arts and sciences.

All that conquest, though, past the point of uniting the Mongols? Pure ego.

***

The exhibit ends by showing us modern-day Mongolians. The population in Denver, 2,500 to 3,000, is the largest in the United States; Mongolians like Denver’s climate. Denver has been Ulaanbator’s sister-city since 2002, and there is a City of Ulaanbaatar park near Lowry.

On Sunday, approximately half the members of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science decided to show up when we did.  Oh, well, at least we had biscuits in our bellies.

We had an hour to amuse ourselves before we could get into the Genghis Khan exhibit, so we wandered around until we found my favorite exhibit at the museum: Vasily Konovalenko’s gem carvings. As you may or may not be able to tell from this sign, the guy was self-taught. He became famous for his carvings in Russia, and then he emigrated to the United States in 1981. The DMNS has the largest collection of his carvings outside Moscow.

Almost everything about this servant is carved from gems, except the tray.

It was a bit of a challenge to photograph the figures, between the low light and the reflective cases. This detail from a strolling couple has eye-popping colors. The bodies are carved from quartz. My favorite carving is this one, of three singers, one with a balalaika (on the left) and one with a horn. DMNS uploaded a few pictures of other carvings to Flickr.

On Sunday Todd and I visited the Genghis Khan exhibition at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in City Park. Unfortunately, photography was expressly forbidden in the exhibit. If I’d had a supercool stealthy Leica, or some such camera, I might have snuck some photos. But I didn’t, and nobody else was sneaking any, so I didn’t have any cover.

I was able to take pictures of other parts of the museum, however. Here is the first, and probably the plainest, of my photographs: a side gallery at the DMNS. It’s probably used for parties. My favorite part is the palm trees.

Saturday wasn’t the first time I’d been to the Denver Black Arts Festival. I went last year and enjoyed watching the Over the Hill Drill Team, among other things (my apologies for the blurry point-and-shoot picture). But this year the 23-year-old festival was under new management and promised change, in the form of the Health Is Wealth Pavilion and the Gift of Green Pavilion. There were also two food courts, as well as numerous arts vendors scattered throughout the park.

I’m not sure the arrangement of the festival in City Park differed from last year’s. It seemed the same to me, but then I did enter from 17th and Colorado this year, instead of walking over from the farmer’s market on Colfax at the esplanade.

I paid the “voluntary” $1 donation at the gate and spent another $2 on a raffle ticket. My first stop was Joda African Village, a discrete area with its own small stage and a few booths. I arrived at the end of M’ Shaka Fusion’s performance and didn’t feel compelled to wait for the next act, so I moved on to the F. Cosmo Harris Gospel Stage, where a dance group was performing to recorded music.

One thing I like about the Black Arts Festival is its location, actually IN a park instead of on the street surrounding a park (like Cinco de Mayo). But if you’re going to put a festival in a park, why not set up stages closer to shady areas so that festival-goers don’t have to hide under umbrellas?

The Black Arts Festival wends its way through City Park from 17th and Colorado toward the lake, with most booths set up along the paved paths and stages in the grass. I stopped for lunch at the Jerk Joint, one of two Caribbean food vendors, for the jerk pork dinner, with moist shredded pork, rice, and red cabbage coleslaw. The BBQ sauce tasted of vinegar, but my favorite condiment was the sauce marked “very spicy.” Yes! Then I finished with ice cream at Baskin-Robbins, which always makes me think of growing up in Kansas City. This food court also featured BBQ and the chicken-on-a-stick I enjoyed at Juneteenth. In the second food court, closer to the lake, I passed a Greek food both, the first I’ve seen at any festival, but I was full.

From across the park this building beckoned me, but as soon as I walked in I realized I had entirely mistaken it. I was expecting exhibits about nontoxic paint and compact fluorescent light bulbs, but instead, the HUD Healthy Home explained how to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning and how to seal cracks to keep out bugs. I wondered why I’ve never seen this exhibit at any other festival; I had the same reaction to my second encounter with the car crash exhibit (the first was at Juneteenth).

Finally I reached the Kuumba Main Stage, located down the hill from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. While the crowd there waited for the SOS Band, they were entertained by local radio personality Reggie McDaniel and the members of Slam Nuba, a competitive performance poetry team that regularly competes in the National Poetry Slam. Their theme was relationships, and the second reader asserted that words are magic, both good and bad: “Your marriage is mangled because you misused your magic!” My favorite reader was the Original Woman, who asked the crowd stretched out on the lawn if they were tired of the fairy tales they told their daughters, tired of the stories in which all the woman are evil. She said she wanted to tell a story in which a princess wakes up a prince.

At that point I wished I had more than a couple of hours to spend at the festival. It wasn’t nearly enough to sample the rich variety of offerings. I was heading back to my truck when I remembered one final errand: I wanted to dispose of an extra copy of Black and Brown Faces in America’s Wild Places, a book written by photographer Dudley Edmondson in an effort to coax more African Americans into national parks. The value of this book for white people lies in sections like “Being a Face of Color in Remote Places.” (You should buy it just to read the story by the Yosemite park ranger about taking a KKK family into a cave.)

I stopped at the booth for Urban Spectrum: Spreading the News About People of Color, thinking they might want a copy of the book to add to the selection of books already on their table. Rosalind Harris, the publisher, suggested I donate it to the Black American West Museum and was generous enough to escort me through the festival in an effort to locate a woman who worked at the museum. I truly appreciate her kindness.