What day did my oven door explode? It was on Saturday evening, …right! I had made a pizza at the usual high temperature (500ºF). We had finished eating, watched something on TV, the oven was off and the door was open the whole time after I took out the pizza, and the oven had completely cooled down. Before bed it was time to clean up. As I held the rack I had taken out of the oven when I made the pizza, I lightly touched it to the still-open oven door. I didn’t bang it, it was more like a slight tap. And, boom! – the entire glass plate on the inside of the door just shattered into a thousand pieces. Incredible.
So we spent twenty minutes picking up shards off the floor and also using a spatula to lift the remaining shattered plate of glass off the open door (most of the broken plate of glass lay on the still intact exterior glass of the oven door). It was surreal.
I googled the issue, and apparently it’s not uncommon. Christ. So now I have yet another house to-do on my list, the one I’d like to ignore: phone [favorite appliance repair company], hope to get [favorite appliance repair man] for repairs.
Yesterday we drove into Boston to the MFA. It was a good visit, but such staggering differences in the quality and the qualities of the exhibitions we saw. First, and by far the best: Botticelli. This exhibition is astonishing for bringing together not only never-before-seen-in-the-US works by Botticelli, plus assembling a star cast of works from US (lots of Boston) and Italian collections, but also for opening with Fra Filippo Lippi (and even his son, Filippino Lippi). Next up we ambled over to see “Matisse in His Studio.” What a disappointment. I’m not sure if it’s the curation (too many distinctly second-rate and / or tossed-off weak sketches, preliminaries, etc. were included, which basically just underscored the superiority of the inspirations – African masks, say – over Matisse’s “interpretations”), or what, but this show pissed me off. Like we’re supposed to genuflect in front of the great “Old Master”‘s every brain fart. I doubt, seriously, whether Matisse would have approved of this exhibition, which seemed better suited to a small volume, a publication – because even relatively weak work can look so much better reproduced in a book. It might have more likely been able to hold its own against a tribal mask that way. It was also jarring to see the lousy craftsmanship of the super-revered moderns after seeing the Botticelli exhibition. We also saw the Lodz photo exhibit, very depressing, obviously. Why, why…