the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters."
Okay so that's really the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot. But it still seems appropriate. We went and saw the Titanic exhibit at COSI today.
Having read up on the discovery of the wreck way back in elementary school, having been a die-hard Titanic buff up until that damned DiCaprio movie came out, I was very interested when I heard the exhibit was coming. (Which was, like, last week, but still, I was excited!) I've avoided the "new" COSI, ever since they moved, due to horrid reviews and complaints by ppl who loved the old one, but I thought if I was ever going to go, this would be the best time.
I was both pleased and disappointed by the exhibit. It was decently set up, although the lighting was a little too dark in several rooms for my liking. It was very cool to see actual artifacts brought up from the ocean floor, and to read about the preservation efforts that kept many items from dissolving once exposed to air. (They've been down there some 80 years remember.) The pressure and long exposure to the salt water actually alters the composition of some materials. Apparently some things, either iron or steel, I forget, have a tendancy to explode when they come in contact with air...as hubby said, "I bet they found that out the hard way..."
I was irritated at first that they would remove items from the wreck, not just purses and shoes and cups and such but things like the light from the forward mast, the whistle from one of the smokestacks. Then I read the poster that talked about how the things would eventually dissolve because of the undersea creatures devouring them over time, and thought maybe they're better preserved after all. Not nearly as poigniant though, cleaned up and behind glass, as pictures of them resting on the seafloor are. Up here they just look old, like something you'd see in a museum or antique store. Down there, they look...I dunno, desolate. Abandoned. Lost. You get the feeling of disaster, seeing them there: this was a wreck, a destruction. Up here they're just museum relics.
The recreations of the ship's interior were cool. Walking down a hallway of first-class suites, seeing a third-class berth, and of course, the magnificent Grand Staircase (which I thought we'd be walking on but was in fact roped off to the public, damn them...) And by the way, translated to modern American dollars, the best first class suite on the ship cost over $60,000. A bunk in a 3rd class cabin would run you $620, and you'd be sharing it with three other people...and if you were in 3rd class, you probably died.
Anyway, that was about all I really got out of it. There were too many families, with too many fucking kids, to really get the somber awe-filled feel I usually get about the Titanic. I like kids, but with all the people around I couldn't pull myself out of the museum and into the past. (I kept skimming text posters and hardly watched any of the video portions, because there were so many people I just wanted out.) The scale model of the sunken bow section of the ship seemed to be missing the crow's nest, which bothered me to the point that I kept looking for it in the artifact showcases; I was wondering if the model had been made after the pillaging. And to me, the exhibit didn't give a good representation of the horror of being on the "unsinkable ship" as it sank, nor did it show the full coolness of discovering it sitting on the ocean bottom.
But then, the new COSI overall seems to be geared more toward kids and less toward science, or so I observed. And so I was thoroughly disappointed with much of the rest of the place. They replaced the Streets of Yesteryear exhibit, which used to take up a whole level of the old building, with this dinky street representation of 1898, which then changed to the same street as appeared in 1968. Nice idea, poorly implemented, but lots of fun things to poke at for kids. The most amusing thing I saw was a kid trying to use a rotary telephone. I wanted to go tell him that he had to spin it ALL the way around before letting go, or the number wouldn't dial right, but I refrained.
Moral of the story: 'tis better to read a book, rent a video, and otherwise do thine own research than invest in a flashy display geared toward the masses, if thou hast true interest in a topic. But I got to touch a piece of the hull of the Titanic, so despite the publicity and disgusting merchandising that accompanied the show, I am content.
