Arty Avignon

One of the museums I visited while in Avignon was the Angladon, a collection amassed by turn-of-the-last-century couturier Jacques Doucet. The guy mentored Paul Poiret and created fashions for the likes of Sarah Bernhardt and Liane de Pougy. His tastes in art ranged across a spectrum, but he liked Art Déco right much.

Here are some of the pieces I liked.

Black mask and crocodile mask, 19^th Century Guinea:

Portrait of a woman, possibly Mary Stuart, 16^th Century French School:

(What entranced me was the headpiece that seems to grasp her at the ears and center of the forehead. How does that even work?)

Bookcase, with books double-shelved:

Filing cabinet:

Bronze owl, André Derain, c1925:

Portrait of his wife, Tsuguharu Léonard Foujita, 1917:

Brush rest, China, from the time of Emperor Kângxi, 1661-1722:

“Rat Scarecrow”, China, 19^th Century:

Snow in Louveciennes, Albert Sisley, 1874:

Half-open Door, Édouard Vuillard, 1891

This is just a reflection on the case holding the Vuillard and Sisley paintings:

 

A great beat; I give it a three

I was at a conference last month. Not much of a brainer but the official party at the end of Day 1 was an Octoberfest jobber. The weather was nice, so it was held in the hotel’s courtyard, the sauerbraten and other snacks were fine and the sparkling wine was eminently drinkable.

But then they had a band.

I have so many questions. Like—do they wear those outfits to and from the gigs, or do they change at the venue? You wouldn’t want to get stopped by the State Police and end up spending the night in the hoosegow in those getups. Also, do they have other outfits for when they’re The Mariachi Brothers or play at bar mitzvahs?

Frankly, I find that stuff kind of cringeworthy, although not as much as Morris dancers. Those guys give me the willies.

But my real issue with them (and I was not alone in this) was their volume. Their playing was fine, but they had a sound setup that would have provided enough amplification to fill the Rose Bowl. They’d have been pleasantly audible if they’d turned off all the amps and just gone acoustic.

It was rather amusing, though. I left as they were breaking into that old Bavarian standard, “The Gambler”. America, gonif.

Silver spike

For more than 150 years, a gigantic phallic monument to Lord Nelson was plopped in the middle of one of the main drags in Dublin. It was erected (sorry) by the Dublin Corporation (city government) to pay homage to the victor at Trafalgar, not so different, actually, from the one in Trafalgar Square in London.

Then, in March 1966, the top of the pillar—Nelson’s statue—was blown up, presumably by members of the IRA kitted out with explosives from their pals in ETA. The remainder of the phallus was subsequently removed as a hazard.

For more than 20 years, Dubliners mulled over what to do with the space, and in 1997 The Corpo opened a design competition to replace the Pillar. The winning design was a 120-meter metallic spike, signifying nothing, really, except that you could build it.

Seriously—it has no meaning.

(Okay, the winning architectural firm called it the Spire of Dublin, and described it as an “elegant and dynamic simplicity bridging art and technology.” Whatever. They alternatively called it the Monument of Light, which makes me think of Albert Speer’s Cathedral of Light, so, no.)

Well, at least it's not a British admiral. Or a Starbucks.

But naturally, as I was walking back to my hotel from 14 Henrietta Street, I noticed it, and I had to shoot some photos.

However—and this comes under the category of “don’t try this at home, kids”—I got a little carried away with trying to capture the entire 120 meters in the shot. As I was concentrating on it—and fighting with the bloody LED screen on my digital P&S camera—I became aware of a quiet, repetitive sound somewhere in the area. Eventually I looked up and realized what the repetitive noise was. (When I got back to my hotel I saw that I’d caught it on camera, but because you can’t see anything in the sunlight on an LED screen, I didn’t realize it at the time.)

And I scooted.

Sorry, LUAS driver. I am a total idiot.

Circling the square

Dublin is famous for its Georgian squares—parks surrounded by townhouses dating from the four English kings named George, 1714 to 1830. The elegant architectural style appeals to me, so on Sunday I walked over to one of the first such to be built south of the River Liffey, Merrion Square, to admire the doors. And the knockers.

(Why does spellcheck red-line Liffey? Is no one at Microsoft Irish? Or even familiar with geography?)

Viz:

Most of the buildings are commercial establishments, and the 21^st Century has intruded:

It’s the detail that makes these doors so spectacular, though.

This door was interesting:

Primarily because it’s so hopeful about junk mail:

This guy’s door was quite the break in pattern:

Maybe because he’s something to do with real estate:

That he dressed it up:

It wasn’t just the knockers that were spectacular; several door knobs were also quite ornate:

Not all the brass was polished; some establishments were clearly slacking off. (They probably have clapped-out washing machines in their front gardens at home.) The Slovakian consular office didn’t shine their door hardware at all:

Although they did marginally better with the plate on the wall:

I thought some of the stairs down to the basement were interesting:

And there was some kind of photo shoot, with a really stroppy crew:

The park part of the square, which at one time would have been open only to residents, has a splendid playground, and statues honoring some of the famous inhabitants:

This runner was putting one of them to good use:

And some magpies were enjoying themselves.

Next trip I’ll have to take a look around Mountjoy, Fitzwilliam and Parnell Squares; I love this stuff.

Upsoaring wings: damned, damned, damned

I first ran into Jonathan Swift in high school, when I did a paper on the Anglo-Irish hostility. You know—the “hostility” that started in the 12^th Century, when Henry II used the excuse of the Irish Church’s refusal to follow the Gregorian reforms (the ones that stick in my mind being monks’ tonsures and celebration of Easter) invaded Ireland. And it’s continuing today as Henry’s heir Theresa May prepares to abrogate the Good Friday Agreement and reinstate a hard border between the six counties of Ulster and the 26 counties of the Republic.

Well.

The fusion of Mother England and Celtic Ireland has produced nearly 800 years of literary giants: Oscar Wilde, Seán O’Casey, Oliver Goldsmith, George Bernard Shaw, C.S. Lewis, J.M. Synge, Bram Stoker, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Swift among them. Swift, born in 1667, straddled Ireland and England literally, born in Dublin, spending much of his early adulthood in England and then return to Dublin where he was Dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral from 1715 until his death in 1745. You may know him as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, where we get a taste of his ability to use humor to skewer the many ills he saw in the world.

The one that imprinted on me was A Modest Proposal (full title being A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick), in which Swift solves the problem of poverty in Ireland by permitting parents to sell their children as food to what we’d today call members of the 1% (English 1%, to be precise). In quintessentially Swiftian fashion, he mocks the heartlessness that the 1% still show to the poor. It’s deadly.

Swift was politically active, first for the Whigs and then for the Tories, and (as evidenced by Proposal and other writings) he was vehemently opposed to Britain’s Irish policies. He managed to get up Queen Anne’s nose, and lost ecclesiastical appointment in England. Saint Patrick’s, Dublin, was outside Anne’s gift, so that’s where he ended up. Toward the end of his life he became obsessed with death, and suffered from mental illness, quarreling with friends and growing increasingly isolated.

Today’s entry isn’t titled; it’s a concise disquisition on the nature of hell. It strikes me as being timely, nearly 300 years later. Same players, same outcomes. So much for progress.

All folks who pretend to religion and grace,

Allow there's a HELL, but dispute of the place:

But, if HELL may by logical rules be defined

The place of the damned -I'll tell you my mind.

Wherever the damned do chiefly abound,

Most certainly there is HELL to be found:

Damned poets, damned critics, damned blockheads, damned knaves,

Damned senators bribed, damned prostitute slaves;

Damned lawyers and judges, damned lords and damned squires;

Damned spies and informers, damned friends and damned liars;

Damned villains, corrupted in every station;

Damned time-serving priests all over the nation;

And into the bargain I'll readily give you

Damned ignorant prelates, and counsellors privy.

Then let us no longer by parsons be flammed,

For we know by these marks the place of the damned:

And HELL to be sure is at Paris or Rome.

How happy for us that it is not at home!

Upsoaring wings: Through violence and grace

Jean Cocteau was one of those polymaths who are all over the creative place—poet, writer, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. And he was good at all of it. He delighted in cocking a snook at bourgeois sensibilities, and he was very good at that, too.

The crowd he ran with—including Picasso, Dialhigev, Apollinaire, Modigliani and Diaghilev—was equally wild and crazy. He collaborated with all sorts of artists to create cutting edge works that outraged the Establishment: novels, poems, ballets, plays, pictures. Nothing was beyond him.

Cocteau greatly admired Orson Welles, who in many ways resembled him as Enfant Terrible and creative genius. They met at the 1936 staging of Welles’ “Voodoo Macbeth”, which moved the story from Scotland to the Caribbean, featured an all African-American cast and substituted Haitian voodoo for the Scottish witchcraft. Just exactly the sort of thing Cocteau loved.

“

At the 1948 Venice Film Festival, the two were in top form, according to Simon Callow. “[Welles] and the perennially provocative Jean Cocteau formed a sort of anti-festival clique…Together in Venice, the two men behaved like two very naughty boys.”

Here’s a photo of the two of them conspiring:

Today’s poem for National Poetry Month is from 1962, not particularly titled (Cocteau was not the sort to get fussed about titles), on Welles, to which I’m adding a drawing Cocteau did of Welles as the frontispiece of a biography by André Bazin:

Orson Welles is a poet

through his violence

and through his grace.

Never does he tumble

from the tightrope

on which he crosses cities

and their dramas.

He is a poet too in the

Loyal friendship he bears

our dreams and our struggles.

Others will know better than I

how to praise his work.

I content myself with sending him

my fraternal greeting.

His handshake is as firm as he is

and I think of it each time my work

obliges me to leap over an obstacle.