Fundraising for art

One of the rooms I visited in the National Gallery on Monday had as a focal point what’s referred to in British garden improvement shows as a “water feature”. This one is called “Venus and Cupid”; I forget who sculpted it.

In addition to the usual spitting fish, at the goddess’s feet, this one had an interesting element: water drips from the hair that Venus is wringing, onto a dish held by Cupid, and then splashes into the pool below.

But here’s the thing that stumps me every single time I encounter it: the pool is completely lined with coins. I mean—look at it:

What is it with people and contained bodies of water that they feel obliged to toss money into it? In the few minutes I was in the room three sets of parents gave their offspring coins to throw into the pool.

I mean, I’m sure that every little bit helps the budget of the National Gallery, but this is one practice I just do not get.

Form and function

Not too far away from the wide-rimmed bowl that featured one of the approximately twelve bazillion rapes of Greek mythology, there’s a case with three more Italian Renaissance pots.

Well, two “drug jars” and a plate. By someone called Orazio Pompeii, about whom I can find no information at all.

I was vastly impressed by the size of the drug jars—at least 15 inches high. I mean—that’s pretty much the Costco-size medication container, and I wonder what drug you could get in that quantity?

Back then, I mean.

Also, I thought it very interesting that the illustration on one of them was of Cleopatra’s final dose:

Is that an invitation or a discouraging function, do you think?

But then there was the plate, which was only described as “an allegorical subject”. (Sorry about the light glare.)

I’ll have to go back and see if I can copy down the Latin inscription and get a translation. But my first thought was, “I’ll be blowed if I can figure out what, exactly, allegory this represents.”

But I’d purely like to find out.

P.S. Okay, the “drug jars” are apparently apothecary jars, so not for personal use. Unless you were extra-special friends of the druggist, I suppose.

Food service for the gods

On my flying visit to the National Gallery of Art on Monday I wandered into a room with Renaissance porcelain stuff.

(Sorry, but when I think of old dishware, I can’t help but recall one of George Carlin’s early routines about Congolia Breckinridge, the hapless daytime TV game show contestant who’s given the question category of Ancient Chinese Pottery and is stumped by the question, “How many ancient Chinese pots in a dozen?” Yes, I’m a Philistine.)

Well here’s a quasi-ancient Italian dish that completely stumped me: Francesco Avelli’s broad-rimmed bowl with Neptune raping Theophane; arms of Pucci with an ‘ombrellino’”, of 1532. (The “ombrellino” is the canopy; I had to look it up.)

Because of course you want to eat your linguine and scallops from a bowl with a picture of a god raping…well, anyone, right?

Especially if it’s got a designer’s family coat of arms on it. You can tell that branding has been around for a long time.

(I’m not going to be much help in explicating the Neptune and Theophane thing. It’s the usual maiden-too-beautiful-for-her-own-good-drives-the-gods-to-pursue-her thing, only I kind of lost interest when they started transmogrifying into sheep and rams.)

Not night at the museum

There’s an old joke that Iowans tell: What’s the difference between Minnesota and yoghurt?

Yoghurt has culture.

Okay, with the rim shot out of the way, yesterday I decided I needed more culture than I could get from a bowl of Greek yoghurt, so I headed for the National Mall. Because I live in the District They Call Columbia for the nonce, I left my place at 0930 and got to the Smithsonian Metro station at 0940. It was bitterly cold, so I had to keep moving at a good clip for that 20 minutes. And when that time was up I was in front of the National Gallery of Art, so that’s where I went.

It’s hard to describe how therapeutic that choice was. Of all the options—American history, natural history, air & space, Sackler, etc., the National Gallery was just exactly what I needed. I could only spend a couple of hours there, on account of massive back pain, but since I live here, it doesn’t matter. I can come back. But for yesterday, despite the pain, I felt lifted up and renewed by walking through just a few rooms.

 I didn’t bother with a museum map, because it’s not like I have to hit the “must-see” galleries on one trip; I could let serendipity decide my route. And serendipity delivered, because pretty much the first room I entered was full of Rodins—not the major, large-as-life pieces, but small and entirely accessible ones.

A couple of my favorites (on this pass; they might change the next time I go):

“The Evil Spirits”—I don’t know the story of this, what, exactly the forms represent, or why, but I just love the way Rodin entwines them.

“Sphinx”—I’ve never seen this mythical creature depicted in so benign a fashion. Not to mention without the lion’s body.

And how about "The Hand of God”?

From Rodin I wandered through a photography exhibit, which included some work by Richard Avedon. I hadn’t realized that he did anything besides fashion and celebrity photos, but there was a series of the great and the powerful he did in the run-up to the 1976 presidential election that was stunning, including this shot of one of my heroes, Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. Look at her fierceness:

And this “panorama” of the US leaders, military and diplomatic, in Saigon in 1971, which he called “The Mission Council”. It’s actually multiple photos that he put together with intrinsic fragmentation (allegory for the effect the war was having on the country), centered on General Creighton Abrams, commander of MAC-V, and Ellsworth Bunker, Ambassador to Vietnam. Well, South Vietnam, as was.

And that’s what the museum experience is supposed to do, isn’t it—expand your sense as well as your sensibilities.

In case this is your limit of culture vulturism, I’ll save some of my other pix for later and close out today’s post with a shot of the walkway between the east and west wings of the National Gallery.

Next time I go, I may just walk back and forth along this twinkling passage for a couple of hours for my cultural experience. Beats yoghurt.

Gratitude Monday: Le bon weekend

Today I am grateful for three-day weekends. And for having a job that recognizes the boundaries between work and, you know, life. 

And therefore for being able to enjoy the time off.

That is all.

Truly, sadly, deeply

If I could figure out how to put this post inside a black border, I would do it, because Alan Rickman has died, and my world truly seems diminished.

I want to say that the first thing you noticed about Rickman was his voice; if ever the use of “velvet” as a descriptor was apt, it was for his voice. Mellow, soft, resonant; you wanted to stroke it. But the velvet covered a core of steel, which came through in a number of ways.

He also had the most expressive face, he  conveyed madness, menace, mystery, disdain, longing, tenderness, brutality—everything came from his voice and his face. He was amazing.

I suspect it’s primarily because of Rickman (not Bruce Willis) that 1988’s Die Hard has become enshrined on a lot of people’s traditional must-watch Christmas movie lists. It was his first Hollywood role (although I recall him six years before as the slimy Obadiah Slope in the mini-series of The Barchester Chronicles). There was such relish in Rickman’s portrayal of villains—Hans Gruber in Die Hard, Slope in Barchester, Marston in Quigley Down Under, the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. They were all borderline OTT (okay, some of them went about 50 miles past the border), but utterly individual. He brought something new to each character.

Which brings me to another point, related to the voice, but much more. Rickman had a unique enunciation (which made him such a good target for the celebrity impersonators) that added layers of depth and deliciousness to the portrayal. I don’t know whether he was given the best lines in his films or he just made them the best, but in movie after movie it’s Rickman’s character who’s quoted over others.

In fact, there’s a cottage industry for celebrities imitating him, viz. my favorite, John Sessions on the panel show QI:

Moreover, he could turn a small or mediocre film into something special. The Costner Robin Hood, for example. It was splashy, but dreadful, except for Rickman’s Sheriff. Bottle Shock was thin, with a plot that drifted all over the place, but watching him made it worthwhile. Same for The January Man—even early in his career, he could add interest to a dog of a movie.

I don’t need to tell you about the Harry Potter movies (but you should read Daniel Radcliffe’s beautiful tribute to Rickman as the actor, the colleague and the human being). It was like the guy invented evil. But I loved him in the smaller productions: Truly, Madly, Deeply is one of my all-time favorite love stories, and Rickman as the dead cellist whose spirit returns to help his lover over her grief is just stunning.

And then there’s Dogma, a quirky, profane essay into religion, morality, gynecology, the destruction of the universe, and Rufus, the 13^th apostle. Rickman played Metatron, the Voice of God. Here he is, in a completely different version of the Annunciation.

He held his own in an all-star production like Love Actually, and (in my opinion) totally owned Sense and Sensibility.

And if you haven’t noticed from this very short list, his range was enormous, and I’ve not even got to his stage work. Or his personal integrity, generosity and kindness (which Radcliffe and others who knew him well have discussed).

At 69, Rickman’s loss is huge; he should have had at least a couple more decades to give us. It seems completely inadequate to say that I’m deeply saddened by his death, but that’s all I got. To quote his android in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “I told you this would all end in tears.”

Men behaving badly

So. The St. Louis (né Cleveland) Rams are moving to Los Angeles. Again.

Evidently St. Louis didn’t pony up enough to keep the NFL team there, and the city’s been dumped like a busted-up wide receiver with irreparable ACL tears. Or possibly like your second-choice date for the prom when the first choice unaccountably accepts.

As I understand it, the Rams told St. Louis, “It’s not us, it’s you.”

This is their second marriage to LA—they were the pro-football team in residence for all the time I lived there. Well, “in-residence” meaning they played in the LA Coliseum and then moved to Anaheim, which offered them more than LA for the privilege of allowing grown men to pad up more than the Michelin Man to butt heads, scratch their crotches and act like WWF performers on national television. In total, they were the “Los Angeles Rams” from 1946 to 1994.

Now, after 22 years of pledging troth to the Midwest, they’re basically saying they’re just not that into St. Louis after all, and they're ready to return to their former love.

By making this move, they’ve pre-empted the Oakland Raiders, who also played in LA the last time they got into a snit with the City Across the Bay over the notion of what they were entitled to from their community and fan base. They practiced at El Segundo High School in the early part of that relationship, which lasted from 1982 to 1994.

(That was obviously an apocalyptic year if you were an Angeleno and you gave a toss about pro football.)

As I was leaving the Valley They Call Silicon last month, the local news was pretty well wound up over the Raiders kicking their toes against the baseboards and whining that they don’t have a proper multi-billion-dollar playing field like all the other NFL teams, so they’re going to see what LA has to offer. After all, they already know the route to get there.

And as if that’s not enough steroid-infused moaning, the San Diego Chargers have suddenly also decided that nothing but Los Angeles is good enough for them. As I understand it, the Chargers get first refusal of sharing space with the Rams and the Raiders have to wait their turn. And maybe lose out.

Now, I don’t know spit about professional sports except what I can pick up from the media about the latest felony charges filed against one or more of their star players. But I do know a lot about sociopaths and dysfunctional relationships, and NFL teams, their players and their owners exhibit all the signs of both of these.

What I also don’t know is how fans allow themselves to be snookered by these teams, especially after they repeatedly demonstrate their contempt for everyone around them, especially their greatest admirers.

 

If these guys were blondes, they’d be called gold-diggers. They’re the very definition of greedy, self-serving welfare queens with no sense of loyalty to their market base—the people who pay stupid money to watch them play a game, follow their antics as though they were paradigms of Wildean wit and wear ridiculously overpriced kit simply because it’s associated with the team.

They arrive at a city like they’re at the head of an Imperial Triumph and strut about as though the entire metropolis is theirs to use as they will. But when the glitter starts flaking off, out come the demands for more. And then the whining.

They clearly view their communities and their fans as both interchangeable and disposable. “I love LA!” We’re not there this season? Oops—my bad! “St. Louis is the place.” Or Oakland. Or San Diego.

Or not.

Engaging in speculation

Well, I’ll be blowed: Newscorp CEO Rupert Murdoch, 84, and erstwhile super-model Jerry Hall, 59, have announced their engagement. Rather quaintly, they placed a notification in the births, marriages and deaths section of one of Murdoch’s flagship publications, the London Times.

As you might imagine, there’s considerable comment flying around the ether about the romance, and possible incentives for Hall’s involvement with Murdoch. No one seems to question his motivation. A lot is being made of the age difference, and Murdoch’s, uh, physical attraction(s).

So let me just point out a couple of things. Murdoch married his last wife, Wendi Deng, at age 66, when she was 29; a 37-year delta. So 25 years is a twelve-year improvement in that regard.

Second, having spent a couple of decades with Mick Jagger, and bearing four of his children, it’s not like Hall isn’t used to waking up in the morning and looking into the face of a corpse. (Not that I’m inquiring in any respect into the sleeping arrangements of any of these people.)

If you’ve not spent time in the UK, you might not have seen this commercial that Hall did for Strongbow Cider. I always thought it pretty amusing, although it never inspired me to actually, you know, drink the stuff.

But the thought occurs to me: Woman’s going to need a barrel full of cider to get through the next few months. Not to mention living with this particular cadaver.

Horsing around

I’m not sure why this meme came through on social media recently. I mean, any more than any of the “do you remember princess phones/poodle skirts/roller skate keys” memes.

If you don’t recognize it, it’s a vaulting horse, used for gymnastics. (In the Olympics, women use the horse to vault (think: Kerri Strug); men use it for upper body routines.) I recognize it, but not because I’ve ever seen it in use, much less used it myself.

When I was around junior high age, I picked up a paperback copy of The Wooden Horse, by Eric Williams, at a used bookshop on East Colorado Boulevard. That was in the days when E. Colorado was seedy and you had to be willing to push past the winos to get to the used book stores. I was.

(These days it’s Old Town Pasadena, and you have to pay big bucks to valet park your car while you eat at the trendy bistrot-du-jour. If there’s a book store of any stripe there, it’s got expensively distressed plank floors, exposed brick (possibly faux) walls and free-trade organically-grown hand-roasted coffee served in an eclectic array of porcelain-like cups. And nothing in the store costs less than $10.95, including the coffee.)

The book is a fictionalized account of a real escape by RAF officer Williams and two fellow POWs from Stalag Luft III (yes, the camp of The Great Escape, although a different compound). The schtick was that the vaulting horse would be carried out to an open field in the camp, with a man and a shovel hidden inside. The horse would be set down in the same place every day, the man would dig a tunnel under it, and each afternoon, men would carry the horse, the man and dug-up dirt back to the barracks, where the dirt would be distributed. (They covered over the opening to the hole, but I disremember exactly how that was done.)

So—a bunch of guys would carry the horse (which had to be not a trivial weight), with one or two men inside, out every day. Then a larger bunch of guys would vault over it throughout the day with enough verisimilitude that the German guards never questioned what it was there for. Then they carried horse, men and dirt back. Remarkably, to my mind, in light of the fact that they all knew that they weren’t going to benefit directly from this repeated exercise.

Eventually the horse hid two diggers, and at the time of escape (October, 1943), three men. All of them made their way to Sweden and back to the UK.

Now here’s my conundrum, as a junior high schooler, reading about a World War II POW camp populated mostly by RAF officers—a world thrice-removed from my life, with respect to the horse—I had no earthly notion of what the man was talking about. I knew what a vaulting horse was—it looked like this:

I knew it looked like that because that’s what we had in our school gym. How the hell could you conceal anything, much less three men in that contraption?

The paperback book had no illustrations, and there was no handy-dandy Internet then to come to my rescue. I went through the entire escape narrative without being able to clearly visualize how Williams and his mates did it. It wasn’t until some years later, when I found another edition of the book, that it became apparent. (I never saw the 1950 film based on the book, but here’s a still from it.)

So, when this meme made its way to my feed, what I first thought of was not gym class, or how old I may or may not be, it was of the ingenuity, perseverance and teamwork of comrades to support a crack-brained escape scheme over a period of months, back in the days before princess phones, poodle skirts and roller skates were even a thing.

Gratitude Monday: Street legal

As you may know, I’m a fourth-generation Californian. From Los Angeles. Which means that my car is very important to me.

I knew when planning my relocation to the District They Call Columbia that it would take some time to ship my car from California. When I moved from Virginia to Seattle, it was two weeks, but my employer paid for a rental car during that between-time. Not happening this time, so I was expecting to be reliant on public transportation for at least another week.

Imagine my surprise, then, to get an email on Tuesday announcing that the dispatcher for the shipping company was trying to reach me; the driver was scheduled to deliver my car the following morning.

Well, it was a bit of a scramble, but I managed to find an address near the Reston Metro station where I thought there’d be room to offload a vehicle from one of those auto-transport trailers, and I hauled out there to meet the driver’s schedule (which was obviously much more important than mine).

Imagine my surprise (again) to see the rig with my car parked in front of it on the off-ramp to the Dulles Toll Road (not the address I’d given) as the train was pulling into the station. Well, whatever, I hotfooted it over there, signed for it and prepared to drive away.

It was covered by a film of filth—the kind of thing you see on abandoned cars and vehicles in junk yards. I don’t know what the hell that rig drove through on the way from Burlingame, but it was mighty dirty. The windshield wipers in the front and rear wiper in the back scraped some of it off, but the side windows and mirrors were practically opaque.

Still—I congratulated myself on having had the foresight to bring both my sat-nav unit and the Capitol Hill parking pass with me, and made my way back to the District. Not only that, but I found a parking spot only a couple of blocks from my residence. (This is truly a miracle, because I’m very close to the working guts of congressional offices. Daytime parking spots are basically in the hen’s teeth category.)

As I backed and filled, a Prius hovered nearby, obviously in hopes that I was trying to leave and not get in. But as it drove away in disappointment, I waxed anxious over which way I should leave the permit on my dash—QR code toward the engine or the interior? I figure that if the parking enforcement personnel don’t find it in exactly the configuration they’re expecting, they’ll cite your ass and move on.

Friday I picked up my E-ZPass transponder at the downtown AAA office, and that afternoon I registered it (not online, as their site didn’t work, but some nice young woman from somewhere way south of the Mason-Dixon Line got the job done on the phone).

BTW—when I left the area eight years ago, the toll between Reston and I-66 totaled $0.75. It’s now $3.50. They start you out with $35 on your account. You’d blow through that in your first week of commuting.

I was so glad to discover that Friday night’s rain was sufficient to clear enough of the film on my windows so I didn’t have to take it to a car wash. And, as I was driving out to Reston for breakfast on Saturday, the transponder worked. And on my return to the Hill of the Capitol, I found street parking right across the street from my flat.

Honestly, it just don’t get better than that, vehicularly speaking. And this Californian is really grateful for all of it.