The most common comment on any report card I received in elementary school was, “Ellen…
San Francisco 1: I Begin at the End
One thing just leads to another. And another. And another. It is now 10:51 A.M. Pacific time on 15 May 2019 and I am using a program called “Notes” which is definitely not Word and it is horrible. I can’t get into Office, it seems, because the...
It Can Always Be Worse
The phone rang. Caller ID said it was the Tattooed Boy, perhaps to wish my Dear One “Happy Birthday” because, after all, it was February 8. But a woman whose voice I did not recognize spoke, saying there had been an accident and that Jay wanted to talk. He had been...
“They Started It!”: Facts, Truth and Blame
When I saw that video clip of Nick Sandmann smirking at Omaha Elder Nathan Phillips who was drumming and chanting, and realized just how close the two were standing, I was outraged at the boy’s insolence, shocked at the implicit insult of a white person to an...
Books # 26 – 34 ½ in 2018: All The Rest
I had set myself a goal on GoodReads of 50 books in 2018 and got to 34 ½. I also determined that I would post on every book I read in this blog. Well, that’s two resolutions not kept. So here are the titles left out since 4 August 2018 (in the order read): Noah...
The Portal: Eugène Delacroix’s “The Women of Algiers in their Apartment” (1834)
The painting on that wall in the Tisch Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art would not let me move on. Only a couple of years ago, My Dear One and I had wandered the maze of discontinuous hallways and Escher-like stairs that constitute today’s Louvre Museum to...
Berthe Morisot, an Impressionist Painter
I had known the exhibition was coming, noted it when it opened and then was all but resigned to missing it, as I do so many shows. But no, My Dear One and I occupied that empty day between Christmas and New Year’s with a drive to the Barnes Foundation. Damned awful...
Christmas Letter 2018
We flew off to Montreal in October for some poutine, some art museum and a ride on the Grande Roue Ferris wheel, and came back to strange goings-on in the climate controls of the car. The Scion’s fan hadn’t been working well, clacking on low, squawking on high. Then...
In The Shadow of Mont-Royal 1: Art Everywhere
Art is everywhere in Montreal. In that chilly breeze in October, in the slaty light, the stroll down Sherbrooke to the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts took us past memorials to Steve Jobs and Canada’s poet laureate, Leonard Cohen. The campus—for all those buildings...