December 28th, 2018 | General, visual arts, Women
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...
December 5th, 2018 | Canada, Europe, Family, Friends, Genealogy, General, Holidays, Memory, Travel
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...
November 30th, 2018 | Architecture and Design, Canada, General, Travel, visual arts
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...
September 5th, 2018 | Education, General, visual arts
The exhibition Modern Times: American Art 1910-1950 just closed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I had been thinking I should go see it since late last spring. I made it on the last day. Good show. Glad to see those works out of the vaults where they normally hide...
September 4th, 2018 | General, Memory, Politics
I remember my mother glued to our old black-and-white television in November 1963 and Kennedy’s funeral procession as it wended its way ultimately to Arlington National Cemetery. I watched some of it—I was eleven—and remember the views of the caisson and the riderless...
August 5th, 2018 | Education, General, visual arts, Women
I have been reading a lot of books that focus on art and Paris from the 1890s into the first decades of the 20th century and these two followed one on the other. What is truly fascinating after a sequence that included Corbett’s Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin,...
June 25th, 2018 | Architecture and Design, Europe, Gardens and Gardening, General, literature and poetry, the world and Mother Nature, Travel, visual arts
Every time I pick up a Ross King book, it’s longer and weightier. Brunelleschi’s Dome was a little bit of a thing, perfect for reading on a transcontinental flight. Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling was longer but then the Sistine Chapel ceiling is a better...
June 24th, 2018 | Africa, General, Indigenous Peoples, literature and poetry, Popular Culture, Travel
I do like Gideon Crew–quite a bit more than Preston & Child’s better-known sleuth, Agent Pendergast, whom I find annoying in the southern, courtly, albino-pale, omniscient and omnipotent way. “The Pharaoh Key” (#5 in the Gideon Crew series)...
June 19th, 2018 | Education, General, literature and poetry
Books that explore language, grammar and writing are my guilty pleasure. I consider the injunctions presented as I am absorbed by the text, trying to figure out if the writers are following their own instructions. I also hope that I will learning something from them I...
May 29th, 2018 | Europe, General, literature and poetry, Memory, music, Politics, Popular Culture, Time Passes, transportation, Travel
According to the introduction, Mary McAuliffe produced “Twilight of the Belle Epoque: The Paris of Picasso,Stravinsky, Proust, Renault, Marie Curie, Gertrude Stein, and Their Friends through the Great War” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014) as a sort of conclusion to...
