Sonya Clark's truce flag

At last night's discussion group, the topic was Ukraine: when did the war begin? is "war" the term you'd use? why did it start? how much money has the U.S. spent in support of Ukraine in the last nine months? is that amount reasonable? organizations that funnel donations to the Ukrainian cause? to Ukrainians? would you send money? specific support for Ukrainian relief or to organizations that work in many situations, e.g., International Rescue Committee, Doctors Without Borders, American Friends Service Committee (or other service committees)? how has your opinion changed over the course of the year? can the U.N. or the international courts play a role in ending the Ukrainian conflict?

Most of the people in the discussion supported aid for Ukraine, including military aid. I mentioned in an email before the discussion (which was online rather than in-person) that I was torn by the whole thing. I'm an adamant pacifist but I couldn't explain what that meant in this context. I do believe strongly that war is generally (always?) a result of earlier war or conflict. How do you get to peace? Is it just utopian and totally unachievable? Quakers and Mennonites and others have been trying for centuries to achieve peace. Martin Luther King said that "true peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."

I'm in Washington at the moment and visited the "This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World" at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum today. Lots of powerful work but one work that seemed to me to address my dilemma about explaining pacifism. The wall text near Monumental by Sonya Clark read "What if this flag of truce was the flag we knew, instead of the Confederate battle flag?"

The large textile work is based on the piece of cloth flown at Appomattox Court House in 1865 to indicate the surrender of the Confederate army. The cloth is in the collection of the National Museum of American History, part of the Smithsonian. This large version was made by Sonya Clark in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. It was shown in a 2019 exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. For more information on the project: https://americanart.si.edu/blog/sonya-clark-art

Conflicts and wars involve two or more parties. We need justice but, mostly, we just need to all be willing to say "no" to resolving our conflicts through violence. I am discouraged by the situation in Ukraine but I know that peace is impossible when military response is honored.

the books I read in 2022

The last book I read in 2021 was the enjoyable Some reasons for travelling to Italy by Peter Wilson. That title will not surprise you. The only surprising thing might be the "some" rather than "oodles of." As is usually the case, my reading this past year has been a mix of fiction and non-fiction. This is the list of titles, in chronological reading order, some annotations. Most of the editions I read are paperbacks; the dates here might be the hardcover date. 

• Mr Beethoven, by Paul Griffiths (2020)
• Memorial, by Bryan Washington (2020) - this was on a friend's list of books read and recommended this year; me too
• Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart (2020) - strong feeling of place (Scotland) and economics (poverty) and youth; also on another friend's list of books read
• A nest of vipers, by Andrea Camilleri (2013) - Camilleri's Montalbano mysteries are set in Sicily and very evocative of place; many have been made into TV movies
• Dark archives: a librarian's investigation into the science and history of books bound in human skin, by Megan Rosenbloom (2020) - sounds morbid but Rosenbloom uses a book to focus each chapter which may or may not involve a book that is actually bound in human skin; really enjoyed reading this book
• Queer city: gay London from the Romans to the present day, by Peter Ackroyd (2017)
• Breakfast with Buddha, by Roland Merullo (2007) - Dorothy recommended this one after I told her about having read his The delight of being ordinary; both are recommended by me, Breakfast takes place on a road trip to North Dakota
• On Juneteenth, by Annette Gordon-Reed (2021) - I had to read it for a variety of reasons, including its currency and Juneteenth is my birthday
• A visit to Don Otavio, by Sybille Bedford (first published in 1953, I read the NYRB edition, 2016, with introduction by Bruce Chatwin)
• The nickel boys, by Colson Whitehead (2019)
• How to hide an empire: a history of the greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr (2019)
• Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell (2020)
• Out of Italy: two centuries of world domination and demise, by Fernand Braudel (first published in 1989, I read Europa Compass, 2019, translation)
• Logical family: a memoir, by Armistead Maupin (2017) - some good reflections on life events that played out in his fiction
• The glass facade, by John Watney (1963)
• The folded leaf, by William Maxwell (first published in 1945, I read the 1956 Vintage edition)
• Square haunting: five women, freedom and London between the wars, by Francesca Wade (2020) - H.D., Dorothy Sayers, Jane Harrison, Eileen Power, Virginia Woolf, on Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury
• Bath haus, by P.J. Vernon (2021)
• The smart enough city: putting technology in its place to reclaim our urban future, by Ben Green (2019)
• A saint from Texas, by Edmund White (2021)
• Broken glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the fight over a modernist masterpiece, by Alex Beam (2020) - I toured the Edith Farnsworth House, outside Chicago, after the ARLIS/NA conference; the struggle to get the house built was monumental; it was wonderful to see the house, much illustrated and published, in its landscape along the Fox River
• Ninety-nine glimpses of Princess Margaret, by Craig Brown (2017) - maybe I liked it because I'm just a royal family fanboy or because I was kind of obsessed with The Crown; still, this was a good read of short chapters focusing on events with some association with Princess Margaret
• The mirror & the light, by Hilary Mantel (2020) - finally
• The sweetness of water, by Nathan Harris (2021)
• Four lost cities: a secret history of the urban age, by Annalee Newitz (2021) - Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor, Cahokia
• Correspondents, by Tim Murphy (2019) - the protagonist is an Irish-Arab American who becomes a journalist/correspondent in the Middle East during the late 1990s into the aughts; I enjoyed it very much, good place-ness, rather heartbreaking
• Lotharingia: a personal history of Europe's lost country, by Simon Winder (2019) - one of a trilogy about Central Europe

I'm not quite done with Lotharingia but it is such a wonderful read. Lotharingia started out as the portion of Europe given by Charlemagne to one of his grandsons.  The story has lots of Burgundy and Flanders stuff, places and art and architecture that I have long been interested in. Winder litters his history with geographic and cultural spices.

I didn't annotate all of the titles and I pretty much enjoyed all of this year's books. It took me quite a while to get through The mirror & the light but I had to read volume 3 of the Cromwell trilogy and I was deeply immersed in Tudor England as I read it. 

If you want to see how Goodreads sees my year's reading, go to https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2022/6837039. There, you can click on book jackets and see a description. Remember to support independent bookstores if you are going to buy the book. Both IndieBound and Bookshop.org can help you order a book by mail and support an independent bookstore in the process.

separated at birth: Mary Baker Pirelli

 

Pirelli Tower

Milan, Italy

Gio Ponti, with Pier Luigi Nervi and Arturo Danusso

1956-1958

Photo by jon_buono on flickr

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonbuono/13996836142/

Christian Science Center

Boston, Massachusetts

tower on right: former Administration Building, 1972

Araldo Cossutta of I.M. Pei & Associates

By I, Luca Galuzzi, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2689070

separated at birth: goats and antiquities

The Ortlip Gallery at Houghton University currently has an exhibition of "Lithographs of the Holy Land and Egypt by David Roberts, Royal Academician." I know I recataloged a bunch of large portfolios, including like Roberts if not Roberts himself, when I was in the reclass section at Cornell between 1969 and 1971. Here's one of the lithographs that especially caught my eye in the exhibition.

"Goats at the entrance to the caves of Beni Hassan"

David Roberts, R.A. (1796-1864)

Part of the reason it really caught my eye is that we had seen sheep and goats at the ruins of Solunto. We heard their bells before we saw them. We were heading along the northern coast of Sicily, about to return our rental car and spend a last couple days in Palermo before heading to Rome and home.

We also have seen goats being used for grass and shrub control in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. It's a fairly old park but not antique.

Christmas 1994 & the Cistercian Chapel by Gary Cunningham

Christmas 1994 found me alone (but not lonely) in Texas, where I was then living, in Fort Worth. I gave myself a local road trip for Christmas. The day started with Christmas morning mass at the Cistercian Abbey Church on the outskirts of Dallas, designed by Gary Cunningham and completed not long before. The low winter sun was bright on the facade of the church.

I went on to the Solana office park, designed by Legorreta Arquitectos. The campus was adorned with bright red decorative balls in reflecting pools and across the landscape.

Next stop was Decatur to add to my collection of county courthouses. There was recorded seasonal music playing around the courthouse square. This was Texas so the temperature was plenty warm for Christmas, compared to upstate New York.

It is nearing Christmas 2022, twenty-eight years later. Today's mail brought the November-December issue of Texas Architect, one of the magazines I index for the Avery Index. Imagine my delight to find that the Cistercian Chapel has won the 25-Year Award from the Texas Society of Architects. There are more professional pictures in the article, including one with a healthy layer of snow and three interior views.

Life and reading always chase their own tails. I am presently reading Lotharingia by Simon Winder. We are in the 15th century so it is lots of Burgundy and plenty of Cistercian stuff.

$200 billion dollars

One of the headlines in today's New York times: Worsening debt in poor nations threatens crisis. Looming default risk. Lenders are slow to help--World Bank warns of lost progress.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/03/business/developing-countries-debt-defaults.html

So what's the amount that the poor countries owe, by some calculations? As much as $200 billion dollars to wealthy nations.

An article on visualcapitalist.com has a table of the ten richest billionaires for each year of the last ten. Mostly men. The richest person in 2022 has something over $200 billion. The richest person in 2013 had a rather paltry $73 billion.

Yes, I know it's only money. The 2022 person is Elon Musk so that number may be different now than it was at the beginning of the year. In 2015, two Kochs or two Waltons, together, could have beat out #1, Bill Gates.

the things you learn in the credits

As you may know, I'm a bit obsessed with film credits, especially Loop Groups aka Crowd ADR. And filming locations, both cities and buildings.

Prince Charles is played by Dominic West in Season 5 of The Crown. As I was watching the credits of an episode today, I noticed that the actor playing Prince William was Senan West and wondered if he was related to Dominic West. A little googling indicates Senan is Dominic's eldest son. Television imitating life.

Prince William and Prince Charles, The Crown, Season 5

(Senan West and Dominic West)

(photo: Keith Bernstein/Netflix)

(from the Netflix Tudum site)

Dominic West also played a role in Downton Abbey: A New Era, the second movie based on the television series. He played Guy Dexter, a silent film star, part of a film being made at Downton Abbey. Fictionally, he will rescue Thomas Barrow from his closet.

teary meltdowns in Cefalù

We stayed in Cefalù as we neared the end of our month's circumnavigation of Sicily in 2013. Our hotel was away from the center, near the sea. This view was from the deck outside our room. I was feeling quite teary about the impending return to the U.S.

The days before Cefalù had taken us from Taormina and the landscape around Mount Etna, through the mountains, along the northern coast, visiting several sites of the Fiumara d'Arte.

I am often taken back to Sicily in my thoughts, sometimes just flashback memories, sometimes by reading or films. I just finished watching From Scratch on Netflix. It's a love story of a Black American woman and a Sicilian man. She's an artist, he's a chef. He grew up in a small town not far from Cefalù. We didn't go through Pollina where his native town scenes were filmed but we were close. There was plenty of Florence and Sicily as setting, along with Los Angeles. They also thanked the town of Termini Imerese in the credits; we drove through Termini Imerese and discovered this wonderful 18th-century bridge.

At one point in the film, after Lino and Amy have moved to Los Angeles and before Lino has found his place in the sprawl, he notes that he is flummoxed by Los Angeles because there is no center. In Italian towns, even the small ones, the Centro is important. Amy, naturally and beautifully, says that she will be his center as he is hers.

Plenty to get sentimental about, as well as being tear-jerked by the story of Lino and Amy. I checked the IMDb page for Zoe Saldaña, the female lead and producer for From Scratch. She is also a June 19th-born person.

modernist moments: Villa Cavrois and Raadhuis Hilversum

Villa Cavrois, Croix, France, 1932

designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens

photo: By Velvet - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46023775

City Hall, Hilversum, The Netherlands, 1931

designed by W.M. Dudok

(my photo, 2016)

separated at birth: Stratford/Dix

Stratford Hall, perhaps my favorite American Palladian country house. Built in the 1730s by Thomas Lee. Listed on the National Register in 1966. Located in Westmoreland County, Virginia, along the Rappahannock River. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/096-0024/ Photo credit: Calder Loth, 2017

Harvey Building, Dix Park, Raleigh, N.C. Rear elevation. Photo by John Meckley. https://www.flickr.com/photos/meckleychina/52341940204/in/dateposted/

Cleveland, architecture, and CWRU

James Polshek died a few days ago in New York City. His obituary in the New York Times says that he started his undergraduate studies in medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He took a course in modern architecture and changed his major. He transferred to Yale to get a stronger architecture education and stood next to Le Corbusier in a New York City elevator on his way to Yale.

When I was doing some itinerant cataloging at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson a dozen years ago, I fell in love with the Honey House, part of a group of dormitory buildings in the center of campus. I passed it every day at least once as I went about campus.

It has that wonderful balance and proportion that is so appealing to me in Palladian villas. I discovered later that the dormitory complex was designed by Polshek. He wasn't one of those architects where you saw the building and said obviously it was by him. But there is a care and quality that shows across his work.

When I was planning my 2015 road trip to Iowa City, Denver, Albuquerque, Fort Worth, and Bentonville, with other stops along the way, the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock was clearly on the list of sites/sights. It is also designed by Polshek, some years later than the Honey House.

The presidential library and museum is along the riverfront and near an old bridge, now for pedestrians. I wouldn't mind going back to Little Rock since the Arkansas Arts Center (now Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts) is building a new building. The expansion is designed by Studio Gang, another favorite firm.

When I was reading the Polshek obituary, I was disappointed that my graduate alma mater, Case Western Reserve University, had not satisfied Polshek's educational desires. It was an art history program, not architecture studio. I can't remember clearly but I think I took a course in American architecture during my first year of graduate study at CWRU. The professor was Edmund Chapman who was professor from 1946 to 1972. I was very satisfied with my CWRU education. Perhaps it was Dr Chapman that taught the modern architecture class that led Polshek to changing his major.

flâneurs are not slackers

Who knows why one's brain goes where it goes? I was reading about Claire Chase's season at Carnegie Hall and decided to check her LC authority record.  Flâneurs came to mind. Probably from Flute players to Flautists which files close to Flaneurs. I segued to wondering if Flâneuses were in the LCSH authority file. No Flâneuses in LCSH. I was horrified, however, to find a see-also reference between Flaneurs and Slackers. At least, all the possibly pejorative references are on Slackers.

150	__ |a Flaneurs
450	__ |a Saunterers
550	__ |w g |a Persons
550	__ |a Slackers
670	__ |a Work cat.: Kjellen, A. Flanören och hans storstadsvärld, 1985.
670	__ |a Web. 3.
670	__ |a Random House.
670	__ |a OED.
670	__ |a Amer. Heritage dict. of the Engl. lang., via WWW, June 13, 2005 |b (flâneur: An aimless idler; a loafer)
670	__ |a Cambridge dictionaries online, June 13, 2005 |b (flaneur: stroller; idler)
670	__ |a Merriam-Web. online dict., June 13, 2005 |b (flaneur: an idle man-about-town)
670	__ |a MSN Encarta dict., via WWW, June 13, 2005 |b (flâneur (plural flâneurs): idler: somebody who is idling or loafing about (literary))

150	__ |a Slackers
450	__ |a Bums (Lazy people)
450	__ |a Idlers (Persons)
450	__ |a Lazy people
450	__ |a Loafers (Persons)
450	__ |a Loungers (Persons)
550	__ |w g |a Persons
550	__ |a Flaneurs
670	__ |a Work cat.: 2005027230: Lutz, T. Doing nothing: a history of loungers, loafers, bums, and slackers in America, c2006.

separated at birth: Roman roads

Roman road, discovered at the site of a new McDonald's in Marino, Italy, restored and now visible under glass floor; photo from Hyperallergic article, February 2017, courtesy of Superintendency for Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape

Roman road, exposed, at Selinunte, on the southern coast of Sicily, photo 2013

Modern roads vary in smoothness and general condition too.

As fewer and fewer people are buying print newspapers, it is getting harder and harder to find a copy when you want one. Especially if you're looking for a specific paper like the Sunday New York Times. John sent me a link to a recent article on Curbed about why it's so hard to buy a copy of the Sunday Times. Most bodegas and delis don't carry it anymore. Even Starbucks doesn't. John lives in Ridgewood, Queens, and I've walked miles unsuccessfully to find a Times on a Sunday morning when I've been cat-sitting at John's apartment.

Recently, I've been getting my Times at the local Wegmans when I'm at home in western New York State. It's usually reliable but yesterday was the second time in a couple months they didn't have one for me. A few weeks ago, they didn't get any of the New York City papers. Yesterday, they got a short shipment and were sold out by 9:15 or so when I got there. I was sore distressed since it was my first Sunday with duty at the library and I didn't have the rest of the day to drive off somewhere else (Bath, Corning, Geneseo, Ithaca, Rochester) to find a copy. I called the Top's Friendly Market in Bath. They still had a copy and put one aside for me.

I set off for Bath after my morning walk on Monday morning, to get the reserved paper and then to stop in Hornell for a dose of pancakes at Billy Schu's in Hornell. I walked up to the customer service desk at Top's with confidence and asked for my Times. The clerk looked at the small stack of reserved papers and there was no Times. Yikes. She called for assistance from someone else who said he'd just taken the unsold Times (they had extras!!) to the back room to be written off and discarded. Maybe he could still find a clean copy. And thank heavens he could.

So I hugged my Sunday Times and headed back toward Hornell. Billy Schu's was closed for Labor Day. Oh, well, the big triumph was getting the paper and there was even a special Design section.

Photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2008_newsstand_NYC_USA_2453239739.jpg

Black Manhattan

Sometimes you feel like you're having a virgin experience ... and you're not. When we were in Provincetown in early July, I had a drink at Harbor Lounge that they called a Black Manhattan. It was rye and amaro and angostura bitters. It was delightful as well as beautiful. So I had another.

I was reading some old journal entries a little while ago and noted that I had a Black Manhattan in January at North Square, a restaurant kitty corner from Washington Square in Manhattan, just "around the corner" from my old apartment. And just six months before the one I imagined was my first Black Manhattan.

the jewel on the screen

I've been (re)watching The Jewel in the Crown (1984). It is one of the screen depictions of India that has put the country so high on my list of places I'd like to visit. Other movies include City of Joy (1992) and Gandhi (1982). The acting in all three of these films is extraordinary. Peggy Ashcroft and Art Malik were probably the two that I remembered best from my watching of The Jewel when it was first shown on PBS. At least, by name.

Now, it is Geraldine James that I am finding most thrilling. Just her presence on screen, as Sarah Layton, fills me with emotion. It is partly because I had watched Benediction (2021) not long before I started watching The Jewel on Netflix discs. She is not someone that I particularly knew before this recent infatuation but there are other recent roles that I enjoyed without attaching her name (and career). She played Queen Mary in the first Downton Abbey movie. She is in 45 Years which has been on my Netflix queue for some time (I've just moved it up the queue). In that, she plays the friend of Charlotte Rampling who was nominated for an Oscar for her role.

When I was internet traversing for this post, I drifted across pictures of Geraldine James with Ben Kingsley as Gandhi. I was surprised to see that she had done another film set in India and then even more surprised to see that it predated, but only just, The Jewel. I guess I'll have to go watch Gandhi again now. One thing is leading to another ... like always.

(The picture is from the Apple TV page for The Jewel in the Crown. The actor in the driver's seat is Charles Dance, here playing Guy Perron, and also playing Lord Mountbatten in The Crown.)

speculative cataloging

According to the Summary of Decisions, Editorial Meeting 5, May 13, 2022, the Library of Congress vocabulary editors decided not to approve the LCGFT proposal for Speculative fiction.

The reasoning: Sources describing this genre convey a lack of consensus on the meaning of the term. The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature provides several definitions for speculative fiction ranging from a specific subgenre of science fiction to a super category encompassing all fiction that departs from "reality". Because the usage is still in flux for this term and consensus has not been reached on its meaning, the term was not approved, but may be resubmitted at a future time when the boundaries of the genre are more concrete.

I very much enjoy that the reasoning matches the term. And while I'm speaking of science fiction (or, rather, they're speaking of science fiction), we went to the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once last night and it's quite amusing and strangely optimistic. It is very nice to be in Cambridge with the Kendall Square Cinema just down the street. It was, however, one of my first visits there where I wasn't ready to rush to each of the previewed movies.

separated at birth: fisherman; Schiaparelli or Fortuny?

 

Japan, Meiji period (ca. 1869-1912)

Fisherman with basket and net

Carved ivory okimono

Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Frederick Baekeland

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art

Cornell University

78.104.001

(gallery label, June 2022)

memories of my grandmother, inspired by Armistead Maupin

Armistead Maupin (Teddy, to his family) visited his grandmother at the nursing home and she did not recognize him. The long-past occurrence of reading his palm triggers her memory.

"I was making a gloomy retreat from Grannie's apartment when I had an idea. Returning to her chair, I thrust out my hand with the palm turned upward for her perusal. She seized it immediately and began reading the lines in rapt silence, like a book she'd laid down the night before and couldn't wait to return to.

Then, without even looking up, she said, very softly, 'Teddy.'

'Yes,' I said, laughing. 'Yes!'

'You're in your thirties now.'

'I am indeed.'

When her eyes finally moved up to my own, they were as open and lively as the sea. 'And you've written a novel, you say?'

'Yes. And you're in it.'

'Oh, dear.'

I laughed again. 'Not literally, but your spirit is there. Your loving, accepting spirit. She's a landlady in San Francisco, and she's a little ... spooky about things.'" [ellipsis in the text]

--Logical family: a memoir by Armistead Maupin (HarperCollins), page 276-277 in the paperback edition.

The last time I saw my grandmother (Gram, we called her) was at the nursing home. I had recently come back from my first trip to Italy (1985, I think). She didn't seem to recognize me but I had a stack of postcards and was showing them to her. When we got to a picture of the Rialto Bridge in Venice, she spoke of her father's stories of his "grand tour" to Europe in 1902. He had accompanied the art historian and professor O.P. Fairfield on the trip after an unusually hard year's work as acting president of Alfred University. His doctor said that the trip would do him more good than a year's medicine. This is paraphrased from the diary he kept on the trip.

My postcard of a famous bridge had penetrated my grandmother's aged fog and brought her memories of her father as it brought me a connection to the generations of my family. And confirmation of why I still love travel in general, Italy in particular, postcards, and probably even Palladio.

By Veronika.szappanos - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=100527291

Some years later, in 2004, 102 years after my great grandfather's trip to Italy, I traveled to Venice with Sharon Chickanzeff, livening up my life narrative by breaking my arm at about midnight, with water on the plaza, under a full moon, while peering across the canal at Santa Maria della Salute.

shock and awe

 

When I turned the page of the T magazine and encountered this advertisement, I was almost as stunned as first viewing the famous dildo picture of Lynda Benglis in Artforum, way back in the 1970s. Stopped in my very thoughts.

Caption: Lynda Benglis by Juergen Teller. loewe.com

separated at birth: flaws and scars

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpGMUuXJbGU

Andrew Garfield on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

October 12, 2017

talking about why we don't need movie stars:

they're a projection of perfection, we are all a lot of things,

dark and light, a collection of bad habits,

focus on perfection, need to accept ourselves in entirety,

beingness, not enoughness,

pretending to be real

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH_uvSxdoQU

Bridgerton, season 2, last episode

Daphne's confession in the rain to Simon

just because something is not perfect 

does not make it unworthy of love, 

you felt you needed to be without fault to be loved,

"I cannot pretend that I do not love you,

I love all of you, even the parts that are too dark

and too shameful, every scar, every flaw, every imperfection"

obsessions

In case you were wondering, Downton Abbey: A New Era has a credit for both Loop Group and Crowd ADR. The Loop Group again was Sync or Swim. But that's all I'll say here. No plot spoilers.

catering by Hantsport Baptist Church Auxiliary

As you may know, I'm a fan of watching the credits until the very end of a movie. I just watched "Cloudburst," a 2011 Canadian-American film starring Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker. The catering was done by several groups including the Hantsport Baptist Church Auxiliary. Here's the Hantsport Baptist Church in Hantsport, Nova Scotia.

(screen grab on 4 May 2022 from Google Street View, image capture 2018)

Hantsport is in the West Hants Regional Municipality. "Hants" is an abbreviation for Hampshire in England. The Wikipedia entry for Hantsport does not mention a connection with Hampshire but you wonder (or, rather, I wonder). The article does say that the native Mi'kmaq people called the area Kakagwek which meant "the place where meat is sliced and dried" and the town is still home to a small Mi'kmaq community.

clipping files

Every month, Architectural Record runs a "Guess the Architect" contest. The May issue came in today's mail and the building looked familiar but I couldn't place it. The architect was identified as being known for his interest in brick and the building's shape alludes to its location in a harbor city and its ownership by a shipping company. I googled around with various things and finally put in "hamburg" as a fairly wild guess, and there it was.

By Esther Westerveld from Haarlemmermeer, Nederland - Chilehaus - Hamburg, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33420849

The Chilehaus was completed in 1924 and designed by Fritz Höger. His Wikipedia page is linked under his name. One of the sources of information is the newspaper clipping files in the 20th Century Press Archives at the ZBW, aka the German National Library of Economics. The clippings are digitized and easily zoom in and out. We've had lots of sessions and discussions about artist files in ARLIS/NA circles. We finally got Artist files into the LC controlled vocabularies, specifically LCGFT.

The artist files were a very important part of our library resources when I worked at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, in the early 1990s.

By the way, when you look at the Chilehaus in context with the assistance of the little yellow guy in Google, the prow of the building is considerably less pronounced.

Bonus picture, aerial view of Chilehaus:

By Foto: Martina Nolte, Lizenz: Creative Commons by-sa-3.0 de, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26568634

Hieronymus Bosch in the NYTBR

Twice during the past couple-three weeks in the New York times book review, writers have mentioned Hieronymus Bosch.

"'The Doloriad' evokes Beckett's plays, or, in its static depiction of misery, Hieronymus Bosch's paintings. But 'Endgame' and 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' are funny and don't take five hours to get through. Ultimately this book, for all its ambition, isn't for me. But, who knows, it just might be what your rotten little heart deserves." -- J. Robert Lennon, in a review entitled "Wicked by design" of The Doloriad, by Missouri Williams, MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York times book review, March 27, 2022, p. 10.

"One of my treasures is a book received long ago from fellow students as a present for my Ph. D. It is a beautifully illustrated volume about Hieronymus Bosch, the medieval painter. Many people find his art disturbing, but I was born in the city where he lived and worked, and grew up with his imaginative visions of heaven and hell. I like his attention to facial expressions while depicting humanity's sins and follies. There are also tons of animals in his paintings mixed with trees, fruits and figures that are half human, half animal. Bosch was the world's first surrealist." -- Frans de Waal, "By the book," New York times book review, April 3, 2022, p. 6.

I wonder if Frans de Waal's "beautifully illustrated volume" is the 1966 monograph on Bosch by Charles de Tolnay that has had a place of honor on my shelves for more than 50 years. I am much more taken by de Waal's image of Bosch than Lennon's "static depiction of misery." Flying to Madrid to see Bosch's paintings may take more than five hours but it is well worth the trip.

restraint is relative

When you see a lovely rowhouse like this one in the 1300 block on North Dearborn Street in Chicago, you think about the extravagant window surrounds and variations in material colors. "Restraint" is not the first word that comes to mind, especially given the other houses nearby.

And then your mind drifts to those art nouveau houses you saw in Brussels:

Or to the multicolor exteriors of art nouveau houses in Turin:

Why, that Chicago house is almost classical in its quiet eclecticism.

separated at birth: basalt churches

Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church

Baltimore, Maryland

(Thomas Dixon, archt., completed 1872)

Gothic Revival

Santa Maria

Randazzo, Sicily, Italy

(opened 1214, belltower completed in 1863)

Gothic / Gothic Revival

I brake for chipmunks

This morning on my morning walk, I noticed a chipmunk was crossing the street about fifteen feet ahead of me. I stopped walking, just about as the chipmunk stopped moving. It seemed to be listening to see if those approaching footsteps were dangerous. It turned around, ran back in the direction it had come, and went almost up to the pine trees and stopped again. I didn't move. It reassessed the danger. Turned around again and ran across the street when it determined the footsteps were no longer approaching.

When I lived in Texas, I had a bumper sticker on my Isuzu pickup that said "I brake for Greek Revival." I think it came from the preservation society in Providence because Texans don't have quite so much Greek Revival as they have in Rhode Island. Bob drove the truck to work one day and one of his coworkers thought it said "I brake for Geek Revival." Not the same thing.

P.S. because it's a small world. I was looking for a picture of a chipmunk running across the street and one of the Google responses was from Dickinson, North Dakota, the destination of the road trip in Breakfast with Buddha.

The Modern, Fort Worth

This fine building, housing the Fort Worth Community Arts Center, was across the street from the Amon Carter Museum when I worked there. The building then housed the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth which later moved to a Tadao Ando building not far away. This building was designed by O'Neil Ford & Associates and is connected to the Scott Theater designed by Herbert Bayer.

Today I got to try to disentangle the authority record for Arts Fort Worth which is the new name of the merged Fort Worth Community Arts Center and the Arts Council of Fort Worth. But, more importantly, I got to think about this wonderful building.

Now the Modern looks more like this.

I was quite disappointed when I first visited Fort Worth after this building was open. I approached it from Allen's house and what you were greeted by was the loading dock. Not very pedestrian friendly. It is Sunbelt U.S. of A. Oh, well, you also get loading dock when you approach the Art Institute of Chicago from Monroe Street, a little more disguised.

separated at birth: Sicilian mecca

 

Selinunte,

on the southern coast of Sicily,

picture taken in March 2013

Mecca Hills Wilderness, California,

picture taken by DAS in February 2022

North Dakota redux

Today, still in North Dakota:

Oxford House, Fargo, N.D., built 1902 for Webster Merrifield, the third president of the University of North Dakota. Served as the president's house until the 1950s and then became a dormitory, the art department building, and the alumni center, before sitting mostly unused after 2012. Now rehabilitated as the Dr. Kathleen and Hal Gershman Graduate Center. Rehabilitation architects: JLG Architects (who also are working on the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library). Photo by Chad Ziemendorf for Preservation, the National Trust magazine. Oh, by the way, yes, this did come to my attention as I indexed.

North Dakota

What are the chances that North Dakota will come at you two days in a row? Perhaps not high, but also not impossible, as I discovered earlier today.

Yesterday, a friend from New York City sent us a link from a Hyperallergic article about a protest over the plan to send the controversial statue of Teddy Roosevelt from the front of the American Museum of Natural History in NYC to the forthcoming Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. The site for the library is on seized Indigenous land in North Dakota.

After reading the Hyperallergic article, I crawled into a prairie dog hole on the TRPL website. The building site is near Medora, N.D., and TR's ranch and the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Much of that land was seized in the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851). Rather like all of the other Indigenous land in North America that was bought, stolen, or seized from the Native Americans.

The book I am currently reading is Breakfast with Buddha by Roland Merullo (2007). It was recommended by Dorothy when I mentioned that I had really enjoyed his The delight of being ordinary, about a road trip by Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama. Breakfast with Buddha is also about a road trip, about Otto Ringling who drives to North Dakota to empty his childhood home after his parents are killed in a traffic accident. He was supposed to take his wacky sister but she substitutes a somewhat inscrutable Rinpoche. An "inscrutable Rinpoche" may be inherently redundant.

While the Rinpoche is meditating before they set off for a day's journey, Otto sinks into a couple hours of morning television at their hotel. As he's speculating about the sordid and exposed lives of the guests on the talk show, he remembers what his father said about North Dakota as the family returned from a sun festival at one of the Indian reservations in North Dakota.

"After we'd watched the dancing and singing and were on our way home in our car, my dad remarked upon how far we'd advanced since the days when the land was ruled by Indian tribes. There were farms now, he said, where once there'd been only buffalo. Farms with telephones and TVs, tractors, airplanes, medicines ... whereas, in those old days there had been nothing. You worked from morning till night, you hunted and fished and sewed and cooked, sang and danced a few times a year, made war, made peace. 'Look at us now,' he said, sweeping his hand out near the windshield at a stretch of heartland. 'Look at all this.'" (page 137, ellipsis in the book) The protagonist compares this "nothing" or "all this" to the wasteland of the TV talk shows that he had just wallowed in for a couple hours.

By the way, North Dakota is one of the three U.S. states that I have never set foot in. And reading Buildings of North Dakota was the impetus for one of my first edits of a Wikipedia page when I noted a church by an architect who also did a church in Napoleon, Ohio.

Also, by the way, just a few pages beyond the protagonist's family trip memory in Breakfast with Buddha is a chapter that circles around coincidence.

separated at birth: index / indexing

I was looking at the Times book announcements and reviews yesterday. One of the reviews was of Index, A history of the: a bookish adventure from medieval manuscripts to the digital age by Dennis Duncan (W.W. Norton). Just my kind of book. I love my indexing gig and the book is about books (&c) and the title is inverted like a subject heading string might be. It's got a pretty zippy cover.

When I think of indexes aesthetically, I generally wander over to the work of Alejandro Cesarco who was often on exhibit at Murray Guy, a favorite gallery on West 17th Street. He has done these wonderful pages of index entries where the indicated mentions may be interlocked though many stand alone. He has also done other book-related art and was matched with John Baldessari in the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative. 

You can see more of Cesarco's work on his web page, linked under his name.

separated at birth: ONLY LYON, OY YO

photo by Daniel Kelly - Vieux Lyon, Lyon, France

https://www.flickr.com/photos/37073171@N08/46858925262/

photo by Phil Schmerbeck - Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, N.Y.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/soundteeth/50919937278/