Moira Rose is now working for Eli Lilly

Fake Eli Lilly advertisement at the end of Stephen Colbert's monologue

10 November 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WhQjgy96hE

(the last minute or so)

Moira Rose for Herb Ervelfingerlicking Fruit Wines

Schitt's Creek

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

I Navigli di Milano, then and now

Two and a half years ago, we were in Milan, really enjoying the early evening cocktails and snacks, aka aperitivo. One of our most enjoyable evenings was along the Navigli (canals), on the south side of the centro. The remnants of the canals are there but it is now mostly social engagement territory rather than trade and warehouses. Last Sunday's Times had an article about the situation in Europe as coronavirus cases increase significantly. The article was accompanied by a photograph by Alessandro Grassani for the Times. He also has done significant series of photographs on immigrants and immigration. Now, the crowded streets of the Navigli are quite empty ...

A cyclist peddling down an empty street in Milan on the first day of a new lockdown on Friday.

(Alessandro Grassani for the New York Times)

telltale sentences, telltale words

The New York Times published a special DealBook section on September 13, 2020, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Milton Friedman's seminal essay in the magazine in September 1970. The essay was entitled "The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits." The 2020 anniversary section presents short reflections on sentences in the Friedman article, including descriptions of how Friedman's prognosis has played out and what the future might hold as we reflect in a time of reckoning on racial justice, economic imbalance, climate change, and pandemic. I recommend looking at the section but there was one sequence of Friedman sentences that just shouted at me with relevance for something that has been troubling me.

And I quote Friedman:

"The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned 'merely' with profit but also with promoting desirable 'social' ends; that business has a 'social conscience' and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are—or would be if they or any one else took them seriously— preaching pure and unadulterated socialism."

We have been hearing statements, often accusatory, that the Democrats are preaching socialism, as well as communism and Marxism, in this election season. I do not have a problem with socialism and hate to see it as a slam, especially an overly simplistic slam. But it was reading the last sentence in the quotation above that made me realize how bald the accusations are. I grew up in a solid anti-FDR anti-state household. My parents (and their parents, etc.) generally didn't support big government. They lived mostly in small towns and were active in church, relying on neighbors and church members for support when needed.

I worked in the ceramics library during summers and vacations in my undergrad years, the mid-late 1960s, when social-political action and anti-war discussions were common among college kids whether or not they were active protestors or building occupiers. (Of course, now they'd be thugs and terrorists.) In a discussion, one of my coworkers (Lynne Sootheran) said if people don't take care of people, the state has to take care of people. It was a Damascene moment for me, the moment when my socio-political leanings shifted from what I had inherited. Being small town folks, we were mostly oblivious to the world beyond our small worlds.

Reading the sentences from the Friedman article clarified for me how socialism could be a dirty word in some camps. I still wonder how my folks would have reacted to the takeover of the Republican Party by fundamental thinking. They had already suffered the fundamentalist takeover of their beloved Seventh Day Baptist General Conference. It would not surprise me if they had shifted to the Libertarian Party.

I am also very glad that my life since college has mostly been spent in cities. Even in little Alfred, I appreciate the ability to do most of my daily business by walking rather than driving and parking.

P.S. For Brett Stephens's take on traditional conservatism, this article from last week's Sunday Review on "What We've Lost" might be of interest.

site specificity redux

Site specificity came around again today. I'd done a post about it at the beginning of the month. I was working today with Bronwen on whether we should propose "Performance scores" for LCGFT and came across a webpage entitled In Terms of Performance which is "a keywords anthology designed to provoke discovery across artistic disciplines." It includes three short essays on site, by Simon Dove, Tania El Khoury, and Joanna Haigood.

As I looked for help in the Art & Architecture Thesaurus on performance scores, I was somewhat distressed to find "scores (documents for music)" and "dance notation" in totally different hierarchies (documents and writing styles, respectively).

In Janine Antoni's short essay on choreography, she lists "Ikea pictographic instructions for assembling furniture" in her list of references.

Lady Croft by Philip de László

 The Hon. Nancy Beatrice Borwick, Lady Croft (1884-1949)

Portrait by Philip Alexius László de Lombos

(viewed in email from the Royal Oak Foundation,

the American affiliate of the National Trust of England,

Wales and Northern Ireland)

Never having heard of Philip Alexius László de Lombos, I naturally (it being me) checked the LC/NAF authority file for the painter. I picked "lombos" as my entry word for a left-anchored browse and found nothing. Not Lombos at all. Never give up too early. Searched "laszlo" and found him:

010	__ |a no2004037532
035	__ |a (OCoLC)oca06327328
040	__ |a ICU |b eng |e rda |c ICU |d DLC |d FU
046	__ |f 1869 |g 1937 |2 edtf
100	1_ |a László, Fülöp, |d 1869-1937
400	1_ |a De László, Philip Alexius, |d 1869-1937
400	1_ |a László de Lombos, Philip Alexius de, |d 1869-1937
400	1_ |a László, Fülöp Elek, |d 1869-1937
400	1_ |a László, Philip de, |d 1869-1937

What? No reference from Lombos??

The Royal Oak Foundation email was about the "National Trust Property of the Week" -- Croft Castle in Herefordshire. The Crofts had settled there by the time of the Domesday Book and the castle dates to the 14th and 15th centuries. The Crofts lost the house in 1746 but were back in 1923. The house went to the National Trust in 1956, not that we'll be able to visit it any time soon.

site specificity

 Site specificity in art, as a concept, sometimes troubles me but especially when someone claims it to be absolute. All installations are at least somewhat specific to the place in which they are installed, and almost anything can be moved to another site or reproduced (reconstructed) in a new place. My interest was piqued when the Library of Congress added a subject heading for Site specific installations (Art) as distinct from and a narrower term than Installations (Art). If you click on the "troubles me," you'll be taken to a few earlier blog entries that dance around this matter. And now I've had a couple interesting experiences and readings with site specificity in the past couple weeks.

"Annie Jump and the Library of Heaven" was presented at Alfred University in mid September 2020 after being delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring. It is "a play for all audiences about finding your place in the universe and intelligent life in your hometown." The original plan was for a traditional theater presentation. COVID health concerns moved it outside and, mirabile dictu, the setting became the parking area at the observatory on campus with a couple bits actually taking place inside the telescope buildings. The story was all about Annie Jump trying to come to terms with life beyond this planet and how to deal with her quirky astronomer father. The play was pretty heartening but seeing it under the starlit sky at the observatory was fantabulous indeed. What a site for this specific play.

I love my indexing work for the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals. One of my titles is Future Anterior and an issue I just did -- volume 15, number 2, winter 2018 -- was on the theme "Ex situ: on moving monuments." That is, ex situ as contrasted from in situ. The issue includes a description by Ryan Mendoza of his deconstruction of Rosa Parks's house in Detroit when it was threatened with demolition and its reconstruction in Berlin. When its time in Berlin was ending, there was talk of moving it back to the United States but it has now been reconstructed at the Palazzo Reale in Naples. What a trip this supposedly immovable structure has been taking, and what a time this is.

I'm not sure either of these experiences has convinced me that Site specific installations (Art) is a necessary subject heading but they certainly have given me plenty to think about. I think I'd prefer Site specificity in art in combination with Installations (Art) when the artist really talks about the specific site of an installation.

Italians and Jews in Odessa

Episode "Traveling to Eat" was on The Splendid Table on NPR as I drove home from Wegmans this morning. One of the stories was a talk with Caroline Eden who has traveled around the Black Sea, investigating places and food. She did a couple road trips but visited Odessa and Istanbul as specific destinations. She considers Istanbul the most grand food place in the world.

Caroline Eden mentioned the significant evidence of Italian and Jewish food in Odessa. Though there were ancient and medieval settlements where Odessa now is, its modern origins date back to 1794 when Catherine the Great established the city and port on the shores of the Black Sea, now in the Ukraine. It was a free port from 1819 to 1858 and the fourth largest city in the Russian Empire, after Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Warsaw. There were Italians among the planners and developers and a large Jewish community developed in the 19th century. The Italians were mostly a legacy of Genoese colonies in the Crimea in late medieval times.

I've never known a great deal about Odessa though we did hear about it when Atticus Aldridge was explaining his origins to Rose and the Jewish refugees in York.

Atticus mentions to one of the refugees that his family came to England from Odessa in 1859 and 1871. The former nobleman says that he's not Russian, he's Jewish. There were several pogroms in the mid-later 19th century, including 1859 and 1871.

I hadn't known much about Genoa beyond art history classes until visiting it twice in 2018. I really enjoyed the city. The landscape is tremendous, the hills rise sharply from the harbor. The food is delicious. The art nouveau villas are stupendous, as they are all across Italy. Italians call art nouveau Liberty, from the store in London.

I probably don't need to mention how disappointing the pandemic-related travel restrictions are. It is soul numbing to not even feel that planning a European trip (or Canadian) is feasible.

separated at birth: Hoffmann & Ruby

Josef Hoffmann

Musée d'Orsay

(from the Wikipedia page for Hoffmann)

Sterling Ruby

Stove 4, 2013

(in the retrospective exhibition at the

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston)

Josef Hoffmann did plenty of design objects that have a slender shape and pierced metal. I thought of Hoffmann when I saw the stove by Sterling Ruby last week in an exhibition at the ICA in Boston. Evocative attenuation. Hoffmann is quite widely exhibited but I particularly remember an exhibition that I saw with Christie at the Neue Galerie in New York City. One of the objects was my introduction to shagreen, an untanned rawhide now mostly produced from farmed Asian stingrays.

Sterling Ruby addresses climate change with his stoves which were featured in a 2015 exhibition at the Musée de la chasse et de la nature, held in conjunction with the Paris climate summit.

Indonesian scarf, caught in the wind

"Last week, she told me to dance like an Indonesian scarf caught in the wind. I don't even know that that looks like."

Stevie Budd, in "The Roast" episode, Season 5

Schitt's Creek (2015-2020)

Yinka Shonibare MBE

"Wind Sculpture (SG) I"

Central Park, New York City

(photo: Jason Wyche)

separated at birth: military monuments

Les Invalides

Paris, France

(photo from Wikipedia)

Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces

Patriot Park, Odintsovsky District, Russia

(photo from Wikipedia via Architizer)