The Snowy Day

The steps down from Barton Dam

Around Barton Dam: we hoped to see some ducks, but the river was mostly frozen.

Glass Sculpture at Phipps Conservatory

"Longfellows," displayed in the orchid room. Sculptor: Hans Godo Fräbel 

One of many by Dale Chihuly

Glass sculpture, glass roof

Great Events of Fifty Years Ago

As 2013 draws to a close, I'm thinking about various anniversaries that have taken place during the past nearly 12 months.

SNCC Sit-in, Atlanta, Georgia, ca. 1963

The year 1963 saw a major effort in favor of civil rights for Americans of all races. In the spring of 1963, the sit-in above took place at a Tottle-House diner. While twenty-first century diners, with their exaggerated menus and retro juke boxes, evoke nostalgia in their younger patrons and may seem to embody the good things of a bygone era, not everything about them was really wonderful. The 1960 sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro NC is perhaps more famous than that of 1963. There were many others: Nashville, Arlington VA, and more.

Martin Luther King, Washington DC, August 28, 1963
At the March on Washington, he gave the famous speech "I have a dream."

During 1963, the civil rights movement was widespread and very active, notably the March on Washington. Sadly, the year also saw violence against peaceful demonstrators, as well as extreme attacks on black people, especially the murder of Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963 and the vicious church bombing in Birmingham on September 15, 1963.

Needless to say, the most significant and lastingly important event of 1963 was the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22. Last month's commemoratives of the event were numerous and moving, so I need not say more. And in 1964, Lyndon Johnson managed to have major civil rights legislation passed, satisfying many of the goals of the movement, though certainly not changing everything that was wrong. We still have far to go in fairness and equality for all, even 50 years onward.

One book about the civil rights struggle published in 1963 was An Education in Georgia by Calvin Trillin and Charlayne Hunter-Gault. I believe it was the first book Calvin Trillin wrote. Since he later became one of the most wonderful food writers I know, I think it's appropriate to mention it here. I've never read it, but I have read Hunter-Gault's autobiography, In My Place, which includes a fascinating account of her struggle as a very young woman to be one of the first blacks to study at the University of Georgia, another big step in the struggle for civil rights.

But now for a completely trivial food fact from 1963: according to the Food Timeline, this was the big year for the introduction into American cuisine of the Black Forest Cake. While based on a German original, the Black Forest Cake was newly popular in many upscale restaurants and the subject of American recipe versions.

Random current image of a Black Forest Cake from this blog

"While the ingredients and general method of Black Forest Cake can be traced through hundreds of years, food historians generally agree this recipe belongs to the 20th century," states the Food Timeline. "We find no evidence of anything close to Black Forest Cake, as we know it today, in our small collection of 19th-20th century German-American cooking texts. The earliest recipes we find are dated 1960s." This source particularly cites a recipe from The German Cookbook by Mimi Sheraton, published in 1963 -- I couldn't find any images that claimed to use her recipe, though.

Two other trends of 1963: Beatlemania, or enormous love of the Beatles was just beginning. And a wave of enthusiasm for Mona Lisa was inspired by her visit early in 1963 to the National Gallery in Washington, DC, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, thanks to the diplomacy of Jacqueline Kennedy.

Mona Lisa visits the US: the painting is now too fragile to travel,
so this was probably her last trip out of Paris.

Note: This post appears simultaneously on my food blog, for which I wrote it.

100 years ago today...

Today is the 100th anniversary of Mona Lisa's return to the Louvre. She was stolen on August 11, 1911, by an employee named Vincenzo Peruggia, who took the painting to Italy. He was eventually found out when he tried to sell it to the Uffizi in Florence.

I have several postcards in my collection from the period when Mona Lisa went missing and no one knew where she was. Here are a couple of them:

"Happy, after 400 years,
To find the key to the outdoors"

"I will come back in a few years
when chickens have teeth."

Marcel Duchamp's famous Mona Lisa parody L.H.O.O.Q., though not published until 1919, was probably inspired by the huge attention to the theft and return. Perhaps the flood of Mona Lisa parodies and appropriations throughout the entire following 100 years owes something to the notorious theft. (Yesterday I blogged about some very recent and not very relevant borrowings.)

Marcel Duchamp: L.H.O.O.Q.

Irrelevant Mona Lisa Images

Why is Mona Lisa so frequently parodied in illustrations for news or feature articles when there's absolutely nothing about her in the article? Could it possibly be that the illustrators don't read the articles, only the titles? Could artists and editors so thoroughly lack any imagination? How does a cliche get repeated so frequently? Inquiring minds want to know.

Illustration for an article about guilty pleasures: "Nothing to lose but your guilt"
in the New Yorker.

Illustration for an article about makeup: "Giving Makeup a Slap"
in More Intelligent Life.

Image promoting Doritos Locos Tacos, originally on a Facebook promotion,
used in USA Today obituary of originator of idea.

Total number of times Mona Lisa was actually mentioned in these articles: ZERO. These are only the very recent ones from a long history of missing creativity.

Around our Neighborhood

Is it a Tardis?
On the corner of Granger and Lincoln Streets?

No... it's a "LittleFreeLibrary" ...

offering books for children and adults, and also a frog.

Our neighbor's milkweed looks very delicate

It was a cold day for walking. Even the crows look cold against the wintery sky.

In case you don't know: a Tardis is "a time machine and spacecraft in the British science fiction television program Doctor Who and its associated spin-offs." In fact the originals aren't red, they are blue.

Solar-Powered Mona Lisa

Last night at Midnight Madness, the Ann Arbor downtown sale and pre-Christmas celebration, I found a beautiful solar-powered Mona Lisa at a charming shop, Peaceable Kingdom. Here she is, my Kikkerland Mona Lisa, waving in the late afternoon sun shining in my window today. As a long-time collector of Mona Lisa objects, I can say that this is not one of the best 3-D Mona Lisa renderings I've ever seen, as her neck is rather long compared to my interpretation of the original, and her expression is a little more that of a saint than of the Mona Lisa I know. But as a whole, I'm thrilled by this new addition to my Monas.

Coincidently, earlier today I came across the Kikkerland name in another context: a New York Times headline: Quirky Kikkerland Opens Its First Retail Store.  The article says this: "The shop ... offers the company’s entire collection, including lightning-bolt-shaped power strips and bottle openers resembling Mexican wrestlers, along with products from other manufacturers."

Kikkerland Shop from NYT Article

But wait...It seems that I've bought many more Kikkerland items than I realized, over the years. Recently, I've bought three tea robots that hang on the edge of a cup -- also from Kikkerland. All were gifts for tea lovers:

Kikkerland tea robot from amazon.com

Getting curious, I took a look at kikkerland.com, fascinating website of the company. Several of my favorite robot windups are also their product. I took out some of these robots to play with last winter. Here's a photo:

Windup robots from my collection:
Kikkerland designs are at far right and far left, as well as the long-legged one in the center and the one with the scissors type handle (whose x-ray once caused the TSA to open my bag and check for an actual scissors).

See the one with really long legs in the photo above? I bought it in the late 90s from a museum gift shop. It's one of their first windup robots, according to the history on their website. Further, the wind-up pencil sharpener I bought last month at the Chicago Art Institute to give as a gift is another Kikkerland design. Reading the website makes me think I've been a customer of this indeed quirky company almost since they began making windup toys. 

Best obscure fact about Kikkerland: it's a New York company founded by Dutch immigrants, who called it Kikkerland because that's a pet name for the Netherlands. It means frogland.

More of my solar Mona: the back of the package and a side view also in the sunlight.

I completely agree with this statement from kikkerland.com: "Since 1992, the folks at Kikkerland Design have traveled the world in search of original designs for things that can make life more enjoyable. Clever things to intrigue you. Smart things that make everyday tasks easier. And gentle things that make you feel happier when you use them." I've ordered myself one of those Kikkerland wind-up pencil sharpeners to make life happier.

Wordless Wednesday: Squirrel Hill Gardens

Wordless Wednesday: Home to Thanksgiving

-- by Currier and Ives (WikiMedia)

Cold Morning

Burns Park School this morning

Bird Feeder

Not far from our recently-installed bird feeder we have a garden statue. For the last couple of months, it has become a perch for birds waiting their turn at our new bird-seed feeder and suet feeder. As expected, we also have some squirrel challenges, from the big fat grey squirrels that have always lived in our yard, and from smaller red squirrels that have only recently moved into the territory. We are enjoying the spectacle of both birds and squirrels, including an aggressive gang of house sparrows and several more appealing species of warblers, finches, woodpeckers, etc.

My recent photo collage showed some of the birds that have been feeding here, but I had a request for a picture of a male rather than a female cardinal -- this is it. Len took this and all the other bird photos with his good cameras and specialized lenses.

About that garden statue: we bought it in Traverse City many years ago, and it's occupied various locations in the yard ever since.

Wordless Wednesday: Feeding the Birds

Doris Lessing

Before I finish reading the New York Times obituary for Doris Lessing, who died today, I thought I would write down one of my most vivid impressions from her novels. Of course it's from The Golden Notebook. And I've added the relevant quotes from the review.

What I remember: one of the central women in the book is working through her feelings about Stalin, both internally and through discussions and fights with her fellow left-wingers and communist party members. She also is working through psychoanalysis, so she's very aware of her dreams, including day dreams or fantasies. Her fantasy that I recall is that Stalin asks her advice about what he should do to be a better leader -- and she tells him how to solve whatever problem she sees as critical. I think she writes this down in one of her many color-coded notebooks but I think in the red, not the golden, notebook.

Then, unless I'm recalling the book wrong after all these years, the character finds out that virtually every communist has the same fantasy of explaining to Stalin what he needs to do. Somehow this captured some fundamental thing for me, about the way that political idealists thought. [And says the NYT review: "Ms. Lessing wrote that she had intended the novel to capture the chaotic period after the Soviet Union denounced Stalinism. Under the pressure of the revelations about Stalin’s crimes, the movement that had been the glue of her social and intellectual circle came undone."]

I've read many of Lessing's other books, including the entire Martha Quest series which changes genres at the last book, a feat I always admired. The first several books are an old-fashioned coming of age story of the meaningfully named Martha Quest as she grows up in a British colony of Africa and eventually gets away from her boring background. The last is a distopia set long into the future -- though now it's no longer the future, and our hindsight tells us it didn't quite happen that way. [Says the review: "The weighty series of books… remolds some of the issues and situations treated in 'The Golden Notebook': war, Communism, sex, abortion, domestic violence, abandoning children, psychoanalysis and breakdown. But the series reaches forward to the next millennium and the destruction of the earth."]

Lessing's later books were entirely different from these early ones -- like the last Martha Quest novel, The Four-Gated City, they are mainly set in distopian futures, or in one case a sort of combination of the past and the future. I liked them, but not as much as I liked the earlier ones. What I don't know is how much I would like the earlier ones if I reread them now, so much later in time and in my life.

The NYT review cites a number of facts from Lessing's autobiography, which I've never read. Perhaps I'll read it now. I'm sorry to hear that she's gone; she was a very great writer.

Oh, No, Amy Tan

Melodrama. That’s how I view Amy Tan’s new novel The Valley of Amazement: 600 repetitive pages of melodrama! Too long, too repetitive, very disappointing.

I struggled through The Valley of Amazement, but I didn’t enjoy it. Set in Shanghai between 1900 and the late 1930s, the novel centers on two courtesans, mother and daughter. The first several hundred pages are narrated by the daughter, who is unaware of much of her own history. Nearly at the end, the mother’s first-person account of her own story back-fills the tale. Both stories include lots of melodrama (tender husbands dead; children snatched away; many sorts of exploitation and mistreatment; riches-to-rags-to-riches plotlines). The choice of telling the story in reverse order seems awkward rather than suspenseful.

In addition, both women’s stories provide lurid descriptions of the life of a girl sold or otherwise forced into slavery. Yes, though each one lived in luxury, she was effectively a slave, and her life depended on learning to curb her own wishes and to please the men who bought her high-class favors. As a literary choice the subject of a Shanghai courtesan 100 years ago could go in a number of directions, but I think this one didn’t turn out well.

Sorry, Amy Tan, I’ve loved almost all of your other novels. This one didn’t come up to any of the previous ones I’ve read. I see the amazon.com reviews are coming in to agree with me.

Note: I posted this review on amazon.com, just for fun. I usually don't bother to be one of hundreds of amazon reviewers.

Wordless Wednesday: Taking Photos, Warsaw 2013

Wordless Wednesday: Chicago Art Institute

Masks

Baule Mask, Ivory Coast
Chicago Institute of Arts 

Lega Mask, Congo
Chicago Institute of Arts

Northwest American Native Masks
Field Museum 

New Guinea Men's House Masks
Field Museum

I love tribal masks. Here are a few that I found appealing on my museum visits this past weekend.

To the Field Museum of Natural History

Waiting for the Metra Train from Hyde Park to the Field Musuem.
The train was 10 minutes late.

Just past the Metra station near the Field Museum.

Walking towards the museum...

The Field Museum

The stunning lakeshore from the Field Museum steps. 

In the main courtyard is Sue, the Museum's prize T-Rex. Sue was unearthed in 1990

Getting to the museum on a beautiful, sunny Sunday morning was fun. Once inside the museum, I visited the current special exhibit about the 1893 World's Fair, as well as several permanent exhibits on Native Americans; African countries of Senegal, Benin, and Cameroon; Spirits of the Pacific, especially New Guinea; Tibet; and a few others. I'll post a few more photos later. I also walked through a visiting exhibit from the US Holocaust Museum on Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda: chilling, of course.

At the Chicago Institute of Arts

A bride & groom posing for photos in the museum