Happy 2019!

Earlier today I was speaking to Uncle Eddy and I said to him, "Can you imagine it's 2019?!"--to which he replied, "NO!" The way time flies by, it won't be long before we hit 2028, the centenary of his birth! We spent a lovely Christmas and the week afterward with AA's family in Kansas City, MO. Aside from family visits, I indulged in my first-ever KC barbecue dinner (delicious, but heavy on meat), and we visited the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and the National World War I Memorial and Museum over the course of the week. We flew home on Sunday, then headed into the City the next day for a New Year's Eve dinner with AR, GM, and GG. It was pouring in NYC, so everyone gathered for the Times Square ball-drop got drenched, including Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper (above), whom we watched while staying toasty warm and dry just a few blocks away watching and supporting our fellow gays on TV. (Other than watching Anderson Cooper get drunk on shots, it wasn't as eventful as we would have hoped though. Or am I being nostalgic for Dick Clark?)

Today for New Year's Day we had a quiet day at home. We ate for dinner butternut squash soup, cod with lemon and pomegranate, and steamed broccoli. Then we watched the gay-themed movie The Cakemaker (2017, image right), in which a German baker goes to Jerusalem to find the family of his recently deceased lover, with some awkward consequences. It wasn't a bad movie...the acting and directing was good, there were some existential questions about sexuality worth pondering, and there were a few important moments about Jewish/Gentile cultural differences, but it was a bit slow. I am craving black forest cake now (you have to watch to get the message).

Happy 2019!

MWA XXXIX: Steichen's Swanson

"Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty. ... So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful." -- Susan Sontag, "The Heroism of Vision," from On Photography (1977), p.85

I have been reading Sontag's book as one of my commute reads, and although some of her ideas seem dated now, I can tell how they were significant for a younger generation of connoisseurs, curators, and art historians in the 1970s when visual art was struggling to maintain its momentum with the rise of conceptual art and happenings in the contemporary scene. This particular essay, however, I have found very interesting because she proposed that the power of photography, as a democratized form of visual imagery and reproductive media, created for viewers a definition of what beauty is supposed to be. Although she focused on avant-garde practices and left out much discussion on commercial and fashion photography, the implication is clearly there as well. From the very beginning, advertising and mass media, through photographic imagery, have instructed us on how we are supposed to look and thus feel, and if we don't measure up somehow we fail as humans in our society. The role of photography to celebrity culture is tied to this and arguably today is even worse now than it ever was because of the onslaught of mass media and advertising impacting people 24/7.

I begin with this preface about beauty and photography to introduce what I've selected as the latest Monthly Work of Art. I first encountered the image you see above many years ago, and  I believe it was one of the great images that motivated me along to my eventual career in art history. The photograph is a portrait of Gloria Swanson photographed by Edward Steichen. I first saw this work in person at an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg more than 25 years ago. When many years later I told my friend and photohistorian extraordinaire RL the story of how much I loved this photograph and how it had inspired me, his response was "Of course it did!" I took that to mean two things: first, that it was indeed an evocative and beautifully composed photograph; and second, that naturally it would also appeal to me because it was so queer.

Photographed in 1924 and published in Vanity Fair in February 1928, a vintage print went up for auction at Sotheby's in 2014 and sold for $629,000. But if you could put a price on the beautiful, this photograph would likely be among those whose worth was priceless. The subject is Gloria Swanson (1899-1983), who at the time of the shoot was the highest paid actress in the world. She was a star of the silent film era and made the transition to talkies, but fell out of favor in Hollywood until she starred as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950), playing (ironically?) a fading film star from the silent film era who lives as a hermit in her Hollywood mansion but falls in love with a young screenwriter. In some ways, the photograph practically foreshadows Desmond's famous line "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up," spoken by Swanson in a husky voice that seeps through the translucent black veil in Steichen's image. The theatrical effects of the photograph and its references to old Hollywood and 1920s glamour are of course all of the stock traits that make it queer.

The photographer, Edward Steichen (1879-1973), established his career as a painter and Pictorialist photographer, but by the 1920s he had become a fashion and celebrity photographer, and later went on to become Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. In his autobiography, Steichen wrote about photographing Swanson: "[We] had had a long session, with many changes of costume and different lighting effects. At the end of the session, I took a piece of black lace veil and hung it in front of her face. She recognized the idea at once. Her eyes dilated, and her look was that of a leopardess lurking behind leafy shrubbery, watching her prey" (Steichen, A Life in Photography, chapter 8). This description of the photo shoot suggests a few interesting notions. First, that the perfect image only came to them after an already-long, strenuous, exhausting day, implying then that it was not hard work but instantaneity and magical genius that had created this image. This notion of artistic strokes of genius is a trope one finds with every artist in history, and clearly was intended to make their work actually seem effortless and thus sophisticated. Second, the quotation also demonstrates that Swanson as the subject was equally involved in the creation of the image, specifically through performance and pose. Hence, it was a mutually-created stroke of genius, Adam-and-God touching fingers to spark Michelangelesque creation.

What Steichen does not seem to give credit to, however, is the power of the black veil. These netted fabrics have served to mask women's face for millennia, to allow them to feel a sense of protection against the staring eyes of others. In the case of mourning, a black veil permits the women to be private in her grief when she is in public, and informs people they should step away out of respect. In contrast, a white veil on a Western wedding dress masks the beauty of the woman's face, only to be revealed at the end when the new husband is permitted to kiss his bride. He lifts her veil, sees her face, and is now the sole owner of the commodity of beauty that has been hidden before that moment. Women in the Islamic community who wear full burqa often include veils, and regardless of the socio-political or gender-biased implications behind this practice, ultimately the veil here serves the same purpose: to disguise the woman and, by implication, make her invisible (even if, in Western society, it has the opposite effect).

The black veil in this photograph, seemingly thrown up haphazardly by Steichen, instantly creates a barrier that thereafter prevents the viewer from ever penetrating into the subject's space. It transforms a color of mourning into a commodity for showcasing beauty. But the veil also distances the subject from the gaze of the viewer, and thus creates an erotic tension between them. In many ways this was symptomatic of the role Swanson herself played in society as a film actress: visible and larger-than-life on the big screen for everyone to see, she was unavailable to the public as a real, live person. Unlike a full-length film, this single-frame image exacerbates this tension. She stares, eyes locked, leopardess-like, on her prey, the viewer, and thus shifts the power of the gaze back onto its source. Her gaze, specifically through that veil, empowers her and ultimately castrates (figuratively speaking) the (presumed male) viewer who has sought to penetrate her. The image is, indeed, one that showcases beauty, but at the same time it emphasizes the subject's power. Rather than subjugate her, the veil becomes the woman's armor.

Happy 2016!

Another New Year celebration has passed. A year ago our annual New Year's message celebrated not only the welcome of 2015 but our 500th post. This year, it was quite a laid-back celebration. AA and I rang in the new year with our feet up on the coffee table participating in the countdown...and then going to bed. Yes, it was a quiet couple's night for us. Today, however, New Year's Day, we were in SoHo and the East Village for a while walking around. Our 72-degree temperatures of Christmas Eve are long gone...the high today was 43, and it's going to get colder over the next few days, so it was chilly, but good to get out.

We went to see the new movie Carol with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, who play respectively an older, married mother and a younger aspiring photographer who fall in love during Christmas/New Year's of 1951-52. The movie may seem a little slow, but it is beautifully filmed, and the writing and acting is superb, so the tempo of the storyline is intentional and more realistic as a result. Cate looks stunning in this move, incredibly elegant in her expensive, chic 1950s couture, and Rooney is adorable in her plaids and youthful sweaters. Their characters practically transform into icons from the past. Rooney becomes a dead ringer for Audrey Hepburn, and Cate finds herself somewhere between Deborah Kerr and Grace Kelly. A true love story, it has its crescendo and its heartache. The film delicately handles their sexuality and the controversy of their love, not as normalized, for it would never have been perceived that way in the 1950s, but certainly more as being more consciously in the cultural awareness of the greater NYC area than one might typically assume of lesbianism in the 1950s. Sarah Paulson (best known from her amazing characters on American Horror Story) is excellent as well in her supporting role as Cate's friend and former lover. Overall, this is a movie worth seeing indeed, and will receive a number of nominations if not awards.

Last year I did not change the look or design of bklynbiblio, but I've made some background and color changes this time around. I may update it a few times seasonally, when I have the time. If you read these posts via email or an RSS reader, you can always go directly to http://bklynbiblio.blogspot.com to see the new look and read all of the posts from the past. And so we welcome the year 2016...HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

Week-in-my-Life: Mar 2015 (Pt. 3)

Recapping the last two days of the week... (you can read parts 1 & 2 here and here)...

FRIDAY 03/20/15

6:35am = After falling asleep about 11:30pm the previous night, wake up about 3 times during the night; finally get out of bed to start the day. Breakfast: whole-wheat waffle with peanut butter & strawberry preserves, blackberry-flavored Greek yogurt, and tea.

7:55am = Against my better judgment, decide to launch into a liberal but jocular defense against a conservative post on Facebook by the ex-cousin-in-law KG.

9:00am = Start work day chatting briefly with staff about plans for the day; snack: coffee and two (tiny!) shortbread cookies.

11:30am = Catching up on more neverending emails and projects, but making progress. Receive news at work that donors' tax documents for their donations are signed, so rush off 7 blocks away to retrieve papers and call donors reassuring them docs are on the way, then process via FedEx. Snow starts falling.

1:00pm = Snow is coming down harder now. (Happy 1st day of Spring!) Home for lunch: spinach salad with chicken, tomatoes, apple, Swiss cheese, cashews, and ranch dressing with water.

2:00pm = Grab backpack and laptop, then head downtown to work at Pret a Manger cafe near World Trade Center. Snack: chocolate chip cookie and Earl Grey tea (which, surprisingly, the cashier gives me for free...how nice!). Spend next few hours working mostly on my performance review and catching up on emails. Snow seriously falling now.

4:15pm = Receive my awaited summons from AA to head to NJ, so pack up laptop and walk in blizzard-like conditions to PATH train, on which my iPhone dies at 43% battery for like the gazillionth time, which causes me to curse out Apple yet again, although in my head, not aloud, because passengers will think I'm borderline lunatic fringe.

7:00pm = Lazy in-house early evening with AA channel surfing between Something's Gotta Give and Pretty in Pink, the most schizophrenic and incongruous pairing of flicks ever. Finally select new movie to watch, The Namesake (U.S. premiere 2007), which at first I am hesitant about because I've wanted to read the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri before seeing the film, but then agree and truly am very satisfied. The movie is excellent and highly recommended as a snapshot of the immigrant experience and assimilation into American culture (hence image above). The Indian actress Tabu plays the mother Ashima and is just superb. Dinner during the move: barbecue chicken pizza and salad with red wine. (Why didn't we order Indian?!?!).

10:00pm = In bed, AA quickly falling asleep (see earlier in week for comments on his sleep habits), so I watch Dateline, but then realize there is loud music coming from next door. And, of all things, it's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" by The Shirelles. Then it repeats. Five times!! I wake up AA and tell him someone must have been murdered and the song was put on to mask the screams (the episode of Dateline has clearly affected me). He clearly thinks I'm crazy and falls asleep. Finally the song stops...only to be followed by "Locomotion"...repeated 4 times! Someone must be practicing their karaoke or auditioning for America's Got Talent. It finally stops about the time Dateline ends, and I actually fall asleep.

SATURDAY 03/21/15

7:30am = Wake up from a glorious full-night of sleep...first time this entire week! Huzzah! Breakfast: blood-orange Greek yogurt, English muffin with butter & blackberry preserves, and two cups of coffee.

8:00am = Continue to engage on Facebook with KG using tongue-in-cheek commentary about conservatism/liberalism, then fondly remind him of his NYC liberal roots. Further ongoing commentary leads me to give up and say we should celebrate happier thoughts, like that the DPG-JBs, AA, and I are going to Rome and Florence soon! More huzzah!

9:00am = While AA is in class, I start preparing notes for my upcoming talk in Rome on the sculptor John Gibson (more on that in another post). Make great progress. Snack about 11am: raisins, walnuts, and tea.

12:30pm = AA picks me up and we drive to Edgewater for lunch at Greek Taverna: lamb (AA) and pork (moi) souvlaki sandwiches with homemade herb fries.

2:30pm = Decide to go for a drive and wind up on the Palisades Parkway. Park and admire the view of the Manhattan/Bronx landscape along the Hudson River (see the lovely image AA took below).

3:45pm = At Newport Mall in Panera having berry scone and tea (AA has peach-pecan muffin and coffee), and amazingly they don't charge me for the food (how does that happen two days in a row?!).

4:30pm = At the movies seeing Kingsman: The Secret Service, having used a coupon for free tickets courtesy of the M-CAs (thanks!). Movie is slow at first, but picks up fast and is quite an action-packed film, with some uncomfortable environmental truths, dark humor, and some graphic-but-not-bloody violence...overall quite good!

8:30pm = Dinner: homemade chicken tacos courtesy of Chef AA! And (very strong!) blueberry martinis. Dessert: fruit & granola with a cup of tea. And the wind-down for the night is coming soon...

Whenever I write these "Week-in-my-Life" posts, I'm always amazed by the unusual things that happen. There was the library flood or the visit to the Palisades or all the snow. Before writing, you know some things are a given, like what will happen at work or some basic meals that are consistently eaten each day. But after writing, you discover all the surprises, the little twists that make all of it worth having written. One of the great challenges I've learned in life is that it is a continuous series of ups and downs, peaks and valleys. Sometimes these are very difficult to deal with and you want them to go away, but other times there are happy moments that you want to last. But they all come together, and we discover that that is life, the adventure, the wave, the laughter and the tears, the giggling and the frustrations, and the quiet moments you spend with those you love. It's all part of life, and these predictable and unexpected experiences are all what makes it worth living to the fullest.

Random Musings 15

Big news in the art world last night! More major auction records were broken at the Christie's New York post-war and contemporary art sale. The sale itself brought in a record-high amount of $691.58 million, and there were record high sales for major artists, including one that put Jeff Koons at the top for most-paid-at-auction-for-a-living-artist. The really big news of the night, however, was when Francis Bacon's triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud, 1969, stole the show, selling for the hammer price of $142.4 million, becoming the most money ever paid for a work of art at auction. (The actual sale price was $127m; the rest was the buyer's premium that goes to the auction house.) The previous record happened last year with a version of Munch's Scream selling for $119. (Here is more on my past musings about these records and art sales.) You can see the trio of framed works by Bacon in the image above (source: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times), hovering over the crowd as the frenzy of the auction took place. I'm wondering if some wise ass will claim that as a triptych each piece should only count for 1/3 of the hammer price and thus be much lower. For the record, Bacon worked in triptychs over and over, and even though the three pieces are framed separately, that doesn't mean they're separate works. Unlike the Scream, which was quite a big deal but not life-altering to me, I must confess that this sale excites me because I'm a fan of Bacon's work. Long-time readers may recall my post about Bacon's rise in fame back in 2008, just prior to the big retrospective exhibition that was being planned for London, New York, and Madrid. I find Bacon's work visceral; it hurts to look at it. If you think you can hear the scream in Munch's painting, you will feel in your gut the heart-wrenching agony bellowing from Bacon's paintings. Despite the pain and angst, though, there's something also energizing about his pictures. They are both figurative and abstract in a way that makes you question what you think figurative and abstract actually mean. And in my chats with painters, I've discovered they love him as a painter. His brushstroke and use of colors dazzle them and demonstrate amazing skill and handling that make him a rival to Picasso and Matisse as the leading painters of the 20th century. And now that he carries the highest record ever paid at auction for a single work of art, few can doubt hereafter his awesome presence in modern art. For more about the auction, see the news report by Carol Vogel in the NYT. Some of CultureGrrl's observations about the sale and Christie's bizarre disclaimer on buyer and seller buy-ins shows that the old days of equality in auction sales are long gone.

Among some other musings I've been storing up... About two weekends ago, AA and I took a short getaway trip to New Orleans for some R&R. We got to see the RL-DGs and their new baby NGL, plus play with the ever-adorable dog Penny. But RL--officially and professionally Russell Lord, photography curator--also had some incredible exhibitions on that we went to see. Edward Burtynsky: Water at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans was just beautiful. His photographs shot around the world highlight the importance of water in our lives and the ways in which we control it. The images are dazzling and breath-taking. He creates such complex compositions in colors so vibrant you would swear you were looking at abstract paintings. The image below is one of a number of these beautiful pictures (image: Dryland Farming #2: Monegros County Aragon Spain, 2010; copyright Edward Burtynsky). To top that show off, Russell also curated the thought-provoking exhibition Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Here, Russell explored how Parks's 1948 photographic essay, published in Life magazine about a Harlem gangster named Leonard "Red" Jackson, actually revealed a cropped, edited form of sensationalist journalism that belied the truth behind what Parks really saw in this so-called gang leader struggling to live an everyday life as a black youth in Harlem. Both of these shows are just fascinating, so everyone should go see them if you're in New Orleans. And while you're there, you can check out his third exhibition, a "best of" in the photography collection at NOMA.

For photography and architecture buffs who love New York City, there is a new fun website that appeals to all those people who love seeing pictures of cities and landmarks "then and now." Called NYC Grid, it allows you to use a yellow dividing-line bar over photographs to see how landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge and surrounding areas changed from the past to now. It's quite an amazing tool and demonstrates how fun Internet technology can be at times. There are currently only 32 works you can do this too, but the site has fun photography of different neighborhoods worth perusing as well.

Have you ever wondered how music sounded in ancient Greece and Rome? Mathematically and chromatically, scholars had determined in the past how it was constructed. Now with some clever tinkering of musical instruments, a scholar at Oxford University has demonstrated how Greek music sounded. You can read more about this interesting study here from the BBC, and click here to listen to a few of the recordings of vocal and instrumental music (in association with Archaeology magazine).

Finally...(drum roll, please!)...imagine my devilish delight when I discovered that my all-time favorite Disney villain, Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty, was being given her own biopic in non-animated form! I haven't seen a Disney movie like this in eons, so I'm looking forward to this. Maleficent really was wicked...and could turn into a dragon too. How cool is that? Angelina Jolie plays her in the film...creepy! OK, it's also a bit bizarre, I know, but still...it's Maleficent! Here's the trailer for the film...

Reviews: Other Oz Stories

Last weekend was St. Patrick's Day, and even though I did nothing Irish (well, I did imbibe a few cocktails), I had a rather "green"-faced weekend. On the Saturday night, I got together with my friends JM and DC to see Oz the Great and Powerful. Now, I should explain that going to the movies in NYC is a bit of an investment: $15 to be exact, for one person. So I'm rather cheap and get very selective about what movies I will see in the theater. This was one that I thought would be fun and worth seeing on the big screen. It's now been the #1 at the box office for a few weeks now, and you can see it in digital projection, IMAX, and 3D formats (which of course cost even more). We stuck with basic digital projection. And it was fine. I mean, even the movie was fine. In other words, it wasn't as great as I thought it would be. Maybe I had high expectations. It wasn't bad though. The first half was a bit hokey; the second half had more action and kept you going. James Franco is adorable as the fallible con-artist Oz who inadvertently falls into Oz during a tornado and winds up leading a rebellion. (Side note on Franco: I love-envy-hate him now that he's an actor-writer-artist-activist-model-filmmaker-anythinghislittleheartdesiresperformer). Rachel Weisz is one of my favorite actresses. Michelle Williams is quirky as Glinda. Mila Kunis...how is it possible that someone that sexy has such a whiny voice that every time I see her I cannot help but envision her cartoon role of Meg from Family Guy? In any case, the movie's overall story is fine, special effects and computer animation a bit over-the-top, but enjoyable nonetheless. It's an alternative, prequel to the Dorothy Gale story, and you see where the story is going based on how this movie ends. Disney's website for the movie is actually pretty sleek, with a neat 3D effect that is quite cool.

The surprise of the weekend, however, was that on Sunday I (finally!) got to see Wicked on Broadway. I was meeting my friend BC and one of his friends, who were visiting from TX, and I had no idea they were getting tickets for a matinee. I literally got out of the subway and met up with them having just bought the tickets from someone outside the box office, with less than 2 minutes to spare before the show started. (And since they got the tickets last-minute, they paid almost nothing, and they wound up treating me, which was a delightful surprise.) Now, I realize this show has been around for a while and traveling, so I'm probably one of the last gay men to see it. Regardless, I loved it! (Like that's a surprise.) I had read Gregory Maguire's book Wicked years ago, and I did not like it. The musical version is exactly what his novel should have been, a revision of the story of the witches of Oz, but one that entertained you, not bored you. Elphaba, the green-skinned witch, is a social outcast, and anyone who has ever felt different and struggled with fitting in (can you say gay?) knows first-hand why her story is so moving. For me, what makes it even more moving is her fight to help the animals who are being forced to suppress their ability to talk through rather cruel tortures. There's friendship, love and romance, magic, and comedy (Galinda--"The 'a' is silent!"--is hilarious). I now can see how and why Kristin Chenoweth as Glinda and Idina Menzel as Elphaba were such a fabulous team in the original Broadway production. In the version I saw, the same roles were performed by Alli Mauzey and Willemijn Verkaik, and they both did admirable jobs. And then there's the musical numbers...

The score is performed throughout the show, and it pushes the storyline along very quickly as a result, making it easy to enjoy. In that sense, it's perfect for modern audiences who are used to non-stop Internet gadgets and televisions with 10,000 channel options to flick through. It's not an easy musical score, however. There are dissonant harmonies and difficult passages for singing at times. I could definitely hear the influence of Stephen Sondheim on Stephen Schwartz (music and lyrics). Everyone would agree that the most powerful and moving song of the show is "Defying Gravity," the song in which Elphaba makes the final decision to become "wicked," for a good cause, and in the process learns to fly (hence the scene shot seen here). "Defying Gravity" takes on the double meaning of fighting for your dreams, so it's also a powerful song for those who believe in fighting for a cause and standing up for what you believe in. The song ends Act I, which I have to confess confused me because it's so powerful I thought the show was over. As a result, Act II seems a bit of a let-down, but that's of course the act in which everything "Dorothy Gale"-related happens, leading up to some surprising plot twists toward the end, so it's definitely worth staying around for Act II. My other favorite song was in that act as well. This was "For Good," a ballad on friendship between Elphaba and Glinda. I confess it made me cry. It has one of the most beautifully simple lines: "Because I knew you, I have been changed for good." (To a couple of my dearest friends--you know who you are--I send that sentiment out to you.) Yes, without a doubt, I would definitely see Wicked again.

Week-in-my-Life: Aug 2012 (Pt. 1)

I know it’s been a while since I last blogged, so I thought I would rectify that by bringing back another one of my random weeks in my life posts, which I last did back in Feb/Mar 2011 (here, here, and here). In some ways it is timely to do this now, as I’ve had a few changes take place in my life. For starters, I’m no longer employed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (bklynbiblio readers may recall this post about one of my work-related digitization projects last Dec.) Circumstances worked out that it was the right time for me to move on to something new, and I’m thrilled to say that I’ll be teaching again starting in Sep. I will be an adjunct lecturer at City College of New York (teaching 19th-Century European Art) and Marymount Manhattan College (teaching a survey of Asian Art). I’m also actively working on my dissertation again. My friend KB and I decided we needed to motivate ourselves by being held accountable to someone, so we are writing weekly updates to one another on our progress. In the spirit of unfolding diurnal events during a random week in my life, here’s what has taken place so far (and in all fairness, I should admit that I've left out mention of the daily dips into Ghirardelli chocolates).

SUNDAY 08/05/12

AA, JM, and I take DC to the beach for his 42nd birthday, specifically Asbury Park where we soak up the sand and surf, probably have few too many cocktails but lots of fun, and wind up at tea dance at Paradise. breakfast #1: tea and cereal; breakfast #2: muffin and iced coffee at Pret a Manger. lunch: pizza and salad. dinner: 5Guys cheeseburger and fries, which we eat during a black-out from a torrential thunderstorm that oddly reminds me of Florida.

MONDAY 08/06/12

9:00am = drop off laundry, then call Time Warner because I still have no Internet service for 2 weeks now, find out I have (yet another) service appointment for Friday, would it not have been nice if someone had told me this before now??!! (begin to secretly plot how to destroy them for their arrogance).

9:30am = breakfast at Maybelle’s Café: bacon, egg & cheddar on brioche and cappuccino. stunned to find entire café filled with people who apparently are all out of work, so uncertain if it’s a good thing that I’m joining them. spend next few hours gathering digital images on early Indus Valley civilizations of Mohenjo-Daro in the Punjab for my lecture.

1:00pm = lunch: turkey & Swiss sandwich on multi-grain break with grapes and walnuts

2:00pm = continue working on same project, successfully finish first PowerPoint for one of my classes, including writing out explanations about things as diverse as the Bhagavad Gita and religious concepts like samsara (huzzah!).

6:30pm = dinner: spinach salad with salmon; Netflix movie: MidsomerMurders: Master Class (4 stars, midlands England, creepy piano teacher, fabulous students getting bumped off...what's not to loved?)

TUESDAY 08/07/12

7:30am = breakfast: pomegranate yogurt, ½ multi-grain bagel with cream cheese, and tea

9:00am = begin dissertation writing with reorganization of material, diving head-first into introduction chapter to justify to myself why I'm slaving away on this bloody thing, amazed to discover 4½ pages written.

12:00pm = lunch: turkey & Swiss sandwich (again), this time with leftover pasta salad; Netflix movie = Mirror Mirror (watch about 20 minutes; so not thrilled with Julia Roberts as a bitchy Queen Mum to Snow White)

2:00pm = off to gym, burn off about 400 calories doing machines and cardio

5:00pm = go to library and do more digital image research, this time on Buddhism and Buddhist art in India and Tibet

7:30pm = dinner: chicken & avocado salad at Pret a Manger

9:00pm = meet academic colleagues DJ and PK from London for professional networking drinks at Lyon’s in Village

WEDNESDAY 08/08/12

8:00am = breakfast: egg & cheddar with multi-grain bread and fruit, cup of coffee

9:00am = more dissertation writing; finish another 5 pages (huzzah some more!)

1:00pm = meet CS3 at the Ferrari dealership/store on Park Avenue (hence the Ferrari logo above), where he insists I show my license and prove to them that I’m actually a Ferrari and one of the distant cousins; despite this humiliation, we have delightful and engaging professional luncheon where we gossip first, then discuss at length electronic publishing, digital image rights, and the world of art books today. lunch: Cuban sandwich with plantain chips, iced tea (thanks for lunch, CS3!).

4:00pm = back to library for more digital image research on Buddhist art, suddenly becoming overwhelmed by the reality of how much work is involved in preparing a lecture to teach!

6:30pm = still at library, suddenly realize I should have left half hour earlier and now will never make it to yoga class (groan!), but then strangely bump into fellow doctoral dissertater SD and catch up for few minutes where we commiserate over the non-existent future of academic careers.

8:00pm = dinner: tomato, red bean, black olive, peas & walnuts salad with Lean Cuisine macaroni & cheese and 2 fried chicken tenders; Netflix movie: continue watching Mirror Mirror, but only get 30 minutes in before catch-up phone calls from the Uncle and SVH.

Stay tuned for more...

Barbra in Brooklyn

Please pardon bklynbiblio for a moment while I gush about some thrilling news: I've got tickets to see Barbra Streisand at her sold-out concert here in Brooklyn this coming October!! Persistence paid off. I was convinced the concert was sold out, but I kept trying, and I got through. This is truly a life-long dream come true for me, so I'm giddy with glee. My amigo AA is going with me. He's not as big a fan as I, but he's being a great sport in joining me, and I appreciate the company very much (muchas gracias!). Besides, during the concert I may swoon and will need him to catch me. Don't laugh! We'll be in the nosebleed section, so I very well could swoon from the high altitude. The concert will be at the Barclays Center, the new stadium they're still constructing not too far away from me. It has been a controversial building project in the Brooklyn community for a while now, and I can't help but think the P.R. machines believe having someone like Barbra headline a concert there soon after it opens will help assuage some of the discontent. We'll see about that. In the meantime, I'll continue to grin and think "Hello, Gorgeous!", per her role seen here as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl (1968). To read more about the concert and Barbra's return to her roots in Brooklyn, you can click here.

Happy 2012!

Is it really 2012? Someone needs to tell Father Time to slow down! The weather here in NYC is surprisingly mild, pushing into the 50s today, although we are expecting a cold snap with highs in the 20s on Tuesday. Since I've been recovering from another sinus infection and feeling perpetually exhausted, I decided to lay low last night. I wound up watching the 1934 film It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, which was surprisingly racy for the time, with blatant sexual innuendos and flashes of bare flesh. The film itself was okay, but it wasn't easy listening to all that misogyny, as if constantly belittling a woman was a sure way to win her heart.

For the past few years, I've been redesigning the look of bklynbiblio on New Year's, and today is no exception. A few months ago Google introduced some new templates, but despite their sleek looks and functionality, none of them worked for me. Since I believe the look of the blog shouldn't overwhelm the posts themselves, I've gone for a more streamlined look for easier reading. (If you read these posts by email or RSS, go to http://bklynbiblio.blogspot.com to see it live.) So here's to another year of blogging. Happy 2012!

Random Musings 10

I'm heading to Florida for a dysfunctional family Christmas. If you're wondering if this is a picture of my relatives, it's not, but I swear if my lesbian cousins (the DG-JBs) were to ever really let loose, I'm convinced they would be just like Edina and Patsy (more on them below). I've been saving up a bunch of links and posts to blog about, so enjoy this Random Musing.

The Guardian has an interesting interactive guide that allows you to zoom in and find out more about drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, in conjunction with the National Gallery's current exhibition about his years at the court of Milan.

When I was at the YCBA, my co-visiting scholar was Georgina Cole, who received her PhD from Sydney University in Australia. She was there working on a project relating to the senses in 18th-century British painting. She's also started a new blog/website, Early Modern Art Network, which focuses on news relating to art from the 17th and 18th centuries. She's transcribed a funny 18th-century letter to the editor from an enraged parent about how having his children trained to be artists had made his life miserable: "When I the other Day found that Remonstrance was in vain, and rage exerted without Effect, and clasped my Hands and sighed with pure Vexation, my Daughter told me I looked like the Soldier in Belisarius; my eldest Son said I was more like West’s weeping Grenadier, and my youngest, a little Imp about ten Years of Age, got into a Corner of the Room with his Chalks and blue Paper to copy my Face, his own Father’s Face, Sir, for a Head of Despair."

I've blogged about the World of the Year in the past, but unfortunately we now have conflicts depending on the source as to what the actual word of 2011 is. Dictionary.com had declared "tergiversate" to be the annual word (huh?), but now Merriam-Webster claims the word of the year is "pragmatic," based on the number of people who searched for that word. Complicating matters is the Oxford English Dictionary, which apparently declared "squeezed middle" the word of the year, never mind that's a phrase, not a word.

Thanks to my dear friend SVH, my latest sci-fi obsession is Farscape. Yes, I'm a little late to this, as it's been off the air for a while, but it's fun. A pregnant bio-ship with a sexy lost human and escaped alien prisoners, none of whom know or trust one another? What a fun concept!

New York magazine has declared 2011 to be the year in which male bodies were exploited in the movies, such as Chris Evans here in Captain America. There is a rather lovely slideshow of images worth seeing on the site, although I do find it odd that they all look alike (never mind why  Evans insists on shaving his chest hair). Unfortunately, my fantasy boyfriend Ewan McGregor wasn't on the list, although I guess he didn't actually take his shirt off in any films this year (a first for him!). His film Beginners, with Christopher Plummer as his aging father who comes out of the closet late in life, was absolutely one of the best movies of the year. The Anglophenia blog put up a post earlier this year with video clips of all things Ewan, so check it out.

And unless you've been living under a rock I'm sure you've heard the news that--20 years after the first episodes premiered--Absolutely Fabulous is coming back with some new episodes with Edina and Patsy partying hard and Saffie scolding them the whole time. I can't wait! Here's a hilarious clip from the newest episode in which they trash-talk the Kardashians (who I still to this day do not understand why people think they are important!!). Enjoy, sweetie dahling!

28 New Haven Days: Part 1

I've been in New Haven for approximately 55 hours, and while I'm more settled now than when I first arrived, so far it's been a relatively quiet start. Friday night I was staying at the Graduate Club, and I spent that afternoon getting my Yale ID, then touching base with the YCBA staff and getting acquainted in more detail with the Library itself. Because yesterday was the annual Harvard-Yale game (I presume that's football?), plus with Thanksgiving coming up, I'm arriving here during an unusual time when many things are shut down for the week, including some of the Libraries. Nevertheless, I managed to keep myself entertained a bit this weekend. On Saturday, I moved into the Taft Apartments, which you see here. They were built in 1912 and named for Pres. Taft, who after his presidency taught at Yale and lived here. The apartments, however, are perhaps more famous because they're next to the Shubert Theater, which historically has been a testing ground for plays before heading to Broadway, but these days seem to be stuck doing revivals and seasonal works like A Christmas Carol in early December. The Taft has made an appearance in more than one film too, like All About Eve (1950), when Eve (Anne Baxter) is performing at the Shubert and she is confronted in her Taft apartment about her own past. (If you haven't seen this movie, get it now...it's one of Bette Davis's best films with her classic line "Fasten your seat belts--it's gonna be a bumpy night!") As for my apartment, so far so good, although my previous occupant wasn't exactly the cleanest person, leaving behind half-dirty dishes and her long black hair on more than one towel, including (shockingly) the kitchen dish towels which, alas, I did not discover until after I cooked my dinner and found hair in my food. (Yes...very gross.)

Shermania had written me about an exhibition at Artspace called Library Science, and I'm so glad he told me. It's the perfect combination of contemporary art and librarianship coming together in a way that would satisfy any bibliophile or library nerd. Candida Höfer was of course included, showcasing one of her large-scale photographs of libraries, but a number of other artists in the show were new to me and had some interesting ideas about libraries, books, and cataloging. Mickey Smith rephotographs found photos of people posing with faux libraries as backdrops, calling into question what the library is meant to suggest when it is not real. He also laid out an entire collection of hundreds of volumes of the Federal Reserve in a way that one quite literally walks over the books in order to look at his photographs. Considering this entire series is now available through online databases, Smith makes us rethink the evolution of information and the gradual disappearance of books in the e-publishing world as we walk all over them and what they historically have represented. Reynard Loki reenvisions the idea of cataloging with an ongoing project in which he indexes on paper his entire library by the first and last lines of each book he owns, and Erica Baum's large-scale photographs of subject heading cards from old card catalogs suddenly makes words like "Power" take on a whole new visual sensibility. This was an interesting exhibition for sure.

I was working on a different review today, but by lunchtime I decided I needed to get some air so I took a long stroll and wound up, oddly enough, in the Grove Street Cemetery. Yes, I admit, I'm a cemetery stroller. I find cemeteries to be very peaceful places where you can commune with nature (loved the birds and squirrels), but also look at the sculpture of the tomb stones and learn about people with whom I have no connection but who were important to someone at some time enough that a marker still exists to mark their remains. A number of the oldest tombstones here date from the 1700s and are now in very bad shape, but a number of 19th-century stones are still intact. I was pleasantly surprised to discover the grave for Eli Whitney (inventor of the cotton gin), but of all the plots I saw the one that caught my eye was that of Edward Elbridge Salisbury (1814-1901), which you see in the foreground of the image above. It's not that the sculpture is of great significance, but when you read the accomplishments of this man, most notably his becoming Yale's first Professor of Arabic and Sanskrit during a period when hardly anyone knew a thing about these languages, you realize he was an important academic figure. I had to look up more about him and discovered that his entire collection of books and manuscripts was donated to the Libraries and are the foundation for the Near East Collection. Looking in WorldCat, however, I was surprised to see what he had authored. While he did publish a few tracts on things like the Persian cuneiform alphabet (1849), he also wrote about Michelangelo (1861), and published a number of books about genealogy and his own family history. It makes you realize how specialized we've become in academia today, and it reminds me of the importance of making sure I don't get too pigeon-holed in my own work.

Royalty

Of course I watched the Royal Wedding! How could I not? Having blogged about William & Catherine's engagement, which took place while I was in England last Fall, naturally I was going to watch it. What can I say: I am an Anglophile. The wedding did bring back memories of when I was a boy drinking early morning tea with Momma and Nana as we watched Charles & Diana get married. Can you believe that was 30 years ago? They would have loved this Royal Wedding as well. Hearing that the Queen had given the couple the titles the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge also put a smile on my lips, making me think back to my days of studying at Selwyn College at Cambridge University. It was where I first met my friend CF and we had quite a few adventures. Sure enough, CF wound up texting me during the wedding saying the same thing. Speaking of technology, I was struck also by how the Royals have integrated it into their public lives. The British Monarchy has had its own website for years, but did you know they have a Flickr pool, a Twitter page, a Facebook page, and a YouTube site? It's pretty amazing when you consider they have a reputation for being old fashioned. The picture you see here of the newlyweds is from their Flickr photostream of official wedding photos which William & Katherine selected to be disseminated.

Every Internet-based form of news media has the wedding covered, so I won't bother linking to anything, but I'll make just a few observations. As always, there was a lot of pomp & circumstance, but the Brits have been doing it for so long, and always do it so well, it's simply magical simply to watch. But let's face it, it's all about the fashion. First, her wedding dress was stunning, elegant, and timeless. Like everyone else, I immediately thought of Grace Kelly, and I loved the retro-yet-modern 1950s look the dress had. I had a suspicion there would be a connection to the house of Alexander McQueen (the Met’s exhibition on him opens next week), but I didn’t know it would be designed by Sarah Burton. Second, William looked brilliant in red, and Harry…yum! Why are men always stuck wearing dour tuxedos at weddings? Uniforms aside, a little bit of color can only enhance the look, respecting, of course, that the bride still must outshine. (My friends RL+DG were a model to emulate!) William & Kate’s two kisses on the balcony and the drive-off in the Aston Martin were smart moves on their part. They managed to pull of tradition with modern flair, showing how they are the new monarchy for the 21st century. Third, loved the Queen looking all sassy in that sunshine yellow frock and hat...85 years old too! (Her 60-year Jubilee is coming up in 2012.) Finally, the hats...insane! The Duchess of York (Fergie) mayn't have been invited to the wedding, but her daughters are learning from her about standing out in a crowd. Princess Beatrice's hat looked like a combination of a Rococo wall ornament and a Christmas-giftbox-ribbon. The hats were adventurously fabulous. American women, take note!

With the swelling of the crowds in the London streets and the estimated 2 billion people who watched the wedding worldwide, hopefully the naysayers about the monarchy realize that despite everything there is a tradition of over 1000 years that has been the backbone of the British people and made them who they are today. For sure, the monarchy has to evolve to meet the more Republican (and even Socialist) demands of the people, but nothing happens overnight. The truth is, we need people like the Queen. Part of the mystique that surrounds our world leaders is the assumed glarmorous, magical world in which they live. People want to know that the Queen and the Royals are just like them, but at the same time they also need for them to be distant, removed, even above them in some way, so that they become a model to which one can aspire. An important part of that aspiration is the glam and the pomp & circumstance. People need a little tradition, and some historically-derived bling, in order to help guide them to a higher model of excellence. This doesn't mean the Queen is a god; it means she represents the best of the nation, and the world. Besides, think of the alternative: do the Brits really want their only visual representation of leadership to be David Cameron and his wife? Trust me, Americans know: we had 8 years of George & Laura Bush, and it wasn't pretty.

As an aside, my royal watching actually had begun Thursday evening when I finally watched on DVD The King’s Speech. It’s strange that I hadn’t seen the movie before now, but the timing to watch it worked out well, and of course I loved the film. The climax of the movie, when he gives his wartime radio speech, the way they syncopated it to the second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, was a marvelous moment in cinematic history. The important thing to keep in mind, however, is that this actually did happen. Here is his portrait by Meredith Frampton, painted in 1929 when he was still the Duke of York (image: National Portrait Gallery). He was King George VI, the father of Queen Elizabeth II, the Duke of Cambridge’s great-grandfather. He had to overcome a major obstacle in order to become a leader, and he did it with the help of a friend who was not of royalty but of the people. It’s something to think about as the present Royals drive off into the sunset on their honeymoon, and a new generation of the monarchy takes us along with them for the ride.

The Dying Dyrad (with an update)

Yesterday afternoon, I looked out the back window of my apartment and was thinking that the tree in the yard needed to be trimmed. Imagine how shocked I was this morning when I woke up to one of the most ferocious sounds in existence: that of buzz saws ripping through the air. The beautiful tree was being cut down completely, its branches falling to the ground in a heap of bare spindly limbs. Whenever I see in person a tree being cut down, I swear I feel a lump in my chest, and the same happened this morning. It feels like slaughter to me. Admittedly, I'm being melodramatic, because the tree branches were interfering with the electrical wiring and were simply overgrown, but still it hurts. Thinking back, this extends to a sad childhood memory of when my parents decided to cut down the enormous weeping willow tree in our backyard. It was like losing a friend then, and it's the same even now. I think immediately that a Dryad is dying. Dryads are the spirits of trees in Greek mythology. The image you see here is Evelyn De Morgan's late Victorian painting of The Dryad. When a tree is cut down, the Dryad who lives in it cries aloud and dies along with the tree. It was tradition in ancient cultures that the man with the axe would seek the Dryad's blessing before cutting it down for their need, not unlike the thanking of the spirit of an animal killed for sacrificing itself to sustain humankind. Seeing the tree come down limb by limb I couldn't help but think about the hawk that has visited me and the way the snow has landed on the tree's bare branches creating a beautiful cascading blanket in white. I'm very glad now that I took the pictures that accompany those posts to remember her by. I'll have to look for spring buds on some other tree this year.

UPDATE: I bumped into the landlady's daughter a little while ago and discovered that indeed the tree coming down was not by choice. Apparently one of our neighbors started complaining about it being in their yard. Ah, well, what can you do. Today is a day for surprises though. I just turned the corner of my street, and they're filming a scene for a new horror movie called Hellbenders. I think I just saw actor Clifton Collins, Jr., but I have no idea who he is, so I came home before they yelled at me to get off the set (that happened to me twice when I accidentally walked onto the set of Gossip Girl while it was filming in NYC...as if I want my cameo appearance to be on that show).

Random Musings 6

The Royal Academy in London has been in existence since 1768, its first President being Sir Joshua Reynolds and including among its famous members J.M.W. Turner and Frederic, Lord Leighton. It has had the cachet of being the leading institution for British art since its foundation, although naturally over its history there have been groups who challenged its principles and teachings, such as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. In spite this paradigmatic position, to be elected a Royal Academician, one of the 80 "eminent practising artists" active in the United Kingdom, is an incredible honor and says much about your position in the world and history of British art. So you can imagine there was some surprise when news broke that Grayson Perry, the 2003 Turner Prize winner (the first transvestite to win that prestigious award), was elected to the RA. The image you see here shows Perry as his transvestite persona Claire in a gallery beside one of his vases (image: London Evening Standard). I'm a relative newbie to the career of Perry, only having begun following his work last fall when I was in the UK (and I must credit CC with pointing his ceramics out to me and thus leading me on my journey to know more about him). Since then I've been fascinated. His vases are beautiful amphora-like objects, but the images on them reveal very personal childlike sketches that frequently depict graphic scenes on subjects such as war and sexual violence. There's something about the images that make me think of Edward Gorey, but with less wit, more visceral realism. His work has helped reinvigorate an interest in ceramics for many, in part because of the subjectivity that appears on works that historically have been decorative or functional objects. The RA, however, doesn't elect decorative artists, so what is interesting with this story too is that they elected him as a printmaker. I'm less familiar with his prints, but the implication from the article in The Art Newspaper is that his work in printmaking was a veiled attempt to acknowledge his achievements without having to bend the rules of election to the RA. The best bit in the article has to do with Perry himself: "On 22 March he was the guest speaker at the RA Schools annual dinner, and although it was a black tie event, Perry added some colour to the night and came as his usual female altar-ego 'Claire', rather than hire a tired Moss Bros suit."

On this side of the Atlantic in NYC, I've been raving about the Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand photography exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you haven't seen it yet, you've got one week before it closes. Opening this week is Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century exhibition, which promises to be a delightful show. Inspired by Lorenz Eitner's insightful article "The Open Window and the Storm-Tossed Boat: An Essay in the Iconography of Romanticism" published in The Art Bulletin (December 1955), this exhibition showcases a number of jewel-like pictures by mostly German, Austrian, and Danish artists from the early 1800s who were infatuated with photorealistic interiors and views outside their windows.

In non-art news, The New York Times has done another incredible job using Internet technology with its latest interactive tool (thanks to PR for sending this to me). Using census data, "Mapping America: Every City, Every Block" allows you to type in a zip code or a city name, and you can see the ethnic/racial population breakdown for neighborhoods, as well as information about incomes, education, and family structures. When I did a search for my own largely Italian-American Brooklyn neighborhood, I wasn't surprised to discover it's 61-66% White, but I was surprised to discover that the Asian population was 11-12%. I was actually more surprised to discover that 3-4% of the population in my neighborhood define themselves as same-sex couples, because I was convinced until now I was the only gay in the village. (Definitely click on that link if you've never seen the hilarious BBC comedy Little Britain.)

The new season of Torchwood is set to premiere on July 8th. While I'm glad that John Barrowman and Eve Myles will be part of it, at least for some of the episodes, I'm still annoyed that it's going to be on Starz Network, which I don't think anyone I know actually gets as part of their cable system. I guess we'll have to wait for the DVD.

Speaking of DVDs, if you didn't catch Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor as prison lovers in I Love You Philip Morris during its limited-run release, you absolutely must see it on DVD, which is being released in the US this week. It is a fabulous dark comedy that will make you squirm, jeer, cry, and laugh out loud. Ewan as a naive blond Southern boy...you just wanna eat him up!

And, last but certainly not least, remember that April is Prevention of Cruelty to Animals month, sponsored by the ASPCA. This year is the 145th anniversary of their charter, which was signed here in NYC in 1866. Click here for my past post about the group's history. Go orange and remember We Are Their Voice!

DW in the USA

Doctor Whoovians (such as myself) are excited that Series 6 (the second season with Doctor Matt Smith) will be premiering in the US this coming April 23rd on BBC America. Companions Amelia "Amy" Pond, Rory, and the mysterious River Song all are returning as well. Little Britain fans will be titillated to know that David Walliams will be on an episode playing an alien, which should be great fun (Walliams also is an admitted Whoovian). The big news though is that much of the season is going to take place in the United States during various points in history, including the first episode which starts in Utah and winds up in Washington, D.C. That gives a new spin on things for Brits used to the Anglocentric plots in its nearly 50-year history. But of course it isn't the first time The Doctor has visited the US. In the new series alone, Doctor David visited NYC with Martha Jones during the construction of the Empire State Building in the late 1920s, with the Daleks turning New Yorkers into pig-faced mutant alien slaves. (Come on...ya gotta love this stuff!) In related news, I'm curious to see Matt Smith playing gay writer Christopher Isherwood in Christopher and His Kind, a British movie that is going right to DVD here in the US. (For those not in the know, Isherwood wrote The Berlin Stories, which became the basis for the musical Cabaret.) For now, however, we look forward to The Doctor and Amy Pond in about 4 weeks time. Here's the trailer for the new season: http://bcove.me/6ht2w0hq.

UPDATE 3/21/11: I had drinks & dinner with my friend and fellow Whoovian CW here in St. Petersburg tonight. Imagine my surprise when she presented me with my very own Doctor Who-inspired blue bow tie and button that shouts "Geronimo!" I now have my proper attire for the April 23rd premiere.

Random Musings 3 (UK Edition)

The picture you see here is what I emptied out of my wallet and pocket tonight. Lots of coins! Does anyone really like them? Some women have change purses, but others just throw them in their bags. Men have to lug them around in their front pocket, putting them off-balance and making them sound a walking sleigh bell music box. I’ve seen some men with wallets that have little change purses, but of course that just creates a giant lump in their back pocket. I know who likes coins: coffee and sandwich shops, where you can leave your spare change at the register as a tip. And people do because they don’t want to carry the change around with them. Here in the UK, if you do that, you must be careful or you may accidentally give them more than you wanted to. In the US we use paper currency for $1 and the ever-rare-but-still-valid $2. We don’t mind carrying that around and rarely would we ever dump that in a tip jar. But in the UK, they use £1 and £2 coins. The US government tries to get us to use $1 coins, but no one likes them, even when they’re pretty and distinctive like the heavier gold-colored £1 coins you see in the picture above. In case you’re wondering, there was £9.97 in my pocket: a £5 note (with the lovely Liz smiling at you) and four £1, three 20p(ence), one 10p, two 2p, and three 1p coins. Based on today’s exchange rate, that’s $16.10 on the table. The point to all this is that while one has to get adjusted to foreign currency units, one of things I discovered being here is that rounding things with coins so as to leave with fewer coins than when you came in, which I do in the US, just doesn't work the same way here. For instance, if my grocery bill comes to $12.67, I might give the cashier $15 in bills and $.67 in spare change, so that I get three crisp $1 bills back, and thus leave feeling less weighed down. Here, though, if my grocery bill were the same in pounds and I gave the cashier £15 in notes and 67p in change, I would still leave with coins—three £1 coins, or a £2 and a £1 coin—which sometimes weighs more than the spare change I might have carried normally. It's funny, the things you learn in other countries.

For instance, another thing I’ve learned is that it is absolutely critical to learn your right from your left, especially when crossing the street. Now, we all know that the Brits drive on the “wrong” side of the road (and I can say that because almost everyone else in the world drives the same way Americans do...something to do with Napoleon, I think, but I’ll let my friend CF, a Napoleon devotee, chime in on that one). What we don’t realize is that they also love one way streets, and they don’t necessarily like to tell you in plain language when it is a one way street. Needless to say, the lesson here is that once you think you’ve got it down, that you should look RIGHT before looking LEFT when crossing, don’t get cocky, because you may suddenly turn out to have stumbled upon a one way street, and you may almost get run over by a bus, which is exactly what happened to me this morning. Fortunately, Brits are too polite to laugh aloud at my stupidity.

Remember my commentary about public drunkenness not too long ago? Well, I’ve had some feedback from my British friends about that. Of course one of them was taken aback that I had made it seem so pandemic, but then the more we spoke about it the truth came out: it is a nationwide problem. The truth is that the drinking age here is 18, not 21, most pubs close earlier than bars do in the US, and few young adults have cars that they drive everywhere like in the US. As a result, there is a greater visibility of drunk young adults stumbling through the streets at night. The good news is that I haven’t been accosted by said partiers since that blog post, so maybe the word got out to avoid me. By sheer coincidence, too, this morning on the BBC there was a report about pub owners and clients having huge issues with families who bring their children into pubs and allow them to treat the place as if it were a family-oriented zone, when in fact it is, truly, a bar. I was actually stunned to hear that children were even allowed in pubs. Who knew? I admit though that a part of me was grinning about it too, having commented once about strollers and screaming babies disturbing my peace in a once-quiet coffee shop in NYC (for which I got seriously reprimanded by my cousins who are young mothers!).

Finally, I thought it was worth mentioning that the TV in my flat has a number of channels to choose from. The problem is that only 4 of them work. Of course the UK has cable and satellite TV, but the flat only has basic programming. It took me the first 2 weeks to figure out what channels they actually were: BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, and Channel 4. Gratefully, there are guides online for the channels, so I’ve been able to avoid all the American shows like Friends and Frasier and stick with British soap operas like Hollyoaks and raunchy comedy like The Graham Norton Show (unedited! hurrah!). But for anyone who loves historic reality programs, wait until The High Street arrives in the US. It’s brilliant! The premise is that different families are put in charge of shops reliving periods from the past. Situated in an English village whose historic center has died out, their job is to bring people back to the city center, while living as if they were in the past. The first episode, for instance, had them living in the 1870s. The butcher had to deal with no refrigeration for his meat, and the baker had to prepare loaves of bread using lard and a brick oven. The second episode took place in the 1910s, and dealt with social issues like women’s rights and the impact of World War I on shopkeepers when men had to leave women in charge of businesses. I have to confess: that is one kind of reality show I would love to be on.

And, of course, the big news out of London is that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows premiered there last night with all the stars on the red carpet. Am I the only one surprised by how chic Emma Watson looks these days? You go, girl! I can't wait to see the movie, probably when I'm in London, which will be soon. Yes, believe it or not, my time in Leeds is almost done, but then I’m on to Liverpool and London, so there is more to come. Before I depart from Leeds though, I’ll have to stop by the German Christmas Village which just opened. Maybe tomorrow...

50 UK Days: Week 3

All Hallow's Eve--a.k.a. Halloween--has only become a big deal in the UK in the past few years. The majority of people I saw celebrating did so this past Saturday night, and almost everyone was in the 18-25 year range. They were all dressed in “sexy knickers” too. I don’t think I saw a single scary costume out there. But my favorite explanation as to why Halloween is so much more significant in the US than here came from a ITV newscaster this morning who claimed it was because America has huge pumpkins, like the large ones in the picture above (photo: Mark Boster, L.A. Times). In the UK they never get that big. I guess it's true then...size does matter.

Choosing to ignore most of the drunken revelry, I spent the weekend exploring more of Leeds (and doing research of course). On Saturday I shopped at the City Market, which basically is a flea market meets meat/fish/produce market. With all the possible shopping options here, my mother would have been ecstatic. If we had come to England on a visit, I could have dropped her off in Leeds for 2 weeks so I could go site-seeing, and she would have been like a bluejay in a birdbath flittering from one shop to the next in sheer delight.

On Sunday, I spent a few hours at the Leeds City Museum. Living in NYC, it’s difficult to visit museums in smaller cities and be open-minded about their collections and installations, but occasionally you can be impressed. The City Museum did just that, in particular with their displays on the history of the city. I took the digital photograph you see here of one part of this installation focusing on mid-Victorian history. You can see display cases of historic clothing and everyday objects, and between the cases are videos of people reenacting the lives of Leeds citizens from the past, using their actual words and real-life scenarios taken from surviving personal diaries and correspondence. The domes hanging from the ceiling are where you stand to hear the videos. The history section goes from Anglo-Saxon days to the present, but of course my favorite parts were from the late 1700s to the early 1900s. The displays all show an awareness of the Disneyfication of museums, which in the US are geared for children. Here I was surprised to see adults enchanted by the flip-charts, games, trivia, and whatnot, to the point that I found myself joining them in pulling on levers and pressing buttons too, just to learn more about the city’s history. Did you know, for instance, that the population grew from 17,000 in the 1770s to more than 89,000 by the 1840s? This exponential growth in population was because of the industrial revolution, which made Leeds one of the most important wool manufacturing production centers in the world.

Other parts of the museum were less thrilling. The section on the ancient world has a requisite exposed mummy in the Egyptian section and a few insignificant examples of Greco-Roman marbles and vases. The natural history section has lots of taxidermied animals, which always freak me out, so I ignored that section. They did have a special exhibition on that was interesting though: Heroes & Heroines: Fashion from Film. The show included outfits worn by actors in different historic films made for the cinema and television. In part, the exhibition is seen as relevant for an area rich in the history of wool and textile manufacturing, and a countryside (Yorkshire) where many historical dramas have been either set or filmed. It included things like Cate Blanchett’s coronation gown when she played the Tudor queen Elizabeth and Kate Winslet’s evening gown as Sylvia Llewelyn Davies in Finding Neverland. The curators juxtaposed this with true historical clothing from the represented time period, to show how costume designers base their work on original styles, but modify them for the camera. Of all the outfits on display, I found myself chuckling over those worn by Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. There was the banyan robe he wore after stepping from a bath, and the outfit he stripped out of before diving into the lake. The outfits and text labels for these couldn’t help but remind us how much we loved Firth’s watery scenes. Even the label for an historical white linen shirt from the early 1800s noted that it was “typical of the kind of garment the BBC’s Mr. Darcy would have worn when taking a dip in the lake. It is a lot longer than shirts worn today...because, in the past, men did not wear underpants! Instead men would simply tuck their shirt between their legs.” You can almost hear the giggle in-between the words, can’t you? On that note, it seemed only appropriate to end with that classic scene of Mr. Darcy’s dip in the lake and said linen shirt. If you’ve never seen this miniseries, you must. It is one of the best BBC literary adaptations ever made, and Firth really is quite sexy.