Gay Pride 2010

This past weekend was Gay Pride 2010, the 40th anniversary of the first parade in the City. One of my friends, NV, came up from Miami Beach for his first NYC Gay Pride, which turned out to be a fun-filled weekend with the boys. On Friday night, we ate dinner with AR & JM at a new Thai restaurant in Chelsea. NV & I then headed to Splash, where we met up with more friends for a few hours of high-tech dancing and “acrobatically inclined” go-go boys (don’t ask, you had to be there). I had the dance remix version of Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro” playing in my head for most of the next day (see below).

On Saturday, NV & I headed to the Brooklyn Museum for two queer-themed exhibits, Andy Warhol: The Last Decade and American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection. (We also wound up going to The Metropolitan Museum of Art today with MP & CF to see the other half of the same fashion exhibition, American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity; both exhibitions are beautiful, but the Met’s installation is a stunning visual feast for the eyes.) Following the Brooklyn Museum visit, we did some obligatory clothes shopping at Brooklyn Industries. After a mandatory disco nap, we headed out for the night to another friend’s place where 10 of us met up and had cocktails (vodka & cranberry seems to be the gay drink these days) along with pizza and salad for dinner. Afterwards we all went to Eastern Bloc in the East Village for some classic 80s music, where we met up with yet more friends. I was under some ridiculous notion that this bar would have a dance floor, but that was not the case, so we basically squished ourselves into a long stretch of people, sweat our asses off, ordered more drinks, and created our own dancing zone, including on boxes overlooking the crowd.

Sunday was the official Gay Pride Parade. My friends and I were a little disappointed in it this year. It may have been because the theme was more about social action such as the legalization of gay marriage, and as a result the parade was less the over-the-top, sexy, flamboyant craziness as it had been in the past. As bklynbiblio readers know (including from my more detailed explanatory post on last year’s parade), I purposely avoid politics on this blog. I do of course have great respect for the long history of activists who have helped make a difference in civil rights (including, for instance, the lesbian activist Storme DeLarverie, one of the original Stonewall protesters, who according to this recent article in The New York Times sadly now has dementia and lives in a nursing home in Brooklyn). However, when it comes to the parade, people really just want to be entertained. Yes, we admit it, we want more floats with hot go-go boys dancing on them. We got a few, but not enough. (One of the lesbian clubs had a float with sexy dancing girls on it!) It was also surprising that no one threw out beads (a la Mardi Gras) as they always have in the past. I’m not sure if that’s a product of the suffering economy or a desire to keep the City cleaner. All that said, don’t be completely misled by our disappointment, because there were some festive floats with outlandish figures (Latinos know how to party). You can see a great photo stream of pictures by Tom Giebel on his Flickr group. The picture above is by him as well, and it shows just one of the gay groups marching. Who knew there was a group that brought together queer bloggers in NYC?! After the parade, we went to Barracuda for drinks, Rafaella’s for dinner, and then home to crash. Needless to say, I slept well last night.

In the spirit of Gay Pride, here’s Lady Gaga’s provocatively queer video for “Alejandro.” I feel so privileged that my own name gets vocal prominence after those of Alejandro and Fernando.

DW meets VVG

I love it when my disparate areas of interest converge. When it comes to Doctor Who, this does happen on occasion. For instance, in the episode "Tooth and Claw," Doctor David and Rose go back to 19th-century England and have an adventure with Queen Victoria and werewolf-like aliens, during which Rose keeps trying to get the queen to say "We are not amused!", and HRH eventually establishes the Torchwood Institute for the protection of the British Empire from alien attacks. In the next new episode of the show, however, Doctor Matt and Amy head to 1889 Provence in which they meet Vincent van Gogh (whom, I might add, has never looked so beefy!). The artist is being hounded by an invisible monster-like alien. I must say, it's an interesting idea: it certainly offers us another explanation as to whether he was mentally unstable or not. The image you see above is a digital adaptation of van Gogh's famous painting (from the Museum of Modern Art) in which Terry Lightfoot has added in the upper right corner near the moon the Doctor's TARDIS (i.e. his time travel spaceship in the shape of a blue police box). The strange thing about all of this is that last year SVH actually sent me a magnet with the exact same image, although on the magnet the TARDIS is more in the center and larger. I cannot for the life of me find the magnet anywhere on the Internet, so I now suspect she traveled to the future and brought one back, probably in anticipation of this storyline. The episode aired on June 5 in the UK, but Americans will see its premiere next week. Alas, I'll have to wait even longer, but for a good reason. NV from Miami Beach will be staying with me while we celebrate NYC Gay Pride with friends.

BQH Conference

A few weeks ago, while I was in Florida, the executive committee in my graduate program met and, I'm pleased to say, approved my dissertation proposal: "Refashioning the Gods: John Gibson, the Roman School of Sculpture, and the Modern Classical Body." As you may remember from a previous post on this blog, Gibson was a British sculptor who moved to Rome in 1817 and established a studio there, becoming one of the most important sculptors of his day. My dissertation will address how Gibson was both a classicist and a modernist, how his appreciation of ancient Greco-Roman art merged with his understanding of modern taste, and thus made him the successful sculptor that he was in his day.

In addition to my upcoming residential fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute, and a travel award from my school, I was informed this week that I also have received another award: the Spero-Goldreich Dissertation Fellowship. The money from this award is going to pay my travel expenses to do research in London at the Royal Academy this fall. I am extremely grateful to the private sponsors of this award.

Before I leave for England, however, I'll be making a stop in Montreal first, where I will be delivering a paper at the British Queer History Conference at McGill University. I am on a panel session on 19th-century British art with my friends and colleagues Carolyn Conroy (on Simeon Solomon) and Jongwoo Jeremy Kim (on Henry Scott Tuke). Christopher Reed from Penn State is our moderator. It should be an interesting conference, with talks by Jeffrey Weeks, Matt Cook, and others. You can see the whole program here.

You may be wondering how all this relates to the picture above. That is a photograph I took in April 2006 of Chatsworth, truly one of the most magnificent estates in England, still owned by the Duke of Devonshire and his family. The 6th Duke was one of Gibson's first patrons, and my upcoming conference paper will be about how these two bachelors negotiated the aspects of queer art patronage in the early 19th century. Here is the abstract for my paper.

The Sculptor and the Duke: John Gibson, the Duke of Devonshire, and Queer Art Patronage

During the winter of 1819, the Duke of Devonshire visited the Roman studio of the British sculptor John Gibson. At the time, Gibson was working on a seven-foot model of a sculptural group of two nudes entitled Mars Restrained by Cupid. The Duke immediately commissioned the work in marble. In the sculpture, the idealized warrior god and the ephebic god of love gaze into one another’s eyes as Cupid gently restrains Mars from brandishing his sword. Alluding to the pederastic tradition of ancient Greece, as well as the sensual aesthetics of the Biblical David as sculpted by Donatello and Michelangelo, Mars Restrained by Cupid is an example of early nineteenth-century queer art from the perspective of subject, artist, and patron.

Born in Wales and raised in Liverpool, the artist John Gibson (1790-1866) eventually made his way to Rome where he studied sculpture under Antonio Canova. Thereafter, he established a lifelong career in Rome as a British expatriate sculptor. Gibson came to count among his patrons Queen Victoria herself, but his legacy to art was the reintroduction of polychromy into sculpture with works such as the Tinted Venus, which premiered at the International Exhibition of 1862. Espousing the teachings of J.J. Winckelmann and the art of ancient Greece, Gibson produced interpretations of ephebic gods in marble, such as The Sleeping Shepherd Boy (1818) and Narcissus (1829). His patron, William Spencer Cavendish, the sixth Duke of Devonshire (1790-1858), inherited his title upon the death of his father in 1811 and began renovations at Chatsworth, including the construction of a sculpture gallery. Once the Napoleonic Wars had ended, he went on his first Grand Tour to Rome, and it was during this trip that he commissioned the statue by Gibson. He subsequently commissioned or purchased work from other sculptors in Rome, almost all of which were of mythological nude males, including Endymion by Canova and Ganymede with the Eagle of Jove by Adamo Tadolini. His arrangement of these works at the entrance to his sculpture gallery inevitably created a queer space through which one had to pass in order to see other works in the collection.

In this paper, I will consider the juxtaposition of Gibson’s sculptural oeuvre with Devonshire’s choice of art objects for this gallery, a queer space in which Mars Restrained by Cupid played an important role. Certainly it is true that representations of the nude male epitomized idealized beauty in Neoclassical art, and not all such figures are inherently queer in nature. However, art historians such as Thomas Crow have noted that there were homosocial artistic circles, such as the atelier of Jacques-Louis David, and that he and some of his students did paint subjects that pointed to the ancient Greek pederastic tradition. This spirit of homosexualism, according to Whitney Davis, demonstrates that in the early nineteenth century representations of same sex passion existed before the conscious manifestation of a homosexual identity occurred later in the century. Citing published and archival biographical and commercial information, as well as theories on the collecting and display of art, I will consider the sculptor Gibson and his patron the Duke of Devonshire as a case study for the existence of queer art patronage in Britain and Rome in the early nineteenth-century.

MOMIX Botanica

Last night, AR and I went to the Joyce Theater to see the dance performance Botanica by MOMIX. I don't want to call this post a review, because I'm not qualified to review dance. I don't in fact go to many dance productions, but after last night I realize that I need to make a point of going more often because I enjoy them. This show in particular was excellent, the choreography superb. The MOMIX website states: “Known internationally for presenting work of exceptional inventiveness and physical beauty, MOMIX is a company of dancer-illusionists under the direction of Moses Pendleton. For 20 years, MOMIX has been celebrated for its ability to conjure up a world of surrealistic images using props, light, shadow, humor and the human body.” Last night’s show, Botanica, combined modern interpretive dance with props and costumes in a dreamlike paean to evolution and nature's cyclical existence, moving through all four seasons. Parts of it were humorous (even silly at times), but other parts were emotional (also in part because of the music), and all of it was charged with heightened eroticism (half-naked, very fit, beautiful people always helps). The Centaurs, where dancers made up the horse-half of the humanoid dancers, were amazing in their animalistic choreography. In some ways, the performance was like dance meets Julie Taymor meets Cirque du Soleil—a fascinating combination to say the least. The image above is from the opening sequence associated with winter (image: Broadwayworld.com). Shockingly, we paid only $59 for the tickets and had excellent seats in the orchestra section. Less expensive seats were available too. To pay so little to see a great show in NYC is almost unheard of, so it made the experience even more enjoyable. The YouTube video below shows you highlights of the performance, but if you want to see more, there is another longer YouTube video that gives you a sense of the entire show. If you get a chance to see MOMIX on tour, do so. You may find it a little odd at times, but you won’t be disappointed.

Review: New Paintings by Meera Thompson

This past Tuesday, RL and I went to an opening at the Atlantic Gallery to see an exhibition of new paintings by Meera Thompson. I've known Meera for a few years now through the library where I work, but this was the first time I had an opportunity to see her art in person. The triptych above, Suddenly, is one of the new paintings on display. All of the pictures in this exhibition are gouache, ink, and watercolor on handmade cotton paper. It is difficult to fully appreciate in digital format the strength of the works themselves. The texture of the paper, for instance, creates volumetric depth in its absorption of color, adding to a better appreciation of the tonality in the pictures. Her work is soothing, and this is reinforced by their size, designed for the domestic sphere. It would be challenging to compare them to, say, the monumental, masculinist color panels of Mark Rothko, designed for restaurants, corporate offices, and museums. Thompson instead sees her interpretation of color as evocative and sensual, and in this sense the smaller size of the pictures works beautifully.

Thompson is interested in the relationship between artist and viewer. In her artist's statement she notes, "This series of new paintings represents an endeavor to cross the divide between what the painter does and what the viewer sees--to construct a bridge that spans the painter's impulses and the viewer's responses." This conjures in my mind an image of an arched Japanese bridge stretching over a body of water, a la Claude Monet or Hiroshige, and the Japonisme reference is appropriate to Thompson's work. She is inspired in part by Chinese and Japanese landscape paintings, which have an exquisite aesthetic unto themselves, and you can see how her use of color references scroll paintings and Ukiyo-e prints. Indeed, in those works where she uses the triptych format (traditionally a Western religious art object), a Zen-like quality comes to fore, suggesting a juxtaposition of Western and Eastern spiritual philosophies. When I looked at these works in the gallery, however, I found myself thinking most about tonal poems by fin de siècle composers like Claude Debussy or Gabriel Fauré. This was especially true in the triptychs, where each work is independent but unites with its parts like movements in a concerto. This sort of tonalism harkens back to the work of the James McNeill Whistler, who titled his paintings symphonies and nocturnes, but in composition Thompson's work shares more with the tonalism of the less well known American artist, Thomas Wilmer Dewing.

Thompson's work was complemented in the gallery by an exhibition of wonderful line drawings by Jeff Miller. His portraits are skillful; he knows how to capture human form and give it personality. However, I prefer his more fluid line drawings of nudes whose attenuated bodies suggest the geometry of Paul Cézanne and the Jugendstil angst of Egon Schiele, all in a queer aesthetic that is simply a pleasure to behold. Thompson's and Miller's works are on display until June 19, at the Atlantic Gallery, 135 W. 29th St., Suite 601, in NYC.

Modern Art in May

The merry month of May has generated some interesting tidbits in the world of modern art that I thought I would share. For instance, one of my favorite modern artists, Franz Kline (1910-1962), deserves a shout out because it was his 100th birthday on May 23. Kline frequently is overshadowed by his fellow Abstract Expressionist colleagues Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, but I find his work to be enthralling in a way that is uniquely his own. I suspect it may be the persistant use of black and white, as you can see in the example here. In this painting, Nijinsky (1950, Metropolitan Museum of Art), Kline used the power of paint and brushstroke to epitomize action, for which the Ab Ex artists were well known. The title alludes to the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, but at the same time it is sheer artistic expression on canvas. Kline’s breakthrough came when he began painting with large brushes and enamels frequently used by house painters. He then would overpaint it with bold strokes of white paint. His broad expressionistic strokes fly off the canvas, making you realize you are seeing just a microcosm of the larger experience of what the painting suggests. Despite the so-called spontaneity of Ab Ex painting, Kline would sketch his designs using the pages of telephone books until he came up with the pattern he most wanted. Even more fascinating is how his work conjures images of Chinese calligraphy. The connection isn’t so far-fetched: the so-called Qing Eccentrics in the 17th century used to create the same fluid motion when they wrote their poetry and painted their landscapes, allowing their spirituality and emotions to pour forth through the mechanics of their art, not unlike the Ab Ex group.

One of my favorite contemporary artists, the Nigerian-born British artist Yinka Shonibare (whose exhibition I wrote about in September), has been commissioned to erect a sculpture on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in London. For the past few years, a new work is commissioned annually for this empty plinth. Last year it was performance art. This year, it’s a ship in a bottle, a work designed to commemorate Lord Nelson’s defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Trafalgar. The Guardian has great pictures that show how the work was put together. Workers literally slid into the mouth of the bottle to work on the details of the ship itself. The sculpture is scheduled to still be up in the fall, so hopefully I will get to see it when I’m in London.

Earlier this month, I had written about my visit to MOMA to see the thought-provoking and fascinating Marina Abramovic retrospective. The interactive performance piece, The Artist Is Present, continues until Monday, and the museum has captured photographically a number of individuals who have borne witness to the artist's intense visual interaction. Of course celebrities like Isabella Rossellini and Rufus Wainwright have now participated in this, but it is fascinating to see so many everyday people involved, not to mention their range of emotions in response to the work. Jerry Saltz has a review in this week’s New York magazine. He’s somewhat ambivalent about her work; he appreciates it, but he also finds it a little silly. In another article in the same issue, one of Abramavic’s performance artists, Deborah Wing-Sproul, talks about how she prepared to participate in the reinterpretations. There are pictures in the articles, so check them out, including one of Wing-Sproul participating in Nude with Skeleton, which I had noted was my favorite piece in the retrospective. Performance art consciously pushes the limits of the body beyond its natural abilities. I recently finished reading Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant, a novel about 16th-century nuns, some of whom fast and punish their bodies in order to see and feel the presence of Jesus. We now may call this spiritual ecstasy, but it's striking how performance art can be almost like that, albeit in secular form. Like yogis, performance artists push their bodies to attain a form of personal control and enlightenment.

Pablo Picasso is back on top in the “value of art” world. On May 4, his 1932 painting Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur (Nude, Green Leaves and Bust) sold at Christie’s for a world-record price of $106.5 million. Picasso supposedly painted the picture in one day. CultureGrrl wrote a few posts about the sale, noting as she normally does with auctions that the actual hammer price was lower than this. Auction houses always add a buyer’s premium, which is their commission. Regardless, the point is that the unknown buyer spent that much in order to purchase the painting, quickly throwing out of the running the short-lived record from February when an Alberto Giacommetti sculpture sold at auction for $104.3 million. I guess it’s comforting to know that not everyone has been affected by the recession.

Then again, if you can’t afford to buy modern art, you could always try stealing it. Last week, someone broke into the Museum of Modern Art in Paris during the night and stole five paintings by some of the great masters of modern art: Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Amedeo Modigliani. It is suspected that the burglar had some inside help, because he was able to exploit a little-known problem with the security system, i.e. it was broken. What else can you say to that, except c’est la vie!

Return from the Sunshine State

My trip to Florida was filled with lots of events. The picture you see here is one I took of The Pier, a complex with shops, restaurants, and an aquarium in downtown St. Petersburg that stretches out into Tampa Bay. There has been some public building on this site since the 1880s, but the upside-down pyramidal structure was built in the 1970s. I was told that there are plans to start doing major renovations here--possibly even eliminate the building--because the actual pier foundation needs a major overhaul in its support structure. Although the building is a bit kitschy, I do hope they keep it, as it's been a great landmark for decades now.

My primary reason for going to the Sunshine State these days mostly revolves around the health and well being of a few seniors in the family, notably Padre, my uncle, and my aunt. Thus, there were almost daily visits to either one doctor or another and hospitals. No sooner after I arrived, for instance, my aunt fell and broke her hip, needing a partial hip replacement and subsequently physical therapy at a senior rehabilitation center. The good news is that by the time I left everyone was doing well, so that was a comfort. I also had a few dinners with cousins, and on one very hot and humid afternoon I went with my godchildren to Lowry Park Zoo. While there, we rode the carousel, saw lots of fun animals (loved the meerkats and penguins), and enjoyed a delicious chocolate ice cream cone (I say that because I'm not a big fan of ice cream).

The planned "Gay Boys Weekend" at the Flamingo was great fun. I had coordinated this trip with friends to belatedly celebrate my 40th birthday, the passing of my Oral Exam, and the submission of my dissertation proposal (which has been accepted with some minor changes...more on that in a future post). In the picture below are some of my friends and I at tea dance (notice a few Bears in the background...don't ask, long story). My friends came from NYC, Miami, and Houston. The "resort" itself was basically a roadside highway hotel, but the pool area was great, and their local drink special was a deliciously fizzy $3 concoction that (if I remember correctly) had Smirnoff pomegranate vodka, seltzer, and some sort of sweet syrupy flavoring (pink in color, of course). We ate out all the time, going one night to Central Avenue Oyster Bar for some great seafood and going twice to Pia's Trattoria for some of the most delicious, simple Italian cuisine with wonderful ambiance and service.

My trip ended with a few days in Jacksonville visiting SVH for her birthday and to see my canine nephew George the Greyhound. I've never been completely comfortable around large dogs (not sure why exactly), but he is the one large dog that I absolutely adore. We went to the dog park one morning and got a bit muddy playing with all the dogs. We also went to the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens, of course to see the animals, but also so that SVH could photograph the public displays of poetry that relate in part to the "Poetry in the Branches" campaign led by Poets House (actually located here in NYC). She is one of the organizers at the Jacksonville Public Library for this NEH-funded program to encourage people to read poetry.

All in all, it was a great trip, but it's good to be home. I'm already back to work and settling back into my groove here in Brooklyn and on bklynbiblio.

Sunshine State

I'm heading to Florida for a couple of weeks, so bklynbiblio posts may be infrequent. I'll be in St. Petersburg visiting Padre and la famiglia. The image above is a great shot of one section of the downtown area of the city along Tampa Bay (image courtesy of Annalisa Weller's blog). Next weekend, friends of mine will be meeting me in St. Pete for a "Gay Boys Weekend" at the Flamingo Resort, which promises to be loads of fun. At the end of my visit, I'll be spending a few days with SVH and my canine nephew George in Jacksonville. I'm looking forward to sunshine, swimming, partying, zoos and dog parks, and just plain old relaxing! I even have my next novel ready for the plane ride: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Now to finish packing...

High Fashion: The Costume Institute Gala

Every May one of the highlights of the NYC social season is the Costume Institute Gala held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vogue editor Anna Wintour is the leader of this event, but shares the spotlight with new co-hosts each year. This year these roles were filled by Oprah Winfrey and Patrick Robinson, executive vice president for design at Gap. The picture above is Winfrey with designer Oscar de la Renta, who designed her gown. The gala is held at the museum in conjunction with the opening of the Costume Institute's annual spring/summer exhibition. This year the exhibition is American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity, focusing on the recently acquired collection of women's fashions from 1890-1940 recently donated by the Brooklyn Museum (that institution is also hosting a related exhibition of other parts of the same collection, American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection).

The decor for the gala ball is always spectacular. When I left work yesterday, the boxes of flowers and the giant hot air balloon filling the Great Hall were suggestive of the more streamlined and sporty rising-middle-class American mode of living that perhaps challenged the traditional mode of aristocratic European fashion. Tickets for this event ranged in price but went up to $250,000. For this price, the 700+ guests in attendance had cocktails in the Petrie Court and dinner in the Temple of Dendur, plus live entertainment by Lady GaGa.
Of course photographers go crazy shooting all the celebrities on the red carpet up the Met's main staircase, catching a glimpse of their fashion hits and misses. The New York Times has an article about the event and a slideshow with fashion highlights, as does New York magazine. Emma Watson is all grown up and looked lovely, and Kristen Davis was quite elegant. But I don't know about Carey Mulligan with that petite dress or Tina Fey in that zipper jumper outfit...what were they thinking?? These two pictures are among my favorites. Mariska Hargitay, as always, looked stunning. As for the men, I think Jimmy Fallon was looking rather smart, don't you think? (Image credits: Hiroko Masuike for New York Times and Getty Images for New York magazine)

Week of the Arts in NYC

You would think that after passing my Oral Exam in art history I might want to avoid art-related things this week, but as it turns out, I've had a great week for doing artsy things that one can only experience in NYC.

Last Friday, for instance, I went with JHC to see the Marina Abramovic retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. I'm not into performance art all that much (requires patience!) and I really don't like video art (I get migraines!), but I decided to go because we wanted to see the naked people. Yes, in this retrospective, the Yugoslavian-born Abramovic has men and women--clothed and unclothed--reenacting her performance pieces from the 1970s to the present, including one in which a nude man and woman face one another and visitors are invited to walk between them (and not touch them as they have become works of art, but a few people can't resist copping a feel). As you can tell from what I've already written, I loved the exhibition. It was so much more interesting because it was arranged in one exhibition space. Most performance pieces are individual works in isolation; to see them in one group like this as an unfolding of a life's artistic career with archival film footage and live demonstrations made it more thought-provoking. Abramovic successfully uses the fourth dimension of time/temporality to make sculpture (i.e. the body) come to life. Her current live performance in The Artist Is Present, in which visitors are invited to sit across a table from her and gaze at one another in silence, seemed at first dry and boring, but the more you watched them the more you found yourself feeling the discomfort and tranquility of non-verbal communication. My favorite performance piece was Nude with a Skeleton, in which a naked man lies on a table with a human skeleton on top of him. As he breathes, the skeleton rises and falls along with his chest. It makes for a fascinating presentation of the memento mori, juxtaposing issues of life and death, and by framing it with a sexy nude Abramovic encourages us to challenge our ideas about what is sexual, erotic, and fetishistic.

On Wednesday evening, I invited RL to join me at The Metropolitan Museum of Art for a special talk given by the Director, Thomas P. Campbell: "Discovering History: The Met and the Ancient World." The presentation was about the Met's long history and interest in participating in archaeological digs, preserving artifacts, and educating people through publications and exhibitions on ancient cultures such as Egypt, Greece, Rome, and Mesopotamia. In part the talk served to offer an alternative perspective from the current trend of blaming museums of illegal acquisitions of ancient works. The talk was very interesting from a historical point of view, as Campbell used numerous historical photographs and a film showcasing this early part of the museum's history. The talk also was related to the exhibition Tutankhamun's Funeral that recently opened. (This, of course, has nothing to do with the highly-touted traveling exhibition of the treasures of King Tut from Cairo. Critics have been panning the blockbuster exhibition for focusing more on the spectacle of the pharaoh rather than presenting an accurate, scholarly exhibition to educate people, even though National Geographic is apparently a major sponsor of the show. Opening near Times Square with tickets selling for $28.50 each, I have no doubt that the exhibition is going to rake in a small fortune.)

Then on Thursday night I went with DC to the opening for the Hungarian Modernism show at the Shepherd & Derom Gallery on the Upper East Side. There weren't too many works on display that I liked all that much, but it was fascinating to see how early 20th-century movements like Cubism and Der Blaue Reiter influenced artists who may not have been in Paris or Munich at that time.

Last but not least, for my birthday PR & AM got me a ticket to go see with them the revival of La Cage aux Folles. We went last night. This new version opened a few weeks ago and stars Kelsey Grammer as Georges and Douglas Hodge as Albin. When it began, I felt like it was a bit campy (okay, aside from the obvious fact that it was about a drag queen night club), with lots of overacting and heightened melodrama. It also seemed outdated somehow, as if we'd heard all this before. But as the show continued, it got better and better. The music became more engaging, the acting improved, and the dance numbers with the "Cagelles" (see the image above) were fabulous. In fact, one of the great strengths of the musical was that the chorus of drag queens were all very muscular male dancers whose ability to do flips and twirls in heels and corsets made the whole performance even more amazing. Grammer was fine as Georges (sometimes his singing was off-key), but Hodge absolutely stole the show as his partner Albin (aka Zaza!). It's amazing to think this is Hodge's Broadway premiere. By the time the first act ended and he sang in full drag the song "I Am What I Am" you want to cry because of the intolerance that we know still exists in our world today. In that sense the show turned out to be more relevant today than ever before. To top it off, Georges and Albin share a big smooch at the end that makes you stand up and applaud for them. All in all, it was a fabulous way to end a week of great art-related events. What can I say: it's great to live in NYC.

UPDATE 5/2/10, 7:45am: As I was writing this post last evening, in particular about having been in Times Square to see a Broadway musical, someone was parking an SUV loaded with a bomb on the corner of 7th Avenue and 45th Street. NYC was saved from another potential terrorist attack because of the vigilance of a t-shirt vendor who noticed smoke coming from the car and smelled gunpowder. The entire area was evacuated last night. This morning, things are slowly getting back to normal. NYC is still an incredible place to live, especially for its arts scene, but it is worth remembering that 9/11 was only 8 & 1/2 years ago and we need to be aware.

US Military, Lady Gaga, and Ke$sha

One hopes that regardless of how we feel about America's involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we all support our troops for their courage and patriotism. Apparently now we can support them for their music taste, dance productions, and video skills too! Certainly everyone needs to take a break, so it's actually great to see these videos with our military chilling out and doing their own version of some pop music. I've put links below to YouTube videos that I thought were hilarious and worth sharing. The first one is by members of the US Air Force Academy doing Ke$sha's "Tik Tok," which is followed by her actual video. The second is by US soldiers in Afghanistan doing Lady Gaga's "Telephone," followed by her actual video with Beyonce. That video, by the way, is great as a movie unto itself. Of course, the thing I find most amusing about all this is...people are concerned gays in the military??? Uhm, apparently their presence makes life a lot more enjoyable for our boys.

After Orals

Good news: I passed my Oral Exam! Hopefully that is the last exam I will ever take. I studied for about 6 months, I felt relatively confident about certain areas and hesitant about other areas, and I had practice sessions with co-students/friends. Yet, taking the exam still turned out to be an incredibly unpredictable experience that was both agonizing and rewarding. My thanks to KZ for being such an awesome study partner, and to RL, PR, and MS for giving me great practice sessions! For the record, my examining committee members were Profs. Patricia Mainardi, Judy Sund, and Sally Webster. Here’s the low-down on the images and issues.

Focus Area: Classicism in British Painting & Sculpture, 1785-1900 (note: I was only shown sculpture)
1) John Gibson, Tinted Venus (1851-56) and Frederic Leighton, Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1874-77) [images above]
2) John Flaxman, Fury of Athamas (1790-94) and Francis Chantrey, Monument to David Pike Watts (1817-26)
Issues: modes of classicism, polychromy, marble/bronze, idealism/naturalism, ancient/Renaissance models, nationalism, classicism and modernity

Minor: American Art, 1750-1945
3) Albert Moore, Pomegranates (1865-66) and James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No. III (1865-67) [note: Moore is British, but what is Whistler?]; issues: classicism/Japonisme, Aesthetic Movement, artistic training
4) Benjamin West, Death of General Wolfe (1770) and Charles Willson Peale, Exhumation of the Mastodon (1805-08); issues: history/genre painting, academic training, American identities
5) John La Farge, Kwannon Meditating on Human Life (late 1880s-1908) and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Adams Memorial (1890-91); issues: Japonisme, Symbolism, decorative art


Major: European Art, 1750-1900
6) Caspar David Friedrich, Abbey in the Oak Forest (1809-10), John Constable, study for Hadleigh Castle (1828-29), and Ernest Meissonier, Ruins of the Tuileries (1871); issues: Romantic/documentary ruins, nationalism, death/rebirth [note: always know the book cover images of your professors’ books!]
7) Joseph W.M. Turner, Rain, Steam, Speed: The Great Western Railway (1844), William Powell Frith, Railway Station (1862), and Claude Monet, Pont de l’Europe, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877); issues: railway/industry, genre/landscape painting, light/color
8) Paul Serusier, Talisman (1888) and Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bellevue (1882-85); issues: Post-Impressionist modes of landscape painting, proto-abstraction in color/form
9) Bertel Thorvaldsen, Jason with the Golden Fleece (1808-28) and Auguste Rodin, Monument to Balzac (1898); issues: monumental sculpture, classical/realistic body
10) Jacques-Louis David, Death of Socrates (1787) and Eugène Delacroix, Barque of Dante (1822); issues: Neoclassicism/Romanticism, classical/Renaissance body types

Looking back on all this, I think some of these image groups included unusual works one rarely sees. In some ways that bothered me, but then again obviously that’s part of the experience of this exam. Because of my interest in British art, there were more British works than most probably see. On the other hand, no one showed me Pre-Raphaelite paintings because presumably they expected I would know those. Of the groups above, I did well with my focus area (British sculpture) and my minor (I was told I’m a “closeted Americanist”), but I had a more challenging time with #s 6-8 for different reasons (e.g. why 2 Post-Impressionist landscapes? ugh!). Keep in mind that by the second hour I was seriously losing steam (railway pun unintended).

So if you ever have to take an exam like this, expect the unexpected. As much as you may prepare for anything, you will not be prepared for everything. Part of this exam is to test how you can improvise and respond to works you may not have seen before or ever thought of paired together. Fortunately, the other half of the exam is addressing canonical works/issues you will know. That said, everyone’s experience will be different because everyone brings different skill levels to this kind of exam. The choice of examining committee makes a big difference too. But there is one piece of advice I received from a few people that definitely worked for me. When you see the images, breathe. Those few seconds will give you a chance to collect your thoughts and allow you to articulate how you want to respond to the images.

(Image credits: Walker Art Gallery, Tate Britain, Butler Institute of American Art, RJ Swanson on Flickr)

Before Orals

After months of studying, my Oral Exam in my PhD program will take place in 2 days from now. I posted earlier this year a description of what the exam format will be like. Needless to say, I am a bit anxious about the experience of the exam, considering how important this is in my program of study, but I want to take on this challenge. In that spirit, over the past few weeks I've been changing my profile picture on Facebook with details from various paintings looking for one that symbolizes my intent with regard to this exam. I've settled on the work you see here, Thor Battering by Midgard Serpent (1790) by Henry Fuseli, but I've temporarily retitled it bklynbiblio battering the oral examination. I finally had an opportunity to see this painting last summer at the Royal Academy and I still admire it greatly. It's a tour de force of 18th-century history painting in that it demonstrates Fuseli's talents through his use of foreshortening, perspective, and dramatic lighting to draw the viewer's attention to the powerful subject.

Fuseli was an ingenious artist (and not just because he painted dark, sexually-charged works like The Nightmare). Swiss-born, he went to Italy for his artistic training and was influenced by ancient sculpture, but seemed to find his greatest affinity with the spirit of terribilità associated with Michelangelo, as you can see in the exaggerated musculature of the nude Thor in this painting. The art historian William Vaughan has argued convincingly in German Romantic Painting that Fuseli was associated with Sturm-und-Drang, a literary movement affiliated with German writers such as Goethe that focused on emotions over rational thought. It is seen by many as one of the roots of Romanticism. Vaughan calls Fuseli's work expressive classicism, which I find an excellent way of demonstrating how he produced art that evokes both Classicism and Romanticism. Fuseli made his way to London and with his successful history/mythological paintings was elected a full member of the Royal Academy; this painting was his diploma work. He later became the Professor of Painting at the school. Here is more about the painting from the Royal Academy's website: "This mythological subject comes from the Icelandic sagas of the Edda, which were known in England from P. H. Mallet’s book Northern Antiquities (1770). Fuseli depicts the fable in which Thor rows out in a boat with the giant Hymir, shown cowering somewhat cowardly in the stern. Using an ox’s head as bait, Thor manages to fish up the Serpent of Midgard. In the top left is shown the elderly figure of the god Odin. Fuseli’s heroic figure wrestling with the evil serpent is given great grandeur and drama as it emerges from the inky background. Parallels have been drawn between this epic struggle and contemporary events in France. Fuseli was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution and Thor’s battle with the serpent could be seen to mirror the French people’s struggle against the ancien régime."

DW: The Eleventh Hour

If I hadn't been so focused on studying for Orals this weekend, I probably would have succumbed to the temptation of watching the Doctor Who marathon today on BBC America. It was all part of the hype for the much-anticipated 9pm premiere of the new season with Matt Smith as the regenerated Doctor and Karen Gillan as his new companion Amy Pond. As bklynbiblio readers know, I'm a bit of a Doctor Who fanatic, and I was among those crushed by David Tennant's departure as the 10th Doctor (and by crushed I also mean my crush on Tennant himself). When I first heard about Matt Smith, I was uncertain what to expect. Gillan and he seem so young to me, I was convinced the producers were aiming for a new target audience that, alas, I was now passed in age. All that said, of course I sat down and watched the premiere episode tonight, and I was not disappointed. It had all the fast-paced action and quick wit that we've come to expect from the show. The producers have done a great job reinventing things a bit. Not only does the 11th Doctor have a nerdier academic wardrobe (bowties and suspenders!), but the TARDIS regenerated too and has a whole new look. Like Smith's Doctor, the TARDIS now has retro-flair, a 1950s futuristic gloss that I think will work well as a contrast to the previous, more biomorphic TARDIS. I admit it's going to be a challenge to get used to Smith as The Doctor, but I like feisty Amy Pond, so it should be an adventurous season. Sneak-peaks are showing the Daleks and the Weeping Angels will be making comebacks, so we're in for some exciting sci-fi TV!

My Neighborhood Is #4

To quote Nate Silver of Brooklyn Heights in the current issue of New York magazine: "I've been happy here, but like most New Yorkers, I suffer from a bit of grass-is-greener syndrome. Would I be better off living in Astoria? Prospect Heights? Chelsea?" Nate & Co. of the magazine conducted a recent quantitative assessment of neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. Among their criteria were things like housing costs, transit, shopping, diversity, green space, etc. Each of these areas were assigned point values and prioritized in some mathematical manner which I don't understand and...voilà!...they've determined that the best NYC neighborhood is Park Slope (Brooklyn), followed by the Lower East Side, and Sunnyside (Queens). My neighborhood, Cobble Hill/Boerum Hill, comes in at #4.

Now my initial response to this was to be somewhat excited, because it would seem that I would agree with the results. I actually love my neighborhood. I've lived here since 2005. I rent a floor of a brownstone built in 1895 (alas, the building has lost all its Victorian charm over time), giving me a lot more space than most other New Yorkers. I have everything I need within a few blocks: laundromat, grocery store, at least 3 cafes (one of which is also a decent bagel place, which is an absolute necessity in NYC), and some great restaurants just a few blocks away. On the downside, the closest subway is an 8-minute walk, which in the rain or in blustery winter conditions pretty much sucks. Oh, yes, and we have way too many hipster couples with children (please tell me why I have to compete with strollers and crying babies in a small cafe when I just want to read a book with a cup of coffee and a bagel???).

As for the other neighborhoods on the list, the LES has never really impressed me, but admittedly I haven't spent enough time there, and I've never been to Sunnyside so I can't say anything about that place. Park Slope is pretty great, but truthfully it seems very gentrified and expensive as a result. That, of course, is rather ironic, because according to this article, Park Slope is supposed to be one of the best deals for apartments (2 bedroom for $2275/month), but who are they kidding? All of the rents they're citing in this article are actually lower than what people typically pay. Nate & Co. are forgetting about things like rent stabilization and control; when it exists, it drastically changes the scope of rents.

There is a Livability Calculator which accompanies the article. It allows you to rank your own priorities and thus generate the perfect neighborhood for you. The problem is that apparently some decent places don't make it on the list at all. If you browse the pages of comments left by readers, you'll discover, for instance, many who lament that Forest Hills (Queens) is missing, and apparently this area has some of the great deals in terms of rent, etc. (I've been to Forest Hills a few times, and it seems all right; I'm just not a big fan of Queens in general). There are other concerns with this general article and the study's results. Nate & Co. recognize this, but they don't seem to clarify all the issues. In fact, to me, it seems most strange that a quantitative survey is being used to assess quality of life? How do you measure desire and taste? Isn't what you like about your neighborhood related to what you get out of it? You could live in a neighborhood with the best school system and fabulous restaurants, but if you don't have children and you never eat out, then what good is it for you to be living in that neighborhood?

The best part of the article is the comment section online. Leave it to New Yorkers to express qualitative thoughts to the article and study. LMR925, for instance, writes: "Something that was not mentioned regarding Tribeca is that everyone who lives there is a nouveau riche turd and hanging out in the playground with them (or their nannies) and their bratty kids is the PITS! I live in the West Village. It is better there though we have plenty of jackasses too." I think another commenter, FHOEBE, aptly points out a problem with how they're defining diversity and how that relates to the magazine's readership: "Diversity really need to be defined more realistically because it's absurd to call many of these neighborhoods 'diverse.' Be aware that on this spectrum, diversity means white with either a light dusting of everyone else to slight sprinkle. It's ridiculous to write an article of this sort that went to certain lengths to be comprehensive, without interrogating the fact that readership dictates its truth. ... It may not be so pretty for your readers to confront, but it's a white-centric, rich-centric article (and dare I say publication)."

All that said, it's still somewhat fun to discover my neighborhood is #4 on the list, and none of the commenters seem to be squabbling that. Going back to the Livability Calculator, I adjusted it to my own personal interests to discover my "perfect" neighborhood. #1 is the East Village and #2 is Tribeca. Now, while it would be great to live in those neighborhoods, I don't know how they're figuring those results because there is no way I could ever afford to live in either place, as they have some of the most expensive real estate in the City. What is funny, however, is what ranks as #s 3, 4, and 5 for me: Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, and...you guessed it!...Cobble Hill/Boerum Hill. Imagine that: bklynbiblio favors Brooklyn neighborhoods! Apparently I'm exactly where I'm meant to be right now.

GLBTQ Birthdays

Writing this post on a Sunday night, it occurs to me that I have been 40 years old for over 27 hours now. Yes, readers, April 10th was a milestone birthday, and I had a wonderful celebration with 20 good friends all packed into my Brooklyn brownstone apartment. It was definitely a successful party: it took until 2:30 this afternoon for me to get rid of my hangover. As I mentally prepared myself the past two weeks or so for this occasion, I began to think about other people whose birthdays are taking place these first few weeks of April. This actually all started because I was pleasantly surprised to discover recently that my fantasy boyfriend Ewan McGregor (image: Best of Ewan website) celebrates his birthday on March 31. The Scot just celebrated his 39th birthday! Okay, so admittedly he's not gay, but with more than one "gay/bisexual" role on his resume (from The Pillow Book and Velvet Goldmine to the recent I Love You Phillip Morris, which for ridiculously homophobic reasons still has not been able to get a distributor in the US), Ewan is arguably the most open-minded queer actor out there, with varied major roles from Trainspotting to Moulin Rouge. He was fantastic also in the current film The Ghost Writer which I saw last week with RK.

But moving on from my Ewan obsession, this post actually is about birthdays. We all like to know that we were born on the same day as someone famous. It somehow makes us feel special. My cousin DG, for instance, shares her birthday with Queen Victoria (about which we ARE quite amused!). Comparatively speaking, when I was growing up I was always depressed to know that the two people who shared my birthday were the actor Harry Morgan and the football player Don Meredith. But now, thanks to the GLBTQ Encyclopedia, a free resource that tells you everything you ever wanted to know about the gay world, I'm pleased to discover I also share my birthday with famous queers like the English playwright and poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (b. 1647), and the landscape architect and philanthropist James Ogilvy, Earl of Findlater (b. 1750). Now, admittedly, Rochester was a bit of a rake, a free-spirited sex addict who didn't discriminate in his partners too much, but Findlater was probably more of a self-identifying homosexual, living in Europe with his partner Johann Georg Fischer.

Some other gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender/queer birthdays for this month include:
April 2: Danish fairy tale author Hans Christian Andersen (b. 1805), who was probably bisexual, and lesbian social commentator and literary critic Camille Paglia (b. 1947);
April 3: gay actor David Hyde Pierce (b. 1959);
April 5: Victorian English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (b. 1837, dying on April 10, 1909), who was probably more auto-erotic than gay or bisexual;
April 9: lesbian actress Cynthia Nixon (b. 1966);
April 14: gay actor Sir John Gielgud (b. 1904);
April 15: gay Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452), gay-but-never-out Anglo-American writer Henry James (b. 1843), and lesbian blues singer Bessie Smith (b. 1894).
And of course let's not forget bisexual playwright and poet William Shakespeare, who will celebrate his 446th birthday on April 23rd. Happy Birthday, fellow queers!