Charlotte Bronte's diary
The city was full of art over the last few days with competing fairs and scores of gallery exhibits, but the of all the art around, the thing I will remember from the weekend is the show at the Morgan Library called "The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives". The website is terrible (The exhibition is small. Why so few scans? Why so few transcriptions? Why are the scans so small?! Why do so many of the podcasts have to be read by someone that sounds like that English teacher you disliked in 7th grade? Etc. etc.) so don't bother, just go visit the Museum in person. You'll read Nathaniel Hawthorn muse in a diary about a story he's considering on “the life of a woman, who by the old colonial law was condemned always to wear the letter A…” You'll read Stuart Davis' "Complete formula for artistic & financial Success." And you'll see Charlotte Bronte's tiny handwriting, that alone was worth the trip for me.
Sidenote: Be sure to grab the xeroxed transcriptions as you walk in the door. They're easy to miss.
Photographs taken of the front and back of the Mona Lisa's empty frame after it's theft (the frame was abandoned in a staircase during the Peruggia's getaway).
In 1911 an Italian named Vincenzo Peruggia managed to steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. The Museum and the police were mystified. "La Gioconda is gone. That is all I can say. So far we have not the slightest clue as to the perpetrator of the crime," reported the Assistant Curator of the Louvre to the NYTimes.
Peruggia secreted the painting to his small apartment two blocks from the museum and kept it hidden for almost two years. I often wonder if, during those years, he kept the painting locked up in the secret false bottom of his trunk (where it was eventually found), or if, sometimes, he would take it out and and hang it while he made himself dinner and enjoyed a glass a wine. I love the mental image of Peruggia alone at table breaking bread with Mona Lisa's eyes always on him.
The National Archives have released a film (in color) of the OSS visiting Tibet in 1942. The scenes approaching Lhasa are especially spectacular if you've been there any time in the last 20 years.
The grandfather of an acquaintance of mine was on one of these OSS trips and ended leaving his American wife (the grandmother of my friend) for a Tibetan woman — that's the story I want to hear.
Nicholas Felton published his annual report today. Unlike years past where he cataloged, analyzed, and quantified a single year of his own life, this time he examined the life — the entire life — of his father Gordon Felton, who died in 2010. Nick studied scores of documents, calendars, postcards, and pictures to build a portrait of his dad in data. And it's quite a portrait. By triangulating his father's movements, Nick literally maps the shape of the world with the forms of continents emerging from the mesh of connecting lines (Felton Sr. was one hell of a traveler). The document is full of stories "Name legally changed to Gordon Felton in the province of Manitoba September 9, 1954 at 4:15" and facts both amusing ("Middle name Paul added in 1968") and heartbreaking (Last Day Sep 12, 2010 81 years, 2 months and 8 days old). Ultimately though, the document is a set of mysteries. Reading it reminded me of the questions asked by Rawlston in the opening scene of Citizen Kane after the newsreel ends.
RAWLSTON
What made Kane what he was?
And, for that matter, what
was he? What we've just seen are the outlines
of a career - what's behind the
career? What's the man? Was he good or bad?
Strong or foolish? Tragic or silly?
Why did he do all those things?
What was he after?
These are questions that will not be answered by this report, but they are the type of questions the report raises. The questions make the man real to people who never knew him. How did this elevator operator find himself at the far end of the Soviet Union. Why was he in Vietnam? Why that middle name? Why the divorces? What happened in 1964?
Anyone who has lost someone close knows the complicated emotions brought on by the sorting of the collected ephemera of a life. Some survivors live with the stuff, some put it in boxes and hide it away, some throw it out. Nicholas did something harder, he tried to understand the things his dad left behind, and then he tried to make us understand. I see this as a courageous act of love. It shows on every page of the report and that's a beautiful thing.
When I was a kid I thought if I could memorize the encyclopedia that I could understand the whole world. Good old fashioned paper encyclopedias are almost extinct these days, but I recently discovered the Smithsonian Natural History visual reference. It's a visual encyclopedia for the natural world with 600 pages and thousands of photographs. In my house it's quickly become a favorite. My kids use it constantly, for projects or just to discover something new. Best of all it's only around $30. Easily the best $30 I've spent on my kids in ages.
Phillip Toledano has created a new body of work titled Kim Jong Phil. He writes:
"For my palette, I've copied pre-existing dictatorial art. Paintings from North Korea, statues of assorted dictators (Kim Il Sung, Laurent Kabilla, and Saddam Hussein). I had these works re-created in China, and each instance, I've replaced the great leaders with myself."
I finally dug through the original archive myself at the The Historic Houses Trust site today. It's well worth the visit. The site allows download of full resolution versions of the images and provides context. Many of the descriptions are like that famous 6 word Hemingway short, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
In my 20's I went there regularly, not for the food—I never had a truly great meal there—but for the crowd. It was the type of place you might run into Woody Allen or Gregory Peck, you might be seated next to a table of pinky-ringed Italian men in shark skin suits, or you might find yourself next to a Mets pitcher who ate there for good luck. Why this place? The room was nothing special, just a dark rectangle hung with low grade office ceiling tile. The lighting was lousy, and there were those damned plastic flowers in cheap sconces. It wasn't like Dan Tana's in LA, with it's red leather booths and feel of faded glamour. Gino's was almost lowbrow, but it had an irresistible sense of style regardless. The yellow door was just the right yellow, the green sign was EXACTLY what it was supposed to be, and the red zebra wallpaper was... well, perfect. The zebras, in addition to being on the walls, could be found on the matches and the napkins and the doors to the bathrooms. Gino must have known he was on to something, because those zebras became design icons in their own right. Without the zebras, the room is nothing special. I always said the zebras helped carry the place through time.
When the restaurant was slated to close Gay Talese wrote, "All the items on the menu appear on a single plastic-covered page and were handwritten in ink sixty-five years ago by the restaurant’s founder, Gino Circiello, a dapper and debonair trendsetter in 1945 who thereafter ignored all trends. Even a year after his death at eighty-nine, in 2001, when the restaurant was described in the Zagat Survey as “frozen in the 40’s,” the regulars liked to boast that, at Gino’s, nothing was new: within the zebra-covered walls of this place everything remained the same, including the fact that a stripe was missing from the rumps of half the zebras—a mistake made by the original designer which Mr. Gino, a superstitious Italian of Neapolitan origin, chose not to correct, because to do so, he feared, might bring him bad luck." (full article)
Don't know why I was thinking about Gino's today, but I wanted the wallpaper for my computer. I couldn't find a digital copy so I made one myself: Gino's Digital Zebra Wallpaper. I left the stripe off the rump.
Kevin Cheng twittered recently "Cannot find any iTunes solution that lets me have an external master library, laptop w/ synced subset, and synced ratings/metadata."
Ahh.. the holy grail. I've been pursuing it for some time because I often orbit between 3 or 4 machines. I'd go further. I also want my iphones to share the synced data and to be able to sync on multiple computers. It can be done! Here's how.
Assumptions: I assume Macintosh. I assume normal locations for your Music folder and for the iTunes folder. I assume matching usernames on all the computers. I have 2 sets of instructions the first is for a fresh start (new library), the second set is for converting an existing library. Most importantly I assume a Dropbox account (they're free).
I keep being served rice labeled Mexican rice, that is not Mexican rice, at least not Mexican Rice as I know it.
Here is how to make proper Mexican rice:
Liquify 1 big tomato, 1 garlic clove, 1 onion, salt, black pepper and a teaspoon and a half of cumin. Add some chilis if you like things spicy. Set aside.
Boil 2 cups of chicken broth, then let it simmer. Keep one cold cup of broth off to the side
Soak 1 cup of long grain rice in warm water for 4 minutes. Drain and let it stand for 5 minutes.
Put a touch of bacon in a frying pan and warm it up to grease the pan. Add a touch of oil. Then add the rice and fry it until the rice turns golden brown.
Turn the heat up on the broth.
Add the liquified tomato mixture to the rice and fry for one minute.
Now add the broth. Bring to a boil. Once everything starts boiling reduce the heat and cover loosely so the steam escapes. When the liquid has vanished, add a third cup of cold broth, cover and cook until it has also evaporated.
The future is when the stars die a million million years from now and everything is so cold.
Sometimes when you're waiting for your birthday or Christmas or some special secret thing, the future seems like forever.
A long time ago, today was the future.
A long time ago they thought we would have floating sidewalks and flying cars and everything would be automatic.
(Automatic was a big part of the future for those guys.)
They thought the future would always be beatiful.
They wrote "We want no part in the past."
Funny it was so very long ago.
Some day, a long time from today, we'll all be old and we'll remember lying here talking about the future and we'll laugh about everything we did not know.
