My Year in Books: American Cousins

[This year, I was curious about what I was reading, so when I finished a book I put it on an ever-growing pile by my desk. Here is the second of two histories.]

When London Was Capital of  America by Julie Flavell, Yale University Press, 2010
Provenance: Half-Price Books

Both this volume and the previous one were picked up at Half-Price, which has a pretty good selection on the more obscure chunks of history. Over the past couple years, I've picked up books on Hittite civilization, prehistoric Europe, the age of fighting sail, and these two books. And it makes sense for Half-Price's business models (purchases from individuals but more often overstocks from companies) that books about the more esoteric eras show up here in neat, even piles. Not that these books were failures - only that they never attained the escape velocity necessary for them to see wider distribution.

So, the esoteric area in question is London before the American Revolution. It is one of those forgotten periods, akin to antebellum America - those data points that lead directly up to the  next big event are noted, while most of the others is ignored. Flavell's book captures the feeling and flavor of the era for being a colonial in what was then the most important city in the world.

I picked up a lot of things here. Here are some examples:

• When you said a American from the colonies, it included not only the 13 that we learn about, but the British West Indies as well. All were considered as one general group.
• When you said America from the colonies, you were probably talking about southern planters. They were there are lot, because they had the money and the need to be trading in London. They were also noticeable for their black slave attendants. 
• Slavery was declared unlawful in England in 1772 on what the judge in case had hoped to be a narrow ruling (whether a chattel slave could be removed from England against his or her will) that was taken as a general rule. Slaves could as a result declare their freedom it brought to England. Their owners were not so reticent about capturing them and shipping them back to the colonies, and those in charge winked at that as well. Slavery did not get banished from Empire until the 1830s.
• There were representatives of the northern colonies as well in London, but they were not much more noticed than Brit citizens from the sticks - a bit backwards, but still considered British.
• There was no real idea of an American mindset - Americans were Brits from further away.
• An exception were American from the New England area. They were just considered nuts - stiff-necked religious fundies with radical ideas. Once they started in on property damage and firing on British soldiers that opinion just crystallized.

Flavell deals with representatives from each of the American regions (though not from the Indies - that would have interesting) / Much of the early going centers on Henry Laurens of South Carolina, whose letters and diary represent a confluence of the American Dreams in London - His own plans gets us an eye into business in the City, his plans for his sons tell us of education, the fate of a niece portrays the woman's role and perils, and his slave, Scipio in the colonies, renamed Robert in London, shows both the slave and servant experience. Laurens' works reveal a belief in the world overturned by later events.

The other mainland colonies have representatives as well.  Stephen Sayre is a fast-talking Yankee from Long Island seeking to ensconce himself in the British merchantile. Ben Franklin captures a few chapters, and comes off as a man who, though lionized in America and France, sought to fit in as well in Britain, such that his measured responses made one obeserver label him "The most cautious man in I have ever seen". 

Their stories are trying to fit into the most powerful city in the world, and with the coming revolution the choices that had to be made when their land of their birth was no longer connected to the greatest city in the nation. To those living in this pre-revolutionary time and place, there was little clue that things would change and change dramatically, and the book captures that era extremely well.

More later, 

Daisey History Five: Holes in History

Yeah, I'm still playing with the titles of this series, but never mind that. One thing that Mike Daisey reminds us of regularly in his A People's History (based on the Howard Zinn book of the similar name) is that he is not telling us anything that we don't already know. We know a lot of what he's telling us at a basic, down-in-your-bones level, but we don't bring it up, because its kinda dark and depressing and true. As a result, our history doesn't make a lot of sense, because we have a lot of holes in it.

We've hit some already. In his own narrative, Daisey hits Columbus, then bounces over to early English colonies (because, you know, the Spanish never had any claims on the eventual United States), then we blink over to the Revolution, then everything is rosy until we hit the Civil War. You can't talk about everything, and that's part of Daisey's point - it is all in the editing, and important swathes end up on the cutting room floor.

For my own upbringing, we didn't hit the Civil War to the level of detail his classes did, but we DID spend a lot of time on the exploration of America. Maybe it was the whole Space Program narrative of my youth, but we got deeply into the voyages of exploration for Cabot, DeSoto, LaSalle, Deleon, Cartier, and everybody else.  If you had a bunch of boats and went wandering through the American Heartland, you got a name-check in my history books. Sort of one big game of Sid Meiers Civilization at the point when you get caravels and can sudden roll out on the rest of the world. Now, my history books, like Daisey's, were a little emptier about talking about the people that these explorers met, lumping them all into "Indians" as opposed to nations and peoples and tribes. That's part of the erasure thing we were talking about earlier.

And yes, the period from the War of 1812 and the Civil War was always treated as "The run-up to the Civil War", since that is the big climax of the show up to then. But for those living though it, this period was "How the hell do we keep this together?"

If I look at the US in 1814 or so, I would say that the South is running things, and Virginia is running the South. Almost all the Presidents were Virginian. Most of the decisions were Virginian. The capital of the country, named after a Virginian, was built NEXT to Virginia, carving out part of MARYLAND for Virginia's benefit*. Things are so crappy for New England that during the War of 1812 there was talk of THEM seceding and making a separate peace with England.

So a lot of the history of that period boils down to "How Are We Going to Make Virginia Happy?" All the compromises, all the swapping of slave and free states, all of it, is how to preserve the southern slavery hegemony while keeping the non-slave-holders on board. Yet, by 1860, I have a powerful North, one that (obviously) would win a war against an agrarian South.

So how the heck did THAT happen?

Part of it may be raw geography. There was an article tracking the conservative south through its geological makeup - good for cotton, which meant it was a fertile land for big plantations, which brought in a lot of slaves, which created an entire African-American culture in the south, which had to be controlled by the slave-holders and former slave-holders, which got us to Jim Crow and then the Civil Rights Movement which got us to the current state of gerrymandering and voter suppression. It is a good story.

The North, however, benefited from the Industrial Revolution and the South did not. Why? The South had money. power and long-standing ties with Britain and the rest of Europe. Why are they shipping bulk cotton to Europe (and New England) as opposed to developing an industrial base themselves? They had the manpower in the slave population, and could utilize that base. They could have upgraded,

I have some theories. One of them involves the Fall Line. This is something I learned about in Social Studies in grade school. The South had the coast, then the Piedmont, then the Appalachians. The Fall Line is how far you can go upstream before falls or rapids stop further progress. So you can ship stuff down easily from there. Plus falls are great places to put mills that run off water because of the natural drop. As you go further north, that line gets closer to the coast, so the mills are practically on the coast itself, nearer the ports. So it may make sense to send cotton from you plantation to New England or Europe as opposed to building mills. Eventually, with electrification, the production of finished textiles moved into the south itself (see the movie Norma Rae), but by the Civil War, the south sent most of its raw material elsewhere.

I have yet to see a good history that explains the development of the industrial north as anything else than natural evolution.It is another type of erasure, another hole in history, but one that serves the established narrative by making it seem inevitable.

More later,

* UPDATE: That's only partially true, a reader noted. Virginia contributed a chunk of land across the river. However, most of the government buildings were on the Maryland side, so the Virginia side was not as developed. As it started looking that DC would ban the slave trade (a big business in nearby Alexandria, at the tip of the then-DC), Virginia agitated to get the land back. So while Virginia DID kick in for the site of DC, the government made them happy by giving it back. So the spirit of the comment stands, but not the facts as presented.

Norman American Rockwell

Triple Self-Portrait/ © The Norman Rockwell Estate

Yesterday I took the day off and went to the Tacoma Art Museum for an exhibit of Norman Rockwell's art. It required a little side street negotiation, because the main drag was occupied by the Daffodil Festival Parade. In other news, Tacoma has a Daffodil Festival Parade, which is actually four parades in four towns (Tacoma, Puyallup, Sumner, and Oorting) which results in marching bands bundling onto school buses and daffodil-covered floats engaged in high-speed chases. Or so I imagine. The end result a Saturday morning in a museum surprisingly light in traffic.

The Tacoma Art Museum is a small operation up the hill from the Museum of Glass (Museum of Glass + Earthquake Zone = Momento Mori). The floor plan is like an angular letter "p", with the counter (hole) in the letter consisting of bowl-shaped, tiled, mirrored interior court, which, in the modern style is titled, "Untitled", but everyone apparently calls "The Wave". The area surrounding "The Wave" are a series of small galleries. I don't know if they have a permanent collection, though they did have a gallery dedicated to Chihuly (because an entire museum dedicated to glass a half-mile away was obviously not enough).

Anyway, Norman Rockwell. America's best-known painter and illustrator, but still, after all these years, is still pushing against the wall of being called a true Artist-with-a-capital-A. Which is a pity, because he obviously is a Great American Artist to all but the most blinkered of academics. But I think this is because of his artistic strengths, his background, his subject matter, and his longevity.

Rockwell was a master technician and portraitist in a world that went non-representational in his lifetime. His ability to imbue emotions into the human face and body and to add depth, is as legendary as it is obvious.He could make Bob Hope look creepy and Dick Nixon look wise. He was direct in his goals - there is little wondering what the artist was trying to say here. He told stories in his work, pure and simple, refining the moment to single image. And I think denying the puzzle to the critics reduces his charm to them.

His background also rankles the movers and shakers of big-A Art. He was an illustrator by trade and training, a common craftsman who toiled for mere compensation to a deadline and an art order, as opposed to garret-starved wretch who wrests deeper truths from a patron or gallery system. He belongs to a mighty heritage that gets tarred with the small-a brush. Lautrec, Parrish, and Mucha were antecedents in this tradition. In the fantasy of the 80s we have Elmore, Easley, and Parkinson. And currently I have had the pleasure of working with the new generation -  Dociu, Kotaki, and Anderson. I am not going to deny to any them that they are doing Art. The same goes for Rockwell himself.

Rockwell's subject matter was very American, in particular its virtues. That made him a patriotic comfort food, his work suitable to grace the end table, the school room, and the phone book cover. He belonged to the small town America where he painted, recruiting his neighbors as models. And he seemed to have an inherent niceness about him, and it is hard not to conflate him with Mister Rogers in his grounded, positive nature. He apparently could not "paint angry" and in the exhibit, you can see his rawer emotions for "A Murder in Mississippi" get refined and crafted to the point that the magazine used a color study instead of the final work.

The Problem We All Live With/ Detroit Institute of Arts

His work has become iconic, and in taking on that iconic nature, makes itself the establishment to play against. He has been equated with the nostalgic, and with it the conservative. Yet once he moved from the more stodgy Saturday Evening Post to the more liberal Look, he unleashed a deep multiculturalism that was part and parcel of the struggles of the '60s. He was probably the only artist in America who could scrawl a racial epithet in the background "The Problem We All Live With" and have it published nationwide. He was like the original Star Trek - quaint now, but for the time radical and on the front lines.

His career spanned from the 20's to the 70s, and consisted of him breaking out of boxes into bigger boxes. He started with Boy's Life, and was labeled as a children's artist, then moved into the well-known Post gig where he defined the genre to a great degree. Casting loose from the Post, he moved into a New England Progressiveness that has been diminished as the more liberal arts cede the past to its more conservative brethren. Rockwell's America is an active verb, moving forward, doing things, and encountering life.

Uneasy Christmas in the Birthplace of Christ/Detroit Institute of Arts

The sum total of the criticism reflects more badly on his critics than on his art. To say his work is old-fashioned, or too realistic, or too American is to admit that modern art has no place in its galleries for such things, and the big tent shrinks. Yet to dismiss his work as mere craft is to do the artist, and all art, a disservice. His "Uneasy Christmas in the Birthplace of Christ" holds more emotional tonnage than Picasso's "Massacre in Korea"

You should go see this exhibit. It runs until the end of May, and may be one of the PNW's best kept art secrets. Yes, you should get yourself down to Tacoma (time does NOT pass slower there - it's just the way they time their traffic lights) and see it. There is something deeper and more meaningful in seeing the texture of this original art as opposed to a high gloss artbook or on a screen. Or on the cover of Saturday Evening Post.

More later,

Play: Time and Revolution

The Cook by Eduardo Machado, Directed by Juliette Carrillo, Settle REP, through 1 December, 2007

This play works, primarily through the brilliance of its lead and the excellent feeling of the march of time through the confines of a kitchen in Cuba.

And this is interesting, because it has an uphill fight, as the play has well-rounded, not always likable characters, a polarizing subject (Castro's Cuba) and the overall feel and potential danger of pitching over into political polemic.

The play is broken down into three acts for three different eras. The first is New Year's Eve, 1958, when Castro is moving on the capital and Batista and his boys are leaving in droves. The setting is the kitchen of the upper class house, where Gladys, the cook, is desperately holding things together for the people upstairs, with the aid of two cousins and her husband, Carlos, the chauffeur. She must deal with demands like Baked Alaska and pushing the clocks back an hour so the Master of the house can get back in time (the timeless nature of the household gets inserted early). The elements of class and race come into play in the upstairs/downstairs relationship.

A phone call comes in from the Master, and Adria, the Mistress of the House books out, complete with fur coat and valuables, leaving the staff and partiers behind for the Communists. Before she goes, however, she elicits a promise from Gladys to preserve the house for her promised return.

That's the big drive for the rest of the play - Gladys keeping the house for Adria. Thematically, the house is Cuba, abandoned by its upper class, kept running on thinner and thinner resources by those left behind.

Jump to 1972, and we are in the middle Castro's regime, along with increased sexual politics between Carlos and Gladys. Carlos is now a middle-weight the Party and has a pregnant mistress. Gladys's cousin is a homosexual followed by the secret police. Gladys can save her cousin at a cost of giving Carlos ascendancy in the household. Her resolve is tested, and decisions are made.

Jump to 1997, and American tourists are arriving in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. They have made the house a paladar, a small family restaurant, in order to keep it going. Carlos and Gladys are still together, joined by Rosa, Carlos' daughter by his mistress (who has since fled both Carlos and the island). Rosa is the voice of the New Cuba, who has grown up there. Adria finally returns, in the form of her daughter, Lourdes, an unapologetic Ugly American. You can see where this is going.

Where "The Cook" works as a play is that it internalizes so much of the history and the national politics within the confines of the Gladys' kitchen, and the heart of the play is how the rest of the world impinges of her domain. It is about loyalty misplaced, promises made, and about the progress of time, healing some wounds, keeping others fresh.

Zabryna Guevara as Gladys pulls it all off, aging with the old kitchen, moving from dedidated young servant to master of her own world easily and believably. Given the heavy import and deeper messages that roll around on the stage, it is up to her to pull it together, and like her character, Guevara pulls it off in a splendid, moving performance.

The supporting cast is almost equally as good - Al Espinosa as Carlos comes across as more than merely a communist cypher and strawman for the revolution gone awry. His goal is always one at control, and his final state, that of accepting and supporting Gladys, is one of the triumphs of the play. A.K.Murtadha as the homosexual cousin Julio is extremely broad, and he is the posterboy for showing the cruelty of the regime (like democracies do SO much better). Here we are in danger of pitching completely over into broad political moralism, but Guevara's strong performance and Glady's character pulls it back.

Where it fails is in the portrayal of the upper class characters, Adria and Lourdes, played by the same actress. While race is a definite component in the history of the house which is Cuba (the lighter-skinned Spanish descendants had the advantages and were capable of fleeing the country when the revolution came), Jessica Pimentel's peaches and cream complexion is too much, and she looks and sounds more Megan Mullally (from "Will and Grace") than a Spanish-descended noblewoman, more comfortable in the Hamptons than Havana. Her characters are called upon for the faintest promises and the cruelest betrayals, and this is a difficult proposition for any actress. She doesn't carry it across here, neither believable as Mistress of the house or as Judgment from America.

(And yeah, the toughest moment to "sell" would be when Adria declares her long-unspoken friendship with underclass Gladys, then leaves. If the friendship was so strong, why not take the devoted servants with her? Particularly since one of them (Carlos, the Chauffeur, is driving them to the airport anyway?).

I think the reason the play works despite this is that we are allowed to see and develop most of the other characters over time, and watch the slow shabbification of the set (done extremely subtly, such that only at the end did I realize that the plaster had fallen in and the tiles were missing in parts of the kitchen). The sense of time and that of growth and development, off-stage and on, helps bring the play and its characters to a fuller, richer life. And Gladys, the centerpost, the support for both the play and her household, has the richest life of all.

More later,

Furthermore: Shades of Washington

OK, I promised to deal with this one, even if Daisey mentions it in a later bit. Not seeing it in Zinn, but that's the job of the historian - to decide what stories get told. There are more than enough tales in the current narrative where the People decide to get frisky with all this freedom and stuff, and the Government decides to kick their teeth in, and here's one more.

This is the only statue I know of for the Whiskey
Rebellion. It is not where the actual fighting took
place, but rather in Washington, PA (also called
Little Washington), 20 miles south of us.

And it is important to us because it involves George Washington. And it is important to me because it is where I grew up.

I wrote last time about how my chunk of Western PA was the launching pad for the Seven Years War. And even afterwards there were competing claims about who owned the region - PA or VA. That was settled in 1784 with a survey. Things got better, right?

Well, then there was the Whiskey Rebellion. 1791-1794. It started two years into Washington's first term., and came to a head after his re-election.

OK, here's the short form: Early US Government was broke, needed to raise funds to pay for the revolution. Among other things, Hamilton pushed out a tax on distilled spirits. West of the Alleghenies this did not go over well. Whiskey was used as a modicum of trade, more stable than the government currency in places. Also it was easier and profitable to ship whiskey back east than the component parts. In addition to being a pain on the producers, the tax gave a break to big distillers as opposed to small operations, and there were a lot of small operations into Western PA.

And the guys who were most affected in this? White guys, with guns.

So from 1791 to 1794 there was a ratcheting up, with defiance to pay the tax, or the fines that came with the tax (you had to go to Philly to do that, which was way the hell and gone). Tax collectors were attacked, there were meetings about the degree of revolt, Moderates argued with Radicals. A lot of the tools of the Revolution were put into play - Liberty Poles and correspondence circles. Here was see the creation of Democratic-Republican societies, which would actually become the "other party" to oppose the Federalists. These whiskey rebels felt they were continuing the War of Independence many of them had fought in.

And seriously, if you tell a lot of people the war is about taxation by a distant government, they're going to get bent out of shape when the winner tax them from a distant government.

The Federal Government, finding their way out of the mess that what the Articles of the Confederation and the Panic of 1792, disagreed with this concept. From the Federalist standpoint, championed by Hamilton and with Washington's support, the Revolution had created a new sovereignty, and stuff that was OK during the revolution was no longer appropriate. Going with Daisey's note that the Revolutionary war was merely a change in the letterhead of management, that makes sense. All these frontiersmen threatening people was going too far.

And the strike of the point was the burning of the Neville house, up on Bower Hill, a couple valleys away from where I grew up, not far from the church I was baptized in. Walking distance, really. The whole process started when John Neville, put in charge of collecting the taxes, accompanied a federal marshal to serve writs against the rebels. They were fired upon at the Miller house and Neville returned home.

Later, a group of about 30 militiamen arrived to besiege the house. Shots were fired. Both sides retreated for reinforcements. About 600 rebels showed up the next night, Neville had fled at that point. The rebel leader, Major MacFarlane, was shot during an attempt at negotiations. The house eventually surrendered, the survivors within spared, and the building burned to the ground.

Neville was was a perfect example of the elite that Daisey talks about. Virginian. Wealthy. "As close to being an aristocrat as republican America west of the Alleghenies would allow", per his wiki entry. He had slaves who helped defend the household. When news of the attack reached back to the nation's capital at Philly, the new government had to decide whether they would negotiate or send in the troops. Washington did both - sent in some negotiation team and recruited militia from a few states and marched on Pittsburgh, along with Hamilton and Light-Horse Harry Lee. Only time a US President has led troops. Imagine Trump at the head of a tank corps rolling through Texas.

In the face of the armed forces of the Government, the rebels faded. Some lit out for further west (like Kentucky, which might as well be the back end of the moon in those days). A few were arrested. Fewer were tried. Two were convicted to be hanged. They were pardoned by Washington.

But this was a moment, one of those pivot moments where things could go many ways. Some saw this as betrayal of founding principles. Others put it as creation of a new nation that would not put up with this crap. For most people, it was a speed bump, forgotten in the wake of the Revolution, something that comes up in one of these Internet articles.

For me, it is local history. The house where the initial shots were fired is still there, in South Park (a large park known for picnics, county fairs, and the working model of Skybus, our monorail). Neville's house (sorry - Neville's OTHER house - he had one that is still around in  nearby Heidelberg) was replaced by a hospital and now by townhouses. Suburban sprawl has moved over the coal-dark hills and fog-shrouded creeks, so established the trees planted in the subdivisions have reached climax growth.

And yeah, I think George was done messing with us after this.

More later,

I is for Imperium(s)

Space, as someone wise once said, is big. Really, really big. And so space empires are sprawling masses that challenge both the sense of space and of time itself. And the gaming universes provide us with not one, but two Imperiums.

And it makes sense - both showed up post-Star Wars, and despite differences from the Empire presented there, both have an Emperor. Neither could really use the term Empire itself, so we have a related term, Imperium. One campaign comes from England as the setting of its Warhammer 40k universe, and the other from America as the setting for its Traveller game.

Warhammer's Imperium first. The Imperium, also called the Imperium of Man or the Imperium of Mankind is a sprawling mass that occupies (but does not dominate) most of the Galaxy. It is ruled with an iron first by the Emperor who is based at Old Terra, or rather by his ministers, since the Emperor is hors de combat from a rebellion some 10,000 years previous, and currently exists on cosmic life support, used to maintain the ability to move through space for the humans and as a buwark against the darkness of chaos, which are the main baddies in the universe. He's a god-sized nightlight.

The Warhammer Imperium

And this is an interesting thing - Warhammer's Imperium is a frozen universe. The Imperium hasn't changed much since the Emperor was first put in deep freeze. The wars continue and conflict between a conservative, controlling empire and everyone else is eternal. Most of the empire pretty much sucks, and it sucks under the watchful eye of the Imperium's masters, who are willing to declare heresy and dispatch the heavily-armed space marines at the drop of a gauntlet.

The result is pretty much a monoculture. Yeah, the Elf/Eldar are out there, and the forces of chaos, and there are a couple of nonhuman races, but everything is pretty much similar turf for the space marines and their opponents (often other space marines) to pound the ground. But in general, the planets might as well just be one, and exist solely as terrain for Games Workshop miniatures.

The other Imperium is the Third Imperium, though it is also called the Imperium, from GDW's Traveller. It instead occupies a more modest potion of our galactic arm, but its maps are extensively detailed, creating a universe so large that one small segment, usually the Spinward Marches, is enough for an extensive campaign. The Third Imperium has an Emperor, or had one, or has many, as they launched an event where they broke up the empire into smaller but still massive pieces. The center of the Third Imperium was not Earth, but rather Capital (originally Sylea), one of many planets where humans were relocated to by the Ancients, a predecessor race. In fact the Terrans and the Solomani Confederation are considered barbaric latecomers in this universe. Another subgroup of humans are the Zhodani, who are psychic, and, like in the Warhammer Universe, therefore suspect.

The Traveller Imperium

The planets of the Third Imperium are more diverse, but they tend to have that Star Wars diversity where the ten-square mile patch of ground is the area is represented. (Hoth, by the way, had some pristine tropical beachfront property, by the way, but the Rebels didn't set up there and so you never saw it). Though for a lot of travelers in Traveller, there is a McDonaldization of space, where the up (orbital) and down (ground) stations are pretty much what people see.

Interstellar history is a challenge for the Third Imperium, but they handle it not by freezing time, but rather by engaging in long, looping cycles of empire and collapse, usually in the 16-1800 year range. Given that it was only in the 1200s when the game launched, I had thought of it as an empire past its prime but not falling apart yet. However, more recent product stage a number of Galaxy-shattering events have upended that applecart into smaller groups. Still more recent product then goes back to the glory years of the original.

Of the two, I think I like GDW's Imperium3 over GW's Imperium of Monstrous Men. There is more variety and spaces where the Imperium is not that allows you to set up a campaign, most of them based around taking missions to pay off your ship. Less military, nor merchantile. But both attempt to show worldbuilding at its ultimate ends of taking on the galaxy.

More later,

Jeff's Day Off

Well, actually it was an afternoon, but it was enough. After another 50+ hour week, I knocked off at noon, came home, pilled the cat, and headed out to Cap Hill.

Capitol Hill is one of several counterculture neighborhoods in Seattle (Fremont, Alki,and Green Lake also come to mind). It gets its name from the fact that the State Capital was going to be there. Actually, the Capital ended up being a little further south. In Olympia. But the name stuck, and its Cap Hill and its one of those creative and strange hubs in the Seattle area.

Actually, I ended up at the Frye Museum on First Hill (the hill closer to the downtown) first. The Frye is one of my favorite museums in Seattle, and probably one of the least-known. Here's the story in a nutshell. Charles Frye (and wife Emma) made it big in meat-packing during the Gold Rush Years, and starting collecting art, with an eye towards the more realistic painters of Germany, France, and the US of the end of the last century. When they passed on, the collection was to be left to a museum that would exhibit the works for free. No one took up that offer, and as a result, the Frye Museum itself came about. In addition to a great collection of mid-to-late 18th Century art (You ever heard of the Munich Succession? Me neither, until they had an exhibit on it), they have great curated shows. A show of Mucha prints that ran when I first came out here. Western watercolors. Holocaust dioramas made out of Legos. Its a very small but very rich museum which always surprises me.

Case in point. I look three steps into the lobby and immediately swung left, attracted by a picture of three red "Barrel of Monkeys" monkeys (the ones with the question mark arms) on a plate with a mousetrap next to it. It was a still life, but unlike any I had seen. Most still life art I've seen has been of the late 18th/ early 19th - flowers, bowls with fruit, that sort of thing. Seeing such a mundane and modern presentation just floored me for the moment, and halted me in my tracks, literally slack-jawed.

The artist is named Steve Fraser and he does amazing work that mixes the modern with the traditional and the transient with the truthful. A skull in bubble wrap. Goldfish crackers laid out in patterns. "See no evil/Hear no evil/Speak no evil" worked out with pears. Stuff that has both whimsy and deeper feelings beneath it. I can see why I've always disconnected with Still Life art in the past - those were historic records for me, while this was amazing and contemporary in a way that much modern art fails to be.

So I picked up a book at the Museum shop (The museum, as I noted, is free, but this is the third time I've been there that I've ended up picking up a book connected with the exhibit there, something I'm usually immune to). And the young woman behind the counter was former WotC and recognized me, and we chatted about the state of the company. I mentioned I was doing web design and she recommended a book on Information Architecture.

Then I hit Broadway, the spine that runs down the length of Cap Hill. Its a great people-watching neighborhood -a lot of young people, strangely colored hair, and locals with pets. Hit a couple bookstores (including Twice-Sold Tales, a used bookstore run by the widest cats in Christendom (and a few support-humans to run the register). Got a short story collection that included a nonfiction piece on the real-world events that inspired The African Queen and a book on the supposed Chinese discovery of America in 1421. Sat for an hour at a coffee house and watched humanity swirl by. I tried to locate another former WotCer who has been our administrative assistant, but her goth art shop had since been replaced by a bondage boutique. On the other hand, a new "Museum of the Strange" opened up near the north end of Broadway, which covered Fortean subjects (Bigfoots, UFOs - they were going have a Weird Science meeting this evening and create some ball lightning, but I had other plans).

And then on to a movie with Michael Moore. No, not the one everyone is talking about, but rather The Corporation, which was very good but very long (the seats at the Harvard Exit theater were not made for 2 1/2 hour marathons). Actually, the movie review should get its own entry, so I'll give it one next time, since I am still digesting it all.

And home. And while it was but a mere afternoon, I felt I got more accomplished for myself then I had in a very, very busy week.

More later,