Another Friday ballet, rather than Saturday.

I don’t know if I’ve explained before, but we subscribe to the Washington Ballet, and we’ve got a Kennedy Center ballet subscription as well. And when the Washington Ballet danced in the Eisenhower Theater at the Kennedy Center, all was well. They would never schedule a Washington Ballet event in the Eisenhower Theater at the same time as another ballet program in the Opera House.

But now they’re rehabbing refurbishing remodeling whatever the Ike Theater, so Washington Ballet is dancing elsewhere. And they’re having to coordinate with Shakespeare Theatre productions and whatnot, so they don’t care so much about the Kennedy Center ballet schedule. And so twice this year we’ve got tickets to two different ballets on the same Saturday night. So we opt to swap the Kennedy Center tickets for another night, since we have to coordinate with Becky regarding the Washington Ballet. So that’s why we’re here at the Kennedy Center on a Friday night.

And it’s New York City Ballet with a program called Four Voices. (It’s program #2 of the two that they’re doing this visit. Program #1 is called Balanchine and Robbins. As if our program didn’t contain Balanchine or Robbins. It does, but I guess it’s four voices since it adds Wheeldon and Martins.)

Up first is Carousel (A Dance), music composed by Richard Rodgers and arranged by William David Brohn, choreography by Christopher Wheeldon. I like the music, the two songs Carousel Waltz and If I Love You, since I know Carousel Waltz so well from the beginning bit from Dire Straits Tunnel of Love off of Making Movies. (Although if pressed I probably would have said that the borrowed bit was from Richard Strauss. But there I’m probably confusing Richard Strauss with Johann Strauss.)

This particular dance, in any case, is just simply charming as all get out. As noted, the music is an orchestral arrangement of the two songs; it’s not just a simple reading of one after the other. And so the looping thereof back and forth, coming in and out, works quite well of course with the carousel image. The choreography is a bit obvious with the corps forming a big ring and going round. But when the guys lift up their partners, who in turn move the brass poles they’ve been handed up and down, and it all gets so explicitly carousel-like, well, I gotta grin in delight and just go with it.

Next is Zakousky, with music by four dead Russian composers, choreography by Peter Martins, who’s sitting right over there. He’s the artistic director, so no surprise. The dance is just two dancers, Yvonne Bourree and Benjamin Millepied, pas-de-deux-ing and whatnot, all pretty uninspiring. There are a lot of lifts that are kinda half-hearted halfway up lifts, like he’s trying to get her up high but never makes it. They stay with the timing, however, so there’s not like any time where he could have gotten her up there. So it’s all by design. But why? Why these tepid unsatisfying lifts?

Towards the end he shoots her way the hell up there, so clearly he’s able to do it. So it remains a mystery as to why there were those weird lifts. The music runs the whole range, from pure delight from our man Tchaikovsky, and even Prokofiev, to the demonic irritations of Rachmaninoff, and on to Stravinsky sounding like he’s trying to kill us.

There’s one terrifying moment where Yvonne Bourree is doing some solo combination, moving upstage left, and she falls. Just completely wipes out. You know how disappointing it is in figure skating when they fall? It’s a surprise and you’re saddened by it, but you do see it all the time. You don’t see it in ballet, certainly not in the pros anyway. And it’s a ghastly shock.

She just gets up, though, and jumps right back in, somehow able to get back in step with the music. I have enough trouble staying on the beats when everything goes perfectly well. But after a fall? Yikes. So I therefore hold her in so much greater esteem, for falling. Weird, huh?

After the first intermission we come back to Agon, music by Stravinsky again, choreography by Balanchine himself. I expect to enjoy this one the most – hey, it’s Balanchine right? – but again with the Stravinsky madness. At least it’s got the legendary Wendy Whelan, another one of those dancers whom I imagine to be like 9 feet tall. Only she’s really so much smaller in person. Not frail exactly, but … delicate. But muscle-y too. And lovely.

Last up, after another intermission and where we see our very own ballet mistress Miss Jessica out in the lobby, is The Concert (or the Perils of Everybody), music by Chopin, choreography by Jerome Robbins. It’s a totally comedic farce, something you don’t see a lot in ballet.

There’s a lot of business involving the dancers as audience to a piano recital, silliness with chairs and such. The best joke here is when Stirling Hyltin plays this utterly enthusiastic concert-goer, sidling her chair right up to and fairly hugging the piano. And when the musical chairs begins with patrons being in the wrong seat, at one point someone literally pulls the chair out from under her, but she doesn’t even notice, still just sits there clinging to the piano.

Unfortunately there’s also a weird violence-against-women-as-comedy vibe going on too. The other two sort of main characters are a man and woman, I assume a married couple, the husband of which couple chases after Stirling Hyltin a lot. After failing to catch her, he pulls out some bat or stick or something and bashes her over the head with it, able then to drag her offstage. This is apparently supposed to be funny. Later he sneaks up behind his wife, brandishing a knife. He stabs her repeatedly, but alas to no effect. He then tests the knife on himself, of course doing himself grave harm. But, again, beating and stabbing women – funny or not funny?

The wife part of the couple we at first take to be Likolani Brown, next to whose parents we used to sit before they moved their seats over to the other side of the opera house. They’re trying to be make their way closer to the middle. We haven’t seen them in a while, nor do we see them tonight since they’re Saturday night folks. Like we usually are. But this probably can’t be Likolani Brown, since it’s somewhat of a featured role in this piece, and she’s listed in the corps.

The one truly hysterical section of this act comes when six ballerinas dance a more traditional piece, as if part of an actual corps de ballet or something. It’s totally real and funny when one of them is always off or behind or doing the reverse of what she’s supposed to be doing. Having myself been in a ballet recital or two where I have only a dim idea of what I’m supposed to be doing, and I end up just looking at Dawn or someone else for cues as to what the next likely movement is going to be, I can certainly relate. I am howling and crying with laughter.

I only get 14 out of 24 and thus lose the office pool, after winning two years in a row. I can usually count on getting three out of the four acting awards, but manage only two this year. Even worse, I screw the pooch completely on foreign language and documentary and shorts. Big fat zero on all five.

Mike Kelly wins with 15. Damn, I was counting on that forty bucks.

I’m otherwise thrilled, however, that Marion Cotillard and Tilda Swinton both win, since I utterly adore them both, Ms. Swinton for Orlando & Mlle. Cotillard for Un long dimanche de fiançailles and Jeux d’enfants.

I probably shouldn’t have gone with the grand dame legends in both actress categories. But, to be perfectly honest, going with that thinking would probably have led me to pick Cate Blanchett for supporting, given that she was up for leading as well. Or I would have gone with Saorise Ronan on the theory that the youngest or oldest wins the supporting actress category, and if I wasn’t going to go with Ruby Dee as oldest then I’d go with Ms. Ronan as youngest. Ms. Swinton would have been just about my last pick, despite being easily my favorite among the group.

And I wish I had gone with Taxi to the Dark Side instead of No End in Sight, after hearing Bill Moyers’s piece on it from his Journal show. I listened to it by way of podcast, while I was picking up trash off the street on Sunday. I hadn’t realized Taxi was made by Alex Gibney, director of the excellent Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. But, then again, Gibney was also executive producer of No End in Sight, so who knows what I would have done with this information if I’d had it on Friday, when I filled out my office ballot.

And all of this is very much despite the fact that La Vie en Rose and Eastern Promises were the only movies among all of the nominees that I actually saw, of course. I try not to let complete ignorance get in the way of these things.

The most striking thing in this gallery of amazing Rodin’s isn’t a Rodin at all; it’s an enormous painting of St. Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage. It’s the kind of thing that totally stops you dead in your tracks. I’m standing there dumbfounded for a minute, then I realize that this is yet another object that Helena had suggested seeing. So totally major points for her for this, and for the caryatid tips as well.

I spend almost forty minutes with St. Joan, sitting directly across from her. Like I said, it’s a gigantic work. No size is listed on the identification plaque, but I’ll estimate eight feet by eight feet square. (In fact it’s 8’4″ by 9’2″.) St. Joan is to the right, looking off-screen further to the right, and up. She’s evidently been spinning and has been interrupted. Her stool at the wheel behind her is lying knocked over. Behind her in the garden, between her spinning and the house, are the three saints, hovering in the air.

St. Joan is so real, standing there. She’s painted in an almost hyper-real style compared to the saints. They almost blend into the house behind them, St. Michael’s head right at the apex of the gable and his armor nearly the same color as the bricks. St. Margaret is to his right, somewhat below him, the angle from his head to hers exactly matching the pitch of the roof. St. Catherine is very hard to make out at all, behind the spinning wheel and some trees, and it’s hard to make out her face at all. Perhaps her face is buried in her hands. It’s hard to say. She could be a martyr holding her own decapitated head, for all I can tell. Maybe depends on which St. Catherine she is.

The right side of the house almost divides the picture exactly in half, separating the saints from St. Joan. And she’s only hearing them, not seeing them, as they are behind her and she’s gazing so intently up and away from them. She so obviously moved, overwhelmed even. She’s grabbing a branch in front of her, maybe even leaning on the tree behind her for support. She dressed very plainly, simple cotton and wool, skirt and blouse and what-do-you-call-it over the blouse, like a cardigan that laces instead of buttons, or an unboned bodice with sleeves.

The picture is an interesting companion for today for the Botticelli, although St. Joan is so much bigger than St. Jerome, which I suppose one can be if you’re oil on canvas versus tempera on wood. Both saints are depicted at important milestones in their lives, although St. Joan is at a beginning and St. Jerome is at an end. Not entirely the end for him, mind you, since he’s got the glorious afterlife awaiting him. And despite this moving beginning moment, St. Joan’s battles against England aren’t going to end well, at least not for her personally.

Joan of Arc, 1879, Jules Bastien-Lepage (French, 1848–1884), Oil on canvas; 100 x 110 in. (254 x 279.4 cm), Gift of Erwin Davis, 1889 (89.21.1)

I find the gallery with Rodin sculptures. Helena had suggested checking out the fallen caryatid. I’m eager to do so, especially because I’m not sure what a caryatid is exactly. Caryatid makes me think of katydid. I’m guessing though that it’s not really some kind of insect, but what would it mean to be a fallen katydid? What precisely would one have to do wrong to be a fallen katydid?

Along the way I spot Rodin’s Cupid and Psyche. It seems to depict Cupid trying to fly away and Psyche trying to hold him down. Perhaps it’s when Cupid bails on Psyche after her sisters have convinced her to shine the lamp on him while he’s sleeping, and a drop of hot oil on his shoulder wakes him up. Here’s how William Adlington translated the scene, in 1566, from The Golden Asse by Lucius Apuleius:

The god beeing burned in this sort, and perceiving that promise and faith was broken, hee fled away without utterance of any word, from the eyes and hands of his most unhappy wife. But Psyche fortuned to catch him as hee was rising by the right thigh, and held him fast as hee flew above in the aire, until such time as constrained by wearinesse shee let goe and fell downe upon the ground.

That’s not quite how it’s unfolding here.

It’s a marble sculpture, maybe 1/3 scale, or maybe Greeks and/or gods were smaller back then. They’re on a rough base, just like a rock really, except there’s also this prong coming up out to the right, on which Cupid casually kind of rests his left hand & wrist. Seems like maybe it’s a necessary structural element for the sculpture. One can see how otherwise his whole arm might snap off in a stiff wind.

The immediate effect is that he’s fleeing and she’s clinging tightly, trying to keep him from getting away. At least that’s the impression given by their relative positions to one another. But they’re not at all tensed up and fighting. Rather, they’re fairly relaxed. As mentioned, his left hand is rather casual on the prong. He’s also hiding his face under his right arm. Her face is hidden too, buried into him, under him, right up to his face. Her left arm is thrown around his torso, but her hand around his back is rather limp. And her right arm is bent double, the back of her hand resting protectively between her breasts. She’s both pulling herself toward him and defending herself from him.

And it’s his face that’s tormented. Hers is fairly serene. She seems like she’s trying to kiss him ever so delicately.

The plaque says that the sculpture is particularly “illustrating the moment of Psyche’s abandonment by Cupid owing to the machinations of Venus.” I’m not sure what moment that would be. Psyche’s whole reason for being there in the first place I suppose stems from Venus’ machinations. But this moment, when he’s fleeing? Wouldn’t that be the sisters’ machinations?

Down at the west end of the gallery I find the fallen caryatid. Two actually, bronze casts. One carrying a stone, the other an urn. Turns out a caryatid is “a sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head.” Not an insect at all! I’m in no way disappointed.

They’re not anymore serving as architectural supports, Rodin having extracted them from The Gates of Hell. But once a caryatid, always a caryatid, I suppose. The one under the stone seems a whole lot more burdened than the one with the urn. Much more tormented. And her big toe is rubbed bright, as if people sense her greater anguish and feel a need to touch her, to comfort her.

Very confusingly, the plaques for both caryatids say that they were first modeled about 1881 but that these bronze casts are from 1981. Nineteen eighty-one? A hundred years later, long after Rodin’s death? Are they still Rodins?

I’m on my own Tuesday morning in NYC, while Dawn is in training. So I’m off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I ride the subway from Grand Central to 86th Street, on the 4 Express. Stops only at 59th Street in between. I ride on car 1185, part of the R142 order built by Bombardier for the IRT from 2002 to 2003, replacing the old Redbird fleet from 1958. There are exits at the 86th Street station out to both the east and west sides of Lexington, but there’s a helpful sheet of paper taped to the wall telling me which way to go.

I get to the museum around ten and have to check my backpack. I wait around until ten-fifteen for the free introductory tour. Takes about an hour, making our way from ancient Greece to Rome to 18th century Africa to America 1928 (Demuth’s Figure 5 in Gold) back to 18th century France to 14th century Germany to 16th century Spain back to 18th century France again and finally to Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher from 1661 or so. That’s quite an hour, don’t you think?

I dig all of it, even the Demuth modern piece. I ask the docent a question at the first piece, just about where this particular frieze would have been, like in a house or a public building. Why would someone have made it, I wonder. Who would have wanted it for what purpose? Artistic? Religious? Both? She seems kinda annoyed at me for interrupting her flow, so I keep generally quiet for the rest of the tour. Except at the Demuth when she says that there’s more modern stuff upstairs or somewhere in the museum, including “Julian Hirst’s shark.”

“Julian or Damian?” I ask.

She admits that it’s Damian, although this clearly hasn’t endeared me any more to her either.

On my own for a couple of hours I go looking for some objects that Helena has suggested. On my way out from the Vermeer I notice the one Botticelli that they’ve got here, so I stop at that for a while. It’s The Last Communion of St. Jerome.

The scene depicted takes place in St. Jerome’s bedroom cell where he spent the last decades of his life. If the info plaque didn’t tell me this, I’d have figured that this was in a church. What looks to be like an altar, with palms and crucifix above, is in fact St. Jerome’s bed. I suppose maybe I shouldn’t have mistaken the bedspread for the altar cloth, in that the former here seems to be some sort of fur or animal skin whereas the latter is generally just plain white.

The cell itself is a strangely abstracted place, in that from our vantage point it looks like a three-sided building somewhere outside. The sky seen above the roof and through the windows is solid blue, cloudless, and we see no other landscape features. It’s almost like the whole room is suspended in mid-air. Maybe that helps to enforce the idea of this being the last communion of St. Jerome, like he’s almost already on his way. He’s already no longer of this earth, maybe not quite in heaven yet but clearly on his way there.

There are six figures in the room, St. Jerome included. There are three on each side, facing each other, at the foot of the bed. St. Jerome himself is middle right, facing the priest at middle left, who is holding the communion wafer in his right hand, just about ready to place it on St. Jerome’s tongue. Each man is being assisted, St. Jerome being physically supported by two monks, the priest attended by two altar boys.

Generally the figures are all facing each other, with their bodies turned slightly towards us, so not quite facing but not quite profile. Three-quarters turned maybe. Or perhaps the ballet croisé. St. Jerome’s face is in direct profile, as is the face of the altar boy directly across from him. The priest’s face is almost, just almost, in profile, except for a slight tilt of his head, where we can see the underside of his chin. The tilt really conveys a lot of sympathy towards the saint.

The monk whose head the priest’s head almost touches also looks very concerned about St. Jerome. The other monk on the other side of St. Jerome looks less so, but he is the one clutching him tightly, holding him up. The altar boy further away seems to gaze up at his candle, distracted, lost in some other thoughts. The nearer altar boy, the one in profile, seems very interested. He’s almost up on his toes, gazing over the priest’s shoulder, trying to see what’s going on. He seems much more curious than concerned.

St. Jerome himself appears to be focussed on nothing. He is on his knees, hands clasped in front of him in prayer, mouth open to receive communion. But as he looks straight ahead, he doesn’t seem to be seeing the priest or the altar boys. Perhaps he’s looking inward. Again, like the scene itself, he’s no longer really here among us. He’s on his way already.

The frame itself is a work of art too. It’s heavily gilded, but the gilding is fading, so that it now looks like orange marmalade. And above the painting the frame is arched, and there’s a separate scene painted in there as well. God on his throne, surrounded by angels and cherubim. These are true cherubim in the sense that they’re little children heads with wings, no fat little bodies attached. They’re frankly disturbing, is what they are. The angels are lovely though. What’s most interesting is the crucified Christ that God holds, between his knees like a cello.

The Last Communion of St. Jerome, early 1490s, Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi) (Italian, Florentine, 1444/45–1510), Tempera and gold on wood; 13 1/2 x 10 in. (34.3 x 25.4 cm), Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913 (14.40.642).

We take the noon Acela to NYC. I’m incredibly severely monumentally cranky about walking the 1/2 hour from home to Union Station and again on the other end with another 1/2 hour from Penn Station to our hotel, which is on East 50th between Lexington and Third. Maybe if I’d brought the rolling suitcase, I’d be happier. But I’ve got just an overnight bag slung over my shoulder. And in it also is Dawn’s big three-ring binder for her training. And our coats, since it’s so warm out.

I feel a little better after checking into the San Carlos and then heading straight to a pub on Second Avenue called the Press Box. I have a Sam while Dawn has a glass of Pinot Grigio.

We walk around a bit, on 50th towards the river, although we don’t cross FDR Drive. We find Beekman Place then make our way back to First Avenue, then back east on 52nd. We look down towards the UN and over towards Roosevelt Island.

We kinda sorta make our way towards Central Park, going back to First and up to 59th, then west towards the park, although it’s getting late and will be getting dark soon. Yes, it’s getting darker and darker, we’ll never make it there and back, so we head back down to 51st between Second and Third to Amma.

We share a yummy bottle of the Rocca Bernarda Pinot Grigio. Dawn goes with the Dum Aloo, whereas I opt for the Malabar Salmon. It’s all really, really good. The salmon is presented quite nicely, too. We go with the Gulab Jamun for dessert, and it’s quite tasty but there’s some problem with the coffee so we’re done with dessert before I get my coffee.

There’s a cool picture on the wall next to our table, a photograph from India of bicycle taxis parked in front of a billboard advertising a Bollywood movie. I don’t really recognize anyone in the movie poster, but if you held a gun to my head I would maybe say that the guy on the right is Amitabh Bachchan. I ask our waiter and he doesn’t know. Another waiter says that the picture is from southern India and the guy on the left is Mammootty. Oh, hey, I’ve seen him in Rajiv Menon’s movie Kandukondain Kandukondain, a Tamil version of Sense & Sensibility. Mammootty plays the Col. Brandon character to Ashwarya Rai’s Marianne Dashwood character. We all pause to sigh over Ashwarya Rai.

We’re back to the Kennedy Center to see the Tokyo Ballet perform Raymonda. It’s another Mariinsky, as in Kirov, original. Petipa choreography of course. Dawn notes that it’s a pretty minor company doing a pretty minor work. And it’s totally great.

Like La Bayadére it’s pretty much about a pretty girl in love with a handsome boy, and there’s some evil guy trying to get the girl instead. Instead of ancient India and a temple dancer, in this case the setting is medieval Provence and the pretty girl is Raymonda, the niece of the Countess of Doris. The handsome boy this time is Jean de Brienne, who is currently off on a Crusade, but like Solor he is represented by a portrait. And the villain is very specifically Muslim this time, leader of the Saracens, Abderachman, rather than the High Brahmin.

Oh, and the King of Hungary is here, pretty much in charge of everything. Like the Rajah, I suppose. It’s all very Bayadere-like, but alas no Kingdom of the Shades, although Act III is traditionally known as Le Festival des Noces.

I’m very sleepy during Act I, then perked up by Act II, and then completely blown away by Act III. I cannot fully believe it when Terashima Hiromi and Denys Matviyenko keep reappearing, after what I can only think is the exhausting finale, to dance again. I’m happy to join the standing ovation, richly deserved for once. Although I wish more people would yell brava along with, or instead of, bravo, especially since I’m too timid to yell.

(Also note that I’ve inserted a post below on the Washington Ballet’s performance that we saw at the new Harman Center on February 2.)

It’s funny, all the British TV we watch.

Tonight we start watching a recent adaptation of Mansfield Park, being shown on PBS Masterpiece during their Jane Austin marathon. (The things we do for our loved ones, I tell you.) What’s funny is recognizing actors from other British TV stuff. This time it’s Douglas Hodge. As soon as I see him I say, “Hey, it’s Tertius.” Yes, he played Tertius in the version of Middlemarch that we saw, the one with the lovely Juliet Aubrey. We also saw him in The Way We Live Now, playing Roger Carbury, cousin to the odious Sir Felix Carbury, faithless suitor to Marie Melmotte, played by the dazzling Shirley Henderson. In Mansfield Park he’s Sir Thomas Bertram, Douglas Hodge is.

It takes me longer to figure out the guy playing older brother Tom Bertram, heir to Mansfield Park. Finally. “Hey, he was Tom Pullings in Master and Commander.” I remember the cool scar he had on his cheek in that. Must have been the lack of that what made me take so long to recognize him.

In general, everyone is way too good-looking, in a Georgian England’s Next Top Model kind of way. Except for Billie Piper’s eyebrows. What’s the deal with those? Whoever’s playing Maria Bertram looks vaguely familiar. IMBD tells me she’s the new Bionic Woman on NBC. And, whoa, she was in four-hundred and thirty-two episodes of Eastenders.

Alistair Cooke being long gone, we have Gillian Anderson as our host. She reminds me of my all-time favorite stripper, Christina L. I suppose it’s not just that she looks like her, with her hair longer now, the same dyed red color. But also that I had made a deal with Christina that I’d try watching X Files if she would go out one night and look at the Comet Hale-Bopp that was big in the sky at the time. I watched like four episodes of X Files. Not really my thing, although I do really like David Duchovny in general. And Gillian Anderson, although at the time she didn’t remind me of Christina. And she never did check out Hale-Bopp, as far as I remember. Not really her thing, I guess.

(And I learn from IMDB that Alistair Cooke died fairly recently, in 2004. Almost made it to a hundred. He only hosted Masterpiece Theatre until 1993, apparently retiring after twenty-two years at it. Would’ve been cool to see him introducing Upstairs Downstairs every week back in the day, instead of sans intros on DVD like we had.)

(We only make it through about half of Mansfield Park. Dawn will mercifully declare it unfit to watch tomorrow night. We’ll abandon it in favor of the old Amanda Root version of Persuasion. You remember Amanda Root, right? She was Winifred in the newer Forsyte Saga, with Gina McKee and Rupert Graves and Ioan Gruffud. And Ciarán Hinds plays Wentworth. You remember him in The Mayor of Casterbridge? With Juliet Aubrey, Jodhi May, Polly Walker, and Jean Marsh? He’s also apparently in a version of Jane Eyre with Samantha Morton, but we haven’t seen that one.)

We see the Washington Ballet doing a program called Genius. Eh. It’s all fairly modern and leaves me generally if not quite cold then let’s say tepid.

What I do appreciate about the first two acts, Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes, music by Virgil Thomson (Etudes for piano), choreography by Mark Morris, and There Where She Loved, music by Frederic Chopin and Kurt Weill, is that they’ve got live music, pianist Glenn Sales over there on the left. The second also includes soprano Kate Vetter Cain and mezzo soprano Shelley Waite. Note that the Chopin and Weill songs alternate; they apparently never collaborated on anything.

I especially try not to much like the third act, Nine Sinatra Songs, choreography by Twyla Tharp. But, despite even having seen it before, it’s still pretty irresistible. My absolute favorite piece is One For My Baby (And One More for the Road). I’m not a huge Sinatra fan to begin with, and I’m even less of a Bette Midler fan, but I always remember her singing this to Johnny Carson on his last or next to last night, and then she ran offstage crying. But then also not only is it Erin Mahoney-Du dancing in it, but it’s her first appearance back since her maternity leave. She’s so great to see again. And especially in this, where she and Luis Torres play sort of drunk but not too drunk. And there’s this one move, where she sets and then leaps backwards for him to catch her, that just thrills me for some reason.

I wait for it and thrill to it again in the last piece, My Way for the second time, where the entire cast returns to perform their variations all together. It’s right at the end, and she leaps back to him and then he dashes off stage left with her.

We see American Ballet Theatre’s Sleeping Beauty. All I can say is that the Kirov really spoils one. Dawn declares that watching the corp tonight is like watching one of our recitals. Hyperbole, of course. They can’t be that bad. But at times I’m not sure if the corp are supposed to be moving in unison or in canon. They are that bad.

Dinner at Luigi’s before the show. I go with the taglierini con porcini and Dawn with the rigatoni all’arabbiata. We get a very decent carafe of pinot grigio, although I worry that only a 1/2 liter of wine isn’t going to be enough if we’re used to having a regular 750 ml bottle with dinner when we go out. But it does just fine. I pace myself for once.

The Kirov coming to the Kennedy Center and doing La Bayadére is a much bigger deal than I had realized. This is the first time they’re doing the full version in Washington. When we got the tickets I was simply pleased that we were seeing La Bayadére again, having seen ABT’s version a couple of years ago. But this is the real deal, the real thing, with ABT’s being merely some sort of bastard cousin. I’m generally hopeless at remembering what we’re seeing or what we’ve seen, and I’ve often gotten La Bayadére confused with Le Corsaire. I know we’ve seen Le Corsaire as well, although I don’t remember if we saw the Kirov do it or ABT. One of them had boats, I remember. I keep picturing Luis Torres as Conrad, but that can’t be right. Maybe it was Marcelo Gomes.

I will now, though, always always remember the Kirov’s La Bayadére.

It’s funny what a mess it all is, for the most part. Starts out with Solor and Nikiya already in love. Then the Rajah goes and betroths Solor to Gamzatti. Solor just kind of goes with the flow on this as well, even though he’s sworn his fidelity to Nikiya over the sacred fire. Bastard. Then there’s drama. It’s the third act when all the business is all over where the dancing for no reason other than dancing really gets going.

Viktoria Tereshkina dances Nikiya. She’s got kinda big floppy feet and hyper-extended knees for my tastes. The treat for me is Irina Golub as Gamzatti. (That’s her picture there in the dictionary under cup-cake.) She spends the first two acts just acting, in heels, not donning her pointe shoes until the third act. Being a cupcake, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. And it’s possibly the cupcake factor which makes me more sympathetic to Gamzatti than maybe I’m supposed to be, although in her defense I will point out that she offers fabulous jewels to Nikiya, quite pleadingly, not just once but twice. And Nikiya does try to stab her. And I like to think that Gamzatti doesn’t know anything about the poisonous snake hidden in the flowers.

Is the opening of the third act which is the real star of the show, of course. The Kingdom of the Shades. Hypnotizing, mesmerizing, utterly dazzling, life-changing unforgettable. I’m like a caveman with words here, unable to express how transcendent it is.

Pretty typical for a Saturday morning, we’re up early to go work out. We’re up a little earlier even, a little before 7:30 a.m. Usually we get up closer to eight.

We’re getting ready to leave the house around 9:30, but I notice that the front tire on my bike is flat. I made it home just fine Thursday night; not sure why it’s flat now. So I try pumping it back up before I think about putting in a new tube. It pumps up to 80 psi, but I watch as the pressure gauge slowly sinks. This baby ain’t holding air. I’m gonna have to change it.

As I’m standing there contemplating all this, the tire blows out. I shut my eyes at the huge bang, as I’m quite naturally startled and not sure for the first few milliseconds just what has happened. I figure it out pretty quickly though. Dawn is waiting outside for me. She’s heard it too, but figures it’s just a random gunshot or something from the neighborhood. She doesn’t know it’s come from inside the house. Our cat Evie has been sitting by me, by the bike, this whole time. She seems completely unconcerned. Our other cat Gwen would’ve jumped about three feet in the air and dashed upstairs. Evie is either braver or dumber. Maybe both.

Other thing is, is that this was a puncture resistant tube. Apparently that means it’s filled with goo. And said goo has been flung all over the living room. I notice it on the couch first. It’s a new couch, so I run to get some paper towels to clean up quickly. There’s some sort of stain resistant coating or something on the couch, though. Cleans up easily. Next I notice the TV screen is coated. I clean that off too.

For the next couple of days I’ll keep discovering new areas of goo coatings. Other areas of my bike. The right shoulder of my barn coat. The ooze cleans up a lot easier right away. A day or two later and it’s not so easy to remove.

Since 5starjoe bails at the last minute, I get 3pennyjane all to myself yet again. But I do have the added pressure of picking a place. There’s apparently this new scheme where we don’t all sort of decide where we’re going, but more that someone has to nominate a place. And this week it’s my turn to nominate. So I go tooling through Yahoo yellow pages, looking at restaurants in an ever widening circle from the office. And I see Levante’s and immediately know it’s the place.

Although I check their website and discover that it’s a chain. I mean, I knew there was one in Bethesda and this one up the street just below Dupont Circle. But apparently it’s bigger than that. Says that it’s a successful chain in Europe. These locations evidently represent the vanguard of the assault on the Americas. It kinda makes me want to eat there less, but then I decide that that’s snobbery. So I still support the choice.

It’s nicer inside than I remember the Bethesda location being, when I went there with Erin Sellman and her sister Andrea, lo these 8 or 9 years ago now. I’m in jeans, since it’s Friday, even though we’re not supposed to be wearing jeans today since there’s committee meetings all this week. I’m one of two in the office who seemed to have fucked up this way. Although in his defense, the other guy is wearing a tie. But it’s with jeans, which I think calls attention to his jeans more than not wearing a tie would. Plus, his jeans are stone-washed, whereas mine are comfortably dark, much less notice-able. And he’s on the second floor, right in line with the large conference room, and I’m hidden up here on the seventh floor.

The point is that I’m in jeans and I feel a little under-dressed in here, while 3pj is lovely and appropriately dressed. But it’s lunch time, and I’m evidently wearing nice enough jeans, since they seat us.

We’re talking about the Colbert portrait currently hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. I’m such a yob; I’ve never ever been to the National Portrait Gallery. And I think it would be, I don’t know, the height of hypocrisy to go just for the Colbert portrait, although 3pj disagrees. She also notes that there are long lines, people waiting to have their picture taken with the portrait.

And also to my credit here I would like to point out that I’ve been planning on going to this museum. It was closed for a couple of years and has only recently reopened. I was on their website just yesterday, looking to see if they had anything by Chuck Close, even, and planning on a visit.

3PJ mentions that she went to a Joseph Cornell exhibit there last year. Man, that woulda been way cool to see. I mostly know his work from reading the standard popular biography, Deborah Solomon’s Utopia Parkway.

3PJ has the lentil soup and the kaser pide. Neither of us is sure how to pronounce the latter. I guess pide is enough like pita that maybe one couldn’t go too far wrong just saying that. And as for kaser, I think of it like kaiser. Maybe it’s like Turkish for emperor or something. (A little later research tells me it’s like the Greek kaseri cheese, if that’s any help.) I’m a little overwhelmed by the menu, so I go with the day’s special, a seafood stew and an entree of rockfish, which entree comes with small potatoes and giant asparagus.

I get the yearly email from Ringling, announcing the circus coming to town. And this year we get Bello! Hooray!

Wait. Wait a minute. Okay, says here they’re in Baltimore, then to DC to the Verizon Center, then out to Fairfax to the Patriot Center. Then up to NYC Madison Square Garden? Where’s the DC Armory? Two blocks from my house. When are they coming there? When is Bello coming to my neighborhood?

Answer: he isn’t. No Armory shows this year. And I actually get upset. Almost physically ill. A real sinking feeling in the pit of my gut.

And I don’t want to go the Verizon Center or any big hockey arena to see the circus. I love the circus at the Armory. It’s big enough for the high wire act, but small enough to actually see, you know?

Alas, no Bello for me this year.

So, apparently i Ricchi moved, some years ago. I remember going there when it was on I Street. Or maybe I just remember making reservations for Larry Garrett there, when I was his secretary. But I seem to remember we, the OFTS admin staff, went there for some function once. Ah, well. Doesn’t really matter.

When we get here today I do specifically remember having come with the ASH senior staff for some function, maybe Marty’s birthday. We sat in a private room way back somewhere, having to go past the kitchen and kitchen staff like gangsters or something. Today we’re in the little dining room across from the kitchen.

Our waiter is Carlos, and as soon as I’m friendly with him 5starjoe & 3pennyjane start to laugh and tell me to back off. Funny guys. And here I’d been planning on getting a glass of the Sant’ Elena pinot grigio in 3PJ’s honor. But they only have it by the bottle anyway. We’re not getting a bottle of wine for lunch. They get ice water and I go with the sparkling.

They don’t have like a special restaurant week menu; rather, it just contains certain items from the regular menu. I go with the pappa al pomodoro, Florentine tomato soup, as does 3pj. 5*J opts for the risotto, since he’s wearing a white shirt and doesn’t want to also be wearing tomato soup. So I tell a version of the famous joke:

Navy guy and a Marine are in the mens room. The Marine finishes, zips up, and goes to walk out the door. “Hey,” the Navy guy says. “In the Navy they teach us to wash our hands after we go to the bathroom.” The Marine replies, “Yeah, well, in the Marines they teach us not to piss on our hands.”

This leads to 5*j mentioning this movie with Jane Fonda that he rented or saw on cable or something where Jane Fonda’s character complains that all of the men lately that she’s met have for some weird reason decided to tell a dirty joke on the first date. I think he mentions that her next date, with Rod Taylor, goes the same way, so she walks out. So 3pj counters with a story of a man she knows who had a woman, on a date, tell him that he had perfect abs off of which to snort coke, in reply to which he threw the woman out of his apartment. So this leads me to mention that somewhere in life or literature along the way I picked up the understanding that the height of decadence would be snorting heroin off of little boys’ bare asses in Bangkok, and that I did in fact mention this once on a first date.

(Later I discuss with 3pj the absolute horrors of human trafficking and sexual tourism, especially in Bangkok. And I feel bad about joking about it.)

5*J mentions a disastrous first (and only) date, where he knew that she was going to say that she liked going to Club Five. That’s right next door to 18th Street Lounge, site of that first date with mention of snorting heroin off of little boys. (Although in fact mention of said depravity was later, back at her place, on the front steps of her apartment building.)

As for entrees, they both get the pork loin, whereas I go with the salmon. We all get the tart for dessert. I try to get a copy of the menu from the manager as we’re leaving, but he seems to lack any interest whatsoever in helping me. So I leave without.

It’s restaurant week.

We’ve kinda had this regular Friday thing going, 3pennyjane and 5starjoe and me. Started as a small holiday lunch, Friday before Christmas, but 5_*j was out so it was just 3pj and me at Luigi’s. Then the next week we went with 5_*j to Mackey’s. So then it became this regular thing. Last week it was Penang.

But, like I said, it’s restaurant week in DC this week, so 3pj researches and comes up with two options, in lieu of Vidalia on Friday, which has no tables, no room at the inn. One is Vidalia on Tuesday; other is i Ricchi on Friday. I immediately declare, in the spirit of Solomon, that it should be both.

3PJ agrees, but 5_*j has like some work or something to do. So I get 3pj all to myself today. This more than makes up for the fact that we can’t get a table until two o’clock. I’m like Jack dining with the gunroom, grumbly with hunger by the time we sit down.

3PJ starts off with the wild mushroom soup⁰, which is a “creamy purée with red wine-truffle emulsion¹ and house cured shoat² pancetta³.” I go for the seasonal lettuce blend, which I generally just call the salad, that’s apparently a “roulade⁴ of hazelnuts, brad’s goat cheese, dried apricots, fines herbes and champagne vinaigrette.” 3PJ then has the roasted briar hollow farm rabbit leg, “with ginger-carrot purée, heirloom onions, herbed spaetzle⁵ and amish mustard-rabbit emulsion⁶.” I go with the cape hatteras stew, which has “octopus, mussels, shrimp and oysters with heirloom beans, preserved tomatoes⁷, croutons and saffron-mussel broth.” For dessert we both have the vanilla bean cake, layered with strawberry-champagne jam, valhrona⁸ white chocolate mousse and poppy seed crème anglaise⁹.

I mean to get wine, but I chicken out. 3PJ gets the ginger cola. Possibly Blenheim’s, but I don’t remember now. I get the Cricket Cola, even though the waiter warns me away from it. Tastes awful, he says.

I have been to Vidalia once before, years ago, with Erin Sellman and Don & Gloria, I believe. Looks nothing like I remember it. I seem to remember it as one big room, whereas now it’s broken up into different sections. I like it, mind. It’s very nice. Nicer than I remember actually. Still way out of my price range, my league, my class, usually. So it’s nice to come, to splurge, blow some Christmas money.

⁰ All of the descriptions reflect that the entire menu is in lower case, so certain things that I would assume to be proper nouns are not capitalized. But I imagine that it’d have been Brad’s goat cheese, Amish mustard-rabbit emulsions, Cape Hatteras stew, and Valrhona white chocolate mousse.

¹ An emulsion in general is a mixture of two things which can’t be mixed. In food terms, let’s say like with oil and water. Oil and water famously don’t mix, of course, but shake them together and they seem sort of mixed-ish, for a while anyway. So to emulsify something is to disperse the one substance within the other. They’re technically not really mixed, even though for our purposes here, say eating them, they’re mixed. Here, specifically, they’re serving a red wine-truffle emulsion. One imagines the truffles dispersed throughout the red wine. What else would you call it?

² A shoat is a young, weaned pig. They claim that it’s house cured, although I’d go with the hyphen, house-cured, here. Either way, they’re somehow doing it on the premises. Is what they’re saying, anyway. We won’t go so far as to assume that they’re also, say, slaughtering the little fellows here.

³ Pancetta is cured belly of pork. An Italian thing. And not just any belly in this case, but of the aforementioned young, weaned pig, remember. But the -etta seems to denote that as well, the diminutive, the little one. And think of the panc- part as like paunch. Paunch like belly. So, little paunchy. Or, better yet, lil’ paunchy, how about?

⁴ In music, a roulade is a quick succession of notes sung as one syllable. In cooking, it’s some sort of filling rolled up in something else. Either way, the name’s from the French rouler, to roll. I guess the musical use suggests rolling off the tongue or something. On my plate today it’s like a daub of cheese, evidently from a goat, and possibly made by somebody named Brad. Unless they mean that the whole thing is a roulade in the sense that it’s tossed. Could go either way here.

⁵ Spaetzle (or spatzles) are German noodles or dumplings, in this case dumplings. The name comes from the German for little sparrows. They look like tiny gnocchi, which name comes from the Italian for knots, as in knots in wood.

⁶ See ¹. Not sure if the mustard or the rabbit or the emulsion itself is Amish. Or I suppose you can imagine some Amish dude suspended in mustard, if that’s your thing.

⁷ Preserved tomatoes sounds so much ritzier than canned, don’t you think? I like it also since it’s Killick’s first name. Honest to God.

⁸ I believe they mean Valrhona here, transposing the r and the h. It’s a French brand of chocolate.

⁹ Literally English cream, although it’s in fact a light custard. A custard has cream, of course, as a basic ingredient, but it necessarily involves mixing with eggs as well. The word custard seems to come from some sort of bastardization of crustade. (The OED in fact calls it a perverted form of crustade. Kinky, yeah?) And that comes originally from the French for crust, of course. It was originally a sort of pie, with the c/r/ust/ard on top.

(And all of the preceding smart tidbits are courtesy of research in the OED. I didn’t know any of this stuff.)

We drink a lot of diet soda at home. Pretty much the various iterations of Diet Coke. There’s the regular Diet Coke for Dawn on weekend mornings. For me it’s the Lime Diet Coke. And then there’s the caffeine-free for evenings. It’s kinda like the lazy man’s coffee, something a little bitter and sweet in the mornings or after dinner.

So anyway, Coke has this promotion called My Coke Rewards, where products have this code that you type into their website. It’s like totally tracking everything you drink. Creepy and Orwellian, no doubt. But hey, they’ve got swag in return. Each twelve pack of sodas has a code for ten points, and now after twelve-hundred-some points, I cash in for my prize.

It’s your basic 50mm refractor. You could buy it for like $44 or so. But, hey, in my book, it’s free. Cause I drink Coke, man.

I totally have to set it up on the back porch as soon as I get home. It’s pretty cloudy, though. I can only find like three stars out total, I have no idea which though, without other stars for context. I know Mars is out pretty bright these days, so maybe one of them’s that. I haven’t even calibrated the spotter scope with the main objective lens yet, so I can’t even find them anyway. But still, it’s great fun to have a telescope.

Someday maybe when I’m old and retired and we’re living someplace farther away from bright city lights, it’ll be more useful. Or anyway, I’ll take it down to Newnan GA when we go for Thanksgiving this year. Out on the farm in the middle of nowhere, it ought to be of some more use. And when I’m old and retired I’ll probably invest in like a six-inch reflector with an equatorial mount. But, again, for now, this little baby’s fine. And free, remember?

Holiday Greetings from the Nation’s Capitol!

It’s been yet another busy year. Regarding home improvement, we finally finished re-doing the stairs. Beyond that, we don’t have much to show except for new paint in the living and dining rooms. The dining room has no wood trim – that’s Edward’s next project. The painting project took so long because Edward had to reconstruct various parts of the walls in the dining area, including one area twice, after having to rip out the new drywall so that we could have (totally wacky) plumbers install new pipes for an outside faucet in the front (so Dawn doesn’t have to drag the hose from the backyard through the house). And then Edward had to replace a few broken or rotted floorboards. This all took several months. Dawn was very exasperated about not having a dining room table for all that time except for the weekend when her dad came to visit.

Our sad news is that our evil-but-beloved cat Louise (picture at left) died in April, at the ripe old age of 18. We had her cremated and buried her in the backyard with her Mr. Mousie, in a grand ceremony with a home-made gravestone. In May, we got another cat, a pretty white female with blue eyes and gray tabby markings. Her name is Evie, and she’s both adorable and a little on the crazy-obsessive side. She’s spent much of her time with us in an Elizabethan collar, first because of an eye infection and then because she developed a strange insistence upon licking her inner thighs raw and bloody. She’s already cost us more in vet bills than Louise and Gwen combined during their entire lives. Evie’s favorite hobbies are tormenting Gwen, playing with her toy mousies, and eating. She’d be quite the little tub o’ lard, but we ration her kibbles to try and keep her stomach from dragging on the ground. We thought Gwen would enjoy being the alpha cat for once, but Evie turns out to be the pushy one – the confidence of youth! See the picture of Evie with Dawn below from her early days with us, slender and complete with shaved belly (from spaying) and Elizabethan collar.

We finally went on a vacation this year – our first non-family vacation since our honeymoon. We went to Boston in early May. We drove there, and it was just amazing to see how late spring comes in New England. Although the temperatures were in the 80s, the forsythia was still blooming and the trees were just starting to get their leaves. We had a wonderful time. Boston’s a beautiful city. We walked everywhere, even to Harvard, which turned out to be a bit further away than we were expecting! Edward went to see the USS Constitution (a famous old wooden Navy ship) twice, once with Dawn and once on his own, while Dawn was visiting the librarians at her new firm. Which brings us to our next news item…

Dawn has a new job. She’s now the D.C. Library Manager for Ropes & Gray, a Boston-based firm. She likes her new job, but doesn’t like having to travel to Boston and New York on a regular basis for meetings and HR training. She especially enjoys making more money than Edward once again! Edward is still at the American Society of Hematology. He has to go work their annual conference for the first time this year, so he’ll be gone to Atlanta for 10 days in December, which is why we’re getting the Christmas tree up and the Christmas cards out before he goes!

We bought new bikes this year and have been riding them a lot. We got Bianchi commuter bikes, so they’re sturdy but not remarkably speedy. Dawn rides to work almost every day and Edward rides about once a week. Dawn likes not having to wait for Edward (who’s almost always running late) to come pick her up from ballet or the gym in the evenings. We try to go for at least one long ride together on the weekends. We rode to Mt. Vernon one Thursday when we had the day off. That’s forty miles, round trip! When we got home we were so exhausted we went straight to bed. Dawn’s planning to get a road bike next year so she can zip on ahead of Edward on those long rides. Edward’s long legs and bigger tires make him much faster than Dawn, but he likes to go slow and not get sweaty so he usually lets Dawn go first.

We wish you all a blessed holiday season and a very Happy New Year!

Dawn & Edward & Gwen & Evie

From best to worst:

Waitress
Eastern Promises
Casino Royale
Mrs. Brown
Michael Collins
La Vie en Rose
Garden State
Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself
The Lavender Hill Mob
Bride and Prejudice
Capote
Little Children
The Door in the Floor
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Lawrence of Arabia
To Kill a Mockingbird
Funny Face
Little Miss Sunshine
Jules and Jim
L’ultimo Bacio
Jamaica Inn
Baby the Rain Must Fall
Imitation of Life (1959)
Imitation of Life (1934)

And didn’t finish:

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
The Squid and the Whale
Wonderland
Blue Crush

Dawn plans a mid-day trip to the National Gallery of Art. We ride our bikes over after we work out at our gym. We’re going mainly to see the J.M.W. Turner exhibition, since it’s closing next week. But while we’re there we may as well check out the Edward Hopper.

Being the ignorant fellow that I am, I’m pretty clueless as to who this Turner guy is. But, as I learn today, I’m at least familiar with his painting of HMS Temeraire. I’m not sure why. But the amazing discovery today is: dude painted other boats. Lots of other boats. Non-boat stuff too, but, as you’ll see, I mainly concentrate on his maritime works.

First up is Fisherman at Sea (1796, oil on canvas, 91.4 x 122.2 cm, framed, Tate, London). It’s dark scary night-time. I try to figure out just what they’re doing at the moment, since they don’t seem to have sails up, neither do they have out sweeps or oars. Okay then, they must have nets out, but it’s hard to see ’em. Seems like I can make out one line that’s out, but that looks taut like an anchor line. Ah, there are some floats, what must be the nets.

And Dawn by this time is done with this gallery and moving on to the next. She makes so much better use of her time at museums. I always want to stop and stare. She likes the 30-minute exhibition. I like the 5-hour tour. So that’s why I pretty much ignore everything else and go for the boats. Gives me time to stare properly at some things anyway.

Then there’s The Shipwreck (1805, oil on canvas, 170.5 x 241.5 cm, framed, Tate, London). Again with the scary night, but this is much scarier what with the wreck and all. The ship itself is pretty much hidden, behind the sail of the cutter or launch or whichever boat it is, the biggest of the ship’s boats.

At least Spithead: Boat’s Crew Recovering an Anchor (1808, oil on canvas, 171.4 x 235 cm, framed, Tate, London) is daytime, although it looks like a crummy day’s work nonetheless. Looks pretty windy. And it’s a strange angle where the viewer sees the action unfolding. We’re way down low, right at the surface of the sea. The horizon is just a straight line. We’re almost in a strange bowl, underneath which is this supposed anchor. Again, what hard work. How deep is Spithead anyway?

The very earliest Horatio Hornblower story has him arriving on HMS Justinian, in Spithead. He’s immediately seasick, to great derision, especially from the evil Simpson.

The real stars of the show to me today are the two paintings of Trafalgar. The first is Turner’s largest work, up there on the wall looking as big as my living room, The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805 (1823-1824, oil on canvas, 259.1 x 365.8 cm [that’s like 8 feet by 12 feet], National Maritime Museum, London). It apparently was much criticized in its day, for daring to compress the action. Notice how the famous morning “England expects …” signal is flying from Victory’s main-mast, when it would have been on the mizzen-mast, which we see the mizzentop mast has fallen, when that happened later, in the early afternoon, while Redoubtable sinks in the foreground, which wasn’t until the next day. It’s all very exciting, if not at all photo-journalistic.

More up close and personal is The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory (1806, reworked 1808, oil on canvas, 170.8 x 238.8 cm, framed, Tate, London). At first I can’t figure out why everyone seems to be just standing around, when it’s clearly some warm action going on, all sorts of ships yardarm to yardarm. But then I figure that those guys in the red coats are the Marines. Sharpshooters, although they’re on deck, not in the tops. Those other guys over there are in fact hauling on ropes, not just lollygagging. Then it really hits me that the one other group, well, they are in fact just standing there. Or some are crouching there, cradling the just mortally wounded Lord Nelson, who lies in the middle of them. I stare at this tragic scene for quite a while. Then I go back to the living-room sized Trafalgar picture for a while. Then back to this one for another long stare.

Sadly, Turner’s later work leaves me pretty cold. He apparently is pre-figuring modernism, getting almost impressionistic. Somewhat unsatisfying mush, to my eyes. Case in point is Disaster at Sea, aka The Wreck of the Amphitrite (c. 1833-1835, oil on canvas, 171.5 x 222.1 cm, Tate, London). Those blobs are said to be women and children. It’s supposed to be tragic. It sounds tragic, but I guess I expect a painting to do more than sound tragic. And it’s weird because Turner goes to Italy around this time and does some damned sharp paintings of Venice.

Time to leave, Dawn is quite done here. Maybe I can come back during the week.

We go over to the East Building. Whereas Turner was just really crowded, there’s a long line waiting to get into the Edward Hopper. No thanks. We’re not that big of fans. We head back to the West Building for British Picturesque Landscapes. This turns out to be one tiny gallery, with book illustrations. Gives us time then to also check out the Baroque Woodcut exhibition. Which turns out to be stunning in its own way as well. Great explanation and examples of process. That one runs through March. You should totally go see that one.

Day After Tomorrow. First heard this when Tom Waits was on the Daily Show. It’s probably your typical Tom Waits dirge, which I love, as opposed to the standard issue Tom Waits sort of noisy carnival or disturbed cabaret song that I don’t like. But this song fits in, especially as a counterpoint to the last song, the Patty Griffin Poor Man’s House. Here it’s “Tell me how does God choose? Whose prayers does he refuse?”

The Open Road Song. I like how this song’s point of view changes, going from the child’s naive romantic vision of the hobo to the really cynical present-day troubadour. But given how this mix developed, “When I grow up I want to be a bum” fit right in. I also like a lot how his voice goes down low and flat towards the end of the “I seek my fortune in the wide world” line.

Marieke. I may have mentioned elsewhere seeing a production of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris in the basement of the Irish Times with Abby. This was the song that really knocked me out. I did embarrass myself later when I mentioned liking that song that was sung partially in German by the crying girl. After a bit of a pause they, Abby and the producer, both mumbled something about it being (famously) in Dutch. Jacques Brel was Flemish, didn’t you know. It’s otherwise just sort of a simple song about loss, about missing someone who is long gone. I don’t remember narratively where it fit into the show, if there’s anything more specific than that. But it’s grand and sad and the use of a different language just adds to the sadness. Like missing a person and a place and a time and a way of life, all of it gone.

Settin’ the Woods on Fire. I kinda like lightening things up a little with this, when there’s so much else from Hank Williams that could have really helped go further south here. I especially love the line “We’ll order up two bowls of chili.” But then also I’ve always loved how the song puts the good time that will be had in a definite perspective. “Tomorrow I’ll be right back plowing,” he says. It reminds me of, and why I love, Something Else by Eddie Cochran. Or much by Chuck Berry. People having fun, but having to work for it. Like the exact opposite of the privileged fun found in most any Beach Boys song.

The Needle Has Landed. Not really sure what this song’s about. Neko Case is always a bit enigmatic. But that’s part of the enjoyment, of course. In some ways I take the needle to mean a record needle. “Let it play,” she sings. And so it’s sort of an ode to things that are gone now, like those records we used to play. But there’s a darker tale in here somewhere as well. She gets left at the Greyhound station when she moves away, apparently not to return: “And that’s why I never come back here. That’s why they spit out my name.” But also “If I knew then what’s so obvious now, [then] you’d still be here baby” is such a great lovely sad wistful line. The song also somehow makes me think of two Ken Follet novels, The Eagle has Landed and The Eye of the Needle, but I don’t think they have anything to do with this.

Three Days Straight. Clearly about being trapped in a mine, although not otherwise political in a way that, say, Woody Guthrie might have sung about mine accidents. He gets a little wild and makes a speech when the reporter from channel 9 asks him a question, but we don’t ever find out what he has to say. He does tell us that he wouldn’t go back in that hole again, to save his life.

No Bad News. Directed at President Bush, I imagine. A sad little boy. She asks him why doesn’t he burn his own house down and leave the rest of us to live in peace. But, clearly by the title of this whole mix, my favorite lines are “We’ll grow kindness in our hearts for all the strangers among us, till there are no strangers anymore.” I reworked it a little for the title, but it’s an amazing and wonderful Christian idea. And, hey, I love the rocking mariachi horns as well.

Where the Smoke Blows. I have no idea what the Bothy Acoustic Mix means. I haven’t heard any other mixes of this song. But Karine Polwart is amazing nonetheless. I first saw her when she did a lot of singing at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 2003. I worked only a couple blocks away and made it down a whole lot of days. And she was part of the Scotland part of the events. Battlefield Band was there as well, although she was no longer a member by then, being a member of Mailnky. She’s since moved on from them as well. They had a CD or 2 of Malinky at the store at the festival, but I never bought any. I wanted just her, like she was on stage, not as part of some larger group. Finally now she’s gone solo.

Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards. Putting down some poli-tunes would like require some Billy Bragg, by like law or something, wouldn’t it? I’ve always loved this particular song because I like to dance to it, doing a weird kind of jig to it in my kitchen. It apparently has Michelle Shocked singing backup on in, before she was famous, although now she’s not famous anymore. There’s a big message here, even though it seems to flow linearly lyrically from grand (Fidel Castro’s brother) to the really personal (the revolutionary t-shirt). And he yells out, “Beam me up, Scotty” at the end. I saw Billy Bragg once at the 9:30 Club, with a full band, and a then-not-yet-a-superstar-in-Canada Sarah Harmer opened.

James Connolly. Saw Black 47 with my brother and sister at a bar in East Hanover NJ once. Was a great show, except when Larry Kirwan told the crowd that it was great to be in East Brunswick. He winced just after he said it, knowing he’d screwed up. I especially love the monologue in the break in this song. Don’t let them bury me in a field of shamrocks, he pleads. Raise the Starry Plough on high instead.

The Tigers Have Spoken. This one by Neko Case seems pretty straightforward. There’s this tiger that’s been chained up forever. Goes crazy, so they shoot it. This particular version is from a live show at the 9:30 Club. Not that I was there; it was recorded by NPR. Before this song, Neko says, “This is a very sad song about tigers.” It sure is. I gather it’s also about loneliness. But then also there was just the other day an incident at the zoo in San Francisco, where a tiger got out of its cage and killed a guy and mauled two others. Police shot it dead.

Workin’ For The Enemy. I love so many of the rhymes and images in this song. There’s this truck filled with stolen goods that the narrator and Sonny are supposed to drive south, “Down two-lane highways in the foggy woods with a cigar in my mouth.” And rhyming “business being tendered” with “we went on a bender.” I also especially like his description of the ’67 Ford when it stops working: “The Galaxie broke down.” Nicely describes a whole lotta things, seems like. The narrative itself somewhat breaks down at the end. Not sure what finding his rising star means, unless it’s supposed to go with the galaxy image as well.

Long Walk Home. Another one seemingly aimed right at George W. Bush. At the end he sings about how his father tells him what a community means, how it doesn’t crowd you but it doesn’t let you go it alone either. And that the flag flying over the courthouse means certain things. Tells us what we’ll do, and what we won’t do. I like to think that one of the things that what we won’t do is torture people. I don’t know if it’s on purpose or what, but in the video for the song, right after that line, there’s a cut to a shot of a young man. He’s seen behind a fence, maybe like he’s locked up, like those poor forgotten souls down in Guantanamo.

No More Buffalo. Really the song that made me want to make this mix. I explained before how dazzled I was by the third verse, with the dust of the herds. I love the advice about still chasing after what used to be there. “Top that rise and face the pain,” he says.

Johnny Appleseed. (Do you ever think of the real Johnny Appleseed as a sort of environmental terrorist, deliberately effecting an invasive non-native species? No, I suppose not. Was apparently an immensely loving gentle soul.) In the song here, Joe sings about poor workers locked in the factory. It always make me think of the horrible fire at the Imperial Foods chicken processing plant in Hamlet NC in 1991, where twenty-five workers died because they were locked in, like in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911. This is progress? “If you’re after getting the honey,” Joe says, “then you don’t go killing all the bees.”

The Unwelcome Guest. Also saw Billy Bragg once, doing a solo show, at the auditorium in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Sadly, I couldn’t tell you if he sang this song or not. I don’t think he did. There were a lot of other songs on Mermaid Avenue that bowled me over right away. This one really snuck up on me, maybe a couple years later, and now it’s definitely my favorite on the record. Okay, this or California Stars still. This is some sort of Robin Hood tale, of course, although I can’t quite place it in time. Does it take place in medieval times, or like in the old west, or in modern times? Doesn’t quite fit perfectly anywhere. Maybe that makes it fit everywhere then.

Poor Man’s House. Nothing enigmatic or ambiguous here. Devastating.

Daddy’s been working for days and days and doesn’t eat.
He doesn’t say much but his time I think it’s got him beat.
It isn’t that he isn’t smart or kind or clever.
Your daddy’s poor today and he will be poor forever.

I make, and give copies to Joe and Helena today, a CD of stuff I’ve been listening to lately. I haven’t made a various tunes tape (I still think of them as mix tapes) since the wedding CD, I think. Have I? Before that it was The Blues of Throwing It All Away in early 2002.

The big, big difference this time is the iPod, what gadget I won in that contest at TAUG in April. Making a playlist in iTunes and listening to that is the easiest thing in the world. Can add, delete, rearrange with the fewest of mouse clicks.

James McMurtry No More Buffalo really started the whole project, wanting to put that on a mix tape. There’s this really strangely moving and complicated idea in the third verse, where he talks about looking out across the plains and seeing “the dust of the [buffalo] herds still hovering in the air.” But somebody else points out that “those are combines kicking up that dust.” It’s just sad and cool all at the same time. “Man, they were here. They were here, I swear,” he sings.

So added to that were the basic songs I have in fact been listening to lately. Tom Waits Day After Tomorrow. Peter Case Ain’t Gonna Worry No More, Underneath the Stars, and Palookaville. Neko Case, oh a whole lotta songs from her. Bruce Springsteen Long Walk Home. Patty Griffin No Bad News and Poor Man’s House. Billy Bragg and Wilco from the Mermaid Avenue album, a song that took me a while to appreciate, but then really blossomed into a real favorite, The Unwelcome Guest.

So then I started looking for songs that fit with those, and I started looking for a title. I worked with a bunch of lyrics from No More Buffalo, from The Dust of the Herds to Those Are Combines Kicking Up That Dust. Never really found anything that would encompass what the whole mix seemed to be adding up to. But that was probably because the whole mix wasn’t adding up to much.

And one other problem was that, thinking about this with Joe and Helena in mind, the Peter Case and Neko Case songs were getting to be a problem. I had made them both single discs of each artist with a lot of my favorites on them. So I didn’t want to then give them any of the same songs again on this. So then I scrapped those songs. But then I still wanted to put lots of Peter Case and Neko Case on, so I had to go scrounging for more songs.

The Peter Case was a bit easier, in that he had a rather larger body of work. And it was after I added The Open Road Song to replace Underneath the Stars that I realized that a theme was in fact emerging from the rubble. Something rather political. Nothing grandly political, but small humanist personal political maybe. So looking for more political songs got me to add Billy Bragg Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards and Black 47 James Connolly. (Although those are more macro than micro, politics-wise.)

And then that started to work to rearrange the songs as well. No More Buffalo, which had been bouncing between being first and being last, moved more to the middle. And Poor Man’s House became the ending song. And with that the cover changed. I’d been playing with a great old picture of Buster Keaton. But I started thinking about the politics of poverty, and figured Walker Evans, something from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, would do the trick. Thus the picture of Allie Mae Burroughs. I’m not sure if in fact it’s in the book, but I found it online at the Met’s great website. Knew as soon as I saw it that it was the one.

Talking to Joe later, seems like I did maybe give him some of the same Peter Case and/or Neko Case. I had changed the playlists by the time I made CDs for Helena. I knew that I was giving him another copy of Joe Strummer Johnny Appleseed. But, what the hell. It’s Joe Strummer, and it’s political (if a bit obtusely so). And it’s skiffle. What more could you want in one song?

In the end, the whole message of the mix and of this season and of this life is in Poor Man’s House.

Mama says God tends to every little skinny sheep
So count your ribs and say your prayers and get to sleep
Nothing is louder to God’s ears than a poor man’s sorrow

Lovely day at home, with just the sweet wife Dawn. And kitties.

We unwrap presents while drinking mimosas. Love morning booze.

I give Dawn the clothes from her list, but also surprise her with a Rosemary and Thyme box set. The first season. She gives me clothes, but then also Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (And So Can You!). A fun treat.

The in-laws totally score with me, giving me a Cochrane biography and a little reproduction sextant. Awesome.

The cats give me underwear. They give Dawn socks.

In the afternoon we go for a long bike ride.

Later we finish watching La vie en rose. Oddly, the major dramatic movements in the film are set to L’Hymne à l’amour and Non, je ne regrette rien. Not much is made with the actual song La vie en rose itself. I suppose maybe that’s her most famous song here, in the US, while the movie seems to really be made for the domestic audience, the French themselves. Movie was in fact called La Môme for its release in France.

Playing around with the subtitles after we’re done watching, I discover that while there are no English subtitles whatsoever during songs, changing over to French subtitles I see that those do run during the songs, with the lyrics. Not that I speak French, mind you, so I still don’t understand. Or understand the words themselves anyway. But nobody needs to know the actual lyrics when Edit Piaf sings. Oh no. You get it anyway. That’s just how great she is.

I missed the Washington Ballet’s Nutcracker this year, since I was in Atlanta. But, handily, we go to see the American Ballet Theatre’s production tonight.

We totally score on parking, just a few blocks away, 750 meters from the front door according to my geeky measuring using Google Earth. On the way, we come across a young couple who seem maybe lost. I love giving people directions, so I ask if they need help finding something. The woman asks, Where’s the Kennedy Center? Oh, well, it’s that enormous brightly lit building at the end of the street, I tell them. We’re going there. Follow us.

I kinda expect that we’ll walk together and chat, but the man, yakking on a cell phone, seems to have no interest in us or walking with us. Seems to have not a whole lot of interest with his charming companion either. A shame. I at least get out of her that they’re going to the NSO performing Handel’s Messiah.

We have our usual seats, although the people who normally sit to our right have pawned their tickets off to their daughter and son-in-law.

It’s interesting seeing someone else do Nutcracker, after having only seen Washington Ballet’s version. It’s still not the most remarkable of works. Too much party scene. Mice and soldiers fighting. I kinda miss Washington Ballet’s Clara throwing her shoe at the Rat King. Here Clara distracts him so that the Nutcracker Prince can stab him with his sword. The Spanish, Arabian, Chinese, and Russian dances are pretty unmemorable. I miss the Washington Ballet’s Anacostia Indians and the Chinese dancers’ long streamers.

But Xiomara Reyes as the Sugar Plum Fairy and Herman Cornejo as her consort really do shine. Seems like that’s what the whole night is really for, the two of them.

That’s Gordon on the right. Your right. Paul is to your left, to Gordon’s right. They’re my best friends.

I loved this Calvin and Hobbes when it first came out. Just right. Found out today, though, that it inspired this:

“First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.” — Peter Ellis

(h/t Andrew Sullivan)

Commodore Aubrey and Dr. Maturin are drinking the last of the coffee.

Jack walked in, pouring himself a cup as he bade Stephen good morning, and said, ‘I am afraid they are all in.’

‘All in what?’

‘All the Frenchmen are in harbour, with their two Indiamen and the Victor. Have not you been on deck? We are lying off Port-Louis. The coffee has a damned odd taste.’

‘This I attribute to the excrement of rats. Rats have eaten our entire stock; and I take the present brew to be a mixture of the scrapings at the bottom of the sack.’

‘I thought it had a familiar tang,’ said Jack. ‘Killick, you may tell Mr Seymour, with my compliments, that you are to have a boat. And if you don’t find at least a stone of beans among the squadron, you need not come back. It is no use trying the Néréide; she don’t drink any.’

When the pot had been jealously divided down to its ultimate dregs, dregs that might have been called dubious, had there been any doubt of their nature, they went on deck.

O’Brian, Patrick. The Mauritius Command. p. 185.

New Bruce Springsteen album Magic out today. From the song Long Walk Home:

My father said “Son, we’re
lucky in this town
It’s a beautiful place to be born
It just wraps its arms around you
Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone.
You know that flag
flying over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone
Who we are, what we’ll do
and what we won’t.”

Oh my goodness, after all these years.

Do you ever have like some snatch of memory of something, something you saw in a movie or on TV when you were a kid, and can’t remember what it was or who was in it? I’ve had this one bugging me for years, and now I’ve got it nailed.

There was an earlier one, bugged me for a long time. All I remembered was that something was happening in a jungle, where some kind of tribe or clan worshiped this white rhinoceros. I seemed to remember Doug McClure and maybe Jane Seymour in it.

Through the magic of IMDB, I was able to do a plot summary search on white rhino, and came up with some British b-movie from the mid-sixties called alternatively Prehistoric Women or Slave Girls, the latter apparently being the UK theatrical title and the former being the US television title. I would have seen the US TV version, natch. No Doug McClure or Jane Seymour in sight, however, but I’m sure this one’s it.

Another one that’s nagged me, a lot longer, and much harder to pin down, was some scene in some sort of futuristic college classroom, where at the end one of the students gets shot in the head and we come to find out that he’s a robot. Oh, man, no amount of Googling has ever got me close to finding this one.

But then today, for no reason that I can now determine, I decide that maybe it’s from an episode of Night Gallery. So I go toodling through episode guides, first on IMDB, then on epguides.com. Hmmm, there’s an episode in the second season called Class of 99. That sounds promising. Had Vincent Price and a young Randolph Mantooth. I sure don’t remember them being in it, but still, not a deal-breaker.

I follow a link from epguides.com to a review at tv.com by one Blugis, who says, “Full of surprises, Class of 99 opens on the day of finals at an unknown, unnamed university sometime in the future (most likely 1999). We see these students answer complex questions, that gradually become more about bahavioral [sic] responses. You start to realize that this is no ordinary group of students, and soon you’re drawn into the story, wanting to know just what is happening between them as their behavior starts to change.” He also calls it “[t]he best episode in the series.”

Still, nothing conclusive, but nowadays we’ve got Google video search and YouTube. And sure enough, somebody’s ripped the thing and posted it on YouTube, in two parts. And, oh yeah baby, this is it! Mystery solved!

It’s really not that good, ultimately, watching it now, but it sure spooked me as a kid, haunting me these last thirty-five years or so.

You are mistaken, sure, when you say they do not know him: unlearned men have a wonderful penetration in these matters — have you ever known a village reputation to be wrong? It is a penetration that seems to dissipate, with a little education, somewhat as the ability to remember poetry will go. I have known peasants who could recite two or three thousand verses.

Stephen Maturin,
Master & Commander,
p. 230

Marion Cotillard’s feral portrait of the French singer Édith Piaf as a captive wild animal hurling herself at the bars of her cage is the most astonishing immersion of one performer into the body and soul of another I’ve ever encountered in a film.

Stephen Holden, The New York Times, 2/28/2007

The recital’s not until June 9. But since we’ve got the piece down so well, we ran through in costume a couple times today.

Actually, I was much happier when we were in just our normal everyday ballet gear. The lift where I sit Dawn on my chest was much easier. Dawn’s performance skirt is so slippery, I don’t get a good grip to heave her on up, and I don’t ever feel like she’s up there in any way stable.

But that’s show biz, I suppose.