Off the Cliff

Apparently the aurora borealis will be visible tonight in places where it's not raining, which is not here. At least the sidewalks were somewhat dryer than yesterday so all I had to do was wipe the wheels down at each stop, not poke into the housings with a screwdriver like yesterday.

Continue to throw out bits of the dead past for recycle. Am now into the bedroom boxes and their stash of APAs from the latter 90s, which left me feeling oogier than even the doujinshi do. There's a nightmare feel about aspects of those four years.  I know it took me a good year to get over the reverse culture shock and the loose-endedness of not knowing what I was going to do next. Dépaysée is what the French call it and what I was, even if I was also in my own pays. So glad those days are over.

The one thing I can't throw out are the original Takamatsu / Jan episodes of Channel 5, which ran in Animage. Yes I have the tanks and yes I threw out the other eps but those, obscure as they are, I need to keep. Hoping vainly that some day I'll figure out what's happening, though Shibata Ami will never tell me.

As for reading, I reread House of Many Ways since DWJ doesn't stick in the memory, and also Enchanted Glass, which I thought was her short stories but isn't. Several Desmond Merrions on the tablet and phone. Heir to Murder, A Smell of Smoke, Murder M. D. Dipping into the Leonardo biography but All Those Painters! besides the fact that it dates to 1988 and the author's speculation about the character of Da Vinci's mentor Verrocchio, based on his portrait, are nullified by the fact that said portrait is now firmly identified as one of Perugino.

Started The Place of Shells which has that 'translated from the Japanese' feel to it, because it is. But it led me down a rabbit hole looking at Soseki's Ten Nights of Dream, of which there is a bilingual edition on Kobo if I find my Japanese copy too obscure, and I do, which then led me to look at a new translation of Mon/ The Gate with an introduction by Pico Iyer, which I read. Iyer says it's not what Soseki says but the things he doesn't that count,  which means I will never read Mon, thank you, because I am not Japanese and can't pick up on stuff not-said when it's text. Iyer compares Soseki to Ishiguro, and I see what he means. He also compares him to Murakami and I disagree completely, at least where style is concerned. Murakami I find refreshingly straightforward. But he may have been talking about the haplessness of both authors' characters, which, well, maybe.

Nuit blanche last night, very annoyingly. Got off close to 4, woke  up at 9 something, finally got up at 11. Supposed to be warm today so I bit the heavy-eyed achy-limbed bullet and called a cab to go to the ROM. Bloor past Spadina is a parking lot for reasons known only to itself. One of which might be the extremely wide bike lanes on that stretch. I'm all for bicycle lanes but can't quite see why the ones by Mink Mile need to be two metres/ 6'6, especially as the ones farther west are much narrower, where all the restaurants, ergo all the bike couriers, go. Whatever, the ROM  is redoing the Chin Lee Excrescence so one can again, and happily, enter by the Romanesque entry round the corner, into the familiar rotunda from my childhood.

Must say the AGO is much more wheelchair friendly than the ROM, even though both were built when the concept of catering to disability didn't exist. Maybe the AGO's renovation is more recent than the ROM's, or rather the late 80s renovation that preceded the Excrescence. Because if you want to go to the third floor where the Flemish painting exhibit is, there's only one elevator you can take,  tucked away around a corner, because all the others involve stairs when you arrive there. And then one goes down these very narrow corridors-- I mean, not wide enough for two people to pass each other-- between the new interior walls and the old outer stone walls to get you to where you're going. My friend the architect's daughter said All architects are assholes (like surgeons, apparently) and while I wouldn't go quite that far, I'll opine that the ROM has certainly hired asshole architects. 

However. Did indeed see the Flemish paintings in all their glowing colour and 16th/ 17th century extravagance. I prefer early Flemish myself, but the best we could do here was a school of Bosch copy of details from the right hand Hell panel in the Garden of Earthly Delights, and a rather pleasant Nativity by Hans Memling. Note also Michaelina Wautier, from the mid-1600s, a natural and pleasant contrast to some of her overdone contemporaries. Though the rooms of the exhibit were still pretty small and I had to be careful where I went with my walker: and when a tour group came through, wait for them to pass.

Then did a revisit of the Chinese collection on the ground floor, any number of Buddhist statues and the stone camels from the tomb area. I think we may have climbed on them as children, which people did in those days, and fortunately do not do now.

Having gone nowhere yesterday, I was determined to walk back the four anna half subway stops to get my steps in, and did, barely. The sole of my right foot has been panging me for several weeks now: physio thinks it's bunions, I think it's plantar fascitis, who knows. But I limped along gamely and when I passed Wiener's went in, with no great hopes, to ask if they had ever got the tree lopper in that was on back order since June. And they did! And it was cheaper than at 'we do not deliver' Canadian Tire,  and it fit in the basket of my walker, sort of ie it scraped the branches of any tree I passed, so I brought it home in triumph, go me. Of course it also weighs a ton and I hope I can lift it when it's extended, or even when it's not, but that's one itch scratched.

Wimped out and took a cab to the AGO to see the Rembrandts and his contemporaries and a few of his pupils. Chivalrous cabbie helped me in and out of his car though technically I can do it myself, and sensibly avoided Dundas St altogether, which previous drivers did not. Driver explained that taking Huron was better than taking the more direct Beverley, since the latter has more traffic signals, stop signs and crosswalks than the former. So I waited in line while families with many many kids bought tickets: not that there's much to see that would interest an under-10; and bought a membership for myself since it's only ten dollars more. Guy asked me if I'd been a member before, which I had five or six years ago, but couldn't remember which of my double-barrelled first names I'd had it under. Trying the first (official and medical) one got me an address on Bedford Rd, the house we sold in '88. I didn't think the AGO's computers went back that far, and the membership was certainly my father's. However, all sorted, and I had a latte at the coffee shop, saw the various Dutch guys including the dork sticking his finger into the skull's nose (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michiel_Sweerts) (he died the next year FWIW), and bought next year's calendar at the gift shop. Did not have pricey food at the Bistro, being virtuous.

Also being virtuous, did not go west over to Chinatown where they have mooncakes on sale. But that was more because I didn't think of it,  which is good. Have to do bloodwork this month and my insulin levels need to be reined in until then. Went east over to University to pick up the subway, only to find that the elevators there were under maintenance and I couldn't get down to the platform. So a good thing I'd cabbed it down. Moral: always check the TTC webpage for elevator outages. So had to hoof it up to College with my knee twinging at me in an unwonted fashion. And the new wide bike lanes on University preclude hailing a cab from there, much less picking one up at the various hospitals on the way. But the Queen's Park elevators worked and the St George one too, so got safely to Bathurst and walked or rather limped the rest of the way home. Have scheduled an extra session with the physio to see what she can do with my unhappy knee. It's not much more than a meal at the Bistro would have set me back.

I had intentions of going down to the AGO for the show of women artists through the ages which ends tomorrow, but Friday was greasy mug and even if I cabbed it down, how would I get back? The Spadina LRT that I took last year is doing track maintenance, the cars have been replaced by buses, and people are already complaining about how slow it is having to share the road with cars. Yes indeed, I remember it well. Yesterday rained, tomorrow is free admission to the gallery meaning crowds, so it had to be today if I was going. And oh look, St Patrick station three blocks over has elevators so I can subway back at need.

So down I went. Interesting exhibit, several unknown to me artists, engravers, and ms illuminators, a couple of whose works were ascribed to male artists (Hals, David) but research has proved them to be by women pupils of same. Many Vigée-Lebrun paintings of French noblewomen, shortly to find their way to the guillotine, but only one Gentileschi that I could see. Galleries are probably loath to lend their Artemisias these days,  now she's become so hot. Another 18th century Venetian artist had sketches of male nudes, even though women theoretically couldn't take life drawing classes. Should have made a note of her name but didn't.

Succeeded in finding the coffee shop this time, which saved me spending serious money at the AGO Bistro. Prices are still pricey, but treated me to a Pride cookie and a latte.

Subway elevators clunk enough to make me nervous but I got to Bathurst safely, since Christie still isn't finished renovating. And then I went to check out the new BoM in the apartment complex that replaced Honest Ed's. I noticed it last week and thought 'oh the BoM has secured the banking at that niche spot, go them, but of course they'll keep the one at Euclid that serves the Korean community'. Hahaha no. This is not how banks work in Canada. That branch and its outdoor ATM is closed. And the new one has no outside ATMS, is closed on Sundays, and is not open evenings ever. They really want us to move to a cashless society. So in addition to being three blocks out of my way, on the other side of Bloor and on a stretch of sidewalk paved in arm jolting cobblestones,  it can only be accessed during the day. I'd switch to TD, which is at least accessible 24/7, but BoM, unlike the Royal, doesn't charge me for every interac transaction, and I rather think TD does.

Anyway, that was my culture for the year. 

Weather still mild so I decided to make it to the AGO. Alas, the jets were practising for the air show this weekend, meaning painful sonic booms, so to limit outside exposure I called for a cab. Beck has finally ironed out the kinks of its automated voice system ie the voice tells you what to do and if you follow the pattern (number, street name, street/ road/ blvd/ etc. disambiguation,  CITY) the robot repeats it back to you correctly. Alas again, they haven't got their drivers in working condition. My cell rings as I'm sitting outside, no cab in sight, 'I'm in front of your house now', the hell you are. You're sitting outside 534 and I'm at 543, the number I gave your robot. When I get in the car the driver's screen is large enough to read from the back and yes it says 543. If I do this again I swear I'm giving my address as 545. NND won't mind.

My heart sank when I got inside the gallery because the line went back to the entrance. Holidays, of course. But that was a tour group, and the real line was only a few people. Group reached the ticket taker a second before I did, but luckily she asked if she could let me in first. The Cassatt and Daughter show was interesting enough, though the patrons were as worth looking at as the pictures. There was a Kushner&Sherman lookalike couple that I knew couldn't be because the originals are in Europe now, and a woman in draped Raphaelite robes, and a tousle-headed little girl looking like the models in a number of the paintings. Also a tour group of maybe thirty kids in red tshirts for identification, 9 or 10 at a guess, who paraded through the exhibit rooms and straight out without looking at anything, much to the surprise of the security staff.

The exhibition had all ten of Cassatt's famous prints, as well as the oil paintings both she and her daughter did. Renoir reminiscent as to colours and subject matter. The prints have faded- IIRC because of the chemical composition of the pigments she used. But what most struck me, I'm afraid, is that she loved to do mother and child paintings and prints, and unless the kid is on a bus, the kid is naked. My expert's eye says these are 12 to 18 month olds, not babies as I define babies, and unless toileting was done differently in the early 20th century, you're risking disaster carting that child about without a diaper. Taking her into the garden to pick apples is probably the least dangerous place to do it, but you really are asking to have your own lovely dress ruined.

So now I was ready for a latte at the 2nd floor café in the Galleria Italia, except I couldn't find the galleria. You used to run into it without trying, but they've blocked something off so I kept going round and round, on the admittedly smooth floors.  I could smell the coffee but couldn't get to it, and the maps all lied. Finally found a security guard who said to go through the African exhibition and turn left. Which did, and at last found the long wooden gallery the runs along the front of the building. But there was no coffee shop there. Or tables or chairs or indeed anything at all. It's been four years since I was last here and the place *looked* the same but... no café. But I think this was where the tour group was trying to get to, because the map implied that the Galleria was the other side of the Cassatt.

Totally confused by now, not to mention footsore even with my walker, I went back to the ground floor where the pricey restaurant is. They found a table for me-- being crippled has its uses, since they were going to put me on a wait list-- and I had very pricey  bread and very pricey paté and very very pricey wine, and my server told me the café is now on the ground floor and no wonder I could smell coffee in all the wrong places. And I do think that guard might have mentioned that there was nothing in the Galleria Italia itself and if I wanted the café, it's moved. Since you have to leave the AGO proper to get to the restaurant,  it being  the other side of the gift shop, I couldn't even go back to get a latte there. Once out, you're out. However the gift shop already has next year's calendars and I got a satisfactory modern Japanese artist, which consoles me for much. 

Then took transit back home. Taking a wide walker, even one that folds, on the Spadina LRT among all the shopping Chinese grannies and grandpas is an interesting experience, because they have walkers too, as well as many many bags of groceries, and we're all squished together Tokyo-like. But people were very kind about giving me their seat and helping me get the beast onto the car: because you do have to step up, and even worse step down, over a not inconsiderable gap,  to get on and off. No way you can use a wheelchair, motorized or not, on those cars, which means no way are they disabled accessible I-don't-care-what-you-say.

And when we got to the subway they were cracking down on the fare jumpers.  Unlike in the past, they scanned everyone's ticket, including old folk with their walkers, and pulled miscreants out of the queue and kept them there. In the before times when it was just me and my staff, the checker pointedly ignored me as I went past with my card all ready for scanning. But this guy had clearly had enough. The two women who'd failed the test were trying to argue with him and he was having no part of it.

I didn't have to walk home from Bathurst- -there are up escalators at Christie, though one of them requires climbing three steps to get on and whose screw-up was that, I sometimes wonder-- but I had a hold at the library, and if I pushed it a bit I could also get a latte at Ninetails. Which did: and maybe sun and pleasant temperatures just put Torontonians in a sweet mood (except subway inspectors) because people continued to open doors for me very helpfully. So a good day with much exercise: but I still wonder if I'll ever walk unaided again.

And now the Canada Revenue workers are gearing up for a strike. I could have sent my tax stuff by regular mail and saved fifty dollars.

Temps will rise precipitously in the next few days, bringing out all the buds, so I will go look out the study window at my bare night-time cherry tree, doing its impersonation of the bare trees in Hiroshige's Foxfires print for the last time till November. As here

Occurred to me that it's time I read that booklet on the Primavera I've had for the better part of 40 years,  and no I don't recall where or when I picked it up. Turns out to be about the restoration work done on the painting but also includes historical background and interpretations of the painting pre and post treatment, with lovely full-colour plates not only of the Primavera itself but of other works. (Botticelli was a practical joker, did you know? He doesn't look like one in his self-insert in the Adoration of the Magi but so he was.)

This is not only happily reminiscent of reading Magnifico, which I did seven years ago-- and how did 2016 get to be that long ago? yes, yes, covid, but also the Trump years which I blotted from memory. But also hearkens much further back, to high school, and the Florentine Shop and a Time-Life book on the Renaissance with pictures of various interiors,  and possibly The Agony and the Ecstasy (book, not movie). It wasn't the first fully-furnished mental time/space construct of my life but was one of the most brightly coloured. These constructs are always made of scraps of this and that, bolstered by random conflations-- the university gothic of Victoria College, that I passed through on my way home from school, and the clear blue sky of a November late afternoon through the  arched windows thereof, and the golden background of some Fra Angelico angels, all came together to make a seamless whole, which then was echoed in the backdrop to an early scene in the Prokovieff Romeo and Juliet, pale dawn sky over a narrow cobbled street. 

And of course the real Florence did nothing to contradict my version, but wouldn't matter if it did. Mine is a Renaissance Florence of the mind and quite divorced from reality. Though if I'd seen a lot more baroque wretched excess there, instead of an almost Quakerish restraint,  I might have felt different. Rome certainly was all baroque wretched excess, even if the last time I saw it was when I was an ignorant twelve who knew no art history. But Rome sorted very well with the kind of Catholicism I was then neck-deep in, all relics and holy cards and glorious martyrs. Which of course had its roots in the baroque Counter-reformation of the sixteenth century. And by the 16th century my Renaissance was over, replaced by men in trunks and beards who all died young of syphilis.

No, back to the serene beauty and balance of the Primavera, and its newly (in 1984) revealed glowing colours.

You know, I don't think I've ever seen a copy of Yoshitoshi's Sotoba no Komachi for sale and I probably wouldn't have bought it in my giddy thirties even if I had. But that's really a wonderful picture. This is the great beauty Ono no Komachi, she of the famous hana no iro:

as the color of the blossoms
has lost its luster
to no avail
so I have passed through life
gazing at the rains

'heartless beauty mourns her futile life and her vanished beauty' etc etc.

Yes, well-- *look* at her. In Yoshitoshi's picture she's smiling. Possibly 'I can smile at the old days/ I was beautiful then' but equally possibly 'there's still beauty left around me and it ain't bad at all.'

How very 1993 it's being just now. Grey, washy, cool but humid, with cicadas.

Reading Wednesday has actually finished a book. Two, in fact.

F. C. Yee, The Epic Crush of Genie Lo
-- which, aside from having lotsa fun with the Journey to the West, is (I am told) an impeccably accurate account of what it's like being American-born Chinese. Being ABC sounds nearly as bad as being Singaporean.

Katherine Govier, The Ghost Brush
-- life of Hokusai's daughter Oei, who was also an artist under the name Katsushika Ooi. Her art is like nothing I've ever seen. These are paintings on silk, which would explain the strong colours, but it's startling after the usual faded out quality of woodblock prints: 
https://blog.britishmuseum.org/hokusai-and-oi-keeping-it-in-the-family/

I may have to reconsider Hokusai himself. I've always said that Hiroshige's my man, because he does people-less landscape while Hokusai does people in a landscape.  But I have to admit that a *lot* of Hiroshige is deadly dull, and what saves dull landscape is, in fact, people.

Forget where I got this book. A wee free library, I think. It was a gift to  'Michel and Lynn' and contains the author's signature as well as  a note, on Japanese notepaper, from the original giver,  a Japanese with a  unisex name. Passing on finished books is one thing, but I suspect Michel and Lynn of never having having read the book at all. Hmph.

Currently rereading Going Postal, fun, fast, and refreshing. Beaver along happily through Hamabe no Kafuka and doggedly through Jean de Florette, and have The Red Queen Dies waiting for me next.

Wouldn't be the start of the month if I hadn't put on a kilo. But this time I've put on two kilos and am annoyed by it. Half is waterweight, of course- my feet feel tight in their skin- but the rest is I don't know what, though I suspect rice.

Current reading is far too heavy for the backpack, so I rousted out Janet Flanner's Paris was Yesterday, the columns she wrote for the New Yorker in the 1920s and early 30s. But it too is brittle and crumbling and I must find something more recent. I can't remember when I first read it: I want to say 80s but it may have been the late 90s. It's unlike other expat memoirs of Paris in the 20s because Harold Ross, bless him, specifically told Flanner to write about 'what's happening in Paris, not what you think is happening'. Which burst the insular NAmerican bubble right there and forced her to write about French people.

Her foreword does talk more about the expats, which you can't do without name dropping (the community was *small*, like it or not.) She was a friend of Hemingway's, which counts as a black mark in my books, but also Sylvia Beach and Gertrude and Alice, so good enough. But I'm more interested in her reportings of the French art and literature scene than of the American one, which has been done to death by devotees of St Ernest. Even if the main European artists and writers of the time are mere ghostly echoes now, names I may have heard in childhood, like Maeterlinck.

What tickles me, on a more personal level, is that her society notes from 1926 and '27 mention several aristocratic ladies- Herminie duchesse de Rohan, Anna de Noailles, Mathilde de Rothschild- that I put intact into one of my Papuwa/ Eroica fics, having completely forgotten their sources.

Incidentally, the current meds make for vivid if mundane dreams. But a recent one involved an exam for which I had to write several different Eroica fanfics, one of which I cast as a letter written in green ink and properly enclosed in an envelope.

Something has been living in the porch roof, because this morning two planks were hanging loose. Actually it's been loose for decades, ever since an incompetent animal removal service closed up a squirrel entry in the belief that the squirrels were gone, when in fact a couple of babies were still inside. Cue hysterical mother squirrel and desperate offspring, who eventually broke through a plank of the 2by4 flooring. But now it's not just loose but hanging down. Must go hunting for handymen again.

No matter. Another lovely day, hotter midafternoon than I cared for but cool otherwise, white clouds and blue sky. In search of washi, I rode down to what was once The Japanese Paper Place, now The Paper Store, out Queen West west. (The JPP proper is now in a warehouse farther west, in 'must have a car' territory. I think I once bought a bathtub in the West Mall, ages back, and discovered there are no sidewalks there.) The former Queen west village is due south from work, and is now all big box fashion and little else, because no one can afford the rents. Queen West west is due south of me, and is where all the trendy boutiques and gelato places have gone. It's been a good dozen years since I was there, and much changed. But I note that Stuart Jackson has moved there as well, who's an ukiyo-e dealer I bought a few things from 35 years back. He used to be in Yorkville when *that* was still affordable, which was, yes, 35 years ago. Useful to know this, now I think of downsizing and dumping a few of my less inspired prints.

Anyway, The Paper Place does still have some washi, and I bought four sheets. But of course I still have a roll of perfectly good white paper that I'd completely forgotten about. Shall use one or the other: and maybe white glue instead of the trad flour and water, in order not to tempt the mouse again.

The windows are all closed but I can still smell the skunk outside.

My bro has discovered that keeping lights on will repel the raccoons, so they no longer poop on his balcony nor under the overhang of his kitchen window. I wish light would repel skunks as well, and that there was a way to light up the cherry tree.

It was a sunny! day today so I battled The Rut to the extent of attending the last day of Impressionism in the Age of Industry at the AGO. It mostly featured one of Monet's trains (of which it seems I already have a print, picked up off the boulevard) and some watery Pissaros. There was also a Mary Cassatt painting that I somehow missed, because the exhibit really did very little for me and my back was hurting. Also the minor annoyance of having to line up for a ticket because the exhibit was time entry, which I hadn't known, as is the Yayoi Kusama installation that I stumbled upon afterwards. Had I been genkier, or brought my walking stick, I might have gone back down to get the Kusama ticket, but at that point it just wasn't going to happen. In fact, what stood out for me most from the afternoon's visit was the Inuit sculpture I browsed while waiting for my entry time: Akpaliapik's Screaming Faces, Kakutuk's Wolf Spirit Eating Man, and Ruben's Sedna. Disquieting and unforgettable.

The sun brought the cherry and plum blossoms out in the neighbourhood, and I had the unusual-these-days pleasure of seeing them on foot this evening, because as if several hours tromping about the AGO weren't enough, I decided to walk over to Markham and Bloor for the diet Pepsi no one has. I keep saying I never walk anymore, and I do never walk anymore compared to my daily traipsing about pre-2015. I blame the demise of my regular coffee shop as much as the lower back pain, but as I walked the route today I registered that it is indeed farther to there than to my new local in the opposite direction. It just seems closer because there are no major streets to cross.

1. The thermostat is set at 20C and my house is still cold. (This is because the thermostat was actually at 16. It's now at 20 and the house is too hot.)

2. My android phone keeps giving me messages that the battery is overheating and asks me what I want to do about it. One option is 'dismiss' and I forget the other, but nothing much happens whichever one I click. Phone doesn't seem noticeably warm in any case. Google about, find the number combination that will tell you your battery's status (and no, it's not an option on the battery menu), check battery's status, am told it's dead. Still functions, but is dead.

3. Thought I had allergies, appear to have a cold, thus spent tedious weekend mostly indoors. Did finish Lucy Mangan's Bookworm: a memoir of childhood reading, which is well enough though I disagree with her on many things, including the superiority of Randolph Caldecott over Walter Crane. I can see why she (and Maurice Sendak as well) say so, but I prefer Crane to Caldecott for the same reason I prefer Botticelli to Raphael.

Speaking of Sendak, I also prefer Wild Things to Night Kitchen, and possibly Outside Over There to both, though not for the kids, of course. Night Kitchen is just too much Little Nemo in Slumberland for me, and Laurel and Hardy gave me nightmares as a child.

More pleasantly, finished Moominsummer Madness and The Exploits of Moominpapa. Moomin mère is the antithesis of Mangan's to my mind abusive mother, though Mangan doesn't quite say she is. Shall continue reading Moomins for the gentle pleasure of the world, so different from this one.

Way back in the day, the ROM had a scale model of the Parthenon with a regrettably fat-faced Athena which one of my Classics profs basically ascribed to 'I told them but they wouldn't listen to me.' It was coloured, because even fifty years ago people knew that Greek statues were painted. Looked like crap, I must say.

Now there's an exhibit of Greek statuary models coloured with the kind of dyes the Greeks would have used. The linked German page presumably has more, but they won't load in my browser. And, um, yes. The 18th and 19th century Hellenist fanbois would have had fits at the gaudiness of the thing.

The coloured terracotta warriors were much more refined.

Haven't posted because nothing has been happening aside from the usual- work and wandering aches. Lower back/ lumbar at the moment, making walking unpleasant. Have had this pain before, many times: it recurs in spite of chiropracty, physiotherapy, acupuncture, and weight fluctuations. Can't remember what if anything made it go away the last time, and the time before, and back in 2015 when it seriously interfered with meditation, and and and.

But today I went down to the AGO to see what 2018 calendars they have. Not many and nothing that says 'This is IT!!' like last year's Emma Haworth calendar with its long distance views of London. Hokusai, Carr, and O'Keefe, of course; a whole calendar devoted to sections of The Garden of Earthly Delights which I have hanging over my bed and don't need to see in greater detail; and a Canadian artist who does odd representations of animals, so far the best bet. (Midoco had a Hasui calendar with all the warhorses, most disappointing. Maybe when they get more stock in... I mean, I always buy next door a Mucha calendar- the man was beyond prolific- and have no idea what to do if they stop producing art nouveau calendars.)

But being there decided to eat in their restaurant: a $15 Long Island Tea and a $15 appetizer of smoked slamon and marble bread (two slices, I grant you) plus assorted obscure small vegetables. Wish I was rich enough to indulge in a $25 hamburger which has no meat in it, being- as I understand it- a portobello mushroom with trimmings and fries on the side. Pretentions go- well, a lot farther in fashionable restaurants, I believe- but for a sort-of common person's venue like the AGO, that's pretty pretentious.

( Wednesday )

Not a day off- had to go in for an hour this morning which but-of-course screwed up my sleeping. But after that I took myself down to the Art Gallery and caught the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit after buying myself a membership which will pay for itself in four visits.

It was a tad too crowded for comfortable viewing: nothing like the terracotta warriors, but those guys were up on plinths and nobody much was trying to read the plaques on the other stuff. This crowd was elderly with canes and wheelchairs, or middle-aged with avoirdupois, so I didn't get to see as much information as I might. Not that it matters. I like houses in my art and when O'Keeffe did those they were very nearly abstract, like that famous patio door which in the paintings hangs above the ground like a black window to nowhere.

So I'm left with flowers that look sexual to me if not to her, and landscapes that relate to nothing I know. Except that her hills look like meat, or liver, or like that dead thing in Dali's Persistence of Memory. Intriguing but disquieting.
( Still Wednesday )

Woke with little desire to get out of bed or do much of anything. Thus made myself bike down to the AGO to see the Mystical Landcape exhibit, so I could say I'd gone. Alas that it left me unimpressed. Possibly I lack the mystical mindset; or possibly the experience was diffused by the slow-moving crowds, three-quarters of whom were carrying a phone-like object with the recorded commentary, that rendered them oblivious to the presence of anyone else. The terracotta warriors was more crowded, but people weren't tuned in to voices only they could hear.

Anyway, mystical landscape to me means Harald Sohlberg. Though there's a stunning work by the Belgian Symbolist Degouve de Nunques. Online articles link him inextricably with Magritte, and one can see why. But the present exhibit has The Pool of Blood (the only online image seems to be from a reproduction site) which, in context of the WW1 paintings that surround it, has a nightmare frisson.
( The rest of the undistinguished day )

All the sulky lions (all the sulky lions)
All the sulky lions (all the sulky lions)

Bref, ladyofastolat went to Venice and reveals that the Renaissance was as bad at depicting lions as they were at depicting babies.

Today was the kind of marathon I'm no longer up for, a mere six hours with a two hour break in between that saw me ordering a Manhattan when what I wanted was a Cosmopolitan. Whatever. Alcohol is alcohol.

But the return of a p/t body meant I had the first three days of this week off, and I profited by it to go see the wakashu exhibit at the ROM. What it says on the tin: "Four hundred years ago in Japan, male youths, called wakashu, were the objects of sexual desire for women and men. Creating a third gender, wakashu looked different from both women and adult men and played distinct social and sexual roles." So now I know how to tell the men from the women in woodblock prints. Fun enough, but they had a two minute clip from Gohatto on rerun and the voices kept interfering with my reading of the exhibit labels.

I'm also appalled to learn that our museum's collection of woodblock prints was given to the museum in 1926, but were largely left underexplored. "There were boxes that nobody had opened for years," (the curator) said. "It was very challenging because not much was on the museum database, so we had to record all of the information."

So the Guardian has an article about David Inshaw, best known perhaps for The Badminton Game, an early and recognized masterpiece.
( Sweet and sour )

Josie across the street's family have been emptying her house and leaving Free To A Good Home items on the front lawn- sad things like giant plastic Christmas candles and creches from when her husband was still alive to decorate the front porch, and boxes of family comedy DVDs to cheer her insomniac nights, and uplifting religious books from before her eyes got too bad to read. (Someone took all the giant Christmas stuff, so that's a consolation.) They stripped the downstairs of its pale blue wallpaper covered in roses, the sort of thing a 90-something woman would feel at home in, especially one who lived in the downstairs, and took down the front room curtains and shades through which I'd see her light on at all hours.

But there was one oddity on the lawn- an impressionistic print of a woman riding a horse, on a stark white background, done in shades of blue and lavender-grey and old rose. It's so very not an Italian grandmother's taste: might be something her son brought from his own home when they moved in a year ago and decided he didn't care for. I know I've seen it in a store somewhere- I assume mass-produced, but there's no signature or any sign of what it is. I copped it for myself, partly as a souvenir, and partly, as I discover, that it goes perfectly with my bedroom's colours, being the exact shades of incandescens' dragon quilt on the rocking chair. Hung it across from the bed where Andrew Wyeth's Evening at Kuerner's used to be in all its brown autumnal melancholy, and now suddenly the room looks so much bigger when I walk in.

ETA: informative FB friend identifies it as native American painter Carol Grigg's Riding Farboy. (That was the only site I could find with a decent picture of it.)

Have had a busy weekend but can't say at all what I did. This is partly 'living in the moment' practice, where I *don't* make lists of my accomplishments. However, a lot of papers involving a lot of past got tossed in the recycle: notebooks with lists of figures, which were the dimensions of scanned dj pages waiting to be added to the html coding back in 2000; a thick stack of letters in Japanese to and from YYH circles ordering various new djs for Julie in the late 90s; 'perfect books' for series like Tactics and Puff magazines with articles on Angel Sanctuary and Rurou ni Kenshin; letters and photos from daycare acquaintances dated to 1990. A quarter century is long enough to keep some things.

I may have said before that the most sensible thing I did on returning from Japan was to reorganize my libraries, upstairs and down. I don't recall getting rid of books, but I'm doing that now. A good four feet of art books have been sold to BMV, people and things I'm not going to want to look at much, like Bosch and Brueghel and Hokusai and Kuniyoshi's samurai prints and Hiroshige's fishes (*and* his stations of the Tokaido. Hiroshige either drew a lot of dreck, or the landscape of 19th century Japan was nothing to write home about. And since his Famous Views of Edo have a pretty high proportion of stunning, I'll blame the landscape.)

Michelangelo's David looks totally different when you're facing towards his head than when, conventionally, you're looking at the torso:

In his popular biographical novel about Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone (1961) argues that the sculpture depicts David "before he entered the battle, when he decided that the Israelites must be freed from their vassalage to the Philistines.... Was not the decision more important than the act itself, since character was more critical than action? For him, then, it was David's decision that made him a giant, not his killing of Goliath." (p. 390)

From the conventional side view of the statue that Stone undoubtedly had in mind, David does appear to be lost in thought as he gazes off into the distance. From the long-concealed frontal view depicted above, however, it is clear that the only decision David is making is when to release his stone and where to place it. Contra Stone, he is already committed irretrievably to the battle.

Indeed. I thought David serene. Check him face on: he's a scowling Sylvester Stallone-clone.

There's also a digital toy available on that wp for turning the David image around yourself, should you be minded to.

The regime for the winter. Even if it doesn't lose me weight-- being offset by Korean marmalade tea yum yum-- it means I can now get to the subway without turning my ankle in the six inch wide trench someone (I suspect not the homeowner) hacked out of that twenty yard stretch on the main drag.

Fuji Arts has their advertising all over the place. Clicked on the links this morning and cruised the Hasui/ Shin-hanga section for an hour or so. Woodblock prints are still as enticing as twenty-five and thirty years ago when I first started collecting. So what if the Hasuis are all later stuff from the original blocks? Some of my favourite prints in this house are exactly that. (I note the originals, where they exist, are double or triple the price.) Won't do it, of course: any spare cash goes on The House now. But I was amused to find myself momentarily back in 1989, my Hasui/ Koitsu buying year, with the world all before me and a strong urge to run off to Japan again, as if that would solve all my problems. Balanced by the desire to buy shin-hanga, so that if I can't go there, I can still have a piece of Japan to keep here.

If you need a concrete example of how I define fantoddy, this picture gets it in one. Mind, Caspar David Friedrich pretty much had fantod in his blood.

As an example
and another
and a third.

Nothing definably wrong, nothing at all right. The way an MR James story feels before the horrors start to appear.

(Note also, other online versions of A Walk at Dusk make it look much more crepuscular.)