Home again and desperate for local material. When we were sitting at the dinner table Thursday evening I noticed a nest under the eaves of our front porch where a downspout creates a little nook. A beautiful chubby robin flitted in and out with bits of material, sometimes sitting on what we assume are eggs. The most direct view through a window on a cloudy day wasn't very clear but when I stepped out on the porch the bird stayed in nearby trees. We hope to see some little peeping beaks soon.
My sister and brother-in-law have spent their careers at Penn State. They are a bit puzzled why the university feels the need to replace a sizeable and architecturally interesting art museum with another about twice as big. They thought it might have something to do with rich alumni donating more art than there were walls to hang it on, so they would build more wall space so rich alumni would donate more stuff. Or something.
Gotta get some new local material but it's supposed to rain most of today. We'll see.
Penn State has a remarkably large art museum with an interesting collection. So, because they have rich alumni, they are building a new one almost twice as big. The entrance to the current one has these sculptures of Nittany Lion paws (see yesterday's post). My brother-in-law, the witty psych professor, says that they are sometimes referred to as faux pas.
American colleges and universities all have some sort of mascot or character. I think it's a federal law. My school, St. Louis University, is in the running for the most absurd with the Billiken, https://www.slu.edu/about/key-facts/what-is-a-billiken.php. Penn State has the Nittany Lion, named for wildcats that may once have prowled Mt. Nittany down the road. (It's in the middle of the Alleghenies.) There is a statue in the center of the campus where every single graduate must get a photograph. The eyes seem awfully blank to me.
Home tonight.
Hello from Happy Valley, Pennsylvania, the somewhat sardonic name used by locals for the area around the town of State College and Penn State University. My sister is retired from many years in administration and her husband is a senior member of the psych department. We visited the university arboretum and gardens yesterday. One of their projects is to encourage pollinators of local plant species. This hive is in sort of a glass and wood case, which I gather is opened periodically. It lets bee-phobic people like me get a close up view.
I spent most of yesterday hanging out with my sister and brother-in-law in State College, Pennsylvania, home of Penn State University. They spent their careers there, she in administration, he in the faculty. No new images from here so I'll roll the tape back a bit. This statue is near the Jewel Box glass house we've seen lately. I know this is a traditional image and story, but one wonders about the effect of preaching to creatures without language and brains the size of macadamia nuts.
But look at those cool platform sandals.
If Kevin McCarthy can get away with it then so can I.
We've been through this airport a few times but I don't know my way around. I'll take a beacon when I see one. On to central Pennsylvania today.
A well known statue in Tower Grove Park of Alexander von Humboldt. He used to be a Really Big Deal, an idolized figure in the sciences and humanities. You see statues of him around the U.S., particularly in areas with German populations. There is a Humboldt Park near where my son lived in Chicago. He's not so much in vogue any more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_von_Humboldt. I read a fascinating biography of him a few years ago, https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Nature-Adventures-Alexander-Humboldt/dp/1848549008/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1650667258&sr=1-1
This statue has always seemed a bit odd to me. The pose looks mournful, downcast or simply tired. Don't know what's behind it.
And I don't know what I'll post for a bit. Back in the air this afternoon for some family business. You're probably not interested in pictures of the Philadelphia airport.
A shift from Forest Park to my favorite St. Louis park, Tower Grove. It's smaller than Forest Park, the largest urban park in the U.S., but still pretty big, 289 acres / 117 ha. https://www.towergrovepark.org/ It is laid out as a Victorian walking park, full of gazebos, a bandstand, picnic grounds and athletic fields. There is almost always something to photograph.
The wonderful family in yesterday's post lives not far from us. As mentioned, they grow thousands of tulips around their house and distribute them to the community. The location is no secret - it is in the newspaper article about them I cited. This photo can't show the whole effect. The house is on a corner with gardens wrapping all around. They would make a better neighbor than Mr. Rogers.
There is some good left in the world.
We live in one of St. Louis' older, inner suburbs, Webster Groves. A local couple rent a Mustang convertible for Easter, driving a route around our town, honking and greeting people. Children wait for them in front of their homes. The couple are Jewish and Christian; the kids are adopted. One is in a big rabbit suit. They wanted a way for children to encounter the Easter Bunny in socially distant times. The family also planted 4,000 tulips in their garden with plans to give them all away. https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/webster-groves-family-delivers-drive-by-happiness-with-easter-bunny-aboard/article_ca4ac088-a89f-52d5-abb1-098cf6a05da9.html
We need more of this.
The egg hunt that Ellie attended on Saturday had photo ops with the Easter Bunny. Not to be passed up. This violates one of the cardinal rules of photography not to have things growing out of the head of subjects. Not much I could do here, although I did take out yellow caution tape in Photoshop.
Time to get out of New York and back to the advertised topic of this blog. I hadn't left the the house in a few days. There was a wild Easter egg run that Ellie wanted to do in a field at a local college. (That's her in the pale green sleeveless dress - the child is nearly impervious to cold.) A large field was strewn with plastic eggs containing candy. It was divided into three sections by age and, on a signal, the kids swept across it. It made us think of a cloud of locusts streaming over the earth, stripping everything in sight.
The forty five minute excursion knocked me out for the day. No fever, oxygen saturation fine but completely out of energy. I think I'll drive to some of the local parks today and shoot flowers from my car window.
Out to dinner in NYC with the young, monied and maskless. This is Amelie, a favorite wine bar and French restaurant in the West Village where, as is normal in crowded Manhattan, the tables are elbow to elbow. This sort of thing may have led to my wife and my infections. However, we're both good as new by today. The protocol says my granddaughter can jump on me by Sunday.
The columns in a station create visual compartments between the passengers, who are already seated on opposite ends of the bench. The woman on the left looks up, perhaps in hope that her train will soon arrive. The man on the right slumps with chin in hand, perhaps from fatigue or depression. The Target bag reminds me of the ongoing virus risk. Neither of them is masked. Maybe that's how we got infected last weekend.
Still staying home with relatively mild symptoms but it's just not normal for me to want to nap in the afternoon. Grateful that all those shots have prevented any serious disease.
I suspect that this photo won't get a lot of popular reaction but I really like it. It's more for the composition and formal structure - the blue-gray of Central Park on a cloudy day surrounding the fiery colors of the food cart and arrangement of dishes around a central gyro on a spit, sort of like small images of monks enclosing a central figure in a Buddhist painting. And the rectangle in a rectangle - in a rectangle, if you count the window. I dunno. Just me.
I'll be staying with NYC pix for a while 'cause I won't be getting new local stuff. Mild cough and fatigue for the last couple of days, about the same for my wife. What the heck, home Covid test yesterday morning. Positive. PCR tests yesterday also positive for both of us. Got some some new super duper antiviral. Symptoms not too bad (spacier than usual) but not taking chances since I'm immunosupressed. So, for now, staying home and posting a pic from Chinatown in lower Manhattan on a rainy evening.
I'm permitting myself one more of these from the observation deck at The Summit. The multi-level deign is stunning.
Home again but I'll be running photos from the trip for a while, having no local material.
It rained on and off on the day we went to the Whitney Museum of American Art. We stopped for a snack at the cafe on the top floor and watched the wet splatter on the patio just outside. With a long lens and an articulating LED screen, I could feel good about being indoors.
Much of The Summit observation deck is spread over three levels, most of it mirrored except for the windows. There are openings between the levels, some right-angled, some, like here, cylindrical. It is very hard to figure out just what you are looking at.
Room full of silver mylar balloons, The Summit Observation deck, NYC.
Maybe I should say if I can pay for it there, I can pay for it anywhere. What the hell, I'm retired. This money only has to last me for the rest of my life.
Visitors to New York have several options for sky high observation decks these days. When I was a kid everyone went to the Empire State Building, seen here on the right. Yesterday we went to a new one called, appropriately enough, The Summit, at a gigantic building next to Grand Central Station, One Vanderbilt Place. (Yes, the same Vanderbilt as in the Monopoly game. Anyway, see https://summitov.com/). I must say that I was impressed. We will probably see more of this.
I suppose our Number 1 go-to place in New York is the Whitney Museum of American Art. It's in a striking building on the Lower West Side with views of the Hudson. One thing I like is its many terraces with city and river views. You can look down from one to the other and sometimes see something surprising.
We went to The Temple last night, the Metropolitan Opera. They put on a stunning performance of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, one cast member exceeding the other, set on a very clever revolving stage. The other thing that stunned us was that the place was about half full. People sitting by us said it was Covid and all the major venues were still well off peak.
The Tale of Two Cities Tour has reached its second destination. According to some claptrap written many years ago by Sir Walter Scott:
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Well, it is. Out on the town today and the Metropolitan Opera tonight.
It still amazes me that I can upload a post from 38,000 feet in the air, which is what I'm doing now. I could have said farewell Los Angeles but with periods of extreme heat, the worsening drought, wildfires, earthquakes and Trump still around, that might might sound sarcastic.
This is the iconic LA City Hall. Americans of my age remember it from the opening of the old Los Angeles police detective show, Dragnet. We recall Sgt. Friday: Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts. The fact is that it's going to be chilly and wet at the next stop.
Metro Los Angeles is so vast there are many areas we have not visited before. Northeast of the city center near Pasadena is The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, a 120 acre / 49 hectare opulent estate that I think had something to do with railroad money. Opulent is too weak a word. https://www.huntington.org/ They have a Gutenberg Bible, Gainsboroughs out to here and overwhelming gardens. I'm getting too old for all the up and down steep hillsides so we couldn't get to all of it. However, just the rose garden could occupy a photographer for a long time.
LACMA is the acronym for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art but everybody here just calls it that. The institution is about 50 years old. Most of its original set of buildings have been demolished while some big, new futuristic structure is being built. Some of the space is still around, including this contemporary gallery. Some people prefer their phones to what is on the walls.
We spent Saturday at The Getty Center in the super-expensive Bel Air district of Los Angeles. J. Paul Getty made his fortune in oil and was in his time considered the richest man in America. He had a great interest in art and left a very large amount of money to create a multi-building museum and scholarship complex, https://www.getty.edu/visit/center/. It was uncharacteristically overcast in LA and the light wasn't great for outdoor shooting but this is part of the main garden.
By the way, if you are in LA or may be here in the next couple of months, the large retrospective of the work of photographer Imogen Cunningham is a knockout, the most powerful show I've seen in this medium in a long time. Go. https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/cunningham/index.html
I should have posted this just after we arrived. From the airplane, 15 or 20 minutes out of LAX.
The LA Museum of Contemporary Art has an outpost for large installations and special shows funded by the zillionaire David Geffen. The show inside was fascinating but we won't get to that now. One of the outer walls has had this - could you call it a mural? - by Barbara Kruger for some time. This is her style, provocative statements, almost always in the same typeface. It's interesting but also, at least for me, repetitive. She needs a new idea.
Well, in this town there is one symmetrical object that rules them all. I bet some of you guessed what I would post for this theme.
Our Tale of Two Cities tour really gets rolling today. The activities are likely to include tacos, a cartoonist named Walt and and a solemn mass.
We reached our first stop. Gustavo Dudamel isn't conducting tonight (we've seen him a couple of times and he's something to watch). Rather, it's Zubin Mehta, the orchestra's conductor laureate, leading Mozart's Great Mass in C Minor. I remember him when he was the music director at the New York Philharmonic. Afterwards, lucky us, we get to drive back to the hotel on the 101.
