Ready to go

Bags packed. Photography gear organized. A long plane ride ahead. We leave on Friday afternoon to arrive in London on Saturday. Overnight at the airport hotel, and on Sunday a long bus ride down to Southampton with a group of friends. There we join the ship that is to take us (and a whole army of other people) through the Channel and out to the Atlantic to La Coruna, in northern Spain. Then it's onward to Bilbao in Vizcaya, and then Bordeaux, France, and finally Guernsey in the Channel Islands, before returning to Southampton the following Saturday.

We follow that with six days in the company of good friends in London.

No posts for the next couple of weeks. But expect a report, with pictures, after we come back home.

Twee

Today I learned a new word.

twee – adj. Chiefly Brit. affectedly dainty or quaint. [apparently reduced from tweet, mimicking child's pronunciation of sweet.]

Sounds like a fun word to use once in a while

Absent the Muse

It has been over a week since my last post.

I was honored to speak at the memorial gathering of a departed friend last weekend. The event was attended by a couple of hundred people, as the man and his family are well-known, and he had many achievements for us to commemorate. We feel greatly diminished when a friend departs this life, yet our personal sense of loss is of course nothing compared to that of spouse, children, and other family members. Who bravely carry on, in the warmth of his memory.

***

A schoolmate of mine, from six decades ago, surprised me with a phone call today. He was in the area to visit his older sister, and will soon leave for his home in Australia. From there, he often visits the new republic of East Timor, where he is involved in work helping with that country's economic recovery from years of occupation and civil war. We would have met in person, were it not for time constraints. We hope there will be a next time.

***

Last week we attended a concert at our younger granddaughter's high school. She was a member of the chorus. The kids really enjoy themselves at these events, particularly since it is so close to the end of the school year. We too, the old folks, enjoyed their singing. We also enjoyed the performance by a young violinist, a high school junior, who appears to be headed for a distinguished career in the concert halls of the world. He performed the Tchaikovsky concerto, just the first movement, and he did so very well, as did the orchestra.

***

We leave in a few days for Britain on a long-planned vacation. The vacation includes a cruise to northern Spain, southwestern France, and one of the Channel Islands. I am especially looking forward to visiting Santiago de Compostela, and the shrine reputed to contain the remains of St James. I hope the weather in that part of the world is at least as agreeable as what we are experiencing in California.

***

The Sounds of Age.

Oh, they come and go for the most part. A creak here, a snap there, when you least expect it. Joints, bone, cartilage, it could be anything. It's almost as though, like the Tin Woodman in "The Wizard of Oz", we need a drop or two of lubrication from time to time.

But what I find increasingly disturbing is this thing they call tinnitus, a persistent ringing in the ears. The sound of mating summer insects comes closest to describing it. At certain times one is more conscious of it than at others. It's best not to think about it, as thinking about it brings it on.

***

Pleasures of the iPod

On my morning walks, my iPod is a great companion. Whether it is listening to the Gipsy Kings playing "A Mi Manera" or the "Florida Suite" by Frederick Delius, I find the music makes the exercise a good deal less tiresome.

Color Slides 1984

Golden Gate Bridge Plaza

Freeway

Corner Laundromat

Sheraton Palace Garden Court

Cadillac - Classic Elegance at the Concours

Aging

In the April 30, 2007 issue of the New Yorker is an article by Dr Atul Gawande:"The Way We Age Now." It is one of the most depressing reports I have read in a long time.

Click here for the article

Museum Etiquette

Museum guards can't have a very difficult job, I don't suppose. They stand around the entrances and exits to the galleries, keeping a sharp lookout for the more audacious museum-goers who, in order to 'rilly' appreciate a work of art, must get all touchy-feely around it, whether it be a painting or a sculpture or, horror of horrors, one of those modern works which their creators refer to as arrangements, usually titled 'Untitled', but which may resemble a spilled container of old excelsior, or the entrails of a ritually slaughtered animal.

Guards in European museums, I find, are often haughty and supercilious when compared to those in this country. That may be because the art one is likely to come across in European museums may be older and more priceless (how about that for an oxymoron) than what we have in the U.S. Or it may be that the European guards know their unions are so powerful there's no chance they'll ever be fired for being overzealous in the performance of their duties.

"Silenzio!" yells the guard in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. "No photos. Photos verboten," croaks the blue-uniformed fellow in the Prince-bishop's palace in Wurzburg, Germany. At the Peterhof Palace outside St.Petersburg, Russia, the guards make sure you put on special overshoes with carpet soles when on the marquetry floor; thus the visitors can help polish the floor as they trundle through the palace. While at the Hermitage, svelte female guards in high heels pay scant attention to the throngs of tourists; they are too busy filing their fingernails.

I'd say that the guards in our museums have better manners than their European counterparts. It has been many years since I visited the Louvre, so I am really not in a position to comment on guard etiquette there.

Evening

A warm and pleasant evening, warm enough for our real windows to stay open till late, while I ponder what to write in this faux Window on my electronic desktop.

Have just about completed a panegyric for a departed friend; I will be delivering it this weekend in The City at his memorial.

The sun is just setting behind the house across the street from ours. Not a cloud in the sky. Long shadows cross our lush green lawn. A scent of jasmine is carried into my room on a light breeze. A bird in my neighbor's tree sings its song, and is answered by another.

My computer's hard drive is making worrisome noises. I can hear the noises despite the tinnitus ringing in my ear like the cicadas of summer. Speaking of cicadas, I am reminded of our trip to Monte Albán in Mexico twenty-odd years ago. Whatever those insects were, cicadas or crickets, they certainly made a din that was as loud as it was unrelenting. But, like anything else, you get used to the sound after a while.

I guess we'll be having leftovers for dinner tonight.

Modern Art

Yesterday we did something we had been meaning to do for a long time: we went to see the Picasso and the Americans show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was big, and it was brash, and we enjoyed it immensely.

Our docent was a matronly schoolteacher who clearly knew her stuff. The pieces she chose for comparison, and the anecdotes with while she connected them, gave our mature audience, also well-informed themselves, a much better understanding of the influence the Spanish master had on his younger American counterparts, Max Weber, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Louise Bourgeois, and others.

The entire fifth floor of the MOMA had been given up for the show, and all the galleries were well arranged. The show is due to close on May 28, so if you want to see it, you still have about three weeks to go.

Also on view on the museum's fourth floor are paintings by Brice Marden, whose panels of flat color filled several galleries (and frankly did nothing for us visually or emotionally) but whose large canvases of sensuous lines of muted color were worth contemplating.

It was all in all an afternoon well spent in The City.

7:00 AM

On the pillow-case
a grey hair
made brilliant
by the morning sun