Category Archives: Travel

Ireland (or The Ireland Around Baltimore, Anyway)

Travel

From my earliest youth I have regarded the connection between Ireland and Great Britain as the curse of the Irish nation, and felt convinced, that while it lasted this country would never be free or happy. Wolfe Tone, 1798

When you are lying drunk at the airport you’re Irish. When you win an Oscar you’re British. Brenda Fricker, first Irish actress to win an Academy Award, while earning the award.

For the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown, Patrick Freyne quoting an unnamed Irish journakist asked about the British monarchy from an Irish perspective.

On our way home from France, we stopped by Michele’s second family home in Baltimore, Ireland. Baltimore is a picturesque, small, former fishing village and current home to a couple of sailing schools and two ferry hubs. Michele’s family has had a small home overlooking the Baltimore harbor for about forty years, long enough so they consider themselves locals. The home is a converted garage and is about ten feet wide and three stories high (the picture, above, was taken from in front of the family home, and the picture, below, was taken from their second-story window). The closest bar is about a hundred and fifty feet away, and a two-star Michelin restaurant is about 500 feet down the road.

Ireland was England’s first colony, and the country is still trying to deal with that. It is a little disconcerting because the Irish are White, probably very close genetically to their conquerors, and they all speak English. English with a brogue, true, but English as their primary language. As a short aside, all the street signs are in both Irish and English, but I never heard two Irish people talking to each other in Irish (although Michele says that she has). End short aside.

From everything I read, the national narrative still seems to be one of imperial victimhood, although it seems as if this is changing. A 1972 amendment of the Irish constitution, for example, removed the “special position” of the Catholic Church, which the oppressor brought with them, as “guardian of the Faith” and the recognition of other named religious denominations in Ireland, and in 2018, the Irish repealed, by referendum, the constitutional prohibition of abortion.

There are ruins or restored stone buildings everywhere, in this part of Ireland, anyway, and they seem like a fading image of the old imperialism. There are also a lot of new manors, as the Irish call the new big houses built by a new rich class, presumably – by me, at least – from Cork and Dublin. Sometimes, it is easy to tell the new imperialism from the old imperialism. Sometimes it isn’t.

At the end of Michele’s street is a restored castle, O’Driscoll Castle, which was reputed to be a sanctuary for druids in the “ancient days” and less than 30 kilometers away is Drombeg Stone Circle, a site sacred to the druids.

Above all, Ireland is beautiful, and this is an especially beautiful part of Ireland. There is not much topography, which is to be expected after the long time Ireland had been under ice during the last glaciation. The countryside is riotously green and meticulously maintained, giving everything a look of a very nice park or an expensive estate. Meticulously maintained is the operative phrase here. Everyplace is clean and neat. It reminds me of my mother, who constantly told us, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.”

Every day that we were there, the weather was lovely, but that is unusual; Ireland is beautiful because, on average, it rains 146 days per year. Still, whatever the reason, Ireland is beautiful and very photogenic.

Thinking About Creativity While Seeing An Art Extravaganza

Architecture, Art, Travel

Every child is an artist until he’s told he’s not an artist. John Lennon

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. Pablo Picasso

Creativity is intelligence having fun. Albert Einstein

On our last day in Paris, we went to the David Hockney show at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in a building designed by Frank Gehry. It was a major show by Britain’s most influential contemporary artist, in a building by, arguably, the most influential architect of our time, but for me, our lunch was the artistic high point. Before we saw the show, we had lunch at Le Frank, the museum’s cafe, run by Jean-Louis Nomicos.

Much, maybe most, food is a combination of ingredients. Not usually, but often, I would prefer the ingredients separately. I don’t want a great tomato buried in a hamburger; I would rather have it on the side. The same goes for pickles. Once, maybe twenty years ago, at a Chinese restaurant in the old Westfield Center in San Francisco – I’m pretty sure it was M.Y. China – I had a Kung Pow Chicken that had been deconstructed into its component parts. It was delicious and I still remember it.

I had my second deconstructed dish at Jean-Louis Nomicos’ Le Frank, a Caesar salad, with caramelized chicken with a hat of fried parmesan cheese. I loved it. It was delicious, especially the solid core of the Romaine lettuce slathered with a very thick Ceaser dressing. Sitting outside with Michele on a warm afternoon, next to a garden overlooked by a golden Takashi Murakami sculpture, eating this deconstructed Ceaser salad, it is hard to ignore that I am extraordinarily fortunate.

I’ve already said that Frank Gehry designed the Fondation Louis Vuitton building, but I want to emphasize that because the building influences a large part of the museum experience, including my deconstructed salad. The Fondation Louis Vuitton says the structure is characterized by a combination of solid “iceberg” volumes and expansive, glass “sails”. According to several sources, the sails are glass to get around Parisian height-restricting zoning laws, but the basic deconstructed motif goes back to, at least, Gehry’s early days in Southern California.

Frank Gehry’s house, designed in 1977. Photo by IK’s World Trip.

We all have watched athletes degrade, but it is harder to see mental degradation, including creativity, but the degradation is there. I still remember a study on age and creativity done by the University of California – Berkeley in the very late 1950s, while I was in college, majoring in Industrial Psychology. I don’t remember all the creative fields that were in the study, but I do remember that Chemistry was the field that its practitioners peaked earliest at about 28, and Architects peaked the latest at about 46. Frank Gehry has peaked.

The design process for Fondation Louis Vuitton started about 2001, which means that Gehry was about 72. Wandering through this Frank Gehry building, it is hard to think this is the high point of Frank Gehry’s career. Outside, the iceberg and sail motif is fairly easy to read, but inside, it gets very confusing. But more germane, the building does not seem that original. It just seems like a less coherent rehash of what Frank Gehry has been doing repeatedly for the last fifty years.

That is not to say that this Gehry building isn’t interesting; it is. It just isn’t as interesting – or as influential – as buildings he designed forty years ago. One nice touch, though, is that we tourists are allowed on the roof, where we can get a view of tourist Paris one way and business Paris the other way, although neither view is unrestricted.

I think of David Hockney as an LA artist, partially because he was painting in LA when I first became aware of him, and partially because his colors seem so LAish. LA is also where Hockney first got interested in photography, and I think his photography, with its manipulation of perspective, is fabulous.

As an aside, about twenty years ago – plus or minus – Michele was taking a photography class in which she did a photo collage of Point Lobos. During the critique of the class, the teacher mentioned that Michele’s photograph was like David Hockney’s Pearblossom Highway. When she told me she had been compared to David Hockney, I was sooo jealous. End aside.

The David Hockney show is billed as a retrospective of the last twenty-five years of his work, and it is exuberant and accessible (and the galleries were full of art aficionados, making it hard to see the huge pieces). Wandering the show, which was huge, I was reminded of a Dorothy Parker quote: First you write for yourself, then you write for your friends, then you write for money. Much of the show seemed to fall into the third category. Again, that is not to say that the later Hockney works were not terrific; they are, they just seem a little perfunctory.

What I especially liked were Hockney’s portraits, which I hadn’t seen before, and it also gave me the chance to take my own portrait of a very bored guard. All in all, it was a great show and a great way to end our stay in Paris.

Arc de Triomphe

Architecture, Travel, War

No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. Muhammad Ali

After much of the day wandering around the area, we ended up at the Arc de Triomphe. The Arc de Triomphe was built – well, started, anyway – by Napoleon Bonaparte to honor the French Army and to celebrate French military victories. It was intended as a grand monument to celebrate the glory of France and its soldiers during the Napoleonic era. 

It made me sad. I half expected to be angry, if anything, but this impressive monument just made me sad. France was not bigger or stronger after its love afair with Napoleon, its borders were the same as they had been in 1792, but it had lost about half a million soldiers (estimates vary wildly). That’s about half a million dead people, mostly young men, for nothing. Well, a little man’s ego, I guess, but other than that, nothing.

By way of disclosure and to be fair, over the years, France has added other sections? items? memorials, such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier with an eternal flame, to the Arc de Triomphe.

But, in the end, the Arc de Triomphe is still a memorial to war, to killing, to death. And today, with Russia and Israel trying to kill as many people as they can, it seems especially gruesome.

A Paris Neighborhood & Jane Jacobs

Architecture, Cousins' Trip, Travel

It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist’s studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan. Julian Barns

The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

During our short stay in Paris, Michele and I stayed in a small hotel that had been refurbished, sort of near the Arc de Triomphe. It was in a mixed, gentrifying neighborhood. For me, it was the best part of the trip. We took a cab from the train station to the hotel, but just before we got to the hotel, the driver pulled over in what I would call a seedy area and said something in French that meant, I think, “Here is your destination.” It wasn’t, and after some pseudo-conversation which included pointing at various smartphone pages, he said something like “Oh” in French, turned the corner, and drove another three blocks to our hotel.

It was no longer 100°F, but I was still whooped when we first got to Paris. I opted for a day of doing nothing. Michele wandered around the neighborhood in the morning and then returned to the hotel to pick me up for lunch at Restaurant Le Merrill. Restaurant Le Merrill is just a run-of-the-mill French restaurant, which means the lunch was super. Then we spent the afternoon wandering around the area.

As we wandered around this neighborhood, I kept thinking of Jane Jacobs. This neighborhood is exactly what she had promoted. Around the middle of the last century, urban planning became a hot topic, involving the demolition of slums and their replacement with large, planned developments. In the United States, Frank Lloyd Wright designed and promoted Broadacre City, and in France, Le Corbusier designed the Radiant City. Robert Moses, an urban planner in New York, was one of the most powerful advocates of large-scale projects that destroyed vibrant neighborhoods.

As an aside, among other atrocities committed by Moses in the name of civic improvement, the Cross Bronx Expressway displaced nearly 4,000 families, not counting the families impacted by the increased noise, as it cut a seven-mile gash through the Bronx. End aside.

In the United States, at the time, areas considered slums ripe for improvement due to narrow streets and old, often rundown, buildings included North Beach in San Francisco, the North End in Boston, Georgetown in Washington, and Greenwich Village in Manhattan. All four of those areas are now considered highly desirable places to live, partially due to Jane Jacobs. Greenwich Village and its planned destruction by the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway is where Jane Jacobs stopped Robert Moses and changed urban planning forever, well, at least for the past 75 years. At the time, Jacobs was dismissively referred to as a “housewife”; now she is considered one of the most influential people in urban planning in the 20th century. She wrote a book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which basically said that everything Robert Moses said and did was wrong.

Jane Jacobs said that destroying a rundown neighborhood was wrong, a crime. As I recall, she believed that the tuberculosis rate in a neighborhood was a more accurate indicator of a community’s health than the condition of its buildings. She thought neighborhoods were organic, writing, Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. 

She was for wide sidewalks, narrow streets, and diversity both in its buildings and inhabitants.

Theree Temples In Lyon (continued)

Museum, Travel

Temple to Reason: Musée des Confluences

Who are we and what is our place in the world? The definition of human identity and the link between what we term ‘humanity’ and ‘animality is a topic of universal debate. We question the way human beings see the world, form part of it and contribute to its transformation. Our world is one in which the living, human and non-human, interconnect with each other in a variety of ways and form a web of life. The Musée des Confluences

Michele and I are home, safe and sound in our little beddy-by, but my blog is still in France, and I want to keep it that way for a while.

I want to start this post by saying – confessing, really – that when Michele first mentioned she wanted to see the Musée des Confluences in Lyon, I thought it was an art museum, much like the art museums we have been visiting in every city we have been to. It isn’t. As Michele was researching hours and location, she discovered that the museum is billed as a science center and anthropology museum.

When we walked in later than we had planned because of a very nice, late morning breakfasst of oysters – that I augmented with the largest, tastiest, prawn I have eaten since Hong Kong in 2009 – I thought the musée would be a natural history museum similar to my favorite, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, or a science museum like the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. It was like neither, and yet it was kind of both.

But the Musée des Confluences is a museum unlike any I’ve seen before. Every science and natural history museum I’ve visited, and every National Park I’ve been to, presents their information as immutable certainties. This museum doesn’t. This museum presents its information as what we currently think. In my mind, that is a significant difference.

Too many of us think our opinion is the Truth, and we hold these collected Truths as dogma. That attitude makes much of the country distrustful of us coastal elites and our allied experts. The Musée des Confluences presents a more nuanced and softer picture. An information card, for example, states: Human beings use observations and the laws of physics in an attempt to understand the origin and evolution of the universe. The prevailing cosmological model, called the Big Bang, portrays the Universe as a system in expansion that might have begun around 13.8 billion years ago.

The Musée des Confluences is not an art museum, but, starting with the building – in which the actual museum, the display rooms, are on the second floor giving the building a feeling of standing on its tippy toes like an oil derrick, or, as we learned at the museum, a mammoth – the displays are often as much art as information.

The museum building was designed by an Austrian firm, Coop Himmelb(l), an out-of-town architectural firm that I had never heard of (I’ve ranted about out-of-town architects enough, so I’ll just let it go). BTW, the fact that I’ve never heard of Coop Himmelb or their founders should not be taken as a judgment on the firm, just a judgment of my ignorance of current, important, architects and buildings. BTW, the name of the firm, Coop Himmelb, is a pun on blue sky, and the company’s tagline is Himmelblau is not a color but an idea of creating architecture with fantasy, as buoyant and variable as clouds. So they do sound sort of with-it.

The Musée des Confluences is named for the confluence of the Saône and Rhône Rivers. This area has a long and rich human history, and the accumulated detritus from that long history comprises much of the museum’s collection. Confluences also represents the coming together of three major local archaeological collections: the Natural History Museum of Lyon, the Guimet Museum in Lyon, and the Colonial Museum of Lyon, which, in turn, were the result of the confluence of previous collectors, going all the way back to the brothers Gaspard and Balthasar de Monconys who started collecting in the 17th Century.

The combination of these three disparate collections could have easily resulted in a chaotic and disorganized mess, but it didn’t; it resulted in a wonderful and fascinating museum that combined the best of both old-timey museums, as a collection of whatever the original collectors were collecting, and less stuff but more teaching about the stuff. Michele and I stayed, fascinated, until they kicked us out. I wholeheartedly recommend the Musée des Confluences to anyone visiting Lyon.

Before I conclude this post, I would like to make a final, probably unnecessary, comment. The museum has a display of three females, from left to right, Homo floresiensis, Homo sapiens – that’s us – and Homo neanderthalensis that were all inhabitating different parts of our planet at the same time. We are the only ones left and, by most accounts we wiped out the other Hominins (maybe because the Homo floresiensis and Homo neanderthalensis women didn’t modestly cover their breasts, but probably not).