The Temple of Beautiful Things

photo courtesy of Spencer Greet

Every now and then we are fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time.

Yesterday, that place was living within driving distance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Norm, Spence and I went to the Museum to take in the "Cézanne and Beyond" Exhibit.

We have seen many exhibits at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It is a pleasure just to go there; to travel the length of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, park and walk past the Washington Monument fountain up to the Museum is like visiting another world, or country - the Parkway was inspired by the Champs-Elysee in Paris - and at the end of the Parkway sits a classic Greek-Revival Temple of Beautiful Things, itself a feast for the eyes. Yes, there is the Rocky climb up the steps (no running for me) and at the top it is always thrilling to turn around and see down the length of the Parkway to City Hall.

Spence, of course, had his camera at the ready; he took many pictures - of the Art Museum, the fountain, the parkway - but groused anyway that he was being rushed, as artists are wont to do (he didn't get a chance to photograph the Rocky statue as many times as he wanted). We had timed tickets for the exhibit, yet still had to endure a human cattle chute of roped lines for half an hour to get inside the gallery.

It was worth the wait. Nothing feeds the soul like a few hours spent contemplating great art. I always emerge feeling less the savage, more the civilized human being.

The exhibit is stunning; its premise is that Cézanne was the first truly modern painter, and his influence can be seen in other modernists, from those who immediately followed him to present-day artists. To illustrate this concept, the curators brought together works by other artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Mondrian, who need only one name to identify them to even the casual art lover, to painters/mixed media artists such as Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Fernand Léger, and Alberto Giacometti, and photographer Jeff Wall. Although the latter artists are not quite household names they are all significant.

For me there is a paradox in the contemplation of an exibit such as this. I realize that the more I learn, the more there is to know, and my current sum of knowledge about art seems to shrink by comparison to what I could learn.

Part of the thrill of an exhibit like this is to see original works of art that have been reproduced so many times that they are familiar to everyone, like Cézanne's The Bathers. For me, though, the work in this exhibit that sent the biggest chills down my spine was not one of the Cézannes, as stunning as they are, but the Picasso painting The Dream (La Rêve). It is so beautiful in the original that I could hardly tear my eyes away. What the show illustrated was that this is a Picasso "copy", if you will, of Cézanne's 1877 Mme. Cezanne in a Red Armchair, down to the red chair in which she sits. Picasso painted La Rêve in 1932; it is a portrait of his then-mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter.

Speaking of tearing, La Rêve is owned by Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino magnate, who was about to sell it in 2006 (for $139 million dollars, doncha know) when he poked a hole in it. He apparently had it hanging in an office, and was showing it to some people when he jabbed it with his elbow. Oops! There goes $139 million...! The sale was called off, which perhaps allowed it to be showed in this exhibit. I have to say that I saw no holes in it.

Spencer's favorite artist in the exhibit was Jasper Johns; he found the works of Johns, who combined collage and painting, to be clever and amazing, especially a work called In The Studio, which mixed two-dimensional painting with three-dimensional objects. Spence also really liked a Jasper Johns work called Map, a reinterpretation of the map of the United States. He also identified with the work of Jeff Wall, whose photographs were displayed in light boxes.

Sadly, today is the last day for the Cézanne exhibit at the Museum.

Our next trip to the Temple of Beautiful Things may be to attend an upcoming photography exhibit, "Spectacle: Photographs from the Collection ." With any luck we will get there in enough time for Spence to visit the Rocky Statue, and take another hundred or so photographs of his own.

Houseguests

Photo courtesy of Spencer Greet

One of the interesting things about living in a semi-rural setting is that the fauna (not to mention flora) in the area never let you forget that you are an interloper.

Here they were, these birds or these ants or these bees, minding their own business and going about their buzzing, flying, crawling lives, and one day some human shows up, cuts the trees down, digs a big hole in the ground, and builds a house, without so much as a by-your-leave.

What about us, the woodland creatures and insects say in an aggrieved tone, which in reality probably sounds like a lot of squeaks and whistles and chirpy noises. You think that you can just come in here and displace us, and we'll just go meekly away and find another tree to live in?

Well, you've got another think coming.

So, here you are, Homeowning Interloper, in this house, and there is the patter of tiny feet all around you. These would not be the feet of any of the house's official occupants, all of whom have fairly large feet.

No, these would be the feet of mice.

How on earth did the mice get in here, you ask. Oh, that's right, the basement door was wide open for pretty much all of January, because the lock was broken and you live on a hill and gale-force winds blew up the hill from the north and slammed into the basement door.

Meanwhile, there are mice out there, thinking to themselves, hmm, it's pretty cold out here. And that house over there has a very inviting-looking open doorway. I guess that means we get to live inside, instead of out in this frozen field. And so, the mouse family moves in, and the next thing you know, they are raiding the refrigerator and losing the remote in the sofa cushions.

Then, springtime comes. And you, Homeowning Interloper, hear strange noises. They are not quite inside the house, but they are not quite outside either. The noises sound like banging or flapping inside of a metal pipe.

That's because birds are building nests inside of your gutters. Yes, your home has become an avian condo. The feathered fiends are filling your gutters with their bird paraphenalia. They seem to work at very odd hours, and wake you with their excruciatingly early-morning activities. By the way, don't expect the gutters to fulfill their intended purpose any longer; they will become miniature Niagaras, loosing a curtain of water right in front of your door whenever it rains.

Speaking of condos, look outside and you will see holes around the size of a nickel punctuating the cedar siding. Those would be the apartment complexes of the carpenter bees, tunneling into the house like so many little Charles Bronsons in The Great Escape. They are escaping the outdoors, I guess.

Then you go down to the finished part of the basement; finished, I say, with drywall and Pergo floors and recessed lighting and everything, and what do you see? What could it be? Why, it is a spider the size of a camel, big enough to hold a saddle and take you across the Sahara. And even though you tell yourself that you have gotten over your fear of spiders, that you are a mature adult now, you back out of the room very slowly and go looking for someone else to deal with this menace.

You notice that the frame on one of the approximately 586 exterior doors to your house is rotted at the bottom, and your friend who is a handyman comes and rips it out and discovers an entire colony of ants apparently reinacting War and Peace in your doorjamb. He proceeds to annihilate the tiny buggers, but you know they will be back, with a vengeance.

Chipmunks, those Disneyesque rodents, run in and out of your stone retaining walls, every now and then stopping to stare at you impudently.

The brick patio, which you neglected to spray with pre-emergent stuff when you should have, now looks like a verdant meadow.

And so it goes. And you realize that in a battle of wits with Mother Nature, you are only half-armed.

Vinho Verde

We are living in impecunious times.

That big, fat life we were living, just a few years ago? Gone. We are now living the chastened life, like Scarlett O'Hara, on her knees in the field at Tara. We are digging up stinky old radishes for dinner, and shaking our fist at the fates.

Well, maybe I exaggerate just a teensy bit.

Actually, our chastening has taken the form of buying cheapo wines at the local State Owned and Operated Purveyor of Alcoholic Beverages. And by cheapo, I mean less than $10.00 per bottle.

Preferably, less than $8.00 per bottle.

I get my little tiny grocery cart and cruise around the state store, trying not to look like some desperate old wino. I check out the Chairman's Selections at the front of the store, which frequently involve getting a $69.95 bottle of wine for only $43.50! While I am sure that these fine beverages are worth every penny, they are still a tad rich for my blood. And, since I have the rarefied palate of a billygoat, I will pretty much drink anything, even though I can tell wine from vinegar.

Then I stroll casually over to the back of the store, where the cheaper featured wines are. Here I am more likely to strike paydirt, which means a quantity of wine that is drinkable by my standards and costs less than a trip to the movies.

My most recent find is a Vinho Verde, from the Minho region of Portugal. Vinho Verde literally means "green wine" because it is a white wine with a greenish tinge. It is a very young wine, barely past adolescence; it has no sage advice to impart, no dark secrets to share. It is light and fruity and meant to be drunk by the end of the day.

Did I say day? I meant year, within a year.

It bubbles a little (wineosaurs call this pétillance) when you pour it into your glass, which is a lot of fun. It is a party-girl wine; it will not remember the silly things you say or do when you drink it. Plus, it has an alcohol content of only 9.6 percent, perfect for my tiny liver to process in a timely fashion.

I found this little gem, called Fâmega, on sale for only $5.99! So, I put six bottles into my cart, and slunk off to the cash register, where a stern-looking grandmotherly lady fixed me with a gimlet eye and asked for my driver's license in addition to my credit card.

Perhaps if she had actually had a gimlet, she would have looked less cranky.

Or perhaps, a sparkly glass of Vinho Verde, if I hadn't bought it all.

Chemical Warfare

OK, I have resisted writing about this for lo these many months. But I just have to get this off of my proverbial chest (not my literal chest, thank goodness, which would be creepy beyond words).

Stink bugs.

They infest my house. The are seemingly everywhere, shuffling along slowly like arthritic old men, clinging to houseplants, hanging on valences, lying belly-up and dessicated on the floor of the mudroom.

Occasionally a stink bug will have a burst of energy and target the recessed kitchen lighting with crazy circles. But mostly they just park themselves. They are apparently not harmful.

The full name for the stink bug is actually the brown marmorated stink bug (marmorated meaning marbled or streaked in appearance; I looked it up). You know that you are smelly when the word "stink" is a part of your official name. They are in the insect family Pentatomidae, and were accidentally brought to Pennsylvania in the 1990s from Asia. They seem to like it here very much indeed.

Since they move with the speed of tectonic plates, stink bugs do not try evasive action when you come at them with a tissue, or piece of paper, to pluck them from their perch. Rather, they depend upon chemical warfare to protect themselves, and emit an unpleasant and surprisingly durable odor that is difficult to describe; it smells something like a combination of shoe polish and old ham. It doesn't wash off easily.

This means that you must treat the offensive little invaders gently, lest they anoint you with their peculiar perfume. You would really like to smash them with a shoe, or some other object that has a broad flat surface and can be wielded with force in a satisfying way. But that would release the stench. Don't think the odiferous beasties are unaware of this.

Vacuuming them with the handvac works pretty well. Then you have to run outside and dump them quickly, and run back into the house hoping that they are not following you. This makes you feel like an idiot, but you are desperate.

How do they get in, you ask yourself. Surely they are not just strolling in the front door whenever it opens. Well, according to entomological web sites, they get in through the cracks around doorways or windows, or from behind the baseboards, and you are supposed to seal all of these openings with calk, or some such.

Right. I might as well try painting my house with an eyelash, it would take less effort. And somehow, I just know that all of the calk in the world will not keep a determined insect out.

Why do they come in at all? They don't seem to be enjoying themselves much once they are in here. Supposedly they come in to avoid the cold winter months (which in Pennsylvania sometimes means the two weeks in January when the temperature drops below freezing). And yet, I have read that their protection system actually contains a kind of anti-freeze, making them capable of surviving the cold.

Perhaps they are just lonely. Or perhaps, like the elderly who flock to Florida in December, the inside of my home is just the warm vacation spot where they come to be with others like themselves, to play canasta and eat an early dinner, and wait for Spring.