Red, White & Blue on Dartmouth Green

Desi and Della will likely be around for the nation's Tricentennial.  Imagine what their world will be like (or don't, if you're a half-empty glass kind of guy like I am).

"Hoarfrost with Rabbit" by Kiki Smith (2014), Hood Art Museum

We happened upon an Independence Day parade in Hanover, New Hampshire while checking out Dartmouth College where Victor, my former Pines housemate, is an alumnus.  

Watching the small-town parade made me feel a lot better about life in America than anything I read in the newspaper.  I felt the same way after driving to Seattle and back three summers ago.  Polarization is less apparent in person.

Wrapped samples of Red Kite Candy, tossed from this tiny Fiat, definitely elevated my blood sugar level, but in a really good way.  If the store hadn't been closed, I would have bought a box of melt-in-your-mouth caramels and I'm not usually a candy guy.

A fierce bull painted on a blue pick-up served as a reminder that they're not all like Ferdinand whom Thom and I had visited on the drive to Quechee.

Dartmouth's Hood Museum of Art commissioned this work for a nearby building's exterior. Artist Ellsworth Kelly says its architecture reminded him of symmetrical Renaissance arches. Alumnus and private equity investor Leon Black paid for it before he was besmirched by the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

Dartmouth Panels (2012)

Victor's college experience must have been considerably different than mine, not only because the campus is somewhat rural and isolated.  Dartmouth has the Ivy League's smallest undergraduate enrollment and a reputation for conservatism.  Both of these buildings face the Green, a large town square where the paraders and locals celebrated the sweat-inducing holiday.

Dartmouth Hall

Brauner Library

Somehow, I can't imagine a petting zoo on the South Lawn.

Local firefighters displayed their trucks and equipment and gave away some red plastic hats.  Too bad Dagny was at sleep away camp for her first time.  Kids really do grow up so fast . . . 

Della always manages to find a way to provoke.  Nobody else was shouting out the British capital on their tees!

The Tricksters, a New England wedding band, really, REALLY rocked.  I never realized how much Shake It Off owes to Hey Ya!

Dartmouth is full of surprises, like this oddly tricked-out car.

We assembled for a Semiquincentennial photo op with the Founding Fathers and Abigail Adams, both a founding mother and wife if anyone's asking.

Occasional showers did not dampen Desi's enthusiasm for the pool later that afternoon.  He does love his binky.

Despite her raspberry, Della was enthusiastic about the new summer outfits Thom bought for the D-Kids.  Dagny's awaited hers in Boston.

 

I gave Desi one last spin prior to our departure Sunday morning.  Blind Moofy wanted to get in on the dizziness, too.

LieCENTENNiAL

“It is unpatriotic not to tell the truth whether about the president or anyone else,” said President Theodore Roosevelt in 1918.

“Broadly put, nationalism is about allegiance to one’s own kind; patriotism is allegiance to a creed,” said Jon Meacham, a presidential historian. “The Age of Trump — and that is what historians will have to call this — is a nationalistic one.”

“​His [Trump's] version of patriotism is rooted in his narcissism,” said Chad Williams, a historian and professor of African American and Black diaspora studies at Boston University. “It’s self-aggrandizing on the one hand, but it’s also deeply ahistorical, and I think this entire commemoration has been reflective of this.”  

“He’s completely engineered the weight and the power of the executive government to tell Americans how they should conceive of their past,”  said David W. Blight, a professor of American history at Yale University.  (New York Times, July 9)

Bullish on Ferdinand

The Story of Ferdinand, an iconic children's book by Munro Leaf, didn't enter my consciousness until adulthood when, attracted by the bright red cover, I bought it as a gift. But Robert Lawson's illustrations are so artful that I asked Thom if we could stop in Amherst to see the originals en route to Quechee for Independence Day.

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is celebrating the 90th anniversary of the book's publication with Under the Cork Tree: The Story of Ferdinand. Founded in 2002 by the man best known for writing and illustrating The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the museum also served as a cooling station and picnic site on a brutally hot day.

Nobody read to Thom as a child but he enjoyed the exhibit enough to purchase a sleeved copy of the book for a future grandniece or nephew.  Actually, Ferdinand reminds me a lot of Thom who always has insisted on going his own way, although he has never been a shade-seeker.

Nearly a century after the book's publication--which coincided with the Spanish Civil War--it can be a little hard to discern the intentions of the book's creators.  Does the presence of a vulture atop a tree marking Ferdinand's growth suggest he doesn't have long to live because his destiny is a ring where he likely will be gored to death?  Or does it symbolize the rise of fascism in Europe?  Neither Franco nor Hitler had any doubt:  they both banned the book.

Ferdinand leaves the head butting and ground pawing to other young bulls but he ends up in the ring anyway because of a roving band of matadors, his enormous size and a random bee sting.  Lawson illustrates the events almost cinematically in a sequence that could have been storyboarded by Alfred Hitchcock.  Text isn't even really necessary.

"Ferdinand knew that they wouldn't pick him and he didn't care."

Then, in tight close-up, a bee appears, positioned between his rump and swinging tail.

"He didn't look where he was sitting..."

Cut to Ferdinand's face as he experiences the initial shock of the sting with widened eyes and flared nostrils

"Well, if you were a bumble bee and a bull sat on you what would you do?"

. . .  before he jumps reflexively

"Ferdinand jumped up with a snort."

. . . attracting the attention of predatory matadors who mistake his actions for a fighting spirit and take him away to Madrid.   

"The five men saw him and they all shouted with joy."

But instead of charging a red flag in the ring, Ferdinand prefers sniffing the flowers protruding from the women's hats.  The matadors send him back to pasture.   While I embrace pacifism philosophically, the story can just as easily be taken at face value--in a world of random events, remaining true to yourself is a good thing--which explains why the charismatic bull became a 20th century commercial juggernaut with lots and lots of merch!

Pinning a tail on Ferdinand seems inadvisable considering his reaction to the bee sting.

Walt Disney broadened the book's appeal with a short animated film in which he voiced Ferdinand's mother in a fluting voice.  It won an Oscar in 1938.  You can watch Lawson's unique artistry sanded down into slapstick and stereotype on You Tube.  Disney, whom some accused of Nazi sympathies (he gave Leni Riefenstahl a tour of his studios), eliminated the vulture.  Just sayin'.

Production Sketch (1938)

Or maybe Uncle Walt feared political controversy would reduce sales of his "own game."

The illustrations are on loan from the Morgan Library, where Mary Flager Cary donated them. She's the granddaughter of the man responsible for the development of south Florida and the settlement of Palm Beach in particular.

We checked out the other galleries, too, including another terrific exhibit, Soul, Sound & Voice: The Art of Jerry Pinkney. His work embraces both the imagined

"The Grasshopper and the Ants" (2015)

. . . and the seldom-seen realistic.

"The Sunday Outing"  (1994)

Carle himself drew this cat

 

and painted the bright murals that decorate the lobby.

(detail)

Villa Coco (5*)

What I feared might be a silly book turned out to be a profound one with just the right amount of madcap shenanigans.

They lived in a sealed world of comic-strip logic, and within that world, all schemes ended as happily as a monkey’s life in Zanzibar.

A young gay archivist at loose ends in a rotary-phone world accepts a temporary job in Tuscany cataloging what seem to be the ever changing contents of Villa Coco, imperiously ruled by a self-made Baronessa entirely set in her nonagenarian ways.  Although author Andrew Sean Greer withholds his narrator's name until the end of the novel, she insists on calling him Giovedi--Italian for Thursday, the day of his arrival--and demands that he learn the language.  He accedes, a little grudgingly, with the empathic counsel of Oscar, the Baronessa's oldest friend.  Discreetly gay, he also delivers an ambiguous warning that Giovedi nearly misinterprets:  "Do not be lazy in love."

Although the formerly randy narrator has sworn off sex for the duration of his mostly rural sojourn--described so evocatively you will want to make good on your threats to self-deport from 21st century America--the childless, always scheming Baronessa has other plans.  She insists he take a brief road trip with Giacomo, her handsome and married cousin (in the European way) to Commachio, a charming village unknown to tourists where their dilapidated Mitsu-Bitchy breaks down.

What would it be like, to know you were secretly Venice? I envied the town, though of course in the canals were not gondolas but the local specialty—eels—which made the waters wriggle slightly in their courses. Yes, eels. They were the basis of the town’s famous cuisine and were its familiar spirits, beloved, much the way other towns cherish their swallows or poplars or stags; if it had been an American town, the local high school team would have been the Fighting Eels.

Giovedi couldn't be farther from America at Villa Coco where the plumbing is primitive and everything has a provenance, especially the people who surround him and whose old world values begin to shape his identity.

One can find the experience, in America, of standing where it seems no person has ever stood before—on a wilderness peak or a rocky, inaccessible shore—but seldom do we feel that thousands have stood there, for thousands of years, and empires have risen and fallen and will continue to do so long after we have gone.

During his formative expatriation, Giovedi faces some difficult choices, particularly after he meets his older doppelganger by chance in a cafe and he can't quite shake his predicted future. Should he embrace his alluring new lifestyle or should he return to America in pursuit of a real career and relationship?  For what he initially believes to be solely selfish reasons, the Baronessa counsels him against leaving.

“You would start thinking again that literature began with Hemingway and art with Warhol. That the fate of the world depends upon your presidential election. That a proper dinner conversation is to discuss your favorite television shows. Like every American, you would lose—”

“Really?” I broke in, irritated. “What would I lose?”

She looked at me at last. “Your sense of humor.”

Humor matters to the Baronessa no less than to Greer.   When Giovedi decides his next move after a disastrous visit to Florence "to see a Caravaggio"--forbidden by the Baronessa--he finally opens up to her, confessing his hearbreak.  She responds with the kind of advice that perfectly captures the generous impetus of Greer's novels, particularly at a moment in time when storytelling faces grave threats both technical and political.

You must tell it again another time, she had said on our way to Ferrara. Made better, not just for the sake of the listener but for the sake of the teller. To have mastered the story. It is the work of the metallurgist to extract the gold from a clump of earth, and so it was the work of the speaker, I understood at last, to extract and refine, from the admixed events of love and life, the comedy.

Villa Coco comes to a most satsifying end with an unanticipated train ride to Venice.  By this time Giovedi has become less and less American, almost like a Henry James character but one shorn of cynicism rather than innocence by his stay abroad.  We learn his real name just as he experiences an epiphany.

The price for seeing things as they really are. It is our youth.

Fresh Perspective

I reached out to Cynthia as soon as I read about the wildfires in southern Colorado.  One broke out just five miles from her home.  How would you like to look see this from your kitchen window, knowing how tinder dry the landscape is?  Fortunately, she and her husband have trimmed trees and reduced scrub oak around their property to reduce fire risk and they're in the process of installing a huge water cistern, too.

 

Their neighborhood is so remote that it took fire trucks almost 35 minutes to arrive; by then it had engulfed more than 20 acres.  The blaze has been 30% contained since Cynthia took this photo three days ago.

Spraying fire retardant helped, but they're not out of the woods yet: some fires farther away are still burning out of control.  

But Cynthia has never been one to sit around and worry, particularly when she can put her skill set to good use.

I sort of volunteered myself to feed the firefighters.  And I’ve been making meals for 25 to 100 hungry people for 3 days now.  I go through 6 dozen eggs for breakfast casseroles or burritos, 30+ pounds of chicken for chicken rice casserole, 30+ pounds of beef for beef tips etc.  The challenge is not feeding that many but running 40 minutes into town to buy groceries 😬

May she and Bill remain safe.  Their situation really puts New York City's sweltering temps and our seriously leaky pool at the Folly in perspective!

More Cynthia: 

Semi-Grand Tour (1975)

FLASHBACK:  Bestie (1980s)

Dear Friend (2021)

Hot Fun in the Summertime (2021)

Overnight @ One Binkley Gulch (2024)

Plus One Views

Christine invited me to be her plus one for her niece's wedding dinner.  New York Waterway got us across the Hudson to Weehawken in the blazing sun.  The $10.25 fare works out to a little more than a dollar a minute.

Here's Christine with the bride and groom, Jamie and Ziad.  Christine wore something borrowed 😈.

The views from Molos were as terrific as the food, especially as the sun set.

 

Guests were encouraged to use a special photo both.  Here's Jamie with Eden, her gay bestie

. . . and Karen, her mother (Christine's sister-in-law).  She learned how to make pierogen from Christine's Polish grandmother and worries the recipe will not survive her.

Ziad's heritage is Palestinian and Jordanian. His Muslim family and friends really knew how to party.  There was LOTS of exuberant dancing and not much drinking.

A full moon was rising over Manhattan by the time we caught the 10:40 p.m. ferry back to midtown.

Christine said the return ride made her feel like she was tripping!