Friday, July 3, 2026
Wednesday, July 1, 2026
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:
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
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 Zaid. 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.
Zaid'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.
Christine said the return ride made her feel like she was tripping!
What They Said: June 2026
“This conflict is ripe for conclusion,” said Thomas Graham, a longtime American diplomat. “The mood has changed in Moscow. The battlefield is different: The Ukrainians have frozen the front line. The economic problems in Russia are building, and some political discontent is bubbling up. Conversations inside the Kremlin are on ‘How do we present this as a victory?’”
“The coding focus is what makes this filing interesting,” said Shashi Bellamkonda, a director at Info-Tech Research Group, a technology research and advisory firm. “Anthropic didn’t try to be everything. No browser, no image generation, no commerce layer. That discipline is now a $47 billion run rate.” (New York Times, June 2)
* * * * *
“I’m interested in the intersection of technology and storytelling, and seeing how that can push the bounds of creativity to create deeper and richer experiences for audiences,” director Martin Scorsese said in a statement explaining his embrace of AI as a storyboarding tool. “Remember, cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve.”
“This is the new battle line in New York City and urban politics,” said Michael Lange, a writer in New York's 7th Congressional District, an area he has described as the "Commie Corridor." “There are going to be plenty of neighborhoods and districts where the past establishment has receded, and the frontier is now socialists versus progressives,” he continued. (New York Times, June 3)
* * * * *
“I like his in-person self better than his Twitter self,” Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of Space X, said about Elon Musk on the Stanford business school podcast. “In fact, they feel like two different people to me many of the times.”
“The [U.S. Supreme] court just seems really hellbent on getting lower federal courts out of any policing of redistricting,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard and an election law expert.
“This is where hope has a home,” said Tina Tchen, executive vice president of programs for the newly opened Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. (New York Times, June 5)
* * * * *
“It’s like everybody’s got a fishing pole with a carrot, and you’re the rabbit, and they’re pulling it right, and pulling it left,” said Robert Van Winkle, better known as Vanilla Ice, bemoaning how several entertainers had cancelled their participation in Freedom 250 because of the concert's affiliation with the White House. “This country is not what it was in the ’90s, man.” (New York Times, June 6)
* * * * *
“She [Marilyn Monroe] can be anything to anyone. She is the American dream in darkness and in light — her rise story comforts us to think dreams can come true and her decline story comforts us to think maybe we’re better off if our dreams don’t come true. From the feminist angle, she is equally versatile: She can be seen as defiant or a victim of exploitation, an artist or an object. Also, you can’t underestimate what dying young does for your longevity!,” said Hollywood historian Sam Wasson, explaining Monroe's enduring appeal a century after her birth. (New York Times, June 7)
* * * * *
“What was this all for?” asked Amirali, a 62-year-old engineer in Tehran. “They bombed and destroyed our country, our airports, roads and factories in the name of regime change so they could bring Ahmadinejad [Iran's president from 2005-2013]? This shows the goal was never to make Iran better or free.”
“Cellphones have come between people,” Madonna said about her recent performance at Coachella. “I came to this earth to be a doer, not a watcher.” (New York Times, June 8)
* * * * *
"My hope is that the leadership of Paramount will say to themselves, this isn’t working," said Scott Pelley, the recently fired correspondent for CBS News who began working at the network in 1989. "We have broadcasts that almost don’t get on the air. We have respected journalists saying that there is a thumb on the scale for one political party over another. We have a broadcast that is among the most important in America. The most successful in the history of all television. It was doing great, so why are we making these changes? We need adult supervision and at the moment we don’t have it. We have people who’ve been installed in these jobs who through no fault of their own have no experience in television. They don’t know what they’re doing. And there’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at '60 Minutes' before, or at CBS News before. So that is my hope: a return to sanity. We can save this. It’s possible to land this plane. But right now, CBS News is on fire."
“Having workers tied to an employer for their legal status, their wages, working conditions, their ability to return, creates such a power differential that really exacerbates vulnerability to forced labor,” said Rachel Micah-Jones, executive director of the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, which advocates on behalf of migrant workers. (New York Times, June 9)
* * * * *
“Most Bicycle Boys are not married and probably never will be, at least not until they give up their bikes,” Candace Bushnell wrote in a 1995 "Sex and the City" column. (New York Times, June 11)
* * * * *
“I believe the only true knowledge is through experience,” photographer Duane Michaels once said. “You read a love story, and then you fall in love — then you realize the difference. I want to know what something feels like, not what it looks like.” (New York Times, June 12)
* * * * *
“Every time I make a little progress, I’m back in the hospital,” said Earl Monroe, now 81, who played with the New York Knicks when they last won the NBA championship in 1973 but who has since endured more than 40 operations, including a knee replacement, two new hips and spinal fusion. “Mentally it’s hard, because I know I can’t do things anymore. It’s disheartening. But then you think about people facing harder things. I say something for them in my prayers at night.” (New York Times, June 13)
* * * * *
“He’s trying to put his face on the money,” Georgia senator Jon Ossoff said. “Did you see that? He’s building a monument to himself. But see, Atlanta, he’s doing these things now because no one will honor him when he’s gone, because he’s a failed president and a national disgrace.”
“There’s this tsunami of garbage,’’ James Murdoch, new owner of New York magazine and Vox, said of AI-generated content. “Something that is editorially crafted, either by an individual writer or by an editorial mind across a number of different writers and subjects — I think that value is very clear, and I think it actually becomes more valuable.”
“A dancer dies twice,” Martha Graham said. “Once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful.”
“I think everybody’s carrying around a bag of heroin in their pocket, and it’s called an iPhone,” Hunter Biden said on California governor Gavin Newsom's podcast. “It is the dopamine hit of choice for 350 million of us. And what we do is that we are fed this lie that this country’s divided, that everybody hates everybody.”
“There’s nothing else like being in New York,” Sofia Coppola said. “You have to really earn it. It weeds out the wimps, I think.” (New York Times, June 14)
* * * * *
“It’s pure — there it is!” Bill Bradley, the Hall of Famer from the last title team, said from his watch-party chair after the Knicks won Game 1. “The ball either goes in or it doesn’t. There is no ambiguity and no doubt about what has just happened.”
“I worry that A.I. will be to high-school-educated women what deindustrialization was to high-school-educated men,” said Molly Kinder, a former researcher at the Brookings Institution who is starting an organization focused on A.I.’s impact on workers and the economy.
“Marriage is a patriarchal, antiquated institution that I will never be interested in unless I meet a billionaire. Maybe then I’ll get married with a prenup,” Laverne Cox, trans pioneer said, laughing.
“A lot of my late-night debates with my friends about the state of the music industry involve me saying very loudly, ‘Sombr is the future, and he does it all on his own, and he doesn’t need A.I., the kids are fine,’” Taylor Swift said in a speech after she was the youngest person ever to be inducted into the Songwriter Hall of Fame. (New York Times, June 15)
* * * * *
“This is a social phenomenon that has grown exponentially,” said Dr. Louis Daigle, an emergency physician in Quebec, the world's leader in legal euthanasia. “A lot of people now idealize this way of dying, with dignity, so much so that I think there is a belief that there are now two good ways to die: either suddenly or with medically assisted dying.”
“[David Hockney] loved the sunlight, the weather, the boys,” said Richard Benefield, a veteran museum executive who served as the first director of the David Hockney Foundation. “L.A. was the place he could go and be completely free; he could be gay and not worry about everything people were so hung up about in the 1960s in the U.K.” (New York Times, June 16)
* * * * *
“If any geographical point can be suddenly weaponized and leveraged for money, and then closed again at the whim of a certain government or authorities, of course, that’s for us — it’s a concerning development,” said Vincent Clerc, the chief executive of the shipping giant Maersk, after the details of America's peace deal with Iran were announced. “You have to wonder then what’s next.”
“[Jon Ossoff] is not trying to be a national star,” said Jason Carter, who is the grandson of former President Jimmy Carter and has run for statewide office in Georgia. “He’s trying to be a good senator. If being a good senator turns you into a national star, we’ll all watch and see.”
“It’s all out there, there’s no hiding and I think that’s allowed his wardrobe to be what he wants it to be,” said Simon Chilvers, who wrote frequently about David Hockney’s outfits over the years.. “There was a freedom in the way in which he expressed himself.” (New York Times, June 18)
* * * * *
“The Knicks did not just win for New York City, they won like New York City,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said. “What is New York if not your back up against the wall?” (New York Times, June 19)
* * * * *
“Iran’s new leadership views Lebanon as part and parcel of its own national security, as previous Israeli advances against Hezbollah in 2024 paved the way for a direct conflict with Iran,” said Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “For Iran, the end game is an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.”
“I wouldn’t believe him if his tongue was notarized,” hotelier Leona Helmsley once said of Donald Trump.
"I remember as a kid hearing from either Judd Apatow or Garry Shandling that you work your way up through Hollywood, and eventually you are led into a room alone with Jack Nicholson," Seth Rogen said. "It’s just you and him in a small room together. And that’s when you’re like, I did it." (New York Times, June 21)
* * * * *
“There’s a fundamental idea that the [nation's capital] conveys about public value being first and foremost over private interest,” said Thomas Luebke, the longtime secretary of the Commission of Fine Arts, which was created by Congress in 1910 to help shepherd the city’s evolution. “That idea that we come first as a group is somehow conveyed in the scale and design of the city.” (New York Times, June 24)
* * * * *
“Let them come here for three months without bodyguards and then go to a supermarket to see if this has improved,’’ said Álvaro Espinoza, 56, a jeweler in Los Teques, a commuter town outside Venezuela's capital, Caracas, referring to American officials. “It’s all a lie.”
“In the world that we live in right now, this is the only thing you can come to and you can be fully present the entire time,” said Jake James, 2026 winner of a Jimmy Award, which honors excellence in high school musical theater.
“This is not journalism. This is history told to you through the telephone,” said Guy Branum, a 50-year old gay comedian, actor and writer. “This is trying to get the energy of an older gay guy in the back room at Akbar telling you a thing that you didn’t know before.”
“[Buc-ees] brings everything that’s American into one spot,” said Jeroen Boersma, a 30-year-old World Cup fan from the Netherlands. “America is a lot of big foods, a lot of crazy foods. It is driving culture. It is big cars.” (New York Times, June 25)
* * * * *
“Motherhood is siblings bickering over who can look out of which window and who started it and who you love the most even though you love all of them the same but at the moment you don’t like any of them in the slightest,” Jill Smokler once wrote on her blog "Scary Mommy." (New York Times, June 26)
* * * * *
“Once you go down the pricing scale, people pay less attention to ethics or morality,” said Matthias Schmidt, an independent analyst in Berlin who tracks electric vehicles sales. “Tesla’s product has become so appealing from a price perspective, it’s almost too good to refuse.” (New York Times, June 27)
* * * * *
“I’m a left wing, two-state, pro-peace Israeli, but I’m not blind or crazy,” said Asaf Zamir, a deputy mayor of Tel Aviv. “I know what the situation in Israel is, and we’re not those things we’re being called [genocidal & apartheid]. And yet, more and more Americans are buying into and voting on those grounds. That troubles me.”
“Everyone shows up to vote for president, but no one shows up to vote for dogcatcher,” said Kenny Blight, 38, who is part of Promise Keepers, an evangelical men’s ministry. “I want a biblical dogcatcher.”
“I thought irony was having a day,” said Karolyn Sharp when she learned that Iran and Egypt would be featured in Seattle's World Cup Pride match.
"I embrace new technology all the time, but it tends to be sold to people at the expense of systems that might still be valid and viable," said director Christopher Nolan. "That’s what I saw in my industry — throwing the baby out with the bath water. We almost lost film!"
“[Marilyn Monroe] showed an interest in intellectual subjects which was, to say the least, disconcerting,” remarked George Sanders, her co-star in All About Eve. “She was somebody in a play not yet written.” (New York Times, June 28)
* * * * *
“Loner and loneliness are not the same,” said Jerry Moriarty, a painter who shunned the art world. “Everybody has been lonely, but not everybody is a loner. Jack is alone, but he is not a loner. I am a loner, and I fully understand why that makes me strange to society. I am not lonely. Being alone is total freedom for me.”
“I think we can say we [human beings] are the masters of laughter,” said Chiara De Gregorio, a research fellow at the University of Warwick in Britain. “We can have a small, polite laugh in front of the Queen of England, and then we are in the pub with our friends, and we laugh so much in a different way. We can even laugh in a way that communicates to the other person that we actually didn’t find the joke they said funny.” (New York Times, June 30)
Sunday, June 28, 2026
Ragtime (5+*)
When I last saw Ragtime, the 20th century was drawing to a close; despite the musical's ending--which reflected the cancerous horrors of racism--it seemed like a celebration of melting pot America, soon validated by the joyous election of Barrack Obama in 2008.
This afternoon, with the nation's semiquincentennial less than a week away, it felt more like an elegy for what might have been, through no fault of the rousing production, but because our country seems so unmoored from the authentic family values that the show embraces in its final moments.
Diverse voices are raised in melodious song from the opening number and director Lear DeBessonet takes full advantage of the Vivian Beaumont's revolving stage to blend a huge cast that represents the 1906 demographics of the United States. We're at the dawn of America's love affair with the automobile and ragtime provides the new century's soundtrack.
Book writer Terrence McNally mostly dispenses with the cynicism of E.L. Doctorow's 1975 classic novel, which featured historical figures as supporting players, an unusual conceit at the time. The first "crime of the century" (involving the life of an earlier, less talented showgirl named Evelyn Nesbit) and the escape artistry of Harry Houdini dominate the front pages. Emma Goldman rabble rouses on behalf of the poor, and Booker T. Washington publicly embraces a "separate but equal" strategy to free his people from discrimination only to have it backfire. A ruthless J.P. Morgan embodies the Gilded Age's rapacious one percent.
Archetypal characters including an upper class white woman, a Jewish immigrant and a young Black father are jockeying to live their best lives on a heavily stylized set dressed just enough to give the audience a sense of where the story takes place while allowing the always soaring score, occasionally operatic in its intensity, to take center stage. The cast is uniformly excellent but John Clay III, the Sunday matinee understudy, deserves special mention for his thrilling performance as Coalhouse Walker, Jr., the ragtime pianist whose success and oppression literally drives the tragic story. Imagine Sidney Poitier singing like Luciano Pavarotti with a slight vibrato and you'll understand why he left me brimming with tears more than once.
Saturday, June 27, 2026
Giant (5*)
Like Walt Whitman famously once said, "I am large, I contain multitudes."
The Brit Roald Dahl certainly did: son of well-to-do Norwegian immigrants, RAF pilot during World War II, children's book author, animal lover, devoted father, unfaithful husband, caretaker, and crank but in Mark Rosenblatt's brutal Giant, audiences leave the theater with his "truth" ringing in their ears: at his embittered core, he's an unrepentant anti-Semite. Having never read any of his classic books--although I did love the first filmed adaptation of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and Matilda on Broadway--it may be easier for me to reach that conclusion than others because I don't have any childhood allegiance to lose.
The first hour of the play seems like deja vu, as have most debates about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict during my lifetime. It's almost possible to sit on the fence while Dahl (John Lithgow, a 6' 4" curmudgeon extraordinaire) shouts it out with Jessie Stone (Aya Cash, pitch perfect in a bright red dress), a Jewish sales director at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, over an impolitic book review he has just published alleging that Israelis have morphed into Nazis by bombing Lebanon where innocent children have died or been maimed. It's 1983, by the way.
Both his very assimilated British agent, who managed to escape Germany via Kindertransport, and his paramour of the past 11 years (during which time he remained married to Patricia Neal, the Academy Award winning actress with whom he had five children and whom he helped nurse back to health after she had a serious stroke during pregnancy), recognize that Dahl needs to atone if his genius for seeing the world through a child's eyes is to remain profitable. They offload the heavy lifting of persuasion to the forthright American, as a representative of his biggest market. Stone, whom Dahl derisively refers to as "Stein" after asking point blank if she's Jewish, delivers a full-throated defense of her people (if not the Israelis) that ends the first act with a moral authority that still resonates with anyone who grew up in the long shadow of the Holocaust but now seems increasingly out of synch with world opinion.
During act two, Stone spends much of her time off stage as Dahl resists entreaties from the characters whose income and home renovations his talent supports to walk back his inflammatory remarks which they attribute primarily to his contrarianism. But once Dahl crosses a red line with his two most trusted confidantes by accusing his agent of being a "house Jew," he turns to his cheery young cook and estate manager for their support. Rosenblatt uses them as proxies for the British people and the difference in their reactions reflects the same kind of generation gap that divided many Americans during the Civil Rights era.
For reasons that remain opaque, Dahl finally agrees to do an interview with a sympathetic journalist, much to the relief of everyone except Stone. Even though she's not entirely immune to author's manipulations, she understands in her heart that genuine concern for all children--even her own disabled son--can co-exist with anti-Semitism.
I'll say this for Dahl: for whatever reasons, he had the courage of his convictions; Lithgow, just two inches shorter than Dahl, expresses them--VERBATIM--with shocking odiousness in the play's final scene, during a spontaneous interview with a persistent journalist. Rosenblatt and director Nicholas Hynter (firing on all cylinders, as usual) leave the audience in a bind, particularly those members with young children or grandchildren: does an author's documented bigotry merit the cancellation of work which his agent has earlier described so meaningfully from a humanist's point of view?
Giant also left me wondering about the very early, controversial and longstanding pro-Palestinian advocacy of Vanessa Redgrave, surely one of the greatest actresses of my lifetime, whose artistry was also fertilized on British soil. No doubt she contains multitudes, too.
Thursday, June 25, 2026
Musical Bodies, Sublime Poetry & A Temple Mash-Up
Leave it to Vivienne Westwood to fashion the world's cheekiest rape alarm. This penis whistle also happens to belong to someone I know who lent it for display in "Musical Bodies," an unusual exhibit at the Met that made a much bigger impression than the one I went to see.
Male artists have long invested woodwind depictions with sexual innuendo. Leering examples include this 18th-century British porcelain
. . . and this Japanese woodcut from the 19th. "Skin flute" was one of the first metaphors embraced by my dirty mind.
Spread-legs guitars like this one, custom made for the 2006 film Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny, spoof rock 'n roll's testosterone-driven shredding.
Boys just gotta be boys!
 |
| Untitled, from Fornicon by Tomi Ungerer (1969) |
Except maybe Prince. A gender-fluid pioneer long before his time, he combined the astrological signs for Mars and Venus to create his "Love Symbol," embodied by this purple guitar. It's both curvy and phallic. David and I caught him at Radio City in 1983 when it looked as if he were using the neck of his guitar to make love. We partied like it was 1999. Unforgettable!
Odalisques can be found under harpsichord lids, too.
These more modern works have an added political dimension. The hand of god holds these robed figures, emphasizing Black spirituality in the face of segregation
Raphael: Sublime Poetry
Saint Sebastian looks more refined than tortured in this portrait no doubt because the young nobleman who served as Raphael's model didn't want to appear nude and bloody.
This fresco decorated the hood of a fireplace in the Vatican Palace.
 |
| Italian harpsichord by Alessandro Trasuntino with lid interior painting by Titian & Paris Bordone (1531) "Venus & the Lute Player" by Titian (ca. 1485/90?-1576) |
The multimedia exhibit also includes performances by people who use different body parts to make unique sounds like Beatbox House
. . . and Savion Glover.
Even mannequins can exponentially increase their note output with the Piano Arc 360.
Visitors are invited to make their own kind of music by walking through a long, carpeted hallway that emits light and tones with each step.
Some artists have illustrated musical bodies literally.
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| "The Kingdom of Harmony" by Alexandre Lacauchie (1848) |
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| French lithograph depicting Henri Huerta (1871) |
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| "Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp)" by Augusta Savage (1939) |
. . . while a life-size, mind-blowing musical sculpture commissioned by an Indian prince to express opposition to relentlessly encroaching British colonialism inspired this drawing, which I initially mistook for a lascivious armadillo. It depicts a Bengal tiger mauling a soldier with a concealed organ providing a soundtrack of wails. When the British East India Company finally won the Anglo-Mysore wars of the late 18th century, the victors took the sculpture back to London where the automaton trophy played "Rule Britannia" at the East India House until its demolition in 1861. Now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, "Tipu's Tiger" seems like plunder that ought to be returned!
 |
| "Repatriation of Tipu's Tiger" by Saba Qjzilbash (2022) |
In Ghana, music can be as enveloping in death as in life. Yep, this is a casket. It lacks only a Stairway To Heaven.
Arizona artist John Douglas painted this macabre drum kit for Alex González of the Latin rock band Maná.
The Day of the Dead imagery is a reminder of this mortal coil.
Man Ray loved a metronome. For musicians the instruments took over time-keeping from the human body; for a surrealist like him, they're a taskmaster that kept the creative impulse producing under the eye of a watchful muse. Tick tock. Tick tock.
 |
| Indestructible Object (1963) |
Walt Disney injected more than a little surrealism into his "Silly Symphony," a series of cartoons produced by his animation studio during the '30s. These two clips feature skeleton xylophones, and a saxophone crushing hard on a stringed instrument.
It's not like I don't recognize Raphael's incredible talent and productivity, especially after visits to Florence and Milan last fall. Religious imagery, aside from a few saints, just doesn't appeal to me as much as quirkier subject matter, usually secular.
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| "Saint Francis of Assisi" (predella detail, ca 1504-05) |
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| (ca 1502-03) |
Raphael's baby Jesus is more playful than was usually found in other depiction of the Madonna and Child, but he appears to be bearing the weight of the world with resigned weariness.
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| The Niccolini-Cowper Madonna (1508) |
Raphael's portraits are more my speed. He has conferred Apollonian beauty on this young Florentine banker
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| "Portrait of Bindo Altoviti" (ca 1515-16) |
. . . and has painted his mistress as Venus, the goddess of love. Given the nudity, it seems odd that he painted her in collaboration with Giulio Romano.
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| "Portrait of the Nude Fornarina" (ca 1518-20) |
The exhibit includes many fine studies that Raphael did prior to painting, including this one of Homer whose storytelling, nearly three millennia old, is about to dominate ours when The Odyssey, the first narrative film shot entirely on IMAX by Christopher Nolan, opens in July.
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| Standing Putto Bearing a Garland (ca. 1512) |
The Renaissance doesn't get higher than the suite of reception rooms that Raphael also painted there. The exhibit re-creates them through projections. When I visited Rome, I recall only seeing Michelangelo's work in the Sistine Chapel probably because photos were prohibited. It's hard to believe Raphael created so much before his untimely death at the age of 37 which Vasari attributed to "excessive lovemaking," although pneumonia was more likely the cause.
Raphael illustrated the acts of the apostles in a series of "cartoons" that also were rendered as tapestries. In this one, Jesus tells Peter "Henceforth you will be catching men." Sounds like me in the Ramble during my salad days!
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| "The Miraculous Draft of the Fishes" by Jan van Tieghem and Frans Gheteels (late 1540s or early 1550s) |
In this one, Saint Paul converts his Roman jailers to Christianity by performing a miracle that opens the doors where he has been imprisoned: a literal earthquake.
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| "Saint Paul in Prison" by Pieter van Aelst (ca 1517-21) |
Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur
I had just enough time before closing to check out the 20th century sculptures that the Met has juxtaposed with the Temple of Dendur.
It really is a brilliant mash-up.
I didn't realize until this visit that the temple had been rescued from submersion in Egypt's Lake Nasser.
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