Photo Pest: October 2023

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Competitive Decorating

Is it me or have the skeletons, ghosts and spiders on Manhattan's Upper West Side gotten bigger, the jack o'lanterns more numerous than in the past? Decide for yourself.

Maybe just more people are decorating for Halloween. All these photos were taken on just two blocks between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West. In my 2016 batch of Halloween photos, I covered much more of the neighborhood.

Sunday, October 22, 2023

Stereophonic (4*)

The minute I heard that the guy from Arcade Fire had written the songs for a play about the difficulties and rewards of creative collaboration I bought a ticket. Poorly titled, Stereophonic is kind of a slow burn but when the band, superbly cast, starts singing behind the glass wall of the incredibly authentic studio that serves as the only set, you know you're in superb hands even if they belong to the younger brother (oops!) of the frontman in in one of my favorite bands of the new millennium. The interpersonal dynamics of a band that playwright David Adjimi insists isn't Fleetwood Mac occasionally border on the cliched, but who cares when the music they're making sounds nearly as good as "Rumours"? Will Brill comically nails the bassist who falls in and out of sobriety as often as love, and Sarah Pidgeon should record the solo album Columbia Records offers her character. And sure, you want to wring Tom Pecinka's perfectionist neck, but as one terrific goosebump-inducing number demonstrates, nice guys in the studio probably don't make iconic albums no matter how deftly their sound engineers twiddle the mixing knobs.

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Agog

Believe me, I know from gorgeous reading rooms. When I worked at the New York Public Library, I used to nap in its hushed, lamp-shaded Beaux Arts temple during lunch hours after rough nights of youthful dissipation. But the domed architecture of the reading room in the Library of Congress--195 feet tall--makes the one on 5th Avenue and 42nd Street seem minor league by comparison.

I was in town visiting Christine and encountered my second Neptune fountain in a week. It greets visitors to the Thomas Jefferson Building, erected during the Gilded Age.

After just spending a week in Bavaria, I thought perhaps I had lost the capacity to be agog, but no. My mouth dropped as soon as I stepped into the main hall, surely one of the most impressive public spaces in our nation's capital.

Signs of the Zodiac, a nice touch, decorate the marble floor. Christine's a Sagittarius.

The nation's third president is a lot less controversial in this setting than in his home at Monticello where Jefferson's slave ownership is unavoidable.

A separate room contains his personal library.

From floor to ceiling, it's as beautiful as the rest of the building.

But we hadn't come for the architectural dazzle dazzle. Christine wanted me to see an exhibit drawn from the library's collection of 14 million photographs.

Enormous enlargements of Harriet Tubman and Tina Turner adorned the walls.

You can access the entirety of "Not an Ostrich: & Other Images from America's Library" online. Here are a few of my favorites.

Stanley Kubrick (1947)

I didn't have to look at the caption to know this photo documented the AIDS crisis.

Nicholas Nixon (1987)

While the library likely has many almost anthropological photos of Native Americans taken by Edward S. Curtis in the early 20th century, the curators chose a more recent portrait of a dancer from the Tarasco First Nation to modernize the viewer's appreciation for indigenous culture.

Will Wilson (2012)

After a delicious take-out lunch at Eastern Market, we boarded the metro to Dupont Circle for a visit to the Phillips Collection.

"African Modernism in America, 1947-67," exhibits unfamiliar paintings that were the fascinating products of a cultural exchange program sponsored by Fisk University.

"A Fulani Milkwoman" by Bruce Onobrakpeya (1960s)

"Crocodile Eating Fish" by Pilipili Mulongoy (ca 1960)

"Profile" by Gerard Sekoto (1960)

Head of Imade by Ben Enwonwu (ca 1949)

London's Tate Modern had introduced me to Ibrahim El-Salahi, who achieved an international reputation since painting this work. His calligraphic style is instantly recognizable.

"Vision of the Tomb" by Ibrahim El-Salahi (1965)

Jacob Lawrence is one of the few American artists included in the show. His extraordinary work always colorfully straddles the divide between the abstract and the figurative.

"Victory" (1947)

A photogenic staircase took us down to the permanent collection where we found half of Lawrence's Migration Series exhibited. MoMA owns the other 30, even-numbered panels.

"They left because the boll weevil had ravaged the cotton crop." (1941)

Maurice Utrillo was one of my mother's favorite artists. Reproduction of his works hung in our French Provincial living room.

"Place du Tertre" (1911)

Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, a painter herself, helped establish modern art in America. Their collection was accessible to the public eight years before the Museum of Modern Art opened in 1929.

"Spring, Rue de Seine" by Janice Biala (1936)

"Still Life" by Giorgio Morandi (1950)

The afternoon kept getting better: we walked to our next destination through a charming neighborhood where these homeowners have an eye-grabbing method of showing their support for circus animals.

The Whitman Walker Clinic, which provides health services to Washington's LGBT community, is celebrating an important anniversary.

And there's good theater just around the corner, too. Coming up next: Fat Ham.

Christine treated me to a five-course meal--pretty and yummy in equal doses, with impeccable service--at Nina May's in DC's Shaw District as part of my belated 70th birthday celebration.

Afterward, she took me to see Jesse Ware, an incredibly talented British chanteuse, seduce a crowd of mostly gay men at the Lincoln Theater. I thought I had died and gone to heaven when she encored with "Believe" from the balcony, wreathed in a feather boa. Cher had better look over her shoulder!

Thanks again, Christine--turning 70 may not be pretty but it sure can be fun!

Monday, October 16, 2023

Congressional Cemetery

Christine and I ran into her friend Wendy at the graveyard. As you do when you're in your 70s and 80s. We were in the Congressional Cemetery where people have been laid to rest for more than two centuries in 35 acres of primo real estate.

Wendy, who is as upset about Netflix pulling the plug on DVD.com as I am, used her hiking poles to pull away the branches so I could get a picture of the "Madam on the Mall's" overgrown tombstone. Mary Ann Hall operated a brothel near the Capitol through 14 presidential administrations.

An early 19th-century senator from Connecticut--born when that state was a British colony--was the first member of Congress to be be buried in the cemetery, which now contains the remains of 70,000 people. Many of their cenotaphs--which can mean that their actual remains are interred elsewhere--have similar shapes.

Did you know that John C. Calhoun, the secessionist senator from South Carolina who defended slavery to his pre-Civil War death, served twice as vice-president, for both John Adams and Andrew Jackson?

Although dead members of Congress seem to have been a lot more functional--in both good ways and bad--than those still amongst us, tombstones of other folks beckoned for aesthetic, historic and personal reasons.

Functionality dictated the design of this very idiosyncratic marker.

You can't miss the very busy memorial of Matthew Brady, the Civil War photographer, complete with Halloween skull and raven. Darkroom chemicals eventually blinded Brady; many photos attributed to him actually were taken by his staff.

It announces "The Camera Is the Eye of History."

I read somewhere that the likeness of Frederick Douglass, standing here with Abraham Lincoln, was the most reproduced of the 19th century. Che Guevara holds that distinction in the 20th.

I love the trinkets pilgrims leave behind. They always make me wish I'd thought to bring a can of Campbell's soup to Pittsburgh.

I particularly liked this painted rock left on another tombstone.

The monument for John Philip Sousa, who as director made the Marine Band "the President's own," includes a bench. Christine's grandson is a leatherneck currently stationed at the Marine Barracks, within walking distance of her home on Capitol Hill.

The Congressional Cemetery is an expansion of an older Episcopal burial ground whose charter forbade the burial of "infidels" and people of color. Those oldest fogies must have spun in their graves at the inclusion of Marion Barry, whose addiction to crack while serving three terms as mayor of the nation's capital tarnished his early and important civil rights work.

Those fogies would be even more appalled by a cemetery-published walking tour that includes an LGBT corner anchored by Sgt. Leonard P. Matlovich, the first member of the U.S. Armed Forces to come out with an agenda while on active duty.

His story eventually made the front page of the New York Times the month that I graduated from college, and eventually landed Matlovich on the cover of Time magazine. Even though the sergeant had served in Viet Nam three times and won a Purple Heart, I was too terrified to discuss his bravery with my father who had been stationed in Saigon during the Tet Offensive, but I did read the cover story as if it were a primer on what it meant to be gay.

Said Matlovich, pithily, whose name deliberately does not appear on this tombstone: "When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one."

Although the origins of the large marble slab around Matlovich's tombstone are unclear, I'm guessing it exists mostly to frame this belated recognization of the man's courage, a bronzed certificate presented by one of the Bush presidents, probably George H.W., given the lack of identifying initials. The text seems both vague and inadequate for such a grandiose placement. The man deserves the Presidential Medal for Freedom!

Matlovich, killed by AIDS at the age of 44 in 1988, rests close to Frank Kameny, who helped him maximize the impact of his discharge from the Air Force. Kameny himself brought the first gay rights lawsuit before an American court and lost, but his persistent activism made him the grandfather of the movement.

Matlovich died in West Hollywood. Two reasons have been suggested for his decision to be buried on the right coast, one romantic and the other ironic. Peter Doyle, another veteran (of the Confederate Army!) believed to have been the love of Walt Whitman's life, lies here too, although in an area at some remove from Matlovich.

Walt Whitman & Peter Doyle (ca 1869)

Geography more plausibly supports the ironic explanation: Matlovich's grave is just a few plots away from that of Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover's longtime companion.

J. Edgar himself is buried nearby with his parents and sister. The longtime FBI director (and destroyer of reputations) wrote my father a letter in 1967 thanking him for "his helpful assistance in matters of mutual interest" that I discovered only after his death. It haunts me to this day, because Ken disliked Hoover as much as he hated surveilling men's rooms for homosexual activity, an assignment that led him to request a transfer from the Pentagon to Ft. Bliss after we returned from Germany in 1957.

Victor, a cemetery docent with a deaf Weimaraner, told us a great story after Christine took this photo. "Every year on his birthday, somebody climbs the fence and puts a stiletto on his tombstone." Who says cemeteries aren't fun?