Close To Home

A foot injury and a partial-knee replacement kept me closer to the Folly than in winters past.  We really do need to landscape the front yard.  The ibis investigating our jungle from the sidewalk probably would agree.

Other than the artificial orchid arrangement Thom created for the Florida room, we did absolutely nothing in the way of home improvement.  He's gotten a lot of use out of that vase.

I also stayed longer into the spring to recover from my surgery, a smart move.  I turned the pool into a physical therapy center, moving from one side to the other to avoid the morning and afternoon sun which seemed to shine nearly every day for months.  Florida experienced severe drought and wildfires during our stay.

Morning Sun

Afternoon Sun

I spent hours looking up into the sky while doing PT as birds, butterflies, planes and drones drifted past.  Very Zen.

The South Florida National Cemetery lowered the flag to honor President Jimmy Carter.  His death at 100 offered a poignant and timely reminder of how selflessness can serve the American people.  I'm embarrassed to admit that I threw my vote away on John B. Anderson when the peanut farmer from Georgia ran for re-election in 1980.

We fled to Sarasota for two nights in late January while exterminators fumigated the house for termites. Here's Thom with chatty Heidi, the German proprietor of a kitschy schnitzel house she named for herself after moving to south Florida from Berlin 19 years ago.  "I found my people here," she explained.

An enormous scale model of an early 20th-century circus was the highlight of our visit to the Ringling Museum.

The ants returned to the Folly less than a week after the termites disappeared.  It's either one or the other in Florida.  Reservations for our cutting board were overbooked.

Foot pain forced me to substitute swimming for walking after our chilly Sarasota sojourn.  A lifeguard gave me a hard time for going too far out, not for the first time.  I like to get beyond the surf break.

You don't have to look far in Palm Beach County for evidence of beach erosion.  Sand replenishment closed sections of Phipps Park.

If I owned a multi-million dollar home in Manalapan, I'd follow Billy Joel's lead given the proximity of the ocean at LOW tide in the exclusive beachfront neighborhood.  The Piano Man sold his for nearly $50 million, $15 million less than his asking price, last October. Don't feel too bad for him, though.  He bought the place for $22 million in 2015.  The rich just keep getting richer . . . 

South Florida offers great socializing opportunities in the winter.  We hit the Norton Museum of Art with Paul and Linn for a terrific boxing exhibit.

"Prize Fight (Jake LaMotta and "Blackjack" Billy Fox)" by Rosalyn Drexler (1997)

Andrew and Steven spent a month enjoying the Miami energy in Brickell with awesome views from their pool deck.

I picked them up at the Brightline station in West Palm Beach to take them to the Lake Worth Beach Street Painting Festival.  They'd never been before.

Even the unicorns celebrated gay pride at this year's parade.  Too bad the D-Girls weren't here to see them.

I loved the snake-themed exhibit at the Bunker Art Space.

"The Sargasso Sea" by Barrow Parke (2022)

Thom cooked a traditional St. Patrick's Day dinner as colorful as it was delicious while Chris was in Moldova, thanks to the European Union which picked up funding for his judicial program after the US issued a "stop work" order.

Fortunately, my Achilles tendonitis didn't interfere with biking, either.  I loaded mine--not this one, parked in front of a recent condo development--into the Folly for a Lake Okeechobee ride during my first week of "me-time" since purchasing the house in 2018.

The plumbing fixtures chime, although those at the lake are much bigger and so antique that they're now on permanent display in a park.

Cocktail glasses and small bowls of chopped liver cast long shadows in the Florida room at the Folly during solo appetizers.

Less than a week after surgery, I began taking short walks in our neighborhood that eventually extended as far as Bryant Park, which fronts the intracoastal, and the Gulfstream Hotel, currently under extraordinarily slow renovation.  It almost was if I was seeing South Palm Park for the first time.  No wonder we decided to buy here!

To mix things up a bit, I also drove to Lake Osborne for a sunset walk.

I never knew the windows in the Methodist Church there were stained glass.

Not long after Chris departed for the season, Thom reminded me we never had visited the Ann Norton Sculpture Garden.

We also drove to Fort Lauderdale to see Surrounded Islands at the NSU Museum. I enjoyed looking at the Joel Meyerowitz exhibit even more.  He turned color photography into an art form.

"White House Diving Board Palm Tree, 1978"

We celebrated my departure at Oceano where the steak tartare was even better than when Christine treated us in March.

Lucky Thom--he gets an entire month of sunny me-time with nobody nagging at him to keep shut the refrigerator door shut!

Surrounded Islands

More than 20 years before Christo and Jeanne-Claude enchanted New Yorkers with "The Gates," the couple surrounded eleven islands in Biscayne Bay with more than 6.5 million feet of pink fabric.  

 

Their foundation recently donated materials that document the 1983 installation--their biggest and most expensive to date--to the NSU (Nova Southeastern University) Museum in Fort Lauderdale.  

Thom and I drove down to see the multimedia exhibit.

It includes video shot by the Maysles brothers as well as local television stations.

The Miami-Dade Public Library System helped the artists secure the necessary government approvals and cut through the red tape.   But the risky bet paid off:  "Surrounded Islands" put the city on the culture map.  It took more than 400 people--and many boats--to help Christo and Jeanne-Claude realize their vision.  Their installation instructions included repeated reminders to reapply sun block.

"Friends with You:  Into the Clouds" greet visitors to the huge museum, nearly deserted on a Saturday afternoon.

"The American Dream," an exhibit of exuberant paintings by Dimithry Victor, explores the Haitian immigrant's experience.

"Synthetic Giants: Cost of Strength" (2024)

"No Place I'd Rather Be" (2024)

"Tranquility" (2023)

"Cover Girl" (2024)

Other Haitian artists are included in the museum's collection.

"The Indigo Room" by Edouard Duval-Carrié

"Untitled (Boy with Balloons)" by Gabriel Bien Aimé (1993)

Intermezzo (4*)

 

Who knew that heteronormative conventions could be just as stifling for straight people as gays?

Sally Rooney uses a pair of Irish brothers, each gifted in his own way and both grieving the recent loss of their divorced father, to examine how other people's expectations--as well as their own--impedes their mastery of Cupid's unexpected moves? 

 

Ivan, a competitive chess player still young enough to wear highly symbolic braces, meets Margaret, an older arts administrator separated from her husband in a small Irish town where everyone knows her business.  Each brings out in the other a passion neither ever has known before, yet Margaret insists they keep their affair a secret. Eventually, Ivan, as emotionally reticent as he is physically expressive, confesses that he hates his brother, whom he accuses of stealing the opportunity to eulogize his father.  He recognizes this "theft" only in retrospect due to his immaturity which also leads to Ivan ghosting him for much of the book.

Peter, a successful human rights lawyer in Dublin is more than a decade older than his geeky brother.  He continues to carry a torch for Sylvie, a college girlfriend, now a professor, who ended their relationship after suffering a terrible bodily injury that makes sex painful and likely prohibits pregnancy, although that disability is never explicitly stated. Locked in a downward spiral with alcohol and other drugs, Peter at the same time remains highly conflicted about what he considers his transactional sexual relationship with Naomi, a stunning webcam model with a pierced septum about Ivan's age.  

The primary characters in Intermezzo are differentiated with language that evokes their various states of mind over several autumn weeks:  Ivan (aggrieved), Peter (impaired) and Margaret (frightened) as they try to come to grips with their feelings about each other.  Their intellectual soul searching occasionally becomes slightly tedious,  especially in comparison with Alexei, Ivan's adorable whippet, whose simple affections provide some welcome relief from all the angst and whose shared homelessness with Naomi finally kicks the plot into high gear. 

Without ever deviating from the quirky personalities that Rooney has taken such pains to establish, Ivan, Margaret, Peter, Sylvia and Naomi come together quite believably and even more movingly.  And, as the title suggests, this mistress of the millennial zeitgeist may not be quite done with them yet.  I can't be the only tear-drenched fan who wants to know:  where will the five of them spend Christmas?  Or even more intriguingly, who will end up with who?

Nobody when they’re rejected believes it’s really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction – which even makes sense from the evolutionary perspective – is simply the strongest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing. 

Happy Mother's Day, Dorothea!

Not to be maudlin, but I haven't been able to send a Mother's Day card since 1974.  And with one exception, I can't think of anyone in my peer group who still can.  So meeting Susan and Dorothea, her 97-year-old mother yesterday at the Ann Norton Sculpture Garden in West Palm Beach was kinda special.  

Dorothea lived on her own until February; Susan had flown in from California to celebrate the occasion for the 72nd time with her mom.  Wow!  When I asked Dorothea if this was her first visit, she replied "Yes,  My husband always wanted to come.  But then he died," she said wistfully.  Aging singly has its advantages.

"Do you know who's also named Dorothea?" I asked. I'm not sure she heard me but Susan, a nurse, wanted to know. "Dorothea Brooke," from Middlemarch. "Oh my god, that was my favorite book when I was a girl! Should I read it again?" "Absolutely!" I replied.

Gateway 1 (1972-74)

Thom, who lost his mother while we were traveling in Africa, marveled at Dorothea, too. "Her hair, her nails, the jewelry--she's perfectly done up!" "Vanity is the last thing to go before appetite," I replied. Ever courtly, he also helped Dorothea, who had broken her hip in a recent fall, get out of the museum and into her car.  

Coquina, a sedimentary building material mined from shell deposits off the coast of eastern Florida, covers the terrace and many of the winding paths with grace notes of moss.   

The grounds also include Ann Norton's home and studio.  Born in Selma, AL, Ann Weaver married the founder of the nearby Norton Museum of Art well into her career, when she was 40 and he was a 70-year-old widower.  He died five years later, leaving her the property and an income that would allow her the freedom to create the tucked-away sculpture garden that has become her unusual and underappreciated legacy.

The sculpture garden hosts works by four other artists every year to keep things fresh.  We were lucky enough to catch the Alex Katz exhibit.  Like Dorothea, he's still going strong at the same age.

Norton's studio is just as she left it upon her death in 1982.  She's buried in Live Oak Cemetery which, when I visited last summer, did not include her on the list of notable grave sites.  Shame on them--again!

I'm assuming this is a study for "Seven Beings," perhaps her finest work.

Scaffolding made it possible for Norton, barely five feet tall herself, to sculpt the gender-nonspecific figures in three groups from pink Norwegian granite.  Completed in 1965, "Seven Beings" is the earliest example of Norton's "monumental" phase, influenced by her travels to Utah (materials) and the Far East (spiritual themes).

(partial view)

Much of her oeuvre also can be described as immobile, a factor which likely makes Norton less well known than she might otherwise be outside the Palm Beach area, or why none of these pieces are included in the sculpture garden at the Norton Museum, just a few blocks away.

Gateway 5 (1977)

Gateway to Knowledge (1983-84)

Untitled Horizontal Sculpture (1979)

There's also an orchid house

. . . and a cobwebbed grotto.  Next time we'll bring a bottle of wine and a picnic lunch!

David H. Souter (1939-2025)

David H. Souter by Paul Davis (National Portrait Gallery, 1990)

David H. Souter, who could trace his history back to the Mayflower, loved America.

No one who has Boston needs Paris.

David H. Souter cited legal precedent in two of his most significant opinions, voting with the Supreme Court majority in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld a woman's right to abortion in 1992, and dissenting from the 2000 decision in Bush v Gore that ended a recount of the popular vote in Florida to install the Republican nominee as president by judicial fiat.

David H. Souter chose his retirement date strategically, submitting his resignation from the Supreme Court at the age of 69 only after the election of President Barack Obama to prevent the appointment of another conservative by the son of the man who appointed him.

David H. Souter valued his privacy and kept his mouth shut.

David H. Souter was an optimist.

History provides an antidote to cynicism about the past.

If the robes of Supreme Court justices were numbered, I would wear 105 to honor David H. Souter.

More People I Loved:

David Hockney

Robert Duvall

Catherine O'Hara

David R. Slavitt

Sly Stone

Pope Francis

Marianne Faithfull

David Lynch

Earl Holliman

Gena Rowlands

Shelley Duvall

Roger Corman

Faith Ringgold

Richard Serra

Alexei Navalny

Pee Wee Herman

Glenda Jackson

George Maharis

Tina Turner

Burt Bacharach

Angela Lansbury

Queen Elizabeth II

Sidney Poitier

Joan Didion

Stephen Sondheim

Edward Albee

Muhammad Ali

David Bowie

Our Evenings (5*)

Alan Hollinghurst clearly didn't get the memo instructing old white men to avoid first-person narratives about people of color.  It's a good thing, because Our Evenings is a spellbinding feat of projection that neatly manages to convey how sensibility can matter as much as race and class in the grand scheme of things.

I've been a Hollinghurst stan since the very beginning.  We're just nine months apart in age which means we've been influenced by the same world events and have benefitted from greater tolerance of homosexuality.  In some respects, Hollinghurst owes the success of his career--and his Booker Prize--to the latter, although it would have been interesting to see if sublimation of his gay themes might have brought him a wider audience as it did for writers like Henry James,  E.M. Forster, Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee.

Dave, the product of a brief and mysterious liaison between a Burmese man and his British secretary, narrates Our Evenings which is as much about him as his beloved mother, an upwardly mobile dressmaker.  He discovers they have more in common that either first thinks when he's forced to piss out of the window of her business partner's posh home, which has just become his own.

When the novel begins, Dave is a young scholarship student visiting the country home of his patron, Mark Hadlow, a member of the British establishment as interested in art and good works as he is in making money and spawning evil.  Hadlow also happens to be the father of Dave's classmate, Giles, a bully who, in the novel's only shortcoming, functions more as a specter of reactionary politics than a flesh and blood character.  Dave thwarts Giles's schoolboy advances by locking his guest room door, a move that appears to incite decades of enmity as Giles becomes a powerful minister with a helicopter he uses for highly audible payback.

Hollinghurst gradually reveals Dave's biracial heritage through the mostly less-than-enlightened reactions of other characters, including Giles's grandmother, a French actress of a certain age and some repute.  Witness to the young man's thespian talents during an impromptu at-home rehearsal, Elise bluntly assesses his future as an actor:

‘If you have the gift,’ she said, ‘you can do anything. But it will be difficult for you.’ She gave me the pondering stare of someone needing to be frank as well as supportive. ‘Not because of your talent, but because of how people see you. I can tell you, I have worked with…I’ve worked with all sorts of people, Algerians, for instance, and with the most fascinating Indian actors. It’s not easy for them. Well, in India, of course, they make their own films, but in France, and in England, these actors by and large have to play what we call the mauvais rôles…you understand?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Or of course you can do radio.’

Elise is almost right. Dave soon finds work playing ethnic roles on the telly, and his often nude performances with an avant garde theatre company lead to an offer from the Royal Shakespeare Company where he barely lasts a season.  He does not, however, become embittered and remains mostly incurious about his father's background because he considers himself as English as any of his peers. Look no further than his spot-on impersonations of British stereotypes like Jeeves--made even funnier by his skin color--for evidence. All the world's a stage for Dave.  

Dave also finds love several times, first with a crush on a boundary-adhering English teacher at Bampton, the public school he and Giles attend.  Mr. Hudson supervises the Record Club and takes a special interest in Dave, perhaps for his exoticism.  They spend hours together alone, chastely dissecting the beauty of classical music. A lovely piece by Leoš Janáček, a Czech composer, gives the novel its name and much later, its raison d'etre when Dave muses how satisfying the time he has spent with other men, off-stage, has been:

When we first met, the phrase was our term for the teasingly rationed three or four times a week we saw each other, both of us still wary at having found so exactly what we wanted. Then the caution seemed absurd and the evenings joined up into one unguarded time together.

Hollinghurst similarly uses pop music to nail the Swinging Sixties when free love could be mistaken for homosexuality.  Here's Dave pondering his unrequited love for a gay-friendly classmate at Oxford with whom he spends the night after getting high and listening to Cream's Disraeli Gears, track-by-track.

It was hard to see exactly where we were treading. My confusion in the shadowy time-lapse of thought and action, being truly stoned, as Nick said, muffled the dismay of rejection. It was somehow as if we’d had an affair, broken up and agreed to remain the best of friends, all in four minutes. In a few more seconds we might decide to get together again.

Once Nick gently rejects Dave, he encourages him to pursue his acting--which a critic for The Times has lauded for its "tireless brilliance"--as a sort of consolation prize for choking during his final exams at Oxford.

I said, ‘Have you noticed I don’t look much like, say, Alan Bates?’ and smiled, to soften my sharp tone. Sometimes Nick’s absolute unconsciousness of my appearance, my difference, a sort of ethical beauty in him, seemed to verge on a blander disregard for the whole problem.

Yet "a blander disregard for the whole problem" (i.e. white privilege in a nutshell), is better than the political alternative, which rears its ugly, ugly head by the novel's shattering end. Although Dave never makes racism the central issue of his life, the pandemic unleashes random forces that return it to the forefront.  Giles, who once characterized his house guest and school mate as "a brown bastard" finally wins the struggle for dominance that he began half a century earlier, in the shadow of colonialism.

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," as Elise might have said.