The Seven Wonders, Overheard

Posted on April 7, 2016 by admin

Today I overheard another conversation, this time in line in an ordinary store in the ordinary suburb I call home. A man and a boy were taking, father and son, I assume. They too were about as ordinary as could be, both wearing sports logo shirts (Backhawks and Cubs).

“There was the Great Pyramid,” the father said.

“And the lighthouse and statue of Zeus,” the son said.

“Yes, and the mausoleum and the hanging garden and the lighthouse, and what else?”

“I already said the lighthouse.”

“Right. Now let’s see…”

They were talking about the Seven Wonders of the World. Maybe the boy, about 10, had been studying them, though I’d be hard-pressed to imagine they come up in school any more. Or in living memory. I didn’t learn about them in school. Maybe the boy had his own interest in them, or maybe the father did. Anyway, it isn’t something you overhear in line every day. Or ever. Until now. It made me smile, though I didn’t say anything.

I’m reminded of them time when some friends and I were in line to see a movie in Nashville, ca. 1986, and somehow the subject of the Frisian languages came up, including the notion that Frisian is as close to English as any language is, without actually being English. We’d heard that was the opinion among linguists.

A fellow behind us in line — this was at the movie theater at Vanderbilt — was visibly astonished. He felt he had to speak up, apparently, and he asked us how we’d heard about Frisian. He was from the Frisian Islands, he said, though at school at VU.

I don’t remember what we told him. I’d heard of Frisian somewhere before, maybe first in my American Heritage College Dictionary, which has a fine family tree diagram of Indo-European languages, with Frisian on it as a close cousin to English. No doubt he’d resigned himself to not bothering to tell Americans he was from the Frisians, but rather from the Netherlands or Germany.

See You Later, Alligator

Posted on April 6, 2016 by admin

While walking the dog during the most recent warm day — a few days ago now — I passed a knot of grade-school kids and their bicycles across the street. I didn’t pay them much attention, but after I’d passed by, I clearly heard one of the boys say, directed at one or more of the others, “See you later, alligator! After a while, crocodile!”

People still say that? Kids still do? It sounded old even when I was young, though I can’t say I heard it much. Later I heard the mid-50s song of that name, recorded by Bill Haley, which seems to have popularized the phrase, but not invented it.

I’d always imagined it was from the ’20s. It sounds like it belongs in the same league as the bees’ knees or 23 skidoo or the like, but after looking around a little, its exact origin and timing remain elusive. One source speculates it started with Swing devotees of the late ’30s, which is plausible, but who knows?

On the other hand, I do know that the phrase lives on in the 2010s. Maybe some celebrity who appeals to kids is saying it now.

Wisconsin, Home of Funny Hats

Posted on April 5, 2016 by admin

Various presidential candidates have been stumping just north of here recently, and when I opened Google News this morning, a Washington Post item, complete with Mars Cheese Castle photo, was prominent. I’ve never seen the junior Senator from Texas in person, but I have seen that cheesehead mouse.

The Senator reportedly declined to wear a cheesehead. Wearegreenbay.com quoted him as saying “there is an ironclad rule of politics which is no funny hats… And any hat is by definition defined as a funny hat.”

This from the man who wants to (ultimately) be in charge of the Bureau of Funny Hats, which is part of the Commerce Department, along with the Silly Walks Administration. I don’t think Ronald Reagan was afraid to wear funny hats.

The Manliest Vegetable

Posted on April 4, 2016 by admin

Today was one of the days that should be warm, but isn’t. Winter doesn’t want to let go. It even snowed a little, with cold rain predicted for the rest of the week. Bah.

I don’t have what it takes to be a drinking man, but I did visit a large liquor store not long ago, along with my brother Jay. That’s where I learned that potatoes are the manliest of all vegetables. Who knew? That’s a promotion for the humble spud, I think. Jay documented the evidence with his phone.
Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits imports the vodka into the United States, and its web site says: “Luksusowa Vodka (pronounced LOOK-SOO-SO-VAH) was created in 1928 in Poland. Luksusowa means ‘Luxurious’ in Polish… A smooth, rich, high-quality imported vodka that beats the competition in terms of flavor, mouthfeel & price.”

Mouthfeel? I’ve never heard of that before, but it’s one of those words that instantly explains itself.

Miyajima (Itsukushima) During Cherry Blossom Season

Posted on April 3, 2016 by admin

Here in northern Illinois, the grass is greening, small buds are budding and birds are making more noise. A few new-generation insects are in view. It’s even warm and sunny on some days, such as today, which followed a miserable, dank, cold Saturday. Such is the seasonal seesaw.

As this map and chart explain, early April is peak cherry blossom season in the Kansai and a few other parts of Japan. That’s when I saw the blossoms in Kyoto — the first year I was there — plus in parts of Osaka, including the crowded National Mint grounds but also the little-known but strikingly beautiful Osaka Gogoku Shrine in Suminoe Ward (which everyone simply called Suminoe Shrine).

In early April 1993, we went to Hiroshima for a weekend, and visited Miyajima (宮島), an island in the Inland Sea near the city. Formally called Itsukushima (厳島), it’s home to a Shinto shrine complex and best known for its monumental torii out in the water, which happened to be behind scaffolding when were were there.

Fortunately, the cherry blossoms were in full, unencumbered view. Temple deer were around, too.

I didn’t know until recently that Itsukushima is a World Heritage Site, put on the list after we were there, in 1996. UNESCO notes: “The present shrine dates from the 12th century and the harmoniously arranged buildings reveal great artistic and technical skill. The shrine plays on the contrasts in colour and form between mountains and sea and illustrates the Japanese concept of scenic beauty, which combines nature and human creativity.”

The Force Awakens

Posted on March 31, 2016 by admin

We went to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens recently, since I’m not the sort who rushes out to see the newest thing in the theaters, though that did happen with the first movie of the series those long summers ago (more than a dozen of us went together; it was an event). On the whole, the most recent yarn had everything it needed to: sympathetic characters, old and new, lots of action, lots of spaceships and exotic sets, lots of improbabilities and coincidences, lots of homages — many homages to the original movies, some simply visual, others in bits of dialogue — and so on. My favorite homage was the discussion of throwing a captured First Order minion into a trash chute, though you don’t actually see the heroes do it.

All in all, worth second-run prices. Some quibbles: Interestingly, Finn said that his bad-guy job was in sanitation, which set up the homage to the trash chute. Certainly a necessary function, but if so, why was he part of the death squad detail at the beginning of the movie? Do all of the storm troopers rotate into death squads now and then, just to keep them murderous? If so, why are they such lousy shots?

Why is the armed force defending the presumably re-established Republic called the Resistance? Sure, resistance has a noble undertone, but it implies trying to overthrow tyranny, not protect a government. Shouldn’t it have been the Galactic Force or the Republic Defenders or the like? (Or the Force Force?) Guess the Republican Guard wouldn’t work, the Iranians having taken that one.

And how is it that the Jedi were so thin on the ground that the retirement of just one of them, namely Luke Skywalker, shut down the whole enterprise? Weren’t there others? You know, a second string? Maybe these things are explained in the expanded universe, but I’m grown man. I refuse to have anything to do with that.

Also, I wonder just how much dough Mark Hamill got paid, along with top billing, to stand there for a few seconds and look old? Maybe that sum is a balm for his, shall we say, not-as-stellar-as-Harrison Ford’s career. By contrast Ford had a meaty-ish part in the latest movie, but then again he clearly signed up only for this one, unless there’s some movie resurrection magic ahead for Han Solo.

The supreme bad guy was malformed and ugly, or at least his hologram/projection/whatever of him was. But of course. Ugly = Evil. As I wrote a good many years ago, when I was busy ignoring one of the prequels, I pictured the unseen evil emperor in the first movie as “a handsome yet ruthless tyrant, a spellbinding demagogue, a despot who made the hyperdrive trains run on time, and who had an intensely loyal following in parts of the galaxy that got public works contracts. But no. He turned out to be a drooling, hissing, ugly fellow who ruled by channeling the Dark Side, rather than bread and circuses (and maybe a gulag).

“Better still would have been a despotic Emperor with some virtues, someone who offered peace to a Republic torn by civil war, someone along the lines of Augustus. In that case, the rebel alliance might still be fighting for freedom, but with less purity of motive — and willing to blow up a planet or two itself…”

Christopher Orr in the Atlantic did a reasonably good review of the movie, except for this line toward the end: “The original Star Wars was in almost every way an original, a movie that forever changed filmmaking for both good and ill.” Maybe original if you were 10, as he was.

But it was fully known and commented upon at the time that, aside from the remarkable special effects, very little about the first movie was original, and not just in the sense that all Hero With a Thousand Faces on a Journey of a Thousand Leagues stories tap into archetypes. Still, that didn’t make the first movie any less enjoyable or important in the history of summer blockbusters. Obviously the thing struck a chord. I remember reports of people going to see the first one many, many times. Then again, people also went to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show many, many times. That struck a somewhat different chord, I figure.

The Next Generation

Posted on March 30, 2016 by admin

Best wishes and congratulations to my nephew Sam and his wife Emily, who are expecting their first child in October. Another Stribling in the world, huzzah.

I doubt that Sam will mind me borrowing his drawing for the occasion, posted recently on Facebook. He and Emily are both architects, practicing in Dallas. He’s always had a talent for drawing.

This makes me a great-uncle. As far as I can tell, a great-uncle’s main role is to appear now and then and look scary old to the child. At least, that’s what my grandmother’s brother, Uncle Ralph (d. 1971), looked like to me. Well, not too scary, except for the fact that he was confined to a wheelchair and had only one functioning eye, conditions I hope to avoid. But you never know.

The Krannert Art Museum

Posted on March 29, 2016 by admin

Time to praise university art museums: generally unpretentious, inexpensive and not so large that you can’t have a good look-see in a short time. One of the places Lilly and I visited at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was the Krannert Art Museum, which has ten galleries and art ranging from ancient Egypt and Pre-Columbian to much more recent items.

One so recent that it was created using an iPhone: “A Lexicon of Dusk.”
Over the last six years, a Houston artist named Ruth Robbins took her iPhone out and took pictures at dusk. From these, she made a series of 26 different postcards, copies of which were on a long shelf at the gallery. That’s the artwork.

“Printed as postcards for the viewer to take away — a distributed work of art in line with conceptual art practices — the images show richly colored ambiguous skies and whatever else she happened to have seen at the time: lights low on the horizon, an electricity pole, a snow-covered landscape, an equestrian statue,” the sign near the cards says. “Longitude and latitude coordinates are documented on each image…” That, and an exact date and time when the image was made.

The best part? Postcards are free to take, adds the sign. I took one of each. I’ve already mailed a few.

In the room adjoining the postcard exhibit was an amusing series called “The First and Last of the Modernists,” by Lorraine O’Grady, pairing images of Baudelaire with Michael Jackson.

I’ve had a soft spot for Baudelaire since an entertaining acquaintance of mine recited “Be Drunk” — I think it was this translation — at a party at our house late in my college years, ca. 1982. As for the King of Pop, I can’t claim to be a fan, but I respect his reach. I heard his songs walking down the streets of the 10 European countries I visited in the summer of ’83, even East Germany, but maybe not the Vatican City, and even then I might have heard something from a transistor radio someone was carrying at the Piazza San Pietro.

Another room sported some African art. Not just pre-Scramble works from lost states and misty kingdoms, but more modern items. These are two of a particularly striking series, “Seven Lines From Djwartou” by Yelimane Fall.

I appreciated these visually, not as someone who can read Arabic. The artist-calligrapher hails from Senegal, and is a devotee of one Sheikh Amadou Bamba, founder of the Sufi brotherhood Mourides in that country, and who wrote the poem “Djawartou” in the early 20th century, among many other things.

As the BBC notes, “Senegal’s most powerful men are not politicians, but the leaders of the country’s Islamic Sufi brotherhoods, to which a very large proportion of Senegalese belong, and whose influence pervades every aspect of Senegalese life.”

Seems that the Mourides are a very big deal in their corner of the world and, from what I can tell from a brief look, eschew the poisons of Wahhabism, and stress hard work among their members (work hard, make money, support the sect). And there are enclaves of them elsewhere. According to Religion News, “Their dictum, ‘pray as if you will die tomorrow and work as if you will live for ever,’ has brought the Mourides economic success wherever they have settled. In New York, the Mourides established their own community, Little Senegal, and July 28 has officially been designated Sheikh Amadou Bamba day.”

Remarkable the things that go into making an image on the wall. I never knew any of that. I don’t expect to make a detailed study of Senegal, but it’s good to be reminded that there are whole other worlds here on Earth yet beyond one’s experience.

The University of Illinois During the 2016 Spring Break

Posted on March 28, 2016 by admin

On the afternoon of March 18, Lilly and I drove down to Champaign-Urbana, and on the next day, we took a look at the University of Illinois flagship campus, which happens to sprawl across both of those small towns. Since our visit, Lilly has decided to attend there in the fall. She’d been leaning toward it anyway. We’d only been there once before, briefly, during our return from the Downstate towns of Arthur and Arcola in the spring of 2007. So it was as if we’d never been there before, especially for her.

Spring break had just started at the university. That meant only a handful of students were around, including some who were clearly leaving. On one street on campus, buses were lined up and ready to take students to specifically marked destinations, mostly in the Chicago area. Spring break also meant, happily, that parking was free and easy.

Even so, we spent a lot of time on foot. Without much of a plan: sometimes new places call for the old random walkabout. Lilly will certainly learn all she needs to know about the place and more in the fullness of time. The campus has a lot of fine buildings, especially fronting the Main Quad, and I was especially taken with Foellinger Auditorium and its green dome at one end of that quad, though I didn’t quite get an image of its full domed glory.

The building dates from 1907 and was designed by Clarence H. Blackall, a Boston architect who did a lot of theaters, and if you read a list of them, very many didn’t survive the great age (that is, regrettable age) of knocking down old stuff, whose apogee came in the 1960s. The Foellinger has clearly endured, though I’ve read that it wasn’t up to stuff acoustically at first, and needed a lot more work. We didn’t pop inside for a look. Next time, maybe.

Not far away was the 185-foot McFarland Carillon, which dates only from 2009.
A Missouri firm called Peckham, Guyton, Albers & Viets, which seems to do a lot of higher ed work, designed the tower, which has 49 bells. We noticed bells ringing at half hours and quarter hours, sometimes, but I’m not sure it was the carillon.

Elsewhere we peeked inside the chapel at St. John’s Catholic Newman Center, which is part of a complex that includes Newman Hall and the Institute of Catholic Thought, and is the largest Newman Center in the country, according to Wiki. Dating from 1926, the chapel has a splendid interior. I explained to Lilly that it was named after Cardinal Newman, not Alfred E., but she didn’t know either of them.

Nearby is the Episcopal Chapel of Saint John the Devine, also a part of a campus ministry. I wanted to take a look in there too, but it was closed for the day.

Heading back to our parking space, we encountered one of the many pieces of public art on campus.There was no plaque nearby that I saw, but information is online. It’s full title is “Tree of Life Fantasy: Synopsis of the Book of Questions Concerning the World Order and/or the Order of Worlds,” by Alice Aycock. As we approached it, I figured it might be a massive sundial, as I’ve seen recently, but no.

This description lacquers on the art-ese pretty well, but it does rhetorically ask, “can we not comprehend the sculpture solely as an interesting, if baffling, assemblage of disparate elements?” Yes, we can. Interesting, but in my amateur opinion not baffling, because it’s mainly an interesting assemblage of disparate elements, though I’d say an interesting “combination of shapes,” since disparate is a ten-dollar word best saved for special occasions.

GTT Spring ’16 Leftovers

Posted on March 24, 2016 by admin

A good Easter to all. I’ll post again on Easter Monday.

Not long after posting about the moon tower at 41st and Speedway on Monday, I happened across this vintage image of that tower. The handwriting on the photo asserts that it was the first of the Austin moonlight towers.

Tom and I had occasion to visit a trendy, non-chain coffee house in Austin. Tom said it was trendy, anyway. I noticed the quiet. Everyone was focused on a laptop or hand-held device. No one was talking, even though the joint was full. That’s not an exaggeration.

Did Samuel Pepys and John Dryden keep to themselves at the coffee houses they frequented? Did Washington, Jefferson, or Hamilton stay mum at Merchants Coffee House in Philadelphia? Didn’t the beats yak it up at Greenwich Village coffee houses? There ought to be talk at a coffee house, regardless of how advanced communication tech becomes.

As long as I’m in a judgmental mood, the fellow in the seat next to me on my return flight from Texas was using his iPad during most of the trip to watch golf. The very picture of a Millennial, with the full beard and flannel shirt, he sat there and watched people play golf. Playing golf is one thing, but what’s interesting about watching people play golf on an itty-bitty screen for two hours? My judgmental mood recedes with a shrug; it takes all kinds.

On a hill off US 281 not far from Johnson City, Texas, is the Arc de Texas.
The structure offers lodging — with a patio and pool in back — and a room to taste local wines, as well as Hill Country views from the roof, available to any passerby during normal business hours.
Arc de Texas is part of a larger entity called Lighthouse Hill Ranch, whose acreage offers a number of posh places to stay for the night.

Walking along Main Street in Fredericksburg near the former Nimitz Hotel, you’ll find Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (1885-1966) in bronze. You have to look on YouTube to find the “Chester Nimitz Oriental Garden Waltz” by the Austin Lounge Lizards.

In the George H.W. Bush gallery of the National Museum of Pacific War, you’ll find a painting of a less-expected figure from the history of naval conflict, though completely fitting, in one of the rooms about the buildup to the war: Marshal-Admiral Marquis Tōgō Heihachirō (1848-1934).
As noted before, Texas is important in marketing goods in Texas. Need more evidence?
These eggs were obtained at a San Antonio HEB grocery store.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling