Monthly Archives: January 2016

Pit of Winter, and No Place to Toboggan

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According to online sources, the temperature outside as I post is zero degrees Fahrenheit, with small negative numbers expected in the near future. Tomorrow will see highs in the positive single digits. So here we are, in the pit of winter.

Twenty-eight Januaries ago I was tramping around at one of the Du Page County Forest Preserves, maybe Blackwell Forest Preserve in Warrenville. I used drive out from the city periodically to visit a friend in Warrenville, usually on a Saturday. During the warm months, I’d help him tend his large garden, receiving a share of the produce.

In the winter, I forget what we did, besides watch videos and — on January 23, 1988 — visit a snow-covered forest preserve as the snow fell. I had my camera, and it was during a period when I was taking black-and-white pictures. We happened across a closed toboggan run.

Du Page County Jan 1988I can’t pin it down now, or rather don’t want to spend much time at it, but I’m fairly certain that the local forest preserves closed their handful of toboggan runs sometime not long before I took the picture. Probably it was the expense, or the liability, or both.

Africa-Dzonga 5c

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One of my small-change-of-the-world coins has words in the Khoisan language on it. That, I’ve discovered, is a modern umbrella term for the peoples once known as the Bushmen and the Hottentots, and their languages. The words on the coin are rendered ǃKE E: ǀXARRA ǁKE, but don’t ask me how that’s pronounced. The English translation is, “diverse people unite.”

That’s the motto found on the South African coat of arms, which happens to be on the observe of the 2003 South African 5-cent piece that I have. A lot of recent SA coinage features the coat of arms, which was adopted by the post-Apartheid government in 2000.

The coat of arms also includes ears of wheat, elephant tusks, a shield, two human figures, a spear and a knobkierie. Over all that is a secretary bird and a rising sun. Around the coat of arms is Africa-Dzonga, which is “South Africa” in Tsonga, one of the 11 official languages of the country.
SAfrica5cOBVApparently the languages take turns each year on the coinage, beginning in 2002. Tsonga’s turn happened to come the next year, at least on the 5-cent pieces (it seems to be different on other denominations).

The reverse of the coin is simpler: a blue crane and the value.
SAfrica5cREVMinting of the copper-plated steel 5-cent piece stopped in 2012, a victim of inflation, but the coins weren’t demonetized, so it’s still technically worth about three-tenths of US cent. The 1- and 2-cent pieces were discontinued ten years earlier.

Manto Mavrogenous, Face on the 2-Drachma Coin

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Among many other things, coinage is (or can be) educational. Take Manto Mavrogenous (Μαντώ Μαυρογένους), for instance. Until recently I didn’t know who that was. Then I acquired a demonetized 2-drachma piece, which has her portrait on it, so I had to find out more. I still don’t know that much — it would take more digging than I want to spend on the matter right now — but I learned some some basics, from the likes of this site and this one.

Such as that she participated in an important way in the Greek War of Independence, especially by outfitting rebel forces at her own expense, and encouraging other wealthy Europeans to support the cause. Apparently she was the subject of a Greek movie in 1971, but her story cries out for a big-budget biopic in our time, with a few changes, of course. It’s one thing for her to be Demetrios Ypsilantis’ lover, but the script can also spice things up with a love triangle that involves Lord Byron as well, played by some handsome English actor. Did she ever really meet Lord Byron? Details, details.

The Hellenic Republic thought enough of her to put her on the 2 drachma coin from 1988 to 2001, which was retired when the country traded for euros (and a peck o’ trouble).
2 drachma2 drachmaIt’s a nice little coin, and unlike many copper-plated coins of recent vintage, such as the U.S. cent since 1982, it’s actually copper. The nautical design on the obverse (at least, I think it’s the observe) makes sense in the context of Manto Mavrogenous’ contributions to kicking Ottoman butt, a good bit of which involved raising and paying for ships to fight near Mykonos.

Falkland Islands Penny

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Not long ago I came into possession of a Falkland Islands penny. I wish I could say that it’s worth a lot, but the currency is pegged to the pound sterling — and probably minted in the UK — that would put it at about US 1.44 cents. A proof issue might be worth more, but mine isn’t a proof, and technically not even uncirculated, though it’s pretty shiny.

The coin is copper-plated steel. This particular design was issued in 1998 and ’99, as engraved by Arnold Machin (1911-1999). If you’ve handled a British coin or stamp made during the latter half of the 20th century, he likely had something to do with it. The Falklands coins seem to have been among his last works (he did most of the other denominations, too).

Naturally the observe features Queen Elizabeth.

FIpennyObvThe reverse sports a pair of gentoo penguins and their egg.

FIpennyRevThat seems fitting, though there ought to be a suitable motto as well. Something like, THEY’RE OURS, BUGGER OFF.

Another Year, Another Tree

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Notes on taking down the Christmas tree, which I did yesterday, because the village comes to collect dry trees in my neighborhood on early January Mondays. First, no one wants to help. Other members of the household don’t mind putting on decorations, but no one cares much for taking them off. No surprise there.

Once unadorned, the tree goes from its month-long position in the living room, around a left turn into the “foyer,” then out the front door. From there it’s a direct line to the edge of the street, where it sits with the regular trash and recyclables.

Also unsurprisingly, the tree leaves a thick path of pine needles in its wake. These are mostly vacuumed or swept up before long, but it will be days or weeks before the last visible needles disappear, and others hide for months or longer. There are probably a needle or two from ’00s trees behind some of the larger pieces of furniture several feet from where any Christmas tree ever stood or passed by on its way out.

Also, there’s always one bit of decoration — not counting the icicles — inadvertently left on the tree, which then falls off on the way outside. It doesn’t matter how thoroughly you examine the bare, dry tree. Sometimes I’ve taken a flashlight and shined it on interior branches, though I didn’t do that this year.

Doesn’t matter. There’s always something clinging to the bitter end, and so it was this year. But it was one of the uglier decorations, a plastic Santa. It could have vanished and I’d never have missed it. I found it just outside the front door.

One year I found a small wooden decoration in the snow out where the tree sat, waiting to be hauled away. I wouldn’t have missed it either. Why hang such forgettable items on the tree at all? That’s a question for another day, one in December, about the informal aesthetics of your tree.

Alabama Weekend ’87

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Winter has asserted itself after a namby-pamby early phase. It reached about 40 degrees F on Saturday. Now, according to weather data available instantly online — another small marvel of the age — it’s about 3 degrees F. Tomorrow will be likewise gelid.

In early 1987, I was offered a job in Chicago, which I took. The second weekend of the year, I took a final road trip from Nashville, to see a friend in Alabama.

January 9, 1987

After lunch at Mary’s barbecue [still in business] and wrapping up bits of work during the afternoon, Mike and I left town in my car. It was cold and rainy all the way into Alabama. Ate dinner in Huntsville, some surprisingly good Mexican food [I didn’t note the name]. Stopped along the way a number of times for Mike to smoke his cigarettes. We met Dan at 11:30 pm at the Huddle House off I-20 in Anniston, and from there followed him to his place.

Dan and Susan have rented a modern log cabin in rural Alabama way the hell from anything (this weekend, Susan was away, so it was just the three of us). Two stories, a basement, a pond and a cat. Very pleasant. Before going to sleep, we drank beer and watched some ’30s and ’40s cartoons on tape.

Two kids knocked on the door — 16 or 17 from the looks of them — claiming they’d run their car into a ditch and wanting to use the phone. After some deliberation, we decided that they had run their car into a ditch during a drunken episode. It took them a good while to decide who to call. Then they asked for some of our beer and were angry when we refused, but did nothing more than leave. I’d hate to go through life as stupid as those two.

January 10

We ate and played games and watched movies on video. Actually only one movie all the way through, Rambo (Rambo: First Blood Part II), which of course we’d all heard of, but none of us had seen. We also watched parts of The Battleship Potemkin and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. [For variety, I guess.] Games: Trivial Pursuit, darts, and Risk. Dan won Risk, but it was a close one. At one point I lorded over the Americas and had footholds in Europe and Asia, but a weak point was exploited and my forces crumpled like an aluminum can.

January 11

Sunday we left at a reasonable hour (11) and drove to Atlanta. We met Layne and her co-worker Shelly, a transplant from Pennsylvania with big eyes, at the Sheraton Northlake. Had lunch at Athens Pizza, which I’d been to on a previous visit. The first place I’d ever had feta cheese pizza. A fine lunch. [I’m glad to learn that Athens Pizza is still around.] But we didn’t stay much longer, driving back to Nashville in the afternoon.

Liebling for the New Year

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On January 1, I picked up A.J. Liebling’s Between Meals, subtitled “An Appetite for Paris,” which is a 1959 collection of essays about his eating experiences in that city and other parts of France, which were vast and diverse, beginning in the 1920s. It’s an immensely charming work, not just about the food and drink he encountered, but also with bits about other gastronomes, life as an expat, technically as a student in Paris, boxing — he wrote a lot about that elsewhere — and other asides.

It’s a somewhat different expat-Paris-in-the-20s than Hemingway’s. For Liebling, eating and drinking were the point, and not just in the context of hanging out with other expats (Liebling seemed to eat alone a lot). Hemingway drank a lot, of course, because That’s What Men Do, but for Liebling his “feeding” — his term — was purely aesthetic. In France he found a lifelong devotion to being a gastronome, and by the time he died in 1963, at 59, it had made him very fat.

I doubt that he regretted it. In Between Meals he writes: “Mens sano in corpore sano is a contradiction in terms, the fantasy of a Mr. Have-your-cake-and-eat-it. No sane man can afford to dispense with the debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane. Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drinking water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted.”

You’d thinking eating to excess in Jazz Age Paris would be enough for any man, but Liebling asserts that Belle Époque gastronomes had it better: “In the heroic age before the First World War, there were men and women who ate, in addition to a whacking lunch and a glorious dinner, a voluminous souper after the theater or the other amusements of the evening. I have known some of the survivors, octogenarians of unblemished appetite and unfailing good humor — spry, wry, and free of the ulcers that come from worrying about a balanced diet….

“One of the last of the great round-the-clock gastronomes of France was Yves Mirande, a small, merry author of farces and musical comedy books [1875-1957]. In 1955… Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Borbeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot — and, of course, a fine civet made from marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the young leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne…”

Liebling also touched on another puzzling phenomenon, in the context of eating, but which applies to other things. Namely, why wealth often seems to narrow, rather than broaden, experience: “A man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed to be a dilettante at table. This is not because all millionaires are stupid but because they are not impelled to experiment. In learning to eat, as in psychoanalysis, the customer, in order to profit, must be sensible of the cost.”

Church, Funicular, Incinerator

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Yuriko’s been back from Japan since Saturday. Among other places she visited there was the Church of the Light, which has stood in Ibaraki in Osaka Prefecture since 1989.
Church of the LightThat’s the interior, which receives light from a cross of a gap in its thick concrete walls. Architectural autodidact Tadao Ando designed the church. Most of his work until around 2000 was in Japan, but lately he’s been doing international commissions, such as the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2002).

Yuriko reports that it’s a remarkable space, considering that it’s essentially a concrete cube. Or a set of cubes; it’s a little hard to tell, even after reading about the structure. More about it — including a lot of pictures — is at Mooponto, “the only web magazine devoted to japanese minimalist architecture.”

I had a brief selfish reaction to hearing about the church. Why didn’t I visit it when I lived (relatively) nearby? I thought about that a while, and maybe I remember hearing about it, but also that the parishioners discouraged casual visitors. They still do, but you can make a reservation to visit.

Here’s another thing I’ll do if I ever visit the Osaka area again: ride the Otokoyama Cable Line funicular. Because one thing we all should do in this life is ride funiculars.
Otokoyama funicularAlso called the Cable Line of the Keihan Electric Railway, it takes visitors up to Iwashimizu Shrine in Yawata, Kyoto. Yuriko went ahead of New Year’s. Somehow or other I’ve never heard of the line or the shrine. A shrine of some sort has been on the site since the Heian period (9th century) and the funicular’s been around since 1926, so I’ve got no excuse.

Another place in the Kansai that I want to see someday is the Maishima Incineration Plant in Osaka. I missed it when I lived there because it didn’t exist until the late 1990s. A few years ago I saw a photo of it and thought, what in the world? That’s in Osaka? Yep. Some photos and a bit about the place and the Austrian architect who designed it are here.

The Greeks: From Agamemnon to Alexander the Great

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I’m not sure if it counts as a megashow, but the touring exhibit called The Greeks: From Agamemnon to Alexander the Great now at the Field Museum seems like a fairly big deal among museum shows. For one thing, it’s sizable enough, featuring a large assortment of sculpture, tools, vessels, jewelry, weapons, helmets, and more.

“Presented in chronological order, the exhibition begins with the Neolithic Period, around 6000 BC, and continues until the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, marking the end of the Classical period,” the Field Museum says. “Highlights of the exhibition include artifacts from the tombs of the first rulers of Mycenae… a burial that depicts the ritual of burial and sacrifice in a funeral pyre described by Homer in the Iliad, a replicated Illyrian warrior helmet that visitors may try on, grave goods from the tomb of Philip II, and inscribed pieces of pottery (ostraka) that were used to ostracize even the most powerful leaders of Classical Greek society.”

But the show’s main distinction is that its artifacts come from no fewer than 20 Greek museums, and some of them haven’t ever been exhibited outside of Greece. Such as this fellow.
Not AgamemnonBecause my misspent youth didn’t include a visit to Greece, I’d never seen this object in person, though I’ve seen the image reproduced enough to be familiar with it. At once I thought Agamemnon. I wasn’t the first person to think of that, of course.

“Displayed here for the first time outside of Greece, this is the gold mask that Schliemann first associated with Agamemnon,” the sign near the artifact said. “It was placed over the face of a person who died in his or her thirties. Although the deceased was certainly not Agamemnon — assuming that Agamemnon ever existed — he or she could have been one of his ancestors and was undoubtedly a powerful Mycenaean ruler. Mycenae, Circle A, Grave V, second half of the 16th century BCE. National Archaeological Museum, Athens.”

Google “mask of Agememnon” or the like, and you’re get this image, not the mask above. That’s because Schliemann later dug up another mask — the one Google pulls up — that he more famously associated with Agamemnon. The second mask wasn’t part of the exhibition, but there was an artful 19th-century replica of it on display.

Other familiar faces populated the exhibit. That is, sculptures I’d seen reproduced in books or elsewhere. Such as Homer (a Roman copy of a Greek work, exact time of creation unknown).

D'oh!Then there’s this unnamed lad with an Archaic smile. In fact, he seems pretty happy, considering that part of his penis is missing.

Smile, damn you, smileHere’s Aristotle (another Roman copy). I’m pretty sure this very image was depicted on a collection of his works that I have somewhere.

AristotleAnd Alexander.

Looks like Jim MorrisonThe bust is a Greek original, created in Pella. Am I the only one who thinks Jim Morrison resembles this Alexander? Anyway, the busts of Homer and Aristotle are from the National Archaeological Museum, while the famed face of Alexander is usually found at the Archaeological Museum of Pella (open only since 2009).

The exhibit will be in Chicago until April, and then go to the National Geographic Society Museum in DC for its last stop. Previously, it traveled to Ottawa and Montreal. The Greeks pointedly decided not to send the trove to anywhere in the UK, such as the British Museum or even the Victoria and Alberta. Still some bad feelings over the Elgin Marbles, it seems.

New Year’s Eve at the Field Museum

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On the last day of 2015, Ann and I went to the Field Museum. It had been a while since I’d been there (maybe this long ago), though she told me she’d visited with a school group in the not-too-distant past. It was a cold, gray day, just the time for an indoor diversion.

Note to the CTA: how is it that a bus (No. 130) directly from Union Station and Northwestern Station to the Museum Campus — home of the Field Museum, but also the Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium — runs only in the summer? Isn’t that backwards? Summer’s the time to cover all or part of the distance on foot. In winter it’s good to have transit. Never mind, we walked to State Street and caught the No. 146, arriving at the museum not long after noon.

Field Museum Dec 31, 2015We saw some of time-honored exhibits at the Field, such as Sue the T. Rex. People sure are fond of taking its picture.
Field MuseumNot very many people were down in the basement looking at the Man-Eater of Mfuwe, but there it was, behind glass.
Field Museum“This cat terrorized Zambia’s Luangwa River Valley — near Msoro Monty’s [a 1920s man-eater] old stamping grounds — in 1991,” notes the Smithsonian. “After killing at least six people, the lion strutted through the center of a village, reportedly carrying a laundry bag that had belonged to one of his victims. A California man on safari, after waiting in a hunting blind for 20 nights, later shot and killed him.” Unlike Cecil the Lion, there was no international outrage over that.

The Field Museum also has a nice collection of Pacific Northwest house posts.
Field MuseumNot quite the selection that the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver has, but impressive. We were among the few in the hall looking at them.

I was also glad to see that the Field is preparing to exhibit pieces of the Chelyabinsk meteorite. According to a sign, the Field has “one of the largest collections of the Chelyabinsk meteorite in the Western Hemisphere.” (I wonder what the Church of the Chelyabinsk Meteorite thinks of that, if there really is such a group.)

None of that is why I wanted to visit the Field. Instead it was a rare occasion when I was willing to pay extra to see a special show. Namely, “The Greeks: Agamemnon to Alexander the Great.” It was worth it. More on that shortly.