The Paperboys at the Triple Door

We were invited to catch the Paperboys at the Triple Door this Friday night. The Paperboys’ music is a mélange of Celtic, folk, bluegrass and pop. The show? We liked it. The band played a straight set of great music including songs off their latest album The Road to Ellenside like California. There were at least two covers (that we recognized) that were very good: Fragile (Sting) and All Along the Watchtower (Dylan) – listen to that fiddle! I swear I thought they covered Blame Sally’s La Llorona too, but can't be sure.

The venue, the old Embassy Theatre, was great too. We never had been there before. We had a front row “booth” – yes there is dining – and ate some goodies off the Wild Ginger menu before the show started. Cracked coconut martini and ahi tuna bruschetta anyone?

Seattle Art Museum: The Italian Room

We went to the Seattle Art Museum to see the Hopper exhibit and afterwards wandered (by chance) to the Italian Room. We had been there in 2007 just after the museum opened in its new space but had not thought about it since. Suddenly, as we read the information sheet explaining the room, we went “a-ha”.

During our sabbatical we spent the last 10 days in northeast Italy in the Alta Badia region. While there we were struck by both the exterior and interior architecture. One feature in particular that is interesting in the living rooms are the stoves that kept the house warm. These stoves, called stua in the local dialect, are large and you can sit and even sleep around (or on top) of them. We wrote a post describing them.

The “a-ha” moment happened when we read the description of the Italian Room as “The rich warm glow of the wood-paneled room through the doorway beckons you into the northern Lombard town of Chiavenna, where this room was installed in the sixteenth century. Called a stüa in the local dialect, these wood-paneled rooms contained stone or tile-covered stoves around which the family would gather on cold nights.”

Enrico David – Bulbous Marauder

There is a room in the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) featuring an installation by Enrico David, an Italian-born artist based in London. This installation runs from November 8, 2008 to March 15, 2009 and is called Bulbous Marauder. It is part of the SAM Next program that is designed to feature emerging artists from around the world. After the Edward Hopper exhibit, this room drew our attention immediately. It was darkly lit with harlequin-patterned, paper lanterns emitting a beckoning glow. David provided all the works in the room. The theme? We don’t know for sure, but the flyer accompanying the installation probably best summarized it as “…somewhat like stepping down a back alley in Dickens-meets-Lewis Carroll London.” We saw strong elements of Italian design in David’s work. It reminded us of something that you might see at La Biennale and that made us sigh.

The Far Side of the Moon

Photo of the moon and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album cover. 

I was reading an excerpt from Eudora Welty (1909-2001)’s One Writer’s Beginnings in Lapham’s Quarterly (see previous post) and I started thinking about the moon. In the excerpt Welty talks about her misunderstanding about where the moon “rose” and in one story she wrote that the moon rose in the west. 

After reading that I realized that I wasn’t exactly sure I could speak to the mechanics of how the moon rotates around the earth. In particular, I thought the “dark side” of the moon was, well, always dark. You see? The arts can lead you astray because I always think of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and assumed that it is always dark. 

Well, after some schoolin' at Travelmarx headquarters I’m happy to report that the dark side of the moon is not truly always dark and is probably more aptly called the “far side of the moon”. The moon is tidally locked to the earth which means that the same face of the moon always faces the earth. 

And now the tricky part: “A tidally locked body takes just as long to rotate around its own axis as it does to revolve around its partner.” Or, in other words, the moon takes 27.3 days to rotate once on its own axis as well as revolve around the earth. The sticking point for me was squaring the fact that the moon keeps the same face towards earth yet rotates around its axis. You can think of it this way: You are in the middle of a merry-go-round and a friend is facing you at the edge of the merry-go-round. After one complete revolution of the merry-go-round, your friend has made one revolution around you *as well as* one on his own axis. Think about it.

Seattle Art Museum: Edward Hopper's Women

The exhibit Edward Hopper’s Women is at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) from November 13, 2008 – March 1, 2009. A small number of paintings are presented including the famous Chop Suey (1929) pictured above. Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967) was an American painter and printmaker whose work spans 60 years.

The exhibit opens a new window on to the artist beyond the creator of “those” mid-century, nostalgic, film-noir-ish, iconographic views of diners. (Sorry, we can’t help but to mention OMD’s inspired Hopper cover for Crush.) Instead, Hopper’s work becomes more narrative as you learn about him as a person (introverted) and his relentless study of people, especially the modern American women in urban scenes. Part of the key to deciphering Hopper, is understanding his relationship with his wife Josephine. She was the model for most if not all of the women in the paintings, and more importantly, the psychology of their hinted-at cool relationship makes the paintings perhaps a bit more understandable. Aspects of their relationship seem to be played out in the paintings: cool and detached, figures, whether one or more, seem isolated and you the viewer feels voyeuristic.

Through two world wars, the Great Depression, and various art trends not much changed in Hopper’s work. Was that because American life truly didn’t change or Hopper’s interest didn’t?

Lapham’s Quarterly : Ways of Learning

We were shopping the other day in our nearby grocery store and this magazine caught my eye: Lapham’s Quarterly: Ways of Learning. I bought it and am glad I did. The quarterly contains over 200 pieces (often excerpted from larger works) that focus on education and learning. The roster of contributors is varied and includes Plato, Thomas Jefferson, Helen Keller, Leonardo Da Vinci, Confucius and Salvador Dalí to name a few. I wasn't familiar with many of the contributors and that is half the fun: any one of the pieces is a jumping off point for further exploration. The quarterly is worth it, if not to get some exposure to different voices throughout history.

The forward by editor Lewis Lapham lays out the theme of the issue: the state of education past and present as viewed by authors “whose writings have passed the test of time.” The lead off quote by Plutarch states succinctly one of the ways educations could and has gone wrong: “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” While some of the writing gives advice, most of the pieces are stories of individuals in, out, and around the educational system. You the reader are left to draw your own conclusions. One story in particular that demonstrates this is an excerpt by Helen Keller (1880 – 1968): The Story of My Life. In the excerpt Keller describes how her first teacher Anne Sullivan spelled words into her hand (fingerspelling) and the transformative effect that had on her – the naming of things and the fire that kindled in her to then know all the names of things. Keller became deaf, blind, and mute after contracting an illness as an infant.

One theme that arises often in the quarterly is an idea raised in the 1905 essay The Ph.D. Octopus by William James (1842 – 1910): that our educational system often emphasizes the diploma as the best measure of future instructor’s capability, an idea in which James takes issue. In the essay (also included in the quarterly) James tells the story of a man who becomes a professor but didn’t have a Ph.D. and how that caused a bit of a scandal at the time. James advises that we must keep in check the hold of the Ph.D. Octopus upon American life.

The quarterly includes a funny excerpt from Anders Henriksson’s book, Non Campus Mentis, where he assembles “historical” writings from college exams and term papers to create a new kind of history. The essay starts as: “Civilization woozed out of the Nile about 300,000 years ago. The Nile was a river that had some water in it. Every year it would flood and irritate the land.”

For a description of the quarterly in Lapham’s own words, there is an ABC (Australian Broadcast Corporation) interview that is informative.

Pioneer Museum – Imperial Valley

We spent an hour touring the Pioneer Museum of the Imperial Valley. What I learned: 1) The current incarnation of the Salton Sea was formed from a 1905 flood when the Colorado River broke a dike and flooded what was called the Salton Sink. 2) Barbara Worth was a character in the novel The Winning of Barbara Worth by Harold Bell Wright (1872 – 1944). Wright was a resident of the Imperial Valley and has a section in the museum dedicated to him. 3) A sand spike is a natural concretion that they still don’t know for sure how it is formed. (Wave action in Pleistocene sea is one possibility). The spikes seem to be only found in the Imperial Valley and, in particular, around Mt. Signal. 4) After water was first brought to what was called the Colorado Desert in 1901 and now is called the Imperial Valley, people of all nationalities came to the valley to farm. The museum in fact has a large section with small exhibits dedicated to nationalities like French, Japanese, Portuguese, Lebanese, East Indian, Greek, and of course Italian to name a few. Local families of each nationality donated items for the exhibits.

We happened to go with a couple of long time residents of the area so it was interesting to watch their reactions to the museum pointing out so-and-so and getting the back-story .

The Pioneer Museum is located near the Imperial Valley College at 373 East Aten Road on Highway 111 in Imperial, California. There is a small admission fee.

Puerto Nuevo

Puerto Nuevo is a Sea Food and Mexican restaurant in Brawley California (1191 Main St.). On this particular night a very loud 4-piece band (Norteño is my best guess of the style) accompanied an interesting Mexican meal focused on fish. We had a tasty cold, mixed fish appetizer composed of different types of fresh fish mixed with cucumber and avocado. Each of our main plates looked good but I opted for the simple fish tacos which were good.

Update 2011-05-31: This place is now closed and our Imperial Valley hosts say that a number of businesses have come and gone in this location.