Greetings from Redmond

Spent another lovely nostalgic day in Redmond and Seattle, starting with breakfast in our hotel, after which we checked out and brought our things to Daniel's house. From there we drove to Redmond, where we met our former next door neighbors for lunch at Kitanda and a walk on the dock in our old neighborhood; we got to see one of the eagles, a great blue heron, some Canada geese, wood ducks, and grebes. 

Then we met Daniel and Cahaya at Marymoor Park with their huskies, who encountered several other huskies in the dog park. Cahaya had some stops to make on the way home, so we went to Idylwood Park to walk by the beach where we walked almost every day when we lived in Redmond. We also drove past the leaves changing color along West Lake Sammamish Parkway and the new light rail along the highway. 

In the late afternoon we drove to Seattle Center to get dinner at the Armory. Cahaya couldn't get anything she wanted, so she went to find sushi and the rest of us had Mod Pizza, then went to Chihuly Garden and Glass, which is sometimes open to the public at night when there isn't a wedding or special event. We'd never seen the gardens lit up before, and they're just as spectacular in the dark!

Poem for Monday and SAM Impressionists

Comforts of Home 

By Marcela Sulak 

When I buy vegetables I prefer

to be in my country rather than yours

though in my country crescent moon carrots, radish hearts

are not so juicy and fancifully shaped.

But I prefer to find you in a place

your vocabulary carves a secret door

through which I can enter or escape.

Where syntax is not a floodlight on my blinded tongue

negotiating taxis at night.

I prefer to be here, where I don't have to lie,

to say I’m married and my man's

the jealous type. He's with the police,

and my father is the ambassador.

Here I am not a bare field in need of a flag.

Here the way I hold tomatoes, touch a cantaloupe

is just like all the others do

and it is your fingers which are different.

You don't watch me carry my purchases home.

I can stare back. And when I smile

it means whatever I want it to.

-------- 

Monday was a chore day -- laundry, bathrooms, and a Big Project for the month, details of which to be revealed later. We discovered that we had leftover pepper jack soup in the freezer, which we ate for lunch, and we walked to the beach in overcast but not at all cold weather, where today the geese and crows outnumbered the ducks and we saw only one eagle. 

Cheryl and I watched the first three seasons of the new season of The Night Manager together, which I enjoyed a lot; so far it's less violent than the original, it feels acceptably Le Carré to me, and it has two women I like. Now we're watching more All Creatures Great and Small, which I am just as happy is back for another season. Impressionists at the Seattle Art Museum:

 

Under the Lamp by Marie Bracquemond

 

The Water Lily Pond by Claude Monet

 

Spring on West 78th Street, Childe Hassam

 

Apple Trees in Flower by Alfred Sisley

 

Portrait of Alexander J. Cassatt by Mary Cassatt

 

Leon Delafosse by John Singer Sargent

 

The Chess Game by John Singer Sargent, through the glass case of a Louis Comfort Tiffany bowl

Poem for Friday and Venus Is Missing

A Hymn To Venus 

By Sappho 

Translated by Roby Datta 

O thou on broider'd throne, immortal Venus,

Daughter of Jove, wile-weaver, I beseech thee,

Not, not with pains, and not with troubles, weigh thou,

O Queen, my spirit;

But hither come, if ever thou aforetime

That voice of mine with heedful ear from far-off

Didst hear, and, having left thy Father's mansions

All-golden, camest

With chariot yoked; and thou wast drawn by beauteous

And fleeting sparrows, round the earth all-dusky

A-flapping fast their wings, from utmost heaven

Athwart the midmost;

And quickly they arrived; and thou, O blest one,

Thy smile displaying on thy face immortal,

Didst ask, why now again I grieved, and wherefore

Again I call'd thee,

And what I most desired, for me to happen,

With madding spirit. "Now again, what Charmer

Wouldst thou lead forth to be thy love? What person,

O Sappho, wrongs thee?

"For, even tho' one flies, one soon shall follow,

And, if one takes not gifts, one yet shall give them,

And, if one loves thee not, one soon shall love thee,

Howso unwilling."

Come now to me, and loosen me from cruel

Tangle of care, and, whatso to accomplish

My spirit seeks, accomplish; and thyself be

A fellow-fighter.

-------- 

Adam and Haley closed on their new house on Friday! They're moving closer to her parents, since she's teaching classes in Fitchburg and Worcester but not in Boston, and he works remotely so he's fine with moving. My day was not as exciting as theirs -- it involved eggs for lunch, a bunch of phone calls trying to find a new doctor, and various computer stuff, but it didn't rain and the beach had ducks and some cormorants. 

When we got home, we watched the Peach Bowl; I like both Oregon and Indiana, but the latter won easily. Now we're watching the last episode of The Winter King, where a lot of the violence seems to be for violence's sake and not history or storytelling, but I never read the books it's based on so maybe this is Cornwell's fault and not the show's. Here are photos of Venus Is Missing, a one-woman tour de force at the Seattle Art Museum:

Poem for Wednesday and Chihuly Sun

Glass 

By Robert Francis 

Words of a poem should be glass

But glass so simple-subtle its shape

Is nothing but the shape of what it holds.

A glass spun for itself is empty,

Brittle, at best Venetian trinket.

Embossed glass hides the poem of its absence.

Words should be looked through, should be windows.

The best word were invisible.

The poem is the thing the poet thinks.

If the impossible were not,

And if the glass, only the glass,

Could be removed, the poem would remain.

-------- 

I did lots of chatting on Wednesday -- with my high school friends in the morning, the first time in several weeks we all made it onto the call, and with Kristen in the afternoon around watching Turning Red, since we're waiting for Laurie to watch anything longer or more complicated. In between I did some sorting of clothing for a start-of-year donation to Goodwill and a bunch of reconciling checkbook stuff from the end of last year, plus a walk to the lake.

The Masked Singer is back, which I am ridiculously happy about (and happy they started the season with Rita Ora singing "Golden" from KPop Demon Hunters; I think I'm rooting for Scarab to win it all). Since we only have MGM+ for a few days, we're watching The Winter King, the violent rape-filled Arthurian retelling based on Bernard Cornwell novels, and I admit I like the less "realistic" Robin Hood Saxons much better. The huge Yellow Sun piece at Chihuly Garden and Glass: 

Greetings from the Seattle Art Museum

We spent Sunday at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), and it was, shall we say, a mixed experience for me. Perhaps I was just not in the right mood for it, having just had a couple of arguments with people using recent academic garbage-speak in bad faith discussions about Israel (if I see the phrase "settler colonialism" again in 2026 I refuse to be held responsible for what comes out of my mouth in response, and the first week of January isn't even over). 

Perhaps we should not have started with the top floor exhibit, Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism, which I should have realized based on that title might exemplify the recent museum trend in which art is either interpreted to mean whatever anticolonialist, wealth-critical, anti-appropriation [pick your own buzzword] the curator wishes or conversely is criticized for failing to be sufficiently any of the above. Did you know that when people of color create elaborate paintings of fruit, it's a commentary on class and global shortages, but when white people paint extremely similar works, it's a flaunting of their privilege? 

Painting bloody pigs after slaughter is virtuous, and painting women sweating in fields is an important statement, but painting decadent French tables either means that the artist could see how atrocious the class system was or that the artist was completely blind to same, depending on who the artist was and what statement the curator wanted to make. It was a doozy, though the rest of the galleries at the museum were even worse, and thus begins a rant.

 

Here I am reflected in an important piece of contemporary art called "High Finish Box" which apparently exemplifies West Coast Minimalism, though you wouldn't know it from the card because this one only includes artist John McCracken's name and dates. (How come we get told that we must see Orientalism, cultural appropriation, and imperialism in the lovely homoerotic -- though don't expect the museum to point that last out -- work of John Singer Sargent, but we get no overdetermined interpretations of or even basic background on the various spatter paintings, Barnett Newman line paintings, and inevitable Rothko "Untitled"?)

 

This is a crop of my photo of Albert Bierstadt's Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast. (Confession: I love Bierstadt, which undoubtedly biases me and also reveals my imperialist tendencies.) The card next to it notes that when he painted this, Bierstadt had never visited the Pacific Coast, so this is entirely a fantasy landscape, created on commission for a fur merchant whose "economic interests in the region were clear. Interests that required moral and philosophical justifications, and political and military projections of power to reinforce." The card also says, "Here, Puget Sound is a heavenly realm...everything in this painting is grand -- except the Indigenous people on the shoreline. Their diminutive presence suggests that they are inconsequential to the story being told." Now, again, I'm not an art critic, but my first reaction upon looking at this painting is that the whole story of the painting is these local people, in rough seas in a gigantic rocky landscape, who are bringing their canoes safely to shore. All the light in the painting is pointing to their safe landing. And you can see how much skill it took by looking at the boat still in shadow, being skillfully maneuvered over the waves. It's the fucking curator diminishing the people in the painting, not the artist. (Interestingly, what's on SAM's web site is quite different than what's hanging next to the painting in the museum.)

 

Now in point of contrast, this is Shipwreck off the Coast of Alaska by Louis-Philippe Crépin (whose work I know much less well than Bierstadt's). It was, incidentally, purchased for the museum by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Art Acquisition Fund. It's the story of a real disaster in which a French expedition capsized and 21 men drowned, including the two noble La Borde brothers. The museum card explains how the La Bordes are shown trying to save their doomed comrades and adds, "At the right are two members of the Tlingit tribe, who witnessed the event and searched in vain for survivors...the story of the shipwreck remains part of the Tlingit oral tradition." Now, that may be so, but in this painting, you hardly notice the two tiny deep-in-shadow indigenous people. I'm glad the card points them out, but nothing in the painting glorifies or centers them and a viewer could be forgiven for thinking they were other colonists or even locals pointing and saying "hahaha look at these idiot French sailors." (This painting has the identical entry on the website as the museum card.)

 

This is "The Temptation of St. Anthony #2." Now, admittedly, being Jewish, I know very little about saints and have trouble keeping straight which one did what. And as an art dilettante, I know that Michelangelo did a painting of St. Anthony, but I don't know why it's important -- whether it's because of the content or the use of paint or its influence on later artists...and maybe this one is not even in dialogue with those other artistic interpretations, maybe it's an expression of the artist's Catholicism or anti-Catholicism or something else. The point is that THIS painting has ZERO context on its card despite being obviously allusive; it's the exact opposite of all the paintings with cards not just interpreting them for viewers but ordering viewers to have specific reactions -- to be horrified by the Orientalism or the cultural appropriation or whatever. Give me some clue why this is important!

 

This series of photos by Dawoud Bey are called David Hammons, Pissed Off, made to record how Hammons responded to sculptor Richard Serra's massive and controversial Tilted Arc in Manhattan. The card notes that Hammons is pissing on the sculpture as a statement about Serra's "social and art-world politics" and later threw 25 pairs of shoes over it like sneakers dangling from power lines. What it doesn't explain anywhere is exactly what Serra's sculpture was, what it looked like, why it was controversial; it was massive, rust-covered, blocking big sections of a public area that physically prevented people from getting quickly from one side to the other, was not approved by the vast majority of people who depended on work in the area, it was a security hazard, but you'd have to look at Wikipedia and various art web sites as I did to find this out if you weren't already familiar with it. Without that context, the photos look kinda like a mediocre Mapplethorpe ripoff with public urination and men in uniform. (Side note: there's an exhibit with taxidermied cats by Hammons here that I gather is supposed to make a statement about African-American excellence, but all I could think about is where the dead cats came from, and whether they were killed specifically for this exhibit, which not only didn't SAM but none of the web sites where I looked had anything to say about -- I've been told recently that it's white privilege to worry about animals when people of color are being abused/tortured every day, but I needs must worry about multiple issues at once.)

 

And speaking of cats, this piece by Tony Feher -- the suspended chalices -- is called GrandMa's Pussy. I DON'T KNOW WHERE YOUR FILTHY MIND IS because 1) there is zero context for this on the card on the wall, just the artist's name and dates, and 2) the museum web site (which I checked when I got home) assures me that it evokes "a sweet grandmother who aligns with the archetypal and perhaps nostalgic image of a gracious and generous giver...who implores you to eat more and not leave so soon; her home becomes a site of care, with multiple bowls and plates and jars of things from which she encourages you to help yourself" and I'm assured in the same essay that "pussy" meant something very different in 2013 when the sculpture was created than it does today. Sorry but I just have to add HAHAHAHAHAHA CLEARLY THE PORN TO WHICH I WAS EXPOSED IN MY YOUTH WAS AHEAD OF ITS TIME. And I'm pretty sure Chaucer made a pussy joke. (By the way, nowhere does the web site entry mention actual pussycats, when they just might -- might -- have been able to convince me that the piece got its name because Grandma's cat knocked all these items off her counter.)

 

On a happier animal note, the exhibit A Room for Animal Intelligence has dozens of portrayals of animals from all over the world with placards from the animals' POV. This is Monkey Holding a Baby from 1800s Japan, so it's presumed to be a macaque, the only species of monkey native to Japan. This one expresses regret on its little card not to have been painted in color, as they have pink-red faces. 

Anyway, we came home, watched the Ravens-Steelers game which was a lot of fun for the first half and let's never speak of the ending, and now we're watching The Mirror Crack'd because Amazon Prime suggested it to us and I haven't seen it in a million years and Paul doesn't think he's ever seen it. Other than chatting with neighbors as they were packing up their holiday decorations and having ham and bean soup for dinner, that was most of my Sunday excitement!

Greetings from Chihuly Garden and Glass

We chatted with some relatives on New Year's morning and watched most of the Rose Parade, in which my father's brother's wife was riding with the Blue Shadows Mounted Drill Team. Then we ate waffles and eggs before heading into the city, where we parked near Seattle Center, walked around the Space Needle (and through the gift shop), and went to Chihuly Garden and Glass. The garden wasn't crowded because it was drizzling, and we got to watch glassblowing and part of the film about Chihuly's exhibition in Jerusalem. Of course, as always, the glass itself is spectacular.

 

We visited the gingerbread houses at the Sheraton. too. Indiana thankfully beat Alabama in the Rose Bowl while we were out, though we got home in time to see the unfortunate end of the Sugar Bowl over dinner, then while I was chatting with my Thursday group. Afterward we caught up on Percy Jackson, which hasn't been gripping me this season though there's nothing really wrong with it; it's just so kid-focused that all the adult women are villainized (I don't care if the adult men are evil, ha, but I don't want to root for Percy a lot of the time). Now we're catching up on a few Graham Norton episodes.

Poem for Saturday and Volunteer Park Sights

Water Lilies 

By Sara Teasdale 

If you have forgotten water lilies floating

On a dark lake among mountains in the afternoon shade,

If you have forgotten their wet, sleepy fragrance,

Then you can return and not be afraid.

But if you remember, then turn away forever

To the plains and the prairies where pools are far apart,

There you will not come at dusk on closing water lilies,

And the shadow of mountains will not fall on your heart. 

-------- 

We had rain back in the Seattle area on Saturday, so although we went to Volunteer Park after lunch, we mostly stuck to the indoor spaces. This was fine, because harpist Bill McJohn was performing in the conservatory in the room with the decorated trees and poinsettias -- we also walked through the cactus house, the ancient forest room, and the orchids -- and there were a couple of exhibits we wanted to see at the Seattle Asian Art Museum next door, including Anila Quayyum Agha's exhibit of geometric-patterned Islamic-based steel and paper art and Ai Weiwei's Water Lilies, a display based on Monet created from over half a million LEGO pieces.

 

We stopped at Safeway for food for next week and ingredients for things we're bringing to Cahaya's parents' house tomorrow for holiday celebrations. We saw the end of the Eagles-Commanders game before Cheryl and I watched the most recent episode of Taylor Swift: The End of an Era, followed by The Eras Tour: The Final Show, both on Disney+ -- it's very fun to watch the concert after hearing interviews with the choreographers, dancers, and various other people connected to the show, and I hadn't seen decent footage of the TTPD numbers before. Now we're catching up on the Ghosts holiday two-parter, which is goofy and fun.