Yale Center for British Art

We were in New Haven for a couple of days this week, and I went to the Yale Center for British Art. 

I'm not an Anglophile.  At least, I don't consider myself one.  In fact when I was younger I had arguments with Americans who I thought were too Anglophilic - childish arguments, to be sure, but the point is that although I don't consider myself a cultural nationalist neither do I have a thing for British culture for its own sake.  That said, I do like my share of UK bands, writers, films, etc.  And over the last decade or so I've developed a real love for 18th and 19th century British painters. 

I don't think I realized quite what a love it was until I spent the afternoon at this gallery, though.  I'm not sure I can quite explain it, either.  I can explain my love for old portraiture in general - a good portrait that really captures the personality of the sitter is the best way I know to connect across the centuries, to feel common humanity from a remote age.  But why British portraits of that period, more than American?  More than French?  More than Dutch?  (Well, maybe not more than Dutch.)  I
have to think about this more.

So since I haven't thought about it enough I'll just link to a couple of masterpieces I saw and tell you why I loved them.

One is a painting that I think most viewers would agree is a masterpiece:  Reynolds's "Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue."  Reynolds makes her look utterly dreamy, yet completely conscious of her charm - you expect her to say something bawdy, or just to wink, at any moment.  She's so young, and so alive. 

The other is one that perhaps a lot of viewers would pass by:  George Beare's "Portrait of an Elderly Lady and a Girl."  Certainly it lacks the perfection of the Reynolds.  Mrs. Sgt. T once taught me that most portraitists used generic bodies and only had the subjects pose for the face, and you can really see it in the old woman's body and arms, which so utterly fail to match her face.  But that face - so unabashedly aged, so unglamorous, so real.  And the granddaughter, fresh-faced but a little awkward, a little bored.  Again:  real.

*

Is it connection that I feel?  Is it the conviction that, unlike the subjects of French or Dutch portraits, if I somehow met these people I could speak with them and understand what they said?  An illusion, of course, but a powerful one.  And yet they're British, and I'm not, right?  Does this mean that I don't feel American?  That I don't think there's a distinction between British and American culture, either in the 18th century or now?  Would I have been a Tory in '76?  Do I agree with the Booker Prize being thrown open to Americans? 

Sunshine Daydream

We were out of the country for much of July, coming back the day after the Country Fair ended.   So for the first time in three years, I didn't go, and you, Gentle Readers, were spared a long navel-gazing post about hippies.  Time for a break anyway, though.

*

But then I saw Sunshine Daydream a few days ago.  This is a movie made about a Grateful Dead concert in 1972.  The concert has been legendary among Dead fans ever since, in the sense that it has circulated widely and been widely hailed as one of their best shows ever (The Deadhead's Taping Compendium makes a serious case, over several pages, for it as a religious experience).  The film has also been legendary, but in a different sense:  it was never released, and most Heads have only known it as a rumor, or as a grainy multi-generational VHS dub, or youtube of same.  More myth than reality.  But the Dead's organization have finally cleaned it up, remastered it, and are releasing both the audio of the show and a DVD of the movie, and to plug it they did a satellite simulcast of the film to theaters around the country this past week on Jerry's birthday.

It so happens that this show took place in Veneta, at the site of what was then a Renaissance Fair, which later became the Oregon Country Fair.  So seeing this film in Springfield (at the only local theater receiving it) meant that I was seeing it in the company, not just of a lot of Eugene's trademark hippies, but of people who had been there, and seeing it as close as you could get to where it happened.  And of course I've been to the Fairgrounds, stood on that field, thought to myself, this is where it happened.  Hell, when we moved here I was even excited to realize that Nancy's Yogurt is an actual ongoing thing (and it's pretty damn good yogurt, too). 

So, you know, if I couldn't make it to the OCF this year, this was the next best thing, and maybe in some ways better, in terms of getting my annual dose of hippie wannabe nostalgia...

*

It turns out to be a pretty great film. 

The actual filming is a little variable - the footage of "Sing Me Back Home," the last song, gets kind of unwatchable because it was getting dark and the filmmakers didn't have the right film or lighting equipment.  The interspersal of 1966 performance footage, and Furthur bus film, is interesting but was utterly baffling to the uninitiated (such as Mrs. Sgt. T), because totally unexplained, just dropped in without warning.  And the animation in the middle of "Dark Star" is interesting, but ultimately not quite as interesting as it would have been to just keep showing us the band.

On the other hand it captures the eventness of the event pretty well (I say, not having been there).  It makes you feel the heat, and at the same time the lushness of the Veneta countryside, and the utter freedom of the scene.  Which is maybe a euphemism for saying it has a lot of naked hippies dancing in a field under the sun near some trees.  A lot.  And when it comes right down to it, if that sounds fun to you, you'll probably like this film.  And if not, not.

But as much as I liked that aspect of the film (and I did indeed, in spite/because of the fact that I wouldn't have had the courage to get naked and dance myself), it's the music, and the way the music is presented, that makes it worth seeing. 

Here too there are limitations - only a couple of shots of Keith Godchaux, for example, which broke my heart because he's clearly audible on the soundtrack, playing brilliantly.  The filmmakers caught the other members, though, and show them playing - long, nicely focused shots of players playing.  Sometimes we get their fingers, and if I was a guitar player I'm sure that would please me;  other times we just get their faces, which in some ways is more interesting, because I can't help but wonder what it would feel like to be able to play like that.  But often we get several members at once, and that's where we get the magic of ensemble playing, right there on screen.  You can see them nodding at each other, grimacing or smiling at what the others are doing, signalling each other.

Or, more tellingly, not signalling each other.  The musical high point is, of course, the "Dark Star," a magnificent piece of ensemble playing.  Utterly musical - if your image of the Dead is of aimless noodling, then, well, let's just say you're way wrong, and this "Dark Star" might show you why.  It's jamming, mostly without vocals, but always with a purpose, always with a direction - they're not just drifting, they're moving through a succession of musical moods and settings with careful attention to what they're doing now, and a good sense of where they might go next.  It's anything but stagnant.

And it's also, in true Dead fashion, anything but lead-and-comping.  They're all soloing at once - Jerry's lines can sound like a lead guitar, but often only in the sense that he's providing the most obvious musical anchor, giving everybody else the freedom to embroider even more creatively.  And when they move, they all move together, without missing a beat or a shade or a grace note.  And that's where the film is so brilliant, because for long minutes of this "Dark Star" (when it's not weird animation), we're watching the band, and we realize that they're not really watching each other.  No one of them is catching the others' eyes, giving directions, signalling.  They're just listening to each other, and that's enough.  It's really phenomenal.  And of course it's something any Deadhead knows the band could do.  But I've never seen it caught visually so well.

I doubt anybody who doesn't already get the Dead could make it through this film.  Which is a shame, because more than any other, I think it shows why those of us who love them for their music (as opposed to What They Represented, or whatever) love them.

*

So I saw that Thursday night, and most of the day Friday I was still in this great glow, having seen my annual quota of naked dancing hippies, having remembered (after a few weeks of not really listening to them) why I love the Dead, and having come to a deeper appreciation of how very right it feels to me that I've come to live in this place.

And then I read this.  Some background.  That blog is one I read regularly.  It's maybe my third or fourth morning read.  And what sets it apart, for me, is that author's particular point of view - his subject position, to use a dated piece of academic parlance.  He's a solid leftist with a particular interest in and sympathy for labor unions, an interest that manifests itself in his work as a historian of the labor movement in this country but that has its roots, as he frequently reminds us, in his upbringing in the very working-class town of Springfield, Oregon.  To me that's all to the good:  not only does he provide me food for thought from a congenial political point of view, not only does he educate me on aspects of the left that I'm not as familiar with as I should be, but he helps me better understand the community I live in (even though he doesn't live here anymore).  Cool. 

But God, what a dick he's being in that post, right?  And more so in the comments.  Now, I get it:  there are cultural tensions between Eugene and Springfield that pretty neatly mirror the major cultural tensions in the American left as a whole.  Intellectual vs. working class, environment vs. industry, college vs. factory (or sawmill), New Left vs. Old Left.  Spotted owls vs. loggers.  Hippies vs. blue-collars.  And I'm entirely willing to allow that Loomis might have scars from his childhood here;  we all carry that kind of baggage.  So I can forgive him being a dick, a troll (it's his blog, right), and whatever. 

I'm more saddened by how ready we on the Left are to break into warring tribes:  it's the old circular firing squad, the Fractured Left meme, and it's exactly what They want us to be doing.  Which we know - even Loomis knows it, or I should say especially him, because he's out there fighting the good fight, trying to remind the Left what it has spent the last few decades forgetting, that it doesn't win without labor, and in fact that labor rights are human rights.

United we stand, in other words.  But all that goes by the board when there's a chance to point and laugh at hippies.  I've never understood this.  I've seen it for decades, from precisely the people who should know better.  I spent part of my sophomore year in high school in an ongoing argument with a punk girl, trying to convince her that hippies weren't the enemy, that we were all on the same side, had more in common than not, that we'd be better off allying to fight the real enemy.  Never worked.  So we get people like Loomis, who, instead of welcoming people to the Left no matter what their motivation, or failing that, instead of, you know, live and let live, points and laughs.  Like a dick. 

Because that's all he's doing, is pointing and laughing.  There's no reasoned argument in there that X political approach is ineffective, or that Y lifestyle is actually pernicious in some way;  there can't be reasoned argument, because he's not bothering to address any actual thing.  He just says "hippies," and the other bullies all know what he means.

Rebecca Reider: Dreaming the Biosphere (2009)

We were in Tucson a couple of months ago, visiting the 'rents.  Every time we go, we visit a few more of the places listed in our guidebook.  This time we hit Bisbee, Tombstone, and some of the historic spots in downtown Tucson.

We also drove out to Biosphere 2.  I had a vague memory of this from news reports in the early '90s, as many do:  it's a totally sealed manmade ecosystem, a kind of earthbound spaceship out in the desert.  A bunch of scientists locked themselves inside for a couple of years to see if they could survive on nothing but what they could grow inside the facility.  If you remember this much, you probably remember something of the media narrative, as well:  what had started out with such high hopes and idealism ended in failure and ignominy.

First, the place.  In purely architectural terms, it's fascinating.  We have a colleague, an architectural historian, who specializes in utopias, and this is one.  It looks like a spaceship out in the desert - between the geodesic domes and the greenhouses, the airlock through which you enter and the sky-reaching towers, it makes you think of Star Trek more than anything.  Not a ludicrous comparison, either:  remember that certain iterations of the Star Trek myth involve things like hydroponics bays, spaceship gardens - manmade ecosystems.  Biosphere 2 was meant to experiment with the idea that humankind might be able to engineer its way away from dependence on the planet, by recreating it under controlled conditions.  Utopian.

And, it's beautiful.  From a scientific standpoint this is irrelevant, but from a Utopian one it's not:  from the outside, from the inside, the facility appeals to the dreamer, the aspirer, in the viewer.  It makes you want to believe.

In the gift shop they had a number of books, and this looked like the best, so I bought it.  Rebecca Reider's 2009 Dreaming the Biosphere: The Theater of All Possibilities.  It's an amazing book, doing so much more than it promises.

One thing the book is:  a media critique, specifically a coruscating look at how the US mass media (mis)reports on science.  Her critique here echoes, intentionally or not, a lot of what has been pointed out about the way the media treats politics:  shoehorning everything into a narrative, a simplistic storyline with heroes and villains, winners and losers.  In the case of Biosphere 2, what that means is that science reporters wrote positively of the project as long as it fit easily into the mold of exploration, pioneers, heroic experimenters - but when it became easier to fit the project into a different mold, one of cheats and miscreants, the media tore down the Biospherians as quickly and eagerly as they had built them up.  All of this without much effort at presenting to the public the complexity of what was really being done at the facility.

Consider:  if you, like me, have only the vaguest notion of this project, but still have the general impression that it was a failure, what does that mean?  That the Biospherians ended up not being able to survive their two years completely without outside help?  But if this is science, if it's an experiment, how is that a failure?  It produced results.  It generated data.  That's no failure - but popular science reporting isn't interested in that.  It wants triumphs.  It wants the money shot of happy plump bionauts waving and beaming as they bound out of the airlock - not emaciated, older-but-wiser people stepping hesitantly out into a world their bodies have learned to cope largely without...

The media wants telegenic alphas, not weirdos.  And the Biospherians were weirdos.  (More on that below.)

Another thing this book is:  a critique of the way science is conducted, and most importantly funded, in contemporary academic America.  Biosphere 2 was constructed with private money by a private group, but when the plug was pulled it went on the market to anybody who might be interested in doing something with it.  It's a weird facility, but utterly sui generis;  surely somebody can do something with it.  Reider, writing in 2009, extends her story past the end of the original Biosphere project through the years when the place was leased and managed by Columbia University, and this is as fascinating a story as anything else in the book.  It seems the Biosphere was always either too controlled or not controlled enough for the kind of experiments Columbia's science faculty wanted to do.  It either simulated the real biosphere too closely - with too much complexity, too many natural systems interacting too unpredictably - or not closely enough, with too few variables.  That's bad luck, but what Reider also manages to suggest is that Columbia wasn't willing to look at what Biosphere 2 could do.  It wasn't designed as a laboratory, but as a living thing - but the kind of science that might be able to effectively utilize such a thing, she argues, doesn't fit into the small-ball, results-oriented, grant-proposal-friendly science that the current American system rewards.  Not being a scientist myself I have no idea if she's right, but it sounds right - it squares with what I see in my very different corner of academia.  (In this connection, I'd love to see her carry the story foreward someday.  After Columbia gave up, the University of Arizona, in Tucson, leased the place, and the day we visited happened, just happened, to be the day that it was announced that Biosphere 2 had been given outright to UA.  Are they doing any better?  They're well placed to, not just because they're local and Columbia wasn't, but because UA people have been involved with the project for a very long time...)

What this book mostly is, to my surprise and delight:  a counterculture chronicle.  And this made everything else make sense.  Biosphere 2 was conceived, funded, built, and inhabited by people who had been living together on a New Mexico commune called Synergia Ranch since 1969.  In her telling it sounds almost like a cult, centered around the charismatic John Allen - but if Reider had used that narrative her book would have been as useless as the pop science that gave you the "Biosphere failed" narrative.  She's quite sympathetic to the Synergians/Biospherians - which is not the same as saying she's "on their side."  She's open to their point of view, interested in their aspirations and achievements.

So.  The Biosphere was, like the Oregon Country Fair and the latter-day Grateful Dead, one of the ways in which the '60s counterculture managed to plant itself in the distinctly inhospitable soil of the '80s and '90s.  It was a hippie thing.

What's the Synergian deal?  It's very un-hippie - that is, not at all like what the mass media would have you think hippies were. They were Gurdjieffian rather than Learian, dedicated to a mysticism of self-improvement rather than worship or the pursuit of religious ecstasy.  They taught themselves how to be architects, builders, shipwrights, scientists.  Action was their thing - get out and do, then get out and do more.

Very Horatio Alger in some ways.  But they were doing this in a context of communal living outside of Santa Fe - and in many ways they kept up the communal arrangement all the way up through the Biosphere years.  Cooking and eating together, and performing regular group theatricals.  Theater as ritual, though, as Jungian group self-analysis or therapy.  Putting on masks to reveal the true face.  They were, like other communes of their time and place, rejecting straight society by withdrawing from it.

So, to put it crudely, they were science hippies rather than art hippies, I guess you could say.  But it was a different kind of science.  It has to be admitted that if they were presenting Biosphere 2 to the media as a wholly straight-science, experimental-data-gathering sort of thing, they were being a bit disingenuous themselves, because the philosophical roots of the project were in the '70s counterculture's sense of crisis.  The belief that humankind was rapidly making this biosphere, the real one, the first one, uninhabitable - polluting and destroying its systems, so that human life would one day become physically unsustainable here - not to mention cultivating political and social systems that have already made human life nearly unpalatable here...

(Well, they're not wrong.)

...and that therefore, forward-looking people needed to think about a way to get out.  The "2" in Biosphere 2 means just that:  the facility was designed to be humanity's second habitat, a prototype for what we'll need to build to escape the charred embers of Biosphere 1.

You can see this impulse, this vision of the future so strangely utopian and dystopian at the same time, in much of the science fiction and counterculture pop culture of the day.  What is Star Trek but an acknowledgment that the situation on Earth is going to get worse before it gets better (Star Trek is a utopia that takes place after a dystopia), and that for it to get truly better we're going to need to reach beyond our own planet?  Some of the better examples are more obscure - Jefferson Airplane songwriter Paul Kantner's recurring vision (in "Wooden Ships" and Blows Against The Empire) of hippies escaping straight society to literally found a new world somewhere, Neil Young's image of spaceships "flying Mother Nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun."

And once the media discovered that, it was all over, really.  Hippies?  With a bank account, and machines?  God forbid.

But:  as Reider notes, it may have been weird science, but that doesn't mean it wasn't science at all.  She makes a case for Biosphere 2 as swashbuckling exploratory science.  Build the thing and try the thing and learn what you can from that, rather than measuring every inch of ground.  It's not a kind of science, again, that plays real well in grant committee deliberations, but then again, maybe Magellan's wouldn't have, either...

If there was a failure in the Biosphere project, it wasn't a scientific one, per se, at least not a biological one.  The biosphere inside the facility did develop in unexpected ways, the systems did go a bit haywire, but again, all of that generates data.  What went wrong in less useful ways was the social system.  Reider does an excellent job of explaining how the crew locked inside the facility very quickly split into opposing factions.  Real Survivor stuff.  And she marshals all kinds of sociological studies to suggest that this was inevitable.  Small groups will always split into factions.  That, coupled with the fact that Allen was an autocrat, and the Synergians insisted on maintaining their separateness within any group of collaborators, meant that the social utopia that they had assumed would follow upon the physical one decayed even more rapidly than the physical one.

And that's what I found most interesting, even moving, about this book.  I'm fascinated by the idea of idealistic groups withdrawing from mainstream society and setting up on their own.  Of course in some ways it's the age-old American pattern, right?  If you think England, or Boston, or St. Louis, is screwed up, don't fix it, leave.  And in some ways it's the Mormon heritage to which I'm heir:  the people who set up Salt Lake weren't hippies, but they were radical idealists living in a commune.

I'm fascinated, but not very hopeful, because as near as I can tell what happens when you set up on your own is that, at best, you end up more or less replicating what you left behind, just with you on top.  As Euro-American society spreads across the continent it ends up not really improving on what it left behind, right?  Just replicating it - if anything, with more McDonald's.   Or, at worst, the community apart shades off into autocracy, cultlike organization, craziness. 

But it doesnn't have to be that way.  Sometimes, in a limited situation, it can work, for a while, or at least I like to think it can.  It did in the parking lots of some Grateful Dead shows.  It does at the OCF.  And by Reider's account, it did at Synergia Ranch.  Not that I'd want to live in any of those places - but the beauties you can glimpse in those times and places are things I wouldn't want to live without having available to think about.

(But I may change my mind tomorrow.)

Powell's

I have to say, for all of my admittedly left-of-center, countercultural/yuppie inclinations, I don't have much sympathy for the Cult of the Independent Bookstore. Do I find the selection at your average Waldenbooks or Borders stifling? Sure, but I think that's as much a function of size as corporateness: I generally find the selection at comparably-sized indie bookstores just as stifling. Stifling in a different way, certainly - you can find titles at the indie that you can't at the Borders - but I've never thought the selection at indies was any broader a slice of the publishing spectrum - just centered at a different point on the spectrum.

Let me put it another way. Nine times out of ten when I'm searching for a specific title, as opposed to just browsing, it's either a translation from a Japanese author or it's something old and unfashionable. Or, it's an academic book. Either way, I'm unlikely to find it in a bricks-and-mortar store, and that's true whether the stocking decisions are being made by a corporate suit who doesn't even read books or by a conscientious hipster who still, chances are, hasn't heard of Wahei Tatematsu and doesn't care to invest in keeping a copy of Guy Mannering on the shelf.

Case in point: when we went to San Francisco, I stumbled across City Lights. I don't know why I'd forgotten to put it on my must-see list, sometime Beat enthusiast as I am (hey, I read The Portable Jack Kerouac cover to cover! I read every word of Naked Lunch!), but I did, so I was happy to literally discover it on a walk to see Chinatown. And of course I spent an hour or so browsing, looking for the right book to buy. A beat author, even one of City Lights' own, would have been too obvious, and I've been reading more haikai in translation lately, so I thought I'd try to replace the Issa book that I lost on the bus last fall... No dice. For all of San Francisco's East Asian orientation, for all of the Beat movement's Japan fixation, they had almost no haiku. Some of Rexroth's translations, and that was about it. Well, what did I expect? It's a storied bookstore, but not that large.

I'm neither bragging nor, really, complaining. I recognize that I have somewhat specialized needs in books, and that nobody could make a living satisfying them, at least not and pay rent on a shop.

This is why I've been right at home in the internet-commerce era: I can actually get a copy of Cecilia Seigle's Yoshiwara if I want to. I know that Amazon is killing bricks-and-mortar bookstores, but I can't mourn the loss, because, really, they never did much for me...

Same goes, mutatis mutandem, for record stores. I can appreciate the cool factor of indie record stores, but how many of them carry the full Yazoo catalog?

Anyway, I've felt this way for many years, and I think I still feel this way, but I've been forced to make one whopping exception: used bookstores. Like, Powell's, dude. Powell's. It's worth a trip to Portland all on its own. That City of Books really is all that.

I've been lucky enough to live in a lot of places with good used bookstores. The three years I lived in Provo, I was a few blocks away from Pioneer Books; I haven't been to their new location, but their old one was a marvel, a nondescript strip-mall storefront that kept going back and back and back through room after room of tottering piles of books, each room darker and danker and richer than the last, each room connected with a narrower, skeevier-looking passage than the last. Salt Lake, for that matter, has one of my favorite used bookstores: Sam Weller's. This one, too, is fun because the path through the stacks takes odd turns and feels like a labyrinth.

St. Louis had some good ones, and Tokyo - well, Japan is so book-happy that it makes even Powell's look like a 7-11 magazine rack. In fact the only city I've lived in as an adult that disappointed me for used books was Cambridge/Somerville. I went to Harvard expecting to find used-book nirvana. And there are a couple of used-book places in Harvard Square - the basement of the Harvard Book Store (not to be confused with the university bookstore, the Coop - which is run by Barnes & Noble) is where I went most, but it was just half of a basement, really. Used to go to McIntyre & Moore in Davis Square, but found them overpriced and understocked. I always wondered if there was some secret book haven north of the Charles that I was missing, and maybe there was (but if so, don't tell me about it: I don't think I want to know what I missed, now that I've left).

Eugene even has what I need: Smith Family. In fact discovering this place, a couple of blocks from the University, was something of an epiphany for me. If you've wondered (and why would you) why I've been blogging almost exclusively about English-language books for the past year or so, it's because I've been taking immense pleasure in wandering into Smith Family and finding good, awesome, intriguing, tantalizing books and walking out with them. Needless to say their selection of Japanese-language books is quite small (but they do have some, which is amazing enough; but then, so did Pioneer), so the books I walk out with have been in English.

I've been surprised at how important this experience has become for me, of every couple of weeks popping back into Smith Family to plan some more heavy reading. Maybe it's time for me to reassess my dismissal of bricks-and-mortar bookstores. When I'm looking for a specific title, especially a scholarly one, I'll still usually end up having to get it on Amazon - but there is a very real pleasure in going to a place full of books, overspilling the shelves and begging for a home, and just being there for a while.

Portland Japanese Garden

So, in case it hasn't come through yet, we, me and Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki, really really like Portland. I guess it's a hip and happening place, which makes me feel a bit squeamish about saying I like it (I did a teaching demo at a college there and definitely felt like the students were way too hip for my blood), but it really does have most of what we love in a city. Beautiful setting, walkable urban density, great public transport, excellent restaurants, decent museum, and vibrant cultural consciousness that, in typical Pacific Northwest fashion, is more trained on East Asia than we'd expected, which is good for us.

And it has Powell's, but that's a topic for another day.

Dig. Not only does Portland have the Chinese garden, which would be enough for any American city to boast of; it also has the Portland Japanese Garden, which is just as nice.

Here I'm on solider ground. I've been to a number of famous Japanese gardens, including a lot of the Kyoto greatest hits. I won't say the Portland garden is a substitute for going to see the real thing, but I will say that it feels pretty authentic. A little more self-conscious in its desire to mix various styles together in one place, to provide an overview of the tradition, but that's not a bad thing, and it's handled quite well. Even the kare-sansui is pretty impressive.

And, just as important as authenticity, it's beautiful. It's a wonderful site for a garden, nestled in the west hills, with fir-covered slopes hemming it in, and it takes full advantage of the setting, with pleasant ravines and a waterfall worked into the design. And it opens up at one point on a magnificent view of Mt. Hood over the city skyline.

Lan Su Chinese Garden in Portland

So I finished reading this on the train up to Portland a couple of weeks back. ...I love traveling by train. It's a much more relaxed, not to mention comfortable, experience than air travel, and more scenic than car travel - plus, you can read. If this country invested half as much in rail as it does in highways, life would be a lot more pleasant.

We went up because we were craving dim sum, and you can't get that in Eugene. We went to Chinatown in Portland, but the dim sum we had was disappointing, because it turns out the good restaurants have moved to a new Chinatown in the 'burbs. In fact, downtown Chinatown is kind of dying, we discovered (it was our first time), which is a shame, not only because the location is so good, but because there are a lot of funky old buildings there that one would like to see thriving.

And, more than anything, because Portland's old Chinatown does have one absolutely awesome attraction that can't easily be moved out to the suburbs: the Lan Su (as in PortLANd-SUzhou, Portland's sister city) classical Chinese garden.

I've never been to China, so I can't swear it's authentic, but it was built by craftsmen from Suzhou about ten years ago, and it's said to be the most authentic Chinese garden outside of China. Certainly it beats anything else I've seen in the States. It's smallish, as befits an urban garden, but it feels quite spacious, due to the cunning layout which fills the space with nooks and crannies and odd-angled vistas, preventing you from seeing the whole thing at once, water or land.

Both in its contemporary situation and in the tradition it's supposed to represent, it's an urban garden, as I say: it's meant to be what a scholar in the city might have had at home, his peaceful oasis and refuge from official duties. For that reason, the skyscrapers and occasional traffic noise contribute to the effect, rather than detracting: they remind you, gently, what you've shut out beyond the walls.

What's within the walls is quite beautiful, combining traditional architecture and landscaping to provide a sequence of picture-postcard views of water, flowers, trees, rocks, buildings. I think the best view is to be had from the second floor of the teahouse. Which is, note, a functioning teahouse with a dizzying variety of teas and sweets to complement them.

There are worse ways to while away a summer Sunday afternoon than drinking oolong tea and eating moon cakes and toasted pumpkin seeds in a Chinese garden.

Mission Dolores pix

Mrs. Sgt. T took some photos of Mission Dolores, and she gave me a few to post.

First, here's the exterior. The old mission chapel is on the left, the new basilica on the right.













Next, here's the interior of the old chapel.



Here's a closeup of the altarpiece at the end.



Here's a closeup of the closeup:



Here's the inside of the basilica, looking toward the altar:



Here's the inside of the basilica, looking toward the street entrance:



And here's St. Francis.

Mission Dolores, San Francisco

Mrs. Sgt. T and I like church architecture. Someday we're going to make it to Europe together and see some of the great cathedrals; she's seen a lot of them, but I haven't. In the meantime, whenever we travel in the US we try to see famous churches. Which is not too easy, because for all its Christian fervor, America doesn't celebrate its church buildings as much as I think it could.

Case in point: when we went to San Francisco we sought out Mission Dolores. This is the original Spanish mission, founded by colleagues of Father Junipero Serra in 1776, from which the city of San Francisco grew. The original late-18th century mission chapel still stands, relatively unchanged, surviving earthquakes and fires; it's the oldest structure in the city. The modern basilica next to it was built after the great earthquake, but it has going for it an immense architectural beauty, inside and out. All told, you'd figure this would be a major tourist destination, and yet when we went it was all but empty; certainly it gets only a fraction of the visitors that Alcatraz does, or the Golden Gate Bridge, or Chinatown. All of which are awe-inspiring; but so is this.

The mission chapel is adobe, and is imposing even now; obviously part of its architectural message at the time was shock and awe, and you can still feel a little of that today. It was an interesting comparison for us with San Xavier del Bac south of Tucson, which we visited last December but never got around to blogging. They were both built at around the same time, and my impression at least is that both more or less retain their original look. But San Xavier, besides being rather larger, is almost entirely frescoes inside, and seems to have more of the flavor of Native American design in its wall-paintings. There's a little of that in Dolores, on the painted roofbeams for example, but the centerpiece there is a huge altarpiece that was carried up from Mexico proper in the late 18th century: it's much more subdued in its coloring and European in its shapes. At least, so it seemed to me: no expert.

The basilica next door dates from 1918, after the earthquake, and it's a marvelous early 20th century cathedral. It contains a dazzling array of mosaics and stained glass of a variety of colors and subjects, but what gives the whole place such a memorable air is the big mostly-scarlet stained glass of St. Francis at one end, which bathes the whole interior in a crimson glow, like a late-summer sunset.

(I wish now that I'd blogged San Xavier at the time: it's tremendously impressive, too. And in both cases we were invited to think about the naked power the buildings were meant to display. At Mission Dolores that's not as immediately apparent, since the surrounding buildings are nice modern apartments; but San Xavier is still surrounded by the evident poverty of the Tohono O'odham reservation. That is to say, it's still pretty easy to see what impression the missionaries meant to give with this building, and by extension with Mission Dolores too [different missionaries, same mission]: shock and awe, as I say.

It's a good thing to be reminded of that. And yet we find it doesn't really diminish our admiration of the beauty of the buildings themselves. I don't know if that's insensitive of us; I hope it isn't, but I do wonder. How can the same heart be simultaneously saddened by the mistreatment of indigenous peoples and gladdened by the architecture that was an instrument of that mistreatment? I don't know. I mean, in an odd way my experience of these places is probably enhanced by a sense that their beauty is mingled with tragedy. So much of history is like that.)

San Francisco

This is turning into a what-I-did-on-my-summer-working-vacation blog, but I guess that's okay. After a hectic couple of weeks in Japan we came back to the States, to Eugene via San Francisco. Our first visit there.

We didn't do much in SF that falls under the purview of this blog. We visited the Haight so that I, as a semicloseted hippie wannabe, could fantasize that I was getting a sense of what it might have been like, and so I could stand in front of 710 Ashbury Street. We went to the Asian Art Museum, but I was too jet-lagged to really enjoy it, except for the original copy of The Four Immigrants Manga they had on display. I went to the City Lights bookstore, and was disappointed by their selection of haiku (whatever you're going to say: yes, I know). We went to Mission Dolores - but that deserves a post of its own.

That said, in a blog dedicated mostly to things I find beautiful, I just have to say: San Francisco is the most beautiful city I've ever seen.

The inevitable caveats: I haven't traveled much outside the US, so I make no claims for it vis-a-vis Venice, Paris, Buenos Aires, Delhi, or wherever. And I haven't been to every important American city, although I've been to a lot. And I'm not talking "most awesomest city": that would be Tokyo, hands down. And I make no judgments as to SF's liveability: I think I'd like its public transport, its food, its weather, and its politics, but I'm sure there's a lot I wouldn't like.

And I'm not talking about the city with the most beautiful things in it: that might be Kyoto, or (I grudgingly admit) New York. I'm talking of the city itself, of city as art object, as something to look at in its own right.

And everywhere I looked in San Francisco - and I know we were only there for four days, and mostly only saw the touristy spots - I saw beauty. The buildings, the hills, the public art, the views of the bay and the bridges and the skyscrapers and the endless Victorians. San Francisco is breathtaking.

Heijo Palace, and lame mascotage

The frustrating, or maybe tantalizing, thing about visiting Nara has always been that it's not really there anymore. That was never really true, of course: you'd go because of the fantastic Buddhist temples and one super-awesome Shinto shrine that are there, and maybe also because of the museum. But those are there because the sleepy little country town of Nara was, in the 8th century, Heijô-kyô, capital of Japan, the country's first permanent capital in fact, patterned after the shining Tang Chinese metropolis of Chang'an, and pretty impressive in its own right. But it stopped being all that as the 8th century drew to a close, and for most of recorded history the temples have been all that remained: the great capital was dismantled, and the city plan was obscured, largely returning to farmland. A lot of it's still that way today; what isn't is faceless suburban sprawl (Nara is within commuting distance of Kyoto and Osaka).

That's the way things were when I first visited in 1993. Awe-inspiring temples, and beyond that, just rumors that there was once a capital there. The city center is now over by where the temples are, and the land that was once the imperial palace was (in 1993) under fields and railroad tracks.

This year is, as I think I mentioned, the 1300th anniversary of the establishment of Heijô-kyô, and for my money the best thing about it is that it convinced the country to rebuild the Imperial Palace there, part of it anyway, according to what ancient records and archaeological discoveries have told them it should look like. They've built the Daigokuden, or Audience Hall, the southern or Suzaku gate, and some walls enclosing the palace compound.

This is a very good thing. For the first time, you can get a sense of what this capital might have looked like. If you go this year, you can go through the Daigokuden, and also visit an on-site museum that boasts a replica of one of the kentôshi boats and a 3-D CG video of the whole ancient city. There are rumors that these latter installations, and the whole open-to-the-public thing, might not last beyond this anniversary year, so go quickly if you can. It would be a pity if it all closed for lack of funding, but then the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

On a personal note, seeing this restoration in its completed state was peculiarly satisfying, because in a way Mrs. Sgt T and I have kind of watched it go up. Her research takes her to Nara almost every year, and I accompany her sometimes, like I did this year. The Suzaku Gate was rebuilt in 1998, and I first saw it a few years later, with her - not being a classicist I'd heard nothing about it, and was flabbergasted to see this beautiful thing in the rice paddies from the windows of the Kintetsu train.

Every time we've been back since we've seen a little more of it done. A couple of years ago was the last time, and then we tramped all around the grounds, where building foundations are laid out - we saw the hulk of the Daigokuden, under construction, saw the Suzaku Gate up close for the first time, and ran for our lives from some kind of humongous insect that swarms down out of the trees at dusk in summer. (There are creepy-crawlies in Nara: this summer the missus got a rash on her arms from some poisonous caterpillar hairs that were blowing around in the breeze. Doctor said he sees it all the time.)

So here are some pix, courtesy of Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki. The first is the Daigokuden, the second is the Suzaku Gate as seen from the Daigokuden (that's the wonderfully named Kinki Railroad, or Kintetsu, in front).

And the third is the interior of one of the on-site souvenir shops. That fella is the Official 1300th Anniversary Mascot No. 1, "Sento-kun." He's supposed to represent an Indian Buddhist monk (the Nara period is also when Buddhist really took hold in Japan). The antlers are a tribute to the free-roaming deer that populate the parks and temples in "downtown" Nara.

You'll be pardoned for thinking that he's a singularly unattractive mascot. You wouldn't be alone: he's been the target of ridicule ever since he was announced in early 2008. Even his name is lame: it means "Moving the Capital"-kun, or Little Mr. Moving the Capital (i.e., to Nara). That's it. It's almost as clunky in Japanese as in English.

To be fair, he does kind of grow on you, especially after you've been hearing people rag on him for two years. Although I'm still not sure pity is the primary emotion you want people to feel when they see your mascot, he does kind of fit in with the kimo-kawaii aesthetic that's popular right now.

So unpopular was Sentokun that they introduced a buddy for him a few months later in '08: Manto-kun. At least his name is clever. Sen also means "thousand," so the next one up, in the Japanese numbering system, would logically be "ten thousand," or man: so, Manto-kun. Plus, "manto" means "cape" (from "mantle"), and he wears a cape. Unfortunately, he's also a deer with a building on his head. Strike two.

The final indignity was when some local Buddhist clergy got upset that Sentokun was seemingly making light of Buddhism - for chrissake, he's got antlers growing out of his head! So they came up with a third character to foist upon the public: Naamu-kun. He's supposed to look like a childhood version of Prince Shôtoku, who was instrumental in establishing Buddhism in Japan, and he's meant to teach kids Buddhist values. Even his name is a mantra. (Who says Japan doesn't take religion seriously?)

Strike three.

Nara meisho mukashi annai

As I mentioned, one of the reasons we go back to Japan is to buy out bookstores, or come as close to it as our meager stash of cash will allow (which is, of course, not very close). And believe it or not I sometimes even read some of the stuff we buy; not always, but sometimes. I do enjoy books, and I do enjoy books in Japanese.

So within the first week after arriving this time around, immediately after finishing Pickwick, I had started four new books. Which is never good news for me, because try as I might I can't be in the middle of more than one book at a time (for pleasure reading, that is). I envy people who can be in the middle of three or four books at once, juggling them as the mood strikes them and reading all of them with adequate comprehension. I can't. So this time around I started a new book on Edo culture, Murakami Haruki's latest, another collection of Mizuki Shigeru's kappa manga, and this book, but before long this was the one I was carrying with me everywhere.

It's Nara meisho mukashi annai: Etoki Yamato meisho zue 奈良名所むかし案内〜絵とき「大和名所図会」, by Hondo Akira 本渡章 (Sôgensha 創元社 2007). Here's the deal.

There was a big boom in gazetteers in the late Tokugawa period: travel guides, beautifully illustrated, with facts both for the traveler (where to eat, what to buy) and for the armchair traveler (how each place described figures in literature and history, notes on local customs and lore). I'm fascinated by these things, by the way - they provide pleasure on so many levels. There's the frisson of the familiar, as you feel yourself united with these people from far away and long ago in your shared experience of tourism; there's the comfort of the reference work, as these books organize knowledge in a pleasing, orderly format; then there's the art, which is
unfailingly beautiful. (Beholdmyswarthyface-san writes a little bit about a famous one for Edo here.)

The most famous of these guidebooks were written by Akisato Ritô 秋里離島 and illustrated by Takehara Shunchôsai 竹原春朝斎. One of their productions was a guide to the city of Nara and its environs, called Yamato (an old name for the region) meisho zue; it was published in 1791.

The book in question is sort of a beginner's guide to the Yamato meisho zue. Rather than simply transcribing and annotating the original (which would be fairly long and difficult for modern readers), he selects thirty of the most interesting illustrations and writes about them, describing what they show, with quotations from the original. Clearly it was published as a way of tying the ongoing Edo boom to the boomlet in Nara stuff that is coinciding with the 1300th anniversary of the city.

And hey, that's what hooked me. I saw it in the museum shop at Narahaku and had to have it.

Is it any good? Sort of. As the above description suggests, it's really neither fish nor fowl. The scholar in me would have preferred a straight transcription - Hondo doesn't quote nearly enough from the original, preferring instead to mix quotes from the original with his own summary of the significance of each place. He's trying to make it function as both a guide to what Edo people thought of Nara and environs and a guidebook for moderns in its own right. But I have plenty of modern guidebooks, so I would have preferred this to focus solely on the earlier view. And as a modern guidebook, of course it's not very useful either - no maps, for one thing.

That said, it's easy to read, and the illustrations themselves are just wonderful. Wisely, Hondo includes selections from both the birds' eye views with which Akisato and Takehara introduce each place and the close-ups of various scenes from ancient legend and current custom. My favorite is the rock divers of Miyataki. This was a stretch of rough water in Yoshino where local guys would do trick-dives for the tourists, who would throw them money. The picture is amazing. Dig the guy doing a back-flip in the middle, and the tourists on the left saying "Holy shit!"

This was a good companion to keep with me during our trek around Nara. As an Edoist by vocation and an Edoite by avocation I found it a good way to personalize the trip, so I didn't feel like a total third wheel tagging along while the ancient-studies person in the family saw stuff she understands.

Taliesin West

The last art-related thing on our trip to Arizona that I haven't blogged about is the first one we did, which was our visit to Taliesin West. This is the home/school Frank Lloyd Wright designed and built in the desert outside of Scottsdale, his winter home.

I've been putting off blogging about it because I feel I should really have something fine to say about it. Something worthy of it. I don't. I mean, it was awesome. We took the three-hour tour, and I'd recommend it. It really was worth the $60.

It was worth it because it was really nice to be able to see the whole place, or at least as much as is open to the public: the living areas, the working areas, the gardens, the guest house. It's still functioning as a school, the docents made clear; and those docents - what a trip. We were guided around by this elderly German woman who knew Mr. Wright, and spoke of him in very reverent tones. At break time we were seated at a table with this even older woman in a wheelchair who had spent most of her youth with Wright at the two Taliesins, and from her wheelchair she regaled us with tales of life at the school. Both of these women, as well as the way everybody stressed the self-contained nature of life at Taliesin (Wright really seems to have controlled all aspects of his students' lives) reminded me a lot of some of the religious colonies I've visited - Amana, for example. A totally secular modernist cult? Not so far-fetched, I guess...

But that's a little paranoid. Mostly it was just three hours of looking at beautiful, even noble modernist architecture that really does live up to its promise. Interacting respectfully with the landscape, while at the same time feeling extremely mod and aesthetically well-thought-out. In fact it almost felt comfortable - Wright's stuff, if taken to its logical conclusion, can lead to unhappy hipsters, but I don't think I'd be too unhappy living there.

Erik Larson: The Devil in the White City (2003)

It’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve devoted my life to the study of fiction. But that’s not to say that I have anything against non-fiction; more precisely, I’m not one of these literary scholars who’s determined to police the borders of literature in such a way as to keep non-fiction at bay. True crime, popular history, memoir, and all the other myriad forms of non- or quasi-fiction can all provide reading pleasure, intellectual depth, artistic excellence, up there with the best novels. Sometimes more: truth is stranger than, etc. I don’t follow any of these genres as enthusiastically as I do certain types of fiction, but every so often I’ll read a non-fiction book that will make me wonder why I bother with fiction at all.

This is not quite one of those, but it’s pretty good. I picked it up in O’Hare on the way back from Chicago last week. It’s about the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, and it focuses mainly on two men: Daniel Burnham, the Fair’s chief architect and visionary, and Herman Mudgett, a.k.a. H.H. Holmes, a murderer who preyed on visitors to the Fair.

It’s a fascinating book. The 1893 Fair is one of those grand 19th-century events that are not only forgotten today, but almost incomprehensible to the modern mind: in these days of easy entertainment it’s hard to imagine anybody investing that much time and money in constructing something like this, something you have to go out to appreciate. And it’s even harder to imagine it having anything close to the same impact.

Larson makes a good case for that impact, on areas of modern life as mundane as breakfast and as all-encompassing as urban planning. He also fills the book with fascinating detail about the personalities and challenges involved in staging the fair, and, in the parallel story, about Mudgett’s activities.

What makes the book so fascinating, or perhaps more than just fascinating, haunting, is that parallel story, the rich irony Larson has hit upon that the Fair – the White City, as it was called, because all the buildings were painted white – embodied all the best aspirations of the art and technology of its day, even while it harbored a man who epitomized the worst in human evil.

Unfortunately, that irony is one that’s pretty easily captured in a book jacket blurb or an NPR story, and I was a little disappointed on finishing the book to find that I wasn’t any more moved, actually having read the book, than I had been on first reading about the book. I’m not sure quite what that means. Was there more Larson could have done within the pages of his book to expound upon this irony? Then it might have seemed like overkill, though.

This overkill actually happens, for me at least, with one strategy Larson does adopt to accentuate the story’s literary qualities. He narrates it as if it were a novel, telling us what characters are doing and thinking in moments for which we don’t (and in the case of thoughts, naturally can’t) have any definitive evidence. Looking through his footnotes, it sounds like these are all plausible, responsible recreations, and he points out that this strategy has a respectable lineage (he invokes Truman Capote), but it still nags at me. However plausible his conjectures, they have the perverse effect of undermining his case, because we can’t escape the fact that they’re fictional. Whatever Mudgett was thinking as he killed Anna Williams, we at least know it wasn’t what Larson says he was thinking, because Larson made that up.

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Went back to the Institute of Contemporary Art today, so Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki could see the Shepard Fairey exhibit.

The museum itself is great. Not only are the contents worth seeing, but the building itself is really cool, hanging out over the water in a way that looks cool from the outside (if you happen to see it from the side), and gives you a great view across the harbor to the airport from the inside.

But that coolness isn’t apparent as you approach. From the land side the place looks like a nondescript box. Following the directions on the museum’s website, you approach through a no-man’s land of wharfside buildings, and are then confronted by what looks like a very ad hoc parking lot. Poorly marked, with broken-down fences, stacks of construction debris and dismantled police barricades, haphazardly placed concrete dividers that are crumbling leaving their rebar exposed, random piles of sand, broken pavement, temporary buildings, hard-to-see signs, odd geometry, and double-painted contradictory parking lines. Unattractive in every way. On the far side of this you see what must be the museum, because it has Andre the Giant’s face on it, but from the street you can’t see an entrance, so you wonder if you’re actually in the right place. Taking it on faith you walk through the parking lot, and if you happened to pick the right direction, then yes, there’s the entrance. From there on you’re good.

The whole thing is so typically Boston. There’s some really cool stuff here. But to get to it you have to wade through some really unwelcoming and ugly shit.

2120 South Michigan Avenue

I was in Chicago last week for a conference, and I had an afternoon with no interesting panels lined up, so I decided to do a little sightseeing. I went to the old Chess Records studio, which it turns out survives. It’s one they moved into in about ’57, so a lot of the classics weren’t recorded there, but a lot were. I didn’t know about it the last couple of times I was in Chicago. It’s been restored and now it’s run as a non-profit, Willie Dixon’s Blues Heaven. Educational, etc.

So I walked about halfway there, all the way down Michigan Avenue until I ran out of park on the left, and got tired—my back had been hurting for a couple of days, and all this walking wasn't helping. Decided to take the El the rest of the way. Got off at Chinatown and walked back over to Michigan, and found no. 2120. Now, it was a windy and chilly day in late March in Chicago, so by the time I reached the place I was tired and cold and a little windburned and maybe a little sunburned; I’d also walked through what felt like a kind of sketchy part of town, between Chinatown and Michigan Avenue. I don’t know much about Chicago, but I think by the time you’re there you’re getting into the South Side, and it definitely looked rundown and a little dangerous, as per legend (which is all I know). I'm not complaining: it put me in a blues mood. I've been listening to Chess artists for years, and I just recently got the 4-disc Chess Blues box, and had been playing it non-stop since getting to Chicago. This was a pilgrimage.

And the place was closed. Sign on the door said “gone out to lunch, bank, post office, be back after 2:00. Sorry for the inconvenience.” It was just after one, and I had an hour to kill. Nothing to do in that area, unless I felt like hanging out in a lunchroom that looked none too welcoming. So I walked around some more. Found Prairie Avenue, once the elitest address in town, now just an oasis of high-priced condos and some vacant lots. Stepped in some dog shit. Great.

Eventually killed enough time that I felt I could go back. It was a little before two, but I figured maybe whoever was in charge would be back early to, you know, do some business. I was ready to drop some cash on souvenirs, let me tell you.

Nope. So I hung around the door. What else could I do? At least I was there. It’s a small building, with a plate glass front so you can see in to a big photo of Willie Dixon on one wall, what looked like a photo of Clinton and Daley on another, some chairs, a reception counter, and a gift shop behind that. Curtain over the counter was closed, but you could peek into the gift shop; a Bo Diddley box set was staring back at me, and some coffee mugs. Looked like a place I wanted to get into. Maybe I could walk around the old studio, like the website said. Maybe I could stand where Muddy Waters stood, and Howlin’ Wolf, and Little Walter. Etta James, Buddy Guy, Sonny Boy Williamson, Hound Dog Taylor.

I ended up waiting until about 2:15, but nobody showed up. I would've waited longer if I hadn't already been waiting so long, if you know what I mean. Meanwhile I was feeling more and more suspicious myself: I was dressed in old blue jeans, scuffed shoes, leather jacket, cap pulled low over my eyes; I’m sure I looked a bit skeevy. And uncomfortable among the boarded up buildings, barred windows, half-dead cars, etc. A big guy in leather and chains riding a mean-looking hog was circling around and around the block.

Anyway, I eventually gave up and walked back to Chinatown-Cermak Station. And that was my visit to the Home of the Blues.

Baltimore Basilica

Me and Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki were in Baltimore for the Thanksgiving holiday. While there spent a pleasant afternoon wandering around the Mt. Vernon area, and we ended up at the Baltimore Basilica.

Like the city it graces, the Basilica is off the beaten path for most tourists, but it's one of the great buildings the Tanuki has seen in this country. Take a look here, and read up on its history here.

In brief, it was designed in 1805 by Benjamin Latrobe, who also designed the U.S. Capitol. The Basilica uses a lot of the same ideas: classical columns and a dome inspired by the Pantheon. All of this gives the exterior an unexpected look for a cathedral.

The interior is just as surprising. The ornamentation is not exactly minimalist, but definitely understated. Most remarkable is the color scheme, which has recently been restored to Latrobe's original vision: lots of white, with delicate pink and blue accents. In all, it's entirely different from, say, the shadowy, suggestive depths of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, or the dizzying detail on every interior surface of the Cathedral Basilica in St. Louis, or the colorful Southwestern primitivism of the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City (which happen to be the other important U.S. cathedrals the Tanuki has visited).

The windows complete the vision. Evidently the Basilica had stained glass windows until a recent restoration, but that wasn't what Latrobe had originally intended, and in the renovation they went back to the clear glass windows he had called for. As a result, the interior is flooded with calm white light which interacts with Latrobe's airy color scheme to create an atmosphere of lightness and glory. It uplifts you, gently, rather than overwhelming you. The Old Cathedral in St. Louis has something of the same feel, with its clear windows and delicately modulated colors, but architecturally, that building feels little different than a normal church. The Baltimore Basilica is unmistakably monumental.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it feels closest to some of the monuments and early government buildings in D.C. It shares the same vision of rationality and spirituality supporting each other, and finding expression in an aesthetic that is at once direct and elegant.

It's one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever been in.

Mt. Auburn Cemetery

Is this art? Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki and I went on an outing last week to Mt. Auburn Cemetery here in Cambridge - it looked like it was the closest we were going to get this season to a serious leaf-peeping excursion.

It's an interesting place. First garden-style cemetery in the States (as opposed to the earlier churchyard-style cemeteries), and a pioneer in landscaping, precursor of the great urban parks of the 19th century, such as Central Park, or the Tanuki's favorite, St. Louis's Forest Park.

The difference is, of course, that this is a graveyard. It's full of dead people, and the stones that mark where they lie. So you stroll around enjoying the foliage, the carefully arranged treescapes and ponds and hills and hollows, but every prospect is centered around tombs.

Of course these are tombs of wealthy Bostonians from the mid- to late nineteenth century: romantic in the extreme, decorated with all manner of statuary, all kinds of Greco-Roman motifs and Romantic imagery.

Romantic is the key word: the whole place is like a strollthrough the Romantic imagination. The earth itself is sculpted so as to epitomize the contemporary ideal of the picturesque - hidden pools meant to evoke lonely cathedrals of nature, dells shaded by huge maples and ringed by gothic tomb entrances, mausolea designed to look like rustic forest chapels.

And everywhere there's mortuary sculpture. Angels, gods, eagles, urns, ivy, all of stone, all standing out white against the leaves and grass, like ghosts or something.

I've tramped around any number of old New England graveyards, the style that preceded Mt. Auburn - I can't get enough of them, the old death's-head tombstones, the eighteenth-century epitaphs. Compared to them, this would have been a startling new conception of death and the afterlife.

As well as a nice place for a stroll in early November.