Halifax — October 25, 2012

On Thursday morning something happened to wake me up early without benefit of alarm clock. By 7:15 I was showered, shaved, dressed, and downstairs for breakfast. It was still before sunrise. After some time for prayer, I left for downtown. A leisurely stroll down Cogswell Street and along the waterfront brought me to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic at 10:15. The wiki link tells you about all the things they have, and I saw most of them. My primary objectives were the materials about the Halifax Explosion and the Titanic.

I had heard of the explosion. I knew that Massachusetts had been so generous in sending relief that Nova Scotia's enduring gratitude is expressed by the sending of a large Christmas tree to Boston every year. But I had not know of the extent of the death and destruction in the largest man-made explosion before Hiroshima. It was truly tragic. The exhibit, which includes a film and a number of displays, is very moving.

Halifax's principal connection to the Titanic was the sending of two ships to look for survivors and recover victims. Their regular work was laying and repairing transatlantic telephone and telegraph cables, so they were accustomed to working in those waters. As it happened they found no survivors but recovered hundreds of bodies. They had undertakers aboard and embalmed all they could until they ran out of embalming fluid. Those they could not embalm they gave a respectful burial at sea. Families came to take some of the bodies, but others were unclaimed, so several hundred victims were buried in Halifax cemeteries, according to their religion when that could be determined.

Beyond those exhibits, there are numerous small boats, mostly sailboats, displays relating to boatbuilding, sailmaking, shipping, wartime naval operations, etc. After a couple of hours in the museum, I went to the adjacent dock, to their ship the CSS Acadia, which had served for more than 50 years in the work of charting the ocean off Atlantic Canada. It was fun going around and up to the upper decks and finding out something of how they operated. The surveyors (hydrographers) were civilians, but the crew of the ship were navy. I was also delighted to find that they had a resident cat, Erik the Red, and to make his acquaintance.

CSS Acadia

The cat Erik (on a staff member's jacket on a chart table)

George's Island in Halifax Harbor, with McNab Island in background

Canadian Naval Vessel returning to port. Acadia dipped her ensign in salute as the ship passed.

After several hours touring the museum, I went a few blocks up the hill to The Maxwell's Plum, which bills itself as an English-style pub. There I was able to sample some (32 oz. — it was on special on Thursdays) of the Garrison ale which the panhandling musician from Saskatchewan had praised two days earlier. It was quite good, although not the best brew I've ever had — that may have something to to with the breadth of the young man's experience compared to mine. Coincidentally, heading up Sackville Street to the pub, I realized that the spot where I encountered the teenaged panhandler Tuesday evening was just a block from a gay nightclub called Reflections. I wonder if that was merely a coincidence.

Interior of The Maxwell's Pub

A not untypical early 19th Century building on Water Street 

After lunch I went back to the museum on my all-day admission and spent another couple of hours until closing time. I arrived a few minutes late for the 5:15 Mass at the cathedral. Then I strolled up Spring Garden Road to South Park Street, where I looked at several monuments in Victoria Park: Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, and others. Victoria Park is the southern end of a succession of greenspaces extending about 1 1/2 km south from Halifax Common and including the grounds of the Citadel. That brought me to University Avenue. Symphony Nova Scotia was to give a concert that evening in the Dalhousie University Arts Center. By a wonderful serendipity the program was "Music of the Titanic Era." So I spent an enjoyable evening listening to mostly British orchestral music of the very early 20th Century.

SNS on the stage of Rebecca Cohn Auditorium moments before the concert

After that I was ready for dinner and headed to the Rockbottom Brewpub, after finding a place that advertised in the SNS program book already closed. Actually, when I got there, I had a decision to make. I figured it was my last chance to run into my cousin. Upstairs in the building is Your Father's Moustache Pub and Eatery, and in the basement is the Rockbottom. Ultimately I decided that if he was at either, he was more likely to be at the Rockbottom because it was open mic night, and he has appeared with his guitar at talent shows on campus. He wasn't there, but it was still an okay place  to have dinner at 10:30. I suppose I should have peeked in at YFM as well, but I didn't think it through as clearly as I'm doing right now. Oh, well.

Anyway, it was a very good day for me in Halifax.

My Barber Puts Me to Shame — and Other Stuff

My Barber. Maybe the first part of the title is elitist, but it's what I was thinking as I walked home from the barber shop on Thursday. He started me off with a little joke which it took me a minute to got. I usually wait two or three months between haircuts, so my hair was getting pretty long. He said I needed a haircut or a violin.

While he cut my hair we started blandly by talking about the weather. When I mentioned the snow in Rome, that led to some conversation about place in Italy we'd like to visit. He said he had never got to Rome: his only time in Italy was many years ago when he was in the Navy and his ship went to Naples. But he had liked it when they went to Holland, and he had a week in Amsterdam. At that point I was thinking sailor+Amsterdam=visits to prostitutes. But before I could come up with a bland comment or question, he said he had loved visiting the Rijksmuseum and being able to stand in front of "The Night Watch."

That led me to ask if he had been to the exhibition of Dutch paintings at the Peabody Essex Museum. Well, he had been six times! (I went twice.) After he had seen the whole exhibit, he went back and looked more carefully at some of the specific paintings. So I mentioned that I had seen a movie at Cabot Street Cinema. "The Mill and the Cross?" he asked. He gets their tabloid fliers and wishes he could get there more often, but the performance schedule is difficult for him. OTOH, he has an opportunity to buy a DVD of the movies for $25. We talked about it for a bit. He also told me that he was taking a course in art appreciation, and I said I thought the movie would fit in with it very well, and he said my enthusiasm for it was inclining him to buy it.

Next he mentioned that he often spent a half hour on the art course before he came to work. This called The Teaching Company to mind, and, sure enough, they produced the course. He has maybe six of the courses, and he really likes them. (I've bought a lot of their courses, but, unlike him, I haven't taken the time to watch most of them. It's like my unread books.)

Edited to add: At some point the discussion turned to music. He was of the opinion that Bach is the greatest of the Baroque composers. I commented that when I was a boy, I knew that my dad liked Bach, but I didn't care for Bach that much. While I didn't want to say exactly that Bach is an acquired taste, the fact is that at some point something clicked, and I could really appreciate Bach. Similarly, in the 1980's I could agree with a colleague at work that the Bach cantatas played every Sunday morning on WGBH were "lugubrious" at some point something clicked, and now I appreciate them.

Finally we turned to language study. It's fascinating for him watching his 2-3 year old granddaughter learn English, and he thinks immersion is the best way to learn a language. He has got to a point with his German that he almost never needs a dictionary when he reads the German "Readers' Digest." (I dabble in languages, and maybe have gotten beyond beginner stage with German, but I've never achieved that degree of proficiency since I studied French and Latin in school.)

As I paid, he commented that he had really enjoyed talking with me — he could never have such a conversation with most customers. As I reflected on it, I realized that he was pursuing his interests much more deeply than I do, and, without a university degree, is a truly educated man.


Other Stuff.  I went to three musical events in Boston this week: an opera on Wednesday, a symphony concert on Thursday, and a chamber music concert and social evening at the Harvard Musical Association on Friday.

Continuation: The opera was interesting, and I wish I had a chance to go back and hear it again to pick up on details I think I missed first time around. The symphony was good, but unexciting. See my music blog for a bit more about the symphony concert.

Friday evening I went to Scollay Square. Natalia was my waitress, and she did a good job, but, unlike Wendy on my previous visit there, she showed no interest in my book or in having any real conversation. But after a while, three people arrived and sat at a table to my left: a middle aged man and woman, and a blond teenaged boy in a short-sleeved T shirt. At first I was sorry I hadn't sat somewhere where I could see him without turning my head, but eventually I decided it was a good thing, because I might have stared at him too obviously if I had had a direct view. We left at the same time, and I noticed that the boy had a skateboard.

The concert was an interesting one. The musicians were the Leipzig Quartet and the first half of the concert was an adaptation of something they have done in Germany based on Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. They perform pieces which they find somehow related to the main character of the novel, Adrian Leverkühn, a composer who sells his soul to the devil to become even greater than Beethoven. Between each piece they play, there is a reading of part of the dialogue between Leverkühn and the devil. The program notes explained that Mann intended this as an allegory about Germany under Hitler, which sold its soul to the devil for the sake of empire. I thought, based on the notes, that the book would be worth reading, but the conversation between the two was so wordy and abstract that it killed any interest in reading the book. (But too bad Mann hadn't had the foresight to write it in the 1920's, before Germany made the final pact with the devil, rather than in the 1940's, when it no longer could serve as a warning, but only as a lamentation.)

As I was on my way to Boston, I somehow came to think of the phrase, "soak an eye," and I realized that it fits the scene in "Casablanca" where Rick brushes aside Sam's reluctance to play "As Time Goes By." Rick tells Sam, "If she can stand it, soak an eye."*

* If I'm being too vague about this, just ask, and I'll be happy to explain. But just read it aloud, and it'll probably make sense.

Museum — 19th Century American Landscapes

Over the weekend, while my sister-in-law was here, I suggested we go to the Peabody Essex Museum to see the exhibition of American landscape paintings. If you click on the thumbnail photos, you get a pretty good sample of the works on display. Notice the little i in the lower right of each "full-sized" picture. When you click it you get title, artist, date, etc. (This is the same museum where I recently saw the exhibition of Dutch art. I showed my s-i-l the "catalogue" of that exhibition with copies of all the pictures, and information about them. She seemed to find it very interesting.)

When we got to the museum, she said she wanted to see the Japanese and Chinese collections first, so we split up. I took my time looking at the landscapes, and then sat in an area where they were giving side-by side screenings of documentary films by Peter Hutton.  ("Using a split-screen and fixed perspective, Two Rivers (2003) tracks boat travel up New York's Hudson River and down China's Yangtze River, witnessing the ebb and flow of trade, industry and human progress. Two Rivers is shown in conjunction with Painting the American Vision, an exhibition of Hudson River School landscape paintings.") The films run on continuous loops; they are of different lengths, but about 25 minutes. About the time I had seen the whole thing, my s-i-l arrived, having seen the landscapes, as well as the Japanese and Chinese galleries. She said she liked it all and she'd like to return some time and see other galleries as well.

As I was looking at some of the paintings, it occurred to me that the æsthetic of the artists was not far removed from that of the Dutch landscape artists of three centuries earlier, although the American scenery is often much more spectacular. In flat scenes, the similarity is more evident.

If you want to see more than you can with the enlarged thumbnails, the entire exhibition (I think) is included in the "catalogue," a book titled "The Hudson River School: Nature and the AmericanVision," which was on sale at the museum shop for $50.00, but can be obtained online for $31.50. With something like 55 pictures, it makes the cost less than 60¢ per picture, which is a pretty good value, if you like that kind of stuff, IMO. I'll probably order it.

Museum — 17th Century Dutch Art

A week ago I (finally) went to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, to see the exhibition of paintings from the private collection of Eijk and Rose-Marie van Otterloo. Apparently the van Otterloos have often lent paintings from their collection to museums here and in the Netherlands, but they have never done such a large exhibition. If I understood correctly, this is their entire collection. It ran in Salem from February 26 through June 19. It will move on to San Francisco and be at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco from July 9 through October 2. Then it's on to Houston, where it will be at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from November 13, 2011 through February 12, 2012.

I found it very worthwhile. Of course, everybody's taste differs, but there were paintings in just about all the genres represented that really caught my eye: landscapes, seascapes, village and country scenes, interiors, and portraits. There is also a cute painting of a little sleeping dog.

The "catalogue" of the exhibition, as they call these things, is titled "Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie an Eijk van Otterloo Collection," and it's available through Amazon.com for under $41.00. (I bought it at the museum at list price of $65.00.) It's a big, heavy book, with 404 heavy stock pages, and, as an Amazon reviewer said, "All the works are beautifully illustrated, often with large, full-page reproductions, and a detailed presentation of each painting (description, meaning, provenance, exhibition history) accompanies each illustration." The same reviewer also said, "The collection's depth is absolutely breathtaking, from Rembrandt's 1632 Portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh (the Van Otterloo's had to part with 18 works from their collection to be able to acquire it), to Saenredam's 1660 Interior of the St Bavokerk (only about 50 works by Saenredam have survived, most of them in museums), from Jacob Van Ruysdael's landscapes (three of them!) to Frans Hals's 1660 Portrait of a Preacher, etc." and, "An exceptional publication for an exceptional collection, and a must-have for any artlover's library."

So if you can get to the San Francisco or Houston showings, I think it will be well worth seeing. Whether or not you go, the book is a real bargain, IMO. You get to have and keep reproductions of all these beautiful paintings and pictures of the furniture from the same time and place which is also part of the exhibition; and it only costs you about twice or three times what you'd need to pay to get into the museum!