España, Día 9: Toledo

When we visited Europe four years ago, I planned for us to spend a day in Toledo, but we ended up going to Segovia instead. A fast-speed train linking Madrid and Toledo was built in 2005--more than ten years after I left Spain. I don't think I realized that when we visited four years ago. We were thrilled that Gerardo and Gimena joined us.

Walking from the train station to the center of the medieval city was a good call. 

Blue Men and Water Gardens

From The Cultural Landscape Foundation:
"Dedicated on October 19, 1974, the four-and-a-half -acre Water Garden is a gift to the citizens of Fort Worth from the Amon Carter Foundation. Motivated by Lady Bird Johnson’s civic beautification movement, the Foundation’s president, Ruth Carter Johnson, selected architect Philip Johnson, who had recently completed the Amon Carter Museum, to enhance several blocks of derelict property located in downtown Forth Worth.

"Flanked by the convention center, railroads, and an elevated freeway, Johnson designed the asymmetrical space to occupy multiple levels. Unlike his rectilinear Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden in New York City, in the Fort Worth Water Garden angular, polygonal forms of concrete, water, and vegetation shift and undulate across the park. The series of walkways, pools, terraces, and a central plaza create varied spaces that are both open, closed, sunken, raised, private, and public. The three main pools, celebrate different characteristics of water. The Quiet Pool features a sheet of water falling down into a still, sunken pool surrounded by bald cypress, while the Dancing Pool boasts forty aerating fountains. The highlight of the park is the Active Pool, where water rushes down steep, stone steps to a roaring gorge forty feet below. Visitors can descend above the gushing water on an elevated walkway of free-standing steps. One critic wrote, after the opening of the garden, that the Water Garden reflected Johnson’s departure from his ‘Miesian’ period to a more activated and dynamic geometry."

Celebrating 25 Years--Day Last in NYC

On our last day in New York City, we took a walking tour of Greenwich Village. First, we walked near the house of William Bayard, where "Partially paralyzed but still alive, a dying [Alexander] Hamilton was brought back across the Hudson" after his duel with Aaron Burr. Hamilton died from his injuries on July 12, 1804--exactly 115 years before our visit. Apparently, though, the plaque at 82 Jane Street, posted in 1936, misidentifies the site of the Hamilton house, which is, in fact one block north. I read this later.

Next up: Abingdon Square, site of the gruesome, tragic murder of actress Adrienne Shelly in 2006.

Mari had scrambled eggs at Cafe Panino Mucho Giusto, and we then made our way to 74 West Charles Street, where native Oklahoman Woody Guthrie lived between December 1942 and May 1943. That's not very long, but it was the first apartment lease in NYC that Woody signed alone. It was also his 11th address in 3 years. He lived here with Marjorie, a dancer with the Martha Graham troupe. At the time, they were both still married to other people. He called the apartment "Rancho del Sol." They got married in 1945. Woody spent 27 of his 55 years living in New York City.

Woody lived on the same street where another enemy of fascism, Sinclair Lewis, lived between 1910 and 1913. In 1935, Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, a novel about the election of a fascist to the US Presidency.

We visited the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, 50 years after the Stonewall riots.

And then we made our way to the house on Grove street, where Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, died in 1809.


For a time, the street was named Reason Street after Paine's Age of Reason.

Above: the exterior of the Friends apartment.

We also walked by the apartment at 65 Morton where Julius Rosenberg did spywork and Cafe Wha?, where 19-year-old Bob Dylan (Zimmerman) had his New York City debut on January 24, 1961, one year before he released his first LP. Dylan had come to NYC to meet Woody Guthrie. Jimi Hendrix was 24 when he was "discovered" at the Cafe on August 6, 1966.

After walking down the street where Edgar Allen Poe lived when he published "The Raven" after moving here in 1844, we walked through Washington Square Park.

Built in 1892, the Washington Square Arch was built to commemorate the centennial of George Washington's inauguration as President of the United States in 1789, which took place in New York City, then the nation's capital.
 
Before leaving Greenwich Village, we walked by the one-time homes of Emma Lazarus (whose poem "The New Colossus" is engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty) and Mark Twain (1900-1901--when he wrote the Anti-Imperialist "To the Person Sitting in Darkness") and the townhouse that the Weathermen accidentally detonated on March 6, 1970 when they were working on a bomb. Dustin Hoffman was their next-door neighbor.

We took a taxi to Katz's Deli on the Lower East Side.
It has been 30 years since "When Harry Met Sally" was released. It includes a famous scene, filmed at Katz's, in which Sally shows Harry how easy it is for a woman to fake enjoyment. While we were in the restaurant, a Sally look-alike was recreating the scene a few tables away from us.

After lunch, we took a bus up first avenue to the Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was the first time either of us had been there.  We saw an exhibit of work by Simone Leigh (my birth-year peer) who won the Guggenheim's 2018 Hugo Boss prize. Leigh created the sculpture "Brick House," which we saw on the High Line Spur.

We also saw an exhibit built around Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Defacement," a protest against police brutality that he painted on the wall of Keith Haring's studio after the death of artist Michael Stewart in 1983.

This summer six of the floors of the Museum have been dedicated to the museum's "first artist-curated exhibition."  Six contemporary artists used the museum's collection to create a distinct thematic presentation.


This part of the Museum was curated by Cai Guo-Qiang, who was born in 1957 in Fujian province in China, where Mari and I lived for the first four years of our marriage, 1994-1998.

After we left the Guggenheim, we walked through Central Park. The 30-story El Dorado, behind Mari and the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis reservoir, was built in 1931. Lots of celebrities live and have lived there.

Before heading back to the airport, we stop at the Neue Galerie where we see an exhibit called "Eclipse of the Sun: Art of the Weimar Republic," featuring work by George Grosz, Otto Dix and Christian Schad. The permanent collection includes important works by Klimt, including a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. No photos were allowed.

We took a taxi to La Guardia and although traffic was a headache, we got there much earlier than I'm used to.

We were surprised and happy to find that Pablo and Emilio and Grandmother and Granddaddy were still up when we got back to the house after midnight.  Nina had been safely delivered to the Chickasaw Arts Academy, and all the kids had enjoyed a grand time during our absence.

We immediately began fantasizing about going to New York to celebrate the one-year anniversary of our 25th year anniversary. If we went, we'd stay at the Jane again, but we might fly into Newark next time and take the AirTrain into Penn Station.  We could also visit the renovated Modern, which is currently being renovated. And it would be great to see Sujata and Arun again--this time we'd pay for dinner!

Family Vacay VIII: Day 2--Miami to St. Louis

Our first stop is the George Washington Carver National Historic Site in Diamond, Missouri, which is just outside Joplin.

Carver was born into slavery here in the 1860s.

When George was very young, he and his mother were kidnapped. The man Moses Carver hired to hunt them down brought George back, but George never saw his mother again.

George Washington Carver died in 1943. He is buried at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Moses Carver and his wife, the slave owners who raised George, are buried in this cemetery. .

After the Civil War, George left the Carvers' home to seek an education when he was 10-12 years old--about the age that our kids are this summer.
Carver supported himself by working as a servant, a hotel cook, a laundryman, and a farm labourer. In 1879, he witnessed a lynching in Fort Scott, Kansas that haunted him for the rest of his days.

Carver was working as a farmhand in Minneapolis, Kansas when he finished high school in his late 20s. He moved to Iowa to study art and then transferred to Iowa State Agricultural College (later Iowa State University), where he received a bachelor’s degree in agricultural science in 1894 and a master of science degree in 1896.


When George returned to the visit the Carvers in later years, they lived in this house, which was built in 1881. Over the course of our trip, Mari read us excerpts from a 2015 biography of Carver by Christina Vella. She recommends it.

Our next stop was the Polymath Educational Cafe in Marshfield, Missouri. As I remembered it, the cafe was only open to 2 pm on Saturdays. When I realized we would just make it before closing, I called to confirm that we would be able to eat there if we arrived shortly before 2. The owner said "sure." It was only after we arrived that we realized that the Polymath Educational Cafe actually closes at 1 pm on Saturdays. She stayed open an extra hour to offer us a vegetarian feast.

After we checked in to our hotel in downtown St. Louis, we headed to the City Museum, which is open until midnight on Saturday night. The "Museum"--which was highly recommended to us by Lisa, Norah and Melissa--did not disappoint.
All we knew going in was that it had a 10-story slide.


I can now report that 80% of the Museum is a multi-story indoor/outdoor playground featuring slides, tunnels and mazes.

That's Nina in the photo above, demonstrating impressive bravery by climbing through a sky cage-tunnel several stories above the ground.

Describing the Museum as a playground undersells the imaginative work that went into its construction. Notice the school bus peering over the corner of the building in the photo above. The Museum is also a playground for the eyes.
Pablo and Emilio exited one side of the basement and emerged some minutes later from underneath the jaw of a giant white cave whale.
Later, Emilio and Nina appeared briefly among the stalagtites in one of the cage-tunnel's arteries.
The whale's tongue and throat provide one entry way into the cavern maze.

Pablo has always been a very flexible boy.
Part of the 15% of the museum that was not playground included a modern art exhibit that featured a sculpture by KAWS (not pictured here).
The museum pizza was surprisingly tasty.

Pablo and I didn't discover the dragon's lair until after I saw it in on a postcard in the bookstore on our first attempt to exit the building. We went back in to find it hidden in the cavern maze.
Our decision to visit on a Saturday night was a wise one. They say lines can be quite long during the day, but we did not encounter any during our visit. We left shortly before 11 p.m.

2018 Summer Family Film Festival Finale

School starts tomorrow.  That's 5th grade for Nina and Pablo and 7th grade for Emilio and new schools for all. Tonight, we finished screening the 8th and final film in our 2018 Summer Family Film Festival. I curated, with help from Mari.

Karate Kid (1984). June.
The Sting (1973). June.
The Adventures of Tintin (2011). June or July.
Rear Window (1954) July 1.
1776 (1972) July 22.
The Cowboys (1972) July 30.
High Noon (1952.). August 5.
Murder on the Orient Express (2017). August 13.

We saw all of these, except for the last, from beginning to end on the big screen upstairs, sitting on the couch together.  Tonight, I asked the kids what their favorite was, and they all answered unhesitatingly: Rear Window.  Emi didn't think he could consider Murder on the Orient Express, since he and I saw it first in the cinema last winter, but he thought he might throw his vote that way, if he could.

Film festivals of previous summers have included: Spartacus, Ben-Hur, North by Northwest, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E. T., Raiders of the Lost Ark (and its several sequels), The Man Who Knew Too Much, City Lights, The Great Dictator, Modern Times, and Mutiny on the Bounty. All were successes, except for Mutiny (1935), which produced a mutiny on our own Bounty. The kids are not fans of Captain Bligh.