Canals and Alleys of Venice

Scary Frari

A night time visit to Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, or "Frari", one of the most famous churches in Venice.  It was dark in the square, the doors were ajar, most of the light inside was from candles, it was deserted.  I immediately started channeling The DaVinci Code.    The painting above the main alter is the Assumption by Titian (also below).  Wow.

(detail)

Spooky tomb where Canova's heart is buried.   I'm sure Robert Langdon would not hesitate to enter.

Guarding the Front Entrance of...

the Boston Museum of Fine Arts....

Appeal To The Great Spirit, Cyrus Dallin, (cast 1909)

The Venice Guggenheim....  

Marino Marini, The Angel of the City, Marino Martini (cast 1950)

A morning walk in Venice

 Alberto Prosdocimi (Italian, 1852-1925)

 flooding from high tide...

 front hall of San Marco flooded...a two-fer, art history + natural disaster

don't tread on me.

Nobska Point Lighthouse, Woods Hole

 1828, rebuilt as 40 foot iron/brick tower in 1876

The lighthouse was automated in 1985 and the house is now the residence of the Commander of the US Coast Guard Sector Southeastern New England based in Woods Hole. 

dusk ferry to Martha's Vineyard....a jeep invasion underway??

A modern mythology....

John Everett Millais, Ophelia (oil on canvas, 1852, Tate)

Gregory Crewdson,  "Untitled (Ophelia from Twilight)" (photograph, 2001)

350.org Day

In addition to being Zombie Day, today is also the annual day of action for 350.org, when people at 7347 events in 188 countries work together to raise awareness of the global climate crisis.  You can follow the link to the web site and see inspiring pictures of what is going on all around the world today.  Here are Stockholm activists dressed up as the sun, wind, and water thanking people on the subway for choosing public transportation.

Here is my climate update:  On September 19, 10 days later then usual, Arctic sea ice reached its third lowest recorded extent (the two lower years were 2007 and 2008).  For the first time, two yachts, one from Russia and one from Norway, circumnavigated the Arctic Sea through the northeast (over Russia) and northwest (over Canada) passages in one season.  And they didn't even have to eat their boots.

A few days ago I was talking to a colleague whose recent trip to a research station in Greenland was canceled --- instead of flying in three scientists and one writer (Simon Winchester, I hear), the Greenland authorities sent four marksmen to protect the field researchers from marauding polar bears who normally would be far out on the sea ice hunting seal this time of year.  Of course, it is shoot to kill.

10/10/10, World Zombie Day

Are you ready?

Those notorious Harvard druggies

Prof. Timothy Leary

If you are anywhere between the ages of 40 and 70 and possibly smoked pot in your youth (but of course did not inhale), I'm sure you'd find The Harvard Psychedelic Club, by Don Lattin, a rip-roaring read.  Did you know that Timothy Leary,  Richard Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass), and Andrew Weil were all Harvard professors together?  These three almost single-handedly ushered in the Age of Aquarius with their research on the spiritual, religious, and mind-altering effects of LSD.  As human experimentation on undergraduates was off-limits, the work, starting with the Harvard Psilocybin Project, was carried out with the assistance of graduate students (a specialized form of indentured adult).  The anticipated revolution in the field of psychology was to begin in Leary's home at 64 Homer Street in Newton in the winter of 1960-61.  Here is a picture of the house not a mile from mine.  Does the local historical society know about this?  Why no plaque?

 trip the light fantastic....

All these grad students tripping together under the supervision of Leary and Alpert eventually started living together as a "spiritual" family in a house Alpert/Ram Dass purchased at 23 Kenwood Avenue, around the corner (they went up against the neighbors and Newton's single-family zoning laws and won).   Everybody living and loving together---dig that Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood!

 Be here now....

The story goes on from there with much collateral damage, unorthodoxy, and ultimately, that social movement we call "the Sixties".  Weil, Leary, and Ram Dass all left, or were fired by, Harvard, moving west to Haight-Ashbury, India, Mexico, or jail and some still carry grudges for each other to this day--really, this book is a trip, pardon the pun. 

remember?

Here is one of most interesting passages in Lattin's book, relevant to ideals of Utopias, as per Morris and others before him:

"Leary and Alpert's transcendental community in the Boston suburbs was a harbinger of the hippie communes that would pop up across the country in the late 1960s. But it also harked back to an earlier social experiment conducted not far from Newton, in the Roxbury section of Boston.  One hundred and twenty years before Leary and Alpert established their three homes in Newton, a transcendentalist former Unitarian minister named George Ripley founded Brook Farm, a utopian community organized in the 1840s---the same decade in which Henry David Thoreau set up camp at Walden Pond.  Leary would soon come to see his life as a continuation of the work of Thoreau, Emerson, and Margaret Filler, the American writer and protofeminist who participated in the Brook Farm experiment.

"Leary and Alpert liked to compare their ouster from Harvard with the earlier banishment of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wore out his welcome with a famous 1838 address to the graduating class at the Harvard Divinity School.  In that speech, Emerson condemned the odious errors of historical Christianity, calling its depiction of the Son of God a "noxious exaggeration".  True religion, Emerson proclaimed, would allow "every man to expand to the full circle of the universe."  Twenty years after he was kicked out of Harvard, Leary would cite the transcendentalists as the inspiration behind his call that every man "turn on, tune in, drop out."

"They, too, were saying turn on, tune in, go within.  Become self-reliant.  Before Emerson came back to Harvard in 1838, he was in Europe hanging out with notorious druggies like Coleridge and Wordsworth," Leary said at a 1983 Harvard reunion. "They were expanding their minds with hashish and opium and reading the Bhagavad Gita.  Then he came back here and gave that famous speech where he said, "Don't look for God in the temples.  Look within."  Find God within yourself.  Drop out.  Become self-reliant.  Do your own thing."

 Now the mushrooms go in Weil's $50 an ounce youth-assuring face-creams....that's what I call moving with the times.  Or maybe he's just still moving the times himself?