I let Andrew handle the money, because money is in his genes, not mine.
I’ve never been good with money, but then I’ve never had any money to practice with.
My parents paid for my undergraduate education, which cost them a fortune, but which allowed me to receive my Baccalaureate free from student loans.
Andrew is paying for my law school education, which has been costing him a fortune, but which will allow me to receive my Juris Doctor free from student loans.
Of course, the downside, for me, is that I have to be nice to Andrew since he’s footing the bill. I have to pretend that I like the atonal, modernist music with which he tortures me, I have to pretend that the Big Ten Conference is on a par with the vastly superior Big Twelve Conference, and I have to pretend that I like his cooking, including that shrimp-tomato-rice dish Andrew’s father warned me about.
To be serious, we have a gentlemen’s agreement about my law school expenses. If things do not work out between us, I will pay Andrew back my law school tuition over a ten year period of time, with that obligation ending ten years after I graduate from law school.
In any case, I never worry about money as long as I have food on the table and a warm place to sleep. I leave all such worries to Andrew.
We never spend money. We don’t spend a dime on ourselves. We are not wasteful, we never buy foolish or frivolous things, we are not interested in technological gewgaws. We live very simply.
That will not change—even though $412,000 in option profits was assigned (and actually turned over) to me in December and January.
I take no credit for this maneuver, and I take no credit for my good fortune. The windfall was thrown into my lap.
Simply put, when oil was $160 a barrel in July, Andrew’s father and Andrew’s brother had Andrew and me buy six aggressive option contracts, effectively betting that the price of oil would decline sharply from then-current levels.
We were not alone. Hundreds of thousands of other Americans did the same thing at the same time.
Everyone who did so made out like bandits.
Our options were not naked options—at risk, and only at risk, was the tiny amount of money we put forward to buy the option contracts, which cost us a relative pittance—and the purpose of the options was to hit a home run or lose the entire (but insignificant) premiums paid. Nothing in-between was ever contemplated.
We did hit a home run. In fact, we hit six home runs, one for each of the option contracts we bought.
By September, the price of crude was dropping like a stone, and we knew that we had hit pay dirt—but that was only the beginning of the oil price collapse. The price of crude continued to slide, dramatically, until December. It was a staggering, brutal decline, but for Andrew and me it was a beautiful decline.
Our problem was taxes. Our gains would be short-term gains, half of which would be taxed at Andrew’s highest marginal rate. Further, an enormous amount of tax-planning had already been done for Andrew for 2008, tax-planning that did not take into account the prospect of an options payload at year-end.
The solution: the original option premiums were gifted to me, and I, in turn, immediately gifted one-third of the premiums to my sister and another one-third to my brother. All of this was accomplished by early October, more than eleven weeks before we started closing out the option contracts. It involved mountains of paperwork shipped back and forth, overnight express, between Minnesota, New York, Boston, Tennessee and Oklahoma.
Three of the option contracts were closed out in December and the other three option contracts were closed out in January. (Of course, this was done so as to spread reportable gains over two tax years.)
The proceeds from the option contracts are now held jointly by me, my sister and my brother. We will, of course, have to pay taxes on the gains, but all three of us are currently full-time students, without additional taxable income. We will never be in lower tax brackets than we are right now.
The money will be used to pay for education expenses. After taxes, my share will more than cover my final two years of law school tuition. After taxes, my sister’s share will cover most of her expenses for her next three years at Vanderbilt. After taxes, my brother’s share will cover much of the cost for his approaching four years at Southern Methodist.
Most of all, this windfall is a giant break for my parents, who otherwise would be footing the bill at two very costly universities beginning next year. A burden has been lifted from their shoulders.
Andrew gets to participate in the windfall, too, since a significant portion of his salary will no longer have to go toward paying my law school tuition. That money can now be devoted to atonal, modernist music scores, scores Andrew can use to torture me.
As for me, I’ve never had $412,000 in a checking account before.
I guess I’ll have to continue to be nice to Andrew, much as it hurts me.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Yet Another List
Having already compiled lists of the plays, operas, ballets and orchestral concerts Andrew and I have attended over the last three years, all of which are already out of date, I now list, in order, the artists we have heard in recital.
Church concerts, and organ recitals and organ demonstrations, are omitted from my list.
________________________________________________
Jennifer Larmore, Mezzo Soprano
Antoine Palloc, Piano
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Anne-Sophie Mutter, Violin
Lambert Orkis, Piano
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Karita Mattila, Soprano
Martin Katz, Piano
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Vivica Genaux, Mezzo Soprano
Craig Rutenberg, Piano
Music Room, SPCO Center
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Jonathan Biss, Piano
Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center, Macalester College
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Measha Brueggergosman, Soprano
Michael McMahon, Piano
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Joshua Bell, Violin
Jeremy Denk, Piano
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Lang Lang, Piano
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Kathleen Battle, Soprano
Ted Taylor, Piano
Daniel Swenberg, Theorbo
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
________________________________________________
Bryn Terfel, Baritone
Malcolm Martineau, Piano
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Christian Tetzlaff, Violin
Leif Ove Andsnes, Piano
Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory
Boston
Church concerts, and organ recitals and organ demonstrations, are omitted from my list.
________________________________________________
Jennifer Larmore, Mezzo Soprano
Antoine Palloc, Piano
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Anne-Sophie Mutter, Violin
Lambert Orkis, Piano
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Karita Mattila, Soprano
Martin Katz, Piano
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Vivica Genaux, Mezzo Soprano
Craig Rutenberg, Piano
Music Room, SPCO Center
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Jonathan Biss, Piano
Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center, Macalester College
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Measha Brueggergosman, Soprano
Michael McMahon, Piano
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Joshua Bell, Violin
Jeremy Denk, Piano
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Lang Lang, Piano
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Kathleen Battle, Soprano
Ted Taylor, Piano
Daniel Swenberg, Theorbo
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
________________________________________________
Bryn Terfel, Baritone
Malcolm Martineau, Piano
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
________________________________________________
Christian Tetzlaff, Violin
Leif Ove Andsnes, Piano
Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory
Boston
The Museum For Hamburg History
The best general-interest museum we visited in Hamburg was The Museum For Hamburg History (“Museum Fur Hamburgische Geschichte”), one of the world’s very greatest history museums.
The photo above shows the entrance to The Museum For Hamburg History, visible only once the visitor enters the front courtyard from the street.
The museum was constructed between 1914 and 1922, one of many large-scale civic projects in Germany initiated with the imprimatur of The Kaiser in the period immediately prior to the First World War, a period in which a unified Germany—and an emerging world power—was beginning to flex its muscles on the international stage.
The photo below shows the building during its long construction phase and provides some idea of the scale of the museum edifice.
The building was designed by architect Fritz Schumacher, a master of the modern Hanseatic style as practiced in Hamburg from the late-19th-Century through the 1930’s. The style calls for dark brick and intricate stone moldings, and pays tribute to traditional Hanseatic architecture by borrowing Northern European design elements from the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods.
Bremen-born Schumacher (1869-1947) spent eight of his formative years in the United States, only returning to Germany in his late teens. He devoted the last 24 years of his working life (1909 to 1933) to the design of buildings for The City Of Hamburg.
Hamburg underwent a construction boom from the 1850’s until the onset of World War II, a period in which the city saw its population grow from 50,000 persons to over two million persons. The city’s population peaked in 1943, the year of the firestorm. The city was evacuated after the 1943 firestorm, and—like so many German cities—The City Of Hamburg was never to see its population return to pre-war levels.
Even during World War I, when the city’s adult male population was largely serving in the trenches of France, major civic construction projects continued to fruition in Hamburg (and in the rest of Germany, too). Although the population of Germany was near starvation from 1916 on (a result of the British naval blockade), and although Germany’s heavy industry was devoted primarily to the production of armaments, major construction projects continued throughout the duration of the war.
Schumacher designed literally dozens of important buildings in Hamburg, many of which survived the Second World War or were reconstructed after that war in their pre-war forms. Schumacher buildings may be seen throughout the city of Hamburg to this very day. He was a master architect.
The Museum For Hamburg History is enormous. From the street façade, the visitor has no idea how vast is the museum structure, primarily because the street façade is what turns out to be merely a small wing of the museum, designed to serve as an elegant welcome portal. The bulk of the museum building lies behind the dignified entrance, concealed from the street via trees, brick walls, and skillful landscaping. Only after the visitor enters the building and passes through the beautiful multi-storied entrance hall—with its grand stone vaulting, statues and banners—and enters the museum proper does the visitor begin to realize what a giant building the visitor has entered.
In the photograph below, the museum’s entrance wing is the near-insignificant appendage located at the far upper right of the photograph (visitors enter through the courtyard, the only portion of the building that faces the frontage street, albeit at a distance). The photograph amply demonstrates how the building is many times larger than it appears to be from street level.
The museum building features large glass-roofed inner courtyards, magnificent stairwells and foyers, and installations of key public rooms from ancient Hamburg buildings of prominence.
Most of these historic interiors were the result of preservation efforts after The Great Fire Of 1842 caused much of the city to be destroyed. After The Great Fire, pre-1842 buildings, by and large, were not reconstructed in their old forms. Instead, salvageable portions of the old buildings were placed into storage and entirely new buildings, to new designs, were erected on the same sites.
Much of the interior fabric of The Museum Of Hamburg History was specifically designed to incorporate great halls and notable public rooms dismantled from landmark Hamburg buildings after the 1842 fire. These interiors were preserved, for decades, by The City Of Hamburg until such time as they could be reinstalled in a purpose-built building devoted to the city’s history. Preparatory plans for a city history museum were in place as early as 1839, seventy-five years before construction of the museum finally got under way.
The Museum For Hamburg History is truly a history museum beyond compare. I have never visited Musee Carnavalet in Paris, but from its reputation Musee Carnavalet is supposed to be one of the world’s very finest museums devoted to the history of a single city. Alex and Andrew have visited the Carnavalet exhaustively, and they have said that The Museum For Hamburg History is finer even than the Carnavalet, which truly must signify something about the Hamburg museum’s quality.
We spent two full (non-consecutive) days visiting The Museum For Hamburg History, arriving both times as the museum opened for the day and remaining both times until it closed. Despite devoting two full days to the museum, we nonetheless did not have an opportunity to see everything in the museum.
The extensive collection ranges from the city’s founding in the Middle Ages to the present. The main subjects covered are the Hamburg Harbor—and associated transport and trade—and the political, social and cultural history of the city. The Great Fire Of 1842 is documented in an informative and evocative way, as is the virtual ruin of the city during World War II. There are numerous models of the city, its churches, railways and ships disbursed throughout the museum. Many of these models are of amazing quality, complexity and beauty.
The first day we visited the museum, we toured the “basement”, which actually is above ground level and which actually is composed of two floors. It took us an entire day to get through the “basement”.
The “basement” contained exhibits addressing the history of costume, music, art, theater, science and religion in Hamburg. One of the most interesting of these rooms was a large room devoted to historic musical instruments: string instruments, keyboards, and bizarre brass and wind instruments the likes of which I had never seen.
The main exhibit in the “basement”, however, involved a detailed, exhaustive and dramatic sweep of rooms covering the history of Hamburg from the onset of The Wilhelmine Era through the late 20th Century. For me, these rooms were the heart and soul of the museum, covering, as they did, the emergence of modern Germany and its eventful, tragic history.
I learned, for instance, that Hamburg suffered through what amounted to several revolutions in all but name in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. The city was gripped with prolonged periods of social unrest from approximately 1880 until the onset of World War I.
The decade of economic crisis in the 1920’s was also covered in depth, as was the incorporation of surrounding towns and cities into Hamburg proper during the 1930’s, the decade in which Hamburg became a true metropolis.
Numerous rooms addressed the World War II years, although surprisingly little attention was paid to the horrific 1943 firestorm that destroyed much of the city. Enlarged photographs of the burned-out city, without more, were allowed to tell the whole story of the city’s destruction—there was very little additional information, and no artifacts, to place the photographs of the burned-out Hamburg into some kind of context. There was also no criticism of the Allied bombing campaigns against the city, which slightly surprised me.
The World War II rooms made no acknowledgement of Neuengamme, the Hamburg concentration camp, and no mention of the inhuman way in which Hamburg city officials arranged for the brutal murder of all Neuengamme inmates shortly before the camp was overrun by Allied soldiers in the final days of the war.
In similar fashion, there was no mention of the horrific murders in Hamburg of the victims of Nazi medical experiments. Such persons, along with their keepers, had been transferred to Hamburg and were killed in a city high school (still in use) only two or three days before their potential rescues by Allied forces. These grotesque killings were not included in the museum’s exhaustive presentation of city history.
The post-War years, full of privation, were also addressed in depth, as was the 1962 flood that ravaged the center of the city, covering all ground, high and low, between The River Elbe and The Alster Lakes. The Hamburg Flood Of 1962 was one of the most destructive floods, anywhere, of the past 200 years.
Hamburg was in the British zone of occupation in the immediate post-War period, and to this day Hamburgers insist that the British were incompetent and malevolent administrators. The British were indifferent to the food and shelter needs of the Hamburg populace, indifferent to the preservation of Hamburg landmarks, and indifferent to criminal activity occurring under British jurisdiction. As a result, the city did not begin to recover from the war until 1951, the year the British occupation ended. An entire section of this portion of the museum was devoted to troubles during the period of British occupation.
Throughout this grand sweep of rooms, one of the constant display themes was the presentation, at ten-year intervals, of fully-furnished living quarters for a typical middle-class Hamburg family, complete with dinnerware, tableware, appliances, window dressings, and even books and magazines from the period. It was fascinating to see how domestic life in Hamburg changed, decade-by-decade, from the 1870’s through the 1990’s.
One fact we found intriguing was that the average middle-class Hamburg family employed numerous servants all through the First World War and well into the decade of the 1920’s. It was only with the rapid economic deterioration that began in Germany in 1923—the period of hyperinflation, which wiped out generations of accumulated wealth—that the era of servants for the middle class began to end, a victim of hard economic times. Between 1923 and 1928, all but the very wealthiest of Hamburgers were forced to lay off their staffs of servants, never to reengage them.
Our second day at the museum was devoted to the “first” and “second” floors, although these actually were the third and fourth floors of the building. Most of the exhibits on these floors were devoted to Pre-Wilhelmine Hamburg.
Hamburg’s key role in The Reformation was covered exhaustively, as was the city’s history as a founding member of The Hanseatic League. The city’s centuries-long trouble with piracy was also the focus of several rooms.
An amazing amount of attention was paid to Hamburg’s Stock Exchange, including vast numbers of artifacts from the original 1558 Exchange. One of the most elaborate installations in the entire museum was the original Merchants Hall of the old Stock Exchange, with shields and banners and numerous life-size stone statues of both historic and mythic figures, all portrayed as guardians of the economic interests of what for centuries was Germany’s most important commercial city. All such items were original.
Many displays were not what one would usually expect to find inside a history museum.
Most surprising for us was the presence of a 19th-Century steamer that plied the waters of The River Elbe. The steamer had been moved from The River Elbe to the construction site on which the building was erected and incorporated into the building fabric. We toured the entire steamer, climbing up and down ladders and narrow stairwells, until we had seen everything onboard the steamer.
The upper floors included restorations of important public rooms from significant Hamburg residences of the Baroque period, complete with period furnishings, textiles, paintings and silver.
Historic archways from old Hamburg buildings were incorporated, to great effect, into the exteriors and interiors of the entire building. Examining the array of old archways was one of our greatest pleasures while touring the museum.
The most important of these archways was an elaborate 1605 portal from Saint-Petri-Kirche, one of the largest and most important surviving portals from the Baroque era.
An incredible number of Baroque archways survived over the centuries, and several of these archways were erected in a beautifully-landscaped park situated alongside the museum building. A few of the archways mounted outdoors were stand-alone objects, placed above pathways, while others were used as entrances and exits for different sections of the park. The most beautiful of all Baroque archways we saw in Hamburg had been placed in the park. It was taken from a private mansion, with the family name still visible on its carvings. The date was 1611.
One of the most popular attractions at The Museum For Hamburg History was an enormous model railway. The railway recreated all of Hamburg’s many rail stations and rail lines. Four times a day, museum personnel activate the railway, by far the largest and most complicated model railway I have ever seen. During the railway demonstrations, visitors may observe numerous trains operating on numerous tracks for twenty minutes at a time. It was very impressive.
During the two days we visited the museum, the museum was practically empty of visitors. We were often the only visitors in each room we explored. We visited the museum on weekdays and, at the very least, we had expected to encounter school groups. We saw none.
On both visits, we ate lunch at the museum café, a full-service restaurant of some quality. Despite a proliferation of wait staff, we were among only a handful of diners on both occasions. I suppose the museum receives the bulk of its visitors on weekends.
The museum was partially destroyed in 1944—bombings of Hamburg continued to the very end of the war, despite the fact that the 1943 firestorm had wiped out much of the city—but city officials determined that The Museum For Hamburg History would be the first museum to be rebuilt and reopened after the war. Portions of the museum re-opened as early as late 1945, only months after the cessation of hostilities.
No other museum in Hamburg was to reopen until the following decade.
The photo above shows the entrance to The Museum For Hamburg History, visible only once the visitor enters the front courtyard from the street.
The museum was constructed between 1914 and 1922, one of many large-scale civic projects in Germany initiated with the imprimatur of The Kaiser in the period immediately prior to the First World War, a period in which a unified Germany—and an emerging world power—was beginning to flex its muscles on the international stage.
The photo below shows the building during its long construction phase and provides some idea of the scale of the museum edifice.
The building was designed by architect Fritz Schumacher, a master of the modern Hanseatic style as practiced in Hamburg from the late-19th-Century through the 1930’s. The style calls for dark brick and intricate stone moldings, and pays tribute to traditional Hanseatic architecture by borrowing Northern European design elements from the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods.
Bremen-born Schumacher (1869-1947) spent eight of his formative years in the United States, only returning to Germany in his late teens. He devoted the last 24 years of his working life (1909 to 1933) to the design of buildings for The City Of Hamburg.
Hamburg underwent a construction boom from the 1850’s until the onset of World War II, a period in which the city saw its population grow from 50,000 persons to over two million persons. The city’s population peaked in 1943, the year of the firestorm. The city was evacuated after the 1943 firestorm, and—like so many German cities—The City Of Hamburg was never to see its population return to pre-war levels.
Even during World War I, when the city’s adult male population was largely serving in the trenches of France, major civic construction projects continued to fruition in Hamburg (and in the rest of Germany, too). Although the population of Germany was near starvation from 1916 on (a result of the British naval blockade), and although Germany’s heavy industry was devoted primarily to the production of armaments, major construction projects continued throughout the duration of the war.
Schumacher designed literally dozens of important buildings in Hamburg, many of which survived the Second World War or were reconstructed after that war in their pre-war forms. Schumacher buildings may be seen throughout the city of Hamburg to this very day. He was a master architect.
The Museum For Hamburg History is enormous. From the street façade, the visitor has no idea how vast is the museum structure, primarily because the street façade is what turns out to be merely a small wing of the museum, designed to serve as an elegant welcome portal. The bulk of the museum building lies behind the dignified entrance, concealed from the street via trees, brick walls, and skillful landscaping. Only after the visitor enters the building and passes through the beautiful multi-storied entrance hall—with its grand stone vaulting, statues and banners—and enters the museum proper does the visitor begin to realize what a giant building the visitor has entered.
In the photograph below, the museum’s entrance wing is the near-insignificant appendage located at the far upper right of the photograph (visitors enter through the courtyard, the only portion of the building that faces the frontage street, albeit at a distance). The photograph amply demonstrates how the building is many times larger than it appears to be from street level.
The museum building features large glass-roofed inner courtyards, magnificent stairwells and foyers, and installations of key public rooms from ancient Hamburg buildings of prominence.
Most of these historic interiors were the result of preservation efforts after The Great Fire Of 1842 caused much of the city to be destroyed. After The Great Fire, pre-1842 buildings, by and large, were not reconstructed in their old forms. Instead, salvageable portions of the old buildings were placed into storage and entirely new buildings, to new designs, were erected on the same sites.
Much of the interior fabric of The Museum Of Hamburg History was specifically designed to incorporate great halls and notable public rooms dismantled from landmark Hamburg buildings after the 1842 fire. These interiors were preserved, for decades, by The City Of Hamburg until such time as they could be reinstalled in a purpose-built building devoted to the city’s history. Preparatory plans for a city history museum were in place as early as 1839, seventy-five years before construction of the museum finally got under way.
The Museum For Hamburg History is truly a history museum beyond compare. I have never visited Musee Carnavalet in Paris, but from its reputation Musee Carnavalet is supposed to be one of the world’s very finest museums devoted to the history of a single city. Alex and Andrew have visited the Carnavalet exhaustively, and they have said that The Museum For Hamburg History is finer even than the Carnavalet, which truly must signify something about the Hamburg museum’s quality.
We spent two full (non-consecutive) days visiting The Museum For Hamburg History, arriving both times as the museum opened for the day and remaining both times until it closed. Despite devoting two full days to the museum, we nonetheless did not have an opportunity to see everything in the museum.
The extensive collection ranges from the city’s founding in the Middle Ages to the present. The main subjects covered are the Hamburg Harbor—and associated transport and trade—and the political, social and cultural history of the city. The Great Fire Of 1842 is documented in an informative and evocative way, as is the virtual ruin of the city during World War II. There are numerous models of the city, its churches, railways and ships disbursed throughout the museum. Many of these models are of amazing quality, complexity and beauty.
The first day we visited the museum, we toured the “basement”, which actually is above ground level and which actually is composed of two floors. It took us an entire day to get through the “basement”.
The “basement” contained exhibits addressing the history of costume, music, art, theater, science and religion in Hamburg. One of the most interesting of these rooms was a large room devoted to historic musical instruments: string instruments, keyboards, and bizarre brass and wind instruments the likes of which I had never seen.
The main exhibit in the “basement”, however, involved a detailed, exhaustive and dramatic sweep of rooms covering the history of Hamburg from the onset of The Wilhelmine Era through the late 20th Century. For me, these rooms were the heart and soul of the museum, covering, as they did, the emergence of modern Germany and its eventful, tragic history.
I learned, for instance, that Hamburg suffered through what amounted to several revolutions in all but name in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. The city was gripped with prolonged periods of social unrest from approximately 1880 until the onset of World War I.
The decade of economic crisis in the 1920’s was also covered in depth, as was the incorporation of surrounding towns and cities into Hamburg proper during the 1930’s, the decade in which Hamburg became a true metropolis.
Numerous rooms addressed the World War II years, although surprisingly little attention was paid to the horrific 1943 firestorm that destroyed much of the city. Enlarged photographs of the burned-out city, without more, were allowed to tell the whole story of the city’s destruction—there was very little additional information, and no artifacts, to place the photographs of the burned-out Hamburg into some kind of context. There was also no criticism of the Allied bombing campaigns against the city, which slightly surprised me.
The World War II rooms made no acknowledgement of Neuengamme, the Hamburg concentration camp, and no mention of the inhuman way in which Hamburg city officials arranged for the brutal murder of all Neuengamme inmates shortly before the camp was overrun by Allied soldiers in the final days of the war.
In similar fashion, there was no mention of the horrific murders in Hamburg of the victims of Nazi medical experiments. Such persons, along with their keepers, had been transferred to Hamburg and were killed in a city high school (still in use) only two or three days before their potential rescues by Allied forces. These grotesque killings were not included in the museum’s exhaustive presentation of city history.
The post-War years, full of privation, were also addressed in depth, as was the 1962 flood that ravaged the center of the city, covering all ground, high and low, between The River Elbe and The Alster Lakes. The Hamburg Flood Of 1962 was one of the most destructive floods, anywhere, of the past 200 years.
Hamburg was in the British zone of occupation in the immediate post-War period, and to this day Hamburgers insist that the British were incompetent and malevolent administrators. The British were indifferent to the food and shelter needs of the Hamburg populace, indifferent to the preservation of Hamburg landmarks, and indifferent to criminal activity occurring under British jurisdiction. As a result, the city did not begin to recover from the war until 1951, the year the British occupation ended. An entire section of this portion of the museum was devoted to troubles during the period of British occupation.
Throughout this grand sweep of rooms, one of the constant display themes was the presentation, at ten-year intervals, of fully-furnished living quarters for a typical middle-class Hamburg family, complete with dinnerware, tableware, appliances, window dressings, and even books and magazines from the period. It was fascinating to see how domestic life in Hamburg changed, decade-by-decade, from the 1870’s through the 1990’s.
One fact we found intriguing was that the average middle-class Hamburg family employed numerous servants all through the First World War and well into the decade of the 1920’s. It was only with the rapid economic deterioration that began in Germany in 1923—the period of hyperinflation, which wiped out generations of accumulated wealth—that the era of servants for the middle class began to end, a victim of hard economic times. Between 1923 and 1928, all but the very wealthiest of Hamburgers were forced to lay off their staffs of servants, never to reengage them.
Our second day at the museum was devoted to the “first” and “second” floors, although these actually were the third and fourth floors of the building. Most of the exhibits on these floors were devoted to Pre-Wilhelmine Hamburg.
Hamburg’s key role in The Reformation was covered exhaustively, as was the city’s history as a founding member of The Hanseatic League. The city’s centuries-long trouble with piracy was also the focus of several rooms.
An amazing amount of attention was paid to Hamburg’s Stock Exchange, including vast numbers of artifacts from the original 1558 Exchange. One of the most elaborate installations in the entire museum was the original Merchants Hall of the old Stock Exchange, with shields and banners and numerous life-size stone statues of both historic and mythic figures, all portrayed as guardians of the economic interests of what for centuries was Germany’s most important commercial city. All such items were original.
Many displays were not what one would usually expect to find inside a history museum.
Most surprising for us was the presence of a 19th-Century steamer that plied the waters of The River Elbe. The steamer had been moved from The River Elbe to the construction site on which the building was erected and incorporated into the building fabric. We toured the entire steamer, climbing up and down ladders and narrow stairwells, until we had seen everything onboard the steamer.
The upper floors included restorations of important public rooms from significant Hamburg residences of the Baroque period, complete with period furnishings, textiles, paintings and silver.
Historic archways from old Hamburg buildings were incorporated, to great effect, into the exteriors and interiors of the entire building. Examining the array of old archways was one of our greatest pleasures while touring the museum.
The most important of these archways was an elaborate 1605 portal from Saint-Petri-Kirche, one of the largest and most important surviving portals from the Baroque era.
An incredible number of Baroque archways survived over the centuries, and several of these archways were erected in a beautifully-landscaped park situated alongside the museum building. A few of the archways mounted outdoors were stand-alone objects, placed above pathways, while others were used as entrances and exits for different sections of the park. The most beautiful of all Baroque archways we saw in Hamburg had been placed in the park. It was taken from a private mansion, with the family name still visible on its carvings. The date was 1611.
One of the most popular attractions at The Museum For Hamburg History was an enormous model railway. The railway recreated all of Hamburg’s many rail stations and rail lines. Four times a day, museum personnel activate the railway, by far the largest and most complicated model railway I have ever seen. During the railway demonstrations, visitors may observe numerous trains operating on numerous tracks for twenty minutes at a time. It was very impressive.
During the two days we visited the museum, the museum was practically empty of visitors. We were often the only visitors in each room we explored. We visited the museum on weekdays and, at the very least, we had expected to encounter school groups. We saw none.
On both visits, we ate lunch at the museum café, a full-service restaurant of some quality. Despite a proliferation of wait staff, we were among only a handful of diners on both occasions. I suppose the museum receives the bulk of its visitors on weekends.
The museum was partially destroyed in 1944—bombings of Hamburg continued to the very end of the war, despite the fact that the 1943 firestorm had wiped out much of the city—but city officials determined that The Museum For Hamburg History would be the first museum to be rebuilt and reopened after the war. Portions of the museum re-opened as early as late 1945, only months after the cessation of hostilities.
No other museum in Hamburg was to reopen until the following decade.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
"It Is Impolite To Use Headphones While Someone Else Is In The Room"
My second term is under way. I am back to studying devotedly.
Andrew has been depressed for weeks, and especially so since Christmas, but his depression started to pass this week. For that I am grateful.
For those who do not know Andrew, they would never have had any idea that he was depressed these last several weeks, and this is because he goes through the motions, beautifully, of pretending to be perfectly fine.
I, however, can tell when Andrew is depressed, and he has been exceedingly depressed since the beginning of December.
I told Andrew’s mother at Christmas that Andrew was depressed, and she told me that she could tell he was depressed, but she also told me that she knew exactly what to do.
Among other things, Andrew’s mother says that we need to move to a new apartment, because the low ceilings of our apartment make Andrew feel cramped.
Andrew, however, refuses to contemplate a move, insisting that we remain right where we are and stick it out for three years. He says that we have a signed lease under favorable terms, that we painted and fixed up the apartment to suit our satisfaction, that we bought furniture expressly tailored for the layout of our apartment, and that it would be foolish to throw away our investment of time and money. He utterly refuses to waste energy even thinking about new living quarters and undertaking arrangements to move our things.
A few days after we returned from our holidays, Andrew received in the mail a set of very expensive, very high-end headphones, a gift from his mother and father. Andrew is supposed to use the headphones to listen to music while I study, especially dissonant, 20th-Century music in which I have little interest.
Andrew refuses to use the headphones. He has not used them even once. The headphones remain on the shelf, untouched, in the very box in which they arrived. Andrew claims it is impolite to use headphones while someone else is in the room.
One of Alex’s assignments during his visit with us over the January holiday weekend was to insist that we buy a television and subscribe to cable so that Andrew could follow the college basketball season. Alex was under instructions from his father to buy us a television himself, and to arrange himself to have cable installed, if we refused.
Andrew simply would not hear of it. He insisted that television would be a distraction for me—and in that regard, he was right—and he said that he would not even allow a television to cross the threshold of the apartment. Further, Andrew told Alex that if Alex bought a television for us during his visit, Andrew was going to return it to the vendor as soon as Alex returned to Minneapolis.
When Andrew is depressed, he does not sleep well. Either he will not sleep at all—in which case he will get up in the middle of the night and go into the kitchen and read—or he will toss and turn and talk in his sleep. I can understand some of what he says in his sleep. He talks in his sleep to his mother, to his father, to the dog, and to me, and he constantly talks about “home”. I have heard him say, a hundred times in his sleep, clear as a bell, “I want to go home”.
I noticed that Andrew became demonstrably better, day-by-day, on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week. He seems to be back to his old self today. I am relieved. I know that Boston, which he intensely dislikes (as do I), is the source of his depression.
I feel guilty, having dragged him here.
Andrew has been depressed for weeks, and especially so since Christmas, but his depression started to pass this week. For that I am grateful.
For those who do not know Andrew, they would never have had any idea that he was depressed these last several weeks, and this is because he goes through the motions, beautifully, of pretending to be perfectly fine.
I, however, can tell when Andrew is depressed, and he has been exceedingly depressed since the beginning of December.
I told Andrew’s mother at Christmas that Andrew was depressed, and she told me that she could tell he was depressed, but she also told me that she knew exactly what to do.
Among other things, Andrew’s mother says that we need to move to a new apartment, because the low ceilings of our apartment make Andrew feel cramped.
Andrew, however, refuses to contemplate a move, insisting that we remain right where we are and stick it out for three years. He says that we have a signed lease under favorable terms, that we painted and fixed up the apartment to suit our satisfaction, that we bought furniture expressly tailored for the layout of our apartment, and that it would be foolish to throw away our investment of time and money. He utterly refuses to waste energy even thinking about new living quarters and undertaking arrangements to move our things.
A few days after we returned from our holidays, Andrew received in the mail a set of very expensive, very high-end headphones, a gift from his mother and father. Andrew is supposed to use the headphones to listen to music while I study, especially dissonant, 20th-Century music in which I have little interest.
Andrew refuses to use the headphones. He has not used them even once. The headphones remain on the shelf, untouched, in the very box in which they arrived. Andrew claims it is impolite to use headphones while someone else is in the room.
One of Alex’s assignments during his visit with us over the January holiday weekend was to insist that we buy a television and subscribe to cable so that Andrew could follow the college basketball season. Alex was under instructions from his father to buy us a television himself, and to arrange himself to have cable installed, if we refused.
Andrew simply would not hear of it. He insisted that television would be a distraction for me—and in that regard, he was right—and he said that he would not even allow a television to cross the threshold of the apartment. Further, Andrew told Alex that if Alex bought a television for us during his visit, Andrew was going to return it to the vendor as soon as Alex returned to Minneapolis.
When Andrew is depressed, he does not sleep well. Either he will not sleep at all—in which case he will get up in the middle of the night and go into the kitchen and read—or he will toss and turn and talk in his sleep. I can understand some of what he says in his sleep. He talks in his sleep to his mother, to his father, to the dog, and to me, and he constantly talks about “home”. I have heard him say, a hundred times in his sleep, clear as a bell, “I want to go home”.
I noticed that Andrew became demonstrably better, day-by-day, on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week. He seems to be back to his old self today. I am relieved. I know that Boston, which he intensely dislikes (as do I), is the source of his depression.
I feel guilty, having dragged him here.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
A Welcome Visitor
Andrew and I had a very nice weekend with Alex, despite the cold. The weather, however, caused us to alter our daytime plans for Saturday and Sunday, dropping outside activities in favor of inside visits. In any case, everything worked out perfectly.
It was my job to drive to the airport Friday afternoon in order to pick up Alex and bring him home. Alex and I walked in the door of the apartment only a few minutes before Andrew returned home from work.
Friday night was devoted to cooking and eating and catching up, and little else.
The first thing we did was put bread in the oven to bake, and soup on the stove to heat. On Thursday night, Andrew had prepared dough for bread as well as his mother’s tomato-based vegetable soup, which calls only for yellow and green vegetables. We thought warm bread and hot soup would be the perfect foods to give Alex as soon as he arrived, since we suspected he would be hungry long before time for dinner and since we believed he would welcome some warming food.
The bread and the soup warmed us up, and warmed up the apartment, too.
Our next project was boiling chicken parts in herbs and spices and broiling tuna, most of which was to be saved for Saturday. Once the chicken and tuna were well under way, we prepared pasta, and ate a plate of pasta with a little chicken and tuna on the side.
Only at this point did we begin to prepare our main dinner foods for the night: a pork roast, cheddar potatoes, parsnips, Brussels sprouts and fried apples.
By the time we were done eating dinner, we had spent over five hours in the kitchen, cooking, eating and cleaning up, in sequence, three times. It was fun.
We went to bed early Friday night, and we rose early Saturday morning.
The first thing we did was make banana bread and nut bread, and put those in the oven, at which point we ate a bowl of cereal, followed by a bowl of berries (strawberries, blueberries, blackberries). This was followed by our real breakfast—ham-and-cheese omelets and potatoes—which in turn was followed by the banana bread and nut bread. It took us a couple of hours to get through all of this, during which time we read the newspapers and discussed how we were going to spend much of our day.
Our original plan was to spend the bulk of Saturday taking an extended walk, from mid-morning until mid-afternoon, exploring some of Boston’s most historic neighborhoods, but the bitter cold caused us to abandon this plan.
As a replacement project, we chose to make a visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and we decided that we would try to arrive at the museum at 12:00 Noon and leave at 3:00 p.m.
This gave us plenty of time to clean up, and plenty of time to make chicken-salad sandwiches and tuna-salad sandwiches to take with us.
We enjoyed our visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The museum is quirky, as befits its founder and namesake, who was an unmistakable eccentric. Housed in a late-19th-Century recreation of a 15th-Century Venetian Palazzo, the museum displays paintings, sculpture, antiquities, decorative arts and what can only be described as oddities. The artworks are displayed in the same manner as they were displayed during Mrs. Gardner’s lifetime, viz., irrespective of nationality, school or period. It is all rather jumbled, if not rather peculiar, but also rather fun.
The museum has a $12.00 admission fee (unless one’s first name is Isabella, in which case admission is free). I am troubled by steep admission fees, as I believe that museums, as a general rule, should offer free access to the public, consistent with their missions as tax-supported institutions. Moreover, I would categorize the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s collection as a six-dollar collection, not a twelve-dollar collection.
In 1990, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was the victim of the nation’s most famous art theft, an art theft still unsolved. Through subterfuge, thieves dressed as Boston policemen gained entrance to the museum after hours, and made off with several key Rembrandt masterpieces as well as one of the world’s greatest surviving Vermeer paintings, all of which were priceless. None of the stolen artwork has ever been recovered.
After our museum visit, we ate the sandwiches and fruit we had packed and headed over to The Lyric Stage Company Of Boston, where we had tickets for the 4:00 p.m. performance of “The Year Of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion.
None of us had read the book on which the stage play is based, so we were not quite prepared for what we saw and heard onstage at The Lyric Stage Company. “The Year Of Magical Thinking” turned out be a one-woman show, lasting ninety minutes, about a year in Didion’s life in which her husband died and she was to learn of her daughter’s mortal illness.
The material was maudlin, self-indulgent and creepy beyond belief, and I quite intentionally classify it as “Women’s Entertainment”, with all the pejorative connotations associated with that particular brand of material, which I thought had died out decades ago. “The Year Of Magical Thinking” is no more sophisticated and no more thoughtful than the tripe paraded in a Ross Hunter movie production from the 1950’s, and I was angry that we had wasted our time and our money on such appalling rubbish. So was Alex, and so was Andrew.
After the play, we ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant—we all three ordered wonton soup, egg rolls, and shrimp-fried rice, followed by individual servings of Hunan beef, sweet-and-sour pork, and General Tso’s chicken, which we shared back and forth—and after dinner we headed over to The Huntington Theatre Company to attend the 8:00 p.m. performance of Emlyn Williams’s “The Corn Is Green”.
None of us had seen a previous stage production of this play. None of us had seen the film version, either.
“The Corn Is Green” is a very old-fashioned play, dating back to the era of the well-made, three-act play, often featuring a large cast. The play remains a durable vehicle for a star actress, and The Huntington Theatre Company had an excellent actress on hand, Kate Burton, to lead the cast. Burton was very good. She was one of the finest American actresses I had ever seen. She commanded the stage, and held the audience’s full attention, for two hours and thirty minutes.
No one else onstage was at Burton’s level—the rest of the company of actors was provincial—but the bad acting from the ensemble did not destroy our enjoyment of the play. I doubt any of us would want to see “The Corn Is Green” a second time, but we very much enjoyed this earnest but creaky drama for a single viewing.
The level of presentation—stage design, costume design, lighting design, stage direction, casting—was not high. Such quality of presentation would never pass muster at The Guthrie Theater and would never fly with Minneapolis audiences.
Boston is definitely not a theater town.
When we got home from “The Corn Is Green”, Andrew prepared a hot brandy sauce, and we poured the hot brandy sauce over peaches and ice cream and enjoyed a late dessert.
We slept in a little later on Sunday morning.
As soon as we got up, we made orange bread and lemon bread, and put those in the oven, after which we ate a bowl of cereal, followed by a plate of melon slices (cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon). For our main breakfast, we ate bacon, scrambled eggs, and potatoes, followed by the orange bread and lemon bread.
During breakfast, we discussed how we were going to spend our Sunday. Owing to the cold, we abandoned our original plans—another series of self-guided walks through historic Boston neighborhoods—for the second consecutive day.
After weighing a few alternatives, we settled upon a visit to the USS Constitution and the USS Constitution Museum. It turned out to be a good choice for us.
The USS Constitution, whose nickname is “Old Ironsides”, has a remarkable history. Prior to visiting the museum and touring the ship itself, none of us had more than a bare-boned knowledge of the vessel’s vast historic significance.
The USS Constitution is the oldest commissioned vessel afloat anywhere in the world.
Launched in 1797, the USS Constitution is one of the six ships of the original U.S. Navy. The ship’s name was chosen by George Washington.
The ship was involved in the War Of The Barbary Pirates, but its most dramatic service came in the War Of 1812, a war in which the USS Constitution destroyed five different British battleships in four separate engagements, each one of which was notable and each one of which has gone down in the annals of wartime naval history. It was during the War Of 1812 that the ship became famous and acquired its nickname. The USS Constitution was part of a remarkable U.S. naval force that, although vastly outnumbered, somehow defeated a superior British navy, over and over, in that conflict. This was a miraculous feat, since the British navy, only a few years earlier, had achieved a stupendous victory over the combined navies of France and Spain, both world powers at the time.
Not only is the USS Constitution still afloat, but the vessel also remains seaworthy. The ship is generally taken out to harbor once a year, but only under tow, and not under sail, because full rigging is exorbitantly expensive. The last time the USS Constitution went to sea under its own rigging was in 1997, a special voyage held in conjunction with the ship’s Bicentennial. It must have provided a most magnificent and unforgettable sight.
The tour of the ship, conducted by U.S. Navy personnel, was both impressive and frustrating. The ship is presently undergoing renovation—there is an entire forest in the State Of Indiana whose trees are devoted exclusively to providing material for ongoing maintenance of the USS Constitution—and we would have liked to explore the vessel in much more detail than the guided tour allowed.
The USS Constitution Museum, set ashore alongside the ship, was not particularly impressive, but we were happy to spend an hour viewing artifacts associated with the ship while reading about the long and distinguished history of this magnificent vessel.
We were very pleased that we made the decision to visit the USS Constitution. It was a last-minute choice on our part, winning out over a couple of other options we had considered, and it was a very successful choice, as things turned out.
We were back home by the middle of the afternoon, and we prepared an early dinner, because we had plans for the evening and would have to leave the apartment again at 6:30 p.m.
We started with soup, a type of clam chowder that is neither New England clam chowder nor Manhattan clam chowder. Andrew had tried out the recipe on me while I was studying for my exams, and it had worked out, and I had liked it, and it does not take long to make, and we thought Alex might like to try it. The recipe is very simple, and involves onion, pepper, corn, bacon and hash brown potatoes in addition to clams. It turned out a second time, and Alex liked it.
We followed the soup with a major garden salad, containing a little bit of everything, and then we had our main course: baked steak, prepared according to Andrew’s mother’s personal recipe, accompanied by baked potato and steamed broccoli, steamed corn and steamed carrots.
Not long after eating dinner, we headed out again, because we were to go to Watertown to catch a performance of the musical “Cabaret” at the Arsenal Theater, performed by the New Repertory Theater Company.
We enjoyed “Cabaret” very much, despite the fact that the performance was not particularly good. It was a performance operating precisely on the inflection point at which, throughout the performance, it might have risen to professional quality at any time or instantly have descended to the level of a college presentation. The performance remained, firmly, on this inflection point all night, stubbornly refusing to budge. Oddly, this tension sort of added to our enjoyment of the show. “Cabaret” is an indestructible vehicle, and the material came across, despite the fact that most of the singing was poor. A live orchestra was used.
Our weekend’s three theater excursions—“The Year Of Magical Thinking”, “The Corn Is Green” and “Cabaret”—provided Andrew and me (as well as Alex) with our first experiences of local theater in Boston. I’m not confident Andrew and I will return to see additional performance by any of these local theater companies anytime soon. As far as local Boston ensembles are concerned, I believe our time will be better spent, and the rewards greater, at Boston Ballet rather than at the local repertory theater companies. Nevertheless, I’m glad we attended these performances, because doing so allowed Andrew and me to satisfy our curiosities about the local companies and because doing so allowed Andrew and me to offer Alex some evening entertainment during his visit. Aside from the Joan Didion play, mercifully short, Alex was happy with what he saw. He enjoyed the two evenings out. He enjoyed exploring the different venues. He enjoyed seeing “The Corn Is Green” and “Cabaret”. In fact, he was pleasantly surprised when he had learned, before his visit, that there were three plays in town with some prospective appeal for him. He instantly said “Yes” when Andrew had asked him whether he wanted us to get tickets for the three productions. I’m glad things worked out.
When we got home, we were all hungry for dessert, so we made white cupcakes, and ate the cupcakes with ice cream and raspberries.
On Monday morning, we ate a Sunday breakfast. As soon as we got up, we made a cinnamon streusel coffee cake and put that in the oven. While that was baking, we made hot oatmeal, and followed the oatmeal with bananas, nuts and honey. Our main breakfast came next: buttermilk pancakes and sausage. We wrapped things up with the coffee cake.
Our Monday program was a visit to the New England Aquarium. There is no aquarium in Minneapolis, and Alex thought it might be fun to visit the New England Aquarium.
There were a few interesting displays on view at the aquarium, most interesting for us of which was the penguin exhibit. The penguins were fascinating to watch, and we could hardly take our eyes off the penguin community as it went about its daily routine.
I have no idea how the New England Aquarium measures up when compared to other aquariums around the world, but we were not particularly impressed. We did not believe it was worth the $19.95 admission price.
We left the aquarium in the early afternoon and walked over to Faneuil Hall Marketplace and had lunch at McCormick And Schmick’s. Andrew and I thought it was imperative that we give Alex at least one good seafood meal while he was in Boston, and we knew that McCormick And Schmick’s would not disappoint (although there is a McCormick And Schmick’s in Minneapolis, too). Our meal was excellent.
After lunch, we walked around Faneuil Hall Marketplace for a couple of hours before we returned home.
We stayed in for the rest of the day, playing cards and playing around on the computers and reading the Sunday newspapers one day late and cooking and listening to music (Tchaikovsky’s opera, “Eugene Onegin”, which Andrew and I will hear at the Metropolitan Opera next month, and Stravinsky’s complete score to the ballet, “Pulcinella”, the first piece of music by Stravinsky I have heard that I actually like).
We prepared a major dinner. Andrew baked bread for the second time in three days and, while the bread was baking, we made a tomato-cucumber salad and an Amish pepper salad, which we ate with warm bread. A bit later, we prepared a very sharp version of macaroni-and-cheese, and ate the macaroni-and-cheese with baked stuffed peppers and baked stuffed tomatoes. The main event came later: roast chicken and stuffing, mashed potatoes, and steamed peas and steamed corn. For dessert, Andrew made an apple cake.
Yesterday morning we slept in, knowing that Andrew and Alex would have to rise at 3:00 a.m. this morning in order to make it to Logan in time for Alex to catch his plane back to Minneapolis. We didn’t get up until almost 8:00 a.m., and we had another Sunday breakfast. We started with hot oatmeal with apple, cinnamon and raisins, and we followed that up with Eggs Benedict, and we ended with apple pancakes and sausage.
Our plan for yesterday was to visit the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, but all through breakfast we discussed other options, such as the Science Museum and a few other alternatives. None of the potential alternatives captured our imagination or seized our attention, so we decided to stick with our original plan and head up to Salem.
The Peabody Essex Museum is the oldest museum in continuous operation in the United States, dating back to the late 18th Century. Its original mission was to collect treasures from all over the world and to bring them back to Salem for display. Salem’s trading firms, whose ships sailed the globe and engaged in trade in Europe, Africa, the Americas and the Far East, amassed hordes of items from all over the world during the era of clipper ships. The items they brought back to Salem form the basis of today’s collection, supplemented over the past century-and-a-half with items amassed by museum personnel.
We did not attempt to explore the entire museum, which is very large (it is one of America’s 25 largest art museums). Instead, we focused on the collections we believed would be of most interest to us.
On the first floor, we viewed the collection of maritime art and the collection of American decorative art, as well as the rooms addressing Salem’s seafaring history. On the second floor, we visited the collection of Japanese art.
That was enough for us. Nothing we viewed was of first- or second-quality. We did not bother even to take a quick stroll through the many temporary exhibitions or through the collections of art from China, India, Korea, Oceania, Africa and North America, or through the collections of photography, architecture, export art, and rare books and manuscripts.
The Peabody Essex Museum has an outrageous admission price, $15.00, which is more than it costs to gain admittance to the Louvre. The museum lacks a Louvre-quality collection, to say the least, and should reduce, even eliminate, its admission fee. The museum has a four-dollar collection, not a fifteen-dollar collection. At least residents of Salem are, I believe, admitted to the museum without charge.
We returned home by the middle of the afternoon and, first thing, we prepared a late lunch: poached salmon, wild rice and steamed broccoli.
We did not do anything for the rest of the day other than hang around the apartment.
Andrew and I gave Alex a good dinner for the final night of his visit. We prepared a pot roast with tomatoes, onions and peppers. We ate the pot roast with mashed potatoes, butternut squash, escalloped green and red cabbage cooked with butter and cream, and an apple salad. For dessert, we ate blackberry cobbler and ice cream.
I don’t believe Alex will be able to report back to Minneapolis that we did not feed him well during his visit!
I’m glad Alex came for the long weekend. He is very good company, and a very good guest, helping out whenever possible and lending a cheerful presence to what otherwise might have been simply another cold, and not particularly eventful, January weekend. Because of Alex’s presence, Andrew and I made a point of getting out and showing him some things we otherwise would have delayed seeing ourselves, perhaps for months if not years. That is one of the advantages of out-of-town visitors—they encourage hosts to discover interesting attractions in their own locales.
As for Alex, he had a very good time. He got plenty of rest, plenty of good food, plenty of company, and managed to see a few interesting things that made his weekend getaway worthwhile.
I don’t believe he could have done better.
His visit ended this morning, when we had to rise at 3:00 a.m. in order to get him to the airport to catch the first flight of the day to the Twin Cities. Andrew planned to take Alex to the airport by himself, but I heard the alarm go off and I decided to get up, too, and go to the airport with them. Because it was still the middle of the night when we left home—it was 4:00 a.m.—we did not have to contend with traffic in either direction.
Andrew is back at work today, but I am off this week. I will do some reading.
On Friday afternoon, Andrew and I will drive down to New York for the weekend, our final weekend of leisure before my classes begin again the following Monday, on which day it will be back to the grind for me, too. We plan to attend a performance of New York City Ballet, a performance of Miami City Ballet (the company will present a guest engagement at City Center), a concert by the New York Philharmonic (the guest conductor will be Riccardo Muti), and a performance of the Broadway revival of “Equus”, which will close soon.
Alex brought a copy of “Equus” with him from Minneapolis so that I can read the play before this weekend’s performance.
I am going to read it today.
It was my job to drive to the airport Friday afternoon in order to pick up Alex and bring him home. Alex and I walked in the door of the apartment only a few minutes before Andrew returned home from work.
Friday night was devoted to cooking and eating and catching up, and little else.
The first thing we did was put bread in the oven to bake, and soup on the stove to heat. On Thursday night, Andrew had prepared dough for bread as well as his mother’s tomato-based vegetable soup, which calls only for yellow and green vegetables. We thought warm bread and hot soup would be the perfect foods to give Alex as soon as he arrived, since we suspected he would be hungry long before time for dinner and since we believed he would welcome some warming food.
The bread and the soup warmed us up, and warmed up the apartment, too.
Our next project was boiling chicken parts in herbs and spices and broiling tuna, most of which was to be saved for Saturday. Once the chicken and tuna were well under way, we prepared pasta, and ate a plate of pasta with a little chicken and tuna on the side.
Only at this point did we begin to prepare our main dinner foods for the night: a pork roast, cheddar potatoes, parsnips, Brussels sprouts and fried apples.
By the time we were done eating dinner, we had spent over five hours in the kitchen, cooking, eating and cleaning up, in sequence, three times. It was fun.
We went to bed early Friday night, and we rose early Saturday morning.
The first thing we did was make banana bread and nut bread, and put those in the oven, at which point we ate a bowl of cereal, followed by a bowl of berries (strawberries, blueberries, blackberries). This was followed by our real breakfast—ham-and-cheese omelets and potatoes—which in turn was followed by the banana bread and nut bread. It took us a couple of hours to get through all of this, during which time we read the newspapers and discussed how we were going to spend much of our day.
Our original plan was to spend the bulk of Saturday taking an extended walk, from mid-morning until mid-afternoon, exploring some of Boston’s most historic neighborhoods, but the bitter cold caused us to abandon this plan.
As a replacement project, we chose to make a visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and we decided that we would try to arrive at the museum at 12:00 Noon and leave at 3:00 p.m.
This gave us plenty of time to clean up, and plenty of time to make chicken-salad sandwiches and tuna-salad sandwiches to take with us.
We enjoyed our visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The museum is quirky, as befits its founder and namesake, who was an unmistakable eccentric. Housed in a late-19th-Century recreation of a 15th-Century Venetian Palazzo, the museum displays paintings, sculpture, antiquities, decorative arts and what can only be described as oddities. The artworks are displayed in the same manner as they were displayed during Mrs. Gardner’s lifetime, viz., irrespective of nationality, school or period. It is all rather jumbled, if not rather peculiar, but also rather fun.
The museum has a $12.00 admission fee (unless one’s first name is Isabella, in which case admission is free). I am troubled by steep admission fees, as I believe that museums, as a general rule, should offer free access to the public, consistent with their missions as tax-supported institutions. Moreover, I would categorize the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s collection as a six-dollar collection, not a twelve-dollar collection.
In 1990, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was the victim of the nation’s most famous art theft, an art theft still unsolved. Through subterfuge, thieves dressed as Boston policemen gained entrance to the museum after hours, and made off with several key Rembrandt masterpieces as well as one of the world’s greatest surviving Vermeer paintings, all of which were priceless. None of the stolen artwork has ever been recovered.
After our museum visit, we ate the sandwiches and fruit we had packed and headed over to The Lyric Stage Company Of Boston, where we had tickets for the 4:00 p.m. performance of “The Year Of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion.
None of us had read the book on which the stage play is based, so we were not quite prepared for what we saw and heard onstage at The Lyric Stage Company. “The Year Of Magical Thinking” turned out be a one-woman show, lasting ninety minutes, about a year in Didion’s life in which her husband died and she was to learn of her daughter’s mortal illness.
The material was maudlin, self-indulgent and creepy beyond belief, and I quite intentionally classify it as “Women’s Entertainment”, with all the pejorative connotations associated with that particular brand of material, which I thought had died out decades ago. “The Year Of Magical Thinking” is no more sophisticated and no more thoughtful than the tripe paraded in a Ross Hunter movie production from the 1950’s, and I was angry that we had wasted our time and our money on such appalling rubbish. So was Alex, and so was Andrew.
After the play, we ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant—we all three ordered wonton soup, egg rolls, and shrimp-fried rice, followed by individual servings of Hunan beef, sweet-and-sour pork, and General Tso’s chicken, which we shared back and forth—and after dinner we headed over to The Huntington Theatre Company to attend the 8:00 p.m. performance of Emlyn Williams’s “The Corn Is Green”.
None of us had seen a previous stage production of this play. None of us had seen the film version, either.
“The Corn Is Green” is a very old-fashioned play, dating back to the era of the well-made, three-act play, often featuring a large cast. The play remains a durable vehicle for a star actress, and The Huntington Theatre Company had an excellent actress on hand, Kate Burton, to lead the cast. Burton was very good. She was one of the finest American actresses I had ever seen. She commanded the stage, and held the audience’s full attention, for two hours and thirty minutes.
No one else onstage was at Burton’s level—the rest of the company of actors was provincial—but the bad acting from the ensemble did not destroy our enjoyment of the play. I doubt any of us would want to see “The Corn Is Green” a second time, but we very much enjoyed this earnest but creaky drama for a single viewing.
The level of presentation—stage design, costume design, lighting design, stage direction, casting—was not high. Such quality of presentation would never pass muster at The Guthrie Theater and would never fly with Minneapolis audiences.
Boston is definitely not a theater town.
When we got home from “The Corn Is Green”, Andrew prepared a hot brandy sauce, and we poured the hot brandy sauce over peaches and ice cream and enjoyed a late dessert.
We slept in a little later on Sunday morning.
As soon as we got up, we made orange bread and lemon bread, and put those in the oven, after which we ate a bowl of cereal, followed by a plate of melon slices (cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon). For our main breakfast, we ate bacon, scrambled eggs, and potatoes, followed by the orange bread and lemon bread.
During breakfast, we discussed how we were going to spend our Sunday. Owing to the cold, we abandoned our original plans—another series of self-guided walks through historic Boston neighborhoods—for the second consecutive day.
After weighing a few alternatives, we settled upon a visit to the USS Constitution and the USS Constitution Museum. It turned out to be a good choice for us.
The USS Constitution, whose nickname is “Old Ironsides”, has a remarkable history. Prior to visiting the museum and touring the ship itself, none of us had more than a bare-boned knowledge of the vessel’s vast historic significance.
The USS Constitution is the oldest commissioned vessel afloat anywhere in the world.
Launched in 1797, the USS Constitution is one of the six ships of the original U.S. Navy. The ship’s name was chosen by George Washington.
The ship was involved in the War Of The Barbary Pirates, but its most dramatic service came in the War Of 1812, a war in which the USS Constitution destroyed five different British battleships in four separate engagements, each one of which was notable and each one of which has gone down in the annals of wartime naval history. It was during the War Of 1812 that the ship became famous and acquired its nickname. The USS Constitution was part of a remarkable U.S. naval force that, although vastly outnumbered, somehow defeated a superior British navy, over and over, in that conflict. This was a miraculous feat, since the British navy, only a few years earlier, had achieved a stupendous victory over the combined navies of France and Spain, both world powers at the time.
Not only is the USS Constitution still afloat, but the vessel also remains seaworthy. The ship is generally taken out to harbor once a year, but only under tow, and not under sail, because full rigging is exorbitantly expensive. The last time the USS Constitution went to sea under its own rigging was in 1997, a special voyage held in conjunction with the ship’s Bicentennial. It must have provided a most magnificent and unforgettable sight.
The tour of the ship, conducted by U.S. Navy personnel, was both impressive and frustrating. The ship is presently undergoing renovation—there is an entire forest in the State Of Indiana whose trees are devoted exclusively to providing material for ongoing maintenance of the USS Constitution—and we would have liked to explore the vessel in much more detail than the guided tour allowed.
The USS Constitution Museum, set ashore alongside the ship, was not particularly impressive, but we were happy to spend an hour viewing artifacts associated with the ship while reading about the long and distinguished history of this magnificent vessel.
We were very pleased that we made the decision to visit the USS Constitution. It was a last-minute choice on our part, winning out over a couple of other options we had considered, and it was a very successful choice, as things turned out.
We were back home by the middle of the afternoon, and we prepared an early dinner, because we had plans for the evening and would have to leave the apartment again at 6:30 p.m.
We started with soup, a type of clam chowder that is neither New England clam chowder nor Manhattan clam chowder. Andrew had tried out the recipe on me while I was studying for my exams, and it had worked out, and I had liked it, and it does not take long to make, and we thought Alex might like to try it. The recipe is very simple, and involves onion, pepper, corn, bacon and hash brown potatoes in addition to clams. It turned out a second time, and Alex liked it.
We followed the soup with a major garden salad, containing a little bit of everything, and then we had our main course: baked steak, prepared according to Andrew’s mother’s personal recipe, accompanied by baked potato and steamed broccoli, steamed corn and steamed carrots.
Not long after eating dinner, we headed out again, because we were to go to Watertown to catch a performance of the musical “Cabaret” at the Arsenal Theater, performed by the New Repertory Theater Company.
We enjoyed “Cabaret” very much, despite the fact that the performance was not particularly good. It was a performance operating precisely on the inflection point at which, throughout the performance, it might have risen to professional quality at any time or instantly have descended to the level of a college presentation. The performance remained, firmly, on this inflection point all night, stubbornly refusing to budge. Oddly, this tension sort of added to our enjoyment of the show. “Cabaret” is an indestructible vehicle, and the material came across, despite the fact that most of the singing was poor. A live orchestra was used.
Our weekend’s three theater excursions—“The Year Of Magical Thinking”, “The Corn Is Green” and “Cabaret”—provided Andrew and me (as well as Alex) with our first experiences of local theater in Boston. I’m not confident Andrew and I will return to see additional performance by any of these local theater companies anytime soon. As far as local Boston ensembles are concerned, I believe our time will be better spent, and the rewards greater, at Boston Ballet rather than at the local repertory theater companies. Nevertheless, I’m glad we attended these performances, because doing so allowed Andrew and me to satisfy our curiosities about the local companies and because doing so allowed Andrew and me to offer Alex some evening entertainment during his visit. Aside from the Joan Didion play, mercifully short, Alex was happy with what he saw. He enjoyed the two evenings out. He enjoyed exploring the different venues. He enjoyed seeing “The Corn Is Green” and “Cabaret”. In fact, he was pleasantly surprised when he had learned, before his visit, that there were three plays in town with some prospective appeal for him. He instantly said “Yes” when Andrew had asked him whether he wanted us to get tickets for the three productions. I’m glad things worked out.
When we got home, we were all hungry for dessert, so we made white cupcakes, and ate the cupcakes with ice cream and raspberries.
On Monday morning, we ate a Sunday breakfast. As soon as we got up, we made a cinnamon streusel coffee cake and put that in the oven. While that was baking, we made hot oatmeal, and followed the oatmeal with bananas, nuts and honey. Our main breakfast came next: buttermilk pancakes and sausage. We wrapped things up with the coffee cake.
Our Monday program was a visit to the New England Aquarium. There is no aquarium in Minneapolis, and Alex thought it might be fun to visit the New England Aquarium.
There were a few interesting displays on view at the aquarium, most interesting for us of which was the penguin exhibit. The penguins were fascinating to watch, and we could hardly take our eyes off the penguin community as it went about its daily routine.
I have no idea how the New England Aquarium measures up when compared to other aquariums around the world, but we were not particularly impressed. We did not believe it was worth the $19.95 admission price.
We left the aquarium in the early afternoon and walked over to Faneuil Hall Marketplace and had lunch at McCormick And Schmick’s. Andrew and I thought it was imperative that we give Alex at least one good seafood meal while he was in Boston, and we knew that McCormick And Schmick’s would not disappoint (although there is a McCormick And Schmick’s in Minneapolis, too). Our meal was excellent.
After lunch, we walked around Faneuil Hall Marketplace for a couple of hours before we returned home.
We stayed in for the rest of the day, playing cards and playing around on the computers and reading the Sunday newspapers one day late and cooking and listening to music (Tchaikovsky’s opera, “Eugene Onegin”, which Andrew and I will hear at the Metropolitan Opera next month, and Stravinsky’s complete score to the ballet, “Pulcinella”, the first piece of music by Stravinsky I have heard that I actually like).
We prepared a major dinner. Andrew baked bread for the second time in three days and, while the bread was baking, we made a tomato-cucumber salad and an Amish pepper salad, which we ate with warm bread. A bit later, we prepared a very sharp version of macaroni-and-cheese, and ate the macaroni-and-cheese with baked stuffed peppers and baked stuffed tomatoes. The main event came later: roast chicken and stuffing, mashed potatoes, and steamed peas and steamed corn. For dessert, Andrew made an apple cake.
Yesterday morning we slept in, knowing that Andrew and Alex would have to rise at 3:00 a.m. this morning in order to make it to Logan in time for Alex to catch his plane back to Minneapolis. We didn’t get up until almost 8:00 a.m., and we had another Sunday breakfast. We started with hot oatmeal with apple, cinnamon and raisins, and we followed that up with Eggs Benedict, and we ended with apple pancakes and sausage.
Our plan for yesterday was to visit the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, but all through breakfast we discussed other options, such as the Science Museum and a few other alternatives. None of the potential alternatives captured our imagination or seized our attention, so we decided to stick with our original plan and head up to Salem.
The Peabody Essex Museum is the oldest museum in continuous operation in the United States, dating back to the late 18th Century. Its original mission was to collect treasures from all over the world and to bring them back to Salem for display. Salem’s trading firms, whose ships sailed the globe and engaged in trade in Europe, Africa, the Americas and the Far East, amassed hordes of items from all over the world during the era of clipper ships. The items they brought back to Salem form the basis of today’s collection, supplemented over the past century-and-a-half with items amassed by museum personnel.
We did not attempt to explore the entire museum, which is very large (it is one of America’s 25 largest art museums). Instead, we focused on the collections we believed would be of most interest to us.
On the first floor, we viewed the collection of maritime art and the collection of American decorative art, as well as the rooms addressing Salem’s seafaring history. On the second floor, we visited the collection of Japanese art.
That was enough for us. Nothing we viewed was of first- or second-quality. We did not bother even to take a quick stroll through the many temporary exhibitions or through the collections of art from China, India, Korea, Oceania, Africa and North America, or through the collections of photography, architecture, export art, and rare books and manuscripts.
The Peabody Essex Museum has an outrageous admission price, $15.00, which is more than it costs to gain admittance to the Louvre. The museum lacks a Louvre-quality collection, to say the least, and should reduce, even eliminate, its admission fee. The museum has a four-dollar collection, not a fifteen-dollar collection. At least residents of Salem are, I believe, admitted to the museum without charge.
We returned home by the middle of the afternoon and, first thing, we prepared a late lunch: poached salmon, wild rice and steamed broccoli.
We did not do anything for the rest of the day other than hang around the apartment.
Andrew and I gave Alex a good dinner for the final night of his visit. We prepared a pot roast with tomatoes, onions and peppers. We ate the pot roast with mashed potatoes, butternut squash, escalloped green and red cabbage cooked with butter and cream, and an apple salad. For dessert, we ate blackberry cobbler and ice cream.
I don’t believe Alex will be able to report back to Minneapolis that we did not feed him well during his visit!
I’m glad Alex came for the long weekend. He is very good company, and a very good guest, helping out whenever possible and lending a cheerful presence to what otherwise might have been simply another cold, and not particularly eventful, January weekend. Because of Alex’s presence, Andrew and I made a point of getting out and showing him some things we otherwise would have delayed seeing ourselves, perhaps for months if not years. That is one of the advantages of out-of-town visitors—they encourage hosts to discover interesting attractions in their own locales.
As for Alex, he had a very good time. He got plenty of rest, plenty of good food, plenty of company, and managed to see a few interesting things that made his weekend getaway worthwhile.
I don’t believe he could have done better.
His visit ended this morning, when we had to rise at 3:00 a.m. in order to get him to the airport to catch the first flight of the day to the Twin Cities. Andrew planned to take Alex to the airport by himself, but I heard the alarm go off and I decided to get up, too, and go to the airport with them. Because it was still the middle of the night when we left home—it was 4:00 a.m.—we did not have to contend with traffic in either direction.
Andrew is back at work today, but I am off this week. I will do some reading.
On Friday afternoon, Andrew and I will drive down to New York for the weekend, our final weekend of leisure before my classes begin again the following Monday, on which day it will be back to the grind for me, too. We plan to attend a performance of New York City Ballet, a performance of Miami City Ballet (the company will present a guest engagement at City Center), a concert by the New York Philharmonic (the guest conductor will be Riccardo Muti), and a performance of the Broadway revival of “Equus”, which will close soon.
Alex brought a copy of “Equus” with him from Minneapolis so that I can read the play before this weekend’s performance.
I am going to read it today.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
A State Of Decompression
My exams are over, and I have immediately entered a state of decompression.
I am not tired, because I have been getting plenty of rest, but I have been very keyed-up for the last month, ever since classes ended, and I am relieved that exams are now over. The exams were in the back of my mind the entire holiday period, which inhibited my enjoyment of Christmas this year, and I am now ready to celebrate by doing something crazy, like running in circles or jumping up and down.
I am off until a week from Monday, and it will seem strange to me not to have every minute scheduled. I’m not even sure what I should do tomorrow and Friday, since Andrew will be at work, but my instinct tells me that I should read a good book that is as much unlike legal casebooks as possible or bug my sister to death about some non-existent issue, such as the prospect of the Taliban invading Vanderbilt by stealth.
Andrew has been shouldering all the household tasks since Christmas, and I would like to pay him back, except there is nothing for me to do. The apartment is clean as a whistle, there is no laundry to be done, no food shopping necessary, no errands that need to be run, and no mail to plow through. Perhaps I should make a mess, and then clean it up afterward.
Alex is coming to visit us on Friday. On Friday afternoon, it will be my job to drive to the airport and pick him up and bring him home.
I’m glad he’s coming. Even though we last saw him two weeks ago, the time is convenient for a visit owing to my current break and owing to the holiday weekend. Alex was planning on visiting us in March, on the weekend before or the weekend after my Spring Break, but he advanced his visit after I told Andrew’s mother over Christmas that Andrew was becoming depressed in Boston.
“I know. I can see it” was her response, but she also said that she knew exactly what to do. One of her remedies was to suggest that Alex come see us after my exams were over but before my classes for the second term began. Alex was only too happy to plan a visit to Boston this weekend—in fact, he may come visit us in March, too, as we originally planned—because it will give him something interesting and different to do over the long holiday weekend. He enjoys walking around cities, looking at historic buildings and examining interesting architecture, and the fact that it will be cold in Boston this weekend will not bother him in the least, since he grew up in cold weather and positively thrives on it.
We have a full schedule of activities planned, and it should be a swell weekend for all of us.
As for me, I brought four books back from Minneapolis specifically to occupy me next week. I chose books I should have read before now, but which have somehow escaped me. Between “David Copperfield”, “The Mill On The Floss”, “The Sun Also Rises” and “Tender Is The Night”, I should be able to occupy myself next week while Andrew is at work, catching up on books I already should know and clearing my mind of legal case studies.
If the books do not sustain my interest, I’ll have to come up with a diabolical plan to frighten my sister, forwarding to her secret news of the deadly bacteria rampaging through Vanderbilt’s Food Services Division and the shameful efforts of Vanderbilt’s administration to hide this alarming development from students.
I am not tired, because I have been getting plenty of rest, but I have been very keyed-up for the last month, ever since classes ended, and I am relieved that exams are now over. The exams were in the back of my mind the entire holiday period, which inhibited my enjoyment of Christmas this year, and I am now ready to celebrate by doing something crazy, like running in circles or jumping up and down.
I am off until a week from Monday, and it will seem strange to me not to have every minute scheduled. I’m not even sure what I should do tomorrow and Friday, since Andrew will be at work, but my instinct tells me that I should read a good book that is as much unlike legal casebooks as possible or bug my sister to death about some non-existent issue, such as the prospect of the Taliban invading Vanderbilt by stealth.
Andrew has been shouldering all the household tasks since Christmas, and I would like to pay him back, except there is nothing for me to do. The apartment is clean as a whistle, there is no laundry to be done, no food shopping necessary, no errands that need to be run, and no mail to plow through. Perhaps I should make a mess, and then clean it up afterward.
Alex is coming to visit us on Friday. On Friday afternoon, it will be my job to drive to the airport and pick him up and bring him home.
I’m glad he’s coming. Even though we last saw him two weeks ago, the time is convenient for a visit owing to my current break and owing to the holiday weekend. Alex was planning on visiting us in March, on the weekend before or the weekend after my Spring Break, but he advanced his visit after I told Andrew’s mother over Christmas that Andrew was becoming depressed in Boston.
“I know. I can see it” was her response, but she also said that she knew exactly what to do. One of her remedies was to suggest that Alex come see us after my exams were over but before my classes for the second term began. Alex was only too happy to plan a visit to Boston this weekend—in fact, he may come visit us in March, too, as we originally planned—because it will give him something interesting and different to do over the long holiday weekend. He enjoys walking around cities, looking at historic buildings and examining interesting architecture, and the fact that it will be cold in Boston this weekend will not bother him in the least, since he grew up in cold weather and positively thrives on it.
We have a full schedule of activities planned, and it should be a swell weekend for all of us.
As for me, I brought four books back from Minneapolis specifically to occupy me next week. I chose books I should have read before now, but which have somehow escaped me. Between “David Copperfield”, “The Mill On The Floss”, “The Sun Also Rises” and “Tender Is The Night”, I should be able to occupy myself next week while Andrew is at work, catching up on books I already should know and clearing my mind of legal case studies.
If the books do not sustain my interest, I’ll have to come up with a diabolical plan to frighten my sister, forwarding to her secret news of the deadly bacteria rampaging through Vanderbilt’s Food Services Division and the shameful efforts of Vanderbilt’s administration to hide this alarming development from students.
Friday, January 2, 2009
2008 Into 2009
Our holidays were good ones. Our four days in Oklahoma were good, and our four days in Minnesota were good.
We are back now. Andrew is back at work, and I am back at the books, preparing for exams.
On a personal level, the year 2008 was a very good year for Andrew and me and our families.
Andrew and I survived our move to Boston.
Andrew’s brothers moved back home to Minneapolis and are happily settled into new jobs.
Andrew’s parents saw one son leave Minneapolis for three years, but saw two sons return home permanently and gained a beautiful, healthy baby granddaughter at year-end. Cargill and General Mills enjoyed record-breaking years and saw their share prices increase during 2008, bucking market trends.
My sister is happy in her first year at Vanderbilt.
My brother’s high school football season was a spectacular success and he is looking forward to enrolling at Southern Methodist University in September.
My father’s law firm is thriving, turning away business, and my mother’s CPA firm is generating record revenues. Both are so busy they cannot even schedule vacation time.
We have much to be thankful for, and we look forward to a healthy and prosperous 2009.
The future is bright.
We are back now. Andrew is back at work, and I am back at the books, preparing for exams.
On a personal level, the year 2008 was a very good year for Andrew and me and our families.
Andrew and I survived our move to Boston.
Andrew’s brothers moved back home to Minneapolis and are happily settled into new jobs.
Andrew’s parents saw one son leave Minneapolis for three years, but saw two sons return home permanently and gained a beautiful, healthy baby granddaughter at year-end. Cargill and General Mills enjoyed record-breaking years and saw their share prices increase during 2008, bucking market trends.
My sister is happy in her first year at Vanderbilt.
My brother’s high school football season was a spectacular success and he is looking forward to enrolling at Southern Methodist University in September.
My father’s law firm is thriving, turning away business, and my mother’s CPA firm is generating record revenues. Both are so busy they cannot even schedule vacation time.
We have much to be thankful for, and we look forward to a healthy and prosperous 2009.
The future is bright.
Monday, December 29, 2008
List Of Orchestra Concerts
Andrew and I save our concert programs. For both of us, it is somehow inconceivable to toss them out.
When we mailed a few things home in early December (the purpose of the package was to ship Alec’s birthday gift), we included a few compact discs we had borrowed from Andrew’s father as well as the small number of concert programs we had accumulated since moving East.
Now that I have organized and filed our concert programs here in Minnesota, I can easily list the orchestra concerts Andrew and I have heard in the last thirty-four months. It is a larger number than I had realized: twenty-three, by my count. Andrew heard a few additional orchestras over this same period, since he attended a few concerts—such as concerts by the Dallas Symphony and the Houston Symphony—while on business travel.
Over that period, we have heard only two works more than once: Rossini’s “Barber Of Seville” Overture, performed twice, and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, performed three times.
The best of all concerts we attended was the Leipzig Gewandhaus concert under Riccardo Chailly. While the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra is not the finest of the orchestras we have heard—I would award that honor to the Vienna Philharmonic, I believe—it presented the most deeply-satisfying performance. The very worst performance, and by far the worst orchestra as well, was the San Francisco Symphony.
We happened to encounter far too much music by Mahler in the 2006-2007 season (and we missed yet an additional Mahler performance in early 2007 because of a snowstorm), but we have managed to avoid Mahler since September 2007. Truly, I do not strenuously object to Mahler, but Mahler is programmed far too often in the U.S., and we were doused with far too much Mahler from October 2006 through September 2007.
During the coming school term, we plan to attend two Boston Symphony concerts (Dutoit and Temirkanov), one New York Philharmonic concert (Muti), one concert by Boston’s Handel And Haydn Society (Norrington), and two concerts by visiting orchestras: the London Symphony (Gergiev) and The National Philharmonic Of Russia (Spivakov).
The orchestra concerts we have attended, in order, appear below.
________________________________________________
Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
James Conlon, Conductor
Mahler: Symphony No. 6
________________________________________________
Orchestra And Chorus Of Saint-Michealis-Kirche
Saint-Michaelis-Kirche
Hamburg
Thomas Schoener, Conductor
Ruth Ziesak, Soprano
Thomas Laske, Baritone
Brahms: A German Requiem
________________________________________________
NDR Orchestra Of Hamburg
Laeiszhalle
Hamburg
Christoph Dohnanyi, Conductor
Emanuel Ax, Pianist
Bartok: Two Portraits
Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 25
Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”)
________________________________________________
Orchestre Des Champs Elysees
Laeiszhalle
Hamburg
Philippe Herreweghe, Conductor
Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 3 (“Scottish”)
Schumann: Symphony No. 3 (“Rhenish”)
________________________________________________
Oslo Philharmonic
Laeiszhalle
Hamburg
Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Conductor
Boris Berezowsky, Pianist
Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 21 (“Elivra Madigan”)
Mahler: Symphony No. 5
________________________________________________
Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
Roberto Abbado, Conductor
Rossini: “L’Italiana In Algeri” Overture
Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony No. 2
Ligeti: Ramifications
Haydn: Symphony No. 94 (“Surprise”)
Rossini: “The Barber Of Seville” Overture
________________________________________________
Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Osmo Vanska, Conductor
Sibelius: Night Ride And Sunrise
Beethoven: Symphony No. 4
Sibelius: Symphony No. 5
________________________________________________
Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Osmo Vanska, Conductor
Helena Juntunen, Soprano
Jennifer Larmore, Mezzo Soprano
Mahler: Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”)
________________________________________________
San Francisco Symphony
Royal Albert Hall
London
Michael Tilson Thomas, Conductor
Mahler: Symphony No. 7
________________________________________________
Vienna Philharmonic
Royal Albert Hall
London
Daniel Barenboim, Conductor
Schubert: Symphony No. 5
Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 (“Romantic”)
________________________________________________
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Royal Albert Hall
London
Riccardo Chailly, Conductor
Viviane Hagner, Violinist
Beethoven: Coriolan Overture
Beethoven: Violin Concerto
Brahms: Symphony No. 4
________________________________________________
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Royal Albert Hall
London
James Levine, Conductor
Carter: Three Illusions For Orchestra
Bartok: Concerto For Orchestra
Brahms: Symphony No. 1
________________________________________________
Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Osmo Vanska, Conductor
Holst: The Planets
[By design, Andrew and I attended only the second half of this concert one Friday at lunchtime. The first half of the concert featured music by Corigliano and Chopin.]
________________________________________________
Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Conductor
Mozart: Symphony No. 41 (“Jupiter”)
Skrowaczewski: Fantasy For Flute And Orchestra
Brahms: Symphony No. 2
________________________________________________
Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Osmo Vanska, Conductor
Alfred Brendel, Pianist
Webern: Passacaglia
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 3
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 6
________________________________________________
Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
Reinbert De Leeuw, Conductor
Dawn Upshaw, Soprano
Stravinsky: Dumbarton Oaks Concerto
Hindemith: Chamber Music No. 1
Schoenberg: Brettl-Lieder
Revueltas: Homage To Federico Garcia Lorca
Berio: Folksongs
________________________________________________
Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Osmo Vanska, Conductor
Baiba Skride, Violinist
Rossini: “The Barber Of Seville” Overture
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto
Mozart: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
Hindemith: “Mathis Der Maler” Symphonie
________________________________________________
Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Neville Marriner, Conductor
Jorja Fleezanis, Violinist
Elgar: Violin Concerto
Brahms: Symphony No. 4
________________________________________________
Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Helmuth Rilling, Conductor
Brahms: Nanie
Brahms: Four Songs For Women’s Voices, Two Horns And Harp
Brahms: Schicksalslied
[By design, Andrew and I attended only the second half of this concert one Friday at lunchtime. The first half of the concert featured music by Schubert.]
________________________________________________
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Symphony Hall
Boston
James Levine, Conductor
Maurizio Pollini, Pianist
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 (“Pathetique”)
Kirchner: The Forbidden
Schumann: Piano Concerto
________________________________________________
Dresden Staatskapelle
Symphony Hall
Boston
Fabio Luisi, Conductor
Rudolf Buchbinder, Pianist
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 1
Brahms: Symphony No. 4
________________________________________________
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Symphony Hall
Boston
Julian Kuerti, Conductor
Lynn Harrell, Cellist
Brahms/Rubbra: Variations And Fugue On A Theme Of Handel
Elgar: Cello Concerto
Tchaikovsky: Manfred Symphony
________________________________________________
Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Yan Pascal Tortelier, Conductor
Mozart: “The Abduction From The Seraglio” Overture
Berlioz: Harold In Italy
Delius: “The Walk To The Paradise Garden” From “A Village Romeo And Juliet”
Elgar: Enigma Variations
When we mailed a few things home in early December (the purpose of the package was to ship Alec’s birthday gift), we included a few compact discs we had borrowed from Andrew’s father as well as the small number of concert programs we had accumulated since moving East.
Now that I have organized and filed our concert programs here in Minnesota, I can easily list the orchestra concerts Andrew and I have heard in the last thirty-four months. It is a larger number than I had realized: twenty-three, by my count. Andrew heard a few additional orchestras over this same period, since he attended a few concerts—such as concerts by the Dallas Symphony and the Houston Symphony—while on business travel.
Over that period, we have heard only two works more than once: Rossini’s “Barber Of Seville” Overture, performed twice, and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, performed three times.
The best of all concerts we attended was the Leipzig Gewandhaus concert under Riccardo Chailly. While the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra is not the finest of the orchestras we have heard—I would award that honor to the Vienna Philharmonic, I believe—it presented the most deeply-satisfying performance. The very worst performance, and by far the worst orchestra as well, was the San Francisco Symphony.
We happened to encounter far too much music by Mahler in the 2006-2007 season (and we missed yet an additional Mahler performance in early 2007 because of a snowstorm), but we have managed to avoid Mahler since September 2007. Truly, I do not strenuously object to Mahler, but Mahler is programmed far too often in the U.S., and we were doused with far too much Mahler from October 2006 through September 2007.
During the coming school term, we plan to attend two Boston Symphony concerts (Dutoit and Temirkanov), one New York Philharmonic concert (Muti), one concert by Boston’s Handel And Haydn Society (Norrington), and two concerts by visiting orchestras: the London Symphony (Gergiev) and The National Philharmonic Of Russia (Spivakov).
The orchestra concerts we have attended, in order, appear below.
________________________________________________
Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
James Conlon, Conductor
Mahler: Symphony No. 6
________________________________________________
Orchestra And Chorus Of Saint-Michealis-Kirche
Saint-Michaelis-Kirche
Hamburg
Thomas Schoener, Conductor
Ruth Ziesak, Soprano
Thomas Laske, Baritone
Brahms: A German Requiem
________________________________________________
NDR Orchestra Of Hamburg
Laeiszhalle
Hamburg
Christoph Dohnanyi, Conductor
Emanuel Ax, Pianist
Bartok: Two Portraits
Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 25
Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”)
________________________________________________
Orchestre Des Champs Elysees
Laeiszhalle
Hamburg
Philippe Herreweghe, Conductor
Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 3 (“Scottish”)
Schumann: Symphony No. 3 (“Rhenish”)
________________________________________________
Oslo Philharmonic
Laeiszhalle
Hamburg
Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Conductor
Boris Berezowsky, Pianist
Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 21 (“Elivra Madigan”)
Mahler: Symphony No. 5
________________________________________________
Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
Roberto Abbado, Conductor
Rossini: “L’Italiana In Algeri” Overture
Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony No. 2
Ligeti: Ramifications
Haydn: Symphony No. 94 (“Surprise”)
Rossini: “The Barber Of Seville” Overture
________________________________________________
Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Osmo Vanska, Conductor
Sibelius: Night Ride And Sunrise
Beethoven: Symphony No. 4
Sibelius: Symphony No. 5
________________________________________________
Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Osmo Vanska, Conductor
Helena Juntunen, Soprano
Jennifer Larmore, Mezzo Soprano
Mahler: Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”)
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San Francisco Symphony
Royal Albert Hall
London
Michael Tilson Thomas, Conductor
Mahler: Symphony No. 7
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Vienna Philharmonic
Royal Albert Hall
London
Daniel Barenboim, Conductor
Schubert: Symphony No. 5
Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 (“Romantic”)
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Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Royal Albert Hall
London
Riccardo Chailly, Conductor
Viviane Hagner, Violinist
Beethoven: Coriolan Overture
Beethoven: Violin Concerto
Brahms: Symphony No. 4
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Boston Symphony Orchestra
Royal Albert Hall
London
James Levine, Conductor
Carter: Three Illusions For Orchestra
Bartok: Concerto For Orchestra
Brahms: Symphony No. 1
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Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Osmo Vanska, Conductor
Holst: The Planets
[By design, Andrew and I attended only the second half of this concert one Friday at lunchtime. The first half of the concert featured music by Corigliano and Chopin.]
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Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Conductor
Mozart: Symphony No. 41 (“Jupiter”)
Skrowaczewski: Fantasy For Flute And Orchestra
Brahms: Symphony No. 2
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Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Osmo Vanska, Conductor
Alfred Brendel, Pianist
Webern: Passacaglia
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 3
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 6
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Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra
Ordway Center
Saint Paul
Reinbert De Leeuw, Conductor
Dawn Upshaw, Soprano
Stravinsky: Dumbarton Oaks Concerto
Hindemith: Chamber Music No. 1
Schoenberg: Brettl-Lieder
Revueltas: Homage To Federico Garcia Lorca
Berio: Folksongs
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Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Osmo Vanska, Conductor
Baiba Skride, Violinist
Rossini: “The Barber Of Seville” Overture
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto
Mozart: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
Hindemith: “Mathis Der Maler” Symphonie
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Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Neville Marriner, Conductor
Jorja Fleezanis, Violinist
Elgar: Violin Concerto
Brahms: Symphony No. 4
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Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Helmuth Rilling, Conductor
Brahms: Nanie
Brahms: Four Songs For Women’s Voices, Two Horns And Harp
Brahms: Schicksalslied
[By design, Andrew and I attended only the second half of this concert one Friday at lunchtime. The first half of the concert featured music by Schubert.]
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Boston Symphony Orchestra
Symphony Hall
Boston
James Levine, Conductor
Maurizio Pollini, Pianist
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 (“Pathetique”)
Kirchner: The Forbidden
Schumann: Piano Concerto
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Dresden Staatskapelle
Symphony Hall
Boston
Fabio Luisi, Conductor
Rudolf Buchbinder, Pianist
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 1
Brahms: Symphony No. 4
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Boston Symphony Orchestra
Symphony Hall
Boston
Julian Kuerti, Conductor
Lynn Harrell, Cellist
Brahms/Rubbra: Variations And Fugue On A Theme Of Handel
Elgar: Cello Concerto
Tchaikovsky: Manfred Symphony
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Minnesota Orchestra
Orchestra Hall
Minneapolis
Yan Pascal Tortelier, Conductor
Mozart: “The Abduction From The Seraglio” Overture
Berlioz: Harold In Italy
Delius: “The Walk To The Paradise Garden” From “A Village Romeo And Juliet”
Elgar: Enigma Variations
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Season's Greetings
Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840)
Fir Trees In The Snow
1828
Neue Pinakothek, Munich
Oil On Wood
12 inches by 9 3/4 inches
"Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow"
It is 18 degrees Fahrenheit and snowing in Boston. It is expected to snow through midday tomorrow, with accumulation up to twelve inches.
It is 25 degrees Fahrenheit and snowing in Minneapolis. A Winter Weather Advisory is in effect. The snow is expected to continue the rest of the afternoon and into the night.
It is 31 degrees Fahrenheit in Oklahoma, but at least it is not snowing. Temperatures are expected to drop to 20 degrees Fahrenheit later this afternoon, as a Cold Front has moved in and is expected to remain for several days.
Of course, Andrew and I have been keeping our eyes on the weather in Minnesota and Oklahoma, because we will be in those states over the holidays.
Can someone please explain to me why we will not be spending our holidays in Malta?
It is 25 degrees Fahrenheit and snowing in Minneapolis. A Winter Weather Advisory is in effect. The snow is expected to continue the rest of the afternoon and into the night.
It is 31 degrees Fahrenheit in Oklahoma, but at least it is not snowing. Temperatures are expected to drop to 20 degrees Fahrenheit later this afternoon, as a Cold Front has moved in and is expected to remain for several days.
Of course, Andrew and I have been keeping our eyes on the weather in Minnesota and Oklahoma, because we will be in those states over the holidays.
Can someone please explain to me why we will not be spending our holidays in Malta?