From Camelot to Zumbaland

 

Friday, February 22, 2013 – From Camelot to Zumbaland

Has it really been over 8 days since I’ve sat down to write?  I guess the past week has been quite hectic for both of us.  Over the Presidents’ Day weekend, Elisa and Christian came down from New York for a short visit.  We did lots of cooking and eating while they were here – simple food, but healthy and tasty:  turbot with roasted tomatoes and panko breadcrumbs, garlicky broccoli rabe with Parmesan, and pumpkin bread with hand-chopped chocolate “chips” made from a single origin 70% chocolate bar. 

Aside from entertaining visitors, I’m just trying to keep up with Elliott.  In spite of his nagging lower back pain, he’s been spending hours and hours everyday on the second bathroom remodeling project.  Between researching vanities on the computer, running out to Home Depot, Lowe’s, and the tile showroom, or removing old tile and grout, he’s constantly busy, and I have to remind him occasionally to stop and take a break.

As Elliott’s chauffeur and fellow-researcher, I’ve put in a lot of time on the project as well.  And I haven’t avoided the physical labor either.  Today Elliott has given me a job that involves spackling and sanding.  So for a change of pace, I welcomed the recent opportunity to do a couple of days of subbing at Camelot, a nearby elementary school, where I worked in a multi-grade deaf and hard of hearing classroom.  It was challenging and fun at the same time, and it brought back memories of when Elisa and Matt were much younger.  I really admire elementary school teachers who have seven (!) hours a day of direct student contact with instruction in every subject – math, science, social studies, and language arts.  How do they ever have time to plan and prepare their lessons and grade papers?  By comparison, when I was teaching in high school, I had fewer hours of student contact, I usually taught only two different ESOL subjects, and it was still a very demanding job.  Just thinking about it now makes me feel exhausted, and I wonder how I ever managed to work full-time. 

In addition to subbing, I’ve been trying to get back into an exercise routine after becoming somewhat sloth-like in the new year.  I started having sinus problems in mid-January and that sapped a lot of my energy.  Even when the infection cleared up, I kept making excuses for not heading to the gym.  Finally, I managed to overcome my inertia.  At first, I bundled up and took short walks outside, figuring that even 15 minutes of brisk walking was better than zero minutes of physical activity.  Eventually, I got back to the gym.  And this morning, suffering from PPOG (post pig-out guilt), I even tried a Zumba class for the first time.  It was an attempt to burn off the extra calories I consumed yesterday during my cookie baking session, which started out innocently enough.  I was trying to use up the leftover canned pumpkin that remained after Elisa and I baked the pumpkin bread last weekend.  So I modified my all-time favorite cookie recipe (it has an oatmeal-based dough) to incorporate the pumpkin.  After I filled up two cookies sheets and popped them into the oven, there was still plenty of dough left in the mixing bowl.  The spoon was just sitting there, so I decided to take a taste, and it was really good, so I took another taste, and then another, and then…well, you can guess what happened.  That raw cookie dough was so delicious.  There must be something addictive about the combination of sweet butter and brown sugar.  But enough of that for now.  If I don’t change the subject, I’ll rush back into the kitchen to eat the few remaining cookies.  

So, in my art history class, we’re still in the 15^th century, but we’ve moved north from Italy to Flanders, where oil painting rules, the style is meticulously detailed, and the surfaces are so smooth that no brushstrokes can be detected.  While the subjects are not exclusively religious, there are several important altarpieces that we’ve studied.  In the process, I’ve developed some knowledge of Christian iconography.  Without this class, I would have completely missed the symbolic meaning of the sheaf of wheat, the glass of water, the table, the three white lilies, the violets, the grape motif, the bare feet, the blown out candle, etc. in the Mérode and Portinari altarpieces.  I also now know the difference between an Annunciation and an Adoration.   

However, one of the paintings I found most intriguing is completely secular in subject.  It’s Jan van Eyck’s 1433 portrait entitled Man in a Red Turban.   

 

Is it a self-portrait? Why is he wearing that red shmattah wrapped around his head?  Was he having a bad hair day?  Or were turbans fashionable headgear for men in Flanders in the 15^th century?  (possibly because people didn’t take frequent showers back in those days and everyday was a bad hair day?)  And why red?  I brought up my questions in class, but my professor didn’t have any answers.  If I have time (ha!), I’ll try to get to the university library to do some research.

A Sweet, Sweet Valentine's Day

 

Thursday, February 14, 2013 – A Sweet, Sweet Valentine’s Day

Happy Valentine's Day (photo by Elliott Thompson)

My blood sugar level is probably in the stratosphere after our two-day Valentine’s celebration.  For the first time in our nearly 30-year relationship, we went out to eat for the holiday.  In fact, we got a head start by going out to eat yesterday as well.  Actually, yesterday’s meal was a lunch-a-trois with our friend Millicent at the Tysons Corner Seasons 52.  Elliott ventured into new culinary territory by ordering a buffalo burger and all of us indulged by sampling the mini-desserts.   

Mini-desserts at Seasons 52 - hardly any calories!

 

Since restaurants are usually mobbed on the evening of Valentine’s, I took Elliott out for lunch today at Casa Italia, a new Italian restaurant right here in Fairfax City.  The food was excellent (fried calamari, vegetable lasagna, and veal Francese) and we couldn’t finish our meal without sharing a freshly-filled cannolo – that’s the singular of cannoli.  There’s something so romantic about Italian food.  

A wonderful end to lunch at Casa Italia

 Earlier in the day, I’d stopped by the Dulce’s, the local Peruvian bakery, and picked up some sweet treats to have at home after dinner:  guava and apple turnovers, strawberry empanada, and two alfajores (creamy dulce de leche sandwiched between tender, crumbly cookies).  Yes, it was sugar overload, but it’s only once a year.  

David/Apollo Says "Ciao!"

 

Tuesday, February 12, 2013 – David/Apollo Says “Ciao!”

I hate to gloat, especially when my friend Lynda in Connecticut is still digging out from over 3 feet of snow, but today we’re enjoying perfect walking weather in the DC area – bright sun, blue skies, upper 40s, no wind.  I went out for a walk this morning, knowing all too well that this too shall pass.  In fact, there’s mention of some mixed precipitation tomorrow.  But for now, I’ll enjoy a brief respite from the worst of winter. 

On the homefront, the second bathroom remodeling project is underway although it’s still in the very early stages.  Thoughts of toilets, tubs and tile are swirling around in my head.  Many more decisions lie ahead for us.  Elliott and I had a date at Lowe’s yesterday where I learned about all the latest toilet features.  But enough of this.  I’d rather talk about something else, like my visit to the National Gallery of Art last Saturday.

Am I David or Apollo?

Kathy and I stopped by the museum to see Michelangelo’s unfinished marble statue, which is on loan from the Bargello Museum in Florence, Italy.  The poor fellow has been having an identity crisis for nearly 500 years.  Scholars can’t say definitively if Michelangelo intended to portray the biblical hero David or the Greek god Apollo.  There is evidence for both beliefs.  It’s all tied up with the politics of Cinquecento (1500s) Florence, with supporters of the republic battling the powerful Medici family and imperial forces.  In any case, the statue is beautiful to behold, especially in the small gallery where viewers can get an up-close look.  It was fascinating to see evidence of the process of sculpting the form out of the block of marble.  I am completely in awe of sculptors who use a subtractive method.  It’s something I’ve never attempted.  If you’re in the Washington area, hurry over to see David/Apollo before March 3, when he’ll say “arrivederci, DC” and head back to Italy. 

The other exhibit we enjoyed immensely at the NGA comes from the private collection of James Dyke.  Color, Line, Light features 19^th and 20^th century French works on paper, including watercolors, drawings, and pastels by a wide range of artists.  This show will be on view until late May.  It was fascinating to see unfamiliar works by familiar names, such as Delacroix, Monet, and Pissarro.  I was especially struck by Delacroix’s eerily evocative battle scene populated by ghostly figures.  Also, Monet’s pastel rendering of Waterloo Bridge was an ethereal gem.  The very helpful text accompanying the exhibit explains major period styles from Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism to Impressionism, Nabis and Symbolism, to later Neo-Impressionism. 

By the way, after my last art history class, where I saw images of Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel in Padua, Italy, I’m ready to hop on a transatlantic flight to see these masterpieces in person.  I never thought I’d get excited about the Proto-Renaissance (the early art historian Vasari coined this term), but it’s happening! 

Restaurant Week Forever!

 Saturday, February 9, 2013 – Restaurant Week Forever!

If Washington area restaurant owners were smart, they’d declare every week Restaurant Week.  Last December, I started checking daily for information about Winter 2013 Restaurant Week.  As soon as the dates were announced, I rushed to make reservations. First, I had to choose a restaurant for a lunch date with Elliott, who’s not a big fan of ethnic cuisines.  His idea of foreign food is French.  In other words, he likes food that seems familiar.  So the restaurant couldn’t be associated with any particular ethnicity, but it also had to be interesting enough to satisfy my desire for new culinary experiences.  Willow, located in the Ballston section of Arlington, seemed to fit the bill.  It is an elegant but unpretentious restaurant that serves what might be called modern American cuisine, i.e. innovative but recognizable food.  We certainly were not disappointed.  Elliott started off with a mushroom and white truffle bisque that was creamy and flavorful.  My roasted beet and goat cheese salad was a delight for the eyes as well as the palate.  

 Our happiness continued with the main courses.  Elliott satisfied his red meat craving with filet mignon Stroganoff while I enjoyed skewered salmon.  For dessert, we shared passion fruit cheesecake with raspberry sauce and brought home a package of house-made cherry chocolate oatmeal cookies.  What an inspired idea! 

For my second restaurant outing, I could be more adventurous.  Oyamel is a Mexican restaurant that has long intrigued me.  It’s part of the José Andres group, which includes several restaurants that I love, such as Zaytinya and the now-shuttered Café Atlantico.  My friend Kathy was as excited as I was when we set out for DC on a cold but sunny Saturday.  Thoughts of warm and sunny Mexico were dancing through our heads as we made our way through the windy streets.  The decor of Oyamel is a profusion of folk art and cheerful colors.  We immediately started gobbling up the still-warm tortilla chips as we pondered the possibilities on the special 4-course menu.  With so many delicious choices, it took a while to make our decisions. 

For a first course, Kathy zeroed in on the tortilla soup garnished with crispy tortilla strips, avocado, and queso fresco, and I finally settled on gazpacho-inspired salad from the historic city of Morelia.  It was a colorful sweet and sour mixture of jicama, pineapple, mango, cucumber, queso fresco, and sour orange. 
 

My second course was shrimp sautéed with shallots, arbol chiles, problano peppers, lime and sweet aged black garlic.  Kathy opted for a vegetarian dish of sautéed Brussels sprouts, arbol chiles, pumpkin seeds, peanuts and lime. 
 

Next came the taco course.  Mine had a vegetable-based filling that featured Swiss chard, potatoes, onions, tomatoes and chipotle salsa, while Kathy’s taco norteño was stuffed with shredded beef in an ancho chile and cumin sauce.  Both were wonderful and those warm house-made corn tortillas tasted a whole lot better than the low-carb ones I’ve been buying at Trader Joe’s. 
 
Finally, our dessert arrived.  We’d both ordered the sweet potato flan with Honeycrisp apple sorbet and tamarind sauce.  What a revelation of flavors and textures – pure genius.  That made two great new restaurant discoveries in a week.  More Restaurant Week, please.  

 

Meet the Homunculus

 

Friday, February 8, 2013 – Meet the Homunculus  

  

Yesterday’s art history lecture left me on the verge of tears.  Not because I hate the class – on the contrary, I adore the class, and yesterday’s lecture was no exception.  My amazing professor has already given me an array of tools for appreciating art, regardless of its time, place, or medium.  And I was really excited when we started to address the actual content of western art.  In less than seventy-five minutes, we did a whirlwind tour of the antecedents of the Renaissance.  In other words, we got an information-packed overview of ancient Greek architecture and sculpture, ancient Roman architecture, sculpture and painting, Medieval art (early, Romanesque, and Gothic) and the Italo-Byzantine tradition of the Mediterranean world, all of which laid the foundation for the Renaissance.  Towards the end of the lecture, Dr. De Armendi introduced us to Cimabue, an important transitional figure, and his monumental 13^th century altarpiece.  Now I’ve got a brain brimming with new understanding of the history and the art of several centuries.  My vocabulary includes a long list of new words, my favorite of which is “homunculus,” which is defined as a little man.  This is often seen in Byzantine paintings of the Virgin holding the baby Jesus, who is portrayed as a child-sized man. 

 

 

I can hardly wait to learn about Giotto and the early Renaissance next week.  Well, then, why did I feel like crying when I walked out of class?  Simply because I realized how much I’d missed over the years on trips to Athens, Florence, Rome, Siena, Paris, London, Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and so many more places.  It’s as if I had walked through several living art history courses with my eyes closed.  Such a waste!  But there’s no point in crying now.  It’s time to start planning how to remedy the situation.  The solution will undoubtedly include several field trips. 

In conclusion, I hope my much younger friends will learn from my experience.  If I were still teaching in high school, I’d urge my college-bound students to make a survey of Western art a part of their undergraduate experience. 

Art Appreciation

 

Saturday, February 2, 2013 – Art Appreciation

I’m so fortunate to be surrounded by artists.  Not only do I live with a bonafide artist (Elliott), but my next door neighbor on one side is a painter (that would be Anne), and my neighbor on the other side is…um, well…I guess some kind of installation artist might be the best way to describe him?  I first found out about his work last spring when he installed a piece that I called Trois Toilettes in his backyard.  At any time of day, I could see it from my deck, the three gleaming porcelain pieces at various angles of repose amidst the foliage.  Shortly before Elliott’s 100^th birthday celebration, we asked this neighbor to temporarily relocate the piece.  Actually, one day Elliott walked across the lawn and gave him directions to the county dump.  Much to our relief, Trois Toilettes disappeared a few days later.  But now it seems that our neighbor has been inspired once again.  A couple of weeks ago, a new piece appeared in his yard.  I call this new installation Homage to a Fish since it reminds me of the skeleton of a large (very large) fish.  After looking at it for several days, I decided to put my newly acquired knowledge from my art history class to work by doing a “formal analysis” of the piece.  

 

First of all, we’ll look at the the medium:  this is a three-dimensional installation that includes a number of  sculptural forms made of a variety of materials, including an unknown metal, wood, leaves, and plastic.  Next, the abstract style of the piece combines a distortion of a recognizable element, i.e. the fish skeleton, with the purely non-objective.  Thus, while the piece is not realistic in the traditional sense, it is grounded in reality.  Now let’s examine the composition.  The main geometric form is cylinder, as seen in the pieces of wood.  In addition, the diagonal metal line, which suggests the backbone of the fish, draws the eye to the focal point of the composition.  The section of blue plastic echoes this orthogonal line.  As this piece occupies a three-dimensional space, the overlapping of forms provides depth to the composition.  The varied angles of the wooden forms emphasize the depth of the piece.  The negative space between the lines is an important component of the framework as it helps define the form.  The long slender well-defined lines contained in the skeletal form are dynamic in the sense that they provide a strong directional force.  The irregularity of the angles also contribute to the sense of dynamism. 

Line seems to be the artist’s primary concern in this particular piece.  Color plays a secondary role in achieving the overall effect.  The shiny reflective metal lines appear to float in front of the wooden forms, which recede due to their subdued intensity and relatively darker value.  The randomly scattered leaves in the foreground are somewhat monochromatic, in shades of tan and brown.  However, their modulating value and uneven edges suggest motion, which draws the viewer into the piece.  Likewise, the blue plastic form on the right, while receding, provides a contrast that highlights the skeleton form and adds to the sense of motion.  With its reflective metal form, the piece uses light as an essential element.  The bright metal and the vivid blue plastic are in marked contrast to the natural materials of wood and leaves.  Finally, by projecting the diagonal lines into the negative space, this free-standing piece invites the viewer to enter into the composition.

Wow!  I never realized my neighbor was so talented! 

Home Schooling

 

Friday, February 1, 2013 – Home Schooling

Elliott can now claim a new title – world’s oldest student.  When I went off for my art history class at George Mason University, I detected a twinge of envy on his part.  He is proud of maintaining his intellectual curiosity, and if not for his physical limitations, he would have signed up for the art history class along with me.  Fortuitously, a sale catalog from The Great Courses arrived in the mail around the time the semester began.  This seemed to be the perfect solution.  Out of 20 or more courses that we considered, we narrowed it down to five:  Old Testament, New Testament, the art of reading, Einstein’s physics for non-scientists, and a history of jazz.

Once the package of discs arrived, the next decision was which course to “attend” first.  With our dual interests in art and religion, and my current enrollment in the art history class, we chose to focus on the Bible, since it provides the content for much of western art.  Earlier this week, we sat down for our first lecture on the Old Testament.  We were very impressed with our professor and each of the 45-minute lectures has been fascinating.  

There are so many advantages to this method of continuing education – you can attend class whenever you want, you can wear whatever you want, you can sit in a rocking chair, and you can pause the lecture if you have a coughing attack or have to run to the bathroom.  Now that we’ve discovered home schooling, there’s no chance of mental stagnation for Elliott. 

Also on the knowledge front, I have just discovered that the tilapia is not a laboratory creation after all.  Perusing an art history book, I learned that this poor, misunderstood fish has been around for a long, long time.  One of the photos showed a painted tomb wall in Egypt, dating back to around 1350 BCE, in which the tilapia is portrayed along with other animals.  The caption notes that ancient Egyptians would have recognized the tilapia as a symbol of rebirth.  I never would have imagined that.  But I still contend that tilapia has the consistency of rubber – and a taste to match, and I’ll seek out another type of fish the next time I make fish tacos.