TriumphAnt

Just by way of a warm-up, let’s open with a Stupid Headline of the Day:

"Bear gave off no reasons for concern before trainer's death"
(Associated Press, April 23)

People -- it's a BEAR! Don't look for "reasons" for concern. There is only one: It's a BEAR!

Glad to be of help.

Oh, and yes (you probably won't be surprised to learn), the story deals with people who are every bit as stupid as that headline might suggest:

"In a February interview, Randy Miller called Rocky 'the best working bear in the business,' the San Bernardino Sun reported on its website Wednesday. But, the paper quoted him as saying, 'If one of these animals gets a hold of your throat, you're finished.'"

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A friend of Baby Duck recently sent me a work-related e-mail entitled “Words you do not want to hear on a conference call”. He then itemized several that indicated a high likelihood he was about to become involved in planning for an emergency flood-related evacuation of an entire community as this winter’s incredible snowfalls metamorphose into this spring’s torrential meltwater flows along several of our rivers. (I pictured a cartoon of a snuggly bed with wings on it – meaning all hope of sleep may be flying out the window for the next few of his work days. Not a situation I would wish on anyone but, if ever a job could be labeled “satisfying”, I expect one that involves saving lives would fall completely under that heading.)

It’s only the most tenuous of segués, but it suggested to me a title for this next little note, “Things you don’t want to experience when you’re picking up your offspring from piano lessons.”

Offspring takes piano lessons in a pleasant part of Ottawa – right beside the National Museum of Science and Technology. It's a patch that, besides the building, includes several acres of open lawns, trees and picnic tables. Plus a lighthouse, an Atlas rocket, a radar station and a massive locomotive. (It is a most eclectic patch of national capital land.) As the number of daylight hours increases, on music lesson evenings I quite deliberately give myself up to 45 minutes of waiting while I simply sit and listen to music or podcasts on the iPod or work a cryptic crossword… to name just a few of the pleasant time whilers that engage me on these ever more summery evenings.


On the evening of her most recent lesson, offpsring had just emerged and, darkness having fully fallen, I was getting ready ro drive us away when I noticed a car, or rather its headlights, approaching from the left. Noting that it would cross directly in front of me, I paused to let it go by, and then observed (a) that it was in fact a City of Ottawa police car, and (b) it stopped, blocking me in. Then we watched in growing perplexity as the driver, a uniformed officer, got out and came around to my door.

“Uh… hi?” I ventured.

“Good evening sir; you seem to have been here for quite a while.”

“Um… yes, I was waiting for my daughter here (pointing to the occupant of the passenger seat) until she was finished her music lesson there." (pointing to the storefront over which the enormous “Amulet Studios” sign was fully aglow.

He paused. I wondered why. Then I realized that moments before, I had been listening to the iPod and had been quietly (I thought) singing along with… uh oh… “Fat Bottomed Girls” by the late great Freddie Mercury and Queen. Gah, don’t tell me someone was offended – and by what? The fact of my certainly off-key efforts or the lyrical content of the air in question? Must be the song itself, I concluded... Can’t imagine why:

“I've been singing with my band
Across the water, across the land,
I seen ev'ry blue eyed floozy on the way, hey
But their beauty and their style
Wear kind of smooth after a while.
Take me to them lardy ladies every time!

(C'mon)
Oh won't you take me home tonight?
Oh down beside your red firelight,
Oh and you give it all you got
Fat bottomed girls you make the rockin' world go round
Fat bottomed girls you make the rockin' world go round.”

“I… uh… well, I just sit and listen to my iPod…”

“No problem, sir… it’s just that we have a police operation about to go down quite close to here… obviously I can’t get too particular… but we need you to leave… now.”

“Umm… OK, as soon as you move your cruiser, I’ll do just that.”

“Thank you very much sir; have a good evening.”

He turned and was moving around the front of his own car, when he stopped, returned and asked, “Oh, one more thing sir (great; I’ve got Columbo here)… are you the owner of this car?”

“Yes I am.”

“Thank you sir.” And off he went.

And off we went, only just a tad more quickly than we typically exit the Amulet Studios parking lot.

All of which left me with two questions, both unanswered at this writing: What was the nature of the “operation”? Because so far it has piqued no local media follow-up. And second, why in heaven’s name did it matter that I am the owner of the car? (And almost as an aside... add those to the fact that his opening sentence suggested I had already been under observation for some time.)

I'm not paranoid... really. BUT I SURE WISH PEOPLE WOULD STOP SAYING THAT ABOUT ME!!

The lines are open for rumour, speculation, insinuation and innuendo. Ready, set, go.

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Back to New York…

Occasionally on a trip I will experience a spit of bad luck. Many years ago, accompanied by Leslie’s “Wait until you see it…” exhortations, I was making my way from a hotel in London, England to what I expected would be my first-ever view of Big Ben, sitting atop its tower in the flesh (figuratively speaking, that is… “in stoneclad brick” would be the more literal description). I still recall stepping from a tube station into bright sunlight and, precisely where the Mother of Parliaments’ tower and its magnificent clock were supposed to fall into view, there was a foundation-to-pinnacle sheath of blue construction tarpaulin. The stone cladding was in the process of being sandblasted for the first time in decades and it just happened to coincide with our visit. The best I could say is that it was definitely shaped like the clock tower I’d seen only in photos to that point in my life.

Fast-Forward to NYC, April 2008.

Before we left Ottawa, the Guggenheim Museum was described to me by a friend as a pretty, indeed a beautiful package with so-so contents. A frequent feature of movies and TV shows set in NYC, the Guggenheim is a – to some, “the” – signature work of architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the subject of often rapturous reviews. And yes, some of them suggest – as did my friend – that the architecture downright overpowers all but the most magnificent of exhibits housed within its iconic walls.

So given the “Big Ben” introduction to this item, it should now come as no surprise to anyone that this is what greeted us when the cab in which we were riding swung around the corner to where Wright’s stunning inverted beehive was supposed to heave into view:


(Photo: Guggenhenheim.org / restoration)

As for the contents, well, the day we were there they lived precisely down to our forewarned low expectations.

Cai Guo-Qiang is a Chinese artist who, if Guggenheim website bumpf is to be believed, is “internationally acclaimed as an artist whose creative transgressions and cultural provocations have literally exploded the accepted parameters of art making in our time”.

Contrary to the frequent misuse these days of “literally” to mean “really, REALLY”, in using it here to qualify “exploded” the Guggenheim people are being perfectly correct. Among the many media this artist employs (in an exhibit that, astonishingly, ran the entire Guggenheim spiral gallery from ground floor to roof) is gunpowder. In this case, part of his massive multi-media installation was a series of gigantic canvasses upon which he had ignited varying quantities of the explosive, after which he persuaded the Guggenheim people that the scorched remains should be mounted on its venerable display surfaces.

In another installation, the artist had placed the excavated remains of an ancient Chinese boat in whose hull he heaped tons of shards from shattered plates, cups and saucers. (The artist, you see, is a Chinese emigrant and also has a few political points he wants to make. This one showed us “broken China” – get it, get it?) Other parts of this massive installation pretty well revealed me to be, I’m afraid, a Philistine because I was much more amused than awestruck by, for example, a dozen life-sized stuffed tigers festooned with arrows. I was similarly unmoved by a long, leaping stream of 99 life-sized stuffed wolves who circled fully half a single level before coming to grief smack against a large glass barrier.
(Photo: www.iconeye.com)

I confess, however, that I was mightily impressed – not so much by the piece but rather by the legend behind it – of another part of the exhibit: a full sized boat hull suspended from the ceiling that was riddled with so many arrows it resembled an inverted hedgehog. The legend tells of a Chinese general who awoke one morning to find his own army perilously close to an opposing force. Having just come from another battle, the general and his troops were almost out of arrows. So on one misty morning, he floated a boat across the river towards his enemy’s camp. He had stocked the boat with straw figures resembling warriors. Meanwhile, his own army stayed safely behind, yelling and generally making an attack-like barrage of yells and other sundry noises. His decoy promptly attracted a torrent of volleys from defending archers. When the general’s boat returned to his camp, some 3,000 arrows were stuck to it and subsequently were put to good use defeating his opponent’s force.

According to a brief review of this particular installation that appears on the Museum of Modern Art’s website, “Surreptitiously gathering strength from one's opponent is also a strategic principle in martial arts. Turning to a militaristic episode and a cultural practice, Cai not only suggests a defensive strategy in the face of foreign intervention, but also creates a poetic metaphor in the image of a wounded body transcending pain and floating in a cloud of feathered arrows.”

Uh huh. Well, what do you expect? These artsy types have to stick together.

But with all due respect to Mr Guo-Qiang – the entire friggin’ Guggenheim????

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Here’s a piece of advice for would-be NYC visitors who believe what is written in the online activity guides. Doublecheck your information, with a phone call if necessary. I say this merely because again we found ourselves mildly disappointed when, after a cab ride to one of the city’s many famous piers, found that the one boat tour we wanted to take only ran in the summer – a critical piece of background that did not appear on the floating tour company’s website. (That cab ride, incidentally, did indeed realize the tales I had heard of the white-knuckle experience a Manhattan cab ride can be. NYC cab drivers are not to be trifled with and from my position in the front passenger seat, I found myself rising slightly from my seat in one tense moment after another as we whirled down narrow downtown streets, often barreling no more than a very few scant millimetres past the huge side mirrors of parked delivery trucks.)

Although we were flummoxed by what had been planned as a water tour around the Statue of Liberty, it was a gorgeous sunny day and we turned the occasion into a most pleasant walking ramble along the waterfront, turning into the city once more when we reached the street where the Empire State Building is sited.

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I doubt I can say much about the Empire State Building that other people haven’t said as well, or better, when it comes to describing the impression of actually being at its base, looking up, and then entering that stunning art deco foyer that appeared in a photo in my previous entry here. What the brochures typically will not tell you, however, is how even here Disneyfication -- with not a small dose of PT Barnumery -- rears its ugly head. After passing through the awe-inducing foyer, we immediately were steered to something called the “Sky Ride”, a quasi-IMAX experience where Kevin Bacon narrates a filmed aerial tour of the downtown. You and about 40 other people are strapped into this giant box with rows of seats and as your movie screen presents the illusion of diving, soaring, banking, plunging and even cracking through the streets into a storm drain, the (all too literal) box seats bump and tilt and generally don’t do it nearly so well as does Disney.

Barnum – well, his famous maxim about suckers and the sixty-second intervals at which they enter the world, anyway – shows up after you get closer to the summit when you are zig-zagged along with a long line of visitors to hear what is surely one of the more bizarre sales pitches ever made.

At the Empire State Building, the guides at this level make an almost psychotically repetitive point of telling you with, apparently, no small measure of pride, how utterly unhelpful the situation is on the observation deck. No guides are there, they shout. Neither are there any printed posters showing the key points of interest to be seen as you stare off any one of the four sides of the deck. In fact, they wax evangelically about how desperate will be the need you feel to have in your possession one of the two or three different versions of the guide to the New York view from the Empire State Building, which they are only too happy to sell you NOW, because IT WILL BE TOO LATE when you get up to the observation deck.

(My Barnum allusion is not far off the mark. The last time I was subjected to a sales push this vigorous, it was while attending a Big Top Shrine Circus with offspring and being forced to hear a pitch about every three minutes to buy a cheesy Star-Wars-glow-in-the-dark lightsaber because the whole tent population’s waving of their limply glowing lights will be the ONLY WAY the performers will know you are appreciating their performance. Applause, it seems, and cheering, were prohibited because it upset the animals. So buy and wave a lightsaber, EVERYBODY – “Children of all ages!!” – so as to show our stars how much you enjoyed their show.)

So just to take you out this time, here's another shot from the family album:

In my last post, I alluded to the view from the Top of the Rock as being especially delightful because it included the Empire Street Building. Well, I certainly don’t want anyone to think that the view from the Empire State is any slouch, either and at the centre of this image is yet another NYC skyline icon, the Chrysler Building.

Up next... that danged city'll make an art lover out of me yet!