As many of my colleagues have bemoaned in their blogs, the weather here in New England has been miserable for the last few weeks. However today dawned bright and warm, with a nice breeze: still a little humid, but otherwise a perfect spring day. So we headed down to the North End of Boston to poke around the Italian groceries and bakeries. We had lunch just across the street from the Paul Revere House, and visited it afterwards.

The people that “restored” it early in the 20th century seem to have brought more enthusiasm than historical rigor to the project. They actually reconstructed it as it had been first built at the end of the 17th century. To do this, they removed many of the features and additions that Paul Revere would have known when he lived there 90 years later. There’s a lesson there, I feel.

Before heading home we stopped in Salumeria Italiana, a wonderful Italian grocery on Richmond Street, and picked up some bread and several kinds of cheese. Among these was a Blu del Moncenisio, which turned out to be one of those truly great cheeses that one encounters every now and then. I’m a sucker for blue cheese (preferably with a baguette and a robust red wine or port), and this was a marvellous example of the cheesemaker’s craft. Recommended.

We just got back from the Boston MFA (Musem of Fine Arts) where a new Art Deco exhibit has just opened. It’s organized into three sections, roughly 30-50-20 percent respectively. The first presents various ideas and styles that influenced art deco – everything from Classical Greek and Egyptian, through African and Meso-american patterns and colours, to Russian ballet costumes.
The second section is art deco proper: the tsunami of styles – individual yet linked – that were launched on the world at the 1925 Paris Exhibition. I felt that the organizers of this show cast their net a little wider than I would have done. Man Ray’s Electricity, while brilliant, doesn’t feel as though it has anything to do with art deco. Nor do the wonderful miniatures (postcards, really) of Josephine Baker; not everything in Paris in the 1920s qualified as art deco. But enough quibbling: overall, this section was superb. My favourite piece was Tamara de Lempicka’s stunning nude La Bella Raphaela (shown above; click for full size). The scanned image doesn’t do justice to the work, particularly the breathtakingly sumptuous reds of her lips and the cloth she’s lying on.
The final section showed the impact of art deco on design in the USA. (Recall that the USA was offered a place at the original 1925 exhibition, but, as the MFA’s program notes, The USA declined to participate on the grounds that �there was no modern design in America�.) There are some gems here, illustrating especially the distinctive “streamline” twist that America introduced. And the huge boxwood model of the Rockefeller Center shows how art deco ideas were incorporated into the design of New York’s skyscrapers.
Overall, a very cool show. I bought the t-shirt.

Yesterday evening my daughter (Kate) and I went to see the final performance of the Japan Society of Boston‘s presentation of Kabuki at the Cutler Majestic theatre in Boston. The performance was given by the Heisei Nakamura-za Kabuki Troupe starring Nakamua Kankuro, who are touring New York, Boston, and Washington DC this summer. (There’s a fascinating interview here, in which Nakamura Kankuro talks about the challenge and opportunity to bring kabuki to the United States.)
The troupe – actors, singers, musicians – performed two pieces that showed different sides of kabuki, Bo-Shibari (“Tied to a pole”), and Renjishi (“Dance for two lions”). There’s a detailed description of each here, with comments by Kankuro. The performance was in Japanese (obviously), and there was no printed or simultaneous translation, although Peter Grilli, the president of the Japan Society of Boston, provided a short introduction to the pieces. But the language was not a barrier.
The result? It was glorious – visually stunning, dramatic, funny, clever, musically exciting, challenging, dramatic, exuberant, and just plain fun.
One point of note was that the audience included many Japanese, mostly living in the Boston area (though some had travelled a long way to attend the show). As a result there was much bowing as people met. There was even one woman in a beautiful pink kimono, with all the trimmings.

Saturday evening, 7:30. I’ll post a review on Sunday:

I got back home to Boston late last night after an 8 day trip to Silicon Valley. This afternoon we [my wife, daughter, son-in-law and I] headed up to the Museum of Fine Arts, since we had tickets for the Gauguin in Tahiti exhibit. As it turned out, none of us thought much of that show (a little Gauguin goes a long way, and his pedophilia is hard to ignore), but two other exhibits more than made up for it.

First, we saw the Japanese Postcards show. This is simply wonderful – see it if you get the chance. It’s drawn from a collection of thousands of Japanese postcards from the first half of the 20th century: New Year’s cards, art cards, humorous cards, cards celebrating the Russian-Japanese war, advertisements, Art Nouveau, Art Deco… just delightful. The one on the right is by Kobayashi Kaichi, entitled Woman Waiting for her Beloved at 2:25. We bought the book for the exhibition, and one of the staff confided that the Japanese Postcards book had been outselling the Gauguin in Tahiti catalogue by a significant margin.
The other delightful surprise was the exhibition by the English couple Tim Noble and Sue Webster. To quote the MFA: The artists integrate satire and punk strategies with the study of modern sculpture and a keen awareness of the self-importance of the London art scene. Responding to the media hype of the British art world, Noble and Webster find inspiration in pop culture and advertising, creating brilliant animated light displays, or illuminations, such as the fountain and dollar sign in this exhibition. By contrast, their �rubbish,� or shadow sculptures, are brought to life when a simple light is projected over a carefully arranged pile of domestic garbage. Tim Noble & Sue Webster explores the team�s mature work, including seven examples of illuminations, shadow sculptures, and their latest neon forms: a boy/girl couple covered with streetwise slang. The piece to the left is Excessive Sensual Indulgence. Exhilarating, and very, very English.
My favourite pieces were “Real Life is Rubbish” and “Fucking Beautiful”, shown below: