Although a museum may host a variety of artists, displaying many different genres, each museum has its own flavor. Its own impact. The Prado in Madrid, for example, is a beautiful and sad museum, with seemingly countless portraits of a dead or dying Christ, and wall-sized battle scenes with war dead strewn across scarred landscapes; and this:
Saturn (devouring his son) by Francisco Goya
You walk out of the Prado knowing you have seen great art, but not necessarily feeling good about it.
Three weeks ago we visited the Museum of Young Art (MOYA) in Oosterhout, the Netherlands. It had numerous whimsical paintings and sculptures.
Two sculptures by Tomas Schats
But for my money, this was the best:
De Kinderhater by Francis Vanhee
I do not know if this is a good portrait, but the artist’s inscription is perfect.
I chuckled as we walked out of the museum. Denise poked me. “What are you laughing at?” she asked.
“Children always paint your face wrong,” I said.
The conversation repeated itself throughout the day until, finally, Denise would hear a snicker and just say, “Children always paint your face wrong.”
“Yeah,” I would say. “That’s what I’ve read.”
I walked out of MOYA not sure I had seen great art. But that was beside the point. The art made ME feel great.
Even as I write about it now, three weeks later, I am smiling.
We had been away from home for two weeks and were tired of seeing things. I also was tired of doing things, but Denise’s shopping muscles are indefatigable. She braved the oppressive heat and wandered through Eindhoven stores.
There was an air-conditioned IMAX theater a mere five minute walk from our hotel. I decided to see a movie. One might argue that seeing a movie is both “seeing things” and “doing things,” but given the film I planned to visit, this is true only on a transparently superficial level.
I had already seen The Odyssey in IMAX. The only other offering was Spider-Man: Brand New Day, in “4D.”
“What is 4D?” I asked.
“It’s great,” said the middle-aged woman who wore a badge bearing the theater’s name. She should know, I thought.
“The movie is filmed in 3D. Here are your glasses. And the seat reacts to what is happening on the screen!” She said this with so much enthusiasm that I started to look forward to what I was sure would be a dumb movie.
So I sit in a seat in the second row (all other rows are sold out). When the commercials and trailers finally end, at least twenty minutes past the advertised start time, Spiderman appears, slinging a web that somehow always finds a way to connect to what should be thin air; but apparently just off screen there is some kind of beam exactly where he needs one.
As Spiderman appears my seat is jerking back and forth. But “jerking back and forth” does not do justice to what is going on. I am nearly thrown from the seat. I grasp the armrests to keep myself out of the aisle. My middle back is where my ass should have been. Change is falling out of my pockets. It is as though a very strong man is punishing me for something I should not have said.
I struggle to remain seated and focus on the screen. I am perplexed. The image is of a man floating effortlessly through space. Is shaking my chair supposed to make me wish that I also could fly away?
Soon Spiderman is in the rain. I realize that I am being misted by water. I do not know where it comes from.
I do not mind the mist. This actually might enhance the theater experience . . . but no, wait, Spiderman is flying again, and once again some angry mothertrucker is trying to dislodge me from my chair!
This is a superhero movie so of course there are lots of fight scenes. One after another. Each battle involves unrealistically athletic people with lightning reflexes moving at impossible speeds. Am I able to follow all the action? I might have been, if I wasn’t struggling just to sit upright.
Was Spiderman a good film? I honestly do not know. I spent the entire movie either annoyed by the idiotic shaking, or apprehensive about the shaking that I knew was just around the corner. It was like being stalked and bullied by a jerk that I was not allowed to punch, but who could rattle my chair and pour water on me anytime he wants.
What I am saying is, if ever a woman who looks like she could have been your mother when you were 25 or 30 tells you that 4D movies are fun, remember that this woman is not your mother.
Lots of people have been married thirty years or more, so maybe you think that accomplishment is no big deal. But of all the billions of people in the world, living and dead, who have celebrated a Pearl Anniversary, only one has been married to me. Thirty years with me is a feat requiring the patience of Job, the persistence of Sisyphus, and (sometimes) a Herculean tolerance of offensive odors.
Our 30th was this past July 4. Denise and I decided that on July 3 we would go to Porto, Portugal, and celebrate there.
We flew to Porto by Ryanair. Ryanair is an Irish discount airline offering cheap fares and an absolutely free test of one’s tolerance for discomfort. While the advertised rates are quite reasonable, the company receives (on average) an extra $24 per passenger, over and above the ticket price.
Our first experience with Ryanair illustrated one of the ways the airline extracts additional funds from unwary customers. We appeared at the airline’s Dublin reception desk, ticket receipts in hand. A young woman asked for our boarding passes. “That’s what we are here for,” I explain.
“Oh,” she says. “You were supposed to check in two hours before the flight.”
I look at my watch. “You mean we have missed our flight because we are only one hour and forty-five minutes early?”
She looks as though I have asked where babies come from, amazed that a man my age could be so ignorant. “You are supposed to check in online two hours before the flight,” she explains. “But I can check you in now.”
“Okay,” I say. “I guess that brings us back where we started. We would like to check in.”
“Sure,” she says. “Happy to help. That will be $75 per passenger.”
“No,” I say, showing her a receipt. “I already paid for the tickets, and they weren’t that much.”
Now she looks reluctant to go on, like she has gotten to the part where she needs to describe some unspeakable thing a daddy does to the mommy in order to make a baby. “The $75 is the in-person check-in fee. Checking in is free if you do it online, but at the airport it is $75.”
I am stunned, but I think quickly. I pull out my phone so I can check in online. She shakes her head, obviously saddened by my inattention to details. “It’s too late for that,” she says.
We had no choice but to pay the corporate extortionist the money it demanded. But to my way of thinking, Ryanair stole $150. I was determined to get it back. A little research showed me how.
Ryanair makes (on average) about $10 per passenger, per trip. The $10 profit is calculated after including ancillary revenue from seat selection, checked and cabin bag fees, priority boarding, airport check-in fees, etc. Since those added monies, on average, amount to $24, every passenger who foregoes all “extras” flies for $14 less than Ryanair’s cost. I would exact my revenge by eating into the bloodsucker’s bottom line.
Once Ryanair’s money-losing bait-and-switch fare has gotten your attention, has you scheduling a trip on one of its airplanes, its web site explains that if you and your wife, children, partner, etc., want to sit together you will have to pay for the privilege. If you do not cough up the extra dough, Ryanair says it will assign your seats “randomly.”
After 30 years of marriage Denise and I can tolerate being apart for the duration of a 90 minute flight. We insisted that the airline give us the “free,” supposedly randomly selected, seats. Not because we do not love each other, not because we would not have enjoyed holding hands during the flight, and not because we couldn’t afford the “upgrade.” No, we did it because we refuse to be Ryanair’s bitches.
Ryanair does not like uppity passengers. For both the original and return flights the airline assigned Denise a seat in the first three rows, and placed me in the last 3 rows. Many fliers have noted that the prevalence of widespread disbursement undermines the claim that seat assignments are random. “That will show them,” Ryanair thinks as it assigns two lovers seats on opposite ends of the plane.
“Ha!” Dan and Denise reply. “Is that all you got?” Ryanair does not know who it is dealing with.
Unless paid extra, Ryanair limits each passenger to one bag that will fit under the seat. But if you fly much you have seen passengers with elongated pillows wrapped around their necks. Ryanair doesn’t (yet) charge for bringing one on board. Denise jumped on this loophole and bought us each a special pillow case. That case can be filled with socks and underwear, leaving more room in the small under-seat bag.
A neck pillow full of socks and underwear creates no problem at all on the way to your destination. It is less satisfactory on the way home – when you have unlaundered socks and underwear inches from your nose – unless you have acquired a tolerance for offensive odors.
Like I said. Ryanair does not know who they are dealing with.
Our round trip Porto excursion cost Ryanair $48. That reduces Ryanair’s debt to $102, but only if we disregard interest, which I do not.
I recall from my youth hearing old folks talk about what was important to them. Mostly they talked about how well they slept, or the weather, or perhaps how the rheumatism was acting up. Once in a while they said the world was going to hell in a handbasket.
Well, I don’t have rheumatism, and of course the world IS going to hell in a handbasket, but that is such common knowledge it is hardly worth mentioning. You do NOT want to get me started about sleep . . .
That pretty much leaves just the weather, which is the real reason I am writing. It is raining. I am under the roof of our gazebo. Wood blazes in the fireplace next to me. Long yellow fingers dance over red glowing embers. I hear the pitter-patter of raindrops. Sometimes, for five or twenty minutes, the pitter-patter becomes something more intense. It becomes vaguely threatening, but without being scary, like when a shih-poo barks at a rottweiler.
The summers here are dry. Weeks, even months, go by without a drop of rain. Cactus and palm trees, plants that send their roots more downward rather than outward, they do well, but almost all else dies unless irrigated. This probably has something to do with the bliss that I feel sitting by the fire, listening to the rain.
Or maybe it’s the Old Fashioned, made with maple syrup and quality bourbon.
You might infer from my essay about Tate Modern, where I dumped on a beloved contemporary art museum, art films, and giant spiders, that I am hard to impress. I see why you might think that.
Today I dispel that perception by writing positively. I write about a work of art that left me in awe. It is not a painting, or a sculpture, or a movie. It is not music, and neither poetry nor prose. It is not, as you might otherwise soon surmise, a building.
My previous missive described how Denise and I swapped homes with friends from Harpenden, England. Harpenden is just twenty or twenty-five minutes, by train, from London. This allowed us to visit London regularly. We would go there, make surprised exclamations about how expensive everything was, and then take the train back to Harpenden.
Of course London has more to offer than just absurdly high prices. Some of the world’s best museums are there, and they offer free admission. And so does Tate Modern.
Some patriots refer to the USA as their “Motherland.” Others call it the “Fatherland.” I do not know which is correct; but, until our country’s gender identity is resolved, the United States should be banned from women’s sports.
I did not intentionally join the Old Farts Club (“OFC”). But when you are in a foreign country you gravitate to people who speak English. These are fellow ex-pats, most of whom are retired. There are some young people who work remotely, but their prostates and backs and joints all are in good working order, which leaves just the weather to talk about with them. Social tides moved me to the OFC, like in Animal House, when that jerk Niedermeyer guides Pinto and Flounder to the Omega House corner reserved for nerds.
I play padel several times a week. I am one of the older players and so am routinely humbled by my slow reflexes. But my teammates and opponents, and other ex-pat friends, (mostly) are retired, so they are not spring chickens themselves. Some of them made enough money that they could comfortably retire in their 50’s. Others, like Denise and I, did not. In the U.S. these groups would live in different neighborhoods and belong to different clubs. Here, we all go to the same parties and play golf or padel together. It is like when I lived in college dorms and roomed with kids from all walks of life, except there is a lot less binge drinking and sexual tension.
Back when we were in the U.S., working for a living, I was a lawyer and Denise was a teacher. We mostly socialized with lawyers and teachers and told stories and jokes about lawyering and teaching. But we in the OFC don’t talk about our old lives. Of course there are common introductory questions like, “Why did you move to Spain?” or “How did you pick Alicante?” But only rarely do the inquiries delve deeper than that. If someone lets slip that they were a mechanic or doctor or lawyer or salesman, they immediately change the subject to their recent visit to a European capital. It’s almost like we are all in witness protection, concerned that too much historical information might result in mob retribution. But the truth is, we just find our former iterations less interesting than the present.
It’s weird being an old fart. Believe it or not, I spent my entire life younger than I am now. Being old seems like a recent aberration, like hemorrhoids; something I should be able to fix with the right cream or pill. But by hanging out together we old farts at least can maintain the illusion that our condition is “normal,” just as we thought youth was normal, back in the day when boomers ruled and we were getting things done.
It is easy to maintain the illusion of normalcy when my age-peers and I play padel during the week and the courts are mostly occupied by retirees. But then comes the weekend, and the courts and cafés are teeming with people who are impossibly young. They are beautiful and energetic and play really, really, well. Suddenly my friends and I are in the minority, and it’s not a cool minority, like Idris Elba and Halle Berry at the Oscars.
No, we definitely are in the Omega House nerd corner. We do nothing productive. We don’t flirt or try to impress each other. All we do is get up when we want, read books, play sports (maybe), paint (maybe), watch movies, travel, and talk over wine, beer, or coffee.
Come to think of it, the Omega House nerd corner ain’t all bad.
