Landmarks

Olana

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Only one person has asked, which means that many have been wondering silently. It’s a clamor of silence. (In the world of a co-dependent, almost complete silence is the same thing as many specific requests.) The question(s): The photo at the top, where is that? What is it photo of?

Indeed, there is one photo on this web site that is not of me or my duck friend, and it has sat at the top of the front page since The Gad About Town made its debut. It is at the top. It is the view of the Hudson River looking south from Frederic Edwin Church‘s home studio, Olana, near Hudson, New York. It is a photo taken in 2013.
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Memory Screen

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“A heavy rain drowns each raindrop; a light rain, like the kind I saw in the woods out behind my house when I was a child, a light rain striking the leaves and branches of trees, further slowing their impact, that rain produces the strongest petrichor of all, the one that renders me into an seven-year-old noticing the world for the first time.
 
“The lightest of rain after the driest of spells leads to the most argillaceous petrichor, which is the kind that humans smell as relief, the thought that things will start growing again.” — “Petrichor,” Jan. 26, 2015

We called it “The Woods.” Well, I did. Sometimes, I referred to it as a “forest,” which it most certainly was not. Our backyard ended at a line of trees and the dross beneath them; our lightly manicured, suburban lawn did not grow beyond that line, despite my teen-aged lawn mowing efforts to expand it by clearing the dead leaves and branches away. That tight boundary made The Woods appear all the more elemental and foreign.
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Discrediting Reality

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marqués de Dalí de Pubol, was born 111 years ago today. “A nice round number,” he is not reported to have not said to anyone about this or any other number, except round ones, today or any other day.

Salvador Dalí was the most local of artists—many street scenes in his works replicate from childhood memory the turn-of-the-century streets of his hometown of Figueres, many beach-scapes are photorealistic recreations of the rocks and outcroppings and jetties of the nearby Port Lligat beaches he loved—and his works bring viewers into a yet more local setting: his mind and his dreams.

His body is interred in a crypt in the Dalí Theatre and Museum in Figueres, across the street from the church in which he was baptized and received his first communion.

Dalí’s popularity as an artist has never really had peaks and valleys; his work started to attract notice when he was in his mid-20s and his course through life took him from attention-getting to admired to loved to beloved, and now he is thought of as one of the major visual artists of the 20th century.

His self-promoting persona sometimes outshone the creations but at times it was his chief creation.

And for $30 from various websites, you can purchase a melting wristwatch, as seen at top, a visual reference to one of Dalí’s most famous paintings: The Persistence of Memory.
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