November 5, 2016

Yesteryear
One year ago today: November 5, 2015, gators & gorillas.
Five years ago today: November 5, 2011, the human side of science, again.
Nine years ago today: November 5, 2007, “in other words”.
Random years ago today: November 5, 2009, the daylight savings towtruck scam.

MORNING
           Consider this the best birthday present possible for a dude like me, but my guitar buddy and I just spend today checking out the artwork at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg. I was unaware it was so near by, but then, except for that one trip to buy motorcycle parts, I’m a stranger to St. Pete’s. I imagined it was a regular museum with a Dali exhibit, but it is a dedicated hurricane-proof structure (18” thick walls) established by a small group of his wealthy patrons. And to you couthless types, that is pronounced “Dawh–LEEE”. Har!

           I wrote how the sign said 36 miles, but that is to the outskirts of Tampa and the two cities are not that close together. It’s over an hour’s trip from here and old Hwy 60 is the scenic route, though it doesn’t always hit the greatest neighborhoods. Remember Birmingham. On the ride over in the Trent’s sparkling new 50 mpg Prius, I joked about how the rulebook says women think it classy when you take them to see art.

           Wow, I called that one right. Not all the artwork was on the walls. Honest, the place was chock full of some of the most gorgeous womanhood I’ve seen in years. Far out of proportion to the Florida norm, and I might add a lot of them were single, the museum is obviously a non-intimidating visit for unescorted women. Alas, at a third my age, at best I could only engage them in light conversation. Though I did suggest to a few we’d be interested in joining up for coffee.
           This picture is, like a lot of Dali’s work (now that I’m an expert on it) misleading. The figure in the foreground is tiny, maybe ¾” tall. A lot of his work contains these insets with strikingly detailed brushwork. It would be out of the question for the average person to paint something that small. It required 21 pictures with the Vivitar macro to get this one image and even that is not as crisp as the painting.

           The museum is set with a view to Tampa Bay, always a beautiful stretch of water with a barely perceptible shoreline. Florida is flat. I have to recommend it, just take your wallet, the place is a private collection. (Adult admission on this date is $24.) If you can keep your eyes on the paintings, you’ll notice Dali went through quite a number of periods and wound up being the rebel of his age, signature moustache and all. I was unaware that he did landscapes, nudes, and sculpture. Here is his famous lobster phone. Hey, if you want to see these things without my mitts and watermarks, cough up your own $24. And another $10 for parking.

           As usual, you could look up all the information you wanted on Dali in the history books, but nothing works better than being there. Some of his paintings are gargantuan, one was painted on a gunny sack. Like so many artists, the love of his life died before he did and her effect was permanent. He moved back to Spain after that and stayed there.
           There are docents you can walk around with or headphones, but guided tours don’t really make the grade with neither Trent nor I. Enjoy what little adventure they still allow in this day and age and later go on one of the walks. We got there late in the day anyway so we had a free format view of the fine art and the Dior original’s they were wearing. The short skirt with lots of leg has come back into fashion, and still has the same effect when the women are young enough. I don’t know how I managed some serious time viewing the paintings.

Picture of the day.
Incredibly rich daughter of former Beatles producer.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
NOON
           My previous exposure to Dali was encyclopedias and the odd magazine feature. The man plainly thought what most of do of bureaucrats, often depicting them as monsters with hollow heads containing a few scattered seashells. My Vivitar of Columbus discovering America didn’t turn out, but here is an equally enormous painting, some thirty feet tall. Note rather than sign his work always, there is a picture in picture of the artist in the lower left corner. Not all of his later paintings are surrealist, but like this example, they contain strong influences that way. He painted a lot of deserts.

           [Author's note: as a treat, I have the explanation for that sagging watch in his most famous painting, “The Persistence of Memory”. It’s in New York, but the sister painting some 22 years later is depicted here. People who knew him say the cliff in the background was a formation visible from his balcony. Of course, the melting clock is the focal point.
           Seems he was having dinner with his wife and friends with a plan to go to the theater after. He developed a headache and told the others to go without him. He’d completed most of the painting but felt there was something missing. His favorite cheese was gouda and there was a round brick of it on the counter that had melted over the edge.]

           He thought of a clock face and added it to the painting. When the theater party returned, his wife took one look and told him this painting would now have a permanent effect on anyone who saw it. She was right about that, it is one of the most identifiable in the world, right up there with the Mona Lisa. Alas, the photo here is the best of a batch made with the Vivitar. I’m not picking on that company, the manufacturers collude to build in some kind of defect into all but their most expensive cameras. Go figure.
           These are the only paintings I formerly associated with Dali, I had not seen any of the other styles he worked on earlier. The proper term I believe is the artist had periods but I can say, even his earlier work reveals the detail you can find in the tiny insets or mini-portraits in his surrealist works. If I ever get another chance, I will take a magnifying glass. It is too easy to overlook his incredible effort, [he was] probably working with the fabled "single hair brush".

           [Blurry or not], you can still make out the cliffs in the upper right and this time there are two sagging clocks. This arrangement is characteristic of much of the displays on his last works. There is a vast empty space on the paintings with a few relatively tiny but meticulous figures or buildings spotted here and there. The figures tend toward skeletal and often they are transparent except for enough outline to be recognized as human-like. Thanks to Trent, this is the first time in my life I have seen actual Dali paintings, meaning prior to this, I have only seen depictions in various encyclopedias. Geez, I'm the real cultured one, arnti?

           The museum itself is properly designed as a tribute to his work, and thus has a lot of features about it that are more than impressive. The centerpiece of that architecture has got to be the spiral staircase. (Sorry, gang, at my age, we took the elevator.) It is something else, the best view is to stand near the bottom and look up. The stairs end while the case continues upward to the sky. This photo can’t convey the impressiveness, yet one could easily walk past it without noticing. I would have missed it if Trent hadn’t pointed.
           Also evident was the atmosphere. This isn’t a hang-out joint for the proletariat. I suppose the admission price went a long way to weeding out the riff-raff, though there were more than a few T-shirts and ball caps present. Generally, it was an impressively aloof and you just knew some of these twenty-something women had flown there in a Learjet. The star of that show was this total babe in a dark purple dress of silk-like material I’ve never seen before. I’ve seen bodies like that before, but as I confessed to Trent, that is the one thing I regret about growing old. And, she was alone. Or so I thought, it turns out she was momentarily separated from a party of twelve.

NIGHT
           We discovered the coffee shop closes an hour before the museum, so we grabbed a libation (I had to use that word) and did a whirlwind of the souvenir shop to see Dali’s restored Rolls Royce. It was such an old design at first I mistook it for a Packard. In what is probably true to life, the back windows of the riding compartment were fogged and you could just make out a nude female mannequin assuming the posture.

           Trent, having been in the area before, navigated us back to Ybor City. But we passed through the obvious artsy zone near the museum, and that might be a place you’d want to visit for equally appealing vistas. Let’s just say the concentration of culture and woman flesh per square yard completely outclasses anything south Florida has to offer. If you stay in Dade or Broward too long, you forget that America can be full of gorgeous, well-behaved women.

           Now, who remember Ybor City. If you can find the blog report of the last time I was here, I think that was in 2001. The Hippie and I gigged at some hotel, but I remember sleeping in the car most of the trip, so could not orient myself or find the hotel. The area was just being polished up back then, and yes, the blog was still a few years in the future. This was even in the pre-toothpick era, but that’s another story. The next day, I walked around myself while everybody else was sleeping it off. I had a pastry and toured an old Cuban cigar shop they were just beginning to spruce up.
           This time, I was the birthday boy. It was the classiest restaurant I’ve been to in Florida, and that includes all the swank places on the company credit card back in my working days. Trent had mentioned this restaurant established in 1905, and it was about as old world as you can still get.

           You get a menu, but hardly know where to start. We sat under the two-ton chandelier. Alas you know I don’t eat beef and chicken is on the table at home six days a week, and this place, the Columbia, specialized in guess what. Now, everything about this place said authentic, so having missed lunch, I went for the soup and sandwich. Deelish, but I could not finish the portion.
           I had no room for even a bite of desert, but that was fine. Just a few moments before, my peripheral vision caught a flash of dark purple silk, and guess who was sitting at the very table next to me with her kid brother for an escort. Like Trent says, we must have impeccable tastes on where to show up. Personality and compatibility aside, what I would not give to even be seen with a woman like that again. Twenty-eight, looks eighteen, and she knows it. I need a new wardrobe myself.

ADDENDUM
           This was a real treat, the whole day. And mostly thanks to Trent, as I would not normally find all these great places on my own. Driving the batbike in some ways restricts where I’ll go because of parking. Put another way, I like to park where I can see the vehicle. And museums are not fun alone. Actually, what I had said about women and museums earlier was in the context of how women view these outings as quality time and you’d be wise to remember that on a daily basis. Except for the dudes wearing suits, Trent and I were the better mannered and better dressed guys in the museum and restaurant, but from what I could tell, we never got even a glance from the ladies. Either they are that discrete, or that inured to matters. I prefer to think the former. These were obvious see-and-be-seen locations.

           Here are a couple more pics or the day. There’s the chandelier, the babe in purple was two feet to my right as I snapped this, I could feel my arm tanning on that side. As just said, she never glanced, but she did insist her brother move around to the head of the table so everyone in out direction got an unobstructed view.

           The other view is across Tampa Bay looking east. If you can make them out, there are the few tall buildings of downtown on the horizon. The urban areas are connected by a series on long causeways. If what we saw was the regular Saturday traffic, you probably would not want to commute during the week. The area, despite being older and more centralized than Miami, is still a much cleaner and spiffier looking place. The reasons for this could be interpreted several ways. Trent points out the town has a large military presence, in the sense of headquarters rather than barracks. He quipped this may be where the real decisions are made, rather than the Pentagon.

           Of course, I mentioned the Smithsonian. Trent says there is a better and newer exhibition hall in Dulles. After I cleared my ears, I thought he said Dallas, I’ll have to reconsider which place I want to see. I described to him how influenced I had been as a child and how that remains my incentive to this day, the Space and Aeronautical hall. I had semi-planned a summer trip. He says no, the summers are brutal. I’d heard that, but thought I’d be indoors most of the time.

           Much as I hate to admit it, this was a full day for me. I was tuckered out by 8:00-ish. We stopped at the local club on the way back but I was all in. Lest we forget, I did put in a few days of heavy labor on that tree, though the real reason is I never did recover my core energy since 2003. A slower pace sooner or later had to be in my stars. Trent says fine, just being in an area like this lowers one’s blood pressure ten points. That sums up better since I’m more likely to just describe how quiet it is and presume you know that lowers one's diastolic.


Last Laugh

++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Return Home
++++++++++++++++++++++++++