Castelo Rodrigo is a medieval village in northern Portugal near the Douro River. It dates back to 1209 when it was part of the Kingdom of Leon. It became part of Portugal in 1297. The village has a few hundred inhabitants.
The Castle
Overlooking the village are the remains of a castle that was built in the 13th century under the direction of King Alfonso IX of Leon. It was named after Count Rodrigo Gonzalez de Giron who was responsible for defending the castle.
This is known as the “treason door” apparently a backdoor to sneak into the castle.
Clock Tower
The clock tower was added to the castle at a later date, though I could find no information as to when.
Church of Our Lady of Rocamador
This church, which is also from the 13th century, is still in operation today.
Sanctuary of Our Lady of Remedies, Lamego, Portugal
Lamego is a town of 26,000 inhabitants in Northern Portugal near the Douro River. If you are in the center of Lamego, you are only 686 steps from the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Remedies. After each set of steps is a terrace with fountains, statues and blue and white ceramic tile religious scenes, surrounded by a park. At the top is a Catholic sanctuary which dates back to 1750. That’s when construction began. It wasn’t completed until 1905. It remains an active church.
From the Museum of Modern Art exhibit Frida and Diego: The Last Dream. Exhibit of the two Mexican artists was held in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera’s production of El Ultima Seuno de Frida y Diego.
Self Portrait with Cropped Hair, Frida KahloMy Grandparents, My Parents and ISelf Portrait on the border between Mexico and the United StatedTree of Hope, Remain StrongSelf Portrait, Diego RiveraNude with Necklace, Diego RiversAgrarian Leader Zapata, Diego Rivera
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) was a French painter and artist who later in life became a U.S, citizen. A retrospective of his work was held this summer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Photos in this post are from that exhibit.
This drawing, Magdeleine at the Piano was created by Duchamp in 1900 when he was 13.
Early in his career Duchamp’s painting was influenced by the post impressionists. His nudes, like the two below, were described as ugly ay the art critic Guillaume Apollinaire. Duchamp and Apollinaire would later become good friends.
Nude with Black Stockings, 1910Nude Seated in a Bathtub, 1910Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel, 1910Duchamp created this poster in 1910 for the Societe de Peinture Moderne in Rouen
Later Duchamp would gravitate toward Cubism. Perhaps his best known paintings, the Nude Descending a Staircase, demonstrate this.
Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 1), 1911Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), 1912Apropos of Little Sister, 1911Chocolate Grinder (No. 1), 1913
Shortly afterward Duchamp declared that he was done with “retinal art.” He would do one last painting Tu m’ in 1918. It takes some imagination to translate Tu m’ but one of those efforts came up with “you are bored.”
In lieu of painting, Duchamp began exhibiting what he called “ready mades.” These were manufactured objects, some as simple as a plain snow shovel. His best known ready made, and perhaps his best known work is The Fountain. The fountain is in fact a urinal that he acquired at a flea market in Paris. He signed it R Mutt and submitted it to a Society of Independent Artists exhibit. The organizers declared it was not art and placed it behind a partition. The 1917 original has been lost. Below is a reproduction.
Apolinaire Enameled, 1917
The ready mades also included machines that Duchamp built.
L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) was created by taking a cheap souvenir print of the Mona Lisa and penciling in a mustache and goatee. Duchamp would later translate L.H.O.O.Q. as “there is a fire down below.” Others have suggested a more literal translation is “she has a hot ass.”
From 1918 to 1923 he worked on To Be Looked at (From the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour. More commonly it is known as The Large Glass. The cracks you see were not part of the original work but occurred while the piece was being transported. Below the original is a 1965 reproduction by Richard Hamilton.
Duchamp became involved with the Dada movement in New York in the 1920’s. Reacting to the horrors of World War I, the Dadas were both anti-war and anti-bourgeois. Duchamp created this poster.
In the 1920’s and 1930’s, Duchamp largely gave up producing art and focused on playing chess competitively. Later in his career he created a series of Box in a Valise (1935-1941). These boxes contained miniature versions of Duchamp’s art. They were signed “from or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Selavy.” The latter was Duchamp’s female persona.
If I were to describe this documentary in one word it would be emotion. It’s about dying, cancer, love, gender identity.
Andrea Gibson is the poet laureate of Colorado. They (Gibson’s preferred pronoun) would perform at poetry slams and readings to sold out houses at venues usually used for rock music. In 2021 she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. After some initial treatments it was deemed incurable. The movie, while showing glimpses of Gibson throughout their life, is primarily focused on their life after that diagnosis.
Parts of this movie will bring you at least to the edge of tears. It’s what cancer patients go through, famous poet or not. The tests, the treatments, the choices that have to be made and for Gibson, the escalating series of bad news. Where does the good light shine? Pretty consistently on Gibson’s relationship with their partner Megan Falley. Also on Gibson’s pursuit and eventual realization of a last performance.
Along the way we do get to hear a lot of Gibson’s poetry which I found to be both accessible and brilliant. The movie is intimate and heartfelt. I know it has been described as uplifting, but it just made me want to cry.
(Available on Apple TV)
Natchez
As a lifelong Northeasterner, this is what I think of as the old South. Big old plantation houses with white columns and big porches. Inside there’s fancy table settings and ornate couches. In this documentary they claim that Natchez was once the richest town in America. That wealth was based on cotton. The boll weevil ate that.
So it seems the next best bet was tourism. Run by a group of Southern ladies and wearing hoop dresses, the tourism involved guided tours of these antebellum mansions. The folks coming to town for the tours? White, old and mostly Southern. And it seems like there’s fewer of them each year. The souvenir shop closes up because selling Confederate hats and knick knacks is apparently no longer a viable business plan.
Natchez’ historic wealth was based on one other thing. Slave labor. The movie looks at how the tour guides and the ladies in hoop dresses deal with the social history that goes along with the historic homes. We see both ends of the spectrum. There’s a passionate, articulate black tour guide who includes a stop at the site of one of the South’s largest slave markets. It is now a national park that they are trying to build into a slave market museum (please don’t tell Trump). And we also see a decked-out white geezer who with a smile on his face pukes out vile racist comments.
But it’s not like Natchez never changes. We even get a glimpse of a drag show, complete with rednecks outside protesting.
(Available to rent on Apple, Prime or YouTube)
Cutting Through Rocks
Cutting Through Rocks is probably easier than this. This being a divorced Iranian woman on a motorcycle trying to convince girls not to let their families marry them off at a young age.
This documentary follows Sara Sahverdi. She becomes the first female ever to be elected to the town council in the remote Northern Iran village where she lives. As a council person, she talks to girls about staying in school and going to university, she teaches them to ride motorcycles, she tries to talk to their parents and her brothers. Not all these conversations go well.
There is a backlash. The worst of which involves some sort of charge that requires her to go to court where a judge is to decide if she will be required to have gender change surgery. Fortunately the judge says no. He offers Sara this advice: lay low and try to find a husband. Unless things have changed since this was filmed, she does neither.
As a film this is education not entertainment. We hear stories about this type of suppression of women, but it’s a whole different thing to see it happening before your eyes with real people. I don’t imagine movie cameras have made their way into this village often. There are moments of inspiration and there are moments of desperation as well. But pretty sure these aren’t problems that will be solved by bombing the country.
Wild Inside
The star of the show is Flaco. He’s a Eurasian eagle owl. That’s a big owl that doesn’t normally exist here. Flaco was bred for captivity and spent the entire 13 years of his life at the Central Park Zoo, That is until someone cut the mesh enclosure of his too small habitat. Flaco literally flew the coup.
No one really knew if Flaco could fly. Or if he could hunt food. He figured it out, Flaco made himself at home in Central Park then moved to the East Village and later the Upper West Side. He had an entourage of followers, folks who called themselves “owlers.” And people all over the city were thrilled by Flaco sightings. They all had cameras and that footage found its way into this documentary.
Flaco was something of a New York celebrity. His bright-eyed image appeared on t-shirts and tote bags. We even meet a couple getting his and hers Flaco tattoos.
The film does raise some serious questions. Should every effort have been made to capture him to save him from the many potentially fatal hazards of city life? Or as one commenter observed, is it unethical to trap a self-sufficient animal? Speaking of ethics, there’s the issue of breeding animals for captivity. And maybe the biggest question, is a short life ‘free as a bird’ better than a long life in captivity?
Flaco had his own answer. He never revisited his old home and wouldn’t touch the zoo food (lab rats) they tried to bait him with. Along the way he won the hearts of New Yorkers from all walks of life. Maybe they liked the choices the big bird made.
Opened in 1898. Once known as the ‘Showplace of the Nation.” In 1904 it was partially washed away by a storm and in 1924 it burned down. Each time it was rebuilt. In its heyday, the Steel Pier included movie theaters, a concert hall, and a water show featuring a diving horse. As a child I saw Bill Haley and the Comets there in 1955.
Another fire, in 1969, resulted in the pier being shortened by about a third. Due to its deteriorating condition, the pier was closed for much of the 80’s. It reopened in 1992 as an amusement park. It remains an amusement park to this day. The current Steel Pier has 24 rides, a helicopter station and an arcade. The Ferris wheel in the picture was added in 2017.
The Steel Pier circa 1910.
Boardwalk Hall
Built in 1929, Boardwalk Hall claimed to be the nation’s first convention center. It was the home of the Miss America Pageant from 1940 to 2004. It hosted the Democratic National Convention in 1964, the one that nominated Lyndon B. Johnson. Performers who have played there include Judy Garland, the Beatles, the Rollling Stones, and Bruce Springsteen. It underwent a $90 million renovation in 2001 and since has been the home, however briefly, to a number of minor league hockey, basketball and arena football teams. It hosts the Mid-Atlantic Conference basketball championships and is a regular stop on the Harlem Globetrotters tour.
The Claridge
The Claridge Hotel is the building with the gold dome. Though it is now dwarfed by Bally’s, it was once known as the “Skyscraper by the Sea.” That was in 1930 when it opened. It offered guests both fresh and saltwater, hot and cold.
During World War II it was one of several building taken over by the government. It housed the Air Force. In 1943 it was the site of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation World Conference, attended by Franklin’s Delano Roosevelt and representatives from 44 countries.
Over its nearly a century of existence as a hotel it has hosted Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mantle, Bob Hope, Martin Luther King Jr., Frank Sinatra and Princess Grace of Monaco.
There has been numerous changes of ownership. It opened a casino in 1981. That closed in 2012. The Claridge continues today as a non-casino hotel. No slot machines or betting tables, but it does have a High Roller Cannabis Dispensary.
Resorts
Resorts was Atlantic City’s first casino, the first casino in the U.S. outside the state of Nevada. It opened in 1978 in a building that was previously Chalfonte-Haddon Hall, a 100 room hotel that dated back to the 1920’s.
Resorts was once the subject of a bidding war between Donald Trump and Merve Griffin. They ended up dividing the spoils. Griffin got the Resorts Casino and Trump got the in-development Taj Mahal. That would become one of the two AC casinos Trump bankrupted. Griffin put $90 million dollars into renovating Resorts and later sold it to Sun International.
It is notable as a casino resort that at one time actively marketed itself to LGBTQ+ patrons. Resorts opened a gay night club in 2011 called Prohibition. It has since closed.
Absecon Lighthouse
Standing 171 feet high, the Absecon Lighthouse is the tallest lighthouse in New Jersey. It is named after the Absecon Inlet which it overlooks.
According to the web site U.S. Ghost Adventures, “Absecon Lighthouse has probably been haunted since day one, and the sands around the lighthouse surely have spirits rooming at night.” Apparently one of the lighthouse keepers claims to have seen none other than the Jersey Devil himself parked atop the tower.
You can check that out yourself since it’s open to the public and you can climb to the top. It’s 228 steps. The lighthouse was first lit in 1857. It has been deactivated since 1933, although it is still lit at night. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Dolphins in the Atlantic offshore Atlantic CityAtlantic City’s free public beachFishing off the rocksThe back bay
(Photos taken aboard a tour boat operated by Atlantic City Cruises.)
European and British Art at the National Gallery of Ireland
Crucifixion, Albert Gleizes (France)Concrete Cabin West Side, Peter Doig (Scotland)
Evie Home at Work in Her Studio, Hilda Geralda van Stockum (Netherlands)Calisto, Richard Rothwell (Italy)Umpferstedt III, Lionel Feininger (Germany)
The following works are from a special exhibit “William Blake, the Age of Romantic Fantasy”
The Inscription over the Gate, William Blake (England)The Punishment of the Thieves, William BlakeThe Bard, William BlakeLady Hamilton as Casandra, George Romney (England)The Fairy of the Fountain, William Etty (England)The Destruction of the Temple, Samuel Colman (US)
If you pick up this book expecting a tale of lying, grifting and bullying, you won’t be disappointed. What you’ll find here is the evidence. If you don’t believe that’s what Donald Trump is about, you probably aren’t going to be reading this anyway.
Two veteran White House correspondents have put together a full accounting of about a year and a half of Trump’s second term, beginning with the aftermath of the 2024 election. If you follow domestic political news you’ll be familiar with this stuff, Epstein, Iran, crypto, deportations. What Haberman and Swan try to do is provide a look from the inside out.
Most of this doesn’t surprise me, but I still marveled at how shallow the man is. Right from the start, when Trump was selecting his Cabinet, the room was lined with monitors because a key factor in making these choices was how they looked on TV. During one meeting when a military officer was providing an analysis of the war in the Ukraine, Trump interrupted to comment, “I’m not a big fan of Ukraine, except their women. They keep winning Miss Universe.” That drew suppressed laughs from Vance and Hegseth. During a guided tour of the African-American History Museum, when shown an exhibit about Dutch involvement in the slave trade, Trump commented, “You know, they love me in the Netherlands.” And after his widely publicized contentious meeting with Ukrainian President Zelensky, he pronounced it “better than The Apprentice.”
He’s also pretty thin-skinned. He ordered the firing of the director of the National Portrait Gallery because he didn’t like a photo of him that was displayed there.
The authors comment “Donald Trump had long since demonstrated he could adore himself far more, and in greater detail, than anyone else might.” Don’t think anyone could dispute that.
One thing that I found truly shocking was Trump praising the way China dealt with protestors in Tiananmen Square. (If you’re not familiar with this, they slaughtered them.) Says Trump, “they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.” This was presented within the context of discussions about sending troops into Democrat-led cities.
The supporting actors in this tale could well be the multiple choice answers to the question “Who’s the worst human being on the planet?” Is it a. Stephen Miller? b. Ilon Musk? Or c. Roger Stone? I’d go with d. All of the above.
It is surprising that the authors have so much inside information about who said what in so many of the most important closed meetings at both Mar-a-Lago and the White House. This is an administration obsessed with stopping leakers and surrounding themselves with only avowed loyalists. Obviously some of these supposed loyalists are working more than one agenda.
News stories about the publication of this book reported on the chapters about the discomfort within the executive group about the potential release of the so-called Epstein files. Following one of those meetings, the authors say, “One of the officials would later describe it as a ‘surreal’ experience to be discussing Donald Trump and abused nipples in the White House situation room.” Yes, that’s the same room used by Kennedy during the Cuban missile crises, the room where Obama and his advisors watched the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. These days it’s the setting for discussing accusations of sexual abuse by Trump. After reading this I’m pretty sure we’re never going to see more of what’s in those files.
All and all this is pretty solid journalism. Woodward and Bernstein I suspect would approve. And, fittingly, it comes packaged in a shiny gold jacket.
Works by Irish artists at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin
Magnus Modus, Joseph Walsh (Cork)Carting Seaweed on Sutton Sands, Joseph Malachy Kavanagh (Dublin)Davy Byrne’s Pub, Dublin, from the Bailey, Henry Aaron Kernoff (Dublin)Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain, Una Watters (Dublin)Elijah, Colin Middleton (Belfast)Decoration, Mainie Jellett (Dublin) A Family, Louise le Brocquy (Dublin)A Cleric, Jack B. Yeats (Dublin)The Sunshade, William Leech (Dublin)Girl in a Garden, Patrick Swift (Dublin)
Where else would you find a museum dedicated to the people who left? EPIC is part history museum, chronicling the famines, conflicts and recessions that sent people packing. You can see and hear the stories of some of those emigrants, including Annie Clark, the teenager who became the first person to enter the U.S. through Ellis Island.
The museum is also a celebration of what the Irish have offered the world through their emigrants. If you made a name for yourself and have some connection to Ireland, no matter how distant, you’re here. You might expect to find John F. Kennedy, but how about Bruce Springsteen as well?
EPIC is located in the CHQ building on the banks of the River Liffey. (CHQ stands for custom house quay.) The building dates back to 1820. It was used as a storehouse for tobacco, spirits, tea and wine. It was formerly known as Stack A and Tobacco Store.
The Guinness Storehouse
Head shot
After an afternoon full of Guinness it was time for fish and chips. This is from the very excellent Fish Shop, a 16-stool restaurant that’s smaller than my living room.
This place had a line out the door every time I walked by. I live in New Jersey and am something of a pizza snob. I had no intention of getting pizza in Ireland. But late at night on the way home from a pub, with the line as long as ever, I caved and got in line with mostly teenagers. And it was delicious.
The Merrion Hotel
This hotel has an amazing museum quality art collection. These two guys were always on call to point you to the elevator.
Futile DefenseShut-eye with AcolyteJohn BoydThe Old Fox, Mt. Charles, Co. Donegel, John Doherty
