19 Nov

Barcelona’s Museums – So Much Culture!

My taller half and I are on a two week trip to Spain and while he is at a Very Important Conference I am getting cultured. Like a yogurt. A yogurt that is visiting many of Barcelona’s Museums.

My first stop was the Museu Maritim de Barcelona, which was a triple dose of history. First, it’s a museum. Second, the building complex in which it is located became a museum in 1941 but had previously been used as a shipyard since the 13th century. Finally, archeology on the site also indicates the presence of a Roman necropolis, because Europe.

eclvvAs an American, when faced with this sort of epochal historical context certain parts of my brain overload and I can only burble in internet memespeak.

But I kept going and looked at the pretty boats and great exhibits which were nicely labeled in Catalan, Castillian Spanish, and English.

I learned that Barcelona’s port contributes 24% of shipping through Spain, including  .8 million cars per year. When we passed through here on our 2011 bike tour we arrived on a boat which brought a large number of cars (and two bikes) from Italy and we wondered about it at the time. Now I know that the Barcelonans are aggressively expanding to be the European entry port for Asian goods (via Suez Canal).

Replica of the flagship in the European fleet that trounced the Turks in 1571

Replica of the flagship in the European fleet that trounced the Turks in 1571 in the Battle of Lepanto. That’s a very important battle in the history of Christianity, so look it up!

In addition to port industry and historical boats, they had exhibits on the history of underwater photography and on travel by boat. The travel section included an ~8 ft long drawing showing the cross section of a late 19th century passenger liner which I seriously coveted and unsuccessfully tried to get a panoramic photo of.  Alas! Instead, I give you this Zen koan from MMB: The port is the first and last thing seen by those traveling by sea.

An international variety of chocolate sculpture

An international variety of chocolate sculpture

From there I went to the Museu Xocolata, where your ticket is also a chocolate bar with a wrapper appropriate to your country of origin. The museum was notable mostly for the bizarre chocolate sculptures made with varying levels of artistry, presumably by students of the patisserie school in the same building, but I learned a few new facts: Chocolate (as a drink) apparently was acceptable nourishment for monks on fasting days and Catholic nuns in Mexico were the first to think of adding sugar to chocolate.

There was also the local aspect. Barcelona was a pretty big port of entry for goods from the New World, including chocolate, so it ended up with chocolate warehouses and factories, making it the site of the first mechanical production of chocolate in 1777.

Lips.

Lips. Second from right, bottom row.

I stopped in at the municipal photo archive (upstairs from the chocolate museum) where there was a very small exhibit on early photography techniques which made a good companion to early underwater photo exhibit at MMB. I watched a video showing the whole process of making a daguerrotype and learned that when adding color to photos at the time, “lips” was one of the included hues.

The following day I went to the Monestir de Pedrables, which, like the shipyards of the MMB is so old I can barely fathom it. It was founded in 1326 by/for a Queen Elisenda, the fourth wife of King Jaume II. He died the next year and she, being only in her thirties, lived out the remaining 35 years of her life at the monastery. It continued as an active convent, save for a few brief war-induced interruptions, until the 1970s when the nuns moved to a new facility next door and the place became a public museum. The exhibits include, most impressively, the entire grounds, as well as the expected collection of religious art. Having visited a number of cathedrals on our last European sojourn, the notable thing about the Pedrables religious art is that they mixed and matched to make altar pieces with art by different artists and from different eras, including Catalan paintings next to Flemish visions of the various saints.

Where does sacramental wine come from? Question answered!

Where does sacramental wine come from? Question answered!

Generally, I  find that Catholic art leaves me with a lot of questions, like “what is an ostensory?” Or “How come this is the holy family of the fly?” Or “what’s the story behind a painting labeled ‘St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins and a Donor’?” Sometimes I feel smart, though, when I see a lady carrying her boobs on a silver platter and I know she’s the patron saint of breast cancer.

Even when you’ve seen all many cathedrals that they all blend together, you still want to check out Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, which was today’s cultural pilgrimage.

I found it amazing that something made of stone and glass (and light) can seem so soft. In the overhead words of a nearby Canadian tourist, “This is so inspiring, I would come here even if I was an atheist and enjoy it.” The basement has many many iterative models in plaster, both to show the evolution of the cathedral’s design, and to guide them as they work to complete it. Yes, they started in 1883 and, funded by the tickets of several million visitors each year they are hoping to finish in 2026, on the centenary anniversary of Gaudi’s death.  Seeing so many plaster casts made me wish that Gaudi were around today so he could have access to CAD & a 3D printer. It would be like Mozart in the mall with Bill & Ted.

13 Dec

Slavic Quick Cat redux

Back in 2009, I spent some time working for the University of Washington library system, helping to catalog new acquisitions for the Slavic collection. I kept notes on the curious things which crossed my desk & posted ‘Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging’ in parts 1-20. Part 1 is here.

I just found a draft email that includes more info from that time, so here it is. Read More

20 Sep

Pumpkin Day in Perm

TikvaDayAre you familiar with Perm? No? I’m not surprised. I’ve only heard of it because I’ve read Tom Holt’s comic fantasy novel Who’s Afraid of Beowulf?, in which one of the characters gets a lot of ribbing for having gone to Perm. It’s on the western side of Urals, near Ekaterinburg. Maybe not exactly Siberia in my American mind, but pretty darn close. A place I don’t spend much time thinking about, and a place I didn’t expect to have a pumpkin festival.

But they do!

ТыкваDay [Tykva = pumpkin] 2013 was September 12-15, in Gorky Park. (Not the Gorky Park in Moscow, the Gorky Park in Perm.) Read More

07 Sep

What does the Fox say?

In writing Sobel’s Skin, the first of the Isobel the Bear-Eater series, I’ve spent a fair amount of time on research. I have a youtube playlist of “Isobel the Bear-Eater – references” , plus a Pinterest board. Many are cultural references, but some of the most helpful are the sounds of nature. It’s a little odd, to be writing things down on paper [er, screen] and needing to know what they sound like. Fortunately, for things I haven’t encountered myself or which I can’t remember well, there’s always the youtubes.* Read More

16 Jul

New acquisitions: Children’s books about the Russian Far East

A pile of RFE children's books

A pile of RFE children’s books

Alaska has a different relationship with Russia than any other American state. It’s a geographic, historical, and even emotional connection. After all, as Sara Palin put it, we can see Russia from our backyards. As you might imagine, the political border between northwestern Alaska and northeastern Russia, is one that was largely disregarded by the indigenous peoples on both sides of the Bering Strait until the Cold War got far enough along to enforce the border and separate families. The Iron Curtain was something that dropped down in Eastern Europe. Alaska and the Russian Far East were divided by the Ice Curtain, and when it began to melt sister-city ties were established that were truer siblings than many such international relationships. Exchanges happened as well, including with my hometown.

The exchange visits were more than a swap of people: they were exchanges of material goods, mostly in the form of gifts. I remember collecting bubble gum for some sort of international care package when I was in second grade, because we understood that Soviet children were deprived of this ubiquitous American luxury. In high school, when I took my first international trip to Magadan, each American student carried one piece of luggage, and one box of printer paper for the school we would visit. I returned with VHS tapes that would not play, but visitors who stayed with us brought jewelry (lots of mineral wealth in the RFE), brightly colored scarves, watches, and children’s books if they knew their hosts had children. Read More

09 Jul

Going native

Art by Jennifer Norton
Art by Jennifer Norton

Art by Jennifer Norton

I’m back in Seattle, but before I left Alaska, I spent an evening going to art openings with my mother in my hometown of Homer, Alaska. It’s a bit of a nostalgia thing, really, as she used to cover arts for the local paper, and I tagged along with her to many many openings as a child. Homer is a big art town, so there’s quite a bit to see.

Our first stop was Bunnell Street, a restored building housing a wonderful gallery and a bed and breakfast. Rather than a single artist’s work, their current exhibition is a curated collection by a variety of Alaskan artists.

During the opening, the curator stood up and spoke to the crowd about his experiences coming to Alaska, originally as a seasonal worker. The first question that many people asked him was, ‘how long have you been here?’ Now that he’s lived in-state for ten years, he still feels like there is a line drawn in the sand, and he wanted address that with the show. Here’s his statement on the idea behind the show. Read More