Amy Winehouse Paints the Queen

Celebrity Portraits, Part 1

The greater Los Angeles area hosts a number of world-class museums, and in preparation for AVC field trips to the Getty, whose current exhibitions examine the cult of celebrity, the AVC blog will look at some of the tensions inherent in our worship of famous people.  The Getty itself will be up for analysis in a week, but before then, let's talk about somebody who has the most widely circulated face in the world, namely, Britain's current ruling monarch, Queen Elizabeth II.

She is on postage stamps, money, Embassy walls, beach towels, tea pots, and even condoms.  Movies feature her, including the very gripping drama The Queen, and she sits for many state portraits every year.  What makes a portrait "work," and how much should we expect a celebrity portrait to reveal about the sitter's character?

Take for example the late great Lady Di.

Although she's no longer as famous as she once was, this 1991 picture by Snowdon still resonates with many viewers.  She looks up at the heavens (always a good trick to stretch out the neck, making it look younger, and to give the jawline clean angles), communicating with some kind of higher spirit, a spirit which happens to be bathing her in a very flattering light.  We don't know who she's looking at, but it probably isn't Prince Charles.  The tousled hair and oxford shirt don't look butch and instead add to her charm --- she is so good looking, she even looks good dressed as a man.  Is this who she "really" is?  It's a very flattering portrait, and perhaps that was who she "was" --- somebody hungry for fame and somebody whom camera lenses loved to fall in love with.

These sorts of issues will be part of a blockbuster summer show in London soon.  As the 2012 Olympics come to London, all of the museums are bringing out their highest profile shows.  The British Museum, for example, has cornered the market on Shakespeare, while the National Portrait Gallery has a sure-bet crowd pleaser with their overview of "The Queen in Art and Image."

This cover of the exhibit catalog shows her in all of her bejeweled magnificence.  It's worth a trip to London just to see the crown jewels on display in the Tower of London.  We're so used to movie props that it's hard to adjust to seeing bling on this scale --- all of it real.  The portrait here, on the book cover, happens to be the same as one used on stamps and other iconic distribution methods.  Even Michael Jackson hasn't had as much press (good or bad) as the Queen.  But as portraits go, is this a good one?  True, it's based on a photograph, tinted to look like an older style of photography, so in not just pose but visual culture, it's a very traditional piece of work.  Perhaps though this is who she is --- traditional, wise, calm, stable.  No funny stuff for her, thank you.  No abstract expressionism or Andy Warhol.  What makes a celebrity portrait noteworthy?

Maybe a how-to guide would help.  Here's one from the same year this portrait was made.

Don't you love the salacious cover?  What appears to be a totally nude woman --- and inside, we learn she wears only her earrings and a wristwatch, which makes it seem all the more tawdry --- is covered with the paper-clipped note.  She looks demurely into the far distance, not confronting the reader the way that bold Olympia does in Manet's famous portrait.  Of course, I don't think we can get the Queen to sit for a classical nude portrait, with or without her earrings.

Some sitters are eager to disrobe though.  Performance artist Leigh Bowery (1961-1994) was one of Lucien Freud's best nude subjects.  Freud (the grandson of Sigmund) we will get to in just a moment, along with the troubling question of what color flesh really is.  First we should figure out which is more useful, photography or painting, when trying to capture a sitter's essence.  Probably the most famous photographer of famous people right now is Annie Leibovitz, best known for her covers for Rolling Stone magazine, including this startling icon.

She too had worked with Bowery, a performance artist and fashion designer who later died of AIDS.  Here he is on set, prior to a shoot, dressed in one of the latex fetish outfits that was part of his act.

It's a great picture, dark and mysterious, one that turns viewers into voyeurs peeking through the curtains into some strange world of illicit sex.  Yet compare that to Freud's treatment of the same (and at that time, very notorious) subject.

First, here is a photograph of Freud in his London studio, working on a portrait.

As a side note, Freud, who died last summer in the same week as Amy Winehouse, never cleaned his studio, so that the walls and floor were covered with dried paint.  His friend and co-art world star, Francis Bacon, had the same practice, only Bacon's studio had even more rubbish on the floor.  Let's look at a Freud painting of Bowery, not the one in progress here, but one from the same period.

In doing the scan, I have cropped out the penis, but Freud is very much a "warts and all" artist, and never edited out the body for delicacy.  He might crop a subject for artistic reasons, but if so, the genitals usually stayed in.  In any case, isn't it interesting how directly the sitter looks out at us so directly?  He is by conventional standards not a perfect model --- he won't make the cover of Mens Fitness magazine, not unless it's part of a "before and after" sequence.  What this blog can't show is, first, size --- these are huge canvases, life size or larger often --- nor, second, the toothpaste-thick layers of paint, layers that are crusted up like scabs or a bad application of Bondo on a repaired car fender.  Blues, greens, reds, blacks: for Freud, there is no one color that is "flesh," and he builds entire landscapes of color and texture out of the human body.

What would happen if a "warts and all" artist like Freud were to paint the Queen?  For many years this was sort of an insiders' art world joke, along the lines of the Pope at a gay bar or something.  It just was a juxtaposition that never was going to happen.  But in the end, the Queen did sit, and in the end, Lucien Freud was Lucien Freud.  Here is the sitting in progress:

And here is the finished portrait.  (No, you won't find it on any postage stamps.)

Many people disliked this when it first was released but I think there's a determination in her face, as well as the reality of age.  She has lived a long life, including the dark days of the London Blitz and bombings by the IRA and the wars in Afghanistan and the Falklands.  Her experiences are here, under these many layers of paint, as well as her loyal suffering in the name of duty.  Interestingly, Freud has been influenced by photography, something I don't think many critics have written about.  Look at how tight the crop is here: that's a choice that come from photographic conventions, not the long tradition of art history portraiture.  Goya or Velasquez never cropped sitters that tight, especially not reigning monarchs.  Instead this is a combat photographer's aesthetic, since as the famous war shooter Frank Capra said, "If you're pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough."

Influence and tradition inform any portrait, painted or otherwise.  Annie Leibovitz has to to deal with those artists who have preceded her, along with the simple fact that she IS Annie Leibovitz, the person has photographed everybody from President Bush to Patti Smith.  Allowed to work with the Queen, she had to think about what to ask her sitter to wear, what kind of crown or tiara to request, what to do about lighting.  Here is what she came up with, followed by what influenced her.

The background is Buckingham Palace, which has a small woodland behind it, even though it is in the heart of urban London.  The Queen wears a cloak that quotes, visually, earlier pieces, including these two.

This was done in 1953 by the then-fashionable Cecil Beaton, less well known today than he once was.

And here's another inspiration for the Annie Leibovitz choice.  It is a painting from one year later, done by Pietro Annigoni, commissioned by (and still owned by) The Fishmonger's Company.

The facial expression here is magnificent, with a steady, faraway gaze that implies selflessness and wisdom.  This is so highly romantic it nearly veers into schmaltz, but somehow manages to stay just this side of sentimentality, helped by the literal and yet regal cloak she wears.  The Fishermongers got their money's worth this time for sure.

In 1968, Cecil Beaton was again on the job, using a boating cloak that we will meet again in the Leibovitz image.

How do we update something like this or the Annigoni?  While the regalia is still extant, clearly the Queen herself has grown older, and clearly too, her schedule is now even more tightly managed.  One gets half an hour for a photo shoot, if lucky.  (In her book At Work, Leibovitz said it was actually only 25 minutes she was given, though she was able to set up lighting beforehand.  For many celebrities, this is a normal constraint.  I know of one photographer shooting a major pro golfer for an ad campaign who was only given five minutes, which was to occur during a break in filming a commercial for some other endorsement.  You had really really better be organized and ready.  No saying, "oops the lens cap was on" in these situations!)

Let's look at the modern one again.

In case you're wondering about the lighting, this is a composite.  The Queen was photographed indoors, then that image was cut and pasted into a scene from Buckingham Palace shot the day before.  This IS a place the Queen might walk daily, but during the 25 minutes, they could not go outside.  There was not time to shift locations and set the lighting up again.  Though a portrait photographer primarily, obviously she understands how landscapes work, too.  As a somewhat related note, Annie Leibovitz has worked twice in the Antelope Valley, at least so far as I know.  She shot Ella Fitzgerald at El Mirage Dry Lake, and she did a portrait of the painter David Hockney somewhere along Pearblossom Highway.  Once many years ago I saw Ansel Adams working in Yosemite.  All of that is to say, if you see some lunatic with a large format camera on the berm of the road, slow down and look twice, since it might be somebody important.

Meanwhile, what does this portrait tell us?  The book The Queen in Art and Image calls it "magisterial."  I am impressed by the drama --- this is somebody dressed for a storm yet not needing an umbrella or even a shower cap.  She is a lone figure, isolated and self-reliant, equal to the stormy wilderness around her.  She is part of the world yet not cowed by the world, and for a relatively petite woman, she fills the foreground with the solid strength of a heavyweight boxer.  Not backed up against a wall, she has the confidence to stand alone in nature, aware and in control.  Empires come, empires go, but long live the Queen: she and her lineage will endure.

This is heady stuff, and I may be over-reading the image.  Maybe Annie Leibovitz (whose bankruptcy troubles are well known) just wanted a free trip to London.  She is still alive and working --- look for her in most issues of Vanity Fair --- while Lucien Freud (and may God rest his soul) had the misfortune to die the same week as Amy Winehouse.  That's bad news, if you care about your obituary; always better in terms of reputation if one passes during a slow news week than one with Michael Jackson in it or Whitney Houston.  

I often think about the afterlife, and not always with reverence.  Do you think they ever, say, give out the wrong hotel room keys, or assign somebody the wrong study buddy?  I am thinking of Lucien Freud, who may or may not have painted the ugliest portrait of the Queen in the history of British art, but who definitely knew what he was doing.  What if somehow his file got mixed up with Amy Winehouse's?  Some day --- far in the future, perhaps --- the current Queen will pass on, and there she will be in Heaven, sitting for yet another portrait.  She will waiting be in the studio, the door will open, and tattooed but sober, in will walk Amy Winehouse, not Lucien Freud.  

What will the Queen say?  

Given how many crisis meetings and wars and bombings she will have endured by then, I doubt much will put her off her pace.  Perhaps she will shake hands and say, there's been some sort of a mix up.  If you're not a painter my dear, then what do you do?

Amy Winehouse can belt out a tune or two and then that will be it ---- she and the Queen can shut the door, put their heads together, and do karaoke until the cows come home.

If only we had access to YouTube in Heaven.

The Impossibility of Swimming Pools

Diving into the Deep End of Illusion and Representation

Oh the good life.  That is what our parents were all promised, right, when they moved to California from Oklahoma or Nebraska or Ohio?  (Listen to the accents in the Antelope Valley and you can hear traces of Okie English still, especially among the most long-time of our residents.)  We know what makes the good life good, too, and it's not just the weather.  No, besides eternal sunshine and blonde wives, we each need a big house and a blue, blue pool.  This fashion spread from 1970 promises it all.

Yellow hair, yellow dresses, yellow sunshine, and beneath a perfect blue sky, the Roman villa indulgence of a perfect blue reflecting pool --- yes, the good life indeed.

Yet, as we all know, this is the endless trap of endless longing, since no matter how big or how clean or how lounge-chair bedecked our pools are, somebody down the block always will have a bigger, better, more lavish one.

Yes, Hearst Castle's pool is almost certainly bigger than yours, even if you own (and live in) a Hilton on Waikiki.  Down the block there always will be something better.  Our own pools will never compare.

Do we even know how to act around swimming pools?  On the right, East L.A. in 1968, I am practicing for what I have now, which is a mostly-white beard.  In the middle, neighbor lad Melvin seems a bit serious.  One wants to give his part of the picture the tag line, "Are we having fun yet?"  On the left my brother Fred is especially dubious --- just what is this pool thing all about, and why does the water from the hose come out so cold?  Note our scissors-and-a-salad-bowl haircuts.

The painter David Hockney would argue that one thing wrong with my pictures so far in this blog is perspective.  He faults the average photograph as being too limited compared to the scanning and edge blurred reality of normal vision --- he jokingly calls it the "product of a paralyzed cyclops."  He assembled a collage of Polaroids to capture the flickering light and shifting gaze that looking at a real pool entails, creating in the process a much larger print than the usual snapshot in an album.  For Hockney, size matters, as does a fractured and unstable horizon line.

Certainly that is what most pools are for, most of the time --- not being swum in, but being looked at.  Now to enhance the trick of that perspective, modern design options include the so-called infinity pool, where edge and sky blend into one.  Welcome to Los Angeles, baby doll, where even the water wants to be perfect and infinite.

Perhaps I am thinking about this all wrong, as is even the astute and multifaceted Mr. Hockney.  Maybe the essence of a pool is not the view from above, but the view from "inside," from below the surface, a look "into" the contents of the pool.

Sort of a sexy shot, isn't it?  (Most images for this blog come from the exhibition catalog titled Backyard Oasis, tied in with what I am told is a fun show at the Palm Springs Museum of Art.)  When I was in high school the water polo players (more so than the football stars) were the narrow-waisted, broad-shouldered epitome of Greco-Masculine ideal.

Sexuality and swimming pools no doubt goes back to the first thermal hot springs 10,000 years before the Romans, but in post-WW 2 America, it really began to flourish as an ideal.  Even MM herself deigned to do some pool shots.

Maybe I am missing something, but her awkward pose and the actual fact of how abrasive poolside concrete is in reality make this, for me, a lot less sexy than it is supposed to be.  That is true as well for this group shot below, from 1972.  (I hope nobody on the AVC staff list recognizes themselves in this shot.)

This is supposed to be an orgy about to happen, but all I can think of is how for me at least this horseplay is just that --- a lot of shouting and splashing and eyes getting weepy from chlorine.  Maybe it is the harsh lighting from the flash, too, but I just don't find this an invitation to be sensually inclined.  It might be fun, but it's not erotic.  Maybe I am just thinking of those times at cheap motels when having a room near the pool turns out to be a very poor (and noisy) choice.

Sexuality and swimming pools of course crosses lines of orientation, and entire museums could be filled with images cataloging the role of the swimming pool and the semiotic of gay erotica.  This fellow from Pacific Palisades can be a stand-in for all of his fellow bathers.

Yet all is not the sex and glamor and baby oil that it seems.  Somebody has had to sweep that patio, water the plants, hose down the faux Roman statuary.  The economics of pools perhaps needs more discussion.  For every swimming pool there is probably a person of color somewhere who chlorinates it, vacuums up the leaves, and changes the filter.  Here we see this premise in action, at a resort in Namibia.

Not just the social implications of pools remains under-examined, but also some of the ecological questions, as well.  Richard Misrach has made that point in his Desert Cantos series, when he made the photograph below, at an abandoned resort at the Salton Sea.  This fetid cesspit of a disaster is 20 miles wide and 60 miles long, water that via farm runoff and evaporation grows ever saltier and ever more toxic with each passing summer.  A river flows into it from Mexico that once was listed as the most polluted river in America.  Here is Misrach's photo.

The pool is left over from a brief boom, when it seemed that the Salton Sea was going to become the poor man's Riviera.  Alas, the water kept rising, the fish kept dying, the stinks kept getting stinkier.  Now flooded trailer parks and abandoned towns provide post-apocalyptic images for each new generation of art MFA students.  Only the mad, the very poor, and the birdwatchers come here.  His photo shows a horizon that fades away into summer humidity, an empty promise of failed dreams.

Elsewhere in Southern California, empty pools and foreclosed houses served a different purpose, as skateboarders turned pools into the prototype X Games that in turn lead to changes in the surfing culture, and, from there, to the invention of snowboards and snowboarding.

I admire their feisty style, even if I can't skateboard to save my life.  (Heck, I can barely surf, and water is a lot softer than cement.)  Movies like Dogtown and Z-Boys capture this era in a way that a previous generation was outlined in Endless Summer.  Sean Penn narrates Dogtown, and the movie includes footage by Chris Stecyk, who took the shot included above.

Which swings back around to my initial premise, that a swimming pool is an impossibility.  It promises a lifestyle we'll never inhabit and yet at the same time, in its Edenic perfection, hides the problems of social inequality and resource consumption.  In a state that is a desert for much of its habitat, should pools even be legal in California?

While photographing the LA River from a helicopter, I took this picture at the north end of the San Fernando Valley, capturing a row of what were called (pre-bust) "McMansions" --- each huge, each on a postage stamp lot, and each with a pool wedged in like an afterthought along some margin of the dinky property.  Maybe the problem here is not the the pool, just its size in relation to the available space.  When I was a kid, my parents rented a really small house, and it had, as one would expect, an equally small yard.  But here we go then, let's make the resources fit the footprint, and for a small yard, they found a proportionally small pool.

Of course, times were simpler back then, as the telephone indicates.  (And God bless Kodachrome, still stable and vivid after all these years.)  Now I suppose kids that age will be put out of they don't have a real phone to play with, preferably an iPhone with some kind of "change my diapers" app and a ring tone array from all the latest Pixar releases.  Luckily I didn't know any better, and in fact, mine was probably the last house on the block in the 1990s to get a cordless handset for the house line.  (Land lines --- remember those?  Yes, I still have one, mostly for nostalgia.)

So in the end, what should we say about pools? 

One Hockney painting I am very fond of was made here in L.A. but is owned by the Tate in London.  Indeed, it is usually the first piece of proper art one sees upon landing at Heathrow, since, depending what terminal you come out at, a framed print of this painting is in a cafe near the where one exits customs.  Titled A Bigger Splash, it uses acrylic house paint to produce an intentionally flat, uniform finish, utterly unlike the skies of (say) 17th century Delft landscapes. 

For Hockney then, to wrap this post up, a pool is a kind of inverted sky, and the sky here, as we all know, is perfect and infinite and never, ever rainy.  Growing up in the Midlands and seeing the sharp-edged shadows of winter days in sunny California captured in the backgrounds of Laurel and Hardy films, Hockney knew that he had to come to California.  Oppressed with mildewy damp days and a cotton wool softness, he yearned for our sun and our sky.  And, once he got here, he knew he had to acquire the attributes of the lifestyle: a driver's license, a tan, a gorgeous boyfriend, and, of course, a swimming pool.  All of these things he did, and so we end the blog with this painting, showing not a person but the water, and not even the water, but a representation of water in splattered white house paint. 

What is the perfect swimming pool?  Not one at the Y and not one at your uncle's house, but as with all things in Zen and Hollywood, the perfect pool is the one in your mind: endless and clean and as eternal as the sky itself.

Twelve Office Chairs (and One Dog)

An Informal Survey of Seats

We use them all day long, yet we don't really think about them much, the chairs in our offices, and even then it's usually in the negative --- if our backs hurt, we complain about the chair.   Otherwise, nothing.  We ignore them until the next time we start complaining. (In this way, office chairs resemble how we usually treat the classified staff IN the chairs.)

Some office chairs have ended up in art museum, including the 1994 Aeron Chair (shown below). This one here is from 1849 and has sprung-steel bands to give it bounce and tilt. I love the art-deco-ish metal work on the arm rests.

A fun survey of chairs can be found in this book, below, from where the 1849 chair comes, along with a few other shots in this blog.  It breaks it all down, from headrest to footsies.

According to this book, there is no part of the office chair that has not been tweaked or corrected or made to look new and improved, and some "modern" designs are older than automobiles and electric lights. Look for example at this sequence of arm rest designs.

These arm rests don't look classic, they just look tired.  (And they don't look like they were ever comfortable, not even in 1965, when the chair was probably delivered to us.)  This chair, rescued perhaps from the Island of Unloved Toys, lives in the break room in OF3.

 The world is full of abandoned office chairs --- not quite comfortable enough to be somebody's desk chair at a work station, yet not quite so broken as to be eligible for the dumpster, or at least not for a dumpster behind a school or natural history museum. This chair below is in the Ornithology Department at the Museum of Natural History in Exposition Park. The bird on the table is a dead condor which I was studying as part of a review of wild animals in Los Angeles.  Hard to imagine, but Pasadena and even Hollywood would have been filled once with condors, just as the Antelope Valley had antelope. (And Grizzly Bears too, if we were going back a few hundred years.) Now we have landfills and bad office chairs.

 In OF3's break room there is an office chair that is a bit confusing to people, but I do remember the story behind it, as it (or was) mine.  When I was hired in 1989, AVC still allowed instructors to control small aspects of their lives, including, in some rare instances, their office desks and chairs.  I was having back trouble then, and Vice President Rae Yoshida (long may her name be remembered with honor and joy) authorized an odd chair, the one here.

How it works is, you sit your behind the higher part (on the right, above) and then tuck your legs under, kneeling on the padded part in front.  It supposedly kept your back in an ideal posture while typing. Well, it may have done so indeed, but it also wasn't the right size for me in some ill defined way, and while it may have saved my back, it blew out my knees. (Now my office chairs are from Staples; I paid for them myself.)  Some chairs date themselves very swiftly, such as this design, the first one, which is from the 1970s, and the one below it, more timeless yet seemingly "from" the 1990s.  It just has that look, doesn't it?

The top of the two is by Olivetti, and even has a 1970s name, "Synthesis 45."  Injection-molded plastic was a new thing then. As for the second chair above, that is one I hear about on the radio a lot. One of the sponsors of National Public Radio programming is the "Herman Miller Aeron Chair Now Available in True Black." I have heard that for years, but its inclusion in the chairs book (and its inclusion, according to its website, in the Museum of Modern Art's design collection) made me look up more about it.  I guess it really must be a pretty good chair, since it costs $850, plus shipping.

The Administrative Assistant in Language Arts is a wise and long-suffering person named Donna Casey, and if you are even in the LS1 building do stop in and say hi, as she is a true gift to our Division --- and to the campus as a whole. When she learned I was doing the blog on chairs, she reminded me to include those bouncing ball chairs that are also supposed to be good for strengthening the back. I have one at home that is too small for me, though visiting toddlers like to roll it around the living room, and Lucy likes it too since its height is such my hands come down just to a good level for petting.

Next time I redo my AVC office though, if I can't convince my dean to buy me the Herman Miller Aeron Chair Now Available in True Black ("But they talk about it on the radio!" I can explain), then maybe we can go more retro / cool / frontier looking. Here is something from a folk art collection in Kentucky, a classic American chair from the 1890s.  By then America was becoming settled --- we were winding up a successful 200 year genocidal relationship with Native Americans and had pretty much shot the buffalo into oblivion.  Nostalgic for the lost American West and the values it supposedly represented, city slickers began to collect antler furniture, such as this item below.  It was an international fad; in England, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had furniture like this, but theirs came from Germany.  Hmm, with tastes like this in Buckingham Palace, no wonder Lady Di never got along with the royal family.

Maybe the best office chair is not to have a chair at all --- or an office.  Here is Life magazine photographer Margaret Bourke White doing her job, which is to say, making art, and in this case, doing so on top of the Chrysler Building.  I happened to see a similar shot recently, something very nicely done by Vincent Laforet, and besides the use of color, can you notice another difference?

Here is the recent shot, taken the same place.

Ah yes, the legally required safety harness.  And so with that, can we predict the office chair of the future? It should have cup holders (after all, don't most new cars have, like, ten cup holders in them?), and maybe built-in heating and cooling elements (again, like expensive car seats). But what if you make a sudden roll towards the filing cabinet yet go so fast you tip over?

That is right. What the office chair of the future will come with will be seat belts. That . . . and with a stack of forms saying that if you burn yourself on the cup of coffee in your cupholder while racing up and down the newly waxed hallway floor, it won't be the chair company's fault. 

And last point on this topic, when your office furniture wears out, please don't just dump it in the desert.  No, not at all.  After all, there is a very special place to throw away broken office furniture --- the break room in OF3.

Every Day Miracles

Not Here Yet (But Soon)

At the suggestion of one of my students, over the next few weeks this blog will celebrate everyday objects, looking at their evolution, their taken-for-granted status, and their magic.  Among items we will consider will be swimming pools (or California's prototype skateboard parks, depending how you want to look at them)...

... at that most essential and humble object, the office chair (here, an 1849 example with a tensioned steel spring suspension)...

and at the refrigerator, or what my dad called "the ice box."

It will take a bit of time to get the right images lined up, but within the week this series will start, giving praise for the things that make life possible (or at least comfortable) and seeing how one thing became another thing.  Watch here: we'll be back soon.

Tina McDermott's New Orleans

Livin' Large in the Big Easy

While the AVC faculty have the same problems as the rest of the world (busted cars, busted marriages, kids who won't keep out of trouble and kids who do stay out of trouble but then need to go off to very very expensive colleges), unlike other places I have worked, we do share some common loves, including good food, good music, and great places to go during our break times.  Recently one of the Communication Department professors (and new boss of the Accreditation Committee), Tina McDermott, shared with me some of her memories of New Orleans.

While this most recent intersession break she traveled to Israel, next winter she has told me her hope is to be able to go back to New Orleans, maybe even renting a place and spending some time.

What's the attraction?

Well, I can answer for her, at least in one respect.

BEADS.  How can you not love a city where for months on end, everybody decorates everything with beads?

The build-up to Mardi Gras reminds me of a fun mix of Christmas and Halloween, and while we know from Tim Burton movies that is not always a happy combination, at least in New Orleans, it makes for some very attractive decorations.

But let's have Tina speak for herself.

"First and foremost, I love the music.  It is impossible not to dance.   Last year I saw the Funky Meters, an offshoot of The Meters with some of the original members in the band, at the famous Tipitina’s (a club founded in 1977 to showcase Professor Longhair in his later years).  The club was packed, standing room only.  From college co-eds to 60-somethings, the audience was all there for one purpose and one purpose only: to hear some serious grooves.  Art Neville (granddaddy of the Neville clan on keyboards) lovingly led the band from one funk-filled jam to the next, with the crowd boppin’ on the backbeat in a collective sway, a shared sense of joy.  

Good live music is everywhere in New Orleans.  Even the bowling alley and the airport feature well known musicians any given night of the week.  A brass band appears out of thin air on a corner of Frenchman Street.  A crowd gathers to dance.  It’s 10:00 on a Monday night and things are just getting started.  The music and musicians are an organic result of the place and the history.  Ancient and complex African drum beats forcefully migrated to this continent morphed over time into blues, boogie-woogie, jazz, funk, and R&B.  This is the place where the soul of American music was literally birthed.   The pain and joy are simultaneous.  New Orleans music is packed with history lessons.

I also love the language and the culture, it reveals the diversity that is the result of a complicated past.  What fun it is to say “Laissez les bon temp rouler.” Even if you don’t speak French, you know what it means.  In French “fais-do-do” (FAY-doh-doh) means go to sleep.  This is what you tell your kids when it’s time to go to bed (and in fact, that is the name of a French lullaby that my French speaking mother used to sing to me).  But in Louisiana, that means that it’s time for the adults to party, thus the word for party is “fais-do-do.”  

And my favorite word to say out loud is Tchoupitoulas (CHOP-it-TOO-luhs), as in “the wild Tchoupitoulas gonna stomp some romp,” from that Mardi Gras Indian song, “Meet the Boys on the Battlefront.”  Tchoupitoulas is the name for the Native American tribes of the Mississippi River, who provided shelter and refuge to runaway slaves before the Civil War.   The enmeshed culture of African and Indian is honored and celebrated by the black community with Mardi Gras Indian social clubs and parades, music on the streets, and elaborate Big Chief costumes that weigh 100 pounds in sequins, feathers, and beads.  It’s tacky and beautiful at the same time, and, serious fun.  This cultural mix up is, to my mind, truly American.

And don’t even start me on the cuisine.  Creole and Cajun both have French roots, so you can’t go wrong.  When I was in New Orleans last year, the worst food I had was some white toast for breakfast at an otherwise good restaurant.  All was forgiven.   There was a jazz singer and pianist playing some jazz standards, it was a Sunday morning, and we made friends with some locals at the next table.  Yes, the Café du Monde is packed with tourists, but there is nowhere else in the world to eat a beignet that puffy and fluffy and sweet."

Well now.  That made me hungry and jealous.  I wish I could be there right now --- and I would be, except (a) the spring term is in session, and (b) I gave up time travel for Lent.  Thanks, Tina, for these memories.  And, just for the record, I will mention that she teaches even better than she sings, so AVC is doubly blessed.  As for what the Accreditation Committee does and why they're super duper important right now, well --- that's food for another (perhaps less colorful) posting.