Seven Hours (25 cents)

We spent seven hours at the National Gallery of Art today, from 11 until 6. Time passed quickly.

1. The Henri Rousseau Exhibit. Rousseau's paintings, in person, look very naive and primitive, without detailed attention paid to perspective or sizing. Yet, they are not unpleasant and, particularly the jungle paintings, are fanciful enough to overcome their other shortcomings. Rousseau himself seems to have been a sad character. Born in France in the mid-1800s, he was married twice, and saw five of his seven children die before adulthood, as well as his two wives (one at 37, the other at 51). His working career was spent as a customs agent, a job from which he retired at 49 with an insufficient pension, to enable himself to spend his time painting. He was an untrained painter, and for most of his life ignored. Yet some artists (like Picasso) thought highly of him, and one of the highlights of his life was the party Picasso threw for him, inviting other well known artists of Paris and such as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Low lights were his arrests for stealing stamps from a lawyer for whom he worked as a youth, and his arrest and sentencing for attempted bank fraud, when he fraudently opened a bank account and was going to withdraw a significant amount of funds on credit. He died of a gangrenous leg at 66.

The exhibit is large, and is accompanied by a well made movie, narrated by Kevin Klose (Kevin Kline?).

2. The work of Charles Sheeler. This is the other special exhibit at the East building, and it is an exhibit of an American painter/photographer of the first half of the twentieth century, who specialized in urban and industrial paintings (such as his series on the GM River Rouge MI plant, or on mills in New England). Quite a contrast with Rousseau.

3. The West building has two exhibits on Venice, one of old masters and the other of drawings. We had previously seen the first and skipped the second today. You can't do everything in just 7 hours.

4. We opted for the buffet lunch in the West building courtyard that apparently has something to do with Venice. The food was all right, and the variety interesting, but it was probably too expensive for what there was. The meat dishes included a guinea hen in a black pepper sauce and a liver pate on toast, neither of which looked very appetizing. There was a delicious radiccio salad, calamri, eggs, a zucchini fritata, an arugula salad, carrots and raison salad, polenta, breads, strawberries, fig and nut loaf, and more.

5. We saw two movies. We did not expect much of the first, a 1927 American silent movie called "A Boy of the Streets", which had been lost and then found in a movie conservation library in Toulouse, where it was fixed up and interlineated in French. The boy's older brother is mixed up with the wrong guys in San Francisco, and they are paid by an opposition politician to pull a Watergate on the incumbent. In the meantime, the boy is hit by a car driven by a beautiful young woman, whose father is the incumbant and taken to their house to recover. Meanwhile the brother and two other men break into the house and are caught, but the girl saves the brother by saying that she had asked him to come and get his younger sibling. You can see what is going to happen. Yes the older brother and the girl live happily ever after and "have many children", but not before a numbers of plot twists and turns, and fights, and jails, and fancy parties. All in all, a lot better than anticipated.

6. After the movie, and a short time in the museum book shop, we went to see an exhibit of drawings from the Woodner collection, which were quite enjoyable. All European, they were as old as the 1400s and as new as the twentieth century.

7. Back to the theater for "Senso", a 1954 Italian movie starring Farley Granger, set in Venice (you see the pattern) at the time the Italians were unifying and about to kick out the Austrians. It starts with terrific scenes of performance of Tosca and becomes itself an opera without words - where the Italian contessa falls in love with the insincere Austrian officer, and sells out her countrymen only to find out that all he wanted was her money. Operatic plots are often quite silly but saved by the music. Here, there was no music.

After we left the gallery, we headed to the AV for dinner, to find it closed for its August holiday. We wound up at the Islander on 12th and U, a Trinidadian restaurant with live jazz. A very interesting Caribbean menu with curry flavor (that's Trinidad for you), and the food was not bad (some quite good flavors), but everything in the kitchen got mixed up. For instance, you are asked if you want A or B. You say A, and then they give you C. That sort of thing. Plus, they don't serve coffee. Whoever heard of that? No tea either. The waitress said "because we don't serve anything that is packaged". The meal was too expensive for what we got. The saxophone led jazz (we stayed for three pieces) was "easy listening jazz", and the listening was a little too easy. A few years ago we sat on the banks of the Snake River in Idaho Falls and heard an easy listening sax player. They could have gone to school together.