Maggie's Farm

I want to go the the museum at the Belevedere Palace in Vienna more to see the Kokoshkas than to see the jazzy Klimts. Klimt is fine, but Kokoshka is one of the gnarly German Expressionists that I get a kick out of. Well, Austrian in this case.

I have a good Klimt quote though:

I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women...There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night...Who ever wants to know something about me... ought to look carefully at my pictures.

Kokoshka's famous 1914 Bride of the Wind:

Rick Moran led us to the real meaning of Dog Days. Via Wiki:

For the ancient Egyptians, Sirius appeared just before the season of the Nile's flooding, so they used the star as a "watchdog" for that event. Since its rising also coincided with a time of extreme heat, the connection with hot, sultry weather was made for all time.

Sirius is the shiny dog collar tag in Canis Major:

Here. It was Edwardian: high-fashion with post-Victorian mores and plenty of mineral water. Edward Vll himself loved to hang out there and pick up chicks. Back then, being a bit pudgy was not a problem. We remain in his debt for making tweed respectable, and for replacing white tie and tails with the simple black tie of today.

While feasting on late after-dinner hazelnut gelati a little over a week ago in the relatively non-touristy lakefront village of Baveno, just up from the small piazza on the main drag, we were drawn to the sounds of a church choir, and sat on the stoop of the side door of the sanctuary for a half hour listening to them practice as darkness fell.

Nothing can make a 20-person choir sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir the way a small stone 900 year-old church can. Excellent group, too, with an exuberant organist.

Saint Gervaso is the patron saint of Baveno. Like many old buldings in Italy, the church was built of stone previously used in Roman buildings, some still bearing Roman markings and lettering. Recycling. We noted that they never took stones from the Roman bridges or aqueducts, though. Smart - and a conservative message.

This is no famous church, just an ordinary village church. Clearly pre-Gothic. The church and tower were built in around 1100 (but the front of the sanctuary was expanded a bit since then), the Baptistery in 1628, and the open hall of the Stations of the Cross probably in the 1700s, when Baveno became wealthy from its quarries of pink marble (which are still in use).

Palm trees right up there near the Swiss border.

 More photos of this small, unknown parish church below -

Via Dallas News' aviation blog:

Mr. Anubis, in situ.

Can you imagine being a person who is scared of flying, and you do not know that there’s a three story tall statue of the Egyptian god of the dead nearby the runway easement, and you’re in your seat in the takeoff roll, and you look out the window – say it’s night time too – and all floodlit standing there staring at you as you’re going past at 150 mph is – Mr. Anubis ?

or, somewhere nearby also at the Denver International Airport, the Blue Mustang?

For generations (since 1818), those who need to look well put-together but not Wall Street glam have relied on Brooks Brothers for their basics.

I kinda like the feel of a rumpled normal cotton Brooks shirt, but Mrs. BD and Mrs. Gwynnie recently chatted about how much they can save in dry cleaner bills with the Brooks Non-Iron shirts, which can be washed in the washer and refuse to reach that rumpled look.

The slim-fits and traditional fits (many of them) are half-off right now.

I ask "Why do we always have to spend money to save money?"

More of my pics taken last week. Nice little town, Wellfleet. Resident population 2700. Nothing fancy about it. Unpretentious summer getaway with more spots to swim and beach than anywhere I know of, but it is not for those who require warm water.

More pics below the fold -

For those in driving distance of lovely and historic Southport, CT, the annual Pequot Library Book Sale is a blast, and coming up soon. Last year, they had 140,000 used books for sale, all sorted by category by the volunteers.

You can purchase, for a pittance, a year's worth of reading material, and will surely stumble into some serendipitous finds that could enrich your life. It's happened to me at that sale, many times over the years.

They have hot-dogs and soda pop, too. You have to bear in mind that the book dealers get there the first day to grab up the valuable and rare stuff, but the prices go down each day.

Our prior post on the subject here. 

Say hello if you see me there. I'm the big guy in camo with the turkey etc.

Photo is a typical old house in downtown Southport.

That's Great Island out there, across from Chequessett Neck. I have done the Great Island long walk several times (8-10 miles). Last time, we saw the resident Great Horned Owl. On this trip, the heat defeated us before we got very far.

I recommend the hike as a way to immerse onself in the salty, piney goodness of the Outer Cape. (Bring hat, sneakers, and backpack with water and things to munch, or you will regret it.)

For me, my annual trek to the Cape is an annual (pagan?) re-baptism. I lived there until I was 5 or 6 (do not remember a thing), but have returned almost every year since then, often with extended family and often not. I believe I converted the now-Mrs. BD to me partly by taking her up there.

Or maybe it was a test to see whether the lovely, spirited young Jersey gal could love something that I loved. She did. Still does.

Our shrink friend Shrinkwrapped terms this "possibly the best therapy session ever."

I posted tons of Wellfleet architecture a couple of years ago, but here are some fresh ones from last week. Such a small town, I will run out of them fast, having already almost fully and unintentionally documented the village for posterity.

I include the antique, the regular, and the ordinary, while excluding the occasional eyesores.

From this interesting review of a new bio of E.M. Forster:

“Only connect” makes its entrance shortly after Margaret Schlegel, the novel’s liberal intellectual heroine, is first kissed by Henry Wilcox, the conservative businessman whom she has rather surprisingly agreed to marry. Passion has played little part in their relationship, and though they have gotten engaged they have not yet touched. When Wilcox suddenly embraces her, then, Margaret “was startled and nearly screamed,” and though she tries to kiss “with genuine love the lips that were pressed against her own,” she feels afterwards that “on looking back, the incident displeased her. It was so isolated. Nothing in their previous conversation had heralded it, and, worse still, no tenderness had ensued ... he had hurried away as if ashamed.” A few pages later, Margaret’s reflections on this erotic incompetence lead, as often happens in Forster’s fiction, into an authorial homily...

Forster, like CS Lewis and so many splendid writers, was a sexual innocent. Nothing wrong with that, in my view. Fun and diverting and even bonding as it may be, there is more to life than animal instincts. (Not that we disparage those, here at Maggie's Farm, where the animals shamelessly mate, feed, and drink at the drop of a hat.)

This humble old farmstead across the bay from Plymouth Colony was established in the 1650s, and is now within the Cape Cod National Seashore, up one of my secret Wellfleet sand road walking routes in the general vicinity of Duck Harbor.

Many regular visitors to Wellfleet do not know that Duck Harbor used to be a harbor, so this old place was a harborside farm. When currents and sand closed the opening to Cape Cod Bay long ago, most people moved to the big harbor in town (often with their whole houses, too. Lumber was in short supply.)

The original cabins from 1650 are long gone, but I cannot date these structures. Maybe some readers can. This is the main farmhouse, the chimney of which ought to provide a dating clue:

 More pics of the farm below the fold -

Thanks to Hell In A Handbasket for alerting us to a worthy site, Women's Outdoor News.

And thanks to our buddy for this fine aviation site which we have seen before, Flight Level 390. I want that guy flying my airplane. With the machine on auto 99% of the time, what is there to do but sleep or blog?

Wellfleet MA has a good harbor and a fair variety of boats. None of the fancy stuff like Newport or Nantucket, though. The town is not social enough to attract that crowd, but it is social enough for everybody to get in line for a Harbor Freeze cone on the pier every night after supper. (It is Mac's now, but I still call it Harbor Freeze.) I have seen people on that line from NYC that I haven't seen in 20 years.

There is plenty of dock space, and a large anchorage. It still has a small commercial fleet, more engaged in lobstering or in dragging for quahogs and sea clams than in fishing. The big-time fishing boats berth in Provincetown, where they have quick access out of Cape Cod Bay to the ocean.

I can not imagine living too far from the sea, and I feel that swimming in fresh water or overly-warm water is sort of disgusting. Chilly salt water is what works to cleanse and re-baptize my soul.

More boat pics below the fold -

Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life.

Thanks to Mario Vittone for this excellent post that everybody ought to read (h/t, reader).

Another good one from Mario: Going Fishing? No You’re Not.  Every time you leave shore, you leave safety and, however relaxing and fun it may be, you are entering a dangerous environment on a contraption which is floating at the moment, but wants to sink. If there were no bit of adventure to boating, nobody would do it without getting paid.

It's not that the water wants to kill you but, as a reader commented elsewhere, "Nature doesn't care."

Last I heard, commercial fishing is the most dangerous occupation in America, and unwatched swimming pools are death traps for little kids. I know a couple whose 3 year-old drowned during their poolside cocktail party. Fifty people there, and nobody noticed the little kid slip under.

Story at Neptunus:

When you go to places like Cape Cod or the Berkshires (as I do), you have to put up with this sort of stuff. I maintain my sense of humor, but these sorts of things bug Mrs. BD because she is intolerant of idiotic females who make her gender look retarded, and rightly assumes such vehicles belong to women.

If they really loved Gaia, would they be driving?

No. They would be walking to volunteer at the Turtle Abortion Clinic. "Every Turtle A Wanted Turtle." Sheesh. If you ask me, we cannot have too many turtles. Maggie's loves turtles of all varieties, races, species, and religions.

Truth is, I brake for turtles too:

Roman Coin Hoard Found in Somerset. What fun to find something like that.

I found a Massachusetts Pine Tree coin (1700s) on a Wellfleet Harbor beach a few years ago, with a hole through it (for stringing one's money, I suppose), and thought I had found something wonderful. I don't know where I put it.

Here is the lighthouse-keeper's house today (the Coast Guard moved the light itself to California):

This little brick structure in the back contained the kerosene, delivered by boat as needed, to keep Mayo Light burning to mark Wellfleet Harbor:

Just past Mayo Beach, through the 1920s, was the grand Chequessett Inn, built on pilings (the stumps of which still poke through the mud) and finally destroyed by an attack of sea ice in the 1930s. Rumor is that rum-runner boats would stop by at night, contributing to the Inn's popularity during Prohibition.

It was built by Mr. Lorenzo Dow Baker, the pioneer of the banana trade from the Caribbean and Central America. On a whim, he loaded his schooner's empty hold with tropical fruit for the return trip to Boston, and made millions. Mainly bananas, hitherto unknown in Boston. Ended up owning plantations all over Central America, and a big hotel in Jamaica. His employees were Jamaicans: They worked Wellfleet in the summer and the Jamaica hotel in the winter.

Baker's business became the Boston Fruit Company, the foundation of the United Fruit Company. A clever Yankee.

Low tide, Cape Cod Bay, way out on the western shore of Great Island this weekend. Heaven. You can even bring your doggie. No people there, either, except me and the Mrs. and the rare beachcomber.

A dune knitted together by a clump of Bayberry overlooking Cape Cod Bay, near Duck Harbor:

I know many readers may tire of my New England travelogue photos, but I am the Editor so, if you don't like them, don't look at them. It will take a while to complete this photo dump. Meanwhile, catch up on our holiday weekend posts which were rich with stuff.

Your Editor and Mrs. Editor have been on lower Cape Cod ("lower" means upper on the Cape. You go "up" when you go down to Hyannis. Figure that out. Less confusing to call it the "outer" Cape, but that's too easy) for an extra-long soul-feeding  weekend, as we require an annual immersion in the smell of hot Pitch Pine, hot sand, salt air, chilly baptismal salt water, beach grass, and the endless clams and oysters and raw Atlantic Bluefin tuna on which we feed. Our goal is eternity as a Great Black-Backed Gull, sitting on sand bars, staring at the horizon, and feeding on whatever gets washed up by the sea.

However, these first pics are for our pal Sipp. Newcomb Hollow, sunrise this past weekend, and ye olde Beachcomber in the early morning light. The local Cumby opens at 5, and I am always there by 5 with the fishermen - and I mean the pros, not the amateurs. The rough gnarly guys in boots who ain't askeered of drowning and who shamelessly hit on the gals at the counter with promises like "We could have lotsa fun tonight when I get back if you would just give me a nice smile."

I like to make my early morning rounds to see what is going on.

If you squint and stare straight east, on a clear day you might see the coast of Portugal in the far distance, just over the horizon.

I'll wrap up my Newport photo dump with a few pics from the Flower Show, which is the main reason Mrs. BD dragged me to Rhode Island last weekend. The Newport Flower Show is what the gardening and arranging ladies term an "important" show. It attracts garden club competitors from as far as Texas, and it raises lots of money for the Preservation Society of Newport County.

Mrs. BD did not have an entry in the show this year, but she likes to keep a finger on the pulse of things.

Last weekend's show was held at Rosecliff, one of the loveliest Newport cottages. Guy who built it was a Comstock Lode heir. My photos do not capture how crowded the place was with flower people and their tolerant husbands, mostly, like me, feigning deep interest and appreciation while furtively glancing at one's watch.

More pics of the show below the fold -

Quote from an essay of the above title by Roger Scruton in City Journal:

Until recently, European architects have either connived at the evisceration of our cities or actively promoted it. Relying on the spurious rhetoric of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, they endorsed the totalitarian projects of the political elite, whose goal after the war was not to restore the cities but to clear away the “slums.” By “slums,” they meant the harmonious classical streets of affordable houses, seeded with local industries, corner shops, schools, and places of worship, that had made it possible for real communities to flourish in the center of our towns. High-rise blocks in open parkland, of the kind that Le Corbusier proposed in his plan for the demolition of Paris north of the Seine, would replace them. Meanwhile, all forms of employment and enjoyment would move elsewhere. Public buildings would be expressly modernist, with steel and concrete frames and curtain walls, but with no facades or intelligible apertures, and no perceivable relation to their neighbors. Important monuments from the past would remain, but often set in new and aesthetically annihilating contexts, such as that provided for Saint Paul’s in London.

Citizens protested, and conservation societies fought throughout Europe for the old idea of what a city should look like, but the modernists won the battle of ideas. They took over the architecture schools and set out to ensure that the classical discipline of architecture would never again be learned, since it would never again be taught. The vandalization of the curriculum was successful: European architecture schools no longer taught students the grammar of the classical Orders; they no longer taught how to understand moldings, or how to draw existing monuments, urban streets, the human figure, or such vital aesthetic phenomena as the fall of light on a Corinthian capital or the shadow of a campanile on a sloping roof; they no longer taught appreciation for facades, cornices, doorways, or anything else that one could glean from a study of Serlio or Palladio.

Read the whole thing. 

Photo below: The charming, friendly, safe, and human-scale Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, which was a crime-ridden "slum" one generation ago, part of Hell's Kitchen. Ripe for massive demolition and "urban planning" and "urban renewal." The social engineers are almost always wrong because they are oblivious to human nature. This one-time slum is a very pleasant place to live in, provided that your neighbors behave themselves.

Don't blame the old buildings.

Newport, RI has the largest number of pre-Revolutionary houses and buildings in the USA. This one is odd. A saltbox with a ? gambrel roof. WTH? Name the year it was built:

I'll take you for an architectural stroll from around Kay St down Bellevue, with structures of all eras, beginning with this Victorian:

More pics (from last weekend) below the fold -