a fool in the forest

Someday I'll Find You, Moose Light Behind You

Behold "Moo," the illuminated moose head.  His glowing physiognomy a majestic addition to any room, Moo was designed by Trond Svengård and Ove Rogne for Oslo's Northern Lighting:

The inspiration behind the Moo lamp was found in northern Norway -- in the breathtaking scenery of Hamarey, where both of the designers have summer houses.  Here the moose is frequently seen passing close to the houses and even over the lawns.  The designers hope Moo will stand out as a post-modern kitsch trophy, making the viewer smile happily as they recognize this 'king of the Norwegian forest.'

Yes, he's the King of the Norwegian wood.  Isn't it good?  Of course, you don't actually need him in order to light your summer house in northern Norway, since the sun hardly ever goes down there in summer.  But if you found yourself in your northern Norwegian summer house in the winter, Moo would be comforting, if spectral, companion.

(Via Dezeen, where the commenters are a tough crowd, not easily impressed.  Photo by Northern Lighting.)

Orignal Intent

It is not to be gainsaid that all is well when, on a holiday weekend Sunday, one's RSS feed is amply supplied with moose.  To wit:

Via 3quarksdaily comes a fine article by Prof. Keith Stewart Thomson in the American Scientist, entitled Jefferson, Buffon and the Moose, detailing the efforts of Thomas Jefferson, in his 1781 Notes on the State of Virginia, to debunk the notion widely circulated by the great French naturalist the Count de Buffon that the indigenous creatures (and native peoples) of the Americas were in all cases smaller, weaker, pale shadows of their counterparts on the eastern side of the Atlantic.  The majestic Moose was given pride of place among Jefferson's proofs that America was a land well supplied with beasts surpassing those of Old Europe. 

Prof. Thomson writes near the end of his article:

Around the time Notes was published, Jefferson was living in Paris as the new nation's ambassador to France.  When he arrived, Jefferson sent Buffon a copy of Notes and the skin of a large panther, and was subsequently invited to dine with Buffon at the Jardin du Roi, Paris's magnificent botanical garden.  Of that meeting Jefferson later wrote, 'in my conversations with the Count de Buffon . . . I find him absolutely unacquainted with our Elk and our deer.  He has hitherto believed that our deer never had horns more than a foot long.'  So Jefferson decided to show him a full-grown American moose.  He wrote to General John Sullivan, president (governor) of New Hampshire, for help in getting a large specimen, instructing him that the bones of the head and legs should be left in the skin so that it could be mounted in a life-like manner.  Eventually a 'seven-foot tall' moose was collected in Vermont and shipped to Paris.

Many years later, Daniel Webster told the story that Jefferson had had the moose set up in the hall of his apartment and invited Buffon to see it.  Confronted with that stark refutation of his earlier thesis, Buffon was said to have exclaimed, 'I should have consulted you, Monsieur, before I published my book on natural history, and then I should have been sure of my facts.'  It would be nice if this story were true.  In fact, Buffon, by this time old and sick, was away from Paris when the moose arrived in October 1787.  Jefferson sent it to Buffon's long time associate, zoologist Louis-Jean-Marie D'Aubenton, for the great man to see when he returned.  Although most of the hair had fallen off the hide, the antlers sent by Sullivan were from a smaller animal and the whole carcass was probably rancid, Jefferson was 'in hopes that Monsieur de Buffon will be able to have it stuffed, and placed on his legs in the King's Cabinet.'

The sketch accompanying the article is by George Stubbs, the master painter of 18th Century British race horses and of other, wilder animals.  The sketch depicts a bull moose calf owned by the Duke of Richmond.  It appears from the available scholarship that this sketch represents the third moose acquired by the Duke.  Three years earlier, Stubbs produced this painting of The Duke of Richmond's First Moose (1770):

This fine figure of a Moose was in New York this time last year as part of a large Stubbs retrospective at The Frick Collection, whose curators' notes show that British nobility was more in tune with mooseness than its French counterparts:

Eighteenth-century English noblemen imported North American moose to their estates for domestication and breeding. Their experiments failed, but these primitive-looking creatures remained of interest to natural scientists like William Hunter. Hunter studied Richmond’s yearling moose, and having stated, 'Good paintings of animals give much clearer ideas than descriptions,' he commissioned Stubbs to paint an 'exact resemblance' that included a pair of mature antlers.

Hunter intended to lecture at the Royal Society on his radical theory of natural extinction while displaying this work. Stubbs painted from direct observation, successfully completing his task with a scientist’s detached accuracy. Because the native habitat was unknown to him, Stubbs improbably depicted the moose commanding a mountain landscape. However, he did include a pond, as Hunter had recorded that moose ate 'the rank herbage of marshy grounds.'

Elsewhere today, the visual wine reviewers at Chateau Petrogasm offer this as their descriptor for the 2004 Chateau de Beaucastel, Chateauneuf du Pape:

To paraphrase a weary old groaner of a punchline, the lesson here is:

"A stolen Rhone gathers no moose."

~~~

Translator's Note: The post title is not a typo.  "Orignal" is French for "Moose."

~~~

UPDATE: More Moose!  To honor the passing of "[o]ne of the great hobos, labor organizers, union men and singer/writer/mentors," Utah Phillips, songs:illinois offers a selection of his work, including a so unsavory it's savory tale of what one can cook up with a pastry shell and some moose, er, leavings: "Moose Turd Pie."  As a bonus, quite a dreadful pun involving rural electrification is included at the outset of that piece.  Recommended for all them's as is not easily offenced.

Squirrels Without End, Amen

This Fool now continues his policy of countering Rabbitist Hegemony by the annual posting of an Easter Squirrel.

Although they have fallen far out of fashion, domesticated squirrels seem to have been common household companions of young men growing up in the years before the American Revolution.  Two years ago, I posted John Singleton Copley's 1765 portrait of his young stepbrother in the company of a chained and rather put-upon looking little squirrel.  Copley was entrenched as a Bostonian before he emigrated to pursue a thriving career as a portraitist in London, but in 1771 he made a professional jaunt to New York.  Among the commissions he received on that trip were a trio of paintings of members of the Verplanck family, one of which provided Copley the opportunity to revisit his squirrel theme:

John Singleton Copley, Daniel Crommelin Verplanck (1771), from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

My first thought on seeing this picture was that young Daniel Verplanck was rather a small boy, or else he kept company with rather a large squirrel.  The Met's curators are suitably impressed by Daniel's fuzzy friend:

Daniel attended the city's best schools and his parents passed on to him their taste for the finest of everything; his portrait exceeds theirs in grandeur, in keeping with their high expectations for him.  He wears a stylish suit with a brocaded vest and sits on a porch amid imposing classical columns.  His remarkable pet squirrel, which Daniel has apparently civilized through careful training, holds onto his leg without inflicting pain.

As indicated by the fact that they were commissioning Copley portraits, the Verplancks were well established by 1771.  They continued in prominence at least into the mid-20th Century when they did what prominent New Yorkers do: donated their portraits to the Metropolitan Museum.  Copley's portraits of Daniel's father, Samuel Verplanck, and of his uncle, Gulian Verplanck, share a wall in the museum in their very own period room.   (The room is closed to the public until later this year, but you can still take a Virtual Reality Tour.)  After the Revolution, Uncle Gulian was a Speaker of the New York State Assembly; Daniel himself grew up to serve in Congress.  Should you find yourself up the Hudson Valley near Fishkill, you can visit the Verplanck family estate, Mount Gulian.

It may surprise you to learn that the role of Daniel Verplanck and his Remarkable Squirrel in American art history does not end in 1771. Some 188 years later, Joseph Cornell rediscovered the plucky pair and promptly did with them as he did with so many other cultural referents.

He put them in a box:

Joseph Cornell, Americana: Natural Philosophy (What Makes the Weather?) (ca. 1959), from the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

And a particularly attractive Cornell box it is; also very Easter-like, what with the dove and rainbow and such.  Happy Easter to all.

~~~

For completists, here are links to all of our prior years' Easter Squirrel posts:

• 2007 [Hans Holbein the Younger]
• 2006 [John Singleton Copley]
• 2005 [Hans Hoffman]
• 2004 [Albrecht Dürer]

"The Hora! The Hora!"

Hanukkah will begin at sunset today.  It is not my own holiday season, but it is a holiday season for many -- most, really -- of my longest lasting and most cherished friends.  So, for them in particular, let me offer this excerpt from a 1989 Chabad telethon broadcast, featuring the festive song stylings of Mr. P. Himmelman, Mr. H. D. Stanton, and, looking very relaxed on the mouth organ, Mr. B. Zimmerman-Dylan.  L'Chaim indeed:

Those same friends of mine will appreciate that I could not resist this when it turned up in a search for appropriate imagery.  I detect the influence of Marc Chagall in this fine Menorah of the North:

 

~~~

Chabad video via Some Velvet Blog.

Moose Menorah photo by Kathy Willens (AP) via Ventura County Star.  Simply have to have one?  Try New Orleans' Dashka Roth contemporary jewelry and judaica.

Stuff, Meet Nonsense

I have a backlog of miscellaneous items, many months in the making, saved away to be pointed to in an appropriate post.  Since many of those posts seem destined never to arrive, here is an attic-cleaning catch-all of items whose only common feature is that they caught this Fool's interest:

• Søren Kierkegaard, Denmark's gift to philosophy and one of the best writers ever to apply himself to that trade, has been turning up with some frequency in my weblog reading.  Here, for instance is ArtsJournal music blogger Kyle Gann, en route to Copenhagen, thinking at length about SK's place in his personal canon:

Of course, I was a musician too, and while the 'Or' of Either/Or held a certain academic interest, it was the 'Either' that I devoured with page-flipping relish.  Kierkegaard's pseudonymous division of his authorship into 'aesthetic' versus 'ethical' or religious personas may have been ironic in intent, with a finger on the religious side of the scale, but his detailed psychology of the total aesthete was, as he knew, the more seductive.  His argument about Don Giovanni - that since the seducer is the personality most trapped in time, and music is the art that deals with time, seduction is the perfect musical subject, therefore Don Giovanni is the most perfect possible piece of music - wasn't very convincing then or now, despite the persuasive fanaticism with which it is developed.  But he captured and conveyed, in startlingly vivid terms, the manic subjectivism of a mental life turned away from the quotidian world and devoted to the absolute in art.  To read that was a heady loss of innocence, a recognition that someone else had heard the same siren song I did - and followed it.

Via Sounds & Fury.  I have LA Opera's Don Giovanni to look forward to in a few weeks, which is as good an excuse as any to revisit the unconvincing but enjoyable musical portions of Either/Or.  [Kierkegaard fanciers may derive a small chuckle from the Amazon.com page reachable by that link, which straightfacedly lists "Victor Eremita," one of Kierkegaard's numerous pseudonyms, as "editor" of that Penguin edition.  Others will wonder what we are chuckling about.]

SK also turned up unexpectedly on Tom Wark's daily wine blog, Fermentation, in a post entitled "Kierkegaard & Self Medicating with Wine."  Tom's subject is the dangerous illusions that may lie concealed behind "appreciation" of the noble grape and its works:

Even more depressing than finding one's self embracing Kierkegaard's aesthetic life of jumping from transitory experience to transitory experience in an attempt to stave off a life of boredom, is the somewhat similar strategy of dealing with the boredom of life by pretending that self-medication with wine is actually the act of connoisseurship.

• Combining two of my favorite things -- original series Star Trek and the late great Edward Gorey -- Shaenon Garrity imagines Edward Gorey's "The Trouble With Tribbles". 

What does it mean?  I derive from it this Foolish aphorism:

Pastiche is a cracking form of flattery, and crackers are a flatter form of pastry! 

Tired of imitations?  For real Goreyana, repair to the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts.

• Writers on Writing #1:  Back in April, Mike Snider connected the dots between poetry and improvisational comedy.

• Writers on Writing #2:  M. John Harrison, a very fine writer mysteriously underappreciated in this country, offers valuable safety tips for writers of fantasy.

Substitute imagination for exhaustiveness, and inventiveness for research. As a reader I’m not interested in a 'fully worked out' world.  I’m not interested in 'self consistency'.  I don’t care what kind of underpants Iberian troops wore in 1812, or if I do I can find out about it for myself.  I don’t want the facts about the Silk Road or the collapse of the Greenland Colony, sugared up & presented in three-volumes as an imaginary world.  I don’t want to be talked through your enthusiasm for costume.  I don’t want be talked through anything.

• Writers on Writing #3:  Novelist John Crowley reports:

I was describing to tomsdisch the things I'd been finding via Google in service of my new book (some described herein) -- things I didn't know could be known --  and he said 'ah yes, Google has put an end to the art of wondering.'

Which to me attains very nearly to the status of an immortal apercu.

To which category might also be added Disch's recent two-line poem, "Correction."

• Fluffy-Tailed American Imperialism:  Dispatches from the trenches in The English Civil War of the Squirrels:

'Unless something radical and imaginative is done . . . Squirrel Nutkin and his friends and relations are going to be toast.'

The fox and badger lobbies are also heard from. 

Via 3quarksdaily. 

[Nutkin buttons photo (click to enlarge) by jasmined via Flickr, under Creative Commons license.]

• Lives of the Connoisseurs: TIME Magazine' Richard Lacayo on Peggy Guggenheim, reminding us that the early 20th Century was a pretty good time to be well-off and blessed with discerning taste:
  

She found a house with the largest private garden in Venice and had the last private gondola in the city for her daily long rides.  She entertained frequently, though not lavishly.  She was notorious for her scanty food and cheap wine.  From her biographers you get the sense of a full life — the guest book carried names like Giacometti, Paul Bowles, Cocteau, Chagall, Saul Steinberg, Cecil Beaton, Stravinsky, Tennessee Wiliams, Paul Newman and Truman Capote — but not always a happy one. She lavished fast cars on one of her younger lovers.  He died in one.

• "O brave new world that hath such produce in't!"

Whole Foods has opened a new 2-story greengrocer's establishment here in Pasadena, its largest store west of the Rockies.  Callie Miller of LAist dotes, posts many photos and declares that it "seem[s]...excessive, in the most eco-friendly way possible."

Unfortunately not shown in those photos: the site was formerly occupied by auto repair facilities and a tire store, all in a brick garage building that I would guess dated back to the mid 1920's.  In a nice bit of adaptive reuse, Whole Foods left two of the brick walls standing and incorporated them into the ground floor of the new store.  For a city sitting slambang in the thick of earthquake country, old Pasadena has a remarkable quantity of brick construction.

• Poetry Mashups!  T.S. Eliot meets Portishead in the room where the women be coming and going and talking up papal painters, whilst down at the bar Charles Bukowski goes a few rounds with Led Zeppelin.

[escapegrace pointed the way.]

Subterranean Stockholmsich Moose

Long ago, what we now term "public art" -- art commissioned by the local temporal authority as an adjunct to large construction projects -- produced masterworks: Bernini's Roman fountains, for example.  Today, when public works projects ostentatiously devote some minim of their budget to art, the results are generally bleak: works that "pay tribute to" or "acknowledge" something or other that We Surely All Agree is Good, works that strive not to offend anyone with a pulse, works that aim for the cute, the kitschy or the clever-clever.  Most of the art incorporated as part of the Los Angeles Metro Rail subway system is no exception.

In contrast: 

No, it's not Bernini, it's not even Great Art, but it shows vastly more personality, imagination and oomph than American transit bureaucrats could ever compass.  This fern-filled grotto, and the cave-dwelling moose up above, both come from an extensive series of photos of stations in the Stockholm subway system -- the Tunnelbana -- posted at Ueba.net.   Click through and enjoy: it gets more eccentric from here. 

I suspect Alice's white rabbit was on the design committee: he knew a bit about decorating burrows.

[Stockholm subway links via Wired and Andrew Sullivan.]

This Year's Squirrel (and a Tudor-Era Woman of Mystery)

Our now-traditional Easter Squirrel for 2007 is Han Holbein the Younger's portrait, ca. 1527, of A Squirrel with a Starling and Lady A Lady with a Squirrel and Starling.  As in 2006, the featured work depicts a Squirrel Enchained, although this one seems a bit more contented with his lot than last year's sad wee beastie.

This painting usually hangs in London's National Gallery, but I first stumbled upon it online earlier this year when it was on loan for the big Holbein show at Tate Britain.  (The Tate has been dropping its "H"es lately, having moved straight on from Holbein to Hogarth, with Hockney forthcoming.)

Unlike most Holbein portraits, the human subject of this one is not named, and there has been a good deal of perplexity over the years as to who this squirrelophilic woman might be.   A plausible theory was finally offered in 2004, when

a research associate at the University of East Anglia - David J. King - saw a photograph of the portrait in a catalogue to which he was contributing. 

He recognised the squirrel as the emblem of the Lovell family who lived in East Harling in Norfolk and was able to refer back to other uses of squirrels in the stained glass windows and the tombs in their parish church of St Peter and St Paul.  From there, a likely connection was suggested to Anne Lovell, the wife of the owner of the nearby Lovell estates.  At the time, the name of the bird and the town of East Harling had a similar pronunciation further implying that the starling was a clever visual pun.

The National Gallery assumes that Mrs. Lovell, if that is who she is, did not sit for her portrait with either the squirrel or the starling present.  Following the established artistic practice of his day, Holbein painted the two animals separately before Photoshopping them in to the final composition.

Happy Easter!

SQUIRRELSOME INCIDENTALS:

• Researcher David King's own account of his curatorial sleuthing leading to the identity of the sitter is available here.

• The Squirrel portrait first came to the National Gallery in 1992, and turns out to have been purchased in part with funds donated by J. Paul Getty.  As I discovered during last Sunday's visit, Mr. Getty's own establishment is currently playing host to another fine Holbein, the 1543 Portrait of Robert Cheseman and his falcon.  That portrait usually hangs in the MauritsHuis in The Hague, where it keeps very impressive company -- Girl with a Pearl Earring, anyone? -- among the top 10 works in the collection.  It comes to the Getty direct from its own prior loan to the Tate exhibition. 

The portrait of Mr. Cheseman contains no squirrels.  It is to be hoped that his falcon didn't, either.

Are You Ready for Some Moose Ball?

The weekend is nearly upon us, and I have not indulged my fondness for moose in quite some time.  That is all the occasion I require to post

Moose Ball! 

A bizarre love triangle constructed with simple tools: one moose, one ball, and the melancholy aria of the dog whose ball it once was . . . .

Because good things must come in threes, we round out our moosecapades with two food-related clips.  Next up, a tasty dessert recipe from the late Jim Henson as the Swedish Chef:

And to conclude, an advertisement circa 1964 for Post Crispy Critters breakfast cereal -- "The one and only cereal that comes in shape of animals!" -- announcing the addition of Orange Moose to the sugar-spangled oat menagerie:

More information on Crispy Critters and the associated characters -- notably Linus the Lionhearted, voiced by Sheldon Leonard and star of his own Saturday morning cartoon show and associated comic book -- is available via Scott Shaw's Oddball Comics and at Topher's Breakfast Cereal Character Guide. 

If I recall correctly, the Orange Moose were a sequel of sorts to the previously introduced Pink Elephants. 

As a former consumer of Crispy Critters looking back forty-plus years later, two things about this ad particularly strike me:

• Apparently, there was a time when cereal makers believed they could hold their target audience's attention for a full 60 seconds.  Almost nothing is advertised at that length today, let alone breakfast cereal.

• How difficult is it to sell cereal on the basis of a new color scheme when your ad is in black and white?

Merry Chrismoose from a fool in the forest

[Photo by klsa12 (Martin Boose, Dresden, Germany) via stock.xchng.]

Wet Zeppelin

Here we have the makings of a blockbuster historical thriller:

On your right is Flugzeugträger A, also known as the Graf Zeppelin, the Nazis' one and only aircraft carrier. 

Begun in 1936, construction was never fully completed and the ship was never actually put to use.  It was scuttled by the Germans somewhere near Gdansk to keep it from the approaching Russian army in 1945.  Having taken possession of the neighborhood, the Russians later raised the vessel and sailed it into the Baltic, where it disappeared under Mysterious Circumstances, most likely involving loud and dramatic explosions.

Today, nearly sixty years later, DER SPIEGEL reports that what remains of the Graf Zeppelin has been found:

Divers working for the Polish oil firm Petrobaltic on Monday discovered the rusting hulk of Nazi Germany's only aircraft carrier, the Graf Zeppelin, sunk in mysterious circumstances by the Soviets after World War II.  Its exact location had been a riddle for almost 60 years.

* * *

On Monday, while sounding for oil deposits in the Baltic Sea, Polish workers discovered the wreck about 55 kilometers (34 miles) outside the Polish harbor town of Wladyslawowo, near Gdansk.  According to international maritime law the remains belong to the Federal Republic of Germany, but the German Defense Ministry told news agency ddp that jurisdiction is still under discussion.  In the meantime, the ship's mysteries are far from fully solved.

'It's difficult to say why the Russians have always been so stubbornly reluctant to talk about the location of the wreck,' Lukasz Orlicki, a Polish maritime historian, told the Times of London.  'Perhaps it was the usual obsession with secrecy, or perhaps there was some kind of suspect cargo.'

Perhaps . . . .

I'm thinking Nicholas Cage in the lead, racing through the backwater shipyards of Old Europe on the track of nautical clues while dodging bullets and pondering the romantic yearnings of an attractive Estonian sextant refurbisher (Lindsay Lohan) with mysteries of her own, climaxing with an elaborate battle of the mini-submersibles beneath the Gulf of Bothnia and the discovery of the Graf Zeppelin's Secret, for which the world will not be ready -- until July 2008! 

You read it here first, and I'll be expecting my points from the gross, in cash and up front.

And in other news from DER SPIEGEL:

Fire Brigade Called as Rodents Go Nuts:
Squirrels Storm German House