[Above photo: Christmas is such a many-layered holiday. ]
22 January 2023
I’m taking the train from Boston to NY, now just past New Haven. It isn’t the Acela, so it stops briefly a few times and takes ½ hour longer. The Acela presents as sleek but if anyone has taken the TGV or the Japanese or S. Korean bullet trains, the American rail system is kind of pathetic. The Shinkansen, for example, is welcomed into and out of the station by a uniformed employee in white gloves with a stopwatch, after gliding through the countryside at impossible speeds. The KTX (Korea) drifts along at 180mph. Likewise the TGV. On all three, it is difficult to view much because the towns and fields pass quickly. I do, the view notwithstanding, prefer them to the bus, even though the latter is reasonably direct and comfortable. All beat driving.
I have an abiding affection for Boston both from my personal experience there in college and as the site of my mother’s family home. All of my sibs were born there. It is quaint and quirky. Polly and I bought a new, largish flat-screen TV yesterday, mounted it on a wall bracket and then set out for the Fine Arts Museum to see the Cy Twombly exhibit.
We walked to the Government Center T station, since Haymarket is closed due to the construction of a parking garage. On my last visit a piece of heavy equipment fell several stories at the site and I think the operator was injured or killed. Government Center is next to Boston City Hall, an example of “Brutalist” architecture. It looks like a huge Humvee or other military vehicle, all broad hard lines and sharp, well-defined corners, with deep recesses. Ugh! Not representative of the kind of government I’d like to see.
The T is special, even with its old cars. We took the Green Line “Heath”, which stopped directly in front of the MFA. The entry line was longish but moved rapidly.
We moved almost as rapidly through the Twombly exhibit. My god, the emperor’s new clothes. What a bunch of junk. The most interesting piece, other than the many antiquities displayed to remind us of the sources of his inspiration, was a photo taken by someone else, showing a handsome couple, Twombly standing in the foreground and his wife, an Italian heiress, reclining on a chaise in the room behind him. He is dressed in a white linen suit, impeccably groomed, and looking as vacant and performative as a peacock. She was similarly shod. One could only imagine how dry their relationship must have been.
The “paintings”, for there were very few that would so qualify, were his scribbled lists of words or short sentences. I mean, really. If I have to read an extensive explanation to extract any feeling or meaning from a work of “art”, and there appears to be little of skill or subtlety involved, it is of no interest to me. In truth, it felt like a 2 1/2yo child’s bathroom productions: “Aren’t it just amazing?” “Marvelous?” The “work” seemed intensely personal and pretentious. Only one of many reasons that I could never be an art critic: my intolerance of laziness, of lack of skill, and of a vision so diminished by self-obsession. Well, I do appear to have had a pretty strong reaction to it, after all!
In adjacent rooms were wonderful canvasses by Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Courbet, Degas and that crowd, which salved my pique.
My trip is brief. I’m going primarily to support a friend, at her request, who is having an ablation for atrial fibrillation. She’s had the a-fib for several years but recently passed out in a restaurant, which alarmed her. I’ll also visit with Harold and Connie, hopefully see Marcy, and have supper at a Burmese restaurant in Brooklyn with a Burmese child psychiatrist and her husband+daughter. She is supportive of the Opposition and is in contact with the psychiatrists whom I teach.
Unfortunately for me, after I left town, 6’ of snow fell. Another 6’ is predicted for Monday. Here it is merely overcast, or occasionally drizzling. However, before I left Portland, I saw a male Downey woodpecker with his jaunty red beret, a pair of nuthatches, and a largish blue bird (I’d call it a scrub jay in California.) making good use of my feeder. Who knows what’s next?!!
I do wonder how well the slight of hand will work for the GOP this time around: that is, when trying to disguise their desire to keep power by any means, enrich the wealthy, and shrink social programs (SS and Medicare) by making a lot of noise: Hunter’s laptop, Joe’s sloppiness with documents, lies about lowering taxes, LGBTQ rights, churchiness, firearm freedom, control of women’s bodies, and various random issues. Their infighting and the Speaker’s obsequious compromises promise to make for good newspaper sales. I hope the media can begin to quietly address these with facts, not overreact, and can re-direct the conversation soberly to the issues that are of fundamental importance to the people of this nation. In psychotherapy, this would be called “Containment”.
Now we’re at New Rochelle, 20’ minutes from Penn Station. I’ll seek the “Quiet Car” whenever I travel by train if I’m unaccompanied, although this one was not so quiet: the guy in front of me was playing “We are the champions of the world” loudly enough that I had to talk with him and the young (?Indian) couple behind me were snuggling and she giggled, loudly and constantly, for about 20 minutes. I’m not sure what tickled her but likely him. They departed at New Haven, possibly Yale undergrads. Happy to see them happy but better to giggle in a coach with other ground rules. Am I getting cranky, or what?
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 