Date: 11/18/2013
Day: 53
Location: Pasadena, CA
Miles Today: 49
Total Miles: 12,193
Small Disaster Sunday, Pontificating, Culcha Vulcha Monday, Seen on the Road, Tomorrow
It Was Awful
Writing this blog is not entirely painful, but whatever else, it is certainly time consuming. Yesterday evening instead of posting the completed product, the Colonel managed to delete it. Gone. He found himself channeling the GEICO gecko; "Somebody help me ... I've deleted by blog." Which did no good at all. This at about 11:50 PM. First time that has happened and it was not a happy making occurrence. Apparently BlogSpot thinks one knows what one is doing with the delete command. This is not strictly the case.
What was posted was OK, but the product of several hours post midnight maundering. Too bad actually, because the Simon Rodia part is, inherently, really interesting.
This is how it is
One or two of the folks who claim to have read some of this bloggery have suggested that the Colonel is an opinionated old coot. Those are not exactly their words which reflect more on provenance and species, but you get the idea. It takes all kinds. That said here is the truth:
We are blessed in the Bay Area to have a spectacular, "world class" (nasty phrase) opera and equally first class ballet. The theater universe is adequate. Where we fall far short in the culture wars is inre museums. The Asian is very good, but limited in their collection. (And broke.) The other fine arts museums in Nor Cal are woeful.
In greater LA the circumstance is reversed. The opera and ballet here are mostly not worth the trip and the theater is really good. But the museums are spectacular. The LA County, the various incarnations of the Getty and, our targets for the day, The Huntington Library and the Norton Simon Museum are world treasures, each worth a week.
Two of the Best Possible Places
The Huntington Library
The Huntington Library, Art Collection and botanical gardens in San Marino are unmatched in the Colonels experience. The book collection has pretty much a copy of every first edition you might be interested in, 9 million items in all. It also has the Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales (in our opinion, the most beautiful book in the world,) a Gutenberg Bible on vellum, the double-elephant folio edition off Audubon's The Birds of America with illustrations about a yard square and a spectacular collection of early editions of Shakespeare.
The art collection is at least the equal of the library. "Pinky" and "The Blue Boy" probably reside in your minds eye. Gainsborough, Marie Cassatt, Edward Hopper; it is an extensive collection. One image only from the collection:
Outside are their botanical gardens a long established Japanese garden and a new and expanding Chinese garden.
If you have never been to the Huntington, it is worth a trip to LA to visit.
A few images follow from the Chinese Garden, the Garden of Flowering Fragrance.
The Norton Simon Museum
Superlatives get boring, but this is small museum in Pasadena is the best of this scale we have ever seen. If one wanted to gain an education in the Western Cannon of painting, one could get it here. No comments, all of these images are described in detail on line.
Seen on the Road
Family watering hole. Fresh fish, pour a good drink.
There have been requests for an image of the Colonel. No photograph is known, but this drawing is considered by some to be a fairly close likeness, made back in his book collecting days. He is, of course, much older now.
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