Beyond the Master Forger’s Ability

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Giovanni Bellini’s “The Transfiguration” (1480)

This is a repost from ten years ago today: August 4, 2014.

Yesterday, I was drawn to the television by a segment on “Sixty Minutes” about the noted German art forger, Wolfgang Beltracchi. When Bob Simon of CBS asked him what painters he couldn’t forge, Beltracchi, without hesitation, answered Bellini. I took him to mean Giovanni Bellini (1430-1516) and not his brother Gentile (they were both brothers-in-law of the great Andrea Mantegna). The only time I remember ever seeing or original Giovanni Bellini was at the Frick Collection in New York City, which has a superb “St. Francis in Ecstasy” also painted in 1480. I have included an image below.

There is such an incredible sense of detail in a Bellini oil that I feel as if I could pick a background segment (say 1/64th of the total) and enlarge it to full size without losing anything. And the detail would be almost as fascinating as the foreground. Look at that fence following the upward path in “The Transfiguration” (above), and note the minor variations from post to post. Look at that dead tree at the lower left, or that couple meeting in the upper right near the tree.

I can almost imagine Bellini in an ecstasy such as St. Francis in the painting below.

St. Francis in Ecstasy (1480) at the Frick Collection

Brave New World

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555827 19.07.1980 Вынос олимпийского флага на торжественной церемонии открытия Игр XXII Олимпиады. Центральный стадион имени В.И. Ленина 19 июля 1980 года. Сергей Гунеев/РИА Новости

Remember the 1980 Moscow Olympics? We weren’t represented because Jimmy Carter pulled us out after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. In 1984, the Russians got back at us by not sending anyone to the Los Angeles games.

It was a different world back then. It seems the Olympic contests were always being interpreted as Free World vs. Communists. Maybe that was mostly the news media’s doing, but not entirely. For instance, I remember the euphoria in the air when the U.S. hockey team defeated the Russians at the Lake Placid Olympics in February 1980 (that was when both Olympics were held the same year) by a score of 4-3. That despite the fact that the frantic Russians outshot the Americans 39-16.

Soviet Russian Athletes on the Award Stand

But after the fall of Communism things changed. It’s no longer just the Free World vs. the Communists. The rest of the world got better, across the board it seems. Early this afternoon, I watched three Caribbean island democracies medal: St. Lucia, Dominica, and Grenada.

Of course, Russia and Belarus are not represented because Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine, with his assistance of his willing stooge Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus.

Gone are the lovely Russian women gymnasts. No more “White Swan of Belarus.” A few Russian and Belarussian athletes are participating under the Olympic equivalent of the Skull and Crossbones—and probably facing the ire of Putin and Lukashenko. It’s a pity, because they have some splendid athletes there, but the Olympics is nothing if not political.

I used to always root for the Free World. Then, I just rooted for the U.S. Now I’m just happy to see the rest of the world catch up.

Of course, China is developing an impressive sports machine, but at least they haven’t invaded anybody since they got their wings clipped in 1979 in Viet Nam by Vo Nguyen Giap.

Jade Flower Palace

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Beijing Palace Ruins

Du Fu (aka Tu Fu) was born in AD 712 and died in 770. The following poem is from Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Chinese. It is a great favorite of mine.

Jade Flower Palace

The stream swirls. The wind moans in
The pines. Grey rats scurry over
Broken tiles. What prince, long ago,
Built this palace, standing in
Ruins beside the cliffs? There are
Green ghost fires in the black rooms.
The shattered pavements are all
Washed away. Ten thousand organ
Pipes whistle and roar. The storm
Scatters the red autumn leaves.
His dancing girls are yellow dust.
Their painted cheeks have crumbled
Away. His gold chariots
And courtiers are gone. Only
A stone horse is left of his
Glory. I sit on the grass and
Start a poem, but the pathos of
It overcomes me. The future
Slips imperceptibly away.
Who can say what the years will bring?

Old Ben

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I have just read for the third or fourth time William Faulkner’s short novel The Bear—this time in the version used for the author’s Big Woods (1955) collection of hunting stories. All the other times were in the version used for Go Down Moses (1942). Here Sam Fathers talks to Ike McCaslin and Ash about the bear Old Ben.

“He do it every year,” Sam said. “Once: Ash and Boon say he comes up here to run the other little bears away. Tell them to get the hell out of here and stay out until the hunters are gone. Maybe.” The boy no longer heard anything at all, yet still Sam’s head continued to turn gradually and steadily until the back of it was toward him. Then it turned back and looked down at him—the same face, grave, familiar, expressionless until it smiled, the same old man’s eyes from which as he watched there faded slowly a quality darkly and fiercely lambent, passionate and proud. “He dont care no more for bears than he does for dogs or men neither. He come to see who’s here, who’s new in camp this year, whether he can shoot or not, can stay or not. Whether we got the dog yet that can bay and hold him until a man gets there with a gun. Because he’s the head bear. He’s the man.”


A Perfect 10

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Romanian Gymnast Nadia Comăneci in 1976

The first Olympics I watched to any extent were the 1976 games of the Montreal Summer Olympics. The heroine of those games was the 14-year-old Nadia Comăneci of Romania. She made Olympics history by being the first gymnast to score a perfect 10—and not once, but seven times. That netted her three gold metals, a silver, and a bronze, which she is seen wearing in the above photo.

Nadia started the whole gymnastics mania that has grown up around the Summer Olympics, and that continued with Svetlana Boginskaya, nicknamed “The White Swan of Belarus” in 1988 and 1992, and with Simone Biles today.

What ever happened to Nadia? Actually, she was in the opening day ceremonies of the 2024 Paris Olympiad. Today, she is an American citizen, having hightailed it out of Romania before the fall of the Ceauşescus in 1989.

Today she is 62 years old, being some 48 years removed from the svelte little girl who enchanted all of us way back when.

The Twisties

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French Gymnast Melanie de Jesus Dos Santos

The term was much discussed during the last Tokyo Olympiad (2021), when U.S. gymnast Simone Biles withdrew from competition after suffering an attack of “the twisties.”

At that time, the BBC discussed the phenomenon:

So what are the “twisties”?

Gymnasts have described the twisties as a kind of mental block.

In some sports a sudden mental block – like the “yips” in golf – may cost you a missed putt, or a lost game.

In gymnastics, it can cause a person to lose their sense of space and dimension as they’re in the air, causing them to lose control of their body and do extra twists or flips that they hadn’t intended. In the worst cases, they can find themselves suddenly unable to land safely.

The twisties can happen to a gymnast even if they’ve done the same manoeuvre for years without problems.

Biles – one of the sport’s all-time greatest athletes – appeared to become disorientated while performing a vault on Tuesday and stumbled as she landed.

It was a moment that struck an instant chord with those who suspected what she might be going through.

I have been watching the U.S. women gymnasts on the balance beam earlier this evening, and the subject came up on an NBC interview with Simone Biles before her routine was televised. Now Simone is a very grounded person with clear perception and first-hand knowledge of the demons that can assail a performer in the spotlight. And, like few other participants in the Olympics, Simone is definitely in the spotlight. All. The. Time.

As it turned out, Simone’s balance beam routine in Paris 2024 was spot on. Afterwards, NBC showed another gymnast in the process of suffering a major case of the twisties. It was Melanie de Jesus Dos Santos of Martinique, who was competing for France.

A stunningly beautiful young woman, Dos Santos is shown muffing spectacularly all the major gymnastic events. In between gaffes, she was almost perfect; but she was in the throes of the twisties.

Whatever we do in life, we can suddenly lose our way. We could drive a chef’s knife into our fingers while chopping onions; or slip and fall in the bathroom while getting out of the tub; or turn the steering wheel the wrong way when backing out of a parking space; or any of a thousand other missteps.

When we are in the twisties, we should do what Simone Biles did: Drop out momentarily from any high performance activities. It’s not cowardice. It’s what we have to do to survive when we momentarily lose our way.

My Cities: Paris

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Place Denfert-Rochereau in Paris

My last name is Paris, although I have not a drop of French blood in my veins. In Hungarian, my last name is Páris, pronounced PAH-reesh. On my father’s Czechoslovakian passport when he emigrated to the United States in 1929 (bad timing), his last name was shown as Parisej. When I asked him about this, he said the dominant Czechs always messed with Slovak last names.

There was a time when I was anti-French. This reached its height in 1976, when my Laker Airlines flight to London first stopped at Paris’s Orly Airport. We were all deplaned and made to go through security by the French police. When one of the officers wanted me to open up the back up my Olympus OM-1 camera and expose the film that was loaded, I refused and remarked rather snootily, “Je ne suis pas Carlos le terroriste!” Somehow, the officer smirked and let me continue without sending me to the guillotine.

Since then, I began to admire France more and more. My girlfriend, Martine, was born in Paris. My favorite novelists (Honoré de Balzac and Marcel Proust) are French. Subsequently, I visited Paris twice with Martine, staying first near Place de Clichy and then on the Left Bank near the Eiffel Tower.

I fell in love with Arthur Rimbaud, Blaise Pascal, Paul Eluard, François Villon, Emile Zola, Albert Camus, Patrick Modiano, Jean-Pierre Manchette, Nicolas Poussin, Antoine Watteau, Claude Lorrain, Auguste Renoir and his cinéaste son Jean, Jean-Luc Godard … Oh, hell, the list goes on damn near forever! In the end, I did a 180.

Public Transit Map of Paris

Now with the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, I am more impressed than ever with the French. In a handful of brilliant images, France reminded us who and what they were, and what they meant to the world.

Whenever I read a French novel, I am never without a copy of Paris Pratique Par Arrondissement in my lap, so I can follow the action street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood. It’s almost as if I considered Paris as more than just another city: It is a city I revere, a world city.

A New Ending for “A Doll’s House”

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Nora Helmer Walking Out of Her Marriage

One of the characters in Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s Bluebeard has an interesting take on Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, which ends shockingly (for its time) by the wife, Nora Helmer, walking out on her husband. Speaking is Marilee Kemp, with whom the artist Rabo Karabedian, is in love.

Her sense of her lace in the world back in 1933, with the Great Depression going on, revealed itself, I think, in a conversation we had about A Doll’s House, the play by Henrik Ibsen. A new reader’s edition of that play had just come out, with illustrations by Dan Gregory, so we both read it and then discussed it afterwards.

Gregory’s most compelling illustration showed the very end of the play, with the leading character, Nora, going out the front door of her comfortable house, leaving her middle-class husband and children and servants behind, declaring that she had to discover her own identity out in the real world before she could be a strong mother and wife.

. . .

That is how the play ends. Nora isn’t going to allow herself to be patronized for being as uninformed and helpless as a child anymore.

And Marilee said to me, “That’s where the play begins as far as I’m concerned. We never find out how she survived. What kind of job could a woman get back then? Nora didn’t have any skills or education. She didn’t even have money for food and a place to stay.”

. . .

That was precisely Marilee’s situation, too, of course. There was nothing waiting for her outside the door of Gregory’s very comfortable dwelling except hunger and humiliation, no matter how meanly he might treat her.

A few days later, she told me that she had solved the problem. “That ending is a fake!” she said, delighted with herself. “Ibsen just tacked it on so the audience could go home happy. He didn’t have the nerve to tell what really happened, what the whole rest of the play says has to happen.”

“What has to happen?” I said.

“She has to commit suicide,” said Marilee. “And I mean right away—in front of a streetcar or something before the curtain comes down. That’s the play. Nobody’s ever seen it, but that’s the play!”

The Scruffy and the Soshes

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Me at the Living Desert in the Coachella Valley 2022

There are two types of guys in this world (now where have you heard that before?)—the scruffy and the soshes (pronounced sōsh-es). I am clearly among the scruffy, though you will not find me wearing T-shirts, shorts, or flip-flops in public. Also: No tattoos. I guess that makes me a middling scruffy guy.

I have never been a fashion plate. In fact, I have looked down on guys that were. To me, they were soshes: People who were self-conscious about their appearance and, at the same time looked down on people like me, who just didn’t care.

As a retired senior on a fixed income, I have a clothes budget that approaches zero. Some of my shirts and pants are older than many of my acquaintances.

If I had the money, I would probably wear pants that would fit me better, what with my short legs and pot belly, but I would still avoid anything that would smack of GQ or Country Club. At this point in my life, who am I trying to impress? Do I have any possible future as a chick magnet at age 79? Would I even want to? These are important questions as I age.

Fortunately, I feel comfortable in my own skin, even if that skin at times resembles the lunar surface.

To Ensenada for Tacos

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Doña Sabina of La Guerrerense in Ensenada

An hour south of the Mexican border is the city of Ensenada, which along with Tijuana and several other locations in Baja California has become a foodie hotbed. And we’re not talking sit-down restaurants with white tablecloths and snooty sommeliers, but food stands where crowds of standees munch on world-class Mexican food. Ensenada is famous for having invented the fish taco and the margarita; and Tijuana is home of the Caesar Salad.

In September, my brother and I will drive to Ensenada for a few days and indulge in some serious street grunting. To get an idea of what that might be like, check out this video from Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” show:

The little lady in both the photo and the video is Doña Sabina Bandera, whose stand—““La Guerrerense”—is famous for seafood tostadas. In fact, Bourdain called it the best street food purveyor in the world.

I have long felt that something interesting is going on in the Mexican food scene, especially in those parts of Baja so close to Alta California. It will be fun to have some of the best seafood dishes on the continent, and not have to pay a king’s ransom for the privilege.