A Weekend Off

The plan was to take a few days off, no overtime and rest after a three week stretch of dispatching. The plan fell into disrepair almost as soon as we woke up Saturday morning. By the time I was driving the van over the Sunshine Skyway bridge into St Petersburg my mood was as gray as the sky...

 Friday might was decision time in my household. I got off work and was home by 6:30 pm and Tropical Storm Fred was lumbering around the north coast of Cuba producing modest 40mph winds and lots of rain. My wife and I decided it would be best to bundle ourselves on the road and get to the mainland before the storm as modest as it might be, swept the Keys. 

The next morning we tackled the storage locker problem and rented an upstairs unit near the Miami airport. The idea is when we fly back we can stop by the storage locker and pick up anything we might want to haul back to our van life elsewhere in the world. We rented an upstairs unit in an air conditioned building with the hope that our sentimental few possessions might be storm proof...If not we shall be even less burdened than we plan to be as we start our travels.

My wife was strangely lethargic and forced me to do the paperwork (horrors! Me in charge of paperwork?). After we had cleared the back of GANNET2 of our first pile of boxes I insisted we go home. It isn't like Layne to show anything less than a type double A personality. She overrode me and insisted in turn that we continue to St Petersburg and our friend's pool house on loan for the weekend. I got behind the wheel and drove Alligator Alley while wife and dog slept in the back.

The owner of the house is away so we stopped to get supplies at Publix, and when I say "we" I mean I did. In another display if uncharacteristic disinterest herself pulled up extra blankets while I walked Rusty and then stopped in Publix all by myself to get dinner. I was very restrained and bought Useful Things like salad and soup but steered well clear of banana pudding and ice cream and alcohol.

It was a rather odd evening watching my wife droop as a nasty rash appeared on her forehead straying onto her eyelid. I got a bit grumpy feeling certain we should have turned back after the storage locker drop off in Miami and now we were six or seven hours from home. After a disturbed night's sleep I was on Rusty duty as usual and we wandered the neighborhoiod known as The Coffeepot for an hour, Rusty with his nose and me with my camera while the invalid tried to sleep.

It's an interesting part of St Petersburg, near the water  and north of the central downtown, streets of upper class homes covered by large trees with varied architecture and neat gardens on all sides. 

I followed Rusty as he wandered ahead and we were alone on the streets at five of a Sunday morning. It took my mind off my wife's rash, at least a  little bit.

Faced with the prospect of living and traveling in the Promaster  camper van this medical problem was an interesting exercise in how we might cope when away from home.   Certainly it was hugely convenient to have a bed and toilet and kitchen right there for the patient and for myself when she was in medical facilities being checked out.  If necessary we could always rent an air BnB I suppose. In this case we found a clinic and waited two hours beofre Layne could be admitted.

The primary care doctor was pretty freaked out and wanted her to see an ophthalmologist at St Petersburg General. So back in the van where Rusty and I had waited in the rain we called the hospital where a very apologetic nurse said the wait to be seen was at least eight and a half hours. Covid has swamped us she said. My wife looked a bit taken aback. We can get home before that she said, So I started back down the freeway toward Alligator Alley. 

I had been to the Dali Museum that morning, pushed out of the pool house by my wife to see an exhibit of photographs by Lee Miller. 

At the time I couldn't figure out why my feverish wife was so forceful but on the drive back toward Miami she confessed she had wanted to come to St Petersburg so I could get to see the exhibit I had been looking forward to for a while.

She knew if she didn't push I would never have agreed to take on this crazy drive with her showing every sign of a fever.

We had been concerned she might have been starting down a Covid path herself with her compromised immune system but the doctor diagnosed a nasty dose of shingles, so there was that sort of not terrible news. It was painful though.

I took these pictures in a light drizzle outside the museum sitting under the trees and just catching my breath after the sensory overload inside the Dali.

There I was, lurking in the shadows, wondering where my weekend had gone.

On the road to Miami my sick wife had a brilliant idea, and we pulled over to check it out.

There is an eye hospital in Miami called the Bascom Palmer Institute attached to the University of Miami, the preeminent eye hospital in the country. I wonder she said fi they have an emergency clinic. 

Sure enough they have 24 hour emergency services for people with eye problems so I recalibrated Google maps on my phone and got GANNET 2 back into gear. It was an inspired decision. We arrived at about 11:30 at night and I unloaded Layne so she could shuffle off to get help. Part of the joy of this Covid nightmare is the impossibility of gaining access to any medical facility unless you are the patient. This added little wrinkle engenders the sort of helplessness and distance that makes the whole process so much harder. There's no doubt the no visitor rule is critically important but it sure does add a burden. I took Rusty for a walk and then we settled down in the parking lot to sleep until the patient called back. Thank God we had the van and the air conditioning and the toilet all to ourselves.

My walk took me past a hellish landscape of urban decay, homeless lunatics squatting on the sidewalks mumbling to themselves, blanket shrouded lumps snoring under the trees, piles of trash and discarded fast food containers all along the sidewalks. Miami at it's least finest. It was a relief to get home to the van and close the door on the outside world.

Layne woke me from a  deep sleep with a telephone call around 1:30 in the morning with the good news that her eye was not in danger but the facial pain would persist for a few more days. I got behind the wheel, she and Rusty went to bed and we zipped down an empty Overseas Highway to arrive home at 3:30 in the morning. Rusty got his neighborhood walk to check the latest smells, and that was the end of a very weird weekend away. The van's contribution was outstanding; the rest of it sucked. Van life, from the files:

Lee Miller, Photographer

The Dalí Museum is one of our favorite destinations on mainland Florida. Indeed three years ago in August we planned to celebrate our wedding anniversary the weekend after the day I was run down on my motorcycle. Three months in the hospital scotched that planned visit. Here we are three years later and I spent 90 minutes touring the visiting exhibit...on my own. 

Lee Miller was born in 1907 in New York State and died in 1977 in East Sussex England and between those mile posts she lived a great deal of life. She was tall, blonde and beautiful, traits she used to advantage and Life also turned around and used that beauty against her as you might expect. It was therefore a bizarre life in many respects but she was lucky to live in difficult times, unlucky to live in times when women were objects of desire and not valued for their artistic or work skills. That in part is why you haven't heard of her even if you have heard of surrealists such as Man Ray, or Pablo Picasso, or...Salvador Dalí. She liked to use a Rolleiflex, a camera you have seen in the hands of well known male photographers from her era, even if she and her brilliant use of that tool is unknown to you.

My wife stayed at the home of the friend we were visiting while I went to the museum. She is immune compromised and thus always concerned about Covid, but she was simply not feeling well, with a nasty headache. In fact this photography exhibit was for me and she pushed me out the door, go enjoy it she said. So I did. We had a ten o'clock appointment to enter the museum with its current policy of controlled visits. They even had masks to give away for anyone who went through the folderol of getting a reserved time online but showed up without their own mask.

The exhibit started outside right there on the viewing deck overlooking the garden and Tampa Bay. When the new museum replaced the original which was built in 1982 the big question was whether the vast array of windows were hurricane proof. Since the new place opened in 2011 one can only say they have been - so far! However I was shocked to see cracks on this visit, which it turned out was part of the surreal ethic of the exhibit. Fooled me.

I had a ten o'clock appointment thanks to my sick wife's foresight so I had the viewing deck pretty much to myself as the other early arrivals sped to the exhibits. I thought this trompe l'oeil was, as you might expect, nicely done.

The exhibit was up the usual standards of presentation at the Dali and I spent 90 minutes wandering the rooms and looking at the pictures. I came away with a  few thoughts about Lee Miller and her life and times. 

She started out as a model and evolved into a  photographer herself, but from what I could read of her life she seemed to live through the  men who courted her more or less desperately. She worked with and naturally ended up sleeping with Man Ray, a photographer of influence but not of beauty or stature according to the rather cruel commentators. It was, they implied none too subtly, a union of convenience - he got the babe and the babe learned a skill. Rather drab really.

Anyway Miller married a rich Egyptian who took her off to Egypt where she moldered far from the sights and parties of pre war Europe. Her most famous surrealist photo of this period and apparently an inspiration to painters is the one above, A Portrait of Space. 

A disappointment for me in the exhibit was the lack of pictures of her time in Egypt which you'd have thought could have provided endless subjects in those happy 1930s far from the reality of Depression era politics, especially when married to a wealthy guardian.

World War Two was a test for the American dilettante and she rose to the challenge with bravery and determination. It was, as happened to quite a few wanderers, her finest hour perhaps. She traveled with the troops, saw all the horrors you might expect, including the experimental first use of napalm at Saint Malo which produced some pictures. She saw the liberation of Dachau and was most famously photographed washing that concentration camp dust off herself in Hitler's bath tub the day he committed suicide. She had carried Hitler's home address in her notebook for just such an opportunity:

I was struck by her devotion to the picture, her planning and her fearless use of the lens. This next picture struck me, a 16 year old Nazi dead by her own hand in her father's office, unwilling to live when everything around her was collapsing. You can even see shreds of plaster fallen off the ceiling from the bombardments. Such clarity and unwavering precision in the face of such a terrible fate.

After the war Lee Miller divorced her Egyptian husband and married a British surrealist who carted off to a country house in genteel southern England where she took to the bottle and withered away. She seemed to lose her path as she was apparently unable to make her own path without a man. The commentary on this stage of her life was brutal, a woman who had lost her looks discarded by a  philandering husband. One wonders what happened to the artist inside. This cryptic quotation was attached to a photograph of her early modeling days:

I guess it was inevitable that the exhibit would focus on Lee Miller's portraits of famous people gathered around her surrealist friends, which to me was the least interesting aspect of her career. I came away wondering to myself how much we would be celebrating her art had she been a man. There again measured against the indomitable Margaret Bourke-White who was equally beautiful and talented but who kept working as an independent woman Lee Miller seems to have failed her own talents and on her own terms and gave up her photography without a fight. A great shame.

Midnight in Paris

It was a quick visit to the Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, a stop on the way home. Rusty spent three hours with a sitter, (rover.com) and I am trying to learn not to leave him behind with a lump in my throat. This time he got away and came haring after the car as we drove away which made it harder but I got through those three hours and so did he. I fear I enjoyed myself even more than he did walking with a lovely young university student and taking treats from her. 

We are member of the Dalí so we get to skip the lines at the entrance which is nice but our cards were messed up so leaving my wife to deal with the bureaucracy (it was her fault, she threw away the valid replacements and kept the outdated cards it turned out...) I tried once again to capture the essential Dalí surrealism in the wet Rolls Royce parked in the gift shop. They call it the Rainy Taxi frequently reproduced with a Cadillac and the driver with a shark's head. Not here:

Water streaming down inside the windows makes  a photograph as I like it, crisp and clear, impossible so I allowed myself some latitude and contented myself with the Countess' hand appearing through the mist. The other name for this piece is Mannequin Rotting In A Taxi Cab but I couldn't figure out how to spot snails crawling on her body....

The other creepy thing I've seen here previously is a holograph recreation of the artist himself, walking and talking on screens around the museum. My wife enjoyed the interaction, I shuddered and moved on. I do enjoy the innovations and the exhibits they are bringing to the museum which used to be a rather stuffy mausoleum but some of the surreal experiences are beyond me. I think Dalí would have loved them.

We were at the museum for one specific thing, the display of early 20th entry art focussed on 1929 in Paris when the Surrealists were coalescing around two distinct movements.  Dali landed in Paris and joined the "wrong" group quickly switching his allegiance to the more prominent Andre Breton group and the exhibit shows a short film recreating a clash between the poet and Gala, Dalí's wife (and by her estimation his muse) when Breton and Dalí were falling apart. 

The exhibit wasn't huge but it was full of images of the surrealists and their thoughts plastered all over the walls. Thus using the museum app you can listen to an audio tour of the artwork. The app audio is brilliant, you just hold the phone to your ear like a conversation with no need for headphones but the tours are a total headache to follow. I had to keep asking my wife where to go as she who is quipped with her infallible sense of direction was way ahead of me. I circled hopelessly lost for fifteen minutes staring at the incorrect pieces while ruminating on a totally irrelevant critique in my ear about something across the room.

Despite it being a holiday Monday and us being a bit later than usual owing to dog sitting detour it wasn't overly crowded.

I got to watch clips of several Surrealist movies including of course the infamous eye slitting by Bunuel in Un Chien Andalou which I hadn't seen for years. It seemed less horrifying than when I watched it in an art theater 40 years ago and of course much less horrifying than when it came out to audiences not quite used to trains driving toward them onscreen.

Giorgio de Chirico was among those with a picture on the wall and as usual they managed to put up a picture you don't associate with the more famous artist he became.

What I liked too was the fact that we got to see the faces behind the art which so rarely happens. What struck me about these avant guards creators was how bland they appeared in real life. They look like bankers and accountants in jackets and ties with neatly parted hair styles and even Dalí who cultivated public eccentricity later looked the part of an eager young salesman early on.

Then there was The Lighthouse by Tanguy whose story captured my imagination. Here was a Surrealist who started out as a sailor on a freighter and on a whim decided (as you do) to become an artist. he was inspired by what he saw so he left behind the workaday world of shipping as a deckhand and started expressing himself. He blamed Jacques Prévert the poet and de Chirico for his decision and  apparently they embraced him.  

Yves Tanguy:

Another of these bourgeois-turned-artist types shows up in the form of Pierre Roy of Nantes who became an architect and went on to forget that and take up painting instead. They had a couple of his works on display illustrating his roots combined with still life and open landscapes and a piece of surrealist tape (!) which really caught my fancy. 

It's one of the features of Dalí that I enjoy inasmuch as he displays his draughtsmanship at the same time as showing off his surrealist message through perfectly drawn works.  

Then there was Max Ernst and Loplop  is best explained by the Museum of Modern Art but was a birdlike representation of his alter ego in art. Remember these people called themselves surrealists so anything goes here...

I had never heard of Jean Arp, not even when he is known as Hans Arp. He was born in Alsace when France and Germany were arguing and fighting for possession of the border land so he grew up bilingual and used one name in French and the other when speaking German. Europe can be a messy place so we shouldn't be surprised when reality goes off the rails and surrealism takes its place. Please don't ask me to explain why I like this piece and it captured my attention. Mustache and bottles by Jean (Hans) Arp. There:

You wander through a decade of time, a period of intense living by survivors of intense warfare, facing the certain destruction of their world in a few years more and yet they hungered after meaning and explanation and description of life and they fought each other and the establishment to prove they were right. It must have been an extraordinary time and I knew nothing of it as I had to wait anther thirty years to be born. And now I'm old the whole proposition of scrambling to be heard and to be right seems nonsensical. What they left behind justifies it all.

Even if it can be hard to understand and sometimes even to enjoy. I saw some early street photos taken around Paris and I was struck by how banal many of them were, fuzzy black and white prints of streets and trees and fog, stuff you could expect to find on Instagram by people barely able to hold a phone camera steady. Yet photography was break through art form for surrealists, its immediacy and documentary qualities exposed them to new ideas of how to create art. The funny thing is, then as now Photography as Art is a tough concept to sell to the mass of people used to photography as phone snaps, or billboards, TV advertising. In 1929 the idea that a photographic print could be Art was laughable except to these people.

Alexander Calder is known as the Sculptor of Air. Considering he died in 1976 he offered a revolutionary view of sculpture by creating hanging pieces and as you can see artwork that is as ethereal as cobwebs:

There is still plenty of time to make a trek to St Petersburg, a city worth a visit anyway to check out for yourself the surrealist ferment ofParis between the wars. Well worth it.

As much as I wanted to get back to Rusty and then get home I like to stop and look out through the hurricane proof armored glass.

It gives a view of the gardens around the museum and Tampa Bay in the distance. 

And as this was the MLK holiday the parade that was to make leaving the city slightly awkward was getting underway for the long walk to the stadium near downtown St Petersburg. 

Rusty is an excellent traveling companion as he rides the back seat silently and uncomplaining, sleeping, sitting from time to time and looking out the window at scenery. He is as always no trouble at all.