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It has been 50 years since the Stonewall riots which launched the modern gay rights movement. Though there have been some setbacks during that time, it has really been a half-century of meteoric social progress. When I was a child, the brutalization and dehumanization of LGBTQ people was an unremarkable and accepted aspect of society. Although sexual discrimination is still widespread today, it is anything but acceptable to the majority of people. There is constant hard work ahead for all of us, but enlightened people realistically look forward to another 50 years of upwards progress.
To celebrate, here is a little gallery of rainbow crowns and tiaras. Here in New York it is raining and yet there is bright sun. I am going to go out and walk around and see if I can spot some rainbows in the real world. Happy Pride!
Behold! Here is the Tiara of Saitaferne, a crown of gold acquired by the Louvre in 1896. The crown is wrought from a gold sheet and features gorgeous Greek youths surrounded by vines and birds. A Greek inscription on the headdress reads “The council and citizens of Olbia honour the great and invincible King Saitapharnes.” According to classical lore, Saitapharnes was a Scythian king who menaced the Greek colony of Olbia (on the northern tip of Sardinia). The colonists had to bribe him to leave with precious tribute, including this crown. The crown was a sensation in France (and greater Western Europe) when it was purchased for 200,000 gold francs and precipitated much admiration for the matchless craftsmanship of antiquity.
Except…the object is a complete forgery. It was made in 1894 by Israel Rouchomovsky, a master goldsmith from Odessa, on commission from antiquities dealers Schapschelle & Leiba Hochmann. They told Rouchomovsky that the object was for a friend who was a classical archaeologist and they provided Rouchomovsky with detailed instructions as to how to make the tiara.
Israel Rouchomovsky
When Rouchomovsky learned about the deceptive sale to the Louvre, he was aghast and he traveled to France to explain what had happened. Museum experts refused to believe that he had wrought the crown, until he incontrovertibly proved that he was the responsible goldsmith. The revelation led to disgrace for the Louvre’s experts but it made Rouchomovsky a sensation and he became an esteemed art nouveau jeweler in Europe.
The crown itself is now held in the Louvre’s secret archives of shame and and disgrace, but it makes periodic reappearances at exhibitions of famous forgeries. Like the Meidum Geese (which snookered Ferrebeekeeper), the Tiara of Saitaferne raises difficult questions about the meaning of artworks and how their value is contingent on when and by whom they are made. Such questions are becoming more prominent in contemporary art (which has become deeply fixated on political questions of identity and diversity) but, as you can see, the underlying issues are ancient.
The Great Flounder Float at the start of the 2019 Mermaid Parade
I’m sorry about last week’s paucity of blog posts. I was busy building a float for the 2019 Mermaid Parade at Coney Island! This annual festival to Poseidon occurs on a Saturday close to the Summer solstice and is the scene of enormous creative extravagance and burlesque merriment…all in the name of ocean appreciation, of course. Last year I attended with a rolling flatfish float, and although that was a hard day, it was also a noteworthy success.
Mermaid Parade 2018
Alas, parades are like Hollywood blockbuster movies…sequels require even bigger and better special effects (and it is easier to get things wrong). Last year’s float worked and people really enjoyed the spinning wheel of horoscope signs, but it was nearly impossible to transport. After an unhappy run-in with the front door, my roommate and I ended up death marching the thing to Coney island (which is about 7 miles away) at 2:00 AM the day before the parade. Thus, for this year’s Mermaid Parade, I decided to build a magnificent 6.5 meter (21 foot) flounder puppet out of fabric which I could roll up and transport with ease! Genius! We could handle the flounder high above our heads with 3 meter (10 foot) wooden poles and their would be no difficulties like last year.
A quick trip to the trimmings district provided me with hundreds of iridescent ultrasequins to use as scales. Then it was just a matter of hours and hours and hours with the scissors and the hot glue gun (coincidentally, I don’t think I have fingerprints anymore). I bullied some hapless friends into attending the parade with me and another one of my friends, the great Lebanese artist Lara Nasser took these pictures (you should check out her brilliant but disquieting art which contextualizes the uneasy nexus of religion, politics, and gender in contemporary Beirut).
Now, people who have jobs as actuaries, account supervisors, and crooked economists do not recognize this, but when you make actual things, there are always unexpected problems. I should have built some prototype giant puppets, or at least watched old footage of carnival in Brazil. Although I did some test runs and reinforced the fish with some struts made of rigid plastic tubing (cough, chopped-up hula hoops), the great flounder float had a tendency to droop when there was not a stiff wind. When there was a stiff wind, the mighty halibut was more than capable of manhandling the puny humans trying to move it around the Coney Island environment.
The giant tablecloth was weirdly translucent, yet it was heavier than expected as well, as were the 10 foot poles. In the disorganized scrum to line up we kept getting stiff armed by groups of majorettes and half-naked flamingos.
Then, as the parade started in earnest, so did the wind and we were suddenly wrestling a giant sky halibut. It must have looked like a sad episode of “America’s Stupidest Catch” as we reeled around Surf Avenue trying not to get knocked down. The fish gods were angry!
Although we tried valiantly to contain this situation, the float was stronger than the three of us. The glistening flatfish snapped the two outermost poles and then angrily bludgeoned the woebegone attendants with its fins as the audience watched with good-natured drunken derision. We tried to carry the flounder horizontally (like the tablecloth it originally was), but soon there were recriminations, counter proposals, and a decision to withdraw. Arguably this was the right decision, but we were trapped in a 2 mile chute bounded by steel barricades. There was no escape except a long sprint of shame with the now unworkable fish sadly dangling behind us.
This stung at the time, but, in retrospect, who cares about a good competent performance? This is America in 2019 and what we love most here and now is a hot mess! Parades are about spectacle anyway.
So, um, does anybody want to come with me next year? I am not sure how I can top being beaten up by a 21 foot long flatfish in front of 50,000 people but we will think of something (although this particular group of friends may not be into additional parades). There is no way to know what will happen in 2020 (not without some sort of all-knowing oracle, anyway), but I have a feeling it is a year which will feature plenty of new melt-downs and unintentional floundering.
The end of spring and beginning of summer is one of the most magical times in the garden: April’s overture of bulbs and exquisite flowering trees has faded back, but now we get to the real melody of the flower garden–the timeless flowers of transcendent beauty like irises, lilies, roses, and…lilacs.
Flower aficionados may now be raising their eyebrows. The flowers of lilacs are pretty enough in a nondescript way: they look like fuzzy lavender dumplings on deep green broad-leafed trees, but they are not like lilies and roses, the peerless queens of opulent beauty. Why am I mentioning them here? The answer is obvious to people who love gardens, but it is a difficult answer to show on a blog. Honeysuckles, jasmine, gardenias, and roses are all famous for their scent, but, to my nose, nothing smells as paradisiacal as lilacs. Their smell of spicy honey is a sensory experience all to itself. I can’t even think of how to properly describe it except as lilac-smelling. If you can’t summon it to our mind, you should sprint out into the dusk and run through temperate Europe and North America until you smell their heady perfume.
The lilac (Syringa vulgaris) is a species of flowering plant from the the olive family. The common lilac is a small tree native to the Balkan Peninsula, where it grows naturally upon rocky hills. Lilac trees are small and measure at most 6–7 meters (20–23 ft) in height. They can reproduce from an olive-like brown capsule which splits open into two helicopter seeds or by suckering (over time, lilacs form small clonal colonies).
Greece is the cradle of Western Civilization, yet there are no myths that I can think of about lilacs. Medieval letters are likewise silent about lilacs and the fragrant flowers aren’t even mentioned at all by Shakespeare. Lilacs came late to the garden, which, combined with their average looks, is perhaps why we rhapsodize about them less than we should (it is worth noting that there is a beautiful sort of Korean lilac, which, when blooming, looks like a purple dream, but it is not renowned for its scent–it seems that only the rose is capable of having it all).
Korean Dwarf Lilac
The garden lilacs we have seem to descend from Ottoman specimens. Apparently Turkish gardeners managed to ferret out treasures which the ancients missed. These were hybridized and domesticated during the 14th and 15th centuries and cuttings reached the most fashionable and innovative gardens of Western Europe in the late 16th century through the Holy Roman Empire (so Shakespeare could have smelled lilacs, if only he had known the most botanically-connected and florally-innovative aristocrats).
Whatever their provenance, lilacs smell wonderful, and I feel like they should be more fashionable (indeed they have been at the center of garden fame at various points in 18th and 19th centuries). For the sake of Ferrebeekeeper themes it is worth noting that “lilac” is also the name of a muted shade of pale purple. To wrap up the post here is a lilac ottoman. Since I could never find images of the great Ottoman lilac gardens of medieval Istanbul, this purple padded stool will have to do.
“Glove” (Wolf Silveri, ca. 2019) Photograph
As a known fish-themed artist, I like to keep an eye on what the world’s other fish-artists are up to (these are artists who draw/paint/sculpt fish…not artists who are fish). A couple of day’s ago, the Washington Post ran a little miniature show of works by the photographer Wolf Silveri, who became fascinated by the melancholic seafood on display at the marketplace while he was buying dinner. Silveri read that there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans within the next few decades and he wanted to create a disturbing series of unnatural hybrids to reflect this unnatural state of affairs.
Fish are the center of my art right now (albeit in an extremely different way) and I have a history of making works out of garbage too, so I am deeply intrigued by Silveri’s compositions. Yet I am also less than perfectly happy: these poor sea creatures seem more like sad props than like complex protagonists (as opposed to certain flatfish I could name). Also the works seem less surreal than slapdash–but maybe that is a hazard of the photographer’s super-realistic medium (although the show’s title “We’ll Sea” also seems a bit facile). Anyway, it is unsurprising for an artist to carp about a more successful artist, so I could be giving these pictures less credit than they deserve. Above all, anything that makes people passionate about the tragedy overtaking our oceans is worthwhile.
Let me know what you think. I am going to go work on some flounder art!
This story doesn’t really have a point–it is just the brief tale of a senseless crash on the road. Yet it is impossible not to be impressed and horrified by it. Today in Montana, a driver lost control of a semi truck and crashed the enormous vehicle into a ditch. Although the driver and his shotgun man were both unhurt, the truck’s cargo, 40,000 pounds of honey bees, came loose during the collision and I guess are now at large in Montana (this could be the beginning of a very special modern western). The truck was traveling from California to North Dakota which is also fascinating to me. Were these bees going to work the orchards of North Dakota? Was this a honey bee colony ship? We just don’t know all of the details. We don’t even know if the bees will be recovered, although firefighters on the scene (in full fireproof gear and contained breathing devices) said that “only” a quarter of the bees fully escaped.
This incident has taught us that 40,000 pounds of bees is roughly equal to 133 million individual bees! There were more honey bees on that truck then there are people in Japan. I hope some of them set up permanent shop in Bozeman, Montana and it becomes an apiculture Mecca (maybe even changing its name to Beesman, Montana), but probably some insurance accountant will more a few numbers and the incident will be forgotten. It really makes you wonder what is in all of those huge trucks out there on the road though…
I am fascinated by Jupiter! Even though I have no plans for it (unlike, say Venus), Jupiter is so dazzling, beautiful, and huge that it is impossible not to be impressed. Also it is so colossally enormous that it is quite difficult to even conceive of it: Jupiter has a mass one-thousandth that of the Sun! Indeed Jupiter is a sort of miniature solar system in itself with several rings, a magnetosphere, and 79 known moons. Ferrebeekeeper has touched on Jupiter’s moons, its poles, its great spot, and on our robot missions out to the planet.
However today is something more mundane, yet also more accessible: tonight Jupiter is in opposition to Earth. This means that On June 10, 2019, Earth is directly between the sun and planet Jupiter. You should run out into the night and look at it! Tonight you can see the largest moons of Jupiter with a small scope (or, if you are very lucky and have eagle vision, with your bare eyes).
Of course it won’t have all the details you see on pictures back from our probes, but it has something else which is special–it won’t be on some glowing screen. It is real and you can see it for yourself with your own eyes. So, go out and enjoy the June night and the sight of our biggest planetary neighbor. There is a lot to talk about and do, but maybe it is worth taking a little astronomy break right now. And if it is raining or you don’t see this post until tomorrow, don’t worry! There will be a few days when Jupiter dominates the heavens (although you can always check out Fourmilab, if you are having trouble locating it).
Not only is this World ocean Week, but it turns out today is National Doughnut Day! What a week…
Pancreatic Doughnut (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015), Oil on Panel
Before I was a dedicated flounderist, the dominant subject matter of my painting was doughnuts (I felt that the torus shape represented the universe/infinity, while the tiny size and sugariness of the confection made it a perfect representation of the hedonic nature of human aspirations). Like all artists who change direction, I still have a few doughnut paintings I need to finish up. Who knows what will happen to them? It is unclear if they will ever be finished…
However, I also have some finished paintings which I never showed anywhere or did anything with: they just hang around on my walls perplexing me. To celebrate National Doughnut Day, kindly allow me to present one of my favorite of these previous generation paintings. This is “Pancreatic Doughnut” which I painted in 2015. There is a sugary sprinkled doughnut, a cherry-dip ice cream cone, and a strip of super-fatty bacon (which is glistening with blobs of oil just like a real strip of bacon). These problematically sugary items are joined by a sinister bottle of rum and an alcohol molecule which looks like a friendly corgi but is definitely something more problematic.
The real thrust of the painting is found in the Congolese Mangbetu knife…a sinister hook which is about to plunge directly into the diseased pancreas in the bottom right corner of the picture. Yet all is not lost. Above the pancreas, an axolotl floats serenely like a translucent white angel. Axolotls seem to possess the secret of regeneration. Perhaps the grim effects of all of that metabolic damage and gastroenterologic mayhem could be undone…if only we could focus our efforts and our research on the right things instead of desperately trying to trap each other with addictive fixations. It’s a dream of course, but thus do all great things begin.
Happy National Doughnut Day!
This week is World Ocean’s Week and I feel like I have somewhat dropped the ball this year (although the plight of the planetary oceans is the principal ongoing theme of my artwork). At any rate, for tonight’s post, I am not going to write a comprehensive essay about the watery realms which make up the majority of our planet’s surface (although we will get back to that theme). Instead of a complex analysis of how we could help the oceans, here is a cameo appearance by another amazing Tetraodontiforme fish.
This is Aluterus scriptus, commonly known as the scrawled filefish, a master generalist of warm tropical oceans worldwide. The scrawled filefish lives in the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian Ocean. Its habitats are limited to warm seas, but within those seas it does not have a particular favorite niche: the scrawled filefish can be found swimming through coral reefs, seaweed forests, seamounts, rock fields, shipwrecks, sandy seabeds, or just out in the open water. From close up the fish looks like crazy 1980s abstract art with a wild pattern of olive dabs, aqua crazy stripes and black stipples. Yet seen from a distance it blends into the water or the seafloor with shocking success. The scrawled filefish makes use of some of the same impressionistic properties of light, color, and shape which are used in dazzle camouflage. It is hard to find the edges of its oval (partly transparent) body because of the chaos of its patterns. Also, like flounders and cephalopods, the filefish is capable of quickly altering its color patterns such that certain colors fade back or flare into prominence depending on the situation.
The scrawled filefish is also omnivorous and eats all sorts of algae, small invertebrates, corals, mollusks, worms, jellyfish, tunicates, small fish, et cetera et cetera. The fish is diurnal and makes prime use of its yellow eye to see the world, however it is also shy and solitary. Although they are generally spotted alone, filefish are attentive parents. A male will fertilize the eggs of 2 to 5 females who live in his territory. The parents look after the eggs and then watch other the fry when they hatch.
In addition to camouflage, filefish make use of the same trick as their near relatives the triggerfish: they have locking spines at the top and bottom of their body. If attacked, they wedge themselves into tight crevices or holes and lock these spines in place. this is also how they sleep secure at night in an ocean filled with hungry predators.
Nora’s Thrill
My apologies: there have been a lot of photo lists and crown-themed posts and other lesser blog entries lately. it is such a lovely time of year that it is too easy to go into the garden and get lost in the beauty of the season instead writing yet another post about the sad political realities of this debased era. Which is to say, I lost track of time in the garden and need to put up another list post. So here is a collection of magenta-colored irises to celebrate one of the most beautiful times of year as the irises fade back and the roses bloom with all of their arching & ineffable pulchritude.
La Fortune
Hot Spiced Wine
Edith P. Wheeler
Irises are almost as beautiful as roses (which is saying a lot) but their names tend to be much better, and these are no exception. Who could resist “Nora’s Thrill”, “Hot Spiced Wine,” or, uh, “Edith P. Wheeler”? (although admittedly these aren’t quite as good as the meat-themed iris names I blogged about a while back)
Ambroisie
Here in Brooklyn a lot of the irises have come and gone, but mine is just now opening up. I worry that the iris is not getting enough sun to really flourish…and it is in the sunniest spot I have in the garden. This means that, until some of these infernal trees of heaven fall down, I can’t plant “Starship Enterprise” the magenta and icterine beauty pictured below. Not only do we not get the utopian world of the Federation, we can’t even have a whimsical flower named after a spaceship on a tv show. Well…maybe next year, and until then, we can always look at these pictures. They seem superfluous now, but we will want them in January.
ferrebeekeeper 