Cincinnati: Politics and Porker

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photo labeled for reuse: ArtWorks Cincinnati

From before the Civil War to the career of John Boehner, southwest Ohio has been steeped in politics. So maybe it should come as no surprise that later this week the president-elect is launching his “thank you” tour in Cincinnati.

Meanwhile, the city’s renown as the pig processing capital of the country earned it the sobriquet “porkopolis,” as a Cincy native recently reminded me. In the early 1800s, herds of pigs trammeled the streets. No more, we were glad to learn when we visited the sites below, though an ArtWorks project means you encounter gaily painted flying pigs all around town.

Politics and pork, together forever. Or was that politics and poker?

Harriet Beecher Stowe House

Stowe’s dramatic 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, sold more than 1.5 million copies its first year and has been translated into some 75 languages. Historians credit her depiction of the horrors of slavery and the desperation of runaway slaves as energizing the U.S. anti-slavery movement. She based the book on her own experiences. She’d seen slaves in nearby Kentucky and the repugnant activities of slave-hunters in Ohio (a free state) after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, and she could convey the profound sense of loss her characters experienced, based on her own grief after the death of her son Charlie. She lived in this house as a young woman, and the Ohio History Connection has added displays about Cincinnati at the time, including one on the whole porkopolis thing.

William Henry Harrison Tomb and Monument

A few miles west of downtown, along a winding Ohio River drive to North Bend, you’ll find the tomb and monument to ninth U.S. President William Henry Harrison (“Old Tippecanoe”). He’d already had a lengthy military and political career before becoming president at age 68, only to die after a month in office. He was pro-slavery and negotiated numerous extortionate treaties with the Indians that resulted in the loss of their lands. Although he came from a wealthy Virginia family, he pioneered modern campaign techniques, representing himself as a humble “man of the people.” This timely quote from President Harrison’s Inaugural Address is carved on one of the memorial’s stones:

“As long as the love of power is a dominant passion of the human bosom, and as long as the understandings of men can be warped and their affections changed by operations upon their passions and prejudices, so long will the liberties of a people depend on their own constant attention to its preservation.”

William Howard Taft House

william-howard-taft

Anders Zorn, Portrait of William Howard Taft, 1911

Taft was the nation’s 27th President and 10th Chief Justice, his favorite job. He lived in this house as a child and young adult. A Republican, he served as Governor of the Philippines and Teddy Roosevelt’s Secretary of War, Vice-President, and right-hand man. (When Roosevelt sent feisty daughter Alice to Asia with a delegation headed by Taft, one of the chief inducements for her was the opportunity to hobnob with another famous Cincinnati politician in the group, her future husband Nicholas Longworth.)

Roosevelt was disappointed in Taft’s presidency, though, and ran against his re-election in 1912, splitting the Republican vote and assuring a victory for Woodrow Wilson. Taft was much happier as Chief Justice and worked almost daily, modernizing Supreme Court procedures and practices. The nicely maintained house and National Park Service’s visitor center provide an interesting glimpse into the impressive contributions of the entire Taft family to life in Cincinnati and the nation.

What To Read Between Stops

  • Uncle Tom’s Cabin, of course, the most popular book of the 19th Century! An American classic.
  • The Carnival Campaign: How the Rollicking 1840 Campaign of “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too” Changed Presidential Elections Forever by Ronald G. Shafer

But Where Do You STAY in Cincinnati?

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Cincinnatus (photo: Lucas, creative commons license)

Cincinnati takes its name from Roman farmer Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus, who exemplified unwavering service, civic virtue, and a willingness to set aside personal power for the good of the nation.

Similarly, George Washington was admired for stepping aside after two terms as President (while some framers of the Constitution wanted the President to have a lifetime appointment). You may recall this event being recognized in the musical Hamilton, in which Washington sings about “how to say goodbye.”

The Society of the Cincinnati, named in honor of Washington’s act, was set up for veterans of the Continental Army and is the nation’s oldest military hereditary society. Cincinnati was the first major American city founded after the Revolution (1788) and is named for the Society.

Cincinnati an overlooked gem. Even my family’s recent week there didn’t do it full justice. But where do you stay?

Netherland Plaza

Dear reader, no question about it. You stay at the French Art Deco palace, the Netherland Plaza, now a Hilton. The name came about because this landmark hotel is built on the flat land, the Netherland, of the Ohio River’s flood plain below the steep hills for which the city is famous. Its name also came about because the owners originally planned to name it the St. Nicholas Plaza, but ran into legal obstacles after they’d received all the monogrammed linens, china, silverware, and stationery. They needed a “SNP” name—fast. Thus for a while it was the Starrett’s (the builder’s) Netherland Plaza.

netherland-plaza, Art Deco

photo: Vicki Weisfeld

The interior, dining rooms, ballrooms, and every tiny detail are a feast for the eyes. It’s hard to believe such an investment was still doable when construction began in January 1930, a few short months after the big stock market crash.

It was all painted over in the 1960s, of course, in a bid for modernity, but restored lovingly in the early 1980s. Alas, the ice rink in the middle of the restaurant Pavilion Caprice is no more, nor the garage’s automatic (driverless) parking equipment. I’ve seen pictures and cannot imagine how it worked, but it did.

Orchids in the Palm Court is one of only 63 AAA five-diamond restaurants in the United States, and the only one in Ohio. The stunning decorations—murals! marble and rosewood! silver nickel sconces!—would be worth savoring even if the food were less spectacular.

Maybe you won’t luck out like my cousin did and be given the Churchill Suite for a week—yes, Winnie stayed there—but all rooms on the high floors have wonderful views of downtown and the River.

Cincinnatian

Another highly rated hotel is The Cincinnatian, but we spoiled ones found the décor only so-so and the Christmas decorations downright tatty. Still well worth a visit for the delicious high tea, served the third Sunday of every month.

21C Museum Hotel

Now for something completely different. The 21C Museum Hotel is part of a small chain of boutique hotels that feature—and celebrate—contemporary art. We took a tour with a super-knowledgeable guide, and it was thrilling to see so much thoughtful, creative work—painting, sculpture, photography, tapestry, interactive, unclassifiable.

One mesmerizing piece was a clock that uses Big Data to tell the viewer how many x have happened since noon that very day until the current hour and minute. In the ever-changing graphic display, “x” might be “new cases of syphilis” (29 that day),  “dollars spent at US Walmarts” (you don’t want to know), “cases of Svedka vodka sold” (thousands), ad infinitum. Upstairs, a photo exhibit.

Literally hundreds of framed artworks are in the hotel’s Metropole restaurant. Tasty and unusual. Condé Nast travelers named this the “#1 Hotel in the Midwest” in 2014. Loved it lots! Also the yellow penguins’ surprising appearances.

21c-museum-hotel, penguins

photo: Ohio Redevelopment Projects, creative commons license

What to Read in Your Hotel Room

Love Wins: The Lovers and Lawyers Who Fought the Landmark Case for Marriage Equality, co-authored by Jim Obergefell, a Cincinnatian whose same-sex marriage to his dying partner was one of the four lawsuits prompting a 5-4 Supreme Court decision favoring gay marriage. Co-authored by Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Debbie Cenziper. (Click carefully; other books have the same title.)

****Triple Crown

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photo: Tsutomu Takasu, creative commons license

By Felix Francis — Carrying on his late father’s series of horse-racing mysteries, Felix Francis has now written his fifth about the most famous set of horse races in the world, the U.S. Triple Crown. The Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs is the first of the three, and the most prestigious. The Preakness Stakes at Baltimore’s Pimlico Race Course is the oldest, dating back to 1873. The mile-and-a-half Belmont Stakes at New York’s Belmont Park, which takes place exactly five weeks after the Derby, is the most demanding—an insurmountable hurdle in many Triple Crown quests. Francis effectively captures the excitement, behind-the-scenes anxiety, traditions, and pageantry of these iconic meets.

Protagonist and narrator Jefferson Hinkley is an investigator for the British Horseracing Authority invited to the States by a colleague from the fictional U.S. Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency (FACSA) on a secret quest to identify a mole in the agency. Horse owners and trainers are being tipped off before FACSA raids. Hinkley, who misses his adrenaline-fueled days working undercover, is grateful for the change of pace.

A few days before the Kentucky Derby, the timing of a FACSA raid on barns at Churchill Downs is moved up several days, surprising even the agents and certainly the suspect trainer, and one of them shoots the trainer dead. It’s evident the mole is still at work, but worse is about to happen.

Two Derby favorites come down with equine influenza, leaving only one favorite, Fire Point, who wins both the Derby and Preakness. To speed up his investigation, Hinkley poses as an Irish groom, and gets himself hired by Fire Point’s trainer at his Belmont Park stables. Oddly, since author Francis is from the U.K., Hinkley’s speech doesn’t seem especially British, nor particularly Irish in word choice or rhythm when he’s acting as the groom.

Before long, there isn’t much mystery as to who’s is tampering with the horses and how they’re doing it—Francis provides a clue as big as Secretariat’s legendary 31-length win in the Belmont Stakes. Nor is there a puzzle regarding motive. Any Triple Crown winner will generate many millions in stud fees, well beyond his potential racing purses. But if a horse has had equine influenza, his stud career is over before it starts.

Francis’s plot effortlessly and admirably engages the ticking clock device that has become such a staple of thrillers. The rapidly approaching Belmont Stakes means some of the world’s most valuable equine athletes are at risk. And that mole is still out there.

In an unconvincing subplot, a young Puerto Rican groom is overtly hostile to Hinkley, which only adds to his unease as he works around the barns. Plus, there’s the risk he’ll be recognized, and he is well aware of the lengths to which people will go to make sure Fire Point becomes a Triple Crown winner.

If you liked Francis’s other novels or if you just love the pulse-pounding Sport of Kings, you should enjoy this latest entrant in a storied bloodline. Or watch the excellent television series Luck, starring Dustin Hoffman, alas, only one season.

The Lion in Winter

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Rear: Dee Hoty, Michael Cumpsty; front: Hubert Point-Du Jour, Noah Averbach-Katz; photo: Amanda Crommett

It’s Christmas 1183. The succession to the English throne is in disarray.

The reasons are well laid out for you in this production at Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, which I recently saw in preview (opening night is November 18). If you go—and for many reasons the play is well worth seeing—the problems in the second act will most likely have been resolved by director Tyne Rafaeli.

James Goldman’s 1966 play exposed deep schisms in the English court as Henry II (played by Michael Cumpsty) reached the “advanced” age of 50. He is intent upon preserving his empire, which includes England and provinces in France, especially the jewel, Aquitaine, acquired through his marriage to the elegant, passionate Eleanor (Dee Hoty). While he holds court in France, she has been imprisoned in an English castle for the past decade for treachery against Henry. She’s just arrived at the Chinon castle, released temporarily to celebrate Christmas in the viper-riddled bosom of her family.

The couple’s oldest son has died, and they are left with an unpromising trio of sons: Richard (KeiLyn Durrel Jones), Geoffrey (Hubert Point-Du Jour), and the youngest, John (Noah Averbach-Katz). Sullen warrior Richard (the Lionhearted) is the queen’s choice to succeed Henry, but the king wants the childish and rather dim John to follow him. For some reason that even he cannot understand, the scheming Geoffrey is overlooked by everyone, a non-entity in a family of manipulative power brokers.

All five of them are plotting and counter-plotting, negotiating and undermining, and trying their best to strike secret deals with the visiting 18-year-old French King Philip (Ronald Peet). Philip agrees to every plot. Why not? This is first-rate entertainment. If they tear each other apart, as every indication suggests they will, he can step in and pick up the pieces.

Henry and Eleanor’s relationship is the real heart of the play, and it has been complicated by Eleanor’s young step-daughter Alais (pronounced “Alice” and played by Madeleine Rogers), who has a long-running affair with Richard. Cumpsty and Hoty are strong in their roles, and play off each other beautifully—believable antagonists whose love still breaks through, time to time. He was a teenager when she first saw him at the French court, “with a mind like Aristotle and a body like Mortal Sin.” Were their sons ever more than pawns in their dangerous game?

Despite the deadly seriousness of the characters’ plotting, the play has quite a few lines intended to draw laughter and they did. Under Rafaeli’s direction, Act I perked along smoothly. Act II lost energy and felt over-long. I trust they will tighten that up.

Kristen Robinson’s scenic design nicely reinforces the king’s reference to the family as “jungle creatures,” and Andrea Hood’s costumes—especially for Eleanor—are gorgeous. Alais is a pale waif beside her. For tickets, call the box office at 732-345-1400 or visit the box office online.

The Coup Against Public Opinion

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constitutional_conventionBet you think this will be about politics. It is, but not how you think. The Framer’s Coup: The Making of the US Constitution is Michael J. Klarman’s book about the formation and adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Politicians who wave the Constitution about should perhaps read his book first. As he described in a recent lecture at the David Library of the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers tore up what they were supposed to do in Philadelphia and rewrote our founding document quite differently than what the people expected.

Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor, believes the Constitution was a conservative response to the egalitarian impulses that produced the Revolutionary War. In the War, the founding fathers were frustrated at how slow the states were to provide support, deeming them “as obstructionist as the British.” And, they wanted government in the hands of “the right sort” of people—what today we would call “the elites.”

Contrary to what was expected, the framers of the Constitution produced a document that is more nationalizing, with certain explicit and implied powers reserved to the federal government, unlimited taxing and military authority, and the ability to regulate foreign and interstate commerce. It also has the ability to create laws “necessary and proper” to implement these provisions.

The federal government has a mechanism to enforce its supremacy, too, including the federal court system and rules that limit the powers of the states, forbidding them, for example, to print their own paper currency as they did in colonial times.

The Constitution’s anti-populist provisions include relatively long terms in office (for which we can be grateful; constant political campaigning sounds totally unbearable at the moment). Essentially, the men who framed the Constitution did not trust the people’s choice—“you might as well ask a blind man to pick a color,” they believed—and favored a system of indirect elections. Although members of the House of Representatives were to be elected directly, the number of these legislators was at first small, and they were elected from a state at large, not from specific districts, as now. This diluted an individual’s vote. Another of these anti-populist provisions was, of course, the Electoral College.

These friction points of more than 200 years ago are not irrelevant today. Texas governor Greg Abbott has agitated for a new Constitutional Convention aimed at restricting federal power. Article V of the Constitution allows for a new Constitutional Convention if two-thirds of state legislatures request it.

Klarman says, “there’s a reason there hasn’t been another one.” There are no rules in the Constitution about how such a body should proceed, making Article V “the black hole of constitutional law,” according to one legal scholar. Nor are their limits on what such a body can do, which means it could tear the whole thing up and start over, exactly as the Founding Fathers did.

*****Euphoria

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photo: Emilia, creative commons license

By Lily King – Based on events in the life of noted anthropologist Margaret Mead, Euphoria is the story of the warping of personality and relationships that occurs when a person is immersed in an alien culture. What survives, what does not.

In the 1930s, British anthropologist Andrew Bankson has lived a little too long, a little too isolated in a remote region of the Territory of New Guinea, studying the Kiona culture. A chance meeting with a married couple—fellow anthropologists Schuyler Fenwick, an Australian, and his successfully published wife, American Nell Stone—is an overpowering dose of the familiar, of kinship. It’s a lifeline for him. “I felt my loneliness bulge out of me like a goiter,” he writes from a later period, after a successful career.

Bankson is so grateful to talk to these other scientists, to speak English, to gossip, to have common reference points, he giddily persuades them to take on the study of a tribe father along the Sepik River that will place them at least within a few hours’ journey of the Kiona settlement. Physically and emotionally damaged from a few months with the ultra-violent Mumbanyo tribe, the couple also needs a change.

In Nell, Bankson finds a colleague with whom he can discuss, probe, and explore theories about the Kiona and even the entire purpose of anthropological research. Fen isn’t interested. He’s living off Nell’s grant money, not researching in any real sense, not documenting, not writing. He’s occupied in being jealous of his wife, perfecting his skills at self-justification, and letting his moral rudder erode.

Bankson learns much from Nell. His reminiscences about those heady days are interspersed with excerpts from her journal of the same time. Together, these sources create “a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace—a love triangle in extremis,” said reviewer Emily Eakin in the New York Times.

One of the fascinating aspects of the book is King’s descriptions of Nell’s methods—the kinds of questions she asks, the ways she elicits information, her nonjudgmental attitude, her respect. (Would she had been more judgmental about her husband.) The title refers to what she calls the deceptive moment of clarity “When you think you finally have a handle on the place. . . the briefest, purest euphoria.”

At one point, Nell writes in her journal: “You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words . . .words aren’t always the most reliable thing.” Yet, in advancing within their scientific community, words are exactly what they depend on. What words to choose and how to arrange them appears to be a Stone/Fenwick/Bankson breakthrough.

King does a terrific job evoking a sense of place, a thin fog of menace, and the cultures in which the scientists immerse themselves. When it was published in 2014, the book won the Kirkus Prize and the New England Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named a “best book of the year” by nearly 20 news outlets.

In real life, by the time Mead reached New Guinea, she was married to New Zealand anthropologist Reo Fortune and had published her popular and influential Coming of Age in Samoa. New Guinea research colleague Gregory Bateson became Mead’s third husband, and many of the details of the fictional Bankson’s life—his education, the deaths of his two brothers—mirror Gregory’s, but the plot of this book takes a quite different turn. It’s as if the author, musing on the three scientists stranded in the jungle, said to herself, “What if . . .?”

*****No Stone Unturned

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photo: Dan4th Nicholas, creative commons license

By Steve Jackson, narrated by Kevin Pierce. Every year, thousands of Americans disappear who are believed murdered, but their bodies are never found. Even if the police have a suspect, lack of a body and the evidence associated with it impedes and may even prevent prosecution. Without a body, the case may be just not winnable “beyond the shadow of a doubt.”

As harrowing as any fictional thriller, this absorbing book tells the real-life story of Colorado-based NecroSearch International—an organization of volunteer scientists that brings a surprisingly large array of disciplines to the search for clandestine graves and the analysis of the evidence they hold. What began as a research project has led to work with police forces from across the country to find the bodies of more than 300 people missing and believed murdered. This book, initially published in 2001, was updated in 2015 for the audio and Kindle editions.

When a small group of researchers began this work, they were interested only in developing more scientific methods for grave searches. They started by burying the bodies of pigs at various depths to see how, over time, different detection methods could yield useful results. Eventually, they added experts in additional specialties, bringing together forensic scientists, soil experts, naturalists, botanists who know which plants grow in disturbed soil, geologists, experts on hydrology, meteorology, psychology, geophysics, entomology, anthropology, and “cadaver dog” handlers. Some members now are from law enforcement.

They use technology—like ground-penetrating radar, infrared imaging, and aerial photography (now sometimes using drones)—but it’s their encyclopedic knowledge of the way soil, stone, water, plants, insects, and wildlife interact that sets them apart. The scientists always caution that no technology can reveal where a body is, but their methods can tell the police where to look.

When the police have a suspected grave site, the alternative, still used too often, is to bring in a backhoe, destroying evidence and disturbing the remains, so that tiny details that provide important clues are lost. NecroSearch approaches a site like an anthropologist exploring an ancient city, gently removing one layer of soil at a time and sifting it for evidence.

Their first of many setbacks was when some of the pigs were dug up and scavenged by animals. Once they realized a human corpse was as likely to be scavenged as one of the pigs, this became an opportunity to bring in animal behavior experts to consider likely predators and how they would deal with the remains.

Jackson, a journalist with a talent for clear and compelling prose, tells the story of their accumulating expertise through the actual cases they worked on—not all of which were successful. Team members work as volunteers, asking only for expense reimbursement. Their payment is in the form of satisfaction—the successful application of scientific methods to difficult problems, aiding the police in finding evidence that will allow a murderer to go to trial, and, every bit as important to them, giving closure to the family and the investigators, often after years of fruitless searching and agonizing uncertainty.

Kevin Pierce gives a fine, energetic reading that draws you into the cases and what it means to the scientists when they are able to resolve one. “There is no statute of limitations on murder,” they say, “and no statute of limitations on grief. The truth does matter.”

***Blonde Ice

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(photo: David Lytle, creative commons license)

By RG Belsky — This is the third crime mystery in the series featuring New York Daily News reporter Gil Malloy, dogged practitioner of a fading profession. Written in the first person, it holds you close to the genial Malloy and his ups and downs—reportorial, romantic, and bureaucratic.

On the up side, Gil Malloy has fallen into what may be the scoop of the year: a beautiful blonde serial killer is targeting married men cheating on their wives. Malloy’s print editor Marilyn Staley and his internet/social media editor Stacy Albright want to milk the sexy story for all it’s worth. Keeping these two antagonists happy could be a second career. Another plus, Malloy’s adored ex-wife Susan shows promising signs that all is not well with hubby #2. Is there a chance? Capstone to his good luck, Malloy has a juicy job offer from the man likely to be New York’s next mayor.

On the down side, Malloy discovers the scoop through Victoria Issacs, who tells him her husband’s gone missing. In a former life, Issacs was the infamous prostitute Houston. When Malloy wrote a Pulitzer-nominated feature article about her several years back, neglecting to disclose his quotes were all second-hand and he’d never actually met the elusive Houston, criticism of him and the paper was withering. He nearly lost his job, and the stress cost him his marriage. Saying too much about Issacs now will reveal that Malloy actually knows her real identity and, probably worse, has concealed it from his editors.

But Houston’s secret isn’t keepable when a hotel maid finds Walter Issacs dead. The knockout blonde who went up to the room with him has disappeared. As the murders keep coming, the chase is on: NYPD after the killer, and Malloy after the story.

Malloy is a regular-guy kind of narrator with a wisecracking exterior that makes for some lively banter in the newsroom and in his efforts to get back between the sheets with Susan. His colleagues keep telling him his constant jokes can wear thin. He knows that, but can’t seem to stop himself. It is, in fact, his armor.

Frustratingly, Staley, Albright, and NYPD detective Wohlers repeatedly jump to conclusions about the case, based on their assumptions and a remarkable lack of definitive evidence. The narrative glosses over various routine questions that arise in murder investigations. How is it possible there was no forensic evidence at any of these violent crime scenes? No long blonde hair, for instance? How did a woman overpower these much larger, fit men? Drugs are an obvious possibility, but there’s no mention of toxicology tests of the victims until Chapter 49. Although this book is not a police procedural, Malloy’s proximity to the investigation and his evident skills as a reporter suggest he should be asking questions exactly like these.

Despite these quibbles, it’s fun to spend time with Gil Malloy on another wild ride. Author Belsky is an experienced New York journalist who perceptively describes the woes and conflicts in today’s news business and conjures a realistic, energetic New York City, too.

****Foundation

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bayeux-tapestryBy Peter Ackroyd, narrated by Clive Chafer – Is it anxiety about the future that’s propelling me to spend much time lately thinking about the past? I’ve pulled out the family genealogy to work on a new (updated and improved!) version. And I read award-winning British biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd’s 2013 Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors: The History of England Book 1. Several subsequent volumes are planned, four of which have been published..

Foundation takes you from England’s earliest pre-history and the building of Stonehenge, through its occupation by the Romans, the Norman Conquest, the revolt of the barons, and up to the reign of Henry VIII. That’s a lot of history to cover, and to cover it takes more than 18 hours (or almost 500 pages in the print edition).

If one thing is clear from those often difficult and violent early centuries, history doesn’t move forward in a straight line. It’s full of contingencies. There are setbacks, and unexpected jogs in the path. Yet, the habits and customs of the English people, the rights they accumulated, their preoccupations, and, especially, the development of the common law and a vigorous language are part of the patrimony of Americans today. In that sense, this volume is well-named.

Starting with William the Conqueror (1066), I already knew a bit about English monarchy (enough anyway to recite the succession of  kings and queens over the past millennium, an especially lively rendition after a g&t). What fascinated me about Ackroyd’s approach is not so much the parade of often-bloody regime changes, but his parallel descriptions of the lives of everyday people. What was life actually like for those masses we don’t see much of in a BBC costume drama? Makes you glad to live in the 21st century, I can tell you.

Scholars have quibbled with bits of Ackroyd’s research and speculations and lament the lack of footnotes, maps, and documentation—a problem irrelevant in the audio version—but can’t fault him for readability. Foundation isn’t written for them.

Chafer is a fine narrator, a little stiff, but his presentation matches well with his subject matter. This is another one of those books that I wish I’d read in paper and had a physical copy to flag and refer back to. Much in it is worth rereading and remembering. In an interview with Euan Ferguson in The Guardian, Ackroyd said, “what underlines that random happenstance (of history) are the deep continuities of national life that survive, uninfluenced by surface events.” One can hope.

Frida Kahlo: Her Casa Is Our Casa

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photo: Jodi Goalstone

After setting all-time attendance records with 500,000 visitors at New York’s Botanical Garden (NYBG), Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life is firmly planted in Tucson through next May.

Tucson Botanical Gardens is the only other American institution to display the inspiring homage to Kahlo’s Casa Azul, her childhood home in Mexico City. That distinction is fitting because Sonoran Desert plant species are quite similar to the ones at Casa Azul. Kahlo described her beloved home this way: “Mi casa no es tan cómoda, pero tiene un color muy bonito. My house is not so comfortable, but it is nice of color.”

According to an article in the Desert Leaf, a Tucson magazine, the idea for the exhibition germinated when the NYBG’s vice president for exhibitions interviewed a job candidate who had worked and studied in Latin America. Discussing their joint botanical passions led them to the idea of showcasing Kahlo’s gardens.

NYBG engaged hundreds of scientists along with Broadway scenic designer Scott Pask (a part-time Tucson resident and graduate of the University of Arizona) to recreate the key structural elements.

Kahlo, Rivera

photo: Jodi Goalstone

Renowned for her unsmiling, direct gaze and iconic unibrow as much as her artistic acumen, Kahlo found refuge and inspiration in her gardens. After her marriage (not to mention separation, divorce and remarriage) to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, they purchased property adjacent to Casa Azul and tripled the size of the gardens. They lived there from 1929 until 1954.

According to exhibit materials, Rivera, at Kahlo’s suggestion, designed a four-tier pyramid structure to house his large collection of pre-Hispanic artifacts. Agave and cacti crowned the palapa (woven grass) roof to reflect the blend of indigenous culture and history. This representation is what the visitor sees as a centerpiece of the exhibition. Other plantings around Casa Azul included yucca, organ pipe cactus, bougainvillea, and jacaranda.

But the area wasn’t meant only for solitary contemplation, according to Mexican artist Humberto Spindola. NYBG commissioned him to recreate The Two Fridas, a Kahlo double self-portrait using amate (bark paper) typical of Aztec and traditional Mexican folk art, which Kahlo often used in her work.

photo: Jodi Goalstone

photo: Jodi Goalstone

Spindola told the Desert Leaf: “(They) held many fiestas and gatherings at the house and gardens, entertaining their many artist, poet, writer, and communist friends” with platters of Kahlo’s wonderful food, lots of tequila, and live mariachi music. They surely made an unusual couple; Rivera was about a foot taller than the 5’3” Kahlo and was 20 years her senior.

If you are planning a Southwest sojourn, Tucson is a diverse and distinctive destination. It now is a UNESCO World City of Gastronomy, and has a host of notable attractions including the Desert Museum, Mission San Xavier del Bac, and walking, hiking, and horseback riding in Sabino Canyon in the surrounding Santa Catalina Mountains. Additionally, there now is daily non-stop air service from JFK to Tucson on American Airlines.

For more information on the Kahlo exhibition, go to www.tucsonbotanical.org.

This guest post is by Tucson-based Jodi Goalstone, author of the entertaining blog Going Yard, Offbeat Baseball Musings, celebrating her 20th year living in the Old Pueblo.