Mural Capital of the World!

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mural, philadelphia

“Building the City” by Michael Webb (photo: Erik Anestad, creative commons license)

Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program has become a world leader in public art and community involvement with the amazing 4,000 murals it has supported now gracing the exterior walls of all types of buildings. Many of them, like “Building the City” above, use trompe l’oeil techniques that make you look twice: where does the building end and the mural begin?!

The roots of the program are in an initiative city government began 30 years ago to combat graffiti. But it has gone far beyond that limited goal, to become a positive force in the community, with a rich array of activities and initiatives. A key success factor was the decision to create a nonprofit organization to run the program, which allows it to raise money and increase its annual budget manyfold. Now only $1 in $6 comes from City of Philadelphia coffers.

The murals are community projects in every sense, in that neighborhood people actively participate in decisions about what and whom each mural should depict, and they also may help actually create the mural. The technology for producing murals has advanced in ways that enable groups as diverse as schoolchildren and prison inmates to help. Inmates are taught program-related job skills that may help them find future employment. Graffiti is rarely a problem on walls with murals, and community murals can motivate local development and pride. As MAP director Jane Golden says, “Art ignites change.”

In the old days, scaffolding or cherry-pickers were used to lift painters to the top of their big outdoor “canvas.” Some murals are still produced that way, with paint applied directly to the carefully prepared wall. Today, however, many murals are painted in pieces—usually five feet by five feet—on parachute cloth, which is what allows them to be worked on off-site. The painted cloths pieces are then glued in place on the wall. Over the years, paints used in the murals have improved too.

Because of UV protection, they are less likely to fade, and are expected to last from 25 to 30 years. Eight to 10 are scheduled for refurbishment each year. Although most of the murals are painted, some are partially or wholly completed in ceramic tiles.

The Mural Arts Program offers many guided tours—by neighborhood, by theme, by artist—allowing visitors to explore this remarkable public resource. Some of the tours are by trolley, segway, or bicycle. People who want go their own way will find a guide online. Many murals have collateral information available by app or phone.

Enlarging Your Travel Circle:

  • Philadelphia is less than 50 miles away when you’re visiting Wilmington (33 miles)
  • About 100 miles away when you’re in New York (96) or Baltimore (101) and
  • Only 140 miles away when you’re in Washington, D.C.

***The Sudden Disappearance of the Worker Bees

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honeybee

(photo: James DeMers for Pixabay)

By Serge Quadruppani (A Commissario Simona Tavianello Mystery) – On vacation somewhere in the mountainous part of Italy, police Commissario Simona Tavianello and her husband Marco, himself a capo commissario (police chief) encounter the dead body of an engineer for a major—and highly secretive—agricultural research firm. Local activists suspect the victim’s company of contributing to the disappearance of the area’s honeybees, and he’s been shot on the premises of a deserted beekeeper’s shop. While this case ordinarily wouldn’t involve the vacationing couple, it soon emerges that the murder weapon was Simona’s own gun.

A smarmy television reporter . . . an eccentric local scientist . . . a shady government spy . . . a ruthless industrialist—the full deck of eccentric personalities is here, against the backdrop of a real-life crisis in agriculture and some interesting speculation on the promise (or is it the threat?) of nanotechnology.

Possibly it’s an artifact of the translation of this mystery, but a time or two I was unclear which of the book’s many characters was under discussion. More puzzling was the author’s habit of having characters openly blurt out a confession, subverting the mystery. Poor Simona (who ordinarily works for the anti-mafia squad) is involved in the case because of her gun, and she’s also in the way, as the local police try to sort things out.

Her husband is retired and she herself is described as white-haired and a little thick around the middle, yet she still has an eye for the handsome beekeeper that arouses her husband’s jealousy, mostly good-natured. They are old antagonists, locked in a lifelong battle that pleases them both. Their relationship is quite fun for the reader, too.

Quadruppani has a distinctive, somewhat breathless writing style, moving his characters rapidly from one scene to another, and a facility with description of the Italian countryside and lifestyle. Fans of previous books in this series may have developed a fondness for Simona and Marco. As a first-time reader, I found the pace a little frantic—too reminiscent of a bee flitting from flower to flower, gaining information pollen grain by grain, but still needing some serious processing to produce honey.

****The Romanov Sisters

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Tsar, Russia, Romanov

Standing: Maria, Tsaritsa Alexandra; seated, Olga, Tsar Nicholas II, Anastasia, Alexey, Tatiana

By Helen Rappaport – Prepare to have your heart broken. Like everyone, I knew that the Russian Revolution of 1917 brought a violent end to the rule of the Romanov family and the tsars. I also knew the gruesome trivia that Tsaritsa Alexandra had family jewelry taken apart and the gems sewn into her daughters’ clothing. In July 1918, when the family was led to the tiny half-cellar room where they were shot, at first many of the bullets struck the gems and bounced away, giving the fleeting impression the girls were impervious to them.

Rappaport wrote about that last horrific scene in a previous book, Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs, and she may have wanted to spare us—and herself—from reliving it. In this book, she follows the family right up to its final hours, and I found myself reading more and more slowly, trying to delay the inevitable.

Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia were 22, 21, 19, and 17 at the time of their deaths. The book follows the courtship and marriage of their parents, the births and childhoods, and their maturing to young women through remaining letters diaries, and reminiscences of friends and relatives at the time. The reader comes to know these intelligent, warm-hearted, and lively young women well, and their unnecessary death is devastating.

It’s perhaps inevitable to speculate about a happier outcome. What if Nicholas hadn’t unexpectedly become Tsar at the age of 26? What if he’d been a stronger, more experienced military and political leader, a more flexible one, receptive to the idea of constitutional monarchy? What if their mother had been less withdrawn, chronically ill, and mentally fragile and had fostered—rather than assumed—the love of the Russian people? What if heir Alexey hadn’t inherited the hemophilia gene? Would she not have fallen under the sway of the much-reviled Grigory Rasputin?

Even without any of these circumstances, what if Nicholas and Alexandra had taken one of their many opportunities to leave Russia or at least send their daughters abroad? Eventually, even England’s King George V—determined to keep Soviet Russia as an ally in the war against Germany—withdrew his offer to provide his cousins safe haven.

They girls lives were closely sheltered, and they saw little of life as it existed outside their palaces or aboard the imperial yacht used for summer vacations. Alexandra often dressed them all in long white dresses, and that’s the picture most people had of them: remote, inviolate.

Russia, Romanov

Olga & Tatiana with a wounded soldier

An exception arose during the War, when Alexandra, Olga, and Tatiana trained to be nurses. Alexandra couldn’t reliably fulfill these duties because of her health, but the older two—especially Tatiana—were tireless. They wrapped bandages, dressed wounds, assisted in surgery, cleaned instruments, and did everything they could to aid the wounded soldiers in their care, including raising funds for their hospitals. The two younger girls read to the wounded and wrote letters for them.

These soldiers, like everyone else who met them, repeatedly remarked how natural and unaffected the girls were, how curious they were about the lives of other people. They were not at all like what they expected Grand Duchesses to be or what their popular image was. Rappaport has written a well researched, engaging biography of these brief lives and a century-old crime.

 

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****On the Road with Del and Louise

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Route 66, highway, Arizona

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By Art Taylor– Is it OK to say a book by a male author is “charming”? Regardless of possible gender-bias, this book is. Del and Louise are a couple brought together by crime. They met when Del was robbing the 7-11 in Eagle Nest, New Mexico, where Louise worked. They stay together during a succession of American-style self-reinventions aimed at getting a “fresh start,” reinventions that invariably wind up in one shady enterprise or another, and they ultimately . . . well, read the book and find out.

Taylor is an award-winning short story writer, and the individual chapters of this picaresque could stand alone. In fact, the first two chapters have done so, in past issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, where I first read and admired his work. His stories have won numerous Derringer, Agatha, and Macavity awards and are frequently anthologized.

What’s especially fun about On the Road is how well Taylor develops the two principal characters. Del wants to do right, to get straight, but it just isn’t happening, and Louise isn’t above a little larceny herself, if it promotes the couple’s welfare. Del’s intelligence is complemented by Louise’s cleverness in a pinch, and Del’s planning skills by Louise’s gut instincts. Together, they are a “doing the best they can” pair and their story is filled with humor and insight into human failings. The people they meet along the way have plenty of those, as they do themselves.

Their adventures are recounted by Louise in a straightforward and wry narrative voice that includes plenty of insight into her own shortcomings. Although the text is relatively unembellished, Taylor allows himself some spot-on literary flourishes (for instance, when he describes an early morning near Taos as “the sun creeping up, the boil not yet on the day”) and comic bits: “If that first winery we went to was upper crust, the bar in Napa was sure the bottom of the pie.”

Their travels take them from New Mexico to Victorville and Napa Valley, California, then to a comically disastrous scene in a Las Vegas wedding chapel (do I even need to say “cheesy”?). A stint in the North Dakota oil fields proves financially rewarding and emotionally bankrupting. There, Louise learns anew that “The reasons you do things don’t always make up for the doing of them.” Finally they reach North Carolina, Louise’s home state, and her acerbic mother Cora. Her relentless belittling and undermining of Del are priceless, as if all the wicked thrusts and jabs of a lifetime must be desperately delivered in one short visit.

Taylor has created an enjoyable tale and some nerve-wracking adventures without the need for a gruesome body count or far-fetched end-of-the-word-as-we-know-it scenarios. Because the story is so grounded in imperfect humanity and told so convincingly, we share Del and Louise’s bumpy ride, rooting for them every mile of the way. While their lives will never be trouble-free, the reader senses they will always be good.

A longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website.

Bees to Honey, Moths to Light, Readers to Books

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Anthony DoerrA recent post by “Sarah” for Written Word Media described four principles of book cover design that psychological research  shows influence most people. Although individual preferences of course vary, there are enough common denominators to help readers understand why they’re drawn to a particular book on the bookstore table and to help authors and designers increase the odds that their book is the one picked up. On my next trip to the bookstore, I’m going to check this out!

The Big Green Tent, Ludmila UlitskayaSymmetry in the placement of image, title, author name, and so on. The examples used include All the Light We Cannot See, in which every element is centered on the page, except the later-added National Book Award notice, which stands out by its very non-symmetrical placement. A recent book cover I found myself quite drawn to was that for The Big Green Tent, and you’ll see that it gets a check mark in the symmetry box, too.

The Long Fire, Meghan TifftSimplicity in design also gets points. A chaotic cover may suggest chaos within. Give a prospective buyer too many images and text blocks, and the eye doesn’t really know where to look. There are lots of bad examples (some hilarious), but a good one is The Long Fire. Only after you’ve started reading do you realize the smudging over the lips has significance, but you don’t need to understand (or much notice) that beforehand. Subtle. Simple.

Ghost FleetColor. While I’m notorious for saying, “I don’t care what color it is, as long as it’s green,” in fact a more universally attractive color is blue. As Sarah says, color conveys (or should) a lot about the book’s mood. Note the color similarity between All the Light and the techno-thriller Ghost Fleet. Romance novels tend toward red (hot!), chick-lit toward pink and purple, thrillers toward red and black, darkness and fog. Glance at the rack in an airport and you can pretty much peg the books’ genre without reading a word of cover copy.

In Cold Blood, Truman CapoteContrast allows some elements in the book cover to stand out more than others. A book by a new author will likely emphasizes the title. Truman Capote was pretty well known when he wrote In Cold Blood and the cover reflects that. When it was written, there was a lot of buzz about that book, and the cover was designed so you couldn’t miss it. Admire the single drop of blood. (Or is that a hatpin?)

Typography – I’m adding a fifth item here that unlike Sarah’s tips relies not on science but purely in the domain of opinion. Color choice, use of images, and density of information on covers all have styles and trends. Sometimes a designer innovates to make a cover stand out; sometimes designers just copy what has worked well for another book—thinking or hoping readers will make some association with these past successes. Typography has gone through or may still be in the middle of one of those copycat phases, in which the cover’s words are designed to look hand-written in chalk or crayon. I first noticed this technique with The Fault in Our Stars (2012). Three years later, there are a half-dozen uses of it in this roundup of “most anticipated” new books for fall 2015. At that link you can see 42 new covers and Sarah’s principles followed and flaunted. Which are most attractive to you?

With all this in mind, read NPR’s recent deep dive into the significance and impact of the covers of the 2015 National Book Award shortlist with new appreciation!

Equivocation

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GunpowderPlot, quills

(artwork: Scott McKowen for STNJ)

Regrettably, this review comes after the run of Equivocation by award-winning playwright Bill Cain has ended at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. Still, I hope you’ll watch for this sharply witty and thought-provoking play locally or, if you’re from the NJ-NY region, will take a good look at STNJ’s future offerings. They’re having a terrific season.

It’s 1606, King James I is on the English throne (one of the country’s Scottish kings), and he has written a story. Powerful Prime Minister Sir Robert Cecil asks Shag (Shakespeare) to turn the king’s story into a play, with the promise of considerable reward to the Globe theater company if he is successful, and, if he is not, well . . . best not dwell on the details.

The story deals with the very recent event known as The Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of Catholic men tunneled under Parliament, smuggled in 36 barrels of gunpowder, and would have blown up the king, his family, many notables, and the whole House of Lords on Parliament’s opening day. A mysterious letter alerts the king, and the plot is foiled. A man named Guy Fawkes is caught, and the plotters, whose names are gradually extracted via torture, are hideously murdered. Cecil knows a dramatization by Shag will fix the treasonous details about the powder plot in the memory of history.

While the theater company is overjoyed by the prospect of a royal commission, Shag resists writing about current-day events, especially as he comes to doubt the truth of the official version. The risks of being truthful are grimly evident, yet he won’t write a lie.

But what is a lie? The arrest of Father Henry Garnet, a Jesuit who wrote a book called Equivocation, brings this question to light. The priest asks his inquisitor, “If the king were in your house, and his enemies came to your door asking if he were there, would you say ‘yes’—and betray him—or would you say ‘no’—a lie?” Equivocation, the priest tells Shag, allows you to look at the question behind the question. And the real question in this instance is, “May I come in and kill the king?” And the answer is “no.” This is the key to resolving Shag’s struggle with the king’s powder plot story, too.

Cain’s play is deeply interesting historically, politically, religiously, theatricallly, and, as director Paul Mullins said in a post-show discussion, if you want to see it as current-day political allegory, “that’s OK, too.” At the same time it’s fast-moving, full of action, humor, and clever ripostes. Only six cast members play all the parts—many of them taking on 10 or more roles—and yet the staging was so expertly managed and so well acted that who they were playing was perfectly clear, moment to moment. This production had some shocking special effects too.

STNJ newcomers this year Matthew Stucky as Sharpe (a player, the King, plotter Wintour, etc.) and Dominic Comperatore as Nate (a player, Cecil, etc.), and long-time company utility infielder Kevin Isola as Armin (a player, a witch, states’ attorney, Lady Macbeth, etc.) deserve special mention, though all performances were strong.

Regarding The Gunpowder Plot, the program notes say, “The only thing we know with certainty about the event itself is that it could not possibly have occurred in the way the government claimed.” Accepted at face value for centuries, the government’s story has elicited more recent doubts, and even Parliament’s official website suggests the plot might have been the work of agents-provocateurs who wanted to discredit the Jesuits and cement the Protestant religion in the land.

Learning to Drive

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Ben Kingsley, Patricia Clarkson, Learning to DriveDirector Isabel Coixet has put together an altogether pleasant comedy (trailer) set in Manhattan, although much of the action takes place on the inside—inside Wendy Shields (played by Patricia Clarkson) whose husband has left her for younger woman, forcing her to rethink her life. This leads to the startling decision to learn to drive. It takes place on the inside of her Sikh driving instructor, Darwan (Ben Kingsley), whose life is upended by the arrival of an Indian woman he’s never met who’s expecting to become his wife. And, it takes place on the inside of Jasleen (Sarita Choudhury), who speaks little English and who has entered a much more foreign territory than a stamp on a passport would suggest.

The superb cast conveys all the internal yearning, turmoil, disappointment, and joy experienced by these characters without the burden of a heavy-handed script. Writer Sarah Kernochan based the screenplay on a New Yorker essay and built in plenty of funny and sweet moments, too. Especially appreciated is the opportunity to see the colorful and intriguing interior of a Sikh temple.

The cramped confines of a car make for filming challenges worthy of a team of contortionists, but it’s an intimate setting, too (as the excellent 2008 British movie Happy Go Lucky proved), in which quotidian experiences are spiced with the ever-present possibility of catastrophe (bicyclists! trucks! jaywalkers!). “You can’t always trust people to behave properly,” Darwan advises, and this truism resonates with his pupil. Though she would add the caveat that he actually does.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 67%; audiences 68%. Hard to understand why the critics dinged this movie for “predictability” and didn’t notice that exact problem in the awful Grandma which they liked! If you’ve had a hard week or are allergic to people screaming their problems at you for two hours, this is the better choice.

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Lincoln and More — Springfield, Illinois

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New Salem, Lincoln, log cabin

New Salem, Ill. (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

A recent visit to Springfield included both highs and lows. Among the highs: the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum provides a creatively constructed retelling of the Lincoln story. While a familiar one, there also are a few surprises. The displays include two “Journeys”—the boyhood journey and the White House journey—special exhibits and a short film. All very nicely done. What surprised me most, perhaps because I’d forgotten in the recent outpouring of regard for Lincoln and my admiration of Daniel Day-Lewis, is the extent and viciousness of the press coverage of his Presidency. His critics weren’t above taking swipes at Mary Todd Lincoln, either. Perhaps our political dialog hasn’t moved toward more civility in the last 150 years, alas.

Lincoln home

The Lincoln home (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

Other Lincoln-related highs were the reconstruction and historic district where his Springfield home stands—the only house he ever owned. Very interesting. And shifting back in time and creature comforts, New Salem, a recreated village a few miles northwest of Springfield, recreates the community where a young Lincoln lived for six years. There he tried to run two general stores and their failure prompted him to try something else—the law. New Salem includes 23 historically furnished buildings—homes, stores, shops, tavern, and so on, with costumed interpreters happy to tell you about life in this short-lived frontier outpost.

The state capitol was an unexpected beauty! Construction began in 1868, and it now appears to be in the last stages of a major renovation, complete with recreation of the elaborate stenciling and its acres of marble gleaming. There are tours, but we did it on our own, and since the legislative bodies were not in session, we could duck into the elaborately detailed house and senate chambers. If beauty is elevating, the people doing the people’s business have a lot to aspire to.

Illinois Statehouse, capitol, stenciling

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

We also enjoyed historic Edwards Place, home of the Springfield Art Association and a good demonstration of the stages of architectural renovation, and especially the Dana-Thomas House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1902. Owner and widow Susan Lawrence Dana wanted a place she could entertain for her various charities, and Wright gave her so much more! Small rooms, but 35 of them in 16 different living levels totaling 12,000 square feet, a nine-pins alley, a feast of leaded glass ornamentation in stylized Midwestern motifs—butterflies, corn, other plants—the largest collection of site-specific original Wright art glass.

On the downside, Springfield itself is tired and dusty. Several things we wanted to see were unexpectedly closed. The restaurant where we’d made an Open Table reservation was closed for vacation and—worst of all—someone stole my umbrella on a day it was pouring! Luckily, I saw her with it outside the capitol and said, “I think that’s mine.” It must have been my New Jersey affect—Tony Soprano and all. She surrendered it immediately.

Your Travel Circles:

  • Springfield is less than a hundred miles away when you’re in St. Louis (96 miles)
  • You’re only about 200 miles from Springfield when you’re in Chicago, Indianapolis (213), or Columbia, Mo. (185)

****The Laughing Monsters

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Freetown, Africa

Freetown (photo: bobthemagicdragon, creative commons license)

By Denis Johnson – The Laughing Monsters (2014) is an antic suspense novel that focuses on two friends—one white, one black—whose wild adventure starts in pre-Ebola Freetown, Sierra Leone, and unravels across Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ghana. Their goal is to make a financial killing doing something—selling government secrets, peddling fake uranium—then retire to a life on the beach.

Roland Nair, the book’s narrator, is a Scandinavian/American/NATO spook and an admitted coward in a land where courage needs to come in more than the liquid form he prefers. His long-time friend, handsome Michael Adriko, a son of Uganda, teeters on the edge of a major breakdown. Adriko’s undeniable courage and latent lethality is a good way to get both men into trouble. And does. But is Nair working with Adriko or against him?

Also along for the ride is Michael’s fifth fiancée, Davidia, daughter of a U.S. military commander running a secret post somewhere in the Congo. Davidia is beautiful—men’s “gazes followed behind her as if she swept them along with her hands,” and both Nair and Adriko want her. She’s patiently trying to make the best of their low-budget accommodations and travel arrangements, but even she reaches her limit and, anyway, her father wants her back.

Johnson, who won the National Book Award for his 2007 novel about Vietnam, Tree of Smoke, effectively evokes the fractured spirit of the place—the do-si-do-ing for advantage of the operatives loosely connected with various spy agencies with whom they negotiate, the tunnel vision of the American military personnel, the sinister and sometimes overtly threatening village residents they encounter when they’re far from transportation and cell phone coverage.

banana leaves

(photo: Sandi Plek, creative commons license)

The author presents his characters with precision and a fine appreciation of absurdity. Here’s how Nair describes one of Michael’s reckless schemes: “As [Michael] expressed these ideas he followed them with his eyes, watching them gallop away to the place where they made sense.”

Johnson is equally good at conveying the sensory-overload of the African environment: not only the mind-baking heat and the mud and the tainted water, but the ramshackle villages and spluttering vehicles, the barmen and the prostitutes. Nair plunges into political incorrectness with an unforgettable description of an African prostitute “wearing a curly blonde wig, like a chocolate-covered Marilyn Monroe.”

I really enjoyed the first 175 pages or so of this 228-page book, though in the final section, the gods of chaos and Really Bad Hangovers hijacked the narrative, and I felt I was losing the thread. On the whole, it is as described by New York Times critic Joy Williams, “cheerfully nihilistic” as it lays bare the “giddy trickle-down of global exploitation and hubris—the farcical exploits of cold dudes in a hard land.”

Indianapolis Gems

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Indianapolis has been on a 50-year path to assuring its downtown remains vital and inviting. More than a billion dollars has been spent in downtown development, which included its successful early efforts to become a sports mecca (it’s home to the National Collegiate Athletic Association and National Federation of State High School Associations).

In the last decade, the city has created 150 miles of bike lanes and trails. The award-winning Cultural Trail alone has generated about $300 million in new development. Opened in 2013, this wide pedestrian and bicycle path makes an eight-mile loop around the city’s center, linking the Capitol, the Indianapolis Zoo (Luckily we didn’t go there on the day we visited downtown. A cheetah got loose—no end to the excitement in Indy!), the Canal and White River State Park, six cultural districts, and major museums.

One of these is the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art—an unexpected delight in this flat Midwestern city. Noteworthy paintings and bronze sculptures in the downstairs galleries provide a mostly romanticized view of their subjects—settlers, Indians, cowboys, and the landscape. Such works were how Americans on the East Coast first came to appreciate the beauty of America west of the Mississippi.

Upstairs are beautiful photographic portraits and artifacts from many American Indian cultures. The museum offers hands-on demonstrations for kids, too, as well as special exhibits and sales throughout the year. The museum’s indoor-outdoor cafe overlooks the canal and offers southwestern cuisine. A great stop. Also see my review of the Eiteljorg’s neighbor, the Indianapolis State Museum.

Your Travel Circles:

  • You’re only an hour from Indianapolis when you’re in Bloomington (51 mi)
  • About two hours away when you’re in Cincinnati (112), Louisville (115), or Dayton (117)
  • About three hours away when you’re in Columbus (175) or Chicago (182)