First things first: the Washington Monument is an amazing structure when you consider how old it is.  It’s like a 50 story skyscraper built of stone blocks, with no steel to reinforce anything.  Inside, it’s clear that gravity holds this thing together.  The security procedure was, again, rigorous, and that alone must sharply reduce the number of visitors that can be accommodated daily.  The elevator takes you to a landing at the very top of the obelisk, and the mark on the floor indicates a height of 500 feet.  There are two small windows on each face of the pyramidal section of the monument, and depending on which direction you face you see either the WWII Memorial, Lincoln Memorial and Arlington, Virginia; the Capitol and RFK Stadium; the Jefferson Memorial and Reagan National Airport; or the Elipse and the White House.

The Jefferson Memorial requires a hike, but is well worth it.  I love classically inspired architecture, and this structure has about as many columns, steps and pediments as you could fit into a respectable design.  Plus, inside there’s a great big statue.

The National Archives is not far from the Smithsonian Museums, and is a handsome building in its own rights, with a fine dome.  Beneath that dome, of course, are our nation’s most precious possessions: the original Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights.  You know you’ve got some good stuff on display when you decide to keep the Magna Carta off in a corner somewhere.  The cafeteria there was surprisingly good (and very surprisingly affordable), and the elevator was fancy.  Plus, it was at the National Archives that I saw the only authentic Lincoln document of my entire trip, a letter in his own hand.  The Library of Congress has two copies of the Gettysburg Address, and the National Archives has, I believe, the Emancipation Proclamation, but they are too delicate to display for more than a few days each year.  Still, I was glad I got to see something, at least, that bore Lincoln’s own signature.

Time didn’t allow a visit to the National Gallery of Art, alas, but I did go through the sculpture garden.  Most everything in it sucked big time.  But they did have a Calder stabile, so that was nice.  One evening I took the Metro to the Dupont Circle stop and visited the Phillips Collection.  It’s an art museum in an old mansion in a neighborhood that now houses many of the international embassies.  I am very glad that admission was free, because I really only was interested in seeing one thing there.  I made a pretty weak attempt to imitate a painting, too.

So, I missed the National Cathedral, Cedar Hill, the Bureau of Printing and Engraving and the FDR Memorial.  The National Museum of American History and Ford’s Theater were closed, and my White House tour didn’t come through.  But I’ll go back someday.  Huzzah!

We left Gainesville on Tuesday morning before sunrise.  In fact, I probably slept only three hours the night before, and Miriam didn’t sleep at all.  We were at Gainesville Regional Airport by 5 AM, and in Chicago by 10 AM (Central).  Midway is apparently the neglected step-child of Chicago airports.  We took a shuttle bus into the city, and arrived at our hotel hungry.

To solve that problem we started walking, past the busy hot dog vendor in the plaza downstairs from us, and ate instead in Millennium Park, which is a magical place.  Many others were there to picnic as well.  The weather was perfect – in the low 70s and breezy with white fluffy clouds over head.  As we ate our hot dogs we listened to an orchestra rehearse Wagner.  From there we crossed the gardens and Grant Park, stopping at Buckingham Fountain (which is enormous), before arriving at the Field Museum.  I had visited the Field Museum when I was a child, but that was so long ago I can recall very little of it.  I doubt I loved it as much then, too.  Everything was amazing, including the T. rex, the plant and animal dioramas, the cases of minerals, and the building itself.  They even had a temporary exhibit about mythical creatures, including the Unicorn, and I got to touch a narwhal horn which was once presented as having come from the mythical beast.  As Jeff might say, I harnessed the power of the Unicorn.

After all that walking we stopped and had delicious iced novelties at a stand along Lake Michigan.  It was the best snow cone in history.  For dinner we took a cab up to the tourist-centric Navy Pier, but I was determined to ride a huge Ferris Wheel, and we did.  It was great.  The moon was rising over the lake, the skyline of the city was spectacular.  It was one of life’s perfect moments.

I spent most of Wednesday with Burt, who, unfortunately couldn’t come to town by train, and had to drive instead, spending what must have been a fortune to park.  But we had lunch together, then took the subway to the Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium.  At closing time we went out and sat on some steps by the harbor.  The weather was splendid, but it was as bright as could be.  The city looked majestic.  Once Miriam was finished with her work activities we all had dinner at Giordano’s, right around the corner from our hotel.  It was delicious, and filling.  Burt had to be heading home, but Miriam and I walked over to Millennium Park again to listen to an orchestral concert.  We heard Respighi’s Pines of Rome.  There were so many people out enjoying the evening, and we decided to do the same, once again visiting the popular sculpture Cloud Gate, which everyone seems to love.

I had the next day to myself, and I spent the morning walking around the Chicago River and taking photos of the architecture.  Our hotel was right near the Wrigley Building and the Tribune Building, and just a stone’s throw from Marina City. Then I rode a bus down to the Museum of Science and Industry, which is on the south side of the city.  Along the way the bus passed by an amazing number of old townhouses with fabulous steps and doorways.  I was impressed how even at such a distance from the Loop district, great numbers of people live in high-rise buildings, each of which must have impressive views of the city skyline or the lake. I had been to the Museum of Science and Industry when I was a child, and I remember at the time looking through the periscope of the U-505 submarine and seeing an old car parked in an alley.  They’ve since moved the captured Nazi vessel to its own subterranean wing of the complex. The tiniest part of the exhibit made the biggest impact on me.  It was a metal identification badge with an eagle on a swastika, above which are the words “GOTT MIT UNS”.  What a disgusting claim.  The museum has the largest, and therefore coolest model train layout I have ever seen.  I played with it for a long time.  Proof that it is a big museum: the 727 suspended above the aforementioned train layout and full size locomotive. I stared at the Foucault pendulum for a long time trying to understand it, to no avail.  Admission was free; bus fare was only $2, and we passed Soldier Field on the way back.  In the evening we went out to dinner, then explored the theater district en route to see Wicked at the Oriental Theater.  It was a fancy place, and I was a bit surprised that I actually enjoyed the show a great deal.  Credit must be given to the lead actresses, especially Annaleigh Ashford who played Glinda.  I can’t imagine enjoying anyone more in the role (except, perhaps, Kristen Chenoweth, but that’s no surprise).  I have seen video of other actresses in the role, and I know I would not have liked the show as much had I seen someone else in the part. In any case, the story and feel were far enough removed from The Wizard of Oz that I never found myself comparing the two, which is good because nothing could live up to that standard, particularly Arlen and Harburg’s music.

Friday, the first day of summer, promised to be one of the best of my life.  I spend the morning doing more walking around, up Michigan Avenue with its lovely planters to the old Water Tower; along the river across its bridges; and to the Merchandise Mart. What amazes me about Chicago is how an Art Deco building like the Merchandise Mart can coexist with the nearby Gothic, French Renaissance, Structural Expressionist, Beaux Arts, Neoclassical and Chicago Style architecture.  Even the horribly ugly Daley Center is rendered less offensive by its proximity to much handsomer structures.  All I can say about the afternoon’s pilgrimage to Wrigley Field is that it was a dream come true.  It seems smaller in person, but is beyond a doubt the perfect place to watch baseball.  For the record, I paid almost $180 for two tickets in section 240, at the end of row 13; the paid attendance was 41,106; the Cubs beat the White Sox 4-3 off a home-run in the bottom of the 9th.  I was glad to call my dad during “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”.  We beat the crowd back to the Addison station and made our way via bus to a store called Penelope’s in a neighborhood near Wicker Park.  The shop girl explained the abundance of young people was due to the relatively low rent (her three-bedroom was $1,000/mo.)  Miriam bought some nice new clothes.  We rode the train back to the Loop and visited the Art Institute, where we saw many wonderful sculptures and famous paintings.  They even had furniture.  We got in one last evening walk before a late dinner.  The city still felt very safe at eleven o’clock, and the weather was cool and the sidewalks busy.

The next morning we met up with an old friend of Miriam’s, drove through the downtown one last time then had a delightful time at the Brookfield Zoo (gallery coming soon).  We stayed Saturday night at a great hotel nearer to O’Hare.  It was a much better value than the considerably more expensive Hyatt Regency on Wacker Drive. We spent all of Sunday travelling home, including what seemed like an eternity at Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta.  I was sitting on the wrong side of the airplane to get a good shot of Gainesville as were were descending, but I got this shot of Waldo Road.  We arrived home at six o’clock on Sunday evening after leaving our hotel at 6:00 AM that morning.  It was a tough day.

I love Chicago, and if it weren’t ludicrously cold for months on end I would want to live there.

 Maybe I just need more education.  I recognize that the more you learn the more you can appreciate things that once appeared to make no sense.  And I am apt to defend abstract music that others may call noise.  Towards the end of the semester, as I was leaving a class in the Music Building, there were a hundred identical metronomes set up on a brick wall, all clicking away at different tempi.  It was György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique.  There are no actual instruments, and, by its very nature the music has a huge degree of unpredictability and every “performance” will be different; the metronomes swing back and forth until they stop, at different times depending on how much they were wound.  I wouldn’t compare it to the Missa Solemnis, but for what it is it’s okay. 

Of course, nobody can put a price on a hundred clicking metronomes.  And if they could, it wouldn’t be $86 million.

With 2004’s daylight robbery of the Munch Museum in Oslo fresh in my memory, this week’s theft of four Impressionist works from the Bührle Museum in Zürich has me enraged. A Cézanne, Van Gogh, Monet and Degas were snatched from the walls and tossed in a waiting van while the robbers held staff at gunpoint. Meanwhile, two Picassos were swiped last week.

Thank god the Munch masterpieces turned up relatively safe in the end, but you can never be sure what will happen to stolen art; these paintings are in danger.

What I don’t understand is how this can happen. Certainly, I do not wish that any bystander should risk their life fighting off an armed robber, but don’t these museums have any sort of security? The average Wal-Mart deposits less than a hundred thousand dollars per week, but they still send two armed guards in a bulletproof truck to pick it up. These paintings are worth over a hundred million dollars. Do you think that if a museum had a hundred million dollars in cash sitting on a table they wouldn’t have armed guards standing right there?  It’s not a difficult risk-management assessment to make.

We found easy parking along the west wall of the garden, and made our way inside where people were enjoying hot cider and cookies, and dancing to holiday songs sung live to a piano accompaniment. Almost immediately I saw people from my work whom I had no idea would be there. We chatted a while, then Miriam and I went upstairs and browsed the gallery of local art, and took particular interest in the historic photos of Gainesville. This history of this fair city is a special interest of mine.

Then, after some time, we made our way outside where we enjoyed still more refreshment, in the form of hot cocoa and chocolate chip cookies. All of the above was completely free. We paid $7 to take a ride in a horse-drawn carriage around the Duckpond, where the streets were lined with luminaries. It was wonderful, and everyone was so nice, though we covet their historic mansions. Then I got to pet horses.

Finally, it was dinner at Big Lou’s before heading home full of food and Christmas cheer. Gainesville really is great.

This weekend was the Downtown Festival and Arts Show, which takes place every year in November. Mrs. Hill and I have been many times, and this year’s was much like the others, with countless booths of framed photographs, handicrafts, paintings, sculpture, and so on. There was also an array of unhealthy carnival-style food, like funnel cakes, and a booth that had just about everything people usually eat, but in fried form. There was free cheese, and even Sonic was there.

What was fun about this year’s festival was seeing so many people we knew. Dan and Heather were there with Ayler, looking happy as ever, and our other friend named Heather was there with her boyfriend Brian, enjoying an unusual day off from his job at Sweetwater Branch. Plus, on our bike ride downtown, we saw Danielle, our hairdresser, watering the plants in her front yard, and we stopped and chatted.

The weather was perfect, the dancing was entertaining, and the Spammobile was there.

The suit alleges that the Stata Center is plagued by drainage problems and dangerous accumulations of snow and ice. Forgive my ignorance, but doesn’t the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have any engineers?

It serves them right as far as I am concerned. Walt Disney Concert Hall has received good reviews from people I know, and its design is certainly distinctive, as are many of Frank Gehry’s other museums and public spaces, but he seems to me to be marketing novelty over utility with many of his inhabited structures, to wit, the “Dancing House” in Prague and the Gehry Tower in Hannover. I hope the judge in this case laughs in the faces of M.I.T.’s lawyers and dismisses the suit. They should have known better.

Music can be a more satisfying cerebral experience if we let it move us physically. When we hear a chord we like in works by Sibelius or Mahler, our brains want to shout out “Yeah!” When an orchestra builds the timbral mass in Ravel’s Bolero, we want to break out of our seats and dance and show how good it feels. Stand up, sit down, shout, let it all out. As the managers of Lincoln Center contemplate renovations, I say rip out some of the seats and give us room to move.

Yes, Mr. Levitin’s thesis is that music, since the dawn of time has been inextricably linked with dance and jubilation, ergo, it seems unnatural to sit quietly with our hands crossed while listening to classical music in concert. “Most of us would be shocked if audience members at a symphony concert got out of their chairs and clapped their hands, whooped, hollered and danced — as people would at a Ludacris concert. But the reaction we have to Ludacris or U2 is closer to our true nature”, writes Mr. Levitin, seemingly with surprise. Defecation is closer to my true nature, so would that make it okay at a concert?

Mr. Levitin’s op-ed is littered with so many illogical statements it is astonishing that it was published in a major newspaper. His entire irrational argument, however, seems to be rooted in one faulty premise:

Music and dance have also always been a communal activity, something that everyone participated in. The thought of a musical concert in which a class of professionals performed for a quiet audience was virtually unknown throughout our species’ history.

That may be so, but novels and chess and open-heart surgery were virtually unknown throughout our species’ history. That doesn’t mean that the societal conventions that we have established vis à vis those activities are invalid. Cavemen painted pictures at Lascaux in the Paleolithic era, 16,000 years ago. It wasn’t until relatively recently that we hung paintings in public museums. Does that mean we should allow children to take crayons to the walls of the Uffizi? Of course not.

The facts are these: there are some activities for which our culture has prescribed standards of acceptable behavior; classical music is an inherently cerebral art which often requires considered attention be paid in order to appreciate its subtleties.

There is an overwhelming body of music that has been written with the expressed intent of inspiring dance. Enjoy it in whatever way makes you happy. But Sibelius and Mahler–just to cite Mr. Levitin’s examples–didn’t write dance music. Even Ravel’s Bolero–even Ravel’s La Valse–were composed as concert music, to be listened to by an audience seated quietly in chairs, tapping a foot, perhaps. Those gentlemen never imagined that people would one day be able to enjoy recordings in their own homes. For you dancing, hooting-types, shout your hearts out in privacy. But when you’re at a concert, keep still and shut the hell up.

Our goal was to be in front of the guys who grab all the CDs regardless of title or artist, solely to resell elsewhere. That turned out not to be an issue this time, however, since these fellows failed to materialize at all, and, in any case, there were no legitimate classical music CDs save one EMI disc of Sir John Barbirolli conducting the Mahler Symphony No. 9. I purchased it.

I also purchased several art books, including one of the Uffizi Gallery, which Miriam and I toured in 2001 in Florence. I also got something I had been wanting for a long time, a book of Klimt. One of the music-related books I got is very interesting: a dictionary of musical themes, in which countless pieces of classical music are broken down into their various motifs, written in notation. That will be very helpful. We also got scads more of the great travel guides published by DK. They are generally over $20 new, but they are all $5 or less at the FOL sale, which still makes them among the more expensive titles there. Most hardcover books are priced below $2.50.

Miriam had her eye on several paintings in the poster and print tent, all of which, it turns out, were painted by the same fellow. Everyone that passed the tent before the sale opened remarked about them, particularly one featuring a devil and two goats, and another with a beehive. It seemed certain that these would be the first to go, especially when there was one man who was really talking them up to his friends and family. But what baby wants, baby gets, and, indeed, Miriam walked out with those four pictures, which now await suitable wall space to be hung.

The check-out line had grown astonishingly long by ten o’clock, and my arms were near broken from carrying such a heavy box of books. But we made it out of there with our booty, and I went off to work.

This issue really came to my attention in a profound way several years ago when someone came forward with a claim that they were the rightful owner of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, a stunning painting by Gustav Klimt, and one of Austria’s greatest visual treasures. The claimant, Maria Altmann, was the niece of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy Viennese family who owned four other Klimt masterpieces: Adele Bloch-Bauer II, Apfelbaum I, Birkenwald, and Häuser in Unterach am Attersee. Altmann sued in the United States, where her case against Austria went all the way to the Supreme Court. She won, and Austria turned over the paintings, which, naturally, she sold, splitting up a priceless collection that had been the pride of the Schloss Belvedere. Adele Bloch-Bauer I was sold for an estimated $135 million and placed in the Neue Gallerie in New York. The rest sold at auction to anonymous bidders, and, in spite of Ms. Altmann’s hilariously insincere wish that the paintings remain on public display, they are now stashed away in private hands.

So I read this morning that heirs of a prominent Dutch art dealer are now claiming ownership of 225 paintings and two tapestries by Dutch, Flemish and Italian artists now hanging in museums in the Netherlands.

I do not deny that World War II wrought countless injustices, and that Nazi scum looted many works of art which now reside in public galleries throughout the world, though mostly in Europe. But should we draw the line somewhere for those claiming ownership of irreplaceable treasures? The war ended over 60 years ago, and these works of art have been on public display for generations now. When you consider that what those making claims really want is money, I find it hard to be sympathetic. They are not seeking the restitution of some family heirloom. The governments and museums who now posses this disputed art should investigate these claims, and, if it is deemed prudent, they should pay a fair sum of money to the claimants. But masterpieces of art belong to humanity, and that works now hanging in museums for all to enjoy might end up on the wall of some crooked Russian billionaire, or crazy Japanese businessman, is a notion that should offend anyone who loves that which is beautiful.