Alexandersmap

    Category: History

    • Day Tripping With the Beatles

      When you grow up a Beatles fan you learn all the names. Not John, Paul, George and Ringo (that goes without saying), but Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields and The Cavern Club and Elenor Rigby and all the rest. Those names are in Liverpool. And that’s where I found myself yesterday.

      Some people go to Disney World for their dreams to come true. I have a hard time wrapping my head around that. But walking in the footsteps of those who came before? Standing in a spot where a legend was literally born? Yes, please. And Liverpool delivers.

      There’s much more to this city than The Beatles, and I’d love to write about my experiences with all of the museums and exploring the waterfront more. But we had a seven hour window to work with, and a lifetime of assumptions to work through. So it was all about The Fab Four on this trip. If I were to go again, and I hope I do, I’d stay for at least a long weekend for a more immersive Liverpool experience. There’s just so much to see you’ll need the time.

      If you’re a Beatles fan with limited time, I’d recommend the itinerary we created on the fly. Go to The Beatles Story for an immersive self-paced walk through the lives of John, Paul, George and Ringo (that’s the accepted order of names, it messes up everything to jumble them). Wear the headsets and listen to the stories and music, it’s a great launching point for a day with The Beatles.

      Right down the street is the boarding spot for the Magical Mystery Tour, a fabulously fun tour on a bright yellow coach bus. Highly informative stories about what you’re seeing or, importantly, about to see sprinkled with Beatles songs that had many on the bus singing along. That “about to see” part is key, because when driving up a street it’s helpful to know what to look for. Our guide was excellent and prepped us for the turn onto Penny Lane and the drive-by of Elenor Rigby’s grave so we were collectively ready for the moment. Just enough stops for pictures along the way to satiate the Beatles fan checklist without losing momentum. I’ve done a few bus tours in my day, most do the job of informing on the fly well, some not so well. This one is exceptional.

      The tour ended down the street from The Cavern Club, and included a ticket to get in. Perfect way to end the day? Not so fast; there was still one more thing to do before the sun set. My daughter and I walked briskly down to the waterfront for a picture with Ringo, Paul, George and John (See? Doesn’t flow the same). Liverpool is well aware of the positive contribution their four lads have made on the city and erected statues of each of them together looking west. There are other statues of them individually sprinkled in the city but I’m partial to the band together.

      To cap off a Fab day we made our way back to The Cavern Club, deep down several the flights of stairs to the place where they took off. And this place didn’t disappoint. Great music playing on that stage we all know. The arched Cavern walls enclose you, immersive and reflective all at once. You’re literally there, wrapped up in that place you would see in black and white images, now a living monument to the past and a vibrant and exciting bar. The Cavern Club has a pulse, and it’s strong. I had no idea this place deep underground would be the highlight of my day, but it surely was. I’d go again any time at all.

    • Stumbling Across Amherst

      I was thinking about Jeffrey Amherst yesterday. Or rather, Amherst was thrust upon me as I walked through the National Portrait Gallery in London and his face jumped out at me in three paintings. Two were “face in the crowd” works that ensured you knew that yes, HE was there, so was that other HE… and so on. It’s like a snapshot taken at an event, painted over a long period of time. Ego strokes and, to me, tedious. But portraits offer something different, a glimpse into the person. And few people got your attention during the French and Indian War like Jeffrey Amherst.

      No matter what you think of Amherst, and there’s plenty of reason to question his tactics, he helped shift momentum of the war with decisive, ruthless action (giving smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans is certainly ruthless and ethically highly questionable). That victorious campaign positioned him for accolades at home, place names in the New World, and one elite liberal arts college bearing his name. And a portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. I don’t celebrate the life of Amherst, but I acknowledge that he got the job done when the English needed someone to step up.

    • The Guard

      Consider the Queen’s Guard, standing stoic. The guard scans the crowd with his eyes, moves in ever so slight ways, but otherwise still. As the guard stiffens, they’ll stomp their feet vigorously, ceremoniously shift their gun from the right arm to left, swirl to the side and march to a designated spot where they once again stomp and swirl and repeat as many times as they feel necessary to get the blood moving. From there they return to their original spot, stomp and shift the gun back to the right side, stand back at attention with a stomp and cap it off with a dramatically wonderful swirl of the head. A practical way to shake off London rain, or a crowd-pleasing play to the swarm of Changing of the Guard gawkers? No matter, it’s a big hit.

      I saw a similar act yesterday at Tower of London, however this ceremony of the changing of the guard is a Buckingham Palace show. But no changing of the guard on Saturdays. Still, a good chance to see Buckingham Palace, mingle with global tourists and take the required pictures. And oh, the pictures. Indulgent consuming of megabytes of data, all in hopes of the perfect photo. And an indulgent post to mark the occasion.

    • Queen Victoria and the Prince

      Kensington Palace… interesting place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. Too much museum, not enough home for my tastes, but then, I’m not exactly touring the private quarters of the Royal Family, am I? But there’s humanity there at the Palace, and like many I found myself drawn to the life of one previous resident.

      I’ve always had an image of Queen Victoria dressed in black, in her senior years, but Kensington Palace shows you the entire life of Victoria, which offers remarkable new perspective. Standing in the room she was born in offers perspective. As does seeing her children’s rooms. Focus on the jewels if you will, stunning as they are. But nothing jolted me like seeing the seductive young Victoria in a self-commissioned painting for her true love, Prince Albert. This Victoria would have loved iPhones and selfies, I think, if only for the fun they might have brought to her time with Albert.

      They have a wonderful quote from Victoria describing her attractive Prince, and this marvelous line she used to convey what she was feeling: “My heart is quite going.” Alas, true love doesn’t last forever, and Queen Victoria is later quoted after the passing of Prince Albert, “Who will ever call me Victoria now?” And with that you can feel her grief through the decades. Who doesn’t read that and grieve with her?

      Kensington Palace is full of human stories like this. Mary, Victoria, Diana, Kate; I understand the fascination some people have with the Royal Family, though I confess I don’t share the same… enthusiasm. I’d rather live my own life, thank you. But in young Victoria I found a connection.

    • A Weekend Between Trips

      I knew she’d be trouble.  My week away had wound her up, but it was her persistent hunger pangs that drove her mad.  12 hours between meals for a teenager is too long.  And as much as I wanted to finish reading the history of the sacking of Berwick in 1296, my office was being sacked while I ignored her.  First she got up under my book, pushing it back up to my chest.  I conceded a moment to pet her.  Next came the knocking about of small nuisance items, easy to ignore.  Finally, she got up on the end table, flicked her tail at me and knocked the lamp to the floor, shattering the bulb as it landed upside down.  Point made.  I cleaned up the shards of glass, righted the lamp and fed the cats.  It wasn’t yet dawn, but the fast was broken.

      I’ve been reading up on Scottish and English history in preparation for my trip.  I’ll call it a refresher course, as I’ve read much of it before, but with the immediacy of a pending trip I realize what I don’t know.  A personal goal is to never visit a place ignorant of its significance.  As with this trip, there’s so much to digest and so little time.  But we make do with the time we have, don’t we?

      Over the summer I smiled at my daughter as she packed and repacked bags for her semester abroad.  Now, just back from a week away and leaving in a few days for my own trip abroad, the joke’s on me.  There’s a lot to do before the trip, not least of which is taking care of matters on the home front before we leave.  Security cameras?  Check.  Alert neighbors to keep an eye on things?  To be checked.  Arrangements to have the cats fed so there’s a house left to come home to?  Definitely checked.

      I’ve mentally circled this weekend as the in-between time.  I had a business trip that wrapped up last night, a couple of days to get loose ends tied, and then off to the airport for the next trip.  The preparation is largely done.  The lists are made and ready for checking.  Last minute purchases of toiletries, laundry to do, decisions to be made on what to leave out when the bags grow inevitably overstuffed.  I feel like I just got home (I did), but I’m eager to get going once again.  The travel bug has got ahold of me once again.  My apologies to the cat.

    • Edgy in Satire: Edith Lunt Small

      There’s a painting in the long hallway at Richardson’s Canal House that you can get lost in for hours. The artist was Edith Lunt Small, who passed away in 2017, 38 years after creating this fanciful world on canvas. Edith lives on in the painting, portraying herself as a skinny-dipping artist swimming in the Erie Canal in 1825. As the self-portrait indicates, there’s a lot of whimsy in her work, and I enjoyed spending a few minutes with this one.

      Art is meant to be enjoyed, and I found myself smiling at the little details she dropped into this painting, commissioned for Richardson’s Canal House. 1825 Bushnell’s Basin in Small’s world was raucous fun, and I imagine the artist was too. Her son called her work edgy in satire in his eulogy, and based on this one, I see what he means. I was happy to get a glimpse into the spirit that was Edith Lunt Small. These close-ups offer a small glimpse for you as well. This was an artist who clearly loved life!

    • A Handshake with Norman Rockwell

      I always make a point of grabbing the newel post and sliding up my hand on the stair railing when visiting the homes of artists, writers and historical figures.  I’ve written about doing this at Ernest Hemingway’s Key West house, at Mark Twain’s Hartford, Connecticut house, and at Robert Frost’s farmhouse in Derry, New Hampshire.  I had the opportunity to do it again when visiting the Norman Rockwell Studio in Sturbridge, Massachusetts recently.  This to me is a handshake with those who came before, and I feel it most profoundly when I visit the places like these where the giants of the past did their greatest work.

      If you live in America you know Norman Rockwell.  His paintings and sketches are more widely known than any other artist in the 20th century, thanks in large part to his work with The Saturday Evening Post during some of the most significant milestones of that century.  Rockwell was capturing the very human moments everyone felt during the Great Depression, World War’s I and II, the Kennedy Assassination, etc.  The museum carries you through his work and is worth a visit.  I’ve driven by it for decades before finally stopping by for an hour while driving home from New York.  Seeing his paintings doesn’t give me the same feeling as seeing Aivazovsky’s The Ninth Wave did, but that’s largely because there’s a humbleness to Rockwell’s work that doesn’t inspire awe as much as appreciation for the incredible detail he put into his work.

      There’s a story of the painting Country Doctor, which when published on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post inspired letters from people asking about the woman in the photograph on the doctor’s desk.  It seemed she looked like a nurse that had treated patients in England during World War II, and a soldier wrote to ask if she was in fact the same woman….  and was.  Such was the detail in Rockwell’s paintings that a random detail in a larger work, shrunk down for the cover of a magazine, sparked recognition. Rockwell apparently made his subjects, mostly his neighbor’s in the Berkshires, laugh while painting, and there’s joy in most of his work.

      I appreciate art, and linger in the museum longer than I should have on my trip home, but for me standing in the space where Rockwell created that art was more impactful. That space is his studio, moved four miles from downtown Stockbridge to a hill overlooking the Housatonic River and the Berkshires in 1976. Rockwell gifted the studio to the Norman Rockwell Museum, and the studio is set up as it would have been in 1961 when Rockwell was painting Golden Rule, which seems appropriate for an artist who’s work reflected that rule. The space is largely the same, if transported from its original foundation in the heart of Stockbridge. The staircase to the loft is roped off, but the newel post and railing are in reach, like a handshake with Norman. And that sums up his art; within reach of everyone. Simple but complex, and beloved, like the artist himself.

    • The Land Informs

      In New England in the spring of 2006 it started raining and never stopped. The rivers soon overflowed their banks, creating lakes where there was once roads, parking lots and lawns. The Spicket River closed large sections of Salem, New Hampshire and downstream in Methuen and Lawrence, Massachusetts. Ponds too were overflowing, and dams were reaching a breaking point.

      It was at this point that officials in my town decided it was best to release the floodgates on the dam on a pond not far from me. Releasing the water would immediately relieve the pressure on the earthwork holding back the flood waters, which may have been catastrophic had it burst. I live downstream of this dam. When the flood waters were released the stream quickly became a churning serpent racing downhill, picking up momentum in a race to the Spicket River. It reached its first choke point at a culvert up the hill on my street, filled rapidly at this new dam and flowed sideways across a neighbor’s lawn onto the street, which became a riverbed. The crest on the road soon channeled this river onto the lawns of each neighbor in succession until it reached mine.

      When we built this house in 1999 I planted a rugosa rose at the end of the driveway. In seven years it had filled into a fragrant shrub occupying a challenging spot where not much else would grow. It served as the perfect dam for the raging white water racing to meet it. The water swirled around the shrub creating an eddy, which quickly started working on the driveway before continuing on to the end of the street into Hog Hill Brook, which in turn flowed to the Spicket River, then the Merrimack River and finally to the Atlantic Ocean.

      When the rains stopped and the waters receded, a chunk of the driveway was gone. The street fared worse, with long sections of asphalt peeled away. And the bridges downstream still worse than that. But the houses were spared and nobody died, so all told it could have been much worse. As events go it was memorable for those who witnessed it, a triviality to those who hear the stories of that day.

      Memories fade, people move away. but the land often informs if you pay attention. Today that resilient rugosa rose still stands watch at the end of the driveway. The street was repaired and you can still see those patchwork repairs as you walk up the hill, tracking the path of the water that day. The town put in a larger culvert and dumped a pile of dirt leading to it to channel future floods better. My neighbor plants tomatoes on top of it. He’s moving soon, another memory of that day moving away from the site. There are now three bridges dated 2006 or 2007 spanning the Hogs Hill Brook and the Spicket River that betray what happened that spring. The driveway is patched but has never been quite the same. When I walk on the beach near the mouth of the Merrimack River I wonder sometimes if I’m walking on bits of that driveway mixed in with the sand, reunited once again with my feet.

    • Ghost Dancers in the Wild

      We’re all borrowing time, and the ground we stand on too. How many people passed through the spot you’re occupying now? And what was their story? That’s history, and you either dance with the ghosts or ignore them. I like to dance with the ghosts – bring them back to life for awhile. Perhaps they’ll welcome me warmly when I reach the other side.

      Yesterday I had a business lunch with a couple of consultants in Boston. After the usual talk of feature enhancements and product roadmap one of the consultants mentioned his drive from Lake George to Quebec City, and suddenly we’re all pulling out our phones comparing pictures of various forts we’ve visited. Were we the hippest table at Row 34 that day? No doubt. But it’s nice to run into people who know the lay of the land as well, or better, than you do.

      I stopped by the Bourne Historical Center recently as a follow-up to a visit I made to the Aptucxet Trading Post Museum a few weeks back. Both are places to meet other history geeks, and places where you can talk openly about King Philip’s War without the listener backing away slowly. Ghost dancers aren’t always easy to spot in the wild, but corral us in a museum and we open right up.

      Aptucxet was missing one artifact that brought me eventually to the Bourne Historical Center. Specifically, a rock. History is all sticks and stones and the occasional cannon, isn’t it? No, it’s the stories behind those things. It’s always the stories, the rest of this stuff just helps you see it better.

      Anyway, that rock. The Bourne Stone. A piece of granite engraved with markings (pictographs) sometime before the 1650’s. Was it some kid with time on their hands scratching pictures on a rock or some ancient wisdom being passed down to us in a language lost to history? Who knows? But there’s a story in that rock, from the person who marked it to the threshold it once occupied at a Native American meetinghouse and the many people who have stepped on it, touched it and speculated on its meaning ever since.

      I’m no archeologist, but I found it interesting enough to stop by for a look. Maybe the sailboat engraved on the stone captured my attention, or maybe I have a thing for questions with no answer. Whatever it is, I’ve checked a box that’s been nagging me a bit. The mystery of the Bourne Stone for me was solved. What is it? What does it look like? The stories behind it I leave for other ghost dancers.

    • Dancing after the Dragons

      “How could we be capable of forgetting the old myths that stand at the threshold of all mankind, myths of dragons transforming themselves at the last moment into princesses?  Perhaps all dragons in our lives are really princesses just waiting to see us just once being beautiful and courageous.  Perhaps everything fearful is basically helplessness that seeks our help.” – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

      The Ninth Wave is a painting by Ivan Aivazovsky on display at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.  I stood in front of it 30 years ago and it stays with me still.  There are two paintings from that visit that keep coming back to mind, the other being Henri Matisse’s The Dance.  Both are stunning when you stand in front of them and immerse yourself in them.  Google both and look at the images that come up, and you’ll see a wide range of colors, from vibrant primary to muted mixed colors.  There’s nothing like seeing each in person, where it literally washes right over you and you swim and dance with the subjects in the paintings.

      I’ve got a bucket list of art and architecture that I hope to see in my lifetime.  I only have to reconcile the images I see in a book or online to know that there’s nothing like seeing the real thing.  Travel gives you that gift.  And more than seeing The Ninth Wave or The Dance in my mind, I see the entire picture of that time.  Babushkas sternly looking at college kids to make sure we weren’t taking flash photography or crossing past the ropes.  Black market traders trying to swap blue jeans for assorted USSR military stuff.  Seeing Cuban soldiers for the first time when we visited the Aurora (As a Cold War kid being in the Soviet Union and seeing Cuban soldiers was heady stuff).  Such is the richness of world travel; Seeing the world as it is and not some portrayal on a screen.

      I may never get back to St. Petersburg, but I would surely go to the Hermitage again and re-visit these two masterpieces.  I’ve changed quite a lot in 30 years, and so has St. Petersburg and Russia.  When I visited I was a college kid visiting a city with a different name in a country with a different name at the height of Glasnost, which would inevitably wipe Leningrad and the USSR names off the maps in favor of what once was and is again.  The enormity of the changes we’ve seen in the last 30 years cannot be understated.  And we’re in the middle of massive change still.  What will the next 30 years bring?  I hope I’m around to report on it.

      The image of that dragon in Rilke’s quote above brought to my mind The Ninth Wave.  This is the moment when the subjects in the painting are either driven to their deaths under the sea or they find salvation. Aivazovsky leaves it for us to interpret how it ends.  The optimist in me sees the brightening sky shining light through the wave.    Have the courage to hold on just a bit longer and things will get better.  Rise to the challenges of the moment and turn that dragon into a princess.  30 years ago it was Glasnost and Tiananmen Square.  Today it’s Climate Change, the rise of political extremism and the Hong Kong protests.  Is this the Ninth Wave?

      The optimist in me sees a positive future, and eventually the scarcity mentality that leads to extremism and greed giving way to a better world.  The report that showed the dramatic decrease in child mortality is a good example of how the world is getting better.  I’m well aware of the dragons in this world, and a little light shining through the storm clouds doesn’t mean the wave isn’t going to crash down on you.  But I see the joyful dancers of Mattise waiting for us if we can only have the courage to find the princess and join in.  What will we do to get us there?