Category Archive: TRAVEL
Tasmanian Art Gallery
November 2019 If you’re still reeling from the inanities of MONA, why not check out Hobart’s more staid collection, on Davey Street (but enter on the landward side), a stone’s throw from the docks? The Gallery combines artistic works with natural history pieces of local significance: For instance the famous Thylacine, a carnivorous marsupial otherwise known as the Tasmanian Tiger, due to the stripes along its coat. Although last seen alive in 1933, we like to think the wily animal exists and flourishes somewhere in the wild western half of the island (there have been some unverified sightings in recent years)….
Continue Reading →H. L. Mencken and Crap Towns
H. L. Mencken (12 September 1880) There’s a splendid English book called Crap Towns. Lovingly referred to by ‘The Sunday Telegraph’ as “The Domesday book of misery” it celebrates awful urban constructs, from Luton to Hull to Bury St Edmonds. TVC once thought to produce an Australian edition, covering such lively towns as Mt Druitt and Wilcannia, NSW, and Millicent, SA. But the great H.L. Mencken beat us all to it. In his 1928 article, The Libido for the Ugly, Mencken canvasses the ugliest towns in the USA: “I have seen, I believe, all of the most unlovely towns of…
Continue Reading →Get Thee to Getty
J Paul Getty Center, Los Angeles, April 2018 – We mentioned this great pavilioned village above L.A. containing the eclectic cache of zillionaire J. Paul Getty, with reference to his classical statuary. But he, and his trustees after him, have amassed a goodly stock of other stuff: You may recall this Abraham Solomon painting, “Waiting for the Verdict” from the cover of the Penguin edition of Bleak House, then in the Tunbridge Wells Museum…it’s now at Getty. It was fascinating to see the influence of ancient Mughal painting on high Flemish painting, including Rembrandt: Amid French empire parlours, and before works by Watteau, Tiepolo,…
Continue Reading →We Love Lucy’s
Lucy’s El Adobe Café, Melrose Avenue, Hollywood We were stuffed. That is, exhausted and footsore. Having walked from Hollywood Blvd; having traversed the entire Hollywood Cemetery; having found that there’s no easy way from there to Paramount Studios except to walk another few miles, even though it is adjacent; having found that there’s virtually nowhere along Melrose to sit and eat, we chanced upon this place with the modest sign and modest exterior, just over the road from Paramount. Our luck was in. This was a great little Cantina, and the signed photos of stars all over the walls bore testimony…
Continue Reading →The Getty Center
Los Angeles, April 2018 It’s slightly under an hour from Hollywood to John Paul Getty’s multi-pavilioned complex in the hills above Bel Air and Brentwood, but when you arrive, a whole array of art and artefact (some, it is fair to say, makes you wish, to paraphrase Paul Keating about David Roche, he could have put down his scatter-gun) is free. He only employed classicists but we fear, in his collecting, he may not have always consulted them. Some of the eccentricity of Getty’s collecting can be seen in this sequence of busts; genuine Ptolemaic renderings of Alexander, c. 200BC…
Continue Reading →