The Cherry Gatherers, François Boucher, 1768

The Seattle Art Museum‘s exhibition Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: The Treasures of Kenwood House, London, about which I have written here and here and here, ended today. Last Tuesday evening, we made one last visit.

Let me quote one more time the description of the exhibition offered by SAM curator Chiyo Ishikawa at the exhibition website:

Within the neoclassical Kenwood House at Hampstead Heath on the outskirts of London, resides a magnificent painting collection known as the Iveagh Bequest. Kenwood is home to an exceptional collection of Old Master paintings, including major works by Gainsborough, Hals, Rembrandt, Reynolds, Romney, Turner, Van Dyck, and many others. The Iveagh Bequest was donated to Great Britain by Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh (1847–1927) and heir to the world’s most successful brewery. Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: Treasures of Kenwood House, London, a selection of approximately 50 masterpieces from the collection, will tour American museums for the first time. Among other treasures, the exhibition provides a rare opportunity to see Rembrandt’s late Portrait of the Artist (ca. 1665), which has never left Europe before.

The Earl of Iveagh’s personal collection was shaped by the tastes of the Belle Époque—Europe’s equivalent to America’s Gilded Age. His purchases reveal a preference for the portraiture, landscape, and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings that could typically be found in English aristocratic collections. Since the earl was a newcomer to London emigrating from his native Ireland, he may have selected works that would help him fit in with his peers and elevate his social standing.

Kenwood House is a property of English Heritage, described at its website as “the Government’s statutory adviser on the historic environment.” On our first visit, we toured the exhibition with Susan Jenkins, senior curator for English Heritage. Our second tour was led by Chiyo Ishikawa. This time, we had the pleasure of touring the exhibition after hours with SAM’s new museum director, Kim Rorschach.

We hadn’t realized on receiving the tour invitation that eighteenth-century British paintings were the subject of Kim’s doctoral work at Yale some years ago. As she explained when we reached the heart of the exhibition, the portraits of Reynolds and Gainsborough, she spent a year in London during her graduate studies, living near Hampstead Heath and visiting Kenwood House almost weekly. Thus it was a special treat for her, on assuming the directorship last fall, to come just in time for the arrival of some of her old friends.

Kim focused on several of the same paintings that Susan and Chiyo had stopped in front of on the earlier tours, such as Gainsborough’s portrait below (circa 1760) of Mary Countess Howe.

Like Chiyo, Kim is more partial to Gainsborough than Reynolds, and she especially admires this portrait. She took us through it in some detail.

In the next room, while Kim talked about two Gainsborough landscapes, my eye wandered to the two side-by-side paintings by François Boucher, which I somehow had missed on previous visits. As Kim walked the group to the second Gainsborough, I moved into the space that opened up in front of The Cherry Gatherers and realized that it was really quite wonderful. And different from much else in the exhibition.

What is it about Boucher, and his pupil Jean-Honoré Fragonard, that I resisted years ago? I would go to the Frick Collection and race through the Boucher and Fragonard rooms in my haste to see the Vermeers, Holbein, Manet. Well, can you blame me? But after enough visits, I found myself slowing down, then stopping, and now I love the two rooms. (Click on the room links for virtual tours.)

The Four Seasons: Autumn, 1755, François Boucher, The Frick Collection

On coming to the end of the Kenwood House tour, Kim took us through the complementary exhibition European Masters: The Treasures of Seattle. The webpage explains that the Kenwood House exhibition provided

the perfect moment to reveal some of the extraordinary collecting of European painting that has been quietly taking place in Seattle over the last 20 years. European Masters: The Treasures of Seattle features 34 paintings, all from local collections, which will share the special exhibition galleries with the 48 paintings from Kenwood House.

I wouldn’t have expected such good paintings to have made there way here to Seattle. Some will ultimately end up at SAM>

Next Kim led us across the street to a small function on the second floor of the Four Seasons Hotel, from which we had a perfect view of SAM’s newest installation, Doug Aitken’s MIRROR. There was an unveiling two months ago, which we were unable to attend. The unveiling webpage explains that MIRROR is

a permanent art installation for the façade of SAM by artist Doug Aitken, that will become a new landmark in downtown Seattle. MIRROR is an urban earthwork that changes in real time in response to the movements and life around it.

At the unveiling, guests will experience an unprecedented performance with synchronized choreography of MIRROR in relation to compositions by minimalist composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Mr. Riley will be in Seattle for the performance of his monumental work In C, featuring musicians from the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and Stuart Dempster, faculty at the University of Washington School of Music, who performed with Riley for the original debut of In C in 1964.

But here, see for yourself:

Gail and I looked out the window at MIRROR from time to time, chatting with other guests and eating hors d’oeuvres in between. I talked about the Boucher paintings with Kim, who agreed that they stand out from the others that Guinness collected. And another guest told us about concerns the owners of condos in the building to the north of the hotel have about MIRROR. Much as we enjoyed the view out the windows, we don’t live there. Those who do are less excited. Arrangements will have to be made.

That was that. Farewell to Kenwood House.

The next major SAM exhibition, opening late next month, is Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion. Quite a change of pace. I suspect I won’t be writing four posts about it.

It took a month and a half, with a few other books read along the way, but I finally finished Amanda Foreman’s long history A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War last Friday night. Along the way, I had decided I would next read a novel. I had several other books lined up, including another long history of a nineteenth-century subject. But I was ready for fiction.

Which novel? There’s the new one by Claire Messud that came out at the end of April. For a while I thought that might be it. There’s Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings, which also came out while I was reading Foreman, and was well reviewed. But there was some other April release whose reviews intrigued me. What was it?

The NYT to the rescue ten days ago with a feature article on Rachel Kushner. Ah, yes. The Flamethrowers. The article wasn’t all that enlightening, but it did link to James Wood’s New Yorker review of a month ago, described by the NYT’s Maria Russo as rapturous.

How rapturous? Let’s see what Wood has to say:

Rachel Kushner’s second novel, “The Flamethrowers”, is scintillatingly alive, and also alive to artifice. It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures: Kushner is never not telling a story. It is nominally a historical novel (it’s set in the mid-seventies), and, I suppose, also a realist one (it works within the traditional grammar of verisimilitude). But it manifests itself as a pure explosion of now: it catches us in its mobile, flashing present, which is the living reality it conjures on the page at the moment we are reading. Consider Kushner’s vivid descriptions, near the start of the book, of racing and motorcycling. The novel’s narrator, an artist in her early twenties nicknamed Reno (it’s where she’s from), is obsessed with speed, machines, and land-speed records. (Art seems to be a subsidiary concern.) When we first see her, she is riding her Moto Valera motorbike from Nevada to Utah, to take part in the land-speed trials on the Bonneville Salt Flats. In a cool, hospitable, ingenuous tone, she tells us about herself. Her mother was a switchboard operator, “and if her past included something akin to noir, it was only the gritty part, the part about being female, poor, and alone, which in a film was enough of a circumstance to bring in the intrigue, but in her life it attracted only my father.” As she approaches the salt flats, the prose begins to glimmer:

On the short drive from town out to the salt flats, the high desert gleamed under the morning sun. White, sand, rose, and mauve—those were the colors here, sand edging to green in places, with sporadic bursts of powdery yellow, weedy sunflowers blooming three-on-the-tree. . . . Pure white stretching so far into the distance that its horizon revealed a faint curve of the Earth. I heard the sonic rip of a military jet, like a giant trowel being dragged through wet concrete, but saw only blue above, a raw and saturated blue that seemed cut from an inner wedge of sky.

It is easy enough for a good writer (and this is very good prose—that “inner wedge of sky” perfectly capturing the living blueness of atmosphere) to do something verbally fine with the extremities of desert. What is impressive about these early pages is how easily Kushner also begins to tell stories of the desert.

And, in conclusion:

Her novel is an achievement precisely because it resists either paranoid connectedness or knowing universalism. On the contrary, it succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive.

Hard to resist. I decided to begin.

I’m now a fifth of the way through. I haven’t fully succumbed yet. There’s too much else I have to do this week. And, the novel is almost too scintillatingly alive, the prose too glimmering. Small doses seems about right.

I’ll say more when I’m done.

[Tom Tomorrow, May 6, 2013]

Among the many victims of our War on Terror, now in its second decade, is the word “terror” itself. Terror has come to refer to what Muslims do to non-Muslims, or to Christians, or to Americans. With bombs. A white supremacist kills six Sikhs in Wisconsin with a gun? He’s crazy. An anti-abortion fanatic kills a doctor while the doctor is attending church? He’s a man of conscience. But if a Muslim shoots people, or more likely, explodes a bomb, then he’s a terrorist. Bomb + Mulsim = terror; gun + Christian = freedom. I know, I’m simplifying. But it’s how these events get covered, and how too many politicians speak of them.

Which brings me to Hamilton Nolan’s article Terrorism and the Public Imagination today at Gawker. (Hat tip: Glenn Greenwald.) It’s worth checking out. I’ll quote from it below.

In America, all villainy is not created equal.

A couple of disaffected young men in search of meaning drift into radical Islam and become violent. A couple of disaffected young men in search of meaning drift into street crime and become violent. A crowd of innocent people attending the Boston marathon are maimed by flying shrapnel from homemade bombs. A crowd of innocent people attending a Mother’s Day celebration in New Orleans are maimed by flying bullets. Two public events. Two terrible tragedies. One act of violence becomes a huge news story, transfixing the media’s attention for months and drawing outraged proclamations from politicians and pundits. Another act of violence is dismissed as the normal way of the world and quickly forgotten.

[snipp

Besides countless deaths abroad and a staggering debt at home, the primary legacy of America's "War on Terror" is our profoundly warped sense of the dangers of the world we live in, and of who our "enemies" are. As a rule, the rare violence committed by Muslims, with some political or religious motivation, is "terrorism," and deserving of the attention of the public and of our stern-faced leaders. The far more common and destructive acts of violence committed every single day on the streets of America due to poverty and the drug war and lack of education and simple human viciousness are "street violence," which is treated as some timeless aspect of the human condition. This violence, which kills many more Americans each year than any Muslim terrorist could dream of, is unworthy of our brain space.

[snip]

This modern age of Terror That Matters vs. forgettable violence is not simply a matter of ratings. It is a direct outgrowth of a deliberate post-9/11 political strategy to create a world in which the vague specter of “Terrorism” could fill the role of The Big Bad “Other” that had been empty since the end of the Cold War. That strategy was wildly successful. It helped to cow the nation’s news media enough to pave the way for the war in Iraq. It made patriotism synonymous with suspicion. And it persists today, in our reflexes that cause us to instinctively and unquestioningly expect an act of violence inspired by Muslim zealotry to mean something more than an act of violence inspired by any other cause.

I mentioned in my last post that I haven’t been writing much lately, in part, because of house guests. But we sure had lots of good dinners, home and away. It was great to have Carol in the kitchen, both as Gail’s sous-chef and, one night, the chef herself (producing a superb salmon dinner). Among the meals out, I’ll mention three that were all within a block of each other in the Madison Valley neighborhood, just over a mile from here.

It’s a continuing wonder to me that Madison Valley has so many good restaurants. When I moved to Seattle a few decades ago, the Madison Valley commercial strip along Madison Street was non-existent. There was the New York Deli. And nothing else. Not just no other restaurants. No commercial establishments at all. The deli was an island. I’d drive home from the university through the Arboretum, making a left on Madison to go down to the lake and Madison Park, with Madison Valley immediately to the right. Another half mile up the road on the right were some stores, but I’d never head that way.

And now Madison Valley may have a more interesting collection of restaurants than Madison Park, among which are the three where we ate with Carol (and, in the first case, Tom).

1. Luc. I’ve written about Luc before. It’s the more casual French restaurant that Thierry Rautureau opened a few years ago to complement Rover’s, his high-end restaurant about which I’ve also written many times. We will miss Rover’s. Thierry is closing it soon. But Luc will continue, and perhaps we’ll get there more often. We ate there on Mother’s Day two years ago, but made it back only once since then, until going two weeks ago with Tom and Carol, Jessica and Joel.

We shared a basket of soufflé potato crisps to start, along with harissa aioli as a dip. Then I had the salad Lyonnaise: frisée, mustard, poached egg, lardon, and red wine vinaigrette. My main dish was the trout amandine with potato. There was a trout special that several of the others had. And I had to watch Carol, sitting across from me, eat their amazing sausage dish: house made lamb sausage, roasted root vegetables, and spring salad. That sausage is really good. I had forgotten just how good, but Carol was kind enough to let me try it.

I passed on dessert, but did try a bit of Gail’s madeleines. Oh, and a taste of Carol’s ice cream. We need to eat there more often. One thing, though. The back seating area, by a small seating counter that overlooks the kitchen, is really loud, as I learned three Januarys ago when I ate a sort of business dinner there. It’s hard to hear one’s table mates. We need to make sure we get seating in front.

2. La Côte Café. I’ve written about this also many times. I don’t have much to add. Ever since they stopped being a pure crêperie, dropping a lot of dinner crêpes from the menu and adding a variety of alternative French and Italian entrées, I pretty much always order the same thing: the côte salad with butter lettuce, shaved fennel, apple, and vinaigrette; the fettucini carbonara with slab bacon, parmesan, and cream (and a raw egg, not listed); and from their list of dessert crêpes, the Belle-Hélène, withpear, vanilla ice cream, and chocolate sauce. This time I mixed it up, going for the Martiniquaise crêpe for dessert—banana and chocolate sauce. And, of course, a glass of cider from Brittany—I never remember which—that I keep trying to convince myself I enjoy, though it tastes something like burnt rubber.

3. The Harvest Vine. How could we never eat here before? We went a few days ago, our last meal out with Carol. I always thought it was just a wine bar. We’d drive by and people would be squeezed into the small space at the far end of the Madison Valley commercial strip, seeming to fall out of the open windows. What I didn’t know is that there’s restaurant seating below and a Basque menu. Carol knew her way around the menu, having spent plenty of time in Spain with Tom, so she could advise us, as the waiter was more than eager to do.

We shared all our dishes, as is the custom, starting with Tabla Ibérica, a selection of dry-cured meats from the pata negra pig. There were four meats, all fantastic, each thin sliced. We had Gazpacho and the Tortilla Española—a warm potato onion omelette with alioli. And Calçots—grilled Catalan green onions with almond romesco. The Cordero en Torrefacto, or grilled lamb in torrefacto with sautéed artichoke and some other stuff. And Venado, or grilled venison with oyster mushroom-leek ragout.

Hmm. I may have forgotten a dish. If so, perhaps Gail or Carol can comment. For dessert, I had the coconut flan (perfect), Gail the olive oil wine cake with roasted muscat grapes and whipped cream, Carol the rice pudding.

Three wonderful meals. Thank you, Carol and Tom.

Ohio State beating Towson today

Quiet days at Ron’s View. Sorry about that. It seems to be the unavoidable consequence of having houseguests for an extended period and starting a kitchen remodel at the same time. Tom and Carol were in from Edinburgh, Tom for 8 days and Carol for 16. And Joel made it to Seattle for a few days in the middle.

Carol, the last to leave, returned to Edinburgh Thursday, which should have freed up some time. But as I explained the other night in my NCAA men’s lacrosse preview, I had eight lacrosse games to watch yesterday and today. Plus the men’s golf Player’s Championship, which Tiger won in dramatic fashion late this afternoon.

Oh, and today’s Mother’s Day. Dinner out. A visit to Gail’s mother.

Not conducive to writing much. I’ll see what I can do about catching up in the next few days.

Ohio State vs. Denver, ECAC conference championship game

It’s May, and that means it’s time for a series of Ron’s View reports on the NCAA men’s lacrosse tournament. The opening round will be played this weekend, with four games Saturday and four games Sunday. Each day, ESPN2 will broadcast one game and ESPNU the other three. Last year, this arrangement (and the addition of ESPNU to our cable package) made it possible for me to watch parts of all eight games. I don’t expect to be so lucky this weekend, if for no other reason because Sunday is Mother’s Day and Gail hasn’t chosen to celebrate by watching four lacrosse games.

Each year, when I turn to lacrosse, I review some essential background. Here goes.

First, the tournament format. Sixteen teams are invited, with eight of them seeded 1 through 8. Each seeded team gets to play its opening round game at home against one of the unseeded teams. These are the eight games taking place this weekend. The eight winners play their quarterfinal games the following weekend. If all goes to form and the eight seeds win, then they pair up in the traditional way, with #1 playing #8, #2 playing #7, and so on. These games are played on neutral sites. This year, four teams travel to the University of Maryland to play, while the other four go to Indianapolis. The semifinals and final are played the weekend after, which is always arranged to be Memorial Day weekend, with semis on Saturday and final on Memorial Day Monday. In recent years, the final weekend games have rotated between Boston (well, Foxborough), Philadelphia, and Baltimore, at the stadiums of the Patriots, Eagles, and Ravens.

Second, some history. Until the last decade or so, seven teams dominated the tournament, winning every championship among them and almost always supplying the runner-up as well: Syracuse, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Virginia, North Carolina, Cornell, and Maryland. That the dominant teams are from Atlantic coast states is no surprise. The game has historically been played at the high school level mostly along the Atlantic coast (especially Maryland and Long Island) and in upstate New York, a close match to the locations of these schools. But now the game is going national. Even here in the Seattle area, it has become popular among local high schools. And with westward growth, other schools are becoming powers, ranked and seeded highly. Some of the new powers, such as Duke, are still in the traditional areas of strength. Others, such as Notre Dame and Denver, aren’t.

Of course, there are many other Atlantic coast school that have traditions of excellence, such as Navy, Loyola, and Hofstra, to mention three in the Maryland and Long Island lacrosse hotbeds. Navy was runner-up twice, in 1974 and 2005. Loyola was runner-up in 1990.

Lately things are changing. Duke, most notably, was runner-up in 2005 and 2007 before breaking through to win the championship in 2010. (Yes, Duke’s story is complicated, with the premature end to their season in 2006. The surprise may be not that they broke the seven-school-stranglehold on the championship, but that they didn’t do so sooner.) Notre Dame was runner-up to Duke in 2010, in the only final not to include one of the super seven. And last year, Loyola had its own breakthrough, earning the first seed and beating in-state rival Maryland in the final.

Which brings us to this year, and still more change at the top. I caught parts of two conference championship games last weekend. In the Big East championship Saturday, Syracuse closed out its history as a member of the Big East by beating Villanova. And on Sunday, Yale won its second consecutive Ivy title by beating Princeton, which had won over Cornell in a dramatic overtime semifinal. This was not a good year for Princeton. It needed the win and the Ivy championship to earn an automatic NCAA tournament bid. In basketball bracket language, it was a bubble team, and the loss burst its bubble.

That evening, the NCAA announced the bracket. No Princeton. No Virginia. And no Johns Hopkins! The lacrosse world is changing. In their place, new powers in the making snagged seeds two through four. I mentioned Notre Dame and Denver. Also Ohio State, which edged Denver 11-10 in their conference championship game the day before, scoring the winning goal with 24 seconds left.

Here are the seeds:

1. Syracuse
2. Notre Dame
3. Ohio State
4. Denver
5. North Carolina
6. Maryland
7. Duke
8. Penn State

The other participants are

Yale
Loyola
Cornell
Lehigh
Albany
Towson
Detroit
Bryant

Though they’re not seeded, I’ve listed them in the order I assume the selection committee had in mind, with Yale playing #8 seed Penn State in the opening round, Cornell playing #7 seed Duke, and so on. The last two had records below .500, earning bids only because they were conference champions, thereby squeezing stronger teams out of the tournament.

There you have it. A tournament missing the three teams with the most championships after Syracuse. A tournament reflecting the westward shift of the game’s center of gravity. A tournament with only three of the traditional seven seeded. A new order.

I couldn’t convince Gail to head to Philadelphia for Memorial Day weekend. We’ll have to settle for TV. I’ll be watching as much as I can.

I’m still reading Amanda Foreman‘s mammoth history, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War, despite interruptions since starting in late March to fit in three other books (Andrew Delbanco’s reflections on college education and Harvey Jackson’s short histories of the Florida-Alabama Gulf Coast and of Alabama). This morning I reached the five-eighths point and, at last, the Battle of Gettysburg.

As I mentioned last week, A World on Fire has “a Stoppardian Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead quality, with major events such as the Battle of Chancellorsville told through the eyes of minor characters, typically British observers or participants.” All the more so with the Battle of Gettysburg. I loved reading her account—can one imagine an account that is anything less than spellbinding?—but it isn’t the first place to turn for the basics. Nor does she intend it to be.

We visited Gettysburg three years ago this week, following stops in Harper’s Ferry and at Antietam. (See my entirely inadequate reports on the trip here and here.) Foreman’s overview of the battle, brief though it is, brought back the drama of those extraordinary three days a century and a half ago as well as the powerful hold our visit had on us. I wished as I read the book that I could walk and drive the battleground anew.

What we had as guide three years ago was James McPherson’s slim Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg. Our first day, we visited the museum, then toured the grounds with a licensed battlefield guides. (The guide commandeers your car and drives you around for two hours, taking you through the battle day by day.) The next day, we retraced the steps on our own, reading passages from McPherson as we stopped along the way.

View from Little Round Top to Devil’s Den, Gettysburg Battlefield

Prior to our battleground visits, on the evening of the day that we arrived, after we had eaten dinner in town, we stopped at the downtown Friendly’s for takeout dessert. I pulled out of the parking lot, made a turn that I thought would get us back to our bed and breakfast, and soon we were driving in darkness down an unlit country road. After five miles, I made a U-turn and we went back into town.

Only the next day did I realize that the road we were mistakenly on cuts right through the battlefield, over the site where the Confederate troops lined up for Pickett’s Charge. And later still, I realized that one can stand at a point above, looking out over the ground, and see Friendly’s just to the right. The north end of the battlefield merges with today’s downtown commercial strip.

This morning, as I read of the charge, I couldn’t stop myself from picturing the Friendly’s and wanting a strawberry Fribble. From the sacred to the profane. That’s how it is, the two intertwined in my memory.

[Tom Tomorrow, May 25, 2011]

It’s not news that our government is keeping track of us. I have written about this many times, perhaps most recently four months ago in a post on Obama’s signing of a five-year extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. As Yale law professor Jack Balkin explained years ago, we are “witnessing a normalization of the National Surveillance State and its basic policies.”

My view … is that Obama has played the same role with respect to the National Surveillance State that Eisenhower played with respect to the New Deal and the administrative state, and Nixon played with respect to the Great Society and the welfare state. Each President established a bi-partisan consensus and gave bi-partisan legitimation to certain features of national state building.

After the Obama presidency, opponents of a vigorous national surveillance state will be outliers in American politics; they will have no home in either major political party. Their views will be, to use one of my favorite theoretical terms, “off the wall.”

Glenn Greenwald, in his Guardian column yesterday, brings us the latest news, confirming that surveillance is universal.

The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.

[snip]

On Wednesday night, [CNN's Erin] Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two [Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his wife Katherine Russell]. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”

“All of that stuff” – meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant – “is being captured as we speak”.

On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that “all digital communications in the past” are recorded and stored:

Let’s repeat that last part: “no digital communication is secure”, by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications – meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like – are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

Cool, huh? Since reading this, I’ve been wondering: Why doesn’t the government get into the cloud service business?

Isn’t it great to know they’re backing up all our email? And phone conversations too? If I’m careful with my hourly backups to my external hard drive and my use of various email services, I can recover email in an emergency. But something could go wrong. And my phone conversations? I don’t know how I would begin to back them up. Can I even do that legally, unless I ask permission every time I talk to someone? No problem for our government, though, thanks to FISA.

Why don’t they offer to charge us a fee for access to old data? How many times do Gail and I disagree about whether I told her something or not? Now we can settle such debates, assuming the disputed conversation took place on the phone or by email. Then again, maybe they’re recording even our regular conversations, whether in the house, the car, or on walks. Even better, for in that case they could settle any dispute. Just charge a small fee for each individual request, or a larger monthly charge for, say 100 requests, and a still larger charge for unlimited usage.

I would pay for this. Wouldn’t you?

I finished Harvey Jackson’s Inside Alabama: A Personal History of My State yesterday. I wrote about it a week ago and followed up a couple of days later with a post quoting some passages about Dixon Hall Lewis, an Alabama state legislator, congressman, and senator in the 1820s-1840s.

Here, before I set the book aside, I would like to quote one more passage. We jump to the 1960s and perhaps the most famous of all Alabama politicians, George Wallace. What made Wallace so popular in Alabama anyway? And, ultimately, in the country?

Jackson devotes much of the latter part of the book to an explanation, with an illuminating passage that I quote (the essential portion of which is evidently due to Douglas Kiker). Jackson is discussing the 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery—the state capitol—led by Martin Luther King. He writes:

One can even imagine Wallace, looking out at the sea of faces stretching down Dexter Avenue, and not really seeing them. One can imagine his mind drifting off to his upcoming trip to New York and appearance on the Today show. Or maybe thinking about all those letters piling up in the mail room, letters from around the nation praising his stand against the subversive forces that were surely behind the march and the movement. Or maybe he was recalling his reception in the North when he made a tentative run for the presidency the year before. And one can imagine, as journalist Douglas Kiker imagined, after the governor’s warm greeting up there, how he lay asleep and was “awakened by a white, blinding vision” that explained why so many Yankees wanted to be his friend. “They all hate black people,” the vision revealed. “All of them. They’re all afraid, all of them.” And that is when it came to Wallace. “Great God! That’s it. They’re all Southern! The whole United States is Southern!”

Realizing this, Wallace also realized, or believed, or at least hoped, that he could become president of that United States, a nation of southerners, so he took to running.

Three years later, Wallace would win 13.5% of the popular vote, 5 states, and 46 electoral votes. Perhaps greater success would have followed if not for the attempt on his life in 1972.

We’ve arrived! On the first fairway, looking back at the tee box with the 9th and 18th greens to the right.

[Photo by Dan Nakano]

I have written several posts about our trip to Georgia last month, such as this one about restaurants in Athens and this one about the Georgia Museum of Art, also in Athens on the UGA campus. But I have yet to write my promised post on our day at the Masters golf tournament, now three weeks past. It’s tough. There’s so much to say, I hardly know what to focus on. In this post, I will tell part of the story. Perhaps more will follow in a second post.

Some background first, lifted from a post I wrote last August.

Augusta National Golf Club … runs The Masters, one of men’s golf’s four major tournaments, and for many players and observers, the best. I have had the good fortune of attending the three other majors: The Open Championship (familiarly known in the US as the British Open) at St. Andrews in 1990 and Troon in 2004, the US Open at Bethpage on Long Island in 2002, and the PGA Championship here at nearby Sahalee in 1998. But I have never gone to the Masters.

There’s a reason. It’s just about the hardest US sports ticket to get hold of. Tickets for the other three majors are made publicly available, but the Masters is like season tickets for team sports: ticket holders can renew their subscriptions, receiving tickets for life. Since the club isn’t interested in making a ton of money through ticket sales, a modest number of tickets is sold compared to other golf tournaments, and ticket prices remain low. Thus, ticket turnover is low too.

Ticket holders are barred by Augusta’s rules from re-selling their tickets, but of course many do, and the resulting prices are high. Once you get on the course, food prices are low. Indeed, the food is flat out cheap. Not cheap just by the standards of a sporting event, but cheap like turning the clock back a few decades.

There used to be a waiting list for available tickets, but the club abandoned that recently. Intead, it makes a small number of tickets available by lottery. You have to set up an account, log in, give them some information, and apply separately for tickets on tournament days (Thursday through Sunday) and on practice days (Monday through Wednesday). There’s a limit, 2 tickets per day on tournament days, 4 per day on practice days. I applied for both a year ago for this year’s Masters and struck out. I applied again a few months ago for next year’s tournament, learning a month ago that I would not be getting tournament tickets.

Now for the big news: Last night, I got an email informing me that I had won the practice round lottery. I was asked to log in for details. On doing so, I learned that I’ve won 4 tickets for Tuesday, the second practice day. Only Tuesday. I need to pay by September 15 or release them.

Not exactly what I was hoping for. Imagine flying all the way to Georgia, finding a hotel, and staying just for one day. It hardly seems worth the trouble.

Then again, the Masters! I can go! I can see the 12th hole at last. And the 13th. And the 14th. All of them! The holes any golf fan has memorized from years of watching the coverage on TV. (I failed to make this point — the other three majors rotate among courses. The Masters is always in one place. Players and fans come to know the course intimately.)

As you know, Gail and I decided to go. We bypassed the problem of finding a hotel room in or near Augusta by staying 95 miles away in Athens. And with four tickets in hand, we invited our Athens friends Dan and RuthElizabeth to join us.

When the day arrived, we awoke around 5:30, and walked out of our hotel at 6:30, just as Dan and RE drove up. First stop, Jittery Joe’s Coffee for coffee, tea, pastries, bagels. Then on to Augusta. The early morning drive through rural Georgia was lovely, with alternating woods and fields, the fields supporting a light fog layer. As it got brighter and warmer, we came to Interstate 20, then turned east for the closing stretch.

Whenever I have pictured this day, arriving at the Masters, I have imagined horrific traffic. Nope. The I-20 exit to Washington Road, one of the borders of the club and a main street of the city, was closed. We were forced farther east, almost to the Savannah River and the bridge to South Carolina, where we exited and formed two lanes of traffic that wound around, crossed Washington Road, and entered the club grounds. This didn’t take much more than five minutes. (It was around 9:00 AM now.)

We were directed to an aisle of parking, about nine aisles away from the course entrance. As we walked through the lot (I should say that the lot is a field of grass; I don’t know what it’s used for during the rest of the year), we found dozens of people selling lanyards at $5 apiece with plastic pockets that could hold your tournament pass. I was content to tie mine to a belt loop. And there was a strange guy holding a post some 15 feet high with signs attached containing various messages about Jesus. (Three days later, he would be arrested for saying aggressively hostile things to some of the patrons as they entered. Or maybe just removed from the grounds by the Augusta police.) Then we formed one of a series of lines leading to bag inspection, metal detectors, and finally a device that reads tickets to verify that they are real. Beyond this last checkpoint, we were in.

But where were we? It took some more walking and map studying to get oriented.

It turns out that there’s a long entry path. You walk in at the far end of the practice driving rang and make your way along one side of it toward the near end, the end with the players. With the range to your left, there is a bathroom building to the right. This is another special feature of the Masters. Typically, a course brings in lots of temporary porta-potties for the spectators. The Masters, partly because they spare no expense and partly because they know they’ll be hosting spectators annually, has a large permanent structure. We decided to stop there first. As Dan and I entered the men’s side, we were welcomed by a friendly gentleman, akin to a Walmart greeter. Then a young man directed traffic into two lines, depending on where you were heading. Additional people kept us moving, and another man (though I only noticed this at the end of the day) was busily wiping down the sink counter as each sink was used. At the end, yet another staff member thanked us for coming.

As one continues to walk the length of the driving range, one reaches practice chipping greens on the left. One now has the option of walking to the end, turning left, and falling in behind the practicing players, or curving right and into a wide pedestrian area with the giant merchandise store to the right and the first food operation to the left. Again, in contrast to other tournaments we’ve gone to where the merchandise tent would be just that—a tent—the Masters has a permanent structure. They run you up a ramp with switchbacks to lead you into the store. There’s a bit of a traffic jam at the entrance, as you reach to grab a basket or bag in which to put your purchases. Beyond that, there are hundreds of customers, and the first few steps are slow, but then it opens up as people choose various directions.

Like the entry gate and the bathrooms, the store was a model of efficiency. The key is huge numbers of staff. There are hats, shirts, what-not, available to grab in assorted places as you walk by. And there are counters with dozens of people behind them ready to help. Want a knit shirt, for instance, with a Masters logo on it? High up on the wall are 15 versions, with numbers 1 to 15. Color choices, logo choices, etc. You find one of the staff—and as crowded as the store is, many staff are free—ask for a number and a size, and he or she reaches into the shelves on the wall, grabs what you ask for, and hands it over. Not what you want? Ask for another number. We got shirts, hats, worked our way to the end, and lined up in the massive checkout area. They must have twenty lines. But each line has perhaps four pairs of people working four registers. One takes your stuff out and organizes it, the other scans it, you hand over your credit card, you get a big plastic bag with your purchase, and you’re out. What we feared would take half an hour took less than ten minutes.

Surely you don’t want to carry all your purchases around, do you? Well, just turn left and get in one of two new lines. One line is for checking your stuff. Several more staff are ready with giant plastic bags that you put all your purchases in, then you get in line, go up to the counter, hand over your bag, and it’s checked. We joined this line first. Then we watched the activity on the second line in awe. They had boxes of every imaginable size from just a few inches square to feet, stacked up, and a few lines with scales, cash registers, and people. This was the onsite UPS Store! And there was basically no line at all. You walk up, one of several men eye your purchases, grabs a box, puts what you bought in it, you go to the counter, it’s weighed, shut, sealed, you give the woman your address, she tells you the cost, you pay, and you’re out. Six days later, the box arrives at home. Nothing to carry, nothing to pack, and no wasted time. It was faster than the line for checking purchases.

Finally, we were ready for some golf. We walked back past the store entrance on the right and food on the left, through an open area with tables and diners, and onto the grass, sacred ground at last. To the right was a giant scoreboard with every participant’s name. To the left, the clubhouse and some other structures. In front of us, the first fairway. The tee box was back to the left, the green to the right. We decided to turn right and begin our walk around the course. (See photo above.) It was near 10:00 am by now. We would spend the next six hours walking the course in order, holes 1 through 18. The thrill of a lifetime.

More on the course in a second post. Here, as long as I’m talking about the non-course experience, let me say something about lunch. Well, before that I’ll describe my principal discovery of the day. Then lunch.

1. Principal discovery. How to put this? Well, keep in mind, the people who run the Masters are a pretty traditional group, “traditional” being code for a very narrow-minded group whose decisions on assorted policy matters are not always welcomed as just. Examples: their long-time exclusion of African-American members; before that, the years it took before they invited African-Americans to play in the Masters; and, until last year, the long-time exclusion of women members. Not everyone loves the members of Augusta National.

But here’s the thing about them that I came to understand. You know about God and the Jews, right? The chosen people and all that? God gave us the Torah and asked us to follow it. In return, God promised to take care of us. More or less. Exodus 19:5:

Now therefore, if ye will hearken unto My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be Mine own treasure from among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine.

There’s an important point here. In return for God’s gift, his choice of us, we aren’t supposed to ask questions. Don’t ask why the commandments are what they are. Don’t try to make sense of the law. Just do it (as others would be told millennia later). Do it and God will provide.

Simple, no?

Do you see where this is leading? I’ll spell it out. The lords of the Masters are our gods. They have chosen us, the lucky few who get tickets onto the grounds of the Masters. They have rules. We follow them. Don’t run. Be courteous to other patrons (that’s what we are—patrons, not fans). Be very courteous to the players. RESPECT! Follow these rules and the lords of the Masters will provide.

Again, simple. The greatest spectator experience in the world is yours if only you obey.

We obeyed.

2. Lunch. This is a case in point. Boy do they provide!

I have never eaten a pimento cheese sandwich. I didn’t even know until recently what it consisted of. I didn’t expect to like one. But I knew one thing about them: they are a Masters tradition, priced at just $1.50. I would have to have one.

After we walked the front nine, we headed to the food center that lies between an open spectator area and the tenth fairway. There was a large crowd. But again, Masters efficiency rules. One enters through any of perhaps five chutes. Each chute has identical food choices right or left, yielding in effect ten separate lines. First one finds shelves filled with “snacks”, such as bananas, or potato chips, or popcorn with Georgia pecans, or candy. Just past the snack shelves are the sandwiches, all pre-wrapped in green Masters-logoed paper. The pimento cheese. Masters club. Ham and cheese. Chicken breast. Tuna salad. Egg salad. Bar-B-Que. The most expensive of the bunch are the two hot ones, the barbecue and chicken, at $3.00. Beyond sandwiches are beverages, shelves again with the choices arrayed. Beer or lemonade in Masters-logoed plastic cups. Water in Masters plastic bottles. I can’t remember what else. There must have been Coke.

I had read about their good egg salad. And about the classic chicken sandwich. And the barbecue. What to do? At these prices, who cares? Gail grabbed a banana. Me the popcorn and pecans. We took one pimento cheese to try together. We each got barbecue. I got the chicken, Gail the ham and cheese. We got two bottles of water. Beyond the food was an open area, then the cashiers. Like at the merchandise store, they were experts at moving people through. I was about to get on line when I saw a freezer case in front of them with Georgia peach ice cream sandwiches. We had to try that. This was the one place where the staff had slipped. There were boxes of sandwiches, but no loose ones to grab. Someone had to get in there and tear a box open. I had my arms filled with sandwiches. I put them on the cashier counter, dug in, tore a box open, and handed out sandwiches to other patrons, with one for us.

Time to pay. So that’s five sandwiches, two waters, one ice cream, one popcorn, one banana. Our cashier rang it up. $19! That’s nineteen dollars! What would you get for $19 at a professional football or basketball game? Or a baseball game? I was stunned. But, see #1 above.

Time to eat. Barbecue and chicken: great. Popcorn: great. Georgia peach ice cream: great. Pimento cheese: not my thing, but I have to say, I liked it. Some bite from the pepper. Pretty good. I was tempted to run the chute again so I could try the egg salad. But I was full, and there were nine more holes to see, the most famous back nine in golf.

We walked them, nine to eighteen. The eighteenth brought us up to the practice green. The close proximity of the first tee box, eighteenth green, and practice green is another Masters wonder. And with no grandstands to break up the open space. I peeked over three rows of people to see what was up. There was Phil, putting and hanging out with Steve Stricker. Good timing.

Steve Stricker giving Phil Mickelson a putting tip, on the practice green at Augusta

[Photo by Dan Nakano]

Then we wandered past the clubhouse, the pro shop, some other areas out of bounds to us, made a right, and headed into the area between the merchandise building and the first food center we had passed six and a half hours before. Back in the store Dan and I went, so I could buy two more hats while Gail and RE got some drinks across the way. Out in three minutes. To the checkout line so Dan and RE could get the goods they had checked in earlier. Over to the chipping greens near the driving range, where Phil and Ernie and assorted others would make their way as we watched.

I drank my lemonade, gaining a souvenir plastic cup in the process. We had another run at the fancy bathroom. Then we headed out the gate to our car, turned onto Washington Road (away from I-20, as we were forced to do), down Washington into Augusta, onto a highway that heads back north along the Savannah River, with South Carolina across the way, onto I-20, and home.

A perfect day. Thank you Masters gods.