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Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Dateline: Author Appearances & Readings


At the Rosenbach Museum on Bloomsday, June 16, I will join 75 other Philadelphians and read a section from Ulysses. This particular section is the rather long Corny Kelleher Dialogs with Bloom, the Horse, Stephen and Rudy. I will act out all parts. Stay tuned.

In September, Spiral Bookcase in Manayunk is planning a Pretzel Park outdoor reading and Q and A from my book, Manayunk, on the Spiral Bookstore Best Seller List for the last few years.

Recorded 4 Rainbow Minute history readings for The Rainbow Minute, WRIR 97.3fm in Richmond, Virginia. Air time to be announced. Judd Proctor recorded these sessions in Center City for broadcast sometime in June.

Published Letter to the Editor in The Catholic Standard & Times this week:

To the Editor:

I attended a wedding Mass at this beautiful church about a month ago. It was my first time in Nativity and the architecture and interior design of the church seemed to promise an equally beautiful ceremony. As a side note, it was good to see that the "remodeling" frenzy that followed Vatican II did not harm Nativity in any way.

While the church was beautiful, I was disappointed in the quality of the Mass at this particular wedding. Before Mass, people stood and talked--in fact, they talked quite loudly--all over the church. Initially there was a tendency to whisper but this soon gave way to reception-like voices, and even laughter. Gone was the traditional quiet one used to expect (before Mass) in Catholic churches. The experience was like sitting in a cafeteria and watching old friends say hello to one another after slapping each other on the back.

The pastor should address this problem in one of his sermons in the future. There was plenty of time to chat and "get down" after the Mass.

Another disappointing thing about the Mass, was the homily. The priest, rather than using the pulpit to speak, stood in front of the couple and talked to them like he was chatting them up in a bar. He kept saying, "Wow, they met in Barnaby's, wow, isn't God great, wow, oh wow!"

I lost count of the "wow's" after a while, but the people around me in the pews--they were traditionalist Catholics--seemed to be visibly wincing as well. The off the cuff homily was pure stream of consciousness bar talk. The only thing missing was a high five and a baseball cap.

One expects something more formal at a wedding. A litany of WOW's might be okay at the reception, but we don't need to hear this very dumbed down and condescending talk in the middle of Mass.


Sincerely,

Thom Nickels

Saturday, May 21, 2011

An Incredibly Beautiful Day Despite the Novus Ordo Accents


I attended my niece's wedding Mass at this beautiful church about a month ago. It was my first time in Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary church in Media, PA. The architecture and interior design of the church seemed to promise an equally beautiful ceremony. As a side note, it was good to see that the "remodeling" frenzy that followed Vatican II did not harm Nativity in any way.

While I was very happy for my niece Colleen, I was disappointed in the quality of the wedding Mass. Before the Mass, people stood and talked--in fact, they talked quite loudly--all over the church. Initially there was a tendency to whisper but this soon gave way to reception-like raised voices, even bursts of laughter. Gone was the traditional quiet one used to expect (before Mass) in Catholic churches. A friend told me that this is what evangelical Protestants do before the beginning of a service--they chat up a perfect storm. I felt like I was sitting in the Wilma theater in Center City before curtain time.

I'm not against saying hello to old friends and telling jokes, but isn't this what a reception is for? There's plenty of time to "get down" after the Mass.

Another disappointing thing about the Mass--besides the lackluster Novus Ordo elements that rarely ever inspire---was the homily. The priest, rather than using the pulpit to speak, stood in front of the couple and talked to them like he was chatting them up in a bar. He kept saying, "Wow, they met in Barnaby's, wow, isn't God great, wow, oh wow!"

Wow, oh wow.

I lost count of the "wow's" after a while, but the people around me in the pews--there were a few traditionalist Catholics--appeared to be wincing. The off the cuff homily was pure stream of consciousness bar talk. The only thing missing was a high five and a baseball cap.

A litany of WOW's might be okay at the reception, but do we need to hear this very dumbed down and condescending talk in the middle of Mass?

Do we?

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Stage One:The Sleepy 2011 Mayoral Primary in Philadelphia (From The Star)


The other night I got a phone call from a public opinion pollster. Initially I thought it was a national opinion poll about the demise of Bin Laden, so I was ready to talk. My spirits deflated somewhat when the pollster asked if I was voting in the city primary on May 17th.

The question got me thinking about the “sleepiest primary” in the city’s history where T. Milton Street, ex-con, ex-state senator, ex-truck driver and ex- hot dog vendor is running for mayor. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a truck driver or a hot dog vendor, but Milton Street? I remember Mr. Street when he was throwing punches with his brother, the former mayor, during his vendor days in the 1970s. The best thing I think you can say about him then was that he lacked polish. He really was like one of those ruffians you observe while waiting for a bus in a seedy section of town. Today, of course, he’s all buttoned up and beautiful-- despite his just getting out of prison last year.

You have to button up somewhat when you run for mayor, but is this enough?
Mayor Nutter will win this primary hands down, despite the almost total absence of an official campaign. There have been no TV ads, no mayoral debates, no rallies or roving vans with bullhorns. It must be a rare, singular experience indeed to be able to claim an election victory while sleepwalking. Not many of us will get to experience this in life.

When the pollster asked me if I was voting, I almost replied, “When both candidates leave you cold, what’s a voter to do?”

“We only want to know if you are going to vote,” she said.

“I will not be voting,” I replied, instantly recalling all the hoopla Michael Nutter created the first time he ran for office. That mania was like a tailwind from a Lady Gaga concert. It was a time when even apolitical people became Nutter acolytes, when an affluent friend of mine, a Republican, organized a wine fundraiser for Nutter in her Center City digs. The Nutter-support camp was like Jonestown without the Kool-Aid. Here was a politician, after all, who could outtalk a Harvard professor despite a personality trait that I found to be calculatingly cold and “surgical.” Call it a tricky element that would disappoint the people who once hailed him as savior. Political friends brushed me off. “Try to get past his personality. He may not be warm and fuzzy, he’ll get things done.”

I don’t think the city is succeeding with Nutter. Look at the mayor’s record: a 10% temporary property tax hike; a proposed soda, blogger, cigar and trash tax. Some of these ideas materialized and some didn’t. Additionally, there was the firehouse and library-closing fiasco, not to mention that Philly still has the second highest wage tax in the nation, and-- as columnist Chris Friend pointed out—“an educational system on a par with third-world nations.”

Immediately after the pollster’s call I received a campaign email from DA Seth Williams campaigning for City Council candidate, Andy Toy.

“Andy represents not just a voice for change, but rather he will be a much needed catalyst for change in City government. His passion for reform and dedication to improving our City is unshakeable. No other candidate has a record of creating jobs and improving neighborhoods like Andy Toy, and when he is elected to Council there is no doubt he will work hard to move our City forward,” the message said in part. Haven’t I read these words before? Isn’t this just copy and paste political rhetoric, the same promises “re-gifted” campaign after campaign, no matter the politician’s name, when somebody new wants to work in City Hall?

I’m beginning to think that politicians should not talk about change at all.

‘Change’ is becoming a dirty word. It’s become an empty mantra, something that sounds good but has come to have little substance or believability. Can it be that the politicians who would really change things would never talk about change?
I will vote on May 17, but I’m half tempted to bring in a special envelope with a different name on it, and hand it to one of the poll watchers.

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Islam is a Political System (From The Bulletin)


Tom Trento, Director of the Florida Security Council, was in Philadelphia last year to showcase the film, “The Third Jihad,” and to share his thoughts on what he calls “the silent jihad in Philadelphia.”

Over two hundred people packed the main auditorium of the central branch of the Free Library to watch the controversial film that former presidential candidate Rudy Guliani calls “a wake-up call for America.” The Third Jihad exposes the destructive aims of radical Islam, including the subtle dangers of “peaceful” cultural jihad and its influences on western society.

Among the many people interviewed in the film were Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former member of the Dutch Parliament who made the film, Submission, with Theo Van Gogh. Van Gogh was later killed by a Muslim radical for his portrayal [in Submission] of the treatment of women in Islamic societies. Ali, a former Muslim, escaped to the Netherlands to free herself from an arranged marriage in Somalia in 1992.
After the feature length film—a large part of which focuses on Western Europe’s growing radical Islamist populations that call for the institution of Sharia Law in these countries—Mr. Trento took the podium.

A power de-surge prevented the lights in the auditorium from switching on, so Mr. Trento was framed in shadows, as was the audience, symbolic, perhaps of the doomed nature of the subject at hand.

“Islam is a political system, primarily,” Mr. Trento said. “Serious analysts and Islamists say this also. There’s no separation of God and state in Islam. There’s no separation of mosque and state. If this is true, then the essence of its quality, Sharia, also called the pathway or Sharia law, begs the question: can this coexist with a Constitutional Democratic Republic? Is there a way to bring these two together?”

Mr. Trento’s answer is an unqualified no.

“We are talking about a clash of civilizations here,” he said, going on to quote CIA operative Claire Lopez, who also makes an appearance in the film: “We are in the battle for the essence of the United States of America.”

Mr. Trento, in fact, calls it “the epic battle of our lifetime” but insists that most Americans are asleep when it comes to the silent jihad happening all around them.

“You have a battle right here in Philadelphia,” he said. “In fact, on October 28, we are going to hold a 3 or 4 hour workshop on Jihad in Philadelphia and detail all of this in an evidentiary way. For instance, you have an individual in Philadelphia who made a lot of money in the Philadelphia Soul Sound. His name is Kenny Gamble, or Luqman Abdul-Haqq.”

Mr. Trento reminded the audience that Gamble became a Muslim in the 1970s after a personal crisis and then “used his money to build a lot of companies that are working to rebuild the inner city.”

“We are seeing this sort of thing all over the United States,” Mr. Trento said, “This is what is part of the stealth jihad.”

While quick to remind the audience that his desire was not to bash Muslims, Mr. Trento said that it was his intent to confront the ideology of Islam that desires to implement Sharia Law in place of the Constitution of the United States.
“If anyone wants to mess with the Constitution, they become an enemy of the United States. But the issue isn’t Muslims; it’s where you stand on Sharia Law. If you’re for Sharia Law, you’re an enemy of the United States.”

Sharia Law governs every aspect of private and public life of an individual, from how one eats, dresses, grooms, and worships.

“Kenny Gamble has an operation going on,” Mr. Trento said. “Now, when U.S. Intelligence starts to look at these guys—and they’ve been looking at them for a long time—they will see that a kind of organizational flow chart is being utilized the Islamic world by an organization called the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is the Costra Nostra of the Muslim world. So, when you look into this in Philadelphia, and you see the guys with black berets, the new Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, all these various Islamic organizations tie into Kenny Gamble, and they all sit on boards together.”

The next question Mr. Trento asks is: What is Kenny Gamble doing?

“If Kenny Gamble desires to save the inner city, we are with him 100%. If he desires to use Sharia Law and establish an enclave as he’s developing that is separate and distinct from the American Republic Democratic Constitutional system of government as is occurring in London, then he becomes someone that needs to be stopped.
“This is why Kenny Gamble is currently under a pretty intensive microscope,” Mr. Trento said.

An additional concern, Mr. Trento feels, are Kenny Gamble’s “young shock troops… boys anywhere from the age of five to 12. Called Jawala scouts, “these young troopers are the exact duplication of the Hammas model,” Mr. Tento explains. “The psychological impetus being that if you influence a kid when they are 7 years old, you have them for life.

Part of the plan, whenever poison is introduced anywhere, is to introduce it in a nice container of some sort,” Mr. Trento said. “The container right now is trying to rebuild the inner city. We’re going to give Mr. Gamble a chance to denounce Sharia for U.S. principles. Right now the effort is to clean up the neighborhood and grow young men and women in the Islamic faith. I do believe there are sincere Muslims who want to do that, but there are higher officials and they are working out a grand plan, and they are using non Sharia Muslims as useful idiots, as Karl Marx did, to help usher in hundreds of billions of state and federal dollars to protect the progress of low income housing and job finding programs. “

One audience member asked Mr. Trento’s opinion of the proposed Islamic Center two blocks from New York’s Ground Zero.

There’s a doctrine in the annals of the theology of Islam that allows it in wartime to deceive, to have a deceptive position,” Mr. Trento said. “It’s affirmed by the four schools of Islamist theology. It’s for real, folks. When we hear various Inman’s saying, ‘We’re building a building of love and compassion, so that Jews and Christians and everybody can get together, you can believe that if you want to. But it’s important in Islamic theology that once you conquer something or have a conquest of some sort, you claim the land, then you own it eternally, that’s why there will never, never, never be peace in Israel because the 1.3 billion Muslims believe that they own that land because they conquered it at one point.

“Tell your friends and family about this film, tell everyone,” Mr. Trento said. “We are fighting a theocratic political system that’s an irresistible force!”

Thom Nickels

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Museums in the Down Economy (From ICON, May 2011)



The time is 2001, and Anne d’Harnoncourt is the Director at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Museum dining room is packed with art critics and journalists anticipating another press luncheon that will launch another world class exhibit. The wait staff offers red or white wine as journalists search the twenty or so silver accented tables for their name cards. The mood is celebratory and gay, like a scene from the Vincent Minnelli movie, Gigi.

After the speeches, appetizer, entrĂ©e and dessert, the press is handed complimentary copies of the exhibition catalog, which is really not a catalog at all but a pricey art book ranging in the $50.00 price range. These art tomes—Cezanne and Beyond, Andrew Wyeth, Giorgio de Chirico, The Arts in Latin America, Renoir, Dali or Thomas Eakins—make a substantial addition to any library.

If you think this sounds good, just a couple of years before, at a PMA Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi exhibit, the museum hosted ‘journalist trolleys’ that escorted the press to Manayunk and back in order to visit the Venturi offices after another sumptuous feast in the PMA dining room.

Today, many of the classic perks that still have journalists talking have been relegated down the George Orwell memory hole.

Signs that the bad economy was impacting the museum surfaced shortly before Ms. d’Harnoncourt’s death when the Versailles-style press luncheon, in a nod to minimalism, replaced wine with iced tea, and the press catalog handouts metastasized into CD photo miniatures.

Not only at PMA but at large and small museums nationwide, layoffs have decimated staffs, reduced departments, or forced high profile museum personnel--who thought they had a lifetime career—to look for other work. In effect, the national Recession has forced museums to crawl on all fours like survivors of some half baked holocaust.

In Massachusetts, the Rose Museum at Brandeis University put its entire collection up for sale—deaccessing is the museum term—in order to cover operating expenses. In New York, the Brooklyn Museum, in order not to betray a donor, turned its exhibition space over to one artist. The Art Newspaper reported that in Colorado, the Denver Museum announced plans in 2010 to sell 4 of the 825 works earmarked for its new satellite site, the Clyfford Still Museum. With layoffs, furloughs and hiring freezes at an all time high, not to mention endowments shrinking by a third during the worst of the market swoon, the larger the museum the steeper the loss.

Economic stagnation also affected general museum income from tourists, members, publications, shops and restaurants. Corporate support, once as dependable as a rock called Gibraltar, was scaled back because of market priorities. If you think this Lentil soup couldn’t get any thinner, consider the startling new statistics regarding the museum habits of Americans: Three out of 4 people don’t visit museums, and when they do, it’s for “King Tut” style blockbuster exhibitions that bring in huge audiences. Museum visitors are also getting older, unless of course you count the six years old who like to go to Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum.


Please Touch, as has been noted in the Philadelphia press, has also seen better days.

The museum opened in October 2008 to great fanfare, but its move from an economically smart (and small) Center City location to high priced Fairmount Park that has the potential to spell financial disaster for the ‘little museum that could.’ Today both membership and attendance at Please Touch is considerably down.
“The new Please Touch Museum has won adoration from 6-year olds and other important critics,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported recently, “and its move to Memorial Hall undoubtedly kept a rare architectural artifact of the 1876 Centennial Exposition from sliding into irretrievable decrepitude…”

The implied ‘but’ here refers to the museum’s slide into economic disaster.
When plans were announced several years ago to move Please Touch to Memorial Hall, skeptics predicted that the new location wouldn’t work. The criticism wasn’t questioning the remarkable renovation of Memorial Hall that took place in lieu of the move, but it did suggest that betting on a children’s museum to garner enough financial support to meet an 88 million dollars fundraising goal (according to The Inquirer, Please Touch is still 21.5 million shy of its target) was comparable to investing in sub-prime loans.

The planners whose vision it was to turn a small Center City museum into a PMA-like fortress devoted to the “toy” fantasies of 6-year olds must have been smoking something.

Museum officials are still hopeful that Please Touch can rise to the occasion. Executive Vice President Concetta Bencivenga says that “because the economy is starting to show some hopeful signs, we are hopeful that engaged individuals who are passionate about children and education, and really passionate about educating the next generation, begin to support Please Touch, or reaffirm their commitment to help us fulfill our goal of completing our capital campaign.

“Anyone who has ever opened a museum knows that the first year is the most inefficient year,” Bencivenga added, “So we have gone through a lot of reorganization as we settle into the new space.”

Hopefully that can be accomplished despite the museum’s relative isolation from the rest of the city. SEPTA bus service to this part of Fairmount Park is tricky unless you’re a veteran bus rider, so travel by car is almost a necessity. A museum that is out of the “walkable” centralized area of the city where buses rarely travel is bound to experience trouble.

In marked contrast to Please Touch, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has had a relatively unscathed last few years, according to PAFA President and CEO, David R. Brigham. PAFA, in fact, is experiencing a kind of Renaissance with its new director, Harry Philbrick, formerly Director of Education at The Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

“Aldrich was a very nice and quiet contemporary art center and he [Philbrick] turned it into a very important contemporary art museum,” Brigham says, “He has an artist’s edge and an artist’s hand.”

PAFA has not only weathered the economy, but according to Brigham it has had six consecutive balanced budgets. “We’ve also maintained full employment—we’ve had no layoffs during the recession and we’ve actually been able to grow our program and not cut it. We’ve been healthy.” With 650 full time students and 65 faculty members, tuition helps keep PAFA afloat, but it’s not the only thing. “A remaining portion comes from earned income from the store, facility rentals and income from endowments, and that’s a good healthy mix,” Brigham adds.

The PAFA collection houses some 2,000 paintings, 450 sculptures and 11,000 works on paper. The museum’s biggest draw is the annual student exhibition which takes place in May. The exhibition, which showcases the work of graduating students, attracts potential buyers who survey the works while balancing checkbooks, drinks and hors d’oeuvres. The exhibition gives student artists the opportunity to chat up guests as well as make themselves available for interviews.

PAFA, it seems, has no worries about the future. The new addition to the convention center directly across the street is likely to increase visitors. A serendipitous element was the center’s recent gala opening with a convention of 20,000 operating room nurses. The timing for PAFA couldn’t have been better, since its March exhibition, “Anatomy Academy,” included Thomas Eakins’ ‘Gross Clinic,’ as well as other medical works, something that Brigham called an “ideal content for that audience.”

While many museums around the world, in order to increase revenue, have taken to hosting commercially-based “blockbuster” exhibitions, that’s certainly not the case with PAFA.

“The blockbuster exhibition model,” Brigham said, “is not our model because going this route tends to lead to decisions that might be in conflict with one’s mission. That’s not our motivation. Our motivation is to help organize exhibits that help to illuminate the current state of American art. Of course we want them to be popular but our first motivation is to do serious exhibitions.”

Museums outside the City of Philadelphia are also feeling the Recession’s scorched earth policy.

Mention Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania to most people and chances are they will think of artist Andrew Wyeth.

At the Brandywine River Museum one can see generations of Wyeth family art as well as American art that relates in some way to the Brandywine Valley. American still life painting, illustrations, portraititure and landscape works are among the hundreds of works represented in the collection. This summer the museum plans a large Jamie Wyeth exhibit (“Farm Work by Jamie Wyeth”) that will feature the sculpted shapes of farm implements as seen by the artist who lives on a farm in Chadds Ford with his wife, Phyllis.

The Brandywine River Museum was a favorite place of Andrew Wyeth, who used to “pop in and out all the time” according to Director James Duff.

“Jamie pops in as his father did. It’s never a regular thing but it’s a fairly frequent thing because they want to see art. On any given day when he was alive you might find Andrew Wyeth in our gallery just looking at pictures. And Jamie does the same thing to a certain degree. Jamie has a more parapetic life; one day he might be in Washington, the next day in New York or Maine.”

The Brandywine is unique in that it is not a separate organization but a department of the Brandywine Conservatory. The Conservatory, according to Duff, also operates the Chadds Ford Environmental Management Center, charged with the specific task of water quality preservation. This double-barrel mission has been made more complicated by the faltering economy.

“We are scrambling for funds to support environmental work just as we are scrambling for funds to support the arts program,” Duffs adds. “The environmental program was the first program here before the museum came along. “
An old 1864 grist mill was acquired in 1967 for the Conservancy and then later, as Duff notes, “a lot of people thought it would make a dandy museum to deal with regional art.” That happened when the mill was renovated by Baltimore architect James R. Reeves.

Duff was the director of a museum in New York State before coming to the Brandywine 38 years ago. “There have been significant changes in the area,” he says. “When the museum first opened 40 years ago people wondered why there was a 4-lane highway down here because there wasn’t enough traffic to justify 4-lane traffic on US Route 1. No one would have conceived of a stop light in the middle of Chadds Ford then, it was just so unnecessary.”

With the growth of the region also came the growth of the museum.
Today the museum has over 300 volunteers and five buildings on a 12 acre campus filled with wildflowers and indigenous trees. But the Brandywine, like most museums, has not had an easy time of it. “These times have been difficult,” Duff confesses,” especially the last two years, but right now with endowment coming back nearly to what it was 3 years ago, and with attendance increasing, we’re very hopeful about the future.

“Most not for profit institutions take their income based on a trailing average of the market value. When you do that,” Duff adds, “the effect of a declining endowment hits you even years after the actual decline. But with the market coming back we look forward to what we hope will be years of able and growing income.”
Duff also believes that the Brandywine collection will grow, and mentions that the last two exhibits related to the Civil War have been drawing in all kinds of people.

In nearby Bucks County, the place where William Penn called home, there are historic stone cottages, gourmet country stores, the canal, and two museums: the Henry Chapman Mercer Museum and the James Michener Museum.

The Michener Museum, says museum director Brice Katsiff, was one of hundreds of regional museums built in the late 1980s and early 1990s when 1.2 museums a week were opening around the country. These institutions celebrated local cultural history. As for the museum’s namesake, Katsiff says that many people coming into the museum today don’t know who Michener was.

“He’s not in the pantheon of American Literature by any means. Young people will come to the museum and they will know that there’s a museum named after him, but that’s it. When the museum started out there were some people who said that the entire museum should be about Michener.

“Like most museums,” Kistoff says, “the majority of things that come to us come to us through gifts, but we do have modest, limited acquisition funds and we are buying new work. If we give an artist an exhibition we try very hard to buy something from the exhibit for the collection.”

The economy has forced the Michener to cut back on staff through hiring freezes, some layoffs and early retirements. The museum also shrank a portion of its programming. The Michener is a leaner institution than it was 5 years ago.
It also experienced a radical 50% cut in State Arts Funding, declining federal support and the end of a State run program called the Legislative Initiative Grants.

“In the current climate there’s even more negative pressure on government support, witness the effort to eliminate funds for NPR,” Katsiff says, adding that he doesn’t think all the factors in the current government support for the arts cultural climate are the byproduct of the cultural wars. “Some factors are the by product of financial pressure; the cultural war issue may be lingering a little bit in the minds of some people but I don’t think it has the power that it had 10 or 15 years ago.”

For the Michener, the silver lining in the crises is that it is forcing museums to find more diverse funding sources. “The final outcome,” he says, “may be a strengthening and one of the options may be that not all Non-profits or all cultural institutions are going to survive. The question is what degree of government support is healthy.”

Perhaps the most traumatic change for the Michener was the forced closure of its satellite facility in New Hope sometime before the financial collapse. It closed because the museum was not able to support it.

“Look,” Katsiff says, “I think we saw that 20 years ago when Canadian cultural institutions were almost entirely dependent on government money and then there was a shift. Reagan came in and there was a shift in thinking about government money for cultural institutions and the Canadian institutions really suffered serious cutbacks because there had been only one source of money—the government. An institution has to have multiple sources of income so that no one agency ‘owns’ it.”

Despite its financial woes, the Michener added a new wing designed by Philadelphia’s Hillier Group and a new project, by the prestigious Kieran Timberlake firm (currently involved in the design of the US embassy in London) is set to begin soon. The museum is also opening a pavilion for concerts, lectures and jazz night entertainments, a “must do” development in an age when museums must be multi-purpose. Fortunately for the Michener, it is located in a county of almost 700,000 people, many of whom have some financial means.

While life at the Allentown Art Museum may not be all Billy Joel songs, it’s still looking up.

Brooks Joyner, President and CEO of the Museum since May 2010, says that the nation’s financial crises has caused the museum “to hit rock bottom with a bare bones budget.”

Founded in the 1930s, the Allentown Art Museum has a diverse collection of American and Renaissance painting. The museum’s famous Samuel H. Kress collection includes some important Old World Masters, Italian, Dutch and Flemish masterpieces that have been in storage since the museum’s temporary closure since November 2010 until the construction of new gallery space. The museum is scheduled to re-open in October 2011 with a grand opening in February.

Staying open during construction was an option but an expensive one that Joyner says would have cost the museum at least a quarter million dollars. Joyner, who hails from the Josyln Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, has had plenty of experience in budget cuts that approach the shock level of a radical mastectomy.
At the Joslyn, he recalls at July 2001 meeting in which the museum was told by its controllers and financial officers that the institution would come up a 1.2 million short and literally run out of money to pay its obligations. “Jaws dropped on a number of Board members and our Chairman’s face when we heard this,” he said. “And this was before 9/11 and the great economic disaster.”

Joyner says that the museum has been suffering since 2008 when it lost government funding at the federal, state and county levels. The last 2-3 years have been Lentil soup ones, with the museum eliminating Tuesday hours, reducing personnel, establishing a hiring freeze and reducing salaries by 5% across the board. It also had to re-do employee benefit packages and order Departments to reduce their budgets. The bold pairing down, while seemingly inhumane, produced results: By June 2010 the museum was able to balance its budget.

Joyner tells me, “We hope to do that this year. We’ve turned the corner on the losing proposition that had reduced benefits, morale and salaries. Our plan is to restore salaries to the level where they once were.” Just as importantly, the museum has achieved this without, as Joyner says, selling out the integrity of its programs in any way when it lost government funding.

“We’ve been able to supplement with private, corporation and foundation support.” If that happens, the museum can look forward to a significant rebound when it reopens in October; a rebound that Joyner expects will “hit some of our all time highs next year.”

As if the American museum financial crisis needed more bad news, Joyner reminds me that over the last couple of years there’s been “a generational die-off” among the nation’s top museum directors.

The greatest museum directors in the country have been dying quite frequently,” he says. “It’s unbelievable. A few years ago the Cleveland Museum director was going to speak at our museum in Omaha but we got a call from his secretary who said he was ill, not feeling well, and he was dead in 5 days. We also lost Jim Woods, the Chicago Art Institute director, and most recently the Getty President, and then Anne d’Harancourt and 2 months ago the director of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Some die of age and infirmity, but some die suddenly and unexpectedly.”
But that, as they say, is another sad story.









The time is 2001, and Anne d’Harnoncourt is the Director at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Museum dining room is packed with art critics and journalists anticipating another press luncheon that will launch another world class exhibit. The wait staff offers red or white wine as journalists search the twenty or so silver accented tables for their name cards. The mood is celebratory and gay, like a scene from the Vincent Minnelli movie, Gigi.
After the speeches, appetizer, entrĂ©e and dessert, the press is handed complimentary copies of the exhibition catalog, which is really not a catalog at all but a pricey art book ranging in the $50.00 price range. These art tomes—Cezanne and Beyond, Andrew Wyeth, Giorgio de Chirico, The Arts in Latin America, Renoir, Dali or Thomas Eakins—make a substantial addition to any library.
If you think this sounds good, just a couple of years before, at a PMA Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi exhibit, the museum hosted ‘journalist trolleys’ that escorted the press to Manayunk and back in order to visit the Venturi offices after another sumptuous feast in the PMA dining room.
Today, many of the classic perks that still have journalists talking have been relegated down the George Orwell memory hole.
Signs that the bad economy was impacting the museum surfaced shortly before Ms. d’Harnoncourt’s death when the Versailles-style press luncheon, in a nod to minimalism, replaced wine with iced tea, and the press catalog handouts metastasized into CD photo miniatures.
Not only at PMA but at large and small museums nationwide, layoffs have decimated staffs, reduced departments, or forced high profile museum personnel--who thought they had a lifetime career—to look for other work. In effect, the national Recession has forced museums to crawl on all fours like survivors of some half baked holocaust.
In Massachusetts, the Rose Museum at Brandeis University put its entire collection up for sale—deaccessing is the museum term—in order to cover operating expenses. In New York, the Brooklyn Museum, in order not to betray a donor, turned its exhibition space over to one artist. The Art Newspaper reported that in Colorado, the Denver Museum announced plans in 2010 to sell 4 of the 825 works earmarked for its new satellite site, the Clyfford Still Museum. With layoffs, furloughs and hiring freezes at an all time high, not to mention endowments shrinking by a third during the worst of the market swoon, the larger the museum the steeper the loss.
Economic stagnation also affected general museum income from tourists, members, publications, shops and restaurants. Corporate support, once as dependable as a rock called Gibraltar, was scaled back because of market priorities. If you think this Lentil soup couldn’t get any thinner, consider the startling new statistics regarding the museum habits of Americans: Three out of 4 people don’t visit museums, and when they do, it’s for “King Tut” style blockbuster exhibitions that bring in huge audiences. Museum visitors are also getting older, unless of course you count the six years old who like to go to Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum.


Please Touch, as has been noted in the Philadelphia press, has also seen better days.
The museum opened in October 2008 to great fanfare, but its move from an economically smart (and small) Center City location to high priced Fairmount Park that has the potential to spell financial disaster for the ‘little museum that could.’ Today both membership and attendance at Please Touch is considerably down.
“The new Please Touch Museum has won adoration from 6-year olds and other important critics,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported recently, “and its move to Memorial Hall undoubtedly kept a rare architectural artifact of the 1876 Centennial Exposition from sliding into irretrievable decrepitude…”
The implied ‘but’ here refers to the museum’s slide into economic disaster.
When plans were announced several years ago to move Please Touch to Memorial Hall, skeptics predicted that the new location wouldn’t work. The criticism wasn’t questioning the remarkable renovation of Memorial Hall that took place in lieu of the move, but it did suggest that betting on a children’s museum to garner enough financial support to meet an 88 million dollars fundraising goal (according to The Inquirer, Please Touch is still 21.5 million shy of its target) was comparable to investing in sub-prime loans.
The planners whose vision it was to turn a small Center City museum into a PMA-like fortress devoted to the “toy” fantasies of 6-year olds must have been smoking something.
Museum officials are still hopeful that Please Touch can rise to the occasion. Executive Vice President Concetta Bencivenga says that “because the economy is starting to show some hopeful signs, we are hopeful that engaged individuals who are passionate about children and education, and really passionate about educating the next generation, begin to support Please Touch, or reaffirm their commitment to help us fulfill our goal of completing our capital campaign.
“Anyone who has ever opened a museum knows that the first year is the most inefficient year,” Bencivenga added, “So we have gone through a lot of reorganization as we settle into the new space.”

Hopefully that can be accomplished despite the museum’s relative isolation from the rest of the city. SEPTA bus service to this part of Fairmount Park is tricky unless you’re a veteran bus rider, so travel by car is almost a necessity. A museum that is out of the “walkable” centralized area of the city where buses rarely travel is bound to experience trouble.

In marked contrast to Please Touch, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has had a relatively unscathed last few years, according to PAFA President and CEO, David R. Brigham. PAFA, in fact, is experiencing a kind of Renaissance with its new director, Harry Philbrick, formerly Director of Education at The Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
“Aldrich was a very nice and quiet contemporary art center and he [Philbrick] turned it into a very important contemporary art museum,” Brigham says, “He has an artist’s edge and an artist’s hand.”
PAFA has not only weathered the economy, but according to Brigham it has had six consecutive balanced budgets. “We’ve also maintained full employment—we’ve had no layoffs during the recession and we’ve actually been able to grow our program and not cut it. We’ve been healthy.” With 650 full time students and 65 faculty members, tuition helps keep PAFA afloat, but it’s not the only thing. “A remaining portion comes from earned income from the store, facility rentals and income from endowments, and that’s a good healthy mix,” Brigham adds.
The PAFA collection houses some 2,000 paintings, 450 sculptures and 11,000 works on paper. The museum’s biggest draw is the annual student exhibition which takes place in May. The exhibition, which showcases the work of graduating students, attracts potential buyers who survey the works while balancing checkbooks, drinks and hors d’oeuvres. The exhibition gives student artists the opportunity to chat up guests as well as make themselves available for interviews.
PAFA, it seems, has no worries about the future. The new addition to the convention center directly across the street is likely to increase visitors. A serendipitous element was the center’s recent gala opening with a convention of 20,000 operating room nurses. The timing for PAFA couldn’t have been better, since its March exhibition, “Anatomy Academy,” included Thomas Eakins’ ‘Gross Clinic,’ as well as other medical works, something that Brigham called an “ideal content for that audience.”
While many museums around the world, in order to increase revenue, have taken to hosting commercially-based “blockbuster” exhibitions, that’s certainly not the case with PAFA.
“The blockbuster exhibition model,” Brigham said, “is not our model because going this route tends to lead to decisions that might be in conflict with one’s mission. That’s not our motivation. Our motivation is to help organize exhibits that help to illuminate the current state of American art. Of course we want them to be popular but our first motivation is to do serious exhibitions.”
Museums outside the City of Philadelphia are also feeling the Recession’s scorched earth policy.
Mention Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania to most people and chances are they will think of artist Andrew Wyeth.
At the Brandywine River Museum one can see generations of Wyeth family art as well as American art that relates in some way to the Brandywine Valley. American still life painting, illustrations, portraititure and landscape works are among the hundreds of works represented in the collection. This summer the museum plans a large Jamie Wyeth exhibit (“Farm Work by Jamie Wyeth”) that will feature the sculpted shapes of farm implements as seen by the artist who lives on a farm in Chadds Ford with his wife, Phyllis.
The Brandywine River Museum was a favorite place of Andrew Wyeth, who used to “pop in and out all the time” according to Director James Duff.
“Jamie pops in as his father did. It’s never a regular thing but it’s a fairly frequent thing because they want to see art. On any given day when he was alive you might find Andrew Wyeth in our gallery just looking at pictures. And Jamie does the same thing to a certain degree. Jamie has a more parapetic life; one day he might be in Washington, the next day in New York or Maine.”
The Brandywine is unique in that it is not a separate organization but a department of the Brandywine Conservatory. The Conservatory, according to Duff, also operates the Chadds Ford Environmental Management Center, charged with the specific task of water quality preservation. This double-barrel mission has been made more complicated by the faltering economy.
“We are scrambling for funds to support environmental work just as we are scrambling for funds to support the arts program,” Duffs adds. “The environmental program was the first program here before the museum came along. “
An old 1864 grist mill was acquired in 1967 for the Conservancy and then later, as Duff notes, “a lot of people thought it would make a dandy museum to deal with regional art.” That happened when the mill was renovated by Baltimore architect James R. Reeves.
Duff was the director of a museum in New York State before coming to the Brandywine 38 years ago. “There have been significant changes in the area,” he says. “When the museum first opened 40 years ago people wondered why there was a 4-lane highway down here because there wasn’t enough traffic to justify 4-lane traffic on US Route 1. No one would have conceived of a stop light in the middle of Chadds Ford then, it was just so unnecessary.”
With the growth of the region also came the growth of the museum.
Today the museum has over 300 volunteers and five buildings on a 12 acre campus filled with wildflowers and indigenous trees. But the Brandywine, like most museums, has not had an easy time of it. “These times have been difficult,” Duff confesses,” especially the last two years, but right now with endowment coming back nearly to what it was 3 years ago, and with attendance increasing, we’re very hopeful about the future.
“Most not for profit institutions take their income based on a trailing average of the market value. When you do that,” Duff adds, “the effect of a declining endowment hits you even years after the actual decline. But with the market coming back we look forward to what we hope will be years of able and growing income.”
Duff also believes that the Brandywine collection will grow, and mentions that the last two exhibits related to the Civil War have been drawing in all kinds of people.

In nearby Bucks County, the place where William Penn called home, there are historic stone cottages, gourmet country stores, the canal, and two museums: the Henry Chapman Mercer Museum and the James Michener Museum.
The Michener Museum, says museum director Brice Katsiff, was one of hundreds of regional museums built in the late 1980s and early 1990s when 1.2 museums a week were opening around the country. These institutions celebrated local cultural history. As for the museum’s namesake, Katsiff says that many people coming into the museum today don’t know who Michener was.
“He’s not in the pantheon of American Literature by any means. Young people will come to the museum and they will know that there’s a museum named after him, but that’s it. When the museum started out there were some people who said that the entire museum should be about Michener.
“Like most museums,” Kistoff says, “the majority of things that come to us come to us through gifts, but we do have modest, limited acquisition funds and we are buying new work. If we give an artist an exhibition we try very hard to buy something from the exhibit for the collection.”
The economy has forced the Michener to cut back on staff through hiring freezes, some layoffs and early retirements. The museum also shrank a portion of its programming. The Michener is a leaner institution than it was 5 years ago.
It also experienced a radical 50% cut in State Arts Funding, declining federal support and the end of a State run program called the Legislative Initiative Grants.
“In the current climate there’s even more negative pressure on government support, witness the effort to eliminate funds for NPR,” Katsiff says, adding that he doesn’t think all the factors in the current government support for the arts cultural climate are the byproduct of the cultural wars. “Some factors are the by product of financial pressure; the cultural war issue may be lingering a little bit in the minds of some people but I don’t think it has the power that it had 10 or 15 years ago.”
For the Michener, the silver lining in the crises is that it is forcing museums to find more diverse funding sources. “The final outcome,” he says, “may be a strengthening and one of the options may be that not all Non-profits or all cultural institutions are going to survive. The question is what degree of government support is healthy.”

Perhaps the most traumatic change for the Michener was the forced closure of its satellite facility in New Hope sometime before the financial collapse. It closed because the museum was not able to support it.
“Look,” Katsiff says, “I think we saw that 20 years ago when Canadian cultural institutions were almost entirely dependent on government money and then there was a shift. Reagan came in and there was a shift in thinking about government money for cultural institutions and the Canadian institutions really suffered serious cutbacks because there had been only one source of money—the government. An institution has to have multiple sources of income so that no one agency ‘owns’ it.”
Despite its financial woes, the Michener added a new wing designed by Philadelphia’s Hillier Group and a new project, by the prestigious Kieran Timberlake firm (currently involved in the design of the US embassy in London) is set to begin soon. The museum is also opening a pavilion for concerts, lectures and jazz night entertainments, a “must do” development in an age when museums must be multi-purpose. Fortunately for the Michener, it is located in a county of almost 700,000 people, many of whom have some financial means.

While life at the Allentown Art Museum may not be all Billy Joel songs, it’s still looking up.
Brooks Joyner, President and CEO of the Museum since May 2010, says that the nation’s financial crises has caused the museum “to hit rock bottom with a bare bones budget.”
Founded in the 1930s, the Allentown Art Museum has a diverse collection of American and Renaissance painting. The museum’s famous Samuel H. Kress collection includes some important Old World Masters, Italian, Dutch and Flemish masterpieces that have been in storage since the museum’s temporary closure since November 2010 until the construction of new gallery space. The museum is scheduled to re-open in October 2011 with a grand opening in February.
Staying open during construction was an option but an expensive one that Joyner says would have cost the museum at least a quarter million dollars. Joyner, who hails from the Josyln Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, has had plenty of experience in budget cuts that approach the shock level of a radical mastectomy.
At the Joslyn, he recalls at July 2001 meeting in which the museum was told by its controllers and financial officers that the institution would come up a 1.2 million short and literally run out of money to pay its obligations. “Jaws dropped on a number of Board members and our Chairman’s face when we heard this,” he said. “And this was before 9/11 and the great economic disaster.”
Joyner says that the museum has been suffering since 2008 when it lost government funding at the federal, state and county levels. The last 2-3 years have been Lentil soup ones, with the museum eliminating Tuesday hours, reducing personnel, establishing a hiring freeze and reducing salaries by 5% across the board. It also had to re-do employee benefit packages and order Departments to reduce their budgets. The bold pairing down, while seemingly inhumane, produced results: By June 2010 the museum was able to balance its budget.
Joyner tells me, “We hope to do that this year. We’ve turned the corner on the losing proposition that had reduced benefits, morale and salaries. Our plan is to restore salaries to the level where they once were.” Just as importantly, the museum has achieved this without, as Joyner says, selling out the integrity of its programs in any way when it lost government funding.
“We’ve been able to supplement with private, corporation and foundation support.” If that happens, the museum can look forward to a significant rebound when it reopens in October; a rebound that Joyner expects will “hit some of our all time highs next year.”

As if the American museum financial crisis needed more bad news, Joyner reminds me that over the last couple of years there’s been “a generational die-off” among the nation’s top museum directors.
“The greatest museum directors in the country have been dying quite frequently,” he says. “It’s unbelievable. A few years ago the Cleveland Museum director was going to speak at our museum in Omaha but we got a call from his secretary who said he was ill, not feeling well, and he was dead in 5 days. We also lost Jim Woods, the Chicago Art Institute director, and most recently the Getty President, and then Anne d’Harancourt and 2 months ago the director of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Some die of age and infirmity, but some die suddenly and unexpectedly.”
But that, as they say, is another sad story.

Thom Nickels

An American Journalist in Lapland (from the May issue of ICON Magazine)


There’s not much to the Finnish Lapland day during the winter months. The sun rises around 10:30 am and begins to set around 2. In the summer, it’s a different story. Twenty-four hours of sunlight make this the land of the Midnight Sun. It’s also a time, however, when Laplanders admit to having trouble sleeping.
“Even if I draw the curtains and make my bedroom as dark as possible, I know the sun is out there and this makes it hard to sleep,” is a comment you might hear if you ever make the day and a half journey to this faraway place.

A winter’s day in Lapland is a fragile thing. I know because I traveled to this unique part of the world in January. My first view of the Lapland sunrise was from the lobby of the Levi Soko hotel where I roomed with other members of a small international press corps after our ‘get acquainted’ dinner the night before. The sunrise on that first morning was hardly spectacular. The sun’s rays were so weak throughout the day that I commented to someone, “It looks like the sun is in Intensive Care.”

We were seven journalists from countries as diverse as Russia, England, Austria, Italy, Germany, Poland and the US.

As the representative American journalist, I had traveled the longest with multi-hour stopovers in Copenhagen and Helsinki before hopping a jet to Rovaniemi, Lapland, where I met my colleagues.

The Rovaniemi airport was my first sense of being near the North Pole. A large neon Santa sleigh that looks as if it’s emblazoned in the sky hovers over the airport as a sort of reminder that the world’s only official Santa Claus Post Office Box is in this very town.

In Rovaniemi—where the corps, as if in a synchronized trance, studied the tall, snow-capped Finish trees—boarded a small chartered bus for the two hour trek into Levi Lapland. It was snowing lightly, the Arctic’s version of the daily “pineapple mist” rain in the Hawaiian Islands. The flakes had a non-threatening feel. Never, for instance, did we feel that our driver would get stuck in a snow drift as she drove with military like precision into the Arctic Rim. The Finns, after all, are geniuses when it comes to dealing with snow.

During the ride we were given a rundown on the two Finnish personalities. “There’s the winter persona--dour and introspective; and the summer self, which is high, sunny, and extroverted,” Leena, our Lapland tour guide said.

Later, in restaurants, I’d notice Finnish couples and families who’d sit and brood in silence, as if awaiting execution. Couples sat with their backs to walls rather than face one another. Leena explained that although the Finns seem cold they have good hearts. “Once they decide you are a friend, they are there “permanently.” Certainly not like those fickle Californians who have made an art out of the easy, meaningless smile.

Our hotel was a good place to observe interactions between Finns and Russians. Because the December-January holiday is the Russian ski season, many of the Russians were checking out while we were there, so it was easy to observe classic Bolshevik boisterousness, which reminded me of Philadelphia Flyers fans after a winning game.

(During a post-tour visit to Helsinki several days later, I’d be informed that the Finns like the Russians about as much as the Russians like modern Finnish design. “The Russians want everything to be gold. The gaudier, the better!” my guide told me.)

Day one of the tour was a snowmobiling safari, so we boarded the bus that gave us ample views of the architecturally plain Lapland houses, set back in snowy Hallmark card style silhouettes. Mention was made of a snow covered golf course “somewhere out there in the distance.” A reward was offered to anyone who could spot a golf ball.
Snowmobiling is big business in Lapland. We donned zoot suits and helmets and signed waivers promising we would not hold the snowmobile company accountable for accidents.

. Snowmobile injuries and deaths are not uncommon in Lapland. In fact, it was only after the safari that I checked the Internet for the grisly facts associated with this. It was then that I understood why the Berlin journalist who had opted to be my passenger had been so frightened. While I proved to be a fairly good driver- I kept myself in the lead section throughout much of the ride—there were a couple of near skirmishes in which my snowmobile almost toppled over.

Driving these 30-40 mph devices made me think of WW II and the time that Finnish Commander-in-Chief Gustof Emil Mannerhein (later the country’s sixth president), invited Hitler to lunch. It was Hitler’s only visit to Finland, and Mannerheim, eager to show his independence, did his best to blow cigar smoke in the (antismoking) Fuhrer’s face as well as annoy the persnickety vegetarian by asking for great helpings of meat.

Our snowmobile safari traveled for miles through the Lapland wilderness, stopping periodically for photographs or to let the slower drivers catch up. Our destination was a Reindeer Farm by Perhesafarit, where we would meet our guides, a young married couple in traditional Laplander clothes. At the farm we were taught how to feed and walk the animals after taking the obligatory sleigh ride. Lunch was in their private home at a long wooden table near a blazing fireplace. Salmon soup, bread, and an iced berry drink warmed us considerably even as a few of us began to fantasize about red wine. Alcohol and snowmobiling don’t mix, however. In fact, it’s more of a lethal combination on snowmobile paths than it is on US roadways.
By the time we said good-bye to this very 1960s “Alice’s Restaurant” couple, the sun was beginning to set.

On the snowmobiles again, there was a rush to beat impending darkness. Our ride guide upped the speed quota which meant that he was through babysitting. The snowmobiles in front of me, headlights on, bolted away in a jet propulsion thrust. I didn’t know that speed like this was possible on a wintry terrain. Then I recalled our guide’s warning: “Slowing down out of fear only increases the chances of tipping over, so keep at it.” With this in mind, I stepped on it as the Berlin journalist behind me held on for dear life.

“We’re going to be alright,” I said, more out of self affirmation than certainty.

During the ride back two journalists fell far behind the group, lost somewhere in the forest. For some reason I thought of the Donner party although they eventually surfaced.

Laplanders, perhaps because of the extreme climate, seem to have a healthy, sexy vitality. While many Finnish men and women have Scandinavian traits--tall with large extremities—(At the Soko there were a number of statuesque Finnish females in long Heidi-braids)—never tell a Swede that Finland is part of Scandinavia. It is not. (When I visited Sweden a couple years ago the Finns were referred to as if they constituted a population of the developmentally disabled. Conversely, in Finland, I spotted menu items like Baked Swede, which seemed tap into this animosity. )

Nightlife in Levi has the exuberance of a 1980s USA disco. I witnessed kids in knit hats raise their hands in unison to a DJ and sing along enthusiastically as if acting in a Pepsi commercial. The mood is definitely “Up with People,” with men dancing with men when no women are present. There are almost no bar fights in Lapland.

We writers had no trouble dancing together in Lapland’s many bars and clubs. A few of us even joined the Moscow writers for vodka at an Irish pub. Breakfast the next morning was a little later than usual.

At Levi’s Polar Speed Husky farm we watched as hundreds of huskies, some of them mixed breed wolves, barked in unison. Huskies live to work but while waiting to pull sleds they can look sad or anxious. The sled ride itself, at least in the beginning, is a fast and furious affair. I definitely got the feeling that one miscalculation by the dogs or driver could have wrapped the lot of us around a tree or two. Still, few things in life are as beautiful as finding yourself in a sled being pulled by dogs over a vast frozen lake surrounded by tall snow capped trees.

No trip to Finland is complete without a traditional Finnish sauna. In our case the men and women split up and headed towards separate cabins on a frozen lake. There, naked, each of us dipped our bodies into a hole in the below zero lake before heading into the sauna.

In August, 2010, Finland’s annual world sauna championship was called off after the death of a Russian man who had spent 6 minutes in a sauna with a temperature of 110c. His competitor, a Finnish man, was hospitalized.



Finland is secular nation with the Evangelical Lutheran Church as the official state religion, and the Finnish Orthodox Church claiming about 10% of the population. My Helsinki city guide was quick to tell me that when Finns need spiritual nourishment, they go outdoors and sit among the tall trees “where they commune with Nature.”

Helsinki is a small, walk able city with a building height limit much like pre-1986 Philadelphia. It’s hilly in sections, making a post-snowstorm walk on the sidewalks a dicey affair. During my frequent forays to and from the KlausK Design Hotel in the central design district, I found myself taking measured baby steps to avoid Laurel and Hardy-style slide down the steep hills. I was also told to be on the lookout for falling ice from the tops of buildings, a not uncommon occurrence during the Finnish winter.

With Reija, my guide, we met designers in Artek (Art Furniture) at Etelaesplanadi 18; toured Designforum Finland and snuck a peek inside Aero Design Furniture. Everywhere we visited we found the signature “stamp” of architect/designer Alvan Aalto, from furniture and buildings to a bottle of Aalto red wine. The famous Academy Bookstore, with its stairway to the stars design, occupied me for hours. The Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma, while mostly trendy, did feature a 24/7 video of Russian youths revolting in the nearby town because town fathers had decided to disassemble a Russian statue.

At the Uspenski Cathedral Orthodox Church, I met with Timo Mertanen, a monk, who told me that the church used to have a miraculous icon. The miracle-working Mother of God Kozelchan icon was recently stolen by thieves who entered the church at night through a small window. The icon, covered in jewels and gems offered by the faithful in thanksgiving for favors received, has still not been recovered.

As a memento of my visit, Timo the monk handed me a replica of the miracle working icon, a gesture I appreciated and that I’m sure saved me from a lot of traveler angst, or even a plane crash, on the way home.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

My Evening with Taylor, a European Film Star





She's not in films, but she could be. She's the one on the left.
The guy in the middle is my nephew Kevin and his wife Tiffany
is beside him. Kevin and Tiffany came out from Colorado for
Colleen's (Kevin' sister) wedding.

House of the Setting Sun


In the 1993 movie, A Home of Our Own, Kathy Bates plays a Los Angeles widow who jumps in her car one day with her six kids and heads out into the country in search of a home. In this 1960s based (true) story there are no home mortgages or banks to deal with, only a sincere desire to find an abandoned but potentially inhabitable home. Bates’ character, Frances Lacey, does eventually find what she is looking for: a shell of a house in God’s country, and the fascinating story continues from there.
Were I to rewrite A Home of Our Own I would have Frances Lacey drive a lot further east until she reaches the Pennsylvania border via I-95. I would then have her drive, six screaming kids in tow, into Philadelphia as far as the Lehigh-Girard exit whereupon she’d follow Richmond Street to Lehigh, and then to the 2600 block of Mercer Street where she would find a ripe, abandoned house, albeit torn to shreds, but ready for some serious tender loving care.
The home in question sits across from my property. It used to be an attractive seashore-like looking home, with its set-back-from-the-sidewalk entrance and second floor front deck that always reminded most people of a ship. When I first moved here some nine years ago, the house was in fairly good shape. Years before that, however, before its slip into rental Purgatory, I was told it was a neighborhood showplace with a manicured, small goldfish pond on the front yard. The pond has since been covered over (what a surprise) as times changed, but at least the renters, if not always amiable folks (one renter couple used to take a special delight observing the street from the deck and issuing beer-bloated comments to the people below), kept the exterior of the house up.
The interior of the house is another story, of course, because when the last renters moved out and when the property was sold, the word on the street here was that the inside of the infamous ‘ship house’ was a mess.
Conventional wisdom says that renters can be careless. I can attest to this general truth, having been a renter for many years. As a home owner, were I to rent again, I would certainly be far more respectful of the property I inhabited than I was in my twenties.
But on with the story…. A year or so ago the ship house’s new owners came up with a plan to gut the house and rebuild it, but like many plans on paper, the reality didn’t quite measure up to the fantasy.
The new owners assembled a work crew right out of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. They demolished the front deck, tore out windows and walls. The process was slow and insidious like the growth of a fungal infection. The “skin” or the siding of the house came off first, and this exposed the under layer so that the house called to mind an ICU burn victim. The house stayed like this for a while until the crew felt another surge of rehab fever. Then they began demolition in earnest as huge chunks of brick and mortar began to pile up in the back yard and side alley. From the street the once cute little ship house now looks like a bombed out building in Afghanistan.

Neighbors who live alongside this disaster have been pulling their hair out.
“Peasant labor without the benefit of industrial machines,” one neighbor stated in an email. “There’s no contractor, only the owner, his relatives and a schlepper.”
Then there were reports of the owner throwing bricks out the back window, but the real A-bomb was when a 200-300 pound chunk of steel, brick and mortar fell down into a neighbor’s yard and caused $600.00 in damages.
The house is now a local tourist attraction. “What’s going on there?” people say, “Has L&I been contacted.”
But the City of Philadelphia moves at stage coach speed; weeks pass, and nothing happens. It’s the same old story: Abandoned old house sits on a block for years, even decades; if it “sits” long enough people stop caring. They don’t even “see” it anymore.
While I applaud the owner’s “do it yourself” Martha Stewart gusto, I’d also like to remind him that his project is beginning to affect the health and welfare of the community. You can’t have 300 pound chunks of concrete flying off your roof.
Or can you?
Frances Lacey, how I wish I could bring you and your kids here for real, and have you settle this.

Matthias Baldwin Park




MATTHIAS BADLWIN WAS A VERY NICE MAN
Will the City--and his so-called friends-- uphold that legacy?

On an unseasonably cold and windy April 16th Saturday morning in a small park formerly known as Franklintown at 19th and Hamilton Streets, a group of people gathered. The small crowd chatted while periodically checking their watches for the arrival of City Councilman Darrell L. Clarke for the big event: the renaming of the park to the Matthias Baldwin Park.

The name change had been in the works for years. The idea was first proposed in an email from Mel Seligsohn, co-chair of Friends of Matthias Baldwin Park, to City Redevelopment Planner, Rick Shnitzler in December of 2007. Emails generally go nowhere but this one caught fire—a slow fire but name changes take time.

The park itself was the creation of Athena Tacha after its commission by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority and the Franklintown Corporation in the 1980s.

Who was Matthias Baldwin?

For starters, he was a benevolent businessman, often an oxymoron in today's world.


He was also the founder of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, the sprawling 8-city block industry that occupied the area from Broad Street to 18th Street and then from Spring Garden Street to the Reading Railroad tracks. This cramped 196-acre “field” was the Silicon Valley of its day.

In 1831, Baldwin built a small solitary engine that led to the development of the steam engine that in turn led to the locomotive that ran on tracks from Philadelphia into Germantown and Norristown. The company employed thousands of men in the city before its move to Eddystone.

“It’s rare to name a park after a business person,” Friends of Matthias Baldwin member Mrs. Sandy Owens told the crowd. “Most parks are named after poets, beloved American presidents and musicians, but rarely after a famous businessman, but that’s our mane today.

“Even as late as 1957 when his business closed after 112 years, people in Philadelphia still knew who Matthias Baldwin was and they knew the Baldwin Locomotive Works. I think if we asked Philadelphians today who Matthias Baldwin was very few could answer that question…”

Unfortunately, there were no signs of life in or around the Tivoli, the handsome but somehow ghostly looking apartment complex bordering the park. A friend informed me that its primary occupants, hipsters and yuppies with dogs, were probably still asleep in their digs, unaware that their favorite doggie park was undergoing a name change. One would think, naturally, that such an event would be a draw, and that the couples would exit en masse, doggie in tow, to take a peek, but that was not the case. We were left wondering if any of them were viewing the proceedings, knee deep in coffee and laptops, from the upper story windows.



Had they ventured out they would have heard Seamus Kearney, key organizer of the event and co-founder of the Friends of Matthias Baldwin, recite the Baldwin-disappearance mantra.

“His great house on the banks of the Delaware, gone
His factor disappeared
The company he founded no longer in existence
The school named for him now demolished
And a statue of him situated in a little visited nook in City Hall!”

But we will, Kearney promised, “revive the memory of Matthias Baldwin and his deeds.”

When at last the ever gracious Mr. Clarke spoke, he apologized for being late although nobody was holding him to it.

“I was up at a park in Northern Liberties near 4th Street waiting for the mayor, waiting for the mayor,” he said to knowing chuckles. “And then I said, ‘I gotta go,’ and they said, ‘Where you have to go?’ and I said “I gotta go down to Franklin Town Park; they’re renaming it,’ and they said ‘Oh you mean that little fancy park?’”

More chuckles from the crowd as the wind kicked in, blowing the paper plates set nearby for the donated fresh fruit from a nearby deli called Fretters.

“It may be a little fancy, but it’s no less a park than what you guys have here,” Clarke said he told the Northern Liberties folks.

“Actually, I thought this was going to be much more of a challenge,” Clarke confessed. I thought at first—Franklin Town? That’s a significant name. Franklin? Em, been around for a while. Well, we contacted the park, and they went to work with the Friends group here and they got on the case!”

As great as Ben Franklin was, the city can survive with one less park named Franklin.

At the sign’s unveiling there was a robust round of applause, and immediately after this came a gust of wind I can only describe as “locomotive.”


---The absence of the mainstream press at the event was discouraging. Only The Weekly Press showed up. For that The Weekly Press should receive a special citation. The reality is, they received the opposite from the very people who shuld have been more "Baldwin-like."