NEW YEAR'S PILGRIM

Now I'm going down to that river of Jordan
Just to bathe my weary soul
If I can just touch  the hem of His garment, good Lord
Then I know You'll take me home 

    ----  ----  ---- ----

Funny, up all night as usual, but with Rose and Claude (doing his Jackson Pollock paper-scattering-arranging thing) for company (Pansy also – opening closed cabinets and tilting pictures on the wall), and believing that Jane’s having a blast with Rachel and her other friends, things Augur well.  Healthy, wealthy and wise (a phrase with partial Philadelphia roots) sounds like a reasonable plan and priority order.  Wisdom is difficult to achieve or obtain.  Happy New Year !!  !!

 
   

Louvin Brothers: The River of Jordan (Link) 

Two medieval pilgrim badges associated with St. Thomas à Becket &  Canterbury, British Museum, London

I Am A Pilgrim lyric:  Merle Travis

Right Said Fred: I'm Too Sexy (Link) 

    ----  ----  ---- ----

NETSUKE TIME AND PLACE

netsuke

• Previous 8/169 Next

• Object
• netsuke
• Museum number

HG.686

• Description

Ivory netsuke. Kettle with landscape and tea utensils.

• Producer name
• Made by: Gyokuhosai
• Date
• 19thC
• Production place
• Made in: Japan
• (Asia,Japan)
• Materials
• ivory
• Dimensions
• Height: 2.4 centimetres
• Width: 4 centimetres
• Depth: 3.5 centimetres
• Inscriptions

o     

• Inscription Type

signature

• Inscription Comment

Gyokuhosai

• Location

G91/case7

• Exhibition history

2012 Sept – 2013 Jan, BM Gallery 91, ‘Ritual and revelry: the art of drinking in Asia'

• Conservation

See treatments 

• Subjects
• tea production/trade
• landscape
• Acquisition name
• Bequeathed by: Anne Hull Grundy
• Acquisition date

1978-1984

• Department

Asia

·        Registration number

HG.686

According to the British Museum, an institution I trust implicitly, the netsuke pictured above shows three effects of sake (rice wine), namely, Sadness, Euphoria and Fatigue. 

I’m no expert on netsuke and no one’s eyesight is good enough to read the details in the object at hand from a photo.  Consequently, I’m content to take the BM's summary at face value, wondering however why Sadness leads off the trilateral description.  

In my own experiences with sake and drunkenness, Euphoria comes first, followed by Fatigue.  Fortunately, I rarely experience Sadness in the drunkenness context, although I clearly remember that the first time someone told me about netsuke art, as well as his personal netsuke collection, I became very Fatigued and Sad (or Sad and Fatigued, I forget the order) because I was uninterested in what he was saying and it seemed a Neverending Story. 

My lecturer was also at the time generously serving me from bottle-ends of various Chateau d’Yquem vintages in his dormitory  room on the second floor of Mary Lyon 3 at Swarthmore College, a glamorous and unusual event in those unprepossessing surroundings.  G. had collected this rare and exquisite wine, which I had never tasted before, at a New York City wine tasting he had just attended with his father, the person who originally encouraged him to begin "collecting small" (you can't collect many things smaller than netsukes) as training for eventually  "collecting big."  I knew and liked the father and, characteristically,  he was giving his son good advice.

I would be very interested in recommencing the netsuke conversation now, but it would probably be over tea because I’ve lost the head for alcohol. 

And Euphoria.

Kevin Ayers: Everyone's Sometime and Some People's All The Time Blues (June 1, 1974 perfomance) 

Kevin Ayers: I'm So Tired (from That's What You Get, Babe) 

Saturday With Sappho (Knucklebone)

68.

Golden goblets with knucklebone stems.

Note:     Try as I might, I was unable to find a golden goblet with a knucklebone stem like the one Sappho describes to illustrate this post.  The closest drinking vessels I could find (I was searching for gold + knucklebone, but I would have settled for either in a 6th century BC Greek cup) were this very beautiful late Helladic II era (ca. 1500 BC) Mycenean gold stemmed goblet in the British Museum (shown in first position below the poem fragment) and Jane's braided stem gold goblet, which appears at the bottom of this post.  Jane's creation formed part of her place-setting honoring brilliant Japanese skater Miki Ando, which she fabricated several years ago when her 5th grade art class re-imagined and re-staged Judy Chicago's famous "Dinner Party"with a cast of female figures from history who inspired each of them.  Neither is close to Sappho's goblet, but they're both definitely worth a Saturday review.

        The other illustrations here are all fascinating.  Researching this, I learned about the venerable   game of "knucklebones" (or "astragalus"), about which I had been completely ignorant until today.   The Hellenistic terracotta crouched maidens (from the late 4th or early 3rd century B.C.) shown above from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore are playing this ancient form of jacks, in which five small animal bones were tossed in the air and caught on the back of the hand.  So is the woman in Chardin's 1734 "The Game of Knucklebones" ("Les Osselets") from the Baltimore Museum of Art immediately above this note.  Jane and Caroline still play jacks together and it's easy to see how jacks resemble organic, ancestral, repurposed-for-amusement, game equipment.

        Between the two sculpted maidens from Greece and the painted French girl is a curious bronze knucklebone-shaped votive weight from the Louvre. A "lost-wax" method casting from between 522-486 BC, it is the only surviving work of the artist Pasikles, whose name is inscribed on it.  According to the Louvre's catalogue description, "Pasikles must have been a remarkable craftsman, as is demonstrated by his mastery in casting such a large bronze, controlling the cooling of such a large mass of molten metal, and producing a weight that corresponds precisely to the Miletian system of weights and measures." Pasikles work was dedicated to Apollo at the oracle temple of  Didymus by two visitors from Miletus in the third quarter of the 6th century BC and was later captured by Darius The Great and taken as a spoil of war to Susa in Persia, where Jacques de Morgan excavated it in 1901.

The painting leading off today's episode of  Saturday With Sappho (Knucklebone) is Gustav Klimt's portrait of the great poet dating from 1888-90. It is housed at the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna.  And now we're off to Avalon -- the barrier island near Cape May, not King Arthur's place -- to visit the birds and tigers.