July 23, 2021
Since the start of the year, in concert with my team mate, partner, love of my life, husband, I have packed up my entire house into three storage units, moved to a bedroom in my daughter's house from where I launched 6 weeks of the worst camping in my life, and discovered that camping under these circumstances is just a nice name for being homeless. I had a van crammed full of everything that would fit but rarely found the energy to use any of the work, art, and magic tools that I brought.
It was a soul sucking experience with ticks.

Then I started searching for a place to live full time, while camping. It is very difficult to find a new home when you are not able to GO to the places to meet with tentative landlords or property managers. And when we did go to look at a place, we had to leave all kinds of valuable things unsupervised in our campsite for hours. We did our best to secure the most precious things (Mike's computer and other work tools being foremost) but it would have been a devastating blow if someone had looted our campsite.

Then I started mooching off my brother and his wife - it took three weeks to find and lease our new home here in Baltimore, 20 minutes from where my brother and his wonderful wife live.

Now I'm unpacking three storage units worth of stuff from a large home with a shed into a two bedroom basement apartment. Many things must go. I need to stop paying to store things that don't fit in my home.

So I've been busy non-stop since the start of 2021, except for that wonderful brief hiatus for my 70th birthday - when my eldest daughter took me to The Magic Kingdom in Disney World.

• I love mail delivery.
• I love being housed.
• I love air conditioning.
• I love having hot running water.
• I love having ice that doesn't melt.
• I love having electricity whenever I want it.
• I love having a full sized refrigerator with a big freezer.
• I love never having rain water seep into my kitchen and form large pools of water that I must stand in to cook.
• I love that Mike doesn't have to haul in water, wash dishes in the rain, go out on ice and potty disposal chores.
• I love being able to use my computer whenever I want, without feeling guilty about stealing the electricity that Mike needs to do his job.
• ​I love that I can have a house plant. I hope to get the house plants my daughter is caring for soon. I wonder how Violet is doing with her new mother. 
• I love a hot shower with strong water pressure with no strangers nearby, no mosquito attacks, no calibration of how to get dressed without getting my clothes wet on an unclean floor. I love that my shampoo just sits on a shelf in the shower and does not need to hauled to and from the shower every time I want to wash my hair. It's just THERE!
• I still like my camping dishes and continue to use them but I love having access to all my best utensils that didn't make the cut, that didn't get to come camping with me. I never planned to have boiled pasta while camping . . . so I didn't need the pasta serving tool. Garlic press. Pizza wheel. Knives in a wooden block holder (a lovely gift from my brother) instead of in a bag in a tub, confusing to locate amongst the other bags in the tub.
• I love being housed.

Life is good.
Dr. P-J

July 21, 2021
I went with a friend to see Women Behaving Badly, an exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art. I recommend it.

We briefly viewed a few other things - I will be going back to take a much closer look at the mosaics, looted from Antioch (an ancient Greek city). The museum has: "Twenty-eight mosaic pavements from Antioch on view that tell the story of this ancient city prior to its destruction by catastrophic earthquakes in 526 and 528 A.D." They fascinate me.

I am often filled with revulsion when I see the portraits of rich patrons and the religious art created to perpetuate a hegemonic world view that oppressed/oppresses women and others. Today was no different. I am attracted to the beautiful furniture (monoethnic in size in some fine examples I saw today) while being slightly nauseated as it forces me to contemplate the massive structural economic inequality that continues to plague our world. Rich women painted as though they were goddesses . . . the better to massage their superiority and empower them to "lord it over" their "inferiors."

When the weather is cooler, I want to see the sculpture garden, which looks to consist of contemporary / modern 3D art - which I both appreciate because they are not looted artifacts, and despise because they generally uninspired, insipid, or dreary. 

The slides start with a photo of the cover of the museum brochure.  The next three photos are of a painting I admire of a Gypsy child - I was offended by the use of the world "exotic" used in the textual support - used without critical thought to describe subject matter such as gypsies. Perhaps the curator of this part of the museum should read Said's "Orientalism."

If I spend too much time in some parts of an art museum, I become angry. That "winners and losers" worldview that rewards those with unearned privilege claws at my gut. I've been to the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay in France and the art museum in Cologne, Germany. I've been to the Smithsonian Art Museum in DC, the Chicago Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Art Museum by UCLA, and the MET in NYC. And others. They are the same in organizational structure. We see ancient statues (stolen from various countries around the world - Egypt, Greece, Italy, etc.). We see religious art - roomfuls. We see patronage art of rich people, many of them portraits of the rich themselves, wearing fine clothes or puffed up in imagined scenes. We see the silver work, the gold jewelry, the furniture and the pottery of the rich. Tiffany glass work and Fabergé eggs, crystal bottles and beautifully inlaid wood screens.

The exhibit "Women Behaving Badly is worth the price of admission; oh wait - it's free. What an antidote to my feelings of participation in my own oppression that arise when I view art that reinforces masculine hegemony.
​
The fourth photo is of a massive doorknocker meant to represent Sarah Bernhardt as Medea. The next three photos are of an inkwell designed and created by Sarah Bernhardt in 1880 - Inkwell: Self-portrait as a Sphinx.
The next two photos relate to Loie Fuller - the poster is an example of the textual support in the exhibit. She invented colored stage lighting, among her other accomplishments.

The final photo is of our lunches at Gertrude's Chesapeake Kitchen. Our meal was marvelous; everything on the menu looked fabulous. We sat with a view of some of the sculpture garden. We watched as the rain moved into town and then we scurried out to the car just as the first drops hit.
​
I'll be going back - I have yet to see the modern art, which rarely offends me and only often bores me . . . perhaps they have some Impressionists. It would be too much to hope for some Van Gogh paintings, but perhaps some Sisley or Pissarro works will grace the walls of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
​~ Dr. P-J

Women Behaving Badly: 400 Years of Power & Protest
​July 18, 2021 — December 19, 2021
Overview
Women who rebelled against sexist social rules have been trivialized and controlled for centuries. Portrayed according to stereotypes or vilified, women acting on their own behalf have been undermined consistently by their representation in Western art. Spanning the Renaissance to the progressive social movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, this exhibition links heroines of the past with modern trailblazers, celebrating women throughout history who broke rules, transgressed boundaries, and insisted upon recognition of their human rights.
Approximately 75 prints, photographs, and books illustrate female power and courage over five centuries into the modern era when women were actively engaging to effect social change. In the first section, prints by such canonical artists as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Francisco de Goya, and Edvard Munch demonstrate how iconic portrayals of powerful women of the past have informed our subsequent understanding of female agency. The second section celebrates women who pursued identities beyond the traditional categories of wife and mother, expanding their presence into the public sphere as dancers, actresses, musicians, authors, and advocates for civil rights. The exhibition title nods to the well-known quote, “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” from a 1976 essay by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Generations of women have continued to give this maxim a life of its own, rallying behind it as a call for challenging societal standards.

Curated by Andaleeb Badiee Banta, Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs
This exhibition is supported by Nancy Hackerman, Clair Zamoiski Segal, Amy and Marc Meadows, Patricia Lasher and Richard Jacobs, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

7/6/21

So it turns out heat, humidity, bugs, especially biting bugs and ticks, make it impossible to enjoy life outside. Camping on the East Coast is hideous, as compared to camping on the West Coast.

The rain. The puddles in the kitchen tent. The clammy claustrophobic ponchos. The restriction to life inside a screen tent.

The lack of sun leading to no solar collecting leading to now power leading to Mike struggling to work. 

The reduction of life to drudgery - meals became more simple as each day passed. Washing dishes involved fetching water, heating water, disposing of water. The dishes were often still greasy after being cleaned. Constant monitoring of ice, fetching ice, throwing away food that has gone bad, worrying about food floating around in questionable icy water, eating it anyway.

Eventually I my back broke out in itching welts due to humidity and lack of showers. I was starting to experience heat related symptoms, particularly lethargy. Taking a shower was a major effort, which exacerbated skin conditions and general discomfort. When I did shower, by the time I got back to camp I was already sweating my clothes into dampness.

And that is just the superficial elements that were problematic.

The best thing about camping is that I appreciate greatly the things I used to take for granted - electricity on demand, hot and cold water on demand, a private shower with no mosquitos and GREAT water pressure, a large easily accessible refrigerator and FREEZER, and most of all, AIR CONDITIONING.

Of course life in Baltimore is not without its problems. Javy was attacked by two pit bulls the day after we moved into our apartment. I will report on that soon. Check out my Facebook page for updates.