Another Dispatch from the Chronicles of George Street

(I like this one best because it makes me look like I have a glass eye)


How many jaunty hats can you find in one office building?
I'll tell you: thousands.

My company is moving offices! The lease ended on our posh George Street building, so we are packing up and moving around the corner to Queen Street. The upheaval has been enormous. The sheer logistics of shifting our operation a few hundred yards has put most of our specialists over the edge. Normal activity was on hold for the last week as everyone sifted through approximately 20 years worth of garbage. We deal with a lot of deceased estates -- situations where we swoop in and clean out the contents of entire houses and auction it off -- so that means a lot of worthless junk tends to accumulate in the building.

We had a pretty good time going through the contents of the fifth floor today. Included in the treasure was a ship's wheel, a stuffed squirrel, a trunk full of sequined capes, and a large box containing a selection of styrofoam heads:

I'm sad to leave our old building. I will always remember walking through the front door on my first day, right in the middle of the Monday morning meeting, and how everyone turned around and stared at me. I will miss our spectacular view of the Firth. I will miss picnic lunches with Nancy on the fifth floor with views of the Castle and Arthur's seat, and knowing it is time to go back to work when I hear the 1 o'clock gun. I will miss the communal fourth floor office: Bruce's singing, Charles sprinting back and forth to the printer, Kenneth giving me gum... The new building is very nice and looks over Queen Street Gardens, but George Street will always be my first love. The new offices are divided into departments. Charles will be in the Valuations office with me. I hope we have a printer.

Portobello and Other Funtivities

Today's funtivity (no management parables) was a trip to Portobello, a coastal suburb of Edinburgh that is highly touted amongst my thrifty peers as the greatest place on earth to go charity shopping. There is also a beach, a craft store, and the world's greatest fish and chip shop. I partook of all three.

I was in the market for a gold leaf pen (bear with me), and apparently the only place in Scotland that sells gold leaf pens is on Portobello High Street. My quest for said terribly specific item was successful, thank goodness, and we had a terrific fish supper to celebrate. Hurrah, Portobello! Hurrah!

The reason for the gold leaf pen is this:

My latest and greatest acquisition: an old crumbly mirror in the rococo style. Don't ask how I'm getting it back to the States. I am having anxiety dreams about it already.

Other ongoing projects include upholstery classes on Tuesday nights and a one-weekend masterclass of calligraphy. I only recently discovered the Lothian Council programme of adult continuing education courses -- they are amazing! And cheap! At this rate I am going to be one crazy old lady.

Anyways, would you like to see the fruits of my academic labour? Here, nap a while:

"For at least 150 years after it was painted, Giorgione’s Castelfranco Altarpiece, the largest surviving composition in oils that the artist ever produced, remained shut off and virtually ignored in the funerary chapel dedicated to St George on the right side of the atrium of the ancient church of San Liberale, Castelfranco. Commissioned by Tuzio Costanzo, a Cypriot condottiere in the Veneto, it was originally in the chiesa vecchia of San Liberale, an edifice demolished in the mid-18^th century. The present chapel in the new church, designed by Francesco Mariareti, does not correspond to the one described in early documents. The saints represented, St Francis, and St George, who significantly holds the banner of the Order of the Knights of St John, gueles a croix argent, were chosen because they participated in the crusades against the Turks, in which successive generations of condottieri in the Costanzo family had made their fortunes in Sicily and Cyprus. For a century and a half, the strange composition of the Madonna on a high throne, isolated against a landscape, seems to have made little impression in the provincial ambiance of Castelfranco, with the exception of a painted panel derived from the St George figure, owned by famed collector Gabriel Vendramin. Following its restoration in 1635, and Carlo Ridolfi’s description of it in the Maraviglie dell’arte (1648), the altarpiece became one of the few known works to be correctly attributed to Giorgione in the 17^th century....

[More, you say? You want more? Well alright. It's your funeral]

... A substantial amount of data concerning the analysis of Giorgione’s pigments was first presented by Lorenzo Lazzarini at the Castelfranco exhibitions in 1978, where Giorgione’s reputation as a colourist was given serious scientific study and proved to be as revolutionary as the early sources claimed. Paolo Pino once said that Venetian colour was so complex it could not be defined in words, but this is no longer the case. The Castelfranco Altarpiece was examined in relation to other works by Giorgione and his contemporaries found in Venetian collections between 1500 and 1510. On the Castelfranco altarpiece itself, Giorgione drew the principal architectural outlines of the throne in relation to the landscape with a pointed stylus on the gesso preparatory ground, and then painted in the backgrounds and details without complex underdrawings. No traces of an extensive preparatory drawing in charcoal or other media, such as was habitual in Bellini’s studio, were found. All this confirmed what Titian told Vasari, that he and Giorgione painted ‘senza disegno’ in the Florentine sense, that is, without preparing compositions in works on paper and without making cartoons. Giorgione really worked out his compositions on the canvas as he went along, beginning with some outlines of the major shapes. He used a rich variety of colours and applied a mixture of coloured glazes in conjunction with related undercolours."

There is so much more where that came from. Nearly 8,000 words of it. Let me know if you're interested and I can fax over a copy.*

* Bibliography courtesy of the National Library of Scotland

Now You Are Alone With Equus

[Exuberant urban photography by Nancy MacDonald.]

The Ghost of Future Perfect

You might have noticed my nifty new blog feature: A VIRTUAL COUNTDOWN. Which leads me to my next question: what can't the internet do? (And where is my flying car?)

I am just a few hundred words away from waving a lusty farewell to Giorgione and my first semester of graduate school. The end is in sight, it seems, and all that stands between me and a tasty masters degree are three more months of unbelievably rigorous coursework and a lengthy dissertation. Not bad; not bad at all.

When I first started talking about coming to Scotland I remember telling a lot of people that I would stay for graduate school and then apply for citizenship. ("It only takes five years!") Well, despite having enthusiastically adhered to the first leg of my plan, I've decided with a surprising level of certainty that I am moving back Stateside as soon as the coursework portion of my program is finished.

This chapter of my life has been at once intoxicating, delicious, harrowing and impossibly difficult; I have made some tremendous friendships and tested myself in ways I never thought possible. I don't want to wax nostalgic just yet, but it is with a measure of sadness that I have reached the decision to turn my back on a life abroad. But what is it that TS Eliot says? Yes, that's right:

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. "

YES to my decision, YES to the next step, and YES to those who are welcoming me back with arms outstretched.

Life Is Too Short For Spoon Rests

Behold: my first and last attempts at colour filters!

My final paper is due on Wednesday. Rock. Today will be my first attempt to revisit the National Library after last week's kerfluffle. The general consensus among my peers is that taking pictures instead of paying for photocopies is "ghetto," so I'll be bringing along a fistful of 20p coins. Wish me luck!

This Is Your Grad Student On Drugs

Whenever I engage in rapid-fire, meaningless posts rest assured it is because I am in the process of writing a very long and very boring research paper.

In this case: "Toward A Newer Understanding of Giorgio Vasari’s Disparate Biographies of Giorgione del Castelfranco." I just made that title up, but it is something to that effect. I always write my titles last. I do that on my blog as well. Coincidence?

I've shacked up at Nancy's flat this weekend in order to write said paper as she is nothing if not fierce in her bully-whamming. She keeps me off facebook, for one thing, but also cooks me food and laughs indulgently when I dance around the living room in an effort to get the art history juices flowing. She also takes pictures of me at my lowest:

Grim.

The real purpose of this post was to relate a short anecdote that happened this Saturday. Frustrated by the aforementioned wretchedness of the St Andrews library, I abandoned the stacks of Fife for the white towers of the National Library in Edinburgh. I called on Friday to reserve a pile of books and went over during my lunch hour to secure the proper paperwork. One thing I've learned about living in Scotland is that if you want to do anything; rent a pressure washer, get a 2% discount at Boots, or get a pedicure; you have to fill out mounds of paperwork. It took almost two hours, but I managed to secure my little card with the requisite terrible picture (an image which could either be my face or an aerial shot of Kenya), and planned my Saturday around a return trip to gather the information I needed for my paper.

The National Library is an impressive place. To get there I have to walk across Princes Street gardens, an expansive wooded green that acts as the natural divide between New Town (where I live and work) and Old Town (where the tourists live and take pictures). To get into Old Town proper you have to walk up something called The Mound, which is really just a steep hill that is difficult to pull with a laptop in your bag. At the top of The Mound is the Royal Mile -- the famous medieval street that runs from the steps of Edinburgh Castle down to Holyrood Palace. I love walking onto the Royal Mile for several reasons:

1. To do so is to step back in time to the summer of 2005 when I first visited Edinburgh and fell deeply, sickeningly in love with it.
2. There is always someone playing the bagpipes.
3. Everyone there is, for some reason, ridiculously attractive.

I basked in the tartan glow of the Scottish tourism machine for a few minutes before making my way to the imposing granite edifice that is the National Library. I wooshed through the modern automatic glass doors and stowed my things in the cloak room. I grabbed everything I needed for the reading room: pens, notebook, locker key, and camera -- I put camera in italics because it is important that you remember this item.

I brought a camera to the library, you see, because it is my super thrifty way of making photocopies. Most libraries in Scotland charge anywhere between 10 and 20 pence per page for xeroxing, a fee which I find to be extortionate and refuse to pay. Instead, I bring my little camera with me and snap away one page at a time and enlarge the images on my computer when I get home. It works like a charm and saves trees to boot, so what would be the problem, right?

Well, I collected my stack of monoliths and settled at a table in the upper reading room. I started flipping through and taking pictures as I went, gathering pace as I got into my information-gathering groove. (I should say that I don't use the flash, as that would just be a little too...)

About twenty minutes later my efficiency bubble was burst when a severe looking woman with dark rimmed glasses who, I would soon find, stank of cigarette smoke came tearing across the room towards me. I froze -- and you would too if a woman whose eyes looked like they were made of knives and broken glass was making a bee-line for you -- and set my camera down on the table.

For this next part, imagine her speaking in a very rough Glaswegian accent; one which involves very tight oooooohs and eeeeeehs:

"Are YOOOOOO taking Pho-Toes?" she demanded.
"Uh... yeah?"
"Well, that is simply NOT allooooowed"

At this point, old Lauren would have sheepishly apologized and slunk from the building in shame, but I've had my fill of silly British laws and their difficult manifestations within my own American life, so I said:

"I don't understand, I've done it many times before and it's never been a problem." (Shazam!)
"We have photocopying facilities DOONstairs yoosee"
"Well, this is free" (Biff!)
"Well, I will hafta ask you to leave the premises, then"
"Are you kidding me?"
"No I am not. Please leave the reading room."

I gave her a long look that said, If I Weren't In A Public Library and Had More Attitude I Would Say Something Strongly To You, But I Am Too Nice Deep Down And Don't Want to Fight and stalked out of the reading room.

So, it took this long, but I have finally been thrown out of somewhere. Most people get thrown out of bars, pubs, or their parent's basements... Me? I got thrown out of the Scottish National Library. It has it's own special kind of fierceness.

The spoils! --


Editor's note: by the time the hosebeast caught me I had already finished the bulk of what I needed, and I left before she made me delete anything, so joke is on you National Library! My bibliography is still bangin' despite your best efforts! (This is in no way a threat or challenge, please do not revoke my membership card. I quite like my picture.)

Break Me Down and Build Me Back Up In the Image of a Grad Student

If you need me in the next few days you can find me on level 4 of the National Library, tearing out anxious fistfuls of unwashed hair and weeping softly. I have 8,000 words due on Friday. Now drop and give me 20!

Smuggled in my bag? Big Ham and a two pound jar of peanut butter.

And I Thought I Was Just Being A Wimp

At 3:30 this morning my windows blew open. And when I say "blew" I mean "exploded." The curtain rods in my living and bed room were blown from the wall, and in the kitchen my drying rack, stuffed with plates, got pushed off the counter and crashed onto the floor. Certain I was being robbed, I elevated three or four feet above my bed and stared out the gaping, whistling hole in my bedroom wall with the glassy eyes of pure, dead fear.

I managed to get the living room and kitchen windows shut, but the *&*#$ bedroom refused to close. I was very nearly sucked out into the street. Seriously. It was like footage from the Weather Channel or what I imagine would happen if someone opened the hatch on a transatlantic flight. Fed up and numb with fear, I wedged it shut with a shoe and retreated to my living room. I wrapped myself in my duvet and spent the rest of the night sleeping on the floor by the fireplace, dreaming I was out at sea.

I reflected on my wretched night during the walk to work this morning. I worried if I told anyone that they would probably call me a wuss. Or worse, a silly American (what, you can't take a little wind?). I felt pretty wussy at the time; especially with the screaming; so I decided to keep quiet.

Well, turns out I wasn't the only one who had a little trouble.

The winds were so strong they had set the alarm off at work, and almost everyone was late getting in due to power cuts and transport delays. Want to bring a country to its knees? Wind terrorism. I'm calling it now.

Once You Drive the Jersey Turnpike In A Pickup Truck With South Carolina Plates You Can Do Anything You Want In This World

Three days. Two people. One red truck. You think you know, but you have no idea.

Goodbye, motherland. I will miss your tender embrace.

We headed North through Virginia, where the mountains are equally mountainous.

We forged on to brave the wilds of lesser known West Virginia. Do you know what their state motto is? "Open For Business." That just makes West Virginia sound like Virginia's trashy cousin.

This photo speaks for itself:

And even more close to home:

What are you saying, Interstate system?

The sunsets from the highway are generally remarkable, and just because you're driving doesn't necessarily mean you can't capture one on film.

I snapped this out the driver's side as we crossed the Mason-Dixon line. Goodbye, everything familiar. Hello New England.

Scott took this as we crossed the George Washington Bridge. That's right -- I drove it! Fist pump!

Groves take on blossoms / the cities grow fair/ the fields are comely/ the world seems new/ all these things urge on / the eager of spirit,/ with mind to travel, / in one who so thinks / to travel far / on the paths of the sea. (The Seafarer)

This is your wharf, you say? Well I'm going to need to see some identification.

Ice skating in downtown Newport AND wearing leggings in public. Biff!

Scott set off for Officer Candidate School early on Sunday morning while I made my weary way to the Providence airport. The flight back was uneventful, and as we were descending into Edinburgh early Monday morning I saw the countryside with brand new, snow-covered eyes:

We circled the city a few times and I saw my street! It was just like Google Earth in the way that Paris is just like Epcot.

14 States and two countries in ten days? Not bad. Not bad at all.

A USA Christmas: The Photo Tour

December 19th: I got picked up at the Charleston airport by a ninja sailor driving a bright red pickup truck. Well howdy-do, sailor:

As soon as we could shake off The Man, we drove from lowcountry to high country; or, as we like to call it, God's country: Asheville, NC:

At home, the kitchen was peaceful. Lo, the calm before the storm:

We trimmed the tree; this year's theme was "birds, covered in glitter":

We stuffed a turkey the size of my apartment:

Things started to pick up. There was cranberry sauce to be made:

This year Scott got his own Christmas plate, because it's never official until there's fine china involved:
You might say I made the centerpiece too big, and you might be right:

Ron pauses for a moment of reflection before demonstrating, for the 6834th time, the universally acclaimed "Ron technique" for unwrapping gifts:

Christmas Zeal at its glorious Zenith:

We made our annual pilgrimage to the Antiques Tobacco Barn. Scott feels right at home with a banjo on his lap:

On Christmas morning the sugar plum fairies stared in confusion as we drove to the airport at 5:30 am. Next stop on the Holiday Tour: Scott's family headquarters in Houston, Texas.

Texas was great: balmy, hospitable, and big. The malls had malls:

(One day, all of this will be yours)

There was fine dining at Mark's Restaurant:


And fine rocking with Mark's band (unrelated, though equally delicious):

Rock, baby, rock. Scott practiced his patented kick-shuffle before taking the stage at Rudyard's:

There were high school reunions which led, inevitably....

... to faceshaking. As they do:

We arrived back in Asheville just in time to see my dear ol' dad before hitting the open road. Do you know what isn't fair? My dad's ridiculous tan. I look like mashed potatoes next to that tawny mug. That's Christmas in the Virgin Islands for you (shakes a pale fist in despair):

It was time to bring the Southern portion of our journey to an end, so we loaded up the truck and headed down the mountain:

Our next chapter will pick up somewhere just shy of the Mason-Dixon, at the precise moment when I realized that I couldn't drive and take pictures at the same time. Luckily, Scott was asleep.

Right Under the Wire

I thought I'd headline the last post of 2007 with a feel-good photo of me and Scott... because nothing says Happy New Year like matching turtlenecks.

I've been blistering around the continental USA at warp speed this holiday season. I even made it to Texas to visit Scott's dear family. (Me! In Texas!). Delicious meals, boisterous parties, and adorable puppies were in abundance. I felt so warm and welcome during my time in Houston -- many thanks to everyone for being so wonderfully open and marvelously kind to this wayward mountain girl. I look forward to seeing you all again soon.

We have returned to Asheville just long enough to wash our clothes. Tomorrow morning we strike off for Rhode Island where Scott will report for Officer Candidate School and I will hop on a plane back to Scotland for one more semester of masters-getting.

This post reads like a to-do list, so I will end it with a short video that makes me laugh -- 'N Sync's Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays:



Plot: Santa gets a mysterious gurgling illness and can’t deliver his presents. ’N Sync is tapped to step in and take over the reigns on his magical sleigh run.

Why it ruins Christmas: Here are 10 reasons why this video ruins Christmas -- Joey Fatone’s goggles; the fact that I now know which one Joey Fatone is; sleigh riding in front of a blue screen; Justin Timberlake's turtleneck; Gary Coleman; homeless people; seriously, where is the guy with the dreds now?; token Asian girl; the close-up of Santa’s upset stomach; it reminds me how old I'm getting.

Happy New Years everyone -- here's to 2008: The Year of Lauren. Rock.