Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Kenny Rogers

Hall
Kenny Rogers
Walker Hall
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
Marlene Dietrich
Tom Tom
Prov.4:17
"For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence." 


 
Walker Hall


 Tennessee warbler




The Walt Disney Concert Hall at 111 South Grand Avenue in Downtown of Los Angeles, California, is the fourth hall of the Los Angeles Music Center.

Chess: "Hall" "Kenny Rogers" "Walker Hall" "Wolf Hall" "Hilary Mantel" "Marlene Dietrich" "Tom Tom"

Mile High

Mile High
Denver 
Colorado
"Crimson and Clover" 
Prov.4:19
 "The way of the wicked is as darkness: they know not at what they stumble."


Grandma's Peach Pie
Sometimes the simplest things are the very best. The first summer that we lived here, my friend Annie brought this mouth-watering treat to a church pie contest, where it handily won the honor of crowd favorite, despite having a simple, 6-item ingredient list. The beauty of this sweet and easy pleaser is that those basic ingredients pack a wallop in the flavor department: a buttery, crumbly graham cracker crust with warm notes of vanilla and honey; a creamy, lemon-spiked topping that is at once both sweet and tangy; and nestled in between, a mile-high layer of fresh, juicy peaches bursting with the brightness of a summer afternoon.

Summer afternoon--Summer afternoon...the two most beautiful words in the English language.

                                                      --Henry James

Chess: "Mile High" "Denver" "Colorado" "Crimson and Clover"

Monday, April 29, 2013

Natalie Portman

DU
Duty
Duero
Door
Natalie Portman
Tucumán-Malvinas
Prov.4:21
"Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart. "

Natalie Portman 

Door or artwork? Love this elaborate door on Cordoba Street in Argentina.

Nadia and Rascal


Chess:  "DU" "Duty" "Duero" "Door" "Natalie Portman" "Tucumán-Malvinas"

Saturday, April 27, 2013

John Lloyd Stephens

John Lloyd Stephens
Lawrence
St. Lawrence
Arabia
Herradura Cove
Playa Potrero
Prov.4:26
"Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established."

“Our Meistersinger, thou set breath in steel;
And it was thou who on the boldest heel
Stood up and flung the span on even wing
Of that great Bridge, our Myth, wherof I sing!” – Hart Crane: Cape Hatteras



 Zephyr Palace, Herradura, Costa Rica.

 Herradura Cove, Villa Lapas


Marriott Los Sueños
Playa Herradura, Garabito, Jacó, Puntarenas
Engadin Valley, Swiss Alps, Switzerland


 Aerial View of Boldt Castle on Heart Island, St. Lawrence River
Thousand Islands - Río San Lorenzo. EEUU Y CANADÁ

 King Street E. looking West towards St. Lawrence Market, Toronto



 John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood: Pioneers of Mayan Archaeology 
by Peter O. Koch





Brooklyn Bridge




Chess:  "John Lloyd Stephens" "Lawrence" "St. Lawrence" "Arabia" "Herradura Cove" "Playa Potrero"

The Collected Poems of Hart Crane

blacktitle.jpg (12329 bytes)

Edward Brunner
The dramatic monologue of "Ave Maria" opens with Columbus crowing like a braggart, congratulating himself on his own superiority. Though he is in the midst of a pounding storm, his concentration is turned toward the accolades he expects at his triumphant return to Spain. He is eager to sweep into the king’s court and rout all those experts and critics who had scorned him, and he invokes his two staunchest advocates: "Be with me, Luis de San Angel, now—"
For I have seen now what no perjured breath
Of clown nor sage can riddle or gainsay;—
To you, too, Juan Perez, whose counsel fear
And greed adjourned,—I bring you back Cathay!
The note of defiance here is unmistakable, but it masks a profound misunderstanding: Columbus’s error, as he will realize in the course of his monologue, is that be believes that "Cathay" is his to bring "back." As long as he is convinced that he possesses Cathay, then he will be truly lost, assailed by a fierce storm that is a parallel to the tempest within him. In truth, his vindictive boasting and his determination to clutch Cathay is a form of greed that should be more alarming to him than death by water. In the beginning, however, the storm he is enduring only prods him into greater boastfulness; he does not yet know that the storm outside and the storm inside are one and the same thing.
To convince himself of the rightness of his mission and to assuage the fear that he may lose all in his storm, he clings to a vision that assigns him a central role of the highest importance. There is a desperate shrillness in his assertions, swathed as they in an unmistakable pride: "I thought of Genoa; and this truth, now proved, / That made me exile in her streets, stood me / More absolute than ever." The emphasis is on the fatal flaw of an unyielding pride. If his truth has been vindicated, then why is he subject to this "tempest-lash"? This is the question that gnaws at him throughout the storm and leads him to rehearse his moments of triumph, both those of the past in the discovery of Cathay and those to come in the future in his return to the court. To steady himself he relives again his moment of glory, the instant when the natives, seeing his boats and men for the first time, addressed them as gods: "And they came out to us crying, / ‘The Great White Birds!’"
With this memory, Columbus is suddenly abashed; he turns at once to address "Madre Maria," as though he had indeed stepped over the marl. He hears the boastful note in his own voice. And from his own shock of realizing that he had been thinking of himself as a god, he understands that his own word has been tested and found wanting. He is, in reality, "between two worlds" where another, harsh, // This third of water, tests the word." The awed praise he had received from the natives had been exactly what he had been anticipating from those contemptible "clowns" and "sages" on his return home, when he could state dramatically and unequivocally: "I bring you back Cathay!"
Cathay is not his to possess. Chastened by the gulf that has opened between his perilous actual position in the waters and his pompous, vainglorious ambition, he experiences the storm dying down (for the storm had been inside him from the start): "Some inmost sob, half-heard, dissuades the abyss, / Merges the wind in measure to the waves, // Series on series, infinite." To Columbus, the amerlioration of the tempest appears as divine intervention; to the modern reader, it is the new confession of humility, that "inmost sob, half-heard," that calms the waters. The abrupt shift in Colkumbus’s fortunes originates in his ability to take the measure of his own vanity, to recoil from it, then rise above it. The reason, then, that his prophecy suddenly seems to carry such undeniable authority—
                                    this crescent ring
Sun-cusped and zoned with modulated fire
Like pearls that whisper through the Doge’s hands
—Yet no delirium of jewels! O Fernando,
Take of that eastern shore, this western sea,
Yet yield thy God’s, thy Virgin’s charity!

—Rush down the plenitude and you shall see
Isaiah counting famine on this lee!
—is that we sense it is his own previous greed and possessiveness and ambition, not simply Fernando’s, that he is pushing away from in these climactic lines. The passage is not simply a condemnation of Fernando but a condemnation of what he himself had become. …
The end result of Columbus’s increased self-awareness is a total sense of the dynamic harmony of the universe, a universe in which he plays a small but crucial part. The concluding stanzas, which to him appear as a vision of the presence of Elohim, to the modern reader appear as a reflection of his new magnanimity. His own assertive ego has been set aside, and he relives with a new understanding his passage westward; it is a test in which God "Cruelly with love" sounds the "parable of man." Like Job he is beset by trials, but he can rise above them by his refusal to yield to pride or ambition. The parable of man is that he has the freedom to fall or, if he takes the courage to face himself, the freedom to soar. The endlessness of such testing is only to be welcomed, for to be challenged, to be brought up short, is to be made aware of one’s own frailty and falsity, and to be given the opportunity to rise to even grater heights. Though the poem ends with no land in sight but "still one shore beyond desire," the conclusion is an affirmative cry. The testing "Hand of Fire" offers the hope of a joyful self-renewal.
From Edward Brunner, "The Bridge in 1926 (I)," Chapter 8 in Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of "The Bridge" (Urbana: U Illinois P, 1985), 135-138

Lee Edelman
"Ave Maria" reinterprets Whitman’s "Passage to India" and "Prayer of Columbus"; but it is Whitman himself whose presence Crane acknowledges in his address to the power that sleeps upon itself [lines 57-58: "O Thou who sleepest on Thyself, apart / Like ocean athwart lanes of death and birth"]. For the rhetoric of Crane’s prayer invokes the language with which Whitman, in "Passage to India," appropriates the authority of deity to himself:
O Thou transcendent,
Nameless, the fibre and the breath,
Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them,
Thou pulse – thou motive of the stars, suns, systems,
That, circling, move in order, safe. Harmonious,
Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space,
How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak if, out of myself,
I could not launch. To those, superior universes? (lines 193-95, 201-5)
Crane’s recasting of these lines in "Ave Maria" appeals to a "transcendent" deity only on the level of narrative myth; in a deeper sense, as I will argue, Crane’s prayer is addressed to Whitman himself. And embedded further in the subtext of that prayer lies, as [R. W. B.] Lewis has also noted, an allusion to these lines from Keats’s "Sleep and Poetry" … Just as Keats declares poetry "the supreme of power," so Whitman, who begins by acclaiming the creative abilities of a "nameless" and "transcendent" presence, ends by internalizing the power of that entity, claiming it as his own.
This claim provides the basis for Crane’s audacious apostrophe to a Whitman cunningly elevated to the status of a deity. That implicit apotheosis of Whitman can be clarified by referring to a passage in "Cape Hatteras" where Crane, with a modesty that belies the will to power of his text, ascribes to Whitman the construction of the very bridge that Crane figures as the source of poetic energy itself:
Our Meistersinger, thou set breath in steel;
And it was thou who on the boldest heel
Stood up and flung the span on even wing
Of that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing!
These lines echo the language and imagery of Columbus’s prayer in "Ave Maria" in the same way that the prayer alludes to Whitman’s phraseology in "Passage to India." The verbal parallels between these two passages from Crane’s poem point to the conflation of Whitman with the deity addressed in "Ave Maria."…
Yet if he conflates Whitman with the deity addressed by Columbus, Crane subsequently attempts to internalize Whitman just as Whitman internalized the "transcendent" power that his own poem addressed. … Where Whitman multiplies himself to undertake this dangerous voyage, Crane insists on isolation: "Utter to loneliness the sail is true." This solitude or "loneliness: achieves for the poet a freedom from the companion whose presence he would deny by successfully internalizing. Indeed, this "utter loneliness" signifies the loneliness of utterance he desires, the solitary eminance he would attain as he sails toward the "incognizable Word" that "Atlantis" will reformulate in a catachresis that designates the bridge itself as "steeled Cognizance."
From Lee Edelman, Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (Stanford: Stanford U P, 1987), 202-203.

The Tower

The Tower
Mark Twain
Diamonds
Day
Dayton
Prov.4:25
"Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee." 






Chess: "The Tower" "Mark Twain" "Diamonds" "Day " "Dayton"

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Horus

Horus
DJ
David Guetta
D'Ear
Face
Prov.4:10
"Hear, O my son, and receive my sayings; and the years of thy life shall be many."



Aerial view form St Mark's Campanile of St Mark's Square and the Doges with the island of San Giorgio Maggiore behind , with its church front designed by Andrea Palladio and begun in 1566. Venice Italy

Chess:  "Horus" "DJ" "David Guetta" "D'Ear" "Face"

The Professional Soldier

Matrix
Military
The Professional Soldier
MacArthur
Raúl 
Lou Rawls
Rolls
John 15:13
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
 Prov.4:23
"Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life."


  The young performers take a break.




Reclining Naiad
Antonio Canova (Italian, Possagno 1757–1822 Venice)
Date:1819–24.


Antonio Canova was the most famous sculptor in Europe when he created this work towards the end of his life in 1820-1823. Canova was a favorite of Napoleon, the emperor of France. He won commissions from aristocratic patrons in Italy and in England.

Canova’s work embodied the ideals of neoclassical thinkers and artists. They looked back to the sculpture of Greece and Rome, much of which had recently been discovered in the eighteenth-century excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum. The idealized woman in this statue is a fresh water nymph – a “naiad” in Greek mythology – and she is intended to evoke comparisons with antique sculpture. Marble was the medium that Greek and Roman sculptors favored; thus marble was the medium used by eighteenth and nineteenth century neoclassical sculptors.

Neoclassical art, which became the predominant style in the mid-eighteenth century, was a reaction to the previous century’s baroque art, which had been dramatic, complex and opulent. Neoclassical art was simple, graceful and relatively plain. And the nude, which had been banished from Western art in the middle ages, had actually made a return in the fifteenth century, when artists first began to learn about Greek and Roman art. That classical art had essentially been lost for hundreds of years.

As the famous twentieth-century art critic Bernard Berenson said, “The nude is the most absorbing problem of classic art at all times. Not only is it the best vehicle for all that in art is directly life-confirming and life-enhancing, but it is itself the most significant object in the human world.”
Chess: "Matrix" "Military" "The Professional Soldier" "MacArthur" "Raúl" "Lou Rawls" "Rolls"



Saturday, April 20, 2013

Bacon

Bacon
Dota
Dote
Dowry
Daughter
Roof
Prov.4:20
"My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings."












Chess:  "Bacon" "Dota" "Dote" "Dowry" "Daughter" "Roof"

Friday, April 19, 2013

Ganymede

Anchor
Ancla
Ankh
Anchorage
El Escorial
Henry Moore
Ganymede
Prov.4:23
"Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life."

Ganymede Abducted by the Eagle, one of the four mythological paintings commissioned by Federico II Gonzaga, is a proto-Baroque work due to its depiction of movement, drama, and diagonal compositional arrangement.
 
The ankh symbol represents life and eternal existence. It is the fullyresurrected and glorified form of the deceased in the afterlife, and the result of a successful union of the ba and ka which can then roam freely about the earth. The ankh is a recurrent attribute of the gods, who presenteternal existence to the king

 El Escorial
"At such a matutinal hour only trashy errand-boys...might be expected to call."---Ronald Firbank



Chess:   "Anchor" "Ancla" "Ankh" “DW”  “Dwight”  “Henry Moore”  “Anchor” “perfume” “blood-good-food” “gules” “El Escorial” “Ganymede

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Rose

Rose
Battle of Santa Rosa
Rosie
Saudi Arabia 
Rosa Lila
Prov.4:8
"Exalt her, and she shall promote thee: she shall bring thee to honour, when thou dost embrace her."








 Chess:  "Rose" "Battle of Santa Rosa" "Rosie" "Saudi Arabia" "Rosa Lila"

Copán

Life-size reconstruction of the Rosalila temple at the site museum of Copán
One of the best preserved phases of Temple 16 is the Rosalila, built over the remains of five previous versions of the temple. Archaeologist Ricardo Agurcia discovered the almost intact shrine while tunneling underneath the final version of the temple. Rosalila is notable for its excellent state of preservation, including the entire building from the base platform up to the roof comb, including its highly elaborate painted stucco decoration. Rosalila features K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' placed at the centre of a mythological tableau, combining the founder of the dynasty with the sky deity Itzamna in avian form. The mythological imagery also includes anthropomorphic mountains, skeletons and crocodiles. Vents in the exterior were designed so smoke from incense being burned inside the shrine would interact with the stucco sculpture of the exterior. The temple had a hieroglyphic stone step with a dedicatory inscription. The stone step is less well preserved than the rest of the building, but a date in AD 571 has been deciphered. Due to the deforestation of the Copán valley, the Rosalila building was the last structure at the site to use such elaborate stucco decoration — vast quantities of firewood could no longer be spared to reduce limestone to plaster. A life-size copy of the Rosalila building has been built at the Copán site museum.[34]
Uaxaclajuun Ub'aah K'awiil encased the Rosalila phase under a new version of the building in the early 8th century AD. An offering was made as part of the rites to terminate the old phase and included a collection of eccentric flints worked into the profiles of humans and gods, which were wrapped in blue-dyed textiles.

 

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Maine

Maine
Boat
Naval
DG
"entienda"
Renoir
Prov.4:7
"Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding." 




Chess: "Maine" "Boat" "Naval" "DG" "entienda"  "Renoir"

The following is from the blog: 
(I'll remove it if the author deems it necessary, if not thanks a lot, because it's really good)

The Alchemist's Pillow


Luncheon morsels and 'a little plan'

One of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's most beloved works is the charming moment captured in Luncheon of the Boating Party, which many of you may have had occasion to enjoy at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. He managed to meld landscape, still life, portraiture and genre painting into an intimate unified composition, while somehow gracefully balancing two figures on the left with a dozen on the right. Despite the crowded table, there is still a welcoming spot waiting for us at the forefront.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880–81. Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
The scene depicts one of the many boating and lunch outings celebrated by Renoir and the group of friends and acquaintances pictured here at the Maison Fournaise restaurant on the Seine river in Chatou, a 20 minute train ride west of Paris. The painting, according to the artist's son Jean in his book Renoir, My Father (see earlier post on the filmmaker and playwright's recollection of his painter father), "was the crowning achievement of a long series of pictures, studies and sketches" done at the restaurant during the 1870s.
 
Here is an actual postcard from that time showing what the restaurant and surrounding area looked like when it was frequented by Renoir and friends just a few years before he painted the famed luncheon group. I have clipped it from an excellent artistic and historical analysis of the painting that you can find here at the Phillips Collection website.

Postcard of the Maison Fournaise and Seine river, 1870s. © Musée Fournaise, Chatou-France
At the time, the restaurant was popularly known as the "Grenouillére", literally, the "frog pond". And this was "not from the numerous batrachians which swarmed in the surrounding fields". The term grenouilles, frogs, was used to describe

... a class of unattached young women, characteristic of the scene before and after the Empire, changing lovers easily, satisfying any whim, going nonchalantly from a mansion in the Champs Elysées to a garret in the Batignolles. To them we owe the memory of a Paris which was brilliant, witty and amusing.
Among that group, moreover, Renoir got a great many of his volunteer models... Because French people love a medley of classes, actresses, society women and respectable middle-class people also patronized the Fournaise restaurant. The tone of it was set by young sportsmen in striped jerseys, who vied with one another to become accomplished boatmen.
Much has been written on the mix of boatmen, artists, patrons, actresses, restaurant owner and others who are gathered around this table. For more information on this festive cast of characters, you can do no better than to visit the informative and enjoyable website devoted to Susan Vreeland's novel Luncheon of the Boating Party.

I will only pick at some choice morsels from this luscious meal. Here, apart from briefly mentioning that the young woman happily playing with the dog is Renoir's beloved Aline Charigot, later to become his wife, I wanted to discuss one of the guests, the gentleman in the yellow straw hat and sleeveless maillot at the bottom right, the engineer, heir to a bank fortune, painter, art patron, yachtsman and close friend of Renoir's: Gustave Caillebotte.

Gustave Caillebotte is a somewhat unsung hero of the Impressionist movement. Born into a family of bankers, he resisted the pressure to follow his father's profession and instead threw himself into what he most loved: painting. According to Jean Renoir, Caillebotte "painted with as much passion as any member of the Impressionist group". Although not always considered an Impressionist painter, in part due to the realism of his paintings, he did exhibit with them. And he became a great friend, patron and financial and moral backer and determined advocate for that group of struggling young "intransigents", as they called themselves.

Below is The Floor Scrapers, one of his paintings. He displayed it at the second Impressionist exhibition of 1876, for which he received, again according to Jean Renoir, "his share of criticism and insults". One of the objections that barred the doors of the official Salon to him in this work was his choice of subject. The urban proletariat were just not considered the proper object of a "serious" artist's attention. While the idealized depictions of peasants and farmers by Millet and others had begun to find favor with the Academy's arbiters of high art, the same did not go for people who toiled in cities.

Gustave Caillebotte, 1875. Les raboteurs de parquet (The Floor Scrapers). Musee d'Orsay, Paris
In Jean Renoir's account of his father's reaction to the painting
Renoir praised it, and Caillebotte, being an exceedingly modest man, had blushed. He was only too well aware of his limitations. "I try to paint honestly, hoping that some day my work will be good enough to hang in the antechamber of the living-room where the Renoirs and Cézannes are hung".
At the recent Impressionist exhibition in Madrid (see earlier post on the Impressionist show at Fundación Mapfre), I was able to see this painting and found it quite striking. I even found myself looking at the floor below the painting to see if I could spot any wood shavings that may have wafted down. In recent years, Caillebotte's works have been drawing renewed attention from art historians and receiving greater due (see the highly interesting essay, "Odd Man In: A Brief Historiography of Caillebotte's Changing Roles in The History of Art" by Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC).

What is beyond all dispute is the valuable contribution he made to the early Impressionists as they struggled to eke out an existence. His financial support, especially for Monet, was crucial. Caillebotte funded exhibitions, paid studio rents, bought several dozen of their paintings and helped keep them together when disputes arose and threatened to irreparably disrupt the movement.

And in 1876, when he wrote his will, he came up with a "little plan" to definitively elevate the Impressionist upstarts to what he felt was their rightful place in the art world, a plan that would not be activated until his death in 1894 at the age of 45. Again, Jean Renoir recalls what his father told him of this generous friend and patron:
 Caillebotte had gathered the most important collection of his friends' works. His enthusiastic purchases were often made just in the nick of time for those who benefited by them. How many artists in financial straits at the end of the month were saved by his generosity and farsightedness. "He had his own little plan ... He was a sort of Joan of Arc of painting".

Gustave Caillebotte — Paris Street- Rainy Weather 1877. Art Institute of Chicago.

Caillebotte willed his collection of nearly 70 paintings (almost all by Impressionists) to the French government, on the condition that they be shown at the Luxembourg Palace (where living artists were exhibited) and then at the Louvre. He hoped the French government would not dare to refuse it. The ostracism still faced by the Impressionists would thus be vanquished and they would finally have their place of honor in the great museum of French and world art. That was Caillebotte's "little plan".

Sadly, the government did not accept the terms. Renoir, as executor of Caillebotte's will, had to carry on the very complicated and unpleasant negotiations. His son Jean describes the outcome:
Everyone knows the sequel. At least two thirds of this unique collection, one of the greatest in the world, was turned down. The remaining third did not get past the doors of the Louvre, but was stored away in the Luxembourg Museum. On the death of Charlotte Caillebotte, those works which had been rejected went to various heirs, who got rid of them as quickly as possible. Scorned by France, they were well received in foreign countries. A good many were bought in the United States. I tell this story to any French friend who accuses Americans of having emptied France of its masterpieces by means of the almighty dollar.
The exact number of paintings almost reluctantly accepted by the French government and stored at the Luxembourg museum was 38. They eventually went on to form the core of the Musée d'Orsay's Impressionist collection. The French government did finally change its mind in 1928 and tried to claim the inheritance of the rest of the paintings from Caillebotte's marvelous collection, but the bequest was repudiated by the heirs (Caillebotte's widowed daughter-in-law), and most of those paintings were purchased by Albert C. Barnes and are now held by the Barnes Foundation near Philadelphia. For more on Caillebotte and a slideshow of some of his major works, see the website Gustave Caillebotte — The Complete Works.


One more person in the Renoir luncheon that I wanted to point out is the young woman holding the glass of wine to her mouth near the center of the composition: Ellen Andrée, an actress who modeled for Renoir (as well as for Degas). You may recall that in the delightful film Amelie, Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party was the painting copied once a year for the last 20 years by Amelie's reclusive artist neighbor, Richard Dufayel. In the movie the figure of Ellen Andrée comes to be associated, at least for Dufayel, with Amelie. If you have not seen Amelie, you probably really should be doing that instead of reading my blog. Perhaps I should have said that at the beginning of this very long post.
Dufayel, Amelie and 'Renoir'

Well, this luncheon is about over now.  I apologize for the length of this post, but here in Spain, as in France, the sobremesa, the leisurely hours spent at the luncheon table after the main eating is done, whiling away the minutes and hours in conversation and friendship, tend to be the best part of the meal. Whet your appetite with the brief video (make sure to put it on 720 HD and full screen) to luxuriate at the table with this now venerable group of boaters cum luncheoners