Folk Art Treasures in Nicaragua

(please click on the photos to see the whole thing)

(A wonderful painting of Granada--wish I could remember the  artist's name)

I have always been drawn to folk art, collecting it when I can and photographing it when I can’t.

To me “folk art” embraces a whole lot of categories—everything from Haitian voodoo flags to textiles woven and embroidered by Mexican women to wooden  statues and furniture carved in fanciful ways by Greek carpenters.

 (These are 2 of the sinks in our hotel - La Gran Francia)

I even count architectural elements and graffiti on public walls as folk art and photograph them wherever I travel (if I like it.)

Because, for the month of May, I’m laboring on a long writing project with an impending deadline, I’m going to turn my blog posts for the duration into “stories without words”.  (It’ s a real challenge for me to say anything briefly—but I have to learn!)

Some will be photo essays about folk art that I’ve encountered in countries  where I’ve traveled.

Much folk art is inspired by religious beliefs.  Often the icons, milagros, statues, paintings and textiles are created for semi-magical properties they are believed to have.  These objects are meant to serve as intermediaries between a petitioner and a saint or deity in hopes of obtaining a favor.

Today I’m showing examples of folk art I found in Nicaragua—especially in the beautiful colonial city of Granada.

Pre-Columbian art has a special place in my heart because it’s mystical, magical, amusing and sinister all at the same time. These fantastical vessels for example.

The crèche scenes that come out at Christmas (naciementos) also count as folk art, I think. Below is a little girl looking at the one in the main square in Granada, and a smaller creche scene in our hotel.

And here is a small collection of  santos in someone's home.

What do you consider to be folk art?  And what do you collect?

May Baskets & May Wreaths

Some sixty years ago, when I was a little girl in (first) Milwaukee, Wisconsin and then in Edina, Minnesota, on the first of  May we would make May baskets out of construction paper and fill them with  whatever flowers we could find in the garden or growing wild. We would hang the baskets on the doorknobs of neighbors—especially old people—ring the door bell, then run away with great hilarity and peek out as the elderly person found the little bouquets on their door.

 Thirty-some years ago, when we moved  to Grafton, MA, I continued the same tradition with my three kids, but then they grew up and moved away.  Just today I looked out at all the flowers popping up in our yard and reflected that all the old people in our neighborhood had died.  In fact, I realized, the only old people left were my husband and myself, so I picked a small May Day bouquet for us out of what’s growing—white violets and purple violets, cherry blossoms, forsythia, wild grape hyacinth--  and here it is.

 In 1977, when the children were all small (the youngest was one month old) we moved from New York City to a suburb of Athens, Greece, courtesy of The New York Times, which had made my husband a foreign correspondent there.  In Greece, even today, whether in the country or the city, on May 1 you make a May wreath of the flowers in the garden.  Roses are in full bloom by then in Greece, along with all sorts of wild flowers.  You hang the May wreath on your door.  It dies and dries and withers until, on June 24th, St. John the Baptist’s Birthday, the dried May wreath is thrown into a bonfire.  The boys of the town leap over the flames first. In the end everyone leaps over the fading fire saying things like  “I leave the bad year  behind in order to enter a better year.”

Here is daughter Eleni in 1980 wearing the wreath that was about to go on the door. Next to her is her sister Marina.

 In Greece, even today, you’ll find May wreaths hanging on the front doors of homes and businesses, although I don’t know if anyone still throws them into a St John’s fire.  In Massachusetts, the tulips and forsythia are out, the bleeding hearts are starting to bloom, and soon the lilacs will open, filling the air with their beauty and perfume.  But today I gathered a small bouquet of May flowers and remembered the years gone by.

Guilt about the Royal Wedding and Motherhood

Daughter Eleni, who studied Folk Lore and Mythology  at Harvard, recently launched her blog “The Liminal Stage”. (As she explains: “Liminal stages are psychological thresholds, times of transition when we stand ‘betwixt and between’ one state and another. The biggies are birth, marriage, death.”)


 Yesterday she posted about the Royal Wedding under the title “Will Kate Middleton Eat My Daughter?” (She was riffing on the current best seller “Cinderella Ate My Daughter” by Peggy Orenstein.)  From the topic of the Royal Wedding, she segued into pregnancy and motherhood and how  guilt is an inevitable ingredient in these major liminal stages—especially in the United States, where everyone is so uptight about what a pregnant woman should or should not do.

 Eleni began her post with the story of how I apologized to her for not watching Diana and Charles’ wedding with her 30 years ago, and maybe that's why  I found her essay hilarious while at the same time very wise and insightful about what a guilt-ridden state is motherhood these days.

So I got her permission to reprint her post today on “A Rolling Crone”. 

Now you’ll know why we’re not getting up at five a.m. tomorrow to drink tea and eat scones together, although we both  hope—along with every other woman waiting to see The Dress, that Kate will find her marriage guilt- and worry-free, unburdened by all the expectations and complications that Princess Diana dragged down the aisle along with her 25-foot train three decades ago.

Will Kate Middleton Eat My Daughter?

April 27th, 2011

That Royal Wedding, July 29, 1981, Getty Images / Fox Photos / Hulton Archive (borrowed from an about.com page on Princess Diana's wedding photos).

This morning my mother apologized. It’s a rare occurrence, but what was even more remarkable was the topic about which she felt guilty. “I was reading somewhere a woman remembering her mother waking her up to watch Princess Diana get married 30 years ago, and now the writer is going to wake up her own daughters to watch the Royal Wedding on Friday,” she reported. “And I felt sort of bad I didn’t wake you girls up.”

I told Joanie not to worry, that I actually thought it was a good move not to teach her five-year-old daughter (not to mention my then two-year-old sister) to fetishize a 19-year-old girl marrying a laconic older man who was in love with someone else.  I didn’t watch that royal wedding and I didn’t grow up expecting to marry a prince, ride around in Cinderella carriages and grace the covers of magazines.

In fact, in light of the current culture of princess parties, and Disney domination (its darker sides are discussed in Peggy Orenstein’s bestselling book Cinderella Ate My Daughter) and the fact that I’m due to give birth to a baby girl on August 19^th, I’ve decided to try to keep my daughter in the dark about Disney princesses for as long as possible. I don’t want her wearing clothing or diapers that advertise a film franchise if I can help it, and I’m guessing that I’ll still be in charge of what she wears until she’s about three.

Does that sound naïve? Defensive? Hypocritical, given the fact that the bandaids in our house already have Elmo on them, in anticipation of the baby’s birth?

Portrait of Amalia of Greece, by Joseph Karl Stieler

The truth is, I have no issue with princesses, real or fictional. The name we’ve picked for our daughter, Amalia, was the name of the first queen of Greece. (I’m not a Royalist, I just like the way the name sounds, that you can say it in Greek, English and Spanish—Amalia’s key cultures–and I have very positive associations with the name, as it also belongs to a dear friend of mine.)

Baby aside, and back to Kate Middleton, I’m taking advantage of a local spa’s Royal Wedding special—half price manicure/pedicures all day, plus they’re serving tea and crumpets! And I am excited to see what Kate wears—I hope it will put to rest the 15 year tyranny of the strapless wedding dress, and offer future brides more interesting options.

But the whole Royal Wedding brouhaha, and my mother’s guilt over opting out of the first one, has got me thinking about motherhood, and how a mom starts feeling guilt and fear before the baby is even born. Part of this is biological I think….I can’t read a People magazine without worrying about bringing a child into a world filled with tsunamis and wars and sex traffickers.

But I think part of the motherhood guilt is cultural, given the way American doctors tell us not to let anyone know we’re pregnant for the first trimester (if something were to go wrong, I’d be devastated either way, plus I’d want the support of my family and close friends–so whose feelings was I safeguarding by staying mum?).  In my first trimester I was painfully aware that something could go wrong at any moment—and then I realized that I will never again be free of that fear—at 96 I’ll be worrying about my 60–year–old baby.

Then, there’s the American culture of blame when it comes to every single thing you put in your mouth. In England, Kate Middleton will be glad to know, food safety is so good pregnant women get to eat sushi and smoked salmon and turkey, whereas here undercooked fish and smoked or cured fish or meats are strictly off limits. A Greek friend’s doctor told her she should drink a glass of red wine a day for the antioxidants, whereas here we’re not even supposed to have feta cheese, much less booze. I think all these US rules are overcautious, Puritanical and just plain wrong (for all our rules, the US has a higher infant mortality rate than most industrialized countries), but of course I’m following them—I couldn’t handle the guilt if I didn’t and something went awry.

Pomegranate--a lucky fruit--from www.flowers.vg

But I remember years ago, an Indian friend’s mother told me she ate a certain fruit or spice during each of her pregnancies, to ensure that her first child be handsome, her second joyful, her third brilliant. And I can’t help but think that is such a healthier, more positive attitude for mothers and babies—believing that by carefully choosing what you eat you can give your child blessings before they even greet the world, rather than fearing that if you put the wrong hors d’oeuvres in your mouth you are dooming your child to a lifetime of failure.

Once the baby’s born there’s the culture of competition—the race to the smuggest, to see who can feed (or diaper) their child more organically, shoe their baby’s tiny toes with the smallest carbon footprint. Before that there are so many loaded conversations about birth itself…I’m the only person in my prenatal pilates class giving birth in a hospital, and I have to admit that fact makes me feel wimpy.

The mother of Amalia the elder (not the Greek queen, but my BFF) likes to say that being a mom means being a punching bag—it’s part of the job description. And while right now I feel that quite literally—Amalia II likes to kick my hand off my stomach if I rest it there while watching TV—she means it figuratively; whatever choices you make as a mom, some of them will disappoint or hurt your children, and they’re sure to blame you. Just look at the first two lines of this blog for an example.

In the end, all you can do, I guess, is try to make the sanest, most loving choices possible, and forgive yourself for the times you fall short. And try not to judge other moms for not seeing parenting exactly as you do.

My non-royal, but rather princess-y carriage

So Joanie, thanks for not raising me expecting to become Princess Diana; it turns out she had a pretty hard row to hoe, despite the lovely tiara. And even though at 19 I was busily pursuing my degree in Folklore and Mythology and blaming my mom for making me wait until I was 13 to get my ears pierced, although my younger sister got hers pierced the exact same day—what’s that about?—I’ve had plenty of princess moments in my day.  I did marry a prince among men, eventually.  And I rode to the first of our two wedding ceremonies in a horse-drawn carriage, because we wed on the island of Corfu and that’s how they roll.

As a commoner without a title (until she’s married), Kate Middleton will ride to Westminster Abbey in a Rolls Royce (although she gets to leave in a carriage). Nevertheless, I hope she is surrounded by just as much love and laughter on her wedding day as I was on mine. I hope the little girls who get up early to watch her wed never forget doing so, and that those who sleep right through it have pleasant dreams of futures that don’t depend on the man they will marry, even if those dreams involve them turning into mermaids or having mice and bluebirds or seven little dwarves sew them fabulous couture gowns—and even if those gowns are strapless. Maybe Kate will have a daughter less than a year after her wedding, too. And when our daughters grow up and blog about us—and they will—I hope they will be kind.

Ophelia--A New York Deb and her Artwork

(The story behind the photo)

Collectors of antique photographs take special pride in finding an identified antique portrait, taken before 1900, and then unearthing something that belonged to the subject—for instance, inheriting great-grandmother’s portrait as well as the brooch she was wearing when the photo was taken.

Whenever I examine a cased image (housed in a small hard case that opens like a book and generally has a velvet  lining opposite the image) I always gently pry the image “sandwich” –  a daguerreotype or ambrotype protected by glass with a brass mat and a metal edge to hold it all together—and look behind the image.  That’s where you can find many treasures—names, dates, an obituary, love poem, maybe an advertising card for the photographer, or even a lock of the subject’s hair.

Through dumb luck I managed to find this portrait of a young lady with the unusual name of Ophelia Merle, taken in New York in the 1850’s by Jeremiah Gurney, the most celebrated photographer of the daguerreian era. Then I discovered and bought a drawing by the same young lady.

Gurney is my favorite daguerreotype artist, bar none.   He worked up the street (Broadway) from Matthew Brady, won more awards than anyone else and was considered the pre-eminent photographer in the United States throughout his long career.  He photographed New York’s high society and most of the eminent men of his day (and with his son scooped the other photographers to photograph Lincoln’s body after the assassination.)

In 2006 I was delighted to find on E-Bay this ¼ plate Gurney portrait of a young woman --identified as “Ophelia Merle” by a contemporary paper label pinned to the velvet.  The mat was stamped “J Gurney, 349 Broadway”. This was Gurney’s second studio, which he occupied from 1852 to 1858— nine rooms where New York’s most distinguished citizens came to have their portraits taken and to lounge around the palatial reception room, admiring the daguerreotypes on display.

The portrait of Ophelia illustrates the chair, the tablecloth and the exact pose that Gurney used for nearly all the women he photographed during this period. (He used different props and poses for men and children.) Every photographer labored to find the pose that would most gracefully display a woman’s face, body and hands.  The subject had to hold the pose for quite a few seconds, and many photographers used a head brace to make sure they didn’t move.  Children were often strapped into their chair and babies sometimes could not be kept still until the photographer had to throw a sheet over the mother and then place the tot in her lap for what I like to call a “hidden mother” portrait.  I doubt that Gurney every was reduced to such measures.

As soon as I bought this image from a woman in Florida, I googled the unusual name and discovered that someone else on E-Bay was selling a pencil drawing by one Ophelia Merle.  He called it “England 1849, Romantic Castle View, Woman Artist”. He wrote that he had earlier sold “another drawing from this artist, that one dated 1849”.

So I bought it.  For under fifty dollars!

Since then I’ve learned more about Ophelia Merle. She was clearly not a beauty, but she was well-placed in New York’s social hierarchy, with French-speaking parents and ancestors from Switzerland. Her full name in New York’s “Who’s Who” was  “Ophelia Merle d’Aubigné.”  She was born on Sept. 28, 1835, married in 1862 to Lyman Beecher Carhart of Peekskill, New York, gave birth to two children (also listed in  “Who’s Who in New York City & State”), and she died on July 7, 1893 at the age of 57.   

If Ophelia did create this drawing in 1849, she was only 14 at the time. Clearly she was older when Gurney photographed her (in the studio he used from 1852 to 1858).  At that point she was a young lady being introduced to society, and having a Gurney portrait wouldn’t hurt her chances of finding a suitable match.  She was married to the young man from Peekskill, N. Y.  in  1862, when she was 27.

In those days, young women from the best families were educated in music, art, languages and etiquette.  Ophelia seems to have been an especially skilled artist, and was probably traveling (with her father Guillaume?) to visit relatives, including her uncle, the Rev. Jean H. of Geneva, Switzerland, when she saw and drew this pastoral scene.

I suspect Ophelia would be pleased to know that today, more than 150 years after she made it, her drawing and her Gurney portrait are together again.

Red Eggs for Easter

Yesterday was Good Friday and once again we trooped off to pick up our slaughtered Easter Lamb from Bahnan's Market on Pleasant Street in Worcester, where they celebrate Easter every year in four languages.  Once again, I got queasy in the ice-cold room where the lambs were hanging and had to escape to the fresh air outside.

Today, early,  we rushed off to church without a bite of food, eager to end our fast with communion.  Then we made our annual pilgrimage to the Pancake House where we wallowed in treats forbidden during the past weeks of Lent (but no meat--yet!).  Now we're dressing for the late-night Easter service which culminates with the church in complete darkness until, at the stroke of midnight, Father Dean announces "Christ is risen" and the light from his candle spreads throughout our congregation and then through the city and through all the world as we make our way home, protecting the flame, and begin to eat  mayeritsa soup and crack our red eggs in competition to see whose is strongest, repeating each time,  the great good news:  "Christ is risen!"  "He is risen indeed!

(If you would like to read a delightfully humorous, lyrical and personal description of the rituals of Orthodox Holy Week as written by daughter Eleni, click on her latest post on her new blog "The Liminal Stage, below." ) 

http://www.theliminalstage.com/?p=321

Below is the saga of our Greek Easter as I reported it last year in a post called "Easter in Four Languages."   The story this year was pretty much the same.  That's one of the great things about ritual, tradition and holidays.

(Please click on the photos to enlarge them)

Today is Good Friday and in a Greek household that means we can’t eat dairy or meat (that’s been going on for 40 days) and also today we can’t eat oil, so on Good Fridays we usually end up surviving on things like plain baked potatoes and peanut butter on crackers.

But today the Big Eleni, who lives with us and is the best cook in the world, has all sorts of “fasting” Good Friday food ready – Halvah, stuffed grape leaves, rice-stuffed tomatoes, taramasalata (made from fish roe) and some sort of artichoke/spinach/ hummus concoction. And boiled shrimp.

Today was also the annual dramatic journey into Worcester to collect the lamb which we had ordered far ahead from Bahnan’s Market on 344 Pleasant Street. As you can see from the first sign above, the people at Bahnan’s are ready to sell you your Easter needs in four languages: English, Greek, Turkish and Arabic.

(And they now have a café where, according to local Greeks, you can get the only authentic gyros for miles around.)

Shopping at Bahnan’s is like a visit to the United Nations, but on Easter week it’s like several festivals rolled into one.

There was a considerable line of people waiting to get into the refrigerated back room to receive the lamb they had ordered and have it cut up to their specifications. And this was in the morning, before church let out. I imagine by afternoon the line was out the door.

I didn’t last long in the refrigerated room, because of the cold and the proximity of all those lamb corpses, some of which looked the size of a small horse. (Our lamb was very small—I believe 27 pounds.)

I had to escape before the butcher started sawing, I couldn't take it, but this process is still easier than some early Easters in Nick’s Northern Greek village when the adorable baby goats were tied to each house’s front door knob and my offspring loved petting them. Then I had to drag the children, (all three under ten) out of town on Holy Saturday to prevent them seeing the general bloodshed as the baby goats were slaughtered and the blood ran in the street.

In the village on Easter Sunday you see spits outside every house, each one tended by the patriarch who is drinking homemade moonshine called Raki and having a good time. We sometimes do the lamb on the spit outside in Grafton, but not when Easter comes this early.

(By the way, this is a rare year when Orthodox Easter and everyone else’s Easter are on the same day. Usually we Greeks are later because Orthodox Easter has to be after Passover. It’s complicated.)

In the photos above you see the Big Eleni shopping for Greek cheese at Bahnan’s. We already have our large round Tsoureki bread with the red egg in the middle. And on Holy Thursday, as always, we dyed dozens of eggs red for the Saturday-night egg-cracking duel when you challenge everyone – saying “Christ is risen” “Indeed he is risen”. Crack! And whoever’s egg comes out the winner gets the other guy’s egg.

Tomorrow—Holy Saturday—we will all go to church very early and without consuming as much as a drop of water beforehand. We line up to take communion and then are free for the first time in seven weeks to eat dairy (not meat. Not yet. But we are free to rush to the Pancake House where we traditionally stuff ourselves with high-calorie breakfast treats that have been forbidden for weeks.)

Then it’s back to church again at midnight.—for the dramatic Midnight Mass on Saturday night when the church is plunged into darkness and the priest comes out at the exact stroke of midnight with a single candle and announces ‘Christ is risen!” Then the flame passes from his candle to everyone else’s and the church fills with light as we sing the Resurrection hymn: “Christos anesti!” We try to keep our candles lit as we drive home to break the Lenten fast by cracking eggs and eating the delicate dill-and-egg-lemon soup made by the Big Eleni out of the lambs intestines.

(Actually, she doesn’t put in the intestines because she knows that our kids would never eat it. In fact one is a vegetarian. And after my visit to the market today, I understand perfectly.)

I hope wherever you are celebrating Easter or Passover -- in any language – you are enjoying warm spring weather. Here in Massachusetts it has finally stopped raining and will be a beautiful weekend. Kalo Pascha!

Nicolas Cage & the LaLaurie Curse Revisited

(I'm reprinting below a blog post that I originally wrote on November 19,2009.  Last week, when I read about actor Nicolas Cage's latest run-in with the law in New Orleans--because of his drunken misbehavior involving, among other things, real estate-- I thought that maybe the LaLaurie House  Curse was still hounding him.  Today I read that he has sold another piece of real estate--a vast mansion in Rhode Island--taking a loss of more than nine MILLION dollars.  Poor Nicolas Cage!

Last week's drama began  when he got  into a public brawl with his wife, Alice Kim, while standing outside a house in the French Quarter.  He insisted that they go in because he believed it was their (current) house on Dumaine Street, but she insisted it was the wrong house. Cage ended up taking out his anger on her, some nearby vehicles and arriving cops.

Turns out the building in question was not the notorious LaLaurie House described below.  But when it comes to real estate, Cage does seem to be laboring under a curse.

As to the LaLaurie house--which has brought misfortune to everyone who ever owned or lived in it--a friend of mine who was in NOLA recently said that it is being restored and fixed up to be  a "Haunted Hotel." It's not clear whether or not Nicolas Cage ever spent a night in the LaLaurie House when he owned it, but I can tell you I would never have the nerve to stay in the LaLaurie Haunted Hotel!) 

Published on Nov. 19, 2009

I was not going to write another word about true haunted house stories, but then my good friend Kay who lives in NOLA gave me a heads up that one of the two mansions that Nicolas Cage has lost to foreclosure in New Orleans was the notorious LaLaurie House in the French Quarter. I did a little research and wrote up this fascinating story and sent it on to the New York Post's Page Six and the info was cited in Page Six's lead item:"I Warned Nic Cage to cool it".

I had known for years the stomach-turning details of the terrible events in the LaLaurie House back in the 1800's and I thought it was interesting that the media--which wrote about Cage's financial and legal disasters last week -- did not mention the evil karma that has dogged the owners of this "most haunted" house since the horribly mutilated victims were discovered in 1834.

Nic Cage himself was well aware of the story and has mentioned it often, including on the Letterman show. He has said that no one in his family has ever had the nerve to spend the night in the house but that he planned to. He also has rejected the requests of a number of "ghost hunters" to check out the house because he feels it would be "exploiting" the ghosts.

Anyway--here's my write up on the story. Tomorrow I'll turn to happier subjects.

Nicolas Cage’s Foreclosed Mansion is New Orleans’ Most Haunted House

On Friday, Nov. 13th it was announced that actor Nicolas Cage had lost his two historically significant New Orleans mansions to foreclosure.

In April 2007 Cage paid $3,450,000 for the notorious LaLaurie house at 1140 Royal Street in the French Quarter. It was built in 1832 for Dr. Louis LaLaurie and his sadistic wife Delphine who , it turned out, was horribly torturing slaves in gruesome ways and keeping their broken and dismembered bodies chained and caged in the attic. The outbreak of fire in 1834 led to the discovery of her torture chamber. The family fled and were never charged. Since then, the ghost stories about the building have multiplied, making it a highly popular tourist stop. The mansion has served as a high school, a music conservatory, a bar, a furniture store, and empty tenement and an apartment building. Almost every inhabitant moved out within months or suffered tragedy and death. At one point it was “The Haunted Saloon”. It’s not clear if Cage ever lived in the building.

Last week the spooky French Empire mansion was acquired by the Birmingham, Ala.-based Regions Bank for $2.3 million.

The bank also acquired Cage’s mansion in the Garden District of New Orleans at 2523 Prytania Street . Cage had purchased it for $3,450,000 in June of 2005. The bank got it for 2.2 million. It was previously owned by novelist Anne Rice and originally was a Catholic Chapel.

Presumably the Garden District chapel, if haunted, houses benevolent ghosts, while the infamous LaLaurie house in the French Quarter would more likely produce hellish demons—like the ones described by pre-Cage inhabitants.

Hopefully no evil spirits haunt the 1830’s French Quarter mansion of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at 521 Governor Nicholls street, less than two blocks away.

Somebody’s Playing My Trump Card

Two weeks ago, when I was invited to Mar-a-Lago, the former Trump home, now a super-expensive private club, I couldn’t resist photographing the portrait above of Donald Trump—a dramatically glamorized vision of The Donald that gives us a glimpse of how he sees himself.

The next day, April 4, I included the photo of the Trump oil painting in a blog post  I wrote called “Lunch at Mar-a-Lago with The Donald.”

Then I forgot about the whole thing until this Saturday, as the April moon turned full, and I learned that my photo of the self-glorifying Trump portrait had become the kitsch seen ‘round the world.

On April 13, Andrew Sullivan, the king of political bloggers, posted my photo of the painting under the title  “A Power-Mad Egomaniac Ctd.” On his “Daily Dish” on TheDailyBeast.com ‘s site.

But Sullivan, who reportedly gets 300,000 or more visitors to his blog in a month, wrote that he had received the photo from a nameless reader who commented:

Many years ago, I attended a social event at Donald Trump's Mad King Ludwig digs, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach. (Trump rents it out to anyone with enough cash.) Donald wasn't there (I think this was during the Ivana divorce, so he was a bit distracted). But he was there in ... oils. Right off the main bar, there's a huge portrait of Trump. Thought you'd get a kick out of seeing how he sees himself.  I swear I am not making this up.

This anonymous reader was stealing my photograph—and even my reference to Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, and claiming it as his own photo taken “many years ago”!

While media throughout the universe picked up Sullivan’s post, I still was blissfully unaware until, on Saturday night, I received an e-mail from another  well-known political blogger,  Michael Shaw, who had somehow traced  the photograph to my blog “A Rolling Crone.”  As he pointed out, even the reflection of my flash in the photograph was identical to the “many years ago” photo from Andrew Sullivan’s reader.

And Michael Shaw wrote a post revealing my authorship titled “Donald Framed” on his blog BagNewsNotes.  Here it is: http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/2011/04/donald-framed/

In the post Shaw, who devotes “BagNews” to visual politics and the analysis of news images, wrote :

A few days ago, Andrew Sullivan posted this photo from an unidentified reader who claimed to have snapped this at Donald Trump’s old Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago estate.  As far as I can tell, the photo was actually lifted and cropped from a blog called A Rolling Crone. The blog …is run by a retired journalist by the name of Joan Gage who offered a post on April 4, 2011, Lunch at Mar-a-Lago with The Donald, which happens to be full of wonderful pictures of the place, including said one above.  (I have written to Joan, by the way, to see if she minds my using the photo since it’s now everywhere.) In the meantime, It’s quite a rendition of the man (quite in the sense of kitsch) as he hypes a potential GOP candidacy for the crass purpose of resuscitating his crass TV show.

By the way, I don’t think the corner is unfinished ala Washington’s portrait.  I think it’s just the flash. The effect, though, doesn’t go badly with that sky and the sense of heavenly power, potential storm and rays from a deity.

I was surprised and impressed that Michael Shaw had tracked me down as the originator of the photograph and published the fact.  My humble blog, which is “about travel, art, photography and life after sixty,” is tiny compared to the blogs of Andrew Sullivan and Michael Shaw.  So far I’ve never gotten any closer to politics as a subject than writing about Michelle Obama’s arms and her one-time lapse in grammar.  (I sent that blog to her office and now receive mailings from the White House  about twice a month, asking my opinion on issues.  I’m sure  a gazillion other folks get the same mailings asking for their opinions, but I’m glad she didn’t take offense at my gentle criticism.)

As my friend and teacher Andy Fish wrote me about the Trump imbroglio, “The internet is kind of like the wild west as far as copyright ownership goes.” 

I’m still feeling my way around this blog-writing thing and it doesn’t feel good to be ripped off and have one’s words or images stolen without credit, but on the other hand,  it was gratifying that Michael Shaw discovered the theft and gave me credit for the photo.  It was exciting, and for a weekend, it was fun to be rubbing elbows with those big-time political bloggers out there in the blogosphere.

(Here’s my favorite comment to the portrait-- posted by "Glen" on Shaw’s blogpost:

“Is this the portrait they display in the attic?  They got the order wrong.”)