WEIRDEST DOG I'VE SEEN IN A CITY OF MANY DOGS: this weirdy fox dog. I think maybe it's a fox on a lead.
I would like more Sundays to be like this - today has been great.
Maxy met me from church and we headed to Lucky Brand just down the road, because it's got a huge sale on at the moment and it's our favourite favourite place to get jeans. Once again, Max was in a purchasing mood, which was very pleasing (I don't shop on Sundays, so was just stroking jeans longingly, giving evil looks at anyone who dared deplete the stocks til I can get back there tomorrow). We spent aaaages in there and Max emerged with a pair of jeans, some shorts and 3 t-shirts for the price of not very much.
With Maxy decked out in his sharp new threads, we sauntered a little further down the road for lunch at Sette Osteria, where we were able to sit outside eating tasty bread and cold meats and olives. It was all very civilised and we're determined to go on holiday to Italy when we get back to the UK.
It was only a two block walk from there to the Phillips Collection, a gallery just by Dupont Circle, which many people rave about. I can't believe we've been here - the city of countless museums and galleries - for nearly 3 months without managing to go to one museum or gallery.
The Phillips is great. It was extended in 2006, so there's a big, three storey wing of mostly 20th century art, then you walk through a corridor to a three storey house, where Phillips himself lived - much like the Frick in New York.
the residential bit of the Phillips Collection
There's a really weird array of art in the collection - kind of a 'greatest hits' of art, with little to
unite the paintings, other than they're by very famous artists. So there's some Klee, Picasso, Rothko, Turner, Mondrian, Constable, El Greco, Delacroix, Degas, Whistler, Hopper, Van Gogh, Cezanne, O'Keefe and Renoir's 'Luncheon of the Boating Party' (the jewel of the collection). I really really liked the Delacroix we saw. I'd never heard of him before Coldplay used a painting of his as the cover of their new album, but am now quite the fan.
It was really nice to have absolutely no time constraints on our visit and be able to wander around and take our time. I'm far from a ponderous gallery visitor - if a piece doesn't interest me, I'll skip on to the next, but usually we always have somewhere else to be, or the gallery's so enormous you have to rush to see everything. So we really enjoyed just pootling around this great gallery just down the road from our flat.
There are three exhibitions on at the moment at the Phillips. There's a big exhibit of paintings by Richard Diebenkorn, which I really didn't care for and a collection of nature photographs by Brett Weston which didn't really interest me either, except his pictures of the Oceano dunes in California - they look amaaaazing and I'd love to visit them.
However, the third exhibition was just sensational. It's called 'The Great American Epic: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series' and is a series of 60 paintings by an African American artist called Jacob Lawrence, depicting the exodus of blacks from the rural south to the industrial north of America during WWI.
It turns out that Jacob Lawrence - who I'd never heard of before - is one of the most important African American painters and is to art what Duke Ellington was to jazz, in his innovation and impact. He was the first African American painter to be represented by a major New York commercial gallery and died in 2000, at the age of 82.
The 60 panels that tell the story are all painted with poster paints and he painted them 
simultaneously, to ensure consistency across the whole series. So he did all the green across all 60 paintings, then all the red, all the blue and so on, so that panel 3 didn't look markedly different to panel 58, or whatever.
His paintings are really simple. There's real economy of line and colour and, while I know NOTHING about art WHATSOEVER - there's real power in the sparseness of his images and the short captions he wrote for each painting.
The exhibition was really well curated, with lots of interesting information, original letters from Lawrence to Phillips (the Phillips Collection owns half his migration series), as well as his original application for a grant to support his work on the project in the first place. There was a short interview film of him a couple of weeks before his death and some really interesting photos from when he was younger, reinforcing just what a big deal it was that he was a successful black man in a very white world.
I was interested to read that he served on the first multiracial warship in WWII and that an exhibition of his art did a tour of US galleries during the war. I found it strange that important art was moving around the country during the war, when mobility was so restricted, until Max pointed out that of course there were no air raids or attacks on the US, so it was probably very easy to move about. Dur (dur added by me, I hasten to add - Max was characteristically patient with me).
Tonight we had the sad job of bidding farewell to Erik Love, who's going back to California forever this week. He gave a party at his house in the North East of DC, in an area far more like what we'd been warned the NE is like than where Alison and Emily live. But in a freakishly swanky flat, considering the outside makes it look a lot like a crack house.
We were the first to arrive and Max immediately made a bee-line for Erik Love's baby
grand piano. Remembering Erik Love's booze-fuelled ambush of our iTunes during our housewarming, in desperate search of something by Usher, Max launched into a piano rendition of 'Yeah!' (a very beepy r'n'b song), which was hilarious and led Erik Love to utter the immortal words to a friend on the phone, "get here quick - there's a British guy playing Usher on the piano".
Emily and some people I recognised from her party but didn't know came along, as did a few other friends of Erik Love's and it was a very low key, sitting-around-chatting affair (again with a lack of interpretive dance). I spent most of my time talking to Alison and Brewster, who were looking way more together and cosy than at Alison and Emily's party last week. They were very sweet and it was nice to get to know Brewster a little better. He's obviously besotted with Alison, but what's nice is that she seems to be getting more and more into him as time goes by. He's still not the most thrilling person I've ever met, but a very nice and solid chap.
I also chatted to Emily quite a bit and she and Alison invited me to join them on their girls' trip to Peru in November, to celebrate Alison's 30th (there's a group of about 6 of them going). It was really nice to be included, but I think we'd rather have a typical American thanksgiving and the two would clash, so I said no.
Someone mentioned at some point that Erik Love does an excellent karaoke version of Boyz II Men's 'End of the Road' and somehow this innocent comment turned into a maelstrom of insistence from all the guests that he treat us to a performance, by way of a going away present. I have to say, he really didn't need much convincing and before we knew it, we were sitting around this drawing room, listening to a singing performance - much like in a salon scene in a Jane Austen novel. Except we were in NE DC and Erik Love was singing whiney r'n'b. It was hilarious. And he was curiously good, which made me suspect this was not the first time he'd done something like this...
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