Kate Perry's Museum....

Pens are so very pleased to welcome Kate Perry. Kate is the author of the Guardians of Destiny series, a Kung Fu Master, a tango enthusiast, and a cupcake aficionado. Voted by her friends as the woman they'd most want to stroll with down a dark alley, Kate's as likely to be spotted at the opera as she is practicing swordplay in Golden Gate Park.




Glass of wine in hand, Amy sat down on my kitchen floor. “Are you going to get a kitchen table soon? I don’t mind plopping on the floor because you’re making me dinner, but isn’t it time?”

“I just moved in, and I’ve been too busy to go furniture shopping.” I stirred mushrooms into the pan of caramelizing onions.

“Speaking of why you’re busy… I bought TEMPTED BY FATE last week. I’m on the handcuff scene. Hawt. ” She fanned herself. “So how is the new book release going?”



“I have one more guest blog to write.” I turned around, brandishing the wooden spatula. “I’m supposed to write about museums.”

“That’s perfect for you. You’ve been to museums all around the world. Write about your favorite one. Or the city that has the best museums.”

I added cream to my mixture, turned the heat down, and faced Amy. “Actually, I had this other idea.”

“Uh-oh.”

“It doesn’t involve explosives this time.”

“That’s only slightly reassuring.” She sighed in resignation. “Tell me.”

“I’m going to open my own museum.”

Amy blinked. “Just when I think I’m used to your crazy ideas, you spring something like this on me. Where are you going to open your museum?”

“Right here.” I waved at the bare walls of my new apartment. “I have prime real estate, not to mention that parking is easy in my neighborhood and I’m by two major Muni lines.”

“Yeah, but where are you going to get paintings from? I doubt you have a bunch of Chagall canvases hiding in your attic.”

“I’m going to do the paintings myself.”

“But you don’t paint, Kate.”

“Yeah, I do,” I said excitedly. I ran to my bedroom, grabbed my pack of paintings, and skid back into the kitchen. “Look.”

She silently flipped through my informal portfolio.

“And I have all these ideas for other paintings. I’d like to do a series based on my Guardians of Destiny series, depicting my heroines kicking ass. And maybe I’ll do a series on the Chinese elements my Guardians represent. And I’d like to do a series on fruit.”

“Fruit?”



“Like tomatoes on the vine.”

“Oo-kay.” She handed me back the paintings. “I don’t want to be a killjoy, but you write, you study kung fu several days a week, and you have a crazy dating schedule—“

“I’ve also been tango dancing.”

“Exactly!” Amy threw her arms in the airs. “When are you going to fit painting and being a curator in there?”

“I’ll cut back dating to two nights a week. And I don’t need that much sleep.”

Amy opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again to down some wine. Finally, she shook her head. “You do realize that if you turn your apartment into a museum, people will constantly be walking through. Which means you’ll have to clean more often.”

“Oh.” I frowned. “I hate cleaning.”

“I know.”

“Damn.”

She nodded. “I know.”

I brightened. “Maybe I can build a robot to do the cleaning.”

“Around your book deadlines?”

“If I created a heroine who was a painter-slash-inventor, then I could chalk it all up to research.”



“You—I—“ Amy shook her head and held out her glass. “Is there more wine?”


Kate can be found on her website at www.kateperry.com and follow her most excellent posts on Twitter @kateperry

The Theft at the Louvre

by Gigi

I briefly mentioned an eventful experience I had many years ago at the Louvre in this blog post here.

Now that the topic of museums has come up, I'm going to explore this famous museum theft in a bit more detail.

A few days before my 23rd birthday, I found myself aimless in Paris. I'd recently finished working in London on a temporary work permit, and was trying to travel for as long as possible as cheaply as possible. What better way to spend the day than head to the Louvre on the one day a month when it was free?

As it turns out, a lot of other people had the same idea of heading to this free Sunday at the Louvre -- including an art thief.

On May 3, 1998, Le Chemin de Sevres, a painting by Camille Corot worth $1.3 million, was sliced from its frame. No alarms sounded. Nobody even saw the thief.

I don't remember exactly where in the museum I was, because I didn't realize what was happening until we began to be ushered into the mail hall of the Louvre, underneath the giant glass pyramid. (I assume I was looking at sculptures somewhere in the sprawling museum, since stone carvings are my favorite type of art.)

I was staying at the flat of a French friend I'd known when he was a foreign exchange student in California, but I was alone at the Louvre that day. I had my backpack with my camera inside, so alone in the vast crowd, I started taking pictures.


The press reported that when the missing frame was discovered, "exit doors were immediately locked, and every bag carried by every visitor, was checked thoroughly, until the search was concluded, unsuccessfully, many hours later."

Parts of the press reports were true -- but not everything.

While the authorities kept us trapped in the hall for hours, I had a great time observing everything that was going on. Unlike many of the tourists who were scrambling to leave to catch flights, I wasn't in a rush to get out of the museum. When I finally exited, behind most of the tens of thousands of visitors -- I was never searched.

This fact, even more than the daring theft of the painting, has stuck with the mystery writer in me.

Had the thief slipped out before the doors were locked? Or perhaps... could the perpetrator have been one of the faces in my photographs?



I followed the story in the newspapers for a while, including the hard copy clippings above that I saved in my scrapbook. But as I write this, the painting has yet to be found.

I had already been interested in art theft in mystery novels (e.g. Elizabeth Peters' Vicky Bliss mysteries) but this experience cemented my fascination. I was thrilled to discover Hailey Lind's art lover's mystery series a few years ago -- written under a pen name by the Pens' own Juliet Blackwell -- which happens to be how I got involved with these writers who formed the Pens Fatales.

The best art theft thriller I read lately was actually a nonfiction book, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures. It's a memoir by a retired FBI agent who spent his career working undercover to rescue stolen art. When I finished the book, I found I'd put at least a dozen post-it notes in the pages to capture details I wanted to remember when working on my next mystery -- which most definitely involves an art thief.

Martha Takes Her Museums Like Her Tacos - Off The Streets

Picture this.

You're strolling up a hill in San Francisco's Marina district, just a few blocks shy of the lapping waters of the dock.

Steamy, delicious hot dog in one hand.
Cold iced-tea in the other.

Friends on either side, chatting.

Then, hmmm. Lookie here. Spray painted against a building. What do you think of this?


Who is the artist?
What does it mean?
Why is it here?
Why the color choice?
The words inscribed in her skirt - "get up get up get up get up" - a call to arms?
For us?
For what?

That gas mask - so creepy! Some debate the origin of the gas mask in street art but most agree Banksy popularized it (some might hypothesize this is his piece) and even more agree it's iconography ties to British air raids as a symbol of political oppression, groupthink, and a calm acceptance of unacceptable terms.

A regular day, no admission fee, and 20 minutes of philosophical discussion with food in hand. My favorite museum is the street when you weren't expecting it. My favorite piece is whatever happens to be around to catch my attention.

Get up get up get up get up.

There's a museum all around you.

Shrines to the Muses

by Lisa Hughey


So we’ve focused quite a bit on art museums which I love because if I could be an artist I would be, but my scale is never quite right and the color gradations always off, so I mostly appreciate ART and leave the creation to others more talented. Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I visited the museums regularly (The Art Institute of Chicago, The Field Museum, The Museum of Science and Industry were my favorites) and developed a deep love of museums and the stories behind the exhibits.

I love museums that focus on history, even more specifically on the history of a particular person. My first introduction to this, or at least the one that lingers in my memory, is visiting Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home on the Potomac, during my 8th grade school field trip to Washington, DC.

I can still picture his bedroom with the giant four poster bed, white linens, with a book and a pair of spectacles resting on the bed. It was fantastic to stand in his bedroom, the father of the American Revolution and wonder...what would have happened if he’d chosen any other path?


Mt. Vernon Estate and Gardens

Wandering through his home, seeing how he lived and worked, thinking about his place in history really had an impact on me.

I love docent talks, thrilled to be soaking up all that knowledge of the people who lived and worked in the homes. Lately, I’ve been on a kick to visit the shrines to the muses of writers. There are several pretty cool ones in the Bay Area.

Eugene O’Neill’s Tao House is an experience. Atop a hill overlooking a valley, you have to take a bus to reach the house which nowadays isn’t that far from civilization but when he lived there it was in the middle of nowhere. Neither he nor his wife drove so they relied on day servants who did their marketing and shopping (no UPS delivery back then!). They were for all intents and purposes very isolated. When he wasn’t writing, O’Neill was quite a traveler and the art and collected memorabilia from his travels is fascinating. He was also an entertainer, although a somewhat reluctant entertainer according to reports. An absolutely wonderful part of the tour is the glimpse into his writing process. He wrote every day. By long hand.


Pens, Sophie and LGC and I with our pal, Trish Cetrone


Totally jealousy inducing is the placement of his office, off of his bedroom and closet. To reach his office his wife and servants had to travel a gauntlet of three doors and the house rule was that if any one of the doors was closed: DO NOT ENTER.

The other museum is in the Jack London State Park in Sonoma, California. London was actually a frustrated farmer who wrote in order to feed his dream of a sustainable, working farm. The museum is housed in the simple farm house where he lived and worked and entertained. He loved to have people come stay with him. As with O’Neill, London was an avid traveler. His farmhouse is full of furniture and accessories from exotic places. His office looked out over the farm and had a little cot where he often slept while he was working.


The London Farmhouse

London also wrote every day, insisting that no one bother him until he’d gotten in at least 2000 words (again by long hand). London differed in that he would write anywhere, outside on rocks, out near his man-made pond, in his office. Once he’d written his words for the day, he’d joyously entertain until late at night.

Learning about their every day life, their process and their pain has been great inspiration to continue writing and living life in order to inform my work with authenticity.

Lisa


ps. In honor of our Museum topic, I’m drag, er, taking my kids on a trip to the San Francisco MOMA to see an exhibit on the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. :)

Which is Worse: Museum Foot or Housemaid’s Knee?

L.G.C. Smith

I love museums. Any and all museums, except maybe The Three Stooges Museum, which I’ve only heard about from my husband, who adores it and the Stooges. I have never loved the Stooges. Enough said. But any other museum – I probably love it.

Me in a museum in Avignon

I’m sure it comes as a whopping surprise to folks that, as with other things I love, such as road trips, maps, and jam-making, an excess of methodical, relentless perseverance is my preferred modus operandi when visiting museums. None of this half an hour at a time crap for me. Sorry, Juliet. That’s for you people with social lives. I’m basically a recluse --and no, I don’t have major OCD issues. Really. If I go to a museum, odds are I spent a fair bit of time and effort getting there, so I mean to make the most of it.

There is the added advantage that once in a museum, you rarely have to talk to anyone.

There are, however, a few drawbacks to my approach to museums. They are:

1. Other people think you are insane. Other people traveling with you are rarely willing to inter themselves in any museum, no matter how great, for upwards of eight hours at a time. Wieners. My husband’s most admirable trait: he can spend longer in a museum than I can. Which leads to…

2. ...Don’t try to take romantic trips any place there are museums. We spent a week in Florence for our honeymoon. I only remember the museums andthe gelato. And…

3. ...Museum Foot. This is what happens when you shuffle through vast museums sucking in everything paying no attention to how you are moving. Drag. Ooohhh. Stop. Admire. Think. Glance back. Glance forward. Ooohhh. Drag. Wow. Stop. Admire. Think. Cry. Whatever. Repeat for four to five hours. Find cafeteria. Caffeinate. Put protein in. Back to work. Drag. Ooohhh. Stop. Drag. Ooohh. Stop. Repeat until they kick you out. By the end of the day, your feet feel like you’ve run a marathon, then had your toes trod on by a mammoth. In fact, you’ve never moved faster than a sloth all day. Walking the same distance would be a breeze by comparison because you would use your muscles the way they are designed to be used. Clearly, we did not evolve to appreciate the Uffizi Gallery in two days. Even when young.

Me with fellow Museum Foot sufferers at the Rodin Museum

That’s it for the drawbacks.

Some of the most rewarding museums are the smaller ones, those local places that sent all their good stuff to the state capital or a big national museum. Possibly they never had any good stuff to begin with, so they collected what they could and slapped up a museum sign. One of my favorites is the Adams Museum in the town where I was born, Deadwood, South Dakota. (Seriously.) They had some decent stuff, even back when I was a kid, some good Wild West photos, lots of examples of barbed wire, and a load of creepy taxidermy. We went once a year when we visited my grandparents in the Black Hills.

The best exhibit, bar none, was the miniature diorama of a nudist community constructed out of popsicle sticks. I am not kidding, people. Someone local must have made it and donated it. I’m not sure the point was to make a nudist colony, or if that was just a by-product of the limitations of the construction materials. For years on end, my cousins, sibs and I would gawk, point and collapse in silent laughter as we studied the yards and yards of rolling green grass and stick people going about their business in the buff, all inside big lighted cases. Somebody in Deadwood had a sense of humor back in the seventies. God bless ‘em.

The Adams Museum has been renovated at least a few times since then, and the diorama in the basement was gone the last time I was there. Thankfully, the world is full of museums exhibiting similar testaments to questionable taste and generous estimations of intrinsic value. Thank heavens we don’t all have to make it into The Met.

My brother, stricken with an acute case of Museum Foot at Versailles

Finally, the answer to the question in the title is that Museum Foot is always better because it means you spent the day in a museum rather than on your knees scrubbing something.

My Day At The Museum

Pens are thrilled to have our pal Carolyn Jewel as a guest today! Carolyn Jewel writes historical romance for Berkley Books and Paranormal Romance for Grand Central Publishing. My Immortal Assassin, book 3 in her My Immortals paranormal series will be in bookstores everywhere January 4th, 2011. www.carolynjewel.com







Last month (November), I visited a writing friend in Brooklyn. (I should mention I live in California so the visit was for a week, not an afternoon.) I brought my son with me so that, in addition to writing related things I had scheduled, my son and I could do some New York-ish things. A brilliant plan! My son was broken-hearted that he was to miss a week of school, but he bore up well under the crushing disappointment.

I knew better than to overbook Things-To-Be-Seen, since that leads to exhaustion and crabbiness. I am not good with stress and overly ambitious schedules that leave no time for serendipity. Also, my son is 15. There’s only so much a teenager will tolerate from his mother and the point of the trip was not to torture him (seriously!) but to create some memories about travel actually being fun. And that serendipity thing? Four words: The Pop Tart Store.

However, I was determined that we should see the Jan Gossart exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art because the exhibit would improve my son’s mind and expand his horizons. Perhaps he would even be inspired to change his career goals from “sitting around playing Star Craft II all day” to “Renaissance Historian. “

It could happen.

It didn’t, but it could have.

Anyway, by this huge, amazing coincidence, there’s a Fantasy I want to write that involves a Renaissance-ish culture. As it happens, I was at this exact time completing revisions on a short story set in this world. My editor sent them to me the day before we were to leave for New York.

The astonishing timing of editors is the subject of a whole other post, I promise you.

When I was making plans for the New York trip and realized that the Met was going to have an entire exhibit of paintings dedicated to the very period I was using as my inspiration, I was beyond thrilled. There’s a reason English has stolen words like kismet. Also, I am a museum freak. If left to my own devices in a museum I will stop in front of each and every work of art and read every single word. And then contemplate. While writing scenes in my head.

Did I mention my son is 15? Renaissance painters are actually not his favorite thing. He was at great pains to point out to me that I was going through the exhibit slower than the stooped over, gray haired lady with a cane. Well, yeah. She was skipping stuff! The slacker. I suspect, but do not know for certain, that she was not staring at the exquisite portraits and thinking about the best way to steal the clothing for her Fantasy world. I could be wrong about that, of course.

After we finished the Gossart exhibit, we flew through some of the Georgian and Regency paintings because my son felt he had suffered enough and he had a point. Discretion, as they say, is the better part of valor. We went to the Met Store only to learn that the Gossart exhibit book will give you a hernia, so I did not purchase it at the Met. I bought it online later and let the USPS get the hernia shipping it to California.

The Museum of Natural History was much more to the 15 year old’s tastes and we spent quite a while there with nary a complaint about a certain person walking too slow while writing scenes in her head.

How did you feel about museums when you were a teenager?

Kick in the Teeth

Mary Blair’s concept art for Cinderella.

This one is my favorite.

I picked these up at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco about a month ago.

It was also where I saw this, the first known drawing of Mickey Mouse. I must have stood there for a solid fifteen minutes staring at it, as reverently as some look at the Mona Lisa.

The legend goes that Walt drew it at the lowest point in his life. He was broke. A shady businessman had just stolen the rights to his first commercially successful character. He had a long train ride back across the country to dwell on rejection and failure. He could have given up, called it quits. No one would have blamed him.

But he didn’t. Instead, he picked up his pencil and drew. And when he got back to L.A., he had an idea. A few months and a whole hell of a lot of hard work later, the world had Mickey Mouse.

Bringing flowers to museums

I have a confession: I don’t really like museums.

Actually, that’s not true. I adore museums for maybe half an hour at a time.

After that I start to feel a little faint. Maybe it’s the re-circulated air and weird lighting and crowds (I don’t do well in shopping malls, either.) Or maybe it’s the implication that I’ll never be that good no matter how long I paint; or in contrast, the compelling desire to go home RIGHT NOW and paint something to see if I could be great (this was the case with the most recent exhibit I went to on the post-impressionists…I came home and started two new paintings!)

Food and drinks help. A lot. In fact, if I could do museums in half hour intervals studded with food and drinks all day and night. I lived in Florence, Italy one memorable summer, and went to the Uffizi just about every single day, each time discovering something new and precious.

But all that said, I’d like to put in a plug for a great museum experience: the annual Bouquets to Art show at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, which comes only briefly, usually in March. If you haven’t been, it’s a little hard to describe.

Essentially, this fundraiser invites florists and artists –artistic florists, really—to create pieces that respond to particular paintings. Then these pieces are presented in front of, or next to, those paintings.

Sometimes the arrangement mimics something from the painting. In other cases it reflects a shape or color. And at times the floral representation simply responds to the mood of the original art work.



What I love about Bouquets to Art is the vibrant, time-limited interaction of the viewers with the artwork. The show invites the artist/florists and the viewers to take part, to interact, to see anew. The flowers live only briefly, so the show only lasts a few days. But that very brevity adds to its charm.

Because sometimes museums are best savored in small doses.