When Public Art Goes Bad

Every morning, as I bike through the center of Den Haag on my way to work, I think to myself: "WTF?!?"

Straight from Castle Grayskull

Before I go any further, I should clarify that I really like public art. I think it's important.  I think it's cool.  I come, after all, from a city where the (then-future) mayor famously exposed himself to it. Yay public art.

But The Hague has some seriously bad public art.  In fact, it's so bad that I've grown oddly attached to some of it.  I've posted some of my "favorites" after the jump.

As you'll see, Jeff has aptly named two of them (be forewarned, juvenile bathroom humor ensues).  But the other two (and the homage to Skeletor on the right) still lack names - suggestions are always welcome.

Postcard: Rietveld Schroeder House (Utrecht)

What makes this house special: It was built in 1924, when it must have shocked its neighbors. It was designed by a furniture maker, Gerrit Thomas Reitveld, with no formal education (which shows in the house's increasing deterioration). Its upper floor transforms like a magic puzzle box, with all sorts of ingenious sliding doors and latching wall panels, from five rooms into one giant loft-like space. Still, I'm not sure why this house is on the World Heritage List when the Sonneveld house in Rotterdam is not. 

Morocco: Getting over Myself

(I am catching up on old blog posts I never got around to posting. This one dates from early April, after our week-long vacation in Morocco.)

I like to think I know my own shortcomings.  I will never win any awards for tact, I don't volunteer to do the dishes often enough, and I can be unintentionally short with people in a work environment. 

My biggest flaw when it comes to traveling: an endless capacity for timidity. I am afraid to go into places where I might not be welcome, to look lost or uncertain or to otherwise stand out, even to buy things (as that necessitates interacting with strangers).  Thus one of my goals for 2011 is to learn to talk to people when traveling. Easier said than done.

So when we set off to Morocco, I set myself five challenges, all related to getting over myself enough so I could enjoy my vacation.  It did not go as smoothly as planned, but as they say - two steps forward, one step back...  it's not quick, but at least you're moving in the right direction.

The Casablanca train station, our first morning in Morocco

I take back all the nasty things I said...

I take back all the nasty things I said about the camera on my Android phone - well, almost all of them.  Over the last couple of months - since my Paris weekend in May and the Smartphone v. Android faceoff - I've been using my camera phone more and more often.  And the results aren't all that bad.

Here's a dozen pictures, ranging from the outdoors to close-ups to twilight.  The phone did OK, though still not as well (in most cases) as a "real" camera.  Still, my learning curve continues:

Inside Pamplona

Jeff and his Spanish brother
in old Pamplona

There's no better way to see a city than in the company of a local.  Hence our perfect day in Pamplona, spent with Jeff's childhood friend, his wife, their children, and his parents - three generations of Pamplon-ites, so warm and welcoming that I forgot at times they were speaking in Spanish (which, I should point out, I do not understand).

I'm not sure, outside the San Fermin festival (aka, the running of the bulls), that there's that much to "see" in Pamplona - Bilbao and San Sebastian are much more interesting places to spend time as a tourist.  But after walking us around the old town, our friend/inside guide shared with us three favorite spots that are worthy of note:

Why Not? Law as an Undergrad Degree

I run into some problems here in The Hague.  My seven years of higher education just get no respect.  In most of the world, law is an undergraduate degree; those serious about, say, international law will then spend a year getting a subject-specific Master's degree (LLM).  Those really serious will get a PhD - but this isn't like the six to eight years it takes to get a humanities PhD in the U.S.  And then there are those who don't even have a undergrad law degree, but only a one-year LLM.

Many a time I have tried to explained to 23-year-old colleagues that yes, I do have an advanced law degree.  While this is slightly annoying at a personal level, it makes me wonder, what if we didn't stick with the JD model back in the States?

Consider: a state university with a law school (take the University of Oregon) could negotiate with the state bar association (take Oregon's) to allow students from an undergraduate law program to sit for the bar (most states require you to have a degree from an ABA-accredited law school first).  U of O could then start a four-year undergraduate law degree program, perhaps with a strongly recommended fifth-year LLM (Master's degree) component.

Your freshman year of college would be composed of traditional liberal arts classes.  Sophomore year, in addition to taking any remaining general education requirements, you also take courses on legal reasoning and the theoretical underpinnings of law - something that is generally missing from U.S. legal education.  Junior and senior year you take full-on law courses, many of them at the university's law school.  If you complete the program, you are automatically admitted into the law school's LLM program in a specific area of law that is widely practiced in the state.  In Oregon, this might be energy or environmental law, or general business or criminal law.  

Consider further: Some law schools have already floated the idea of cutting out the third year.  Others have effectively done so by requiring a year's worth of externships.  Super-nerds like me, who just can't get enough of school (or are indecisive), could still get a liberal arts college degree and a separate JD.  Those able and willing to go the undergraduate route, however, would save considerable tuition costs - as well as the opportunity and career development cost of two or three years of productive employment in lieu of law school.  Which also means that fewer lawyers would feel trapped in jobs they really didn't like just because they have law school loans to pay off (or to justify how much their parents spent on their tuition).  And if after five years of your BA and LLM studies, you still want more, you could pursue a SJD, like a PhD of law - currently so rare a degree, most people don't know it exists.

Yes, employers would have to be willing to hire these B.A. lawyers.  But the lower cost of these lawyers (justified by their smaller investment in tuition) would be a real incentive.  Indeed, having a pool of B.A. lawyers could increase access to justice for lower income families, small businesses, and non-profit organizations.  The state and local governments could get in on the action, too.  Really, I only see upsides - and I think it's a model that could be feasibly implemented by rolling it out on a state-by-state basis. 

You can thank me later.

The Long Arm of Justice

Having lived in Boston for eight years, I was appropriately titillated by the recent capture of Whitey Bulger.  But I was even more titillated by the capture, the week before, of Ratko Mladic, alleged mastermind of much mayhem in the Balkans in the 1990s.  Consider: Whitey was wanted for 19 murders; Ratko was wanted for more than 7,000 murders in Srebrenica alone.  Damn.

In fact, there's been so many headlines like these in recent weeks that even I have overlooked some of them.  In the spirit of Jeff's recent post about The Hague's lack of brand clarity, and for your use during cocktail parties and high-end water cooler debates, I present a cheat sheet on the international criminal courts in The Hague - and which recent headlines go with which:

Bilbao: Vastly Underrated

When I was planning our trip to northern Spain, allotting one evening to Bilbao seemed more than adequate to accomplish the only thing I was told made Bilbao worthwhile (the Guggenheim).  But that one evening passed too quickly, and when midnight found us at Claudio's in the old town working our way through a plate of local jamon and chistorras, I regretted our rash decision to book tickets on a bus out of town at 9 the next morning.

My new-found love affair with Bilbao took root in the fertile ground of low expectations.  With everyone from the New York Times to our Spanish friends in Pamplona telling us Bilbao is nothing special (save, of course, for Frank Gehry's massive monument to modern art), we were free to discover the city for ourselves. 

Jeff Koons' giant puppy welcomes the city to the museum

Of course, the museum is all that and a bag of chips.  Its shape both inside and out is fluid and mysterious; it spills over into public spaces filled with public art, along the riverfront in one direction and into the city on the other.  The cavernous and curving galleries are best suited for modern art of the giant installation variety, some of which we really liked and some of which was beyond us.  Of our eight precious hours in Bilbao, we spent three on the museum - but the other five were equally memorable.