Month: September 2011

Well apparently 12 days of wisdom is all Martinez could tolerate. That’s how long the beaver lasted on the mural before it was slathered in paint and covered from view. This morning’s Patch had a colorful story of ME being an overeager you-know-what and asking for a beaver to be added. (Which is funny because I’ve been here for all 4 years of this grueling campaign and after a bitterly sheet-piled learning curve  I  KNOW better than to think the city would ever add a beaver.) The editor has since revised the story to reflect my flatly stated position that I had nothing to do with it!

Originally the story said that I handed the artist the photo and illicitly asked to have it included.  Never mind that I read that a beaver was going to be included on the SFGate August 12 and wrote the author to verify. He wrote me back that he had heard it directly from the artist himself. The story is now posted on that website, with a title so clever (at a moment’s notice) that I’m morbidly ashamed I didn’t think of it myself in the last 12 hours. “Martinez Cover-up” Isn’t that beautiful?  To be clear I  never spoke to the artist. I did look up his website and write him that we had lots of photos on our site if he wanted to use one. Never heard from him one way or the other. I even found his description of adding the beaver on his website, which is now down.

Once the painting was up I thought I recognized it and went searching through our images to find the original. When I found the original I posted it here. That’s the sum total of my involvement in it, which means that EITHER someone else asked for the beaver to be added and handed Mario a photo from the website OR someone in the story is lying so that the whole mean-spirited and vindictive tale makes something dimly approaching sense.

(I guess its possible that I was hit in the head and in my post-concussive amnesiac phase forgot the trench coat moment. Hmmm.)

The whole story reminded me vaguely of a story I heard from a tour guide in the Sistine Chapel and turned to verify in wikipedia. Apparently when Michael Angelo finished his masterpiece depicting the final judgment the greatly turmoiled characters were naked, (including God). An anxious master of Ceremonies to the Pope (Biagio da Cesena) objected saying “it was mostly disgraceful that in so sacred a place there should have been depicted all those nude figures, exposing themselves so shamefully,” The unwilling artist was not happy about repainting clothes on the finished work but muralists do what they’re told.(In Rome and in Martinez).

They also get even in their own way “Michelangelo worked Cesena’s face into the scene as Minos, judge of the underworld (far bottom-right corner of the painting) with Donkey ears (i.e. indicating foolishness). It is said that when Cesena complained to the Pope, the pontiff joked that his jurisdiction did not extend to hell, so the portrait would have to remain.

Have you looked closely at all the faces of those dead fish the Italians are processing in the Mural? Just sayin’.