Students from the USC Capital Campus were at the Australian Embassy this morning along with students from the University of Sydney. Is this the most beautiful embassy in Washington, D.C., as someone there claimed? It may well be, especially when you look at all that art.

Yesterday a few USC students and I toured the Embassy of Norway in D.C. Such a friendly welcome, plus great architecture. This is outside the new chancery. We learned the copper for the roof was mined on Karmøy, like the copper for the Statue of Liberty. We’re lucky Norway is our friend and ally.

The uncanny loveliness of living in the same city where I was once a young student and I’m now an old professor — and the privilege of having done and felt so many things elsewhere in the intervening forty-plus, almost fifty, years (and remembering it all, kind of). #georgetown #usc

There’s a new edition of Cimarosa’s “La ballerina amante,” and some scenes were performed for the first time in a million years at Georgetown’s Gonda Theater. It was wonderful. Please, universities, more of this!

As seen in New York this weekend: the magnificent “Macbeth” at the Met; Gio Ponti in the New York Design Gallery; Peter Hujar in the Morgan Library; and the Caroline Ladd Pratt House in Brooklyn, where my brother lived when he was a student at Pratt.

Not an architect I can love, John Russell Pope did do his neoclassical thing with finesse: the Jefferson Memorial, the National Gallery of Art, the National Archives, plus houses, including this 18th-century French beauty built in the 1920s: Meridian House. Pray, can you fall in love with a door?

The old U.S. Embassy in London, designed by Eero Saarinen, now the Chancery Rosewood Hotel, readapted by David Chipperfield — not the worst metamorphosis, I suppose. The old eagle on top is now in the terrace of the, uh, Eagle Bar, presiding over Grosvenor Square as it has since the early 1960s.

Never really “got” Ana Mendieta, but after seeing the show at the Tate Modern, I’m in love with those silhouettes, the drawings on leaves, and the markings of our passing through this Earth everywhere. A sublime exhibition, worth the trip across the gray Atlantic.

Love you forever, Eero Saarinen, midcentury man.

Carlos Fuentes, aged nine, in a mural by Roberto Cueva del Río at the MacVeagh House, the 1910 Beaux Arts mansion serving as the Mexican embassy in Washington when Fuentes’s father was counselor in the 1930s. It’s now the Mexican Cultural Institute; the boy’s eyes remain as perceptive as ever.

Late summer, early fall. Sunday, drizzly sunset. A view of Maryland and the Potomac and West Virginia.

Late summer, early fall. Not a big fan of FLW myself, but I couldn’t stop thinking how much Jim would’ve have enjoyed Fallingwater. He would’ve have smiled through the entire tour and would’ve marveled at the iconic view — which, I confess, I did find most wondrous.

Trains and churches of Cumberland, Maryland.

Matching for Tibet this morning along Connecticut Avenue.

Awesome news for Los Angeles and surely too for Velázquez’s formidable Conde-Duque, who now gets to live in California.

Getty Acquires Rediscovered Diego Velázquez Painting | Getty News

“Portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares” strengthens Getty’s collection of 17th-century European paintings.

getty.edu

“His ego wants what it wants. He lives in a city that he evidently hates and that […] hates him back. But Trump’s obsession with these vulgar memorials to his own vanity is a reminder of the darkness around him, of his hostility to democracy, his loathing of honor, and his disordered mind.”

Trump’s Monumental Obsession

The president fantasizes about a capital city full of memorials—to himself.

theatlantic.com

Late summer in D.C. | Blue Skies.

“17 September 1809 “We had not seen a Vessel since we passed Fair Isle in the North Sea — We had had a gale all day and night and the Swell was frightful — The Swell continued terrific — At about five o clock in the Afternoon a British Brig was discovered. …

Late summer in Washington, D.C., and the sky is blue. Despite it all, this city will be fine. Then again, it would be good to have more control over our own affairs, if you catch my drift.

Even “Blue” is being forced out of the Kennedy Center by Trump-appointed board. As some have suggested, this may well be the first step on demolishing the whole thing. Are we going to sit idly by as the Man in the White House exerts his power of destruction?

“They felt a railway train as power; yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.” “The Education of Henry Adams,” Chapter XXV

Such sadness after so much joy.

Literary birth of a D.C. landmark, the Exorcist steps: “She turned a wistful look to her right, where, beside the house, a precipitous plunge of old stone steps fell away to M Street far below […]” William Peter Blatty, “The Exorcist”

From the timeline of my friend Paco in Madrid, from whom I’ve learned so much about Spain.

Borges would like a word.

Braved the humid heat to visit with the magnificent eleventh-century “Vishnu Reclining on the Serpent Ananda,” who is in at the National Museum of Asian Art all the way from the National Museum of Cambodia — reassembled for the first time in all his elongated gorgeousness.

Flora of the District of Columbia in early summer, as Ozu would have it.

Haunted by this image. What an awesome country America can be. We surely will be touched again by those better angels President Lincoln talked about. (There’s a link to the WaPo story behind the image in the comments.)