I mean, she's not wrong! Although I have more indulgence for Herzog's indulgence that she does, it seems, haha.

Took my nine year old to see Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams in IMAX and she pronounced it "indulgent." (Yes, this reveals way too much about my life as a parent.)

Ahhhhhhh the first thing they did after they freed her from the display case and decked her out in flowers was give her a great big helping of cardamon sweets!

preordered!!!

Love that her only shock her comes not from buying something so clearly just stolen from its worshippers, but from paying full price!

👀 👀 👀

No kidding. Slusser's notes are filled with casual mentions that she had done stuff like soak this image of the Buddhist deity Amoghapasha in Tide detergent before smuggling it out of Nepal (which is what she did with more than a hundred smaller deities who weren't as heavy as the Parvati!)

Obviously I played a teeny tiny role in all this, but it sure makes remembering all those hours staring down carts full of thousands of old photos and scraps of seemingly random notes seem worthwhile...

See these people sitting on either side of Slusser's photograph? They were in it. Adhikari found them - and now they got to see their protective goddess come home.

He's currently sending me photos of the reinstallation, which happened today. Here's the British ambassador helping carry Parvati's palanquin; here's happy celebrants; here's a dignitary who's going to need to go to the drycleaner; here's Parvati back in worship and ok I'm tearing up again.

Adhikari then brought together a long list of stakeholders from the national level to the neighborhood association and got the museum to agree to return Parvati to her shrine!

Sanjay Adhikari, a repatriation activist, started wandering around Kathmandu until he located the exact shrine, where a replacement now stood. Turns out that the community had no idea that their goddess was a few miles away in the museum.

People quickly helped me realize that I'd actually already photographed this sculpture of Parvati/Tara! It had been stolen shortly after Slusser's visit (like all too many other things she brought the the attention of dealers), seized in the UK, and returned to Nepal's National Museum decades ago.

I found a couple more photos from the same day in the mid-1960s from Slusser's archive - one of her assistant cleaning, which showed the sculpture more clearly, and a wider shot showing the courtyard. I posted these on social media asking if anyone had ideas.

...in presentations to explain how she had to clean "dirty" art to photograph it. In reality, she's removing offerings placed by worshippers who regard the sculpture as a living deity.
I started writing a caption for a forthcoming publication and realized I didn't know where the photo was taken.

At the request of Nepali colleagues, I've spent years visiting the archive of photos and documents the art historian Mary Slusser left to the Smithsonian on her death. I was fascinated by this one of her scrubbing a sculpture of a deity with household cleaner, which she used to show...

Sitting here crying while after getting WhatsApped the photo on the right, so let me tell you a little story about how we got here from the photo on the left and why repatriation research matters!

Witnessing the reaction to The Battle of Algiers on an unprepared bro was pretty amazing, not going to lie.

Still from The Battle of Algiers

... The Battle of Algiers, which absolutely blew his mind and convinced him I was a real baller of a chick, man.

Still from Au Hasard Balthazar

My greatest cinematic fail was when long ago I was trying to discourage a bro who kept asking me out, so I invited him to a screening of Au Hasard Balthazar, thinking he would be turned off by the slow-moving sufferings of a donkey, but I got the time wrong and we ended up seeing...

You can't raise the number of hours in your day, but you can lower your expectations for what's good enough to count as done...

bsky.app/profile/mart...

People: Oxford is a bastion of refined civilization.
Oxford:

side by side images of Pat Carroll and Ursula the Sea Witch

Actress and comedian Pat Carroll loved playing Ursula the Sea Witch, although she once reminisced with an interviewer about her shocked moment of realization that all her other roles would be forgotten and “my grandchildren will only know me as a squid.”

Ah! (Was thinking Dancer from the Dance.)

Wait wait wait does the title start with D? If so, hard agree.

Very technical process of keeping a random piece of paper around to which I add words when I catch myself so I can search other chapters, too!

Nobody notices repetitions during a round table!

That is… so much worse than I had envisioned.