#110: Gold Mountain


This is a stage mountain, exquisitely artificial, like a decorative, gold-leafed peak or pinnacle wrested from the depths of Jugendstil, an object  you'd find in painter Gustav Klimt or in the architecture of Peter Behrens (1869-1940).  There is something oddly Wagnerian about it too--a dusty, offstage emblem of Das Rheingold.   The great John Ruskin once wrote (in 1841) a severely moralizing fairy tale called The King of the Golden River.  He wrote it for his tiny  prepubescent inamorata, Effie Gray, who, when she grew up a bit, he then married.  I love Ruskin's writings, but I couldn't read this story.  I tried three times.  I wish he'd written a King of he Golden Mountain instead