Imagine the nerve of some guy who likes Salvador Dali and Google Earth embarking on a Google Earth tour of Dali’s world before me! And he’s a newbie, too! A “Stranger”, as one is called for one’s first few foggy weeks of getting the hang of the satellite photos while scouring this vast spinning planet for Sphinxes and Pentagons.
The Google Earth Community has a ranking system that’s quite funny. You work your way up in the hierarchy according to how many posts you toss into the ante. You start out as a Stranger, then a Tourist, then a Traveller. I got Adventurer status with my 50th post and now I’m closing in on my 100th, so I’ll be promoted to Navigator. For a guy who refused to join the Cub Scouts, this is way cool.
No it’s not. It’s total geekdom. But there is something to be admired in the sacred upper echelon, the “Oracles” and “Sages”, who’ve got thousands of posts to their credit, albeit mostly in the form of repetitive reminders, cautions and suggestions to those of us who stumbled down the roughhewn geo-illogical path after them. The Oracle to whom I turned for help early on has the moniker “Lrae”. In his “avatar” pic he even looks a bit like God, in a Grizzly Adams sort of way (and I truly mean that as a compliment, God). Interestingly, not even any of the guys who set up the points system have reached the pinnacle yet. The posting king, in fact, is still about 1,200 entries short of 5,000, which will make him a “Master”.
Gasp.
What comes after “Master” no one’s ever had the courage to ask.

Anyway, this Stranger comes along and scoops my idea for posting a tour of all the interesting corners of this great big bemused world that Salvador Dali painted himself into. The Stranger calls himself Digital_D. I sent him a heartfelt message of congratulations (cough!) and urged him to get on with his self-described “work in progress”, which as it stands has only five places marked, and three of them are in Dali’s native Spain, though none mentions his birth and death there. What an amateur, y’know what I mean?
So I check back a couple of days later to see if he’s responded in any way, and lo and behold I’ve been corrected by one of the Sages from on high: Digital_D didn’t just post his tour this month, as I could have sworn after reading the publication date – it was way back in July ‘05, and he’s been AWOL ever since. No doubt fallen into one of Dali’s paintings someplace and can’t get out again. C’est la vie!
So the Sage urges me to pick up the slacker’s slack, but I don’t want to rush things in case Digital suddenly recovers from staring at too many surreal landscapes. I’ll give him a little “soft-watch” time, if you catch my drift, and meanwhile treat Dorseyland visitors to a look at what Mr _D has come up with so far.

Sadly, little of Spain has been properly photographed from Heaven yet, so the sites of Salvador’s earthly beginning and end look like the bottom line on an eye chart. Nevertheless, I’ve found some great photos of the places in question on the Net, taken by people standing on the ground, not spacemen. Elsewhere on Digital’s mini-tour the viewing’s fine, although (what an amateur, y’know what I mean?) he didn’t bother zooming in close enough to actually see the buildings he describes in his commentary. So I bent the space images a bit and got in close for a better look. I’ve quoted liberally from Digital_D’s own commentary, but helped him out there too with some vigorous editing.
The absent Mr _D’s post at Google Earth is here. If you don’t know why I’m rambling on about the Dali tour, you obviously have seen my other weblog, Dali House.

On the River Thames, right by that whopping great London Eye that about 349 Google Earth defectianados have pinpointed without a single one of them realising someone else had already done so, Digital introduces “Dali Universe”, housed in the County Hall Gallery, the former home of the Greater London Council:
“Be transported into a world of melting clocks and anthropomorphic sculpture in the Dalí Universe. County Hall Gallery presents the Dalí Universe, a retrospective of Salvador Dalí, the greatest surrealist, self-publicist” blah blah blah “in a dreamlike labyrinth of galleries … Over 500 of his amazing works are on exhibit, including the largest collection of Dalí sculptures dating from 1935-1984, his drawings, lithographs, gold and glass objects and a Dalí-inspired furniture collection.”
It gushes on for a bit more like that, surely the work of some publicist’s intern that Digital scalped off County Hall’s website, evoking “the wild and twisted mind of the Catalan master” and other words that must have curator Beniamino Levi cringing. Levi, it says, “worked with Dalí on the development of his sculptures”.
“Since its opening in the summer of 2000, the Dalí Universe has continued to delight and inspire over 250,000 visitors a year, and has become a favourite for school and social groups.”
I see on the Web that “a highlight is Dalí’s crimson-satin sofa made in the shape of Mae West’s lips”. So there you go. Oh, and pug-faced Picasso is there too, “available with a joint ticket to Dali Universe for a limited time only”. Well, you know Dali and time – it appears, in fact, that his exhibition is permanent, although Pablo’s only squatting, so better get a move on, tourist.

On to Dalí’s birthplace, and the place where he shucked off his mortal coil – Figueres, Spain.
“Inaugurated in 1974, the Dalí Theatre-Museum [actually just outside the nearby city of La Bisbal] was built upon the remains of the former Figueres theatre. It contains the broadest range of works spanning the artistic career of Salvador Dalí [including] ‘The Spectre of Sex Appeal’ (1932), ‘Soft Self-Portrait with Fried Bacon’ (1941) [and] ‘Basket of Bread – Rather Death than Shame’ (1945) … We should also note the set of works that the artist created expressly for the Theatre-Museum, such as the Mae West Room, the Wind Palace Room, the Monument to Francesc Pujols and the Rainy Cadillac. Also to be seen are works by other artists that Dalí wanted to include: El Greco, Marià Fortuny, Modest Urgell, Ernest Meissonier, Marcel Duchamp, Wolf Vostell, Antoni Pitxot and Evarist Vallès.” Digital perhaps declined to accept the museum’s claim to being “the world’s largest surrealist object”, but it sounds good to me.
Our GE guide got the above from the Dali Estate’s terrific website, complete with skittering ants. It explains that Dalí decided in the early 1960s to build his museum in the fire-gutted shell of the century-old Figueres municipal theatre. The fire at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 left “a phantasmagorical ruin”, but two decades later Figueres’ mayor made a pitch to Dalí, who found the setting eerie aplenty and even more appropriate because “I am an eminently theatrical painter”, it was right opposite the church where he was baptised and he had his first exhibition in the theatre vestibule. The whacked tourist websites helpfully point out that it’s only open from March to October, while an IveBeenThere.com contributor says reassuringly: “Once you have had your fill of Dali, there are plenty of shops cafes to wonder around and watch the world go by.”

Not far away is the Gala Dalí Castle museum-house, which is actually the mediaeval castle of Púbol but was where Dali’s wife Gala lived in the 1970s and the man himself in the early ’80s. “Inside, visitors can see the paintings and drawings that Dalí gave as presents to Gala to exhibit at the castle, as well as the elephant sculptures that adorn the garden, a collection of Gala’s haute-couture dresses, and the furniture and many objects with which they decorated the house.” That sounds good!

And still in Spain, the Salvador Dalí Museum-House in Port Lligat, “an essential visiting place” opened to the public in 1997. It’s north of Cadaqués, the village where Dalí lived in his youth, “surrounded by the landscape and bathed in the light which he always showed in his paintings. The house is made up of a cluster of fishermen’s huts, purchased in various phases, which Gala and Dalí structured in the form of a labyrinth and decorated over the course of 40 years, from 1930 … Visitors can see the painter’s workshop, the library, the bedrooms in which they lived their private life, and the garden zone and swimming pool.” Also tempting!

I’d had a Google Earth gander at the Salvador Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, while assembling my Jack Kerouac tribute for Google Earth and Dorseyland.
Kerouac died in St Pete’s, and I was intrigued to learn that he once met Dali, although I couldn’t determine what could possibly have been said between them. The museum’s not far from where ol’ Jack lived and then stopped living.
“Shortly before they were married in 1942, A Reynolds and Eleanor R Morse attended a travelling Salvador Dalí retrospective at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Thrilled by the show … they bought their first painting as a belated wedding gift a year later. Little did they know that this purchase would begin a 40-year adventure as patrons and friends of the artist that would result in the most comprehensive collection of original Dalí work in the world, and some utter junk, like the beanbag chair above.
“Until 1971, the Morses displayed their entire collection in their Cleveland, Ohio, home. When they agreed to loan over 200 pieces to a Dalí retrospective in 1965, however, they realised that a quarter-century of collecting had produced a mini-retrospective that needed and deserved a permanent home in its own right. In 1971 - with Dalí himself presiding over the opening – the Morses opened a museum adjacent to their office building in Beachwood, Ohio.
“By the end of the decade, however, the overwhelming number of visitors made the Morses realise that their collection once again needed improved facilities. After a search that drew national attention, a marine warehouse in downtown St Petersburg was rehabilitated and the museum opened to the public in Florida on March 10, 1982.” I would love to know what Dali thought of Ohio. It’s even more comical than putting Warhol’s museum in Pittsburgh.
The Salvador Dali Museum shop sells Dali in effigy (”Magnetic as Dalí’s own personality was, this finger puppet of the famous Spaniard is ready to hang out on any metal surface”) and a Discovery of America Puzzle (”Dalí was an enigma and so is this 500-piece jigsaw”) and the website has a random-quotes generator and videos on kids’ DIY Dali projects. You might also consider joining the Zodiac Group, “reformed” at the museum in 1996 in homage to the original Zodiacs, who in the early ’30s took turns sponsoring Dali for a month at a stretch. Dali treated them to an annual feast, so the modern Florida Zodiacs get together each year for stuff like a Mad Hatter’s Martini Party or Musical Chairs Dinner. Huh.