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William Montes-Liendo — who prefers simply Montes — touched down in London early this morning. Safe, exhilarated, and already filming. Within hours of arrival he began sending the first dailies: quick, spontaneous impressions of the city as he made his way toward what may be the smallest shared room ever conceived for human habitation — a micro-mini-tiny-infinitesimal capsule populated by fellow nomads from every corner of the planet.

A 25-year-old immigrant who started out chasing a woman who only wanted Chuck Norris somehow ended up ringside for film history—Golan yelling in half-Hebrew, half-English, Jon Voight quoting poetry between takes, Konchalovsky fresh from the Soviet Union directing an American action classic.

The short film I am sharing here is nothing more than a quick study—a montage of luminosity and shadow, a meditation on Sorolla’s way of sculpting daylight, a hint of guitar strings reverberating behind images that refuse to sit still. It is a first step, a way of preparing the eye before standing in front of the original canvases.

“It is well known…”—the phrase lands with quiet confidence. The writer assumes the room shares the lore: Beethoven, before composing, always walked in the countryside or read a poem, usually Goethe’s. Historical accuracy? Partial at best. Cultural shorthand? Undeniable. This wasn’t a citation; it was an invitation to a shared imaginative space.

While errors may have been made in haste or misunderstanding, the path to integrity remains open. The Lewis and Clark Monument—Their First View of the Pacific by Charles Keck is not merely a statue but a significant work of American public art. The City now has an opportunity to correct its course honorably: by acknowledging the absence of due process, restoring the artwork to its lawful and rightful place, and recommitting to the preservation of our shared artistic and histo

Preston, professor emerita at the College of William & Mary, makes use of the Bristow Collection at the New York Public Library, including letters, photographs, and other documents acquired from the composer's descendants. These sources help to present Bristow as a working musician in 19th-century New York: a violinist in orchestras, a church organist and choir director, a private and public school teacher, and a composer across multiple genres.

This article is not an argument for restoring the former name or returning the monument. Reasonable people may still disagree about symbols in public space. But we should all agree that history must be based on what we can prove — not on what we “find fair to assume.”

In the middle of the nineteenth century, an extravagant Frenchman arrived in New York with a gold-tipped baton and a sense of theater that the concert stage had never seen. His name was Louis-Antoine Jullien, and long before Liberace—or anyone who understood that art and spectacle could share the same stage—there was Jullien.

While Americans like George Bristow struggled to define a voice independent from Europe, composers in Italy, Germany, and the newly forming states of Central and Eastern Europe faced parallel challenges. The age of revolutions and unifications — from 1848 to the 1870s — was also the age of cultural nation-building. Music, literature, and painting became instruments of self-definition.