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Nature

It’s a Mystery.

It truly is a mystery to me how some people can use a pencil and with a few strokes generate a three dimensional image, evoke a sense of place, represent what’s in front of our eyes. In drawing, there is none of the forgiveness of working in oil or acrylic paints, where you can re-do over and over again; none of the softness of watercolors which also need to be rendered with skill, but don’t require the precision of the pencil.

Strokes of genius, indeed, which was the perfect title of a NYT article last year that reported on an exhibit at the Morgan Library, aptly titled Drawn to Greatness, and my general view of drawing, which is, of course, not something I will ever be able to do.

 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/arts/design/a-gathering-of-greats-in-a-trove-of-drawings-at-the-morgan.html

 

All this came to mind because my latest hikes felt like walking through landscapes drawn in colored pencil. There is something figurative going on before the buds come in, at the end of the winter when all leaves have been thoroughly blown away, and all that remains is the structure of the trees and the shifting, dry grasses and berry brambles.

There is a delicate quality of the views, something almost feathery. And the monotones, something reminiscent of renaissance drawings, are occasionally interrupted by a burst of color, red, or silver or gold, that has a childlike joy to it, for lack of a better description. As if a kid got her hands on that one red pencil and went wild.

Here is a list of numerous renaissance draftsmen that links to their work.

http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/drawing/renaissance-drawings.htm#types

And here are last week’s Northwest landscapes. Judge for yourself.

Landscape photographs this week are in honor of three friends of mine, Roger Dorband, Michael Granger and Ken Hochfeld,  who are currently showing images from Clatsop County at Argyle Winery Tasting Room in Dundee. If you feel like a little field trip go out there and admire their work.

 

 

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Happy Birthday, Oregon!

Yesterday was Oregon’s birthday and here is all you need to know about it…..https://www.opb.org/news/article/happy-birthday-oregon-learn-18-facts-in-59-seconds/

Well, there are some facts worth knowing that were not included, but let’s stick to the fun and positive today, if only to match the mood of last week’s insanely warm and cloud free walk along the Willamette river, about 7 minute north of my house.

The sun was out. Heuer und Hund were out.

So were the lovers,

a million Chinese tourists,

the anglers and wake boarders,

Mt. Hood and Mt. St Helens.

The geese were out as were the goose flowers.

The sea lions were out,

and  the cormorants preening.

 

Public art or what goes for it in these parts was out.

And the verdict was in: nothing happier than those little birds in the budding shrubbery.

For art today it shall be a painting of the Willamette in earlier times

and  birds – more precisely it shall be an invitation to Friday (2/16)  night’s opening and auction at 7:00 pm here:

https://westprescreativespirit.wordpress.com

Westminster Presbyterian Church, 1624 NE Hancock St. Portland, Oregon.

Show runs February 16 – February 25, 2018
Cloisters Gallery Hours:

The group show of more than 50 artists will be up for a week only; I’ll have some framed bird images there. Please come and join me.

 

 

 

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Cold Peace

Germany has seen a major storm yesterday, coincidentally named Friederike, with hurricane strengt fury.  Snow, ice and winds up to 200 kpm throttled traffic, closed every single train service and delayed planes. People died and got injured, and the recovery will be slow.

I had planned to write about Germany because an article caught my eye that talked about a student exchange between the former East and West of Germany.The general idea of student exchange among different nations is of course to overcome stereotypes, learn to know and hopefully like your neighbors, and have first hand impressions of historical and political differences and similarities.

An exchange then, within the same country, is unusual, unless that country has been artificially divided for decades. As it turns out, the exchange used to work perfectly fine, with a lot of East German students living in West Germany and fewer but still many West German students doing the reverse. Not so in the last three years, however. The program has basically folded.

Why? Many kids from the East do not like to be treated in the West as backwards, potential yokels, or aligned with Neonazis. Or they are aligned with Neonazis and do not want to live somewhere where that is still taboo. A full quarter of the West German youth of the teenage age range now has a migrant background; they fear that they will actually not be safe if going to school in East German states where anti-foreigner sentiment runs unbridled.

There is fear and there is an decidedly conscious sense of “other” on both sides.

The NYT, by the way, had in their recent 2018 travel recommendations mentioned “Germany’s Western states,” and nothing about the East. The latest facts bear out a warning for those who look different (reported in TAZ.de) – and I am just giving two examples.

Two days before New Year’s 19 people were injured and 14 made homeless during arson of a house of Roma families in Plauen, Saxony. The DA reports that neighbors attacked the fire brigrade and yelled insults, including “let them burn” and Sieg Heil.

A refuge shelter was stormed by people who beat up the residents. Guard personell was passively looking on, according to witness reports in Cottbus.

It makes me sick to my stomach. Just as much as the latest reports from Poland, immediately adjacent to the Easter provinces:

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Photographs from the spring feeling here this week, nature being impervious to the crap going on in the world and blissfully sporting 56 degrees in mid January……

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Sparks of Fire

A bit of fire represented by sunlit shrubbery all photographed yesterday might counterbalance Monday’s water and Tuesday’s ashes, I thought. Well, the colors of fire.

For the written bit I’ll focus on the fury, however. More specifically, the fury we find in current music that is reacting to the age of Trump.  The link below is a thoughtful and comprehensive take on contemporary protest music, describing musicians we all know, and also several many of us might not be familiar with.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/trump-protest-music-one-year-dorian-lynskey/550268/

The article is an interview with the U.K. music critic Dorian Lynskey who wrote a book, 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs in 2011 and now talks about the boom in music explicitly protesting against the current state of affairs. He claims that Trump elicited more protest music than previous political figures because he is so detested and so much the focus of what is going on. Only wars have been able to generate more protest music than despicable public figures.

Lynskey points out that protest music had already seen an upswing around the evolution of the Black Lives Matter movement and the increasing polarization that people were willing to risk, in the entertainment business, under Trump. An example is Eminem’s freestyle—if you’re a fan of Trump and you’re a fan of me, I’m drawing a line, which side are you on? People are willing to lose parts of the audience (unless they are country music singers who stay silent. And of course there is Ted Nugent…) Many of the ideas expressed in current protest music are not just dealing with the ugliness of Trump and his minions, but about the ideas of America. The songs tackle how we are going backwards due to greed and hunger for power, how so many feel powerless and in mourning.

Here is Lynskey’s take on what the music actually accomplishes – a take I very much liked.

Protest songs make people feel not alone. If we were looking at a situation where no artists were doing songs about Trump and nobody was talking about opposition to him, you would notice the absence. It would be painful. On a macro scale—a global or online scale—it serves the purpose it served in civil-rights demonstrations, where you’d be walking along singing freedom songs. This is where I think preaching to the converted is underrated. It’s fine to cement beliefs to inspire people to act on them.

There are also cases where they can turn somebody on to a particular fact or a certain way of looking. I learned a huge amount from Public Enemy as a white, suburban, English teenager. A large part of the reason many people know about Kent State as they do is because the [Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young] song “Ohio” brings it to people who are not necessarily researching the Nixon era.

Among the many examples the author gives for music clips, one of my favorite musicians is Kendrik Lamar. Many of my readers might not be familiar with that style of music but it is worth some exploration.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLZRYQMLDW4&feature=player_embedded  

Same is true for a Tribe called Quest. Stretch yourself and leave the comfort zone, listen to the words – even if the use of 4 letter ones remind you of the one they’re directed against.

 

 

 

 

 

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A Smidgen of Black

Yesterday the US celebrated Martin Luther King Day, with the usual platitudes, the usual wagging fingers from sources that otherwise spew racist sentiments quite frequently, and a president who played golf.  There were also, of course, some smart articles that reminded us what the day is all about, what someone who fought in a civil rights movement with the strongest commitment and who paid with his life for it, stands for.

I selected two things as important reminders to keep an eye on during the struggle for social and political change. One is the fact that institutions are easily influenced by their leaders and one wonders how much they are impervious to change. For that I picked the blackmail letter that the FBI sent to MLK in 1964, demanding that he commit suicide unless he wanted them to publicize his extramarital affair.  Yale historian Beverly Gage found the original in the national archives and commented:

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. received this letter, nearly 50 years ago, he quietly informed friends that someone wanted him to kill himself — and he thought he knew who that someone was. Despite its half-baked prose, self-conscious amateurism and other attempts at misdirection, King was certain the letter had come from the F.B.I. Its infamous director, J. Edgar Hoover, made no secret of his desire to see King discredited. A little more than a decade later, the Senate’s Church Committee on intelligence overreach confirmed King’s suspicion.

The article below discusses the details.

 

“King, There Is Only One Thing Left For You To Do.”

The second thing we should take to heart, is a fact that King himself pointed to: racism, poverty, militarism and materialism are all intertwined.  An attack on one needs to include a rejection of the other factors as well, if we want lasting, structural change. Here is a smart, short essay on the topic in the Paris Review.

Martin Luther King’s Radical Anti-Capitalism

 

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Drops of Water

Wish I could just relish the beauty of little drops of water. Water is on my mind because of the crisis in Puerto Rico, however. They don’t have time to waste there over a discussion of the beauty of water – all that counts is the absence of it, the horrifying, shameful, sickening lack of it.

Two articles make my point better than I could, the first one written by a homegrown young man who is really making a mark on the world as a writer and reporter. Proud to know him.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/12/hurricane-maria-man-made-disaster.html

I visited El Yunque in 2012, together with about 12 million other people on that very day. None of whom will this spring be a tourist in Puerto Rico, depriving the island of income now needed more than ever. All of whom will recognize too late what our unwillingness to help with the disaster relief implies: try and find a hospital that is not short on infusion bags during the current influenza wave…. or  a cancer ward not short on chemo infusions.

All that pales, of course, in comparison to what the people of Puerto Rico go through, without end in sight.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/1/14/1730774/-Water-is-life-Puerto-Rico-potable-water-and-El-Yunque

Drops of water just like little drops of help won’t make the difference – there needs to be systemic, structural change.

 

 

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Random Associations to the Republican Tax Bill

 

Yes, you read that correctly – this week will be devoted to strange associations to this monster of a bill, as they pop into my head. And they are not about low hanging fruit but real consequences for large and vulnerable populations in our country.

One thought that came to mind when reading the analysis of how the bill surreptitiously (or not so surreptitiously) guts healthcare is that people need to eat more fruit to ensure strong immune systems. Not that they will have the money to buy those fruit because climate change has affected the prices – we see a steady increase.

Changes in climate are decimating citrus fruit groves, apple orchards, avocado farms. Factors involved are increased heat; increased chill; fires; floods; increased frequency and strength of storms, to name a few.

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/climate-change-what-it-means-for-fruits

Link below outlines the CA fire damage to orchards.

Back to buying fruit, now more expensive due to climate related shortages: even though the USDA strongly encourages people on food stamps to buy more fruit and vegetables (healthier, though less filling,) the folks who gave us the tax bill also plan to cut food stamps by 20 % over the next ten years.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tax-bill-entitlement-programs_us_5a280417e4b02d3bfc371f17.

I guess we will have to resign ourselves to seeing fruit not as the real thing, but in abstract representations: check out these Japanese shelters.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/konagai-japan-fruit-shaped-bus-stops

Or visit a banana museum:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/international-banana-club-museum

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/bananenmuseum

Or stay in a fruit shaped guest house at some fancy Asian resort:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/banphasawan

And just think how many people will profit from the tax bill, so they can stay at the above resort in Thailand… (the very ones who had the funds to stay there all along.)

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So long, California

It’s been a long week and I am tired, back home. Not many of my own words, then, today, other than that I saw grey whales, dolphins, lizards, bees, butterflies, and, of course birds. I know, I know, it’s supposed to be a cultural blog, but today some more bird photographs have to suffice. Finches, goldfinches, and hummingbirds all from this trip  –  facts about humming birds borrowed from the Audubon society.

Hummingbird Abilities

·          Flight: Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly both forward and backwards. They can also hover in mid-air, fly sideways and even upside-down.

·          Wings: A hummingbird’s wings beat about 70 times per second (200 times per second when diving!)

·          Feeding: Hummingbirds are big eaters, eating over twice their weight every day! Their diet consists of both nectar and flying insects.

·          Migration: Some hummingbirds migrate great distances from their summer to winter homes and back. The Rufous Hummingbird flies 3000 miles from Alaska to Mexico twice a year!

·          Senses: Hummingbirds can hear and see better than humans. They can see ultraviolet light. Hummingbirds have little to no sense of smell

Hummingbird Bodies

·          Size: Hummingbirds are the tiniest birds in the world. They average 8.5cm long and can weigh between the weight of 1 and 8 pennies (2 and 20 grams. A penny weighs 2.5 grams.)

·          Tongue: A hummingbird’s tongue is grooved like the shape of a “W” and they have tiny hairs on the tip of the tongue to help lap up nectar.

·          Heart: A hummingbird’s heart is 5 times bigger than a human’s in proportion to its body (2.5% vs .5%)

·          Breath: A hummingbird breathes 20 times faster than a human! (250 vs 12 breaths/minute)

·          Temperature: The hummingbird’s body temperature is 8 degrees higher than a human’s (107 vs 98.6 degrees)

 

Hummingbird Feathers

·          Males: Female hummingbirds are attracted to the iridescent feathers on the males, and it’s the females who pick their mates.

·          Females: Also, all female birds tend to be drab for camouflage. If you are sitting on a nest full of eggs, and something might come along and eat you, do you want to be bright red or do you want to blend into the trees?

·          Number: The average size hummingbird has 940 feathers.

·          Color: On most hummingbirds, the coloring of the feathers does not come from pigmentation, but instead from prism-like cells within the top layer of feathers. The colors you see depend on the angle of the light when it hits the feathers. When hummingbird feathers reflect light, which make the gorget (throat patch) look like it’s glittering from certain angles, but at other angles will make the feathers look dull.

 

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California

On my way down to California this weekend I sat next to a chatty guy on my right and a video-playing guy to my left, who, in response to my request to photograph out of the window if we saw fires, closed the shade so he would not have the reflection on his game screen.

The guy on my right turned out to be an interesting character. He was born on an island in Alaska, to a Finnish father and first nation mother, dropped out of high school and build an empire of crab fishing boats. Girls of his mother’s generation still were not allowed to go to school beyond 5th grade – all hands were needed to prepare food (salt fish, can it, etc.) and raise gardens, so they would not starve in the winters. I also learned that many of the Louisiana crab fishing boats went to Alaska when their grounds ran dry, with their crews now dying in deadly accidents because their boats only go 4 feet deep in the water, double that is needed to face Northern storms.

I asked about climate change – he has seen it for the last 8 years, started to get real loud in our conversation about how anyone could deny the facts – not listen to science, not look at the reality on the ground with the Alaskan environment and fishing being so visibly affected. I was thrilled to see a multimillionaire so riled. Funny how you take the slightest notion that there are still rational, decent people out there as encouragement.

Which brings me to the climate effects here. I am staying a bit South of L.A., and although I have not seen smoke or fire, the air reeks, and people are worried. I have written about the fire fighting situation before, but here is the newest bit – since they are running out of inmates to fight the fires, they are now shipping them in from Nevada!

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/how-much-longer-will-inmates-fight-californias-wildfires/547628/

Photographs are of the shorelines in La Jolla, where I was over the weekend, which will also change with rising oceans. But for now they are sanctuary for wildlife and eye candy for the photographer!

 

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