Yesterday I had a few visitors in the backyard, which suited me just fine. I figured ending the week with tons of pictures rather than ever more words would do us all good.
You know me, though. Words snuck back into my head – words, alas, that refuse to make their way into print in this family friendly blog. So use your imagination as to what I was thinking when I learned that the North Carolina Senate voted along party lines Wednesday to ban anyone from wearing masks in public, even for health reasons. House Bill 237 would extend to everyone, not just protesters towards whom this ban is of course directed, to wear medical masks.
A proposal to amend the bill to ban hate groups — explicitly the Ku Klux Klan and Proud Boys — from being allowed to wear masks in public, which the law currently allows them to petition for (!), was shot down by Republican lawmakers with no debate or explanation, as were calls by Democratic lawmakers to amend the anti-mask bill to protect people who want to wear masks for health concerns. So for immune-compromised people like me there is now the additional worry to either be arrested for wearing a mask or risking infection that can basically kill you. Not that I will ever see North Carolina again, but how many people who live there and can’t leave will be affected? and how does that not violate Federal laws, like the Americans with Disabilities Act?
“The federal disability law requires governments to provide people with disabilities equal access to government programs, services and activities — including public transportation, schools, voting precincts and town meetings. Banning masks could diminish access to those kinds of services to people who are covered under the ADA, such as cancer patients who may need to wear a mask due to a weakened immune system, disability rights advocates say. It could also limit their day-to-day activities.” (Ref.)
I wasn’t the only one watching the deer decimate the apple trees and then leisurely chew cud while resting on the grass, ignoring a cacophony of noises – my dog barking his head off, the Thursday Pickup garbage trucks circling the neighborhood, and my neighbor using a chainsaw to deal with the winter windfall. Be glad to have these pastoral scenes without the sound track!
The crows watched as well, eventually doing some up and down flying maneuvers to get their own luncheon, served on my balcony. Up and down triggered the notion of upside-down, another image eliciting a number of words in my head, “We’re living in a FARCE,” among them.
The upside down flag, a symbol for “Stop the Steal!” used by Trump supporters, was apparently flying in front of Justice Alito’s home. According to the New York Times, the flag was up in January 2021 for multiple days, while the court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case. We are, of course, still waiting on two other cases to be decided by the Supreme Court, involving the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, including whether Mr. Trump has immunity for his actions. So far, no recusals.
Concerned neighbors took the photos and informed the Court at the time – what say you, Justice Roberts? We do know what Justice Alito had to say:
“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
Isn’t it funny how Supreme Court Justices are completely fenced off against the dealings of their wives, while the sitting President is supposed to be responsible for alleged misdeeds of his adult son? Just wondering.
Here is a crow’s reaction – you may use your imagination once more.
If your blood pressure reacts like mine to these news, here is the perfect music to bring it down.
Over a decade ago I exhibited Fugue – The Poetry of Exile at Portland’s Artist Repertory Theatre, photomontage work that attempted to transform poems of exile and displacement, mostly by Holocaust poets, into visual images. The show ran in conjunction with a play by Diane Samuels, Kindertransport, produced by Jewish Theatre Collaborative.
It was early days in my montage-making efforts, with still limited technical skills. But the core components were already in place: visual translation of ideas that invite us, are in need for us to witness.
Here is one of the poems that I chose at the time.
My Blue Piano
At home I have a blue piano. But I can’t play a note.
It’s been in the shadow of the cellar door Ever since the world went rotten.
Four starry hands play harmonies. The Woman in the Moon sang in her boat.
Now only rats dance to the clanks. The keyboard is in bits.
I weep for what is blue. Is dead. Sweet angels, I have eaten
Such bitter bread. Push open The door of heaven. For me, for now —
Although I am still alive — Although it is not allowed.
by Else Lasker-Schüler (translated from the German by Eavan Boland)
(Here is a link to the German original – it is even starker than the translation, requesting permission for dying)
The poet, Else Lasker-Schüler, is one of those people I’d elect to take with me to a deserted island, an artist, activist, risk-taking, and deeply independent woman who supported socialist causes all her life. She left Nazi Germany in 1933, and ended up eventually in Jerusalem, where she wrote some of her best poetry before she died in 1945. Her friends and literary circle there included German-speaking Zionists, such as Martin Buber, Hugo Bergman and Ernst Simon who, like herself, favored a bi-national Palestine.
I was reminded of the poem when I read the insightful ArtsWatch review of an exhibition currently at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, while staring at another defunct piano during my LA Sabbatical last month (today’s photographs.)
The Burned Piano Project: Creating Music Amidst the Noise of Hate is a collaboration between composer and pianist Jennifer Wright, her husband Matias Brecher and textile artist Bonnie Meltzer. The artists resurrect, refashion, in some ways rebirth a Steinway grand piano that belonged to three generations of a Jewish family whose house in Portland was destroyed by arson in 2022, fueled by antisemitic hate. The torched instrument reemerged as a kind of glassy phoenix from the ashes:
“The Glass Piano was designed to appear as delicate as a glittering butterfly, a creature more of spirit than of the earth, yet it possesses subtle strength and a range of glass rods and hammers and pitched sounds that can be orchestrally combined in unusual ways.”
Meltzer, in turn, created a large tapestry and a smaller banner with inscribed stitching, incorporating wood, torched strings and other bits and pieces of the charred piano into her work.
While the Holocaust poet looks at the remnants of her destroyed life, embodied by the defunct piano, and wants nothing more than for it to end, the two contemporary artists rely on joyful defiance, changing the ruins into some sort of vibrant reminder that the possibility of transformation has not been foreclosed.
One can speculate whether those divergent sentiments are the result of the intensity of the trauma, the actual threat to existence, compared to the reactions of concerned bystanders to the consequences of racist vandalism.
It does not matter, in my mind, though, as long as art forces our own witnessing, insists that we acknowledge the horrors brought by war and hate.
This is central to the work of Jorge Tacla, whose art I continue to explore. His focus on ruins is one of the main themes of another exhibition, A Memoir of Ruins, currently on view at the Coral Gables Museum in Florida. His paintings offer a veritable graveyard of bombed and destroyed architecture across the Middle East, war memorials of a kind that mourn the victims rather than celebrate the victors (if there are any, given the centuries of strife built into the conflicts.) I won’t be able to visit, but I strongly urge my readers in the Miami vicinity to go and take it all in – you have until October 27th, 2024. It is timely work in the light of ongoing destruction of entire swaths of land made uninhabitable by warfare, erasing life, mirrored in paintings devoid of human figure.
The imagery acutely remind us of the violent urge to reduce everything possibly connected to human habitation, urges acted upon by various warring powers. They spring from the wish to annihilate not just human beings, the declared enemy who shall be starved, maimed or killed, but also all that could provide a basis for resurrection of a group with a given identity. If you bomb houses of worship, schools and universities, the libraries, the museums, the archives, all the repositories of cultural, historical and personal memory into oblivion, you generate a displacement that goes beyond loss of place – you truly vanquish the soul of a people.
Tacla’s work is the opposite of what has come to be known as “ruin porn,” the depictions of desolation as a backdrop in artistic endeavors, be they classic paintings that centered ruins as moralistic symbolism, or the photographs of urban decay, or the film sets for dystopian science fiction movies. Capitalizing on the visual salaciousness of melancholic imagery, while ignoring the forces that brought the world to ruin, from poverty to warfare, stands in stark contrast of what Tacla does. Without being photorealistic, the canvases convey a sense of absolute erasure, seamlessly merging into the actual visuals from places like Syria and now Gaza, that hit our screens. There is nothing of the frisson we so cherish when observing something slightly alarming from a distance. There is just dread, slowly seeping into your system, if you stand for any amount of time in front of these monumental canvases.
Our fascination with ruins – as long as we don’t have to live in or next to them – has been an artistic staple since the Renaissance. The focus during romanticism shifted to the potential for renewal. After world war II it became a national rallying cry, like Auferstanden aus Ruinen, From the Ruins Risen, the title of the German Democratic Republic’s Anthem from 1949 to 1990.
We might do well to shift our focus yet again, from ruins to the looming possibility that at some point renewal is no longer possible. At an age where weapons of mass destruction can wipe out life as we know it, we can hit a point of no return. We have certainly gotten sufficient warning. If you look at the aftermath of Chernobyl, not just in the exclusion zone for Reactor 4, which has become a pilgrimage site for disaster junkies, but in the forests surrounding the nuclear power plant, you’ll find some stark revelations (hard now under Russian occupation.) The trees downwind from Chernobyl all died immediately after the disaster. With the entire landscape poisoned, the agents of decay and thus eventual renewal, have also ceased to exist. No more bacteria, fungi and insects that usually recycle a forest’s nutrients and rid it of debris to prepare for new growth. They, too have been erased, and so you are left with ruins that will practically last forever, dead matter that will not renew in any form, looming over our very own extinction when war descends in its final form.
As I have so often stated here – fully aware how many of my readers disagree – I don’t believe art per se can change things, be a political force of the needed magnitude. But it can be a canary in the coal mine, helping us to start questioning, figure out causal connections, and at least implores us to think about solutions that exclude future ruins once and for all.
Mothers’ Day is a fraught occasion for many. Those who want(ed) children but are unable to have them, might suffer. Those who don’t want to have children but were forced to carry them, might feel rage once again. Those who are mothers estranged from their children, might re-experience the pain. Those who lost their children to illness and death will freshly mourn. And those who lost beloved mothers will be raw with longing, at times. Loss through natural death is one thing, loss through forced family separation or violence another. Think of the tens of thousands of orphans currently surviving in Gaza and Ukraine, who will face a life without their mother.
Those who rejoice in being remembered by their loving kids, like I did this Sunday, have that nagging feeling that they are privileged, compared to those who feel particularly alone that day. Come to think of it, the only one who currently completely capitalizes from the occasion, is the flower- and greeting-card industry.
“Silent sentinel” Alison Turnbull Hopkins at the White House on New Jersey Day.
Imagine my surprise when I learned from historian Heather Cox Richardson this Saturday, a day before Mothers’ Day, that the origin of this celebration had nothing to do with familial relationships, but was instead a political movement started in the 1870s by Julia Ward Howe. The reformer had enough of the carnage produced by wars, the Civil War and Franco-Prussian War among them, and felt women needed to gain power to affect some change.
Mary Winsor (Penn.) ’17 [holding Suffrage Prisoners banner]
When the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution without allowing women to participate fully in the political (or for that matter, economic) arena in 1869, Howe and like-minded women soon founded the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association, respectively, to promote women’s right to participate in American government.
It was first about the desire to counterbalance what they perceived to be male lust for war, power and aggression, with a female focus on peace. Howe called for a “festival which should be observed as mothers’ day, and which should be devoted to the advocacy of peace doctrines.”
It soon became clear that that could only be achieved if there was a movement towards equal rights for all. This included a change in how women were treated, among others, when they desired to leave abusive relationships, which at the time resulted in them losing all access to their children. And, at the core of it, it included the right to vote. The Suffragette movement was born.
Women marching in national suffrage demonstration in Washington, D.C., May 9, 1914.
As Richardson relates:
Howe had a new vision, she said, of “the august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities.” She sat down immediately and wrote an “Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World.” Men always had and always would decide questions by resorting to “mutual murder,” she wrote, but women did not have to accept “proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror.” Mothers could command their sons, “who owe their life to her suffering,” to stop the madness.
“Arise, women!” Howe commanded. “Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.’”
I was looking at the historical photographs of women protesters I found at the Library of Congress archives and wondered what they would be thinking if they could see how the spirit of their path blazing efforts is systematically undermined today.
There are increasing demands that women should not be allowed to vote, or that it would be better to go back to a time where women lacked that right, as per Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson after earning the Republican nomination for North Carolina governor, for example. John Gibbs, a Michigan candidate for the US House backed by former President Donald Trump railed against giving women the right to vote, arguing that America has “suffered” since women’s suffrage. He praised an organization trying to repeal the 19th Amendment which also argued that women’s suffrage had made the United States into a “totalitarian state.”
Party watchfires burn outside White House, Jan. 1919.
Rights to bodily self-determination that we had finally gained, have been taken away. It is not just about abortion per se, mind you. Birth control in all forms is the next target. There are also new Republican proposals on the table for a federal bill that establishes a registry for pregnancy. There are state law requirements that ask people about the dates and other statistics around their periods (often in the context of admission to a sports team.) There are serious concerns around period tracking apps which can be used by third parties to detect pregnancy and abortion, hence putting women at risk of being prosecuted. There are worries by Senators like Ron Wyden (OR) and Ed Markey (MA) that computerized car location data are freely shared by car makers with law enforcement (requiring only a subpoena, not a warrant signed by a judge.) If you are traveling in your car across state lines for medical treatment, you can be stopped or legally pursued. Privacy principles completely shattered.
No-fault divorce, a huge step towards women’s independence and ability to get out of a relationship that no longer work for them, is under threat as well, just look at legislative proposals in Texas, Nebraska, Louisiana and South Dakota. Details here, but the most extreme danger is for women in abusive relationships. If victims of domestic violence need to go through the lengthy and expensive process of court proceedings proving that they are being harmed, they will be exposed to prolonged and even aggravated abuse during the time it takes to get a verdict, or face prohibitive costs that will silence them. This affects not just the spousal victims, but also the children.
Of course the backlash against women’s rights is not restricted to the Western world. Women in Afghanistan or Iran have seen what few rights they had gained virulently taken away, with widespread discrimination and violent human rights abuses the order of the day. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres bemoaned just 2 months ago about the ruling Taliban having barred girls from education beyond sixth grade, from employment outside the home, and from most public spaces.
Women Ask President for Equal Rights Legislation. Fifty prominent members of the New National Woman’s Party called at the White House today to ask the president’s aid in passing an “Equal Rights Bill” in the next Congress. The bill would give women full equality in the government
Over 30 years ago, Pulitzer prize-winning author Susan Faludi wrote a book about Backlash. Much of what was discussed then is still an issue, or has become even worse, including the fracturing of a feminist movement that limits how much we could act and vote as a strong, united block.
At the time she observed: “In the past, women have proven that they can resist in a meaningful way, when they have had a clear agenda that is unsanitized and unapologetic, a mobilized mass that is forceful and public, and a conviction that is uncompromising and relentless.”
We will see how the absence of an organized mass movement will shape the November election. I hope we will nonetheless make our historic protesting sisters, the ones that initiated Mothers’ Day, deeply proud.
Imagine waking up from a dream with nagging questions. This happened to me a few days ago, when I dreamt that a full headshot of me was plastered across the front side of the New York Post (!) with the caption, “Retired professor admits: I should have said freedom, not …”
Not what? What did I say instead? What was I talking about? Why did I make my way into a conservative tabloid? Then an immediate association to a German idiom, “nicht jedes Wort auf die Goldwaage legen,” “Don’t put every word onto a gold scale,” best captured as “Don’t take everything so literally or with a specific meaning.”
I guess the dream pointed to a deeper issue for me right now, the fact that I am hesitant to write about politics and the unfolding catastrophes caused by political and military decision making in Israel, Gaza and their proxies. The overriding reason for my silence is that I cannot face the horrors on a daily basis and so don’t gather the information necessary to write something sufficiently informed. I have also gotten a lot of feedback that readers could use some cheer in these dark times and so are perfectly excited to see yet another photograph of nature.
But another reason has to do with the choice of words and how much they weigh – a certain amount of censorship in my own head. If I’d commit to a particular vocabulary – genocide, apartheid, anti-zionism, zionism, etc. I would need to write at length how these terms are defined, and how the various, differing definitions are (un)acceptable. It’s too much for me, during times of emotional upheaval. What I have done instead, just so I don’t drift into apathy, is to establish a file where I am collecting many different voices that have thoughtfully and passionately argued about the issues around the student protests and the perspectives of both Israelis and Palestinians on what is unfurling in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks and the now 7 months of war. Maybe there comes a time when we can dig into these sources together. Not now.
That said, I do have one political beef I need to get off my chest. It concerns our upcoming local elections. Specifically, I am aghast at how information that might very well influence our vote, can be hidden until it is too late, if you, like I, vote when your ballots arrive at home, long before the actual election date, 5/21. Portland has a few hotly contested races this year, among them a competition for the 3rd Congressional District in the Democratic primary (not my district, btw.) Former Multnomah County Commissioner Susheela Jayapal, a progressive, runs against Maxine Dexter, a state representative and medical doctor, who all of a sudden received financial support to the tune of $1.7 million, from a 314 Action Fund.
The fund, claiming to want to support science backgrounds for office, conveniently waited to donate until April. Why? That makes it legal to delay the disclosure of its donor until May 20th, a day before the election. Now, if you are like me, wouldn’t you want to know WHO funds certain candidates? What if we learned that those organizations to whom the candidate is obliged pursue politics incongruent to our own goals? Or that we realize someone we agree with stands firmly behind one of the candidates? (As it turns out Dexter’s campaign is financed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, which funneling money into the race through 314 Action Fund.) (Ref.)
For some strange reason, in another critically close race, for Multnomah County District attorney, we have heard a lot about the funding for the progressive incumbent, Mike Schmidt, who I – could you guess? – support. Headline in The Oregonian 2 days ago: Multnomah County DA Mike Schmidt campaign gets boost from progressive philanthropist George Soros. If you take the effort to dig into the article, you learn a bit more: it’s $213.000 in in-kind contributions, by the working families party of Oregon. They, in turn, received money from the Working Families Party National PAC, who in turn was given money by the Democrat PAC, which was given funds for its first quarter by Soros’ Fund for Policy Reform, Voila, Soros supports Schmidt!
Schmidt’s challenger, a DA who is campaigning against his own boss, and who used to be a Republican until he became an Independent in 2017 and has registered as Unaffiliated since 2023, endorsed no less by Portland’s police union, has raised much more money than Schmidt. Do we hear much about his sources? Rhetorical question. A hunk of his funding comes from Portland’s business elite, including Nike co-founder Phil Knight, Columbia Sportswear’s Tim Boyle, and Schnitzer Properties. His largest contributions come from Leadership PACs, as opaque to me as the 314 Action Fund mentioned above.
Maybe it was all about freedom of information in my dream.
Better back to pigeons …. who were courting with abandon yesterday at the park,
the river slow and steady,
Public art glowing with light,
and the young sunbathers, blooming like flowers on the grass, oblivious to the damage done to their aging skins. Then again, maybe they were all covered in SPF 70 sunscreen and just eager to escape the ravages of the real world. Let’s end on that positive thought!
Long moans, yelps, grunts, clicks, mews, hisses and squeaks are the main auditory communications of prehensile-tailed, Brazilian porcupines. Quill rattling and tooth shattering as well. The latter, combined with squeaks of delight and yelps of surprise could be heard from this human as well, during a rodent-rich day of rejoicing at the zoo. A day punctuated by heavy rains and cold wind, while we were doing our annual pilgrimage to a zoo in celebration of our very first date at the Bronx Zoo 42 years ago.
These animals, who can hang with their tail from trees where they spend most of the day sleeping, hidden in the high canopy of South American rainforests, forage at night. The single offspring per breeding cycle is highly dependent on the mother, nursed for weeks before introduced to solid foods, fathers mostly absent. In general, a pretty reclusive and solitary species, with no known predators other than humans and stray dogs who eat them if they can find them (often getting infected at the point with the horrible Chagas disease, since the porcupines carry the kissing bug that transmits it.)
They were not the only rodents we encountered. The flamingos had fled into shelter from the deluge, with a single specimen ignoring the downpour.
Time for the rats to come out – they were everywhere, making good use of the food offerings temporarily abandoned by the birds.
In case you wondered why I’m writing about rats, you can stop now. I am really writing about rituals today. Or, more specifically, rituals in relationships, which turn out to be of enormous value to the longevity of the union, and, more importantly, to the emotional well being of the partners and greater relationship satisfaction. When I say rituals, I am referring to activities that we frame as having some symbolic meaning – me getting downstairs in the morning with coffee already made for me could be a shared routine, or it could be a ritual, if I see it as a gesture that implies a daily commitment to nurturing or some such. Routines don’t have the same positive effect on relationships. What elevates them to rituals is really the shared idea of what motivates the behavior, agreed upon by both partners, which in turn leads to more commitment.
As it turns out, commitment then fosters the duration of a relationship. Which, in turn, benefits psychologically all involved, including the potential entire family system, and the physical well being of the partners into older age.
It doesn’t have to be something big, like Zoo Day has been for us, on an annual basis. Or ways you celebrate birthdays in the family, with rituals extending across generations.
It can be your Friday night Pizza date, if not just a routine, or something as ridiculous as the two of us moving plastic trolls around the house to unconventional locations to surprise the other when they are down.
Since 1982 .we have also been known to engage in multiple exchanges of fortune cookies before we open the ones offered with a Chinese meal, just grabbing them from the other, with no specified iterations. It is completely senseless, not even an in-joke, since we don’t know what the joke would be, and neither one of us remembers the origins, but it is utterly reassuring to be able to predict the ritual will unfold. Knowing each other, sharing, immutable reliance on the familiar interaction – it all makes me – us – happy.
Rodents, rituals, rain – the rare, ravishing day. So grateful for positive occasions in a world that currently offers even more than the usual share of horrors.
Music today is a cover of a Villa-Lobos song from Brazil.
And another piece, for the fun of it, Natania Davrath adding to the repertoire of sounds mentioned today, with the most beautiful of them all.
Nostos There was an apple tree in the yard — this would have been forty years ago — behind, only meadows. Drifts off crocus in the damp grass. I stood at that window: late April. Spring flowers in the neighbor’s yard. How many times, really, did the tree flower on my birthday, the exact day, not before, not after? Substitution of the immutable for the shifting, the evolving. Substitution of the image for relentless earth. What do I know of this place, the role of the tree for decades taken by a bonsai, voices rising from tennis courts — Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut. As one expects of a lyric poet. We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
I do not agree with Glück’s assessment, “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” We look at the world – able to see it – a million times, if we only move about with intention. Or share in the wonder expressed by next generations. Or allow art to be more than representation, pointing us to the beauty inherent in the real world. Maybe we can’t return to the exact childhood tree, but there are plenty apples around.
In some funny way, the title of the poem, Nostos, makes that very point, doesn’t it? The term comes from ancient Greece and refers to the homecoming of the hero after a prolonged absence (one of the main themes of the Odyssey.) Not remembered, but re-experienced, connected again, the world seen, not just recalled. If it was only about a particular childhood garden, it should have been Nostalgia, the combination of Nostos /homecomingwith the word Algos/pain, although nostalgia most often descends into this sentimental wistfulness that I can’t stand.
Back to spring: In today’s images, spring has returned, after a long absence. So has this viewer, in my annual exploration of spring’s bounty, seeing it afresh. And so have paintings, that are not molding in museums, but here, in front of our eyes, conveying a shared appreciation of this season. Forget memory! Here are this week’s perceptions, on walks punctuated by heavy rains and sudden reappearance of the sun.
Max Beckmann SPRING NEAR SÜDENDE (1907)
Hawthorne blossoms shimmered through the trees, or exploded in full view.
Dwight William Tryon Spring (1893)
David Hockney Hawthorne Blossom Near Rudston (2008)
Cows were curious as to what I had to offer…
Doris Lee, Blossom Time, 1959
Plants unfurled, echoing van Gogh’s brush strokes.
Vincent van Gogh, Green Wheat Fields, Auvers, 1890
Meadows exploded with Camassia, and other early spring blooms, many reminiscent of rockets, all shooting towards the light.
Janene Walkky Common Camas or Camassia quamash (2013)
Then there are the fruit tree blossoms, holding up their own against the orange bloom,
Vincent van Gogh Orange Blossoms (1890)
Claude Monet Spring (Fruit Trees in Bloom) (1873)
Walking through the woods was a green, dripping, wet experience, then sunbursts the next minute.
Abbott Handerson Thayer Landscape at Fontainebleau Forest (1876)
Did someone say birds? Ducklings! Orioles, yellow rump warblers (butter butts!), kill deer, wood ducks, geese, barn swallows and purple martins all showing off.
Magnus von Wright Mallard Ducklings (1841)
Tracey Emin Believe in Extraordinary (2015)
AUDUBON bird Red-Breasted Nuthatch Purple Martin (1890)
A friend sent a poem this week that had me thinking ever since. I was riveted by the way it palpably conveys loss, the way it captures how pain can suddenly emerge in the most mundane situations, and the way it contains phrases that are incredibly well forged, “a noticeably notice-me-I’m-nature nature sound.”
There Are Plenty of Angels, She Said in the LADIES
in the rest area LADIES on the road to Terre Haute. Plenty of angels, she said again. But not one, I’ve heard, not a single one will mission to the fade as it does to the darkness. A stall door latched. Her bag got hung. Seen that sign, back west a ways? The one on the warehouse, in a movie marquee? Blessed Hope, it says. Blessed Hope, she said. It’s meant to be a sign from heaven, but hope’s, I’d say, more a human invention, like freeways, she said. Funny word, she said. They call ’em highways when you pay to ride ’em. Mama’s buried off one in Missouri. Had her forty years and forty days on earth. And the day we did it was a noisy day, all out-o’-doors like a day at the beach: the tearin’ down sounds of the sun and the wind, clouds and trees, grass and stones, a noticeably notice-me-I’m-nature nature sound. Mother never did care much for nature. Enjoyed a sunset well enough Those shameless ones like colored candy, those ones can look like wall-to-wall in a Cineplex foyer: pinks and purples, reds, she said. It was so noisy, anyway, that day even the birds shut up for once. Or got their singin’ drownded out. But I could hear when the box hit bottom: Get on with it, is what it sounded like to me— She had dried her hands on a paper towel— I’m done here.
From The Paris Review, Issue no. 129 (Winter 1993)
I experienced a noticeably notice-me-I’m-nature nature view a few weeks ago, and was thinking that my own mother and paternal grandfather loved nature, as do my children and now the next generation who partook in the views of that day. Somehow that shared affinity softens loss, since you can always recall the joyful moments when you were inseparably linked in awe.
That morning we drove from Altadena, CA north into the San Gabriel mountains. Clouds of lifting mist weaved in and out of the valleys, giving the scenery a mysterious, fairy-tale look.
Ceanothus covered the hills in differing shades of blue, occasionally punctuated by yellow tree poppies that looked like sun confetti.
Our goal was the Bear Divide, a location on the Pacific Flyway, the north-south migratory route that connects Alaska to Patagonia for innumerable migratory birds. The San Gabriels provide both rest and food for the flocks, who tend to seek the specific passage way at the location that we drove to.
The corridor which allows passage at relatively high altitudes, was discovered by chance in the spring of 2016. Brought to the attention of the folks at the Moore Lab at Occidental College, a systematic monitoring of the migratory flocks started soon after. (Everything I learned, including the statistics, I found here.) In 2023 they counted 53,511 birds of 140 species from February to May, (the return trip for the birds seems to happen somewhere else) with some mornings as many as 20.000 birds recorded. The sheer variety is stunning.
The lab uses the help of citizen scientists, local birdwatchers and volunteers, to help with the observations. As it turned out, we chanced on a group of volunteers with the USFS who were netting and banding birds the very morning we arrived.
The nets are erected in the mornings and inspected every thirty minutes. They catch birds without harming them, who are then banded with a very light metal ring around a leg that provides numbers for scientists all over the world to report on flight routes, durations, survival.
The data reveal helpful information about birds’ responses to changes in environmental conditions and ecological shifts across the world. If that made me feel good, something else lifted my soul even more: seeing son and toddler rejoice beyond the sheer fascination with the procedures, sensing their appreciation of the world around us (if only lifting every single pebble or bug on the path as behooves a 14 month-old) reminded me of my own happiness during nature walks with my mother or my Opa. Little is lost. Much lives on.
Orange crowned warbler
Highway restrooms: I no longer fear you! When hope is met, who cares if it’s a human invention!
Music today from the Bowerbird Collective. The video alone is worth it.
If you asked me if I prefer exhibitions that feature a single artist or those that display the work of many different ones, I’d have a hard time deciding. I always find myself drawn to retrospectives of a particular artist, because they allow me to learn how someone develops, how they are open to change or impress with continuity of a chosen theme, and how life’s experience(s) can shape the evolution of creativity and skill.
On the other hand, seeing the works of many different artists riff off each other, or provide comparison basis for relative judgements, allow an assessment of the current state of the art and often help me to understand my own reaction to art better, my own taste, if you will.
Art at the Cave gallery rooms
Luckily, today we don’t have to decide between the two approaches: I’ll just present both. I managed to see a riveting retrospective of Sargent Claude Johnson‘s work at The Huntington Library in Pasadena, CA, still up until mid-May. I also visited Shapes that Speak, work by multiple members of The Pacific Northwest Sculptors Group (PNWS) shown during the month of April at Art at the Cave in Vancouver, WA. (I chanced on it, just before closing. Some of the work is truly interesting and you might enjoy looking at the portfolios. Here is a list of the PNWS members with their websites for your perusal.)
Tony Furtado Hiro the Hare
Shapes that Speak is such a catch-all title, but I would be hard pressed myself to come up with something more specific for a group exhibition that is not curated around a particular topic. If these sculptures speak, then surely in different languages, with different degrees of precision, loudness and pitch. Structure varies, just as texture and modes of expression. I would not call it a cacophony, but the Tower of Babel did come to mind.
Tony Furtado Husk
In a way that is the one drawback, compared to all the advantages conveyed by being a member of an artist collective – in this case Pacific Northwest Sculptors, long a treasure for the region – that provides mutual support and exchanges resources and ideas, educates and connects. Group exhibitions of member work can so easily become byzantine, with the viewers having to make their way through a seemingly haphazard collection, trying not to be distracted by too many voices at once, to stick with the metaphor. That said, whoever hung this show did admirable work in grouping exhibits otherwise all over the map.
Left to Right: Laurie Vail Dancer – Bill Leigh Flight – Laurie Vail Kingfisher
Left to Right: Jeremy Kester A Drop in the Ocean – LB Buchan Elysia – Todd BiernackiHomage (c’est un Magritte) – LB Buchan Propeller 2
Note that I believe both to be true: the advantages of artist groups like these far outweigh the disadvantages, and exhibitions could be showing off the strength of each artist if curated around a shared theme, or some underlying principle. Simply putting up recent or favorite displays does a disservice to much of the work that would otherwise shine.
Sherry Wagner Mary
Leslie Crist Portrait (photographed from different angles)
Here are some more examples of the diversity I encountered, in no particular order or preference.
Susan Jones Laminar Flow
Anne Baxter Solar Flare
Sherry Wagner Chip
If the work of the Pacific Northwest artists tell many different stories, Sargent Claude Johnson‘s retrospective at the Huntington is devoted to a main focus: the dignity and beauty of the Black subject in an era that still legalized racial discrimination. It is long overdue to see work from a master, namely a quarter century since his work was surveyed at SF MOMA, and one wonders why an artist who was so prominent during his lifetime has disappeared into the recesses of cultural memory.
The Black modernist (1887 – 1967), often associated with the Harlem Renaissance, lived on the West Coast for most of his lifetime and worked primarily as a sculptor in contrast to his painting East Coast associates, which might explain why he fell through the cracks when this movement experienced renewed interest by contemporary art critics. (In this context it might be or interest to visit a wide reaching exhibition on the Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism that just now opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.)
Negro Woman (1933)
Johnson was born to a father of Swedish ancestry and a mother who was part Cherokee and part African American. While his brothers and sisters chose to be recognized as Native Americans or Caucasians, Sargent decided to live his life as a Black. Some of his work, like this portrait, focussed on the duality of his racial background. In his own words, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others… One ever feels his Two-ness, – an American, a Negroe; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”
Self Portrait (1950s)
This is about the most political statement by him that I could find. In general, the artist did not engage in propagandistic art, whether in his murals or in his work for collectors, and was wholly opposed to the social realism found in the work of other Black artists, like Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, and Charles White. He shared the somewhat apolitical aesthetic stance of a man he admired : Alain LeRoy Locke, the so-called father of the Harlem Renaissance, whose “New Negro” philosophy assumed that “a vibrant race tradition in art will contribute to American art and, in turn, this achievement will help bring about social equality.” (Ref.)
Langston Hughes, a former protégé of Locke’s, considered the Harlem Renaissance movement a failure because it was motivated by a fantasy that the race problem could be solved through art. He accurately wondered whether the contributions of an elite group of black intellectuals to American culture would bring about social change for the masses of African Americans.
Johnson drew from Southern Black folk-culture and African art as sources of inspiration, but also included aspects of Asian-Pacific art. Many elements of pre-Columbian or contemporary Mexican art can be found in his sculptures and friezes. He experimented with various modes, sculpture predominantly, but also painting and prints. A range of materials, wood, paper, metal, enamel, terracotta and more, can be found in his work.
Singing Saints (1940)
Dorothy C. (1938)
Johnson is probably best known for his sculptures, many of whom depict Black women, often with children inseparably attached, a valuable reminder that family separation is not just a thing of a slavery past. Immigrant families, separated at the border during the last eight years, are still not reunited, often due to (coincidental?) administrative omissions of identifiable characteristics that would allow tracing.
Standing Woman (1934)
Forever Free (1933)
Mother and Child (1932)
Some of Johnsons’ children’s busts received awards. Minor quibble for an exhibition that otherwise does a fabulous job in both placing and signage of work: why elevate the one non-Black head to central and elevated position? The little Asian girl was a playmate of Johnson’s children, but it feels weird that she is surrounded by the Black kids.
Clockwise from upper left: Head of a boy (1930) – Elizabeth Gee (1927) – Chester (1931) – Head of a Boy (1928) – Esther (1929)
Johnson worked all his life in side jobs to sustain his artistic practice. Money was tight, which had sorrowful consequences for his wife whose mental health declined and who spent the rest of her life in a mental institution. (The Huntington is truly helpful in providing much information of aspects related to the artist but not necessarily central to the art in its catalogue.)
Even though Johnson was picked for major commissions, including a 185-foot-long frieze for a San Francisco high school that displays an array of athletes, things never got easy. Other public artworks for the Depression-era Works Progress Administration included work for the California School for the Blind in Berkeley.
The following architectural installations were all made for the CALIFORNIA SCHOOL FOR THE BLIND starting in 1933. There are window lunettes and a stage proscenium. The pieces were dispersed and now belong to the Huntington, The California School for the Blind, the African American Museum at Oakland and UC Berkeley – here reunited for the first time. You are invited to explore via touch!
Below is a video screenshot and sketches for San Francisco’s George Washington Highschool Athletics Mural from 1941. Here is a full video.
Johnson’s life did not have a happy ending. He struggled with the ravages of alcoholism and died in 1967 in a residential hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, a somewhat rough neighborhood. His legacy should serve as an inspiration: he told the story of the dignity of people who were ignored at best, despised and discriminated against at worst, art created during a time where this was an act of defiance as well as an expression of hope against hope to help change perceptions.
Alas, this particular story is still ongoing.
Standing Woman (1934)
Here is music from the Harlem Renaissance. Lift every voice.
Sargent Claude Johnson
Feb. 17–May 20, 2024
The Huntington – Library, Museum, Botanical Garden
Walk with me, on a rain drenched Sunday in the Pacific Northwest. First we trudge through my garden – have the galoshes ready.
These are columbines, some of the early bloomers in spring, dainty as they come, and, as it turns out, a delicacy for wandering visitors. As are the apple trees.
These are deer. They have made daily appearances in the yard for the last week, and as of Sunday afternoon, when I am writing this, there are no more columbines. Blossoms completely depleted. Disappeared. Digested. Man.
I have a choice: mourn the destruction of my flora or celebrate the fact that I look out of the window to see four frolicking creatures, feeling at home, at a location that is a 15-minute ride from Portland city center.
You can see the remnants of the destruction of the winter storm – still a lot of windfall around.
True to form I do both, and then I go visit a friend’s wondrous garden that is carefully deer-proofed and full of spring’s signifiers: growth that is tender, soft colored, dripping with wetness and sending out tendrils and shoots to claim the next cycle of life.
It feels like walking through a watercolor painting when you look at the bloom.
The tree peonies proud like queens,
Just the maple leaves show sharp, contrasting rims, but they, too, are softened by their unfocused surround, enveloping them with diffused light.
They come in so many different colors
Such beauty – let it help start the week on the right note, grateful for what is, not what’s been lost. Now tell me what I should plant that the deer won’t eat….
Here is a romantic period Ode to Spring by composer Joachim Raff.
This week I received an email with one of the irregular posts by the Public Professor, whose writing I cherish. Akim Reinhardt, whose shifts in careers and locations exceed even mine, has the gift to combine learnedness with humor and a way of simplifying complex issues in his writing so that pretty much everyone gets it. What could be easily didactic and preaching, instead often elicits a “Man, so clever and so true!” reaction in me.
When I saw the title – The Barbarians Won – I immediately thought of one of my favorite poems, C.P. Cavafy’s Waiting for the Barbarians, prescient lines written in 1898. The poem inspired Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) a novel by South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. Both poem and novel are considered crucial metaphors in literary reactions to western colonialism and the war on terror.
But Cavafy’s poem was sardonic, while Reinhardt’s latest musings seemed atypically pessimistic (and they were written even before the abysmal farce happening at the SKCOTUS (Supreme Kangaroo Court) hearings this week.) He grants the Barbarians their overall victory and ends with a line, “I should leave.”
I agree that an occasional time-out, a pause to replenish, is restorative and necessary to keep up the good fight – to wit my last month which filled me with joy, among others, watching the ravens. But leave?
The barbarians and their fascination with gadgets have won, the newest one appearing daily. Our eyes forever fixed on blinking toys.
The barbarians and their craving for the now have won, clocks all clicking in time. We march, bedraggled, to the sound of clanging bells.
The barbarians and their printed words have won, page after page stacked and bound. No matter what we want, they cite a passage of denial; no matter what we avoid, they read a mandate.
The barbarians and their lust for shiny trinkets have won, their new world a wasteland of flashy baubles. The stars are washed out above us.
The barbarians and their cars have won, sleek tonnage racing along endlessly. Road kill marks the miles.
The barbarians and their lines have won, squares and rectangles laid about and stacked all around. The circle of life has been shaved and shoved into corners.
The barbarians and their foods have won, boxed mac n cheese and flour tortilla tacos washed down with Diet Coke. We check our cholesterol and blood sugar.
The barbarians and their fashions have won, fast and ready to wear. There’s elastic in our jeans and advertisements on our shirts and hats.
The barbarians and their time have won, clocks spinning and blinking and buzzing. We march on their schedule.
The barbarians and their bar-bar talk have won, countless languages stricken from mouths and ears. We can think only this way.
The barbarians and their arrogance have won, their shouted assertions offered up as commandments. No one can be right who disagrees with them.
The barbarians and their freedom have won, forever doing whatever they want. Individuals left alone to fend for themselves, to decide what miseries they will inflict upon others or endure alone.
The barbarians and their colors have won, white and gold exalted. The black and brown discarded.
The barbarians and their bureaucracies have won, victory in triplicate. We stand in line, waiting to fill out forms and be bound in red tape.
The barbarians and their erasures have won, clean scrubbings of the past. Can we still remember what the barbarians did?
The barbarians have won, and now we are waiting for them to leave.
I should leave.
Generally, I think departing and declaring victory for the bad guys is premature. Let’s focus on some positive occurrences across the last weeks to keep us from despairing:
Ukraine Aid made it through congress, better late than never.
More student loan forgiveness
The FTC banned the use of non-compete clauses, huge bonus for labor.
The DOL strengthened overtime rules
The FCC restored net neutrality
The DOT expanded protections for airline passengers
The School Voucher scam in TN failed to make it through this legislative period.
The Arizona house repealed the 1864 law (even if it took three tries to get there.)
Major American Unions endorsed the democratic Presidential candidate.
Trump LOSES his bid for a new trial or a judgment overturning the more than $80 million verdict for E. Jean Carroll in the second trial.
Even though it looks like a majority of SC judges are perfectly happy to reinstall a monarch (as long as he is not a Democrat) the proceedings in other law arenas seem to indicate that accountability is still on the table. An Arizona Grand Jury charged 11 AZ Republicans and seven former Trump aides with felonies around a fake elector scheme. In NYC, the trial proceedings reveal a flailing, shrinking, feeble defendant – regardless of outcome, the image of a cult leader is starting to crack.
If you have time to read, here is a fascinating essay by John Ganz on the ways Trump embodies two different personae – the actual banal criminal (as seen in the Manhattan proceedings), and the sovereign king with impunity for all crimes (as discussed in the SC proceedings.) The man will eventually succumb, but the idol might very well be enshrined into our laws, if the extremist have their way.
If this is not enough of cheer leading, we can always turn to Marc Aurelius, who was born on this day in 121 AD: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
I’ll go watch the birds some more…. while listening to music about ravens.
