More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
The greening of the trees? Really the greening of everything else as well. Whether you look up or down, the sheer saturation and brightness of every plant is the cheeriest sight imaginable. Verdant renewal.
I’ll take it all, as well.
The weeds in my garden, alas, are growing faster than everything else, and so I will make it short here today, so I can go out there and tackle them, ruthlessly.
Three recommendations for things to watch (and I might have recommended one already, if so, blame the repetition on an aging brain.
A Canadian series on Amazon Prime or Hulu, Coroner, (not The Coroner), is a police procedural from Toronto, tackling relevant contemporary themes, from racism, houselessness, queerness, military PTSD, tribal issues to the lure of cults, with a surprising amount of candor and criticism. It centers around the family story of said coroner, her father battling dementia, her gay son, and a mother who abandoned her as a child. Every time it threatens to veer into soap opera territory it rescues itself, and the cast is the most diverse cast I have seen on TV in a long time. The only downer were the last episodes of the last season, which didn’t know how to rap up, featured some deus-ex-machina concoction and a somewhat pathetic ending in the true meaning of the word pathos. Overall intelligent entertainment.
And speaking of racism, here is an astounding film capturing its essence. Black Girl is not for the faint of heart, it is enraging and very sad, but a masterpiece, created by Ousmane Sembène in 1966 to expose French Colonialism. For anyone keen on classic art films, do not miss it.
My last suggestion might be the one mentioned before: the eternally long and equally important documentary that partially explains America today as written up in this Atlantic essay. The link provided by the Atlantic does not work. Here is one I found that shows the full running time of The Sorrow and the Pity. Yes, 4 hours of your life, but none better spent. Marcel Ophuls made this film about the collaboration between the Vichy government and Nazi Germany during World War II. He uses interviews with a German officer, collaborators, and resistance fighters from Clermont-Ferrand. They comment on the nature of and reasons for collaboration, including antisemitism, Anglophobia, fear of Bolsheviks and Soviet invasion, and the desire for power.
Yes, deep into the weeds of politics. I, on the other hand, will be deep into the weeds of my garden, momentarily.
For today I feel like traditional Senegalese music, in honor of the Black Girl.
Yesterday I spent a lot of hours in a meeting at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts. In between conversations and checking out the lay-out of the building for a planned exhibition, I caught some glimpses of the art currently on display.
I said glimpses and I mean glimpses. This is not a review, just what my camera was drawn to for quick snaps when walking the halls. Or my iPhone, as the case may be.
Upstair is devoted to The Nest Project, work by Debbie Baxter, in the context of the current show at the Reser: Hope is beyond Words. The multi-partner art exhibition focuses on survivors of domestic and sexual violence in Oregon. It was created in collaboration with the City of Beaverton Police Department and City of Beaverton, Family Peace Center of Washington County, and Patricia Reser Center for the Arts. (Run time April 3 – May 17, 2026)
A huge actual nest filled with down is an attention magnet, and photographs line the walls depicting various instantiations of Baxter’s idea of having people strip to their newborn status and find shelter in often fetal positions in the handmade nests created on each occasion. (David Slader at ArtsWatch described the project at length last year.)
Image by Debbie Baxter from her website.
The main gallery downstairs featuresa collection of works by people who experienced abuse. Here is the gallery blurb:
Uplifting voices and holding a safe space for self-expression, Hope is Beyond Words showcases creative works drawn from survivors’ experiences. Serving as a catalyst to prompt conversations about collective responsibility and eliminating violence in our communities, individuals come together to help other survivors realize they are not alone that behind the faceless statistics, trauma affects real people in our lives. Demonstrating the human spirit through visual art and written word, individuals from Beaverton and Washington County share insights into the complexities, struggles, realities, and resilience of experiencing trauma, recognizing that everyone deserves to be physically and emotionally safe in our community.
The cocoon can be entered. Fashioned by multiple artists, from what looked like paper machee and coffee grinds.
Two things stood out for me – the variety of ways to express loss and resilience, and the range of ability to elicit curiosity as well as empathy. As I said, this was not an occasion for me to linger with the work, or take it all in. But I WAS taken in by something that could have easily been trite, and has become such a fashionable mechanism to elicit viewer interaction: the opportunity to write down a few words related to the focus of the exhibition, in this case survivors.
Seeing them strung up on the walls, the words spoke to me, and actually gave me a lift. Some earnest about self acceptance, some brutally honest, some just witty. All meant to boost without sneering, and that, truly, hit the spot.
The strangest juxtaposition to a short (6 minute) clip I had watched that very morning, sent by a friend. “The Employment” is clever, handpainted animated work from 2008, by Santiago “Bou” Grasso an Argentinian artist, describing the alienation in a capitalist world, where people are treated as and become objects. Not so at the Reser: people communicating with people, creating bonds through shared experiences or just empathy, and giving comfort. And advice: If life gives you lemons, become a used-car salesman…
Yesterday, the plan had been to write about various ways to reform the Supreme Court after the disastrous partisan decision making of the last years, usurping legislative power without accountability to the people. There are more, and interesting, suggestions beyond the proposals to enlarge the court or to limit the years of tenure in the wake of eviscerating the Voting Rights Act. But I found it too depressing to think that that the political will is too weak for radical restructuring. It would also require election majorities that are right now uncertain given the election interference and manipulations, by, among others, the very Court we are talking about. I could not stomach it.
Give me some green.
All I wanted to do was walk for so long that fatigue would overtake worried thinking. Walk I did.
Marvel, too. It was just too beautiful. Flowering everywhere.
Romantic vistas.
Water like marbled paper.
Birds not far behind.
Including a bald eagle that landed smack in front of me, checked out what’s for breakfast, and then swooped away to find more optimal hunting grounds.
So, all the content you get today, is pictures. And a reminder to be careful with language when you detect invasive plants on your walks or in your garden. Here is what I read from the Center for Plants and Culture, on of my favorite websites ever. ( Text copied below since I want to walk walk walk again today as well):
“Plants are not inherently invasive. They can become problematic when introduced into ecosystems—particularly when human activity alters those ecosystems in ways that favor spread and impact. Therefore, calling a plant an “invader” doesn’t just misplace the blame—it can also shift attention away from the human conditions that created the problem in the first place.
Walk with me, back to our old haunts, Oak Island in full spring regalia.
Before you can even appreciate the views, another sense is stimulated: clouds of sweet hawthorn blossom-scent waft across the meadows. So many of those trees in bloom, predominantly white, but a few pink ones sprinkled in here or there.
The oak trees are leafing out, some of the fresh leaves still uncoated by the least amount of dust. They reflect the light, shining golden green.
Colors are intensified by a grayish sky, providing a terrific contrast effect.
Dog roses embrace trees.
Cherries are already setting fruit, but otherwise blossoms everywhere.
Some old apple trees,
and friends,
and myriad wild flowers, Camassia Quamash among them sprinkling the grass with sky blue.
And of course hawthorn everywhere, sometimes veering on pink.
The waters are still, the occasional carp jumping, robin unperturbed by the splashes in the water.
The woods had a fairy tale quality, including rings nourished by cow droppings.
I feel so thoroughly gutted by Wednesday’s Supreme Court decision eviscerating what was left of the Voting Rights act, that I don’t have it in me to write much until my rage settles. I will link to a couple of smart pieces, though, that will lay out what we are now facing without too much jargon or getting into the legal nitty gritty.
Here is a gift link to Adam Server in The Atlantic.
Here is Leah Litman, one of the most astute court observers.
And here is an NYT timeline of the Voting Rights Act.
It didn’t take 24 hours for the fallout to emerge: Mississippi and Alabama announce that they will eliminate their Black majority districts. Louisiana is literally suspending their primaries to draw more racist maps. The legacy of MLK Jr., John Lewis and so many others who fought for and paid a bloody price for the ability to vote and be fairly represented all down the drain courtesy of the Roberts Court. With the most disingenuous rationale, they are ushering in a period of drastic reduction in minority representation in the name of equal protection. Perverse.
Some things to bring potential cheer towards the end of the week:
There is a closing reception for the photo exhibition “Lloyd Center Journal”, at the gallery of PLACE, 735 NW 18th Ave at Johnson St. Regular Viewing Hours: M-F, 10-6. If you are in town this Friday, 5/1, you are invited to the Closing Reception from 5:30-7:30 pm, with Artist Talk (Horatio Law at 6pm), and guest speakers Tanya Gossard of Slabtown Tours and Norm Gholston of Architecture Heritage Center (6:15pm) on the history and architecture of Lloyd Center. (Quick reminder: this Friday we are called not to shop or work as a form of protest against what is raining down on this nation.)
On Saturday is the opening reception at the Columbia Gorge Museum for Indelicate, a new show of works around women’s roles in service to a society that wanted them stay at home. Featured are actress, writer and artist Jessalyn Maguire, and Sonia Kasparian, fashion designer and artist from Season 17 of “Project Runway. I have not yet seen the exhibition but look forward to exploring it at a later point.
May 02, 2026, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Columbia Gorge Museum, 990 SW Rock Creek Dr, Stevenson, WA 98648, USA
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.
They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in. The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble, They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps, Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another, So it is impossible to tell how many there are.
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently. They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep. Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage—— My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox, My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat stubbornly hanging on to my name and address. They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations. Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head. I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.
I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free—— The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down, Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins, And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself. The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Before they came the air was calm enough, Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss. Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise. Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine. They concentrate my attention, that was happy Playing and resting without committing itself.
The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves. The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat, And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, And comes from a country far away as health.
One of the highlights of spring is my annual trek to the tulip farm. This year I missed the seasonal opportunity, since I came back too late from California. However, a bouquet of tulips was waiting for me upon my return, sent by the kids, considerably brightening last week, even when the flowers reached their old Dutch Master phase of drooping heads and falling petals.
They brought nothing but unadulterated joy, starting with the loving gesture, then beauty, both in prime and in decay. Most importantly, though, they served as daily reminder that nature just produces the most incredible forms and color, each and every year again, the renewal of spring, rebirth.
I could not possibly conceive of tulips as the enemy, the intruder, a force imbued with aggression, disturbance, a bout of suffocation. That is, of course, how tulips are depicted in the poem below, at least superficially. Deep down the poet acknowledges the power nature exerts in anchoring us in life, rather than letting us slip into oblivion, even if she fights tooth and nail to be granted the latter.
Plath wrote this poem a few days after she left the hospital in 1961, where she had spent almost two weeks after an appendectomy. Some weeks earlier, she had miscarried, making me speculate that hormonal shifts and grief added to the experience of pain after surgery, the anger at a mutilated body, the rage against an “awful baby”. At this point, she had been married for 5 years, was the mother of a toddler, and her first suicide attempt safely in the distant past. Yet the darkness of depression raised its head. The ugly lure of death lurked seemingly again. With her marriage breaking up the next year, despite the birth of another child in April 1962, she told friends that a recent significant car accident had been an attempt to end her life. She saw it through the next year by inhaling gas from the stove, ending her life at age 30.
Her son followed in her footsteps, many years later. Her husband’s lover, one cause for the dissolution of the marriage to Plath, also killed herself and the 4 year old daughter she had with Hughes. So much death and destruction.
But the point I am trying to make here, is that under the guise of animosity towards the floral intruders, even in the middle of shattering sadness, Plath captures the vibrancy, the saturation of color, the intensity and above all the life force of tulips to perfection. Her desired state of white, flat, silent oblivion, described in excruciating details, just as the physical dread after surgery, is the perfect foil for the explosion of red insistence by the tulips: dragging you back into existence, wanted or not.
Of course, I cannot help but point out that the aggressive lure of tulips pushed people not just back into life but also down into ruin – the 17th century tulip mania, a speculative bubble that led to an economic crash. Plath’s poem, however, is not about general insights, but a very subjective, personal experience of the dialectic between her desire for extinction and the tulip’s refusal to grant it. Would not have worked with buttercups, or forget-me-nots, or lilies or carnations.
My tulips open my heart with joy; the poet’s words open it with empathy for someone suffering so. But I will cling to the former for a while longer, before I acknowledge that no magic flower exists that can beat clinical depression. Holding on to cheer as long as I can.
“I see my buildings as pieces of cities, and in my designs, I try to make them into responsible and contributing citizens.” – César Pelli, Argentine-American architect (1926–2019).
About a century ago, a young man with a vision started buying parcels of land on Portland’s East side. His plan for a large commercial hub away from downtown was realized some 40 years later, when he had become a loaded southern Californian oil company executive with the means to hire the best architects of the day. Ralph B. Lloyd (1875–1953) did not live to see the opening of the mall that bears his name, in August 1960. By that time it was touted the largest mall in the U.S., designed by John Graham Jr, architect of Seattle’s famed Space Needle, as one of the first in a string of commercial centers his firm became known for.
Lloyd Center, with its open air plan, anchor stores and various attractions, including a famous ice rink, soon became a landmark of the city. Lloyd and his architects understood the lure of free and ample parking. Enough spots for 800 cars materialized. So did the customers. In the 1990s the mall was enclosed and provided with a food court. Even though that separated the complex from the previously open connection to the neighborhood, it remained more than just a place to shop. The entire complex served as a “contributing citizen” reminiscent of Pelli’s formulation. Walking groups of all ages used the space in rainy season. People found shelter from summer heat in the air-conditioned passages. Kids experienced their first taste of freedom when dropped off at the movies or the game rooms. Students hung out, and the ice rink provided endless opportunities to marvel or just people watch. Importantly, it was a community space that reflected economic and racial diversity, so sorely missed by many of us in other parts of the city.
Between the advent of E-commerce, the Covid epidemic, and changes in the overall economy, things went into a downward spiral eventually. Anchor stores left, gang-related crime and the number of houseless congregating around the neighborhood rose, and we are now at a point where the mall will be closed for good by the beginning of August.
The current owners of the center, Urban Renaissance Group and KKR Real Estate Finance Trust Inc., plan to demolish all of it and divide the 29.3 acres into 14 parcels to be sold for mixed-use redevelopment. ZGF architects offered an urban renewal proposal, and a Master plan was approved by city’s Design Commission on March 5th, 2026. Strong opposition by neighborhood groups, including the Save Lloyd Ice Coalition, and the Save Lloyd Campaign in partnership with the Northeast Coalition of Neighborhoods, ignored by the Design Commission, have now led to appeals of this decision. The City Council is scheduled to hear arguments against efforts to replace the mall on Wednesday, June 24 at 9:45 a.m., deciding on approval, modification, or opposition to the proposal entirely.
***
Impending loss of the familiar spurs melancholy for some, curiosity for others. The increasingly abandoned Lloyd Center drew photographer and public art and installation artist Horatio Hung-Yan Law for repeat visits. They turned into a months-long project of poignant documentation of a communal space under the threat of an uncertain fate. The photographic voyage is currently on exhibit at PLACE in NW Portland. Run, don’t walk, to catch this show before it closes on May 1,2026.
Tomes have been written about the lure of ruins and abandoned or decaying industrial and commercial space for photographers. Lucky for us, Law does not yield to the temptation to accentuate morbid aspects of decline. Instead, he provides a portrait of a place that still occasionally vibrates, still has moments of beauty, still conveys a sense of the original optimism of builders trying to integrate structural elegance and airiness into dens of commerce. Add to that choice of positive depiction a clever way to display his photographic harvest: the images on the wall are sequenced in various fashions that echo the feelings of walking through a Mall. There is no unifying style, color and black&white happily co-reside, sizes are all over the map, prints refuse to be rigidly aligned. Some walls are dedicated to architectural themes, others hint at subjective moments that roused emotions in the photographer. Busy views are counterbalanced by quiet glimpses. Law’s capture of the space mirrors both aspects that were emphasized by the original designs (as well as the plans for redevelopment), namely activation AND lingering.
The artist is surely familiar to ArtsWatch readers for his Urban Studies series, portraits of Portland’s neighborhoods taken with his iPhone on daily walks. These images are picked up by chance and a discerning eye, linked only by the fact that they were spotted during ambulation. Almost always interesting takes by our flaneur-in-residence. I had also reported on his curatorial prowess with works by contemporary Asian-American artists at the Portland China Town Museum, where he served as Artist Residency Director. (He will soon again curate a community assemblage, Portland as seen by photographers over age 65. The line-up of 40 participants is a veritable who’s who of the photographic community’s éminences grises, in this case more referring to hair color than actual hidden powers, I presume. Running for 6 weeks again at PLACE which generously donates its space, it promises to be a gang buster event starting at the beginning of May.)
This was the first time I saw an entire body of work exhibited by the artist, again with terrific moxie to break the rules. Simply pinned to walls, repeat motifs with slight, but important modulations. If he can continue to stay safely away from the cliff edge of vaulting into technicolor overdrive, the work could be meaningfully gathered into a book that many of us, I believe, would cherish as a memento of times coming to a close.
***
“At the heart of capitalism is creative destruction.” – Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter.
You’ve probably walked by this sculpture near Lloyd Center a hundred times. Larry Kirkland’s 1991 stack of money on an ionic column in a fountain is titled Capitalism. If you ever read the inscriptions on some 25 of those coins, you likely agree that their outstanding feature is a competition for triteness. Samples:”Business without profit, is not business anymore than a pickle is a candy.” “Never invest in anything that eats or needs repairing.””That money talks, I’ll not deny, I heard it once. It said: “Goodbye”. I rest my case.
An alternative would have been to include some of Schumpeter’s wisdoms, his theory of creative destruction. It describes the process where new innovations replace outdated systems. Whatever you think about capitalism, insights on business cycles, entrepreneurship, and capitalist development need to be considered for modern economics. Or city planning, for that matter, if you want keep your foot in the world as is, rather than what we wished it to be.
I understand the nostalgia, the love for places that served a meaningful role in the community. I also believe we must look forwards, with the contemporary needs for affordable housing and more green spaces overwhelming. Infill of central spaces, linked to public transportation, is paramount in my opinion, IF we can guarantee that the needs of the populace are filled, and not neglected at its expense. Building housing and parks on former parking lots and store fronts sounds like the right move to me. The question is, of course, if the manifold promises and allusions to neighborhood improvement found in the development plan (downloadable here) approved by the Design Committee, are nothing but.
Are there fixed requirements of x units of this or that? Did I miss them, perusing the documents in front of City Council? Are there development laws I am not familiar with? In the plan outlines on policy for Housing Diversity (Policy 2.LD-4), at least, we read: “Encourage development of new housing, especially in Central Lloyd and on the Irvington and Sullivan’s Gulch edges to foster a sense of community and support efficient provision of residential amenities and services.” (My bolding.) A discussion of required features of any redevelopment of Lloyd Center should be paramount during the appeal process in front of Portland City Council.
Then again, we are not facing the erection of a data processing center, or a warehouse to be used as concentration camp on these 29 acres. I guess there’s always something that could be worse.
Or something to be grateful for: in this case that we have Horatio Law’s splendid documentation of a Portland landmark that can serve as a memento to mid-century architectural citizenship.
1100 kilometers on the road in the car by myself. A lot of time to think, and a lot of occasions to stop, stretch my legs and feel awe for the beauty around me.
At this time of year, central California is a riot of color, before the drab of drought sets in. Blossoming oleander lining the median of the highway, fruit trees in bloom, and every where the brilliance of mustard plants. Their yellow against the blue mountains on the horizon reminded me of the war in Ukraine, with another spring under assault, no end in sight. The impunity of those declaring war, the suffering of those forced into it, betrayed even by former allies.
Fire towers everywhere. Birds were searching for grubs, meadows in yellow and purple, again the color combination forcing me to think eastwards. Enough, I decided, let’s get distracted by some surely apolitical site, an abbey built by and for Cistercian monks. Hah! Leave it to me to find the politics there as well….
The Abbey of our Lady of New Clairvaux is located in Vina, California. The small hamlet is close to I-5, and attracts thousands of visitors annually mostly because of the New Clairvaux winery operated by the monks. I did not visit the winery, but drove through the vineyards and beautifully planted and maintained grounds up to the church nearby.
The visitor is greeted by a sculpture outside the church doors that signals strong “Take the baby, Joseph, I’m late for my shift!” vibes. Just kidding, it is of course a representation of a savior offered to the world, beautifully rendered. Surprised me, though, since the core tenet of Trappist monks, as I understood it, was to pray in surrounds bereft of ornamentation, stained glass and sculptures included.
It turned out that you can only enter the church between 2:30 pm and 5:00 pm, the only time not devoted to different chapters of prayer service. But seeing it from the outside was worthwhile the detour, once I learned the history of its construction.
In 1955, Father Thomas Davis, abbot of the newly-founded abbey of our Lady of New Clairvaux, noticed piles of stones in San Francisco’s Golden Gate park, which turned out to be the original building blocks of the Cistercian Monastery of Santa Maria De Ovila located in Trillo, Spain. The abbey had been abandoned for over 150 years and at times used as animal shelter. (I’ll get to how they got there in a minute.) After much historical research, documentation and architectural planning, the stones were brought by 19 trucks to Vina and used for restoring the abbey in the 1990s.
About 60% of the stones could be salvaged. A quarry in Texas delivered what more was needed for the building, and to reinforce the structural integrity of the original stones, which were made in 1181, architects used concrete blocks. That also checked the requirement to be earthquake proof. I obviously missed seeing the ancient stones on the inside, given the visiting hours, but some of the remaining ones are incorporated into the landscape outside the building, much to the photographer’s delight. You can read more about the specifics and the general philosophy behind Cistercian architecture here.
How did the original cloister stones get to San Francisco? A tax-evading millionaire, of course…
It turns out, William Randolph Hearst had shipped the stones from Spain to incorporate into his estate in Wyntoon, in the remote Siskiyou mountains in Northern California. He believed these historical elements would sufficiently reflect his wealth and taste for the extraordinary. It cost him $97.000 in 1925 to buy the monastery, shipped to San Francisco after dismantling in 1931. They were given to the city as tax abatement. Who cares about historic artifacts, spiritual ones no less, dumped into the maintenance grounds of a park….
Cue the “loot or buy up foreign artifacts and antiquities” debate? Not today.
“The world has always been run by rich men. The robber barons of the Gilded Age were known for their ruthlessness in the accumulation of wealth—hiring Pinkertons to shoot striking unionists. But they directly engaged with the world around them, using their wealth and power to muscle it into its most profitable form. And although today’s billionaires are clearly manipulating society to maximize their own profit, something else is also happening—a disassociation from the reality of cause and effect, from meaning and history. These men no longer feel the need to change the world in order to succeed, because their success is guaranteed, no matter what happens to the rest of us.”
I am back home now, tired, happy. Spring has arrived in Oregon as well. Soon we’ll walk together through familiar haunts! First I need to sleep for a week or two, though….
–Nerve/Effrontery//Bile//something bitter to endure//bitterness of spirit : Rancor// an abnormal outgrowth of plant tissue usually due to insect or mite parasites or fungi and sometimes forming an important source of tannin see gall wasp illustration//a skin sore caused by chronic irritation// a cause or state of exasperation.
Last weekend a severe rain storm hit the Bay area. I found large numbers of oak galls under the trees during subsequent walks. The Diablo Mountain range is full of healthy oaks, not yet hit by oak wilt, the fungal disease ravaging the eastern parts of the US.
The funny, apple-like appendages you see on oak trees during spring and summer,
and then on the ground later in the season, are actually small temporary homes of wasps.
These tiny wasps use certain chemicals mimicking growth hormone to induce growth on the leaves and branches of oak trees, reminiscent of tumors, but not really harmful. There are many species of these gall wasps (800 in the US alone), and they all produce different kinds of galls, often on the very same tree.
The larvae use the galls for shelter and food, and eventually the fully formed wasps bore holes into the wall through which they emerge. Their reproduction is pretty nifty, too:
“Many species have alternating generations, meaning all of the adults emerging from galls during one time of the year are female-only, while the adults emerging in a different season have both males and females. Most species have females that can reproduce using parthenogenesis when they emerge by themselves. This means that their eggs are essentially clones of themselves. What’s more, some species appear not to have any males at all.” (Ref.)
The galls sustain a large ecosystem of birds and ground mammals, but also had their benefits for humans. People have used them to make indelible ink for more than 1400 years. If you squash the pulp of galls and add iron sulfate ((FeSO4) and mix in a binder, usually gum arabic, you get a grey ink that will eventually darken to a purplish black. Use was widespread, and often specified by law: Great Britain and France specified the content of iron gall ink for all royal and legal records to ensure permanence. The United States Postal Service had its own official recipe that was to be used in all post office branches for the use of their customers. In Germany the use of special blue or black urkunden- oder dokumentenechte Tinte or documentary use permanent inks is required in notariellen Urkunden (Civil law notarylegal instruments) (I am told by Wikipedia).
I’d rather think about the beauty of those structures, here on my last day in California. And the poetic response they elicit, with so many subtle meanings of the term added, the bitterness of bile, the gall to spit out endless vitriol…
GALL
Those from Aleppo were bitterest, yielding the vividest ink. More permanent than lampblack or bistre, and at first pale grey, it darkened, upon exposure, to the exact shade of rain-pregnant clouds, since somewhere in the prehistory of ink is reproduction: a gall-wasp’s nursery, deliberate worm at the oak apple’s heart. We knew the recipe by heart for centuries: we unlettered, tongueless, with hair of ash, the slattern at the pestle, the bad daughter. But all who made marks on parchment or paper dipped their pens in gall, in vitriol; even the mildest of words like mellow fruitfulness, of supplication like all I endeavour end decay equally in time with bare, barren, sterile; the pages corroding along all their script like a trail of ash (there is beauty in this) as the apple of Sodom, the gall, turned in the hand from gold into ashes and smoke.
“Although I am enthusiastic about Venice, and though I’ve started a few canvases, I’m afraid I will only bring back beginnings that will be nothing else but souvenirs for me”.
In the early 1980s you could sneak into a Forbes exhibition of Fabergé eggs in New York City for free. I went there during my lunch breaks at the New School, across the street on 5th Ave, entering windowless, dark rooms with glass vitrines lit by invisible sources. Inside, the ornate concoctions nestled in dark blue or black velvet, each prettier than the next, gold and pastel colors. As long as you didn’t think about the way the Russian peasantry’s blood and toil enabled the Tsar to acquire such luxury items, you could revel in their beauty.
These associations popped up when I visited the de Young museum’s current exhibition, Monet and Venice, in San Francisco. Dark, windowless rooms, painted in velvety blue, contain numerous gold-framed, jewel-toned showpieces, each as pleasant and precious as a Fabergé egg, albeit rectangular. Fetching, exquisitely crafted, decorative. First impressions, of course, for someone who has never been much of a fan of Monet, and is wary of the through-line of decorative focus expressed by much of his work.
Claude Monet Palazzo Ducale (1908)
Second impression was admiration for how the entire exhibition was set up. The stellar collection of some 30 plus Venice paintings from the artist’s 10 week visit in 1908 (many executed from sketches, likely photographs, and surely memory in the ensuing 4 years back at home) is smartly framed by additional materials. Visitors get exposed to historic photographs of the city, as well as of the Monet couple visiting, and are provided with lots of quotations from the artist about his approach to art, process and subject. First shown at the Brooklyn Museum last fall, the exhibition was co-curated by Lisa Small, senior curator of European art at the Brooklyn Museum, and Melissa Buron, director of collections and chief curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum. A truly successful collaboration.
Carlo Ponti Piazza San Marco ca 1860-1870
Importantly, some works of other artist fascinated by Venice, among them Turner, Sargent and Canaletto, are interspersed with Monet’s cityscapes. (By all reports, he was hesitant to visit the city in the first place because so many admired colleagues had painted it, and the trip was planned by his wife Alice as a recuperative sojourn only, for the aging and cataract-plagued painter. But paint he did, barely arrived.)
Giovanni Canaletto Venice, the Grand Canal looking East, with Santa Maria della Salute, (1749-1750)
Michele Giovanni Marieschi Views of Venice (1741)
John Ruskin The South Side of the Basilica de San Marco, from the Loggia of the Palazzo Ducale, ca 1850.
Give me a Turner, any time.
J.M.W. Turner The Campanile and Piazza of San Marco, Venice (1840)
J.M.W. Turner Boats at the Entrance to the Canale della Giudecca, Venice, off Santa Maria della Salute and the Dogana (maybe 1840)
That said, the shimmering Adriatic light of the Venice lagoon was spectacularly captured in Monet’s paintings on display, but it (or any other bright light) was sorely missing from the surround. The contrast between the dark walls and the relatively small, bright canvasses made the latter into somewhat confined objects, constrained instead of unfolding into their surround.
Claude Monet San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk (1908)
The only thing viscerally reminiscent of Venice were the crowds – here as there, amorphous units wafted from painting to painting, location to location, nowhere more dense that in the final room where large water lily paintings hung. The lure of the familiar, I guess. (This, by the way, despite timed entry slots for the exhibition. Lucky I was double masked.) The contrast could not have been more pronounced: the small cityscapes felt like glorified postcards compared to the immersion effect provided by the large pond canvasses, any given visual angle across the room still enveloping the viewer into the depictions.
Claude Monet Water Lilies (1914-1917)
The works themselves were pleasing in the impressionistic way, but for me became interesting at second glance, if and when I had a chance to break through the cordon of visitors bulging in front of each painting. They are, in some sense, studies of a given subject – this or that Palazzo – from slightly different perspectives (often just a minimally extended surround included) and under different lighting conditions that change the hue of the pastel tones applied. But they are also often horizontally bifurcated – with the top half devoted to depiction, however impressionistic, of a given architectural structure, and the bottom half a laboratory of ever more abstract painting of water.
Claude Monet The Grand Canal, Venice (1908)
The proportions of water to shore (large over small) seemed different from my memory of the canals (narrower in relation). I first thought that maybe we were seeing the psychological effect of boundary extension. This concept refers to remembering a previously viewed scene as containing a larger extent of the background than was actually present, and information that was likely present just outside the boundaries of that view is often incorporated into the representation of that scene. But here we are confronted with the reverse: it is the foreground, the water, that is larger (and also emptier, rid of most of the water traffic surely present in 1908 as well,) than the likely objective perspective. Lots of canvas space to develop abstraction rather than depicting optical impressions, uninhibited by the need to represent anything, perhaps. Have to give Monet that – always exploring, even towards the end of his by then illustrious career, at the height of his renown.
Claude Monet The Church of San Giorgio Maggiore (1908)
Some sentence I picked up at the Marmottan in Paris at a previous visit had stuck with me: “The artist invites universal thoughts of peaceful contemplation.” I wondered how this could come from a man, who was, in his own ways, politically engaged. He was a friend of Emile Zola’s and joined him and other liberals in their belief that Dreyfus was innocent, during the times of the Dreyfus Affair. He was drawn to Courbet, a radical leftist at the time. Prime minister Clemenceau was his friend, and during WW I Monet saw it as his patriotic duty to support the war effort with a victory garden and donations of his paintings to raise funds for victims and the wounded. I scoffed at the notion of art => peaceful contemplation, thinking of it as placating, rather than depicting the world as it is, moving us to remedy what’s wrong.
Goes to show that I am as thoughtless as the next person, if biased about a source. The same invitation to slow down, contemplate and introspect from a different corner – the curator of this year’s Venice Biennale – seemed like just the ticket. Then again, maybe it is not the act of contemplation, but the subject that irked me: Monet hoped for the restorative effect of contemplating the aesthetics of fleetingness in nature, the light, the atmospherics, major keys beauty. Which brings me to Venice 2026, more precisely the 61st Biennale which is about to open in early May. Here we are asked to focus on the “minor keys, the overlooked, disguised, fervently guarded spaces reserved for human dignity.”
(And yes, to all of you who frown, “What’s wrong with restorative beauty?” Nothing at all. It, as any consoling work of art, certainly has a prominent role for anguished souls. I just feel that time is running through our – my – hands like sand, urging a use of art to focus on the most important issues of our world to save what can be saved. Art as the canary in the coal mine. To put it bluntly, the beauty of water lilies or Venice will be a mute topic, once the ponds are dried out, the city drowned.)
Claude Monet Water Lilies (1907)
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In refusing the spectacle of horror, the time has come to listen to the minor keys, to tune in sotto voce to the whispers, to the lower frequencies; to find the oases, the islands, where the dignity of all living beings is safeguarded.
—Curatorial statement by Koyo Kouoh, “In Minor Keys,”2025
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The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys, will run from Saturday 9 May to Sunday 22 November 2026. It has seen its share of tragedy and upheaval long before it started. Curator Koyo Kouoh, highly respected in the art world, died suddenly late last year, leaving her team scrambling to consolidate and materialize her vision for this year’s exhibition. Another death struck, with Henrike Naumann, who was to represent the German pavilion, succumbing to cancer at age 41.
Then South Africa canceled its pavilion. The South African minister of culture had taken political issue with the work of Gabrielle Goliath, who had been unanimously selected by committee. “Elegy” was a decade-long project, a performance and video series that honors women, gay, and trans people who have been victims of violent killings. The new iteration at Venice was to include a tribute to Hiba Abu Nada, a Palestinian poet killed in an Israeli airstrike, as well as the tens of thousands of women and children who have died in Gaza since October 2023. Government and artist tied up in law suits over this perceived censorship move, until the state declared final refusal to be represented this year in Venice at all in February.
The U.S. was not far behind. We will have a Pavilion, but the final choice of representative is highly controversial. For the first time ever, the State Department took on the selection process, sidelining the NEA with budget cuts. Applicants had to pass the “Trump test” that proposals must not “operate any programs promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.” Apparently, the almost unknown artist Robert Lazzarini had initially been selected before being nixed by the State Department, to be dropped for “bureaucratic rather than ideological reasons,” as later reported. Other artists came on with proposals, among them Andres Serrano and Curtis Yarvin.
Who was finally picked? An American born sculptor, living in Mexico, who never applied to show at the Biennale in the first place. Alma Allen has only once been included in a major exhibition in the States, the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Last year some of his sculptures could be seen adjacent to NYC’s Park Avenue. Compare that to the standing of his Biennale predecessors: including Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer, Jasper Johns, Martin Puryear, Simone Leigh and Jeffrey Gibson, among others. He is currently not represented by any gallery. This was his commentary in the NYT: his galleries, Mendes Wood and Olney Gleason, asked him not to accept the Venice Biennale commission and dropped him when he did. Both galleries confirmed that they were no longer working with him, but declined to explain why, making the entire nomination and the obscure process behind it even more controversial.
I learned that “organizing the pavilion this year is commissioner Jenni Parido, founder of a pet food company and now executive director of the mysterious American Arts Conservancy (AAC), a new Florida-based nonprofit established this September with a mission to advance American visual art through diplomacy, education and cultural legacy. As its website states, it was “founded on the belief that art is a foundational element of a thriving democracy.” (Ref.) All in line, one presumes, with what curator Jeffrey Uslip highlights as “Allen’s alchemical transformation of matter explore the concept of ‘elevation,’ both as a physical manifestation of form and as a symbol of collective optimism and self-realization, furthering the Trump Administration’s focus on showcasing American excellence.”
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Pavilions unfilled, pavilions filled with murky selection processes, and now pavilions demanded to be removed: many artists sent out an urgent call to ban outright or relocate national representation of countries engaged in warfare or genocidal action, including Russia, Israel, and the United States. There are precedents: the Russian and South African pavilions had been previously excluded, and there was political reaction to Pinochet’s takeover in Chile in 1974, with all national pavilions closed.
Not exactly minor keys, but a loud cacophony of conflict preceding the opening of this important touchstone in our contemporary art world. More Shostakovich’s 7th in C major than a Schumann concerto in A minor. I will report later how it all unfolds after the opening.
In the meantime, pay the De Young a visit if you are in San Francisco. It is a treat to see the accumulated art works in the current exhibition.
We have no other time than here and now A time that's cheating us with half-filled bowls We have to drink since refills are denied, In front of our paradise
The sword already lurks, for which we, the heirs of lost sons driven from their land, were chosen We grew old, before given a chance of ever being young Our current life a state of not-yet-dying
We once arrived naively filled with faith Into a century ravaged by storms Our prior hopes replaced by stunned internal silence Aid only possible for those who'd loudly cry
We furtively dream of woods and meadows and a morsel of happiness thrown at our feet But no tomorrow will restore the present day we have no other time than here and now
We have no other time than here and now We have no other time than here and now We have no other time than here and now, here and now, than here and now, here and now, here and now, here and now
Jewish poet Mascha Kaléko’s later writing was suffused with the experience of exile. Moving from Poland to Germany, fleeing to the US during Nazi rule, eventually emigrating to Israel where a lack of Hebrew isolated her even more, she was a chronicler of hardship, crushed hopes, victims of displacement.
Little of her oeuvre is translated into English. I tried my hand on the verses above, fully aware I’m not a poet. I kept her punctuation, but was obviously unable to maintain the rhyming scheme. I was more interested in getting the meaning across, her acknowledgement of an inevitable fate and yet an insistence on agency, amidst the most dire circumstances.
During this week in particular I have been thinking about the fate of the displaced, in all the ongoing war zones, the fate of those for whom the sword is lurking, whose lives already are or will be exposed to existential threat.
The whole of Tuesday, after the early Presidential threats of exterminating an entire civilization, never to be restored again, I was in such a state of anticipatory anxiety that I could barely function. Then I woke up enraged this morning, feeling the emotional abuse of threatened violence, keeping a world holding its breath, manipulation only matched by that of the stock market. Those thousands killed, kids included, billions spent, our defensive arsenal depleted. Our reputation in the world in ruins, international transportation made more expensive, an oppressive Iranian regime more secured than ever. A people promised liberation offered obliteration on the turn of a dime, on the whim of either a madman or an intentional manipulator. And none of it providing the security that it won’t start again at any moment in time.
The poem reminded me to stay focused on the here and now, because that is all we have, and should not waste with fears about an unpredictable future. You can go further, though, beyond the “all we have.” WE HAVE the here and now, and as such we can make use of it, with something, anything, to affect what future will arise. Maybe we can render aid to those who are muted into silence, after all, not expecting them to shout for it. Maybe we can refill the bowls of the thirsty, in defiance of the rules.
And just maybe we can unite to rip the swords out of the hands of the bloodthirsty, sadistic monsters that destroy the world for power and riches. We are in a here and now where action is still possible.
We can refuse to join the cult of lemmings bent on self destruction, reverse direction – in the here and now.
A much more elegant and extended version of those thoughts expressed by Rebecca Solnit can be found here.
