Category Archives: Art and Culture

Art and Culture, Politics

This Clement World

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Imbolc                                                                        Valentine Moon

This Clement World.  Not sure why I decided I wanted to see this.  In part the content of course.  Climate change.  In part a chance to get back into some kind of rhythm with Kate, going out, away from home.  She wants that and she’s right.  It’s a different dynamic than the domestic scene and important to the health of our relationship.

Still.  When I attend a performance in an art center, I expect the aesthetic dimension to pre-dominate.  In that sense I want a unity, a coherence and, perhaps most important for me, an emotional punch, a dragging of this often too cerebral guy into his heart and soul, piecing the three into an ensemble, at least for an hour or even 5 minutes.  Didn’t find that tonight.

Cynthia Hopkin’s journey, from personal melodrama to global catastrophe had the potential for merging the political and the aesthetic, rolling them into an engagement beyond the impending doom.  And I’m sure that’s what she wanted.  It’s what I wanted ,too.  It was there at moments.  When she channeled the German physicist studying carbon in sea ice and he spoke of being stuck without food in a bay during an arctic winter.  He became, he said, a predator, too.  He killed a seal, cut off its head, cleared out its guts and ate.  On occasion her beautiful voice touched me, but too often the cacophony in the background, singers and band, drowned out her song.  At least for me.

I know this about art and politics.  They don’t mix well or easily.  What especially doesn’t mix well is message art.  When the performer has a political point of view and uses an artistic medium as vehicle for sharing it.  Tough.  This is very different from a movie or play or poem or song about political issues.  That’s commentary, critique, a venture to find the universal through the story of Hamlet or All the King’s Men or House of Cards or Twelve Angry Men.  It’s different when the art has a perspective it believes in and tries to pitch it.

What I’m talking about here is a play against domestic abuse, a performance to change your mind about climate change (tonight), a play to advance gay rights.  Where the art work is the equivalent of political speech, persuasive political speech.  Then the narrative and flow of the art can easily get bent in service of the message, rather than following the emotional and creative arc.  It’s not impossible; it’s just damn hard and this one, for me, didn’t reach that spot.

Glad she tried, though.

Art and Culture, Family, Latin

Tired Mind

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Imbolc                                                                Valentine Moon

Must of worn out this mind.  Talking to Mark early.  8 a.m.  Then some time on revision, how to do it with a book I’d forgotten, but has very wise advice.  Finding Your Writer’s Voice.  After that, a careful read through an essay on PRB technique and method, one that involved a lot of looking up terms, finding examples of certain techniques in paintings available on the internet.  (all of them, so far)  Then writing the post below.

After that I started to review my Latin for tomorrow.  Couldn’t make my mind go there.  Then I sent went over to Chess.com for some lessons.  I performed abysmally, lowering my rating on challenge after challenge.  I hate feeling stupid and those two did it for me.

Glad Kate and I have dinner out and a piece of performance art at the Walker, Cynthia Hopkin’s piece, This Clement World.  It’s time to unload the brain cells.

Art and Culture, Asia

Here They Come!

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Imbolc                                                                 Valentine Moon

Here’s a link to a new service by the Atlantic, a China channel.  If you follow this link and read the very sensible and wise assessment of the US/China situation by Lee Kuan Yew, the former president of Singapore, you will have a greater grasp of the politics than, apparently, do most of the members of our Congress.  Yew points out certain inevitables like:  China is already a world power and eventually will out pace the US in most if not all indices.  Our relative power in the world will decline.  This has all happened before.

(picture from the Atlantic China channel)

No, not the rise of China and the relative decline of the US, but world powers rise and fall over the course of history.  No big story there.  This gradual change just happens to be underway in our lifetime.

He says, and I agree, that China is no Soviet Union.  That is, they are not set on world domination.  What they want is their place in the world, one in accord with their size, economy and long history.  And, they will get it.

This is a key point.  With or without a sensible US policy China’s rise is certain.  What we can do is manage our reaction to it and help to guide both China and the world as a whole toward amicable relations in trade and political discourse.  Yew makes these points much better than I can.

What I want to add is this.  Even in a state of relative decline the US will still be formidable from a military, economic, innovation and educational perspective.  None of these are trivial.  And we have come to this position of prominence with a history of barely 400 years, much less if you count from our war of independence.  After less than 300 years as a nation we can stand face to face with a civilization with 4,000 years of history.  That is no mean achievement and its reality will not fade as time goes on.

We have been privileged by geography, natural resources, immigrant vigor and by a culture developed on Enlightenment principles of equality and personal freedom.  As Yew also accurately points out though, these Enlightenment principles are time and culture bound.  They are not universal.  It is no more appropriate to think that democracy and individualism should be adopted by other countries than it is to think that Christianity should be accepted as a universal religion.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to understanding between our two cultures can by symbolized by our financial systems emphasis on share holder value rated by corporate performance in quarterly increments versus China’s willingness to build their military over several decades.  We are a sound byte people, addicted to the moment and often ahistorical.  To thrive in a cultural clash with a competitor that has decades and centuries in its vision we must adopt longer term time horizons and realize that ethnocentrism, which was never appropriate as a guide for national policy, may become downright dangerous.

Should we become culturally different?  No.  Should we recognize that others, like the Chinese, might feel the same way?  Yes.

 

 

 

 

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Family, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

And Jazz Saxophone after it all

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Imbolc                                                              Valentine Moon

Here we go.  A perfect day.  Revising Missing before 11:00 am.  A sentence from Ovid before lunch.  Nap.  Working with pre-Raphaelites until 4:00.  Some chess until 5.  Workout.  A movie with Kate.  As I said.

Art and Culture, GeekWorld, Humanities, Media

Collecting

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Imbolc                                                                       Valentine Moon

Tumblr.  Addictive in a sense I don’t fully understand yet.  I’ve selected bloggers on Tumblr, largely where folks post images of one sort or another, who present art.  Over 100 of them at last count.  At any one time only a handful might be posting, so keeping up, or at least staying roughly abreast is doable.  The range of images that folks select is wide, one of  the charms of Tumblr for me, a chance to both get inside people’s heads as they choose images to post and an opportunity to see art that I wouldn’t have found on my own.  In that sense it’s a very eclectic museum.

(folder: architecture)

The addictive part for me is that I’m saving images, image after image, in those files I talked about reorganizing a while back.  Many, many art folders:  art contemporary, art Russia, art Symbolist, artist Blake, artist Matisse.  Cinema and television.  Natural world.  Cities.  War.  Travel.  So on.

Like a squirrel delighted with finding an abundance of acorns, I pluck these images up in my digital cheeks and carry them over to the small holes I’ve dug in my hard drives memory to cache them.  The folders have begun to grow fat with image after image.  Perhaps a hundred images or more in some instances.

(folder, art photography.  the pope’s apartment the night before his announcement about his retirement.)

My question is, why am I doing this?  Part of it is a desire to see again striking images or historically significant images or funny images or moving images.  That’s true, but mostly, like the squirrel, I dig the hole, then go on to dig another hole, often forgetting the one I dug before.  This is what oak trees count on.  How oak forests grow.  Of course, I know where all my folders are and I can open them whenever I want, but my point is that I’m more engaged in stuffing them full than utilizing them.

Utilizing them for what?  My first approach to answering this question will come on Thursday when I start reading the catalog for the Pre-Raphaelite show at the National Gallery.  I have a folder filled with Pre-Raphaelite art and will find images, I imagine, of most of the pieces in the show.  Perhaps I’ll curate them myself, re-organize them in different ways, trying to emphasize different aspects of this 19c phenomenon.  Perhaps I’ll use the images for comparison, for tracing the history of certain themes and techniques.  Or, I might just open the folder and look at them, one after the other, taking in their color, their subject matter.

(folder History England.  a 1920 poster for the tube.)

This is an activity only possible with the internet and large hard drives.  And a lot of time.  It feels important; that’s why I’m writing about it.  But why?  No idea.

Art and Culture, Asia, Feelings, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses

Percussive

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Imbolc                                                                           Valentine Moon

Woke up.  Turned on the phone.  Nothing.  Frozen.  Onto the internet.  Tried several fixes. Nothing.  Over to Verizon. No joy there either.  I’d had my HTC Thunderbolt for four years, so I opted to get a new phone, an HTC DNA.  Another Android phone, in the same lineage as the Thunderbolt so I already understood its basic use.  Not cheap, not outrageously expensive.  Did add one feature to the plan, text messaging.  Yes, after four years of owning a smartphone I’m catching up with today’s elementary school kids.

Later on Kate and I went into the McPhail Center, a place for music learning and performance, now located very near the new Guthrie and the Mill City Museum.  We were there for a performance by the Bakken Trio featuring the gamelan.  The gamelan is an Indonesian instrument, a percussion instrument played by several people.  It includes gongs, zithers, xylophones and upside down bronze pots that each have a tone and are struck with a mallet.

The gamelan’s music organizes around rhythm and melody, having as a particular feature density of tone achieved by the layering of one rhythm on top of another simultaneously.  There are no harmonics.

Joko, an Indonesian gamelan artist who teaches gamelan, has lived in the Twin Cities now for 18 years.  He said that a full gamelan orchestra is the largest percussive ensemble in the world.  (see image above for an Indonesian setting).  Gamelan concerts typically run 8 hours and gamelan musicians in Indonesia may play 8 hours during the day and another 8 at night.  Geez.

I wanted to see this because I’m fascinated by how other people do things.  In this case, music.

The concert itself featured quartet pieces by Ravel and Debussy, both influenced by a traveling program focused on Javanese culture, plus a work by a contemporary composer, Louis Harrison.  Impressed with the gamelan music and its difference from the Western tradition Debussy and Ravel both incorporated it.  Especially in pizzicato and in movements with narrow tonal ranges.

(Ravel)

Both Debussy and Ravel are in the romantic tradition and, for some reason I can’t explain, I don’t like romantic classical music.  I say for some reason because in painting and literature I find myself a romantic by nature and inclination.  There were some beautiful melodies, especially in the Ravel, his String Quartet in F Major.

The Harrison piece, though, Philemon and Baukis (for violin and gamelan), was wonderful.  It was airy and spacious, filled with the rapid changing of tempos typical of gamelan music. Harrison builds and plays the gamelan himself.  Philemon and Baukis, btw, is a story found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  It was the only piece in which the gamelan played.

Following the concert we ate at Sea Change.  We had a miserable experience there a few years back, but tonight was pleasant.  Then back home to the burbs.

Over the meal Kate and I discussed a possible (probable) move into the city at some point before infirmity strikes us so we can enjoy the city life again.  I’m hesitant about it, having spent 19 years adapting myself and my life to the exurbs, but aging has its own relentless pressures.

Aging, Art and Culture, Family, Third Phase

Wow. You’re Really Old Grandma

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Imbolc                                                               Valentine Moon

Over half done with the move.  I can feel the new shape already fitting round my shoulders as I work.  Volumes ready to hand.  Ideas jumping from one to another with just a scan.  A good feeling.

A bit achy but that seems to come with the 66th birthday.  Talked to grandson Gabe, 4 and  1/2 tonight.  He asked Kate how old she was.  68, she said.  Wow.  That’s really old Grandma.  Oh, yeah.  From the mouth’s of babes.

(Old Man with Beard, Rembrandt)

How old?  So old that we’re going to a meeting tomorrow to talk with a women who is, as her book title says, New at Being Old.  Us, too.  This is a Woolly Mammoth gathering and we’re all of a certain age.  Just which we’re not certain, but a certain age of that we’re sure.

When it comes to life, though, I feel gathered, present, neither old nor young, just here, ready to go, still.  Epictetus had a depressing way to think of it:   “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.”  Still, the soul or the self continues to grow and mature as the mansion begins to sag at the corners, a window or two popping out, new paint needed on the doors, tuck pointing here and there.

So, I feel as engaged, if not more, with my life and work as I have ever.

Art and Culture, Writing

Bibliomotion

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Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

The move continues.  The garden study has begun to take on its new shape, a place for art making and art scholarship.  One bookshelf is almost full with reference works like the Grove Dictionary of Art, Oxford Dictionary of Art, four different art history texts, a reference work on materials and techniques as well as my collection of texts on Asian art.

The other emptied shelf has other books, all my pre-Raphaelite books, texts on contemporary art, books devoted to individual artists:  Malevich, Munch, Titian, Picasso, Caravaggio.  Soon all the art books will be out of the writing study and the freed up space will allow the books have piled up on the floor over the last couple of years to finally find shelf space.  Oh blessed day.

Don’t think I’m gonna get to the files today.  This involves moving all my art object files to the horizontal file folder in the garden study after I remove all the files related to my history of Lake Superior into banker’s boxes for temporary storage.  Then, in the file cabinet here in the writing room, I’ll put all the files related to short stories, novels, markets, Latin plus material on the Enlightenment, Modernism, Romanticism and world religions, especially of the ancient variety.  These are the subjects that have held my attention over the years.

I don’t like doing this.  But, I’ll like the finished result.  A lot.  So.  Carry on.

Art and Culture, Our Land and Home, Writing

Simplify, Declutter, Reorganize

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Imbolc                                                                   Valentine Day

If these impulses have begun, can spring be far behind?

A day, two in fact, devoted to finishing the reorganization of my writing room and the garden study.  The garden study will become the central location for all of my art related books, files and folders.  The writing room will have material supportive of novels, short stories, marketing.  I’ve drug my feet on getting this done, focusing on the more immediate Latin or writing tasks I’ve had, but I need to get this work finished so I can settle into a long bout of revising and writing.

The urge to get cracking on the actual writing of Loki’s Children has begun to build and I’ve got all the Missing feedback from beta readers save one.  That means revising Missing will occupy large parts of my working time as well.  Need a space arranged to make that easy, both from a retrieval of information perspective and a non-cluttered, beautiful space perspective as well.

The question of what do with my passion for art post-MIA still occupies me.  I’ve come up with a few ideas, but none of them really click.  The trick may be that I really want to deepen my engagement with particular artworks, artists, styles, periods, movements.  That is, stop researching objects just enough to get six talking points, but go into historical and formal analysis with pieces, spending more focused time on fewer works.  That sounds like what I really want to accomplish now.

In a small way perhaps become an expert on something, like Symbolists, or pre-Raphaelites or contemporary art theory or Kandinsky or Beckmann.  This does help me think it through actually.  I’m yearning for a richer experience, an experience grounded in significant time with the art and its analysis.  How to do that?  I don’t know quite yet.

Art and Culture, GeekWorld

Images, Images Everywhere

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Imbolc                                                                      Cold Moon

Did I mention I transferred all my images, thousands literally, to this newer computer?  Did I mention that for some reason the pictures library here rearranged them in a seemingly random manner?  Requiring my image by image attention to slot them back into accessible folders.  Did I mention that?

Well, if I didn’t, I should have.  It’s taking me a very long time.  A great time suck and for some reason an almost obsessive need for order has taken over.  I need to have them all sorted and back in their places.  I’m not normally like this, at least I don’t think I am, but until this is done, everything else is on the back-burner.

Geez.

On the one hand sorting the images is a sort of psychometric. I and only I chose to save these specific images.  Why?  What do they mean?  Why does the same image appeal to me over and over?  What categories have I chosen as important?  Images of our gardens and our home seem right now to be the largest single collection, though the art collection is very big as are the various travel collections.  Then there’s all those shots of the grandkids.  Animals.  Climate and weather.  Cinema and television.  And on and on.

Some strange satisfaction in seeing the image, deciding on its classification, moving it and going on to the next image has me in its grip.  Some sort of librarian impulse.  Or taxonomist.

Odd.