Category Archives: Art and Culture

Aging, Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, Writing

Creating Self

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Spring                                                              Bee Hiving Moon

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” by George Bernard Shaw

Later today, beets blood, bull and golden and carrots, Nantes and one lone blueberry to replace a dead plant.  I think about it, this planting and nourishing, watching and waiting, then harvesting and preserving and eating, and I feel a part of my life being created.  This part gets its hands dirty, relishes the seasons and their graces, their vagaries.  This part looks at shades of green, knows this most important color as a friend and ally.

Another part, this one quiet and inward, wanders the halls of art museums, galleries, image collections on the internet and in books. Looking.  Seeing.  No dirty hands here.  Visual contact.  Delight in a curve, a color, an image, a remaking of tradition, new ways of perceiving.  This one knows the spread of art from Chauvet Caves to MOMA and delights in each creative moment.

Then the father.  And husband.  The family guy.  Cousins, aunts, uncles.  Grandpop.  One in a line.  A link between that great one-celled ancestor and the transformation of our species that is yet to come.  Love not abstract but concrete and timeless.  Walking with children and their children, walking on toward some unknown future.  Together.  That’s a part.

A noisy chunk, this one involved in struggle, voicing the cries of the poor, the victims, Continue reading Creating Self →

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Narratives With Depth and Power

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Spring                                                           Bee Hiving Moon

Here is why I think the ironically evangelical atheists have it wrong.

Today is Good Friday (though I’m not clear how it ever got that name), the day Christians commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth.  It’s also, this year, the first night of pesach, the night Jews celebrate the angel of death passing over the first born of Jewish households enslaved in Egypt.

No matter the metaphysics you claim, no matter the beliefs you hold, no matter the faith you embrace these are powerful, heart deep and deeper stories.  They are narratives you can build a life upon.  And millions, hundreds of millions have.

Take a working class man, a man who earns his living with his hands, let’s say a Toyota mechanic.  Imagine him struck dumb one night with the power of love.  So struck that he leaves the garage behind and goes forth into the countryside and into the cities claiming that before anything else we have to love one another.

Imagine, further, that he gets a following, a few at first, maybe 12, then a few more, Continue reading Narratives With Depth and Power →

Art and Culture

A Better Tour

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Spring                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

Downer tour last week with Augsburg students and a professor.  My fault, still a downer.  But.  Leave it to elementary kids to brighten a day.  Today I had two tours with third graders.  Fun.  Honest.  Talkative.

(Ashurnarsipal II, King of Assyria and builder of the palace at Nimrud. Image courtesy of the British Museum)

Including a brief span of time when 8 members of the group and I got separated from the chaperons.  That left me with 8 9-year olds suddenly free of known adult supervision and in a brand new space!  Oh, boy.  Good thing I’m a dad.  We had fun though it was a little chaotic.  Then we were found and things were easier again.

This is an age where kids raise their hands, open their mouths, hesitate and say, “Oh, I forgot.”

One 9-year old girl took out her hair band and practiced throwing her hair around in front of the Nocturne Radio, basically a large circular blue mirror in Art Moderne.  Her name was Emma.  I would say watch out for Emma.  Probably starting right now.

Had two hours between tours which makes for a long day.  Had lunch and worked for 45 minutes on the Great Scanning Project.  Slow and steady.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Reimagining Faith: The Chauvet Cave Art

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Spring                                                            Bee Hiving Moon

32,000 years ago.  In Europe.  When the Alps had glaciers 9,000 feet thick, in a valley in what is now France, in a cave concealed by an ancient rock slide, these astonishing works remain, a galleries of ancient art, a museum with no light, no movable images and nothing between us and the artists who worked here but time.  These are the oldest works of art.  Period.  And their lines flow from one place to the next, moving with the grace of an angel in flight, creating forms with ease, with economy of line.

Werner Herzog makes strange and wonderful films.  He finds human narratives in fascinating places.  That the French allowed him to film Chauvet testifies to his reputation and he only enhances it with this work.

He interviewed a man, I didn’t get his name or profession, who said to understand the photograph below there are two attributes of life then that could help make sense of it.  The first he said is fluidity.  That is, trees talk, rocks talk, entities are not fixed, they are fluid, one can change into the other, so a woman can become a river, a tree can become a man.  The second is permeability, the forms are not fixed, a woman might have the head of a bull, or a horse the head and upper body of a human.

He suggests, and it certainly makes sense to me, that this drawing from Chauvet Cave illustrates exactly that first example of permeability.  It doesn’t take much to get to Picasso’s Minotaurs or the Labyrinth in Knossos.  Or, Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Imagine living in a world where life, sentience, spirit embedded itself in everything.  More, image a place where the boundaries of your form and your life were not firm, where the boundary between this place and the Other World seemed always thin.  More, imagine lions with the head and forearms of a cave bear.  Or, a woman turned into a tree by a stream.  A hunter turned into a stag and eaten by his own dogs.

This is a world where neither faith nor belief are necessary because the world is as it is.  Magical.  Changeable.  Wonderful.  Horrifying.  Unpredictable.  Just imagine.

 

Art and Culture

A long day

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Spring                                                          Bee Hiving Moon

Coulda done better this am.  Professor went along with my group for the tour of European art.  She wanted to show them things and I wanted to show them things.  Hmmm.  If I could have enlisted her, probably better, but I wasn’t up to it today.  Why?  Dunna know.

Good part is that I learned a lot in the prep.

Ode and I went through the sports show and had lunch.  Enjoyed the time with him.

Scanned for a while afterwards, until 3pm.  Glad I had a reasonable stop time today.  Will take a while.

 

Art and Culture, Commentary on the news, Humanities, Politics, Weather +Climate

Our Body, Our Politic

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Spring                                                        Bee Hiving Moon

OK, I admit it.  I got suckered in by that warm weather.  Now I miss it.  So, sue me.  Even so, I still prefer the usual seasonal transition, but if you’re gonna make a change at least stick with it for the duration.

Interesting art day today.  College modern history class this morning going through art developments from 1880-1930. I’m ready and looking forward to it.  Then, at 11:15, I meet Ode in the Sports Show, walk through it with him and afterward have lunch.  The Great Scanning Project from 1:00 or so until 3:00 or so.

Saw the Supreme Court may strike down the Health Care Law.  If they do, probably in the interest of limiting the power of government.  Our polity demands a tension between the liberty and freedom of the individual and notions of fairness and equity in the nation at large.

A strong, stubborn part of me recognizes liberty and freedom as essential to a good, full life.  Another, also dominant, part reacts viscerally to a society that tips the scales against the poor.  That puts a thumb on the balance.  Discrimination, out right bigotry has broad, systemic power.  And that hurts me when I see it.

Our country, this rich country, does not need to withhold from its citizens.  We can share while maintaining our wide zone of individual liberty.  I know we can.  Look at how much we shared as a nation to turn back Hitler and Japan.  Look at the dramatic, substantive changes since the Civil Rights Act.  We’re better as a whole than the limited vision of a few.

No matter where you stand in terms of faith the West’s great religions insist on equitable and just treatment of the poor, of women and children.  Surely we can agree on that, at least.

 

 

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Humanities, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Step Outside

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Spring                                                    Bee Hiving Moon

Boy, have you caught the sliver moon with Venus above it and Jupiter below?  Soon there will be tulips and crocus and snow drops.  The magnolia already lights up our patio.  A soft torch of white burning quietly.  Round Lake just a quarter mile from our house looks great right at sunset and in the dark with stars and the moon reflecting in it.

The climate may be playing havoc with the seasons but the inescapable beauty of the natural world remains.

Keats may have stretched it a bit, but not too far.  Truth is beauty.

The good news here is that no .5%’er will ever corner the market on sliver moons or magnolia blossoms or reflections in that pond near your house.  These, the original art works, the masterpieces of our everyday world, belong to the commons.  All we have to do is step outside.

Art and Culture

An American Tour

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Spring                                             New Bee Hiving Moon

Preparing an American History tour, from the earliest inhabitants through the Civil War.  A more interesting assignment that I had imagined.  My oldest object will be the birdstone, an atlatl weight made during the Archaic period of the Woodlands culture in what is now Ohio.  That puts it well back in the 4,000 year old category.  Beautiful, simple, abstract and made with a real feel for the stone, it is an object that could have been made yesterday by a skilled contemporary artist.

I’m also including a memorial screen from the Ijaw people who lived in and on the Niger River Delta on the west coast of Africa.  These screens, of which this is the only example in the US, commemorate the head of Ijaw trading houses.  These trading houses began exchanges with Portuguese and Dutch merchants in the late 15th century. They rivaled in wealth the European merchant princes of the time.

Why are they on an American history tour?  They offered gold, ivory and slaves for European goods.  The slave trade began long before the Europeans arrived.

A Dakota honor shirt, a Haida pipe (non-functional) carved of argillite for sale to whalers, the Gilbert Stuart George Washington, the Charleston room (based on wealth created by slave managers and slave labor in the Lowlands), the trompe l’oeil piece, Reminiscences, a wonderful crazy pot made by the Anna Pottery that features Jefferson Davis trying to escape northern troops while dressed as a woman, the view of Ft. Snelling with the Dakota encampment and Fournier’s soulful depiction of a trading ship on Lake Superior in the late 19th century complete the tour.

And that’s what I did with my Wednesday morning.

Feeling better today and I have no idea why.  Weird.

 

 

Art and Culture

The Great Scanning Project

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Imbolc                                                      Woodpecker Moon

A long ambit today, over to Highway 169 to Crystal, pick up the subwoofer, all fixed now, then thru Crystal and into Robbinsdale on Hennepin 9.  These are both older burbs with businesses along this highway that look of late 40’s, early 50’s vintage.  Some brick, none uniform as is the rage today.  Small businesses like Dan’s, a few clinics,  some gas stations.

Then onto 100 South to 394 and into Minneapolis.  At the museum I wandered through our various American collections, finding objects related to the diverse history of North America, especially the non-European part of that history.  There’s an interesting range of stuff, especially when the view is Civil War backwards.  We have several pieces from the 11th and 12th centuries, one, an atlatl that is even older.

After that we had our meeting on the Great Scanning Project.  The meeting was interminable due to lack of organization.  Sigh.  But we finished and I went back to look at some other American pieces.  I just remembered as I wrote this that there is the George W. portrait and the Charleston room and the Paul Revere silver, too.

Back home.