Category Archives: Art and Culture

Art and Culture, Asia

Tours

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Samhain                                    Waning Harvest Moon

So.   Two very fun tours.  The kids were great.  Excited, eager to see the next object, came prepared from their work with Mr. Bowman.  It was a treat to take them through the museum.  The interior design students and their teacher were, equally, excited and eager though in a more adult, subdued way.  We talked about wabi-sabi as an aesthetic, the tea ceremony, Taoism and Confucianism, ancestor veneration, bridle joints, huang hua li wood, Ming dynasty folding chairs and we even tacked on a sort of overview of the African galleries.  Both groups seemed happy and cheerful and I felt appreciated.  A good morning.

Now.  Tired.  Nap.

Art and Culture

Tours Today

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Samhain                                                  Waning Harvest Moon

Cooler here today.  Into the MIA this morning, then back home.  Tomorrow, more election analysis and Latin.  Over the weekend, put up hardware cloth around the fruit trees, harvest more leeks and make some more pot pies, prepare the bee colonies for winter.  Miscellaneous other matters.  Chapter 23 in Wheelock.  More Ovid.  That sort of thing.

Haven’t heard from my boy lately, but I know he’s alive because he posts to Facebook.

Art and Culture, Asia, Humanities

A Juggler of Ancient Words

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Samhain                                                 Waning Harvest Moon

Today was a glorious day with puffy clouds, clear blue sky and temps in the high 50’s.  Instead of wandering through the woods I spent it trying to get outside Ovid’s Latin.  This is fun, a lot of fun, but it takes such concentration, holding words in the mind while spinning alternative translations, alternative parts of speech, taking one and putting it on a stick, then another, on another stick, and another on the right foot, all spinning, twisting, trying to come together or crash to the floor.  That’s what it’s like for me right now. I presume at some point it becomes less arduous; it must.  A juggler of ancient words.  At least for today.

Tomorrow I’m back in a comfort zone with two Asia tours, one for 2nd and 3rd graders on a very specific mission, and a second with interior design students from the Arts Institute Internationale in Minneapolis.  I haven’t conducted tours for many kids of late; I think folks see me working with adults, with college students, that sort of thing, but I enjoy the kids, especially these ages, their energy, their enthusiasm, their fresh eyes.  With the interior design students I plan to visit all four period rooms in Japan and China, plus look at the tea wares, the Chinese furniture, in particular the folding chair and see the blown out roof technique in Japanese painting.

Art has so many facets.  It touches culture, spirituality, beauty, daring, courage, hope, despair, the full range of emotions and the most complicated of intellectual puzzles like perspective, color and form, all done in a range of materials that seems to have no point of exhaustion.  Then, add the human interaction with art, the relationship between object and viewer, and perspective becomes a prism spinning, never stopping, reflecting.

Art and Culture, Garden

Planting and Reaping

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Fall                                            Waning Harvest Moon

The last forty bulbs, a monet tulip collection, have gone in the ground.   I planted a couple of hundred daffodil and tulips at various spots in the orchard, which we see from the table while eating breakfast.  The others, more daffodils and tulips along with a bunch of new lilies, went into the tiered beds off our patio.  Spring color has such an invigorating effect after winter.

It was more hassle, but I went ahead and amended the sandy orchard soil where I planted the monet tulips.  Without the composted manure/top soil mixture, the sandy soil would not support these tulips for long, especially since most tulips are biennials at best in our garden.

With all the bulbs and corms put to bed, I went to work taking out all the remaining root crops:  onions, beets and carrots.  We had a large number of each, enough to add to our stores for the coming winter.  I also picked four big leeks since I plan to reprise my leek based chicken pot pies.  Over the next week I’ll have to pull the remainder of the leeks and make something with them.  The last butternut squash came in as well.

With the exception of putting the bees up for the winter the only remaining necessary garden chore will be mulching once the ground freezes.  I have oak leaves and still hold out hope that I can find actual bales of straw somewhere.

Aging, Art and Culture, Friends

Representative

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Fall                                                     Waxing Harvest Moon

Spent much of the day with stars in my eyes.  Literally.  After those damned dilating drops at the ophthalmologist.  However, my pressures are still below glaucoma level and the photographs of my retina show insignificant change.  The technician photographing my retinas kept saying, “Watch the green dot.  Your eye’s moving.  Watch the green dot.”  Well, geez.  I thought I was doing a damned good job of keeping my eye from doing its normal task, checking out those flashing lights to the left.  Apparently not good enough.  Anyhow.

Over to Cafe Ena, a Latin fusion restaurant, at the intersection of 46th and Grand for lunch with the docent outing crew.  I had mofongoed Yucca.  This involves pounding and cooking it in some way according to our waiter.

After lunch I walked with Allison and Jane MacKenzie from the Cafe to the Weinstein gallery.  Martin Weinstein, the gallery owner, introduced the current show of Robert Mapplethorpe, Alec Sloth and August Sanders portraits.  He represents Alec, a local boy now part of Magnum, and Robert Mapplethorpe’s estate.

Curious about the business side of gallery work, I asked Martin how representing an artist worked.  Turns out he ships art, packing and insuring it, both incoming and outgoing.  He frames all the pieces or arranges for them to be mounted.  He manages the three buildings that constitute his modest, spare gallery space, pays a woman to assist in the complex logistics of the business.  He also collaborates with museums to mount shows of his artists, mostly on his nickel.  In addition he mounts several shows a year with all the attendant costs, including a reception with wine and cheese, plus boarding and expenses for the artist.  This is all sunk cost, paid out long before any commissions come in from sales.

It is, he emphasized, “A very stressful business.  Always this coming, that going.”  Martin is a tall, slightly stooped man with a shock of white hair and round architect type glasses, thick ones.

The photographs were elegant, Martin was entertaining and there was a good turn out.  A fine afternoon.  Thanks, Allison.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

The Limits of Rationality

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Fall                                           Waxing Harvest Moon

Gave Liberal II this morning.  Lot of conversation, a little consternation.  Best piece was a conversation with Ian Boswell, the music director.  We discussed the limits of rationality and the integration of reason and soulfulness that great music represents.  He pointed to the late sonatas of Beethoven.  This has given me food for thought for Liberal III:  The Future.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality

Questioning the Questioners

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Fall                                          Waxing Harvest Moon

An idea keeps nudging its way forward and I want to get just a bit of it on paper, or in print, or bytes.

The Future of Liberal Thought.  Is equivalent to the struggle over the last century and especially since WWII to define what art is.  That is, a shaking of the foundation, eliminating beauty and traditional forms like painting and sculpture, at least as they had been perceived, to run out in the desert of unknowing.  Saving art by killing it.  If you meet the artist on the road, kill him.

The paintings that capture this notion for me are those of Mark Rothko.  Compare this piece to the Mannerist, Baroque and Neo-Classical works.  Is it of the same tradition?  Does it have the same aim, the same desire?  What of the artist?  What was he thinking?  Or, was he thinking at all?

Just so.  Consider.  The Holocaust.  The Armenian genocide.  WWI.  WWII.  Korea.  Vietnam.  The Great Depression.  Mass starvation, drought, despair.  The cold war.  The rise and fall of the United Soviet Socialist Republic.  Quantum mechanics.  Relativity.  Godel.  Wittgenstein.  The decoding of the human genome.  The discovery of planets in other solar systems.  Manned flight to the moon.  Men and women shuttling regularly between earth and the heavens.

The death of God.

Well.  How do we approach the questions of meaning, the questions often called religious questions?  How do we approach them in light of scientific, cultural, political and economic changes?  Are these changes so momentous that they demand a break with our religious past, a break similar (the same?) in kind to the radical artistic movements of the 20th century?  I think so.

Anyhow, this is where I’m headed.  More.  Later.

Art and Culture, Hydroponics, Letters, Literature, US History, World History, Writing

Humanities

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Fall                                   Waxing Harvest Moon

With Latin, the Baroque and a sermon on the future of liberal thought all coming up this week and the next, plus the horticultural fall chores:  plant bulbs, clean up, harvest the last of the vegetable crop and care for the bees, I react strongly to the recent closing down of humanities classes in SUNY.

There is hope, though, since the humanities are academic disciplines that can be done at home with little discernible drop in quality.  Yes, there’s the problem of training the next generation in how to do the work at home.  It may be time for the disintermediation of the University’s original core curriculum, putting it on the web and in personal relationships, mentoring.  It may be time for Western culture to imitate the Chinese literati, the Mandarin bureaucrats who ran the country while painting, writing poetry, playing the Qin, doing calligraphy and focusing on the Tao.

Let’s get a dialogue going about how we can preserve the humanities one classic at a time, one work of fine art at a time, one poem at a time, one language at a time, one faith tradition at a time.  Like the Great Work, creating a benign human presence on the earth, we must also labor to produce a humane human presence.  It is no easy task and one that requires facility in a number of areas:  literature, history, language, art history, the history of faith traditions.  We must not let the sacred deposit that reflects on our common life wither into dusts.

Perhaps we need a new renaissance, a new enlightenment, ones that focus no longer on the application of science and technology, but instead return to the big questions:  Why are we here?  What is justice?  What is beauty?  What is a nation?  Why do we fight?  Who was Ozymandias?  What is Baroque music?  How many administrators can dance on the head of the department of science?  What is life?  What does it mean to be human?

This is not an anti-science rant, science is fine; let’s not, however, throw out teaching the question askers of culture, the critics of public life, the dancers, painters and poets.  We need them, too, to know what to do with what science produces, in part, yes, but more to remind us that we have a past and that our big questions are similar and often the same as the big questions of that past.  That thought and that art helps us today.  Right now.

Art and Culture, Garden, Humanities

Feeling Rushed

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Fall                                              Waxing Harvest Moon

With Latin on Friday and my tour day on Thursday things can get a bit rushed.  I’m feeling a bit behind right now since my sententiae antiquae are not done and my translation of the reading remains.  The Baroque tour is done, however and I look forward to giving it twice tomorrow.  Tomorrow, too, is the Thaw exhibition lecture.

Not sure when I’m going to get my sententiae done, especially the vexed English to Latin, maybe late tomorrow night, just like real school.  Over the weekend it’ll be bulbs, bulbs and the first draft of the Future of Liberal Thought.