Category Archives: Art and Culture

Art and Culture, Cooking, Humanities

A lot today

Leave a comment

Spring                                  Awakening Moon

Rain last night.  Thanks to all you who offered a faith tradition appropriate rain whatever.  It worked!  That means the onion sets I planted have a nice present in their new home and the garlic and parsnip received encouragement.

Since it was a wet, cool morning, I did just what I said I would, sat in my study and worked on Chapter 12 of Wheelock, the Perfect Active System for all conjugations.  Better than it sounds.

At 11:30 I drove into the art institute for a walk through of the ArtRemix exhibit.  More later when I’m not tired and I’ve had a chance to process what I’ve learned.

Back home to Andover, in bed, slept for an hour, then back in the truck with Kate and out to the last of Brenda Langston’s course on healthy eating, healthy living.  Good stuff.

Art and Culture, Garden, Myth and Story

Burn your bag, boy?

Leave a comment

Spring                                          Awakening Moon

Two stories from the world around us.

Michele Yates, a docent colleague, toured a group of second graders last week.  At the James Ensor expressionist piece, “Intrigue”, a little boy raised his hand, “Look, you can see the paint.  It’s still wet.”  Turns out this young art connoisseur believed we had a basement filled with producers of art, crankin’em out every so often for the delight of the viewing public.  A time when it would have been delightful to be inside his mind and see the imagined works underneath the museum.  I see trolls and gnomes and dwarfs hard at work.  How about you?

(Frejya and the dwarfs)

An l.e.d. sign for onion sets drew me off  Highway 35E and put to Beisswinger’s Hardware Store.  Beisswinger’s is a great old style hardware store with lots and lots of stuff cared for by employees who actually know how to use it all.  When I took my brown sacks of red, yellow and white onion sets inside, it occurred to me that I still need a fence tester for our electric fence; the high voltage pulse knocks out ordinary voltmeters.  I know.  I did it.

Anyhow, he’d never heard of one, but agreed to look it up.  Both of us were surprised when he found not one, but two.  On the way to the electric fence tester aisle, he started this story exactly like this:

“So, Charlie Brown and I were in New Hampshire on my uncle’s farm.  He’s an old guy, over 70, but wiry.  We’re going out hunting [I’m thinking this is a joke, so I’m preparing to laugh whether it’s funny or not.  He seems like a nice guy.] and the old man scrambles over an electric fence.  Charlie Brown steps over it, but gets a jolt.”  In his red Beisswinger store shirt, this guy seems believable.  He goes on,  “The old man hollers back over his shoulder, ‘Burn your bag, boy?”

I had students from Eau Claire and New York Mills today.  Both groups were fun, interested and engaged.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Weather +Climate

PostModern? Oh, Yeah? Prove it.

Leave a comment

Spring                                              Awakening Moon

It’s been a long, long dry spell.  We’ve had no appreciable rain or snow since ()  and the garden has begun to show it.  The daffodils have come up a bit stunted, many still in the ground would have popped long ago if they had the moisture.  Our irrigation system doesn’t start up until late April.  I may give’em a call and see if we can move it up, but that means I have to fix the netaphim Rigel and Vega chewed up at the end of last growing season.  Gotta be done anyhow.

Until Now has me cranked up into steep learning curve mode.  I’ve had the first two lectures, another one comes up next week as do walk-throughs for Art Remix and Until Now.  Before then I have to get my head into the new artists and the new art, read a good bit.  Look at the art.  Read some more.  Write a little. Peck a little.  This should be fun, a new universe of art and artists to explore, many of them working with enlightenment ideas, especially the idea of the modern and the so-called post-modern.

That’s another rabbit hole I’m going to drop into again.  Post-modernism.  I started getting into when I did my D. Min. thesis back in 1990.  Since then, I’ve read a good deal about post-modernism.  The content of the term still eludes me.  Perversely, it has made me very interested in modernism.  That happened because I decided I needed to understand modernism to understand what folks claim about post-modernism.  Seems logical, but I’ve begun to suspect that post-modernism is camouflage for other ideas, especially an assault on the nature of truth claims.  Bet you can’t wait to find out what I learn.

Into the MIA today for two tours, both highlights.  I did a highlights collection of things I already know well because this was a busy week for me.  Besides, I’m putting my energy now into the Until Now/Art Remix.

Art and Culture, Family, Health

And Then Again

Leave a comment

Spring                                     Awakening Moon

OK.  Turns out I had read the numbers right.  No sudden shower of wealth.  No happy Buddha of good fortune.  Also, no tears.  We have enough, more than most.  We have each other, family, the dogs, our property, our friends, our creative work.  And our Latin.  None of that changes, so the amount of money is just what it is.  Still, that brief interlude when we thought we had an unexpected windfall made us realize that we could absorb any amount of extra cash.  Big surprise there, eh?

In for my 6 month eye exam.  A space invaders day with visual field dots and the clicker.  The machine thought I pressed the button too frequently, but I just followed the tech’s suggestion to press the clicker when I thought I saw something.  My pressures are normal, my nerve unchanged.  Jane West, my eye doc, said, “Someone else might look at this and say its physiologic.”  How’s that?  “That you were just born with unusual nerves.  Still, they’re round and they stay the same from photograph to photograph.”  They took portraits of my retina’s every once in a while.  Physiologic, eh?  Explains a lot.

Home.  Reread my e-mails.  Oops.  Education for an exhibition I’m touring, Until Now.  So, brief nap, back in the car, back into the city.  I spent an hour after the education wandering the museum, looking at the Art Remix objects.  I have a Remix tour on May 6th.

I also checked out two print shows, The Wild Things and Old Testament prints.  These are well worth catching.  Prints are the ephemerals of the museum, their sensitivity to light means their exhibition has limits.  They can’t be exposed to even dull light for very long.  So they come up, like daffodils, hang out for a brief time, then they’re gone, often not to be seen again for years.

Kate went to see the back surgeon today.  He thinks her right hip pain may well respond to a hip replacement.  I hope so.  This has gotten pretty bad, too.  It’s not as bad as it was, but before was really bad.  More tests.  More doctor’s appointments.  Still, perhaps a little hope at the end of the tunnel.

Aging, Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

En-Theos

Leave a comment

Spring                                      Awakening Moon

If you know me, you know I have enthusiasms.  Two or three years in astronomy.  Two years of close study of Jungian thought.    9 years of touring and two and a half years of education in art history.  A full years home study course in horticulture.  We’re now in our third year of converting our property to a permaculture environment for vegetables, fruits and nuts.  The most recent instance, though one of long standing in my thoughts, is Latin.

As I finished my first four lines of the Metamorphoses the other day, it struck me that art history and Latin suit me pretty well, better than politics and the church.  I said this out loud to Kate and she said, “Well, philosophy and anthropology were more masculine.”  I guess that’s true and I guess the same certainly goes for politics although that’s changed a lot since the 60’s.  The ministry is a more mushy profession gender wise, especially for liberal protestants, but since I always did politics and consulting, probably not so for me.

The thing is, I don’t think art history and Latin were options that were even visible to me.  It wasn’t, in other words, that I rejected them in favor of philosophy and anthropology.  Nothing much more to say about this than that I have them in my life now and I’m not about to let go.

I have wondered about political action, long my baseline activity, the self-authenticating act.  Has its time passed for me?  I’m not sure about that. Will take more thought.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Letters

A Long Journey’s First Step

Leave a comment

Spring                                                     Awakening Moon

The weather has turned cooler and the sky gray.

I’m proud to report that I have almost completed translating my first four lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  Of course, there are thousands of lines in the complete work and my translation is far from poetic, but this journey is underway.  When I feel a bit more comfortable with it, I’ll post it.  In fact, I’ll post the whole thing in progress on its own page.

Today is the birthday of cybermage, William Schmidt, ex-Jesuit and sheepshead connoisseur,  a combination of attributes that makes him in turn interesting, resourceful and a card shark.

For Mammoths reading this, I have added the Wandervogel entry to my webpage about Nick.

(Pygmalion by Gerome)

Among other top news items today:  Madonna laid a brick (in an African orphanage) and McNabb held up a Redskins jersey while Tiger was honest in a press conference and earned credit for it.   Meanwhile back in the real world health care reform continues to make news as does a 7.2 earthquake that struck southern California and drug cartels to the south.

I think I’m gonna go back to the first decade of the first millennium, no madonna there.  Well, ok.  The Madonna, but you know what I mean.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Letters, Poetry

Latin and Contemporary Art

Leave a comment

Spring                                                      Awakening Moon

Had our Latin session with Greg at noon today.  I asked him if he thought my trying to translate Ovid now would hurt my learning.  He said, no, go for it.  But.  Get a latin text with a commentary and work out your translation to your satisfaction before you compare it to someone else’s.  So, I went on Amazon and found a 2-volume latin text with commentary.  They are on their way.  I’m excited.  I know I’ve got a long way to go before I’m a competent translator, if I ever make it to that level, but I can punt away at it.  He said to expect frustration.  Oh, I do.

(from the Metamorphosis, Ulysses men turned into swine. 1591)

After that into the Art Institute for the first of two lectures on the upcoming spring show, Until Now.    The lecture was excellent.  Docent training leaves out huge chunks of the world’s artistic tradition with a necessary focus on the art history of objects in the museum’s collection, but the biggest lacuna was contemporary art. I found the guest curator’s lecture very informative, a good background for an aspect of art history in which I feel very weak.

Until Now is contemporary art in a large show and it combines with Art Remix which features museum contemporary works placed at provocative or evocative locations. David Ryan, curator of modern design, said years ago the museum would only purchase works of an artist who was dead.  This was to ensure that whatever work we purchased represented an important and/or mature example.  That policy ended a few years ago and the museum has begun collecting living artists.

We have a new contemporary art curator and her initial job was to figure out how contemporary art fits into the MIA’s mission as an encyclopedic collection.  At the MIA we can place contemporary work in context, the art historical context which informed and informs artists working especially since WWII.  The Art Remix is an attempt to draw on the museum’s historical examples and use them as conversation starters about contemporary art as it has evolved out of the older works and how the older works can be illuminated, seen in a different way when viewed through the lens of later artist’s work.

(a work by Kara Walker, African/American, 1998)

The last hour of the day was a conversation about the Art Remix.  I found Liz Armstrong’s rationale for the Remix strong though I felt this first effort was uneven.  Some of it is very provocative, like the photographic panels in the Korean collection and the TV Buddha, which features a bronze buddha watching television, a television screen filled with a video camera turned on the Buddha statue and especially the Chinese Ming dynasty chair carved from a single block of marble and placed in the Wu family reception hall.  The works put in the Egyptian and African galleries (not the Shonibare, which I love) are not as effective for me.

A day with a lot of learning.

Art and Culture, Bees, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

A Light Week Ahead

Leave a comment

Spring                                                    Waxing Awakening Moon

Out the door to the grocery store.  It must be Saturday.  Finished revising the presentation for tomorrow morning and I’ll post it later today.

Kate’s off at work, a now unusual Saturday for her.  She’s begun experiencing the old aches and pains, the ones from before the surgery that were brought on by too much physical effort over too long a time.  The good news is that when she slows down the aches and pains do, too.

I have a quiet week coming up. No legcom meeting since the Legislature is in recess and no tours on Friday.  I do have a night meeting on Monday with the Sierra Club, something called strategic communications, whatever that is.  I’ll find out.  The night after that I start a three evening course on healthy eating taught by Brenda Langston, former owner of Cafe Brenda.  This is yet another stab at the great goal of eating only as many calories as I need.  I’m looking forward to it.

The lighter week means I’ll have time to get in some work outside like cleaning up the yard outside the orchard and the vegetable garden.  It has a plethora of sticks, plastic objects, wire, fence posts that have been moved around over the course of the late fall, winter and early spring by Rigel and Vega.  They remain eager and energetic, digging deep holes here and there, running, jumping, barking, having a good doggie time.  But what a mess!

I also have to get some work done on the beehive, not a big deal but I need to check it and feed them.  Note to self:  use smoke and wear bee suit.  I also need to get the old machine shed completely out and prepped for its conversion to a honey house.  All that can happen while we wait for planting season to begin.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality

Why Is This Art?

Leave a comment

Spring                                       Waxing Awakening Moon

Two interesting tours with third graders this morning.  In the first tour two different kids asked why is this art questions?  One wanted to know why the George Morrison was art and the other wanted to know why a piece in the modern gallery, one with parallel lines on a white background qualified as art.  We had significant discussions on both pieces.  On the first we discussed Morrison’s fascination with horizon lines.  Could they see the horizon line?  Could they imagine a beach?  Yes?  Well, that can make it art.  On the second piece we had a long discussion about blank canvas and a canvas with parallel lines.  One boy offered that it looked like notebook paper.  I mentioned parallel lines.  Had they studied them?  Yes.  Do parallel lines ever meet?  No.  Might have something to do with this piece.

On both tours I took them to foot-in-the-door and suggested they might start thinking now about entering in 2020.  Plenty of time to prepare.  They found many things that interested them.  On the second tour when I told them Frank had only two tablespoons of ink on the  whole canvas, Annie, a small girl, said, “Yeah. Right.  If the tablespoon was this big.” spreading her hands wide.  I enjoyed their skepticism.

After that I settled into a familiar role as a future field instructor for a Unitarian student intern.  Church meetings have a tendency to be unfocused, like gangly children, going this way and that.  It was a feeling I had experienced often, but I have little patience for it now.  I’ll have a chance to have my own meetings with Leslie, the student, provided they ever get the details of their contract worked out.  Thank God I have no role in the details of that.

Off to home.  A nap.  Now some treadmill time.

Art and Culture, Asia

Awakening in the Dark

Leave a comment

Spring                                              Waxing Awakening Moon

Rolled down the car window–oops, anachronism.  Pushed the button which slid the window down–and the scent of moist earth rolled into the truck.  Peat moss mixed with new plant and freshly unfrozen water carried along by a light spring breeze.  Tonight the awakening moon continues to swell, move toward full, growing in synchronicity with the planet 250,000 miles away; its dance partner in this long running marathon.  We squeeze her, she pulls our waters and squeezes us.  A dancer and her consort.

The world for now, our part of the world, moves in darkness and I find the quiet soothing.  The night calms this exurban area down to peaceful.  Silence does not need to be sought; it comes to us as the hour moves past 9:00 pm or so.  If only for these dark hours, we have a hermetic isolation, nothing visible out the windows except stars and the moon.

The longer I study art history, mix with the objects at the MIA, the more I tend to see much of the world through the lens of art.  It’s not a matter of finding art that fits a moment or an idea; rather, it’s as if paintings or sculpture or movies or prints or masks rise up from the unconscious, suggest themselves as a way, a path into an experience.  Here on the website I often choose, usually choose, literal relationships but in day to day life the moments are more ephemeral, less one to one.

Let me see if I can think of an example.  A train whistle late at night may call to mind Honthorst’s “Denial of St. Peter.”  Perhaps it’s the association of a night scene and a sound transformed by being heard at night.  I don’t know.

This is hard, it doesn’t really happen exactly like that, it’s more suggestive, subliminal.  Evanescent. Like the dying tone of the train as it moves further away into the darkness.