Monthly Archives: March 2013

Art and Culture, Family

Marriage is jazz.

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Imbolc                                                             New (Bloodroot) Moon

Jazz at Tryg’s.  Wenso Ashby.   His trio was perfect for a celebration of our anniversary.  Marriage is jazz.  So much improvisation on old standards with the occasional solo performance that comes back, blends in, continues the melody.

This was a benefit for KBEM, the local jazz station that has hit the big time since its inception as an internet radio station.  Kevin Barnes, a KBEM DJ, made the interesting point that being a jazz station was incidental to the stations primary purpose, training young people in the various skills necessary for careers in radio and media.

In fact, this event was a fund raiser for the intern program.  Lucky for us that this educational organization happens to sponsor a damned good jazz station.

Asia

Serpentine

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Imbolc                                                                            Valentine Moon

 

Off to celebrate the year of the snake at Peking Garden.  Lots of seafood served at round tables.  Twirling the lazy susans and grabbing at morsels with wooden chopsticks.

Mary’s been at this for awhile.

Garden

Garden Notes for later

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Imbolc                                                                             Valentine Moon

sugar snap peas

Green Thumb Tip
Sow seeds outdoors 3-4 weeks before last spring frost or as soon as soil can be worked. Tamp soil firmly; keep bed moist until emergence. Germination is slow and uneven, so be patient. Using spun polyester row covers may improve germination rates.

Cucumber, A & C Pickling OG

Green Thumb Tip
Sow seeds outdoors in 12″ diameter hills after the last frost when soil is warm. Space hills 6′ apart in all directions. Can also be started indoors 2-4 weeks before the last frost for an earlier harvest. Cucumbers benefit from consistent moisture. Provide support for vines to save space.
± 1,100 seeds/oz
Latin

So, I Wandered, Weak and Weary

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Imbolc                                                            Valentine Moon

Latin this morning.  Woke up refreshed, ready to hit the streets of Rome.  Which I did.  Still making progress.  Greg and I have a long standing relationship now and he grasps where I’ve headed off the rails.  This time it was figuring out subjects of verbs.  Have to pay more attention to the nominative case.  But you already knew that, didn’t you?

The morning left me weary though so I’m looking forward to the nap.

My left shoulder has been giving me fits for weeks now, so much so that I’ve stopped my upper body resistance workouts to give it a rest.  I can’t lift anything at all heavy with my left hand because of it.  I’ll rest it until after my DC trip, two weeks from now, and if its still a problem, I’m headed to the doc.

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.

Family, Travel

Saudi Arabia

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Imbolc                                                       Valentine Moon

Saudi Arabia.  Mark has been there for well over a year, almost 2, so the day-to-day scene comes more and more into focus, even for me, 8,000 miles away.  Perhaps the oddest piece of information so far concerns postal service.  Addresses don’t work in Saudi Arabia.  To this northern European mind, used to numbered homes and buildings, named streets and precisely divided zip codes this data fails to process.  So much so that we insisted (I insisted) on sending Mark a package for Christmas to his school.  Well, it hasn’t arrived quite yet.

Apparently the only solution to this problem is to use Fedex or DHS.  Which begs the question of how they find a place, but they must have some kind of system.  So, next time we send Mark a picture of Gertie and a book on the geo-political affairs of Saudi Arabia, it’ll go out Fedex.

Banking, too, has its peculiarities.  You can’t get a bank account without an iqama, sort of a work visa, and Mark’s school has not been able to arrange iqamas for their first year employees.  This is Mark’s first year working in Riyadh.  An iqama is roughly equivalent to a green card in the U.S.  Without it Mark has to go on a familiar routine for expats in many countries, a visa run.  On a visa run you leave the country where you live, stay away a few days, then re-enter, starting the visa process again, usually for a period of 90 or 180 days.

Mark also reports that a few students watch jihadi videos and execution videos in his class. His afternoon classes have to stop for the afternoon prayer, then start up again.  The priorities of other cultures, which seem obvious to them, often seem odd or at least unexpected to outsiders.  Mark seems to have adjusted very well to the differences between his U.S. acculturation and the Saudi’s.

 

 

Great Wheel, Weather +Climate

Seasonal Fulcrum

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Imbolc                                                                      Valentine Moon

Brilliant.  New snow, a sun climbing the heavens, reaching for summer.  That hope for release from a long winter.  A space shuttle ride to the green of spring after 5 months of death and decay.  Yes, I love winter.  I love the snow, the cold, the sense of enclosure, the lengthening nights.  And, yes, I love spring.  Bloodroot, daffodils, new leaves of green.  Birds and dogs and kids and all the blooming buzzing confusion. (yes, william james)

This point, right now, is like the fulcrum of a seasonal teeter-totter as the cold of winter still sits dense and heavy on its end, holding spring up high, faraway from the ground.  Spring, unlike other strategies in such a situation (you know, piling on more kids or calling for mom and dad), simply smiles on winter until winter lets up, first balancing the long board, then letting spring’s end come all the way down to the ground.

There is an energy that pours itself into the bones as these seasonal changes come, as if the body wants to merge with the onrushing transformation.  Bones feel lighter now.  Smiles come a bit more often. Toes want to be stood upon. Shoulders no longer cry for more sweater, more coat, more scarf.  Instead they want to be open and warmed.

No.  It’s not yet.  Not yet.  But I can see winter’s resolve beginning to melt and spring’s end of the teeter-totter slowing beginning to inch its way up.

Aging, Dreams, Family, Third Phase, Writing

Legacy

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Imbolc                                                            Valentine Moon

Writing.  Learning about the craft 20 years after devoting myself to it.  Yes, I admit it.  Kate was right.  Though I don’t recall, she says she urged me to go to the Loft way back, back in the days after I left the Presbytery.  Now I am.  To learn about publishing and about serious revision.  She’s often more clear about my vocation than I am.  Strange, but true.

The third phase continues to shimmer in front of me, a veiled space not yet known, the part of life that lies on boundary with the undiscovered country which doubles its resonance as if a great bronze tocsin tolls; though still faraway, its sound grows stronger with each passing day.

So. Legacy, then.  What will remain of mine when I cross the veil and enter that other world?  Of course there will be the vague collation of memories in children and grand-children, the sort of hazy recollection that fades with each passing generation.  Of course. There will be, too, the even gauzier remnants of actions taken:  those apartments and houses on the West Bank, a strengthened legislative program at the Sierra Club, work for non-profits and affordable housing through various groups, but in these my print lies barely visible, as it should be, but it means that connection will soon be lost.  If it has not been lost already.

Where I have most hope lies in the words I have written, like my father before me.  No wonder then that as the third phase beckons and the life of the past recedes writing becomes more important.  There is a sense in which legacy is a thing of vanity only and in that regard insignificant, after all most of us travel that last ancientrail unknown soon after we have set out.  There is, though, another sense in which legacy matters because it matters; that is, the legacy continues to entertain, to provoke, to evoke, to engage not in the world of the hereafter but in the world that is here after we are.

It is to this sort of legacy that I aspire and its persistence through time will depend on the quality of the work and thought I bring to it.  I know it seems perverse from some perspectives but I do not care about my legacy while I live.  Fame or money or recognition do not matter.  Only the work.  If any of them would come, I would choose money for the freedom it would give Kate and me to travel.  Recognition matters to me only as affirmation of labor’s worth.  But I value my work myself, so it is not needed.

 

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.