Somewhere back in the mid 1970’s my mother decided to attend night classes at our local junior college. I encouraged this ambition in the hope (futile, as it turned out) that she would get it out of her system before I graduated high school, as I was not altogether thrilled at the idea of finally starting college only to find my mother already there. Since I had recently acquired (on the second try) a shiny new driver’s licence, it became my job to drive her the mile or so from our home to the campus a couple of nights a week.
When I was a little boy, I quickly learned to stay abreast of the list of dos and don’ts that my parents maintained: as in Socrates’ conception of virtue, the rules might evolve from one day to the next, but the requirement to observe them did not.
It has been pointed out to me that I seem to take a lot of pictures of flowers. Although there is no shortage of more active wildlife here in Winslow, I just don’t have the reflexes to get that perfect shot of a group of deer galloping away at thirty miles an hour, or a pileated woodpecker darting from tree to tree, or a fox or barred owl crossing my path an hour after sunset. So, yes, I photograph a lot of flowers. They don’t run away, they don’t bite, and they’re not likely to kick me in the head.
This weekend marks the traditional anniversary of the founding of Rome in 753 BC. Like so many historically important events, we know it happened, but the devil, it seems, is in the details.
Sometimes you just have to pay your money and get the hell out.
The world has been treated, over the last several days, to a somewhat embarrassing overlap between two of the world’s oldest professions: those of the Fighting Man and the Working Girl.
A group of Secret Service agents and associated military personnel have been removed from their duties pending the investigation of allegations that the men, part of a 200-member team visiting Cartagena, Colombia, in preparation for a visit by President Obama for the Summit of the Americas, hired prostitutes from a strip club and brought them back to their hotel.
An assemblage of a collage. It may be overkill. (“Pop Art: Homage to Richard Hamilton”, by Dave Holcomb.)
Despite two decades behind a computer (I’m old enough to remember Photoshop 1.0!) I still enjoy getting my hands dirty whenever I can with the kinds of art that don’t involve a mouse and a keyboard.
A big part of the appeal for me of non-digital art is the chemistry of it all: the paints and pigments, chalks and charcoals, glues and glazes. I do a lot of collage and assemblage1, not so much because I feel that I can express myself better with glue and wire than with paint, but because I get to play around with so many different types of stuff.
On the Mexican 200-peso note, in place of the usual frock-coated revolutionary leaders and be-feathered Aztec potentates, is a portrait of a woman, wearing the cowl of a nun.
She’s an attractive woman, but with a gaze that’s steady, even stern: she doesn’t look patient, or particularly warm, but her face is decorating a piece of currency, so you have to think she might be someone worth knowing.
That woman is Sor Juana, Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Hieronymite nun, and one of the greatest minds of the 17th century.
I do a lot of photography, but like many people with artistic pretensions I also enjoy working with other media from time to time.
I suppose my favorite plastic medium is assemblage, pulling together odds and ends to make a whole that is (hopefully) greater than the sum of its parts — a useful way, incidentally, to use up the bits of rusty metal and torn cardboard and odd pieces of broken glass that accumulate in my “stuff I might need someday” box out on the porch. I enjoy the purely mechanical aspect of attaching one thing to another, in ways that were never intended by the original manufacturer, to achieve an effect, or make a statement.
One hundred fifteen years ago today, in what is now the Ukraine, Dr Wilhelm Reich was born.
Dr Reich has interested me for many years, and I’ve considered him before as a topic for this blog, but I’ve always felt that he was just too large and complex a subject to squeeze into a few hundred words. You who are reading this, be aware that I’m barely scratching the surface of a vast and difficult story: Dr Reich may or may not have been a bit of a loon, but if he was crazy, it was a great and wonderful craziness.
Without the people, a house is just sticks and mud.
I suppose anyone who has ever spent part of his or her childhood anywhere in rural America has heard the story of Cry Baby Hollow.
I’ve heard the story several times, in several different places. Although in one case, the teller was from Mississippi and placed the tale in a bayou instead of a wooded ravine, the fundamentals are otherwise almost always the same: at some point in the indeterminate past, a young couple sets up housekeeping in a remote forest glade (or swamp hammock), and in the fullness of time the young woman has a child. The household basks for a while in the glow of pioneer Americana, brave, hard-working and happy. All too soon, however, usually within three or four years, some sort of disaster strikes and the parents are killed; in most versions I believe the mother is stricken ill and the father rushes off into the night for help, only to be killed in an accident en route, leaving the mother to die with no one by her side but the toddler. The child remains there, living off whatever he or she can find to eat in the cabin, until finally starving to death.
