POEM: Breakthrough

BREAKTHROUGH

Beware the perfidy of glass.

A lens of clarity offered to all

who choose to gaze,

But a fragile transparent downfall

For one who strikes instead of sees.

Noting, much too late,

Light is the one true partner.

Shining through the invisible pane,

All passes through, into and beyond

The whole remaining

illumined by yet more

Original stars joining in the splendor.

Snow in the Sahara Desert

Here's a web find.  Extraordinary photos of snow received in the Sahara Desert.

Books: "Off the Grid", by C.J. Box, Joe Pickett novel #16

Joe and Nate, the dual heroes of this long-running series, foil libertarian terrorists who plan to destroy the electrical grid, a dystopian scenario I haven't encountered yet in my leisure spy-thriller novel reading.

This plot broadens the more usual narrative scope of Joe Pickett-World.  It certainly calls up stereotypes about remote western locations where extreme libertarians attempt to carve out lifestyles free of the obligations of democratic citizenship. (Cliven Bundy remains free after a mistrial.) 

To my mind, Box seems to advocate for vigilante militia attempts to preserve civil liberties, but that's hanging a PC dismissal over an entertaining novel.  If anything, I'd say it's a bit chilling to think about the level of surveillance existing in the U.S., and equally troubling to think of quasi-fascist, covert attempts to control it.  

That said, this is an exciting read in which the characters confront the opposing rigors of remote western terrain and hi-tech danger.  This novel is really about why getting off the grid is really a futile, socially divisive and dangerous fantasy.

Fenner Basin & Cadiz, Inc: An Aquifer at Risk

Assembly Bill 1000, the California Desert Protection Act

Fenner Basin, a massive aquifer that holds between 17 million and 34 million acre-feet of water, about as much water as in Lake Mead.

the aquifer was replenishing was not, as Cadiz was claiming, 50,000 acre-feet per year (one acre-foot is roughly 325,851 gallons). It was more like 2,000 to 10,000. Since Cadiz's original plan called for a pipeline capable of transporting up to 150,000 acre-feet of water a year, it became clear to environmentalists that if Cadiz had its way the aquifer would be emptied out rather quickly.

Throughout the 2000s, Cadiz retrenched and reformulated its plan. Instead of selling to MWD, it would sell 50,000 to 75,000 acre-feet of water to smaller water agencies, including the Santa Margarita Water District, which serves 165,000 customers in Orange County 

Math Project:  How soon will the aquifer be dry?

Make a projection.

Fenner Basin has 20,000,000 acre feet
                                    45,000 (pump 40,000, 5,000 get resupplied

It will dry up in 444 years

17,000,000 acre feet
       45,000 per year

377 years

229 years

How many square miles of land will be ruined?

Rob Pruitt and Jack Early - Post Pop Conceptual

Pruitt describes his own work as “basically blown up versions of dining table craft projects... I’ve really enjoyed letting the world know that not everything is so mystified or so regulated to expertise—that you can make something really beautiful with a little ingenuity and some supplies from Michael’s.”<sup>[7] - Wikipedia


Pattern and Degradation Exhibition, 2010</sup>

the idea of pattern and design as a valiant but usually doomed attempt to impose some order and beauty on a random, chaotic world - NYT

Mountain Lions

I've lived near the Santa Monica Mountains, and in their canyons during most of my years in L.A. The sprawl of this odd city just crept into and through this east-west range and out onto the flats on the other side, then up the next range.

These roads are old and narrow, and the rough chaparral clings determinedly to the rocky hillsides.  Down in the gullies, crossing the freeways, ranging across the plateaus, the wildlife, equally determined, lives on.

Actually, though, we are among them, they are not around us.  We just don't understand that. 

The mountain lions are mighty predators, and range far and wide to survive.  Yesterday the owner of a dozen llamas which were attacked and eaten, stated in the L.A. Times,

"...the reality is no one will bother to apply for permits anymore.  Shoot, shovel, and shut up, that's what's coming."  He was complaining because a marauding puma will no longer automatically justify a kill permit.  

Non-lethal means must be employed first. Mr. Phillips alpacas were not properly fenced to protect them.   Volunteers from the Mountain Lion Foundation build them pens to shelter them from future predation.

Western Landscape Painters: George Carlson, Lon Chmiel,

George Carlson
I love the  grand sweep of the landscape, the 
careful observation of the geology of these dry western places, and the muted colors. The perspective adds to the drama of the vision, as if one climbed a mountain to see the view from the top.

Umatilla Peak

There Are Canyons

Wings of Snow

Song of the Earth

Wyoming Badlands

Len Chmiel
I have seen this artist at the Autry Museum for Western Art exhibit of western artists in other years, and I love discovering him again.  The brushstrokes are confident and revealing.

Abstrata

Sycamore Creek

Please do not disturb

Way Up There, Horse Heaven Hills, Idaho

Dean L. Jackson

Crowns of Zion

I've not seen this artist before.  His on-line work looks like Andrew Wyeth's, and I can't find much western landscape, but this is marvelous - a subtle low key image of magnificent Zion.

"Y is for Yesterday", by Sue Grafton, and the murder mystery genre

 “Y is for Yesterday” by Sue Grafton:  A commentary on

the problems of the murder mystery genre

My hold at the local library on this book arrived on the day I read that Sue Grafton had died at age 77 after struggling with cancer for two years.  One obituary described her as a “beloved” favorite.  So it is with reluctance and apology I write this mixed review of her novel, and use it as a model for the problem of the pop murder mystery genre.  

Mystery novels are not just a cottage industry, they proliferate well beyond the number of cottages in England and the U.S. combined. Perhaps it’s better terms a trailer park industry.  Our library recently had a Murder Mystery Trivia Night, hosted by about ten local crime novel writers.  I’ve now read two different authors with novels set in the wine country. I know a true-crime historian specialist, who appears on true crime TV shows.  I also personally know three people who’ve written and published them, with quite a bit of success.  And, I’m pleased to say, I’ve had many enjoyable reads. Maybe its just that I’m such a curmudgeon I enjoy nit-picking.  But if I see problems, and they can’t?  What’s that say? What problems, you say?

I stumble plenty:  plot logic, character inconsistencies and over-development,  an inclusion of descriptions which detract from the narrative.  No back story or too much, repetitive narratives, tedious exposition,  On the other hand, back story and authorial voice are quite fascinating, informed and funny.

Maybe because this is a movie town?  Write a novel, sell the screen rights.  In what I take to be an in joke included by Grafton, one of the characters in “Y is for Yesterday” is attempting to do just that.  Kinsey tries to befriend the sometimes antagonistic local newspaper reported with a suggestion to serialize this case for “Vanity Fair”.  

TV legal and cop series have polished me with pseudo-knowledge about legal and police procedure and jargon, the criminal mentality, and honed my already beady eye for plot mistakes and inconsistencies.

UCLA has run an extension course for aspiring mystery writers, and perhaps that has nurtured the genre, alone with the e-book and self-publishing industry.  How good can they all be?  

The stakes faced by these writers is quite high with all this and the excellence of murder classics hanging over them.  But the fascination of the “reveal” in a plot structure is a powerful motive to keep reading even a flawed book.

That said, Sue Grafton’s series is quite good, better than most and still worth reading.  What’s strong about “Y” is that after 24 books, there is no decay or exclusion of backstory and character  with Kinsey and her world, as has occurred in Michael Connelly and Lee Child’s novels.  And it’s set in 1989.  No high tech facilitates the criminal or law enforcement, though there is a fax machine.  

“Yesterday” concerns the murder of a teenage girl at prep school when her murderer gets out of jail eight years later.

Kinsey is hired by his rich parents after a blackmail demand is received. 

All those involved are still living in Santa Teresa, except Austin, the leader of the pack, who disappeared and is said to be living abroad, supported by wealthy parents.  Kinsey interviews everyone, but somehow Austin’s parents are conveniently absent, and no one has ever gone looking for them or him.  

The narrative shifts back and forth from present day to past, and from character to character.  This results in some repeated exposition without always revealing more plot structure.  Characters speak openly to Kinsey as she interviews them, instead of refusing outright, wising up, or lawyering up.  

That said, the characters’ psychologies and motives are very well developed, honed and clear, very human and sympathetic.  Some are funny, and Grafton’s dog and cat characters are integral parts of this book, although “Killer”, the dog in this story, would have had me calling Animal Control instead of befriending it as Kinsey is able to do.

 What’s strong and appealing about Kinsey is that she seems to be only the adult in room, and that’s a position to be envied.  She  handles people patiently and wisely, feels unentitled and earns her way, sustains her effort, and remains dominant.

A parallel event begun in past novels continues in Y,  as Ned Lowe continues in pursuit of Kinsey, intent on murdering her.  I’d like to think that the police would have provided more protection and vigilance than they do, since Kinsey has policemen buddies for whom she has provided many crime solutions.

So, yes, do read “Y is for Yesterday”, and enjoy the leisurely unfolding of the complex plot and, go easier on this book and its imaginative and clever author than I did.

Artist: Ruth Root

Ruth Root’s large scale geometric panels draw from the lineage of non-objective painting. Evoking reference to Piet Mondrian, Ellsworth Kelly, and Olivier Mosset, Root’s playfully orchestrated compositions engage with the fundamental principles of formalism while simultaneously interacting with contemporary modes of interpretation. 

Rendered on shaped, ultra-thin aluminium sheeting, Root’s paintings corrupt the idea of pre-fab form. Confined to the curvilinear borders of her canvas, Root’s componentized swatches of colour reveal an unorthodox organic quality transgressing the tradition of the grid as sigmoid fields, and allowing the seamless application of her paint to slightly bevel at the sharply cropped edges. Root’s paintings are often exhibited flush to the gallery walls, creating an allusion to decaled logotypes and an optical intervention with architectural space.

Though primarily concerned with the tautology of painting itself, Root is often inspired by the phenomenon of urban experience. Her bold industrial colours and aesthetically ordered geometries invoke cityscapes, product design, and 1960s technographics. The liminal quality of her paintings elicits dialogue with digitised media: the consummate flatness of her paintings condenses the illusions of solidity and space into virtual fields, compelling in their dynamic assertion and physically insubstantiality.   - from Sacchi Gallery artist profile

RR: I am such an appreciator of historical and contemporary paintings, and also colour. I am most familiar with the canon of painting, and within that canon there are just so many paintings that I find beautiful and spectacular. I really feel like I am a person who just loves those aspects more than anything else – more than reading or thinking about ideas. I love to look at handmade things and figure out how they are made, as well as how they function. I also want to think about why there is such a need for things to be made and looked at. I love to see how artists use colour and create such a joy from colour. It seems that the things that I now find beautiful are multiple, but I do love things that are complicated and simple at the same time. - Ruth Root quote from Aldrich Museum exhibit

Robert Motherwell - a long-time favorite, re-visited

I can't remember how I discovered Robert Motherwell, except that it was a long time ago, when I was learning about Abstract Expressionism and the New York School.  

He was a natural fit for me: I admired his writing, his sense of form and color, his use of collage, his worldly connections, and his ability to hold a creative and critical perspective, something like Meyer Schapiro.

I have also loved Kurt Schwitters, who also has an amazing sense of form; perhaps because I see Motherwell is connected to his invention of collage. 

Robert Motherwell, Redness of Red, State I, 1985

     Lithograph, Screenprint on Paper 24 × 16 in

The Obama Portraits: for-real artists paint them

Fascinating and well-chosen portrait artists to make the former president and first lady's portraits.  

Black artists celebrating identity

Stylized, Alex Katz backgrounds, decorative, haunting, Patrick Nagel?, advertising art,
Wiley reverses the decoration and places in behind the figure, not on the dress

Kehine Wiley, A New Republic

Pattern and Decoration Movement

Suzannah Phillips, painter

Phillips’ subjects, whether landscape or interior scenes, are transformed into vessels for explorations into light, volume, and form. Like Agnes Martin or Giorgio Morandi, her motifs seem to have emerged from a metaphysical search, from a need to infringe on the barrier between the concrete world and ourselves, to reach a point just beyond our grasp. These new paintings and drawings straddle a line between spirituality and philosophy as they begin to utter the unspeakable, the nature of time and the instability of reality and perception.” –– Beverly Acha,2012

Untitled, 2004

Lobster Lake I, 2008

Landscape X, 2012

Lucy Lippard's "Undermining " - commentary and review

Lucy Lippard: Undermining
The Anthropocene, Geo-Aesthetics, and Land Use Interpretation

 " ...I wanted to do a small book for a change—an extended essay with a lot of images, a parallel visual/verbal narrative. (I notice some readers are getting that and some aren’t.) ...this book, which is really just a rant about what’s happening right now in the West...

...But one of the obvious questions is the role of art in coming environmental catastrophes. Photographers, and “high” artists using photographic media, obviously have the best access to communicating information about these endless crises. For better or worse, people “believe” photographic imagery more than paintings and sculpture." 

-Lucy Lippard in "Artforum", 5-12-2014 interview, discussing her new book, "Undermining", published in 2014.

I was disappointed in this book for many reasons.  I thought I would be reading art criticism about the large topic of environmental artists and art, perhaps with some history. Certainly the  wee bitty photographs of artworks beside the text help. They're intended to be a parallel, and are far more interesting than the text, unfortunately.  I googled the artists, creating a seminar on environmental conceptual artists for myself.

Mitch Dubrowner - Storm Images   Mitch Dubrowner's landscape photographs create narratives about dystopia and apocalypse by evoking sublime terror.

Would that she had written criticism about each of these artists instead.

Lippard begins with a grand metaphor about gravel pits,excavation, unseen tunnels - her writing exposes the hidden truths and forgotten history of the shameless exploitation and ruination of the areas around Galisteo, New Mexico, where she has lived for many years.  It's quite an extended granular ramble, but she makes no more of it than does a journalist. The grand metaphor seems tacked on, underdeveloped.  

I'm horrified to learn how deeply ruined New Mexico is; facing the consequences of drought, mining, tourism - just like the rest of the West. The contradiction is that Lippard doesn't make the connection from local to global.  Why is her local more awful, more significantly illustrative of our ruined landscape, than my local?

I had also hoped to find in the book a unique and expanding viewpoint/aesthetic for understanding land and environmental art. 

So far, I conclude that photo-journalism, multi-media and interactive programs, and the good old museum label seem the only ways to convey visually the issues implied by an image of a landscape. 

Maybe the gallery goer carries the responsibility of further research into the contextual history of it.      

I've tuned into Lippard's art criticism for years now, as I've struggled to teach and make art.

That struggle is like an excavation for me, undertaken after a sustained, seemingly directionless wandering, another struggle.

I'm trying to discover what I think I should know but don't know that I don't know. I cannot find the facts, the ideas, the knowledge, the history, context, of what I dimly perceive must be out there, and am convinced that if I just keep researching, I will find it. 

I go through this ordeal because I didn't get a thorough art education, I think.  So I keep at it, building a perspective alone when I imagine I could have been "in situ", in an nurturing art world milieu. All part of the deal.

Whatever. Lippard's writings, especially "Mixed Blessings", 1990, helped me escape from a Euro-centric locus as I taught art to Los Angeles public high school students. 

Now, I paint and draw the landscape and its creatures. Mu pastel drawing below is extrapolated from a National Geographic photograph by Michael Milicia in an article titled "Visions of Earth", May, 2012.

Piping Plover and Chicks

I was very moved by the image of the mother bird warming her chicks. How did I change this image?  The adult bird has a leg band, enabling her to be studied by ornithologists.  Why?  

The piping plover is an endangered/threatened species in the U.S. And what about the by baby bird that is excluded?  Why isn't it sheltered?  How did it miss out?  Well, how did the species miss out of the shelter and protection it needs?

abandoned Pittsburg Plate Glass Factory, Owens Valley CA

I painted this after loving the colors the chemicals exposed by the drainage of the Owens River Valley by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.  I never knew what it was until I strapped on my Google search engine.

If this hadn't happened, this factory would have no reason to exist.  But I've always loved how haunted it looks, stripped of its minions and accessories.

My hope is that viewers see the painting is a bit "pretty", softened. The baby pink and blue are the colors of childhood. The abandoned factory becomes elegiac, like old textile factories being converted to living spaces in New England towns along its rushing rivers. But the historical context is jarringly opposite the decorative visual: a ruined desiccated valley, polluted ground