BACKYARDS

Andrew Jackson Downing cottage plan, 1842

The American dream is a home of one's own, a cottage with a green pocket of grass in the front yard.

Now we have a little jewel-box of a cottage, but a version peculiar to Southern California.  The back yard has a beautiful "black" swimming pool, palm trees, a gazebo, a barbecue and lounge furniture.

Besides a home of my own, I have a room of my own: the old inaccessible garage has become a studio-playroom, a light-filled white room of fun and possibility.

I sit on charming white wicker, watching the migrating birds in the old trees which grace my neighbors' yards.

Yesterday I swam in 80 degree sunshine.  The water was heated to 90, and I never wanted to get out.
The East Coast is recovering from another serious snow storm. 

I think of it as dumb good fortune, that Mom decided to move to Southern California from Wisconsin, and I live this life of ease and unreal pleasure.

ART: Alexander Calder Exhibit, LACMA

Calder - pure kinetic joy, joy of outrageously delicate balances, of calibration - it is a kind of artistic justice.

Cantilever achieves tension and stability, the body in life flow.

Little Face

And then we play.  It's zen play - the fields of the Lord, given unto us. 

Hydrostatic pressure, always trumping gravity, raising up into air and sky.

Laöcoon

The balance, the subtle non squared angles and gentlest of curves: they are of the body, they are a call to dance, they are felt within as the standing body shifts to match each asymmetry shifting themselves in light wind.

We are sliding off the edge of the world; birds and planets watch and wait for the splash as we roll into the sea and float forever.

Gibraltar

FILMS: Philomena and The Magdalene Sisters

Oh, the Catholic Church in real time, in real life.
I thought I had resolved my issues with the Church by attending a High Anglican parish and becoming a "Zen-glican". 
That was before the astonishing child molestations and the Irish Magdalene  revelations.

Both of these films are based on true stories of institutional malevolent cruelty.   

Over 30,000 pregnant girls were sent to the Magdalene Sisters Laundries in Ireland, where they were work slaves: legally abused, dishonored, and punished. 

In "Philomena", a now aged mother searches for her son. He was "sold" to an American couple from the orphanage maintained on site when he was about four. She and the other unwed mothers were allowed to see their children for a few minutes a day and so the loss was wrenching. He's taken away without even a goodbye embrace. 

With the help of a journalist, she finds that he died of AIDS, and that he was buried in the cemetery of the workhouse she lived in.

Mother and son had searched for each other over the years, inquiring of the nuns at the laundry whether there was any information more than once. Both were told that each was dead. The records were burned in a convenient fire. 

In "The Magdalene Sisters", four young women are sent to the laundry for sexual activity. One already lived in an Catholic orphanage and was placed there because she lingered to speak to a group of boys in the yard one day.

Another was "simple", what we'd call a special needs child, and probably didn't understand what happened to her.  

Another is raped; the neighbors whisper, and she is sent away by her parents and priest while the young man goes free. 

The last is disowned forever by her parents and banished to the sisters' care. Her own mother won't even look at her new little son or speak to her after the childbirth. She is forcibly restrained by her father when she changes her mind about the adoption, the baby taken away from her forever as she screams for help. 

The Mother Superior is a sadistic monster in both films, as are most of the nuns. All their rightful erotic energy has been shaped into a community of aggressive, righteous, greedy, vengeful Lord-of-the-Flies/The Lottery creatures.  

Their evil power is fed by  sustained cruelty to the innocent young sexual transgressors they seek to redeem, in Jesus' name amen.

A particularly poignant and ironic moment is when the young laundresses and nuns view a special Christmas treat, the beautiful film "The Bells of St. Mary's."  Ingrid Bergman's saintly nun's face illumines the screen, and Mother Superior's face reveals her own identification with the perfect Sister Benedict, dying in perfect grace. 

Mother Superior's self-beatification is both evil and innocent. Her examination of conscience before confession would determine no sin in her. Her own moral sensibility is lost, a kind of mental rape performed by Catholic socialization and culture.

Two of the young women escape and are able to make new lives.  One remains in an insane asylum for life, and the last is removed from the laundry when her younger brother comes of age and comes to take her home. Each story's goodbye is a kind of terrible Cinderella-life-ever-after parody.

The issues raised for me by the Church's multiple moral culpabilities are so deep and personal that I probably won't ever get over them. 

Were my schoolmates at St. Mary's ever molested by Father Mulligan?  He used to hug me too hard. Or cute young Father Rourke, his brogue so thick we struggled to understand his daily sermons.

Sister Alcantra hit the kids on the knuckles with rulers, and I was petrified of her every day of first and second grade, watching in horror as the obstreperous farm boys got theirs.  I only got hit once, though.

At 19 in 1965, out of control with painful emotional conflicts and pregnant, I was sent away by my parents to a domestic worker job arranged by Catholic Welfare Services. The baby girl, born April 27, 1966, was placed for adoption and the records sealed.  "No one would know". 

But it's another story, a watered-down American model of what these young women went through, and not nearly so horrible as their experiences.

I think the trauma made me "forget" and dissociate, and the numbness I do feel must be the scars, I hope. I don't want to feel nothing.  I wish I could grieve hard, but that ability has been lost to me.

Even now, as the old prayers were recited by the young women in the film, I found myself praying with them, the words still able to give me spiritual solace, hope, comfort and transcendence.

But surely, a loving God would not subject his creations to such pain and suffering, would He?

No way. I think when my life ends, my consciousness will cease. My soul is not going anyplace, and my remains will go to the wide ocean.

I think the spiritual acts I love to perform are merely classic aesthetic catharsis; I make them in this dystopian and beautiful world because they have their own authentic power for me: to sustain a life of energy and love.





  

  

Environment: A SPECIAL GRIEVING for Whooping Cranes and other wonders

LACMA Japanese Pavilion - Whooping Cranes

In Southern Louisiana,they shoot whooping cranes, 5 since 2011. And Kentucky.  2 there.  So? The ENTIRE population of western whooping cranes is about 300.  I guess some folks think that's too many.  

Every day when I read the newspaper I try to comprehend the range of human stupidity, ignorance, and malice. It's as sterile an endeavor as my efforts to understand the depths of space and death. 

Even more futile: struggle with the reality: go on, try to get over the rage, the despair, the grief, the wish to confront THEM, and stomp them until they are sawdust, like the mad crowd in "The Rage of the Locust".

Oh bring them back: the cranes, the salmon, the black rhinos, the tigers, monarchs, sea bass, whales,the snow,the rain; all the exquisite souls that did not choose to die.

They did not drink and drive, buy assault weapons, abuse their families, commit genocide; they are sentient and guiltless. 

Monsters. We are all implicated. I will never be free of the responsibility and guilt. 

I am going to go run away now, on a treadmill and reach a conditioning heart rate level appropriate for a 67 year old. A kind of somatic penance, all I can perform. 

BOOK: The Book Thief

This is a book for adolescent readers.  Some sentences are really short.  It got in the way of the style. It jumped around.  It made death into a ghost.  Death was a friend. 

It was easy to imagine all the bad things that happened to Liesel.  She tried hard to learn to read. Her love of books and reading saved her.

I bet the movie is good.  I will see it on DVD soon.  

This book would be good for today's students to read.  Many do not know about the Holocaust. They do not understand how awful it was. Some do not think it really happened.  

Seriously.  I admired the expressionistic German tone of this dynamic novel; it's beautifully written, lyric and poetic, the beauty making the horror more chilling and hot at once.  Descriptions of sky and land are fresh and poignant, with a why-didn't-I-notice/think-of-that quality.

The action moves back and forth in time, offering us a watcher's position as Liesel lives through the events of the war.

Death as personified has a gothic German black angel appeal that is haunting and poetic. 

I loved the artistic necessity of Max, the hidden Jew, who paints over Mein Kampf's pages to create a new book - an act of highest artistic subversion and moral redemption. Anselm Kiefer and Jasper Johns painted over and in books as acts of negation and rebirth; that art burns in my mind as I read this book.

  

ART: The Oakland Museum, California Landscapes

Entrance, Oakland Museum:
Ruth Asawa Wall Sculpture, "Untitled"
It's tied wire, associative to the sacred circle and rational square, but like tree limbs, brooms, fans.  How can wire look so soft?  The references come so easy, so confirming, so grounding, inspiring. 

Ruth Asawa was interned in Arkansas during World War II, and went on the become, in her own quiet and elegant work, a model of a liberated zen woman to me.  I have always loved craft as art form, freed of the necessity to be functional. She died last year, with much more art world notice than I would have thought.  She was an artist's artist.

Beth Van Hoesen - Point Richmond? TBD

I love this perceptual landscape treating fog and sun, so iconic of the bay area. 

I've seen this before - the real thing on an island in Indonesia, a beach littered with debris that had swirled there from China, unimaginable trash.  I walked with a marine biologist whose life work was small crustaceans.  How deep and quiet she was as she showed me how the hermit crabs could not surmount the debris to search for a larger shell when theirs had become to small.  She gently cleared a path for one.

Edward Biberman - a WPA muralist and instrumentalist painter from California made this chillingly clinical image of Sepulveda Dam, near our house.  I've often walked around it, photographing.  It's such an elegant Art Deco style, yet so compromised as a purposeful structure - its beauty cloaking the ruination of Western water supplies.

Rex Brandt- Coast at La Purisima Mission

A 30's watercolorist in the deeply energized and muscular, linear style of Disney animators who also painted, Charles Burchfield, and Grant Wood.  What a churning landscape here.  His watercolors sparkle with white paper and splashing waves, crisp, superficial, somehow too styled, too intent on glamour, lovely nonetheless.

Wayne Thiebaud, Urban Square

I can write a long time about the way I love Thiebaud.  His "secret" may be his smooth and sufficiently original synthesis of Pop, realism, and modern color. Most of all I love his riff on traditional perspective.  How oddly and subtly disturbing the skews make for a compressive and truthful, and enjoyment filled experience.

Julius Tavernier, Full Moon over Kilawea, Hawai'i

This is probably not the painting I saw at the museum that day, but I did discover this lesser known but spectacle-seeking landscape artist.  Because of my deep love for Hawai'i, I chose this painting to include.  It is apocalyptic narrative, while the moon hides to see what finality will look like.

I found several paintings of volcanic eruptions, sunsets.  He must have been a born too soon cinematographer, crazy for visual effects, and nature's cataclysms.