PRE-RAPHAELITES: Seminal Reactionaries, 1848

"The more important question is whether The Love Song is the nostalgic, wistful kind of painting that only a kitsch-lover, hopeless romantic, or deep reactionary could really love."

The Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau were taught to me in art history class  as a reaction to modern industrial capitalism.  I missed the designated bromide: create art from the seminal early Italian Renaissance before Raphael, viewed as the purest high artistic and moral achievement. 

Now, I'm a Raphael fan; I think he's neglected because he died too young and his synthesis of Renaissance values has a balance that escapes modern viewers.  Much easier to find Da Vinci's scope and Michelangelo's power than consider Raphael's summative celebration of Italian humanism (the Raphael Stanze). 

When I went to the Sistine Chapel I waded through crowds being warned to hold silence (hopeless) and moved into Pope Julius II's magnificent library.  No one there.  All to the good for me, as I spent hours reading and looking. 

Morgan Meis writes in his blog about the Met's exhibit, "the Pre-Raphaelite Rebellion and It's Legacy", and discusses the artistic rebellion against stultified academic art values at its core.

I'm interested in this because I'm still hopeful that someone will let me live guiltlessly in what's seen as escapist genre kitsch.

It's valuable to have the accomplishment of the pre-Raphs describe so fully.  But I just can't drink the kool-aid. I have to put them into my category of attempted recovery art.  They're like a space capsule that is returned from the sky with the people intact, but missing the propellant rocket that took them there.  You get the nugget, not the chicken.

It's heroic to stand against the magnitude of historical atrocity. But all those brave positions remind me of the futility. German Expressionism and Kathë Kollwitz summon better.  

I'm done here; I'm going to declare genres to be my eternal fadeless summer.   



  

FILM: Witness for the Prosecution, directed by Billy Wilder

Tyrone Power, Marlene Deitrich, Charles Laughton in a film based on a Broadway play by Agatha Christie. It's got a "spoiler alert" at the conclusion to the wonderful plot twist.  

The film is like a lot of play-to-movie adaptations, talky and now dated; we're so familiar with courtroom procedural drama now that the trial, set in the famous Old Bailey London courtroom, seems improbable.

Tyrone Power was in his 40's when he made this film; his last - he died of a heart attack soon after. It's poignant to see this performance. In this film, he looks sleazy and unhealthy.  His face is fleshy and carved with lines, and his presence is disturbing.  Is he a whimsical charmer or a clever and evil criminal? 

Charles Laughton is the perfect curmudgeon, blustering and yet poignant, as the lawyer who defends Power at the risk of his own health. He's a kind of caricatured Churchillian Brit.

Marlene Dietrich plays the truly clever yet unsympathetic wife who schemes to testify to prevent her lover-husband from conviction for murdering a rich widow.  Her face is glowing, iconic, and polished, her eyes seem all-knowing in her Germanic iciness. 

It's Billy Wilder, but I find it off; Agatha Christie's powerful writing and plotting really muffle and dilute the themes that haunt me after seeing a great Wilder film. It's the fully complex ambiguous characters that are best about the film. The war has drained any moral blood left in them, and it's shadow is long.  It's up the Brits to restore a lawful world, not the old central European nexus. 

MEMENTOS: Old sweet possessions

I think she made this one - the letters WAC
 are embroidered with red-white-blue tatting
from the days wen she was in the Army
in World War II.

My mother was born in 1910, lived a life eroded into rigid vigorous strength of character as she worked fiercely to make a secure life for herself.  These are her cloth handkerchiefs; I found them wadded up and unpressed when she closed her home and moved to an assisted living facility. I kept very little, already feeling the shadow, but I had to have these.

I have hung them on a "clothesline", remembering the days when washday meant carrying heavy baskets to the line, worrying if they would freeze or be caught by a sudden rain.

I like to look at the hankies, and wonder what Mom wore with each, or what the day was like she had with the purple violet hanky.  Sometimes they were decorative; a flutter of color bursting from a shirt or dress pocket, secured with a brooch.

They are rather garish and cheaply printed, but enjoyably bright and gay as zinnias marigolds, the flowers she loved.

OLD MOVIES: The Cowboys, 1972 Boys 2 Men

Wayne was 65 in this film, dying 4 years later of lung cancer.  He wears a bad toupee, and his gut is thick and square.  He's tough and stiffened, the big man's atypical  graceful feet a memory.

The plot is a unrealistic fantasy: the ritual passage to manhood required by society is the opportunity to work a cattle drive.  A gold rush lost Adamson (Wayne the cattle rancher), his crew, so he tests and hires the eager local schoolboys. 

Bruce Dern, (I swear he had a nose job later on), is a sadistic rustler, rejected by Wayne for lying to him. 

Wayne is shot to death by Dern in a surprising plot twist in the middle of the film. The boys finish the drive without him,and take satisfying revenge on Dern and his 10 (10 adult!) buddies. 

The film was controversial at the time: it uses the N word (an elegantly spoken Roscoe Lee Brown plays his cook), a politically correct cast, tough-love discipline, including a cure for stuttering, and life lessons in the choice never to stand down stirred the pot.

In one scene, Wayne releases his string of horses from the corral to run free on the range, a beautiful and memorable image of tempered wisdom letting go when it's time.  

Cinematography is by Bruce Surtees, score by John Williams, shot around iconic Santa Fe, Wayne's iron integrity, an elegiac tone veil softening the merciless western code of revenge.

It's a memorable film. Tommy Lee Jones has scheduled a re-make, though there's no current Googlenews to report about it. 

I'm still OK with the way it was.

TRAVEL: San Xavier del Bac Mission, Tucson

personal photo

Come upon St. Xavier del Bac, the "white dove of the desert", from south to north and the  steeples burn hard with unbelievable brightness and purity against the clean dry sky.  

45 years ago I studied this architectural gem in Intro to Art history 1A, and always wished that I would see it. As the years went by I deepened my interest in Baroque and Mannerist art, and puzzled over "churrigueresque", a Spanish counter-Reformation expression of artistic ecstasy.

 The surname of José Benito Churriguera, a Spanish designer, gave the name to the Spanish Rococo style, but other architects as well are famous for the use.

Exteriors were usually stucco with flat planes, towers, columns, and domes.  The façades and interiors are encrusted with with terra-cotta and stucco bas reliefs. Spaces are delineated with broken pediments, curved cornices, balustrades, volutes, shells, and garlands.  The spaces were filled with writhing, undulating, energetic and complex narrative symbols meant to overwhelm the spectator with announcements of spiritual power.

Mexican provincial architecture combined "churriguersco" with indigenous symbols, and the Spanish Colonial cathedrals of Mexico are wondered of expressive reverence. San Xavier del Bac is the best northernmost example of the style.

  

Catholicism's practice included deeply physical and grotesque images of bodily suffering.  Spiritual expression is fused with quite literal representations of pain, which were meant to read as symbolic sacrifice. 

Our Lady of Sorrows east chapel 

The church is used today as a parish for the Tohono O'Odham native American nation, as the descendants of the Papago and Pima Indian Tribes call themselves today.  The church is named for the founder of the order, St. Xavier.

detail of the high altar

Dome built with squinches first used in middle-eastern architecture

Remains of a parish priest whose body after death manifested unusual symptoms which were viewed as miraculous.  The remains serve an intercession function. Prayer requests are pinned to a blanket covering the remains, and offerings are made, in the hope that the saintly priest in heaven will intercede with God to grant the request. This process can be done online also on the church's website.

Spanish Baroque was the main inspiration for Mediterranean Revival architecture which I love to see so much.  Florida and California have the best examples.  Balboa Park in San Diego has fine ones, including the Theosophical Building.  In Tucson itself, the Veterans Hospital was designed in the style.

It's iconic to me: how I think of the land of brilliant skies, palm trees, beaches, and ocean horizons.

TRAVEL: The Titan Missile Museum: Duck and Cover

"Duck and cover!" Baby boomers share this common experience of the Cold War:  survival drills to protect us in case of nuclear disaster,civilian defense sirens being "tested", and that yellow and black sign glaring at me from the comfortable buildings of my little town world.

 

At 12, I read the apocalypse novel On the Beach, and walked around in a daze for a week as the reality of "mutual assured destruction" completed my removal from childhood.

I sadly packed my favorite doll away, and never played with her again.  Quizzically I gazed at everyone living their daily lives, seemingly unconcerned that the world could end. How could they go on like nothing was wrong? After a week, I couldn't stand all the adults bugging me about missing homework, and went back in life participation mode.

The price of denial was very high.  I became a "selective forgetter", expert at pushing away newspaper headlines, and other "inconvenient truths".

Oh, well. It's a sort of Fifty First Dates life strategy,the movie in which the young woman has amnesia and every date with her boyfriend is like the first. 

We took a child with us on our visit to the Titan Guided Missile Museum, and my heart wished to shelter him. I pondered whether this reality would enter his, or the veil of childhood would save him for a bit longer. 

 The 60's-styled guide (long ponytail, aging hippie) described the way it all would work. Once the launch code was entered, no action on earth could stop the detonation that would occur too soon in some enemy city far far away.  

underground view-Titan missile silo

 The desert surface lay flat and burning,and beneath, harnessed and chthonic, mad ruin beyond biblical was waiting, the darkest guardians ever created.    

top view-missile in silo

By 1962, the United States had 54 missiles with nuclear warheads that could be launched and detonated within 35 minutes, each destroying 900 square miles upon impact. This was the Cold War, unreal and real. No existentialist could have redefined absurdity so accurately.  

 "Mutual assured destruction" (MAD) was a paradox of standoff and truce. Perchance, a witch's potion that dissolved power, retaliation, and revenge in meaningless complementary destruction and leave the whole earth for poisoned corpse.  

Ploughshares data from website, 2014 approximate count

 The glass-half-empty report on The End of the World has several options to choose from: earthquakes, environmental collapse, mud n'flood, accidental nuclear detonation.

Today, I live so joyfully in dailyness. As I walked through the museum, I thought how successful my denial has become, and how much I need it, and how well I've built my shelter.  
  

  

TRAVEL: Madera Canyon: The Elegant Trogon Search Concludes

web photo

Mt. Wrightson, over 9500 feet, is the tallest peak in the Santa Rita Mountains, 25 miles south of Tucson. The Santa Ritas are a must-visit for any naturalist, because so many unusual species are found here.

At the end of the road are 3 attractive lodgings, all with extensive feeders in their yards, making for lazy and exciting bird watching.

Magnificent Hummingbird (web photo)

We sighted many wonderful species here, some with our guide, Matt Brown, and others with aid from helpful birders.  This area has many different hummingbirds, always an amazing creature to me. So small, such elegance, speed and power, its tiny heart and wings marvels of possibility.

But the bird we sought is the Elegant Trogon.  Only a few nesting pair are found each year, and only in this part of the U.S. Its northernmost range extends to Costa Rica. It's large, noisy and colorful, 12" with a perching habit, red breast, and long extended tail. The call sounds like a small dog barking, and announces its presence far in advance.

We hiked uphill on the Carrie Nation Trail, the most likely area, according to Matt. He'd been hearing them all morning. Other birders had been sighting trogons every day, and today our luck held.

A man clad in the brightest yellow T-shirt, speaking Texan, called us to a spot of few yards away and flying towards us came our trogon.

distant trogon view - my brother Lanny's photo

(Lanny's photo)

(Lanny's photo)

web photo

Our species list is long. I have at least 25 new birds to add to my life list.  My favorite sightings were the Blue Grosbeak, Hooded Oriole, Hepatic Tanager, Painted Redstart, Northern Cardinal and Bridled Titmouse. 

We were able to return the sighting favor by sharing an unusual sighting of a Mexican whip-poor-will nest setting right next to the trail.

LS brother photo

The camouflage was so impressive I would never have seen it.  The face is somewhat owl-like.

Madera Canyon is a great location because one can drive up and down the road and find varying elevations with their distinctive ecology and wildlife within a few miles.