Tag: Musings
To see where you live, just listen to an artist
I very much feel the vibrations of particular places, to the point that they become unacknowledged characters in my fiction and poetry. I know I’m not alone, even among writers.
Visual artists are also engaged in observing closely and progressing beyond, if they may. Some are not shy about acknowledging their insights, either.
For a few examples, let’s start by turning to Jamie Wyeth’s commenting about Mohegan Island and then venture from there.
- “You look at most paintings of gulls and they look like doves. If you really look at a gull, it is a beautiful bird, but it is a scavenger. It’s a mean, tough bird. To me they’re the sea more than anything else. The eye of a gull, you could paint a million seascapes and you don’t get the same sense of those eyes looking at you. They’re reptilian really.” Where I live, gulls are inescapable, even when you’d rather they weren’t.
- As for living surrounded by water: “Houses on the island are of as much interest as the people. They’re hanging on as tenuously as the people are. Unlike buildings in Pennsylvania which almost grow out of the earth, I always feel that if a big wind comes, everything would be just swept away.” I’ve already posted on this, looking at the town’s gable-style Capes. No wonder I tremble under a heavy wind, as I did in March so long ago in Ohio!
- “The danger with Maine is that it is so anecdotal and emblematic in terms of pretty houses, pretty lobster traps — ‘quaint’ things. Maine is not that way. Maine has a lot of edge, a lot of angst.”
- On blue sea glass: “Maine people must have drunk an inordinate amount of Milk of Magnesia.” I don’t think we need to go there.
- Taos Pueblo/Dine illustrator and designer Margeaux Abeyta also delivers some specifics: “I can’t count the times my father and I would take the long drive from Santa Fe to Gallup just for mutton sandwiches. … Every now and then we’d come across a perfect sky – a deep cobalt blue with rays of cerulean and clouds growing ever toward us as we drove under their long-cast shadows. They moved with one another in an effort to graze the land. Months later, I would recall our drive, lined on the canvas walls of his messy studio. He had documented that very day, an immortalized memory. Looking at across the room at half-finished canvases filled with underbrush of color, I saw the manifestations of a life lived. In this way, it became his own, his way to have a discourse with the world. Tracing back each part of himself, conversations and feelings embedded into each stroke, his very world as he dreamed it.” I must admit getting goosebumps just transcribing that rich passage. But she has more:
- “When my grandmother would take me chokecherry picking deep in the shaded paths, we would lift the bottoms of our blouses to hold the berries, staining the cotton with maroon impressions. While hauling home our treasures, she told stories of her own childhood. When she and her friends would walk the same trails only to be met by an old brown bear, quickly they ran, as gems of red fell from their hands, rolling down the hill behind them. I would look back into that shaded path where berries grew and feel the immense power of this strange world. Falling back beside my grandmother, I knew I was safe in this place she called home.” I am awed by how much deep memories of color inflect emotions here. The red could as easily be blood.
- Now for Alex Katz on his work done in New York City and Maine: “My paintings take all kinds of light. I’ve done a lot of night paintings, and twilight, and morning paintings. I think when people paint the same light all the time, it gets a little monotonous.” Do you ever think about the light where you live? Or the ways it inflects the colors your life?
- British painter Clare Thatcher returns to that connection of color to emotion: “I select a palette I have felt when at the location. My line drawings in charcoal or pencil suggest color to me. I aim to capture the mood and sensation that transports me back there.” What are the colors of where you’re living?
- For a bit of historical dimension, we have French master of the au plein Jean-Baptist Camille Corot: “I am struck upon seeing a certain place. While I strive for conscientious imitation, I yet never for an instant lose the emotion that has taken hold of me.” That points us back to the vibe.
- Nick Bantock, meanwhile, looks at another kind of color: “Art is like therapy; what comes up is what comes up. It may be dark, but that’s what comes up. You may want to keep some of it in a drawer … but never judge it.
Well, I am trying to think of what would have been representative of my native Ohio or neighboring Indiana as well as what would have emotionally internalized as a result. I’ve been much more aware in my moves since, as a poet and as a novelist.
As Aristotle said, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” And also, Edward Hopper’s, “If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” Or, for me, to write.
Culture – yes, the word
When I was growing up, it meant something of a Mount Olympus quality.
Not some kind of norm but an aspiration – a better person and society in the end.
Back before the very culture clash between the two concepts.
Now we add to that the concept of supremacy, not just white but European. Or perhaps, grudgingly, Chinese.
The question remains: How do we encourage excellence?
And what do we name it?
A thought while assembling Tendrils
Once upon a time, meaning not all that long ago, trying to track down ten more or less related facts impinging upon a particular topic would have required a very tedious amount of time in a library. Or may some more remote back office or agency, wherever.
Instead, thanks to the Internet, the list can be cobbled together within a few hours on a laptop.
It can seem like cheating or at least borderline plagiarism.
No guaranties on accuracy, either.
Popcorn goes way back in antiquity
Last year I presented a Double Tendrils about the popular and seemingly ubiquitous snack of popcorn. Quite simply, it’s not just for watching movies. And around this time of year, we start eating more. Not only that, but it turns out to be a uniquely American contribution to the world’s cuisine.
The topic simply overflowed so much that we didn’t have room for tidbits about its deep history.
So here goes with ten related factoids that pop up on that front.
- Try to think of a more purely American food than popcorn. Whether salted or buttered at a movie theatre, or as kettle corn at a county fair or a caramel popcorn ball come the holidays, we hoover it up, even when we’re not watching movies, OK?
- Look, archeologists have found traces of popcorn in 1,000-year-old Peruvian tombs. But it goes back way even earlier.
- The first use of wild and then cultivated corn points for now to the Bat Cave of west central New Mexico in 1948. Ranging from smaller than a penny to about two inches, those ears are about 5,600 years old, older than Adam and Eve, for anyone counting.
- In tombs on the east coast of Peru, researchers have found grains of popcorn perhaps 1,000 years old. These grains have been so well-preserved that they will still pop.
- Popcorn was integral to early 16th century Aztec ceremonies. As Bernardino de Sahagun observed, “And also a number of young women danced, having so vowed, a popcorn dance. As thick as tassels of maize were their popcorn garlands. And these they placed upon (the girls’) heads.” In 1519, Cortes got his first sight of popcorn when he invaded Mexico and came into contact with the Aztecs. Popcorn was an important food for the Aztec natives, who also used popcorn as decoration for ceremonial headdresses, necklaces and ornaments on statues of their gods, including Tlaloc, the god of rain and fertility.
- An early Spanish account of a ceremony honoring the Aztec gods who watched over fishermen reads: “They scattered before him parched corn, called momochitl, a kind of corn which bursts when parched and discloses its contents and makes itself look like a very white flower; they said these were hailstones given to the god of water.”
- Writing of Peruvian natives in 1650, the Spaniard Cobo said, “They toast a certain kind of corn until it bursts. They call it pisancalla, and they use it as a confection.”
- Kernels of popcorn found in burial grounds in the coastal deserts of north Chile were so well preserved they would still pop even though they were 1,000 years old. Likewise, in southwestern Utah, a 1,000-year-old popped kernel of popcorn was found in a dry cave inhabited by predecessors of the Pueblos.
- Indigenous Iroquois people in North America were documented popping corn kernels in heated pottery jars near the Great Lakes region in the 1600s.
- The first patent for a microwave popcorn bag was issued to General Mills in 1981, and home popcorn consumption increased by tens of thousands of pounds in the years following.
Young yearning and pining
Remembering gazing forlornly at LS, the cheerleader of the mysterious olive skin, and dark brown eyes etc.
Jenny, a year older, at the other end of our street, too.
The ache … tongue-tied, like facing a childhood hero or famous actor or scientist …
A shadow of that looking at prime foliage.
Glories and quirks of AM radio, back in the day
My kids don’t even know what it is. How shocking!
Let’s look at a few based on their call letters.
- WLW, Cincinnati, the Nation’s Station, with ten times the wattage than permitted today. It lighted a barn a mile away. Back in those days, it had its own staff musicians.
- WOR, New York, with comedians Bob and Ray as the drivetime crew and storyteller Jean Shepherd in the evening. They originated on WHDH in Boston.
- WSN, Nashville, home of the Grand Ol’ Opry.
- WWVA, Wheeling, West Virginia, Country Jamboree.
- WCKY, Cincinnati, with a very directional nighttime signal that plastered the South with its WCKY Jamboree country programming. It also made Reds baseball highly followed far into Dixie.
- WNOP, Radio Free Newport, an eclectic daytime jazz station broadcasting from Kentucky to the captive peoples across the Ohio River, or so they proclaimed.
- WAVI, the daytime big-band station in Dayton revolving around retired trumpeter BJ, who always signed off decrying the “arcane rules of the FCC in Washington that make us give way to a station in Philadelphia that can in no way serve the Greater Dayton area.”
- WJR, Detroit, with a full mix of original programming, including Adventures in Good Music with Karl Haas, the Redwings, and the Metropolitan Opera on Saturdays.
- WBZ, Boston, with its all-news format when I arrived in New England.
- If you’re of a certain age, you can add your own fond memories of a local station’s wild rock ‘n’ roll DJ or two who fed your adolescent rollercoaster with machine-gun delivery and often took requests in addition to a Top 40 countdown. Sometimes he even mentioned you by name. In my hometown, that was WING.
How many ‘lasts’ of the season?
It’s been a month of “last” tomato sandwiches, each day a surprise blessing.
There have even been at least two “final” rounds with a lawn mower, not that I’m complaining.
And now I’m out on the last cruise of the schooner season.
Would I even recognize Seattle now?
In my novel Nearly Canaan, Joshua and Jaya settled into a place unlike anything they would have imagined. It was (and still is) desert, for one thing, where nearly everything has to be irrigated, for another. Quite simply, it’s a lot like Yakima, in the middle of Washington state.
But they did repeatedly visit the Queen City of the Pacific Northwest, over where the endless gray and its rains were. The enlightened residents had a propensity for dark German movies in some unique art film houses, and I doubt that I’d recognize the place if I ever go back. Remember, I left well before “Sleepless in Seattle” or Dr. Frasier Crane’s arrival from Boston, not that I’d been there, either.
That said, here are ten high points to consider.
- Unlike most American urban areas, there’s more poverty outside the city limits rather than within them. That probably reflects racial dynamics elsewhere or even gentrification conflicts in older cities.
- Seattle has some outstanding opera and symphony experiences. The Wagner’s Ring Cycle in summertime week-long festivals is legendary, even in English. The art museum, meanwhile, is third-rate despite the presence of visually intriguing local artists, at least when I was there.
- Yes, it can be gray for six months or more in stretches. Residents simply dodge the ongoing light rain. It can drive some people over the edge, though.
- When the clouds break, breathtaking views of the Olympic Range appear to the west and Mount Rainier to the east, the latter of which is technically within Seattle’s metropolitan statistical area covered by the U.S. census. Elk and bears are not enumerated.
- The city is the home of Starbucks coffee and the glorious Pike Street vendors’ market.
- That said, eat Dungeness crab early and often. It’s a delicacy found from San Francisco north to Alaska, and is at its best before shipping elsewhere.
- The U.S. military is a huge economic influence, even before Boeing executives fled for Chicago and the company’s reputation went into decline. Microsoft, meanwhile, keeps booming.
- If you visit, ride the ferries that many commuters ride daily. Puget Sound is a very active waterfront. You don’t even have to take your car if you simply want to ride out and back.
- I won’t even touch on the history of Grunge etc., but I will recommend wool Pendleton shirts. They’re the choice of the region’s loggers, who know wet “cotton kills.”
- I also recall the prevalence of mossy roofs and huge garden slugs.
Add to the list of missing in action
I’ve already mentioned telephone books.
And rotary telephones.
And now phonebooths and pay phones in general.
It’s largely gone over to donations, too, which typically prefer online credit card entries rather than paper checks. Try finding the address to send that check when you’re searching their website, perhaps on your smart phone.
For that matter, handling cash in general is overshadowed by those plastic cards.
Parking kiosks that demand credit cards do upset me, though.
I know I’m overlooking a lot more. Care to add to the list?
Jnana's Red Barn 