Parting Looks — Tom Jones

Posted on June 18, 2019 by JMN

James Thomas “Tom” Jones (1920 — 2000) (c) 2019 JMN

More Galleries | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Parting Looks — Buck Schiwetz

Posted on June 17, 2019 by JMN

Edward Muegge “Buck” Schiwetz (1898 — 1984) (c) 2019 JMN

More Galleries | Tagged , | 12 Comments

Surrealism’s Daughters

Posted on June 17, 2019 by JMN
surreal cows head

Leonora Carrington’s fantastical figures emerge in the 1953 painting “And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur” at Gallery Wendi Norris: a seated goddess-cum-mystical figure with a cow’s head and a green moth-flower unfurling like a gigantic leaf. Credit Estate of Leonora Carrington/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Gallery Wendi Norris.

The creature with a “cow’s head” in Carrington’s “And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur” looks like the minotaur bred a doe, which of course is surreally plausible.

The French capital was alive with Surrealism and its contagious emphasis on the subconscious, dreams, startling juxtapositions and general otherworldliness.

surreal carrington down below

Carrington’s “Down Below,” from 1940. The artist’s imaginary settings, characters and palette change with each canvas. Credit Estate of Leonora Carrington/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Gallery Wendi Norris.

Contagious perhaps, but why do I find some of these paintings chilly? I think they work a little too hard at otherworldliness. Perhaps I find it hard to dissociate paintable strangeness from this world.

Surrealism, the most accessible of modern art movements, still has its secrets.

I may be more challenged than I thought in finding surrealism “accessible”; however, if I can read into a painting even a hint of humor and irony, I warm to it.

surreal orinoco

Remedios Varo’s “Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River,” from 1959. Credit Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VEGAP, Madrid.

In Remedios Varos’s painting, the mighty Orinoco River squirts from a goblet. A lady explorer in natty attire, ensconced in an outlandish vessel, has discovered its origin. This pallor-ridden concoction full of delicate drawing and fussy brushing draws me in. I discover details: her hat is actually built into her easy-chair boat, which has a side-pocket for notes and receipts; a tiny compass is conveniently mounted on a flexed material squarely in front of her; her right hand fingers a drawstring that controls side-flaps and a wing-like sail (note how the strings are routed through her epaulet buttons); her left hand manipulates a rope that actuates a bellows-like propulsive mechanism… and so forth. It’s enjoyable not for its painterly properties but because it’s so fastidiously conceived and wittily engineered — a visual joke.

(Roberta Smith, “Female Surrealists Re-emerge in 2 Startling Shows,” NYTimes, 6-13-19)

(c) 2019 JMN

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Guide by the Perplexed — Kentucky-Fried Crow

Posted on June 16, 2019 by JMN
jackwhite

Doodle & Scrawl (JMN)

I’m due a serving of KFC for asserting in the last chapter of GBTP that in guitar tuning the Major Third between strings 3 and 2 punctuates a sequence of Perfect Fifths. I should have said Perfect Fourths.

For me, the way to clarity often is to go the wrong way around, trapping errors until I rest on a patch of clearing. When I made my “Perfect Fifths” gaffe, I thought I was in control of the narrative about the intervals between strings. I wasn’t.

The high E-string is string 1. The low E-string is string 6. In ascending string order — 1 through 6 — the tuning is E-B-G-D-A-E. In descending string order — 6 through 1 — the tuning is E-A-D-G-B-E.

Why should we care about descending string order? Because the pitch sequence in that order is from low to high. And the commonly talked-about intervals are the ascending ones, where the second pitch is higher than the first.

For me if not for you a question hangs in the air: Why did the guitar strings get numbered in this cart-before-horse fashion anyway?

I will deconstruct the interval picture with symbology in the next chapter. It will make no more sense than now, but there you have it — coming next.

(c) 2019 JMN

Posted in Anthology | Leave a comment

Parting Looks — Buck Schiwetz

Posted on June 16, 2019 by JMN

Edward Muegge “Buck” Schiwetz, 1898-1984, born in Cuero, Texas (c) 2019 JMN

More Galleries | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Little Fresh Meat

Posted on June 15, 2019 by JMN
little fresh meat

The singer Cai Xukun performing in Beijing. Credit VCG/Getty Images.

It’s diverting to see how evolving styles of masculinity in China can flummox the patriarchy. Redolent translations bubble up from the fascinating goo of rhetoric around the matter.

… “little fresh meat,” a nickname, coined by fans, for young, delicate-featured, makeup-clad male entertainers.
…
The state news agency Xinhua denounces what it calls… “sissy pants” culture as “pathological….”
…
“The ridiculous condemnation of ‘sissy pants’ men shows the gender ideology of a patriarchal society that equates toughness with men and fragility with women,” a journalist… wrote….

(Helen Gao, “‘Little Fresh Meat’ and the Changing Face of Masculinity in China,” NYTimes, 6-12-19)

A major Communist Party organ wrote that at a time when China confronts multiple threats the country doesn’t want to see its men “shrieking while refreshing their makeup.”

I dunno. A world led by men shrieking while refreshing their makeup seems like a better place.

(c) 2019 JMN

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Suffer the Sugar Ants to Come Unto Me

Posted on June 15, 2019 by JMN

ants

The Divine in ant-drag is having a micro-tiny romp on my kitchen drainboard to remind me how wholly life expresses itself.

Sugar ants go everywhere at once in some inscrutable order, regroup around the task of tugging a crumb this way — no wait, that way! — then settle on just eating it. An hour later the crumb is gone and so are they — back through a nick in the caulk. A platoon of these hyperactive lilliputians can subsist on a speck.

I’m left with no recourse but to share with the sugar ants the space I occupy. I’ve no greater rights to it than they do, says whatever it’s called that stays my hand from dialing the pest control man.

(c) 2019 JMN

Posted in Commentary | Tagged | Leave a comment

An Unsocial Medium

Posted on June 13, 2019 by JMN

ed1

Farhad Manjoo is a favorite journalist of mine. I’ve read him from when he wrote about tech on Slate before joining the NYTimes. He touts in this column an “unsocial” digital diary app called “Day One,” describing it as “a private social network for an audience of one: yourself.”

I use it to jot down my deepest thoughts and shallowest jokes; to rant and to vent; to come to terms with new ideas I’m playing with, ideas that need time to marinate in secret before they’re ready for the world; and to collect and reflect upon all the weird and crazy and touching artifacts of life in this bracing historical moment…
(Farhad Manjoo, “Why a Digital Diary Will Change Your Life,” 6-12-19)

I have to write to think. Before (re-)starting this blog I considered doing private journaling on Penzu instead. However, that seemed a bit too solipsistic. It risked trapping me in the echo chamber of my own head. EthicalDative is middle ground. Though theoretically anyone can view it, it feels private. Its readers are few, and likely to be persons to whom I would open my diary anyway.

(c) 2019 JMN

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , | 4 Comments

The Un-Rosie Side

Posted on June 13, 2019 by JMN
montlaur1

Montlaur painted this self-portrait in 1969… Credit The National WWII Museum/Estate of Guy de Montlaur.

Twenty-five-year-old Guy de Montlaur was a heroic French commando in Normandy on D-Day. Having studied before that for a promising art career, he evoked his war-time experience on canvas until his death in 1977 at 58. The National World War II Museum in New Orleans has collected his paintings in an exhibit called “In Memory of What I Cannot Say.”

The canvases… are a stark departure for the sprawling museum, where displays tend to focus more on the triumph and carefully restored weaponry of World War II. There is no shortage of bombers, fighters, tanks and cheery newsreels showing Rosie the Riveter cranking out equipment on the home front. But little time is spent on the more than one million American troops killed or wounded, or the hard-to-count psychological casualties who struggled to move on from what they witnessed on the battlefield.

montlaur2

“On the Road Near Sallenelles, a Friend,” 1969. Credit The National WWII Museum/Estate of Guy de Montlaur.

The exhibit includes a 1946 documentary film about what it termed “battle neurosis.” Directed by John Huston, its title was “Let There Be Light.” The Army kept it classified for 75 years, releasing it in 1981.

(Dave Philipps, “He Couldn’t Talk About What He Saw in World War II. So He Painted It,” NYTimes, 6-12-19)

(c) 2019 JMN

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Prophecy Fire

Posted on June 9, 2019 by JMN
Denzel Washington, NYTimes

Denzel Washington, NYTimes.

Paul Theroux traveled in China in 1986 and 1987 for his book “Riding the Iron Rooster” published in 1988. He described police assaults on pro-democracy demonstrators that he witnessed. The book was dismissed by some reviewers “as alarmist and Sinophobic.” The Tiananment Square massacre in 1989 made it seem prescient. “… All I had done as a traveler was record what I saw: Writing the truth is prophetic,” Theroux adds in his letter to the NYTimes. He concludes as follows:

I have mentioned this in lectures I have given, in many Western cities as well as in Hong Kong, and each time I raise the subject, uttering the words “Tiananmen Square,” two or three Chinese people — sometimes more — rise and rush to the exits, as if I’d yelled “fire.”

The first time it occurred I was puzzled. When it continued to happen, I was told that all Chinese people connected to the government — which includes business people and academics — are under instructions to respond to any mention of the massacre by turning their backs on the speaker and fleeing the room.
(“Paul Theroux: Truth and Tiananmen [Letter],” NYTimes, 6-7-19)

(c) 2019 JMN

Posted in Quotations | Tagged , | Leave a comment