Divinipotent Daily

Dysfunctional Family Christmas

2011-12-26T08:10:00.001-05:00

"A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together."

~ Garrison Keillor

Did you spend Christmas with your extended family? How was it — a little shredded around the edges? Whether it's drunken uncles, cheek-pulling aunts, whiny children, passive-aggressive in-laws or some other annoyance, we all have our little crosses to bear at family holiday gatherings.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a slightly eccentric but surprisingly functional family; even so, when the extended clan came together for a holiday celebration, wires would start popping out of the hay bale. On Christmas day our house filled with aunts and uncles and cousins, enough to require every available leaf for dining room table plus a card table or two in the adjoining breakfast room. We were a merry mob for the most part, but eventually mom's two older sisters would gather in the kitchen to critique her cooking. The nitpicking began late in the afternoon, after generous quantities of scotch had been consumed by all concerned. Inevitably, one of my aunts would insert herself into the process physically, getting between my mom and the stove, triggering a great crashing and banging of pots. One year a fully cooked 25-pound turkey landed on the floor as I looked on. (I was immediately sworn to secrecy by the adults, who wiped it off and popped it onto the carving board. A useful life lesson.)

What I find fascinating is that many families memorialize their dysfunction in formal photographs. I hope you feel better about your own family after you've had a look at these images from the first two decades of the 1900s.

It's 1912 and today's theme is "living dolls."

Let's all be very quiet and maybe she won't stab us.

In 1914, the family of attorney Raymond Dickey
has itself a grumpy little Christmas.

The Dickeys again a few years later.
I could spend hours pondering who's no longer speaking to whom.

For more dysfunction, see:

Awkward Family Photos

How to Take an Awkward Family Photo

"The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together."

~ Erma Bombeck

The Lighting of the Tree

2011-12-25T11:12:00.000-05:00

"Thousands of lights were burning on the green branches, and gaily-colored pictures, such as she had seen in the shop-windows, looked down upon her. The little maiden stretched out her hands toward them when — the match went out. The lights of the Christmas tree rose higher and higher, she saw them now as stars in heaven…"

~ Hans Christian Andersen

Recently, the wonderful blog Ephemeral New York told the story of how we came to string electric lights on Christmas trees. In 1882 an employee of Thomas Edison named Edward Johnson created a sensation among the New York society set when he strung crepe-paper-wrapped lights on his tree. Another 35 years passed before teenager Albert Sadacca, whose family owned a lighting company, proposed the first ready-made strings of colored lights. By the 1920s, even the White House had adopted Sadacca's idea.

White House Christmas tree, 1920s
from the archives of the Library of Congress

For most New Yorkers, and for many others as well, the words "Christmas tree" summon images of Rockefeller Center's gigantic fir and annual lighting ceremony. The tradition began in 1931 when workers who were building Rockefeller Center erected a 20-foot tree to celebrate their good fortune of being employed in the Great Depression. You can see a photo of the tree and a crowd of construction workers via the Time magazine link at the end of today's blog. [Note: An earlier version of this post included a photo of the first Rockefeller Center tree. However, since there seems to be some dispute about its fair use, I've removed it.]

Two years later, in 1933, Rockefeller Center made the tree a tradition. Here are a few photos taken over the years, all courtesy of the archives of the Museum of the City of New York.

Rockefeller Center 1934 by the great New York City
photographer Samuel Gottscho

A dramatic shot of the tree in 1945, as seen from Fifth Avenue

Rockefeller Center, 1948

There's one more tree I want to show you. This was not in Rockefeller Center but in Dayton, Ohio.

This sad tree was in the home of Wilbur and Orville Wright circa 1900. As we celebrate our blessings, let's be grateful that the Wright brothers were so much better at building airplanes than decorating trees.

For more information, see:

Ephemeral New York: "How New York invented the Christmas tree"

Time: "A Brief History of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree"

"George, a camel, stepped on the foot of a Rockette; six sheep came off the elevator as three kings bearing gifts got on; human Christmas trees bumped into eight maids-a-milking at the water cooler and an elf came down with the flu."

~ William E. Geist

Ghosts of Christmas Shopping Past

2011-12-24T10:24:00.000-05:00

"As we struggle with shopping lists and invitations, compounded by December's bad weather, it is good to be reminded that there are people in our lives who are worth this aggravation, and people to whom we are worth the same."

~Donald E. Westlake

For the last few months I have been collecting photos of long-gone Christmases and now find myself with far too many for a single post. There's only one solution: a series. Since some of us still have presents to buy — behold Christmas shopping as it once was.

In 1921a festive storefront in Washington, DC, celebrated with trees and flags.

Which lucky people got "talking machines" in 1921?

As the caption says, this was Woolworth's Fifth Avenue window in 1935. Miss you, F.W. Woolworth.

In 1944, Macy's offered children a Snow White Christmas.

"Gifts of time and love are surely the basic ingredients of a truly merry Christmas."

~ Peg Bracken

Thankful

2011-11-24T09:24:00.001-05:00

The older I get, the more I am thankful for art and poetry. Today, as the U.S. celebrates the Thanksgiving holiday, I offer a poem titled "Vermeer" by 2011 Nobel laureate for poetry Tomas Tranströmer.

The Music Lesson by Jan Vermeer

Vermeer
By Tomas Tranströmer

No protected world...Just behind the wall the noise begins,
the inn
with laughter and bickering, rows of teeth, tears, the din of bells
and the insane brother-in-law, the death-bringer we all must tremble for.

The big explosion and the tramp of rescue arriving late,
the boats preening themselves on the straits, the money creeping down
in the wrong man's pocket
demands stacked on demands
gaping red flowerheads sweating premonitions of war.

Woman in Blue Reading a Letter by Jan Vermeer

And through the wall into the clear studio
into the second that's allowed to live for centuries.
Pictures that call themselves The Music Lesson
or Woman in Blue Reading a Letter —
she's in her eighth month, two hearts kicking inside her.
On the wall behind is a wrinkled map of Terra Incognita.

Breathe calmly...An unknown blue material is nailed to the chairs.
The gold studs flew in with incredible speed
and stopped abruptly
as if they had never been other than stillness.

Ears sing, from depth or height.
It's the pressure from the other side of the wall.
It makes each fact float
and steadies the brush.

It hurts to go through walls, it makes you ill
but is necessary.
The world is one. But walls...
And the wall is part of yourself —
we know or we don't know but it's true for us all
except for small children. No walls for them.

The clear sky has leaned against the wall.
It's like a prayer to the emptiness.
And the emptiness turns its face to us and whispers,
"I am not empty. I am open."

"Vermeer" and many other Tranströmer poems can be found in the great enigma, new collected poems (c) 1987 Thomas Tranströmer, published by New Directions Books. Kudos to translator by Robin Fulton.

The leaves of 2011

2011-11-13T21:44:00.000-05:00

The leaves of autumn are an extravagant gift nature gives to people who live with four seasons.

Two years ago I noticed three interesting leaves on the ground near my apartment and decided to scan them.

Last year, the leaves were different but equally beautiful, so I scanned them, too, and wrote about them in a post titled "Arts & Crafts: Color by Nature." Now, two years in, I feel like an amateur scientist documenting the environment. What will the leaves look like this year? How do they correlate to the weather? 2011 has been exceptionally wet, with several record-setting rainfalls. Are the leaves somehow a record of this? Beats me, but they sure are beautiful.

The four leaves below came from adjoining branches of the same tree.

Below, more of this year's bounty.

"Winter is an etching, spring a water color, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all."

~ Stanley Horowitz

The prosody of gooseflesh

2011-10-30T08:22:00.000-04:00

Today is the eve of All Hallow's Eve, and because it is a Sunday, it is the day of my neighborhood's annual Halloween parade for tots. Shepherded by their parents, dozens of tiny bumblebees, pumpkins, Thomas the Tank Engines, princesses, Jedi knights, Scooby-Dos and Madeleines will ramble down the street in a long, jaunty row, popping in and out of stores for treats.

But what is there for grown-ups who want a Halloween chill? I suggest this: William Butler Yeats himself reading The Lake Isle of Innisfree in a trembling, conjurer's voice.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
by W. B. Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Ruminating about food and hunger

2011-10-16T08:27:00.000-04:00

"There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread."
~ Mohandas Ghandi

Today is Blog Action Day, when bloggers around the world take on a single topic. Since this is also World Food Day, the topic for 2011 is food.

While there are many ways to think about food, the one that matters most to millions of people right now is the lack of it. As this UNICEF video shows, millions of people in Africa — including some 2 million children — are facing starvation as I write these words.

The video talks about the almost miraculous food paste Plumpy'nut, which can save the life of a starving child as effectively as the right antibiotic can cure a life-threatening infection. You can learn more about Plumpy'nut here.

If Africa seems remote from your concerns, then look no farther than your own country and community. The World Hunger Education Service has a wealth of global hunger statistics on its website.

"Food insecure" is the term the U.S. government uses to describe households where one or more members must reduce their food intake or disrupt their eating patterns because they cannot afford sufficient food. That description applied to 14.5 percent of U.S. households in 2010. You can learn more about it in the publication Household Food Security in the United States in 2010.

In my hometown, the New York City Coalition Against Hunger is "the voice for the more than 1,200 nonprofit soup kitchens and food pantries in New York City and the more than 1.4 million low-income New Yorkers who live in homes that can't afford enough food." Is it ironic that, in the same city where the people who destroyed the economy still get six-figure bonuses, so many people are hungry? Actually, I think it's criminal.

One final word about hunger: "The F Word: Famine Is the Real Obscentity."

"If you can't feed a hundred people, then just feed one."
~ Mother Teresa

The eye of the beholder

2011-10-01T17:38:00.000-04:00

"The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel."

~ Piet Mondrian

A few weeks ago a shrine appeared on in my neighborhood — one of those collections of toys, candles, photos and stuffed animals that spring up wherever someone has died suddenly or too young.

The shrine sits on a corner outside a Filipino grocery store that's across the street from a busy Filipino church. On Sundays, while women, children and some of the men attend church services, five or ten older men normally gather by the grocery store to smoke and shoot the breeze.

At first I didn't pay much attention to the shrine beyond wondering where the smoking men would stand on Sundays. Sidewalk tributes make me feel like a voyeur, a rubbernecker at a traffic accident, and this one was easy to avoid. But one day I passed within a few feet of it and realized this was not what it at first seemed: This is a shrine to the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian.

"Broadway Boogie Woogie"
Piet Mondrian (1942-43)

Mondrian, a founder of the stripped down, anti-romantic De Stijl movement, is known for his grid-based paintings of perpendicular lines in primary colors. He moved to New York in 1940 and created his celebrated "Broadway Boogie Woogie" here in the two years before his death at age 72 in 1944. So there was a New York connection...but what was up with the shrine?

The corner the shrine sits on is one block away from MoMA PS1, an exhibition space for "emerging artists"...the sort of artists who might decide to create a shrine to a long-dead artist that simultaneously violates everything the artist stood for and pays tribute to his enduring influence. I should also mention that Mondrian's "Broadway Boogie Woogie" is part of MoMA's permanent collection — check out a MoMA curator's audio-visual discussion of it here.

I don't know who created this — as far as I can see, it's unsigned — but it was put together with lavish attention to very odd details. For example, this section of the shrine notes the influence of Mondrian on L'Oreal hair products.

Here you can see that while the candles stick to Mondrian's primary colors, the stuffed animals...not so much.

Ultimately, I don't know what the shrine's creator thinks of Mondrian. Is this a critique of the severe De Stijl style or is the real target the schmaltzy sentimentality of sad little stuffed animals and signs professing love? As always, it's in the eye of the beholder.

Whatever it is, they're against it

2011-09-26T22:28:00.000-04:00

"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime."
~ Potter Stewart

After I wrote my previous post about Banned Books Week, I got an email from Dave Rock, the husband of one of my cousins, who reminded me about the Index Librorum Prohibitorum — the Catholic Church's former list of prohibited books. Published from 1559 until it was abolished in 1966, the list included works by some of history's best known scientists, novelists and other authors — Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, John Milton, David Hume, René Descartes and Victor Hugo among them.

When I was very young, the Index was still taken seriously in certain Roman Catholic circles, including my elementary school. Thinking about it fetched up a memory from those days about the time a banned film came to my home town. It was 1958 and the movie was God's Little Acre, starring Robert Ryan, Aldo Ray and Tina Louise. The film was based on Erskine Caldwell's 1933 novel of the same name, for which Caldwell was arrested, tried for obscenity and ultimately exonerated. Its presence at the local movie theater caused outrage, protests and, if I remember correctly, a short-lived boycott.

It all brings to mind the immortal words of Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff in the 1932 movie Horse Feathers.

“The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.”
~ Henry Steele Commager

It's Banned Books Week: Open a book, open a mind

2011-09-24T08:13:00.000-04:00

"I am opposed to any form of tyranny over the mind of man."
~ Thomas Jefferson

The Boston Public Library's Bates Hall, 1896

Banned Books Week 2011 starts today, September 24. While some of us champion freedom, the intolerant are always on the hunt for new ways to curtail it, never recognizing the absurdity of their efforts. As George Bernard Shaw pointed out, “Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.”

One of the sponsors of Banned Books Week, the American Library Association (ALA), has a calendar of events including a virtual read-out on YouTube. The ALA's site also includes lists and statistics about the most frequently challenged books and authors. One mind-boggling example: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World — published in 1932 — is one of the ten most frequently challenged books of 2010.

While the desire to censor may not change, circumstances do. Today's prospective book banners, book burners, political demagogues, religious fanatics and simple megalomaniacs will find that, thanks to digital communications, thoughts are harder than ever to control.

“All books can be indecent books, though recent books are bolder.
For filth, I'm glad to say, is in the mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed, everything is lewd.
I could tell you things about Peter Pan,
And the Wizard of OZ, there's a dirty old man!”
~ Tom Lehrer

New York Public Library reading room

An eye for the absurd

2011-09-19T07:01:00.000-04:00

"Everything we see hides another thing. We always want to see what is hidden by what we see."

~ Rene Magritte

“La Carte d’Après Nature,” a show at the Matthew Marks Gallery on West 22nd Street (New York City) through October 8th, takes its name from a journal created by the great Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte. The New York Times says of the journal: "It took the form of postcards mailed to fellow artists and writers, and included drawings, snippets of poetry and short stories..." Various notes and postcards from the journal are in a display case in an out-of-the-way corner of the gallery entrance area. Two Magritte paintings, "In the Airy Glades" and "The Universe Unmasked," are also in the show.

My old friend Dawn Willis and I were in the neighborhood to see the Gagosian's new Andy Warhol show (more below). We're both huge fans of Magritte, but the work that stood out for both of us was made by the late Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri. His photography dominates the show — dozens of exquisite images, most of them quite small, most infused with a deadpan absurdist spirit. I'd never heard of him before, but now I can't stop thinking about his work and want to know more about him.

Ghirri often photographed people in front of artificial landscapes. Sometimes the effect was subtle, as in this photo, which is titled "Lucerna."

And sometimes the effect is not so subtle at all. Behold "Salzberg."

He also photographed landscapes with artificial features, such as this palm tree.

One of my favorite photos is this one, taken through the window of a hat shop in Parma.

The Internet is disappointingly unhelpful on the subject of Ghirri. I learned from Wikipedia that he was born in Scandiano in 1943 and died in 1992. The program notes for a 2001 exhibition at the Julie Saul Gallery add this: "Ghirri created visually profound images about the nature of representation and seeing. Although he freely acknowledged the influence of American photographers Lee Friedlander, Walker Evans and William Eggleston, as well as Atget, his work possesses a witty and worldly sensibility that is purely his own."

At the Gagosian's West 21st Street gallery, Andy Warhol's silkscreens of Liz Taylor, large and small, are on every wall. Dawn is a major fan and was excited that so many images she hadn't seen before were gathered in one place. A large silver canvas with multiple images of Liz in her National Velvet days was my personal favorite.

Continuing the Warhol theme and rounding out the day's absurdities, we stopped by the chrome-covered Andy Warhol "monument" at Union Square. With its super-shiny finish, it looks like a sports trophy or hood ornament. Andy would probably have loved it.

"All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us."

~ Immanuel Kant

The whole world blind

2011-09-11T10:35:00.000-04:00

I found this postcard in a shop at Jones Beach in the spring of 2002. I take it out and look at it every once in a while. It reminds me to be vigilant, but it has never made me want revenge. Each person is different and all of our feelings are valid, but I simply don't know many people in New York City who wanted revenge. With that in mind, some thoughts for this day...

"He that studieth revenge keepeth his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well." ~ John Milton

"Revenge...is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion." ~ Albert Schweitzer

"An eye for an eye would make the whole world blind." ~ Mohandas Ghandi

In 2009 CBS Sunday Morning did an interesting report about the varied ways people respond to those who inflict suffering on them. You can see it here.

Don't Look Back

2011-08-14T16:40:00.000-04:00

One Secret Thing by Sharon Olds is a collection of beautiful, often painful poems. She writes about a childhood spent feeling worthless, terrorized by and terrified of her parents; about becoming a parent; about watching her frightening mother age into a different, more likable character; about growing older herself.

Sharon Olds can also be very funny. Case in point: A little more than halfway through One Secret Thing you'll find this poem, which made me laugh out loud (ruefully and with recognition).

Self Portrait, Rear View
by Sharon Olds

The Valpincon Bather
by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

At first I almost do not believe it, in the hotel
triple mirror, that that is my body, in
back, below the waist, and above
the legs—the thing that doesn’t stop moving
when I stop moving.
And it doesn’t even look like just one thing,
or even one big, double thing
—even the word saddlebags has a
smooth, calfskin feel to it 
compared to this compendium
of net string bags, shaking their booty of
cellulite fruits and nuts. Some lumps
look like bonbons translated intact
from chocolate box to buttocks, the curl on top
showing, slightly, through my skin. Once I see what I can
do with this, I do it, high-stepping
to make the rapids of my bottom  rush
and ripple like a world wonder. Slowly,
I believe what I am seeing, a 54-year-old
rear end, once a tight end,
high and mighty, almost a chicken butt,
now exhausted, as if tragic. But this is not
an invasion, my cul-de-sac is not being
used to hatch alien cells, ball peens,
gyroscopes, sacks of marbles. It’s my hoard
of treasure, my good luck, not to be
dead, yet, though when I flutter
the wing of my ass again, and see
in a clutch of eggs, each egg,
on its own, as if shell-less, shudder, I wonder
if anyone has ever died,
looking in a mirror, of horror. I think I will
not even catch a cold from it,
I will go to school to it, to Butt
Boot Camp, to the video store, where I saw,
in the window, my hero, my workout jelly
role model, my apotheosis: Killer Buns.

Senseless

2011-06-27T08:27:00.000-04:00

"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."
~ Oscar Wilde

Rene Magritte: "The Invention of Life"

Late last year I developed a strange and enduring form of laryngitis. Although my voice was completely gone for just a few days, I could only speak in a monotone and was unable to laugh aloud for two or three months afterward.

As the problem dragged on, I realized my flattened voice was flattening my mood. And then it occurred to me — why wouldn't it? Our senses give us feedback all the time. Without a range of vocal expression, I sounded like a joyless zombie and gradually started to feel like one, too.

I started looking for scientific studies on the topic — information about how our senses influence our moods. Nothing I've come across touches on the forced silence of laryngitis, but an article titled "Smile! It Could Make You Happier" in the September 2009 issue of Scientific American had some interesting things to say about the way our facial expressions effect our moods. (You can link to an abstract here.)

Among the findings the article discusses:

frowning increases sensitivity to pain
people who were given Botox injections to prevent them from frowning were happier
when Botox prevented people from smiling, they felt depressed

My point here: Our bodies are trying to tell us things, and we are telling things to our bodies even when we don't realize it. I for one plan to pay more attention.

"Seeing, hearing and feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle."
~ Walt Whitman

Look Through Any Window II

2011-05-31T08:09:00.000-04:00

Smoke shop, the Netherlands, 1917

When I worked in advertising, I heard a thing that made sense to me. A guy who specialized in advertising for chain restaurants said that if you want to raise a store's income by 10%, just give it a coat of paint and clean the windows.

Our local Chinese restaurant got caught up in an endless station renovation that routed people away from its door for about two years. Somehow the business survived — probably via take-out. Now that the subway work is almost complete and the scaffolding has come down, the store's windows are thick with dust. I want to tell Mr. Lee, "Wash your windows! Throw some paint on the walls! Look what this store did with a display about milk!"

Rothschild's, Ithaca, NY, 1917

This is my second post about shop windows. (The first is here.) This time, have a look through some windows from the U.S., the UK, the Netherlands and South Africa. The photos date from the early 1900s through the 1940s. Everything says "Come on in."


A ladies' dress shop, Amsterdam, 1915. Note the absence of today's fierce mannequin faces.


Look at this swoopy thing with its Vogue magazines! It's in Newcastle, England, in the 1940s.

Have Hollywood on your mind? This is the Hollywood Hat Shop, also in Newcastle.


World War II was beginning, but these young American boys seem to have been mesmerized by all the Chinese Checkers sets.

The Hollies: "Look Through Any Window"

The best of New York City on $0.00 a day

2011-05-15T11:18:00.000-04:00

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."
~ Thomas Merton

Going to art galleries is one of the best deals in New York; it's free and just about any time you go, something will fill you with wonder. Right now, the galleries in Chelsea have so much wonder on their walls, I hardly know where to begin.

Andre Kertesz: "Bockskay-Ter, Budapest"

"Night" is the name of a moody, noirish photography show featuring the work of four great photographers at the peak of their powers: Robert Doisneau, Ilse Bing, Brassai and Andre Kertesz. The images above and below are two examples. See them all at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery through June 2nd.

Robert Doisneau: "Mademoiselle Anita"

From 1927 to about 1935 Marie-Therese Walter was the love of Pablo Picasso's life as well as his model and muse. Picasso and Marie-Therese: L'amour fou, a selection of the extraordinary work that came from that relationship, just opened at the Gagosian Gallery (April 14 – June 25). The exhibition is a remarkable thing to see for its diversity — paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, even a wall hanging — as well as its intense beauty. In addition to Picasso's work it includes photographs and a few seconds of film of Marie-Therese at her beautiful, glowing and playful best. Here she is in her red beret.

Pablo Picasso: one of several paintings of Marie-Therese in her red beret

If you know Kara Walker for her intricate, kinetic, witty silhouettes portraying black history and life in the U.S., her show at the Sikkema Jenkins gallery (through June 4th) will come as a bracing shock to the system.

Kara Walker: "Louise Beavers"

Titled "Dust Jackets for the Niggerati-and Supporting Dissertations, Drawings submitted ruefully by Dr. Kara E. Walker," it is a sprawling, raw, impassioned series of drawings and prints about dreams deferred, co-opted, sold out and destroyed. The block-printed image above is a "dust jacket" blurb written about the actress Louise Beavers.

Jasper Johns was an established art star when I was a student, and he's still going strong at 81. Patterns, numbers and alphabets continue to inspire him, but he's added some new (to me) elements in his current show at the Matthew Marks Gallery (through July 1). In a room devoted to prints and paintings in the series "Fragment of a Letter" (based on one of many letters written by Vincent Van Gogh to his friend Emile Bernard), he incorporates American sign language into his work.

Jasper Johns: "Fragment of a Letter

The familiar witch-or-urn optical illusion inspires another series of images. In the intaglio print below, he combines urns, witches, sign language and what he calls "shrinky dinks." The man is having fun.


Jasper Johns: "Shrinky Dink 4"

We wandered into the CRG Gallery when we saw Ori Gersht's images through the window. Once inside, what appeared to be paintings turned out to be delicately beautiful photography. The series, "Falling Petals," seems to have been shot in Japan in the height of cherry blossom season. The image below is not my favorite, but it's the only one available online.

Ori Gersht: "Falling Petals"

While Ori Gersht's photography sometimes looks like painting, Mary Henderson tricks the eye the opposite way. She is a skilled hyperrealist whose paintings and watercolors might easily be mistaken for photos — until you realize they reveal more than any photo you're likely to see. "Bathers" is the name and subject of her current show at the Lyons Wier Gallery. The painting below amazed me from its use of light to the strands of hair and the grains of sand on the beach towel. See the gallery website for more.

Mary Henderson: "Back"

"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary."
~ Pablo Picasso

Optical illusion as architectural metaphor

2011-05-08T17:56:00.000-04:00

“Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.”
~ Ernest Dimnet

Can the crane lift the Chrysler building? No, it cannot. Can the crane remove the Chrysler building from view? Yes, it can.

Last December I wrote about waking up one foggy morning to discover the beginning of the end of the New York skyline view I've lived with and loved for 30 years. This is what I saw through my kitchen window that day.

Construction has moved along at a rapid clip in the last five months, revealing a building far worse than my wildest imaginings. The developers have dismissively turned the building's back to the community. They have replaced the beautiful skyline with a featureless, sand-colored monstrosity. If the building is to have a good side, it will face the river. And it gets better: This building is the first of five.

What puzzles me is, what will prospective tenants think about coming home to the visual equivalent of the servant's entrance every night? What will they tell their visitors? I can hear them now: "Just head toward the waterfront and look for the ugliest building you've ever seen. That's us!" Or perhaps the developers expect everyone to arrive by boat.

New York is not just the city that never sleeps. It is the city that never stops reinventing itself. But surely we can do better than this.

"The materials of city planning are sky, space, trees, steel and cement in that order and in that hierarchy."
~ Le Corbusier

Raise high the roofbeams

2011-04-30T15:12:00.000-04:00

"We've removed the ceiling above our dreams. There are no more impossible dreams."
~ Jesse Jackson

Santa Maria Assunta Cathedral, Pisa, Italy

In his April 30th column for WSJ.online, science writer Jonah Lehrer writes that "architecture and design can influence our moods, thoughts and health." As he explains, scientists are discovering that our outlook and our performance on different tasks change in response to aspects of our surroundings "from the quality of a view to the height of a ceiling."

The article put me on a memory path I've traveled down scores of times over the years. It begins when, as a child of three or four, my parents took me to a Roman Catholic mass in a Gothic-style church where the choir sang Gregorian chant.

As light streamed through the stained glass windows and the chanting voices arced and dipped I suddenly had the feeling that my mind was floating through the top of my head to a place way up high in the vaulted ceiling. I wasn't frightened by it. I felt both calm and energized.

Although I gave up religion in my early teens, over the years, when I've needed to think through a difficult problem or even just recharge, I have often found my way to a high-ceilinged church. Even without the chanting choir, the light and those high, beautiful ceilings work a certain magic. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, "Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral." I find that inspiration contagious.

Norwich Cathedral, Norfolk, U.K.

The next time you find yourself near a Gothic-style church, stop in and see how it feels.

In Your Easter Bonnet

2011-04-24T10:42:00.000-04:00

On days like this I start thinking it's a pity that so few people still wear hats.

The photo above, from the archives of the Museum of the City of New York, shows top-hatted men and bonnet-clad women strolling past the Croton Reservoir on Easter Sunday in 1897. (The New York Public Library's main branch on Fifth Avenue occupies the reservoir's former site.)

This was the era known as the "Mauve Decade," so it's safe to assume that many of the ladies were sporting that fashion color.

Below, more fancy bonnets from Easters past when people proudly donned their finery and stepped out to promenade with their peers.

A windy, overcast day didn't stop these strollers from showing off their Easter wardrobes.


Was this even for Easter? Who knows, but what a fine hat.

I don't know if this hat was designed to look like a Shih Tzu, but if so — mission accomplished!

And we mustn't forget the tune. Have a lovely day.

One summer day in 1905

2011-04-11T07:28:00.000-04:00

"Summer afternoon – summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."
~ Henry James

About a month ago one of my favorite Internet places, the Shorpy Historic Photo Archive, published this photo. It was taken at the beach on Coney Island in 1905. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Do yourself an enormous favor and go here to see it full size.

Just look at this little one, with her hair ribbon and biggish bare feet and face filled with bliss. Coney Island was a place that beggared the imagination in 1905 — more Disney than Disneyland, with Dreamland and Luna Park enticing visitors from all over the world with exotic architecture, rides and attractions.

At some point I realized my father was a newborn that summer and started wondering what else was going on with children in and around 1905.

After spending time with U.S. Census Bureau records, the Library of Congress and other government and educational sources, I learned these things about the first decade of the 20th century:

Life was short: The average woman lived 47.3 years and the average man, 46.3.
Work was hard. The average work week was 59 hours, for which the average worker earned $12.98. The average teacher earned about half as much — $325 a year.
Only about half of all children attended school, probably because so many of them were working. Child labor was unregulated until 1938, when the FDR administration passed the Fair Labor Standards Act.

To engage in child's play on a beautiful summer's day is always a joy for a child, but for some of these children it was probably a rare luxury as well.

E. E. Cummings might have had them in mind when he wrote this poem.

"maggie and millie and molly and may"
by E. E. Cummings

maggie and millie and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,

and millie befriended a stranded star
who's rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles;

and may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
It's always ourselves we find in the sea."

Bonus: I found a film clip purporting to be a trip to Coney Island in 1905 by a group of boarding school girls. I seriously doubt it's a documentary — much of it seems staged. But it does show Coney Island during that same, magical summer.

The Fools of April

2011-04-01T07:35:00.001-04:00

My 2010 April Fools' Day story, with updates.

"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness."
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Divinipotent Daily loves whimsy and silliness, and since whimsy is the madly beating heart of a great April Fools' Day prank, I am a highly bemused camper at least once a year.

Some April foolery — like the BBC’s classic 1957 report on the annual spaghetti harvest along the Italian-Swiss border, which you can see by clicking here — is timeless. Most is just enjoyable ephemera. Last year I decided to collect the pranks I came across throughout the day (without actually searching for them) and note them here. I found a bumper crop.

Silliness started bright and early with an e-mail from a friend forwarding a press release with this headline:

“Iroquois Leaders Assail Government Benefits for Illegal Immigrants;

Say Aid Should Be Denied to Anyone Entering U.S. in Last 25,000 Years.”

The closing paragraph was my favorite part: “In a related development, 10,000 angry Tea Partying Medicare recipients protested against themselves today, demanding that ‘government health care keep its grubby hands off our government health care.’ Said one protestor, ‘I simply hate myself for benefiting from a program that proves that everything I stand for is flat-out wrong.’” The release was from Joel Berg of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, which has a tradition of entertaining its friends in the press every April 1st.

Google introduced an exciting new application for its Android phones on April 1, 2010: Google Translate for animals. That's right: a special app to enable us all to make like Dr. Doolittle.

Writer Eugene Finerman’s always entertaining, history-focused blog, Your RDA of Irony, arrived in my inbox with praise for the 600-year reign of the Byzantine Empire. Finerman proposed that for the U.S. to achieve that kind of stability, we should do to our government officials what the Byzantines did to theirs: castrate them.

Readers of the U.K. paper the Independent awoke on April 1, 2010 to the startling news that CERN, which operates the Large Hadron Collider, was planning to install another Hadron Collider within London’s Circle Line tube (subway) tunnel.

CERN itself, not to be outdone, announced the discovery of a “Paleoparticle.” According to the announcement, the new particle “consists of two strange quarks and one top quark but no beauty or charm quark. The physicists have nicknamed it the ‘neutrinosaurus’ because of its repulsive appearance and prehistoric origins.”

Did I mention that Google changed its name to Topeka last April Fools' Day?

An e-mail from the Center for Biological Diversity proclaimed this shocking news: “Palin Recants, Salazar Adopts Wolf” — reporting surprising position reversals by vocal anti-environmentalist Sarah Palin and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who removed the handful of wolves still living in the western U.S. from the endangered species list.

Science writer Ed Yong, on his blog for Discover magazine, revealed the discovery of the gullibility gene and a related part of the brain called "the inferior supra-credulus." At last — an explanation for Birthers!

In still more exciting news, Science magazine announced it was joining forces with rival publication Nature to create a new science journal, Natural Science. The first issue promises such provocative articles as “Evolution: Why won’t it stop?” and “Milk Chocolate: New compound isolated from rabbit eggs.”

Cognitive scientist Mark Changizi reported that Twitter was reducing its maximum character count from 140 to 20.

Science writer Rebecca Skloot’s best-selling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, tells the story of cancer victim Henrietta Lacks, whose “HeLa” genes — taken from her without permission — have led to countless scientific breakthroughs. But on April 1, 2010 the blog The Real Hela revealed that the true source of the HeLa gene was not Ms. Lacks after all — it was film star Hedy Lamarr!

Don't care about cellular biology? Then how about flying cats? The Tetrapod Zoology blog offered up a genuinely disturbing report about “the evolution of dropgorgons and winged cats” (see illustration below).

Mark your calendars: 365 days to the next day of whimsy.

“The best things in life are silly.”
~ Scott Adams

A poem about stillness

2011-03-23T11:53:00.000-04:00

I've read the brief poem below many times in the past two days. It seems perfect to me. In their biography of the author, Marie Howe, the Academy of American Poets includes this quote:

"This might be the most difficult task for us in postmodern life: not to look away from what is actually happening. To put down the iPod and the e-mail and the phone. To look long enough so that we can look through it—like a window."

By that standard, Marie Howe has 20/20 vision.

The Moment

by Marie Howe

Oh, the coming-out-of-nowhere moment

when, nothing

happens

no what-have-I-to-do-today-list

maybe half a moment

the rush of traffic stops.

The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be

slows to silence,

the white cotton curtains hanging still.

Here Comes the English Sunrise

2011-03-07T07:20:00.000-05:00

It's been hard to find time to write something new lately, so I thought I'd re-post something old. This was first published in December 2009.

"He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise."
~ William Blake

There was a time, from the late 1700s through the Victorian era, when it was often said that Britain was the "empire on which the sun never set." Similar things have been said of other empires, including Persia and Spain, but Britain's dominion is the most recent.

Is that the reason why the English are so fond of sunrises? It's hard to say, but their penchant for the orb and its arching rays has led to images of considerable beauty, both humble and grand.

This is the cover of one of my favorite books, The English Sunrise, by Brian Rice and Tony Evans, published in 1972 and now out of print. Although yellowed with age, my copy remains a jewel of a thing — an 8" x 8" paperback filled with seventy-six lovingly positioned images, plus those on the front and back covers, each one an English sunrise. To me this is sufficient argument for why printed books can never be completely replaced by e-books. The English Sunrise can still be found second-hand; I encourage you to do yourself a favor and seek out a copy. You'll see sunrise-bedecked houses and pottery, furniture, radios, tea cozies, signage and even a slot machine. Here are just a handful of examples — not necessarily my favorites, simply chosen at random.

A gate in Shaftesbury.

A handbag.

A leaded glass window.

The entrance to a pub.

The leather door panel of a 1933-36 Jaguar SS1 saloon car.

A bird cage.

A shopfront in Birmingham.

"The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls."
~ John Muir

When Weather Analogies Fail

2011-02-13T18:56:00.000-05:00

"Chaos is the score upon which reality is written."
~ Henry Miller

The past week has been on of those times when job stress and life stress combine like a marauding pack of angry badgers bent on mass destruction.

At my new job, a seemingly inexhaustible series of technological problems confounded my productivity, made me mightily cranky and left me feeling vaguely incompetent. Far more distressing, multiple people who are near and dear to me simultaneously experienced health crises and psychological meltdowns. Out went plans to attend a tribute to Tennessee Williams on Monday, a tribute to Elizabeth Bishop on Tuesday and an Oliver Sacks appearance on Thursday. Out went everything except getting myself and my loved ones through the week alive and well — without losing my job.

If you're a coper, and I come from a long line of them, when everything around you spins out of control, you quietly grit your teeth and lean into it. You figure out where daylight is and start taking slow, careful steps toward it. And that's how the week went.

Time passed and the chaos gradually settled down. I thought about the previous days and found myself grasping for a weather analogy. The first that came to mind was a whirlwind. But a moment later I thought no, that's wrong — there is no coping at the center of a tornado. Then I thought perhaps the quiet space I carved out for myself was like the eye of a hurricane. But that was wrong, too. The eye is just the false calm that precedes the rest of the storm. I ran through the possibilities from drought to flood to Nor'easter. Weather analogies failed me.

Friday happened to be my mother's birthday. She's been gone 25 years. As I wished her a happy birthday, I realized where I'd learned my quiet coping skills. It was all mom's doing. She was so unflappable you might have thought flapping didn't exist. In fact, I did think that growing up.

Thanks, mom.

The Poetry of Pasta

2011-01-30T21:08:00.000-05:00

Jozsef Tornai (1927–) is a Hungarian poet and author whose work I first learned about this morning. The manner of learning is worthy of note. The medium was Twitter, where gifts of knowledge are tossed from person to person like bridal bouquets.

The path to Tornai began with Twitter friend @drmstream (on Twitter people's names or nicknames are preceded by the "@" sign). He mentioned "Average Waves in Unprotected Waters," a story by Anne Tyler first published in the February 28, 1977 issue of the New Yorker. When another friend, @Kcecelia, looked up the story in the New Yorker's online archives, she noticed and mentioned two wonderful poems by Hungarian authors that appeared within the Anne Tyler story's pages.

And so I came to read and love this poem. It is too fine to languish behind the New Yorker's subscribers-only wall and doesn't appear to be available anywhere else, so I offer it here.

Mr. T. S. Eliot Cooking Pasta
by Jozsef Tornai
Translated from the Hungarian by Richard Wilbur

That crackle is well worth hearing.
He breaks in two the macaroni tubes
so as to make them fit the pot,
then casts them with both hands into the water
above the white electric range.
The water bubbles, seethes, the pasta
sinks to the bottom of the pot.
Mr. Eliot casts a glance
through the wide kitchen window toward the park:
it is raining there, and water
pours down the trunks of trees in substantial quantity,
tousling the lawn into a poison-green
Sargasso Sea.
Which reminds him of the pot.
Just so much contemplation has sufficed
for the rising of the pasta
to the water's surface.
He fishes out the bouncing ropes
with a colander, American-made,
and runs cold water on them from the tap.
"One is obliged to do so; otherwise
they will stick together." So Mr. Eliot writes
to a friend, later that evening.
"Still, the most gripping moment
comes when the macaroni
are broken in two with a dry crackle:
in that, somehow,
one recognizes oneself."