In Memory of My Father on His Birthday

A Stroll in the Gallery: The Repentant St. Peter

El Greco. The Repentant St. Peter. 1600-1605. Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C..

In April 1999, after resonating deeply with the bearded voyager ‘s supplication in Thomas Cole’s painting, I found the same gesture in El Greco’s The Repentant St. Peter. I was struck then by the sinewy muscles in Peter’s arms. This is a working man, not a pope. Of what did he repent?

Eight years later, what I remember is the simplicity of Peter’s gesture, not the painting’s vivid color or details such as the tear in the saint’s eye. It is the deeply felt humanity, not the saintliness, that moves me.

Again, I invoke the poetry of Yehudi Amichai: Gods come and go. Prayer is constant.

A Stroll in the Gallery: The Voyage of Life

Thomas Cole. The Voyage of Life: Manhood. 1842. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Looking at Thomas Hart Benton’s murals last week made me think about Thomas Cole’s panoramic series of allegorical paintings, The Voyage of Life. The series consists of four large paintings, not quite wall-sized but each deserving a wall of its own. Trying to imagine a room surrounded by Benton’s murals led me to remember the various galleries in which I’ve experienced Cole’s masterpiece.

The National Gallery of Art moves its collection around every few years, sometimes with disappointing results. You may expect to find old favorites in a cul-de-sac with a comfortable couch where you can contemplate quietly, only to find the paintings relocated to a busy thoroughfare. That happened to me in 2004, the last time I viewed The Voyage of Life. The paintings were hung in the museum’s southeast quadrant in a “vestibule” gallery leading to four other galleries. Four paintings, four walls, four doors, no couch – and a constant stream of chattering people moving in every direction. The location certainly had high foot traffic, and that would be good if the goal were selling Voyage of Life appointment calendars, umbrellas and tote-bags. High traffic, however, is reversely proportional to quality viewing. I missed the lonely cul-de-sac in the southwest quadrant where I’d spent hours looking, thinking, and writing about these paintings.

The Voyage of Life: Childhood; Youth; Manhood; Old Age.

When I first looked at Cole’s paintings I was but a callow youth, like the boy in the second painting, restless and ready to chase castles in the air. I didn’t care much for Cole’s allegorical content. Then and now, I thought the angel’s depiction as symbolic radiant light was contrived. But Cole’s sweeping landscapes caught my imagination. The contrast between dramatic foreground and limitless horizon never failed to move me. It is a painterly effect that may not be perceptible with the eye alone while standing in a real landscape. The effect also is perceptible to the heart, to some vestigial memory of place. It is the depiction of feelings provoked or inspired by the landscape. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries this quality was called ‘The Sublime.” If the angel seemed a little hokey, Cole’s treatment of distant shadow and light on the horizon was numinous. And yes, even as a callow youth, I knew and used that word. In time I came to know other painters from the Hudson River School whose style is called Luminist.

Cole’s allegory began to resonate for me only after my own bateaux had been battered in life’s cataract, as suggested by the third painting. Ms. Modigliani and I spent a rainy April afternoon with The Voyage of Life in 1999 shortly after my mother’s memorial service in Yellow Springs. We went to Washington to complete Mary Lou’s rites at the National Gallery of Art. I looked at the bearded man still standing in his boat, improbably, after a long, treacherous run through the rapids. I thought, that’s me, this is my life. Then I remembered a line from a poem by Yehudi Amichai: Gods come and go. Prayer is constant.

Café Mouffe is Back with Dave Brubeck

The Mouffe took ten, but it feels right to return after this hiatus with a YouTube clip of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five. This performance was recorded in 1961. You won’t see much of Brubeck, but you’ll hear him. If your ear is accustomed to the 1959 hit recording, Paul Desmond’s improvisation here sounds freshly lilting. And there’s a swinging drum solo by Joe Morello. His animation (and horn-rimmed glasses) remind me of my brother-in-law Harold, who was pounding the skins in a regional jazz band around the same time. I was six and thought he was cool. Still do. I have a vivid memory of Diana and Harold taking me to an outdoor Brubeck concert around this time, but they don’t remember it at all. Am I channeling some alternate reality?

If that’s not enough, here’s another YouTube clip of a later performance, maybe from the 70s. Brubeck has wild, Beethoven-like hair, and Desmond looks avuncular like Mr. Rogers. Hard to believe he was a junkie.

Hoarding & the Lifehack: Les Bouquinistes

This photo finds yours truly perusing a 1745 edition of Voltaire found in one of the bookstalls along the Seine. Paris, of course, has its own particular name for the place and its pursuits: Les Bouquinistes.

A Stroll in the Gallery: Venus with a Mirror

Titian. Venus with a Mirror. ca 1555. National Gallery of Art, Washington

In the same way Friday afternoons lead to Café Mouffe, Sunday mornings make me want to stroll through an art museum. Not a forced march, mind you, and not culture creep in a blockbuster cue, 20 seconds per viewer per painting. I want to stroll and be surprised. I want to visit old flames like Venus with a Mirror and rediscover passionate engagement.

Were I in Washington this morning, I’d take the Metro to the Archives stop and head for the Constitution Avenue entrance of the National Gallery of Art. I’d plan to arrive just before the grand bronze doors were unlocked. While waiting I might muse on the historical fact that President James Garfield was assassinated on the spot in 1881, when it was the site of a busy railroad station.

Then I’d sweep up the white marble staircase to the black marble rotunda. Returning to this glorious space never fails to move me. I find a bench, sit, and soak it in. Over the years I’ve chosen the rotunda with its cathedral light, its resplendent fountain and resonant echoes as the sacred place where I honor my parents. For me it is a place suffused with meaning and emotion, what Pierre Nora calls a lieu de memoir. Since I am now the steward of my parents’ Yellow Springs house, memories of them are always near to hand. I come to this soaring rotunda to celebrate their spirits. And I thank them for bringing me to the National Gallery of Art as a child.

After the rotunda I choose a direction for my stroll. I could turn east and head for the Monet gallery that is sure to hold Waterloo Bridge, Gray Day. Or I turn west and head for the Titians. The Monet gallery will have relaxing sofas and a stream of people passing through. Bracketed by innumerable Madonna’s with Child and popely/princely portraits, the Titian gallery may be the route less traveled. If there’s a sofa, too, it might be a hidden garden of delight.

I spent a week reading and writing in these galleries in the spring of 1999, three decades after my parents brought me here for the first time. Three months after my mother’s death, it became a spiritual journey to coming to rest here. (See the March 11 Stroll for Mary Lou’s most-cherished painting at NGA.) In the Monet gallery I’d try to read Paul Tucker’s biography of the painter, but I spent more time listening to snatches of conversation as others adored the paintings. I realized then that my experience of art in museums draws as much on the social context overheard in the moment as on direct visual perception. That’s how a half-blind flaneur looks at paintings.

In the Titian gallery I sank into the sofa and read John Hale’s magisterial history, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance. What a place to read such a book! I filled a notebook with writing about art and history. I paused often to gaze across the gallery at Venus with a Mirror. At a distance of 15 feet I couldn’t begin to see any detailed form beyond a blur. I knew the form; it was a lieu de memoir. What I could see, or apprehend, was the warm, rosy glow of the goddess’s skin.

When I first saw the painting at age 14, I learned how the experience of art could arouse me. Arouse is not a metaphor. Strolling through a museum with Ms. Modigliani is the most enchanting kind of foreplay on a rainy afternoon. At 14 I was amazed to think that Titian must have felt this way about Venus (and the artist’s model) when he painted her. He was approaching 70 then, and he kept the painting in his studio until the day he died. I have to smile now at callow youth and everything left to learn about the sensuality of old men.

At 14 I also apprehended something about painting that would take years to articulate. What makes an oil painting distinct from every other form of visual representation (including this digital image of an oil painting) is the way oil-based pigment absorbs light. Pigment not only reflects light, it absorbs it to some degree and depth, depending on the thickness of paint and varnish applied to the canvas. Titian may have been the first painter to discover how light could animate skin tones. Warmth of fleshly color, not erotic form, breathes the palpable, glowing life into his nudes. In this art Titian remains the master and Venus his muse.

Café Mouffe Presents: Charles Mingus at Antibes

Finally, the whole enchilada! I’d seen YouTube snippets before, but now Interzone Music has posted 14:30 of this legendary performance of I’ll Remember April by the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop. It was recorded at the Antibes Jazz Festival on July 12, 1960. That was two days after my fifth birthday. I was a beatnik poet prodigy then, and I knew all about the French Riviera. After listening to the Antibes live concert album for years, the naughty little boy in me wanted to see Brigitte Bardot and half her bikini in the background here. But hey, I’m not complaining. The film is jerky, the sound murky (listen to the CD to hear the ensemble’s full barbaric yawp), but this is an engaging historical document. It captures one of the last public appearances of that fragile bebop genius, Bud Powell. And it soars with Eric Dolphy and Booker Ervin trading four’s. Breathtaking!

For the record, the full lineup here is: Charles Mingus (bass), Bud Powell (piano), Eric Dolphy (alto), Booker Ervin (tenor), Ted Curson (trumpet), and Dannie Richmond (drums).

Thanks to Bemsha Bob in Seattle for pointing me to the possibility of finding Mingus/Antibes on YouTube. He’s turned me on to a lot of jazz over the years, and his pitch is perfect.

Coming next week to Café Mouffe: Bill Evans

If these roses could tell a story…

… the florist industry would be chagrined. I don’t know whether Inspector Clouseau continues to investigate what happened to them along the way. The e-commerce transaction turned out to be protracted and painful like a root canal. Seeing the photo helps me remember that all I was trying to do was send flowers on an otherwise happy, loving occasion.

There is a back story here about trust and accessibility/usability in an attention economy. Yep, and you thought it was just a vase full of flowers! Someday soon I may revisit the story for my Re-Imagining Accessibility gigs this spring. But for now, I need to try to stop and smell the roses.

JoAnn's Tribute: The Two Loves of Nathan Phillips

It’s shaping up to be Nathan Phillips week on The Daily Deep.. Nate (that’s what the Toronto press called him) tends to get all the attention, but JoAnn gives Grandmother Ett her due in this digital memoir. When JoAnn created it two years ago, she imagined the principal audience to be her mother, Ett’s daughter Madeline. YouTube didn’t exist then. Now the memoir can get the wider audience it deserves. I keep playing it so I can hear J’s dulcet voice.

Ten Years of Ardor for Ms. Modigliani

Amadeo Modigliani. Nude on a Blue Cushion. 1917. National Gallery of Art.

Happy Anniversary, Ms. M.!

Re-Vitalizing Grandpa's Square

Everyone in Toronto knows it as Nathan Phillips Square, the heart of the city. I know it as Grandpa's Square, because Nathan Phillips was JoAnn’s grandfather before he was the "Mayor of All the People." In the 1950s and 60s he played a leading role in building the new City Hall fronted by the plaza that now bears his name. Designed by Finnish architect Viljo Revell, the iconic building sparked Toronto's transformation into a showcase of international architecture. Nevertheless, my favorite Toronto photo is Nathan and Esther Phillips on Bay Street with old City Hall in the background. My second favorite photo is Nate with Jayne Mansfield.

Last week the City of Toronto announced the winning plan for renovating Nathan Phillips Square after 40 years of wear and tear. Architectural Record News has good web graphics of the design. An earlier article in The Torontoist featured illustrations from the four finalists in the design competition.

According to the Toronto Star, the project’s estimated cost is CAD $40-million. The city has budgeted CAD $16-million, and Mayor David Miller is confident the remainder can be raised from corporate and private donors. They will be recognized "very discreetly," Miller said. “No one will be skating on the Coca-Cola Rink. This is Nathan Phillips Square, that's how it's going to remain. Nathan Phillips Square is the most important space in this city.”

With Grandpa Phillips in the news, JoAnn checked to see if he had a Wikipedia page. She converted to Wikipedian in order to correct some factual errors found there. When renovation is completed on the square, she’s sure to be looking for the bronze sundial now located in the Peace Garden on the rise above the skating rink. It was Nate's gift to the city when the square was dedicated in 1965.

Updated 031407: See JoAnn’s tribute to her grandparents on YouTube.

A Stroll in the Gallery: A Girl with a Watering Can

Auguste Renoir. A Girl with a Watering Can. 1876. National Gallery of Art, Washington

My mother’s most favorite painting at NGA. Posted today in memory of her birthday.

A Stroll in the Gallery: Helen Birch Bartlett

Photo source: Art Institute of Chicago

Frederic Clay and Helen Birch Bartlett, c. 1923. Photograph
courtesy of Libby Bartlett Sturges.

See the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago.

“A car, a girl, a community of believers” – Part 3

POEM: “Some Kind of Crazy” by Major Jackson, Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia Press, 2002)

When I do writing workshops I structure my responses to other writers this way. First, respond from life. Next, say what works. Then, and only then, comment on what doesn’t work. “Respond from life” means expressing a memory evoked by the writing. There’s no need to fake or embellish this memory. It’s the authenticity that counts. What a writer needs to hear to keep on going is how her/his work touches a reader’s life. All that other critique of craft is just writing workshop babble.

So here is my response from life to Major Jackson’s poem “Some Kind of Crazy.” The poem reminded me immediately of Joey Ramsey, a kid in the neighborhood where I grew up. He was a year older than me. He lived across the street and two houses down. Like Steve in Jackson’s poem, everyone knew Joe. He definitely added to the “texture of the neighborhood.” Joe could walk uninvited into half the houses on the block. He’d sit down at the kitchen table and join the conversation or start one if necessary. He was the only person, kid or adult, who could pull that off with bravura. The fact he could do that made us feel like we were a neighborhood. A community of believers. We admired Joe for that.

Joe had Downs syndrome. In the 1950s and 60s we used the euphemism “birth defect” to describe his condition. Or we said he was “retarded.” This was a socially acceptable diagnostic label and, simultaneously, a mean-hearted street-slang epithet, depending on the tone with which it was uttered. More reprehensible was the word “Mongoloid,” which conflated prejudiced misconceptions about both race and disability. Thankfully – and this may be the mercy of memoir at work – the labels dropped away when you knew him. Joe was Joe.

On our block of Penn Avenue there were other handicapped kids. Tim had cerebral palsy. Norman had a speech impediment. Mike survived a car crash that killed his girlfriend when he was a freshman in college. His head injury eclipsed a promising math education and resulted in his untimely death from a stroke several years later. Although we didn’t understand at the time, my sister and I shared a twist in our genes that evolved into our degenerative eye disease. It, too, could have been called a birth defect. That twist in the language troubled my mother deeply. My sister and I were fortunate to grow into our disabilities in the 1970s, when it was an act of political commitment, not the stigmatization of a label, to accept the identity of “person with a disability.”

That was the population of Baby Boom kids with disabilities on one neighborhood block when I was growing up. Remembering the neighborhood now reminds me that a fundamental belief in my personal disability ethic can be traced back to Joe. Disability is a common part of everyday life; there is nothing very “special” about it, despite all the euphemisms that suggest otherwise. Like Steve in Major Jackson’s poem, it takes all kinds of people, some kind of crazy, to make a community of believers.

When I was about nine years old, a new bicycle fad swept the neighborhood. The bike had a curved, banana-shaped seat with deep, U-shaped handlebars called “ape-hangers.” In a kid’s imagination the bike looked like a Harley chopper. If you scooted to the rear of the seat and pulled back on the handlebars, you could pop a wheelie as you pedaled down the street. Cashing in on the cache of a Corvette brand name, one popular bike was called The Stingray. It could be customized with a noisemaker that looked like a disk brake and sounded like the purr of a motorcycle. The coolest kids got Stingrays. Other kids chopped their old bikes with banana seats and ape-hangers. And you could always emulate the click of pistons in cylinders with a rubber band and playing card thwacking spokes on a spinning wheel.

I didn’t get a Stingray. Neither did Joe. It bothered me a lot more than it bothered him. The same insouciance that led Joe to half the kitchen tables on the block also buffered him from the slings and arrows of social status. Whenever he pumped his old fat-tire bike up Penn Avenue, he stood as he pedaled and sang out lustily. You couldn’t stop him.

One summer day Joe did something that amazed everyone who saw it. After pedaling up the hill to the top of the block, he paused for dramatic effect and surveyed the scene that fell away below him. Then he kicked off, pedaling twice to pick up speed. Coasting now, he tucked into a tight crouch and leaned left, then right, as the bike glided down the hill in long, graceful arcs. If any mothers saw the spectacle from their houses, they didn’t come out to stop him. AS he swept past me, I heard Joe making triumphal sound effects. Not the vroom, vroom, vroom of an imaginary motorcycle. He was swooshing and slishing like Jean-Claude Killy’s skis as he won the giant slalom at Grenoble.

No one on Penn Avenue ever thought of doing that before. Joe was riffing. He was riffing with what he had. He was riffing on who he was. I call it riffing on the genome.

After supper that night I pumped my own bike up the hill. As the fireflies came out, a breeze began to blow along the street. I waited till there were no cars in sight, then I launched on my giant slalom. I felt what Joe had discovered. Instead of plunging downhill in a straight line, you could stretch out and savor the glory by curving patiently from curb to curb. It wasn’t defying gravity, or submitting to it, but using it to make the ride last a little longer. I felt cool wind rush past my face. I knew it didn’t matter whether I could pop a wheelie. I was doing a Joey. That’s what the stunt became in local legend.

Joe was almost twenty the last time I saw him. He came into my mother’s kitchen, greeting her with his customary “Lou, howya doin’?” We had become coffee-drinkers by then. We loaded up the Folgers with enough sugar to leave a syrupy rime at the bottom of the cups. That’s the way our mothers did it. I don’t remember what we talked about. When we’d drained our cups, we scooped up the sugar with our fingers, licking and nodding as if to say, “It’s good. It’s all good.”

Within a year I moved away, and Joe died of a congenital heart problem. The old neighborhood was never the same.