Category Archives: Human Nature

Correct Me If I’m Wrong (and I Never am . . . )

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spurs & windmill photos

EVERYTHING is research, no? Put on your spurs, head into the wind, and file this, baby!

I think of life as one big information-expedition. Whatever we do or sense or observe gets filed for future reference. Some things are instantly obvious candidates for the Circular File, yes, but everything else should potentially be of interest in one fashion or another. Call it ‘learning from experience’ or fodder for future tall tales to the great-grandkids or simply useful stuff to know, I can’t think of anything that doesn’t, shouldn’t or can’t inform the future self if stored and processed thoughtfully.

Anu Garg‘s wonderful resource website and newsletter A.Word.A.Day (http://wordsmith.org/awad/) is full of marvels: offering the etymology of a word (or more) each day, it seeks to broaden not only our vocabularies but our exposure to and, hopefully, understanding of the history, culture, politics, religions, biology, biography, and so forth–not only of our immediate surrounding population and geographic areas but all of the world’s intertwining ones as well. In addition, the site includes quoted wisdom, pathos and humor from great thinkers and writers. Today’s quotation was one that especially resonated in me:

A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. –Jorge Luis Borges, writer (1899-1986)

I’ve long felt that, whatever other good bad or indifferent qualities I impute to my life experiences, they shape not only how I think and act afterward but also what directions my creative life is bound to take. I have not even remotely achieved the Buddhist ideal of absolute presence in the moment or a fully and minutely examined life. In my case, though, I attempt most to apply that special rigor to the sensory experiences of my existence, since it is the use of the senses in interpreting and expressing my thoughts and ideas as art that gives me my best self-expression in its broader meaning.

Thankfully, my immediate circle is famously patient with such things. When my partner and I go for a walk, he is enjoying the movement and the tour through a place. I am spending some of the outing walking right along with him, but it’s usually interrupted from time to time by my stopping to investigate and/or photograph whatever intriguing distraction has caught my Miss Magpie eye. I call our walks ‘interval training’ on my part, because while my spouse has continued at his regular pace and I’ve been playing amateur researcher-inspector-scientist, the gap has widened from arm’s length and I must either speed up a little or hit a dead run to catch up for another bit of close-up strolling. Whether it’s now stored in my digital memory as a snapshot or not, whatever caught my attention is filed as quickly as possible–preferably while I catch up to my walking partner, since he may well have continued our conversation without noticing that I’d dropped behind and it would make for some disconcerting non-sequiturs indeed if I interjected with commentary on the beetle wing I just hurriedly stuffed in my pocket or the Art Deco cornice I paused to photograph.

Certainly I have found the digital mini-camera a boon when it comes to those fleeting moments of ideation and inspiration. More often than not, it’s long after the fact that I find the meaning and particular interests in whatever had diverted my attention, frequently because, upon seeing the photograph I’d hastily taken, I’m now noticing something new of interest. That’s usually when I spot similarities of appearance or type, or affinities that put this new tidbit into the context of some story I’d intended to tell or that make it a ‘good fit’ for grouping with other found treasures in my endless stream of visual-mental comparisons and meta-matches, these usually leading to yet another story or stream-of-consciousness ramble. Thus go the meanderings of the trackless mind.

The special appeal, for me, of such unplanned and serendipitous findings is that nothing goes to waste. There are no Wrong Answers in this class. Mistakes and griefs, misfires and tragedies, ugly things and scary things and unbelievably stupid things all have as much possibility for conversion into a good story or a fine piece of art as any happy or pretty thing can have. Even MY mistakes and griefs. With a bit of perspective, at least. So, whenever I can unfurl from the fetal position after having been hit by or created a disaster, I teach myself yet again to spring up with the cartoon-like enthusiasm of those eensy-weensy Olympians popping over the vaulting horse, throw my hands triumphantly in the air, and yell, “I meant to do that!” and then do my best to incorporate the most useful elements of what’s left of me after the experience into an even better me.

Or at the least, into a pretty cool piece of creative art.

aquarium photos + text

It takes some courage, to be sure . . .

And it’s particularly helpful to remind myself that, even if I’m not quite up to that task, maybe the Artist character that I play could do it . . .

Eleven is My Favorite Number

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mixed media collage

Sometimes good news comes from truly unexpected sources . . .

Even in languages we think we cannot understand, occasionally–perhaps with the help of images or context or a little theatre-of-mime interaction–we decipher the heart of the matter and make some kind of sense out of what we see and think and hear. Stranger still, sometimes from something terrible a good and beautiful thing can arise.

Modern philosophy and psychology have devoted plenty of study and energy to recognizing and making sense of how ingrained is the human urge to seek and see patterns. The mere fact that it was already bone-deep and age-old in us by the time it became a topic of study and conversation tells us how innate and intrinsic is our desire for the kind of order and continuity and sense found in rhythm, repetition and recurrence. Every kind of pattern offers its own version of meaning, and we like to cling to our own preferred sets of sought and loved markers for comfort.

We start very early with this stuff, showing preferences between different sorts of sensations even as infants–warm over cool, light over dark, sweet over sour, and so forth. We get attached to favorite foods and favorite colors. We develop our tastes and prejudices individually, corporately, culturally.

And we find ways to build elaborate systems of belief around the qualities with which we imbue our likes an dislikes. Not only is blue the boss’s favorite color, it’s THE color, it’s a matter of fact and faith, and people who prefer another color clearly need to be fixed. If the Empress is superstitious that everybody must wear raccoon fur hats on odd-numbered Thursdays, then everybody had better stock up on raccoon fur hats, pronto. (And all of the raccoons in or near the empire might be wise to consider relocating to safer territory.) That’s how dedicated people are to their preferences, my friends. In fact, if a certain sect thinks another certain sect has got hold of wrongheaded enough beliefs, they might just hijack a loaded airplane or two and knock over buildings full of Sect One people and smash them all to oblivion just to make the point of how wrong that bunch are.

Now, I have my favorites and fixations and beliefs, some deep and many shallow as pop-star fame. I like a good Lucky Number Three as much as the next guy, and while I am not the least bit triskaidekaphobic, I might admit to a little pointless fondness for the number Thirteen, if only out of pure cussedness–after all, it’s just the representation of a convenient numerical construct. But with the horrors of a certain 11th day of September so ubiquitous in the hearts, minds and media of the nation at present, I would like to say a word in defense of the wonderfulness of the number 11.

One of the ways I become intrigued by, then somehow attached to, any seemingly random thing is via that process wherein for any reason, at any moment, one becomes aware of having (peripherally or subconsciously) noted a series of recurrences of the object of interest, creating a pattern. In the instance of my seeing elevens repeatedly I can’t even think of how, where or why it caught my attention. But as these things work, once I noticed, I began seeing elevens everywhere for a while. Every time I’d look at a clock, it seemed, it was eleven minutes after some hour. Every meeting somebody required me to attend was either on the eleventh of the month or at 11:00 on some other day. Eleven birds would perch on the billboard across the way, whose white posts against a background of dark trees made a crisp white 11. Clearly once it got on that track, my brain willingly habituated to looking for elevens everywhere, and there was no need for them to have any meaning–their merely being eleven-related was their significance from thenceforward.

But in the way of such things, this made my pattern-seeking soul think that eleven ought to have some significance for me, and so I’d find myself in a reverie, a foggy abstraction in which I was spending any ‘down time’ between purposeful tasks or thoughts on mulling over possible reasons for eleven’s newfound status as a noted number in my life. There was the easy one of my pattern-hungry eye simply finding the clean and upright symmetry of the numeral notation “11” pleasant, soothing and even possibly a nice symbol or metaphor for such appealing characteristics. Of course there are happy temporal associations I could cite: my mother’s birth in the eleventh month of the calendar year; my nephew’s birth on the eleventh day of a far happier September. ‘Elevenses’–well, who can argue with the wisdom of a welcome morning break for sustenance? Not to mention the idea that eleven is even more than, and therefore obviously better than, the ‘standard number of completion’, ten–well, even a not-overly-bright worshiper of guitar amps could see the value in that.

When the dust settled and I’d conceded in my mind that I just had a new “favorite number” for no better reason than why I hold nearly any other thing preferable, I realized that just possibly I was looking harder for reasons to defend and admire eleven precisely because I was bothered by its unfair taintedness of late. That the infamy of the 9-11 attacks took place on the eleventh did not make the number eleven–an inanimate and abstract and essentially minor thing–inherently scary or evil. But if ‘thinking makes it so’, I decided I needed look no further than the damning act itself to see its purest inverse as well, indeed enough goodness to return with one hand what the other was snatching away. Unplumbed human cruelty and violence awoke its shadow twin, an equally unplumbed depth of human generosity and selflessness and healing. From the unwarranted spilling of torrents of blood and poison there also sprang a fountain of communal strength and compassion and they flowed into a sea of determination to be, if only for the moment, much better than we all had been.

For my part, I think I’ll just teach myself that I can count past ten on my fingers if I extend two digits like a skewed pair of twin towers and–far from collapsing–instead they form a V that means both Victory and (better still) Peace.

bottle photo

. . . and now let us drink a toast to the milk of human kindness . . .

Say, Haven’t I Seen You Somewhere Before?

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odd bird + penguin photos

Just what is it that makes today's creatures so familiar, so . . .

This just in from the Department of Everything Old is New Again, Déjà vu Division: the life of the general populace continues to be lived in well-worn grooves. We do what we do the way we’ve always done it, because that feels familiar and safe and because being challenged and growing are such hard work. It’s funny, though: sometimes it’s this very tendency that leads us directly–bump!–into contact with surprises and serendipitously good new things.

Take Doing the Chores, for instance. I do essentially the same set of major items nearly every day of the week, weeks on end, years at a time. But cleaning the same countertop as always in the kitchen I come across a new ant trail, and that leads me to call Mr Enemy-of-the-Bug-People, and that leads to the investigation that uncovers the Great Carpenter Ant Conspiracy before it can topple my little empire. I take a walk around the exact same route as usual and see a new kind of plant I’ve never seen before and think I may have discovered a pretty native flowering plant that might be a great addition when I get enough saved up to rehab and xeriscape our yard.

And there’s the whole thing about ‘going live’ (as far as I’ve done so by being a new-fledged blogger). While I’ve gone so far with change as to practice my dark arts of writing and drawing and photography and such in a public forum instead of closeted in an obscure garret amid a hovering handful of tubercular bohemians (a.k.a. other artistes), I am still just practicing the same arts with like tools and with similar ends. And here I am, thanks to the instant-community of the internet, seeing endless other writers and artists at work in the same new “studio complex”, learning a world of marvelous new ideas about subject, medium, technique and style, and most of all, “meeting” these impressive and engaging and artful people. Just by doing the writing and drawing that I’ve always done, only in a new work space, suddenly I have the opportunity to connect with some truly wonderful new friends.

And those friends bring me full circle in their own way, too, because as always, the roots of friendship grow best in common ground. The arts and interests and ideas that we share are the rich place where friendships are sown and nurtured. We all look for those things most familiar to us all, reflections of our own lives and loves, in choosing with whom we’d like to spend our time. No wonder I thought I recognized you!

beetle and fish photos

Interesting, isn't it, how much alike we are while being so incredibly different from each other?

Hail to All Who Labor in Obscurity! . . . and Pay Attention to Your Teachers

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acrylic on canvasboard

Lineage and life-stories notwithstanding . . .

While I was working on the art for my master’s thesis exhibition, I reached a sort of critical-mass point and got a bit huffy at all of the people exclaiming that I must be a real fan of Edvard Munch. Granted, my subject matter probably looked similarly dark and dreary to many; I’ve always enjoyed playing around with that black-humor borderland between gritty and witty, where vampires slurp on souls at teatime and skeletons tap-dance a cheery, leering Totentanz of delight long past All Souls’. I’ve always found great amusement and entertainment in the design and crafting of strange monstrous birds and beasts, outlandish costumes, and rickety structures to house the people that exist on the fringes of imagination. Munch’s images and stories derived from a darker real-world observation, probably tinted by his own mental and physical state of health over time, but the outcome was arguably a comparable sort of oeuvre.

Paste onto those superficial connections the knowledge that I am of Norwegian extraction in pretty much every direction if my lineage is traced out of the US, and I suppose no one could be blamed for linking the Nordic-darkness-tinged artist in front of them with the only really famous one that comes readily to mind. I couldn’t complain about being compared to a justifiably well-known and original artist, now could I?

But I did. I didn’t really like Munch’s work, you see. I thought it obsessively gloomy and depressive and I wasn’t particularly crazy about his style. I tried really hard to disassociate myself and my work from this sticky albatross-of-an-ancestor I was being put into artificial family bondage with and get people to think of all the ways in which I differed from him.

Silly. Turns out, though I still credit myself with having a far more uplifting personal history than his was, what with my generally idyllic existence from day one, we do have a lot in common. When I saw the Munch museum in Oslo for the first time, I was beginning to see why folk might make connections beyond simple Norsk blood, from ties between us in some of the fundamental issues of interest topically and right on through to how we might apply our media to paper or canvas, how we both would wrestle through a whole series on the same subject or even remake the same picture in different media and styles over time to see how we could effect a different outcome with each attempt. I started to notice that there were evidences of similar drawing gestures and brush strokes, an impressionistic looseness with paint and pastel, that were more often similar than not.

What did I do? Rebel against it more. Silly. By the time I really started to come to terms with this whole idea of being on a path not so very different from Edvard Munch’s artistically, no matter how unlike in experience and life, it was kind of a fait-accompli, something that everyone else had acknowledged long before I was willing to do so. As I say, I was already winding up my grad school time when I began to come to grips with saying, Yeah, this is all right with me: I do so like green eggs and ham. I mean, just because Munch was Norwegian-rooted and an artist and explored darkish subjects and I could be described by exactly those same terms doesn’t mean I can’t like him or admit to it!

Once I finally leapt that completely unnecessary and self-imagined chasm, it was easy to begin finding common ground in a lot more places, affinities with a lot of different art practitioners, than I had been open-minded enough to see before. Amazing how much more I can learn when I’m not wasting all of my energy on resistance. Which is, after all, Futile (I have it on good authority). The next step, and a very long and winding road of steps at that, is the one of recognizing what can be gained by learning at the feet of the masters and of those whose place in history and the popular mind is perhaps well established, while still being myself one of the multitude who ‘work the middle’–all of us laboring at our art, our craft, learning and honing skills without any particular expectation of fame or longevity or remuneration to follow.

The short answer: everything. Why would I continue to refuse all offers of insight and inspiration and the potential to learn and grow and delight in what my predecessors–living, dead, famous and obscure–can teach me! Yes, I have learned among other things that great resources of such knowledge can be dug up with a bit of persistence on my part, or as in the case of good old Edvard Munch, shoved at me until I quit whining and pay attention. Or, as in the case of Alf Hurum, handed to me on a silver platter.

Hurum remains an obscure Norwegian and unknown to most Americans, indeed to most people outside of a relatively specialized cadre in the art and music worlds with good reason to know of him. But he was, it happens, a fine composer of piano and violin works–and somewhat influenced by, you guessed it, Edvard Munch. His reach was greater than one might guess not only because his compositional work remains both playable and listenable after lo, these many years, but also because, having married a woman from Hawaii and grown interested in her roots, Hurum spent the latter part of his life in Hawaii and there helped to found the Honolulu Symphony, among other things.

My learning of him was quite simple and straightforward: my brother-in-law, a fine pianist teaching at the University of Agder – Music Conservatory in Kristiansand, Norway, arranged for me to have a commission to do a portrait for the school when they were refurbishing their then-concert hall. This led to my studying up a little on several Norwegian musicians over time, including Hurum, and producing a set of portraits from which the administration could choose, and most importantly, to my hearing some really lovely music I’d never have otherwise known. Even better, my brother eventually did a research project that led him to make a marvelous recording of Hurum’s piano music (Eventyrland – http://www.rockipedia.no/Vault.aspx?entity=1169501), and now I have the privilege of using that as inspiration whenever I wish to listen to music while making art yet again.

I have no expectation of creating a lasting legacy and occupying any spot as a well-known character like Edvard Munch. I don’t even fantasize about lingering for generations in the ken of a refined and fortunate circle in the way of a lesser-known but also gifted artist like Alf Hurum. But I can surely perpetuate what joys there are in simply making art and learning from those betters who have preceded me in it, from here in my own quiet little corner of existence, and that is glory enough for anyone.

acrylic and colored pencil on paper

Little known, but not unsung . . . influential, but almost secretly so . . .

Comatose, or Something Like It

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bank vault photos

Can't get awake, in gear, loosened up . . .

Brain. Stopped. Full stop.

Is the attack caused by any specific catalyst, or is it just general malaise? Does it matter? It’s a common enough ailment, to be sure. Something tells me that the cheery “Heigh-ho song” sung by Disney‘s seven dwarves, who ostensibly adore the work to which they’re trooping off for the day, did not purely coincidentally share its signature phrase with the heigh-ho also traditionally used to signify a yawn.

Aye, there’s the rub. I’m merely revealing my attitude toward anything I might label WORK. With a perpetually growing agenda of chores and deeds of doing, if not derring, always in front of me, perhaps my personal catalyst in this moment is merely the ennui of the congenitally lazy. Dear me, I probably shouldn’t even use the word congenital, since although it only denotes a condition that existed in me from–or before–birth, it should in no way be construed as deriving genetically. Not my parents’ doing, this disease of mine. I come from a sturdy line of hard working people, really I do, captains of industry in carpentry and grocery marketing and education and ministry and homemaking and dental hygiene and nursing and technology and administration and so many other productive and socially significant and uplifting fields. It’s hard to imagine that anyone deriving from that lineage could possibly be born unwilling to move and desirous of nothing more than to be indolently comfortable without any regard to my deserving.

But here we are. The very sight of a tool lying in wait of its use, a To-Do list leering suggestively at me, or the admittedly messy appearance of something that clearly needs to be Fixed can send me into a syncope of delicate avoidance. Come and revive me from my fainting couch if you must, but do so at your peril. Yes, my everlasting soul–at the very least, my reputation as a responsible adult–is at high risk of the eternal red-inked F of effing disapproval. But is it worth what might happen if, say, you rouse me from a pleasant torpor or my clearly much-needed beauty sleep before, oh, noon-ish? Dare you risk it? Even I am terrified of me when I haven’t had my requisite sleep.

But let us return to the problem of how to get anything accomplished at all when the mere thought of effort is anathema to me. The easy answer is to trick me into thinking that the task at hand is fun. The hard part of the equation, of course, is how to make more than a few very rare tasks seem fun, but I am dependent on the cleverness of others for accomplishing that part of the process as often as possible. Shaming me into doing the right thing almost never works; apparently I have a truly limited capacity for self-criticism except in places where it can be reliably unproductive, for example when it depends on elements of my self and behavior that can’t be altered anyway. Keeping my work schedule pared back to the nearly-manageable smallest number and lowest quantity possible is always a wise move on the part of any who are dim enough to have Expectations of me.

All of this is not to say that I don’t like to DO anything, though my list might be more circumscribed than some, nor that I’m a completely curmudgeonly person just to be around. It’s more that my preferred things-to-do are often those considered less useful on a grand scale, less utilitarian, than what the world might rather ask of me. Indeed, I’m quite the happy (if not grossly self-satisfied, depending on whom you ask and when) person and have a very cheery outlook for the most part, especially when I can hit that sweet spot of having, however accidentally or fortuitously, managed to think I was just having a good old time and at the end of it discovered that I got useful or important or even just practical stuff done. That constitutes something close to perfection in a day.

So go ahead. Con me into being my better self and you will have not only my congratulations on your ingenious ways but my thanks, and those of all others benefitting from it, for getting me to get something done in spite of my natural inclination toward repose. Even my sleepy, constipated brain can wrap around a nice concept like that!

acrylic painting on canvas

A good idea can go all pear-shaped, or if you're lucky, instead it bears fruit.

Foodie Tuesday: Bad News/Good News/Bad News

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photo

Neither photogenic nor as much tastier than photogenic as it should have been . . .

The true food bloggers and kitchen mavens have it all over me when it comes to fully celebrating food in the manner it deserves. Take my lunch the other day (please!). It seemed like a good idea: cream of roasted cauliflower soup with a spoonful of buttery mushrooms on top. Nice and simple and earthy. Turns out, it was too simple, to the point of being about as bland as a children’s book written by well-intentioned Educators. I ate it, being a pietist of my own sort, but not with any particular enjoyment. I should have had the dedication to re-season the soup, but I wasn’t committed enough at the moment. The sautéed mushrooms, it turned out, only emphasized the soup’s lack of valor. A mild, but still a little irksome, moment of appetite suppression that didn’t match up to my original plan at all. The upside of it was that I was sufficiently fueled to fix up a much better dinner by the time my spouse headed home. If I cook up something disappointing, at least I’d rather it’s not when I’m sharing the food!

The week has been a little like that–mistakes and false starts punctuated and rescued by recoveries and rediscoveries.

There was the pantry light that was less and less frequently willing to be switched off until its pull-chain switch finally just broke entirely. It was good that the light was stuck “on” so that we could still find things in the pantry, but bad in that even with a low-e bulb it still heated up the little room, not very welcome in food storage at all but especially when the ambient temp here has been ridiculously high for so long. The other positive that came out of it was the motivation to replace the old ceramic shadeless utility fixture with an actual glassed light fixture, though I can’t say I enjoyed crouching atop my stepladder and angled over the pantry shelf at about 85 degrees Fahrenheit for even as long as it took to wire in a new little lamp. I’ll admit I do like the slightly more diffused light and appreciate the ability to once again turn it on and off, so I will concede that it was time to do the deed.

Then we started seeing ants, more ants, lots of ants around the kitchen. And we’d just had our quarterly household pest-control visitation in the last couple of weeks. At first I’d thought these were just refugees fleeing the spray-guy’s weaponry, but clearly the activity was beginning to build rather than subside. Great! A family of carpenter ants with resistance to our accustomed defense systems. But when I called the pest-control company this morning they sent “my” guy right on out, no waiting. Now, I like him not only because he’s a nice guy who comes when contacted and because he generally manages our bug problems quickly and thoroughly. This man, however, endeared himself to us immediately on his first visit by hooking us up with the best New York style pizza around this area (in a hole in the wall strip mall joint run by New York expats). You know you’ve found a good contractor when he can recommend first class food of any kind.

Today’s bug-fixing visit was a detailed reinspection and treatment with a new combination of baits and poisons and so forth, and certainly the ants visible during my rescuer’s efforts were not inured to this particular combo, so I am hopeful. The inspection and injection, however, required our moving most of the furniture in the affected rooms and most of the kitchen’s pantry and cupboard contents as well. And of course there were dead and dying ants all over the place. Sorry, I’m just not very zen about sharing my home, particularly my food storage areas, with indoor bugs. There was no doubt that at the end of it I would be facing a major household cleaning. The very good thing about the kitchen semi-demolition, however, was the usual one that when the contents of pantry and cupboards and counters get disturbed it’s amazing how much I discover that I’d put out of sight, out of mind or simply forgotten where it was stashed. Amazing that in less than a year since our move in I have managed to get that absent-minded and inattentive about things, but I suppose that’s not as uncommon as I think it is.

In any case, it was inspiring enough to overhaul the entire kitchen; I couldn’t even resist a foray into the freezer, though I’m reasonably certain that neither ants nor pest-control contractor visited in that particular corner of the room.

photo

And in this corner . . .

In any event, it was nice to rediscover a few food strays here and there that will undoubtedly whet my appetite for various forgotten dishes and treats in the near future. The freezer reminded me that I have a pair of modest lobster tails (thank you, there are some kinds of bugs I love) sealed up in there that will surely make a nice treat soon, perhaps with a little hollandaise, my all-time favorite seafood sauce; but I must tell you that I think no haute chef’s classic version or fussy variation of hollandaise matches the version I love best, the one my mother always made from the old Betty Crocker cookbook that’s purely egg yolks and lemon juice and a ton of butter. Meanwhile, I dug up and re-corralled a bunch of other favorite condiments in the pantry, from sauces to preserved lemons to pickled jalapenos and chipotles en adobo to Asian fried shallots. Sigh. Hidden treasures revealed.

Of course I couldn’t do so much tidying without simultaneously making a mess. When I was installing the light fixture, it was catching my sleeve on something that upset a bottle of vinegar from a shelf, sending the bottle headfirst onto the tile floor where it exploded in a shower of intensely fragrant miniscule glass shards and balsamic spray. Today it was turning around only to hear my favorite measuring pitcher (you know the one, you’ve got one too that’s got exactly the combination of measurements you most often use, in the size and shape of pitcher that’s most perfect to fit your favorite whisk, spatula, spoon or single-recipe-amount of any- and everything) overbalance and fall with a sharp crack on those same beautiful but deadly tiles. Goodbye, sweet kitchen tool.

photo

Not a tragedy in the classical sense, perhaps, but still . . .

I’m glad to say that despite my utter lack of grace and athletic skills I am not generally a complete and horrific klutz either. So I’ll be a tad more vigilant and hope that I’ve gotten my major kitchen hijinks out of my system for a little bit now and get on with fixing and eating. And I am certainly glad that there was the impetus, however unwelcome its various pesky sources may have been, to get ‘down and dirty’ in order to be cleaner and more efficient and well-organized in the kitchen again for a while. There is definitely a kind of contentment for me in just looking at a space that has been newly neatened and unveiled, and I know it will lead to more thoughtful cookery for a little while as well. Next soup will surely be much better!

photo

. . . and don't get me started on the joys of a stack of freshly washed kitchen linens or bar towels!

“It’s Complicated” with Orange

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blurred taxi photo

Any color is fraught with meaning, and all relationships are fraught, yet . . .

Maybe it’s a little odd, my having an eccentrically complex relationship with that simple secondary color. Not that I dislike it; the fabulousness of a flaming sunset at the end of the day is hard to argue, and a spectacular orange koi is a worthy showstopper. Lots of things I really admire, even crave, are orange in fact. After all, the orange fruit and all of its showy tangerine and kumquat cousins are pretty, cheery, and refreshingly delish.

But orange still has some slightly off-putting associations for me that keep it as a color generally restrained from entering my go-to list of favorites. The aforementioned fruit might even share in the blame. I’m sure I’m not the first kid in history that thought oranges and mandarins exceedingly tasty except for those pesky un-chewable and indigestible segment membranes. But I may have been in the minority when my solution to that problem was to bypass them, not by spitting empty membranes out indecorously or rudely refusing to eat the food proffered by my kindly parents, but by squirreling them away in my cheek and not swallowing them. Clearly it can’t have been a particularly delicious solution, since the least desirable part of the treat was what remained the longest, but apparently I was too prim and simplistic to have thought the whole procedure through. Further, how I intended to cope with the skeletal remains in the long term if I wasn’t gutsy enough to just spit and throw them away I cannot quite imagine, but clearly the extended timeline was an abstraction beyond the scope of a person of my then so limited life-experience. All I can say is that the experiment was short-lived. When I arrived home after a whole morning’s outing and, on being parentally interrogated about my assumedly pleasant adventures, remained mum, a quick investigation revealed the impacted concretion of orange-leavings jammed up like snus by my gums. I was given a quick course on the proper technique for eating a whole orange section, which to my dismay involved actual swallowing and digestion of the part I didn’t much like. Ah, well, I managed to overcome my disappointment and learn to love the fruit in a slightly more grown-up fashion after that.

Though we are taught at a reasonably young age to watch out for those mercilessly careening yellow and orange cars that make up the majority of the (somewhat heedlessly) speedy American taxi fleet, I’ve certainly never been directly menaced by one–and there are times when there’s no more welcome sight that one hustling to my rescue when it’s wanted. Still, l have moments when the color, seen just peripherally on the move, gives me an instinctive urge to throw myself headlong into a safe ditch or behind a brick building. It might at least prove highly entertaining to those nearby, but it makes me just a bit more paranoid than it ought to when I’m on a city sidewalk.

Another youthful experience that may have colored my feelings about the color orange involved my initial foray into fashion. The first time my parents let me choose my very own garment, the object of my affection was an orange coat. Not just any orange coat, mind you, but a pint-sized, short-length, fake fur trenchcoat-styled warmer in brilliant Safety Orange. You know the color: they make road cones that color to keep you from driving your pickup truck into the sinkhole that just swallowed Highway 2. The warning tape quarantining an anthrax zone is that color. Deadly toadstools warn off marauding fauna with that color. And I chose a coat that was not only that color, but loudly and proudly so in plush fake fur. I must assume that it is the clearest possible confirmation of my parents’ unswerving and unconditional love of their offspring that they not only allowed me to have the coat but to wear it and be seen with them in public. Though children can reasonably be said to look cute in pretty much any old thing they do or do not wear, I think it’s also fair to say that no color has yet been invented that was less likely to flatter my skin tones, let alone give me the air of sophistication I imagine I was expecting from the thing.

That, however, is just what is so odd about my orangey-astic feelings. I felt myself a modern and cosmopolitan woman of distinction in that coat. My adult recoil at picturing the silliness of it in no way matches the love that I remember having for that ridiculously orange fur blob of a coat. No sight is more pleasing than that of a friendly orange taxicab pulling up to the curb at my command. My irritation at eating something with the flavor and consistency of strapping tape in no way diminishes my craving at certain times for a luscious juicy segment of a perfectly simple ripe Navel orange.

I’m complicated that way.

“Siete tutti testimoni!” (You’re All Witnesses!)

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[Ed: including to my bad pretend Italian]

monotype 1982

. . . the question is: what did we just witness?

Once upon a time in an Italian bar/cafe, there was a bit of a dust-up. A woman spray-painted into clothes that could conceivably be construed as the work uniform of a Professional sort of woman was becoming very vocal in her criticism of the bartender who would not fill her order for a drink refill. As it was still quite early in the forenoon and it was perfectly evident to even the least astute detective in the place that she had already quaffed quite a number of drinks, the knowing grins around the room were clearly in support of the barman’s side of the difference, but that interested la dama not at all, if she was capable of noticing. This was highly unlikely, given how much energy she was devoting to berating and abusing the barman and impugning his humanity, his virility, his lineage, his bartending skills, and anything else she could think up to fling at him in epithetic form, all the while storming back and forth as though onstage in her own melodrama. I, for one, didn’t need to know any real Italian to know either what the situation was or how graphic her language. Finally she did decide to appeal to the cafe patrons for support in her cause, and spun around, all wild hair and spandex, screaming “Siete tutti testimoni!”

And indeed we all were witnesses. It’s just that she failed to realize we were witnesses not to any crime or indignity being perpetrated against her but quite the opposite, had witnessed her being a noisy louse, a jerk, e una idiota estrema.

Keeping a low profile with our badness and stupidity is never easy, no sir. Keeping a secret, always on the verge of impossible; otherwise there would never be any big deal made of it. But we all have plenty of times when we’d far prefer no one were paying us any attention. Don’t tell me you’ve never said or done something dopey or rotten and then fervently wished the earth would open up and swallow you. If that were so, your halo would be blinding the rest of us and eventually you’d be shunned and banished from the general company, because tolerably ordinary mortals make mistakes and have faults.

What wouldn’t any of us give to have our own permanent magician’s assistant devoted to diverting the universal attention from our every slip and slight! Lacking that sleight-of-hand, though, we continue to make our every faux pas and fumble right out in front of everybody, and even those failures seemingly accomplished in private tend more often than not to be exposed with astonishing speed. If we were to be visibly dirtied by our every inward flaw, we would look like nothing so much as a whole race of ambulatory mud pies.

graphite drawing

So many ways to get into trouble . . .

The Age of Communication, despite sounding like the cheery promise of more perfect interaction and dialogue between us, has instead mostly created a false sense of remove and anonymity within which many people shed their garments of civility and openly abuse the supposed cover by being ever bolder and more crude in exercising their own imperfections with great abandon, all the while excoriating others whose flaws don’t match their own. Trolls, flamers and lurkers abound.

This isn’t, of course, new. Criminals and miscreants of every flavor have existed since the beginning of recorded time. We merely update our approach to use these newer electronic tools in order to make our awfulness easier to enact or to use new methods that seem to offer better cover for our creeping nastiness.

A fellow blogger recently ‘went public’ with the exposure of one such despicable attack, made via a “comment” on her blog that was nothing less than a vile spewing of personal hatred in the form of threats against her and her child. One can, I imagine, debate endlessly about cause and culpability if one wishes to wade through the possibility of such an attacker’s being non compos mentis or under duress from such-and-such mitigation–while we’re all demonstrably fallible we like to think no real, healthy, normal human would do such a thing to another let alone do so before the eyes of the world. Why and how, however, seem to me to be less helpful questions to ask first than “now what?”

No matter how much we’d like to sweep ugliness under any available rug and forget it, it doesn’t cease to exist–nor do we, however unwittingly or inadvertently or driven by whatever illness or desperation, cease to create more ugliness. The question remains, where do we go from here? Lady Macbeth and all the rest of us know that What is done cannot be undone, so how do we move forward?

Recent events have nagged me into puzzling more than usual in this vein lately. The hideous mass murder in Norway a mere few weeks ago was a terrifying reminder of the ever-present ugly underside of human nature. Americans have been publicly obsessing over how to acknowledge and commemorate the decade-past monstrosity of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Crime waves go up and down but as seasick as they make us we never seem to stop them.

The blogger who published her attacker’s wrong, it seems to me, was wise. She knows that there is a much larger community of people that choose kindness, thoughtful discourse, mutual support and what we believe to be a fundamental good among us that can’t be destroyed by the bad. That we will rise up and, each in our own way, say so when we see someone saying or doing horrid things or being terrible is the only reasonable recourse–silence is complicity or at the very least, acquiescence. And so I must stand with my fellow blogger, and with all my fellow believers in a certain kind of peace, and say to all enemies of that peace that hatred and violence of any kind are not welcome here. In the ether, or on the earth. Not anywhere

Weird and simplistic and naive as it sounds, I think the only way to stop people from doing really evil things is to make them want to stop doing them. [Huh??]

I am making no miraculous proposals here. I own no magic potion, know no transformative incantation, have no universal antidote to hatred and cruelty and incivility. But what I am beginning to learn at this ripe old age is that only by making the first incremental move toward a solution do we have any hope of finding or creating a solution. The only such move I can see that’s feasible for non-magicians is to confront and oppose meanness and wickedness when we see them. Merely standing in open defiance of what we believe is wrong is all that some of us can do, but we surely must do it.

So even though I abhor wallowing in public maundering over unchangeable griefs and agonies past and will not likely take a lot of visible action in response to the 9/11 anniversary or the Norwegian rampage, I will resist the witness-intimidation tactics of both my own passive don’t-get-involved nature and that of the would-be wrongdoers out there and say, Choose better. Being a jerk or worse yet, an openly abusive or cruel or vicious person, has no place among real people. Deliberate kindness and goodness are actually meant to be the norm and should be practiced. Sounds childlike, maybe, but I just have to stand as witness to this.

We’re all witnesses.

Miss Kitty’s Beauty Hive and Be-of-Good-Cheer Embalming Emporium

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bug photocollage

I am abuzz with curiosity about this title you have given yourself . . .

There was once a place near where my parents lived, a privately owned beauty parlor housed in a quaintly kitschy pink pseudo-Mediterranean house wildly out of place in its north coast lumber mill town, named The Beauty Hive. Everything was so potentially wrong, anachronistic, tacky and off-kilter about the place that I had to assume that, rather than producing a continuous line of beehive-sporting, overdressed, elderly women clad in shabby 1962 Dior knockoffs, it was a knowingly winking hip place. I never saw anyone actually emerge re-coiffed from its portal, but hoped in my heart that its name and oddball character were conscious tweaks of the nose of snobbery from a smart marketer.

All of this, perhaps, because I am a horrible snob and hung up on old-fashioned ideas I probably should have long ago given up myself.

One of the many things about which I have rather peculiar and specific ideas (tastes, to be sure, but I tend to treat them almost as law) is the subject of names. I have very strong likes and dislikes among names–fewer, thankfully, of the latter than the former–a great curiosity about the whys and wherefores of someone or something having a particular name, and a fairly rigid belief that one should call a person by the name he or she wishes you to use, whether it “feels” right or not.

By that I mean that there are people who, the instant you meet them, introduce themselves and then say, “but call me [such and such]–everybody does”. Then ‘such and such’ it is. Some are very dependent upon their honorifics for a clear sense of identity (or to shore up an insecure ego), and if one introduces or signs himself as The Very High Reverend Mister Doctor Esophagus, Esquire, then I will jolly well address him by that extravagant title when calling him “by name” (if not just Sir or Your Holiness) until he explicitly permits me to do otherwise–even if I can’t help chortling in private over such pretentious foolishness from a guy greeting me in a grocery queue. I notice that there are plenty of people using their titles in places where their titles have no real meaning, like the academics parading around as Professor Phlegmatic or Doctor Stricture while at their own doctor’s office for a mole removal or the local natatorium for a brisk dip; what has their research and lecturing work to do with their current activity?

I’m equally prickly, though, about people giving titles–spontaneously or otherwise–where they are not requested or even not welcome. When I was a university lecturer, I never applied for the status of tenure-track, and having worked my way through from a starting point of one-class-at-a-time adjunct to full-time teacher over my first couple of years, my official status as a pedagogue remained Lecturer throughout my decades of teaching. I found it a mildly annoying misnomer, then, to be addressed as Professor, not being even an Assistant or Associate Professor let alone “full” (and it seemed extra-ridiculous to be called Lecturer Sparks), so with my classes I made it clear at the outset that I preferred to be on a first-name basis with all of the other serious-minded scholars in the room. If an individual student, personally or culturally, was uncomfortable with first-name familiarity, they were welcome to have me call them Mr. or Mrs. or Dr. and could certainly call me Mrs. or Ms. Sparks, something I actually was whether in the classroom or not. My other official title during my academic years (Curator of Visual Resources, my nom-de-guerre as gallery director at the university) would have been even more asinine used in that setting, because to me it represented the slippery but obvious granting of a mock-shiny and slightly suspect tiara in lieu of a raise. I did have one student that insisted very pointedly on calling me Professor Sparks long after repeated polite requests that he do otherwise, and it came as no surprise that when he was later called to task for clearly choosing to omit a specific stated requirement in an assignment, his response was to threaten me with physical violence in front of the whole class. Really, just how maladjusted does one have to be to need so desperately to mess with another person’s name?

The most truly over-sensitive point with me is that of nicknames. I think I can understand the desire to fit in that drives most nickname use: it implies casual and relaxed attitudes (great in a sports setting or a club, for instance) and an intimacy between people that many find less distancing and formal and fussy than their whole or given names. In some cases, it’s clearly a welcome rescue from being saddled with a name they’re not too fond of in the first place. Sometimes it’s from having a family name that’s too hard to separate. My husband shares his first name with his father, a good name indeed, and yet is not a Junior because their middle names differ. But despite his parents’ initial assumption that they would differentiate between the two by simply calling their son by his middle name, other family members and friends immediately gave him a nickname, diminutive of the first name, and it stuck instead. The result was mainly that if anyone did call my spouse by his full first name, it was assumed the reference was to his dad (or that the son was in Big Trouble). Pity, really, because both men are wonderful, quite distinct from each other, and both in my view well fitted with that great first name they share.

My spouse and I reached a point in life and in his career where he just wanted to enjoy using his real, full first name and be done with the imposed nickname. He had long been known by his full name in Europe and Canada and only gone by the old ‘shorthand’ version back at home for some time now. So he politely let people know, and over time the general response, even among those who have known him since he was a little squirt, has been a gradual re-habituation and our getting to have my partner be known to others by the name we know as his.

I underwent the same process but made the switch a bit longer ago. Growing up, I was a Kathy. I don’t know who first called me that. But by the time I joined six other Kathys and Cathys and Cathies and so forth in one classroom I was beginning to reassess the beauty of my given name of Kathryn. I’ve always liked it, but found like most kids (including the aforementioned boy) that if someone else pastes a nickname on you and you don’t rebel against it for any reason, you’re stuck. I had nothing against being a Kathy–but didn’t enjoy disappearing among a multitude of them. And since I was really fond of the name my parents gave me, why not use it? It’s remarkable how firmly we get it fixed in our heads what a person should be called. My husband found it tricky to ease longtime friends and relatives into calling him what they thought of as his father’s name. I have a similar circle so ingrained with the habit of calling me by my diminutive that there are still random moments of “Kathy” popping up in my presence.

Thing is, I haven’t thought of myself as Kathy since I first decided to revert to what I think of as my real name. When people address me by the nickname in print, it’s a safe bet they’re complete strangers assuming unwanted familiarity with me. When they do so in person, I often fail to respond, simply because I don’t “hear” that name as mine at all anymore–you must be talking to someone else!

There have been a rare few that christened me successfully with other nicknames (some of them even repeatable in public!). I can think of maybe two people who have ever called me Kate, both of whom knew me well enough that I considered it an honorific title specific to them. One aunt affectionately named her über-pasty niece Caspar after the friendly cartoon ghost character. My immediate family and some good friends call me Kat or Kath, which is comfortably casual without being the potentially demeaning diminutive of my (officially) immature years. A few who share or are pleased by my Norwegian ancestry even call me by my middle name of Ingrid. Also pleasing, not least of all because I got that name in honor of my dear aunt.

Then there are the ones, not quite like that borderline-torturer former student but still wanting to be pesky, that choose names for me or anyone else without permission and based on their desire to irritate and irk. Siblings are, of course, very fond of pulling that stunt. Mine chose the nickname for Kathryn that I openly disdained, if not hated, most. Kitty. Any time they really wanted to get under my skin, especially in public, they might slip in that name. Don’t get me wrong, while it’s more of a diminutive than I would ever call a favorite tag per se, it’s not a name I hate in general, just the one that I thought most ill-suited for me.

Finally I got smarter than to react with the sort of crabbiness that so pleased my sisters when they called me Kitty. I usurped the name. I was graduating from college and taking out a business license to sell my artworks on commission, and it occurred to me that if I stole the name Kitty it wouldn’t have half the cachet for my sisters to torment me with anymore. It just needed to be a really obvious bit of silliness that could take the edge off any serious-seeming warfare. That was when I remembered the similarly obvious bit of silliness at that weird beauty parlor near Mom and Dad’s. So I took out a license under the business name of Miss Kitty’s Beauty Hive, a title that remained (though eventually discreetly and more conveniently shortened to MKBH) for a good twenty years. Can’t make fun of me by calling me something I call myself!

So maybe I have to relent and let people call me Kathy again. Even though I so deeply don’t feel like a Kathy anymore–that’s someone I was thirty years ago and no longer know. More likely, I’ll try to keep gently introducing myself as Kathryn, the name my parents loved enough to lay on me at birth, and just smile sweetly when any other title comes my way. It’s all about the tone, the intent.

As for the Embalming Emporium of today’s post title, that just goes with my general sense that if I want to stand out from the crowd–whether of multitudinous iterations of Kathy and Catherine or of bloggers or of artists or of ordinary human beings–I may as well crown myself with the laurels of some seriously distinctive and humorously provocative title. Plus, if I get enough response to it, I can always look into taking up business under yet another name that has little to do with my actual business and everything to do with deciding myself what I want to be called.