A Kind of Hurry

I’m in a kind of hurry

To just slow down a bit.

Since all through life I  worried

That things might fail to fit -

All the living and the loving,

The wondering ‘bout each bit,

Of life’s pictures, and it’s poems,

Of where they’d be arranged,

Since every day, and every way

They’ve kept my mind engaged,

With who and why and wherefore,

With the hopes and goals to meet,

With the myriad potentials of

The paths before my feet.

They’ve kept the brain cells churning,

Neglecting needed sleep.

So now I am a'hurryin' -

To just slow down a tad.

To gently put behind me

The paces of the lad.

To pause and shift my glances

From the towering  tops of trees

To studying small treasures

Lurking down below my knees.

Secret nests of little songbirds,

‘Neath small flowers, tiny eggs,

Will soon be mouths demanding

Bugs, and worms, and crawly things,

That fuel the bright clear music

Of the birds that sing in Spring.

So don’t worry, rush on by me.

Pray, do scurry past my bower.

For I’ll be here to rest and watch,

For nigh onto an hour.

The passing minutes move me not,

They leave me free from worry.

Though again it seems I must confess,

That I’m really in a hurry -

To just slow down a bit.

SchragWall: PPP - Azaleas on Azaleas

As a postscript to my last wall post about the Internet it has taken me about an hour and a half to reconcile snafus with my Apple ID, iCloud ID and various USB readers to be able to send you this. But moving on . . .

The image was originally a photo I took in the azalea garden at WRAL-TV in Raleigh, NC. Neat venue, weddings, graduations, etc. I pulled a strip out of that photo. Pulled it into Photoshop and sort of "abstracted" it and stretched it to 12x36 inches. Then, in that larger format, I "whited out" the portions into which I wanted to draw designs. I then printed out the version with the blanks. I then drew the designs in the blank spaces and added color with a variety of pens, markers, etc.

With an image this size I would advise pulling it and enlarging it so you can see the small details.

Cheers,

Robert

 

The Internet is Breaking

For most of my forty-odd years as a university professor, I spent my time thinking about, teaching about, reading about, and writing about the media. It was a fascinating world in that it was always changing, always evolving into something new. I used to wonder how my colleagues in say, English, for example, avoided going crazy teaching courses like The English Language Novel in the 19th Century. I mean, aside from exploring evidence of the influence of novels from the 19th century on contemporary prose, it seemed a lot like doing the same thing over and over. Which would, I suppose, leave you a lot of time to work on your own novel which many of my colleagues in that department had stashed on their hard drive somewhere.

Anyhow “the media” had a far different problem, at least in the last couple of decades since the internet went public in the mid-1990s. It changes all the time. I used to start my lectures by saying, “OK, let’s talk about what changes we have seen in the media over the last couple of days.” And I always had something to talk about.  During the last couple of years of my teaching career I had been struggling with trying to find a model that would allow my students to understand just why and how those changes came about. And so in about 2018 my colleague Ed Funkhouser (who is out there on The Wall with you - Hi Ed!) wrote a textbook - digital access only, naturally - called The Process: Understanding Technology and the Media.  In that work we propose a model of eight steps of media evolution, steps charting the course of the development of all communication media, from the first evidence of proto-writing to the Internet. Cool huh? We think so - blush, blush.

Anyhow the 8 steps, in order go like this:

1. Need. Some  entity, individual person, group or organization feels compelled to communicate with another entity.
2. The Creators. The folks in the "back room," carvers, painters, bicycle builders, engineers, programmers, examine what is available in their time and place and cobble the available pieces together into what becomes
3. The medium. Print, film, radio, TV, etc.
4. The gatekeepers. Every medium moves through the hands of gatekeepers, the pharaoh, pontiff, church, lawyers, what have you, who decide what media are "allowed" in the culture and who gets to use them. Those decisions get codified into
5. The law. Which is what it sounds like.
6. The entrepreneurs.  After learning what the restrictions and laws surrounding the new medium are, the entrepreneurs figure out how to package the new medium in to a profitable product and bring it to
7. The marketplace where sales people of various stripes try to convince us that we really must have it.
8. We open our pocketbooks to purchase the new gizmo and begin to use it, which invariably leads us back to #1. e.g. "Hey this radio thing is cool - I wish it had pictures." And bing bang we work through the following 7 steps to television.

If we apply this model to understand how the Internet came about we learn how it might be fracturing along some important lines. First this huge entity came into being, like all other media from step 1 Need. But this wasn't a huge societal, organizational, governmental need. It was the need of one guy: Tim Berners-Lee, or Sir Tim as those of us close to him call him. [Lying here, Sir Tim doesn't know me from Adam, but a fellow can dream right?] Berners-Lee has had so much written about him it is hard to separate fact from fiction - it is truly worth a google search. But what is fairly well agreed upon is that what we call the internet first came to light in 1989 when he was working for CERN. His job required him to create hundreds and hundreds of files pertaining to his work. He, like all of us, became frustrated with the repeating questions of "What did I call that file" and "Where did I put it?" 

Unlike us, who just stomp out and get coffee or something stronger, Bernes-Lee solved the problem by devising a system of giving the files unique names so he could search for them on his computer more easily. The system had two major parts; Hypertext Mark-up Language - which gave each file a unique name, and a Universal Resource Location which let his computer know where he had put the file.

One day, or so the legend goes, he typed the name of a file into his computer and the file popped up. But he soon realized the file wasn't on his computer, it was on the computer of a colleague in another location to whom he had sent a copy of the file. A truly unique moment, for which among his other accomplishments, he was knighted in 2004 and in 2013 received the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, sort of the Nobel prize for Engineering. Because, if you haven't guessed by now, Hypertext Markup Language became more widely known as HTML and the Universal Resource Location as URL; two tags that, although we rarely actually type them out these days, are tools that we use dozens, if not hundreds, of times every day to  work our way around the internet.

So things sailed along through the model pretty smoothly with the creators of proto-internet remaining the professional geeks in universities and government labs refining these cool tools that allowed them to communicate easily with each other. But then in 1994 the government, aka gatekeepers, decided that the medium, aka the internet, was now robust enough to open the doors to all of us, and the world-wide-web was born.  And things got a little crazy.

The media, despite lovely slogans like "freedom of the press!" and "the pen is mightier than the sword!" has always been primarily about money and advertising, and the Internet provided opportunities for both in previously unimaginable degree. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s I used to do a lecture about the "cartel" - BND-TV which was an acronym for Bertlemann, Newscorp, Disney, TimeWarner and Viacom; five companies that, at the time, controlled somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of all the news and information outlets in the country. They fought viciously with each other to provide products that would allow them to steal each other's audiences, advertisers, and profits.  They are all mostly around in some form or another, often as pieces within their former competitors. [Do a search for Columbia Journalism Review/ Who Owns What for some eye-opening data. https://beta.cjr.org/resources] 

But they are all dwarfed by the new kids on the block - companies birthed by the 1994 opening of the Internet, the new cartel - Apple, Amazon and Google, with Microsoft sliding in and out. How big are the new kids on the block? Probably shifts day to day, but I read yesterday that Tim Cook was before Congress trying to explain why the App Store's weekly take of 1 billion dollars was not excessive. But that is not really why I think the Internet is breaking. The COVID pandemic drove millions of us to our keyboards to shop, to go to the doctors, etc. and the Big Three little 4 - AAGm - did that pretty well. But they often demanded that we use their unique system of hardware and software, and we were supposed to figure out how to work each of their systems. In short, the big three little 4 forgot they were supposed to be communication companies. Companies that allow each of us to communicate with each other easily - that was the original need that drove MaBell and her competitors forward.

The geeks in the backroom often forget that they are supposed to be communication specialists, not computer engineers. I lived through that bias during the early years of my 4 decade stay at NC State. When computers began to shoulder some of the communication tasks at the university. The system was designed by, and seemingly only for, engineers. You had to work on a computer running the UNIX operating system to access the university system. You may remember the scene from Jurassic Park when the young girl, attempting to corral the raging dinos, sat down in front of a computer and exclaimed, "I know how to work this! This a UNIX box!" And she busily typed away. At State it took years of conflict before PCs running the Windows operating system were allowed on the system, even longer until the "arty" Mac system cleared the isolationist hurdles.

AAGm is currently raising similar exclusionary barriers but more subtly than was the case in the old software wars. But the negative impact on "we the people" is no less frustrating. You see, rather than becoming different kinds of companies, each honed for a different task, AAGm all became slightly different companies designed to do the all the same tasks. That is a bit of an exaggeration. The companies do look a bit different "under the hood" but we, as ordinary people, rarely experience the those differences. For us, each company appears to be trying to do the same thing - communicate with people and places.

And they do that, but unfortunately in doing so they have reverted to the old software wars. Just answer one question: How many passwords do you have? Now break the question out a bit. How many Apple IDs do you have? I, unfortunately, have two. My current one attached to my Goggle gmail account and another still existing one attached to my old University email address. I was chagrined to learn that I could have even more. Makes it difficult to answer the prompt: "What is your Apple ID?" What is the password to your Goggle account? May be different from your gmail account. Or you may have to access your Goggle account to get to your gmail ID. What is your Amazon password? And if you are an Amazon Prime member what is your five digit Amazon Prime pin number? And once you have jumped all these hurdles to get to say, your doctor, what is your MyChart user name and password? And no your "password saver" software is not the answer because AAGm, and the various entities you reach through them, are prone to requiring you to change your "easy to hack password."

"Please enter the last password you can remember for this site. Now enter a new password that you have not used on any site in the past decade. It should be 37 characters long, using special characters, both upper and lower case, and should not contain the names of anyone in your immediate family, pet names or birthdays, or proper nouns in this or any other recognizable language except Klingon."

Now do you understand why I drink? My particular issue is getting this blog to you. I wrote in a previous post that I feel really lucky to have just about everyone I care about on the SchragWall list. But having you on the list is not really a guarantee that you actually get the post. I use Blogger and gmail, both Google products, so I try to keep it as simple as I can on my end. But the blog is really is a sort of "broadcasting model." I create a post and "broadcast" it out to y'all. However, you may have changed your email address, or your provider may have implemented a "new and improved version which does not talk to "Blogger/gmail." You may have been busy and sent it to your "read later" mailbox that you last accessed sometime before New Years." I do not use any kind of tracking software that would tell me if you received the post and opened it. If I wanted to work for the CIA I would have applied long ago. Nor do I frequent some other international tracking organization. Because the Wall is actually international. To date it goes to, in alpha order:

Argentina

China

Canada

Italy

Kazakhstan

USA

And I really have no idea if any of those ex-pats or internationals are receiving the post with any regularity - unless they respond on the page or send me an email directly to robert.schrag@gmail.com.  Some are on Facebook, some use a Facebook App, WhatsApp, some use Signal, some may use something else. Oh, and by the way, if you use Internet Explorer [AKA Internet Exploder during the software wars] you need to change since Microsoft has announced it will terminate the app next summer. I have no idea how they plan to transition current users.

I remember and old commercial by Lee Iacocca when he was CEO of Chrysler Automotive. In essence he said, "If your commuter stops working they tell you to turn it off and turn it back on again. We don't do things that way at Chrysler!" 

I am afraid we are approaching those Bad Old Days on the Internet. The never-ending search to be the biggest kid, the newest kid, the richest CEO appears to be creating an Internet Tower of Babble held together by greed, conspiracy mongers, hysteria, and fake news. I know that is true because I read it on Qanon.

But seriously, I am concerned that unbridled competition amongst some very selfish, very greedy, totally unregulated companies and individuals will endanger my ability to reach you. That saddens me.

Wandering Around in the Memory Palace

.

Since my last post on synesthesia, and messages from a couple of you reporting your own experiences with that fascinating condition, I have been thinking a lot about the mysterious realm that follows us everywhere, hanging out above our shoulders and between our ears.  Mostly I've been reflecting on that intriguing possible mental relationship between synesthesia and memory. Specifically the ability of certain stimuli to call up little memory vignettes; smells, sounds, sights, whatever, that transport you back to another place and time. For me lilacs, dill pickles, newly cut grass, burning leaves, and wood burning fireplaces are particularly powerful aromas that trigger memory floods. I close my eyes, focus on the smell and wait to see where it takes me.  Which, of course, raises the question of where do those aromas take me, and how, and maybe why? Here’s an idea.

The idea of a memory palace is an ancient one. Google tells us that Cicero (106 - 43 BCE) described the Memory Palace technique in his writings on rhetoric, called De Oratore.  However, my earliest recollection of the notion is far more prosaic; Jerry Lucas on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, which Google also informs me took place on May 14, 1971. [Which, of course raises the question of why, with Google, do we really need a memory palace?, but let's let that go for now.] For those of you who have not yet attained "a certain age," Jerry Lucas was a basketball star at Ohio State, the NBA and the Olympics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, who later gained renown for his remarkable memory. Lucas attributed his feats of memory to the memory palace technique.

Briefly the technique is said to work like this: you call to mind a structure with which you are intimately familiar. You know every crook and cranny. No problem there, I often amuse myself when settling down to sleep by mentally “walking around” in the house and neighborhood in which I was raised. Next, when you want to remember something you stash it somewhere in that structure - AKA your memory palace. OK. Now it is getting a little “iffy.” So if I want to remember when my daughters were born I take those dates and stash them in the bottom drawer of the big built-in drawers in my sister’s bedroom where the cat had kittens. All right, maybe. But now when I need to remember those dates I need to bop over to the memory palace and haul those dates out of that drawer - top or bottom or wherever I put them. I may have that somewhat distorted, which may be why it has never worked for me. It always seemed to me that with the memory palace, instead of just remembering one thing - the dates - I now needed to remember where in the memory palace I had put the dates, so now instead of just remembering one thing - daughter dates - I now need to remember two things - drawer and dates. Something rotten in that particular state of Denmark, not?

But like many interesting concepts, the memory palace notion provides some delightful points for reflection.  First and foremost I love the metaphor of a palace as the place in which our memories reside. It is a narrative device that resonates strongly with me. My acquaintance with scripture is sketchy at best, but for some reason the phrase “My father’s house has many mansions.” (John 14:2 - thanks again Google) has always spoken strongly to me, both for its inclusive theme, and for my visual imagining of a structure with a plethora of hallways and doorways, windows and mirrors -  exciting and still a bit frightening. The house in Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden is a delicious example.

So if you combine the idea of this slightly spooky memory palace with my assertion in the previous post about the time-traveling synesthetic potential of music you end up - potentially anyhow - with a synesthetic memory palace in which a song, a dream, an image, color or flavor can catapult you into one of the many rooms of your own unique memory palace, landing you in the lap of a long-ignored, yet still present, memory.

This somewhat fanciful construction has the added benefit of bringing comfort to those of us on the far side of a “certain age” about the accessibility of our memory palace. The memories are there. Oh, I’m not saying that the particular noun for the round bread product that is kneaded, then shaped, baked and boiled, the, the, the, bagel! dammit! won’t occasionally escape you. But the larger more important memory of breakfasts shared where, when and with whom, are still there in the palace, just waiting for the right synesthetic key to turn the lock, swing the door open, revealing the rest of the memory and the absolutely wonderful opportunity to wander around in that time and place one more time.

All of which brings me to both the greatest frustration and the most tantalizing possibility of this whole memory palace notion. The greatest frustration is that I can't choose when to enter my synesthetic memory palace, it just sort of happens when I happen to encounter the key. Nicely serendipitous, but potentially awkward; "Pardon me, miss, but could I sniff your neck?" I'm thinking that some combination of guided meditation/relaxation/reike might provide a path and I play around with those elements sometimes during my night time sleep ritual, however without success to date.

The tantalizing piece comes when I have been fortunate enough to stumble into the palace and walk into one of those lovely, but long forgotten, memories and discover that that particular space leads to other spaces - sort of like a memory maze. The people and places in that first memory lead to other people, places and spaces, and I can wander through that delightful cascade of memories until I am disturbed by some intrusion from what we arrogantly call the "real" world.

Well, that's where I am with the whole memory palace thingy, and I better get this post out to you now, lest I forget . . . .  

Faces and Places in the Chord

Dictionary definitions of synesthesia center on the ability to, or the condition of, simultaneously interpreting sensory input through two ordinarily separate modalities. Most often a blending of visual and auditory senses. So a “synesthete” in the presence of a c-sharp chord, for example, would both hear the tone as we would, but would also “see,” perhaps, a bright blue. I first came across the idea when using Gene Youngblood’s seminal work Expanded Cinema as a text back in 1970. Buckminster Fuller wrote the Introduction, a tour d’force in its own right.

Anyhow, I have remained fascinated by the notion ever since. It is one of those things I wish I had been born with - like perfect pitch, a photographic memory, or the ability to draw recognizable scenes, objects or people. But as is often my wont, I have learned how to fake it. Here’s how that goes:

One of my great frustrations is the “tyranny of the eyelids.” No doubt many of you share this condition. There you are, reading along in the tiny hours of the morning, 2:30, maybe 3:00, and your eyelids just ring the curtain down. Slam! Your brain is still up for “the rest of the story,” but "No Way!" say the eyelids - Slam, bang, locked up, like those metal curtains in front of little shops around the world. "Wait! Wait!" cries my brain, but alas in vain.

OK, despite my best efforts I still haven’t figured out how to read through my eyelids, but I have figured out how to use what may be some vestigial synesthesia ability to continue some entertainment after hours. As I have mentioned before, I have music or nature sounds playing all night long. The synesthetic part comes in when I draw rather complex scenes behind my eyelids as I listen to the music. Well, I’m not really drawing behind my eyelids - yech, a little Hannibal Lecter-ish. Rather, I’m imagining a variety of scenes, sometimes animated, sometimes “real life,” as the music supplies the soundtrack. 

There are a couple of advantages to this system. First and foremost, behind my eyelids, I can draw anything in any style. From Disney to Da Vinci to Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun to Picasso - you name 'em, I can paint 'em all behind my eyelids. My problem has never been imagining the images. The problem has always been moving those imaginings in my head to the paper in front of me. That doesn't work so well. However, behind my eyelids, all I need to do is think and, ta da, there it is.  On paper what I end up with are my own rather strange efforts, some of which I share with you here on Schrag Wall. 

Second, when I am drawing behind my eyelids I never forget how I did something.  The issue is this, I can look at look at a drawing that I did years or decades ago - often a blend of photoshop and hand drawing like some of the ping pong paintings I have shared with you. Sometimes multiple blending of those images, and I wonder "How did I do that?" "Clicking what keys in what sequence and in what order?" "How many layers?"  Time was my fingers just remembered the sequences. Like what I imagine touch typing is like. Something else I never mastered. Nowadays often my reply to myself is "I have no idea."  Incredibly frustrating. When drawing behind my eyelids, no problem. I just think it.

However, recently I have become more aware of what may be the most fascinating, empowering, enjoyable aspect of my truncated version of synesthesia. Synesthesia is a time machine.  I have mentioned that I do a blend of meditation, relaxation, reiki, etc., before going to sleep. And as with everything, I play music throughout the exercise.  Every once in a while, while my attention is elsewhere, a song will fight its way to the foreground, and flings me into the WayBack Machine where I find myself reliving some previous part of my life. These are incredibly powerful recollections? recreations? lucid moments? I'm not sure which. I, invariably, am startled out of my revery. I cling to these moments longer than my "normal dreams." Long enough to wonder who was that? Where was I? When was I? I can usually figure out parts of it.  I do know that the “when” was always in the past. The who and where usually boil down to more of a multiple choice question.  Both answers obviously were incredibly powerful moments, strongly harmonic with my chord sometime and somewhere in the past.

I'll have to think about it; to sleep, perchance to dream.

.

Corrals and Ranges

 “Give me land, lots of land,
Under starry skies above.
Don’t fence me in.”

—Cole Porter and Robert Fletcher

Well, maybe not.  There is something frightening about wide open ranges. Kind of intellectually agoraphobic. Especially these days when your phone, your tablet, even your watch, for God’s sake, seem to dun you with announcements, notifications, reminders, ads and “opportunities.”  I suppose we brought it on ourselves to a certain extent - the whole FOMO thing, fear of missing out. But I am beginning to find myself leaning in the opposite direction.  Having spent my life as an academic, I have always felt that information comes with obligations. To know something comes with an inherent obligation to understand it, or at least to try to understand it, and eventually to understand it, Einstein exhorts us, well enough to explain it clearly to a child.

However, life has unfolded for me recently so as to drop me down the rabbit hole of NFTs - Non-Fungible Tokens. That fact that nobody seems to understand just what they are or why people are willing to spend millions of dollars to “acquire” them, or for that matter what “acquiring” an NFT means, does nothing to ease my lingering personal anxiety. I am, or have been, for 60 or 70 years, a card-carrying intellectual. I am supposed to know, to understand, to explain. Except, I remind myself, I have retired. Which, I assert, is why it is okay to fence yourself in. Build yourself a corral.

These fences, which I am coming to admire, should not become excuses for blinders - shutting out social, political, and intellectual issues that we as a society ignore at our peril. Rather they are reminders that the world has somehow slithered beyond my ability to understand, and by implication, solve, all of the issues, problems, and concerns that my digital announcements, reminders, ads and invitations pour into my increasingly bewildered brain. “Whoa, there Nelly Bell!” say my oft maligned fences. “Art, music, friends and family. Those are your concerns. Fence them in - and in reasonable doses.”

So to take some liberties with Dean Martin’s “MyRifle, My Pony and Me,” tune:

“Purple light in the canyons

There’s where I long to be

With my three good companions

My art, friends, and family.”

—Dimitri Tiomkin / Paul Francis Webster

Wilderness

Would that the wilderness of my future was

Truly trackless, smooth as glass from pole to pole.

No mark or indication as to previous passages,

Of what had gone before; when, where, with what purpose.

Instead the horizon is littered with good intentions.

The “how abouts” the “maybe sos”

The rough drafts, false starts, blank pages.

The detritus of my indecision 

Abandoned for lack of time or passion.

They stare with mute accusation.

And so? What now? Excuses set aside?

Perhaps a true fresh start. 

Refreshed expectations of accomplishments.

Thoreau’s wildness implies wilderness

Implies tracklessness.

Smooth as glass from pole to pole.

Superconductive exploration.

Excitement in a new wilderness 

Of the soul.

Angel Face

 OK, so maybe beauty inducing a spontaneous inhalation, isn’t the best analogy I’ve ever come up with. Let’s try another path to understanding enabling beauty, and shift media as well, from music to literature. And this is where my students would roll their eyes as gen Xers (Yers? Zers?) were wont to do; “Oh, god. Here he goes again!” 

This path to Enabling Beauty is laid out, in part, courtesy of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle a TV show circa 1959 in which we are introduced to Peabody’s Improbable History where canine Professor Peabody and his human sidekick Sherman time travel around history via the Wayback Machine:

“We need to hop into the Wayback Machine. Sherman, set the date to the mid-1400s, say 1450. Florence, Italy. The workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio!”  More eye rolling. Those that weren’t drooping.  “See the youngster over in the corner? Unknown now, but not for long! That is Leonardo de Vinci.”  And then Mr. Peabody would go on to explain that much of Leonardo's early work is collaborative in nature.“During the Renaissance, Sherman, paintings were usually done by groups of artists, directed by a master. Leonardo's first known contribution to one his master's works was in Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ. Almost all critics agree that Leonardo painted the leftmost angel. Its face and hair have a light, graceful quality unlike the other figures in the painting. Leonardo was probably also responsible for the background.”

According to Vasari, Leonardo's first biographer, Verrocchio was so impressed with his pupil's work on the angel’s face that he grew ashamed of his own talents, and swore never to paint again. We really have no way of ascertaining Vasari’s veracity of this version of artistic history, but it does imply that often an early snippet of work points the way to later, more encompassing, excellence.

I have been thinking about that notion of a “little bit,” a “lagniappe” in Cajun, as an indication of later excellence applied to the literature in song lyrics.  The previous post dealt with the spontaneous impact of sound, the quality of the voices, their tone and purity, as an integral element of beauty. It addresses the music/beauty duality as an auditory construct. Neither Amazing Grace nor Somewhere Over the Rainbow really qualify are timeless literature. The one is a religious work, the other a great show tune. Their claim to unusual beauty lies in the auditory tracks. 

However it strikes me that if we pay close attention we can find among some snippets of writing in some song lyrics that might warn us, like Leonardo’s painting of the little angel, that some future excellent writing lurks here. Remember, song lyrics are poetry, or literature set to music; a notion backed up by the, for me initially surprising, announcement that the Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 was awarded to Bob Dylan "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."

For me that notion presents a recurring clue that, hidden in the lyrics of a song, might be some pieces of exceptional literature. That clue, the equivalent of  the “spontaneous inhalation” I propose on the music side, is manifested on the literature side by a kind of “chuckle”:  “Oh, yes. I like that! Wish I had written that!”  If the author is living and has a website, I will occasionally drop them a note of thanks.  More often, I jot the phrase or sentence down in my “Wish I’d Written That” file. A little bit of which I’m cracking open for you here.  

So, just for fun, I’d like to encourage you to send me some of your favorites.  Somewhere down the line I’ll share your nominations here on The Wall.  Let me know if, when I do a follow up of this post, you’d like to share your identity as an exceptional lyric sleuth. Otherwise I’ll just use the normal anonymous footnote style. 

First, a couple of rules. Let’s rule out Dylan. I mean he already has a Nobel Prize, for crying out loud. Second, let’s stipulate works published after the first radio broadcast of music, Reginald Fessenden’s “Christmas Concert” Christmas Eve, 1906.  I know that’s rather arbitrary, but I am a media guy, and that’s still a pretty wide net. And, of course, if you make a good case for an exception, I’ll add it to the list.

To clarify then, I am not looking for a whole poem or lyric. We’ll let Dylan claim that space. Instead we are looking for a parallel to Leonardo’s “Angel’s face.” A single sentence, perhaps couplet or phrase that from our lips draws the Hallelujah, to steal a possible example. Something that leads us to suspect that beautiful literature may lie this way.

Here are a few of my current favorites:

“A phone that rings at midnight ain’t got nothing good to say.

- Trouble on the Line.  - Marley’s Ghost

“Those Williams boys still mean a lot to me - Hank and Tennessee.“

- Good Old Boys Like Me. - Bob McDill

“Try to remember when life was so tender that dreams were kept beside your pillow.” - Try to Remember. Tom Jones “Fantastics”

“Some day, you'll know, I was the one. But tomorrow may rain, so I'll follow the sun.”

I’ll Follow the Sun.  - Lennon and McCartney

“But here in this graveyard that's still no man's land

The countless white crosses in mute witness stand

To man's blind indifference to his fellow man.”  The Green Fields of France. - Bogle Eric

And of course;

“The first time ever I saw your face, I thought the sun rose in your eyes.” The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. -  Ewan MacColl

Pure Beauty

.The second tenet of Distilled Harmony is Enable Beauty, which is a bit slippery on a couple of fronts.  Sometimes it simply means go out, or go online and replenish art supplies - stock up on paper, paint, markers, etc. Get frames to frame pieces I have printed out. Hang stuff on my “gallery walls.” Very prosaic stuff. Literally gather the tools necessary to create works in whatever genre I am playing with at the moment. Baseline “enabling.”  But obviously just having the tools creates only the most tenuous path to beauty - along the lines of get a huge chunk of marble, a hammer and a chisel and hammer away all the marble that doesn’t look like The David. Ta da. That there, that’s yer beauty.

A few rungs up the ladder of sophistication, brings us to the notions of environment and permission. Making most art is messy, which is why artists of all stripes try to claim some type of "studio". A place where the tools of the trade, as it were, can spill out. Do a search on “Video of Jackson Pollock working” for some glimpses of a messy studio on steroids.  But even an artist who works primarily digitally needs a space that can contain post-it notes, print outs of rough drafts, trays for snacks, etc.  I remember, many years ago, stumbling across a potter’s studio during a sort of touring art show somewhere in northern Michigan. And the only thing I remembered the entire “tour” is this awesome studio. Huge space, almost all windows looking out on a stream winding into a forest. I remember thinking “anyone could create here!”  Silly, I know, but that was my thought at the time.

I was ignoring the vital aspect of permission. It's not just about having the space in which to create. Not only is art messy, but it requires large chunks of uninterrupted time. “Doing Art” regardless of the medium is all about flow. You really cannot “hold that thought” or “save that line” “wash your hands and come here for a minute.” Artists do those things, and may be able to come back to the “moment of interruption” and move forward, but the piece created “post-interruptus” will be different from that which would have been created without the interruption. It is not necessarily a case of better or worse, just different. So, it is probably best for an artist to try to create a personal and professional environment in which the permission to spend large amounts of uninterrupted time “doing art” is acknowledged. Where stepping out of your "creating space" is not necessarily seen as an invitation to be set another task.

Yet, all that being said, - with obvious apologies to my better half - the stickiest issue lies ahead. The whole Beauty thing.  I was watching a video the other day about a well-known New York art figure, Ann Freedman, former president Knoedler & Company Gallery, who had been widely acknowledged as selling forgeries of paintings - literally "made in China," that she steadfastly contended were authentic.  When asked what her initial impression of a forged Rothko that she had sold, she replied, “I thought it was just beautiful!” I pick on Rothko for a couple of reasons. First, the “gallery forger” did acknowledge that while she still maintained that her Rothko was “real,” he was “easy to fake.” Secondly, some of my best friends are Rothko lovers. And some Rothko lovers are art experts with impeccable credentials. Rothko is unquestionably an artist of significant stature.

Now, let me sidetrack for one of my favorite stories about my Dad.  When he was in his early 90s Christine and I took him to lunch in Long Grove, which, at the time, was a lovely little town northeast of Chicago. While it has fallen a bit on hard times, there was - and still is, I think - a neat art gallery cum gift shop. Maybe called "The Studio"? Anyhow we were walking around the place, which was “gallery-ish” enough that you keep your voice down. Well, most folks did. However, Dad had been studying an abstract piece hanging on the wall for several minutes before declaring in a definitely non-lowered voice, “Why, I wouldn’t hang that in my toilet!” We quickly decided it was time for lunch and scurried out the door.

Point is, with his expertise fully acknowledged, I feel the same way about Rothko. It mattered naught to me that our purveyor of forged Rothkos, Pollocks, etc., thought her Rothko was “beautiful,” I would have to side with what I think Dad’s assessment of Rothko's work would be, and it would not be "My, that is just beautiful."  The point lies in this aphorism: beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or in the case I would like to explore a little further; in the ear of the listener.

I am addicted to music. I am trying to think of a time during a normal day when I am not listening to music, and I’m having trouble.  “How about right now?” you may ask. Well, right now I am typing on my Mac while listening to a classical piano track on Pandora which is, simultaneously, being accompanied by a rain storm track on Naturespaces. “OK,” you say. “How about when you are asleep?”  Same blend. Pandora and Naturespaces, all night long. And I’m sure that has nothing to do with the fact that I either sleep with my headphones on, or in the guest room. So I guess that the only time I am not listening to music is when I am watching some type of video - which usually has a sound track. Sigh.

All of which has led to consider what characteristics in music do I find most beautiful. While realizing that my characteristics will probably differ from yours I thought it would be fun to share those thoughts and some of that music with you.

I suppose it is not strange that often the music I find most beautiful shares a close relationship with tenet number three, Distill Complexity. It is not that I am unacquainted with complex musical forms. In high school I sang, competitively, in an octet. We had a brilliant conductor who had previously worked with Johnny Mathis and the Young Americans. He was quite demanding and it was largely because of his expertise that we won statewide contests several times. In college, I sang one of the leads in the opera based on James Thurber's children's book Many Moons. So, yes. I am familiar with complexity in musical forms. And occasionally I quite enjoy them. A couple of concerts in Venice; one Vivaldi and unique version of Rossini's Barber of Seville, are among my all time favorites.  But I don't always enjoy complex works.  Singing in the Thurber opera was genuinely terrifying, as the two female leads, both of whom could read music, possessed a couple of the sweetest voices I have ever heard. Which may in part explain my preference for pure "distilled" vocals.

I encountered one such piece, which remains in my top five, while sleeping. Well, not actual asleep but not really awake either.  The clock radio was set to NPRs This Country in the Morning, and as they often did, they were featuring some musical selections.  Today it was Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and I waited, just a tad apprehensively for Judy Garland's iconic rendition.  But only a few notes in I realized that whoever was singing this was better than Garland - much, much better.  If you haven't heard Eva Cassidy's version, I'll paste a link in here. Realizing that - like my perhaps minority take on Rothko - "beauty" is subjective, you may still prefer the Garland version. But do give Eva a serious listen: 

https://youtu.be/2rd8VktT8xY

It is the purity of the sound - the "non-complexity" if you will, that captures me. It is music that just floats you away. You fear that the vocal support, will drop out, fade out somehow, but it never does, and you wonder how she can do that, and then you wish she would never stop. And it is that purity of sound that comes through on this next piece. 

Amazing Grace/My Chains are Gone  was recommended to me by a student in one of my media classes. This version is done by a woman's group from Brigham Young University called Noteworthy. I think this link is the cleanest path to them, but they too are worth the search: https://byurecords.lnk.to/HowSweetSoundID

Those works, among a few others brings me to this thought: “Beauty induces a spontaneous inhalation.” And yes, at first glance that may seem to say the same thing as the old saw; “I don’t know much about art, but I know it when I see it.”  But version one uses bigger, albeit fewer words, hence you would use the second version if you were being paid by the word. However, word count is not really the only difference. Let’s break it down a bit - a close reading if you will.

“Induces.”  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, when something “induces” something, it acts upon the will to lead us to a specific behavior. So in our brief version beauty “acts upon the will.” We don’t choose to take a deep breath, beauty "induces" the behavior.

"Spontaneous." Coming freely and without premeditation or effort.

"Inhalation." The act of inhaling or breathing in.

Put them together and what have you got? Bibity, bopity, Boo? You have something - in our immediate context, a piece of music - that literally takes your breath away, leaves you gasping. And while at the moment we are talking about music, beauty can arise from any stimulus. It can be found in something created by an artist in any medium or genre. It can be, and often is, found in the natural world - from microscopic particles, to the latest high resolution images of a black hole currently making its way across the internet. So can anything be beautiful if beauty is defined by a spontaneous subjective reaction to some external stimulus? Was Ann Freedman's declaration of the forged Rothko as "beautiful" legitimate? Possibly. But other aspects of her assessment give me pause.

For me to be party to "enabling beauty," the created stimulus to which I am reacting, and which I wish to enable, must manifest some combination of three other characteristics: awareness, honesty and intention. And it important to note that notion of "created stimulus." Awareness, honesty and intention applied to occurrences in the natural world take us into the world of theology and metaphysics - is there intentional beauty in a sunset, a rose, in a baby's smile, in your lover's eyes? You can see why I don't want to go there. But those notions certainly can be brought to bear on works created specifically to engage the mind - and the pocketbook - of an audience, be they a patron or a target demographic.

Let me simplify. Ann Freeman's declaration of the "beauty" of her forged Rothko loses credibility because most of the evidence implies that she was aware that the work was dishonest and was created with the sole intention of defrauding wealthy collectors.

Problematically, while that simplification resolves most of the ethical complexities in The Case of The Lady and the Forger, it leaves the "beauty" of the forged painting in limbo. The artist, Pei-Shen Qian, is apparently somewhat of a genius [see https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/nyregion/struggling-immigrant-artist-tied-to-80-million-new-york-fraud.html?] able to forge a number of contemporary artists at a level that fooled a number of "experts." 

 So what of the works themselves? If upon seeing one of these works I experience a spontaneous inhalation. Is that work - for me - truly beautiful? Do I have to be aware that a work - in any genre - is a fraud to remove a created work from my personal realm of the beautiful? Can the work itself somehow be questionable - less beautiful - because of the fraudulent chain of creation and ownership that led to its existence? I'm inclined to believe not. Can a work of art be held responsible for the motivations of the hand that created it? Again, I choose not to go there.

And if that wasn't bad enough, welcome to the world of non-fungible tokens - NFT's - a type of digital image file one of which sold at Christie's for about 70 million dollars on March 11. No actual physical "painting" changed hands, nor is the general public barred from downloading the file and printing their own version of the file. No, I do not understand. Feel free to google "JPG file Sells for 69 Million." However, I did search for the image online. I experienced no spontaneous inhalation. So for me, for the immediate future, beauty appears to be safe from the attack of the NFTs.

.

The Illusion of Identity

 My father, the only centenarian I have known personally, used to tell the story of when he first took my mother home to meet his family on the family farm down in a very rural corner of southeastern South Dakota. They all thought Mom was very nice, but the betting had run high on a local gal. And someone, I was never sure just quite who, did point out that Mom was “Nicht von unserer.” Not one of ours. When my first wife and I moved to Raleigh back in 1980 many of our neighbors invited us to attend church with them. The fact that she was Jewish and I was “unchurched” (a new word for me) led to some awkward moments.

We apparently set large store by identity, there seems to be great comfort in it. Philosophical, religious, political, racial, gender, clan, whatever. The common mindset is always “us and them.” Our people. Those others. There is a great hue and cry regarding identity around the globe today. Whether the focus is hyper-local squabbles within the homeowners association, the school board, town planning commission, etc., or national, Republican versus Democrat, conservative versus liberal, or global, East versus West, 1st World versus Developing Nations. It all boils down to “us versus them.”  I am incredibly tired of all the bickering. As the old 1961 musical put it, Stop The World, I Want to Get Off.

As a long-time fan of science fiction I like to consider a galactic perspective. I’m not quite sure I am ready to buy the veracity of the of the former Israeli Space Security Chief who asserted in a December 9, 2020 Wall Street Journal article that a “galactic federation” has long been in touch with “earth leaders” but the aliens are denying us membership because we “aren’t ready.” Still, as I look at “the news” I am inclined to seriously consider that notion. Or as Groucho Marx put it, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me for a member.”

We do, as earthlings, spend a mind-boggling amount of human lives and treasure squabbling over immature political, social, and philosophical issues - which at the core are all the same issue: “We are better than you, nah, nah, nah.” This where you stick out your tongue, put your thumbs in your ears and waggle your fingers.  “My candidate, my religion, my age group, my gender, my athletic team, my genetic heritage, my ancestors, my, my, my! Nah! Nah!” Meanwhile, the planet upon which we all, regardless of our cherished identity, must live, is going to hell in a handbag. We really, really, need to just grow up. We need to put aside our petty differences and realize that we “humanity” is singular, with only one identity. Otherwise there is no hope that the galactic federation will warn us when the asteroid is going to hit, or provide us with the space transports necessary to get us all to Earth II. 

Without coming to that realization that we are a singular identity and act like cooperating adults, well, grab your handbag ‘cause we are going to hell and taking the planet with us. For the more hopeful, that just leaves us with Elon Musk and terraforming Mars. OK. He is brilliant. A little more fine tuning on the batteries, the self-driving gizmo, and some reasonable pricing, and well, there might be a Tesla in our future. But are you really comfortable with Elon’s Mars as the only option for the future of our singular identity?

.

Dreaming of the Hundred Acre Wood

.One of the great fallacies that we pass on to our children is that they can be anything they want to be. I am not talking about a unique fallacy that has dogged the children living under the age old shadows of discrimination based on race, gender or class. This fallacy of unfettered possibilities touches all children regardless of socioeconomic status, and we, their parents, their teachers and mentors are, in large part, to blame.

I suppose if there was an era when “you can be anything” came even close to being true it would have been for a tiny cluster of privileged children during the Renaissance, when the gentry were supposed to study history, art, philosophy, sport and science - as those pursuits then existed. But as we well know that was the privileged path of young males seeking to become “a Renaissance man.”  Emphasis on privileged and male. But even those favored few lived under a fallacy that is simply more obvious today.

Here is the fallacy as I see it. Our world has become so specialized that the time when a child comes even close to a truly unfettered future is reasonably measured in a mere handful of early years. Past that time the subtle slide toward specialization begins. Playgroups morph into classes - perhaps an unintended, or unrealized echo of the Renaissance model - a little bit of art, a little bit of sport and science; youngsters shepherded from class A to class B, C, D and E by parents who only 5 or 10 years previous had shared the fallacy that they too could be anything they wanted to be.

But now, as glorified chauffeurs,  they shuttle their kids from pillar to post closely watching for any indication of unique interest or ability - “Doesn’t she color well?” “See how well he uses those scissors!” - that should be encouraged by advanced classes, summer camps, and perhaps enrollment in special K-12 schools known for smoothing the way to special avenues of higher or professional education.

The, perhaps strange, image I have in my head is a bunch of young’uns jostling around on the top of a humongous water slide, dozens and dozens of slides spiral down from the top.  A sign at the top says “Take Any Slide You Want!” And the kids do. And it is often the last real choice they make, as the slide swirls them down and around until they splash down into a landing pool filled with others who made the same or very similar choices up top. You choose STEM (Science, technology, engineering and math) slides and you ended up in the big STEM  pool. Arts and music? Splash, there you are!  The Arty pool. Splash e vous! Agricultural? Splash! FFA pool. Education? Splash. Philosophy? Splash.  And so on and so forth.  

The notion is that yes, you can be anything you want. However the slippery slope is that once you step onto one of the slides - and sometimes unintentionally and at a very early age, perhaps nudged by others  - “She has a great backstroke for a six year old!” “Boy, I hope his voice doesn’t change too much!” “She can do long division in her head!” - it grows increasingly difficult to pull yourself off one slide and find your way to another. And suddenly, well if you can call 50 or 60 years "suddenly", you find yourself at the end of a long career humming that old Peggy Lee song, “Is that all there is?”

I point to myself as a sort of example. At some single digit age, not really sure exactly when, I began to demonstrate interest and tolerable competence in what we would now call “the performing arts.”  Without boring you with the related steps, that inclination led me through various high school productions, a BA in theater, MA in what was then called Radio-TV and Film, a Ph.D in Mass Communication and finally, a 45-year career teaching similar stuff in University classrooms and on the Internet. 

I'm not really complaining. It was a nice ride for the most part. Met and worked with some wonderful folks along the way with more than ordinary buffers from the inevitable jerks. However, I must admit that in my last few weeks before retirement I had cause to go over to the Design School to return a DVD.  As I walked through the halls I looked at the very cool projects the students and faculty had created, "Hummm." I thought, "Maybe I should have .  .  .  nah."

Anyhow, here in the early months of retirement I find myself at the top of another water slide. "You can do anything you want!"  Well, I probably need another, more mature analogy. You could break something on those slides. But the point is I don't have to go to work, go to meetings, publish or perish, defend the value of my disciple to my colleagues, deans, and other administrati. And there is great freedom in that reality. But there is also a sort of "option-phobia." When you are a kid poised atop the "You can be anything you want" waterslide, the water seems smooth and welcoming. It isn't until the end of the ride that you come to know the rocks and rapids that needed to be negotiated.  So, off you leapt.  Retirement, on the other hand, comes with the opportunity for reflection - although "opportunity" may not be the right word. Necessity maybe?

Once, many years ago, I asked my "musey room" buddy what his notion of heaven was. His reply was "A comfortable room with an inexhaustible supply of novels." If I were treat retirement as a prelude to heaven and ask myself what my notion of a heavenly retirement would be I would probably respond along the lines of : "A huge studio with an awesome view, an inexhaustible supply of paper, markers, large format printers and scanners, clay, sculpting tools, a kiln, powerful computers with excellent and totally intuitive imaging software, cameras, a bed that didn't hurt my hips, and the ability to sleep whenever I wanted and never having to get up in the morning. We can talk about food after my nap.” The fact that neither his heaven nor my imagined retirement are realistically feasible may explain the necessity for, and evolution of, religion.  OK, where was I? Drifted a little off track there.

Oh, yeah. The intimidating notion of retirement.  Here is, strangely, where I am at the moment: looking for The Hundred Acre Wood.  And in my mind reaching the Hundred Acre Wood means to reach a state of childlike Harmony. Not childish - self-centered, whining - harmony; no, childlike Harmony. And there is a world of difference. No, that is not quite right. There is a lifetime of difference. Let me explain. Childlike harmony is synonymous with with inner peace, with enlightenment.  It is not a foregone conclusion of a life lived. It is a goal. It is, perhaps strangely, for me the essence of the Hundred Acre Wood as depicted in Winnie the Pooh.

The Pooh stories, and here I mean the original versions as opposed to the “Disneyfications” which do bother me. But that is another issue. So, the Pooh stories are obviously entertaining tales for kids and need not be taken any further. But if you do choose to take them further, Pooh is a rather enlightened Bear, blessed with the ability to live in a gently curious perpetual present. Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil strikes me as a uniquely parallel character, a cheerful gentle soul, yet one whose home serves as the locus of a unique, insightful power.

Bombadil would be comfortable in the Hundred Acre Wood. He and Pooh would stroll along - to quote the Loggins and Messina tune House at Pooh Corner - “counting all the bees in the hive, chasing all the clouds from the sky.” More precisely looking for enlightenment in the simple things in life. I would like to join them. I can think of no better way to spend my retirement. But I am uncertain of the path.

How far do we have to go before we find the place that allows us to turn inward? That does not mean “the end of the road.” Rather the idea is that we find a spot for reflection; one that expresses what we have learned to this point, and points a path to refinement. A stepping back from the easel, closing the journal, looking away from the sculpture in its current state. A distanced deciding of what all should remain and what gets smoothed away. This insight is, perhaps, what I hope to find in the Hundred Acre Wood of my retirement.

Silly old bear.

Illustration by EH Shepard @ 1926

.

Racist Art on My Desk?

I don't really think so.  Here is the image that sits there.  I have talked about it before here on the Wall, but if that post predates some of you let me give you its history.  Like millions of folks around the world, my folks read Dr. Seuss books to me as a child and I read them to my kids.  The "Ran Lab" image above resulted from a bit of correspondence I had with the good Dr. Seuss.  One of his many books is "If I Ran the Zoo."  Which begins:

"Its a pretty good Zoo,"

Said young Gerald McGrew.

And the fellow who runs it

Seems proud of it too.

But if I ran the zoo,

Said young Gerald McGrew,

I'd make a few changes,

That's just what I'd do . ."

Dr. Seuss, 1950

And Seuss goes on to describe and illustrate those changes.  Well, with imitation being the most sincere form of flattery, and cloning being all the rage at the time.,  I wrote "If I Ran the Lab" around 2000. It began:

“It’s a pretty good lab,” said weird Harold McNab,

“Though the egghead who runs it is really a crab.

And the work that they turn out’s not quality work,

‘Cause the Project Director’s a bit of a jerk.

But if I ran the lab, said weird Harold McNab,

I’d splice up some genes not halfway so drab

As the genes they’ve been splicing ‘round here up ‘til now.

When it comes to strange genotypes, I’d show them how!!

    Dr. Schrag @ 2000

And I go on to describe those "strange genotypes." At the risk of offending someone somewhere, I would be glad to send you a copy of the full manuscript. But anyhow, I sent a copy off to Dr. Seuss's publisher and a few weeks later the image above arrived in the mail. I thought it quite cool. I also sent a copy to Gary Larson asking if he would like to do the illustrations. Alas, without similar success. In his defense he was in is "retired phase" at the time. No doubt if I sent it to him now . . . anyhow.

So you can imagine, I am not among those applauding the recent announcement that several of the Seuss books will be pulled from  publication for containing racist images.  My objections do not spring from my brief contact with the author, but rather from a Distilled Harmony view of art and culture in general.

Let me explain. Again a brief synopsis of Distilled Harmony. It is a world view that rests on four tenets of descending dominance. First, foster harmony the dominant tenet which demands that we seek the most harmonic path in our lives, decisions and behaviors. Second, enable beauty, which calls upon us to create, or support the creation of, beautiful entities in the traditional realms of the arts. Third is distill complexity, seeking the clearest view of and or explanation of the issues we confront in our lives. Einstein once asserted that if you could not explain something clearly to a child, you did not truly understand it yourself. This tenet admonishes us to seek that clarity. And fourth, oppose harm. In 1867 John Stuart Mill opined, " Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing" Or in the version often attributed to Burke and Churchill; "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Either way you get the idea - when harmony is attacked by evil, one is compelled to act.

The current Seuss kerfuffle is simply the latest touch point among many which, I believe, result in large part from differing perspectives of cultural history. What one group sees as an offensive reminder of long standing cultural abuse, another group defines as a precious, or at least insightful, cultural artifact. One group's Foster Harmony confronts another's Oppose Harm.

You see, I am confused. I don’t quite understand the rules of contemporary cultural sensitivity. And to stretch it a bit if we try to eliminate all the “negative” depictions of cultural differences from all cultures in all eras, don’t we eventually arrive at a “Stepford Wives” cookie cutter model of humanity and culture? Like the Roswell big-headed grey entities with big eyes who sit in as a model for all aliens? And who gets to decide what is “a cultural artifact” and what is “demeaning stereotype”? Why does a young Dolly Parton get away with choosing the town tramp as her role model - as she tells it in her autobiography - when a girl growing up now with that model in mind would be seen as the tramp? So is “cultural legitimacy” merely code for commercial success?

Apparently not. I did some reading regarding the purging of the Dr. Seuss books. Talk about commercial success! Wikipedia cites 600 million books in 20 different languages. Furthermore, his Butter Battle Book and The Lorax are both books with pro-social messages from which all kids would benefit. So do we just get to pick the low-hanging fruit? If I go back over the 20-odd year history of the Wall, I can find a bunch of bits I'd like to change or edit out. But ethically, I feel obligated to leave them in. They are who I was then - if that make sense.  They reflect my history.

And speaking of history, I'm thinking this whole debate would benefit from a consideration of history. Consider a cultural "truism." This one is attributed to a variety of sources - Santayana, Burke, Churchill - and goes something like this,  “Those who do not learn from their history are doomed to repeat it.” It seems to me equally true that those who are kept in ignorance of their past are likely to repeat it. If we keep scrubbing away all evidence of the cultural wars and social differences in our history, it will be as if they never happened, and hence there will be nothing left from which to learn. What Civil War? Who was this King guy? Timothy McWho? Neil Armstrong? Wasn't he a quarterback for the Browns? Ada Lovelace? Wasn't she some porn star?

Let us consider a couple of "texts:" The images that led to rescinding the "sullied six" Seuss books and the beloved hymn Amazing Grace. The first were written and illustrated by Theodore Seuss Geisel in the early days of the 20th century (1937), who later went on to write and illustrate, throughout the century, various sensitive, prosocial books (e.g. The Butter Battle Book (1984), The Lorax (1971), Oh, The Places You'll Go, (1990). Amazing Grace was written in the late 1700s by John Newton, a notorious slaver who sold hundreds, if not thousands of Africans into slavery, and continued to do so for a while after the famous "conversion" that lead to his penning the single hymn.

Perhaps you can sense the source of my confusion. Three self-proclaimed guardians of social visual purity take it upon themselves to pass judgement on a decades long career that did far more to foster harmony among the young people of the world than the relatively unknown works of the artists who called for the cancelling. Yet, the racist author of Amazing Grace gets a pass, one assumes because of the work's religious affiliation and widespread popularity.  Wouldn't it seem more logical to ban all performances of the racist penned hymn Amazing Grace and leave Seuss alone? Realistically both restrictions, on the "sullied six" and a proposed ban on Amazing Grace are foolish manifestations of the divisions currently strangling our nation.

We need to reign in some of the excesses of the current culture police, for it is their supercilious over-reaching that gives comfort to radicals like Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who attacked the Capital, and who - with x-president Trump leading the way - are already using the banning of the "sullied six" to "prove" their claims that left-wing radicals want to chip away at "real American freedoms." 

.

Making Faces

Hello All -

Hope you are all well, wearing masks, washing hands, and getting your vaccine jabs, etc., so that we can all actually meet face-to-face when it is safe for us all.  It is times like these when I wish I could be standing in front of a classroom full of a couple hundred students. I understand that the young and uneducated are refusing to get vaccinated. So I could say "OK, you are mostly young, and your presence here indicates at least the intention to become educated. So for those of you who are thinking about refusing to be vaccinated let me quote one of my favorite grad school professors - 'Have you checked your brain at the door?' You are at a university, one known primarily for science and research. Believe the overwhelming research, roll up your sleeve and get jabbed. That is the shortest route to the bars on Hillsborough street without endangering your friends."

But for the most part y'all on the wall aren't so much as in a college classroom as you are trying to remember what it was like to be in college classroom (- : !  So let us get on to today's real topic: Making Faces!  You have seen some of the current versions, so I thought I would give you a "Behind the Scenes" look at the most recent version of the Faces, as I may be shifting gears soon.

Like the majority of my drawings that are not based on photographs, Faces start with a blank sheet of paper - in this case 14x17 98 lb. I usually start with the eyes since that is where my own eyes are drawn when I look at faces. As you may have noticed the eyes on my recent face seem somehow angry. That is not intentional, nor is it the only kind of face I draw.  Here is an example of a friendlier face:

However, this version did start out with some more of those more angry faces:

Which led to the “in progress” images

And the final image below:

What I am interested in right know is experimenting with a series of eyes that can express more positive emotions!