Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Saturday, June 28, 2003 MAX BECKMANN, Odysseus and Calypso, 1943
"but now he lies away on an island suffering strong pains in the palace of the nymph Kalypso, and she detains him by constraint, and he cannot make his way back to his country, for he has not any ships by him, nor any companions who can convey him back across the seas's wide ridges." The Odyssey, Book V: 13-17 (Lattimore, transl.)
More on Beckmann:
A page of thumbnails of Beckmann's paintings, with larger versions upon clicking. Includes several self-portraits and lesser-known works. Particualr favorites of mine: "Still Life with Saxophone", "Girl with Mandolin", "Still Life with Sea Gulls", "Quappi with Fur", and "Odysseus and Calypso".
A good biography by Matthew Drutt, from the introduction to the catalog, "Max Beckmann in Exile". Also includes a Beckman bibliography.
And a quote from the artist himself: "The greatest mystery of all is reality."
I’ve always admired German Expressionism, especially the graphic works and woodcuts in particular. A new show of the paintings and graphics of Max Beckmann (1884-1950) has opened at the Museum of Modern Art in Long Island City, Queens, and I imagine it is quite an experience.
In the catalog the artist Leon Golub calls him a "suave brute," adding: "You never know with types like Beckmann whether they are playing it straight or manipulating you. I suspect that he didn't intend these images of the bourgeois world to be seen just as grotesques. He must have been laughing, stepping back and observing the context that he was painting with a sardonic eye, and observing himself in that context with the same eye." "Max Beckmann: Chuckling Darkly at Disaster", NYT
In browsing through 10 pages of Beckmann’s graphic works in the exhaustive LACA collection of German Expressionism, I found the more familiar portraits (he did a brooding etching of Dostoyevsky, for example), self-portraits, and scenes of the bourgeois life, but was surprised to also discover a number of scenes from the life of Christ, and an entire series of illustrations for the Book of Revelations. This was an artist who had been affected enormously by the events of his time, and there was a great deal more to him than “suave brutality”.
(The LACA site is excellent and vast but frame-based; use the above link, then “Browse by Department” to “German Expressionism”, then search by artist to find Beckmann.)
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Comments, maybe! I'm doing a test run with HaloScan comments, so if you feel moved to leave a comment over the next few days, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!
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I always find interesting things at Payvand. Billed as "News, Directory, and Bazaar", this site contains the latest news about Iran gleaned from the world press, as well as books, essays, film reviews from and about Iran...you name it. The book listings alone could keep me busy reading for the rest of my life.
I've been thinking about Michel Seuphor's advice to "make something every day" and remembering a mentor I had when I was starting out as an artist. "Draw every day!" he told me. "Keep a sketchbook with you, and draw something, anything, but do it every day. It doesn't matter what you choose - it can be the doorknob. But keep drawing, make it a habit." This man was a gifted wildlife illustrator who could capture the fleeting pose of any bird or animal. When I asked him how he learned to do this, he told me he used to take his sketchbook and go to a skating rink. He skated in the opposite direction from the circling skaters, and sketched their poses and faces in the brief moments as they passed each other - that was how he trained his eye and mental memory.
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
FAITES QUELQUE CHOSE CHAQUE JOUR
The Creation from the Book of Enoch. Limited edition artist's book by Natalie d'Arbeloff
I've recently discovered Blaugustine, the wondrous blog world of Natalie d'Arbeloff. She is a London artist and teacher, of Russian and French descent, who is, for one thing, the creator of extraordinary artist's books. (Facing pages from one are shown above.) She also creates beautifully-drawn and quite funny comics featuring her alter-ego, Augustine, and her adventurous encounters with politics, art, and self.
In addition to being tremendously inventive and gifted, Natalie is also a teacher of art who believes in every person's creative potential. Read Natalie's Bike Ride to Clarity for an unconventional explanation of her philosophy. I'll leave you with a quote on nurturing the creative process from her friend and mentor, Michel Seuphor:
Make something, produce something, anything, but something each day. Put aside. Don’t judge. Make even if you repeat the same thing day after day. To build one’s nest twig by twig.
("Faites quelque chose, produisez quelque chose, n'importe quoi, mais chaque jour quelque chose. Mettez de coté, ne jugez pas, mais faites. Même en répètant la même chose plusieurs jours de suite. Faire son nid, petit brin par petit brin.")
Briefly noted:
Affirmative Action Maureen Dowd's scathing editorial in The New York Times, on Clarence Thomas and yesterday's topic --affirmative action -- is well worth a read.
Will the West ever learn? Why were British troops attacked and killed by villagers in Iraq? Although it has taken a while for the media to report it, the story seems to be that the troops used dogs to search people's homes for weapons, and that they also entered the women's private quarters.
Perhaps we can begin to see that traditional Muslims have a different attitude than we do about "public" and "private" spaces, especially those occupied by women who may not be prepared for a visit by unrelated men. But it's hard for me to understand how clueless the British troops were in their use of dogs. The horror and disgust that a Muslim feels when they are touched by a dog, or when their yard - let alone their home - is entered by a dog, may be foreign to most of us, but it is very real to Muslims. Dogs are haram - forbidden and unclean - according to the Qu'ran. If a practicing Muslim is licked by a dog, or their clothing touched, they will almost certainly have to bathe and change all their clothing. I can't even imagine what it would feel like for them to have their home violated by foreigners with sniffing dogs. This is a basic cultural fact; what a way to learn it, and what a way to reinforce the Iraqis' growing belief that this is an occupying army of foreigners disrespectful to Islam.
Today's affirmative action ruling and a thoughtful post on the subject from mysterium got me thinking about racial inequities in our educational system, and how conditioned we are to glossing over them or looking to solutions like affirmative action, when actually the problem is far more complex.
I had a conversation recently about "diversity" with a black graduate of an Ivy League masters degree program. He said he'd like to "dissect the term diversity" for me, and proceeded to explain that of the four black graduates of the program that year, three were essentially high-income immigrants who had received their undergraduate educations at top-flight American institutions - Penn, Harvard, and Berkeley - and had nothing in common with the inner city Black American experience. Only he had come from the ghetto to a small, historically black college (which I admitted I had never heard of); excelled; and won admittance to the prestigious program. And yet this university, like many others, prides itself on its "diverse" student body, and its success in "minority recruitment".
"You have to look under the surface," my young friend cautioned. "Many students are black, it's true. But where did they really come from? Are these the descendents of slavery? Are these students, like me, who couldn't afford to go anywhere but the "historically black college"? And are these the people who, like me, are going to go back to their communties and teach, or be doctors, serve as models for other youths who see drug-dealing or ball or rap as better ways out of their situation? You have to ask, what is the real goal of the educational system?
So these are critical questions to ask, while from the outside we see something that looks like equality of opportunity. Universities also know that children of middle-class black families - families who have left the ghetto a generation or two ago - are a better bet for success than children of poverty and disadvantage. The worst injustices in education may not be being perpetrated at the university level, but in elementary and secondary schools across our country, where the racial and poverty divide is so enormous as to cut off opportunity before a child has learned to read. If you want to know what's really happening in public school education in our nation's cities, read Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequities (1992):
In Central Harlem, notes the New York Times, the infant death rate is the same as in Malaysia. Among black children in East Harlem, it is even higher: 42 per thousand, which would be considered high in many Third World nations. "A child's chance of surviving to age five," notes New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, "are better in Bangladesh than in East Harlem." In the South Bronx, says the author of a recent study by the nonprofit United Hospital Fund of New York City, 531 infants out of 1,000 require neonatal hospitalization-a remarkable statistic that portends high rates of retardation and brain damage. In Riverdale, by contrast, only 69 infants in 1,000 call for such attention.
What is promised these poor children and their parents, says Professor Eli Ginzberg of Columbia University, is "an essential level" of care as "distinct from optimal." Equity, he states, is "out of the question." In a similar way, the New York Times observes, a lower quality of education for poor children in New York, as elsewhere in America, is "accepted as a fact." Inequality, whether in hospitals or schools, is simply not contested. Any suggestion that poor people in New York will get the same good health care as the rich or middle class, says Dr. Ginzberg, is "inherently nonsensical."
"Out-and-out racism, which in our city and our society, is institutionalized," said David Dinkins in 1987, a year before he was elected mayor, "has allowed this to go on for years."
Excerpt from Savage Inequities (1992) by Jonathan Kozol (other excerpts available on the web discuss racially-inequitable education in Camden, NJ; East St. Louis; Washington, D.C.; and Chicago.)
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Monday, June 23, 2003
A friend writes; We went to dinner on Saturday at a beautiful home in Lidingoe, an island on the Baltic archipelego. That was on midsummer night, in Stockholm a major holiday where the sun just dips below the horizon all night and it never gets dark, and the sun rises again around 3:45 a.m. It is on the same latitude as St. Petersburg, and so these are in fact ''white nights'' right now. My friends there are all castaway eastern Europeans (plus a handful of Swedes) who had ended up in Stockholm as the iron curtain was raised or their countries just got too chaotic to stay there, they are Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, Poles, Russians.
A MEADOW
It was a riverside meadow, lush, from before the hay harvest, On an immaculate day in the sun of June. I searched for it, found it, recognized it. Grasses and flowers grew there familiar in my childhood. With half-closed eyelids I absorbed luminescence. And the scent garnered me, all knowing ceased. Suddenly I felt I was disappearing and weeping with joy.
Georg Gudni (Iceland), GG #42, oil on canvas, 244 x 208 cm
..."Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb? When I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, 'Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped'? "
"Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this." The Book of Job 38:1
This morning I had the privilege of singing Mozart's Missa Brevis in Bb, for organ, choir, and a small group of strings, at church. What a glorious way to inaugurate summer and end our rather grueling but enjoyable choir season until fall.
The Old Testament lesson was from the great Biblical argument between God and Job, with God speaking to Job "out of the whirlwind". The sermon was about discipleship being "the ship in the storm" - that idea that true Christianity involves leaving one's safe harbor of complacent predictability, and entering the storm of the world's suffering, injustice, and chaos. The rector illustrated his point with the recent "storm" generated by the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire's selection of Gene Robinson, an openly gay man in a committed relationship, as Bishop-elect.
I happen to know Gene a little, and have worked with him on a few occasions. He is a remarkable person who will be a fine Bishop - and he will certainly not be the first gay Bishop in the Anglican church - only the first one to admit it. As the Rector remarked, what is different about Gene is that he is a person who is called "to honesty". Thus he has become a symbol, and New Hampshire has become a whirlwind within the Anglican Church worldwide over this issue.
Afterwards I was talking to an Icelandic friend (who had come to hear the music) about the huge flap this appointment has created in Britain. There are large numbers of gay clergy in England - some have said that if all the gays were asked to resign, England would lose 30% of its clergy - but British society has an unwritten rule of "don't ask, don't tell" that keeps people in the closet. I can hear them now, exclaiming, "Those Americans have done it again, with their damn openness!" Of course what we hear in official objections are conservative theological arguments; "Scripture forbids homosexuality", and so forth. But I think the real fear is not of making decisions that conservatives say are "an abomination to God", but of breaking the taboo on honesty: if this Bishop openly admits he is gay, then where will the truth-telling stop? And what is the cost -- to me?
My friend had an interesting cultural take on this. He said, "I think it's partly due to an 'island mentality'. "In Iceland we have it, for sure, and Ireland does, and I would guess that England does too. It's a collective decision by the inhabitants of an island to form a behavioral pact: this is how we are going to deal with such-and-such an issue, and everybody tacitly signs on to it. When someone breaks that pact, it's as if you're betraying all the inhabitants of the island, so people get very upset."
Needless to say, I had never thought of this, or how deeply imbedded such an unspoken cultural "rule" might be in a society and its institutions.
For a completely different inside take on cultural differences, read Joerg's comments at Conscientious on how he views his native German culture after several years of living in the U.S. Joerg insists he 's not a good writer, and Ok, maybe he doesn't have a polished style - English, after all, is not his first language. But he has something a lot of writers lack and can't make up for with "style" - content. Take a look.
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