Odds ‘n’ ends.

Posted on October 22, 2006 by Pat Greene

No, I don’t want to discuss the NLCS. Go Tigers.

I now have 32 complete soundtracks: in addition to the original Broadway production of Follies, I now have South Pacific in Concert, with Reba McEntire, Alec Baldwin and *swoon* Brian Stokes Mitchell.

For all of its manifest shortcomings (mediocre selection, abysmal organization), the iTunes music store beats hard CDs hands down for one reason: no packaging. My fingernails are so much happier when they don’t have to try and scrape those stupid plastic labels off the cases just to open them.

When I was in fourth grade, my mother came home from parent-teacher comferences ready to kill me because I was doing very poorly in reading. This was in spite of the fact that I read at an eighth grade level and had read through the class reader the first week of school. I just never did the book reports or turned in any of my homework. Karma’s a bitch: I had a parent-teacher conference very much like that last week — on the other side.

The middle child has taken up wrestling, which is good. He is threatening to use his wrestling moves on his younger brother, which is not so good. His younger brother taunts him, seemingly believing that he (younger brother) won’t get in trouble whatever happens. This is very bad — also incorrect. I am trying to teach nonviolence, but on the other hand, if little brother got smacked occasionally, he might think twice before trying to instigate trouble.

The new dark peppermint chocolate ice cream at Coldstone Creamery is trés yummy.

At dinner tonight, my husband and I decided that the Germans have the best stews, the Dutch do the best breakfasts, the French the best desserts, but without a doubt the Spanish have the best bar food. We said this while finishing off our second small dish of “datiles diabolados” (deviled dates: dates stuffed with chorizo and wrapped in bacon and broiled). This followed the scallop fritters, and the garlic sausage toast, and the flamenquin (pork roll with cheese, breaded). (We skipped our usual patatas bravas and gambas alla plancha.) Oh, and the little bitty cheese scones. Now, if we could only find a tapas place that served brie broiled with raspberries, like that one pub off the Plaza Major in Madrid, and a place that did proper churros con chocolat, we’d be all set.

I have decided not to do NaNoWriMo proper, but I am working on other projects and decided that the NaNoWriM0 framework (set impossibly high goals with specific limits) would be useful. I did do NaNoWriMo three years ago, and managed to finish my very bad novel; proving if nothing else that I could type 53,000 words in a month. Besides, all the cool kids do NaNoWriMo, and I like hanging out with them.

Just 16 days until election day, Pat Tillman’s birthday.

In California, Kansas and South Dakota, Monday is the last day to register to vote. There are sixteen states which have not yet completely closed registration as of Sunday, October 22. (Some of them have closed mail registration.)

And… just seventeen days until “no more annoying misleading television ads” day.

Posted in Miscellany | 2 Comments

Honoring the fallen…

Posted on October 15, 2006 by Pat Greene

I have just stumbled across this tribute to soldiers and veterans buried in Arlington National Cemetery and elsewhere. I find it profoundly moving, and thought I would pass it along.

Posted in nothing special | Leave a comment

The view from the stands….

Posted on October 15, 2006 by Pat Greene

Some observations from tonight’s band competition:

I’m sorry, but no matter how well they do it, seeing girls in harem outfits toss rifles just looks weird. “Look, a harem girl! And she’s armed!”

Those drum major salutes are getting perilously close to resembling Arnold Rimmer’s.

I see the vogue for dressing drum majors up in costume seems to have waned this year: only Indiana Jones showed up at the awards ceremony.

I was on the wrong side of the field, but I couldn’t see how the pit* members were being dressed. Last year, at one competition, the pit walked onto the field wearing bi-color work shirts. The woman next to me looked at each other in confusion — what were they, fast food workers? They looked like they belonged behind the counter at Arby’s. Then the rest of the band came on, including the guard with checkered flags, and the announcer cheerfully declared they were doing a NASCAR-themed show, and it hit us: they were the “pit” crew. *groan* And then there was the pit that was dressed up like clowns. These guys don’t get no respect, I tell ya.

They need to institute as rule saying that any given guard member can touch no more than four pieces of equipment during the show. It just gets excessive, guys. One band I saw had, I think, four sets of flags alone, not including rifles and sabers and other things.

There was a band which seemed to have a fire theme show followed by a band which had a tsunami theme show. Guess which show did better.

When the grand sweepstakes award trophy is over half as tall as the guard captain of the band that wins it, maybe it’s time to reconsider the size of these things.

Ah, well. It was fun. Two weeks until the next one of these things.

*The pit is composed of all the pieces of percussion down front that don’t march: chimes, gongs, xylophones, etc. Pit members [don’t] march to the beat of their… oh, never mind.

Posted in Kids in all their glory | Tagged | 1 Comment

Posted on October 14, 2006 by Pat Greene

Today, at the elementary school, they had the “fall festival.” Part neighborhood meetup and part PTA fundraiser, they had all the sorts of things you find at events like this: ring tosses, raffles, a silent auction (whoever had put together the auction had done a very good job; the items actually seemed worth their estimated value). And soda, and popcorn. No sno-cones, since it is mid-October, and even in California it’s too nippy for sno-cones. And cotton candy.

Fresh pink cotton candy.

None of that stuff that you see at some school events, which is sold in prebagged clumps, oh no: a real spinning machine, churning out pink puffiness that looked like it belonged in a Barbie Dollhouse somewhere. That pre-bagged stuff is stale; for although cotton candy never really goes bad — how could it? it’s nothing but sugar — it does go flat. Bleah. Then it is good for nothing but as part of gingerbread house displays come Christmas.

Pink, by the way, is a flavor. There are three flavors of cotton candy, generally speaking: pink, blue, and purple.* And as those colors don’t map to any flavor known to man other than “sweet, with some vague unidentifiable overtone that makes it different from the other colors,” it just makes sense to refer the flavor as “pink.”

The girl who made my stick was an amateur, meaning the strands were woven so loosely that the clump was incredibly light and airy — a sugar cloud. (More experienced hands make a slightly denser product, simply so you actually get something for your fifty cents.) That was okay, it was delightful.

Adults eat their cotton candy with their hands, tearing off dainty bits and placing them on their tongues so they don’t get large smeary sticky streaks across their face. Instead, you get hands that would do Fred Biletnikoff proud. I decided just to eat mine like a child. It melted away, leaving me with a sticky face and a big smile, just like when I was ten.

Best fifty cents I’ve spent in a very long time.

*I have seen, on occasion, bizarre flavors such as “pina colada,” but they are an abomination.

Posted in Food, Who I am | Tagged | 2 Comments

Cataloging the collection

Posted on October 12, 2006 by Pat Greene

According to my iTunes, I have 825 songs (3.08 GB, 0r 1.8 days worth) in my “Explicit Broadway” playlist.* (My “Clean Broadway” playlist is the same set, minus part of Rent and a lot of Hair and the odd song from other shows. As my kids have gotten older this is less and less an issue, so that I never play it anymore.)

I have …

30 complete soundtracks. That will be 31 as soon as my CD of the Original Cast Recording of Follies shows up from Amazon.com. (It will also be my second version of Follies: I also have Follies in Concert. I wasn’t quite happy with the FiC version of my two favorite songs, “Would I Leave You?” and “I’m Still Here,” so I ordered the original.)

Songs from 104 other shows. This is mainly thanks to the five disc soundtrack to the documentary miniseries, Broadway: The American Musical. A friend gave it to me last year, and it was the best Christmas present I had gotten since The Big Book of Baseball when I was twelve.

A lot of Sondheim: 6 1/2 complete soundtracks (West Side Story counts a half since he wrote the lyrics); and one or two songs from 7 1/2 other shows (Gypsy counts a half since he wrote the lyrics).

There are no other composers that have anywhere near the same level of representation; the closest would be Kander and Ebb (2 complete soundtracks — would be three but I have been procrastinating on buying Cabaret) and Lerner and Lowe (2 complete soundtracks). I have two Stephen Schwarz soundtracks, but quite frankly Wicked was a mistake.

Andrew Lloyd Weber? 4 songs. And 3 those came on the compilation album.** In fact, of the Cameron MacIntosh produced megaproductions, the only one that I have a complete soundtrack for is Les Miserables.

Chronologically, the songs run from “When the Moon Shines on Moonshine” from Zeigfield Follies of 1919 (1919) to “Show Off” from The Drowsy Chaperone (2006). Eighty seven years of music, although I mainly listen to the last forty of those.

The interesting thing is, I know how inadequate all of this is. I have next to no Rodgers & Hammerstein, or Rodgers & Hart, and only Anything Goes by Cole Porter. And that in revival. I’m not really keen on Jerry Herman, so I think I’m fine with Mame and a couple of the tracks from La Cage Aux Folles.

I guess the tip-off for me that things were getting a little out of hand came when my youngest son (a.k.a., the red-headed Don Quixote) and I had the following conversation a month or so ago:

Me: “Will you guys pipe down? I’m trying to watch the Emmys! They only come on once a year!”
Boy, bitterly: “Well, the Tonys only come on once a year, and you didn’t watch them.”
Me: “And you’re annoyed about this?”
Boy: “I sure am!”

I’ve created a monster.

*Okay, so I’m not a purist. I include a few movie soundtracks in here as well, for movies that had stage incarnations: Chicago, Hair (I have the full Broadway and half the movie soundtrack), and yes, The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

** The compilation album also had “Memory” from Cats, which I deleted from my computer. Just don’t get me started on Cats.

Posted in Culture (popular and otherwise), Music | Tagged | Leave a comment

The water and the stone.

Posted on October 12, 2006 by Pat Greene

Can we be like
drops of water falling on the stone
Splashing, breaking
Disbursing in air
Weaker than the stone by far but be aware
that as time goes by the rock will wear away
“The Rock Will Wear Away,” lyric by Holly Near, music by Meg Christian
Over at Adventus, I have been in a discussion about whether or not changes in the Congress this fall will make any difference at all. He proclaims, pessimistically, that nothing will be any different, that we’re all kidding ourselves. I think he’s wrong, I hope he’s wrong, but maybe he isn’t.

So why bother? Why bother voting? More importantly from my standpoint, why bother trying to get other people to vote?

I have always been involved in voting efforts in various small ways. I registered voters during two different presidential campaigns. In 2004, on my own dime I flew to Florida to be a poll monitor with Election Protection. In 2004, and again this year, I have posted information in various journals about registration and voting rights.

I want people to vote. It matters. It is the first step to an involved citizenry. The next step — and I try to work on that one too — is to talk, and listen, about the important issues that need to be addressed. Other people do that better than I do. Me, I do voting. It’s not sexy, but there it is.

But why bother, if it is not going to change things?

The first answer is obvious: it’s not just about Congress.

It’s about city councils and mayors, and affordable housing initiatives, and school boards and parcel tax referendums, and county commissioners and parks and rec bonds. It’s about what sort of prosecutors and judges carry out justice in our community.

In California this year, it’s about whether a girl can get an abortion without her parents being being notified beforehand.

All these things affect our lives more on a day to day basis than what happens on Capitol Hill. For example, when faced with the need to close a school, the school board where I lived picked for closure the 85% Hispanic school, which served not only as a school but a community resource and where most of the students walked to school. This was in spite of the fact that the committee which had investigated school closures had picked another school as being the best candidate for closure, a school where the parents were quite vocal and organized. After tremendous community outcry the school board changed their decision, but guess what incumbents I am voting against next month?

So it’s about those things.

But it is also about responsibility.

I cannot open the cell doors at Guantanamo. I cannot make torture illegal again. I cannot restore habeas corpus to detainees, or bring troops home from Iraq, or any one of the myriad things our country is doing in the world that make me weep for the blood on my hands.

All I can do is try to influence the people who have the power to do that. I can write letters, send emails, make the occasional phone call (as I did over the Military Commissions Bill). I can try to get others to act, including giving people information that will make it easier for them to vote. I can write. That’s my gift.

If I do not, I wash my hands in the face of evil. I become like Pilate.

I do not know how to atone for my country’s sins, but I can refrain from adding to my own already large pile of transgressions through inaction here. I have to work towards change, even if that change is slow in coming, even if that water falls onto basalt, not chalk. Even if in the end, the rock does not give way, no matter how much water rushes over it.

The other alternatives are despair beyond hope, or denial, or insularity — we’ve got ours, the rest of the world can go hang (and will).

I’d rather be a drop of water.

Posted in Justice, Politics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

By this vote we honor…

Posted on October 12, 2006 by Pat Greene

Most states have instituted a “Vote in Honor of a Veteran” program. People decide to vote in memory and to honor the service of specific members of the armed forces who have served overseas. This is a great idea: men and women in uniform deserve our respect and honor for all they have done in service to our country. (Although fully funding veterans services would be a much more meaningful way to honor them, but I digress….) And recognizing individuals who are otherwise anonymous is a good way to take note of the fact that the battles are fought and won by many people, most of whom go unrecognized by anyone.*

But there are a lot of people who were a lot more directly involved in the fight for the right to participate in democracy.

So…

Vote in honor of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.

Or in honor of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

In honor of Alice Paul and the women of the Occoquan Workhouse.

In honor of Fannie Lou Hamer.

In honor of Medgar Evers.

In honor of the James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Shwerner.

In honor of every legislator at the federal and state level who voted for the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth or Twenty-Sixth Amendments, or the Voting Rights Act.

But most of all, in honor of those men who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to bring forth this bizarre experiment in representative democracy which has managed, somehow, to survive for over two centuries.

*I am totally serious when I say I think our veterans need to be honored more than they are; it’s just that I think a far better way to do that is to a) actually pay them decently when they’re serving and b) provide decent benefits for after they leave, and for their families if they should be killed or disabled and c) fully funding Veterans’ services and d) not sending them off to quagmires with no rhyme or reason. I also have issues with the idea that we subcontract out the protection of freedom to the military, when many of the gravest dangers to freedom have historically lain right within our own borders. But that’s a post for another day.

Posted in History, Politics | Tagged | Leave a comment

Persecution complexes

Posted on October 12, 2006 by Pat Greene

I thought of blogging about the horrific situation of Christians in Iraq, but then Mad Priest already did that.

You hear some American fundamentalists whine about how Christians are “persecuted” in America. Do they even fathom what that word means? Do they have any idea what Christians face in Iraq, or Algeria, or Vietnam? Or in any number of places where professing your religion can get you arrested or killed?

“Persecution” does not mean “People get angry with me when I proclaim the U.S. a Christian nation.” Persecution does not mean “I have to refrain from using public funds and public spaces to prostelytize for my own flavor of Christianity.” “Persecution” does not mean “It’s awful that I am forced to deal with people who say ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas.'” Heck, it doesn’t even mean “People tell me I’m silly for believing in a miracle that happened 2000 years ago” or “People get mad because they think Christianity is responsible for most of the institutionalized evil in the world since Costantine,” even though that hurts a lot. (I know, I’ve faced those myself.)

Persecution means having your priest abducted and killed because the Pope made some less than judicious remarks for which he has since apologized (which were taken out of context, but which were not that smart to begin with). Persecution means having your daughter raped on her way to school because she is a Christian. Persecution means having to hide your Bibles — or not have them at all — because they are dangerous contraband. Persecution means being beaten or murdered for holding church services.

Persecution means something as simple as wearing a cross becomes a political statement.

I would never wish real persecution upon American Christians who feel “persecuted.” I just wish some of them would look around at the larger world a bit.

Update: Yet another case of real persecution, this time from India, as passed along by the Mad Priest. Gee, nothing like having a bunch of people beat you up for your religious beliefs and then you being charged because of it.

Posted in God faith and theology, The World | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Absence makes the heart grow fonder… and the ballot is just as important

Posted on October 5, 2006 by Pat Greene

Just in case you can’t make it to the polls — or, in many states, don’t want to actually go to the polls — on November 7th, absentee ballots and early voting are just the ticket.

Some states allow any registered voter to vote absentee, some require a reason. Some states also have some form of “early voting,” where voters can go to specified locations (usually county election offices) and cast their ballots. The National Conference of State Legislatures lists the states with “no-excuses” absentee voting, and early voting.

There really is NO EXCUSE for not voting.

Absentee voting and early voting has already opened in many states. Listed below are links to where you can find information about absentee voting for each state. Information about early voting can also be obtained from county election offices.

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona [contact county election officials, information at link]
Arkansas
California
Colorado [pdf]
Connecticut
D.C.
Delaware
Florida
Georgia (Georgia is unique in that it has “no-excuse” absentee voting by mail, but you have to have a reason to vote absentee in person — the exact reverse of many states)
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana[pdf]
Iowa [by mail]
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan Note: If you registered by mail, you will need to vote in person before you are eligible to vote absentee
Minnesota
Mississippi [you have to contact county officials for information on absentee voting]
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina [pdf]
North Dakota, early voting
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon Note: elections are conducted completely by mail; if you’re registered, you’ll be sent a ballot. If you don’t receive a ballot at least two weeks before the election (October 24), contact your County Elections Office
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington Note: 34 of 39 counties in Washington have elections by mail, you should receive a ballot in the mail. If election day approaches and you have not received one, contact your County Auditor
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming [pdf, Voter’s Guide, includes lists of county clerks]

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Baseball, hurrah!

Posted on October 3, 2006 by Pat Greene

The real baseball season is over. Now the playoffs begin.

My beloved Mets* are in there, starting out against the Dodgers. They smoked the regular season, but as the other adult in my house can tell you, regular season performance means squat at this point. *cough*Atlanta*cough*

The hated Yankees are in the playoffs too, again, against the Tigers. Is there anyone in the country outside of NYC not pulling for Detroit? They were next to last in their division last year! And the year before that, and the year before that they came within one loss of breaking the 1962 Mets record for most losses in a single season, setting the American League record for single season losses in the process. They give hope to those of us who root for perennial bottom dwellers — like my boys in St. Petersburg.**

The As, who I’m pulling for because they’re the team local to me that I actually like (Giants — boo! hiss!), are playing the Twins. The As are good guys, it would be nice to see them advance out of the first round.

And the Cardinals (eh) are playing the Padres (eh). Albert Pujols is fun to watch, though.

And one of the best parts? The Braves are not in the playoffs, for the first time in forever, which means I will not have to deal with the other adult in the house being in a bad mood after they are (inevitably) eliminated.

Play ball!

* In case you’re wondering how a Florida girl became a Mets fan when she had never been to New York and had no relatives from New York, they used to train in St. Pete, before moving across state to Port St. Lucie. On the other hand, for a long time I was a fan of the Los Angeles (now St. Louis) Rams football team because I liked their helmet design. So you never can tell.

**They would be the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who play in Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg. I started to write “my boys in Tampa Bay,” but that would have made them awfully soggy.

Posted in Sports | Tagged | 2 Comments

A Random Act of Kindness…

Posted on October 1, 2006 by Pat Greene

Yesterday was Jeffrey’s birthday.

Yes, that Jeffrey. Toys’ R’ Us’s giant giraffe mascot. To celebrate Jeffrey’s birthday, the TRU near us had several events, handed out noisemakers, and had a special Pokémon giveway.

Mew.

No, not meow. Mew. It’s a Pokémon. And if you have a Game Boy Pokémon game, you cannot get Mew. It’s not in the games, unless you download it from elsewhere. Rumor has it that you can download them in Japan. Yesterday, you could bring your Game Boy Advance and your Pokémon game to the store and they would download Mew onto your machine free of charge.

I agreed to take my youngest to get Mew. (His brother wanted Mew, as well, but had lost his Pokémon Emerald Game, so he was out of luck.) I had been fighting a migraine, and had taken some heavy duty meds, so we left as soon as they had worn off enough so that I could drive.

The event ran from noon to three. We arrived at 1:45 and the line was out the door. Not a problem — even at that the line was not that long, and we didn’t have to leave until 4:15.

Except the line did not move. It turned out it took five minutes to download the Mew — you had to actually play the game and trade something for the Mew — and there were people who had brought multiple games to put the Mew onto. So we stood and stood and stood. Me and the youngest — the middle child had gone off to sit in the car — for two and a half hours. And we were still forty minutes from the head of the line when 4:15 arrived.

We had to leave. The marching band was playing a “Community Thank You” performance (“Gee! Thanks for putting up with us practicing at seven o’clock in the freaking morning!”) and I had to be there. I was torn.

My youngest son rarely asks for anything. I usually have to take his brothers hither and yon, and he gets dragged along all the time, usually without much complaint. Just this once, he should have been able to get what he wanted.

The lady behind us in line with her daughter kept trying to help us find a solution. Finally, she said “Give me the Game Boy. We’ll get the Mew, and I’ll give you my phone number so we can arrange a time for you to pick it up.”

My son was ecstatic. I was relieved. We turned over the Game Boy, raced over to the high school, watched the show — or at least most of it — and decided to dash back to TRU while the eldest was changing and putting up his equipment. We got back to the store just as our angels had reached the head of the line. Delighted, my Pokémon trainer got his Mew. He traded a level 8 Pichu for it. (You do realize, of course, that I have no idea what that signifies.)

We said thank you — my son over and over — and managed to get to within five minutes of the high school before we got the call from the drummer that we needed to pick him up. And all day today, all I’ve heard is how wonderful Mew is and how grateful my son is to me for having taken him the store and waited for two hours so he could get it. (And how this gives him bragging rights among all his Pokémon playing buddies, but that he’s going to be nice about it and let them play with Mew too*, some.)

So, somewhere out there, is a very nice lady with a very cute daughter who should know that they have made one boy very very happy.

*Not Mewto; that’s a different Pokemon that you can only get by going to “Pokémon Rocks America.” PRA 2005 occured in five (!) cities across the country, and had things you could only get by attending PRA. I met a man there who had driven his kids six hours to get to the one we were attending. I decided not to tell him that the only reason we were there was a) it was 20 minutes from my house and b) it was free. Unfortunately, my son lost the game he had loaded the Mewto on, or he would now have a set of insanely hard to get Pokémon. Unlike TRU, the lines moved a lot faster, and there were a lot of things going on other than just waiting in line to get the Mewto. I will be so glad when they outgrow this or, as was the case with the three teenagers in line in front of us on Saturday, learn to drive.

Posted in Kids in all their glory, My life and times | Tagged | Leave a comment

Posted on September 29, 2006 by Pat Greene

This morning, in several different places, I have been faced with people who have scorned the grief I and others have felt over yesterday’s Military Commissions vote. America has never lived up to “ideals,” they say — usually followed a litany of all the horrors committed over the past 230 years of the nation’s history. America is not something special.

Attempts to explain that belief in those ideals doesn’t mean ignoring a) that in this country they have often not been observed, and b) other countries often do a much better job of following “American” ideals than we do, fall on deaf ears. Attempts to explain that there is a difference (in my eyes, at least) between disregarding the Constitution and dismantling it by law, are disregarded.

And the fact that someone like Martin Luther King saw enough in the ideals of this country to say

One day the South will know that when these disnherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the besy in the American dream and the most sacred values inour Judeo-Christian heritage, and thusly, carrying the nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

“Letter From Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963, reprinted in Letters of the Century, Lisa Grunewald and Stephen J. Adler, eds.

….probably means nothing.

So maybe an emotional analogy will work.

If you lose something precious to you — a cat, say — you mourn. It does not matter how many other pets you have lost. It does not matter even if you recognize that the cat was ill, and quite possibly going to die anyway. You mourn.

An ideal can be something precious.

The anology is not complete — people have a personal attachment to their pets which most of them do not have to the Constitution — but you get the idea. It is not complete for another reason: many of us are experiencing anxiety about the future, as well as mourning.

So call me naive. Feel smug and superior, and holier-than-thou. Tell me how I’m just experiencing the shock of losing my privilege in society and welcome to the real world.

It doesn’t matter.

I mourn.

Posted in History, Justice, Politics | Leave a comment

Posted on September 29, 2006 by Pat Greene

My husband left this morning for Spain. First stop, Madrid. I wish I were going with him.

Things are good, for the most part, in my world. I have a roof over my head. I have food to eat, clothes to wear.

In all likelihood, I am never going to be directly affected by the detainee bill. It’s a pretty safe bet — I’m a stay at home mom, why would anyone go after me? — that I’ll never be getting a knock on the door. I will probably never be tossed into dark cell with no hope of challenging my imprisonment. Which makes it all the more important to fight it: justice is the responsibility of all of us.

I do have resources, emotional and otherwise. I need to draw on them, and see how I can help others.

I need to see Guernica. Yes, it’s a vision of just how evil mankind can be, but I need to see it for another reason. I need to remember that, for all the horrible atrocities humans can inflict upon each other, all is not lost; no regime lasts forever; the fascists, who were responsible for calling in the Nazis to bomb the town, eventually lost power. It is far too easy for me, given my rather melodramatic nature, to get stuck in the present and not step back and look at the big picture.

There is always hope.

Posted in My life and times | Leave a comment

No retreat, baby…

Posted on September 29, 2006 by Pat Greene

I post other people’s words, sometimes, but I don’t post song lyrics. Today, though, these words resonate with me:

Well, we bursted out of class
Had to get away from those fools
We learned more from a 3-minute record, baby
Than we ever learned in school
Tonight I hear the neighborhood drummer sound
I can feel my heart begin to pound
You say you’re tired and you just want to close your eyes
And follow your dreams down

Chorus:
Well, we made a promise we swore we’d always remember
No retreat, baby, no surrender
Like soldiers in the winter’s night
With a vow to defend
No retreat, baby, no surrender

Well, now young faces grow sad and old
And hearts of fire grow cold
We swore blood brothers against the wind
Now I’m ready to grow young again
And hear your sister’s voice calling us home
Across the open yards
Well maybe we’ll cut someplace of own
With these drums and these guitars

Cause we made a promise we swore we’d always remember
No retreat, baby, no surrender
Blood brothers in the stormy night
With a vow to defend
No retreat, baby, no surrender

Now on the street tonight the lights grow dim
The walls of my room are closing in
There’s a war outside still raging
You say it ain’t ours anymore to win
I want to sleep beneath
Peaceful skies in my lover’s bed
With a wide open country in my eyes
And these romantic dreams in my head

Once we made a promise we swore we’d always remember
No retreat, baby, no surrender
Blood brothers in a stormy night
With a vow to defend
No retreat, baby, no surrender

“No Surrender,” Bruce Springsteen.

Keep the faith, people. I know fighting is hard, but going down without a fight is worse.

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Authenticity

Posted on September 27, 2006 by Pat Greene

You have seen pictures of this painting, or maybe the real thing, the formal name of which is The Company of Captain Frans Cocq. It was a group portrait by Rembrandt of one of the militia companies responsible for Amsterdam’s defense.

Except you don’t know it by that name, do you? You know it as The Night Watch.

It’s called The Night Watch because it had at some point been covered with a very dark varnish, so everyone assumed that Rembrandt had painted an evening scene. In the 1940s, a restoration removed the varnish and surprise! the painting was not set at night at all, but in the afternoon. Everybody still calls it The Night Watch, though, even though it clearly hasn’t been that for sixty years at this point.

There are other cases where what the artist painted and what the public knows are at odds. A few years ago, the Sistine Chapel was restored. The restoration was controversial: once several centuries worth of accumulated smoke, dirt and varnish were removed, the colors were far brighter — a few critics called them “ice cream colors” — than people realized.

So what is the real painting? Clearly the painting as artist intended, as the artist painted. But does changing how we see the painting change our evaluation of the worth of the painting? Not the professionals, they have their proper evaluation, but the public?

I have often wondered about this in the context of forgery and misattribution. If forgeries can fool people (and very good forgeries can fool even some experts), why are they lesser art? Once people find out a painting is not done by the painter they think it is, the painting automatically becomes worth less.

Why? The painting has not changed. The sweep of the sheperd’s tunic, which is so excitingly detailed, is exactly the same. The unusual treatment of the landscape is no different. Not one atom of the painting is any more or less than it was before.

The explanation I have heard in regards to forgeries makes a bit of sense, which is that forgeries are of a time and place, and tend to resonate with viewers of that time and place, and therefore do not age as well as real masterpieces do. Elmyr de Hory’s Modiglianis supposedly will not be as attractive in one hundred years as the real Modiglianis (although de Hory was renowned enough that there is a market for his forgeries).

But that does not hold for misattributions, especially of Old Masters. What this means is that we are not assigning value based on the intrinsic worth of the painting but on the value of the artist.

Or maybe there are two different things going on here. In the case of The Night Watch and the Sistine Chapel, we rebel against changes in the familiar, in what we know as greatness. (Imagine if a cleaning of the Mona Lisa made it brighter — there would be an outcry that would make the Sistine Chapel a mere bagatelle.)

In the case of forgeries and misattributions, maybe it is because we do not trust ourselves. We need to be told what is great. The old cliche “I don’t know art but I know what I like” is generally perceived at best to be defensive and at worst to be boorish and unsophisticated. Maybe we need to get past the idea that art is what we are told it is.

The problem, of course, is the hesitancy of people to try new things, but that’s not bad, necessarily. It just means the new things have to resonate with people. Isn’t that what art is about?

I mean, maybe it’s me, but I just don’t get color field art. The work of Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler goes right over my head. On the other hand, I find Jackson Pollack engaging, even if he is not my favorite artist. I know a lot of people who don’t. Similarly, I love Jasper Johns. I don’t love Andy Warhol, even though again I know a lot of people who feel differently.

So maybe I like a painting that was originally attributed to Titian but later attributed to his “school.” That’s okay. The change in attribution would not change the value of the painting to me.

Would it for you?

I realize this entire discussion marks me as the rankest of amateurs, but I’m okay with that. I just wish someone would explain to me how a painting can be so changed, not in monetary value, but in perception, when the painting does not change at all.

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