Stupid people tricks, art division

Posted on May 28, 2006 by Pat Greene

In 1687, the Venetians besieged Athens, which was controlled by the Ottoman Turks. They shelled the city, including the Parthenon, which took a direct hit, blowing out the center of the building in the process.

Odd that a single shell should inflict such damage on a structure sturdy enough to stand pretty much intact for eighteen hundred years. It might have not had such damage had the Turks not decided to use the building as a gunpowder magazine. Funny how that works.

One of the great works of classical architecture, lost to the shortsightedness of war. Not that recent wars have done all that much better: during World War II the world saw the destruction of Coventry Cathedral, not to mention numerous artworks that simply vanished or were destroyed. The Vietnam War and the subsequent rise of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia resulted in the vandalism and neglect of the temple complexes at Ankgor Wat and Akgor Thom. (Fortunately, there is some hope there: preservation efforts are underway, as the sites at Ankgor have been listed as World Heritage Sites.) Early on in the war in Iraq, museums in Baghdad were looted, with priceless artifacts stolen and destroyed. Part of the reason may have been the failure of American forces to secure the National Museum.

War always carries with it a terrible cost in human lives. As a society, in America, we have done a bad job at estimating what those costs will be; so do most nations embarking on a course of war. And the human costs always eclipse the cultural costs: whatever the damage to the temple complexes at Ankgor, as heartbreaking as that may be, it pales in comparison to the horrors inflicted upon the Cambodian people. The looting of the antiquities in Baghdad cannot trump the massacre at Haditha.

But maybe they are of a piece. Art says who we are as a people, gives us our identity. There is a reason beyond simple prestige that the Greek government has been fighting for years to recover the statues from marble friezes of the Parthenon, which currently reside in the British Museum in London. If you see people of a country as not worth protecting, why would you care about protecting their cultural treasures?

Except that that legacy, in some sense belongs to the world as well as to each country. When cultural treasures are destroyed, we are all the poorer: witness the international outcry at the destruction of the colossal Buddhas by the Taliban.

I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this, other than I keep thinking that when all is said and done, there needs to be a reckoning of the cultural destruction wreaked upon Iraq — or any other war-torn country — and that needs to be mourned by others than those who suffered the immediate loss, and even by their enemies.

Posted in Art, Justice, The World | Leave a comment

Barry and Babe…. and Hank.

Posted on May 14, 2006 by Pat Greene

So, it looks like Barry Bonds will pass Babe Ruth on the all time home run list. To which I say…

Big fat hairy deal.

One would think, from the way everyone is going on about this, that Ruth still held the home-run record. Even some journalists still think Ruth holds the record: in an article in the Peninsula (local) section of the San Jose Mercury News, Dan Reed wrote “[Bonds] failed to do what everyone wanted him to do — tie the all-time home run record of Babe Ruth.” Clearly, Mr. Reed needs to walk across the office and talk to the sportswriters occasionally. I can only imagine what they might have said about the article.

America is obsessed with Ruth. No one is ever good enough to match the Great One. Roger Maris played in a season that was too long: Ford Frick, the commissioner of baseball (and the man responsible for the 162 game season to begin with) decreed that Ruth’s record had to be broken in 154 games or it wouldn’t count. (He either ignored or conveniently forgot that the season Ruth set the single-season record, the Yankees played 155 games, because they had tied one earlier in the season.) Frick set this condition for no other season record. Bonds and before him McGwire and Sosa have all been tainted by the steroids scandals. There are those who argue that the record 73 home runs in a single season set by Bonds in 2001 is illegitimate.

Ruth played in smaller stadiums, without grueling travel schedules, during an era when a ball that bounced over the fence could be counted as a home run. More importantly, he played before the color line was broken: Ruth never had to face Negro League pitchers like Satchel Paige. Nothwithstanding, Ruth has always been seen as “America’s home run king.”

Except he’s not.

Hank Aaron is.

Ruth is an “American”-type hero: brash, mythic, larger-than-life. Many of us with more than a passing acquaintance with baseball history are familiar with story of Ruth’s “called home run” and his legendary carousing.

Hank Aaron, on the other hand, carries himself with quiet dignity. He is one of baseball’s class acts. He pursued Ruth’s record in the face of death threats from racists furious that a black man would dare sully the Bambino’s legacy. He earned his record not in a blaze of glory but by remarkable consistency: while he never hit more than 47 home runs in one season, there were only three years, his first and his last two in the league, that he did not hit at least twenty. Furthermore, he not only exceeded Ruth’s record, he obliterated it. He didn’t pass Ruth’s total by 5 homers, but by 5%.

There has never been a whiff of scandal or a hint of impropriety about Aaron. His record can’t be dismissed as being the product of some pharmaceutical lab, or disparaged as being the result of simply a matter of more games per season.

Instead, he’s simply ignored. It’s surprising how many people still say “Babe Ruth’s record…” even though the record hasn’t been Ruth’s for 32 years now. This entire circus surrounding Barry Bonds pursuit of second place is testament to how much Ruth still holds sway over the American imagination. It’s a shame: if I would pick a ballplayer to represent me or my country, I would much prefer it be a man of courage and dignity like Aaron.

Let Barry Bonds pass Ruth on the home run list. It doesn’t matter.

Let him reach, oh, 745 or 750, and then it will matter. Because then the issue of whether Bonds’s home runs are tainted, the product of chemistry not talent, reflects on whether he should take the title from the true champion.

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Posted on May 1, 2006 by Pat Greene

Last Christmas, I got one of my favorite gifts ever: the complete Broadway soundtrack to Rent. I have listened to the soundtrack an estimated 475 times. At one point, the CDs disappeared — I think my family hid them. No worries: I had already ripped them to my computer.

One of the things I love about the Broadway version, as opposed to the movie, is that it really is an opera. Unlike, say, The Sound of Music, or Into the Woods, you can follow almost the entire plot of the musical simply from the recording.

It has turned into a great — if unlikely — teaching tool.

I have preteens, late elementary and middle school kids. They are getting the standard “Just Say No” drugs and alcohol education, and the older is beginning to get AIDS and sex-ed talks. (Even in California, abstinence only education has hit.) I have a great problem with the way these are taught. First of all is the simple excessiveness: one child told me I shouldn’t use ammonia-based cleaning solution because a D.A.R.E. officer told him it was a bad idea. But more importantly, I think they teach kids to view others with a lack of compassion.

It starts out “Using drugs and alcohol is bad, using drugs and alcohol is stupid.” It turns into “Stupid people use drugs, bad people use drugs.” What happens then when a kid is confronted with someone who uses drugs or alcohol? Either they demonize the user as being bad or stupid, or they discard what they are taught about drugs or alcohol, not all of which is bad.

Which is where Rent comes in. While I don’t play all of the soundtrack for them (among other things, I skip “La Vie Boheme” because I really don’t want to have a discussion about what S&M is), and I’m not keen on the bad language, I do play enough to get a sense of the characters.

Enough to get a sense that Mimi is not a bad person. Roger is not a bad person. They are experiencing consequences of their choices — and some of those choices were and are bad. Mimi’s continued use of heroin, in particular, is a bad choice, to the extent it is a choice, given the nature of addiction. Which led me and my youngest to have a discussion of addiction, and why someone would make such choices, and how that doesn’t mean they are beyond help.

It has also proven useful in talking about HIV/AIDS. About what HIV is and does. How about how you cannot get AIDS from casual contact (misinformation they picked up from their peers). About how AIDS is a disease, not a moral judgment, regardless of how you contracted it.

The question of homosexuality has been very easy to deal with: when asked if Angel was Collins’s boyfriend, I simply said yes. And whether Maureen and Joanne were girlfriends, likewise. (Both of which led to my happiest parenting moment recently: when my youngest son heard on the radio of a school group arguing for the right to have materials for their afterschool club about how homosexuality is a sin, he responded, “Why do they care if people are gay? It’s not like it hurts them any. Why can’t they mind their own business?”)

I wish I could write to Jonathan Larson and tell him how important his work is. Wherever he is in the afterlife, I hope he knows.

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A picture is worth thousand words: a morality tale.

Posted on April 10, 2006 by Pat Greene

If you wander down one of the corridors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art, you will come across a full length portrait of one George Harley Drummond, by Sir Henry Raeburn.


George Harley Drummond was the eldest son of a wealthy member of the British aristocracy, aged 25 at the time the portrait was painted. He had been married several years, and had a seven-year old son and two other children, who were the subject of another portrait by the same painter done around the same time. Sir Henry Raeburn was Scotland’s premier portrait painter.

At first glance, the portrait appears to be just another “aristocrat with horse” painting. Except something seems off-kilter.

In most equestrian paintings, at least of the ones I’ve seen, if the man is not astride the horse then he is leaning on or standing next to the horse’s neck. In this painting, George Harley Drummond is standing next to the horse’s saddle, with the horse facing away from the viewer. The curators at the Met put it most delicately: “The foreshortened view of the grazing bay horse is the most complex part of the composition, though not the most important. It is curious, therefore, that the animal’s hindquarters should be so prominently displayed.”

No, it’s not curious, not at all. Not when you look at the painting, and look from the the vapid young man to the horse and back again.

It is a truism in law that the one person you don’t stiff is your defense attorney — because they know where the bodies are buried. Similarly, the one person you should strive to be nice to is your portraitist.

Otherwise, he may let all of posterity know just what a horse’s ass you really are.

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The Prado Moment.

Posted on April 7, 2006 by Pat Greene

I still say it was the fault of that damn painting.

I had flown to Madrid from the West Coast — six hours across country, with the obligatory four hour layover at JFK, then seven hours over the Atlantic — and gotten in about 10 in the morning. I and the friend I flew with were retrieved by my husband and a friend and coworker, with the plan being an afternoon in Madrid, followed possibly by tapas, and an early night at Torrejón de Ardoz, where we were staying. The theory was that staying up without napping would help our bodies acclimate to Spanish time (nine hours later than home). This would mean that we would have stayed up for close to 24 hours straight by the time we went to bed.

I was in Spain as consolation prize for having a husband who is on the road roughly four months a year. Every couple of years, I go abroad with the saved frequent flyer miles — that year (2004), to Spain. After a short stay in the vicinity of Madrid, his project was heading south to the the Spanish hill country north of Seville, to a small mining town called Rio Tinto. I was along for the ride.

After my husband and the fabulous Sarah Huffman (see sidebar) met me and my friend at the airport, we went into town. After the first of what would seem like innumerable dinners of jamón (Spanish ham — similar to proscuitto) at the Muséo de Jamón (a chain restaurant with walls covered completely with dried hams — a little like dining in Norman Bates’s parlor), we headed for the Prado. Since I don’t care much for jamón, I didn’t eat very much.

The Prado is one of the world’s most magnificent musems. In addition to an unparalleled collection of Spanish art, it contains masterpieces of Italian, German, Dutch, and Flemish art. While I was eager to see the Goyas and Velazquezes (although not the Picassos — they are at the Reine Sofia, and at that point in time I was not interested in Picasso anyway), I was dying to see one of the most bizarre works of art ever created: Heironymous Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”.

There is an unfortunate tendency today to attribute anything unusual or extremely imaginative to the impact of either drugs or mental illness. This is rubbish — there is very little that the healthy human mind cannot come up with independent of outside influences. However, having seen Bosch’s work, I think ergotism is about as good an explanation for it as anything else.

“The Garden of Earthly Delights” is not a very large painting, as these things go, especially considering the triptych was designed as an altarpiece: the central panel is roughly 7′ x 6′, the side panels half that width. The three panels are “The Garden of Eden”, on the left, “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, in the middle, and “Hell”, on the right.

No matter which panel you start with, it is a strange work of art. “The Garden of Eden” is the calmest, most reassuring, but even there you see trees with strange, fleshy limbs, and an odd fountain that looks almost alive. Bizarre creatures inhabit the pond near the front, including what looks to be a half duck-half fish with arms. Still, compared to what is to follow, this panel is sanity itself.

The central panel is where things get seriously trippy. The panel is crammed full of people and creatures engaged in various sexual and other activities. Giant fruit litter the landscape. People are trapped inside clams. There is a big circle of people on animals towards the back. Presumably, at least some of this made symbolic sense to its intended audience in the 16th century. As I don’t live in the 16th century, however, it was all lost on me.

It was sometime while looking at the middle panel that I started to feel strange. A sense of dizziness and disorientation began to set in. I felt creeping nausea. An intelligent person would have stopped and gone elsewhere, but, well, I was there to see this painting, by God, and I was going to see this painting thoroughly if it killed me.

I then started looking at the end panel.

Every college dorm in America has at least one copy of “Hell” posted up on a wall somewhere. It’s just the sort of thing you need to contemplate during acid trips. But as often as I had seen prints of the damned thing, it was worse in person.

It is bizarre and fascinating and dark. It is filled with fantastic creatures — the most notable being the “tree-man” at the center — who either are torturing or being tortured. A woman being sucked by leeches. A bird-like creature consuming people and shitting them out. People strung up on harps like crufixes. The knight pinned down and eaten by dogs. The ears — nothing but ears — with the knife-blade between them.

I couldn’t look away.

I started feeling seriously disoriented. I felt like I was losing my sanity. I was going to fall into the painting. My nausea went from “creeping” to “jumping”.

I walked away and looked at some of Bosch’s other, less strange (but still rather odd) work. When that didn’t make me feel better, I went and sat down in the room next door with the Breughels. The nausea subsided, but the dizziness and disorientation did not. What happened next is still quite hazy. At some point, I made my way down to the ladies room on the ground floor, which has nice cool marble tile floors and walls. I leaned against them…

Only to be shaken awake by a guard. Other museum patrons had called the guard because I appeared to have passed out. I was unable to communicate with the guard because my extremely limited Spanish fled, leaving me with only “no habla Español” which I mumbled over and over.

The guard took me to the museum infirmary, where I had better luck communicating with the doctor, who spoke English. The doctor at first thought she must be having trouble understanding me — after all, I had said I had just arrived that day? Surely, that was not right. No, I said, that was right — I had just gotten off the plane. She looked at me for a moment, shook her head, and gave me some apple juice.

After lying down, and having more apple juice and some glucose gel, I felt somewhat better. The doctor diagnosed severe jet-lag and low blood sugar, and ordered me to go back to my hotel and sleep. Which I did, after my friends (who had gone to security when I disappeared) retrieved me from the infirmary.

Two days later, when I came back to the Prado, I had no desire whatsoever to see anymore of Bosch’s handiwork. I avoided the Bosch room completely, and instead concentrated on the Spanish painting on the upper floors, including the heartrending “Third of May” by Goya. (Goya himself had a few strange episodes: there is a room devoted to the “Black Goyas”, which are bizarre and grotesque paintings Goya did toward the end of his life. The most well-known of these is probably “Saturn Devouring One of His Children“.)

I would have thought no more of it, except “Prado moment” became a byword on that trip. A couple of weekends later, when I finally returned to the group after getting lost looking for restrooms at the Alhambra, my husband remarked, “Thank goodness. I thought you were having another Prado moment.”

Of course not, silly. There are no Bosches at the Alhambra.

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Posted on April 7, 2006 by Pat Greene

Time out from our current discussion on art — Terry Karney has written perhaps not a manifesto but a mission statement on being a liberal. Go Terry!

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The girl I love.

Posted on April 6, 2006 by Pat Greene

She’s not a Hollywood Beauty.

She would be classified as being on the large side — she’s normal by most standards, but not for show business. Her face shows a gentle intelligence, but would never launch a thousand ships. Her arms are strong, her hands roughened. Although her clothes are modest and becoming, she is never going to top any “Best Dressed” lists.

I would drop everything on a moment’s notice and fly around the world to sit at her feet.

At least, until the guards kicked me out.

I don’t know her name — people who know art history possibly do — but I know her, the curve of her hand as it cradles the milk jug, the intent half smile as she focuses on pouring out the milk into the dish; and I know the room in which she stands, the window and the table and the loaves of crusty bread so clear you can almost smell their warm yeasty goodness.

She is Vermeer’s Kitchen Maid.

She’s not as flashy, say, as “The Girl with the Pearl Earring.” She has about her a peace and contentment that heals the soul. I want to stay in that room, maybe find out who she is, ask her for one of the loaves, some of the milk. I want to watch the light pouring in through the window, catching her cap, her gown, the milk, her arms.

The light is the most remarkable thing about her — and try as I might, I cannot think of the painting as anything but “her”, as totally identified with the unknown woman at its center. No print can do this painting justice. Light pours out of the canvas in a manner that defies description. You can sit in the Vermeer Room of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on a gray and dank day and watch the light pour out of the window next to the woman’s head, as if you were in the same room with her, hearing the gentle burble of the milk flowing into the bowl.

I love art, deeply. But even within that, there are a small handful of pieces that matter to me at an almost primal level. Among those, most dear to my heart is the Kitchen Maid.

The girl I love.

Posted in Art, Who I am | Tagged | 1 Comment

On Seeing Art.

Posted on April 6, 2006 by Pat Greene

You may well wonder at the vehemence in my last post; I did a bit myself. It boils down to this:

Art matters to me.

Art matters not in an abstract, “Gee, isn’t that pretty” way, but in a visceral, longing so strong I can taste it way.

Great art is a glimpse of God. Or, as a wise priest I know once put it, there is no secular art.

And limiting art seems very much to me like limiting God. There is no chance for surprise, no chance for the unexpected, no chance to push the boundaries of what we know as “acceptable.”

I was also angered by the intellectual dishonesty in the little “test” Libertas set out. If the blogger does in fact know anything about art, they have to know you cannot assess a work of art based on pictures taken of it.

Pictures of things can lie. What was true for Henry VIII, when Hans Holbein’s portrait of Anne of Cleves was perhaps a shade too flattering, and is true today, to the dismay of many a client of OK Cupid, is also true of photographs of paintings. And just as there are people who are more attractive in real life than one would guess based on their photographs, so too with paintings.

I have seen the Mona Lisa. Even subtracting the fact that it is behind a thick wall of glass (for security purposes), it is small, it is dark, it is not terribly appealing. Photographs are much more attractive, although to tell you the truth, I’ve never been all that smitten with her anyway.

I have also seen, not “Convergence,” the Pollock used by Libertas in his little “test,” but an equally unphotogenic Pollock, “Lavender Mist.” From a distance, it is an unremarkable mass of brown and pale lavender. Close up, the eye detects the swirls and patterns in the paint, and , almost involuntarily, tries to make sense of them. One is — or can be, if one lets oneself — be drawn into the play of light and texture on the canvas, light and texture which get obliterated by the camera’s lens. It is not my favorite painting — not even my favorite abstract painting — but I would not hesitate to call it art.

Note, this does not arise from a preference for Pollock over da Vinci, or new over old. Around the corner from the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, is my favorite da Vinci, “The Virgin and Child with St. Anne”, which is breathtaking. And my favorite paintings of all are by the Dutch master Vermeer. (By the way, it should be noted that you cannot asssess an Old Master by its photograph any more than you can an Abstract Expressionist: Vermeer’s paintings often go from being merely pretty in print to being transcendent in real life.)

And what is true in painting can also be true in poetry, in prose, in music.

God is limitless. Art should be limitless, too, bound only by the restrictions placed upon it by our frail human forms.

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Ars Gratia Artis

Posted on April 4, 2006 by Pat Greene

While rummaging around the blogosphere — or at least the small corner of it I forage in — I ran across a link (via Julia over at Sisyphus Shrugged) to Libertas, a conservative art blog. At the beginning of a review for, of all things, the latest Spike Lee film, Libertas asserts his own exalted position as an arbiter of what is proper in the art world:

There are many Philistines in the world, but only one Goliath: that’s me. I think abstract art is a con game. I think free verse stinks. I think atonal music should be outlawed and experimental novels burned. Whenever an artist declares he’s going to break through the restrictions of his form, I feel he should be treated the same as a chess player who declares he’s going to ignore the rules of his game—like an idiot, a harmless eccentric at best. The rules are the game, the restrictions are the form. Indeed, much of the excitement of art comes from watching the spatial confines of the sonnet, say, or the canvas or the movie screen, give way into emotional infinity.

Ah, yes. One of the “my three-year-old can paint better than Jackson Pollock” people. He then confirms this by setting the reader a test, in which the Mona Lisa and the Jackson Pollock painting “Convergence” (not that Libertas has the academic honesty to actually identify the painting), are placed side by side. If the reader identifies the first — but not the second — as art, then they are deemed to have sufficient aethestic sensibilities to be allowed to proceed to read his movie review.

There’s a certain amount of irony at this level of hauteur being exercised over a movie review. For much of the cinema’s history, movies — especially popular movies — have not been taken seriously as works of art. That nothwithstanding, let’s look at his presumptions, shall we? Just what sort of world would we live in, if Libertas were minister of art?

No James Joyce, of course. Or Franz Kafka. No e.e. cummings, or William Carlos Williams. No Arnold Schoenberg or Philip Glass. Little visual art — save photography — past 1920. No Picasso, Bracque, Warhol, Johns. No Brancusi.

No Stravinksy. Both “Rites of Spring” and “The Firebird” caused riots when they debuted — they were too revolutionary. Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” would in no way be acceptable for concert halls.

Auden would be okay; some, but not all, Eliot. Eugene O’Neill would probably be okay, but Samuel Beckett would be right out.

If you accept that movies are art — which Libertas seems to — then without people breaking the constraints of form there would be no Snow White, or any of her progeny from Disney. No Intolerance, no Rashomon, no La Dolce Vita. More recently, no Memento. The brilliant Charlie Kauffman would be out of a job: Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would all be beyond the pale.

And what of theater? I have spoken of Beckett, and O’Neill. What of musical theater? If movies can be considered art, then surely musicals can be as well. Without Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II breaking through what were then the conventions of the form, we would have shows where the stories were merely excuses for trotting out the latest tunes from Tin Pan Alley. And if we accept that the new paradigm is set by the story show as created by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and as practiced by Lerner and Lowe, and Kander and Ebb, and Jerry Herman, and so on …. then the constraints of that form, in both song structure and in subject matter, have been broken through — and brilliantly — by Stephen Sondheim.

But let’s go back further…. the ultimate experimental modern novel is Don Quixote, which was so experimental many consider it to have created the genre. And let’s not forget Tristram Shandy, shall we? A masterpiece of English literature, Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth century novel is so unique Hollywood couldn’t touch it — at least until Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story, which isn’t a film of the novel but a film about how hard it would be to make a film of the novel.

If one tossed out painters who broke with the conventions on the form, that would eliminate, oh… Manet, Goya (have you ever seen the “Black Goyas”? reeaaally creepy), Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Toulouse-Latrec, Klimt, and countless others. Oh, and there’s Whistler, of whose “Nocture in Black and Gold” Ruskin wrote “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” In fact, let’s just go back to iconography, shall we?

Art is like life: Sturgeon’s Law applies here as much as anywhere else. Whenever you have anyone break the conventions of the form and time in which they are working, most often, you’ll get self-indulgent garbage. Whenever you have anyone stay within the conventions of the form in which they are working, a fair amount of the time you will get pretentious, self-important twaddle.

Goliath can keep his safe, well-ordered, rule-bound world.

For myself, a world without the fragile delicacy of “somewhere i have never traveled” by cummings, or the devastating anguish of Picasso’s “Guernica,” or, on a less exalted level, perhaps, without the demonic glee of Sweeney Todd, would be much poorer indeed.

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Just call me "Iron Chef Comfort Food"

Posted on April 4, 2006 by Pat Greene

One of my current popcorn shows is “Be The Next Food Network Star.” Like all reality shows, it has the attraction of watching people drive themselves crazy doing things I would never do, in this case for something (my own tv cooking show!) that I would never want. Unlike “Survivor,” it has the additional advantage of having what seem to be generally nice people as contestants.

The last episode was on, among other things, how well the contestants multitasked. They seemed daunted by the task. Wimps.

I am not a stellar cook, merely an adequate one. My cheesy whipped potatoes are beloved by my family, and I can do a decent job on chicken, and I am renowned among my friends for my frosted mint brownies. (Oh, and I have made croissants. From scratch.) I love making new potatoes with garlic, and broccoli, but also use a lot of convenience foods. I do make a very nice Thanksgiving dinner, however.

And I can multitask like nobody’s business. Take tonight.

It was not a usual dinner: I was not eating, the teenager was not home. Unlike, my usual practice in such cases, which is to say, “Guess you guys are on your own, aren’t you?,” I agreed to act as short order cook. My husband had spent the day tromping through mud and rain shooting imaginary bears*, my nine-year-old was recovering from being sick, and since I was making food for them I agreed to make the other pre-teen something. I told everyone I would make what they wanted for dinner.

Things went down something like this:

Place chicken patty in microwave, turn on. Put water and salt in pan for grits. Put skillet on burner, preheat for potstickers, add oil. Get eggs and two kinds of cheese out of fridge. Remove chicken patty from microwave, place on bread, place in toaster oven with slice of Tillamook sharp cheddar cheese — set on “toast”. Put frozen potstickers in skillet, cook for two minutes. Place omelette pan on burner, preheat. Add grits to boiling water. Add one cup water to potstickers, cover, set timer for eight minutes. Stir grits again. Add butter to omelette pan, beat eggs, season, pour into omelette pan. Plate chicken patty sandwich with yogurt. Stir grits. Add cheese — shredded cheddar/jack blend (yes, I buy the big bags from Costco) and grated parmesan/asiago (no, I grate my own) — to omelette. Stir grits. Flip & plate omelette. Plate grits next to omelette, with butter and cheese. Remove potstickers from heat. Plate, and explain to child that he really does need to eat something other than just potstickers for dinner — maybe some yogurt?

All the while having a conversation with the nine-year-old about the fact that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were contemporaries and friends.

Total elapsed time: 15 minutes. Okay, so it’s convenience and comfort foods, but that’s still not shabby. If I hadn’t been making the potstickers, I could have done it in ten. And I can do similar feats with real food — i.e., things with actual vitamin and mineral content.

And you know what? I could have done that with a camera rolling. I’ve never had to cook under the glare of the spotlights, but I have had to deal with “is it done yet?,””why can’t we have tortellini?”(from one child), “but I don’t like tortellini”(from another), “do we have to have meat sauce?,” “you made what he liked last night, why can’t you make what I like tonight?,” “Ewwwww garlic,” “it’s not my night to do the dishes,” “Hon, I have to leave in ten minutes,” “it’s not my night to clear the table,” and the ever popular “can I make my own dinner?”

I am Mom. See me multitask.


*Seriously, he was running through the woods shooting imaginary bears; okay, pictures of imaginary bears. All as part of a USGS defense against wild animals course he is required to complete in order to do field work.

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Out here with the yellow lines and the dead armadillos.

Posted on March 29, 2006 by Pat Greene

The fabulous Jim Hightower once said “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos.” Certainly, in regards to the abortion debate, it seems that the two sides face each other across barricades, lobbing grenades back and forth. There is no middle of the road. Except where I am.

Make no mistake: I am completely pro-choice. I firmly believe abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.

But, on a personal level, I recognize the beginning of life as carrying very deep significance. Yes, even before viability. Yes, even at a very early stage. I would not abort a pregnancy even in the first twelve weeks, except to protect my life or my health. You can scoff, you can laugh, you can call me irrational, whatever, but there it is: I think abortion is an extremely significant moral act, perhaps not murder, but which can achieve in some circumstances an equivalent moral import. However, I recognize that is my own personal moral calculus and no one else’s, and I make no judgment upon anyone who has had an abortion, other than to feel sad that they had to make what is often, no matter what your politics, a painful and difficult choice.

I can understand how someone in the right to life movement can come to say that “abortion is murder.” I know people who say that. I have family who say that. I believe that they believe that. I also believe that, for some of the people I talk to, it is a shorthand for a complex idea that would otherwise be unwieldy: murder is the closest thing to what it feels like happens morally when an abortion happens, so that’s the word they use. That may not mean that they think about all the legal consequences flowing from abortions in exactly the same way that they would murder.

I have seen in the past two or three weeks a lot of crowing about how hypocritical right-to-lifers are because of that “abortion is murder” stance. If abortion is murder, then why don’t any of the proposed anti-abortion bills provide for prison sentences for the women having the abortion? They clearly don’t actually believe what they’re saying! They are only interested in subjugating women. HYPOCRISY! Idiots! We win!

Except that this isn’t a high-school debating match. You don’t get points for slicing your opponent up into little bits with your brilliant logic and rhetorical skills. What you do get is a closing down of dialogue, and an increasing radicalization on both sides. And really — do you want to push people to supporting prison sentences for women getting abortions? That’s just as likely as ever convincing people of the rightness of the pro-choice position by belittling them.

And what if they do mean murder when they say murder? It is possible to condemn a crime, and have compassion for the criminal. Or to view shades and degrees of culpability. Ah, but to allow that pro-life advocates might think that, then one has to view them as capable of making nuanced moral decisions. They have to be human! Gasp!

And it’s not like we on the left don’t occasionally come up with our own sterling examples of hypocrisy: the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has chosen to pass resolutions condemning various conservative religious organizations — the Catholic Church; Battle Cry for a Generation, a fundamentalist Christian group that stages teen rallies — who are anti-choice or oppose same-sex marriage. Considering that we — by which I mean pro-choice, pro-same-sex-marriage progressives, presumably including the members of the SF Board of Supervisors — have been fighting like hell to keep religion out of government, don’t you think we should try to keep government out of religion? That wall of separation between church and state we treasure runs both ways.

People say that the two sides can’t talk to each other. I think they’re wrong — and a January, 2006 study from the University of Florida backs me up. The study found the differences both sides perceived between themselves and the folks across the barricades were exaggerated.

Screaming at the other side over one issue — abortion — makes it all that much harder to change hearts and minds on other issues, such as the war in Iraq, or the dangers to civil liberties presented by the PATRIOT Act, or same-sex marriage. Because no one likes to be called a hypocrite, or these days, told that they are evil. For is not oppressing others evil?

Personally, I’d rather lose the debating match, if I can engage in open and heartfelt discussion. After all, that’s what adults do.

If I seem angry and bitter about all of this, I am. I know people on both sides, good people, people who searched their consciences to arrive at an answer to the most difficult political and moral question of our age. I am fed up with the nastiness lobbed across the barricades. I am tired tired TIRED of the demonization, of the caricaturing, of the reductionism being spouted from either end of the debate.

You know what? Different may not mean wrong.

And, much more importantly, WRONG does not always and everywhere mean EVIL.

And maybe if we start remembering that for a change then maybe we can reclaim the debate from the screaming demagogues and actually get somewhere.

And maybe, just maybe, we can reclaim the center here. And get rid of these damned armadillos.

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

Looking at the Mountain

Posted on March 26, 2006 by Pat Greene

Early fall, I had been looking forward to Brokeback Mountain coming out. Not as much as some other releases — Capote, Good Night and Good Luck, and Rent— but I thought it looked quite promising. Ang Lee is a good director, and while I don’t care much for Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhall is, to use a not-too-technical term, yummy.

For one reason or another, I didn’t see it. I actually have not seen a lot of movies that one could not take children to — not since I saw Capote, at any rate, which would have been early December. And when I did go to movies, I needed to see comedies, escapist fare; Brokeback Mountain seemed too heavy, too difficult. Now I find myself in the position of wanting to see more serious fare, with Brokeback still in the theaters … and I no longer want to see it.

In the post-Oscar analysis, with the lambasting of the Academy’s decision to award the Best Picture Oscar to Crash, it seems that liking Brokeback Mountain has become a political litmus test. What else to make of the analysts decrying Crash‘s selection as an example of rampant homophobia? Ignoring the fact that there were, in fact, people who were less than impressed with Brokeback Mountain, for reasons having nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the quality . (As there were with Crash, too, for that matter.) I know people who have not even seen Crash who are willing to blame Brokeback‘s loss to homophobia. Sheesh.

Me? I don’t think Crash should have won. Does that make me a racist? I think Capote and Good Night and Good Luck were better movies. I’m not alone: if you look on Rottentomatoes.com, which aggregates film reviews from all over to give sort of a general rating, Good Night & Good Luck and Capote both scored well above Brokeback Mountain, which in turn scored well above Crash. But you don’t see partisans for Capote screaming about homophobia in the award process — oh, wait, Truman Capote was an “effete New York intellectual,” as Jon Stewart pointed out. Doesn’t count.

The fact is, Brokeback Mountain got made and distributed by a major studio, and as of March 26, 2006, has made $158 million, a nice return on a budget on $14 million. It was nominated for eight Oscars, it won three. And while people mutter how courageous it is for actors to play gay characters, within the last 15 years, several actors and actresses have won Oscars for playing gay, lesbian, or transgendered characters — Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, Nicole Kidman in The Hours, Hillary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry, Philip Seymour Hoffman this year for Capote — and quite a few more have been nominated. None of them seem to have suffered as a result.

Is there homophobia in Hollywood? No doubt. After all, the number of performers who are openly gay is slim, with actresses outnumbering actors. (God bless Sir Ian McKellen!) Is that why Crash won? Who knows? It’s a movie about Los Angeles, most of the voters live in the San Fernando Valley, and it resonates with them on a primal, everyday level in a way that a movie about a couple of Wyoming ranchhands doesn’t. (That theory is not mine: I’ve heard it more places than I can shake a copy of EW at. My theory is rather more cynical than that.)

I don’t like my entertainment choices being turned into political or religious statements, whether that be by members of the Catholic League who opposed people like me seeing Kevin Smith’s Dogma (best movie on religion ever made) or fundamentalists who imply that I need to see The Passion of the Christ to be “saved.” Or people who insist that liking Brokeback Mountain is a requirement for showing how unhomophobic I am.

After all, in the end, they’re only movies.

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

Posted on March 24, 2006 by Pat Greene

 

The world is a dangerous place. “Ethnic cleansing” by government backed militias in Darfur; eight people killed in a shoot out between police and drug gangs in Rio; protests over the youth unemployment law in France turn violent.

Iraq. Afghanistan. Israel. Palestine. Pakistan. Iran.

But two days ago the world got a little safer, hopefully: ETA declared a permanent ceasfire.

Esatablished in 1959, ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna — “Basque Homeland and Freedom” in Euskara, the Basque language) — Spain’s cousin to the IRA — is a Basque nationalist organization with extremely violent tendencies. In 1973, it managed to assassinate Spain’s Prime Minister Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, and over the next thirty years carried out a number of bombings and assassinations. In 2001, following a year marked by a number of bombings aimed at politicians and officials, ETA announced that tourists were fair targets. In short, very scary guys.

So scary, in fact, that when Al-Qaeda bombed the Atocha train station in Madrid on March 11, 2004, the Spanish government at first strongly and unequivocally blamed ETA. The group’s past made this quite plausible; so plausible, in fact, that the Spanish were able to get the U.N. to pass Resolution 1530 which names ETA as being specifically responsible for the attacks [pdf]. That it was determined rather quickly that Al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, not ETA, led to the downfall of the conservative government in the elections three days later, amid suspicions that it had deliberately misled the public about ETA’s involvement. Not that suspicions of ETA were completely unfounded, mind you: two weeks before the bombings at Atocha, a van filled with explosives was discovered during a routine traffic inspection, leading to the arrest of two alleged ETA members.

By most accounts, the organization has been weakened through arrests, and the Al-Qaeda bombings have made ETA killings political suicide, even more so than they might have been before. I don’t know: wounded snakes can still bite, can still kill. And ETA has declared ceasfires before: they haven’t held. This is the first time they have ever used “permanent” to describe a ceasefire, though.

I hope to God this holds.

Spain is a magical country, a country of deep history and almost indescribably rich music, art, and literature. Alcala de Henáres, where the bombs that destroyed Atocha may have been placed on the trains, is the birthplace of Miguel Cervantes, creator of the noble knight who, in a very, very roundabout way (through the words of lyricist Joe Darion) is honored in the title of this blog. Madrid, where ETA’s last car bombing took place in 2005, is a grand and colorful city where you can marvel at Heironymous Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” or weep over Picasso’s “Guernica”; head over to the Plaza Mayor and check out the street musicians; or simply wander along the spacious avenidas or through the narrow calles looking for tapas bars. And there is Barcelona, site of ETA’s bloodiest attack, in 1987, which is home to Antonio Gaudi’s remarkable Sagrada Familia and other works. And Seville, where in addition to being barbered, you can wonder that a human can actually move their feet that fast, when you are introduced to the art of flamenco. It was a EU summit in Seville that touched off a series of bombings by ETA in resort towns in southern Spain of 2002.

I’m sort of fond of the place. Can you tell? Along with New Zealand (which I love for very different reasons) Spain is very dear to my heart. Anything that makes the Spanish people safer matters a great deal to me.

The Basque region is seeking greater autonomy, and I have no problem with that. I support it, even. Just not when it involves bombs.

Posted in Justice, The World | 3 Comments

Posted on March 17, 2006 by Pat Greene
Justitia fiat coelum (“Let justice be done though the Heavens may fall.”)
— Edwin Horton’s grandfather’s motto

In 1933, Judge James Edwin Horton, Jr. supervised the second trial, conviction, and sentencing to death of Heywood Patterson, one of the Scottsboro Boys, for the rape of Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. In spite of evidence from the doctor who examined the two women which undercut Price’s story, and Bates’s testimony on the stand (admittedly, the subject of speculation that it had been bought) that there had been no rape, that the women had been with their boyfriends and had made up the story of the rape to escape being hauled in on morals charges, the all white jury took five minutes to find Patterson guilty. The trial had also been marred by racism and anti-Semitism on the part of the prosecution (the anti-Semitism aimed at Patterson’s lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz).

Judge Horton, troubled by the evidence, and having been pulled aside by another doctor who had been present at the examination of the girls and who was sure they were lying, but who was too afraid to testify, did the unthinkable. He ordered a new trial for Patterson.

Clearly, this was not acceptable. The Alabama Supreme Court removed the case from Horton’s control, giving it to a Judge William Callahan, who among other things, instructed the jury that it was to be presumed that no white woman would every voluntarily consent to sex with a black man. Horton also paid a personal price: he was defeated for reelection when he ran for the bench again.

Judge Horton’s action was a stirring example of judicial independence in the face of mob mentality. It demonstrates why the judiciary is independent, needs to be independent — so that they can seek justice without regard to whether it is popular. Sometimes popular notions of justice and common sense are wrong, because of prejudice or reluctance to change, and there is a long litany of cases — Brown v. Board of Education, Loving v. Virginia, Griswold v. Connecticut, to name just three now widely accepted examples from the Supreme Court — which testify to this.

All of which might seem obvious — except that there are some people in South Dakota who feel otherwise. There is a ballot initiative which would effectively establish popular oversight over judicial decision-making, by creating a standing Special Grand Jury allowing anyone to bring complaints against judges. The presumption of probable cause would be against the judge, and, unless the case were completely spurious — difficult, since the allegations of the complaint are to be liberally construed in favor of the complainant — a special jury would be empanelled, which would act as both trier of fact and as trier of law (i.e., both jury and judge) . Three sustained complaints and a judge would be off the bench — and there is no judicial immunity, and judges are responsible for providing for their own defense. Terry Karney has the text of the initiative and an analysis, .

Fortunately, there are many sane and responsible people in South Dakota, at least on this issue: both houses of the South Dakota legislature unanimously passed a resolution urging voters to reject the measure. The description of the motives and intentions of J.A.I.L. (the national organization behind this insanity) contained in the resolution is chilling, especially

“the author of Amendment E has publicly stated that with the passage of Amendment E, Judicial Accountability Initiated Law members from across the country will ‘purposely drive to South Dakota…just for the privilege of getting a traffic ticket so you can demand a jury trial. I anticipate traffic courts to be among the first courts to all but totally close…,’ thus depriving South Dakota citizens of their constitutional right of access to our courts and making it clear that Amendment E is not intended to help cure any alleged problems with South Dakota courts.”

Equally disturbing is the vision of the effects of the bill: “Amendment E would permit convicted felons, whose convictions have been affirmed by our Supreme Court, to sue the prosecutors who prosecuted the felons, the jurors who voted to convict the felons, and the judges who sentenced the felons,” and “Amendment E would actually allow lawsuits against all South Dakota citizen boards, including county commissioners, school board members, city council members, planning and zoning board members, township board members, public utilities commissioners, professional licensing board members, jurors, judges, prosecutors, and all other citizen boards.” By eliminating summary judgment, by which a great many cases are disposed of, it would bring the machinery of justice to a grinding, messy, halt. By allowing suits against other public officials, it would destroy the integrity of government at the local and county level, since it would open up the possibility for local govermental agencies to be held hostage by potential litigants.

This is anarchy. It is the state constitutional enshrinement of jury nullification — the concept that a jury can legally do whatever it damn well pleases — with the added threat of dire consequences to a judge or public official who doesn’t play along. No doubt Alabamians in 1933 would have welcomed this, and no doubt Judge Horton would have quickly found himself in front of a jury charged with the “blocking of a lawful conclusion of a case.”

No one is safe — not judges, not jurors, not public officials, and certainly not the public. And the ballot initiative may be coming to your state soon: JAIL is aiming at passing laws like this in all fifty states. The scary part is — what if they succeed, even in one state?

All of this is based on a notion that “the people know best.” No, they don’t, not always. There is a reason the Bill of Rights exists protecting individual rights against the power of the state. Enstablishing what is essentially justice by popular opinion makes all of us unsafe — for who is to say when any of us might need the services of an impartial and independent decisionmaker, bound by law instead of the popular emotion of the moment?

Posted in History, Justice | Leave a comment

Spring Fashions have just arrived!

Posted on March 17, 2006 by Pat Greene

 

The Wild Winds of Fortune has a new look. Those of you familiar with my Live Journal will know that I change my layout every few months — or every few weeks, even sometimes every few days, in times of stress and boredom.

I think the new color scheme is more “springy” and besides, the white on black was just too stark. Not quite goth — it was too angular for that — more rigidly modern. The world is a stark place these days; blogs don’t have to mirror that in their design.

Well, to tell you the truth, all pretentiousness aside — and was that not pretentious? — I think the white on black was giving me eyestrain. Since I reread posts several times after their initial postings — editing along the way — that’s no fun.

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