:::this is the way the world ends:::
This is from a series I am doing on animal/human territory collisions. Somewhat related to my painting Apex. This is a parking lot near the Eau Claire mall where I saw a fox darting between two SUVs that inspired this painting of a trio of foxes. There should be two more to come, but right now I am very busy painting muslims.
Everyone needs a dog or small child. The things they bring you are priceless. Usually Ernie brings me stuff from around the house and yard in a condition that requires a litttle pondering about its origin and purpose, sometimes we wonder simply what it might have been in its former life before becoming a chew toy. This morning, Ernie brought me a small tag. “Important Safety Instructions” it shouted at me in big, red(well, a little more orange than red now) print. I figured whatever it was had been operated for a fair amount of time without injuring me to my knowlege; but despite my laziness about reading such fair (also includes instructions and technical manuals unless I can’t get the device to work properly without them), I read the small tag. It read:
This portable lamp has a polarized plug (one blade is wider than the other.) Ok, I am following this so far, and I really want to be safe and teach safe practices in the peoper operation of our lamp, whichever one it may be. As a safety feature this plug will fit in a polarized outlet only one way, if the plug does not fit fully into the outlet, reverse the plug, if it still does not fit, contact a qualified electrician. Wow! How will that phone call go?! Sir, I can’t get my plug to plug in. Um, is it a polarized plug, did you try it the other way?
But wait this gets better: Never use with an extension cord unless the plug can be fully inserted, Do not attempt to defeat this safety feature. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO DEFEAT THIS SAFETY FEATURE?! I love the wording on this. It makes it sound as though this the shape of the plug has become a mortal enemy on par with Galactus or Darth Vader- clearly a villian to dangerous to attempt to defeat. Leave that up to the Justice League or perhaps a qualified electrician. There’s more to the note following this, but I suddenly found myself hatching plots to defeat my new enemy. All I need to do now is figure out from which lamp this came and contact the A-Team. Happy NewYear! jp
Don’t know if anybody’s reading this anymore, since there haven’t been many posts or comments. My last painting only received comments from Toby, but here I am undaunted. I infer that many of you have moved to Facebook, but since I am not “friends” with you, this is still the best way to get people’s attention. And I kind of like this mode. Recently, I have finished reading E. O. Wislon’s Concilience, a good challenging book which was a faculty discussion book at the University. I ended up discussing the book with a bunch of scientists. I watched a pretty cool movie called the Visitor, which personalizes the immigration dilemmas in this country. Eliot turned six and Claire will soon be three. James and Sarah will likely be parents, and Kathleen has a boyfriend. Here’s a new painting called Apex. I am going to relate a bit of history that means something to me.
This painting is, of course, about some of the reading on wolves I’ve done. They have studied them for about thirteen years with regards to their return to Yellowstone and their impact on the Ecosystem there. I could go on about this, but long story short, they’re very healthy for the ecosystem. So one Sunday night I was getting ready to read with Eliot, and Sara was checking the Internet to see if there was a mystery on PBS. She called me over to show me there was a program called “The Wolf that Saved America” starting in a few minutes. Of course, I ran downstairs with Eliot, and we watched it. It was fun to see how much Eliot enjoyed it.
It was a mix of history, science, and myth, as they retold the story of an outdoorsman named Ernest Thompson Seton, who was well-known for a time as a professional exterminator of wolves. He boasted that he could rid ranches of marauding wolves in three days. A wolf in New Mexico, that he called Lobo, evaded him for three months. One incident tells of the wolf collecting four chunks of meat Seton had carefully poisoned in a pile and defecating on them. Anyway, Seton was filled with such sadness when he finally killed the wolf that he had a bit of a conversion. He began to promote conservation of the west and influenced T. Roosevelt to protect Yellowstone. One incident about Lobo tells of their ploy to catch him by trapping his mate first. Supposedly, he cried all night, howling strangely. Doug Smith, the head of the Yellowstone project, was interviewed and related a similar incident in Yellowstone. He said, “You’ll forgive the expression, but he sounded as if he was mourning.” I brought this up in my book discussion, questioning why biologists aren’t allowed to anthropomorphize animals, but they must stress the links we share with animals biologically.
When I spoke to my dad, the only person who wanted to listen to my excited rant about the program and wolves, he told me that after Seton became a conservationist, he went camping with my grandfather Clell a couple of times in the Badlands and once down south. I guess Grael has several of Seton’s books dedicated to Clell.
Thanks for listening. If you’re curious about some of the articles that influenced this painting, I’ll be happy to post more.
![diving-bell-and-the-butterfly-le-scaphandre-et-le-papillon-1[1]](https://i0.wp.com/www.wearethehollowmen.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/diving-bell-and-the-butterfly-le-scaphandre-et-le-papillon-11.jpg)
Ned, thanks for telling me about your thoughts on Persepolis and Sweetland. I had heard about Persepolis (and have been meaning to check out the graphic novel it’s based on), but hadn’t heard anything about Sweetland. It’s amazing to me the sheer amount of great movies that fly under the radar nowadays. Quantity of Hollywood drowns the quality?
Speaking of quality, Steph and I watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly a week ago. In Steph’s words, we “couldn’t look away” from Julian Schnabel’s direction, along with Janusz Kaminski’s gorgeous cinematography. A gorgeous movie that is wonderfully sad, effecting, and surprisingly human…surprising in the fact that I’ve gotten used to the lack of human-“ness” in FX-laden movies. It takes the all of the glory and the shame in human existence and creates a portrait that lacks the usual Hollywood gloss, but has more character packed into it than all the summer blockbuster movies combined.
Maybe my surprise has to do with my tendency towards escapism in my movie choice. It’s a little embarrassing to admit … but I feel as if I’ve gone soft and taken an easy route post-college. I’ve only recently started to feel as if I need some more meat in my diet of cultural intake. I just don’t find myself thinking critically as much anymore. I think once I finished college, I was weary of the over-analytical stance I took towards most art and literature and abandoned it for the most part. I think I’m ready for a homecoming.
One of the most amazing components about this film, (Steph and I spoke about this afterwards, in length) it allows the viewer to assume Jean-Dominique Bauby’s persepctive in the first third of the movie. It’s almost as if we were sharing the same Diving Bell with Bauby, and later too, the Butterfly. I think we’re still carrying a bit of the butterfly with us.
Has anyone else seen the film? I’d be curious as to thoughts and reactions from the rest of our group….
Pinker has a quite good article in the NY Times.
There isn’t too much new there, but it offers a good overview of some of the ideas of Moral Psychology and relates them to issues of the environment at the end.
I’m glad that he brings up Peter Singer’s idea of the expanding circle of reciprocal trust and action. He once again dismisses religion by saying that Plato did away with it 2,400 years ago, which again, seems a bit odd, but the article has a lot of good info.
It does seem funny that these guys keep insisting that “love thy neighbor as thy self” is the ultimate moral concept, but keep dismissing religion. Oh well.
Here’s the link if you guys get a chance. It’s about eight pages; so probably takes about fifteen minutes to read.
I’m wondering why I am posting this, but for some reason feel compelled. Since I have been on the couch or in bed lately, I managed to read a bit.
I just finished The Dream Life of Shukhanov by Olga Grushin. It was a terribly engaging book that takes place in real time over three or four days, but covers in flashbacks much of the life of a Soviet artist/critic. There are several narrative techniques that are interesting, such as the way the book flows from third person narration to first. But I guess the most valuable part of the book to me was what it said about living with the choices we make, the life we live, and the art we do and don’t make. It reminded me a bit of Ishiguro’s novels in that it begins to blur the main character Sukhanov’s past with his present in an effort to reconcile the two lives he has led in a manner that is almost surreal.
Thanks Ned for posting the Story of Stuff. I think that it is largely preaching to the choir (with emphasis on “preach”) on this blog but still it is good to know that there are people out there fighting the good fight. I’ve been thinking about these issues over the last few days. I hope to post a more robust response later this week.
So since I took twenty minutes of my time I ask you to take twenty minutes of your time to review this TED talk on A Brief History of Violence by Harvard linguist, Steven Pinker. Shotts if you are looking for an “popularized” science book, you can’t go wrong with anything by Pinker though I have only read The Language Instinct.
Anyway, this is sort of an evidenced based “feel good” story about how the chances of human being killed by another human have consistently dropped throughout history. Pinker talks about why we may believe that the opposite is true and what we may have done right in the last 400 years or so to make this possible. Please take time to view this. I think it’s really important.
I have been contemplating this place and time in life–being 33. It is an interesting but hard to define stage. I have particularly been trying to explore the concept of the Jesus Year, as Jesus was supposedly 33 for the bulk of his ministry, betrayal, and death. The concept is that by the age of 33, you should have done something big–perhaps not have saved us all from sin and hell, mind you, but something large in terms of a contribution. Do we die a metaphorical death in this year? And if so, what is on the other side? What does it mean to contribute something, and something big or important, by this age? I’ve been trying to think through this a bit, and write about it in some way as a project.
What does the Jesus Year hold for you, and what do you make of this idea generally, and in terms of your own lives?
For me, I’m interested in finding larger struggles beyond myself, and maybe that’s ultimately what one can do that lives up to, in part, the example of Jesus. And yet. Here, this year, I’ve been given everything–a good life, companionship, good work, and even a more flexible schedule so that I can teach this fall (something I’ve wanted for a long time) and so that I can write (something I’ve always wanted). Why does this still seem like it falls short? Why are my struggles still primarily with myself? Is this part of the experience of being 33, as a sort of crossroads year? A year in which I know many of my peers are far more successful in terms of what the culture says is successful? Why is it that I still can’t eat right, exercise right, balance my life? Maybe the Jesus Year is the year we are supposed to compare ourselves to Jesus, yes, but really what we do is compare ourselves to everyone else?
But more generally, does this stage of life have any common or universal traits among the culture at large? Are most people already married? already married and divorced? having children? getting higher promotions? running for office? changing jobs? moving? taking up some cause?
I thought you would all be interested in this, seeing as, for a little while longer, at least, we’re all 33, our high school and college classmates are, most of them, 33, and I suspect several of our friends, cousins, and others around us are 33. And we haven’t had a larger question posed lately, so it seems like a good time. Any thoughts?
“…when groups of people – especially males – spend much time together, some sort of hierarchy , if implicit and subtle, is pretty sure to appear. Whether we know it or not, we tend naturally to rank one another, and we signify the ranking through patterns of attention, agreement, and deference – whom we pay attention to, whom we agree with, whose jokes we laugh at, whose suggestions we take.”
From the Moral Animal by Robert Wright.
Pretty funny stuff.
We are all 1st years at Hogwarts School of Wichcraft and Wizardry. Taking turns sitting on the stool, wearing the Sorting Hat, we are all Sorted into our halls. I suspect I would be in Ravenclaw. For those willing to share, where do you think you might end up?
So here I am at the McPherson Public Library buzzing on coffee from the Main St. Deli. Now seems like an appropriate time to post Marlon Brando reading “The Hollow Men.” Enjoy if you dare.
I attended the funeral service yesterday for Bob Hapgood, Sr. He was of course a neighbor of mine and the father to Tony and Bobby, childhood friends.
His death was sudden and unexpected, but the result ultimately of a food habit. Bob had heart surgery several years ago and had a recent heart attack. As his wife, Jeanne, said, “he went in for the surgery and never came home from the hospital.”
I admit it was a tougher loss than I thought it might be, to see the effects on the kids, my friends, eyes welling, but holding back the floods, bravely soldiering on. Bob was a local celebrity and apparently everyone’s friend; what seemed like the entire town reportedly showed for the viewing of the body the night before.  The wait was over two hours for the entire two hours the viewing was open. I saw the Shotts’ at the funeral service, which was a pleasant surprise.
I have been doing a lot of reflection as we are prone to do in these instances. Bob was 65 — just a couple of years older than my father. The boys are a year older and a year younger than myself. I wonder if I am putting enough into living for the moment, and putting enough of myself into all of the important relationships in my life.
I have also been thinking about the lyrics of the song on Deathcab’s CD, “What Sara Said” and what a powerful piece that is.
It IS National Poetry Month, so I shouldn’t let it get away without a current Poetry Post. This one from fellow Kansan Albert Goldbarth, who teaches at Wichita State University and who is the only poet to have twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. This poem is from the “new” section in his recently published (by Graywolf, no less) The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems 1972-2007. Enjoy. And happy National Poetry Month to you.
Human Beauty
If you write a poem about love …
the love is a bird,
the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death …
the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames
you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between
our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,
a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night
in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box
of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white
confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.
“The U.S. has about 50 percent of the world’s wealth and about 6.3 percent of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to the national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not to deceive ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism and world benefaction. We should cease to talk about such vague and unreal objectives as human rights, the rising of living standards and democritization. The day is not far off when we’re going to have to deal in strict power concepts. The less we have been hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
George Kennan, Former Head of the U.S. Department Policy Planning Staff, 1950.
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