Wednesday Literary Perambulations: World History in Quick Bites

This charming little book chronicles the beginnings of man from Pre-history (once again, another work that begins in the cave!) to WWI (frankly, just reading the prehistory chapter and the WWI chapter back to back and skipping the rest of time you have to ask yourself, have we really progressed at all?)   The author, E.H. Gombrich, a Viennese cultural historian who lived mainly in London is most famous for his art history text book, The Story of Art (also worth owning as a reference).  However, his tiny little history summary is a gem – and easily read in bits and bites.  The woodblock illustrations add to the charm.  Available only in German during the 20th century-(Gombrich wrote the original in 1936) – he self-translated the work into English in his later years, working on it until his death, at which point his research assistant took over and brought it to fruition.  It was published in the US in paperback  by Yale University Press posthumously (2008).

It is a perfect bedside book to read “in”  — ours lives on our bathroom reading shelf and teens and adults enjoy browsing through its chapters none of which are more than 11 or 12 pages long.

Thursday Art Insights: If My Summer Vacation Were Any Work of Art…

Ansel Adams, Vintage Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico

A fun game to play : What piece of art most represents what you desire in a vacation?

Vast, empty space – magnificent sunsets and moonrises, dry warm air and no one for miles, except in the distance, in case I were to need a plate of fried eggs. Maybe I’m camping, maybe I’m just driving through.  Ansel Adams had a true sense of the vastness of Western space. His ability to capture the grandness of light in contrast to the mundane nature of quotidian life is arresting in this large gelatin silver print from the 1940s.

Art Insights: Christian Pagan Summer celebrations of St. John the Baptist’s Day

St. John the Baptist Preaching, By Peter Brueghel, The Elder, 1526 Oil on Canvas,

Locusts, wild honey, fasting, caves: THE preacher to tell of the Messianic coming  – St. John the Baptist cut quite the figure and preceded his cousin, Jesus, in a highly memorable fashion.  It is fitting that the man who wandered the world gathering crowds – as shown in this wonderful Brueghel painting – and opening up their spiritual eyes to the coming of Christ would have festivals dedicated on his feast day that coincides with the timing of the Solstice.

Marvelous bonfires are set during late June, often floating mid-water. These pyres light the night skies from Newfoundland to Finland and beyond in a festival tradition that melds St. John the Baptist’s feast day (officially June 24) with the ancient pagan and Roman traditions of Solstice worship and the Roman celebration of their God of Nighttime Thunder (they had 2 – Summanus was the Nighttime Thunder God and the now more famous Jupiter was God of DaytimeTthunder, and actually less famous that Summanus, waaaay back in the day).

Ivan Kupula (St. John the Baptist) Night, Russian Oil Painting by Henryk Hector Siemiradzki, 19th century

Russians to this day celebrate wildly with fires and parties and often nude bathing – both in celebration of  Ivan (John’s) baptismal role AND to celebrate the earlier pagan solstice emphasis on fertility rituals.  If you have ever heard Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain – with its famous witches theme –

known to most of us from its use in the Disney Movie, Fantasia…note the fires and dancing in the cartoon – Disney certainly must have known of this Russian tradition.

Art Thursdays: Introducing Kids to Art

This summer, I plan to impart my love of art, science and culture to my children., even if it kills me (and believe me, I hesitated in saying “kills me,” just in case it actually does.  I fear that then you, my gentle readers, might have an excuse to dance around and say, “I told you so, I told you so,” when you read my obituary in the Globe).

I’m a pretty realistic person.  So I do know that mixing art/culture with children tends to pose some challenges.  In preparation, I have turned to every corporate training I’ve ever had on leadership and management in order to figure out how I will co-opt my sons into going along with this plan. There’s a basic tenet in leadership training that goes something like this, “In order to improve your leadership effectiveness, meet people where they are at.”  Introducing 3 boys to great works of art certainly will take some real walking in their shoes and where my kids shoes are at right now is basically Call of Duty Modern Warfare and anything about the Navy Seals.

Caveat on my summer: by summer, I mean the end of the blissful, seven daily hours of free care via the public school system.  I know it is soon to be summer because this free care is coming to a screeching halt in 3 days.  This is the summer of short exciting trips for each child interspersed with long periods of nothing scheduled.  They requested it this way.  I want to give you a sense of how I am now feeling about this state of affairs. Do you know the feeling when you hear your child is running water upstairs and you get all worried that the sink may overflow or they might drown? You know how you find yourself inching ever more towards the stairs in order to properly assess whether your growing anxiety is justified?  Well, that is just about how I now feel about giving my kids this much say on how full their schedules will be for summer 2015. The closer I get to “summer” the more worried I am getting.

Today was the day I decided it was fish or cut bait time in terms of hatching a plan so that I can meet the potential onslaught of anticipated endless TV watching, mess and sloth head on.  Basically, the plan looks something like this (please snicker quietly if you think this plan won’t fly – it’s all I’ve got and I’m holding onto it like a drowning rat on a small, floating plank in the ocean):

1. Let them sleep as late as possible each day (Pipe dream, the sun wakes them by 7 AM but here’s to hope that that will stop when school’s out.)
2. Eat and exercise while it is cool.
3. Media at midday when it is hot.
4.   2-3 days a week, in late afternoon/early evening when others are clearing out, we will hit a museum-periodically they are even free then; 1-2 days a week we will go to an afternoon movie, with a fun snack or meal thrown in as a bribe to encourage cooperation.

With mantra in hand: “The fun in the planning is meeting them where they are at.  The fun in the planning is meeting them where they are at, ” I have dived in to research war museums, any techie museum where they think they are still on media even if they are now transported to within the 4 walls of a museum (e.g. Museum of Science, MIT Museum, Discovery Museum) and finally, art in a typical art museum that has something to do with violence, death, pestilence, and anything that looks even remotely like a zombie – I’m betting on the middle ages to fill my needs here.

Well, to my shock when I opened up an article: Harvard Art Museums in the NY Times about the recent remodel, it led me to the website which featured the (below) painting of Jesus v. Satan.  And I actually think that that painting will appeal to zombie loving boys! Can’t you see Jesus saying, “Die, Satan” in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice?  Or possibly Jesus in a perfect imitation of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, saying, “Go Ahead, Make My Day…” Already I’m seeing movie-art tie ins! Don’t judge – sometimes you’ve got to go to the more edgy material to hold their attention.

This image is by an artist from Sienna known only as the Master of the Osservanza who painted from c. 1425 to c. 1480.  It is known as The Descent into Limbo and I frankly think the image of Satan whose been stomped down by Jesus and now rests in a hovel under a golden door is kind of funny, in the same way that Wiley Coyote is pretty funny when he finds himself pancaked at the bottom of a canyon.  Maybe the painting should be called: “Beep Beep, Says Jesus”.  I think I’ve stumbled onto the summer theme – “Caption that Art Work.” The boys are going to have a lot of fun cartoon captioning great works of art throughout this and other museums.  Wish us luck!*

*There’s always my desperate go to if this doesn’t work – go into a room in any art museum and tell your child to pick the one work of art they’d save if there were a fire and tell you why.  It’s pretty effective at keeping their attention and you periodically get some pretty creative responses.

Why Caves?

Entombment of Jesus, Mosaic, Church of Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

Someone asked me recently: why caves?    Before starting this blog, I spent some significant time reflecting on imagery that would hold up over time and give me ample literary, artistic and philosophical territory to explore.  Caves kept coming up.   Why would the cave as metaphor hold my attention?  Well, for one, caves are the source of endless material in our modern culture. They are after all where most of us think we began.  Caves are depicted as a source of transformation – from the solemn image of the cave as a conduit for Jesus between His descending and ascending to the pop image of the cave as the safe-house for the quick change antics of Bruce Wayne as he transforms from citizen to Batman and back again. 

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Caves are the source of earth-shattering discoveries: from the cryptic paintings of the hunt at Lascaux to the writings that the Gnostic Christians produced during the 1st to 4th Centuries that were found quite recently in a series of Egyptian caves.  Caves are the place of mystics.  They are where bears and other animals go to retreat and hibernate.   Let’s face it, caves are also kind of creepy.  Much as in life, one often cannot see around the twists and turns of the cave – it is a place where you never quite know what you may find next.  Caves serve as a common metaphor for the locality we return to in order to connect with the after-world; all the while seeking strength to tough it out in the current life we’ve got.  Caves inspire and shock – they are a conduit to our deeper selves and our collective past.  As such, caves seem to work quite nicely as the platform for midlife musings.