I want to say that I am – like everybody else – shocked and horrified at the killings at Sandy Hook School and I am, but more than that, I am pissed. I am pissed at our refusal to deal with Gun Control as a nation. I am pissed at our refusal to look at our national propensity for violence and at our elected leaders inability to take on The Gun Lobby.
Guns kill people. Most guns people have today – and as far as I can tell, ALL guns used in mass murders – are designed to kill people. They are not hunting weapons or target-practices weapons, they are weapons designed – well designed, beautifully designed – to kill as many people as fast as possible. Guns kill people and as if some cosmic hand leaned down to underline that guns kill people, there was a parallel violent spree in China yesterday. Only, because it is so hard to get a gun in China, a knife was used and twenty two Chinese children were wounded – only two seriously – and none were killed.
I read some shithead who said, Many will seek to turn their outrage to action. But now is not the time for politics. Let us instead reflect upon what was lost today, and first grieve together for the victims…. In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth. Now is exactly the time for politics. Now is exactly the time to start working on getting rid of most, if not all, of these guns. Now, while our rage is up enough to actually do something about it.
Until I saw a sort of offhand reference – as if the reader would obviously know who she is – to Tavi Gevinson, I had never heard of her. I don’t know how I missed her as she is about as famous in her world as Fernando Alonso is in his. On the outside chance that there is atleast one other person who hasn’t heard of Tavi, she is a sixteen year old fashion blogger. The astonishing part, however, is that she started when she was eleven – she was born in 1996 – and was famous enough by the time she was 15 to interview Joss Whedon for her blog ( The Style Rookie).
By the time she was 13, Gevinson was a special guest of Vogue Magazine at the New York Fashion Week. By the time she was 15, Gevinson foundedRookie Magazinewhich bills itself as a website for teenage girls with advice like How to Decorate Your Room like a Movie, or Ask a Grown Man:Jon Hamm, or Breaking in a Broken Heart : How to draw power from a truly crappy experience. Looking at Rookie Magazine started out as surprising and slowly became an amazing experience. Everything I have read about teenage girls is written by someone who was a teenager years before and is – sort of – remembering their teenage years from an older perspective, this is written – or edited – by an actual teenage girl and it is so much more sophisticated.
In Breaking in a Broken Heart, Rookie says Develop compassion. Now you know what it feels like to feel like garbage. So you can recognize that feeling in others, and empathize. It strangely becomes a healing experience for both people when this happens. You get over your heartbreak even more, and so do they….Discover that you are loved. Go ahead and try to reject this because it sounds corny and you don’t like feelings. I’m sorry, it’s just the objective truth of the matter. When you understand that you are loved, that there are, really, people who love you, that you DESERVE their love, and that you really do have huge, undying support in this world, from your friends and/or family and/or pets and/or God if you believe in that, the love that you lost begins to feel smaller in comparison.
In talking about Loosing It, Rookie says To avoid having to answer a million questions, I prefer to regard “losing your virginity” as a choose-your-own-adventure. Oral, anal, vaginal, manual, sex toy, something else? YOU PICK! When it comes to identifying as a virgin, only you can decide what “counts.” Maybe you “lost your virginity” the first time you gave oral to your girlfriend. Maybe you it was the first time your boyfriend fingered you. Maybe it was your first-time P in V. There is no wrong way to decide when you’ve lost your virginity. It is an intangible characteristic that only you get to choose whether or not you identify with…That said, maybe you think the whole concept of virginity is stupid. Who’s to say that you ever had one in the first place? Who’s to say that you lost anything when you had sex for the first time? I prefer to think of first-time sexual encounters as gaining a new experience, not losing something. Instead of thinking of things in terms of virginity, feel free to tell someone that you gave oral sex for the first time, or that you haven’t tried vaginal intercourse yet. There is no wrong way to talk about first-time sexual encounters, and anyone who tells you otherwise is likely just as clueless as the rest of us.
I sometimes have a feeling that the next generation will not be able to handle the trashed world we are leaving them. While it is true that we are leaving them a country in which the average kid will not be able to live the same lifestyle as their parents – lifestyle usually being defined as having as much stuff and using as much energy – and we are leaving them a world in which our leaders refuse to even admit that the climate is changing, and we are leaving them a future world in which we did pretty much everything I was taught to believe was responsible for the fall of Rome, this, next, generation just seems better. More capable of looking at real problems.
Reading Rookie, and reading about Tavi Gevison or listening to her TED talk – yes! at something like sixteen – is a hugely reaffirming experience. Check it out, I suspect you will be shocked and thrilled as much as me.
In the SF Chronicle, this morning, was an article with a second paragraph of All this raises a question about what may be the most anticipated ceremonial event yet to happen: the hanging of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s official portrait. The paragraph brought up all sorts of resonating thoughts starting with What? They are hanging Schwarzenegger? Oh, his portrait. and ending with He was a pretty good governor considering the circumstances. In between, among other thoughts such as the National Portrait Gallery being my favorite museum in Washington, I noticed that the paragraph was only one sentence long which I was taught not to do – I don’t know for sure but it must have been before the sixth grade – surly, the Chrony should know better.
Reading the short article – all articles are short in the Chrony – I noticed that Schwarzenegger’s picture was done by Gottfried Helnwein ( I used was because, apparently, the picture is already finished, if not hung, and done because the artist is a photographer and a water color and mixed media painter and I have no idea of the medium of this portrait). Gottfried Helnwein is not an artist that I know, but I feel I should after reading his Selected Collections page which includes the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, the State Russian Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution, among many, many, others. I also read that Schwarzenegger had a picture by Helnwein, in his Governor’s office, of the Mojave and he has a photograph? watercolor? of Death Valley on his website, so I am predisposed to like this guy already.
His portraits – as shown below -look to be even more interesting.
California does have a long – if very narrow – history of interesting Governor’s portraits including this Portrait of Jerry Brown as a Young Man (sorry).
It is possible that I have now joined the legions in Sacramento who agree that the hanging of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s official portrait is one of the most anticipated ceremonial events yet to happen. OK, that may be overstating it, but I am curious. (Oh, the portrait at the top was done by Andrew Wyeth and Brown’s portrait was by California artist Don Bachardy).
I don’t understand why we celebrate Pearl Harbor Day. After all, we lost, we got bombed by surprise, we bungled it.
In the early nineties when Kosovo was trying to get away from the yoke of the Serbs, much was made of the fact that a sacred Serbian battlefield was in Kosovo and the Serbs didn’t want to let that battlefield leave greater Serbia. Several newscasters, by way of showing how wrong the Serbs were, commented on how old grudges never die in Serbia and the Battle of Kosovo Field – lost by the Serbs over 600 years ago in June 1389 – was, stupidly, still a big deal.
But we do the same thing in celebrating Pearl Harbor (we even have Pearl Harbor license plates in California so, I guess, the car owner can remember – every time they go to their car – that 2400 sailors and soldiers were killed on December 7th). It is the same thing with The Alamo lost by a hearty group of volunteers fighting for their right to keep slaves which Mexico had outlawed. All three battles were loses.
Why don’t we celebrate April 18 when we killed – by surprise in semi-Pearl Harbor fashion – Isoroku Yamamoto, commander t of the Imperial Japanese Navy that launched that attack on Pearl Harbor? Or the Doolittle Raid when we bombed Tokyo on the same date one year earlier? Or some win in the Texas war against Mexico?
I have no idea. It seems we – humans – prefer to remember when we got our ass kicked sometime in the past. Anyway, Happy Pearl Harbor Day, and many more.
Over the weekend, the rainy, rainy, weekend, Michele and I went to Point Reyes National Seashore with Richard and Tracy and Gina and Courtney. The timing worked perfectly. It only rained at night, the weather during the day was just turbulent enough to be interesting, and it was much warmer and comfortable than it photographed. The best of all possible worlds. On Saturday afternoon, we into the Park and followed a small stream down to McClures Beach where the storm driven waves put on a show for us.
I love Point Reyes: the connection with Nature, the feeling of edge-of-the-world desolation. Like Death Valley or the Sierra Nevada mountains above timberline, it is a huge landscape – with almost infinite sight-lines – that work best for me when I am out in it; walking.
More years ago than I can remember, I read that the National Park Service was trying to incorporate some – for lack of a better descriptor – normal landscapes into the system. We think of the National Parks as saving the most spectacular parts of America, but, in reality, most of the National Parks are extreme areas because they are the areas that were left over. There are no National Parks in the Great Central Valley of California because it was filled with farms – very productive farms – pretty early in the western settlement cycle. (In May of 2010, on our way back from Death Valley National Park, we stopped at a small pocket of wilderness – Kern National Wildlife Refuge – that the Feds had reclaimed from the San Joaquin part of the Central Valley. It was spectacular – teaming with wildlife, mostly with birds laying over on their North-South migration – and a revelation. We consider the Central Valley the boring part of our trip when we go to the mountains or the desert and this little section of wild land was every bit as exciting as any National Park.)
Point Reyes is, in a way, reclaimed land but it was also only minimally used before it became a park. Yes, there were and still are farms, but they were always sort of hanging on farms with picturesque barns rather than rich working farms with industrial silos.
The barns seem more a part of Nature, a part of the Landscape, rather than cut off from it and, as the National Park Service lets more land revert to Wildness, the Wildness is taking center stage. With its walks and its views, with its openness and hidden intimacy, with its National Parkness, Point Reyes National Seashore has become a place to connect with Nature.
