Reflections

Art, Photography, Psychological Musings

Last Sunday, Michele went to the annual National Bioneers Conference and we agreed to meet at the end of the day at the Tracy Taylor Grubbs Open Studio.

One of the things that is fun about going to the same Open Studio over a period of years is watching how the artist changes. Sure, sometimes they don’t change and sometimes they change all over the place at random, but, every once in awhile, the change is growth. It is like you – in this case, I – can see the artist try to solve the same, intellectual? metaphysical? problem in a variety of ways, getting closer – but, like Zeno’s paradox – never getting there because the search is really the endpoint.

I first saw this in a Jasper Johns show at the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at Marine’s Memorial – more accurately, it was pointed out to me on a tour put on by the  Stanford Art Department – and it seems to me this is what Tracy is doing. I have heard her talk about impermanence as a condition that interests her and, while I don’t want to speak for her, that seems to be central in what I saw last weekend (especially in her lovely iceberg paintings).

She also had on display some lovely little square images made by smoke that seemed to almost be frozen impermanence.

While Michele went to Bioneers, I took BART into The City and spent the later afternoon taking pictures of reflections.

I thought that a series of building reflections printed as small squares similar to Tracy’s smoke squares would be fun. But, sitting here, I think that these reflections reflect – sorry – my interest in what is reality vs. the distortion of reality as my projection. I see a scene – oaks and rolling, golden, hills on Highway 120 by Oakdale come to mind – and photograph it. Only when I look at the image, back home on my monitor, do I notice the power lines and towers, the dead, dry grass. What I saw is not what was there. Building reflections offer a similar distortion; the reflection on a building – so prominent in my mind’s eye – is often overwhelmed by the building I almost didn’t see.

With all that preamble, here are several reflections.

And a final picture from Southern California where the hold on reality may not be as strong.

 

 

 

 

 

Senator George McGovern redux

Politics

Re my post on McGovern, Mike Moore points out that McGovern …didn’t actually fade away; he kept working and working; against world hunger, for the Dems, etc…we saw him speak at the Ludlow Memorial in June of 2008, same day we got Aggie, and, down among the rednecks and the cowboys and the miners of Las Animas County, he was brilliant on behalf of Obama.  I’ll never forget it. Mike goes to say We wish for more like him…

I do too, and reading this reminded me of the time I saw Thomas Eagleton speak at a backyard gathering in Piedmont, California in – about – 1974. That was almost forty years ago and, like Mike, I still remember it clearly.  He was actually standing on a tree stump – a real stump, which, because it was cut at a slight angle, was not that easy to stand on – and gave, probably, the best political speech I have ever heard. Eagleton had been McGovern’s running mate for 18 days until it was revealed that he had had shock treatment for depression and was forced to  withdraw from the campaign.

What struck me at the time with Eagleton was his ability – willingness – to get back up after a huge, public, humiliation and keep fighting the good fight. And, as Mike points out, it was even more so for George McGovern. He took the biggest electoral dubbing in our history and got back up, dusted himself off, and reentered the fray.

Starting in 1998, McGovern served a three-year stint as United States Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture. Later, he worked with Bob Dole to  expand school lunch, food stamps, and nutritional help for pregnant women and poor children and continued to work in this area both nationally and internationally. He may not have ever been on the center stage again, but he continued to fight for what he believed. As Mike says…We wish for more like him.

 

 

 

 

m

Senator George McGovern R.I.P.

Politics

Senator George McGovern died yesterday. He was a mensch and I would like to say that the world will miss him, but, in reality, he has been gone a long time and the world has pretty much gotten over missing him. I would also like to say that McGovern was the first politician, that I can remember, who was Swiftboated, but he really Swiftboated himself.

In World War II,  he was a B-24 pilot which is probably the shittiest job that an Air Force pilot could have during the war. The planes were very hard to fly because of their thin wing – designed to give them good gas milage –  which enabled very long flights. Those long flights – with no fighter cover – were dangerous and B-24s suffered very heavy losses. Typically, 10 to 20% of the planes didn’t come back. And the crews had to do 35 missions before they were relieved.  McGovern refused to run on this record and was disparaged as a Peacenik over Vietnam.

Nixon won and the rest was history pretty much with McGovern. Too bad.

George McGovern was that rare politician, a principled man. Our country need more people like him and, even if he isn’t, he should be missed.

An east side of the Sierra Nevada detour

California, Photography, Sierras, Travel

On Tuesday morning, Aston and Eileen got up early and drove to San Francisco to go to work and we started a little later to drive to Lee Vining to meet Karen Amy and her friend Chris. The first stint took us along the east shore of Lake Tahoe so we could marvel at its blue gem-likeness set in a granite ring. From there, we picked up Highway 50 to crest the Carson Range at Spooner Summit and drop down into the Great Basin of  Nevada just south of the state capitol, Carson City.

From there, it is Highway 395 all the way south to the backdoor to Yosemite at Lee Vining. We cross back into California at Topaz Lake about 60 – some odd – miles south of coming into Nevada . I was born in San Francisco and have lived in California all my non-Army life. I was brought up to think of myself as a Californian more than as an American. As much as I love Nevada, I think of California as my home and even though we have only been in Nevada for a little over an hour, I get a little coming home tingle as we look down the valley with California in the hazy distance. This border crossing, back into California at Topaz Lake seems so archetypical: we drive through high Nevada – it may be dry enough to be called – desert, cross a long flat pass at about 6,000 feet, and then head down into the Topaz Lake Basin with green fields on the California side.

The Walker River flows into Topaz Lake and we go up river as we head south up a long canyon. About 15 years ago, the Walker River overflowed taking out the road and we had to detour about 50 miles out of our way to get to Death Valley. A year or two later, we drove through the denuded canyon on a new road and marveled at the devastation. Now, going up canyon, I am not sure, even, where the river took out the road.

Our plan is to meet Karen at noon at the Mobil Station cafe but we start to run late because we keep running into unexpected traffic controls. It turns out that we are caught up in construction of Digital 395, a 583-mile fiber network whose motto is Connect on the Wild Side. The project seems to be a public/private partnership with lots of semi-official – but unidentifiable –  sounding names like the Eastern Sierra Connect Regional Broadband Consortium and the California Advanced Services Fund. Among others, it is funded by the California Public Utilities Commission and the Department of Commerce under the Recovery Act. I couldn’t help thinking that alot of the people who moved here to get away from civilization and are now getting broadband would use it to badmouth big government. Our trip through Bridgeport is the worst with twenty minutes waits for a slow, controlled, crawl through town which is having all its roads repaved;

iPhone photo by Michele Stern

meanwhile, Karen has shown up an hour and an half early. We finally show up about 30 minutes late and the four of us have a quick lunch so we can scurry twelve miles back to Conway Summit at 8,138 feet where the Aspens are starting to turn.

Portrait by Michele Stern 

After we wandered around the Conway Summit area, going to Virginia Lake and then back down to the view overlooking Mono Lake and, way in the distance, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, south of Mammoth.

By now, Michele and I were in full tour guide mode, wanting to go down to the edge of Mono Lake to better show it off.

Mono Lake is, of course,  not a lake but a dead sea and it is the major rookery for Seagulls on the west coast. Still, it is always a shock to see them here, hundreds of miles – by road, at least – from the sea (which is, after all part of their name). But, here they are, chowing down on Alkali Flies and Brine Shrimp. Somehow, they seem both tamer – as in less frenzied – and wilder – as in less dependant on humans – than on the coast. As we watched the Seagulls, I ended up watching the soft waves, lapping the shore, and marveling at how different these waves are from the waves at Virginia Lake, 45 minutes and 3,200 vertical feet away.

By now it was getting close to our 4 o’clock cut off time, so we took a quick peek down the June Lake loop, looking for fall color, and then headed back over the hill. Karen and Chris to Yosemite Valley and Michele and myself to Portola Valley. At 8600 feet, it was already winter at Tuolumne Meadows.

 

 

The debate

Americana, Politics

Michele and I watched the debate with two guys that love politics and we fell into rooting like we were at a football game. So my perception may be flawed, but it seemed to me that Obama was having a better time than Romney. A more fun time (we thought he crossed over into arrogant once when he kept talking way past the shut-off point and we all started yelling Shut-up, you’re winning). He seems to have found a more presidential zone and his lecture to Romney on Benghazi seemed especially powerful to me.

And, then of course, Romney said Women in Binders. Eerily enough I totally understand what Romney means just like I did when he said The trees are the right height. It is not where I don’t like Romney, but this time I recognized Women in Binders was going to be a big deal. What I didn’t expect was a Tumblr on it (mostly because I don’t really understand Tumblr).