“To thine own self be true…..”

Psychological Musings

I am not sure how it happened – and it really does not make much difference – but Michele and I have been caught up in Linsanity. If you are blessed enough to not be caught up in this whole Knicks-Lin thing – or, maybe, cursed to not be following this feel good, heart warming, story of Linderella coming out of nowhere – there are plenty of places to get caught up on the background. As Sports illustrated says, Think of the singular demographic alloy at play. Lin, who’s worked endlessly on his strength and his jump shot in the past year, is a normal-sized, Christian, first-generation Asian-American. He’s excelled academically, faced racism on the court, been cut twice and sent to the D-league four times. Now he’s an NBA sensation amid the cultural diversity of hoops-starved New York. Opponents aside, who wouldn’t be a fan?

Anyway, we sat down Sunday afternoon to watch Lin and the New York Knicks play the Dallas Mavericks. A confession is in order here: I was in in Texas -while in the Army – in the early sixties and like anyplace in the South, it was not a good place to be a young man from California or any part of the North; I was also a 49er fan during the Montana years and Dallas was an arch rival; so I am pretty much anti-any-Texas-sports-team. Also, Lin played for Palo Alto High, maybe seven miles from our home, so we were defiantly rooting for him, but there was an underlying feeling that the bubble might burst any game now and the Mavericks were the best team in basketball last year. We would have been happy with a good, close, game.

It was a great game with huge swings in the scoring. In the end, the Knicks won and Lin was the reason. It brought up all the questions of how this kid could have been overlooked; how did the Warriors release him after a season? how did Houston? Because we are all racists, even if it sometimes plays out as anti-racists, the most obvious answer seems to be Because he is Asian. I don’t think that is the main reason, the real reason. The real reason is that Jeremy Lin was trying to fit into the Warrior’s system and he did that by not playing his game. During the game’s halftime, they played part of an interview of Lin by ABC’s Rachel Nichols, the interview starts about 3:50 into the clip below and, for me, gets very interesting at about 5:45 where Lin says , I was trying not to make mistakes, I was trying to fit in….this year I am going to make sure I do it my way.

It is one of the oldest lessons out there and one of the hardest to follow. It is as old as the Bible, Polonius said it in Hamlet, This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man, and they still say it in every self improvement book; be yourself. And it is so hard. When Lin had been cut by two teams, when he was afraid he would be playing in Europe,  or on some unknown D-team, or maybe not playing at all; in other words, when he had nothing else to lose, he became true to himself, he started playing his game. His game, it turned out, that fit the Knicks system like a glove. By playing his game, by being true to himself, I suspect, he was able to play with a lot more intensity.  His game, it turns out, includes a lot of assists and his generosity and intensity have transformed the Knicks. With Lin in they are less of a collection of outstanding players and more of a Team.

Untethered, untethered at last

Uncategorized
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
SeaWorld of Pain
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

I was going to say Free, free at last, but then I saw the Wyatt Cenac  on the Daily Show and thought better of it. But I did get my PICC line removed yesterday after my blood test showed that I am infection free.

 

 

150 years ago continued

Americana, General U.S. Grant, War

 

On February 16, 1862, Brigadier General Simon Buckner surrendered Fort Donaldson and about 13,500 men to Brigadier General Grant. Buckner and Grant had been friends in their previous and now different lives. The  military leaders of both the North and the South had often been in the old United States Army together and most had gone to West Point together. When the Civil War started, the majority of the seasoned officers were from the South and most of them deserted the Union. Simon Buckner was one of these.

Buckner had been born in Kentucky   but went north to go to West Point and graduated one year after Grant. He fought in the Mexican-American war and then Buckner returned to New York to teach at West Point but – and I love this part – he quit the teaching post as a protest of West Point’s policy of compulsory chapel attendance. About this time, he married a woman from Connecticut. When the war broke out, Buckner was offered a generalship in the Union army by President Lincoln himself, but he turned it down and, eventually ended up in the Confederate army. And then ended up at Fort Donaldson under a general who deserted his post, leaving Buckner to face Grant.

Ulysses S. Grant was born Hiram Ulysses Grant but his mother dropped the Hiram when he went to West Point. She realized his initials would be HUG when she was stenciling his footlocker and she was afraid that he would be teased which, at 5′-1″ and 117 pounds was probably right (the Congressman that sponsored Grant to West Point added the S for Grant’s mother’s maiden name of Simpson, but, in a clerical error, it was changed to S for Sam and he became Sam Grant at West Point). Like Buckner – and Robert Lee, for that matter – Grant fought in the Mexican-American war. He then hoped to teach math at West Point; instead, he ended up at the almost end of the world, Fort Vancouver in Oregon Territory.

Away from his wife and probably bored, Grant left the Army in disgrace for binge drinking. On his way home, broke and in disgrace, Grant ran into Buckner in New York and – probably very embarrassed – borrowed money from him while he was waiting for money to be sent from Ohio so that Grant could get back to his wife and his home. Buckner and Grant met again, almost eight years later, at Fort Donaldson.

The surrender of Fort Donaldson and an army of 13,500 men was the first major victory for the Union and the first of only three times during the Civil War when an entire army was captured – all by Grant. It was an equally major catastrophe for the South. The victory kept Kentucky in the Union and opened up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers for the North to start driving south in a campaign to open the Mississippi River all the way to New Orleans.

Buckner expected his old friend, Sam Grant, to be sympathetic to his position and asked for special consideration in his and his army’s loss, but for Grant, war was war and it trumped friendship.  He replied to his old friend and one time benefactor, in a letter that included the famous quotation, “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” A pissed off Buckner replied “Sir:—The distribution of the forces under my command, incident to an unexpected change of commanders, and the overwhelming force under your command, compel me, notwithstanding the brilliant success of the Confederate arms yesterday, to accept the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms which you propose.”

Grant offered to loan Buckner money and to help him with his imminent imprisonment, but a still pissed Buckner declined and was sent to prison in Boston. Five months later, he was exchanged for another general.  Grant became instantly famous and was promoted to Major General U. S. – “Unconditional Surrender” – Grant.

While Grant only had about 500 killed, he did have another 2,000 wounded and the battle was not as easy as it later looked.  Grant made several major mistakes – like leaving the battlefield to meet with the Navy but not leaving anybody in command – that he was able to overcome and Grant being Grant, they were mistakes that he never made again.

 

150 years ago

Americana, General U.S. Grant, War

Today, 150 years ago, one year into our Civil War, Union –  the Union being the United States of America -troops were finished moving into position to attack Fort Donelson on the  Cumberland River. Five days and a 150 years ago, on February 6, 1862,  the Union  had won its first major victory against the secessionists – the Confederate States of America – in the battle for Fort Henry on the Tennessee River.  The Union forces were led by a little known, a newly promoted Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant.

I do not know all the reasons for the pull that U. S. Grant has on me: part of it probably has to do with the resurrection of a failed man, part with his lack of pretension, a lot with his change from a non-political – non involved – man to being the greatest, white, champion of civil rights the United States has seen until LBJ a hundred years later. For that, for trying to give Negros their rights, Grant’s reputation suffered during  a post Civil War remembrance that was colored by the Lost Cause of southern valor. As the Negros became happier in their chains, the man who kicked every southern general’s ass including Lee’s became an inept drunk and a butcher.

On the 100th anniversary of the Civil War, 50 years ago, we were starting to get bogged down in Vietnam and allegedly smart people were saying things like Military intelligence is an oxymoron and Grant was a drunk and a butcher and stupid. Now, one of the things about this anniversary is that Grant is being rehabilitated as scholars are re-looking at the war and his presidency. The English have thought of Grant as a great general for a long time, probably starting with British historian General John Fuller  who wrote extensively about Grant and wrote one of my favorite quotes that is both about Grant and our America as it should be:

In the year 1858, in the streets of the city of St. Louis might sometimes be seen a man leading a horse and cart – a seller of faggots. The man was no longer young, about five feet eight inches in height, though he looked shorter, for he stooped slightly, and when he drew up to off-load his wood his limbs trembled, for he suffered from ague. He was a thick-set, muscular man whose dark-brown hair and beard showed no trace of grey.

To the passer-by he was one of many thousands who had failed to make good  – that is, he was a poor, honest, hardworking fellow whose end seemed preordained – to do odd jobs until his days were numbered: to die, and to be forgotten. Yet in the United States of America, then as now, it would have taken a bold man to predict the end of a fellow citizen. The Thousand and One Nights is a romance founded on slender facts, on Eastern dreams which seldom come true without a knife, a bow string, or a cup of poisoned coffee. But here in this vast tumultuous continent facts find rooms wherein to wind and unwind themselves into tremendous romances. No man can tell the destiny of another; for there is magic in this land of vast possibilities, vast as its spaces, in which talent more so than birth sorts through the sieve of opportunity the human grist from the human chaff. This man, humble, work-worn, and disappointed, as he off-loaded his faggots, stood on the brink of his destiny as surely as the prince in the fairy tale when he lifted up the old peasant woman and her bundle of wood, and wading the river found on the far bank that in his arms rested a smiling princess.

The name of this humble seller of wood was Ulysses S. Grant, who within a few years, was destined to command vast armies, to win great battles, and to be twice chosen by his countrymen as their President. If this is not romance – what is?


Grant, who commanded two divisions of Army, was a young man at 39 and still untested. He was accompanied by a Union Navy force commanded by Flag officer Andrew Foote, and, at Fort Henry, the Navy had beaten the enemy before his troops were even able to attack the fort. Now, for the first time, 150 years ago, he would be tested.

The genius of Richard Misrach

Art, Death Valley, Photography

I have been going to the California desert – on a pretty regular basis – for about 35 years. The great majority of that time has been when the light was hot and flat, washed out, the colors dull. Almost every photographer working in the desert shoots during what is called the sweet light or golden hour – between about an half hour before sunrise to about two hours after sunrise and the reverse – sort of – around sunset. Richard Misrach shoots during the middle of the day when the light is flat and washed out and his photographs looks like the desert actually seems to look when most people are actually looking at it.

Most “fine art photographers” tend to not use normal lenses, especially in the desert, with the wide angle being a perennial favorite. So there is some point of interest in the foreground but the real photograph is often the background. Art Wolfe is a terrific photographer; he is a photographer who does – more or less – conventional images in a conventional way better than anybody.  I love his shots but their strength is that they are not what most people see when they go to the desert.

Richard Misrach strength is that his shots show what most people see and are impacted by in the desert.

I love Misrach – his images – and he has had a huge impact on my photography but I have never been quite sure why I am so attracted to them. I have never been sure how he made them work. Over the weekend, we saw the same Misrach photographs displayed at both the Oakland Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum. (It was interesting how the same photographs took on a different feel – tone is better – when they are displayed differently. I preferred the Oakland show, BTW.) More importantly, for me, the two shows helped me understand Misrach’s photography much better.

Now, I think that the genius of Misrach is not in the content of his photographs – which are often pretty mundane – but in how that photograph is played, for lack of a better word. First his images – photo talk for pictures – are huge – like five by six feet huge – and that makes a big difference. And sharp; 8″ by 10″ camera sharp (or, if shot today, huge megapixel sharp).  It is easy to almost get lost in the photographs, they almost become a real life view. He has had the guts to just go for an outrageous size and the impact is worth it (except that they are too big for most homes. Second, the images are desaturated. Just like the desert light, at any time but the golden hour, is desaturated.

It will be fun to see how this plays out in my photography.