Yesterday’s walk…
July 20, 2022
… we unearthed some crab mac and cheese from the freezer last …night… so good… had seconds and did more snacking than i should have… also, a couple of vodka tonics and wine… all together, a bit calorific… more exercise yesterday than other days…
… just looked up the weather… mid 90’s through Sunday, when temps are projected to hit 100… not so unusual this time of year…
… some struggle with Lightroom yesterday… but got work done… wound up with not much to do in afternoon…
… HCR about SS deletion of texts from Jan 5 and 6… about 45 still trying to overturn election… about the election fraud investigation in Georgia… Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers being formerly censured by the Arizona Republican Party… for doing the right thing… protests in front of the Supreme Court where a number of legislators were arrested, including Carolyn Maloney, AOC… Lauren Robel filing a misconduct complaint against Todd Rosita who went on Fox News and said the doctor treating the ten year old rape victim had not done proper filings with the state when she had… the house passing a bill to protect gay marriage… will the senate follow?… 54 Republicans unwilling to go on record against gay marriage… 70% of all Americans and 55% of Republicans support gay marriage… including, i recently learned… Liz Cheney…
… then there is the Idaho Republican party which has included a plank in it’s platform that abortion is illegal in all circumstances, including those in which the mother’s life is at stake and the fetus won’t survive … Scott Herndon, running for the Idaho Senate sponsored the platform amendment saying…
“For the last 49 years we have essentially lost the argument in the culture because we have focused on abortion as the termination of a pregnancy and not the termination of a living human being,” Herndon said to fellow delegates, according to the Idaho Capital Sun. “We will never win this human rights issue, the greatest of our time, if we make allowances for the intentional killing of another human being.
… a man of course… doesn’t have to deal with the consequences… how could any woman support such a stance unless blinded by the Christian Patriarchy… this kind of stupidity makes the best case against religion of any kind… so much unnecessary suffering…
… another article reviewing the landscape of abortion battles across the nation… suggest sthat several polls show Dems picking up momentum in spite of Biden Administration poor approval ratings and a number of issues that normally drive voters away from the party in power… this all actually has the feel to me of an issue that will rapidly settle itself into national legislation as the horror stories start to proliferate… question is… who will be in control after 2024…
Among overall registered voters, 41 percent said they would prefer to see a Democrat-controlled Congress after the midterms, while 40 percent said they would opt for a Republican-controlled one. Republicans led by 1 percentage point among likely voters. The poll was based on responses from 849 registered voters in early July.
… this from an article on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and Buddhism…
Most music has a structure and purpose leading to a resolution.
… this struck me immediately as a condition of life… we want structure, purpose and resolution… so much of our entertainment industry is built on telling stories with structure, purpose and resolution… but what if such a thing is an illusion at best?… we are only passing through… there is nothing about individual lives that is a resolution to anything… we are all part of a greater flow and we do our best to swim within that flow in ways that give us hope and purpose… or at least i do… lately i have struggled with hope… struggled with purpose… in part… this is a condition of getting older… as time on earth runs short, we wonder what our purpose was?… we wonder, was there any meaning to it?… more from the article…
One can engage the sand mandala on many levels; its beauty, its precision, the mastery required to produce it, or the patterns and protection it offers towards awakening. But in the end, we cannot hold onto any of these as the mandala is destroyed and dispersed as a reminder of our own impermanence and return to our primordial source.
… i come to the end of my personal feeds so i suppose it might be time to go for a walk… make some pictures… get a coffee or hot chocolate… maybe down by the river today…
… later, after a long walk by the river… K&C… intense delicate tattooed barista at the helm this AM… she remembers me from last week… i commented on her tattoos favorably last week… still like them this week… she remembers me like we have seen each other more than once, which i don’t think we have…
… i start writing in my analog journal, then switch here… if i were to write something more penetrating, i would only need to copy it here… i don’t think the analog method offers enough perceptible benefit to make it the prevalent place to write…
… it is hot chocolate this morning… i decided the effort of the walk required it… also, needed something to feed my energy level…
… crying baby… my their voices can be so penetrating!… hard to tolerate… my immediate thought is get the baby out of here… this is peaceful morning time… why does the kid get to interrupt it that way?… it’s not a generous response… my ultimate tolerance is more generous… she walks down the aisle with her mother and gives me a charming almost smile while looking at me intently… mom takes her outside where she will be less of annoying if she cry/screams again… thank you mom…
Reading Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog, this…
Not ever hesitating, waves surge to reach human speech. They propose a truce. When we forget Ahab and converse only with Moby-Dick, the universe will manifest itself in full clarity.
… Moby Dick… one of my favorite reads… the message, forget human hubris and insanity, commune with nature, this is our salvation, or could be, if we’d dispense with appetite culture… if 45 is Ahab, are we Moby Dick?, no, we are the unwitting and unwilling among the crew… where then is Moby Dick?… the multiarchy… the misunderstood mythical beast… yes it is we who are being hunted to be extinguished…
… mother with baby, this one not a toddler, not noisy, not screaming just to hear itself scream…
… and the following paragraph from Sea and Fog…
And the sea ceased to be because it became the sea, and we stopped at the station of impermanence, and rose from our bewilderment to witness the junction of the past with the present.
… and this…
The uncontrollable desire to think the fleeting elements of the world, to fuse them into images, into words, is probably the most hypnotic of all Eros' manifestations.
… i find a Paris Review article on Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog: The Art of Etel Adnan… i read this quote…
“My writing and my paintings do not have a direct connection in my mind. But I am sure they influence each other in the measure that everything we do is linked to whatever we are, which includes whatever we have done or are doing. But in general, my writing is involved with history as it is made (but not only) and my painting is very much a reflection of my immense love for the world, the happiness to just be, for nature, and the forces that shape a landscape.”
… i think about my own practice and how i seem lost right now… i am encouraged to reengage…
Heather Cox Richardson, July 19, 2022
Idaho State GOP Says Abortion Should Be Illegal, Even When Used to Save a Woman’s Life
The abortion law fight grows in Texas and Wet Virginia. Here’s what you missed
July 19, 2022
… no alcohol last night… told myself in the morning i would not and i did not… wasn’t strongly tempted…
… storms came through yesterday… rain… H said not enough… need to up the watering time for yard… lots of fireflies in the back yard… i like to step out and watch them for a bit when i let the dogs out in the evening…
… M, B and i set up the coop for the meat chickens… we installed heat lamps even though it’s going to be in the 90’s this week… the little chicks like it around 100, so the heat lamps… will be needed at night for sure… B put on lipstick to help us… i think, “that isn’t needed,” but she thinks so, so it is…
… HCR wrote about how extreme the Republican Party is right now… she ended with some indication that it might be rebounding against them…
… Claes Oldenburg dies at the age of 93… i was not a big fan, my interests run more to rendering the sublime… but, that i have always been aware of his work says something…
Claes Oldenburg, best known for his large, playful works of everyday objects — from a clothespin and a flashlight to a baseball bat and a fried egg — died on the morning of Monday, July 18 at his home in Manhattan, where he was recovering from a hip injury last month. He was 93. The artist’s death was confirmed by Paula Cooper and Pace, the two galleries that have long represented him.
… reading a review of a book about female art monsters… Letters to Gwen John, by Celia Paul… Ceila Paul was the lover/muse of Lucien Freud… Gwen John was the lover/muse of August Rodin… both had art ambitions… Gwen John, Rodin aside, had the greater dedication it appears… she conceived and birthed a child which she promptly turned over to her mother so she would not be distracted by motherhood… Paul decided to become a mother… just now, H’s mother comes to mind…
John organized her life much like the archetypal male art monster, severing family ties and forgoing marriage and children. Any other way of life, in her view, would be antithetical to art. Just as a monk renounces earthly pleasures to access the divine, the artist sequesters herself to access genius. “Your goal was Great Art,” Paul writes to John, “and you knew you had to make sacrifices to attain it.” John would have been disinterested in — if not repulsed by — Paul’s decision to become a mother, despite the untraditional rationale behind it. Her pregnancy was an act of beneficence: “I had wanted to get pregnant so that I could comfort my mother, who was grieving for my father,” she writes.
… i have tried to be dedicated as a photographic artist… i have struggled to do that lately… i am trying to give up alcohol so the struggle is less… i am trying to get back to the creative routines that have sustained me… i am trying to overcome H’s indifference and sometimes hostility to my art practice…
… Dia art workers seeking a Union… this has become something of an epidemic in the art world… i am guessing it is much needed… unions in general seem to be resurgent…
Approximately 135 part-time and full-time workers at the Dia Art Foundation petitioned to unionize with Local 2110 UAW on Friday, July 15. Their organizing efforts are the latest in a wave that has swept cultural institutions across the nation, with recent labor developments at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
… low wages are cited though they are paid a minimum wage of $16 an hour… the article is poorly written getting some factual information wrong… like locating Storm King Art Center in Beacon, which it is not… across the river, yes… not in Beacon… did i say i live in Beacon?…
… a review(?) of a novel published 90 years ago… Now in November by Josephine Johnson… set during the great depression, won the Pulitzer Prize… youngest person to ever win the prize, one of the too few women to win it…
This is the same America that loves a good bootstrapper success story, but this trope Johnson sidesteps, focusing instead on the precariousness of working-class life, when a slip, a fall, a burn, or a broken bone can begin a slow slide, the way the cost of medical care and absence of a social safety net still sink working people today. The shame of watching others suffer without being able to help weighs heavily.
… the horridness of the extreme conservative republicans, who would do away with that social safety net and condemn poor people to servitude…
In many ways, the drought and devastation of the Dust Bowl in Now in November rhyme with our modern experiences of climate change, when a tipped electric line can send a tidal wave of flames surging across the landscape, licking hundreds of homes from the map.
… did you know the Gimlet cocktail originated, at least in part, as a treatment for scurvy?… i did not… excerpts from the book, Doctors and Distillers, The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails, by Camper English…
Proposed antiscorbutics (scurvy preventatives or cures) included rice, beans, sulfuric acid, vinegar, molasses, cinchona bark, mustard, opium, mercury, rhubarb, hops, juniper berries, seal carcass oil, scurvy grass, and especially sauerkraut or horseradish. Fermented beverages like spruce beer, regular beer, and cider, plus fizzy soda water and rum punch were quite often employed. So was gargling with urine, which probably didn’t help with the foul-breath issue. Other ineffective treatments included purgatives, bleeding, sweating, bathing in animal blood, and—surprisingly often—burial of a person up to the neck in sand.
Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial is used in place of fresh lime juice in some dive bars and homes, though it contains sweeteners, preservatives, and added coloring. The ingredient was immortalized in Raymond Chandler’s 1953 book The Long Goodbye, in which a character states, “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.”
… i am amazed at how many bad mistakes i find in articles from supposedly serious places about thoughtful things… i mean, mistakes that one re-reading for editing purposes by author or other should catch… and many are articles that had no reason to be rushed to print… what gives?…
… more reading of Hannah Arendt…
… an article on inflation and climate change… it feels we are heading to a bad time on that front…
In Italy, the hot and dry conditions are expected to destroy a third of the seasonal harvest of rice, corn, and animal fodder — at a minimum. Locusts have descended on the island of Sardinia in the worst invasion in three decades, hurting the production of hay and alfalfa. The European Commission recently downgraded its soft-wheat harvest estimates from 130 million tons to 125 million tons—more bad news amid a food shortage precipitated by Russia’s blockade on exports from Ukraine. (Russia and Ukraine are among the world’s biggest exporters of grain.)
Across the world in China, a record-breaking heat wave is causing major problems. Roofs are melting, residents are relocating to public cooling zones in underground air-raid shelters, and health workers are strapping frozen food to their too-hot hazmat suits. The Central Meteorological Observatory in Tokyo has warned that the heat could further hurt the production of corn and soy, worsening inflation. These crops are used to feed pigs, and early-season failures have already sent the price of pork, China’s staple meat, soaring.
… the desktop computer still pretty slow and crashed on me once… but i got some photos edited from this morning… not a stellar batch but a few good ones…
Heather Cox Richardson, July 18, 2022
Claes Oldenburg, Whose Sculptures Transformed the Everyday, Dies at 93
“A Book About Thirst.” Josephine Johnson’s 1934 Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novel
Searing Summer Heat is Driving Food Prices Higher Still. @Denny, this was among the articles I read this AM. It is very concerning. Big trouble on the horizon.
Letters to Gwen, Celia Paul. Two dedicated women artist, one the muse of Rodin, the other the muse of Lucian Freud, with all that entails. Sounds like a very interesting read.
Claes Oldenburg, Whose Sculptures Transformed the Everyday, Dies at 93. Not my favorite artist but I certainly knew who he was.
How Trying to Find a Cure for Scurvy Led to the Gimlet. Not my favoriite cocktail but an interesting story none-the-less.
July 16, 2022…
… no weigh in today… partying last night… the numbers won’t be good… tomorrow… good time with E, B, M and J last night… we decided to do meat chickens and B has ordered… harvest in mid October… 10 chickens to freeze, almost one per month… i wonder about starting them in the high heat part of the summer but… most of them will survive to harvest… i read my journal entries for the week… i don’t feel like writing by hand… i like the feeling of pen on paper but i don’t like that it’s not digital and transferable to anywhere else…
… i have been thinking about what gives life meaning… why my life seems to be devoid of it right now… one thought… the Enlightenment Humanist world order i have been enmeshed in is unraveling… it feels quite possible, even likely, that the USA will succumb to the dark side of its nature… HCR wrote this morning about the failure to hold the south accountable after the Civil War… this has led to festering resentment for nearly two centuries… the situation we are in now… she notes the importance of holding people accountable, that we didn’t do so then… paying the price for it now… she notes we are trying to do so now…
… a woman telling loud-talking-barista her eyes are “so blue” with the top she has on… the woman sounds African American to me… i wonder if i am right… i am waiting for her to move to a place where i can see her… she does… she is not… so much for voice as a race identifier…
… annoying music…
… monkey pox is in the news… i look up how it is transmitted… by close contact with someone who has it… not through the air…
… time to go…
… later…
… thinking about making photos with small details that are easily missed but the reason the photograph is made…
… we’ve been seeing lots of fireflies in the evening… i look them up and Wikipedia informs me they are in worldwide decline… this makes the current show more remarkable… we must go out and watch the show… it may disappear one day and never come back… children will loose another source of wonder…
… doing a clean install of the operating system… hoping for improved performance… will install apps one by one to see if any of them have been the cause of slow performance…
… about 12 minutes…
… 8 billion people before the end of the year…
… growth continues despite being a bad idea…
Rediscovered Beat-Era Artist Rick Barton’s Drawings Publicly Showcased for the First Time
Barton is essentially a diarist chronicling the highs and lows of his life, his love of classical music, his visits to Mexico and Barcelona, and his feelings of both desire and isolation. Although he was particularly interested in church facades and interiors, he seemed to draw whatever was in front of him wherever he was; it was his way of organizing the interior and exterior chaos of his life.
… the sadness of not being noticed until after death overtakes you… what is the meaning of that?… what is the message to all people in that…
Towards a Post Capitalist Future
And while the degrowth movement is clearly progressive or even largely anti-capitalist, there are few books exploring degrowth from a perspective explicitly critical of capitalism that engages with wider debates on the left—that is, one that sees systems of domination such as patriarchy, colonialism, imperialism, racism, and capitalism as the central, structural problems facing us today.
… could there be a more inelegant word than ‘degrowth’?…
… and now installing LR… taking a long time… so far, with apps i installed, the computer seems to be running more smoothly… adobe products the big test…
… love the idea of subject being tiny… then there is the endless sea… point of the picture?…
Ewan Terlford, The Ecology of Dreams
… i wanted to remember this body of work…
Sean Lotman, The Sniper Paused to Wipe His Brow
… the title of the book got me on this one…
… creative cloud app taking looong time to load… relaunched to see if that made a difference… the relaunch worked… so far, nothing appearing in the launch pad…
Brian Rose, Four Seasons Total Landscaping
… this one because of the 45 connection…
The Complicated Place of Men in the Abortion Debates
As a man who once was in a difficult marriage where a pregnancy occurred and was aborted, I found this article had some interesting things to say about the male side of things.
Liz Cheney for President?
I have been having the thought, frequently and steadily, that a Liz Cheney run for President might be the best pathway to holding on to our Republic and the freedoms that we have enjoyed for so long.
The odds of her being nominated seem long to me. However, if she threw her hat in the ring, I think we might want to help her. And by we, I mean centrist independents and moderate Democrats.
I say this knowing that she holds policy positions that are antithetical to a lot of what I believe in. My calculation is this. At present, the political landscape looks poor for Democrats in 2022 and in 2024. The Biden administration currently has a very low approval rating and conditions don’t look good for improvement in the next two and a half years. We may be looking at a scenario where, even setting aside the state level voting shenanigans, it is going to be difficult for Democrats to win the presidency again. Hopefully this will improve, but it’s prudent to think about the what ifs.
So far, the front runner for the Republican nomination is 45. It’s possible that the 1/6 committee is making a dent in his support, but it remains strong, grounded in willful ignorance as it is. The other alternatives, so far, are Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbot. I have no confidence that either of them would be the kind of reverent constitutionalist that Cheney is. We are talking about the survival of the republic here and Cheney is the only one I trust on the Republican side to insure that.
I am convinced that we cannot allow a MAGA Republican to win the presidency in 2024. I am pretty sure any such candidate will shred the constitution while in office. Certainly 45 would.
Add to this mix that 45 and his MAGA horde are gunning for a constitutional crisis should he (or DeSantis or Abbot) be nominated but loose.
Bottom line, a MAGA candidate either wins and then causes a constitutional crisis, or they loose and cause a constitutional crisis. Both scenarios are grim.
On the other hand, should Cheney find a way to capture the nomination, she can be counted on to uphold the constitution in victory or defeat. And, I would argue, if you really want to return the Republican party to an honorable and reasonable participant in our two party system, she needs to win. The non-MAGA Republicans will need that validation for her principled conservatism to be viable. She also needs time as leader of the party to clean out the worst of the MAGA rats.
If she were to be nominated, run and loose, we would avoid a constitutional crisis. However, a loss would allow the MAGA folk to continue to fester and the party could easily swing to the dark side again.
I have been conducting my own non-scientific survey of liberal friends and, interestingly, many of them are having the same thoughts I am. Recently I read an article in the New York Times about the major Democratic donors that are supporting Cheney in her fight to keep her house seat in 2022. We have all come to the same conclusion, Cheney is looking like a clear pathway out of the disaster we are heading for.
The question independents and liberals will need to ask themselves if she is the Republican nominee in 2024, who is best positioned to save the Republic? And if the answer is Liz Cheney, can we play the long game and overcome our aversion to her policies and vote for her? The choice to me is Cheney now and live to fight for a more liberal society another day. The alternative could seal off any possibility of the multicultural society we have been heading for, for a very long time.
Tha apple install time calculation must operate in a parallel universe moving near the speed of light…
About to embark on a clean install of the Monterey OS on my desktop computer. Backups made. Boot disc made. It’s go time.
No end to the crazy…
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — an avid conspiracist herself — said the stones represented a plan for population control from the “hard left.” QAnon conspiracies have also swirled around the Guidestones.
Forget Abortion, Democrats Should be Messaging About Birth Control
For Democrats who are passionately pro-choice, here is a hard truth: You are not going to turn the scores of millions of voters who find the topic uncomfortable into militant pro-choice activists…
Take Away the President’s Immunity
You think?…
Various motivations may feed into Trump’s electoral calculation for 2024, but one in particular is coming into focus. In seeking office, he would be seeking legal immunity.
Pro-Choicer, Pro-Lifer Do Lunch
…among Americans 50 and older, women outnumber men among those who identify as pro-life. It’s hard to credit that all of those American women, most of whom came of age in a feminist, post-Roe era, are motivated by a desire to subjugate themselves.
Promising Signs from the NATO Summit
At last week’s NATO summit in Madrid, the alliance issued a formal Strategic Concept that is striking for its coherence and focus.
The Best Photobooks from Les Recontres d Arles, 2022
Dayanita Singh: “a book is a conversation with a stranger in the future.”