MY CHILDHOOD FRIEND DEAN TORGES posed a question for me on his fine blog, www.bowyersedge.com. He said:
I regret not asking a question of old men when I was a boy. When they told me, “I wish I knew at your age what I know now,” I regret not prompting them. Several times it happened, always in the company of assembled friends, but not once did I or anyone else ask, “What is it that you know now, Mister? Is it about opportunity? Does it concern confidence or nerve? Something about Standard Oil stock certificates? What? I want to know.”
They understood that we hung on their next words, yet not one of them ever volunteered further information. Instead, they smiled and went silent, outlasting our attention.
These old men were not talking about future events played to an advantage, but about perspective and understanding, something profound, some pearl of wisdom. This much I was sure of and no more. Since I was new to life compared to them, I reasoned that perhaps I was not ready for such wisdom. After all, life lessons worth knowing can’t be told or taught, right?
Dean and I both knew those old guys, elders we respected for their chops – skills in rabbit hunting or frog-gigging or simply making money. We saw this money skill from our perspective as boys – it allowed them to have some of the free time we had, time we knew would be stolen when we were thrust into citizenship. We saw hunting skill as God-given: a man could be blessed enough to be a hunter. Or a woodworker, or an artisan who had God in his fingertips. We knew those old guys but we didn't know much about them. In short, we knew shit.
Why couldn’t they impart their wisdom to us? Why can’t we impart our wisdom to our grandsons, Varmint and Max? Dean’s question heated up my brainpan and my roundabout thoughts have forced me way out on a limb. I must hypothesize from this thin and bendy perch.
I’m going to begin back a piece, because I believe that elders of the tribe once transferred wisdom to young men as part of their manhood rites. But only as far back as World War I for now.
The overwhelming lesson of World War I was that we can’t trust tradition, anointed authority, or royalty. The Great War was largely fought among three grandsons of Queen Victoria: George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, and Czar Nicholas, and Kaiser Bill was Vic’s favorite. The calamitous losses of a war which had no real goals or even a sensible cause were disillusioning and drove a generation out of its comfortable emotional attachment to the familiar. The result was stark modernism, functionalism, reduction. During the Third Battle of Artois (One and Two seem to have been preludes) the Entente Forces lost 86,000 British troops and 250,000 French Troops for a temporary gain of a few hundred yards. The nonsensical official reports of victories costing millions of men for negligible territorial or strategic gain disconnected a generation from any trust they might place in institutions. Cubism, Dadaism, twelve-tone music and the hard-boiled detective novel were post-war products of a disillusioned age.
World War II disillusioned the next generation in another way. It was a more egalitarian conflict with clearer lines drawn between fascism and liberalism (the definitions of these two creeds have changed radically since then). But this war caused another disconnect: the system doesn’t work. The simultaneous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and U.S. bases all over the Pacific revealed that our Navy and intelligence services were completely bamboozled by a second-rate power. Then that strange oriental nation kept the upper hand for the next three years. More confusion: our Communist enemy, Uncle Joe Stalin, became (suddenly, inexplicably, by fiat) our friend and favorite charity. Invasion operations in Dieppe and Norway were total cockups; we couldn’t get it right. Our Atlantic convoys were nightmarish slaughters. The attrition rate for “precision daylight bombing,” something our experienced allies refused to do, approached 100% for the tour of 20 missions. D-Day, the Great Invasion, was such a SNAFU that our toehold on the continent was tenuous for weeks. In those weeks after D-Day our troops moving inland were confronted with the bocáge, impenetrable and stubbornly defensible hedgerows. Our crack aerial photo analysts had assured invasion troops that the hedgerows (most topping 20’) were minor obstacles, only about three feet high. We couldn’t get anything right. Without the USSR’s seemingly unlimited capacity to bleed, we would have surely sought terms with Chancellor Hitler. Men in charge, systems, experts, generals, boards, agencies – never got it right. World War II was one unexpected FUBAR ("fucked up beyond all recognition") after another from Pearl Harbor to the Battle of the Bulge. We couldn’t trust anyone.
The old men we knew were veterans of that conflict or at least that time. Perhaps they had wisdom, but they didn’t trust it. They didn’t trust any obvious truth because they’d seen so many truths die quickly. They were a saddened, cynical generation with a hard shell of “well, we won on a technicality, and the best revenge is to live well.”
But we're not them. Why can’t we impart our wisdom? Let’s go to another war and another time. In the 70’s we shot ourselves in the foot, Dean. Our generation, appalled by the purely political wars in Korea, Cuba, the Congo, and Viet Nam, rejected any “wisdom” from anyone over thirty. We established a Youth Generation. We insisted that given truths were always tainted by politics and corporate manipulation (this happens to be largely true of national truths). We were a “free” generation, open to anything new, rejecting worn-out morality and polite society, questioning both etiquette and hygiene, exalting style over content, adoring the “natural” as achievable by common sense and gut feeling. We cried up youth as a magic time of inherent wisdom that needed no external input. Especially from pigs, honkeys, Tricky Dicks, or war-mongers. We rejected anything the old guys were willing to pass on.
And now we’re the old guys, Dean. We created a youth culture, then grew out of it. I believe we’re actually embarrassed to have an opinion, or to pass on a set of skills. Our young men have no rites of passage into the tribe. Hell, Dean, there ain’t no tribe. It’s every man for himself.
There’s also a cultural certainty that men (compared to women) are foolish, childish, toy- and sex-obsessed, and probably unnecessary when genetics catch up to female superiority. What could they possibly offer young men except more foolishness?
We had a liberal desire to make a better, fairer world, Dean. Out of our fear for crumbling governmental institutions and bumbling authority figures, we have succeeded in writing ourselves out of subsequent scenes. We’ve become the drones. Honestly, I’d looked forward to being a white, Anglo-Saxon, domineering, triumphant male. Nope. It didn’t work out that way. History and our own best instincts torpedoed me.
In order to pass our wisdom on to Varmint and Max, you and I must embrace the importance of what we know. Not many men, in this helter-skelter culture, are brave enough to claim the importance of their intellectual heritage for fear of sudden and derisive denial. Can we sort through thae (considerable) backlog of skills we’ve acquired and settle on the unimpeachably important things our grandsons need? Can we create the rites of passage that prepare young men to receive wisdom? Can we get away with it?
I’m betting we can, for Max’s and Varmint’s sake. We’re the elders now and though our forebears were reluctant to pass on truths tainted by their crushing experience, we have an obligation to find our own assurance, somehow.
A few years ago I sailed on a racing cruise with my dear, incarcerated John Carter. We shipped a crew of ringers – young, strong men picked for their racing experience. Several were Olympic small-boat sailors, all were marvelously beefy deck apes. The first night out I insisted that they sit down to supper instead of take their plates on deck. I discovered that none of them had actually dined with their parents and families. After dinner we had a bit more wine, some poetry, cigars, and civilized talk. The boys were astonished, in thrall. They’d never been part of a formal male gathering with intellectual content and gentle rules of decorum. One of the boys finally spoke up, admitted that he'd never really had the opportunity to sit down with his father or any other adult male in a quiet, conversational atmosphere. Then he said something remarkable, “You guys are, like, grown up. Men. You’ve been, like, around.” We nodded grimly, thinking we had the scars to prove it. Then the boy said, “What’s all this business … about … women?”
Well, what could we say? Perhaps nothing in the absolute truth line but it surprised us later because we had some sound advice and some valuable warnings. It was even important that the boys knew we had shared their confusion and had taken the same perilous journey toward love, had crashed and burned, and it was important that we recognized that they’d do their share of crashing and burning.
So let’s take this as a parable. If we can find the right venue, the right time, and if we know what our young men need from us, we may be able to impart wisdom that, yes, will make their journeys easier. This is a truth in itself.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
That was an extraordinary evening afloat. The boys were bright. Because they had been involved in class and club racing they were accustomed to mature men, even if most of them were shouting skippers and selfish louts. So they were primed to receive something from men. It's doubtful if less worldly and less accomplished boys (winning many races built their assurance) would be as receptive. I'm not sure Himself is justified in his belief that he and Dean Torges can transfer wisdom. It's probable that a "normal" late teenager would be gravely bored by dinner, poetry, discussion and intellectual pursuits without benefit of digital enhancement.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Friday, March 19, 2010
NIGHT STUFF
My naps are precious to me: gourmet sleep. Yesterday I had one of my best naps. This flu cycles on and on like World War I, control ebbing and flowing between my macrophages and the viri, so I’m mostly tired. Having completed a piece for WoodenBoat I took my little fleece blanket and walked into the Big House backyard. I rolled into the rope hammock at the far end of the yard, tucked the blanket up under my head, covered my eyes with my battered Panama hat, and slept for an hour in the gently swinging hammock. The air was like wine, the temperature perfect, and breeze light, and the sun was filtered through leaves. God smiled on me and I slept as peacefully as a boy.
This morning I was awakened by the hardest working piece of local equipment I know of – a little John Deere six-wheeled, motorized utility cart owned by Maragus Stables across the road. The Hispanic ostler is up and working before sunrise. I heard him this morning at 0530h and put on my glasses to watch the lights of the cart scuttle around the paddocks. I opened the window by the bed to hear the ragged purring of its engine. He was giving the horses their morning flakes of green-flecked alfalfa hay.
Sometimes they wake at night in their standing sleep and kick the backs of their stalls or ring the galvanized pipe fencing with their iron shoes, peevish for some equine reason. Humph, “reason” isn’t a quality I associate with horses; they’re not intelligent animals like a dog or a dolphin but herd creatures bound by strict codes of behavior. A few of them have been trained against their herd instincts to be useful in ways, and any riding horse has had its natural balance (usually on the forefeet) readjusted to carry weight on four legs. They can be domesticated but not brought into real communication. So I don’t attribute high-jinks in horses to cleverness or spite but merely to herd protocol reasserting itself in some obscure way.
The cart made its dark rounds, and it’s making it day rounds in the full sunlight now, the day-guy picking up horseapples with his plastic mucking rake and tossing the rich, hardly processed dung in the cart’s tipping back. He’ll run it 150 yards up Wildwood Lane and vector off to the north side of the Lane where at least a hundred tons of horse manure – what must be an obscure fortune in nutrient – age. The Maragus property is a long slice from the road to the edge of the woods where the manure heaps are, just where the hills begin mounting abruptly to the ridge behind us, in our southwest. That’s the ridge that separates Novato from Lucas Valley; George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch is just over the long, descending spine stepping down to 101.
The time before sunrise, before that magical time the Prudent Mariner knows as “nautical twilight,” is dangerous territory for reflection. For a person like me with odd sleep habits – and maybe old guys’ sleep habits are always odd – seeing the lights of any job activity actually underscores the alienation of night dwellers like me. It often backs me into acknowledging just how far outside the mainstream of life I am, how little I share with my fellow citizens. If anyone at the bank or the grocery could see my life written on my forehead I suppose they’d be mildly shocked that I’m not one of them. I don’t have a job, per se, but a self-marketing profession with remarkably little paperwork. Much less, I’m sure, than the bank and the IRS would advise. I have digital trails of iteration and reiteration of my designs and my texts as progressive digital files. There’s a big cardboard folder of original pencil drawings that have been scanned as working files to be wrangled with PhotoShop and Illustrator into products. Much of the production work has been done long past the bedtime of sensible citizens who prepare themselves for sleep an hour or two before midnight.
Occasionally at the end of a late session I walk outside and look at the stars. I’ve turned the movement-activated light outside my door off so I’m not greeted with a nasty flash, and I know how far I can walk up or down the side-drive before the backyard lights or the garage front lights see my heat signature and flash on. For some reason I can almost always see Orion in the celestial lane above the black line of roof to my northeast and the ragged line of poplars to my southwest. I’d go farther and even walk down the road but I’m fenced in like the horses by the danger of a disappointing, intrusive, rude glare of suspicion from the who-are-you front lights.
It’s dangerous to feel so alien and hemmed in and uncollegial. I should live in a village where the grocer and hardware clerk know me and anchor me to life with small talk. I think I’d enjoy having a payroll clerk deduct taxes from my paycheck, and have folks tell me what we were doing. I believe I’d look forward to lunches with various people and to jokes and to family news.
The time before nautical twilight reminds me that at my age, at my level of skill, in my profession/s, I’m unemployable in any practical sense. My collegial time is used up. I’ve become a troll keeping odd hours and wondering about other alienated souls in the dark.
My friend Pat Gavin, the cop, habitually preferred solitary night shifts. His view of humanity was a bit jaundiced: he said that after one in the morning a cop seldom meets anyone who isn’t drunk. In DC I often saw him going on shift or coming off. When I hugged him – he was a very dear friend and one of the best men I’ve known – I’d feel the stiffness of his Kevlar bulletproof vest under his uniform shirt. He’d been shot before, almost fatally, and you could expect that Kevlar as part of his hug.
It would be useful to have some “on-line now” notice on e-mail or some social web program, to know how many of one’s friends – cops, painters, writers, designers – were up and about, someone who might enjoy a chat or even a cuppa.
Carl Sandburg captured night people very well in one of my favorite poems, “Psalm Of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight.”
THE POLICEMAN buys shoes slow and careful;
the teamster buys gloves slow and careful;
they take care of their feet and hands;
they live on their feet and hands.
The milkman never argues;
he works alone and no one speaks to him;
the city is asleep when he is on the job;
he puts a bottle on six hundred porches and calls it a day’s work;
he climbs two hundred wooden stairways;
two horses are company for him;
he never argues.
The rolling-mill men and the sheet-steel men are brothers of cinders;
they empty cinders out of their shoes after the day’s work;
they ask their wives to fix burnt holes in the knees of their trousers;
their necks and ears are covered with a smut;
they scour their necks and ears;
they are brothers of cinders.
CARL SANDBURG, Cornhuskers, 1918
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself is several kinds of fool, as soft-hearted and well-meaning as he is. He should get to bed and get his life into synchronus with life and people. He should get out and avoid reflections on alienation. We're all alone on our own iceberg. It does little good to emphasize that fate.
This morning I was awakened by the hardest working piece of local equipment I know of – a little John Deere six-wheeled, motorized utility cart owned by Maragus Stables across the road. The Hispanic ostler is up and working before sunrise. I heard him this morning at 0530h and put on my glasses to watch the lights of the cart scuttle around the paddocks. I opened the window by the bed to hear the ragged purring of its engine. He was giving the horses their morning flakes of green-flecked alfalfa hay.
Sometimes they wake at night in their standing sleep and kick the backs of their stalls or ring the galvanized pipe fencing with their iron shoes, peevish for some equine reason. Humph, “reason” isn’t a quality I associate with horses; they’re not intelligent animals like a dog or a dolphin but herd creatures bound by strict codes of behavior. A few of them have been trained against their herd instincts to be useful in ways, and any riding horse has had its natural balance (usually on the forefeet) readjusted to carry weight on four legs. They can be domesticated but not brought into real communication. So I don’t attribute high-jinks in horses to cleverness or spite but merely to herd protocol reasserting itself in some obscure way.
The cart made its dark rounds, and it’s making it day rounds in the full sunlight now, the day-guy picking up horseapples with his plastic mucking rake and tossing the rich, hardly processed dung in the cart’s tipping back. He’ll run it 150 yards up Wildwood Lane and vector off to the north side of the Lane where at least a hundred tons of horse manure – what must be an obscure fortune in nutrient – age. The Maragus property is a long slice from the road to the edge of the woods where the manure heaps are, just where the hills begin mounting abruptly to the ridge behind us, in our southwest. That’s the ridge that separates Novato from Lucas Valley; George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch is just over the long, descending spine stepping down to 101.
The time before sunrise, before that magical time the Prudent Mariner knows as “nautical twilight,” is dangerous territory for reflection. For a person like me with odd sleep habits – and maybe old guys’ sleep habits are always odd – seeing the lights of any job activity actually underscores the alienation of night dwellers like me. It often backs me into acknowledging just how far outside the mainstream of life I am, how little I share with my fellow citizens. If anyone at the bank or the grocery could see my life written on my forehead I suppose they’d be mildly shocked that I’m not one of them. I don’t have a job, per se, but a self-marketing profession with remarkably little paperwork. Much less, I’m sure, than the bank and the IRS would advise. I have digital trails of iteration and reiteration of my designs and my texts as progressive digital files. There’s a big cardboard folder of original pencil drawings that have been scanned as working files to be wrangled with PhotoShop and Illustrator into products. Much of the production work has been done long past the bedtime of sensible citizens who prepare themselves for sleep an hour or two before midnight.
Occasionally at the end of a late session I walk outside and look at the stars. I’ve turned the movement-activated light outside my door off so I’m not greeted with a nasty flash, and I know how far I can walk up or down the side-drive before the backyard lights or the garage front lights see my heat signature and flash on. For some reason I can almost always see Orion in the celestial lane above the black line of roof to my northeast and the ragged line of poplars to my southwest. I’d go farther and even walk down the road but I’m fenced in like the horses by the danger of a disappointing, intrusive, rude glare of suspicion from the who-are-you front lights.
It’s dangerous to feel so alien and hemmed in and uncollegial. I should live in a village where the grocer and hardware clerk know me and anchor me to life with small talk. I think I’d enjoy having a payroll clerk deduct taxes from my paycheck, and have folks tell me what we were doing. I believe I’d look forward to lunches with various people and to jokes and to family news.
The time before nautical twilight reminds me that at my age, at my level of skill, in my profession/s, I’m unemployable in any practical sense. My collegial time is used up. I’ve become a troll keeping odd hours and wondering about other alienated souls in the dark.
My friend Pat Gavin, the cop, habitually preferred solitary night shifts. His view of humanity was a bit jaundiced: he said that after one in the morning a cop seldom meets anyone who isn’t drunk. In DC I often saw him going on shift or coming off. When I hugged him – he was a very dear friend and one of the best men I’ve known – I’d feel the stiffness of his Kevlar bulletproof vest under his uniform shirt. He’d been shot before, almost fatally, and you could expect that Kevlar as part of his hug.
It would be useful to have some “on-line now” notice on e-mail or some social web program, to know how many of one’s friends – cops, painters, writers, designers – were up and about, someone who might enjoy a chat or even a cuppa.
Carl Sandburg captured night people very well in one of my favorite poems, “Psalm Of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight.”
THE POLICEMAN buys shoes slow and careful;
the teamster buys gloves slow and careful;
they take care of their feet and hands;
they live on their feet and hands.
The milkman never argues;
he works alone and no one speaks to him;
the city is asleep when he is on the job;
he puts a bottle on six hundred porches and calls it a day’s work;
he climbs two hundred wooden stairways;
two horses are company for him;
he never argues.
The rolling-mill men and the sheet-steel men are brothers of cinders;
they empty cinders out of their shoes after the day’s work;
they ask their wives to fix burnt holes in the knees of their trousers;
their necks and ears are covered with a smut;
they scour their necks and ears;
they are brothers of cinders.
CARL SANDBURG, Cornhuskers, 1918
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself is several kinds of fool, as soft-hearted and well-meaning as he is. He should get to bed and get his life into synchronus with life and people. He should get out and avoid reflections on alienation. We're all alone on our own iceberg. It does little good to emphasize that fate.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
THE TIMES
This short comment overlaps the sentiment of my former blog. It was posted to the New York Times this afternoon as a comment on the David Brooks – Dick Cavett "discussion" comparing the present United States to Rome on the brink of its fall from greatness.
The "fall of Rome" appears in most textbooks (chirpily certain, oversimplistic, No Child Left Unbored) in 476CE and is attributed to the invasion of the Germanic barbarians. Of course Rome didn't fall; it moved. "The grandeur that was Rome" had scuttled east to Constantinople on the Bosporus much earlier, taking the Empire's center of power with it. Rome, itself, was left in the hands of the Germanic mercenaries who made up its military force. Blackwater, Incorporated, in Latin. Expectably, the privatized military deposed the Western emperor without difficulty. The larger power of the Eastern Empire gave it little notice. The citizens of Rome were accustomed to powerplay ups and downs and went on with Roman life. The outlying Empire was probably unaware of the shift for many years.
The Fall of the U.S. Empire won't be as mild and a good deal more confusing. We're probably experiencing it right now. Perhaps it's a good thing in some ways. We've stopped manufacturing our own goods (find an American wrench in a hardware store) and we're unwilling to discipline our habits. Not even our hophead addiction to Saudi oil. Our hope lies in our geography: we're a two-ocean nation with an extravagant interior waterway system. We once had the world's most inclusive railway system. We have massive stores of raw materials and noble educational institutions. If we fall, it may be our rebirth. But watch that first step: it's a doozy.
David Brooks began his half of the dialogue by describing a recent assignment that bounced around the U.S., during which he eavesdropped on other airline passengers.
We're all eavesdropping, David, polling day by day among our fellows, sussing out the mood of the time.
Most of us sense an unrest and dissatisfaction that never quite comes to action as it might have in the 60's. We're not outraged, taking to the streets, waving signs and sniffing tear gas. This mood is more alienating than binding. Most of us are hamstrung by a disquiet that amounts to despair. We shut down and shrink the world around us to something small enough, manageable, understandable. We contemplate our own navels more studiously, avoiding anything more than an occasional reflexive snarl at the news.
Some read this as the pampered narcissism of our time. More likely it's the way we avoid facts we don't want to face: the system is broken. The center will not hold.
We've seen the most spectacularly inept President in our history rampage across our national values and laws without check. We paused to elect what should have been a shining contrast to stupidity. But how much change occurred? This was the breakback blow, that Obama is merely another pol-chosen pol. The broken system is too powerful. We're all trying to avoid the awful truth that the bipartisan wrangling of Congress and flurries of temper from the White House are opera – a colorful distraction from the single party that controls the comedy-drama masks of the left and right wings.
There is only one party: corporate money that funds both parties and owns them, a strangely small cadre of power brokers at the center. It's not a conspiracy; corporate interests simply get what they need. They paid for it. And they pay for the razzle-dazzle of partisan politics as a smokescreen.
Our despair comes from the knowledge that we aren't part of a democracy – the candidates are chosen for us by the parties, really one party beneath the surface. When we were given the choice between two Skull-and-Bonesmen we should have smelled a rat. Or earlier when the wholly undistinguished, unqualified, ungraceful son of a recent President mysteriously gained in the polls.
This isn't a country "by the people, for the people." If we acknowledge this crushing and obvious truth, we're doomed. What do we do when the system is broken, all-powerful and doesn't act in our interest? If we even named that truth, we'd be left with the task of completely rebuilding a new system, culture, matrix of life. Unthinkable. So we accept by silence our lives in a chaotic but totalitarian state directed by quarterly profit and status quo which will grind on until the last penny is collected. Of course we're sad and listless. We've lost hope.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself is still convalescing from a nasty flu. He's eaten nothing but chicken soup for almost a week. Naturally his mood is dyspeptic. Perhaps when he's recovered and hiking again, he'll resume his natural boyish ebullience and write about daffodils and birdsong and food. He's probably right about this decline but it was always so. His grandfather, a peppery and obnoxious man in his day, was certain that everything was going to hell in a handbasket. Has the situation changed? Impossible to say. At least the threat of nuclear obliteration seems to be off the table.
The "fall of Rome" appears in most textbooks (chirpily certain, oversimplistic, No Child Left Unbored) in 476CE and is attributed to the invasion of the Germanic barbarians. Of course Rome didn't fall; it moved. "The grandeur that was Rome" had scuttled east to Constantinople on the Bosporus much earlier, taking the Empire's center of power with it. Rome, itself, was left in the hands of the Germanic mercenaries who made up its military force. Blackwater, Incorporated, in Latin. Expectably, the privatized military deposed the Western emperor without difficulty. The larger power of the Eastern Empire gave it little notice. The citizens of Rome were accustomed to powerplay ups and downs and went on with Roman life. The outlying Empire was probably unaware of the shift for many years.
The Fall of the U.S. Empire won't be as mild and a good deal more confusing. We're probably experiencing it right now. Perhaps it's a good thing in some ways. We've stopped manufacturing our own goods (find an American wrench in a hardware store) and we're unwilling to discipline our habits. Not even our hophead addiction to Saudi oil. Our hope lies in our geography: we're a two-ocean nation with an extravagant interior waterway system. We once had the world's most inclusive railway system. We have massive stores of raw materials and noble educational institutions. If we fall, it may be our rebirth. But watch that first step: it's a doozy.
David Brooks began his half of the dialogue by describing a recent assignment that bounced around the U.S., during which he eavesdropped on other airline passengers.
We're all eavesdropping, David, polling day by day among our fellows, sussing out the mood of the time.
Most of us sense an unrest and dissatisfaction that never quite comes to action as it might have in the 60's. We're not outraged, taking to the streets, waving signs and sniffing tear gas. This mood is more alienating than binding. Most of us are hamstrung by a disquiet that amounts to despair. We shut down and shrink the world around us to something small enough, manageable, understandable. We contemplate our own navels more studiously, avoiding anything more than an occasional reflexive snarl at the news.
Some read this as the pampered narcissism of our time. More likely it's the way we avoid facts we don't want to face: the system is broken. The center will not hold.
We've seen the most spectacularly inept President in our history rampage across our national values and laws without check. We paused to elect what should have been a shining contrast to stupidity. But how much change occurred? This was the breakback blow, that Obama is merely another pol-chosen pol. The broken system is too powerful. We're all trying to avoid the awful truth that the bipartisan wrangling of Congress and flurries of temper from the White House are opera – a colorful distraction from the single party that controls the comedy-drama masks of the left and right wings.
There is only one party: corporate money that funds both parties and owns them, a strangely small cadre of power brokers at the center. It's not a conspiracy; corporate interests simply get what they need. They paid for it. And they pay for the razzle-dazzle of partisan politics as a smokescreen.
Our despair comes from the knowledge that we aren't part of a democracy – the candidates are chosen for us by the parties, really one party beneath the surface. When we were given the choice between two Skull-and-Bonesmen we should have smelled a rat. Or earlier when the wholly undistinguished, unqualified, ungraceful son of a recent President mysteriously gained in the polls.
This isn't a country "by the people, for the people." If we acknowledge this crushing and obvious truth, we're doomed. What do we do when the system is broken, all-powerful and doesn't act in our interest? If we even named that truth, we'd be left with the task of completely rebuilding a new system, culture, matrix of life. Unthinkable. So we accept by silence our lives in a chaotic but totalitarian state directed by quarterly profit and status quo which will grind on until the last penny is collected. Of course we're sad and listless. We've lost hope.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself is still convalescing from a nasty flu. He's eaten nothing but chicken soup for almost a week. Naturally his mood is dyspeptic. Perhaps when he's recovered and hiking again, he'll resume his natural boyish ebullience and write about daffodils and birdsong and food. He's probably right about this decline but it was always so. His grandfather, a peppery and obnoxious man in his day, was certain that everything was going to hell in a handbasket. Has the situation changed? Impossible to say. At least the threat of nuclear obliteration seems to be off the table.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
ALIENATION
A dear friend wrote to me:
I'm disappointed because I literally don't see or hear from any friends anymore. It seems life has swallowed everyone up. I don't think this is the way it is supposed to work. I think we are all missing the point. Isn't work supposed to afford us pleasant experiences with friends and family? It seems my kids and friends are so busy trying to stay afloat there's no time for anything.
This is serious business. Why have we become so alienated? How have our social networks collapsed?
I suspect that we’re all in a seething, quiet panic, circling up the wagons wherever we can, cutting out “extras” like fellowship and sharing in the same way schools are cutting out art and music. My friend is right: it's harder to connect than it was.
The reason for that panic may be that beneath the dollars-and-cents strain of life in a recession or depression we’re confronting an appalling knowledge we don’t wish to recognize. But it's the 500 pound gorilla in the room. We have more and more difficulty ignoring it, now.
The awful truth is that we know in our hearts that the machine is broken. It won’t get better. Obama or Nobama, we get the same corporate government the powerful few choose. Democrats, Republicans, it doesn’t matter – partisanship is a soap opera designed to give us the illusion of debate and struggle toward the right. We know that all our officials are cogs in the corporate juggernaut that dictates our lives.
Remember Jack Nicholson’s character in Easy Rider? He said something like, “It’s hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace. But if you tell people they aren’t free, they’ll get busy killing and maiming to prove that they are.” This incipient panic is dangerous. We will furiously deny that we don’t have freedom and choice. We don’t want to acknowledge that we don’t live in a democracy, that our votes don’t count, and that everything George W. Bush did was backed up by the Democrats. If we admit to ourselves that we’re ants in a game, we won’t have the comfortable illusion of free will. We’re not in charge, not even as a nation of citizens. Our government doesn’t act in our best interests or respond to our needs. Our government has no moral code we can share. We’re ants.
Perhaps the scariest thing about this scenario is that the Corporate Government doesn’t seem to have a plan. It won’t make any steps ahead and insists that we’re jes’ fine as we are. Keep buying, keep driving, keep polluting! What’s good for US Steel is good for the country! The shadowy boardroom figures that run our country don’t seem to have any notion of change or adaptation. We’re past the Hubbard Peak, we’re running out of oil, the world is evolving into a dangerous global puzzle, but the boardroom is concerned only with next quarter’s profits.
The Last Honest Man to sit in the White House may have been Jimmy Carter, who was bold enough to ask citizens to conserve, change their habits, think about energy. He was a one-term president sandbagged by Congress and the Pentagon.
I believe the effort to deny this hidden certainty of disconnect with our institutions is poisoning us. And I believe it affects the way we shrink away from the world, laagered up in our homes, satisfying ourselves with National Idol and Runway Project as fairytale templates for real life. How many kids, 10 to 20, are obsessed by “second life” games in which dire forces can be defeated? How can they submerge themselves in artificial life and ignore real life? Perhaps because their parents haven’t demanded much of them as citizens-in-training. They haven’t been braced by the certainties of discipline, cultural continuity, family structure. They are the chauffeured generation – playdates, soccer, Little League – an entitled generation that realizes there is no up-side to becoming an adult. They know that entering the adult world is giving up on dreams and trekking across a wasteland.
So what can we do about it? We need our friends and we need our families.
I’m opposed to organized religion but I can now see the benefit of the Sabbath, when families presented themselves as a unit before God, the entire nutso, dysfunctional crew. The acceptance of humility and humanity before God is a connecting experience. Kids see their parents bowing to something much larger and mysterious. They feel the spiritual current of shared past, beyond distant ancestors. They confront the mysteries which, I believe, make life less mysterious. But will I hop down to the nearest Methodist Church or synagogue? I will not. Dogma and magic taint the Christian beliefs. The narcissistic buddying up to Jesus taints the Christiam evangelicals. Echoes anguished and embattled tribes in a distant, harsh land taint the cantor’s song.
Honestly, I’m confused. I do believe we should gather in fellowship and joy. We must share our lives so that none of us can feel like the Lone Ranger, which we ain’t. We should resist alienating ourselves (SO damn easy for me to do). In many ways, a lively and thoughtful social life is also a spiritual life, being human with others. Becoming part of the larger web. How do accomplish this in a corrosive time?
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has a talent for welcoming people to his table. He ignores it too much and at his peril. When he groundhogs up he becomes abstract, pedantic, often a ninnyhammer. He is at his best at a table of friends who are talking, arguing, laughing and sharing. What does a dinner cost? Not much compared to the benefits. Why don't more people share themselves? Alienation is the prime poison of our "interesting" time.
I'm disappointed because I literally don't see or hear from any friends anymore. It seems life has swallowed everyone up. I don't think this is the way it is supposed to work. I think we are all missing the point. Isn't work supposed to afford us pleasant experiences with friends and family? It seems my kids and friends are so busy trying to stay afloat there's no time for anything.
This is serious business. Why have we become so alienated? How have our social networks collapsed?
I suspect that we’re all in a seething, quiet panic, circling up the wagons wherever we can, cutting out “extras” like fellowship and sharing in the same way schools are cutting out art and music. My friend is right: it's harder to connect than it was.
The reason for that panic may be that beneath the dollars-and-cents strain of life in a recession or depression we’re confronting an appalling knowledge we don’t wish to recognize. But it's the 500 pound gorilla in the room. We have more and more difficulty ignoring it, now.
The awful truth is that we know in our hearts that the machine is broken. It won’t get better. Obama or Nobama, we get the same corporate government the powerful few choose. Democrats, Republicans, it doesn’t matter – partisanship is a soap opera designed to give us the illusion of debate and struggle toward the right. We know that all our officials are cogs in the corporate juggernaut that dictates our lives.
Remember Jack Nicholson’s character in Easy Rider? He said something like, “It’s hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace. But if you tell people they aren’t free, they’ll get busy killing and maiming to prove that they are.” This incipient panic is dangerous. We will furiously deny that we don’t have freedom and choice. We don’t want to acknowledge that we don’t live in a democracy, that our votes don’t count, and that everything George W. Bush did was backed up by the Democrats. If we admit to ourselves that we’re ants in a game, we won’t have the comfortable illusion of free will. We’re not in charge, not even as a nation of citizens. Our government doesn’t act in our best interests or respond to our needs. Our government has no moral code we can share. We’re ants.
Perhaps the scariest thing about this scenario is that the Corporate Government doesn’t seem to have a plan. It won’t make any steps ahead and insists that we’re jes’ fine as we are. Keep buying, keep driving, keep polluting! What’s good for US Steel is good for the country! The shadowy boardroom figures that run our country don’t seem to have any notion of change or adaptation. We’re past the Hubbard Peak, we’re running out of oil, the world is evolving into a dangerous global puzzle, but the boardroom is concerned only with next quarter’s profits.
The Last Honest Man to sit in the White House may have been Jimmy Carter, who was bold enough to ask citizens to conserve, change their habits, think about energy. He was a one-term president sandbagged by Congress and the Pentagon.
I believe the effort to deny this hidden certainty of disconnect with our institutions is poisoning us. And I believe it affects the way we shrink away from the world, laagered up in our homes, satisfying ourselves with National Idol and Runway Project as fairytale templates for real life. How many kids, 10 to 20, are obsessed by “second life” games in which dire forces can be defeated? How can they submerge themselves in artificial life and ignore real life? Perhaps because their parents haven’t demanded much of them as citizens-in-training. They haven’t been braced by the certainties of discipline, cultural continuity, family structure. They are the chauffeured generation – playdates, soccer, Little League – an entitled generation that realizes there is no up-side to becoming an adult. They know that entering the adult world is giving up on dreams and trekking across a wasteland.
So what can we do about it? We need our friends and we need our families.
I’m opposed to organized religion but I can now see the benefit of the Sabbath, when families presented themselves as a unit before God, the entire nutso, dysfunctional crew. The acceptance of humility and humanity before God is a connecting experience. Kids see their parents bowing to something much larger and mysterious. They feel the spiritual current of shared past, beyond distant ancestors. They confront the mysteries which, I believe, make life less mysterious. But will I hop down to the nearest Methodist Church or synagogue? I will not. Dogma and magic taint the Christian beliefs. The narcissistic buddying up to Jesus taints the Christiam evangelicals. Echoes anguished and embattled tribes in a distant, harsh land taint the cantor’s song.
Honestly, I’m confused. I do believe we should gather in fellowship and joy. We must share our lives so that none of us can feel like the Lone Ranger, which we ain’t. We should resist alienating ourselves (SO damn easy for me to do). In many ways, a lively and thoughtful social life is also a spiritual life, being human with others. Becoming part of the larger web. How do accomplish this in a corrosive time?
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has a talent for welcoming people to his table. He ignores it too much and at his peril. When he groundhogs up he becomes abstract, pedantic, often a ninnyhammer. He is at his best at a table of friends who are talking, arguing, laughing and sharing. What does a dinner cost? Not much compared to the benefits. Why don't more people share themselves? Alienation is the prime poison of our "interesting" time.
Monday, March 8, 2010
BEAUX ARTS CONFESSIONAL
MY DEAR SISTER, Dr. Dr. Judy (she has a DDS and a PhD in education, which makes us all proud and hopeful that she'll avoid the penitentiary) responded to a note in which I mentioned that I'd "pulled a charette."
Another friend commented that this sounded like a painful muscle strain. But Judy, who signs herself "Princess Anne," after her childhood nom de guerre, sensibly asked "What is a charette?" I replied:
A “charette” is an overnight design push to the deadline, an all-out overnighter to finish, taking its name from the cart (“charette,” in Froglaise) that appeared in the draughting room of the Ecole des Beaux Arts architecture studio in France to collect the completed projects. Because the Ecole was considered the heart of architectural design, some of its terms are still used by architecture students and architects today.
The Ecole dominated “public” architecture during the Greek and Roman revival period between our Civil War and the First World War, roughly the time of Mark Twain’s “Gilded Age.” It was a style that reached back to architecture widely supposed to be insuperable in form and beauty and balance. Greek and Roman examples were closely studied, visited, redrawn and dissected geometrically. The forms were structurally appraised and modeled with new mathematical tools in place of the sculptural sense of weight and the rules of thumb used by the ancients. Many libraries and courthouses and churches were based on the designs of reconstructed Roman baths or gladiatorial arenas or temples.
This sounds silly to our ears but it was persuasive to American corporate and municipal clients. Through this era, Europe and even our own traveled gentry regarded the United States as a nation of apple-knockers, clod-hoppers and rubes, plus a few red Indians. Remember that this was the time a well-bred young person’s character and education wasn’t complete until he or she took The Grand Tour of Europe, Greece, and the Holy Land. The object was to understand just how naïve and uncivilized most Americans were. Our national obsession with “the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome” may or may not have stunted our national spirit but it surely didn’t nourish our pride.
So when a European-trained architect responded to a county seat’s aldermen with a design for the new courthouse, pointing out that it was an adaptation of the Baths of Titus in Rome, the local burghers were delighted to have a transplanted divot of cultural respectability flourishing in the county. They felt that classic proportions and plenty of columns would ennoble the institution of the court and improve the cultural climate of the town. It was a bargain: legitimacy, heritage, cultural improvement, nobility of purpose … oh, geez, a lot of stuff came with a Beaux Arts building.
Take the courthouse in the little burg where my sister and I grew up, St. Clairsville, Ohio. It beggars every other structure in town. It is a gallumphing great expression of civic pride and can’t be overlooked. Next to any other structure in town, it is enormous. The city fathers and the swells must have been proud. It is a “Second Empire” design, built between 1885-1888. The architect was Joseph W. Yost from Columbus, Ohio, who later practiced in New York. He also designed the remarkable geology building, Orton Hall, on the Oval at Ohio State University. I remember it well.
The basis of this rant is that a big chunk of America’s design history came from Paris and the Ecole des Beaux Arts. This influence reached its apotheosis in the Great White City of the 1891 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It was organized by Beaux Arts architects “Uncle Dan” Burnham and John Root. The Roman and Greek revival buildings in the White City (lit by hundreds of thousands of electric bulbs powered by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse AC generators) marked a turning point in American identity, an announcement that the United States was a formidable power in every way. Except architecture. The impressive columned, porticoed, galleried, decorated buildings (built of plaster-soaked jute fabric on wood lath) were so popular that, in the words of Frank Lloyd Wright, “It set American architecture back a hundred years.” The buildings and their styles were so successful that roughly the same group of architects (minus Louis Sullivan, who had designed the only “contemporary” structure at the Exposition) designed most of the public buildings around the Smithsonian Mall. The Exposition fixed our expectations of dignity and official design. For better and for worse.
As an expatriate architect, it’s taken me a long time to reach this conclusion and I state it over the objections of my younger selves, but I predict that we will look at this era of revival architecture with sad longing. In many ways those Old Guys, like Uncle Dan Burnham, were right. There was a balance and rhythm inherent in the style, and a sensible human scale, and a rhythm of repeated parts that we don’t have. The vertical columns, the arches, the three dimensional geometry of many revival designs is appealing. It speaks to our collective unconscious, perhaps, or perhaps we simply enjoy variations on known themes. Whatever the reason, I look at work by H. H. Richardson and Edward Janney and Joseph Yost with interest and admiration.
One damnable tenet of the revival design dogma was that architecture reached its apogee during the late Roman empire and nothing offered could rise above it. Yet this quaint, pre-narcissistic notion granted a kind of freedom of movement within the forms. Okay, we’ll never do better than the Coliseum, so let’s do our best and arrange what forms we have in a pleasing way, using what worked well before us, creating new form out of handsome components. What came out of this was both new and familiar. It was steady and reassuring. Anyone could see the way forces were transmitted from cornices down to foundation. I think we’ll miss that.
Contemporary architecture seems to be largely a personality cult. Frank Gehry wraps his structures in stainless steel cocoons of fantastic shapes that have no relation to the flow or function within them. I. M. Pei violates the Smithsonian Mall with a self-indulgent and inefficient fantasy born from his whim rather than any interior, functional argument. Philip Johnson’s “Chippendale Building” is a perfect example of New York society star-worship. Frank Lloyd Wright, who was one of our greatest architects and a force for functionalims, was more concerned with his ideology than with the actual workability of his structures. (They all leaked. All of them.)
Architecture is called the First Art. A good conceit but what IS art? I maintain that art is communication: the artist uses his or her medium to express a verity, something living and interesting to the rest of us. The state of art in our culture is artificial and distant. It no longer represents us. We’ve been drilled to accept art that expresses only the artist’s emotions. So it no longer communicates shared ideas, ideals, fears, joys, wit, need.
If we could be honest with ourselves we might shrug off art dictated by ten galleries in New York City and point out that the art emperor is not wearing clothes. How much contemporary art addresses our feelings? We’re irrelevant to art. A Jackson Pollack painting may have meant something to Jackson Pollack (which I doubt) but I’ve never received his message clearly, not enough to say, “Ah, he’s got it there.” We take some odd delight in not understanding contemporary art. We’ve become so indulgent of our own whims that we license the whims of our designers, encouraging them to “express themselves” like the funded sculptors who have dropped “municipal sculpture” in public places all over the United States – sculptures that don’t reflect the indigenous citizens, who would much rather have them dismantled and taken away.
Architecture should speak to us, about us, for us. When we see a building we should have some notion of its function. We should see the entrance welcoming us. We should have an inherent sense of flow within the building. In a well-designed building we should never be lost but feel the current of design taking us to the right place.
We could understanding the revival buildings. We somehow knew them. Their proportions struck sympathetic chords in us. I’m sorry now I didn’t crawl all over that courthouse in St. Clairsville and learn something about architecture.
Well, Princess Anne, this is a confession and a correction: I have been at war with the Ecole des Beaux Arts too long. I pulled off a charette last week as Ecole students did long ago, and I was unexpectedly happy with the result. I thought about the origins of that word, and you’ve asked about them. It’s driven me to reexamine habitual attitudes. I’ve bad-mouthed The Ecole des Beaux Arts, denied it, damned it, and underestimated its students. I’m not certain that it was the best way to teach architecture but it beat hell out of contemporary architecture.
Consider this one, clear fact: our American Culture is so bankrupt that there is no possibility of ever building the Belmont County Courthouse again. We can’t design in that demanding stye, we no longer have the courage of expression, we have no qualified craftsmen to reproduce the astonishingly careful stone and woodwork, and we simply can’t afford it. Any courthouse built today will have a service life of, perhaps, fifty years, probably half that. Our St. Clairsville courthouse is coming onto 125 years and should last another 200. Any new courthouse will be built of the cheapest materials and assembled from mass-produced components. Just as we no longer have the technology or the will to return to the moon, we can’t afford, design or construct the buildings of which our great-grandfathers were justifiably proud. Perhaps their pride was tinged with Gilded Age desire to be more European but I can forgive them that mistake.
If I had a time machine, being at the dedication of that courthouse would be exciting. Plenty of red, white and blue bunting, Civil War veterans, long speeches, and an imposing, overwhelming structure towering over the one and two story buildings of a sleepy little town. What a luxury: genuine municipal pride, unquestioned national pride, excitement at the American culture flowering. We’ll miss all that.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself would have made a bad architect in his youth. If we could return to our youth with experienced, mellowed, wiser attitudes, he might have made a very fine architect. It's probably just as well we don't have that option. Youth is given too much praise; it's a frightening experience, humiliating, and scarring. Himself is a much nicer fellah than he was, more understanding and less judgmental. Age is given too little praise.
Another friend commented that this sounded like a painful muscle strain. But Judy, who signs herself "Princess Anne," after her childhood nom de guerre, sensibly asked "What is a charette?" I replied:
A “charette” is an overnight design push to the deadline, an all-out overnighter to finish, taking its name from the cart (“charette,” in Froglaise) that appeared in the draughting room of the Ecole des Beaux Arts architecture studio in France to collect the completed projects. Because the Ecole was considered the heart of architectural design, some of its terms are still used by architecture students and architects today.
The Ecole dominated “public” architecture during the Greek and Roman revival period between our Civil War and the First World War, roughly the time of Mark Twain’s “Gilded Age.” It was a style that reached back to architecture widely supposed to be insuperable in form and beauty and balance. Greek and Roman examples were closely studied, visited, redrawn and dissected geometrically. The forms were structurally appraised and modeled with new mathematical tools in place of the sculptural sense of weight and the rules of thumb used by the ancients. Many libraries and courthouses and churches were based on the designs of reconstructed Roman baths or gladiatorial arenas or temples.
This sounds silly to our ears but it was persuasive to American corporate and municipal clients. Through this era, Europe and even our own traveled gentry regarded the United States as a nation of apple-knockers, clod-hoppers and rubes, plus a few red Indians. Remember that this was the time a well-bred young person’s character and education wasn’t complete until he or she took The Grand Tour of Europe, Greece, and the Holy Land. The object was to understand just how naïve and uncivilized most Americans were. Our national obsession with “the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome” may or may not have stunted our national spirit but it surely didn’t nourish our pride.
So when a European-trained architect responded to a county seat’s aldermen with a design for the new courthouse, pointing out that it was an adaptation of the Baths of Titus in Rome, the local burghers were delighted to have a transplanted divot of cultural respectability flourishing in the county. They felt that classic proportions and plenty of columns would ennoble the institution of the court and improve the cultural climate of the town. It was a bargain: legitimacy, heritage, cultural improvement, nobility of purpose … oh, geez, a lot of stuff came with a Beaux Arts building.
Take the courthouse in the little burg where my sister and I grew up, St. Clairsville, Ohio. It beggars every other structure in town. It is a gallumphing great expression of civic pride and can’t be overlooked. Next to any other structure in town, it is enormous. The city fathers and the swells must have been proud. It is a “Second Empire” design, built between 1885-1888. The architect was Joseph W. Yost from Columbus, Ohio, who later practiced in New York. He also designed the remarkable geology building, Orton Hall, on the Oval at Ohio State University. I remember it well.
The basis of this rant is that a big chunk of America’s design history came from Paris and the Ecole des Beaux Arts. This influence reached its apotheosis in the Great White City of the 1891 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It was organized by Beaux Arts architects “Uncle Dan” Burnham and John Root. The Roman and Greek revival buildings in the White City (lit by hundreds of thousands of electric bulbs powered by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse AC generators) marked a turning point in American identity, an announcement that the United States was a formidable power in every way. Except architecture. The impressive columned, porticoed, galleried, decorated buildings (built of plaster-soaked jute fabric on wood lath) were so popular that, in the words of Frank Lloyd Wright, “It set American architecture back a hundred years.” The buildings and their styles were so successful that roughly the same group of architects (minus Louis Sullivan, who had designed the only “contemporary” structure at the Exposition) designed most of the public buildings around the Smithsonian Mall. The Exposition fixed our expectations of dignity and official design. For better and for worse.
As an expatriate architect, it’s taken me a long time to reach this conclusion and I state it over the objections of my younger selves, but I predict that we will look at this era of revival architecture with sad longing. In many ways those Old Guys, like Uncle Dan Burnham, were right. There was a balance and rhythm inherent in the style, and a sensible human scale, and a rhythm of repeated parts that we don’t have. The vertical columns, the arches, the three dimensional geometry of many revival designs is appealing. It speaks to our collective unconscious, perhaps, or perhaps we simply enjoy variations on known themes. Whatever the reason, I look at work by H. H. Richardson and Edward Janney and Joseph Yost with interest and admiration.
One damnable tenet of the revival design dogma was that architecture reached its apogee during the late Roman empire and nothing offered could rise above it. Yet this quaint, pre-narcissistic notion granted a kind of freedom of movement within the forms. Okay, we’ll never do better than the Coliseum, so let’s do our best and arrange what forms we have in a pleasing way, using what worked well before us, creating new form out of handsome components. What came out of this was both new and familiar. It was steady and reassuring. Anyone could see the way forces were transmitted from cornices down to foundation. I think we’ll miss that.
Contemporary architecture seems to be largely a personality cult. Frank Gehry wraps his structures in stainless steel cocoons of fantastic shapes that have no relation to the flow or function within them. I. M. Pei violates the Smithsonian Mall with a self-indulgent and inefficient fantasy born from his whim rather than any interior, functional argument. Philip Johnson’s “Chippendale Building” is a perfect example of New York society star-worship. Frank Lloyd Wright, who was one of our greatest architects and a force for functionalims, was more concerned with his ideology than with the actual workability of his structures. (They all leaked. All of them.)
Architecture is called the First Art. A good conceit but what IS art? I maintain that art is communication: the artist uses his or her medium to express a verity, something living and interesting to the rest of us. The state of art in our culture is artificial and distant. It no longer represents us. We’ve been drilled to accept art that expresses only the artist’s emotions. So it no longer communicates shared ideas, ideals, fears, joys, wit, need.
If we could be honest with ourselves we might shrug off art dictated by ten galleries in New York City and point out that the art emperor is not wearing clothes. How much contemporary art addresses our feelings? We’re irrelevant to art. A Jackson Pollack painting may have meant something to Jackson Pollack (which I doubt) but I’ve never received his message clearly, not enough to say, “Ah, he’s got it there.” We take some odd delight in not understanding contemporary art. We’ve become so indulgent of our own whims that we license the whims of our designers, encouraging them to “express themselves” like the funded sculptors who have dropped “municipal sculpture” in public places all over the United States – sculptures that don’t reflect the indigenous citizens, who would much rather have them dismantled and taken away.
Architecture should speak to us, about us, for us. When we see a building we should have some notion of its function. We should see the entrance welcoming us. We should have an inherent sense of flow within the building. In a well-designed building we should never be lost but feel the current of design taking us to the right place.
We could understanding the revival buildings. We somehow knew them. Their proportions struck sympathetic chords in us. I’m sorry now I didn’t crawl all over that courthouse in St. Clairsville and learn something about architecture.
Well, Princess Anne, this is a confession and a correction: I have been at war with the Ecole des Beaux Arts too long. I pulled off a charette last week as Ecole students did long ago, and I was unexpectedly happy with the result. I thought about the origins of that word, and you’ve asked about them. It’s driven me to reexamine habitual attitudes. I’ve bad-mouthed The Ecole des Beaux Arts, denied it, damned it, and underestimated its students. I’m not certain that it was the best way to teach architecture but it beat hell out of contemporary architecture.
Consider this one, clear fact: our American Culture is so bankrupt that there is no possibility of ever building the Belmont County Courthouse again. We can’t design in that demanding stye, we no longer have the courage of expression, we have no qualified craftsmen to reproduce the astonishingly careful stone and woodwork, and we simply can’t afford it. Any courthouse built today will have a service life of, perhaps, fifty years, probably half that. Our St. Clairsville courthouse is coming onto 125 years and should last another 200. Any new courthouse will be built of the cheapest materials and assembled from mass-produced components. Just as we no longer have the technology or the will to return to the moon, we can’t afford, design or construct the buildings of which our great-grandfathers were justifiably proud. Perhaps their pride was tinged with Gilded Age desire to be more European but I can forgive them that mistake.
If I had a time machine, being at the dedication of that courthouse would be exciting. Plenty of red, white and blue bunting, Civil War veterans, long speeches, and an imposing, overwhelming structure towering over the one and two story buildings of a sleepy little town. What a luxury: genuine municipal pride, unquestioned national pride, excitement at the American culture flowering. We’ll miss all that.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself would have made a bad architect in his youth. If we could return to our youth with experienced, mellowed, wiser attitudes, he might have made a very fine architect. It's probably just as well we don't have that option. Youth is given too much praise; it's a frightening experience, humiliating, and scarring. Himself is a much nicer fellah than he was, more understanding and less judgmental. Age is given too little praise.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
DR. GRAMMA
WE'RE ALL WORRIED about our health, and about our friends' health. We tell them to push fluids, sleep soundly, minimize stress, steam veggies. From a personal perspective we control only a few threads of our health. Ask a thoughtful, chess-playing, small town general practitioner who sees sickness played out on a small canvas over a few generations. He’ll agree that there’s not a lot we can do about sickness beyond a few things you heard from your gramma.
Like all grammas she droned on at length: wash your hands, get to bed, eat your vegetables, get out in the sun, stay out of the sun, shake a leg and get to work, wear clean underwear. It turns out that she was spot-on. The frustrating thing about old wives’ tales is that those wives got old by doing a few things right.
Wash your hands: plain soap and water turns out to be a powerful talisman against flus, coughs, and all communicable diseases. Lady MacBeth may have gone a little overboard but you should never pass up a chance to wash your hands.
Eat your vegetables: granted, your gramma probably underlined this as a matter of puritanical discipline but beneath the ugly-and-not-your-first-choice-so-it-must-be-good-for-you factor you’ve got the wealth of vitamins, way-high fiber and anti-oxidants in Brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli and oatmeal. Let’s not get carried away about about gramma’s laboratory virtues, however: she didn’t know beans (sic) about cooking veggies and probably stewed them into submission. Today we steam them lightly or, best (refer to The New York Times), microwave them briefly and with minimum vitamin loss.
Get out in the sun: important vitamin D, the “sunshine vitamin” is near-impossible to synthesize and is internally produced by our bodies’ interaction with the sun’s ultraviolet light.
Stay out of the sun: antique ladies wore sunbonnets for their complexions, but also because a bushel of their sunned-on friends succumbed to skin cancer. Given our immigration patterns, the prairie sun was especially deadly to fair-skinned Nordic, Irish and British families. Highest incidence of sun cancer in the world: Australia, where white-skinned Celts meet merciless sun.
Shake a leg and get to work: gramma didn’t have a Pilates studio down the block but knew that exercise made a difference. Or she just worked her bustle off, anyway. And if she didn’t know that exercise is healthy, perennial puritanical sensibility suggested that it was hard and, therefore, virtuous.
Wear clean underwear: we might make a case for fungus suppression but this is not gramma's finest medical homily and a social observance more than a clinical desideratum.
We could feel a bit more progressive and smugly scientific if gramma were a total loon and recommended nutso nostrums like echinacea. Embarrassing as it is, these are our New Age superstitions, driven by the narcissistic belief that “those know-it-all doctors aren’t any smarter than me!” Clinically, demonstrably, they are. Whole Foods may sell cool little vials of “safe and gentle” homeopathic cures but in double-blind studies homeopathic quackery registers no more than a placebo effect. Echinacea has no greater basis in logical pharmacopoeia than turning around three times and spitting between your feet.
Modern medicine is largely crisis oriented. Though antibiotics are wonderful and comforting, the statistical successes of real lifesaving medicine can be attributed to a few broader, earlier advances, and not many of those. There may be only five statistically significant advances in medicine.
The first is sepsis, recognition of the ubiquitous existence of germs. Even before germs were specifically identified, physicians learned empirically to wash their hands. One of the most mortal medical crises in the first three-quarters of the 19th century was postpartum infection caused by doctors delivering babies with dirty hands, killing children and mothers at a shocking rate. Civil War surgeons stropped their scalpels on their boot soles and made battlefield wounds doubly or triply lethal. The dangers of sepsis were recognized by the healing pioneer Louis Pasteur, an early gramma with a sly little French beard who insisted that midwives and doctors wash their hands and instruments before birthing. He also saved vast numbers of kids and grownups when he found a way to purify milk (a seriously lethal cocktail in days gone by) with high heat just under the boiling point (Pasteurization, look on your milk carton).
Dr. Pasteur also advanced the practice of vaccination. With it, we’ve conquered desperately lethal diseases like smallpox and polio. The defunct Soviet Union awarded a great distinction to a very few: Hero of the People. Pasteur deserved this award from all of us.
Clean municipal water supply is one of the basic wonders of health. This is a very old advance. The Romans determined, empirically, that tainted water killed, and brought fresh water from enormous distances through buried and elevated aqueducts, the engineering high points of an age. Providing reliably pure “city water” has been a municipal responsibility for many generations. One of the earliest documented tales of empirical epidemiology was the use of medical geography in tracing the source of an epidemic cholera in London of 1854. When Dr. John Snow persuaded officials to refuse use of the public well on Broad Street (where a “cluster” of 127 cholera victims had died), the situation improved. It was later found that the Broad Street well had been dug only three feet from a leaking cess pit. Quid erat demonstrandum.
Another municipal improvement is the fourth statistical advance in medicine: trash pickup. We’re so accustomed to this process that we don’t credit it for saving lives. It does. During one of the Great Plagues of London in the 17th century, a few careful observers commented that the healthiest place to live was London Bridge. This wasn’t the contemporary structure, or the bridge transported stone-by-stone to span an artificial stream in Arizona. Old London bridge was a teeming human marvel carrying shops, apartment buildings and residences, as well as London Bridge Gate (where the heads of traitors were displayed on pike-ends) and London Municipal Waterworks, which the flow of the stream past waterwheels as power. The structures were cantilevered out above the Thames’ flow, leaving a narrow, dim bridge surface for wagons and pedestrians. Cantilevered outboard of these sometimes flimsy constructions were “jakes” or “necessaries” – simple outhouses. The London weather is always damp, above the river damper still, wood is a porous material, nails were precious, so having an out-hung outhouse shear away from the main structure and fall into the river was a common source of annoyance (and even more annoying if someone were in it at the time). This, in this way, London Bridge was continually falling down, my fair lady. But why was it so healthy? Because the residents availed themselves of river’s conveniences: they threw their trash out the windows and their poop dropped directly into the river. Disgusting. But healthy. No trash, no cesspit, no rats. No rats, no fleas. No fleas, no bubonic plague. When American cities began to pick up domestic trash the health of the cities improved enormously.
The fifth great advance in medicine came late: anesthesia. Before properly administered surgical “sleep,” a patient could die from the shock of pain. Untold numbers died because the thought of enduring the knife without a pain-killer was too horrible, so operations that might have saved the patient’s life (or might not if infection from the dirty scalpel settled in the wound), were put off. Queen Victoria was the first “public” woman to received anesthesia for the pain of childbirth. “Laughing gas,” nitrous oxide, revolutionized dentistry.
During London Bridge’s fashionable height, around the year 1600, and right on into our mid-19th century, a physician’s pharmacopoeia was essentially useless. Indeed, the attentions of a “doctor” were flatly dangerous. In the thousands of clinical substances available, there were only three or four that had real effect. One, and the most effective, was the placebo. Another was laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium. Then there were a few topical remedies, some unreliable folk remedies, and an overwhelming world of superstition.
Antibiotics also arrived late, well into the 20th century. Though antibiotics are a comfort to all of us (King Tutankhamen might still be around if his jaw abscess had been treated with penicillin) they aren’t statistically significant. They haven’t made a major difference in public health and mortality. Before antibiotics, many robust folks survived infections like pneumonia, cholera, typhoid fever and even smallpox. A surprising number of soldiers and sailors survived amputations with filthy surgical instruments.
Most of the advancements of science aren’t a drop in the bucket compared to the gargantuan face of humanity. But what your gramma told you, that counts.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has been tossed out of some tolerably high-toned California dinners for taking up the cudgel against New Age superstitions allotted a holy place in Marin folklore – healing touch, homeopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, Chinese herbals, &c. In some ways, being asked to leave because you're insulting ignorant guests is a badge of honor. In most ways – and Himself is learning this slowly – it's boorish. He's a well-intentioned fellow with a persistent inability to identify what's appropriate behavior and discourse.
Like all grammas she droned on at length: wash your hands, get to bed, eat your vegetables, get out in the sun, stay out of the sun, shake a leg and get to work, wear clean underwear. It turns out that she was spot-on. The frustrating thing about old wives’ tales is that those wives got old by doing a few things right.
Wash your hands: plain soap and water turns out to be a powerful talisman against flus, coughs, and all communicable diseases. Lady MacBeth may have gone a little overboard but you should never pass up a chance to wash your hands.
Eat your vegetables: granted, your gramma probably underlined this as a matter of puritanical discipline but beneath the ugly-and-not-your-first-choice-so-it-must-be-good-for-you factor you’ve got the wealth of vitamins, way-high fiber and anti-oxidants in Brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli and oatmeal. Let’s not get carried away about about gramma’s laboratory virtues, however: she didn’t know beans (sic) about cooking veggies and probably stewed them into submission. Today we steam them lightly or, best (refer to The New York Times), microwave them briefly and with minimum vitamin loss.
Get out in the sun: important vitamin D, the “sunshine vitamin” is near-impossible to synthesize and is internally produced by our bodies’ interaction with the sun’s ultraviolet light.
Stay out of the sun: antique ladies wore sunbonnets for their complexions, but also because a bushel of their sunned-on friends succumbed to skin cancer. Given our immigration patterns, the prairie sun was especially deadly to fair-skinned Nordic, Irish and British families. Highest incidence of sun cancer in the world: Australia, where white-skinned Celts meet merciless sun.
Shake a leg and get to work: gramma didn’t have a Pilates studio down the block but knew that exercise made a difference. Or she just worked her bustle off, anyway. And if she didn’t know that exercise is healthy, perennial puritanical sensibility suggested that it was hard and, therefore, virtuous.
Wear clean underwear: we might make a case for fungus suppression but this is not gramma's finest medical homily and a social observance more than a clinical desideratum.
We could feel a bit more progressive and smugly scientific if gramma were a total loon and recommended nutso nostrums like echinacea. Embarrassing as it is, these are our New Age superstitions, driven by the narcissistic belief that “those know-it-all doctors aren’t any smarter than me!” Clinically, demonstrably, they are. Whole Foods may sell cool little vials of “safe and gentle” homeopathic cures but in double-blind studies homeopathic quackery registers no more than a placebo effect. Echinacea has no greater basis in logical pharmacopoeia than turning around three times and spitting between your feet.
Modern medicine is largely crisis oriented. Though antibiotics are wonderful and comforting, the statistical successes of real lifesaving medicine can be attributed to a few broader, earlier advances, and not many of those. There may be only five statistically significant advances in medicine.
The first is sepsis, recognition of the ubiquitous existence of germs. Even before germs were specifically identified, physicians learned empirically to wash their hands. One of the most mortal medical crises in the first three-quarters of the 19th century was postpartum infection caused by doctors delivering babies with dirty hands, killing children and mothers at a shocking rate. Civil War surgeons stropped their scalpels on their boot soles and made battlefield wounds doubly or triply lethal. The dangers of sepsis were recognized by the healing pioneer Louis Pasteur, an early gramma with a sly little French beard who insisted that midwives and doctors wash their hands and instruments before birthing. He also saved vast numbers of kids and grownups when he found a way to purify milk (a seriously lethal cocktail in days gone by) with high heat just under the boiling point (Pasteurization, look on your milk carton).
Dr. Pasteur also advanced the practice of vaccination. With it, we’ve conquered desperately lethal diseases like smallpox and polio. The defunct Soviet Union awarded a great distinction to a very few: Hero of the People. Pasteur deserved this award from all of us.
Clean municipal water supply is one of the basic wonders of health. This is a very old advance. The Romans determined, empirically, that tainted water killed, and brought fresh water from enormous distances through buried and elevated aqueducts, the engineering high points of an age. Providing reliably pure “city water” has been a municipal responsibility for many generations. One of the earliest documented tales of empirical epidemiology was the use of medical geography in tracing the source of an epidemic cholera in London of 1854. When Dr. John Snow persuaded officials to refuse use of the public well on Broad Street (where a “cluster” of 127 cholera victims had died), the situation improved. It was later found that the Broad Street well had been dug only three feet from a leaking cess pit. Quid erat demonstrandum.
Another municipal improvement is the fourth statistical advance in medicine: trash pickup. We’re so accustomed to this process that we don’t credit it for saving lives. It does. During one of the Great Plagues of London in the 17th century, a few careful observers commented that the healthiest place to live was London Bridge. This wasn’t the contemporary structure, or the bridge transported stone-by-stone to span an artificial stream in Arizona. Old London bridge was a teeming human marvel carrying shops, apartment buildings and residences, as well as London Bridge Gate (where the heads of traitors were displayed on pike-ends) and London Municipal Waterworks, which the flow of the stream past waterwheels as power. The structures were cantilevered out above the Thames’ flow, leaving a narrow, dim bridge surface for wagons and pedestrians. Cantilevered outboard of these sometimes flimsy constructions were “jakes” or “necessaries” – simple outhouses. The London weather is always damp, above the river damper still, wood is a porous material, nails were precious, so having an out-hung outhouse shear away from the main structure and fall into the river was a common source of annoyance (and even more annoying if someone were in it at the time). This, in this way, London Bridge was continually falling down, my fair lady. But why was it so healthy? Because the residents availed themselves of river’s conveniences: they threw their trash out the windows and their poop dropped directly into the river. Disgusting. But healthy. No trash, no cesspit, no rats. No rats, no fleas. No fleas, no bubonic plague. When American cities began to pick up domestic trash the health of the cities improved enormously.
The fifth great advance in medicine came late: anesthesia. Before properly administered surgical “sleep,” a patient could die from the shock of pain. Untold numbers died because the thought of enduring the knife without a pain-killer was too horrible, so operations that might have saved the patient’s life (or might not if infection from the dirty scalpel settled in the wound), were put off. Queen Victoria was the first “public” woman to received anesthesia for the pain of childbirth. “Laughing gas,” nitrous oxide, revolutionized dentistry.
During London Bridge’s fashionable height, around the year 1600, and right on into our mid-19th century, a physician’s pharmacopoeia was essentially useless. Indeed, the attentions of a “doctor” were flatly dangerous. In the thousands of clinical substances available, there were only three or four that had real effect. One, and the most effective, was the placebo. Another was laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium. Then there were a few topical remedies, some unreliable folk remedies, and an overwhelming world of superstition.
Antibiotics also arrived late, well into the 20th century. Though antibiotics are a comfort to all of us (King Tutankhamen might still be around if his jaw abscess had been treated with penicillin) they aren’t statistically significant. They haven’t made a major difference in public health and mortality. Before antibiotics, many robust folks survived infections like pneumonia, cholera, typhoid fever and even smallpox. A surprising number of soldiers and sailors survived amputations with filthy surgical instruments.
Most of the advancements of science aren’t a drop in the bucket compared to the gargantuan face of humanity. But what your gramma told you, that counts.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has been tossed out of some tolerably high-toned California dinners for taking up the cudgel against New Age superstitions allotted a holy place in Marin folklore – healing touch, homeopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, Chinese herbals, &c. In some ways, being asked to leave because you're insulting ignorant guests is a badge of honor. In most ways – and Himself is learning this slowly – it's boorish. He's a well-intentioned fellow with a persistent inability to identify what's appropriate behavior and discourse.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)