[happy] New War

It just so happened that today I went to the Minneapolis Institute of Art to see the exhibit Artists Respond American Art and the Viet Nam War.  Coincidentally,  this country of ours is now back in the saddle on its war horse. Will it ever be any different? I doubt it.

It was a moving experience to wander through this exhibit. There were a lot of guys my age or somewhat older. Groups of us stood in silent clutches looking at old photos from "Life" and "Look." If those photos brought the Viet Nam war back for me, bringing it back meant something else entirely for someone who served there.

And there was this. Thick sheaves of responses to the questions below.

And there was a Hmong component to the exhibit because so many Hmong now live in the Twin Cities. A local artist has painted a 50 panel series telling the story of his people and their flight from Laos to Minnesota post Viet Nam war. Some of those panels were on exhibit today. It made me think of the Kurds.

So yeah. Hopes and dreams for the New Year. 2020--and all that BS about perfect vision and seeing clearly. I think our nation is blind to suffering. Viet Nam was the first televised war. It was shocking. Walter Cronkite. The nightly body count. 

And here we are.

Notes from the Apocalypse

Blue heron on a neighbor's chimney

Parts of Houston are still underwater. Many Texas towns have been washed away entirely. California is on fire. The rest of the West is pocked with similar wildfires. A 2700 year old grove of Sequoias near Yosemite is burning. One of the longest-lived organisms on this Earth, the Sequoia has seen centuries of man's folly. The freeway in my old neighborhood is closed due to L.A.'s largest-ever wildfire. A dozen cites in California recorded their highest-ever temperatures yesterday. Today's temperatures may beat that.

It was 86 here in paradise on Friday. Yesterday's high was a little higher. The temperatures aren't dropping much at night. I turned on my air conditioner before going to sleep last night since it was in the high 80s upstairs. Right now, it's already 92 outside. Probably a record. When my mom first arrived here in August of 2012, one of my first tasks was to buy her some long underwear. The fresh breeze from the ocean blew right through her. It was perfectly still here this morning.

And I'm wondering about how my front closet would fare as a fallout shelter. Sometimes the skies around here rumble and roar with military activity. At night it makes me uneasy. There's something going on, but I don't know what it is and probably don't want to know, really.

But the un-knowing of what we know doesn't serve us. I want to hold fast to what I know and let it propel me toward change or insight or something.

I hope you are well, dear everyone. Stay safe. Don't breathe the smoke. But breathe.

Friday Morning Beach Report

Imagine the humans already departed. The buildings empty shells. The streets quiet. Voices silenced except for the shouts of two madmen with sharpened sticks poking out one another's eyes.

What right do they have to murder the birds, extinguish the seas, pluck out the tongues of whales, crush the stones into dust?

I heard a drum beating beneath the waves this morning. Or the whales were talking to one another, already mourning.

Even the pink of the clouds is priceless.

Dispatch from Los Angeles--Part 2

The book salon feast and its creator, reflected in the mirror.

"Despite the shock of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn't immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it."--from Anthony Marra's novel "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena."

A story set during the two recent Chechen wars, Marra's novel has a lot to say about loss, love, cultural identity, betrayal, survival, war, and the art and objects we humans use to connect, commemorate, and remember one another.

The meal was sublime. Yes, of course there was vodka. We poured it into white creme de menthe to make a cocktail called a stinger and we poured it into pomegranate lemonade. There was also dovga--yogurt soup with greens and herbs. There was beef manti and stuffed grape leaves and a dish with peppers that I wish I could be spooning into my mouth right now. And you might want to lie down in case you feel faint when I tell you that we had homemade halva ice cream with homemade chocolate sauce and salted peanuts for dessert.

Then I dove into my bed for the night where I looked out over the City of Angels. Really.

I went to LACMA again this morning, as has become my habit, where I visited the Art of the Americas Building. It lives up to that rather broad name. The heyday of American furniture and decorative arts, and all that, and in a sort of reverse chronology, on the top floor there's this:

The photo can't capture the experience at all.

I gasped when I rounded the corner and caught a glimpse of this gallery with its draperies of reds and greens floating above and its curving walls fashioned of wooded slats. There are one of a kind chandeliers and  lighting that cannot be captured in a photo, and in about 5 seconds you forget all of this because the ancient art is positively stupendous.

And there's this somewhat more modern piece, which was different from everything else, but quite fitting with the larger theme of this 24 hours.

And downstairs, before I walked up the steps to the long, long ago past, there was this:

It fits right in. There were several conjoined couples in the ancient Mexican/Central American clay pieces.

Happy? Memorial Day

Happy has always seemed to me to be the wrong word to adjoin to this holiday.
How about somber? A somber Memorial Day to you.

THIS is what I'll be thinking about today.

And HERE you can listen to a clip of Dennis O'Hare reading the litany of wars and some other excerpts from this play I would love to see.

Death in Paris

Dream:

Paris was burning.

 My mother and I were traveling, and we'd gone to a distant suburb to visit an Algerian marketplace. "This will be like two trips in one," I told her.  "North Africa and France." It was late by the time we sat down at a long wooden table under an enormous tent. We'd gotten a bit lost on a dark narrow street that seemed more like a tunnel than a street. The food stalls were steaming with things we wanted to eat, and I'd almost decided what to order when, in the distance, the blue dome of a mosque crumbled--its minaret falling end over end. There was a rumbling beneath our feet, deep and long, like thunder coming from the depths of hell. My mother heard and saw nothing. It was the collective gasp of the crowd of diners that brought her to her feet.

"What's happening?" she asked me. Before I could answer we werre swept into the crowd, ebbing and flowing first one way, then another, engulfed by a burgeoning panic. Through the window of a bar or maybe it was an apartment, I could see a TV. All of Paris was in flames. The crowd kept swirling, and I wondered if whoever was leading us was as lost as my mother and I had been earlier. I was worried about my mother's feet and how tired they must be getting. I turned to the woman next to me and spoke to her in French, asking her if she would be our guide. No, she said, she couldn't take that responsibility. And besides she had a big day tomorrow. It was her entrance exam for the university. "What will you be studying?" I asked her, wondering why she thought we'd survive to see another day.
"Pharmaceuticals," she told me.

Explosions turned the sky orange. We're probably going to die, I thought. I looked at my mom. I was not afraid. Two old ladies, I thought. And then I realized how different I would feel it was the arm of one of my daughter's that I was holding.