Sunday in the Park With George

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Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - Photo by UGArdener, Flickr Creative Commons

Date night! Dinner and a show with my Honey, dinner at CJ Muggs and a show at The Rep, Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George”. The point of departure for this Sondheim musical is Georges Seurat’s most famous painting, “A Sunday Afternoon the Island of La Grande Jatte”, pictured above.

A 19th century, French painter, Seurat, pioneered the painting technique called Pointillism. He created his paintings by dabbing just the tip of his paintbrush onto the canvas. You might call this a quiet, but absorbing painting technique. Up close Seurat’s painting looks abstract, atomized color into thousands of dots. Step back though and the painting resolves itself into a picture of the artist’s vision. The engineer in me likens this technique to an early analog version of digitization. Unfortunately, Seurat never sold a painting in his lifetime and died at the age of 31.

Seurat, a modernist artist, is the perfect inspiration for this contemplative modernist musical. George, like his play, which thinks as much about itself as the rest of the world is too self-absorbed to even see his female lead, the aptly named Dot. His art is more important and if she cannot realize this, well then. The first act ends with a tour-de-theater on-stage recreation of Seurat’s famous painting.

Flash forward a hundred years and through intermission to the second act. George is now Seurat’s great-grandson. His grandmother, Seurat’s and Dot’s daughter is still on hand. George is still wrestling with the complexities of art and love, but this time around his art is just all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

This play about an artist that failed in love, in life, struck close to home. Our son, Dan is an artist and we worry about him. Art is a tough profession, as Seurat’s life testifies.

Pointillism is art composed of a thousand dots, nay a million, anyway quiet and absorbing work. So is making a thousand squirrels. Is making a thousand squirrels as lucky as making a thousand origami cranes? Only time will tell. No one, save Seurat, realized the greatness of his work, at the time. Dot realized the greatness of Seurat, the man, but her love was unrequited. His love of art, love of self, overshadowed her love, but, at least in the play, they both endured. I wonder it there will be any black squirrels?

Anne Almighty

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Anne Models Amanda's Gloves

Three at last! Three at last! Thank God, it is three at last!

Apologies to Dr. Martin Luther King, but this was Anne’s mantra on a couple of the days this week. There is no school tomorrow, so today is her Friday. No apologies are really necessary for blaspheming with this post’s title, because it is never blasphemy for a husband to praise his wife. Right Dear? What do you think, Mark? Um, um, um, yes, Dear!

Anne had a field trip last night. She rode the school bus across the river to see a play that fellow teacher, Ms. Dwyer was directing. The play was called “Curtains”, a murder-mystery comedy. Anne tried to get me to come along, but last night was too dark and stormy for me to venture out.

The picture with this post, shows Anne modeling her latest creation, fingerless gloves for Amanda. The background of this photo is pretty busy. It has two of Anne’s quilts in it. Anne is also modeling one of her new Christmas sweaters.

Anne left some blog fodder out for me, a cough drop wrapper. This cough drop wrapper has inspirational sayings on it. These include the likes of: “Don’t wait to get started”; “Hi-five yourself”; and my personal favorite “Turn can do into can did”. I guess if you have a cold, or at least a cough, one needs some extra encouragement, but I can’t help but wonder whose job it was to come up with these sayings. Once coined, were they then focus grouped too?

iPhonology

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A prostitute solicits a young man, “For fifty dollars, I’ll let you talk to me about your iPhone.

Apple’s stock rose over 6%, to almost $450, a record high, after it reported its most recent earnings. CNN was putting a target price on Apple of $666, or the number of the devil. No one who knows me, would call me an Apple-phile, but I do love my iPhone. This dichotomy, love the product, but hate the company, would present difficulties for some, but not me. I am prepared to condemn Apple, all of its products, even the iPhone, just not my instance of this device.

Let me first dispense with the rest of Apple’s product line. I’m a PC and I am proud of it, the Mac and its ilk are just overpriced versions of the same product. All of Apple’s innovations were actually stolen from Xerox, which was too stupid to squash the upstart Apple. Ridley Scott’s famous 1984 Macintosh commercial was great, but it fingered the wrong villain. He should have implicated Apple, today’s Big Brother. Let’s segue now to Apple, via the iPhone.

“NPR’s “This American Life” recently showcased, Mike Daisy and his monologue, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”. Check it out. Mr. Daisy, a self-professed Apple-phile, learned of an iPhone that was sold with photographs on it, taken in its factory, in China. These pictures led him on an odyssey, to China. Exercising his own brand of investigative journalism, he uncovered many examples of labor abuse, child labor, blacklisting and unsafe working conditions, to name a few of the offenses that he cataloged.

Daisy’s similarities to Michael Moore, both physically and in journalistic temperament I found unmistakable. The second half of the “This American Life” show does some fact-checking that shows that Apple has corrected many of these abuses. This went only part way to assuage the guilt of an iPhone owner, such as myself.

A Conversation with Siri

Piling on with Apple’s sins, there is its recent debacle, when it attempted to market the iPhone in China. Riots ensued and all sales were soon suspended. Those iPhones were retailed for $800, four times what I have paid for any iPhone. All this in the country of its manufacture.

I have lambasted Apple, but what about its customers? Just like Latin American drug kingpins couldn’t survive without their American drug users, neither could Apple survive without its sycophants. You, the American Apple customer are just as guilty as Apple is of unfair labor practices, etc.

Then there are the injuries that iPhone owners perpetrate upon the rest of society. Case in point, was the recent, much publicized incident at a performance of the NY Philharmonic Symphony. The iPhone’s marimba ringtone went off in the middle of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9. Sure other cell phone users have disrupted a myriad of other performances, but have any of those phone users been dressed down in public, by the conductor?

I want to come clean with you, the reader now. I am a Microsoft Secret Ninja (MSN). I report directly to Mr. Gates and have been working to combat the international Apple conspiracy for many years now. An Apple a day, keeps the doctor away? Don’t believe it, it is all propaganda. They can have my PC, when they sieze it from my cold dead hands, and about my iPhone? I’ll have to text you on that one.

Bananagrams

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BananaGrams

Is the ovary part of the endocrine system? Don’t just sit there slack-jawed, clutching your pearls girls. I’m playing blogging Bananagrams! How many of the words in the above picture can I weave into this post?

President Obama delivers the State of the Union address tonight. This speech officially kicks off the Democratic response to this year’s election cycle. Mr. Obama’s heroic 2008 election set such high expectations, in a time of deep despair that nothing less than an economic miracle could have lived up to the promise. Mario Cuomo once said that a politician campaigns with poetry, but governs with prose. No one can deny the poetry of Obama’s 2008 campaign. Partisans on both sides of the aisle complain at him, but he has made progress on almost everything that he had promised. Liberals fault him for promises that he never made and conservatives fault him for promises that they themselves have thwarted. If you listen closely to the prose of his 2008 campaign, then you’ll find what you voted for.

Republican candidates had had their campaigns on the run, to the max, for some months now. (Here I make a run at the Bananagrams words.) About their presidential field, you have got to be joking. Half of them are fussy nit-wits and none of them have the stones to be president. I’d sooner elect a vole than any of them. And that is the nub of this election, are any of these nag Republicans seed for the presidency? Maybe if you dyed their hair put a mask across their face and tanned their hides, all Boehner style, they could obtain some cuter sort of diva status, but I am un-impressed. I feel ashamed that our country would even consider any of this glop. Give them the ax!

French toast tomorrow? Bread, eggs and milk are its main ingredients. These three ingredients are also swept off the shelves at the mere mention of the word snow. There was not the usual crush at the grocery store tonight. Maybe, people are taking lightly tomorrow’s forecast for a wintery mix? Anyway, I’ll be well stocked, plus I have bacon too.

Anne feels that she must have done something wrong today, because she spent the whole day in goals. Being in goals is not a good thing, it is one step up from the buddy room and we all remember how that was. She must have been on a real jag. First, she said something unkind and out loud about another student in class. [Quizzes] Second, she couldn’t keep her hands to herself. Third, she missed lunch and recess, but is still not sure why. Today she was both of the elementary school’s two counselors, “Wonderful, Counselor, Wonderful, Counselor, the mighty God …” 

Bananagrams is a word game, wherein lettered tiles are used to spell words. The name is derived from the founder’s claim that it is the “anagram game that will drive you bananas!” Anne enjoys playing this game and frequently plays it solitaire. Pictured above is one of her games.

This writing exercise, was a fun little bit. I just wish that I could have worked in the words, kiva or orzo. La ti da … Remaining words: fax, joiner, pager, pi, later, élan.  Fin!

Feathers, Petals and Fur

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This post is both reprise and counterpoint to yesterday’s post. This post shows you all of the pictures that I got all high and mighty about not showing you yesterday. Returning to the scene of the crime, I offer up feathers, in the form of the Silver-Beaked Tanager, the petals of an African Daisy and a mouse in the Climatron’s house. The Clerodendrum photo segues to the City Diner’s chandelier.

After yesterday’s MoBot sojourn, Anne and I hightailed it over to the City Diner on South Grand. We snagged a primo table, in the back, a booth, with side-by-side seating. This gave us the equivalent to stadium seating to the Sunday morning brunch bowl. There were three tables of note. Tables one and two featured two gentlemen each. Each table had one talker and one listener. The third table featured a young couple. Here the man seemed the most animated, the woman looked tired. Leaping to conclusions I assumed that her fatigue was due to too much fun in bed. You know what they say when you assume something? This was silly of me. When the man got up to go to the bathroom, he revealed the newborn-carrier that had been hidden on his side of the booth. Her fatigue was explained. He came back with a baby bottle. Our meal arrived. Afterwards, my attention returned to the two tables of two men. What if I were to mix them up? What would happen if I put the two listeners together and the two talkers together? Would it cause an explosion? Fortunately, the check came before I had time to find out.

Politics is the conjunction of two words. The first syllable Poli- comes from the Greek word Poly, which means many and the second syllable -tics comes from the blood-sucking parasite. So, logically the business of politics must also be the business of many blood-sucking parasites. This is how I view this year’s political landscape from my lofty eyrie, perched in front of my keyboard. I stare out over the blogosphere and study the nuances of the political winds, until I become so bleary eyed that I cannot see the screen for the pixels. I feel like ancient Diogenes, perpetually searching for just one honest politician.

This week I found one and then lost this honest politician all in one short speech. I’m speaking of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). Gabby in a short video, announced her resignation from Congress. She announced it now, to give other candidates time to campaign. She waited a year to announce it, to give herself time to heal. After a year, she decided that she would need more time and that the demands of the job ran counter to her needs. She may return to politics someday. She certainly hasn’t ruled it out and the remarkable level of recovery that she has already obtained, trumpets this belief. I’ll relight Diogenes’ lantern, as portent of her eventual return.

No Feathers, No Petals, No Fur

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Nature photography contests sometimes restrict entries by excluding pictures of birds, flowers and mammals. This is done, because most nature photography usually features one or more of these elements and if you’ve run more than a few of these contests, you have likely gotten tired of these three themes. In this post’s slideshow, I have done the same. This morning, Anne and I drove over to the Missouri Botanical Gardens (MoBot). The weather was foggy, misty and grey this morning. The garden’s grounds are mostly in hibernation this month, but with this unusually mild winter, there is already some signs of spring. We quickly decided to bail from the dull, bland exterior and entered the Climatron.

The Climatron is MoBot’s signature structure. A geodesic dome, it was built-in 1960, to replace the crumbling Palm House, which had housed the garden’s palm and cycad collection since 1914. In 1988 the Climatron was renovated. The two greenhouses, the Desert House and the Mediterranean House, that had bookended it until then were torn down. A new Temperate House was erected and this is where we chose to enter the Climatron from. The Temperate House is almost as warm as the Climatron, but nowhere near as humid. The time spent in the Temperate House helped, as did using an electric hand-drier, but my camera still chose to fog up for the first few minutes in the dome. We spent the next hour in this tropical paradise, far away from the winter blahs.

Adhering to the no feathers, petals and fur protocol, one tends to dwell upon a meditation in texture. Fortunately, nature has texture in abundance. In case you were wondering, Anne assures me that the pictured cycad does not include a flower. Evolutionarily, the cycad predates the development of the flower. Photo expeditions like today’s make for great blog fodder. Between the two of us, Anne and I took about 300 pictures, of which you might see 10%. Pictures are nice, but a blog requires writing too. Hence this meditation on textuality, today’s post.

Wyrd Sisters

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Indian Pipeweed - A Saprophytic Plant

Sister One: Eye of Newt and Toe of Froggie …

Sister Two: I was thinking something more vegetarian, maybe a sun-dried tomato-basil …

Sister Three: You know it is cheaper to buy sun-dried tomatoes at the Plum salad bar, than packaged? Well, I’m just saying.

There was a pause

One: Bubble, bubble, deep fat trouble. Big fat butts and chins that double.

Two: I don’t want to go to Clyde’s.

Three: If you only come in for one meal a day, soon your waist will fade away.

There was a long pause, followed by a shorter pause.

Two: I wouldn’t mind going out to eat, except that it is -7 °F cold outside. That’s too cold for me.

One: You think that is cold, it’s -22 °C in Canada.

Three: Oh, those poor, poor Canadians.

The night was as black as the inside of a cat.

One: Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed.

Two: Thrice and once the hedge pig whined.

Three: I’m getting hungry too. I wish that we could decide.

One: Three times the striped cat has proclaimed.

Two: Three times plus one, that would be four, the concealed pig complained.

Three: Thanks for the old English translation, but I’m still hungry. 

It was a dark and stormy night. The wind howled. Lightning stabbed at the earth erratically, like an inefficient assassin.

One: Something wicked this way comes.

Two: Double, double Toyota troubles, Firebirds and Cadillacs stumble, for all the EPA spells a pot of trouble.

Bill: Hey, what are you old witches doing about dinner?

Three: I’m not a witch, I’m your wife.

One: I’ve found a recipe. Let’s see here, round about the cauldron go; in the poisoned entrails throw, toad that under cold stone days and nights has thirty-one sweltered venom sleeping got, boil thou first in the charmed pot. What do you think about this dish?

Two: That doesn’t sound very vegan to me, but if you insist, I’ll eat meat. Instead of that recipe, why don’t we try this one. Fillet of Fenny snake, in the cauldron boil and bake; eye of newt …

Bill: She turned me into a newt, but I got better.

Two: … and toe of froggie, wool of bat. and tongue of doggie,

Bill: Alfred? Now his bite really will be worse than his bark.

Two: Adder’s fork, and blind worm’s sting, lizard’s breath, and owlet’s wing, for a charm of powerful trouble like a hell broth boil and bubble. What’d you think?

Three: While you three have been whining, I’ve been busy in the kitchen. I’ve whipped up two pans of my world-famous lasagna, one vegetarian and one with meat. It’s all done, so let’s sit down and eat already.

All: Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble.

The End

- Apologies all around, to the bard and Terry P. and to all my out-laws, except for maybe Alfred. ;-)