All Politics Is Local

Posted on August 9, 2012 by RegenAxe

The Verdict of the People – George Caleb Bingham

Tuesday was Election Day here in Saint Louis. Primary elections were held for state and federal offices. The headliner elections included the Republican senatorial primary. West County US Congressman Todd Akin (R) beat his two competitors for the right to challenge incumbent Claire McCaskill (D). This will be a hotly contested race and will dominate Missouri politics into November. Due to redistricting the two sitting Saint Louis area Democratic US Representatives, Lacy Clay (D) and Russ Carnahan (D), had to duke it out for the one remaining Democratic seat left in town. The latest census cost Missouri a Congress seat and the Republican dominated state legislature chose to gerrymander one of the Democratic districts out of existence. Clay handily won the primary and will be our new congressman come November.

Moving closer to home, our incumbent State Representative Stacey Newman (D) had a very close election with another victim of Republican gerrymandering, Susan Carlson (D). As of now, the vote count is 1823 for Newman and 1822 for Carlson. That’s right, just a one vote difference. In a percentage format, that is a 50.01% to 49.99% difference. I’m sure that there will be a recount. Whichever one eventually wins will be our state representative. Also close to home, two of our friends, Nelson and Gina Mitten (D), both won their elections. Nelson will be our city council representative and Gina will be the adjoining district’s state representative. Congratulations to them both!

Anne worked the polls on Tuesday as an election official. These make for long days for her. She is out of the house before 5 AM and it was after 8 PM when she called me for a ride home. Dan had borrowed her car during the day. I drove to the election commission’s office. I found her standing out in the middle of the business park’s darkened parking lot. Even though she was alone and standing in the dark, she didn’t feel uncomfortable. Partly, this was because I was only five minutes away. Maybe more importantly though, it was because police car after police car came rolling past her. They were escorting ballot boxes from the four corners of our far-flung county.

Summer Dreams

Posted on April 30, 2012 by RegenAxe

The Dreamer, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1879

Today was a slow news day for me. At work, I split my time between Saint Charles and Saint Louis, trying to cover both bases. For me, it was another work day, another Monday.

Anne continued student testing today. She is part of the team that runs the standardized testing mandated by No Child Left Behind. Anne likes to refer to this act as No Child Left Untested. She has been preparing to test or actually giving the tests for the entire month of April. In May she will wrap up this year’s testing season and then get ready for summer vacation. She has about two more weeks left, twelve days to be exact, not that she is counting the days to the end of her school year. 😉

What are the three best things about teaching?
June, July and August

The picture will this post is of Renoir’s “The Dreamer”. I photographed it at the Saint Louis Art Museum earlier this year. The following paragraph is the museum’s writeup.

This richly colorful work is one of many studies of young, unidentified models that Renoir painted at his Montmartre studio in the late 1870s. He uses his characteristically feathery brushwork, particularly in his treatment of the background floral wallpaper. The mild eroticism of the sitter’s gaze – the English painter Walter Richard Sickert later described this as a “saucy” portrait – is enhanced by the way in which she idly places her finger in her mouth.

So what are Anne’s summer dreams? There is of course the Cabin. This has become a summer staple. Jay and family will be there this summer. We’ll be visiting California. This will be our “big” vacation this year. There will be lots of people to see and places to go, while out West. We hope to encore last year’s League of Michigan Bicyclist ride. This year the plan is to do MUP (Michigan’s Upper Peninsula). She spent much of yesterday planning a quilting project, so some sewing is likely in the cards and maybe some painting too, painting the bathroom that is. It all sounds saucy to me.

Happy Birthday, to our prettiest and smartest niece, Ashlan!

A Night to Remember

Posted on April 11, 2012 by RegenAxe

Oh, they built the ship Titanic, to sail the ocean blue. For they thought it was a ship that water would never go through. It was on its maiden trip, that an iceberg hit the ship. It was sad when the great ship went down.
It was sad, so sad. It was sad, so sad. It was sad when the great ship went down (to the bottom of the….) Uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants. It was sad when the great ship went down.

The Sinking of the Titanic, by Max Beckmann, 1913

In expectation of the centennial of its sinking the Saint Louis Art Museum pulled from its vaults, “The Sinking of the Titanic”, by Max Beckmann. The following text is the museum’s placard description of the painting. A photo of Beckmann with the painting in his Munich studio shows the large size of this work.

On April 15, 1912, the world’s largest luxury liner, Titanic, sank off the coast of Newfoundland; of the 2,200 passengers, 1,507 died. Beckmann was inspired by news accounts to produce this enormous canvas in which he focused on the lifeboats of the Titanic while placing the distant, brightly lit liner against an iron-red night sky. Beckmann sought to emulate a 19th century French tradition of grand paintings of contemporary events. Here, his theme is the struggle for survival; boats list dangerously or have overturned. The largest lifeboat is crammed with woman and children including one passenger still in her violet evening gown and earrings. Beckmann employs a palette of vibrant green and blue coloring to highlight the nightmarish quality of a scene in which ghostly heads can be seen floating in the water.

The Artist and His Painting

Much ink and many pixels have been devoted to the story of HMS Titanic. It is a story better told by others than me. That is why I’ve included the lyrics to the old camp song about the sinking, a song that I sung while a scout. The Saint Louis Art Museum’s submission is a novel contribution and the following acapella cover offers tribute to James Cameron’s remarkable movie.

Other than the artifice of 3D, Cameron claims that the only thing he change in this re-release is the stars in the sky. An astronomer had complained after the original release that night’s sky was wrong. Cameron has endeavored to correct this mistake. If it were only so easy to change the stars and destinies of the people onboard that fateful night.

It’s Too Hot to Mow the Lawn

Posted on April 1, 2012 by RegenAxe

The rest of the line goes, ‘so we rode a century’, but we didn’t. Today the mercury climbed to near ninety. We fired up the air-conditioning, just to ‘test’ it and then we mowed the lawn. Here is the back story on this day’s endeavors.

Birch Tress at Dawn on Lake George, by Georgia O'Keeffe, 1925

This painting seems more than organic to me, rather it looks sensual, almost erotic. The birch are almost unrecognizable as trees. Still it is a pretty painting. The following paragraph is the Saint Louis Art Museum’s writeup on Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Birch Tress at Dawn on Lake George”.

Sinuous tree trunks and contrasts of pale peach and dark green lend dramatic effect to this work. Georgia O’Keeffe was one of a group of leading American artists who introduced the principles of modern European abstract art to the United States in the early 20th century. Her abstractions of the natural world often feature curving organic forms and maintain a recognizable subject matter.

A letter from the city was waiting for us, when we returned from our bicycle ride yesterday. It basically said, mow your lawn or we will. I must admit that it is over the proscribed 7″ in spots. Those spots just happen to coincide with where our neighbor’s dogs have been fertilizing our grass all winter. The aesthetics of a cyclist’s yard aside, I knuckled under to the rubric that you can’t fight city hall and dug the mower out of winter storage. This excavation unearthed a problem, the water heater is leaking. The joys of home ownership.

In past years the first mowing of the season was always a traumatic affair. That was because in past years, my mower was a reel mower and the old Mark 1 motor wasn’t always up to the job. Now I have an electric mower, so even 7″ long blades are no match to my mower’s snicker-snack. Their curving organic forms fall like leaves of grass to my Ameren powered behemoth.

With the day’s itinerary dictated, I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. Tenderly I will use you short curling grass. I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boots. Long and long has the grass been growing. Give me a field where the unmowed grass grows. The good green grass, that delicate miracle the ever-recurring grass. O deathless grass!

After our transcendental experience with the lawn, we rehung Dan’s aluminium mountain sculpture on the garage. When we were done, we found that the A/C was working just fine and like a siren’s song, its sweet coolness lured us away from any further thoughts of both mowing and biking all in one day. I suspect that the city’s exhortation had less to do with the height of our grass, but with the height of our crazy neighbor’s lawn. If they are going to foreclose on him for back taxes and fees, then it wouldn’t be fair to let us skirt the law either.

Bad Hat Cats

Posted on March 16, 2012 by RegenAxe

Radioactive Cats, Sandy Skoglund

This photo of a photo was taken at the Saint Louis Art Museum. I am not a cat fancier. I do not like cats. Being allergic to them, probably doesn’t help. I was initially drawn to this art, because it portrayed cats in an eerie, otherworldly way. I especially liked, after reading the following writeup that this was the artist’s intent. This work is part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Meticulous in construction yet enigmatic in meaning, Sandy Skoglund’s images blend sculpture, painting, installation photography. Her work includes ordinary interiors that are frequently invaded by an over-abundance of animals in exaggerated colors. According to Skoglund, the purpose of Radioactive Cats “was to undermine the stereotype in our culture of the cute, domesticated pet. The cats are meant to dominate the scene as survivors in a post-nuclear situation because they’ve adapted by turning green.”

Ms. Skoglund has repeated these themes in many of her works. Green cats have reappeared and have also been replaced with red foxes, blue dogs and in her work Gathering Paradise, black squirrels. No LOL cats here, or even any Irish green St. Pat cats. Skoglund’s Radioactive Cats, are so popular that they must have eighteen half-lives.

Eero Saarinen

Posted on March 5, 2012 by RegenAxe

Knoll Armchair, Designed by Eero Saarinen

It is always a bit disconcerting to see something familiar, in an unexpected setting, like an everyday object in a museum. I’m not speaking of some nameless village’s cabinet of curiosities, but a real museum, the Saint Louis Art Museum. It is a beautiful object, so to call it everyday is demeaning, better to call it familiar. My mom purchased four of these chairs, for her dining room set. I’ve sat in them for countless meals. Not only do they look good, they’re comfortable too. Rather than disconcerting, I think that she would find it comforting to hear that her chairs are in our art museum. It would be a vindication of her good taste. Me seeing this chair in the museum, was a reminder of her.

The following is an excerpt from the museum’s writeup.

Architect Eero Saarinen’s sleek, sculptural design is an icon of 20th-century furniture. Prior to World War II, he collaborated with Charles Eames on designs for organic furniture using bentwood. Following the war, Saarinen’s furniture designs employed new materials like plastic to achieve a modern form. This chair’s one-piece base was designed to replace the visual clutter of traditional furniture. In Saarinen’s words, “The undercarriage of chairs and tables in a typical interior makes an ugly, confusing, unrestful world. I wanted to cleat up the slum of legs. I wanted to make the chair all one thing again.”

Eero Saarinen, doesn’t he have some other art work around town? I think it is a sculpture piece. It will come to me. 😉