Friday, September 08, 2006
Art Beat 2006, Downtown South Bend
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Russian Tea Time
I met them in
I was a sixteen-year-old
So the selection of Russian restaurant to honor my parents’ 45th anniversary was no accident. They gave me
We started with a flight of vodkas—bilberry, cranberry, and plain. These vodkas, served with dark rye bread chunks and pickles, go down like velvet. A fine way to start any long, long lunch.
We decided to share a sampler meal because we couldn’t decide between all the delicious options. Borscht (served hot, the traditional way), beet caviar, stuffed mushrooms. Followed by stuffed cabbage, Moldavian chicken meatballs, a breaded chicken delight, beef stroganoff, kashi and rice.
The finish must be handled with care. We managed it properly by drinking endless cups of deep amber Russian tea (available for sale on their website) and a selection of strudels, cookies, and cakes.
A hearty almost three-hour celebration.
The restaurant is located a few steps from the Art Institute, but the day was too mild to ruin by going indoors. So we headed to the
It was a brief world wind visit. I hope they do the same for their 46th anniversary!
Monday, August 28, 2006
About Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)
While the name Duchamp may not ring a bell, you have surely seen or heard about one or two of his works. For example, he is the artist that painted a jaunty mustache on a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa (1919). He also submitted, under the same R. Mutt, an inverted urinal to an art show (1917). Although the urinal was rejected from the show, it has become a legendary anti-sculpture.
I came to admire Duchamp’s self-described title as “respirateur” after reading Duchamp: A Biography by Calvine Tomkins. He was a man who lived his life by his own rules, unafraid to fly in the face of a conventional life and all its creature comforts. He breathed and he created things. In a world suffused with material objects, he transformed the mundane into art by making his “readymades.” He took a regular snow shovel, inscribed a cryptic title, signed it and it was art. Or was it? His art went beyond the visual and material elements associated with art and made his audience think and ask the question: what is art? (What would Duchamp have said about the CowParade?)
Duchamp inspired young artists to think freely, think boldly about both art and life. Some criticized Duchamp for all the bad art that sallied forth in the late twentieth century. And there has been some regrettable artwork. And yet I have to say that Duchamp has inspired me in a positive way. It is my job to be a “respirateur.” For too long I have been enslaved by doctrinal dictates and good-girl standards that compel me to observe and serve the world. Being a good-girl perfectionist, the observe-and-serve mandate dictates when it should merely guide.
First, one must breathe and then one can observe and just observe. Only then can I witness to what I see. Witness by my writing. By my art. And finally by my actions.
Duchamp taught me that it is okay to merely observe the world. In fact, it may be the finest act of humility there is. Of course, to accurately observe the world—to see truthfully what there is and what there should be—is enough for a lifetime. Practically, his life and art have also given me permission to write my novel by my own rules.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Welcome to Write Now
Friday, August 25, 2006
Read all about it!
Thursday, August 24, 2006
After Beef
The cows that decorate the world's major cities as part of the global public art movement, CowParade, are oddly fascinating. (See earlier blog: Car Parade: Budapest and Boston.)
I have spent too much time thinking about why people love these dressed up plaster bovines. But delight they do. Maybe it's the shared common form--your basic cow--transformed. You don't see a cow, you see how the cow was interpreted and that gives a jolt of pleasure as you impress yourself with your ability to understand the visual pun or message of the artist. People "get" this art. (In a way they don't get modern art?) This gives pleasure. Hence the cow parade goes on.
I can't help but think that in one hundred years, art historians will write books about early twenty-first century public art. Perhaps with the following title: "The Bovine Consciousness Emergent in Metropolitan Byways: A study." Or how about: "Heifers Rising: The Rise of Bovine Beauty in Early Twenty-first Century Urban Pastures."
But didn't I just say that my cow diversion was in its final throes of passion? Ready for the slaughter.
Let there be cows.
(Yet, it is so much more satisfying to write about parading cows than to attempt to write about the cow in the middle of my life, which is related to the elephant in the room, if you know what I mean.)
Vow to self: less caffeine, more tennis, less chatter, more keyboard clatter, and so forth.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Cow Parade: Budapest and Boston
And so I decided to instead write about cows.
Another Update: I found the official Hungarian site for the CowParade. Check it out and dust off your Hungarian language skills! http://www.cowparade.hu/index2.html
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
One Hour to Madness and Joy
One Hour to Madness and Joy
by Walt Whitman
One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children,
I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)
O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me
in defiance of the world!
O to return to
O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of
a determin'd man.
O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all
untied and illumin'd!
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
To be absolv'd from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and
you from yours!
To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!
To have the gag remov'd from one's mouth!
To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.
O something unprov'd! something in a trance!
To escape utterly from others' anchors and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
To be lost if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.
Monday, August 07, 2006
Poem: August Morning
Settling into the house will take time after such a long time on the road. I do not look forward to the unpacking. In fact I am a notorious non-unpacker. I live out of my suitcase for weeks rather than face the laundry I should do sooner rather than later. Of course L. unpacks first thing.
To kick things up a notch, here is a lovely poem to savor:
American Life in Poetry: Column 071 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
William Carlos Williams, one of our country's most influential poets and a New Jersey physician, taught us to celebrate daily life. Here Albert Garcia offers us the simple pleasures and modest mysteries of a single summer day.
August Morning It's ripe, the melon
by our sink. Yellow,
bee-bitten, soft, it perfumes
the house too sweetly.
At five I wake, the air
mournful in its quiet.
My wife's eyes swim calmly
under their lids, her mouth and jaw
relaxed, different.
What is happening in the silence
of this house? Curtains
hang heavily from their rods.
Ficus leaves tremble
at my footsteps. Yet
the colors outside are perfect--
orange geranium, blue lobelia.
I wander from room to room
like a man in a museum:
wife, children, books, flowers,
melon. Such still air. Soon
the mid-morning breeze will float in
like tepid water, then hot.
How do I start this day,
I who am unsure
of how my life has happened
or how to proceed
amid this warm and steady sweetness?
Poem copyright (c) by Albert Garcia from his latest book "Skunk Talk" (Bear Starr Press, 2005) and originally published in "Poetry East," No. 44. Reprinted by permission of the author. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Back in Budapest
My parents arrived in
It is a long, long trip from
Saturday and Sunday were spent on the pot-holed roads between villages and bigger cities in Transylvania. We visited a region famous for its salt mines, partially because my hometown in
The mines we visited were huge caverns used here for health and recreation. It is considered therapeutic for those with respiratory problems to spend hours down inside the mines breathing the air which is certainly pollen free. None of us noticed an air ventilation system. No fire escapes. After the 1.5 kilometer bus ride down into the mine, we descended about 200 wooden steps. The experience was eerie. The mine is now equipped with picnic tables, swings, ping pong tables, and room for badminton. There is a church and a museum. And, of course, a coffee bar. (Other parts of the mine are still in working condition.)
After leaving the mines we spent the afternoon in nearby Szovata, a resort town with a salty-water lake. The lake is filled with bobbing heads due to the buoyancy of the water. We didn't float ourselves; instead we enjoyed a long, long lunch on a patio near the lake.
We fed my parents all the local foods we love: cheeses, cakes, fresh fruits and vegetables, mushrooms taken down from the mountains, micc (a kind of grilled meat), kurtos kalach, etc.
We took them up into the mountains around Csik to look at land we might want to buy. We drank Csiki beer on the main street and people watched. (We kept the gypsies at arm's length.)
On Monday we visited the church at Csiksomlyo, famous for its miraculous Virgin Mary statue.
We ate Grandma’s lunch at 1 pm everyday—roka mushrooms paprikas or chicken paprikas, puliszka, or potatoes, or perhaps sheep’s milk cheese and always enough perfectly ripe watermelon to feed an army.
Thanks be to God, the heat wave broke before we arrived in
1. Roads in Transylvania are not just for cars--expect hay-loaded horse carts, motorcycles, bikes, old ladies walking, hitchhikers, train crossings operated by hand, hand-picked berries or mushrooms for sale, trucks, and the occasional grazing cow.
2. Kansas and Transylvania have more in common than you might expect.
3. Poverty does not equal danger or violence.
4. Language barriers can be overcome by walking a puppy on the street.
5. Poverty does not equal lack of education.
6. "Decarbonated" does not mean no carbonation when looking for water with no gas.
7. If you are willing to give your last piece of pizza to a beggar woman, do not feel shocked or offended when she walks two steps away and shares it with her son right before your eyes.
8. Transylvania and Budapest--not handicap accessible.
9. Puppies are worth it.