I’ve been out of touch for a while. Take that as you will.
Before I get back to my regular posting, I’d like to share this amazing photo that my Aunt Carolyn sent from her current journey. She was snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, and happened upon this fish:
Isn’t that about the craziest thing you’ve ever seen? It’s called a Hump Headed Maori Wrasse. The locals have named it Wally.
You can check out Carolyn’s adventures at her blog.
Happy V-Day, friends. If you haven’t sent your loved one(s) a card yet, it’s not too late. www.someecards.com can hook you up.
I’m partial to these:
There are many more fun ones over at that site.
Tomorrow, assuming I have my act together, I will post pictures of the awesome Valentines that my sister made for the kids this year. To say they were a hit is an understatement.
Hope you’re having a good day.
Yesterday I got to volunteer at the annual party for our local Mental Health and Mental Retardation office. Somewhere around 350 clients attended. It was a huge collaborative effort, with many volunteers and donors. My mom was responsible for the gift collection and wrapping effort. She got more than 500 gifts put together and transported to the party. Leftovers went to the MHMR office for homebound clients. Mom and Dad worked the entire party. My kids and I helped with set-up and food and gift distribution. It was a pretty cool family affair.
Highlights:
* Seeing creativity kick into action when, almost an hour after they were supposed to arrive with food, it was discovered that the caterer had the wrong date for the party. Said caterer was harangued to bring food ASAP, and in the interim, Mom and Dad and a neighbor acquired 40 bags of chips, many jugs of salsa, and paper plates and bowls to tide over the hungry and restless clients. For some clients, this would be their only meal of the day.
*The Flyin’ A’s, a singing duo who kept order and made what could have devolved into chaos when the food was two hours late into a party atmosphere. They really were heroes, playing for more than four hours without a break, and staying until the end. The party was supposed to end at 1 p.m., and because of the food snafu, ended after 3 p.m.
*Seeing the volunteer crew leap into action to keep clients orderly and fed as quickly as possible. There were long-time volunteers and first-time volunteers, and every one of them busted their butts. It was impressive!
*Helping my kids to understand their social and moral obligation to others. Together we wrapped 90 of the gifts over the last few weeks, and yesterday they helped decorate the party hall, diligently put bread on every plate, and joyfully watched the gift distribution. They didn’t complain even once. I was very impressed.
*Watching my 6-year-old daughter dance with Santa after the gift distribution. The two of them boogied down on the dance floor!
*Interacting with the clients. I was so happy to be able to serve. To know that my efforts were helping to bring a little joy to their day was just awesome. I had fun talking to them and bringing them food and gifts.
Hope y’all are enjoying the season!
Did you know that Handel’s Messiah has been continuously performed since its debut in 1742?
Last month a flash mob of very talented choristers performed the Hallelujah chorus in the food court of a mall. If you’re not familiar with the term “flash mob”, it’s a phenomenon where a group of people get together in a public place, do something random and unexpected all at the same time, and then disperse. Sometimes it’s very coordinated, and sometimes people who agree to do it just get a text to show up someplace at a particular time, where they will then receive instruction. The Messiah group was clearly pre-coordinated.
The Big M hates flash mobs. “At least when people go to see a show choir they’re prepared for the awkwardness,” he says. “It’s not fair to do that to unsuspecting people in public.”
I disagree. I think flash mobs are fun. Here’s the YouTube of the Hallelujah chorus. Enjoy!
I stumbled upon www.archive.org, repository of classic cartoons and educational films.
The Coronet series of films is hilarious. Try this one out:
They’ve got old movies, old newsreels, government films, music, books … it’s a goldmine for history junkies, and it’s all free.
Edit: If you’re unable to watch the movie by clicking on the image, try one of the links that appear below it. They’re different file formats, and one of them will work on your computer if you experiment.
In White Mountains National Forest of New Hampshire, the trees begin their change.
Dusk falls over the hills.
In the Green Mountains of Vermont, leaves fall like a gentle snow, softly striking the ground in an orange blur.
At the Morse Sugar Farm in Vermont, the pumpkins await carving.
Rain-filtered afternoon light flows through the jars of maple syrup standing guard in the sugar shack. They are the litmus papers for the spring sugar season when it comes time to make and grade the syrup.
The woodpile is stocked for winter.
A few summer wildflowers cling to their blooms even as the trees begin their surrender to the inevitability of winter.
On Old Orchard Beach in Maine, the amusement park is closed for the season.
The tide is out, but the sea has left her roots upon the sand.
They are her mark. I will be back.
The Cape Elizabeth lighthouse guards Casco Bay.
Beneath Fort Williams, the sea has left her stain on the granite cliffs.
On the cape, the Portland Head Light stands guard where it has for the past 219 years.
These are some of the photos from my trip last week.
Saw this outside the house a few minutes ago.
Random rainbow trivia: the ancient Greeks believed that the goddess Iris acted as a messenger to the gods and would travel along a rainbow to deliver her messages. I assume that tradition got passed on to the Romans because even today the Spanish word for rainbow is arco iris — Iris’ arch.
Not often that I get to bust that little tidbit out.
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P.S. If you haven’t seen the double rainbow video yet, go here. It’s so intense!
I like carbonated fruit sodas. I like them in glass bottles.
Hardly any sodas come in glass bottles anymore, and it’s a shame. Glass is a wonderful insulator. The soda comes out of the fridge so cold it has extra bite.
These particular glass bottles have the added attraction of a very cool flip top.
You pull the wire forward, and *pop* goes the ceramic stopper. (It has a rubber ring around the bottom to give it a better seal.) Somehow soda tastes better when you have audio anticipation.
The labels on these particular sodas are kind of homely. I can see they’re reaching for a feel of Renoir or maybe a vintage French poster, but all I’m seeing is a bunch of discordant colors and images vomited onto a label.
Not that that stops me from enjoying my soda. My current favorite is pink lemonade.
Underneath the labels, these bottles are beautiful. I realized quickly that it would be a shame to toss them into the recycling bin.
The Big M and I visited a little French country restaurant in Seattle that brought out bottled water to the table. Looking at my soda bottles, I thought it would be fun to do the same.
So I soaked the bottle I had on hand in hot, soapy dishwater, and then peeled off all the labels. Then I filled it with tap water and stuck it in the fridge to chill.
Isn’t that pretty? Makes you want to drink water, doesn’t it?
The bottle itself has additional beauty that is easily overlooked with all those labels distracting you.
I love the knobby glass texture under my fingers, all cold and sweating. The visual is nice, too. It’s the kind of glass bottle you’d have to pay $10 or more for at a retail outlet, but I got it for $3 at a grocery store. And it came filled with soda.
We stick a bottle on the table at suppertime and call it our “Fancy French Water.” The kids think it’s fun. I do, too.
I’ve been thinking more about the Joshua Bell story and why it’s so uncomfortable to be the one person standing and listening to a street performer.
During the summer there was an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition where young country music star Miranda Lambert sang her #1 hit “The House That Built Me” to the people who had just received their dream house, mortgage-free. It’s a sentimental song, but she sings it with genuine emotion, and it’s a song that, if it catches you in the right mood, will leave you weeping.* These people sat on a couch watching her play the guitar and sing. They looked absolutely miserable. They had wept when they saw the house, wept again as they walked around it, but now they sat dry-eyed and looking like they couldn’t wait for the moment to end.
It was sooo uncomfortable. And I think I know why.
Art conveys emotion to its audience. When that art is something static, like a painting, we can absorb the feeling without self-consciousness. We know that it moves us, and we enjoy the experience because we have no expectations that the painting is watching us watching it or that the artist is nearby waiting for our reaction.
Performance art is different. When it’s you one-on-one with the performer, it feels like all of the emotion is directed at you alone. It feels personal, and that’s an intimacy that’s too intense to handle most of the time. You become self-conscious that the performer has expectations about a reaction from you, and you start to worry that you’re not conveying the correct one. That self-consciousness takes you out of the moment. I think we need a co-audience to deflect some of the emotion so that we can actually appreciate performance art.
I think if you re-did the Joshua Bell experiment and planted a small crowd in front of him you’d see a completely different reaction from passersby. I’m curious what y’all think.
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*This song always catches me in the right mood. It’s embarrassing, actually.
Today I stumbled across this fascinating old article from the Washington Post about virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
A reporter challenged him to play in a Metro station as a street musician to see what would happen. Would commuters on their way to work recognize the transcendent beauty of his playing, or would they hurry on by?
Bell had sold out Boston’s Symphony Hall three days earlier. Tickets for okay seats ran $100 each.
As a former commuter to work, I suspected I knew what would happen. The one and only time I stopped on my way to work in six years was when I saw a pedestrian get hit by a car. A marching band followed by a parade of elephants wouldn’t have slowed me; I was never an early arrival with time to spare.
Some folks worried beforehand that L’Enfant Plaza would have a crowd control problem on its hands with Bell playing, but out of nearly 1,100 commuters that passed by him in the 43 minutes he played, only one recognized him. And a crowd never gathered.
It’s been theorized that beauty is contextual, and I can agree with that. A sunrise when you’re running late getting the kids to school is nowhere close to as lovely as one that arrives after you’ve spent the night in restless sleep wishing the day would come. Especially if that restless sleep is a result of nightmares about evil, supernatural nocturnal creatures coming after you.
I have weird dreams. But that’s beside the point.
I think being in the right frame of mind for beauty is important. As a museum curator in the article pointed out, it’s easier to appreciate a great painting in a museum than to appreciate the same painting reframed and stuck in a coffeehouse with a $150 price tag slapped on it.
But I think that’s only part of the problem. Another part is recognition by others. I think we have so many stimuli coming our way that one way we filter them and decide to stop and pay attention is if other people are already paying attention. Who looks at the sky unless someone is pointing?
Think about paintings again. What painting commands the most attention and respect in the world?
It’s a great painting, sure, but the personal experience is far from transcendent. It’s just you and 100 jostling other people behind a velvet rope 10 feet back looking at a painting through bulletproof glass. But people want to see it because they know it because everyone talks about it.
My favorite paintings are at the Prado in Madrid. But again, this is not original. I was primed for them because at 19 I desperately wanted to go to Europe and I had taken art history and my best friend in childhood had a copy of Velazquez’s Las Meninas hanging in her house. And they’re in an art museum, not a coffeeshop.
I also like this one in the Prado by Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son:
Did I mention the nightmares?
Going back to the subway station, if no one else were stopping to listen, would the music penetrate your consciousness to the point that you’d stop, especially if you were in a hurry?
I’d bet not. But if a huge crowd were gathered, you’d probably stop to look and ask people what was going on. And when they told you a famous musician was playing, you might stick around.
It’s an interesting article, and has video attached. Check it out.
EDIT:
The Big M reminds me that another reason that people aren’t stopping is that it’s uncomfortable to stand close to street musicians, who are just on the edge of panhandling. If it’s just you, you feel weird. If you’re part of a crowd, you don’t. Case in point: note that the only person who stood front and center to watch Bell was a woman who recognized him and knew he wasn’t really a street performer. Even the man who recognized his talent (if not him) and was enthralled by it stood away against a pillar out of the direct line of sight. When he had to get to work, he snuck in to drop money in the violin case and scurried away again as quickly as he could.
