8/20/21
Yes, I am the kind of person who reads The New Yorker. And yes, I am the kind of person who keeps a big stack of aging New Yorkers trying to read all the dog-eared articles. This book review from April seemed promising - the quote from J.M. Coetzee . . . "'a deformed and stunted' society produces a deformed and stunted inner life" really resonated with me as it applies to my own country - deformed and stunted indeed, but with hope, I like to believe.

And then I got to the passage "first the mother dies, then the father, then one of their daughters, then their only son" and I stopped reading. I find I have no further interest in anything James Wood has to say.

It all rides on the insertion of the word "only" to describe their son. Why say "only son" and not just "son"? The meaning is the same - "only" is redundant. But oh what a powerful redundancy - as though the low value daughters are akin to a litter of kittens, but the son . . . oh the son is the inheritor of the family name, the family estate, the family heritage. And only one! What a tragedy.

But the daughters? Oh you know, just girls. That some number of daughters survived? Not important compared to the loss of the ONLY son.
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​And that gives rise to another "only son":

Does the author compare the loss of the only son to the loss of the most famous martyr of all time? Well I won't be reading the rest of the book review so I'll never find out. The author weaves the narrative of male patriarchy into his text and it's not for me. Perhaps I'll read some bell hooks to soothe my wearied soul.

as8/17/21
Yesterday I saw the Van Gogh Exhibit in DC. 
I wish now I had taken pictures of the things that disturbed me about the exhibit . . . But I did get a few photographs of things I liked about it.

Overall, I highly recommend this show:

• There is an interesting set up of images of vases projected onto a large bias relief style vase. Comparing the vases was an amusing exercise, if a bit small potatoes.
• There is a model of The Bedroom that you can walk into. You can sit in there, have your picture taken. Wow factor is high on that piece.
• In that same section there is a deconstructed model of one of the Japanese paintings and a three dimensional construction of the lobby/entrance to the mental institution. Fascinating.
• The largest room is immersive in its own right. Some of it is not really about Van Gogh, but it is still interesting.
• ​The close look at all his self portraits is wonderful. His eyes are piercing and he's looking right at YOU. He's intimidating.
• The coloring room seems like it is for children, but that was also really enjoyable. Just do it.
• You have to pay extra to be a VIP - DO IT! You then get to do an additional 3D immersive experience at the end plus you then get a lanyard, a badge, and a poster, all with starry night decor. The 3D googles were hard to fit on and the whole thing made me car sick, but WOW was that an amazing trip. You start in Van Gogh's bedroom that he so famously painted, check out some buildings in the village, walk past a windmill, walk (glide really) through a wheat field and then a Pissarro-esque forest, then come into the village where the outdoor nightclub is there on your right and then down the street to the quay. So many paintings brought to life and you get to travel through them, looking all around. Are the mountains in the background authentic to Arles? I dunno.​

On the down side:

• One of the panels tells us the largest amounts of money ever paid for Van Gogh paintings. This elevation of the economic value of these objects - as though their worth is amplified because rich individuals and corporations speculate on the value of art - is beneath contempt. It has no place in an art gallery.
• Speculative theories are presented as fact and they denigrate the contribution of the artist. For example, with no further evidence that some modern eye doctor thinks he's proven it, Van Gogh's inventive mastery of color is chalked up to the "fact" that he was color blind. In other words, he didn't invent it! He was just a victim of color blindness. That really ticked me off. There is  zero contemporaneous fact offered to support this claim, although he was seen by numerous doctors, wrote thousands of letters discussing his life, and consulted with (hobnobbed?) scores of other artists.
• In another presentation, we hear the voice of someone claiming to have a profound understanding of the symbolism of Starry Night - in which the stars are the light of optimism and the village is the darkness of despair. The cyprus tree unites these two opposing forces - bridges the gap. Van Gogh's letters are quoted repetitively in the exhibit. There is NO evidence provided of any kind that Van Gogh intended his works to have symbolic content. Yes, we are all subject to Jung's collective unconscious - communication by symbols is the universal human condition. But to ascribe these thoughts relating to Van Gogh's mental illness is unsupported by fact and demeans the artist. It's just speculation that looks like click bait. Do we care about Sylvia Plath's work because she killed herself? Are we just prurient consumers of morbid lives?
• They made a big deal about Van Gogh's last painting, of roots, as somehow manifesting his depressed state, while ignoring other works that had a similar structure of bare wood and the unvarnished truth about nature, not prettified. I found it odd that the curators, who made a big deal about his suicide, did not bother to mention the counter-theories that he was shot by an unsettled teenager. If we are going to dig around in the mud - why not bring up the controversy about that? But no - it didn't fit in with the producers narrative that he was not a suicidal individual.
  
• The obsession about his mental illness and suicide seemed to be of a piece of the current obsession with the lives of famous people - someone kidnapped Lady Gaga's dogs - news at 11; Robert Downey Jr. got loaded and went and slept in a bed at the neighbor's house by mistake, now you can dislike him rather than appreciate his art. I admire these artists but knowing this level of information about their personal lives is degrading to all of us. Pitching Van Gogh as a color-blind suicidal nut-job - why is that needed? There is SO  MUCH to discuss about art without bringing that up. 
• Another element that I found missing was any discussion of Van Gogh's brush work. Their claim is that the reason Van Gogh is so well appreciated is his use of color. Au contraire! While his use of color is spectacular, his brush work, the amount of painting he used, the thickness of the paint, and the brush strokes themselves, unmediated as it were, are a huge element - an element I would argue that is more powerful than his use of color. I love his brush strokes of flowers . . . 
• ​Additionally, his vision of the way things look - the refraction of light around stars, the shape and nature of the clouds in some of the landscapes, the way wall paper pushes forward into the foreground, the difference in how a painting of irises looks close up and far away (abstract vs REAL - as though you are looking out a window at them) - there is SO MUCH MORE TO VAN GOGH than his use of color. How could the curators have neglected these aspects of the best painter of all time?

So I recommend that you go SEE THIS SHOW but bring your critical thinking with you. Are the opinions offered as facts actually supported by evidence? Do you appreciate Van Gogh's art because he was crazy? Or perhaps because some rich people have paid for a painting more than the gross domestic product than some of the world's poorest nations? Shun the anti-artist commentary and focus on the magnificence of Van Gogh's work.

8/3/21
Drove back to Baltimore from Fredericksburg, hauling a load of dishes and clothes and whatnot from one of the storage units. Mama Bear is cleared out and Papa Bear should be cleared out by next Tuesday. That leaves Baby Bear - all high value items - books and paintings. We're getting there . . . 

Driving through the construction of the new HOV toll road on 95 got on my nerves so much that I invented a new name for those lanes - the "Pig Lanes."

Virginia let a contract out to an out-of-state builder to install a toll road down the center of Highway 95. The charges for this one way road are astronomical - only wealthy people can afford to pay that rate on a regular basis.

So when traffic is stop and go all the way from Quantico to Fredericksburg, which it is frequently, the poor people can watch as the wealthy fly by in the Pig Lanes. The incredible expense of these special roads, with immense ramps and other structures and waste of lanes (two lanes going only one way at time where four lands could be fit) will NOT improve traffic flow. Far from it. What the Pig Lanes do is ensure that the rich people won't have to get in the slow traffic that regular people must suffer. 
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The rest of the drive was much more pleasant, after we got past the Pig Lanes, and the slide show shows some of the views that intrigued me on the way home.
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8/1/21
Yesterday, the elder of my two daughters and her amazing boyfriend rented a moving van and picked up all the furniture pieces from the "Papa Bear" storage unit that are too unwieldy to move in our cargo van. They drove them up from Fredericksburg to Baltimore and unloaded them all to the correct rooms and then dead-headed back to the U-Haul place near where they live. I am grateful to have such helpful relatives.

The pre-eminent piece was our bed. I slept in my own bed again last night, the first time since around mid-April, around 14 weeks. During those unhoused weeks, we did get to sleep in a bed sometimes: for the 2 1/2 weeks we mooched offa my sister-in-law and her husband, my brother, and the one night stay-overs every two weeks in "Base Camp" (a bedroom in my daughter's house), and those two days at the motel near Colonial Beach. So there were some breaks in the "get down on the floor to get into bed" routine . . . and the "bugs can crawl right over you with ease" torment . . . 

Sleeping in a bed is more than the nice mattress, the sheets, the room to move around, the closeness to your mate.
The getting in and out of the bed is so radically easier.
While I slept on an air mattress hoisting me 2 inches from the floor, I kept holding onto the idea that I was become more nimble every time I got out of bed at o-dark-thirty to go pee, having to position myself just so and then roll over onto my knees, which I positioned onto my soft furry slippers to keep from injuring my ancient knees (well one of them is really circa-2016, isn't it? All titanium and plastic, innit?), and then grabbing onto my excellent camping chair to get the leverage to stand up. I was getting more nimble, but I was also injuring my knees on a regular basis, making them ache. Being 70, I am trying to care for my creaking infrastructure and not do myself a mischief. A real bed helps that enterprise tremendously.

My heart goes out to all the people who are getting evicted at this very moment - some of the "15 million people in 6.5 million U.S. households" according to an article in Reuters today. (U.S. COVID-19 eviction ban expires, leaving renters at risk.) I have some sense of what they will be experiencing, if they are unlucky enough to have no relatives to mooch offa but lucky enough to have camping equipment.

​I'm counting my blessings.