Warriors

It has been four long weeks since I sent in the DNA samples, a test to see if I am a perfect match for my brother who is fighting an aggressive cancer, likely brought on by his exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam war.

In the meantime I have gone about acting as if everything is normal. I go to my drawing classes on Mondays, yoga 3 times a week, tai chi on Thursdays. I stay in touch with the kids. I manage the over-dry yard and lousy garden. I cook interesting things for myself while my husband is gone to Japan with a class that he leads. I avoid all images of death, harbingers of ill luck. But it's like a radio has been turned on in the back of my brain, and it plays incessantly....noise...noise that I defend myself against.

Then last week in figure drawing class the model who showed up, smiling, was a breast cancer survivor. She was so beautiful. The radio in my head went silent.

I must regress.

My brothers were like the three musketeers, a unit, until Jim (on the left) died in a motorcycle accident. Jon, in the middle, and Jeff on the right, grew up to be drafted into the army. Jon, assigned with the terrible task of driving ammo trucks, signed up for an additional 6 months of duty to prevent his younger brother Jeff from being in the even-worse job of infantryman.  There is a law that says siblings don't have to be in war zones at the same time.

Decades later Jeff pleads with doctors to let him be the donor of stem cells to cure Jon's Agent Orange cancer, but they say he isn't a match. Jeff cannot repay the favor of life. My heart bleeds for him.

But can I?

I carried candles in peace marches. I did not join the army. And I am a female. But I want to take the DNA test anyway.

Sometimes close, sometimes at odds, Jon and I are are a strange twosome in this battle. Our personalities are unlike.

This morning while I was in yoga  a voice message came from Wisconsin. I am a full match for my brother Jon. Sometime in the next 3 months I will give my stem cells to him. A nurse will call me in a week or two.

Today I skipped figure drawing class and stayed home to imagine myself in "warrior two pose," where I feel strongest of all. Invincible, really. I drew myself over and over.

Can you imagine how happy he was when I called to give him the news? He volunteered the information that perfect-match-blood-cells will hunt and kill cancer cells in his body, like soldiers. After all of these years, I too have become a warrior. At long last it is a war that I am prepared to fight.

Helly Nahmad's sentence

Painting by 7th grader combining Felix the cat with Warhol's Marilyn Monroe. Borrowed from this art teacher-help site

Helly Nahmad is a 35 year old art dealer in NYC. He comes from what has been billed as the wealthiest family in Monaco, learning the art business from his father David, who regularly bids up prices at Christies and Sotheby's. The big auction houses love this uber-rich family, even if it does periodically cause the feds to look into price-fixing.

Nahmad, pictured with Victoria's Secret model Miranda Kerr. Photo from The Daily Mail

Today Nahmad faces charges of racketeering, gambling, money laundering, and conspiracy all tied to a sports-betting enterprise and the Russian mob. As I read about his fraudulent selling/trading in high-stakes art, I was reminded of the recent Pulitzer Prize winner, The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, in which a painting is used as gang-land currency. The mobsters in that book do not all get off the hook easily.

Prosecutors with the US attorney's office recommend a year to 18 months for playboy Nahmad, who is a first-time offender, but a really big one. Here's the deal that Nahmad's attorneys are proposing today:

1. No prison.
2. Nahmad will instead put 100K per year towards a program in a Bronx homeless shelter to bring kids to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. *

*Nahmad professes to be qualified for this project by saying in a letter to the judge: " I do not have a great education in other subjects, but I really do know a lot about art, and I think I could really teach young people in a good way and hopefully introduce them to a world they might otherwise never visit."

Okay, deals are cut all the time between wealthy offenders and the court. I really wonder what is right, though. This feels somehow wrong. Introducing kids to art is praise-worthy, but what exactly is this "world they might never visit?" Nahmad's art world is a dirty place, one in which artists aren't rewarded really at all. Nahmad's family has feathered its own nest in that world for decades, and I wouldn't want a child of mine learning from him no matter how desperately homeless I might be.

Photo from Cascadia Courier

Nahmad may well be successful in his plea to avoid jail today. If so, I hope he is required to personally put in time with whole big crowds of rowdy 13 year olds in a genteel museum setting, every day for hours. It takes a trained professional to do this well, and it has to be one who loves kids. Helly, is that you? Be careful what you wish for.

Update: The judge didn't buy it and Nahmad goes to jail for a year and a day.

The field trip

 

A field trip that includes lunch on the town is a special feature of my colored pencil class and everybody looks forward to it. They had pushed tables together to accommodate our group of 19 students in the dimly lit group-seating-area upstairs at the Glenwood restaurant. I chose an awkward seat in the far corner where I would be on the edge of conversations between people who have known each other for years. These were not young students, and I was their least-known, most junior member.

I had planned on being alone in the crowd, but coming my way from across the room, clambering over chairs and smiling, was Irene. She squeezed behind me and forced her wiry frame into the worst seat in the house.

Oh this is fine, I'll just straddle these table legs, she says.

 Irene that's an awful seat. Let's move.

Irene turns down her hearing aid and says: I like to watch people's faces. You can read them, you know. You can always tell who has troubles. Look at Adele.

I look at Adele, but she doesn't seem any different. Agreement seems easiest. Yeah.
We don't change seats, but I change the subject.

Irene you look awesome. Girl, what's your secret?

She regards me seriously, and says I have found the source, I really have. 

We are in a crowded room with people ordering lunch all around and we stare at one another.


What is the source? I ask.


The source...is gratitude. Everyday I say thankyouthankyouthankyou. I say it all day long. Thank you for this day.


Surpassing the trip to the art gallery, I have just had my favorite moment of the field trip. The waiter interrupts us and Irene talks him into something that's not on the menu. Irene is 93 years old. Everybody should have such a friend.

Irene's drawing-in-progress of a barn that reminds her of the family's farm in Montana in the 1920's.

A thousand dark birds

This morning after the rain there was a great noise outside, such a cacophony of crows that Eddy ran to the door and barked.  The two dogs leashed, we stepped into the wet driveway together.

It looked like an audience of a thousand dark birds, flapping their way from tree to tree far above, calling frantically to one another.  "Dog! Dog! Dog! Dog!"  Indeed, the dogs were the first to notice. There in the driveway, still limp from life, lay a single silent crow. I put Ed and Reub back in the house.

It seemed important to be careful when I returned. The crows became quieter, but they observed every move as I took pictures, the sad, respectful investigator at the scene of a crime.

She was so perfect.  If I had desecrated one feather, there is no doubt that the watchful flock gathered in the fir trees would have descended in fury.

 I buried her in the soft duff below the leaves, the crowd above dispersing in twos and threes, the drama playing itself out. Her death had been duly noted by all.

Within You, Without You, acrylic painting by Nancy Watterson Scharf, 2012

This was a sad beginning to the day but I am strangely grateful. Cocooned in a warm house, distracted by my easy world, it is good to be reminded of the lives of birds.

Cephalopod Coffeehouse book review: Out of the Shadows

It's the last Friday of the month, time to own up to what I've read in the past 4 weeks, and for the most part it isn't a pretty picture. Buzzfeed online. The Funny Times for a newspaper. And a new low in fiction: Desperate Housedogs by Sparkle Abbey. My god, how embarrassing! Literary junk food for a whole month? Armchair Squid of The Cephalopod Coffeehouse wonders what my best read has been.

There is one book that sets itself apart from the summertime drivel: Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows, by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams. It's a book about  a photographer who has fascinated me since I first heard about her a couple of years ago: Vivian Maier, the so-called "nanny photographer," whose thousands of undeveloped rolls of film were sold off at an auction in 2007 when she was ill and unable to pay for their storage.

Vivian died unknown in 2009. But John Maloof, who bought the spools of film hoping to find original material for a book he was writing about a Chicago neighborhood, soon realized that he was sitting atop a mountain of astonishing street photography, shot mostly in Chicago, but also in New York and France. Maloof's book Vivian Maier: Street Photographer probably contains more of Vivian's most powerful images than Cahn and Williams book, but less about the details of her secretive life.

Out of the Shadows' unedited photos accompany anecdotes gleaned from interviews with the families for whom she worked during the 50's and 60's. Imagine a nanny who took you on field trips to the Chicago livestock yards...that's pretty strange.

Maier's ability to capture forceful images on everyday walks with her young charges is astounding.


I highly recommend this book, especially in tandem with Maloof's book. I hope to see the documentary (just out this year) about Vivian Maier.  Check out the trailer here:





Writing this book review has made me  feel a little better about myself. One good book per month is better than none.

Julie Green's 500 plates of The Last Supper

Photo stolen from the OSU website. Photographer unknown.

This is Julie Green, who has recently gained increasing national coverage of her work, and whose art has created a big stir at the local public gallery. She is also my husband's extravagantly awesome friend and colleague at Oregon State University. Mostly they know each other from the yoga class that they've attended mid day for years.

I've always been in awe of Julie, and now I'm really glad she's been noticed in a big way for her ongoing work "The Last Supper," depicting the final dinner requests of death row inmates.

No matter what your view of the death penalty, this show packs a very visceral punch.

The prisoner's last meal is personal information made public after the execution.

It's like a little window into who that person was.

Some requests are big and expensive.

Others not so much.

And some not at all.

States that have the death penalty are well-represented.

Some states don't bend over backwards; this one was from Alabama. In 2011 Texas stopped taking last requests altogether.

Julie told me today that she is seeking a museum or organization to accept her donation of these plates, which are not for sale.   She says, "It will be a gift, not for sale, for a space that has room for about 50 new plates each year. If anything comes to mind, now or later, please let me know."

So if you have any ideas about a venue that could house this collection, speak up.

Links:
New York Times feature
Julie's website
BadatSports interview with Julie Green

And below is a thoughtful short video about the why's and how's of Julie's work:



The Last Supper from Dark Rye on Vimeo.

Those that belong to the emperor

I picture Borges over a whiskey, scribbling on a napkin,  coming up with this divine, arbitrary classification of animals:

Animals are divided into:

• those that belong to the Emperor,

• embalmed ones,

• those that are trained,

• suckling pigs,

• mermaids,

• fabulous ones,

• stray dogs,

• those included in the present classification,

• those that tremble as if they were mad,

• innumerable ones,

• those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,

• others,

• those that have just broken a flower vase,

• those that from a long way off look like flies.

from the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge,

by Jorge Luis Borges

Borges' taxonomy is from his 1942 essay The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, which I haven't read, but that's not stopping me from doodling illustrations for it in a battered old sketchbook.

 Who are those that belong to the emperor?

Or the embalmed ones?

It's fun to think about, a project to mull over for a long time.

Fall festival

You know that thing people like to say when they don't want to talk about art: I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like. That's kind of how I feel about politics. Spare me the arguments and details; let me decide who I like for my own reasons. Earplugs and a blindfold aren't a good thing to wear when you're trying to decide who the next leader of an extremely powerful country will be. You should be an informed voter. But with all of the screaming and finger pointing in politics now, who can stand to listen? I wish the election were tomorrow so it would be over.

Anyway. Recently we went to Fall Festival, an annual juried art fair that's worth a visit. We always find ourselves there at lunch, and darn it, once again I didn't have the guts to buy myself an elephant ear. I'll never get that scratched off the 100 Things to Eat Before You Die list. I took this picture though, because I thought it was hilarious that they set up right next to the local Republican Party folks. Do you think they sold more elephant ears that way?

This is a very blue county, so there wasn't much of a line at the GOP food booth. But seriously, what were they thinking? Cabbage Rolls and Meatballs-on-a Stick?  That's just gross.  John, speaking of politicians, said that meatballs-on-a-stick seemed strangely appropriate.

We skipped the meatballs-on-a-stick, opting for felafels instead, and then went to buy these cards, from my friend and fellow art teacher, Julia Lont. Even if I didn't know anything about art, I'd still love these.

Art on walls

I live in an upscale little college town. If you wander through the alleys in the vibrant downtown area you will find poetry and photographs hanging where there might otherwise be graffiti.

When there is graffiti it's rather carefully placed, like this pretty cool example, hanging in a space that seemed to beg for it.

This building, if it were in LA, NYC, or almost anywhere in Europe or South America, would be a canvas for taggers.   People who practice graffiti tend to speak for the dispossessed; they make their mark as a show of power over those who are seen as powerful. It's only a matter of time before it becomes more prevalent here.

 But taggers will almost never make their mark on a space that has been painted already. If you own a giant blank wall you are always free to make your own statement, and this has been done in spades recently in my little town.

 David Lin, Taiwanese, hired an artist to paint a mural on a building he's turning into a restaurant. The 100' mural depicts an oppressive China beating down Tibet and Taiwan. Unsurprisingly, Chinese students at OSU were offended and complained.

 Diplomats from the Chinese embassy flew up from San Francisco to meet with the mayor.

 

 They asked her to have it taken down.

 

She said she has no jurisdiction over art, and reminded them that in the US there is freedom of speech.

 

 The ensuing  bro-ha-ha made international press and has brought Mr. Lin a lot of support. 

In terms of the domination of Tibet, China actually has a point that is rarely heard. However China has no right to ask Mr. Lin to paint over his mural here in the US, and so it will stay.

I say "Yaaay for that!" Art that is spray-painted on the property of others...this is controversial. Still I can't help but be fascinated.