Mary Ginsberg's "Communist Posters": Book Review

North Korea menaces again as a foe of the United States. Cuba waits as if eager for reconciliation. Regimes against which American expended much manpower and munitions fifty years ago now trade with their neighbors in Asia, the largest of which, China, is capitalist in fact if not theory. Headlines and Wiki-Leaks pepper the news and feeds with allegations of Russia, echoing those of the Cold War.

This range of reactions by the U.S. government and media to Communist nations makes this collection of posters from these and allied nations under red flags relevant. On the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mary Ginsberg edits and introduces the most comprehensive presentation in print of often vivid propaganda, that for a less screen-focused century, captured the eyes and the minds of hundreds of millions. They celebrated, endured, or hated the heydays of Fidel or Mao, Lenin and Stalin, and the various apparatchiks who tried to implement their theories and schemes.

A representative example appears early on. Red Loudspeakers Are Sounding Through Every Home (1972), as Ginsberg observes, documents the use of images to instill obedience. In a Chinese village, slogans, songs and lectures emanate from speakers installed on the streets. Their indoctrination may have seemed inescapable. For such broadcasts cannot be shut off. Other means further the deification of the leader as well as his dictates. The home shown on the poster has only a framed portrait of The Chairman, surrounded by small banners with sayings and little red books. Outside, a family gathers.

Over 330 illustrations demonstrate the range and the scope beyond the U.S.S.R. and the P.R.C. Korean, Mongolian, Eastern European, Vietnamese and Cuban chapters provide essays by scholars. These cross-reference the pictures, providing a narrated guided tour that alerts readers to the themes.

These depend heavily on Constructivism and photomontage. Art as function and promotion through photography combine to sell the peasants and workers on these products of the intellectuals. What they peddle are exhortations to produce more, fight harder and act braver. The verbosity of the caption can weigh down the impact of the 1937 image. Sergei Igumnov's red fist emerging from the rolled-up sleeve showing off a worker's clenched and muscular arm strangles a snake with swastika eyes. What this depicts is: "We'll Uproot Spies and Deviationists of the Trotsky-Bukharin Agents of Fascism." Given the relentless purges under the Man of Steel, such creations linger longer for their visual force rather than the ever-changing explanations linking the art to the enemy of the moment.

As dynasties bore down, the masses viewed ideals. Aleksei Lavrov's The People's Dreams Have Come True (1950) has a grandfather resembling Lenin. He clasps a Young Pioneer's shoulder. The old man's smile encourages the slightly wistful, perhaps hesitant, fantasies of the boy, looking up from his book, penned by "a critic of urban social conditions." Pravda sits on the table of their ship's cabin. Behind their sofa a reproduction of "the famous Repin painting Barge Haulers on the Volga" is a bit blurred, but "confirming how terrible things used to be." Outside, ships sail past factories that gleam.

The last Soviet poster blurs into patterns mirroring 1920s abstractions. Other lands drew on their own artistic legacies. Mongolian folk art and calligraphy enter many of its first efforts, while later ones mimic the Chinese Communist preference for red banners, gesticulating vanguards, rosy cheeks and marching masses. Polish aesthetics, as evocatively shown on film posters, also grace political ones. Silhouettes, shadows, stark typefaces and surreal figures shunted aside the Soviet template. Czech and Hungarian designers likewise incorporated pop art and psychedelic patterns into silkscreen and montage takes on opera, a new television model or Allende's brief Chilean victory. Anti-Americanism also heightens for Western audiences a Chinese imitation of an anti-Vietnam war mural, with placards with English-language denunciations of the war machine. North Korea dutifully perpetuates this type.

The appeal of stylized "characters in primary colors, along with shrill slogans, dotted with exclamation marks" predates the reign of Kim Il Sung. But the "visual recognizability and readability" sustain themselves for two-thirds of a century due to the simple, even atrophied graphics. As Koen de Cuester explains in this section, campaigns prove unrelenting under the Kims, and so the shelf life of a given poster is limited: "the message prevails over the package." He also asks a necessary question: "Where does art end and propaganda begin?" For the D.P.R.K., art theory combines ideological with artistic equality through a unified concept. Agitprop exhorts the Koreans to work diligently against an Uncle Sam whose competing tanks, bombers and missiles always loom.
What distinguishes Korean versions is a frequent inclusion of a mythical horse flying over smoking chimneys and rice paddies. Eyes also lead the way as they flare up and as fingers point the way on.

Vietnam takes French and Indochinese influences, hand-drawn lettering, indigenous themes and guerrilla poses from street art for some of its varied products. They stand out as more awkward and more original than the Soviet, Maoist or Korean contributions. They perpetuate the raw, eyewitness sensibility of not an imagined but a real struggle against an imperialist invader, or more than one.

Another rich array of approaches results in Cuban artifacts. International influences entered into the island's art long before 1959. Capitalizing on tourism and a worldwide market, its posters were sold as commercial items. Diminishing the Socialist Realism quotient, they increase the use of stencils, hand-cut and silkscreened. Disparate objects may juxtapose; so may "humour and visual wit." Not to mention Castro's 1977 proclamation: "Our enemy is imperialism, not abstract art." Contrasting the sophistication of the Cuban propaganda against the simplicity of Mongolian, for instance, reminds viewers and readers of the connections one Communist enclave may enjoy, as opposed to another.

One closes this collection wondering what the future holds for political posters. Capitalist systems appeal to the watcher of a screen far more than the passerby of a placard. Scholars in this current century may have to hope that our soon-outmoded digital technology records the catchphrases and memes generated by the political spectrum today as carefully as archivists have these bold posters. (Spectrum Culture) 432 pages 04-22-17 Reaktion Books

Stanley Spencer's "Looking to Heaven: Vol. 1": Book Review

Two million words from this English artist's manuscripts fill notebooks and diaries at the Tate. Stanley Spencer's grandson, John, edits what he confesses to be "an almost impossible task." His forebear kept starting and stopping attempts to create his definitive account of himself. "I don't want a tidy book," the senior Spencer''s cited here, for "life is not tidy." This statement may surprise those who visit the well-preserved (if far more trafficked today) Berkshire village of Cookham, site of his birth. There a small museum displays many of his skewed depictions of his neighbors placed into biblical or visionary scenes, alongside his accomplished pastoral paintings of the place where he spent most of his life. That hamlet remains neatly preserved in its heart. There many of Spencer's landscapes remain recognizable to the careful viewer over a century after Stanley began his storied and odd career.

John Spencer observes that his grandfather "has been variously presented as a village simpleton, an eccentric, haunted by the erotic, a recluse, an egoist, a victim of circumstance--and also a visionary, a complete original, and one of the greatest British artists of the twentieth century." Finally, readers can begin to judge for themselves, from Stanley's diligent letters and lists, the first stages of his British success.

Volume one commences with Spencer's recollections of his youth. Born in 1891, his sketches from his teens appear gracing the margins of this handsome publication. Already a command of line draws one's attention. At fifteen, he began watercolor lessons. These prepared him for matriculation at the premier Slade School of Fine Art, from 1908 to 1912. He commuted to London and back each day.

Tellingly, his classmates nicknamed him "Cookham." Yet he admits that what he "felt" in his village could not be expressed at the Slade. "My knowledge developed by the experience of a series of drunken experiences," unrelated to each other. The key adjective here denotes not inebriation from alcohol, but elevation from his environment, and what he calls an oracular sense of contact with the "Grand Vision." This encompassed his work and his life's perspective, as an alchemy stirring up the quotidian into the mystical. Although a Christian, his faith remained peculiar, generated from within.

His canvas, "John Donne Arriving in Heaven," by 1911 confirms his direction. The Pre-Raphaelites and Giotto combined with modernist elements and foreshortened angles at this formative juncture. The characteristics evident early on would motivate him for a half-century. His return from Slade to his "earthly paradise" back in Berkshire inspired him to create "Apple Gatherers." The wide-eyed or off-handed depiction of faces and gestures looms out of the surface. Limbs distend; bodies contort.

These contortions prefigured his entry into a war that would end this idyll. Stanley's older brothers enlisted. He with a younger sibling joined a Home Hospital Service in the Royal Medical Corps. But he confides to his close friend, Henry Lamb, also now in uniform, that he himself fears being called a slacker. Returning to Cookham, those "wounded are always quiet and never say a word about our not joining." Reading Dostoevsky's The Possessed and hearing a Beethoven movement that portended to Stanley the end of the world reveal his troubled conscience. He tries to align his resistance to brutality with the need to be "a manly man" as a stereotypical loyal young zealot ready to march off.

By his mid-twenties, already known by poet-soldier Rupert Brooke and patron Lady Ottoline Morrell, Stanley felt pressured to do more for patriotism. In mid-1915 he followed his younger brother Gil into the St. John's Ambulance Corps. Assigned to the Beaufort Lunatic Asylum serving as a War Hospital. Stanley survives its "crushing atmosphere" bu "means of my own creative feelings." At this point, John's edition lacks illustrations. Instead, a few facsimiles of letters under a YMCA letterhead appear. Stanley longed to flee the "beastliness" of serving as an orderly. He volunteered for a Field Ambulance as Britain mobilized for the "big push" on the Somme, the massive offensive mid-1916.

That September, Spencer landed in Macedonia. In its mountainous terrain north of Salonica, he yearns for "something findable." For two-and-a-half years, this region "became the goal and place wherein spiritually I wanted to find the redeeming and delivering of myself in all the activities the unexpressed me had lived through and in." The verbiage of this phrasing does not belie its sincerity.

Pencil sketches and ink and wash appear in the margins of John's compilation, signalling Stanley's productivity between his duties. His inspiration comes "by praying for the Power to live purely and absolutely you get that power." He acclaims the intense "feelings" resulting as necessary for an artist.

Shakespeare and Hardy, Chaucer and Milton, music and poetry pepper his letters. Despite hospitalization for malaria, Stanley Spencer sustains his cheer. He requests Robert Louis Stevenson and a little book on Raphael. He misses hot cross buns. He envisions martial splendor from the Book of Joshua. He paints his comrades scrubbing shirts in the overflow from torrents. He compares this to "how the old Greek women do their washing." His imagination fired, he writes to Henry Lamb. "I am a thousand times more determined to do something a thousand times greater than anything when I get home, and am storing up energy all the time." Whether betraying a touch of Orientalism or merely expressing his drive to create and to incorporate thus the Other, he tells another recipient: "Yesterday I drew the head of an Asiatic man. It was nearly as exciting as Columbus discovering America."

Early in 1918 he transfers into the Royal Berkshire Regiment. Their foe, "the Bulgars," moves him typically, as Stanley "got the impression of them as beings which came from an essential and permanent night, and that each night we approached their dark abode as midnight drew near and as the morning descended and came away with it." This sentence shifts from echoes of verse to cadences of the Bible, and given Spencer's immersion into literature then, reflects his own mystical reactions.

After he quotes Paradise Lost to a correspondent, he adds: "That's the sort of thing I live on, along with Army rations." He goes on digging, loving God, and reading Milton as his main occupations. This retreat for introspection ended when in May Spencer applied for a War Memorial promotion "scheme" and to be employed by the Ministry of Information to "paint pictures relating to the war."

Then, an extended passage from Stanley's later recollections is inserted in the chronicle by John. This narrates a bivouac, a long march away from battle, and a sense of dreaminess as distance brings peace. Suddenly, scouting a gradient, Stanley met an armed officer who "wished me well out of the way." He was in the British Army. "No wonder they were still annoyed to see that I still existed."

Soon, combat commences. After, Spencer carries blankets to camp. His Regimental Sergeant Major passes by: "I expect you'd rather be painting, wouldn't you, Spencer?" He might have, given malaria again laid up Stanley back in Salonica. There he reads "the Testament nearly all day," in spite of "paganistic sentiments" in "many things." Looking back twenty years later on his Army treatment, Spencer acknowledges the right and wrong issues. But he laments how the "last war was exploited and used as a means of abusing people in their professions so as to be able to give vent to their jealousy of distinguished persons." Parsed in context, by implication, Stanley declaims that artists in the ranks "did not (AS THEY THOUGHT) serve in any way the immediate needs of the country."

The army's "anti-intellectual prejudice" rankles him. Around 1936, he looks askance at his fellow citizens who refuse to accept that Stanley aspires rather to a "true spiritual life." Therewith he strives towards "the model of essential humanness." While imperfect, he nonetheless insists on being treated fairly. Stanley Spencer's humanity, emphasized as this compendium closes, reminds his audience of the aims he would continue to seek through another war and into another stretch of partial peace.

His 1914 self-portrait takes up the cover of this elegant edition. A dark-haired man with dark eyes. A bold, confident, subtly defiant look. He captured himself well.

The final sentence from this manuscript edited by his grandson sums up much to come for Stanley. "I wish always to stress my own redemption from all that I have been made to suffer." His subsequent life, which it is to be hoped will be documented in the next installment(s) of this series, attests to Stanley Spencer's prickly pride, his dogged individuality, and his spiritual transformation through art.
(Spectrum Culture 4/24/17; Amazon US 5/9/17)

Molly Crabapple's "Drawing Blood": Book Review

Over a year ago, Vanity Fair published a report from the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa. Its Syrian correspondent, for fear of his life, remained anonymous. He sent photos of his city via cellphone. From these, the New York City native who goes by Molly Crabapple sketched intricate drawings, in her typical style of gracefully delineated shapes and wavering people. Out of digital images, Crabapple evoked illustrations hearkening back to a Victorian era when artists filled the news with detailed, lively depictions. Yet, Crabapple also infuses her increasingly activist art with innovation.

In Drawing Blood, she narrates, in "sentences at taut as garrotes," her first three decades. For an artist not yet thirty, a memoir may appear precocious. However, she infuses much of her coming-of-age story with fresh insights into the century, so far, from the perspective of a scrappy woman who confronts disorienting scenarios with mixed detachment and sensitivity. "It's a strange blend of disassociation, to stare into another's eyes only to make those eyes into shapes on paper." From an early age, she sketched to escape and to enlighten herself. Born to a Puerto Rican Marxist professor and a Jewish illustrator for children's books and products, she inherited her father's combativeness and her mother's talent. The child of their early divorce, Crabapple found solace in a few friends.

Of one, a Russian immigrant teenager, she recalls their brief bond. "We clung to each other, as bookish young people often do, while waiting out the years until our real life could begin." Schooled more by her self-taught reading in anarchism and the fin-de-siècle and her listening to Kurt Cobain, punk, and Trent Reznor, she soon fled abroad. She followed the route of many bohemian wanderers.

At the end of another century, she faced many restless travelers like herself, seeking meaning in a globalizing realm. In Marrakesh, "the henna looked like Cheetos dust on white girls, but on brown ones it resembled rose petals." Her own appearance, in what she defines as a tiny figure resembling Wednesday Addams, attracted men. Fending them off on the road drove her inward, to examine her fluid sexual and cultural identities. Restive with art school, she sought to make her craft matter.

Post-9/11, she got caught up in anti-war protests. "A painting didn't have to hang in a gallery, dead as a pinned butterfly. It could exist in spaces where people cared, as a mural, a stage set, a protest placard." This sparked her transformation into a noted chronicler of first the visual and later the verbal impacts of our unjust world. She disciplined herself to render these scenes by a crow's quill pen, flicking it "till the ink sped like motion and blood." Drawing Blood features her work, women as coiffured as those at the court of Versailles, wide eyes half-moons, or as louche men slouched slyly.

Tired of conventional training, she drops out of art school. She enters the sex-worker industry, as a artist's model and a burlesque performer. She endeavors, as her stint with Suicide Girls goads her, "to burn off her childhood," although that dubious enterprise "dispensed pallets of ego-crack. We were Pavlov's bitches." Molly Crabapple adopts her persona. With it, she pursues Internet promotion and procures a precarious living as a minor celebrity in the NYC demi-monde. Her lover, Fred, supports her. She indulges in freedom to roam among the company of many other women, as varied partners.

All the same, the middle section of her saga sags slightly. Her fame exudes a telling tinge of disappointment. Her loft and income are not enough. After the 2008 crash, the commissions she craves fade. She contemplates the fate of those like herself who cheered the excess on in Manhattan: "we sparklers illuminating the face of the destroyer." Chastened but not cured, she keeps feeding that beast, as her profits rebound and her reputation becomes internationally coveted. Witnessing London's anti-austerity activists at the end of 2010, she finally vows to pivot away from her status.

Therefore, "instead of taking refuge in a curlicued past," she puts her rococo pen to use. Frustrated by "painting pigs in Nero's nightclub," Crabapple leaves her insular, smug denizens in clubland behind. The radical upheaval of what she enters as the Occupy Movement intrigues her, but typically, she resists easy enchantment. Her characteristic caution, honed during her travels alone in far places, keeps her grounded. She watches how for some, a night in jail or spent in Zuccotti Park leads to book deals. Having scored her own soon after, she resolves that she will listen to those who truly suffer.

At Guantanamo Bay, she undergoes a revelation as she records the fate of a prisoner. She alternates her creation of nine immense canvases satirizing or commemorating the battle over Capital, Shell Game, with reporting for Vice, The Paris Review, and The Guardian. She squirms over her come-hither portrayal in a New York Times profile, and she cross-examines her own complicity in how she markets herself, determined to survive on her own terms in a cruel, competitive art world.

I found the earlier and later chapters of her account the most rewarding. A comfortable career tames her too much. When Molly Crabapple stares down danger and corruption, whether left to her own savvy in a remote setting, or today as she investigates the long reach of terror and greed, she succeeds best. As she sums up, she is driven "to do violence to her own clichés." She learns "to find joy where once I could only see ash." Drawing Blood illuminates the flames and the fire which warms her now.
(Amazon US 12-1-5 and PopMatters 12-18-15)

Molly Crabapple's "Shell Game"

According to Kristen O'Regan, this is "A New England"; I located this with no idea what it was in a search for Occupy artwork. You can read more about street art in "Agora-phobic" at Guernica.

Animal's Marina Galperina explains that the painting I share here features "modern feminist icon Laurie Penny surrounded by protesting foxes and police hound dogs."  Animal shows all nine images of "Shell Game," conveying feminine imagery in a grand-mock Victorian Empire storybook style. It reminds me of a surprisingly tiny image I saw in London at the Tate , "The Fairy Fellow's Master-Stroke" by Richard Dadd. Not in its direct color, but in the wealth of detail filling the intricate canvas.

Dadd went mad. It is as maddening to consider how little impact the frustrations of ordinary people have against what idealistic anarchists call "impossibilism," the notion that resistance and revolt can overthrow our corrupt system keeping us in debt to bankers, cowed by lawyers, fearful of police, coddled by media and entertainment bent on distracting us, but convinced the next election=change.

I composed this after a week of legal upheaval. Obamacare upheld, Confederate battle flags taken down, and same-sex marriage approved. Argue as some may, decades of progress have paid off. Yes, many grumble at the imposition of federal power. Most, on these and other matters, reason that as with slavery and patriarchy, superstition and bigotry, we must evolve away from outmoded strictures.

Yet, how quickly will liberation happen? I sympathize with principled populism, but its long-range success seems co-opted by those elected. Ever more dependent on an unjust economic and political regime combined to make us compliant by measures at work, cameras in public, and data as tracked, how can we fight such ubiquitous power? The Net promised us empowerment twenty years ago. Now it seeks only to monetize all we do, cajoling us as shoppers and consumers, to exploit our very selves.

It's no longer fat white men in cummerbunds, like Monopoly game millionaires, pulling such strings. Women and those marginalized rush to shatter glass ceilings, but do start-ups differ from Fortune 500 firms that significantly? As the show Silicon Valley skewers, "doing good" is their cynical manifesto. 

What's intriguing about Molly Crabapple's art in the "Shell Game" series is that she incorporates female symbols and caricatures, both as villains and heroines. (If I can still deliberately employ that contested noun.) Her account of the years between 9/11 and Occupy will appear at the end of this year, Drawing Blood. Funded on Kickstarter, her work in the year after OWS continues her pen-and-ink drawings, O'Regan reports, which revel in "frenzied visual chaos and declarative allegory." Like others, the artist takes inspiration from Athens' street art and protests; I found this on the day that the banks were shut EU imposed austerity measures on this defiant/cowed Greek nation.

"To End All Wars: the Graphic Anthology of the Great War": Review

Harry Patch, World War One's last surviving British veteran, was asked what he would tell young people. Defining war as "organised murder", he responded: "Don't join the army." Pat Mills in his introduction adds that this comment was scrubbed from the finished version of Patch's interview. This graphic collection opens with the greatest of such cover-ups; Brick's "The Iron Dice" sketches how millions were sent to slaughter, by imperial cabals protecting profits and peddling patriotism. This anthology's website sums up the consequences: "The so-called ‘Great War’ was the first truly multinational war, the first heavily mechanised war, the first oil war, the first fought to the benefit of capitalists on both sides, the first to murder millions of civilians and the last orchestrated by kings, barons and lords as if it were a ripping game of polo." 
  
26 contributions by 53 artists and writers from 13 nations represent the global impact of this subject. Depicted over four continents are the four theaters of war: land, sea, air, and the home front. A century later, few graphic novels have depicted these early horrors (and heroics, deluded, desperate, or gallant as they may be judged in sober retrospect), compared with the media attention devoted to its successor, WWII. This stark, chiaroscuro, thick compilation begins to redress this deficit. It promotes a humanitarian view of the worldwide conflict as witnessed by not only famous and everyday men and women, but also by a diligent elephant, hounds, purported angels, and an Alpine cat. (A share of U.S. and British profits go to Médecins Sans Frontières/ Doctors Without Borders.) 

Familiar names such as Winston Churchill, Rasputin, Baron Von Richthofen, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mata Hari appear, but most entries feature unheralded men and women. Mostly inspired by true accounts, those who volunteered talents to script and illustrate these boldly drawn or softly delineated stories share sympathy for the plight of those cajoled, conscripted, or, as in Colm Regan's "No More Than Cattle", among hundreds of thousands of Africans under German or British colonialism forced to participate as porters or combatants. While the full list of over two dozen selections cannot be covered in a brief review, a few examples reveal its range of concerns, biographies, and approaches. 

Clode's "The Coward's War" takes up a topic which remains controversial today. "If an army is the reflection of the society for which it was created, Thomas Highgate was the first crack in its mirror." Executed for desertion in 1914, he was one of over three hundred Commonwealth soldiers who met that fate, in a time when very little was understood about stress, shell-shock, and fragility under fire. Clode's dramatic shading (here as in his other inclusion, "The Black Chair" about the Welsh bardic poet Hedd Wyn) deepens the ambiguity of this tribute. It portrays uncertainty. when those leaders ordered to force troops into battle no matter their condition were also victims of this era's ignorance. Prejudice persists. Clode reports how Highgate's hometown in 1999 refused to let his name be added to that feature of many towns, schools, and village squares among the Allies, its local war memorial.

"Il Gatto" saddened me. It follows an intrepid cat who crosses Italian to Austrian lines during the bitter war in the Alps. At one point, Stuart Richards places the feline facing the frozen front, its head above the icy trench, alongside a long line of helmeted soldiers, dug in with rifles drawn for assault.

Sean Michael Wilson's "Live and Let Live" cheered me. It narrates the stand-offs arranged tacitly on the front, so neither German nor Allied troops would fire on each other, as long as no mortal threat was raised. This sensible compromise allowed many soldiers to survive, and affirms common sense.

Yet, that solution could never be published during the war. The plight of journalists, whom the British would shoot as spies, meant that front-line, honest reporting would not emerge for those on the home front. "Truth Be Told" in Pippa Hennessy's unsparing words and Danos Philopoulos' scorching illustrations claw at the page. These convey the quest of one bold correspondent who fought to live.

Survival, in Dan Hill's take on solidarity, "Where Others Follow", educates readers. It explains how sheep have evolved to protect their pacifism. Watch-sheep emerge to guard the flock. Although a single herd rallies against predators, the group recognizes individuals and remembers each one's presence, If in a flock as with troops a single member is subsumed into a collective, an evolving balance endures which meets individual needs and demands of the group. It's a clever lesson, or fable.

But crammed together, endurance drags many down, crushed by the pressures of killing. A U-Boat commander succumbs. After a series of Allied sinkings, he lets his submarine be rammed by a British destroyer. Similarly, elite aces in planes give in after one too many dogfight victories, once the cost to their psyche has been tallied. Tanks explode and bodies shatter across wastelands. Many German versions of testimonies wallow in mud and grime. Dark pages overwhelm the light in  acrid, gloomy evocations of bomb craters and gray hell. "Poppies" depicts the artist Otto Dix, whose engravings acidly commemorate the searing visions he could not escape, as deftly rendered by Kate Houghton.

After such tales sink in, the reader reflects on the legacy left for us a hundred years later. Growing up, I heard very few scattered memories from WWI veterans, rambling anecdotes passed down from two old men. Fewer seem to understand today (with few films let alone novels or testimonies taught in schools today) this fatal march to a war that wiped out, disproportionately, about ten million young men in uniform, along with seven million civilians who never signed up or resigned themselves to fight for empires. The anthologists rouse readers to resist seductive, sinister calls for yet more war.

While a few entries dithered about despite their brevity, dissipating their force by narratives revealing gaps or leaps in time or space, most succeed very well at teaching this persistent lesson of peace. "Perhaps the decision to go to war should never be decided by men in wood paneled offices of state, but by a committee of mothers on both sides, advised by those who have seen war and what it does to soft human bodies, to the fragile mind and very soul." So Joe Gordon concludes this collection with his "Memorial to the Mothers". He reflects on a Royal Scots gravestone he passes often; the father buried beneath died on a 1918 battlefield. There, his son rests too, suffering the same fate in 1940. Gordon wonders about the unheralded mothers left to grieve. He speculates on these women's sorrow and anger and loss, as our inheritance during every war erupting after WWI. "And then perhaps we might finally learn to stop, for what mother really, truly believes anything was worth her bonny boy?"
(Amazon 9-15-14; Pop Matters 8-25-14; Author's website)

Ag dul go Londain aríst, cuid a cúig

Bhí Dé Luain go raibh ár lá deireadh íomlán i Londain. Chuaigh muid go Gailearaí Marlborough i tStraid Albermarle in aice leis Piccadilly. Ní raibh muid ábalta a fheiceáil ealaine le Sarah Raphael, ach bhí maith linn líníochtaí le Henri Matisse.

Shiúil muid triu Piccadilly agus Holborn go Músaem le Sir John Soane, ach bhí sé dúnadh ann. Chuaigh triu Garraí Lincoln's Inn agus An Scoil an Eacnamaíocht i Londain. Tá mac léinn go leor ag timpeall, ag fanacht a ith lón ina tstraideannaí cam agus sean ann. 

Thóg muid leis cuairt ag Na Institiúide Courtauld. Is gailearaí níos iontach. Tá beag ach go raibh den scoth. Fhill muid a fheiceáil Teach Somerset aríst béal dorais ar ais leis taispeantas le Stanley Spencer.

Tá Músaem na Iompair Londain ro-dheor, ach bhí maith taispeantas speisialta póstaeir ar an Tube. Ith dinnéar ag Union Jacks i Garraí na Covent. Cheannaigh Léna milséain de Hardys agus ansin chuaigh muid ar ais go dtí dtaibhléirithe amharclann, ag Apollo ina Deireadh Thiar (sular thit sé i deich óiche ina dhiadh sin!) ag freastail an dráma uaillmhianach, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. 

Bhuel, caith muid a fhágáil. Bhí ceo i Londain, ag deireanach ann. Thóg amach muid an dara Dé Máirt sin go Aerfort Heathrow is gnóthach leis an grian ag ardú.

Going to London, part five.

Bhí Dé Luain go raibh ár lá deireadh íomlán i Londain. Monday was our last whole day in London. We went to Marlborough Gallery on Albermarle Street near Piccadilly. We were unable to view the art of Sarah Raphael, but we liked the drawings of Henri Matisse.

We walked down Piccadilly to Holborn to the Museum of Sir John Soane, but it was closed there. We went through Lincoln's Inn Fields to the London School of Economics. Lots of students were around, waiting to eat lunch in the crooked and old streets.

We paid a visit to the Courtauld Institute. It's such a wonderful gallery. It's small but it's excellent. We returned to see at Somerset House next door again the exhibition of Stanley Spencer.

The London Museum of Transport is too expensive, but we liked the special exhibit of Tube posters. We ate dinner at Union Jacks in Covent Garden. Layne bought candy at Hardy's and then we returned to the theatre, a show at the Apollo in the West End (before it fell in ten nights later!) to attend an ambitious drama, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.

Well, we had to depart. Fog was in London, at last, there. We took off that second Tuesday from very busy Heathrow Airport with the sun rising. (Píctúir le Paul Mitchell: "London Fog"/Ceo Londain)

Kenneth Pople's "Stanley Spencer: A Biography": Book Review

With the attention given the First World War a century later, a look back at one of its greatest if most unpredictable artists, Stanley Spencer, rewards renewed examination. Published in 1991 on the centenary of his birth, drawing on interviews with his two daughters, family and friends, and the Tate Gallery archived writings, Spencer in his first in-depth biography emerges not as the subject of dull critique, but of respect through a diligent effort by Kenneth Pople to let the artist's words speak for themselves. They channel Spencer's interior struggle, evoked and expressed by slow craft or long difficulty. 

While very congenial towards Spencer, Pople provides a skilled interpretation of the rational and genesis for what can often be initially baffling or perplexing art. Painstaking in his observations, he charts Spencer's professional and personal growth in chronological chapters documenting his self-awareness which emerges on canvas, as he sketched and painted from an early age. Pople pauses to offer "suggestions as to their emotional origins" of his art, supported by Spencer's mostly unpublished writings, supplemented by testimony of those who knew him. The sympathy between biographer and subject proves powerful.

Although a readable five-hundred-plus-pages, detail may overwhelm those seeking a précis. Pople doggedly pursues his subject, but rarely distances himself from him. Duncan Robinson's overview rewards readers with enough illustrations and descriptions to begin. After Kitty Hauser's and Fiona MacCarthy's respective monographs, if preceding Pam Gems' pithy play, the still-curious may plunge into Pople for immersion into the steady or turbulent flow between the life and the works. Keith Bell catalogued a necessary survey of hundreds of Spencer's works, but inevitably despite the heft of Bell's contribution, individual paintings cannot all earn the scrutiny that this prolific artist merits.

Therefore, Pople's effort aligns the places and faces of Spencer's beloved village with their spiritual equivalents. As he put it, he walked around Cookham as if he saw heaven. Not that he strolled in heaven, but that he compared what he envisioned there with what he witnessed daily around him. A subtle but necessary distinction, for as Pople explains, Spencer's works attempted to record his own ecstasies, or terrors. "The places are not meant as symbolic or universal. They have no meaning outside of his experience of them. He presumes we all have such places in our memories which evoke similar feelings for us, and that we are able to recognize those that he shows in his painting are but signposts to personal feeling. It is that feeling which he is trying to capture and to universalize." (26) 

He treasured sensory elements of those he knew and settings he passed. Minutes or years later, his prodigious memory, sharp ear, and photographic eye could reproduce the scene or moment he wanted on paper or as a painting. The results may or may not match Cookham, but they usually emanate from it. Pople distinguishes the "observed" landscapes (often considerably sharper in technical execution, if removed of people) or portraits, by which Spencer made a living, from the "visionary" paintings he claims to have preferred, those conflating preternatural events into Cookham's domain. 

The process, Pople extrapolates from Spencer's accounts and art, depends on what that artist called "memory-feeling" as his imagined experiences became transfigured into the biblical inspirations he then interpreted. For instance, "The Centurion's Servant" (1913-14) halts in freeze-frame, as we see the before and the after of a miracle juxtaposed. Pople avers that Spencer sought to release his own delights or confusions (here he prepares that work as war and his call to duty looms) by setting down scenes which "redeem some bewilderments". (64) By shifting his own catharsis onto a biblical event or spiritual backdrop, he purged himself of confusion by a vivid creation as his, and our, memento.
  
"Christ Carrying the Cross" (1920) illustrates the maturation of his vision. Chastened by the Great War, back in Cookham he puts Christ on a village street, as workmen pass with their own ladders held aloft in a similar pose to that of the titular figure. All are doing their job, as Spencer observed. Villagers go about their duties, too, and few notice Christ's action. Neighbors who do stretch their necks out from the upper sills of an adjoining house. "The lace curtains blown out by the draught from the open windows on that sultry summer day have been transformed into wings. The onlookers in their silent commiseration have taken on the protectiveness of angels." (90) Neatly if suggestively, the painting's English residents pass by or peer out as if on sunny spring streets of ancient Jerusalem. 

In many of Spencer's works, if ignorant of his title to alert, a spectator may puzzle over a canvas without understanding who the main figure is, as so often a bustling, oddly elongated, or foreshortened depiction of a crowd challenges a facile comprehension of the theme. Instead, a viewer roams about his visionary work by eye, and becomes swept along in the crowd or gathering. Thus, the viewer shares Spencer's perspective, however skewed or off-kilter. Through such an unsettling immersion, an early twentieth-century modernist obsession with meticulous detail mixes with earlier depictions, drawn from Giotto as much as Gauguin, suggesting how faith then or indifference now contend within a contemporary participant, who examines Spencer and encounters his ambiguity. 

Off to war, Spencer followed three of his brothers. He did his job. Small of stature and not allowed into the fighting ranks until mass slaughter had eased entry requirements, he labored as a hospital orderly and with the ambulance corps in Salonika and Macedonia, followed by parched months in the trenches in 1918, Spencer toughed it out, with detachment from the humiliation he suffered and commitment to outlast his tormenters, until malaria sent him home. Only then did he learn, about six weeks before armistice, one brother had died. Spencer's mystical beliefs appear to have altered given the shocks he encountered during his enlistment. Commissioned as a war artist but with little to show for it, Spencer recorded more memorably he routines he followed in a series of post-war murals at the privately endowed Sandham Memorial Chapel, built for his display. He chose not to commemorate the battles but the behind-the-lines chores. He chose in the vast Resurrection painting at Sandham to depict a dramatic scene. Christ is rising, from beneath a heap of plain white crosses, pulled off of Him by soldiers, from both sides, who all climb out from tombs and trenches. This spectacle stretches to the horizon, as crosses pile up and, nightmare over and heaven at hand, bodies shake graves free.

His other great painting of the 1920s shares the theme of resurrection. Placing its imminence in the Cookham churchyard, this also features repetition. But whereas the Sandham murals portray duties as a human necessity, the 1926 Cookham Resurrection duplicates figures of Spencer and his villagers, with a significant addition. Not until his thirties did he experience sexual fulfillment, and his delayed marriage in 1925 to Hilda Carline fueled his belated integration of the erotic and the ethereal which had hovered in his paintings recently and restlessly. The joy of a humanistic scene of revelation, where his early sketches as Pople includes of an austere God give way to the embraces of a triumphant Hilda cradling their firstborn daughter testify to the invigorated perspective of the roused and redeemed male artist. Pople notes, however, how the idealized Hilda in the many archetypes her husband rushed her into, in person and in paint, early on complicated the messier reality of marriage. 

Pople draws deeply upon Spencer's writings, while he cautions that at times "a hurt overcoloured Stanley's reflections" (187). That is, he sharpened slights or smoothed out memories to fit his own recollections, which in turn filtered into his paintings. These grew in his mind into a whole, even if for practical reasons he had to sell of some of their renderings, while as with the Resurrection series he returned to themes again, or as in his larger murals spun off details as their own paintings to market. The totality of his work from the later 1920s on combines the real and the imaginary, the fabled and the factual, inextricably. In ink and by brush, Cookham, his friends, and his lovers recur.

When Patricia Preece entered his life, at first casually as a near-neighbor returned (in 1927 with her companion Dorothy Hepworth) to a place she had known in childhood, her erotic and emotional appeal for Stanley grew. Both she and her partner (Dorothy denied after Patricia's death any "physical relationship"; Patricia called her a "sister") painted; Patricia when seeking patronage or display of her art subsumed Dorothy's art under her own name. Placed as she was, Patricia manipulated a besotted Spencer to gain finery and dress herself in the manner she saw fit, as his reputation brought him a steady income, by requests for landscapes which kept him distracted from his visionary work. Eager for him to earn more, Patricia urged him to produce still lifes and landscapes steadily, instead. Pople estimates that Spencer spent about $60,000 in today's currency attending to her whims during this unstable period when, married to Hilda, he contemplated a ménage à trois. This led to complications.

Class tension between the humbly-born Spencer and genteel Preece has been exaggerated perhaps by some biographers, but the disparity of their perspectives arose early on. Pople cites her 1932 diary: "Now that he has decided to live here, I wish we had not chosen to come, for he is such a nuisance to us, and so jealous and quarrelsome unless one is continually praising his painting." (283) His compulsive energy increased. Pople propounds that for Spencer, Hilda remained his God-image while Patricia became his Cookham-image. He channeled these impulses into his art and his relationships, to join erotic with spiritual searches towards a fulfilled identity, his fundamental quest in the 1930s.

Hilda and he both painted Patricia; Spencer's wife (who "had heard it all before" as Preece recorded at the onset of finding herself the recipient of Spencer's conversation, evidently a constant chatter) found herself playing uneasy go-between. The going deepened, or detoured as Preece maneuvered it, by Preece's ambiguous-or-not relationship with Hepworth. Enticed, Spencer let his fancies loose. 

Pople explains that Spencer longed to break free of what he phrased as the "prison-wall-tapping" keeping people apart. His visionary series (e.g., "Love on the Moor," "Love Among the Nations," "Adoration of Old Men," "Sunflower and Dog Worship") reveled in unbounded lovemaking. His biographer explains the tumult. "He was in the strict sense of the adjective a 'pure' artist--one who in wonder interpreted the mystery of his own experience." Instead of asking our empathy or sympathy, Spencer forces us in the roiling and rotund depictions of freed bodies caught up in passion to accept the awesome miracle of life. In nudes, he painted Patricia unflinchingly as he would along her dimpled, mottled flesh the perspective, in his simile, as if an ant crawled over it. He stared down skin.

For good reason, Pople titles part six of this biography "The Marital Disasters: 1936-1939". Spencer acted boldly under Patricia's spell. He signed over his home to her, to fund her lifestyle. Unable to cope, Hilda and their two daughters left that home, and she filed for divorce. During the aftermath, Patricia continued to influence Stanley. Pople phrases this muddle as clearly as anyone might: "By an astute balancing act, she could arrange affairs to benefit her materially while freeing her from the sexual obligations of marriage, for which Hilda would be available." (361) Assuming marriage to Patricia would be but a "legal formality", Spencer married Patricia as soon as the law permitted. 

The triple arrangement proved stillborn. He importuned his patrons; neither wife wanted him.  Doubling his feminine inspirations for art, he included Elsie, his Cookham maid, and Daphne, a generous friend. Another war drafted Spencer as a commissioned artist. He illustrated Port Glasgow shipyard. He envisioned typically a larger platform for his murals than even that war's duration could fulfill. Meanwhile, he tried to woo faltering Hilda. A devout Christian Scientist, her views never jibed with Stanley's eclecticism. As Patricia pithily put it when Hilda was institutionalized: "God talked to her. It is just that he talked a little more inconveniently than usual." (432) 

He painted two more resurrections, as the end of the war found here a touching depiction in joyful reunions, and in one, a portrayal of Hilda as needing support getting up after her own return from the dead, it seems. In Glasgow, he had met what Pople calls the "last of his major handholders", Charlotte. A married psychiatrist, a German émigré who had studied with Jung, she found Stanley a congenial sort given his mystical bent. After the war, he tried to keep all of his women content, as they came and went in his bachelor life then. He divorced Patricia on grounds of non-consummation, and while he continued to pine for female companionship, unstinting devotion to his art took precedence over his desires. He pursued Hilda, but slowly he convinced himself at last of the futility. 

After her death in 1950, the last nine years of Spencer's life found him feted. For a measure of how far he had progressed, yet how closely he had kept his focus, compare his 1914 self-portrait that graces the cover with the one near its closing pages, painted a few months before he died in 1959. He fixes his eyes upon himself, and he records his features in a direct, composed, and confident manner. 

He continued to work on enormous canvases, leaving as with his last giant epic, "Christ Preaching at the Cookham Regatta" some of the best unfinished. While Pople regards the posture of Jesus as encouraging His listeners, on seeing this depiction for myself recently at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in the converted Methodist chapel in Cookham, I regarded the pose as frightening, as if the Redeemer cowed the little ones, unable to resist His imposing posture or power. Ambiguity accompanies any interpretation of Spencer. Pople, despite his patience, attests to the difficulty of reconciling the underlying philosophy the artist formulated in his heap of largely unexamined and verbose letters and journals with the art itself to full satisfaction. "So personal are the associations that is impossible to follow him with his own degree of excitement into such territories of the imagination." (485)
 
All the same, this biography stands as the best introduction so far to these territories. Like Dante, Spencer fused a visionary element illuminated by a startling faith, a political critique, a disgust with contemporary cant, and a daring use of analogy. He made it all recognizable by fresh analogies and surprising juxtapositions of people at their best and worst. Spencer tolerated little opposition and his prickly ethics, and his own long battles with conformity, led to his insistence upon integrity. Pople interviewed many who were still alive and their memories of Spencer, along with careful archival research from him and many of his colleagues and teachers and friends, establishes this as essential. 
(Amazon US 2-1-14; Author's website)

Fiona MacCarthy's "Stanley Spencer: An English Vision": Book Review

Having admired Fiona MacCarthy's biographies of bold English artists Eric Gill and William Morris, I anticipated that this shorter overview from a 1997 exhibition of 64 works might reveal insights on a third artist who challenged convention. Fiona McCarthy in sixty pages takes advantage of the larger format to offer an overview which rejects the soft-focus approach even as it accepts that his rounded figures and walled-in "childhood containments" express well Spencer's favorite adjective: "cosy."

As a counterpoint, early on she asserts: "Stanley Spencer looked like a village eccentric. He was not one. There was nothing of the amateur or dilettante in him. His spiritual and personal struggles were in some sense as painful as Van Gogh's." (5) Tough-minded and not as sentimental as may be surmised, Spencer wrote of inflicting "spiritual rape" on everything he strove as an artist to absorb, and that estimation fits him well. "The most impressive of his paintings have the innate gravity that comes from deeply absorbed experience."

She focuses on his earlier career, and the English vision for her appears to be grounded, after his return to Cookham after the Great War and his marriage unravelled, in a plunge from youthful wonder into mature willfulness. McCarthy labels rightly the predicament which found him playing off the resentment Hilda and the calculation of Patricia "alternating tragedy and farce." (42) Out of it, by the early 1930s, his energies seemed to have been warped. Cookham represented to him less the utopia of his late-Victorian formation and more a melange of an existentialist self-affirmation and a pantheistic blood-lust. "Spencer's creative urges seem to feed on emotional and sexual agitation."

MacCarthy, therefore, delves into this period to explore the candor he evoked in his nudes of Patricia, anticipating in their unrelenting exposure of the sagging and dimpled flesh the eye of Lucien Freud. She documents his time "out in the wilderness" after estrangement from Patricia follows a failed reconciliation with the increasingly despondent Hilda. Presaging as well the tragic figures of Francis Bacon, the paintings of Christ in his own wilderness doubt play off their creator's own 1939 solitude.

Of his later career, MacCarthy judges a drop-off in results, whether the Port Glasgow shipbuilding murals which constituted his contribution to the WWII effort (and she notes how he was one of the very few who painted in both wars on behalf of the Crown in an official capacity), or his portraits and landscapes which by the 1950s constituted much of his way to make a living while he contemplated the "Church House, his temple of eroticism" to all the women he had loved.

About the woman who enticed him the most, in her absence more than her presence, in the long run perhaps, MacCarthy calls it "obsessive. Perhaps it was the only means that Spencer had of recognising their tragic incompatability and his own considerable cruelty to Hilda, recycling her so wonderfully in his mind." (57) He could not stop writing to her from beyond her grave, nor could he end the return he made to her embrace in his sketches and drawings for the ambitious chapel of love.

The 64 reproductions feature as captions some passages gleaned from the three million words of his notes and letters at the Tate Gallery Archive. While the editorial constraints may have compressed MacCarthy's insights into a shorter narrative than ideal (it ends suddenly and parts of his life are not expanded), it provides a thoughtful, brief balance to Duncan Robinson's one-volume large-format introduction, Kitty Hauser's monograph, and a transition to Keith Bell's hefty catalogue of Spencer's oeuvre. (All have been also reviewed by me as has this on Amazon US 12-21-13.)

Kitty Hauser's "Stanley Spencer": Book Review

While a few titles about this iconoclastic English painter introduce him in a short span, Hauser's book combines a convincing thesis with her combination of well-chosen illustrations and incisive, accessible text in this 2001 monograph. She packs a lot in eighty pages, and she places Stanley Spencer firmly within his Cookham village contexts. Neither romanticizing nor distorting his very rooted quality in his native place, Kitty Hauser strives to connect him to his time, his social connections, and his personal experiences during the first half of the twentieth century, more or less.

Of his penchant for integrating the miraculous and the mundane in Cookham, so that Christ, for instance, might blend in with Spencer's neighbors on the high street, so much one may not be able to distinguish Him from them, Hauser emphasizes how subject and purpose joined in Spencer's work from an early age. Even though he appeared when his contemporaries pioneered modernism, Spencer took its elements to blend oddly or juxtapose dramatically with natural and domestic settings. In this "secret topography of Cookham," where railings reveal and cordon off and where skewed angles and foreshortened perspectives reveal angels and curtains as nearly indistinguishable, concealment nestles alongside revelation. From Spencer's walks, his memories stored up from childhood abundantly fertile images, as he took the scenes around him and the figures he passed to populate his canvases.

Hauser shows how in his early biblical paintings "the sacred is perceived in our very midst, as if we might come across the birth of Christ on a walk in the country, or bump into a character from the Old Testament on our way to the shops; as if miracles go on all the time, unregarded, behind the high walls of gardens." (37) The idyll Spencer enjoyed between his stint at the Slade School ending in 1912 and his war service commencing in 1915 appears to have been his happiest time. All he did was wander the village and paint, living at his family's home with no other responsibilities.

The war, of course, changed him, and he returned to Cookham unsettled. Furthermore, after the age of thirty or so, he finally found intimacy with his first wife, Hilda Carline and then the strange obsession with the woman who became his second wife, Patricia Preece. Hauser documents how the latter woman strove to get out of the diligent artist whatever she could in terms of money or frocks, and the subsequent convolutions (as dramatized by Pam Gems in her 1996 play "Stanley), show another aspect in which the transcendental, through sexual obsession and delight and confusion, rubbed up against the quotidian. As Hauser relates in another tie-in, to Spencer's WWI memorial panels at Sandham depicting not battle or slaughter but petty chores of orderlies and a "painter's trick" by which heaven and earth interpenetrate in the unrecognized, uncelebrated duties that consume so much of our lives, the similar blur of insight glimpsed in sex or contemplation of the body, as Spencer's nudes of Patricia unsparingly display, show Spencer's refusal to separate the fleshy tones of his palette from the spiritual suggestions of his themes, enmeshed in the bible, his household routines and/or his neighborhood observations. For, these often conflated into a single expression.

Therefore, his work, where a saint may pop up on the high street and where a house may harbor an evangelical surprise or a naked shock evades the usual modernist rejection of narrative content for formal values. Hauser places Spencer in his material realm, and she concludes that his paintings "are an attempt to demonstrate the double life of things; in a sense they are lessons in seeing." (75)  But this took its toll. What he viewed around him pleased him far more than his lovers could, and he drew contentment from his beloved Cookham best by revisiting it on his canvasses, in his sketches, and in his compulsive letters to the woman he divorced but could never abandon, Hilda, which continued (up to a hundred pages in one example) after she suffered mental illness and then died.

Taking this into account, seeing the costs of Spencer's talent and the impact it had on those around him, Hauser cautions any who would promote him only as a "visionary prophet of love," (76) for only when situating Spencer in his birthplace (where he spent two-thirds of his life) can we understand "the very material contexts that fed him as an artist, the human muddle of bodged relationships, thwarted desires, egotism and social aspirations as well as marsh-meadow visions, religious feeling and domestic bliss." Taking the sordid with the sacramental, the earthy with the ethereal, as Spencer himself for all his failings and pride strove to do, appears the best answer to how we should approach the man in terms of his abundant and sometimes astonishing artistic legacy. (See also Fiona MacCarthy's book with a similar scope and focus. 12-21-13 to Amazon US)

Mike McGonigal's "Temperature's Rising: Galaxie 500": Book Review

This collaboration expands an oral history from participants and observers, one of whom, bassist Naomi Yang, crafted the visual content enhancing this careful indie-rock band's image a quarter-century ago. That span surprises her, as she reflects in this compilation's final sentence: "I am grateful for not letting my youth go to waste and I am looking forward to adventures to come." Even before they formed what began as a shambling, untutored Galaxie 500, together from Fall 1987 to Spring 1991, they shared some youthful adventures together, unlike many a rock band's pedigree.

Yang and her partner, drummer Damon Krukowski, have known guitarist-singer Dean Wareham since they were teenagers at the same (unnamed here, but Dalton) Manhattan prep school in the late 1970s. They earned degrees from Harvard, with Yang and Krukowski staying on as graduate students for a while while Wareham worked as a clerical temp. Meanwhile, they started a band in Boston. But it did not sound like Mission of Burma or hardcore. As journalist Francis Dimenno observes: "Their album covers made a statement. Cool Restraint. Educated. Upper Class. Lots of Social Contacts."

As an intern for graphic designer Milton Glaser before she began her visual arts degree at Harvard, Yang possessed a confident air in her own promotional material. When the Italian font she hand-cut from a wedding invitation (which would grace many of Galaxie 500's productions) did not have two letters needed, she drew her own for the band's first cassette labels. She added such refinement seamlessly to the pre-digital mechanical and knife-trimmed process that she meticulously annotated as typographical directions for the band's debut LP Today (1988). These examples, added to the sounds the band labored to produce from raw promise, demonstrate the trio's concern for precision.

It's more elusive from McGonigal's verbal transcriptions (many appeared in a series for Pitchfork in 2010) what Galaxie 500 sounded like, for a curious reader coming to this collection. Writer Martin Aston sums them up: "They played slow when everyone was fast. They were defiantly lo-fi before it became accepted, they preceded shoegazing, but never felt as posy as much of what followed. It was totally out of time, not in a scene, music that existed because they just felt like playing it, or were limited by how they played. Punk mentality. 'We're aspiring to primitivism,' Damon once told me."

Aston's claim that Galaxie 500 "never felt as posy" as those who came later may be debatable. For evidence, the stylized, rarified, or shimmering nature of many photographs by Yang and colleagues such as classmate Sergio Huidor or Shimmy Disc's Michael Macioce (at the World's Fair site in Queens) document well the band's determination to stand out from their leather-jacketed peers. Even in denim, Wareham tries to exude sophistication, while Krukowski's similarly rumpled fashion plays off of his knowing scowl. And as for Yang, her bold earrings and dress sense draw one's attention.

The band, as photos and their recollections illustrate (no questions are asked by McGonigal; he silently arranges the responses in brief chapters around chronological themes) how the three worked together--before they did not. Simon Raymonde of the Cocteau Twins notes Galaxie 500's lack of a solo star: he liked Yang's "simple naive approach" on the bass, while Wareham's "Velvets-y delivery" by "smart lyrics", a dry vocal style, and nimble guitar filled the space left by Krukowski's "expressive" and often spare, jazz-tinged percussion washes and taps.

The drummer explains how he heard the guitar at the top, his partner's bass in the middle of the soundstage on stage or in his mental mix, and himself at the bottom. Fitting this model, Krukowski felt it was "like joining the circus". Under Kramer's production, skillful singles led to an amazing first album, that album to another many judged even better, On Fire (1989) on Rough Trade, and acclaim. 

For a while at gigs, on the road, or in rehearsal, the band got along. Predictably, Wareham laments (briefly here, but see for far more the first hundred pages of his 2008 memoir Black Postcards) that the pressure of a pair teamed off against himself made for poor negotiations as a purported trio. As the band's power struggles grew, they--all in their mid-twenties--contended against outside pressures. Courted by Rough Trade, Yang recoiled. What the businessmen presented in the guise of friendship, she suspected as manipulation. Producing product, for the three committed to crafting quality, clashed with Galaxie 500's ethic.

Their rapid from-underground-to-college-radio success kept some misgivings internally shrouded and externally sidestepped. Kramer remembers: "The band was standing on top of a mountain looking down. The first record didn't seem like it got any bad reviews anywhere." Their second met with even better reception, but their third, This Is Our Music (1990), came with the record label and mismanagement problems (not helped by Kramer's addiction) that left Galaxie 500 straitened. Yang includes a photo of the "money envelope" with penciled scrawls of what cash came in from promoters and what went out for cabfare. Even at the height of their career, the lessons learned on such trials as their U.S. 1990 tour about to the realities of playing a distant city one week and then rushing back to the corporate temp job, as Wareham reflects, sobered them.

McGonigal's determination to match Yang's spare commentary on her archive of artifacts with unadorned transcripts may please fans, but for those less informed, this may not meet a newcomer's needs. The verbal editor provides neither an index nor introduction. True, a discography could be cobbled by a careful reader from Yang's inclusions. Most new fans will prefer a music guide for a standard overview of the band's influences, eclectic covers, lyrical moods, and production emphases. Kramer in an aside laments not capturing Galaxie 500 live when they could play as loud as Sonic Youth; the band's dynamic range on stage and on record, and (within a short career) their quickly improved dexterity both merit more mention than either the trio or their colleagues here provide.

"I was always drawn to the simple and the well proportioned rather than the flashy." Yang's aesthetic speaks for her band. They all squelch any reunion rumors. "We made three albums together, and those records are our children; even though we're divorced we still need to talk about the children occasionally." Wareham's tone captures the steady (or a few wobbly) judgments Galaxie 500 made, as musicians and as creators, to leave the best they could for discerning audiences then, and, enriched by Yang's contributions on their behalf, now in this handsomely assembled presentation of words and depictions about memorable music, (PopMatters 5-9-13; 4-23-13 to Amazon US)

Michel Peissel's "Tibetan Pilgrimage": Book Review

Nearly half a century of Himalayan and Tibetan exploration and nearly thirty expeditions on, this handsome edition offers nearly a hundred watercolors from a renowned adventurer-anthropologist. The late Michel Peissel illustrates "what the lens of a camera cannot see," and he tries to express the inner construction hidden on the outside of the fortresses, homes, monasteries, cave dwellings,  chortens, and castles he surveys. From the western realms of Zanskar, Mustang, and Guge to the Tibetan heartlands around Lhasa and Tsang, to the sites on the eastern Chinese frontiers, this covers immense terrain.

Skillfully suggesting solidity in his lines, yet open to a range of colors symbolizing monastic affiliations and cultural alliances, the exteriors Peissel documents unfold as the clear and cogent narrative keeps pace. It begins with the Songsten Gampo early-medieval dynasty which forged a national Tibet, and shows how the revival of Buddhism enabled monasteries to emerge as akin to universities. Second sons, freed from the land by relative wealth of farmers under a form of feudalism secured by armed power and remote terrain, became monks. This also kept land freed up, as fewer populated it and as brothers commonly shared a wife.

Peissel terms this a golden age, for four centuries, Greater Tibet could afford to feed its people and defend them, while not letting the balance of humans to resources tip against sustainability. While the Fourteenth Dalai Lama represents a peaceful mien, his predecessor the Fifth ruled ruthlessly, bringing to an end the amity. Peissel reminds us that the Dalai Lama, ruthlessly, dominated a third of Greater Tibet, in earlier times by a far more hostile attitude which alienated and persecuted those who opposed rule from Lhasa. We understand why so many monasteries resemble fortresses.The Fifth lama sided with the Mongol and Manchu patrons; he pushed out right, left, and center competing Tibetan families and powers, spreading opposition to Lhasa and the Potala, which housed a palace and prison.

It's noteworthy how Peissel counters the popular image such as Robert Thurman and New Age proponents simplify of a benevolent realm enduring free of strife. Armies, assassinations, and fear dominate the Tibetan past as much as the recent era, and the cease-fire lines across Kashmir, the borders shutting off ancient trade with Bhutan, and the Chinese crackdowns show all too well. These perpetuate the logistical and diplomatic, as well as expedition and geographical difficulties Peissel tells of in his journeys to Mustang in Cold War Nepal in 1964, a Bhutan facing India's intervention in 1970's Lords and Lamas, and the Minaro (The Ants' Gold") along the Kashmir forbidden zones in the early 1980s.

This elegant, readable narrative is short, but long enough to join Peissel's many journeys across his beloved landscapes. Focusing on the man-made environment it does not attend to the human, animal, or ecological encounters of his travel books but it provides an accessible introduction to his career. A short list of his expeditions and books appends this large-format, appealing collection of art and words which take you into the perspective of an artful tale-teller showing us his favorite sights. (Amazon 2-1-13)

Russ Bestley and Alex Ogg's "The Art of Punk": Book Review

Nine hundred images, mostly record sleeves from recalled or forgotten bands, illustrate this large-format presentation of the evolution, rise, and dominance of the punk aesthetic over the past forty-odd years. Russ Bestley and Alex Ogg contribute a deft introduction, short topical essays and captions. Interviews with familiar pioneers such as John Holmstrom, Jamie Reid, and Malcolm Garrett enrich the contents, along with lesser-known designers like LukTam89: this typifies the broader chronological and geographical scope that this edition emphasizes.

This range, from the counterculture of the early 1970s to the globalized anarchists and D.I.Y. provocateurs who continue the anti-corporate ideology far from the Broadway adaptation of Green Day's American Idiot or the shelves at the Hot Topic franchise, exemplifies the reach of a movement tired of the mainstream. But, it's a movement very eager, in many cases past and present, to court mass acceptance as well as media outrage, manufactured more often than genuine. Bestley and Ogg begin by covering terrain already trod by contributors to the interviews in Jon Savage's England's Dreaming {Tapes} and John Robb's Punk Rock: An Oral History. The analysis here fits into what has emerged as the conventional narrative. However, it expands the usual Malcolm McLaren-Vivienne Westwood-Situationists-Sex Pistols-Kings Road Chelsea chronology as it continues. 

Ogg and Bestley define punk's "visual legacy" by its "graphic codes--symbols of struggle and resistance, but also a complex subcultural visual vocabulary and, more cynically, a means to tap into deeply held anti-authoritarian sentiments by lifestyle branders": this combination, they argue, resonates today. The resulting study offers valuable texts to frame the images. Posters and photos intersperse with sleeves for more singles and fewer albums, representing the bulk of the product. 

This can prove as uneven as the sounds themselves these bands recorded. The authors mention the typographic pattern on the reverse of the Buzzcocks' seminal Spiral Scratch EP but do not include it. They note how The Undertones' single "Jimmy, Jimmy" incorporated a transparent sleeve, but they leave it off of a full page filled with colored vinyl that failed to be as innovative. They applaud the work of Raymond Pettibon for SST Records but this gains far less page space than that of Winston Smith's concurrent contributions for the Alternative Tentacles label. A welcome nod later to the adaptation of the aesthetic to current styles only whets the appetite for what should have been a long chapter on this under-examined aspect of punk's relevance, a subject demanding far more depth. A related subject, punk's interpretation by designers beyond the musical world, deserved elaboration.

With a large-scale format, the editors fumble some opportunities for the wisest use of a generous page layout. A poster for Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex gains a big share of space arguably unnecessary to demonstrate its quickly and cheaply reproduced, and rapidly overused, incorporation of photocopied tones and harsh colors. On the other hand, Jamie Reid's soon-withdrawn appropriation of a tourist advertisement for the Pistols' "Holidays in the Sun" shrinks to insignificance. 

Yet, other sections succeed. Reid's clever parody (also soon withdrawn) of an American Express advertisement for the post-Johnny Rotten Sex Pistols' appropriately titled and conceived fiasco The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle benefits by a large scale reproduction. A glance at send-ups of punk by enterprising bands or conniving labels shows the double-edged predicament of making fun of the clowns. Peter Gravelle's outtakes from the photo session for the pie-smeared faces whimsically adorning the debut LP from The Damned reveal the humor inherent in punk. As the photographer observes appropriately, whipped cream optional: "You'd always get, out of five, maybe one good-looking kid, two that were average, one that was a bit geeky, and one you'd have to try to hide." 

The tension and opportunity inherent for The Damned and others who managed to survive the first surges of punk in the late 1970s revealed more chances for self-mockery, as well as self-promotion, whether or not McLaren stayed on as Svengali. Bestley and Ogg decipher New Wave well. Major labels, with the cash lacking for indies such as New Hormones who released Spiral Scratch or New Rose who put out The Damned's first singles, tried to imitate the product and the sounds and the look of punk, but marketed more widely, with arguably greater or lesser amounts of ambition or cynicism.

Colored vinyl, collectibles, limited editions, novelties: the majors gleefully sought to separate fans from their wallets. However, the often maligned New Wave boasted, as its name defined, an avant-garde pedigree from film and the intelligentsia; arguably preferable in some musicians' as well as some marketers' minds to a term associated more with male prison rape prior to John Holmstrom and Legs McNeil's caricatures and long-lived promotions for the Ramones. Ogg and Bestley allow Holmstrom the room to roam into his invention, thanks to the Presidential Seal and a visit to Washington D.C., of the most enduring of logos, that for the back-to-basics leather-jacketed NYC band which preceded the rise of the media-savvy Pistols. 

As with the lucrative deals given the Pistols and the merchandising rewards for the Ramones, the division between those who stayed true to an imagined punk purity and those who sold out to the New Wave blurs. The editors conclude about this A&R fueled "battle of the bands": "Like its hipper cousin post-punk, new wave has been retrofitted to suit a neat and precise historical framework, placing it more firmly within the corporate stereotype it initially set out to oppose." Their judgment serves as an applicable verdict for the visual and aesthetic energy of punk and its restive relations. (Amazon US 10-14-12; slightly altered for PopMatters 10-23-12)

Beirt Cháisc 2013/5773

Tá Cáisc inniu. Nach bhfuil muid a ceiliúradh a dhéanamh air anseo, go fírinne. Ar ndóigh, is maith linn chun feacháint ar scannáin faoi an séasúr seo.

Ní feidir liom a bhréatnaigh na tsraid ar an Chaineal Stair faoi An Bíobla.  Tá mé ag muintir cúrsa "Reiligiún Comparádeacha" anois. Mar sin, cheap mé gur chóir go mbeadh liom a fheicéail é.

Mar sin féin, d'fhoghlaim mé faoi Cháisc na nGiúdach. Rinne ár teaghlach "seder" ag ar an n-teach ar feadh an tseachtaine seo caite. Thug muid a chuir ár chairde ar chéile.

Pléigh muid go léir an sceal anallach. Mhín mo mhac is oige Eaxodus. Ith mo mhac is sine matzah.

Gach mo shaol, tá suim agam leis an Bíobla. Mar sin, tá mé ag mealladh chuig an ábhar seo. Bain sult as agam díospóireachta é freisin.

A pair of Easters 2013/5773.

It's Easter today. We don't celebrate it here, truthfully. Of course, we like to watch films about this season.

I can't watch the series on the History Channel about the bible. I'm teaching a "Comparative Religions" course now. Therefore, I thought I might see it.

Nevertheless, I learned about "the Paschal feast of the Jews" (no word in Irish for Passover!). Our family made a seder at the house during the past week. We invited friends together.

We discussed the ancient story. My younger son explained Exodus. My older son ate matzah.

All my life, I've had an interest in the bible. Therefore, I'm attracted to this material. I enjoy debating it too.

Íomhá/Image: William de Brailes: The Crossing of the Red Sea

Michael Aris' "Views of Medieval Bhutan": Book Review

The adjective's elastic here, as this Himalayan scholar (who died of cancer in 1999 in Britain while his wife, Aung San Suu Kyi, was under control of the junta in Burma for many years) admits. Still, most Westerners further comparisons to "feudal" dzongs and "medieval" customs such as archery or monarchic and monastic devotion when they encounter Bhutan firsthand, or via photos or books. This handsome 1982 edition features an introduction by Tibetan expert Aris, who tutored the Bhutanese royal family for six years when the nation was opening up to modernization, and in less dense form than his other academic publications, he sets out the careful contexts that Samuel Davis, (1760-1819), captured in his journal and by his skilled drawings. A surveyor and draftsman for the Bengal Army, he accompanied Warren Hastings on the second British embassy, in 1783, to the kingdom.

These elegant depictions attest to the only foreign artist "of distinction" to show Bhutan, and the first outsider to paint scenes from these mountains. Aris notes that his fellow Englishman's "legacy played no part in the development of those imaginary utopias which the west continues to locate in the trans-Himalayan region." (11) Aris annotates and excerpts Davis' journal, and nods to its secular, and largely un-Romantic tone, also a part of the naturalistic art he brings to the plates reproduced here. "If sublime and romantic qualities are sometimes found expressed in his art this is surely because Davis, like most of us, was constitutionally incapable of reacting otherwise to certain combinations of mountains, light, fortresses and forests." 

It's intriguing to see how, at Punakha Dzong, Davis includes in his study of "one of the most ancient and considerable of the Rajah's castles" an analysis of its weak point. However formidably walled, its single entrance, he reasons, weakens it: "The best way of forcing admission might be by breaking open the gate with a petard." (50) He sees the subjection of the lower classes (and all women) to the rulers secular and religious, and wishes to free the peasants from the restrictions which a "monk tax" and fealty to a celibate, corrupt regime force in a manner he compares to Rome. He evinces a sympathy for the poor, and he scrutinizes the rituals of their bickering rulers closely. Certainly the considerable exoticism of this remote and then-nearly unknown realm in Davis' steady hand and pen balances with a cool appraisal of its strategic and military value to the Raj and his employer, the Crown. 

His companion and supervisor, Samuel Turner, suggested that after four months waiting in Bhutan, the Tibetan refusal of Davis to continue to that nation with the expedition that Tibetan suspicion of the pen and ink skills of Davis led to his exclusion from the mission. For more on this and the earlier venture into this region, see (reviewed by me Nov. 2012) The High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama, and the First British Expedition to Tibet by Kate Teltscher. Davis returned to India, to collaborate with Sir William Jones, who made the breakthrough connection between Sanskrit and Indo-European languages, and Davis became a Director of the East India Company and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He kept up his draftsmanship, and the fifty-nine examples Aris presents commemorate the considerable talent this West Indies-born Briton brought, at 23, to Bhutan. (1-6-13 to Amazon US)

Aiséiri le Stanley Spencer

Is maith liom an péintéir Stanley Spencer. Chuir mé suas beirt de chuid múrmaisiú faoi An Aiséiri. Tú ábalta fheicéail an sonas de na daoine ar méadú tagtha as an h-uaigheannaí.

Phéintéail Spencer radharcannaí dífríulaí dó sceál seo.  Bá é an téama seo go minic dó sna 1930idí agus 1940idí. Rinne sé leagannacha éagsulaí, mar shampla, le haghaidh reilig im bPort Ghlaschú, an dara le haghaidh séipéil de réir cuimneachan na Cogadh Mór i mBurghclere, agus an eile leis an dúchais reilig aige i gCookham i Sasana.

Ar ndóigh, is bréa liomsa is fearr an dhá seo anseo. Is é an chéad íomhá ó 1945. Measáim go raibh a ceiliúrann "Aiséiri an teacht le chéile" ag deireadh An Dara Cogadh Domhanda.

Is é íomhá an aghaidh thíos "Ardú na h-ínion Jairus" eile í 1947. Ach, sílím go raibh níos sona na an ceann i aice na gCookham. Chuir mé seo ar an Leabhar Aghaidh chomh amlíne íomhá faoi deireadh.

Móraim a dhearcadh agus cumhacht tréithe. Mar sin féin, tá difríocht leis gach na híomhannaí aige ar an ábhar seo.  Mar sin, níl breitheamh é ann.

Resurrection by Stanley Spencer

I like the painter Stanley Spencer. I put a pair of his murals about the Resurrection up. You can see the happiness of the people risen from their graves.

Spencer painted different views of this scenario. This theme happened often between the 1930s and 1940s. He made various versions, for example, at the cemetery in Port Glasgow, a WWI memorial chapel in Burghclere, and another for his native chapel in Cookham in England.

Of course, I love most the two here. The first image is from 1945. I reckon it may be celebrating the  "Resurrection Reunion" closing the Second World War.

The second image below is  "The Resurrection with the Raising of Jairus' Daughter" in 1947. But, I think that one's happier than that at Cookham. I put this on my Facebook as a timeline image recently.

I praise his characteristic perspective and power. Nevertheless, there's a difference with all his images on this topic. That is, there's no judge.

May Day 2012

These posters, about a century apart, show what's changed and what's endured in our capitalist system. Half a year after the Occupy movements rose and fell, and as the supposed Spring '12 events have been revealed as a front for MoveOn and Obama for America, I write this with the same mixture of cynicism and idealism that impelled my comments last November on this blog. I opened a week-old copy of the New York Times to read about suicides attributed to the "economic crisis" rising in Ireland and Italy; the decline of influence of the Catholic Church and the pressure to tie one's identity--especially for middle-aged men--to one's job are culprits. After men face financial disaster and personal loss, the resulting collapse of one's sense of self and one's ability to cope drive more and more to end it all. A fitting epitaph or rallying cry today, also a day whose name signals utter distress.

Certainly, pressures have always been there for any breadwinner, male or female. I watched my dad work often the graveyard shift or the swing shift, after toiling with my often frail mom to run the dog kennel in the daytime that supplemented his wages and kept us solvent, if barely, when often my dad was looking for work. He seemed to find and lose jobs frequently--he explained to me his departures due to a combination of his temper and the unstable nature of a machine shop worker's occupation.

I recall going without what had been once-a-week or so steak for what may have been years; my teeth deteriorated as they came in as permanent ones as we had no insurance and I did not go to either doctor or dentist for what were indeed crucial years. I told my first girlfriend, as I started college, about how much my family made and she--her mother did not work and her own father appeared often "between jobs"--was astonished at how low the figure was. At least it ensured me a Pell Grant, back then for low-income families, and Cal Grants to supplement my financial aid to allow me to enroll at the university I had hoped to attend, in simpler times when one did not make such a choice a decade-long commitment to the right schools, the right tutors, the right scores, the right connections.

For many, as the pyramid schemes illustrate, the gap widens as much as ever between those at the "right" schools and in the right jobs--often benefiting the elite long favored by and comprising the leaders of the right wing, but more and more nowadays--despite the propaganda of the poster depicting our media-military-postindustrial complex today--more "diverse" as to admissions and international membership, if allied with the same powers that be. Those who make it into Berkeley or Harvard, Cambridge or the Sorbonne, MIT or Cal Tech, will not likely be championing Occupy once they make it on Wall Street or in corporate law, a tenured prof like Todd Gitlin or Noam Chomsky or Cornell West's photo-ops and soundbites aside as talk-show book tour exceptions proving the rule. Occupy met with applause on many progressive campuses, and among most of at least their neatly aligned faculty, I reckon; it's estimated in my liberal arts field, 19:20 instructors lean Democrat.

Still, the capitulation of most educational institutions to a corporate model-- if usually unofficially--demonstrates the reality behind the rhetoric. Secure jobs plummet for most of us less favored in getting hired at such institutions even as students are turned away; high enrollments meet budget cutbacks. Online teaching, I predict, will spread to selective universities as it has among many of those with open admissions already. This generates a lot of processed data. Whether this increases the creation of knowledge and wise use, we'll have to see. Electronic databases allow easier access and rapid production of papers and theses contrasted with index cards and library stacks I navigated as one of the last Ph.D.'s to research my dissertation traditionally; I finished just as Netscape blossomed. What happens to critical thinking, as cut-and-paste essays and "distance" degrees flourish, sobers me.

I saw a FB photo today of a mortarboarded grad at a lectern with the caption: "I couldn't have done it without Wikipedia and Google." At least it wasn't subtitled "couldnt of." Remediation, or "developmental" math and writing, take up the majority of courses facing many freshmen before they can progress at our Cal States and in our junior colleges. I have lamented this tediously, so I spare repetition. Suffice to say that the slogan on FB stands more and more for what "research" means now. I heard a tale of a student called in for plagiarism; she had insisted that since she bought the essay online, it was now her "original" work. After all, she had submitted it under her own name.

I face similar situations more and more, and however I try to enforce higher standards worthy of those earning college degrees, the disparity between many of my older students and younger ones regarding articulation, literacy, elegance of expression, and clarity of thought is often telling, and invariably disheartening. Add to this harried vets, inner-city, and international students, a 1.5 generation caught between a native language and an imperfectly learned new one, and a rush to send in rushed assignments overdue or barely on time due to work, socializing, commutes, and/or family life. My students--far from top-tier 1% campuses listed above--compete for fewer jobs and rising debts at the end of their investment. They are also competing, likely, against graduates of highly competitive schools for coveted jobs. Tuition invariably soars yearly, far outpacing the cost of living.

I heard 53% of new grads are looking for work, and out of those who gain it, the growing number of on-call, part-time, temp or "contingent" positions jukes the job stats the administration (as any in an election season) must inflate to keep the voters happy. It's common to see long-time full-timers let go, replaced by a pair of no-benefits, at-will, contracted, perhaps overqualified part-timers. I suppose this makes the government happier: two half-steps forward count as double one step back?

That post-industrial security state depicted above courts campuses and brings lucrative contracts; the liberal arts cannot compete with the hard and social sciences. Business majors lure many debt-ridden students and despite the astronomical tuition, so does law. In whatever the field, tenured radicals are greying and often obtained security in industrially fueled, tax-supported, confident postwar decades when enrollments boomed and budgets soared for those coming out of the Sixties with a doctorate, which also tended to be granted more quickly and with less difficulty than those earned by those like myself who faced straitened job prospects, enormous competition for what positions opened, and fewer hopes in the liberal arts for steady employment at all. Prisons rival schools for funding in California; Jerry Brown's return to govern finds a hammered state budget far different than that of the 70's largesse or his father Pat's social programs after WWII that boosted us all. None of this is news.

I know a woman with a doctorate about to be granted who may emigrate from Ireland to join her brother who tends bar in San Francisco. Highly accomplished in her field, she wonders if she can land a high school post over here. I told her given job layoffs, it might be more difficult than she imagines, although it sounds as if Ireland's austerity budgets make even American ones look lavish.

However, an Irish therapist mused on FB (as I find intellectual and spiritual and political ideas everywhere) how as of the magical 11-11-11 convergence, a feeling of possibility hovered. Yet, it also appeared to have set many people off kilter, and the uncertainty of our times as we are increasingly both linked electronically and cut off intimately adds up to quite a "broken social scene." That scene in "Melancholia" with Kirsten Dunst harnessing lightning from her fingers as annihilation nears appears as applicable as does the equally off-balance "The Tree of Life" with Thomas Wilfred's lumia Opus 161 animation. These two films stood out for me last year as representations of "mythos" today.

I regard this cinematic and philosophical zeitgeist as less hopeful and more unsettling, Both films and the Occupy movement roused hopes and fears; I sense among more than one friend wherever found an untethered mood, as if "all that is solid melts into air." Quoting Marx and Engels from 1848 reminds me of the enchantment of structural upheaval, and how it mixed, often fatally, with the power of disenchantment as harnessed by those shooting soldiers common to both illustrations above.

On the power grid, where do I perch? Privileged, no doubt, far more than I let on with my sad sack self. Yet, unsettled by my own determination to live by a life of the mind, when my soul searches so.

Writing this, I stare at myself with a somber mien. I'm often at a low. When one finds one's emotional support kicked out, and then one's blamed for staggering or falling, the predicament's not a happy one. Instability, personally as well as geopolitically, may make for great art and fine fiction, but when you must live through it, unsure if the ending will be apocalyptic or affirming, it's hard to take comfort in the chronicles of those who have endured similar struggles or who transform them into art.

I close this with a sense of unease. I've been reading lately a lot about the cultural evolution of religion, and I reflect upon the hard-wired nature of our wish for liberating models, inspiring chants, and momentous iconography. The Wobblies who made the older poster and the unknown artist who depicted our Occupy-era 99% share a commitment to a radical reworking of a system that for many in our world stands for the only one remaining. I have FB friends spanning the spectrum from Marxists to Tea Partiers, NRA supporters to grizzled Irish republican stalwarts, New Age infused visionaries and doggedly devoted Democrats with lattes and lapdogs. I am not sure what they share except me, but more than once I found myself sending a post--from a far-left activist turned survivalist if no less tilted to one side--to a Ron Paul military vet stalwart ready to lock and load.

What they have in common may not be much, but on May Day, they unite on a suspicion that those at the top of our pyramid scheme act in our best interests rather than theirs. Buddhists remind us of the "three poisons" of anger/greed, delusion/ignorance, and of desire/attachment. Jewish people retell the Passover story each spring as if it happened to them, to keep the pain and the promise equally alive. That's the longest running narrative handed down orally in our culture, and satirically ripe for parody as it endures, it betters Easter for it can happen to all of us, not only to a Son of God. Beneath ideological differences and political parties, perhaps we can agree that a higher value lurks beneath the slogans and posters, the soundbites and "likes" that more and more substitute for understanding. There remains a possibility for betterment that Wobblies and Occupiers, revolutionaries and reformers, campaigned for: progress for workers everywhere, not as spray painted, but as reified.

Where I teach, the library's stacks are being culled. Thousands of titles will be given to Better World Books, a worthy charity. I have little room for adding to my own collection, but I snatched John Reed's "Ten Days that Shook the World" last week from the pile facing deportation. We know how that idealistic saga from another October's days of rage ended. Maybe past failures will guide us--in this year when Dick Clark dies and some foresee no New Year to celebrate--into a chance for gentle renewal. I found my secondhand copy bought a decade ago on Teilhard de Chardin. That's a nudge.