The Art That Steel Built

We went to Pittsburgh Friday to visit the Carnegie Art Museum. If you’ve never been to Pittsburgh; do go, and enter the city from the west via the Ft. Pitt Tunnel under Washington Mountain because when you emerge, splash! You are hit with a dramatic shot of the city. No matter how many times I visit Pittsburgh, I still find this exciting.
My visit to the museum was interesting because when we arrived, on a fine weekday afternoon no less, the museum was packed. With people. There to see art. This is remarkable because not a three hour’s drive away in Columbus, we’re closing the doors on our symphony because of lack of funding and patronage. And here we were in Pittsburgh surrounded by people of every age, class and ethnic heritage coming to see art, which I thought was dead. It baffles the mind.
I’ll tell you about the Carnegie Museums this week, but first I’d like to tell you a bit about the man who is surrounded by so much myth. Andrew Carnegie was born in 1835 to a working-class family in Dunfermline, Scotland. In 1848, the family left Scotland for America where his father hoped to find work as a weaver, but never succeeded. Andrew took a job in a factory making $1.20 per week, though he later found another job at a steam engine factory making $2.00 per week. The factory manager was so impressed by his penmanship and intelligence that he promoted him to clerk of the factory. At the age of 14 he changed jobs again, this time becoming a messenger earning $20 per month. In 1853, Andrew started working at the Pennsylvania RR telegraph office where he learned the ins and outs of the railroad industry. From the time he was thirteen, until and after his father died in 1855, Andrew was the only breadwinner in the family.
In the following years, he invested in sleeping cars and oil, got drafted in the army, and founded the Keystone Bridge Company. It was when he was thirty-three years old that he outlined for himself a plan to retire at age thirty-five and devote himself to philanthropy and his own education. Though he failed this goal, the powerful urge to bring education to the people had him building libraries throughout the country, one of which sits proudly in downtown Columbus.
If this sounds like a Cinderella story, it is in part because it is. He wasn’t a man without flaws. While he was entirely a self-made man, he paid his employees the low wages typical of the day. I myself will never make a fraction of money Carnegie did; nor did I start working at the age of twelve and I can easily say that I’m not willing to work as hard as he did. His interests in art, nature and education might have compensated for his lack of them as a child. While philanthropy and public works were common for millionaires of the day, Carnegie was not like the suave Harvard-educated William Randolph Hearst who became famous for his hoarding of art from around the world for his own pleasure.
The world we live in today is very different from that of Andrew Carnegie. That Victorian spirit of philanthropy is gone, but witnessing the multitudes of art enthusiasts at the museum has shown me that an appreciation for art and culture is still quite alive. Whether or not they know the names of artists represented in each gallery, one still senses that the visitors think it is important enough to explore.
And whatever my feelings for the Carnegies, Rockafellers and Fricks of the world, the legacies they leave behind are bigger than the men who made them and will last through all time.

Birthday Poem

June surrounds us like a green sea,
The harvest of accumulated
Tasks and errands; of a sprinkler arching
Beads of light over potted plants and mowed lawns,
When nesting birds feed their clamorous young
On worms and bugs caught mid-air.
The daffodil has withered
Beneath the hosta, whose leaves spread
In a victorious gesture like arms embracing summer.

Here, I sit, insatiable,
As passionate as a fast or a prayer,
Forgetting the years as I breathe in
The subtle scent of a summer night,
Mentally marking the moments
To store like snapshots in an album
In this season I hold
Most dear in my heart.

How soon we allow ourselves
To reap and exhaust the rich rewards
Of all our sanguine toil.
We make appointments and arrangements
Spending our innocent future,
Trading past pleasures and duties
For pursuit and desire
Like a tree endlessly blossoming.

June 20th in History

In preparation of my birthday, I looked up the events in history of June 20. I found some interesting tidbits for your to ponder on, and filtered out the rest.

In 451 AD: Germans and Romans beat Atiila the Hun at Catalarinische Fields. This is a good thing.

In 1793: Eli Whitney patents his cotton gin. Another good thing, threatening the slave trade.

In 1837: Queen Victoria at 18 ascends British throne following death of uncle King William IV Ruled for 63 years ending in 1901. A very important symbolic figure of her time. The Victorian era represented the height of the Industrial Revolution, a period of significant social, economic, and technological progress in the United Kingdom. Victoria's reign was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire; during this period it reached its zenith, becoming the foremost global power of the time.

In 1866: Lord George ESMH Carnarvon born, England, egyptologist, who discovered the gravesite of Tutanchamon, or King Tut.

In 1895: 1st female PhD (science) earned (Caroline Willard Baldwin). Go, Caroline.

In 1945: Anne Murray, Canadian Musician, added to 'cleanse the palette.’

In 1953: Cyndi Lauper, born in Brooklyn, singer. Girls Just Want to Have Fun.

In 1968: Rita Finn, née Rita Turgeon, born in Newport City Hospital. Painter, graphic artist, wanna be poet. Full global impact yet to be known.

Hummingbird Heart

I've always had a soft spot in my heart for hummingbirds, the little jewels of the bird world. There's something fragile about them that I understand in an intangible way.

Every year, I grow pineapple sage and lobelia in hopes of attracting hummingbirds to my back yard. Whenever I see one, I run to get my camera and attempt to take a picture. It shouldn’t surprise you that I’ve never succeeded.

A hummingbird is about the size of a cork from a wine bottle, and its heart the size of a baby's fingernail. Comparing the bird’s weight vs. heart size ratio, they have the largest hearts in the world. When you consider that a hummingbird's heart whirs at 500 beats a minute at rest, and up to 1,200 beats a minute in flight, you wonder if they experience time differently than humans. With exquisite eyesight that gives them an ability to catch tiny insects mid-flight, their experience of a second must be more like a minute to us.

All living creatures have approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. Tortoises spend them very slowly, allowing them to live twice and thrice the years of humans. But hummingbirds spend them faster than any other creature, so they live only two to eight years.

Hummingbirds have metabolisms that I can only compare to the speed of light. Their little bodies, completely lacking fat cells, devour oxygen and calories faster than a jet engine. Ambitious in spite of their size, they live closer to death on a daily basis. They frequently die of heart attack. But when hummingbirds sleep, their heart rate slows to about 36 beats per minute, exhausted by the daily marathon.

So, the next time you fall, exhausted, into bed after a stressful and busy day, think of the frantic life of a hummingbird.

Little Birds

My apologies if I sound like a tacky chain email, but upon turning 40, I’ve realized a few things that have helped me over the years and I thought I’d share. My unsolicited advice on getting on in life:

1. Find something you are passionate about and master it.
2. Learn how to mamba. Or bake bread. Or fly a plane. Or play chess, or play the saxophone, or knit, or paint, or write, or speak French. Keep learning things, and whether you make a living from these things or not, they will be your dear friends throughout life.
3. Do something a little scary every day. Step out of your comfort zone. Paint a room magenta. Introduce yourself to someone you admire. Sing in your car. Apply for a job that’s a little out of your league. Write a screenplay.
4. Keep a few friends who are your friends because they like you, not because they want something from you.
5. Buy a garment you can’t really afford and wear it when you need a little boost. Whether it’s a leather jacket, a killer pair of boots, or a fancy hat – putting it on will change your perspective.
6. Be generous and honest with compliments.
7. Think with your head and feel with your heart, and make decisions accordingly. Had I learned this ten years earlier than I did, I could have saved myself an endless amount of pain.
8. Make friends with people who are better than you are at something or other and learn from them.
9. Look people in the eye when you talk with them.
10. Laugh out loud at least once every day.
    
    And keep these few lines I’ve borrowed from ee cummings in your mind:
    
    may my heart always be open to little
    birds who are the secrets of living
    whatever they sing is better than to know
    and if men should not hear them men are old
    
    may my mind stroll about hungry
    and fearless and thirsty and supple
    and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
    for whenever men are right they are not young

How We Met

You know when you hear stories about people who’ve had their palms read or do some past-life regression, they are told they were the Queen of Bohemia or a witch who was burned at the stake in Salem? Not me. I was a milk maid. A happy milk maid, but a milk maid nonetheless.
Concurrently, if my husband and I met in a past life, it wasn’t in Ancient Rome, or 17th Century Paris, or even 1920’s Paris, much to our mutual dismay. We met at the Buena Vista Social Club in 1950’s Cuba. Our eyes must have met in the smoky dinner club, and surely we danced together while Ibrahim Ferrar and Rubén Gonzàlez played Chan Chan for us. Once in a while, in our present life, we turn the lights out and dance in our living room, pretending we’re back at the Buena Vista Social Club.
If you don’t have any of their CD’s or the documentary made by Wim Wenders about them, run out and get one now. Add a little romance to your life.

Has it really been a year?

One year ago, my husband and I were in the midst of a home renovation nightmare that you would not have believed if you were sitting in a movie theater seeing a production by Paramount Pictures. We wanted to have a new roof and have all the aluminum siding removed to reveal the beautiful original wood siding, which we would then paint. Just a simple couple with a little dream.

We secured a roofing contractor who hooked us up with a subcontractor to do the rest for what seemed a reasonable price. The work began on a fine June morning. Upon waking, the outside of our house was swarmed with illegal Mexican laborers. Neither my husband nor myself speak Spanish, but we appreciated the gruelling labor these men performed on a daily basis in blistering heat, so we supplied them with burritos and pizza. The music they listened to while working was a little grating, but it kept them happy.

As the original siding was slowly revealed, we found that most of it was in fairly good shape, but much of it needed replacing. Our home, the work site, was visited by what we assume was the Coyote, a vile creature with gold chains, bad teeth and an ugly way of speaking about the opposite sex. The general contractor, who was on a perpetual verge of a complete nervous breakdown, was rarely present, so my husband acted as the GC - in addition to his full-time job. I put on my jeans and grabbed a paintbrush every evening in hopes of hurrying the work along myself. Then there was the small fire on our front porch. And the watered-down paint (at $50/gallon) to make the work go faster. The icing on the cake was the clash that ensued between the laborers when it was discovered that the lead painter was hording the cash draws instead of paying his team. When the police came to shut down what was about to turn into a violent scene, they were met by what appeared to be a street gang. They had to close off our street from traffic.

What was to be a two-week project stretched into July, when we expected a week-long visit from my sister and brother-in-law. I had failed to alert them about the war-zone that had once been our home because I had hoped to surprise them and assumed the work would be done. To this day, I shake my head in disgrace every time I think of that of that one omission and the less-than-stellar visit they had.

A few weekends ago, as an almost therapeutic gesture of closure, my husband and I repaired the paint that had failed.

I sometimes dream of updating the kitchen. Then I hear echoes of Party Like a Rock Star and shudder.

Put Your Records On

You heard Corrine. Go ahead and let your hair down.

The Muse

So, I've been haunted for years by this need to form concrete ideas about the nature of creativity. I've put far too much thought into pinning down the one discipline and style that calls the loudest or, at least, that I can follow the longest. An email from my old neighbor and good friend Ted brought this question to light once again.
First let me tell you a bit about Ted. We lived next door to each other for more than ten years. (And between the two of us, we should have the lion’s share of stock in that Chinese restaurant a stone’s throw away from our old apartment building because we lived on Phad Thai for at least a year. I digress.) He’s a delightful, intelligent and talented man who gave up writing for chess. He’s a great chess player and has taught me a few moves, though I can’t say I’ve ever beat him. He’s also taught me much about art, music and beauty. If you have people in your life who have done that for you, count yourself blessed.

So, Ted has all these creative juices that have been building up inside him and perhaps creating dangerous levels of serotonin in his brain. Mind you, chess is a very creative pastime, and I can understand where one gets to in life that he turns his back on the Muse. But the Muse isn’t going away.
For me, it is perhaps a stunt in my developmental growth that keeps me creating; the need to work on something and in the end, look at it and say, “I made this.” We humans have been doing this for thousands of years and I don’t see an end in sight.
If you look up the Cave of Hands in Venezuela, over 7,000 years ago the tribesmen painted silhouettes of their hands onto the cave walls. There are other scenes of hunting and of women making a refreshing raspberry sorbet, but for the most part the imagery says, “I was here.” The images may also have some ritual use, and isn’t that what artists today are participating in every time they begin?
My own muse has the same navigational troubles that I have and can’t make up her mind about which direction to lead me in, and the message is perhaps more intricate than I’ve made it out. Not only do I want to say, “I was here,” but that I’m here for such a short time and during my visit I've seen magical things that brought tears to my eyes and I want to use my clumsy tools and share these things with others, and hear them say, ‘Yes, yes I see it too.”
So Ted, your muse is still waiting. And I too will get back to the canvas as soon as I get this 6 pound purring beast off my lap.