She surfs on

Latest development in the Encinitas surfing Madonna saga. As you'll recall, a mosaic of the Virgen de Guadelupe on a surfboard with the caption "Save the Ocean" appeared nearly miraculously under a railroad bridge in Encinitas on Good Friday/Earth Day. (I went on pilgrimage to see her last month.) She was taken down by the city council as graffiti shortly after that, and, I gather, has not yet found a home. But she's back, redeeming an often lampooned statue in neighboring Cardiff.

Sign me up!

Just got my online visa for Australia. Americans get fast-tracked through the online process, so we don't have to sign up for the "Australian Values Statement" other sorts of applicants have to endorse. Mutual respect, fair play and compassion? Sounds good to me!

Underground art

Another joy from the subway art mosaic series - here the downtown platform of the 8th. St stop, with a cameo by Grace Church. The witty mosaics at this station regular spilling beyond their circular frames - often into other circles, like the man torn between hat and dog below. The rainy Grace circle has pendants, too, rain in the sky and an escaped umbrella in a puddle - check them out next time you're there. The series is called "Broadway Diary" (2002) by Timothy Snell. I learned that from a great downloadable brochure called A Guide to Art in the MTA Network - an amazing and growing art gallery, these 500 stations!

The saints come marching

When I mentioned to someone that I was going to see the Dance of the Giglio, a festival brought over to Brooklyn from Nola, she said "Nola - New Orleans?" It's the Italian Nola but she was more right than she knew: the statue of St. Paulino of Nola was hurried out of Our Lady of Mount Carmel before the morning mass for the lifters (presumably to commune with his brother avatars atop the giglio and the barca, waiting to be lifted and danced through Havemeyer Street out front) and then brought festively back following a brass band playing - what else? - "When the saints come marching in." (Only slowly did we realize
that many saints were already in the house - the chapel next to the nave was filled with at least two dozen life-sized saints and figures of Jesus, Mary, angels, etc.) Paulinus doesn't want for company!

A banner recalling giglio festivals past...

Papier-mâché raised to the level of art: the 2011 Williamsburg giglio and a clever 1996 Nola giglio from a poster

La barca, 2011

Fresh zeppole in a paper bag

Arm of the capo leading the lifters of la barca


Off to meet the giglio, to the Giglio Song

At some point I want to get to the bottom of the symbols here. Why a Turk, leading Paolino's boat back to Nola? The story told of Paolino in the documentary "Heaven touches Brooklyn in July" manages to include elements of the stories of the Biblical Joseph (slave who interprets king's dream) and Moses (let my people go), not to mention an enslaving Muslim North Africa, though Paolino was a contemporary of Augustine. Meanwhile from a comparative religion standpoint a festival where jiggling pillar meets boat seems like it's about something else again...

Off my chest

There are times when G. K. Chesterton, the saint of glibness (but sometimes his glibness is saintly!) seems to be talking about us right here, right now.

The modern habit of saying, "This is my opinion, but I may be wrong," is entirely irrational. If I say that it may be wrong I say this is not my opinion. The modern habit of saying "Every man has a different philosophy; this is
my philosophy and it suits me"; the habit of saying this is mere weak-mindedness. A cosmic philosophy is not constructed
to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

That's from an introduction he wrote to the Book of Job in 1916 (xvi-xvii), before his conversion to Catholicism.

Seeing things

What number(s) do you see here? This is the third image in the Ishihara Color Blindness Test, designed so that those with partial or total color
blindness make out different numbers than those with normal vision, and sometimes can discern none at all. Those with normal vision see a 29 here, those with red-green deficiencies see 70; those with total color blindness can make out no numbers at all. How about the one below?
This one (#14) is the first in which only those with color blindness see a number - 5 - while others can make out nothing at all.

Bezaubernd schön

Die Zauberflöte with just seven young singers, two actors, no stage hands, no set but a copse of thin movable bamboo poles, and a piano in place of an orchestra? It can be done! "A Magic Flute," Peter Brooks' last production at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, is also the opener of the Lincoln Center Festival. It's spare and witty, charming and very intimate. Sometimes the bemused French dialogue gave it the feel of an Eric Rohmer film. If it didn't blow me away completely it's because (a) I'm used to poor theater (tho' this was of course top-rate) and (b) stripping away the special effects makes the story's misogyny hard to ignore.

Lilies

Coming up in just a few days is the Dance of the Giglio, highlight of the feast of St. Paulinus of Nola at Our Lady of Carmel Catholic church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I've taught about it several times in my Religious Geography of NY class, but never had a chance to attend. Very excited! The giglio (lily) is a tall portable shrine to San Paolino complete with a brass band, hoisted and bounced by 120 men along an ever-changing route through the neighborhood. It came to Brooklyn along with its saint in the baggage of immigrants and has become one of the biggest Italian American festivals. (The photo is from 1962, found here.) It's going strong back home in Italy, too, where there are still eight separate gigli, one from each part of town. The image below is taken from a video of one of this year's gigli (they continue their battle for supremacy online!). Lived religion indeed - while the Williamsburg giglio is full of Italianalia, this one's got a sax combo and the iconic image of Che Guevara!

Trust, playfulness and passion

J. Peter Euben, distinguished political philosopher and master pedagogue, long at UC Santa Barbara and now at Duke, explains why he starts his lecture class on ethics (75 students) with the Book of Job:


A student once asked, “If there is a God why do we need to study ethics at all? The answers are there.” Having taught for 34 years in one of the most secular areas of the country (Northern California) it never occurred to me to take religion that seriously in an ethics class. But as long as I didn’t I could not speak to nor really hear what a number of my students were saying, what drove their moral lives and, often, what brought them to the class. I am still religiously unmusical but their concerns have become mine. Thus, I begin the course with the Book of Job and, beginning last year (because of what students in my previous classes suggested), I include Dostoevski’s The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.

The choice of Job was also the product of a different conversation, one that led to an intense exchange of views. I began with a portrait of a homeless person—seemingly deranged, smelly, dressed in rags, living in a cardboard hut with scabs all over his body, talking in tongues. The portrait was meant to describe Job, and my argument was that ethical life begins with being able to acknowledge, “There but for the grace of God go I.” But a number of students felt they earned what they had achieved and they could not envisage a world where they could be Job. The dialogue was memorable not because it was between me and my students as much as something between my students that I initiated. Many walked out shaken and angry. I consider that healthy.

Such a dialogue encourages as it presumes a context of trust, playfulness, and passion. Trust because an honest discussion of race, for example, requires it; playfulness to take the edge off intense disagreements that are essential to the development of moral imagination, by which I mean that ability to see the world from another’s point of view; passion because the issues matter and because texts like Job or Dostoyevsky’s cannot be understood without it. [...]

Happy fourth!

The view from my roof. The video on my little Pentax is great - I just forgot I'd put it in "sepia" setting. (You're looking several miles across Brooklyn, the East River and Manhattan toward the Hudson, where the fireworks were launched.)

Go with the flow

You know how I love maps, so you'll be unsurprised that I was persuaded to buy a clear plastic globe at a local antique and curio shop when the owner said "when you look through it you can see all the rivers." Before railroads and airplanes, rivers were the way to go. Flows, not boundary lines, defined the world.

In a family way

The great wall of ivy out my kitchen window is looking almost autumnal. On closer inspection, it turns out it's busy blooming or seeding...

Earl

I'm keeping company with a cat for a few weeks. His human family is at camp and on research trips so he's at Camp Mark. Earl's an old and very gentle fellow. He likes people, purring easily. He never complains and puts up with extraordinary manhandling from children. He lets me pick him up, pauses while I snuggle, then quietly but firmly wriggles away. What a life!

What a life? Spooning out canned cat food and scooping his turds from the kitty litter, I wonder. He eats, licks himself, and craps. He keeps a watch on things, sleeps in various places sometimes with one eye half-open. There are no other cats in his life, or even animals to hunt, so it's people he keeps track of. I've catsat before - I took care of two cats for a year when in graduate school - but I've never had a pet. Earl's low-key existence is raising some mild existential (and ecological) questions for me...

(It's purple milkweed)

Can anyone tell me the name of this rather insanely intricate flower?

On the walls

There's an interesting exhibition on the history of the New School Art Collection in the larger exhibit space at Parsons at the moment. The centerpiece is the newly restored mural Camilo Egas painted for the wall facing the dance studio 80 years ago, "Ecuadorian Festival" (above), companion to Clemente Orozco's "Call for Revolution and Universal Brotherhood" (at the bottom of here" (at the bottom of here) and Thomas Hart Benton's "America Today" murals (here and here). At right you see it reflected in Michael Clegg and Martin Guttman's 1989 photo "Assembly of Deans" - yes, those are New School deans!

Searching images

Here's something really cool. I found this utterly haunting photo on a youtube videoe to some piano music of Janacek (who is with me still). The picture looks to me like archetypal childhood - and (also?) the childhood of my parents' generation. In part this must be because it's in black and white... I wonder if there have been many other generations whose image of the time before their birth was visually different (b&w instead of color) than their own... though the millennials will probably be like that, their parents' worlds in still photographs while theirs are all in motion. Perhaps 2D and 3D will be similar.

But here's something even cooler, in its way. You can now can do a Google search with an image! (This is something I've been waiting for; it might in fact have been around for a while, but I only just discovered it.) So I just dragged my screencap of the image into the search box, and learned that the picture is by American photographer Henry Callahan (1912-1999). It's called "Eleanor and Barbara" and was shot in Chicago in 1953. Seems a kindred spirit.

...
Actually it can get surreal pretty quick. (Not a criticism, necessarily!) I put in a picture of a cactus you know, and look what came up!

Foliage

A resplendently beautiful summer morning, the air clear and a cool breeze from the harbor. The view out the apartment's back and front:

Summer in the City...

Operatic

Hard to believe, but I'm still humming and whistling melodies from the "Cunning Little Vixen," five very eventful days on! I have, I admit, supplemented the NYPhil with much listening to the recording I love.
By this time tomorrow, Janacek may have had to cede place to Verdi: I'm going to the summer encore screening of the Metropolitan Opera in HD's "Simon Boccanegra," with Placido Domingo's debut as a baritone.

BBG summer

My graduate school friend B came to visit Friday and Saturday, with her now 24-year-old daughter M. We had a grand time exploring Brooklyn, including the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a delight in every season.