Obamarama

Washington state still votes for presidential candidates’ delegates via the antiquated caucus system, and I hate it. It requires that all participating members of a precinct show up at the same time in the same room for 90 minutes or more in the middle of winter, be subjected to statements by anyone who chooses to speak (no matter how ill-informed) and vote publicly, and sometimes repeatedly. Each of these conditions makes it less likely that people will make the effort. People who are working, traveling or ill cannot participate. People without transportation or the money to arrange for it are disadvantaged. Shy or private people have a disincentive to attend, since they’re subjected to argument, crowds and publicity for their closely-held beliefs whether they want to engage in such public displays or not. Those with immune deficiencies because of illness or medical treatment (such as those undergoing chemotherapy) put themselves at risk to attend. It’s inconvenient, coming right in the middle of Saturday, the day we look forward to. Caucus locations don't match polling places and the websites which provide location information get overloaded and go down when they're needed most. It takes determination to be a part of the process.

So what happened this year? Did attendance suffer? On the contrary, caucus stations were filled beyond capacity. People parked a half-mile from the school that held my local caucus. The crowd was too large for the school auditorium in which we assembled and had to spill into the gym. People at stations around the state ran out of ballots and pens. And the vote went overwhelmingly to Barack Obama. Hope may not spring eternal, but it sure as hell got the vote out. Hope, and disgust for our current administration.

I’ve heard a lot of people refer to Obama supporters as Obamabots because so many of his followers do seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid and been mesmerized and hypnotized by the man. For some, devotion borders on the fanatical, and it makes me uncomfortable. But not all of us Obama supporters are voting solely on feel-good platitudes and gut reactions. There are strong reasons to vote for the man that are based in rational thought, and even those who subscribe to a realpolitik-style pragmatism must admit that there are compelling reasons to believe that he can help to wash the U.S. of at least some of our sins in the world’s eyes by leading his fellow citizens in taking responsibility for our actions, remembering that we do not own the world and only make up 6% of the world’s population, and being willing to talk to and consider the ideas and needs of other leaders while standing up for our principles at home. I believe he may be able to help us build a stronger and more admirable foreign policy which allows the rest of the world to approach us with a more conciliatory and friendly stance. After these years of adversarial arrogance, a leader who is willing to listen to and consider other countries’ needs and concerns honestly and see our country as others see us could do us a world of good in the eyes of the rest of the planet. He could make us feel more pride in our place in the world based not on some “America, right or wrong” stance, but because of positions that follow our laws and consider international law as well.

Many people complain that his constant harping on the theme of hope leaves their brains feeling bludgeoned with meaningless buzz-words. I understand. They say they fear that he has no real positions because he does not always mention them in his speeches. But look at the extraordinary following he has built based on this (very clever) choice to emphasize feelings in his public speeches, while providing concrete and strong positions on his website and position papers. When asked directly how he stands on various issues during the debates, he has made clear cases for his positions, but most potential voters don’t want to sit still and watch or listen (or read online or in the paper) the answers to these questions. I have been made uncomfortable by the amount of ardor and excitement people have expressed for the man based on how he makes them feel after beautifully delivered but not always deeply meaningful speeches. I myself have complained to friends that, while I admire him for his actual positions and have heard him speak ardently and eloquently on all manner of subjects for some years now, the text of his most popular speeches rarely stands up to the power of the delivery. I felt nervous about the Oprahfication of his campaign during his tour with Ms. Winfrey in January; it seemed that people who attended his appearances were so hungry for hope and so thrilled to be in the presence of celebrity that mass hysteria was taking over.

I understand the thrill of seeing an ardent, excellent speaker with whom one agrees; I don’t blame people for falling for him after spending time in his presence. It takes a hard heart to hear a speaker of his grace and skill (and political positions!) and not be moved and thrilled. But choosing wisely takes more than a good gut feeling. I fear people voting on their gut reactions because that leads to people voting for people like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, too. A lot of people loved the idea of voting for screen icon Arnold Schwarzenegger in California before they knew anything about his politics because they loved the way he made them feel. Millions find even Mike Huckabee refreshing and charismatic, which leaves me dumbfounded, as I find him vindictive and ignorant.

Fortunately, I like Obama’s manner as well as his stand on most issues. But I fear people loving him because Oprah says to, or just because they think it would make them look good to support a black man. I don’t have trouble with people, all candidates being equal (which they aren’t, but if they were), wanting to vote for a woman or a black man as a way to show societal support for groups that were disenfranchised for so many years, and which still face bigotry and stereotyping, and which could bring fresh perspectives and new international respect to the office and the nation. I’d love to be able to vote for a woman I could feel good about, and if I can vote for a strong, brilliant black man with wonderful values and a solid track record I’ll feel terribly lucky.

It makes me sad that the first viable female candidate the Democrats have been able to offer (with apologies to the late Shirley Chisholm) is a centrist pragmatist who angers huge swaths of U.S. society, who blames “vast right-wing conspiracies” when it's convenient and seems willing to let those in her campaign play dirty while pretending not to. I find it sad that there are 150 million females in this country and she’s the most viable female candidate we’ve ever had. I’m not saying Hillary Clinton isn’t extraordinarily bright, savvy and politically gifted. I will certainly vote for her if Hell (and Texas) freeze over and she is somehow able to end what looks at this point like an Obama juggernaut, since she would be endlessly better for this country than John McCain’s conservatism could ever be. But given the choice between a woman so entrenched in Democratic National Committee-style centrism and a devoted, energetic and extraordinarily articulate (read his latest book if you want proof) man who asks the country to stand up tall, live up to its principles and sacrifice when necessary to do the right (and progressive thing), it’s easy for me to stand up for Barack Obama.

Hillary Clinton’s husband’s presidency (which all agree she had a strong advisory position in) promised so many progressive improvements but that administration frequently reneged on its promises (don’t ask, don’t tell, anyone?), pulled the country to the center and bogged down in the middle and sat there, losing momentum. The state of the country, the economy and civil rights were all much better then, of course, and I’d trust her far more than any Republican of any stripe to lead us to a more stable, constitutionally-run country, but given the choice between her and Obama, my choice is clear.

I’ve been sad and embarrassed to hear feminists like Gloria Steinem imply that women who vote for Obama when they could vote for Clinton are traitors to their gender, and that as a group women have it worse than black men in this country. I’ve considered myself a feminist since I was a child and I read every issue of Ms. Magazine (which Steinem, long one of my heroines, founded in 1973), from the first issue until I was in my mid-20s. I loved Ms., I went to a women’s college, and I was a member of NOW for many years, until I came to believe that they had gone off track and no longer shared my beliefs. I stood up to sexism at work on multiple occasions, and I love that both my senators (and both of the senators from my birth state of California) are female Democrats. I would love to vote for a woman I admired for president, but more than that, I love that I do not have to vote along gender lines, but have the choice to vote for the best person for the job. I love that I do not have to choose allegiance to my gender (or race) before allegiance to my principles and to my beloved Constitution.

To me, feminism is a branch of humanism; I approach people of either gender (and any race or mix of races) as deserving my respect unless they prove otherwise, and all the work of feminists (and other civil rights activists) who came before me and paved the way to a more just and equal society helped me to believe that I could put the humanity and decency of others before not only their gender but also their race or sexual orientation. I am relieved that if I cannot feel best voting for a woman, I can at least vote for a black man, which makes my choice not to support the strongest-ever female U.S. presidential candidate less painful.

I’m delighted to have the chance to vote for a black man and to show the world, especially Africa and the Middle East, that we can see someone who isn’t just another white man of Northern European descent as worthy of elevation, leadership and admiration. There is so much resentment and anger toward us, especially in Muslim regions, it would be exciting and I think hugely beneficial to show the world that a man of African descent whose father’s family was Muslim is not automatically denigrated or denounced in our country, despite the huge numbers of bigoted fear-mongers among us who fear Islam and see it only as a source of violent anti-Americanism. I also admire his emphasis on treating others (be they individuals or nations) with respect and diplomacy. A great man or woman, like a great nation, listens to others and engages with them in a manner that honors their humanity. Others will not take heed if they don't feel there is a core of respect for them. We don't have to agree with them, but we should not be so arrogant as to refuse to listen.

Obama himself is Christian; sadly, he would be unelectable in this country otherwise. And he’s actually half-black and half-white, which is pleasing in that he himself would be a wonderful symbol of the intermixed, interracial makeup of our nation. He chooses to identify himself as black, and our country has a long and sordid history of considering any amount of “black blood” a taint so foul that for several hundred years anyone with a single black great-grandparent was considered completely black as a mark of inferiority and shame, and his or her rights were accordingly diminished to the same state as a person of fully African-American parentage. I admire his desire to consider his blackness something to be so prized and honored that he chooses to consider it one of the most salient characteristics in defining him, much as I wish it didn’t matter so much to the populace.

No, I don’t think Obama’s perfect. I do wish he had more experience in national office. But I do think he’s run a cleaner campaign than his primary rival, I think his record is strong, his long history of public service exemplary, his ability to determine the crux of the issues keen, and his awareness of our place in the world and his desire to be a good world citizen as well as a good American citizen laudable. I desperately hope that our next president, whether Obama or Clinton, will have the chance to choose Supreme Court justices whose decisions will help to bolster our sagging civil rights and undo some of the damage that has been done and will continue to be done to us by Bush appointees. While I do think there are distinctions worth noting between Obama and Clinton, and I do feel his platform is closest to my ideals and goals for the country, I recognize that they are quite close in their opinions over all, and this gives me comfort and hope. Either one would be a huge improvement over the disgusting administration we’ve suffered under these past seven years.

The next time someone tells you there’s no difference between parties and that it doesn’t matter who’s elected president, politely mention that the makeup of the Supreme Court determines their day-to-day rights in thousands of areas of daily life. Presidents determine the composition of the court and all sorts of rights, from habeus corpus to abortion to adoption to marriage to the death penalty to income taxes, depend on those nine people. When they tell you presidential party doesn’t matter, ask them whether they think Democrats would have started the war that’s cost trillions of dollars, perhaps a million Iraqi lives, harmed or killed tens of thousands of American soldiers and damaged hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens’ families. Which party has the most members who don’t believe in global warming? Evolution? The Geneva Conventions? Not my party. It matters.

It matters, it matters, it matters.

The Verb "To Pimp"

A couple of weeks ago, television commentator David Shuster got into trouble for asking on MSNBC’s Hardball program whether Hillary Clinton had “pimped out” her daughter Chelsea by putting her to work as a fresh new face and spokesperson for her mother on the campaign trail. Hillary was outraged by the use of the term, found it offensive in the extreme and called for his head; MSNBC responded by suspending him temporarily. This episode brought up several issues: one is whether it’s fair of the press to follow Chelsea’s private life now that she is acting as a shill for her mother; the other is what is an appropriate use of the word “pimp.” Guy Branum wrote an interesting article on the first topic in Slate.com on February 11; Jesse Sheidlower discussed the second topic in a separate article published in Slate on the same day. I’d like to address both issues.

Let’s address the question of the appropriateness of dragging Chelsea Clinton into the limelight. All her life her parents have been extremely tenacious of her right to have a private life and have gone after those who intruded on Chelsea’s personal space and private activities like bulldogs. Most people have found this admirable; we don’t like to see parents trotting their children out and using them as tools to garner public sympathy.

But Chelsea is no longer a child; she is 28 years old, and she has chosen of her own free will to appear in public on her mother’s behalf. If the Clintons see fit to trot her out, it can only be because they feel she is an appealing and attractive surrogate for her mother who demonstrates that Hillary Clinton is not only successful in her public life, but has raised an exceedingly bright, successful, polite and socially astute daughter. It is exactly because she is a symbol that the media want to learn more about her: is she an appropriate symbol? What can we learn about her parents by examining her? If she and her parents have decided that she should play a public and ongoing role in the campaign, it is only fair that members of the press ask about the reasons why. When Hillary Clinton presents her child to the world in her stead, we must ask what the point is, and if she won’t tell us, we have the right to express the question.

David Shuster’s cynical and ugly terminology was totally inappropriate, and there seems to have been a nastiness to the idea behind it as well. I believe he used the objectionable term “pimped out” solely to convey the idea of displaying or using the charms or talents of another person for one’s own gain, but even as he made the comment, he was hedging and implying that he realized the term was loaded.

However, the idea behind his badly-worded comment was valid. Cynical, but valid. I believe that question is, What is the point of using Chelsea on the campaign? Furthermore, why is it suddenly okay to do so now? Why have the Clintons decided that it’s appropriate to put their daughter on constant public display now when they know full well her personal life, behavior, friends and opinions will be even more thoroughly scrutinized as a result? They have always contended that anyone who pried into her life was beneath contempt, but in using her in this way, they have to be aware that they’re opening her life up for even more sustained attention. It is, of course, her right as an adult to help her mother out in this way; I find Chelsea Clinton admirable for being willing to make the personal sacrifices necessary. But for her family to pretend that as a 28-year-old out on the hustings for her mom she’s as far off limits as she was as a 13-year-old is ridiculous.

The primary historical use of the verb “to pimp” means to solicit sexual partners for someone else and to benefit financially from the exchange. As a parent, if someone accused me of pimping my daughter, even in a purely metaphorical sense, I would also be outraged and incensed. Though she is much older than I, Hillary Clinton and I both come from a time when we knew of no attractive or appealing usage of the word “pimp.” Every possible meaning she and I were exposed to was offensive and ugly.

Since the Shuster dustup, I’ve heard a number of people under 30 complaining that they don’t get what the fuss is all about. They’re so used to seeing “to pimp” in a whole new and positive context: to decorate, to make more attractive, to show off one’s desirability or power. When they think of “pimping” they think of showing themselves or their possessions off in high style, and think of television shows like “Pimp My Ride” where cars are overhauled and go from blah to wow—at least according to those who admire a high bling factor.

The new use of the term is so common that millions of young people don’t realize how recently its meaning changed, and how loaded and offensive the term is to most people born before 1980. But David Shuster is 40 years old; he should be aware of how loaded and offensive the term is. There’s no excuse for his resorting to it when there are more precise and appropriate ways of getting to the root question.

I disagree that the word “pimp” is now so commonly used that the age-old offensive sexual meaning no longer competes with more recent meanings. Kids may believe that the term no longer carries offensive sexual overtones, but to most of the populace the first meaning of the verb “to pimp” remains an ugly one referring to people who benefit financially from the sexual degradation of others. Many people don’t mind using “pimped out” or “pimp my ride” in mixed company because they think of it as a term implying over-the-top fashion or a youthful hipness that they’d like to co-opt for themselves. It’s obvious that legions of people no longer give thought to the fact that the term has for centuries referred to (and continues to refer to) a man who subjects women to humiliation, duress and physical, legal and psychological dangers for his own gain. But millions haven’t forgotten the meaning of the word just because an alternate meaning has become popular over the past decade.

Even among young people who admit that the first use of the word refers to someone who procures customers for a prostitute, the term has lost its sting because so many younger people no longer see pimping (that is, making money as a procurer for sex workers) as offensive. They now see sex workers and those in their orbit as becoming ever-closer to the mainstream. Over the past decade, our culture has embraced a certain pimp and ho chic; pornography may not be completely mainstream, but it’s so pervasive and such a lucrative, easily accessible and popular form of entertainment now that hardcore porn style and terminology are now freely accessible and attractive to middle-schoolers. Disturbingly large numbers of teens are quite knowledgeable about porn, from its techniques to its accoutrements.

Many girls now compete to look as much like professional sex workers as possible, not only on reality television shows but also when they choose the clothes they wear to school or select the entertainment they provide at sweet sixteen parties. It's no wonder. Britney Spears’ earliest videos showed her vamping for the camera in extra-short schoolgirl clothing in a blatant appeal to pederastic fantasists. Christina Aguilera and other hot young singers vie for spots on the Pussycat Dolls stage, dressing like hookers, bumping, grinding and stripping as a way to build their public image and sell more CDs. And it works. Porn style becomes more pervasive all the time: breast implants and Brazilian waxes are now commonplace enough to discuss over suburban brunches.

There are some who view this as pro-sexual empowerment of women: “Look at me! I claim my sexuality and am not afraid to flash my crotch to show you how powerful I’ve become!” Pole dancing and faux-lesbian bumping and grinding are now commonplace concert and video cliches. They’re packaged and presented in a way meant to sexually excite men and play to their fantasies, but the only power women get out of it is the power to tease—to excite and then deny satisfaction. Their power is only an extension of their desire to trade sex for what they want. Nor is it even the power to demand their own sexual satisfaction. It is solely the power to prove that they can elicit a sexual response in others, then not fulfill this promise unless they get something of commercial value in exchange.

This kind of perpetually-titillating sexualized social interaction encourages women to believe that their power rests in their ability to focus on and then frustrate those who wield real power. It encourages men to continue to see women as sending mixed messages, to believe that maybe no doesn’t really mean no, and to believe that sex is all about what men want, and that satisfaction requires considering only their own needs and denying women their power. It’s about playing games to heighten excitement, but where do we go from there? And how does that spill into other ways that men and women interrelate in the rest of their lives? I fear that hypersexualization of young people and the presentation of sex as something women promise and then deny in order to gain power (and that men overcome women’s will to get) is a huge step backward for women and men both. Selfishness, force, game-playing and denial all build frustration and walls. And they’re not that great for sex, either.

I’m not against people acknowledging their sexuality. I have no problem with adults reveling in the pleasure of exercising their sexual power with other consenting adults as they see fit. I’m not even against legalizing prostitution, disturbing as I may find the concept personally, since legalization would allow women who have chosen that work to stand up for their rights to represent themselves and not to have to rely on pimps for “protection” from the law or from others who would harm them. They would be more likely to seek proper health care, which would keep themselves and their tricks (and their tricks’ partners) safer, and they would have legal recourse when threatened.

But our odd American puritan streak has so strangled healthy, honest sexual awareness and communication that lust has had to work its way up and out in convoluted forms and formats. It’s disingenuous and dangerous when a culture denies and demonizes people’s basic sexual underpinnings yet at the same time incorporates them into its youth culture so completely that everything is sexualized but no one will admit it.

Advocating abstinence-only sex education and denying teens the right to easy access to contraception and health care is hypocritical and unrealistic, and is totally insufficient preparation in a world which whets sexual appetites and debases sexuality at the same time. Girls are told at home, in houses of worship and even sometimes in their classrooms that they’re weak-willed, dirty sluts unless they’re abstinent till marriage, and they learn that it’s a sin to acknowledge their sexual feelings. If they want to show that they’re basically “good,” they learn not to prepare themselves properly for sex or follow safe sex guidelines when they put themselves in situations where they’re likely to be sexual.

They’re also taught by different but equally persuasive segments of society that their most valuable commodity, which can be traded for power and money, is their sexual attractiveness. If they get “carried away” and end up having unprotected sex, then somehow they’re not as slutty as they would be if they thought ahead, acknowledged what they wanted to do, and had a supply of condoms with them. Meanwhile, the songs, TV shows, websites and movies they like tell them they should be teasing men like whores; their families and houses of worship call them bad if they think ahead and admit that they’re actively sexual creatures.

Talk about mixed messages!

A New Twist

Last year was the year of assemblages with metallic twists for me. In 2007 I put hundreds of hours into creating dozens of assemblages on canvas using yards and yards of wire and metal mesh. I put my years of jewelry-making experience to work as I incorporated gems, pearls and glass beading into several of my pieces. I'm revving up to make more pieces with those materials, but I'm itching to spend more time with the great materials found in nature in 2008. So many excitingly textured materials are made by animals, insects and plants, and I can't wait to mix and match them with the other treasures slowly taking over my studio. I'll be writing more about my new pieces, the art workshops I lead at the Ground Zero Teen Center, and other random musings on art on my Web site, www.lauragrey.com, throughout the year. You'll find my artist's statements there, and links to my online galleries of drawings, paintings and, especially, assemblages. Drop by any time.

Taking Aesthetics Personally

What's so awful about San Francisco's new de Young Museum? The forbidding, forboding atmosphere. It feels unwelcoming, even antihuman. I sense a desire on the part of the museum's board and designers to intimidate, and to be on the cutting edge for the sake of the bragging rights, not because it serves the art or the general populace.

This unpleasantness begins before one even approaches the museum. The tower above it resembles nothing so much as an air traffic controller's post or a prison guard's loft. Draw near: you'll find that the skin of the museum resembles the corroding floor of a mechanic's garage. Enter the front courtyard and a fissure wends its way through the pavers and bisects a block of rock. At first I thought it was a flaw caused by improper settlement of the foundation; when I realized it was intentional I felt sad that the one bit of humor and interest chosen to enliven an otherwise deadly space was a nod to the cause of the demise of the old de Young—the crack looked like the fissures created by the Loma Prieta earthquake that rendered the former building dangerous and uninhabitable. My overall first impression is of a hard, barren fortress reminiscent of Azkaban prison or like the walls of Chateau D'If that confined Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo.

The walls of the courtyard are tall, dark and looming, folding inward in crushing, acute angles. The effect is claustrophobic and I found it brutal. Once inside the museum, the space is less oppressive, but some windows face out onto other tightly acutely angled walls. These block much of the light and any view, denying inmates, uh, visitors visual or emotional relief. A wall of windows at one end of the museum faces the sculpture garden, and these expanses of glass are tall and lovely. This gallery offers seating and affords pleasing views of a garden full of enjoyable and witty sculptures. However, one must disengage from the interior galleries in order to view the sculpture outside. The galleries in which paintings, drawings, photos and decorative items are hung or arranged provide mostly occluded views, if any.

I enjoyed a fine and well-curated exhibit of high fashion designed by many of the greatest 20th century couturiers for the late socialite Nan Kempner in a dark, windowless basement space. Such a gallery does serve delicate items like fabric and art on paper that could fade or weaken in bright light, but to have almost all the galleries above it turning inward and away from nature and sunshine seems ridiculous for a museum in the heart of Golden Gate Park, one of the most beautiful parks in the world, especially in a city so famously and frequently overcast and shrouded in fog, where any chance to enjoy natural light and far vistas of green is welcome.

The museum's art offerings are good for a regional museum; there are not as many world-class pieces as one would see in a top-tier U.S. art museum but the de Young offers a respectable survey of moderately important pieces. Its choice of architecture, however unfortunate I may find it, has set it apart from other museums and garnered a lot of attention from the art world. I admit that this gives the museum some cachet among the most powerful people in the art world, whether I feel it is merited or not.

The de Young's permanent collection of works by masters of the Hudson River School of American landscape painters has always pleased me. These romantic, often exotic landscapes are well displayed, as are the museum's fine historical furnishings. The de Young has always been a magnet for good traveling shows; they just finished an exhibition of assemblages by Louise Nevelson. She is my favorite large-format assemblage artist; her wall-sized constructions of black or white painted wooden shapes are crisp, tactile and bold. My favorite small-format assemblageur is Joseph Cornell, whose wonderful small boxes were also on display in San Francisco this past month across town at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I would love to have been back to SF MOMA and the de Young to enjoy both of these shows if I could. Each time I see one of Nevelson's or Cornell's pieces in person I'm captivated. Nevelson's pieces are strong, angular and imposing, just as she was. Cornell, on the other hand, was a master of filling small boxes with odd assortments of the sublime juxtaposed with the ridiculous. He fits whole worlds into tiny spaces. How delicious.

I will admit that the de Young's galleries are worth visiting and that the edifice is imposing and important, but I still find it not only uninviting and ugly but rather insulting. Why do I take its aesthetics so personally? Because I feel that it represents the insularity of the art world and the disrespect many art insiders have for the general public. Its aesthetic is, to my eye, aggressive and confrontational, just as so much modern art is. These are the very elements of the current art scene that so much of the public finds repellent and offensive; it makes them feel like they're being conned, used, even made fun of. Often they are. Of course there is a place in the world for aggressive, confrontational, even purposely ugly art, and I don't have to like it for it to merit appreciation and attention. But the desire to intrude and impose upon others with one's art, to make people squirm and squint and feel disconcerted has become so prevalent that the old values that were once synonymous with art—beauty, harmony, balance—are now looked down upon as pedestrian, unfashionable, retrograde. Both should coexist, and they do, but the current fashion is to find pieces and places that seek to please as minor, outdated and merely decorative. So much of modern art seeks to subvert what was for millennia the dominant paradigm. This is important and valuable, but it is not the only valid viewpoint and embracing this stance so completely alienates those who are not part of the in crowd.

Though often privately owned, museums are meant to be public spaces where people of all walks of life congregate and cogitate. They come to challenge themselves but also to feed a hunger for beauty, to admire others' technical skill and to relax and remove themselves from the everyday ugliness of the workaday world. Many museum-goers only visit museums when they are traveling; for millions of people museums are an expensive luxury that they rarely allow themselves. It can cost a family of four $60 to $80 to spend an hour or two at many major museums; they don't want to feel they've been used or taken advantage of, or that irony and subversion are the only values worth celebrating. Such spaces should be welcoming, comfortable, exciting spaces. Invigorate people with unusual design, sure, shake them up a bit, but give them some comfort and harmony as well. Don't make them feel belittled, bewildered and unimportant. Edginess can be enjoyable, but people are also drawn to curves, to human-scaled amenities and spaces, to color and light and the integration of architecture with its surroundings. There's no reason to deny museum-goers these delights for the sake of novelty.

The Denver Art Museum offers edgy interior and exterior spaces and breaks expected physical boundaries with jutting angular projections that spill into the plaza and air around its foundation. It sits boldly and assertively, daring people to approach. But it also offers whimsical sculptures along its periphery and many lovely views of the buildings around it which keep it from overwhelming its space or its visitors. It makes the most of its transparency, and though it is large the interior spaces are friendly, comfortable, reasonably sized and well integrated. Those with more traditional aesthetics will find many artworks and spaces in which to relax or be invigorated. Those whose idea of beauty is based more in finding pleasure in imbalance, in running a metaphorical finger along the bold leading edges of minimalism or in exploring the jagged and broken splatter of deconstruction can find pieces that satisfy their hungers, too, without denigrating those with other tastes. Why couldn't the de Young have moved in that direction?

My San Francisco

I was born in San Francisco and lived all my life within an hour’s drive of The City (as Bay Area natives call it) till I moved to to the Northwest in 1997. I never lived in San Francisco itself after my first six weeks in an incubator there, but it always felt like my city, and I’m protective of it and of my memories of its most beautiful and special places.

I love Coit Tower—the WPA-era murals inside it, the views of the bay and San Francisco from its apex, even the shape of the building itself. I remember when Union Square still looked like it does in Francis Ford Coppola’s great thriller, “The Conversation.” As a child, my mother and I would go into The City at Christmastime to stare at the gorgeous windows around Union Square and visit the City of Paris building (demolished by Neiman-Marcus in 1981, the bastards), a lovely beaux-arts-style landmark. We filled our tummies on the great soups at Salmagundi on Geary Street before seeing Peter Donat or Philip Anglim on stage at ACT across the street, and I savored the thick coffee milkshakes at Bill’s Place on Clement Street. Years later I went back to Clement to spend endless happy hours browsing art and design ideas at Green Apple Books.

During my college years I loved dancing at the I-Beam in the Haight (as did Rock Hudson when he was in town) and shopping for neon plastic sunglasses, watches and funky New Wave everything at the Headlines stores on Polk Street and Castro Street, each nestled among sex shops and leather bars and populated with adorable twinks. During the nineties I got married in the exquisite San Francisco City Hall building (Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio did the same thing in the 1950s), and had some of the best meals of my life at Greens, the famous vegetarian restaurant in the Marina district. I loved having afternoon tea in the Fairmont’s Cirque Room to celebrate a special occasion, or meeting friends in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel before showing them around my favorite parts of the city.

I even miss freezing my tuchis up at the Marin Headlands just across the Golden Gate Bridge and looking down at spectacular views of San Francisco (please, don’t ever call my city Frisco) while gusts of cold wind blew my hair straight back and turned my ears first red, then white with cold. (And that was in the summer; in winter it felt positively polar up there.) I wish I could duck into the Musée Mechanique just below Cliff House and enjoy 80-year-old mechanical fortune tellers and player pianos for a few bucks’ worth of quarters again, but it’s moved to Pier 45 at Fisherman's Wharf. I'm glad it still exists, but in its old location, under the boardwalk, it seemed so pleasingly down-at-the-heels. Fisherman's Wharf, while no longer as skanky a place as I knew (and avoided) from childhood, still boasts enough seedy spots to remind me why I've never liked it.

One of my favorite (and most frequent) San Francisco destinations over the years was Golden Gate Park, from its lakes to the elegant glass domed Conservatory of Flowers (one of the world’s largest) to the meadows full of tiny daisies. My father took me there with VW-loads of his hippie friends in the 1960s when I was very small. I remember passing through the Haight-Ashbury district to get there in the late sixties and early seventies and knowing even as a little child that the Haight, and the U.C. Berkeley campus, which my father also took me to, were the places to find hippie culture. (My parents were both students at Cal when they met, and my mom followed the more traditional Cal values while my father took the other road.) I think our sojourns to the epicenters of the counterculture were his attempts at balancing out what he thought was his daughter’s overly mainstream, white-bread, suburban world.

I always felt out of place when visiting my father and hanging out with his scruffy friends during my infrequent visits with him. I felt weird because of my comparative lack of weirdness among these people. At least during Dad’s visits we were were often hanging out in attractive city parks full of impressive things to see and interesting people to gawp at. My father wanted me to see hairy, lefty urban culture as an antidote to what he saw as sleepy, conservative, stultifying suburban values. Sadly, he and his friends and their choices emphasized all the scarier aspects of hippie culture instead of showing me the fresher, freer, more positive aspects. They may have loved countercultural values for their anti-war, anti-establishment elements, and I can admire those aspects, too, at a nearly forty-year remove from the experience. But what I saw and shrank from even as a very tiny child were physically dirty folks with stoned expressions who made a lot of jokes about sex that they thought I didn’t understand, and a father who picked up stray hitchhikers and invited them into his succession of coughing VW Beetles while he drove down foggy streets on dark nights whether I was in the car or not.

Dad also took me to graveyards for picnics occasionally; this scared me at the time, but I wonder whether my own penchant for old cemeteries grew out of these odd al fresco afternoons. On my few overnight visits, Dad thought it funny to have me sleep on a daybed made up under a bookcase that featured a real human skull as a decorative element. My father and his friends had no clue what was appropriate behavior around a small child, listened to me only sporadically and then laughed at whatever I said without explaining to me why my opinions or questions were so funny. I felt lonely among them, and just as much a misfit among hippies as I did around the suburban folks I grew up among.

But I always loved visiting Golden Gate Park, whether with my dad and his deadhead pals, with my beloved uncle on a trip to the Steinhart Aquarium, or with my mom on our way to the de Young Museum. The Japanese Tea Garden had (and still has) koi ponds, melt-in-your-mouth almond cookies and an impossibly steep Japanese bridge to climb, and there were free opera and band concerts at the band shell between the aquarium and the de Young. I enjoyed the whole park, but oh, how I loved the de Young. That’s where I first saw King Tut’s golden mummy case, treasures from the time of of Alexander the Great, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and so many important visiting exhibitions. Even when there wasn’t a blockbuster show there, the de Young was like a visual sampler platter of art, craft and design through the ages. Like other grand old art collections in grand old buildings around the country, one found rooms full of elegant furniture, hallways lined with vitrines stocked with porcelain and fine silver pieces, small portraits and sweeping landscapes, all in a building that had a history and a personality of its own.

Visiting the de Young felt kind of like stepping into an eccentric old aunt’s mansion, but one built in a distinctly Californian style, not like the darker, heavier mansions-based art museums of the East Coast (which I’ll admit I also love). When I was little, the best part for me was going into the central hall lined with suits of armor and banners. It was like a grand baronial space, a dramatic fantasy place where I stepped out of time. The museum was welcoming and of its time, and I loved it.

The de Young that I loved so was a gracious Spanish-style building built in 1919 with a lovely tower built in 1921. It had a simple stucco exterior and flanked by palm trees and a stood behind a pond. Its style was very Californian. A number of buildings on the Mills College campus in nearby Oakland, including my beautiful dormitory, Olney Hall, were built in the same simple Californian stucco, beam and tile-roofed architectural style around the same time. This 1910s and '20s Californian version of the Spanish style has always appealed to me as carrying a number of the elements and proportions found in the Arts & Crafts bungalows built at the time while also incorporating some of the state’s Spanish mission and rancho past. Architect Julia Morgan (most famous for designing the much grander Hearst Castle) used it to good effect in several buildings on the Mills College campus, including the Margaret Carnegie Library, where I worked part-time in the Albert M. Bender Rare Book Room during all four of my years at Mills. This style is unpretentious and it fits into the Californian landscape, and even when built on a grand scale, its simplicity keeps it from overwhelming its occupants. It was a lovely and elegant complement to the art of the de Young.

And now it’s gone.

The huge Loma Prieta earthquake of October 1989 damaged the de Young so profoundly that it was eventually found seismically unsafe. Retrofitting the building didn’t make financial sense to San Francisco voters, and in 1998 they voted to demolish it and replace it. It was torn down and the new de Young’s construction began in 2001. And then some lurking evil force settled into the brains of those in charge of the new design like a malevolent worm. It somehow ate away at their good sense and at any desire they might once have had to create a welcoming public space that both enhanced the art-viewing experience and invited the visitor to linger and appreciate the space itself. Gone were gracious details, human-scaled spaces, architectural echoes of the region’s design history or cultural history, and architectural context for historical pieces. The museum’s designers, architects, directors and private funders instead described the old de Young’s design with sneers and scorn. They couldn’t wait to rip it down and erase any visual reminders of it, save the palm trees that used to surround it. Considering it outdated, tired and ugly, they stated that their new building design sought "to communicate diversity; it is an embodiment of the open-ended concept of art fostered by the museum. It expresses the distinctiveness of different cultures and, at the same time, it is a place of common ground, where diversity meets and intersects, where otherwise hidden kinships between divergent cultural forms become visible and tangible."

Oh yeah? Could have fooled me. It’s the ugliest museum I have ever seen.

I’ll write more about it soon.

I'm a Living Dickens Character!

This week I learned that Charles Dickens invented me in 1872! I had no idea. Look, I have proof: click here.

I feel so much more important now. It’s wonderful to learn that I’m a figment of my favorite novelist’s imagination. I suppose this means I must take up wearing crinolines and corsets, speak in dulcet-toned King's English all the time and faint more often. Well, if it means enjoying carriage rides through London, attending regular afternoon tea parties, wearing Victorian hats and going on long walks through Dickens’ imagination, perhaps it’s worth it.

Maybe I'm Crazy

Okay, so I’m slow. I only just caught on to Gnarls Barkley’s music. I’d heard and enjoyed “Crazy” before, but somehow my ears really opened up to it last week. I’ve been listening to them a lot and enjoying their videos, which are so clever and cool, on You Tube. I love their wonderful inkblot video.

I think Cee-Lo’s vocals are gorgeous; he has a smooth Motown-style falsetto that sounds warm and perfectly natural, not forced like some do, and Danger Mouse's production is delicious. Their rhythms are totally infectious and they’ve got a lovely gospel thing going on, too. Tasty. I love their sense of humor, too; Cee-Lo dressed like Darth Vader at the 2006 MTV Movie Awards, they dressed like droogs from “A Clockwork Orange” for other photos. My favorite is this spot-on "Napoleon Dynamite" send-up.

“Crazy” songs seem to work for me. I love Seal’s early hit “Crazy” (and his later acoustic version of it), and of course Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” is perfection. Willie Nelson made something like $50 for writing that song, and Patsy’s version went on to become the all-time top jukebox single. With reason. Willie’s versions are beautiful too, much softer, as if he’s accepted that his love is a hopeless cause. Patsy seems unconvinced that it was really so crazy to fall in love; Patsy's version of the song is so addictive because when she sings it, her torch still burns so brightly. Her head knows it’s crazy, but her heart still hopes. “The heart has reasons which reason knows nothing of.”

I'll write more on museums soon. In the meantime, I hope you're enjoying the holiday season and have kind, funny, open-hearted people to spend it with. I wish you peace and happiness, now and always.

Wowed by Denver's Splendid Art Museum

Last month I visited Denver for the first time, and was wowed by the fabulous weather (sunny and 72 degrees in November!), the inviting and attractive mix of historical and brand-new architecture, the friendly locals, the city’s progressive vibe, and, especially, by the Denver Art Museum, which I can now call one of my favorite regional museums in the country.

San Francisco’s De Young Museum and the Seattle Art Museum were both renovated recently at enormous expense with mixed results. In contrast, the money, thought and care Denver has poured into the expansion of its most important art museum is successful on many levels. This is primarily because DAM's designers and curators never forgot that the point of having an art museum is to create a positive, exciting and enriching environment for all sorts of people that helps them to enjoy, understand and grow more intimately acquainted with art.

A great civic building should not be an impressive but intimidatingly impersonal temple to the arts that sets the work on display apart from humanity, only to make people feel smaller, less connected and more confused as a result. Often, proponents of modern architecture dedicated to the arts take the view that a fresh, modern approach requires that the building and the art experienced within it must be spare, cold, harsh and huge. I find that such buildings (and such viewpoints) dwarf the soul and undermine both the art and the viewers’ experiences of the art. Those of us who prefer a warmer, more human (and more humane) arts experience are usually left clinging to the old ways and the old styles of display and design if we want to enjoy artworks in an atmosphere that isn’t devoid of charm or feeling. While I love many antique and classic architectural styles and can derive great pleasure from viewing artworks housed in them, I can also take pleasure in the clean lines, fresh perspectives and bold breaks with the past that modernity has to offer. That is, I can enjoy them if the purpose of the building and the needs of its visitors (and appropriate display of its contents) are all taken into consideration as well.

There are alternatives to the bleak, forbidding, humorless and sometimes artistically anorexic big-box museums popping up like pox around the world. San Francisco has the Museum of Modern Art, which is massive and impressive but broken up into digestible chunks of architectural space so that one can enjoy soaring curves and architectural leaps toward the sky from within the building without feeling dwarfed and swallowed by it. The Bellevue Arts Museum has grand vertical spaces in its entry hall, but the floorspace isn’t overwhelmingly large, and the mix of colors, windows, materials and artworks in the space keeps it from being too intimidating. Indeed, most of the museum is broken up into small galleries that allow the primarily intimately-scaled works they feature to be enjoyed without feeling lost or dwarfed by an overscaled, overly bright display space.

When I saw photographs of the Denver Art Museum’s new Hamilton Building I was at first disappointed. The building, which houses about half of the museum’s holdings (the rest are in the more sedate building across the street and connected to the Hamilton Building by a skybridge), was meant by architect Daniel Libeskind to imply the craggy triangular shapes of the Rocky Mountains. This is a respectful nod to the region’s geography, but to me it looked in photographs like a colossal pile of broken glass with huge spikes jutting out into the surrounding plaza in what I feared would be an intimidating fashion. I expected to find it as numbingly offputting as I find Rem Koolhaas’ design for the Seattle Public Library, which looms menacingly over downtown Seattle in sharp, cold, übergeometric fashion.

I find the Seattle Public Library's geometric shapes aggressively, threateningly angular, completely counter to anything found in nature, oversized and overscale, and too unyielding in style and material. When my daughter visited it shortly after it opened, she noted that even its children's section features hard, cold, unwelcoming surfaces and furnishings. Koolhaas’s library, so roundly praised by professional architects, feels claustrophobic to me despite all its glass; the large scale of the diamond-shaped metal grid covering the building makes me feel like a bug crushed beneath a window screen when I am inside the building. The library is oddly scaled and full of unusable spaces yet lacking in enough room to give those browsing the book stacks space to amble and view the books without feeling rather squashed. The building has been praised for bringing nature inside, but I find this laughable. The unattractive and half-dead grasses around and inside the building look weedy, and the grass-patterned carpeting inside only makes the rest of the interior look that much more divorced from nature and natural forms, most importantly including human beings, whose presence within the pile of offset oddly-angled glass blocks seems to be an afterthought. Rather than being a welcoming place in which to study, rest, read, browse, learn and renew, the place has all the welcoming cheer of an airport terminal. Less, actually; many airports, including Seattle’s, are quite full of friendly, inviting public artworks, from inlaid metal salmon swimming along one terminal’s floors to columns covered in intricate mosaic designs to exceptionally pretty stained glass windows that evoke Northwest Indian designs and stories.

But I digress. Yes, the Denver Art Museum’s spiky glass hull does loom a bit over visitors, but it sits in a splendid plaza, a welcoming public space bordered by an appealing glass multiuse building as well as by a practical and lovely modern library complex composed of buildings that reminded me of castles, towers and Monopoly houses, among other pleasing simple shapes. There is a giant sculpture of two cattle next to the museum, "Scottish Angus Cow and Calf" by Dan Ostermiller, which was voted the “Best Climbable Art" by locals, and an enormous Claes Oldenburg sculpture of a dustpan and broom right out front; it is hard not to smile when viewing either of these monumental yet whimsical works. Upon viewing DAM in its architectural context, one gets an immediate impression that those responsible for designing, making and presenting this plaza had not only panache and vision, but also well-developed senses of humor. A major arts center that doesn’t take itself too seriously? How refreshing!

Once inside DAM, the boldly scaled building is broken into component spaces that work with each other seamlessly, giving a sense of an inviting multitude of options without overwhelming the visitor and making her feel insignificant. Ceilings are dropped and comfy yet modern chairs are sized for humans. From the main floor’s small café, one can sit and admire the quirky furnishings that make up several relaxed conversation areas, view the main entrance, the ticket-purchasing area, get a glimpse into the well-stocked gift shop through a triangle of glass and watch a slideshow of images of artworks through another triangular cut-out in a wall. It’s easy to get one’s bearings at a glance and feel that one’s immediate needs have been considered and are easy to fulfill: snacks here, tickets there, comfy conversation area here, gift shop there, stairs to the special exhibition there, views out into the inviting plaza here.

Once upstairs, one finds generous exhibition spaces and many delightful resting spots, small libraries and fascinating exhibits explaining art conservation methods incorporating beautiful pieces from the museum’s permanent collection. There are attractive and comfortable areas for rest and research scattered everywhere, each different and appropriate to the style and content of the gallery. Child-friendly spaces attract people of all ages with interactive lights and activities. Colorfully painted walls act as invigorating backdrops that make artworks pop, a welcome alternative to the sterile and generic white or grey galleries favored at some newly minted museums. The museum is proud of its gallery of Western art, which I expected to find as uninspiring and hackneyed as an old episode of “Bonanza.” Boy, was I wrong. It housed my favorite works in the museum, a series of twenty 12x12-inch paintings of different grasses by Karen Kitchel, in addition to excellent paintings of cowboys, Indians and animals and the expected Frederick Remington horse-and-cowboy sculptures and paintings (which are actually quite impressive).

Just beyond the Western gallery is the skybridge to DAM’s other building, which houses an imposing and impressive gallery of Native American/Indian/First People’s artworks including masks, paintings, sculptures and fiber art. There was also a visiting exhibition of color field paintings that left me unmoved, but which was full of important works by influential artists, few of whom I like. Still, it was an appropriate and important juxtaposition to the rest of the museum’s holdings and to the other main visiting show at the time, an assortment of works of decorative art (from chandeliers to dishes to tapestries) on loan from Paris titled "Artisans & Kings: Selected Treasures from the Louvre."

The scale, the high quality of the artworks in the collection, the breadth of work on display, the excellent libraries and reference rooms scattered about, the attractive and appropriate design of the galleries, and the awareness of the museum’s planners regarding how the museum fits into its metropolitan surroundings both physically and metaphorically all work together to make the Denver Art Museum a great success aesthetically and culturally for people of any artistic persuasion, be it traditional or minimalist, abstract or figurative. The restaurants and gift shops are even well thought out, as are the sizes and layouts of the public spaces. Denver has a lot going for it that makes it worth a visit, but for me, just having another chance to enjoy DAM (and to see the wonderful 40-foot-tall blue bear sculpture at the Colorado Convention Center) will be worth the trip.

LauraGrey.com is Now Online

Laura Grey Fine Arts is online at www.lauragrey.com. Please take a look; from there you can read artist's statements, link to online galleries, find contact and biographical information, and visit this blog.

Museumania!

Over the past six months I’ve had the good fortune to visit eight important regional art museums in the West and Northwest. This summer I entered the recently reborn and outwardly Azkaban-like de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park only to find that this new bunker of a building (complete with looming guard tower) has absolutely none of the charm and grace of the old, Spanish style de Young I spent so many happy hours in, which was devastated by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The new de Young has many minimalists in an ecstatic thrall; I loathed its exterior as I never have any museum before or since. It has won prizes for accessibility, which is commendable, but these photos meant to celebrate it show how stark and unwelcoming its courtyard is. There were some pleasing surprises inside, but the architecture got in the way of the art more than once, even once inside its hideous walls.

The delightful San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), on the other hand, is bold and modern, yet it offers both a nod to the art historical past (its graphic black and white horizontal lines echo those of Siena's cathedral) and the interior provides an attractive yet unobtrusive backdrop to any art displayed within its walls. Its architecture, inside and out, is as big and beautiful a success as the de Young’s is a failure.

A highlight of my pilgrimage through the museums of the West was the Portland Art Museum. This was due less to the museum itself (which is a lovely place) than to the excitement of seeing some of my favorite 17th century Dutch masterpieces in the “Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art: Treasures from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam” show. The exhibition was breathtaking. I haven’t seen so many perfectly executed small masterpieces in one place since I last visited my favorite American shrines to art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (home to the most wonderful array of John Singer Sargent portraits anywhere) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. At PAM I saw one exquisite work after another by some of my favorite artists working during my favorite era in one of my favorite locations on earth. I was dumbstruck by the perfection of the technique of artist after artist. I found that the delicacy and immediacy of the Rembrandt etchings on display rendered them even more touching than the Rembrandt paintings they featured, and when I got to one of my favorite Frans Hals portraits, I wept for the sheer joy of seeing it again.

In August I ventured up to British Columbia and enjoyed the lovely but relatively small Vancouver Art Gallery. With only about 9,000 works of art in the collection, it is still the grandest art museum in the city though it has just a tiny fraction of number of pieces found in San Francisco or Seattle. Vancouver staged a pleasing traveling show, “Monet to Dalí: Modern Masters from the Cleveland Museum of Art.” There were no standout masterpieces to take my breath away; it was a useful overview for comparing and contrasting various important artists' styles and influence, but their greatest work wasn't on display. It was no blockbuster.

I quite enjoyed the Bellevue Art Museum’s extensive and beautifully curated show titled “Raymond Loewy: Designs for a Consumer Culture” which displayed the work of the brilliant and influential mid-20th century industrial designer. The transformation of BAM from another pleasant midlevel regional art museum to a showcase for craft and design as well as “fine art” over the past few years has been very successful artistically, even if their endless financial woes don’t ever seem to ebb completely. I give them kudos for coming up with some startlingly inventive and beautiful shows featuring calligraphy, beadwork, textiles, woodwork and assemblage, among other offerings.

Seattle’s Frye Museum always provides a quirky mix of fresh new, sometimes painfully in-your-face or self-conscious pieces and delicious little gems. During the ten years I’ve been going there, the museum has been consistently original and unusual in the artists it has chosen to showcase. Some I can’t stand, others amuse and delight me. They’ve had some particularly exciting and interesting photography shows over the years, and offered a terrific survey of comic strip art that I still remember years after the fact. Their permanent collection of primarily mid-19th century Mitteleuropean art bequeathed by the founders of the museum is mostly sedate and often academic, but still quite pretty. It includes a dark, erotically-charged and dangerous-seeming painting by Franz von Stuck, “Sin” (“Die Suende”) that’s a real crowd pleaser. It is rehung and reimagined in various forms for different shows nearly every year.

This past week I made it to the Seattle Art Museum, which reopened six months ago after a major expansion and a billion (with a B) dollars worth of new acquisitions. I found some of it very successful, and some quite disappointing. It is huge now, and I was barely able to see a third of it in the two hours I spent there. I plan to return in December to see the second half of the very enjoyable two-part show called “Japan Envisions the West” and to try to get into all the galleries I didn’t even glance into. I should spend more time there before I presume to grade how successful it is over all. I’m afraid it was much less impressive, appealing or approachable than the Denver Art Museum’s dramatic new Hamilton Building, designed by architect Daniel Libeskind and opened to the public a year ago. I found it at first off-puttingly spiky from the outside, but I was captivated by the giant Claes Oldenburg broom and dustpan sculpture out front and have so many positive things to say about all they did right inside. (I've loved Oldenburg since I was six.) And I will say those positive things here, very soon. Over the coming weeks I plan to write a little more about my experiences in each of these museums. Stay tuned. And don't forget to check out my own artworks at www.lauragrey.com.

A Horrible Night/A Wonderful Night

My friend Gordon is in a local hospital’s intensive care unit tonight; he had a motorcycle accident a few hours ago and was found bleeding and in shock. He has several serious injuries that required surgery and he lost a lot of blood, but it looks like he’s going to come through his ordeal well, though it will take time. Being healthy, young, smart enough to wear good protective gear and lucky enough to be taken to a hospital with a fine trauma team saved Gordon’s life. We were so very scared, and are so incredibly grateful.

It was a horrible night for Gordon: his life was nearly snatched from him. He was left with new scars and major injuries that will take a while to heal. And it was a wonderful night for Gordon: he lives, and his friends are all reminded how lucky we are to have him among us and how important it is that he know how we feel. We are all grateful that Gordon has a good life to come back to after peeking over the precarious ledge between life and death.

Gordon is a kind, generous, talented young man, the sort of instantly likeable fellow who brightens a room with his energy, brains and good humor. He appreciates all he has and all others do to help him. He regularly goes out of his way to enrich others’ lives. When we heard of his accident tonight, we had a few very worried hours till we learned that it looks like he’ll come through it all well. People as determined as he is to share their talents and kindness with others are rare, and we thank the doctors and nurses who saved his life tonight.

My friend's very close call has reminded me again how fragile life is, and how blessed we are to have new chances every day to love, to give, to lighten someone’s load, to forgive, to ask forgiveness, to be grateful. We have so many opportunities to do favors, bring comfort, make things better or make sure others know what they mean to us. Each day brings new chances to use our power for good. But our days here don't go on forever; we need to live our lives well today, not wait for next week or next year to make our days count or make our appreciation known to others. Gordon knows these things, and I’m lucky to know him. I am so grateful that he’ll be sticking around. We can really use a guy like him in this weary old world.

Making Friends While Making Art

I'm so jazzed; very soon I'll be starting a new art open house series at the Ground Zero Teen Center in Bellevue. It's a great, welcoming place for teens to gather after school. The center is housed in what used to be a church, with funky corners and angles in unexpected places, and there's a friendly, laid-back, all-inclusive vibe. It's run on a shoestring, but the people in charge do a great job and set a welcoming but low-key tone. It'll be lovely to work with them and the kids.

Ground Zero is a very musical place. There are frequent concerts and people take music lessons there (my daughter goes there for electric guitar lessons with terrific local musician Amy Stolzenbach). There's often music wafting out the doors, a TV droning in the back room, a friendly dog or two wandering through the building and greeting anyone and everyone, and a snack waiting for hungry teens who wander in after school. Even the bathrooms are places of free expression; walls are covered in chalkboard paint and big sticks of sidewalk chalk invite people to draw or write what they feel. They have free practice rooms available for kids with bands to use, and they serve a big dinner once a week. There are posters everywhere reminding people that it's a place of tolerance, respect and kindness, and materials are prominently posted to help kids find information and people to talk to if they're having troubles. It's clear that there are people ready to help kids move in the right direction if they get lost. It feels safe and homey.

The center's walls have a few examples of teen art that crackle with energy and show how much their creators wanted to express what they feel through making something with their hearts and hands. Teens are often spilling over with a hunger to put their feelings into some positive form. I can't wait to see what they come up with during my time with them.

During October I expect to start drop-in art clinic afternoons. I'll bring in a different assortment of art supplies and cool materials the kids may not have easy access to elsewhere, and I'll share a variety of my own works and lots of other sources of inspiration and ideas. Sometimes I'll offer up illustrations of classic and important pieces, and if they're up for it we can talk about what makes them important and whether we actually like them or not. But I also want to bring in examples of art that we take for granted, stuff we find on clothing and packaging and magazines, and point out that they're works of art, too. I'll ask them to share what they find beautiful, and to talk about art that speaks to us even when we find it ugly. I'll work on something in real time, and show them what I'm up to, see what ideas they have, and we can talk about what works for us and what doesn't, how to work around what feel like artistic weaknesses or restrictions, and what is meaningful to them.

My daughter Lily creates intricate, glorious digital artworks with Photoshop. She'll be bringing in examples of her work, too, to spark discussion and to broaden our teen allure. She'll be my trusty sidekick, helping me set things up, making sure everybody's got what they need, and making our space more approachable; someone my age sitting alone at a table with a bunch of funky art supplies might not be as appealing to teens without another actual teen showing interest. Lily's comfortable working in many media, too, so she and I can dive in each week to break the ice.

If kids have no interest in my ideas for the day, that's absolutely fine; the last thing they need is for me to impose my visions on them or make them feel like they have to do things a certain way. I don't want to lecture or talk my way through the whole thing, just to make it easier for them to jump in and try things, get new ideas, see what gets other people excited and ask themselves what they find beautiful or meaningful. So often students feel forced to mimic other people's work or accept other people's beliefs and ideas at face value instead of asking themselves what they truly believe, what matters most, and what they can give to the world and feel good about. I want to help them to feel safe exploring these ideas. We all need to be reminded that beauty comes in many forms, and that our work doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful.

Ooga Chakka

I have a brilliant idea. Let's create a new musical genre based on the opening to the song "Hooked on a Feeling." Yeah, a whole branch of popular music that incorporates the chant "Ooga chakka, ooga, ooga, ooga chakka" in the background of any song, old or new, from Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" to Amy Winehouse's "Rehab." (Try it; it works.) If you're really daring, make an ubercheesy video of yourself acting as stupid as humanly possible, heavy on the ooga chakkas. C'mon, baby, I dare you. Look, it worked for David Hasselhoff.

Memento mori

My mind and hands have been overflowing with new art ideas, techniques, materials and styles this year; it’s been an exciting and productive, if often challenging, year. I’ve engaged in some old artistic pleasures, such as making miniature pencil and pen drawings based on historical portraits and fashioning a few delicate pieces of jewelry, but I’ve also pushed myself in entirely new directions. I’ve done a lot of work with metal mesh and wire constructions; they run the gamut from looking like identifiable sea creatures to being completely conceptual abstract pieces based on the study of physics. (You can click through to a gallery of my recent pieces above.) I’ve done pieces that look like billowing curtains and shimmering bubbles, and brought my love of jewels and detail out of the world of jewelry by wiring gems and metal findings around, over and through canvas. I’ve built up assemblages of bits of twig, watch parts, pressed flowers, layers of wasp nests and phrases from encyclopedia pages, some showing a sort of strutting, geometric confidence and others twinkling shyly.

My work has become much more tactile and textural, sometimes invitingly and sometimes in a more prickly way. My calligraphy series of metal mesh and wire on canvas pieces includes shapes that to me evoke a meeting between the landscapes of Tim Burton and Dr. Seuss, while my wasp (vespa) series is softer, mostly featuring the undulating lines created by a colony of wasps as they built an extraordinary striped paper nest. The gift of the nest was a surprise from a friend, and its texture, unevenness and the perfection of its imperfections have been wonderfully inspiring.

I’ve found another favorite source of inspiration this year in old pocket watch innards, small cogs and wheels, and delicate old watch faces. I’ve been gathering them for some time, and I find them physically pleasing for their meticulous and intricate construction and tininess. But I love them just as much because, cold little mechanical devices that they once were, they were also the intimate possessions of real, warm, living people, most now cold and dead, who relied on them to order their time and make sense of their days. Tiny, clicking, jeweled machines rested in their hands, around their wrists next to to their beating pulses, in their breast pockets, against their hips.

Now their watches are in pieces, showing parts of themselves that their long-dead, long-term owners never saw. They remind me of Dutch memento mori paintings, still lifes that included exquisite renditions of flowers covered in reflective droplets of dew, insects, hour glasses, skulls and ripe fruit and watches. Each lovely item, carefully collected and displayed, acted as a reminder that life is fleeting, that all is vanity, that even the most luscious peach or the most perfect tulip will someday wither, and that we must appreciate them today, but also keep in mind what is really lasting and what really matters. They tell us that the fragility of beauty makes it more precious, and that this is a good thing.

Memento mori pieces are sometimes seen with a Calvinist eye as dark reminders to repent and put away the things of this world. I think this view is mistaken, that they are actually delicate reminders to treasure each day and savor each blessing. The loveliest way I can think of to describe this view is to quote Swinburne’s poem “The Garden of Proserpine”:

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no man lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

These lines also happen to have been quoted and set to music by my mother’s friend of many years, Owen Goldsmith, a composer and arranger of great subtlety whose choral works are so painfully beautiful they invariably make me cry. Owen was a music director at Livermore High School when I was a tiny child, and he went on to a very successful career as a composer of choral works. Thousands of students have sung his works in concerts and competitions over the past forty years.

When I was little, my mother, who was a remarkable pianist, was often the first person to play Owen’s compositions after Owen himself; he would ask her over to play them for him so that he could hear them fresh from another pair of hands, and I was usually there, too, sitting on the floor reading his books of Charles Addams or Pogo comics in the room as his pieces hit the air. My mother also had a powerful and lyrical soprano voice, and she was often the first to sing his songs as well. Now I wish that I had recordings of those magical times; I remember hearing her play and sing them many times at home when I was a child, and I still play the pieces myself from old photostatic copies of the manuscripts, though not with her fluency at the piano.

I do have a recording of my mother and me singing his piece, Cleavings, which was comprised of three short songs, including the one above, about 25 years ago. I listened to my recording again last month, and immediately burst into tears for its beauty, for the pleasure of sharing it with my mother, for the way her voice and mine blended so sweetly, for the loss of her, her talents and her own passion for music and art. That bittersweetness is why we remember that death comes for us all: “memento mori” means “remember death” but implies “treasure life.”

Schrödinger's Cat Toy & Luminiferous Ether

It's time for new art! Since I last posted a link to photos of my latest artworks here in February, I've been feverishly creating a few dozen new pieces; you can take a peek at them by clicking on the photo above and going to my online gallery.

I've started several new series this year; samples from each series are posted. Most of the new works fall into one of four categories: one is inspired by sealife, a second by calligraphy, another by poetry, and the biggest new series is inspired by the world of physics. More paintings and assemblages will be posted soon. Stay tuned!

Everything Is Illuminated

When Jonathan Safran Foer's book Everything Is Illuminated came out a few years ago, I read reviews of it and peeked at the book a few times, but I didn't sit down with the novel and really give it my attention. It looked like fun, but I could see why some reviewers found it too gimicky or cute with its quirky and surprising use of words as illustrations, which some found distracted them from the story. When I heard that one of my favorite actors, Liev Schreiber, was adapting and directing a film version of the story, I was delighted; he's a talented, versatile actor and his interviews are witty, self-deprecating and entertaining. I figured he would bring something fresh and original to the story. The result was lovelier, funnier and more touching than I imagined it would be, and with this single film his place in my heart as a favorite director as well as a fine actor is now permanent.

The film version of Everything is Illuminated stars Elijah Wood, who plays Jonathan Safran Foer, the writer of the novel and the fictionalized main character. Wood is well cast; his performance is appropriately odd and moving, and his discomfort in the world as well as in his own skin are palpable and amusing. A stranger in a strange land, he is an American Jew who travels to Ukraine to see where his late grandfather lived before the Holocaust and to try to meet the woman who saved his grandfather from death. The result is one of the funniest and most touching road pictures I've seen. Jonathan's awkwardness, anxiety and obsessiveness are strangely compelling, and Elijah Wood's performance is certainly worth seeing.

However, the performance that steals the picture and makes me laugh out loud in astonished delight is by the wonderful Ukrainian actor and singer Eugene Hutz. The long-faced Hutz is also the front man for a band called Gogol Bordello, whose music sounds like a fabulous conglomeration of klezmer tunes, gypsy folk music and punk. British comedian Phill Jupitus describes this gypsy punk band as "a bit like The Clash having a fight with The Pogues in Eastern Europe." Their biggest hit, "Start Wearing Purple," plays out the movie during the final credits, and it is as startlingly, infectiously surprising and life-affirming as the film before it. The juxtaposition of amusingly jaded lyrics with drunken wedding-party-style singing fits the feel of the movie perfectly in true traditional Eastern European fashion: life is hard, my youth will vanish and my sanity will follow, so let's start living right now!

Hutz plays Alex, a Ukraininan in his 20s who lives at home with his parents, his grandfather, and his grandfather's beloved dog, Sammy Davis Junior Junior. (Yes, two juniors.) His father's company gives half-assed tours to American Jews touring the Ukraine seeking connection with their lost ancestors. Alex acts as translator and runs interference between his cranky old grandfather, who insists that he is blind but who chauffers confused tourists unwillingly in a run-down compact car, Sammy Davis Junior Junior at his side. Alex has supreme confidence in his style and brilliance and, gangly and ridiculous though he may be in his track suit and attempts at American-style bling, he is convinced of his extraordinary sex appeal. And somehow, like Tim Curry dressed in Transylvanian drag in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, his confidence and lust for life make him sexy. To watch this lanky young man saunter down the street in a scene that parodies the opening to Saturday Night Fever, calling out to admiring passersby and telling you what a premium dancer he is, you can believe that he really is as "premium" as he believes himself to be.

The adventures shared by Alex, his grandfather, Sammy the dog and "Jonfen," as Alex calls Jonathan, are fun and surprising, but also ultimately meaningful and moving, to us as well as to them. Actor Liev Schreiber brings a sense of humor and decency to many of his roles; he has a great talent for making his characters so real, so in-the-moment, that any audience would be hard pressed not to be touched by the stories of the men he plays in movies like A Walk on the Moon (one of my favorites) and the remake of The Manchurian Candidate. In Everything Is Illuminated he shows us that he has the same gift for creating a whole film that he has for creating a compelling character.

A Sampling of My Recent Artworks

At last, I can offer you a virtual gallery of my artworks. Most of the pieces in my online gallery were created over the past year, but I've included a few older favorites as well.

Since last summer, I've turned my focus back toward my lifelong love of creating art and away from words. Of course, I still love delicious writing and I feel sad not to have kept up my blog, but rather than turn my thoughts and energies outward to share with others, I've been turning them inward, asking myself big questions, and expressing my visions, thoughts and hopes with imagery rather than text.

While I still enjoy drawing and doing detailed watercolors, I've recently delighted in branching out into assemblages and working with three-dimensional forms displayed on canvas. It's fun to tweak the idea that art on canvas is more valuable, more genuine, or finer art than works created on paper or other arts often considered to be lesser pieces because they come from the world of handicraft rather than from the fine arts universe.

I enjoy the way balance and negative space become so important in assemblage and collage. My delight in assembling these little pieces is an outgrowth of my love for creating small, intimate artworks and crafts pieces that invite the viewer to get close and share the physical space in which the artwork is displayed. In the past I made a lot of jewelry because I enjoyed the idea of wearable art that the wearer could play with, notice and handle more than pieces that hang on walls or sit on mantels. Jewelry becomes part of the owner's personal physical space. Whatever media I use, I always want my works to be like little jewels: portable, personal, intricate and intimate.

Nihilism and Nightlights

In December 1984, when I was 21 and just seven months out of Mills College, I got what was supposed to be a six-week temp job at Apple Computer testing word processing software for Macintosh computers. I’d beta tested software on an early Lisa computer (the Mac’s big sister) when I worked as a Jill-of-all-trades at a computer consulting firm during and after college, so a friend at Apple thought I might be a good fit. I figured it would be a good stopgap job on the way to a career as a writer or museum curator. What I thought would be a short career hiccup grew into 7-1/2 years at Apple, first as a software test engineer and later as an R&D division newsletter editor.

While being a software test engineer was fun and enlightening and it let me play with cool prototypes for fab new products, what I really wanted to do was write, so during my months as a temp I also wrote ad copy, software documentation, humor pieces and film reviews on the side. I wrote reviews not only for actual films but also for films that existed only in my imagination. One night during the first week of my time at Apple, I got an idea for what I thought could be a funny little film review parody and I came up with a couple of ridiculous ideas for foreign films, then reviewed the fictional movies as if I were the most pompous film reviewer around. I typed up my little piece, edited it and printed it out within the course of a couple of hours. It flowed more easily than just about anything else I’ve written since. The next morning it still looked funny to me, so I decided I’d send it to The San Francisco Chronicle to see whether they might like to put it in the Sunday Punch, their popular arts and entertainment section, in the space they usually saved for humor pieces on the flipside of Herb Caen’s legendary column. Had I thought about the paper’s 750,000-reader Sunday circulation figures or the facts that I was right out of college with a background in history and art history and no journalism background, I might have been daunted. But I was 21 and my youthful belief in endless possibilities saved me from such fears, so I popped my little parody in the mailbox and drove to my supposed six-week job at Apple to crash the MacWrite application as fiercely and often as I could.

A few days later, Rosalie Muller Wright, then the Chronicle’s managing editor of Features and later the editor-in-chief of Sunset Magazine, called to tell me they liked it and would like to publish it. My first attempt at publication was accepted at a big-deal metro paper just like that. It was clear to me that this writing for publication business was much easier than everyone said it would be. (If only all my subsequent efforts could have been as popular with editors.)

Ms. Wright passed my work along to Peter Sussman, who was an editor at the Chronicle for 29 years and went on to teach journalism at Stanford and to become an important writer and editor of articles and books about California’s criminal justice system. He became my editor. I had no idea that my little parody would let me work under two such impressive and important journalists. Mr. Sussman edited my piece, calling me with small but excellent suggestions for changes, and I got my check for $50. I was hooked. It had all been so easy that I sent them another parody funnier than the first to see what would happen. They liked it so much, they offered me the chance to write a series of parody reviews. I grabbed the chance with both hands and wrote one a month for six months. It was one of the best gigs I ever had.

My favorite of the six parodies was the second one, “Nihilism and Nightlights.” Here it is.

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Among the new foreign film releases this season are two films by female directors: Bebe Francobolli’s ode to Dada, “Ciao Chow Chow,” and Christiane de Geronimo’s children’s thriller, “Nightlight.”

Francobolli is the daughter of the Suprematist painter Mazlow Molotov (“The Black Russian”) and Constructivist painter Kiri de Kulpe Kloonig (a former courtesan known as “The Dutch Treat”). Bebe’s parents met in Rome at an international stamp-collecting convention and became Italian citizens before their only child was born.

Named Bebe Francobolli (literally Baby Postage Stamps) after her parents’ avocation, she refused to become a philatelist and rejected the art of her ancestors. She turned to Dada, the nihilistic movement that created “non-art,” laughed at overly serious artists and spawned Surrealism.

These influences can be seen clearly in “Ciao Chow Chow,” in which Bebe herself stars. Translated from Italian into English, and then back into Italian again, with no subtitles, the film begins and ends with Bebe waving goodbye to her beloved Chow dog, Antipasto, symbol of her lost youth and of her ridiculous early films.

“Ciao” is a parody of a self-parody, masterful in its simplicity and in its bold statement that life is to be laughed at, and that nothing is serious or sacred.

Basically nihilistic, with Dadaist subject matter and camera angles, this film is convoluted and uneven, personalized and stylized, and will make no sense to anyone who has not seen Bebe’s early travelogue films. Yet, Bebe promises that it will be her last film work, and that alone has prompted critical acclaim.

Avant-garde director Christiane de Geronimo’s “Nightlight” tells the terrifying story of the night the Mickey Mouse nightlight burned out in the Turner household. Little Bobby Turner is forced to face The Clown Puppet, The Vicious Animal Slippers and The Dreaded Man from Under the Bed.

Filmed in black and white, “Nightlight” captures the shadowy horror of every child’s bedroom, and forces even the adult viewer to come to grips with The Thing in the Closet. Not for the squeamish.

De Geronimo’s earlier attempts at children’s thrillers include “The Teddy Bear with No Face,” Scream, Barbie, Scream” and “Revenge of the Katzenjammer Kids,” in which comic-strip characters from the past are set loose on an unwitting Nebraska farm town.

“Nightlight,” the third of her bedtime stories series, features the late French film star Estella de Lumiere in her final role before the dreadful accident on the set of “Murder on the Trampoline.”

Next month, two recent remakes: Canadian filmmaker and ice-hockey champion Pete Steed’s sport-oriented version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; Fujiko Shiatsu’s sumo wrestling remake of “The Music Man.”