Say It Say It Say It Say It

I never cared for the whole Diana Ross thang. She married the boss; threw her friends over the side; I never thought she was all that pretty — though many people always have and still do — just sorta brittle looking.

When we’d drive to family gatherings in my Dad’s broken down old cars with the crackly AM radio fading in and out, it was the Four Tops or The Temptations I’d hope would fill the Motown slots on the endlessly repeating one hour playlist, not the Supremes. Let’s put all that aside, and wonder at the perfection of this:

The Dog From Ipanema

Who’s Looking At Who?

You have to understand everything to be in business.

Please note I said “understand,” not “be good at.” But if you’re going to turn over part of your efforts to others, for money, and you don’t have a grasp of what they’re doing –or supposed to be doing — you’re in for a lot of trouble. See: 1999 CEO investments in web-based business models if you need a refresher.

What is that allegory about the blind men feeling the elephant? Something about each man describing the animal differently because they can’t see the whole thing. Each fellow is feeling a different part of the beast. I’m sure it’s very Zen and Tony Robbins and Rah Rah Let’s Go Out There and Sell People! if you tell it right in a multi-level marketing motivational speech. But I can’t be bothered to remember it, and believe me, in real life, it’s the elephant that’s blind — and angry, too — and if you’re lucky he just steps on your toes and doesn’t sit on you. And by the way, everybody always is positioned in the same spot under the elephant of commerce: under its tail.

Anyway, I was put on notice that there would be no mercy shown to such as I a long time before I heard : “I can’t save every undercapitalized business in America.” That wasn’t even the first time such a person mentioned they weren’t going to be interested in throwing me a flotation device, even though I didn’t really need one until they had just hurled me into the ocean. The only thing you can ever pray for in business is to be left alone. I must pray in the wrong church.

I make things because it is in my bones to do so. Every once in a while –fairly often, thank God — someone sends me a letter or an e-mail, telling me that the thing I made for them made them happy to look at it, or helped their children to reach the sink to brush their teeth, or some other detail that made their life a little more pleasant. And I have to trust that many more feel that way but are anonymous. You have to put your efforts out into the ether, and doggedly trust sometimes that they are worthwhile. You can’t always tell right away. The penalty for trusting the wrong things is… I can’t save every undercapitalized bu…

The customers feed my children, and my soul. And like the fools we all are, they thank me for it.

Nipotism

My wife and I don’t grow anything to eat.

There’s be no point to it, anyway, as a deer is like a bunny rabbit around here. They eat at the prickly barberry bushes and nibble the spiny leaves off the hollies now. It would be a 24 hour counterassault to try to safeguard actual food from them. Neither one of us comes by it naturally anyway.

My beloved Uncle Raphael grows things to eat. He has a soft spot for enormous gaudy flowers, too. In the early summer he’ll attend any fete with a huge bucket of blooms for the hosts. But this time of year, it’s all food he brings.

I can’t remember the latin term, exactly. Glebae ascriptii, I think. Google is no help. It might be forty years since I read the term, but it stuck. It meant tied to the land, I believe. It referred to people who were serfs, who literally came with the property.

I can’t imagine our ancestors were very wealthy before they crossed the ocean in big rusting freighters to scratch out a life here in America. When I think of paisan, I think of peasant. That is its literal derivation, though that is obscure now. You are my friend, my countryman, my compatriot, because like me, you scratch your living out of the same earth.

I wonder if we were glebae ascriptii. I’m sure we were paisans. I wonder if it is in our bones, somewhere, the wonderful magic of bringing forth life from the land. If it’s in my bones, it is hiding well. Maybe Uncle Ray got mine. He certainly got more than his share. I can’t think of another man that has conjured more things out of this earth and sea than he. It has to be enough, perhaps that he is my zio Raphael, and thinks to give the fruits of his labor to his nipote.

It was common in the working trades to labor next to those that were older, and learn from them. That was the compact. The grail for the younger man was always the grudging respect you could earn with your effort from the older and wiser man. His nephews all took a run at it. Uncle Ray wore us all out. We brought in reinforcements and they flagged. He’s retired now, long after he should have been. Now he wears us out with his tomatoes. Someday he’ll wear out the other archangels with his smile.

Copley Is Not Square

[Originally posted in April 2006, so no, you’re not going senile or having deja vu all over again, again, if this looks familiar.]

I’m hanging around the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston again, at least in the Internet sense. Here’s a picture that’s… ahem… hanging around the museum too. It’s called Boy With A Squirrel, or, alternately: Portrait of Henry Pelham, and it was painted by John Singleton Copley, and it’s a wonder.

Copley is a fairly well known artist, at least in America, because he had the presence of mind to paint well, and paint famous and influential people, and people who would become so.

Copley was born in 1738 to Irish immigrants in what would become the most Irish of American cities, Boston, Massachusetts. Something untoward must have happened, because ten years later, Copley had a step-father, Peter Pelham, a British born engraver. Pelham taught young Copley about engraving, including a method called mezzotint, an extremely demanding technique that allowed engravers to achieve great subtlety in light and shadow, but that few could master well enough to use. His step-father also exposed Copley to a few painters who influenced him some, but he appears to be almost entirely self taught in oil painting, which as you can see, is a marvel.

He painted this portrait of his half brother, Henry Pelham, in 1765. It uses a method of depicting persons along with items from their daily life, called portrait d’apparat, which was very unusual for its time, especially in America. Portrait painting always had lots of symbolism in the items, dress, and setting of their patrons, but they generally weren’t quotidian things from a regular person’s life.

Copley painted all sorts of famous and interesting Americans, like John Adams, Paul Revere, John Hancock, Sam Adams, and all sorts of lesser colonial lights whose names ring a bell to anyone who’s lived in Boston: Codman; Quincy; Warren; Boylston; Pepperell.

Go back and look at the painting. There’s a kind of exactness of likeness that has long fallen out of favor in art. Even the greatest American artist ever, John Singer Sargent, eschewed exactitude and captured his likenesses with brushwork that up close looks like it was done with a housepainting brush. If you look at the studies Copley would do of his portrait subjects, they look almost mechanical, as if he were drawing up plans for the human in question, not painting their portraits.

But go back and look at the painting. The delicacy of effect, the absolute shimmering depth of the minutest detail of the composition, the obvious love of the artist for his medium and his manifest ability to see and convey to the viewer exactly what he sees, and more — what is important about the subject — is like a form of necromancy. It’s no wonder that some cultures think portraits steal one’s soul. Henry Pelham’s soul is in that portrait, and Copley’s to boot.

Before telegraph, and radio, and television, and all the other methods of telling a stranger what you think and about what you think it, the portrait artist did it. You don’t look at that portrait, you live in it for a moment. I’ve made a thousand tables, and looked at ten thousand more, and I can tell you that’s exactly the way the light catches the corner of one. I could look at the picture all day and not run out of things to look at, and marvel over.

There was a problem of course. Copley got married, and his father-in-law was a merchant. A tea merchant. And one of his portrait subjects, Sam Adams, and some of his compatriots, got dressed up in an unconvincing fashion as American Indians, and dumped Copley’s father-in-law’s tea into Boston Harbor. And like many concerned about their famlily’s safety if revolution came, he went to England where he remained for the rest of his life, well regarded, patronized by the rich and the regal, but never again reaching the sublime heights of his American paintings.

No one wants to look at his portrait of George the Fourth when he was the Prince of Wales, after all; not when you can see the young man with the pet squirrel, and know that the marrow of an entire country was in the brush that painted it.

England got him, but they can’t have him.

It’s Actually Called: “Soil”

The always interesting Pajamas Media is just a little more interesting today than most days, as they are running an article written by yours truly:

Deipnosophistae

Mom never understood the bread.

I could see a little bit of disappointment, a little at a time. It was like a ship appearing on the horizon. It’s just a speck at first. You can’t know how big it is until it gets close to shore. Mom was proud of me when I was young, because my friends were all hanging out doing nothing on the corner –or worse– and I was working like a man. But as the months turned to years, the ship of her disappointment hove into view. The tonnage of it up close was formidable.

Disappointment is not shame, nor anything like it. She thought I could do more with myself, is all. Lawyer. Doctor. General. Something where there would be a newspaper clipping or two she could show to the neighbors. That’s my boy. That’s all she wanted. An affirmation.

But the baguettes came out of that hot hole in the wall the first time, and I was hooked. I was never allowed to do much except sweep the floor at first, and carry the sacks of meal. But I knew right away. I knew I could never get away from the smell of it, the wondrous feeling of the flour on my hands, the heat like the sun on a rock at the beach all day long.

I loved it; and so the fellows that did it with a grunt and a sneer for money could never compete with me. They’d go home five minutes early and grumble while I’d go by on my day off and help out and smile. I am their lord and master now. By acclamation. Let him do it; he’ll do it anyway. And the owner’s son, dissipated and snarling, didn’t last a month. I’m the real son. I’ll save my little all and buy it when the old man goes; or he’ll give it to me, because he wants his idea to keep going, and his own boy has other ideas.

I bring it home and lay it on the table, and Mom murmurs her grudging assent. A man decides for himself. At least he’s a man, she thinks. And the bread is the food of angels; but still.

Mom will have to go without, because many will never ask why they raised a statue to me; it has to be enough that a few will ask why they didn’t, when we are all gone.

Der Funnies