… no alcohol last night… told myself in the morning i would not and i did not… wasn’t strongly tempted…
… storms came through yesterday… rain… H said not enough… need to up the watering time for yard… lots of fireflies in the back yard… i like to step out and watch them for a bit when i let the dogs out in the evening…
… M, B and i set up the coop for the meat chickens… we installed heat lamps even though it’s going to be in the 90’s this week… the little chicks like it around 100, so the heat lamps… will be needed at night for sure… B put on lipstick to help us… i think, “that isn’t needed,” but she thinks so, so it is…
… HCR wrote about how extreme the Republican Party is right now… she ended with some indication that it might be rebounding against them…
… Claes Oldenburg dies at the age of 93… i was not a big fan, my interests run more to rendering the sublime… but, that i have always been aware of his work says something…
Claes Oldenburg, best known for his large, playful works of everyday objects — from a clothespin and a flashlight to a baseball bat and a fried egg — died on the morning of Monday, July 18 at his home in Manhattan, where he was recovering from a hip injury last month. He was 93. The artist’s death was confirmed by Paula Cooper and Pace, the two galleries that have long represented him.
… reading a review of a book about female art monsters… Letters to Gwen John, by Celia Paul… Ceila Paul was the lover/muse of Lucien Freud… Gwen John was the lover/muse of August Rodin… both had art ambitions… Gwen John, Rodin aside, had the greater dedication it appears… she conceived and birthed a child which she promptly turned over to her mother so she would not be distracted by motherhood… Paul decided to become a mother… just now, H’s mother comes to mind…
John organized her life much like the archetypal male art monster, severing family ties and forgoing marriage and children. Any other way of life, in her view, would be antithetical to art. Just as a monk renounces earthly pleasures to access the divine, the artist sequesters herself to access genius. “Your goal was Great Art,” Paul writes to John, “and you knew you had to make sacrifices to attain it.” John would have been disinterested in — if not repulsed by — Paul’s decision to become a mother, despite the untraditional rationale behind it. Her pregnancy was an act of beneficence: “I had wanted to get pregnant so that I could comfort my mother, who was grieving for my father,” she writes.
… i have tried to be dedicated as a photographic artist… i have struggled to do that lately… i am trying to give up alcohol so the struggle is less… i am trying to get back to the creative routines that have sustained me… i am trying to overcome H’s indifference and sometimes hostility to my art practice…
… Dia art workers seeking a Union… this has become something of an epidemic in the art world… i am guessing it is much needed… unions in general seem to be resurgent…
Approximately 135 part-time and full-time workers at the Dia Art Foundation petitioned to unionize with Local 2110 UAW on Friday, July 15. Their organizing efforts are the latest in a wave that has swept cultural institutions across the nation, with recent labor developments at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
… low wages are cited though they are paid a minimum wage of $16 an hour… the article is poorly written getting some factual information wrong… like locating Storm King Art Center in Beacon, which it is not… across the river, yes… not in Beacon… did i say i live in Beacon?…
… a review(?) of a novel published 90 years ago… Now in November by Josephine Johnson… set during the great depression, won the Pulitzer Prize… youngest person to ever win the prize, one of the too few women to win it…
This is the same America that loves a good bootstrapper success story, but this trope Johnson sidesteps, focusing instead on the precariousness of working-class life, when a slip, a fall, a burn, or a broken bone can begin a slow slide, the way the cost of medical care and absence of a social safety net still sink working people today. The shame of watching others suffer without being able to help weighs heavily.
… the horridness of the extreme conservative republicans, who would do away with that social safety net and condemn poor people to servitude…
In many ways, the drought and devastation of the Dust Bowl in Now in November rhyme with our modern experiences of climate change, when a tipped electric line can send a tidal wave of flames surging across the landscape, licking hundreds of homes from the map.
… did you know the Gimlet cocktail originated, at least in part, as a treatment for scurvy?… i did not… excerpts from the book, Doctors and Distillers, The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails, by Camper English…
Proposed antiscorbutics (scurvy preventatives or cures) included rice, beans, sulfuric acid, vinegar, molasses, cinchona bark, mustard, opium, mercury, rhubarb, hops, juniper berries, seal carcass oil, scurvy grass, and especially sauerkraut or horseradish. Fermented beverages like spruce beer, regular beer, and cider, plus fizzy soda water and rum punch were quite often employed. So was gargling with urine, which probably didn’t help with the foul-breath issue. Other ineffective treatments included purgatives, bleeding, sweating, bathing in animal blood, and—surprisingly often—burial of a person up to the neck in sand.
Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial is used in place of fresh lime juice in some dive bars and homes, though it contains sweeteners, preservatives, and added coloring. The ingredient was immortalized in Raymond Chandler’s 1953 book The Long Goodbye, in which a character states, “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.”
… i am amazed at how many bad mistakes i find in articles from supposedly serious places about thoughtful things… i mean, mistakes that one re-reading for editing purposes by author or other should catch… and many are articles that had no reason to be rushed to print… what gives?…
… more reading of Hannah Arendt…
… an article on inflation and climate change… it feels we are heading to a bad time on that front…
In Italy, the hot and dry conditions are expected to destroy a third of the seasonal harvest of rice, corn, and animal fodder — at a minimum. Locusts have descended on the island of Sardinia in the worst invasion in three decades, hurting the production of hay and alfalfa. The European Commission recently downgraded its soft-wheat harvest estimates from 130 million tons to 125 million tons—more bad news amid a food shortage precipitated by Russia’s blockade on exports from Ukraine. (Russia and Ukraine are among the world’s biggest exporters of grain.)
Across the world in China, a record-breaking heat wave is causing major problems. Roofs are melting, residents are relocating to public cooling zones in underground air-raid shelters, and health workers are strapping frozen food to their too-hot hazmat suits. The Central Meteorological Observatory in Tokyo has warned that the heat could further hurt the production of corn and soy, worsening inflation. These crops are used to feed pigs, and early-season failures have already sent the price of pork, China’s staple meat, soaring.
… the desktop computer still pretty slow and crashed on me once… but i got some photos edited from this morning… not a stellar batch but a few good ones…
Heather Cox Richardson, July 18, 2022
Claes Oldenburg, Whose Sculptures Transformed the Everyday, Dies at 93
“A Book About Thirst.” Josephine Johnson’s 1934 Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novel