Obsessions and Yo Yos

I took a few days off because there is so much going on in our house. Two in a musical, another in a very intense dancing and singing camp. Both with performances Saturday - we will watch them one after the other, with a mad dash of 25 miles between. Should be a totally exhausting weekend.

But this week is what the summer has been about, for two of us, and the timing was not ours to control. And we're all glad to be doing this - it's just going to consume us completely. In a good way...

I took the days off to get some perspective on work projects, and to be able to help as much as possible with the logistics.

Several days ago Youngest and I were talking about yo yos. He has a cheap one that doesn't work, and another that is basically a plastic party favor. We looked up yo yos on line, because I was curious if the old Duncan Imperial was still made (my yo yo as a kid was a translucent orange-yellow Duncan Imperial). I was bemused and surprised to discover that, like bikes, yo yos have been completely re-engineered since I was kid. Bearings, weight rings, star and ring response systems, hybrid response systems, lots of discussions about mods, categories of play, off-string yo yos... The prices run from two dollars (the Duncan Imperial - strongly discouraged in reviews because it is so difficult to get it to behave consistently) to over four hundred. The average for high performance, competition yo yos seems to be around a hundred dollars. We spent a lot of time on the YoYoNation store site. We talked about yo yo models in the car coming and going to Daughter's camp, and she heard us go on and on. We wear her out, sometimes, the two of us.

On my day off yesterday I dropped Daughter off at her camp, and then drove to Chapel Hill. After three days, the yo yos would not get out of my mind. I finally realized I was being nudged to do something about it. It wasn't going to leave me.

With a shake of my head and a grin, I gave in and stopped at several stores, looking for the new breed of yo yos. I finally found them at Learning Express. They stocked several models of Yomega, in the Raider line-up. They had been fairly well reviewed. I bought a transaxle model for Youngest (more responsive - i.e. will return up the string more easily) and a bearing model for me (they can "sleep" at the end of the string longer, and then still return). They're $13-$15 yo yos. I can understand a price like that. Shame the yo yo that bit me on-line is over $40 and no longer seems to come in the colors I fell in love with (YoYoJam's Mini Motu - red and gold - above) - but these Yomega models will be fine.

So I went on to Davis Library, at UNC Chapel Hill, where I spent so many idle and productive hours in college, wandering the stacks. I automatically gravitated to the N section of the Library of Congress system - the sixth floor of Davis' eight. I discovered that my throw was still intact (like riding a bike, you never forget) and that the yo yo was sweet. I set up my camera and did about two dozen shots on timed delay before I finally got one with me, the yo yo, and the string, all in the shot. Then I spent an hour and a half reading a gorgeous volume of Vincent Van Gogh's letters to Emile Bernard, including beautiful reproductions of the paintings and drawings referenced in the letters. I got confirmation from Vincent, of several things I've been experiencing as a painter; I'll be able to let them be, now that I'm more certain where they lead. One of the things confirmed was that you must not ignore or deny the seemingly silly stuff. Play.

Later that evening, Youngest and I drove to pick up Daughter from camp. When we got to the parking lot, a little early, he was walking ahead of me between the cars. I pulled the yo yo quietly from my pocket and threw it - the lovely high sleeping hum made him turn around. He dropped his jaw. He had talked to me about yo yos several times in the last few days, also bitten, apparently. I said, "I found it in Chapel Hill. Yours is in the car." For the next ten minutes we played them on the grass waiting for Daughter to come out. She lost it when she saw us - laughed long and loud (her laugh, and Dearest's, are the music I love the most). Youngest has been working with his quite a bit since, trying to get the throw strong enough and straight enough to get a solid return. Right now he either throws straight OR fast enough. He's probably only completed a few returns, but he keeps at it. I love that he is breaking into something he can't do and yet he's still happily working at it. That's new since he turned 10 - and important.

But it's not just about him and sharing something with him (though that's a big part of the joy in this)...

My yo yo is in my pocket and it feels right there.

Lincoln

I walked from Georgetown to Virginia Avenue, and back towards the ever present Washington Monument. Then, to my right, I saw the Lincoln Memorial. I knew it was in the totally wrong direction for my walk back to the hotel, and that it was farther away than it looked, but I had to go pay my respects.

In the last block before the green circle that contains America’s finest nod to Greek architecture, I passed between many baseball diamonds. There, within a homerun hit of the Memorial, were teams of every race, ethnicity, and socio-economic background, playing America’s game. Up the hill from those softball teams is that famous statue of our saddest and possibly our most revered President, flanked by two of his most famous orations, both concentrated on the subject that burned in his heart every hour of his Presidency: the preservation of the union and the end of the conflict that made combatants and bitter enemies of the ancestors of some of the players outside on those baseball diamonds.

I read both of those speeches, and chuckled at the part of the Gettysburg Address where he says these words will not be remembered. And what if we were given an oration today like his Second Inaugural Address? Would we resonate with the ringing English? Would we be swayed by his quiet disbelief that some men feel entitled to get their bread by “the sweat of another man’s face”? Would we be moved by the humble submission to the will of God, and the determination to see the terrible thing through to the end as justice and the Almighty might require? I wonder.

I photographed where North Carolina’s stone is set on the top. We’re on the side, just around from the front. When I looked at the front of the Memorial, as I was leaving to walk back along the Mall and up 19 Street, back to Dupont Circle, I noticed that the stones are laid in the order of statehood, and for the 13 Colonies this meant the order of their ratification of the Constitution. I laughed, realizing that NC initially refused to ratify the document, causing them to be one of the last of the 13 to join, and losing them a spot on the front of the Memorial. But I grinned when I remembered why they refused. They would not agree until it included the Bill of Rights. I’m proud of my adopted home state, where I’ve lived nearly two thirds of my life - and I find it amusing that North Carolina shares that stone with the only other state where I’ve lived, the state of my birth, New York.

In New York I lived from age six to seventeen in the town of Gallatin, named for a French financier who helped get the new United States off to a good financial start. I was delighted, on my earlier walk in DC, to see this statue of Gallatin in a place of honor in front of the Treasury Department. The town in New York is too small to make most maps - it had one major intersection (a “T” with one stop sign) and an interchange on the Taconic State Parkway, where the sign mentions the road (Jackson Corners Rd) but not the town.

Painting Today

Maybe I should take my blood pressure after painting...

Here I am with Louise (the paint brush) dreaming on the newly stretched Arches hot press. It's actually quite cool on my cheek, and so soothing with all the possibilities. I used to dread a blank page, but now I love it. I like to run my hand over it a few times, savoring it like taking a deep breath over a bowl of some comforting, delicious soup before you put your spoon in it for the first time.

Here are Louise and Abner. Louise painted my Dad yesterday. Today it's Abner's turn. Abner is older than Louise - perhaps you can tell. I brought Louise into the scene about six months ago, when Abner was having a little trouble with finer lines and corners. But he's a perfect pal for the kind of painting I'm planning today.

I went back through my photos of trees and woods, looking for one that would strike me. This one did, and I let it run through me and out the pencil. Fast. No thinking. Trees, light, the slope, rocks, moss, leaves, sun pricking through, branches in the way... No words, though, just the feelings of the things, and leaving out the things that I wish I could look past or around.

And then I painted it the same way. Fast, without fussing over it. The last hour was slow, looking at it and adding or subtracting. It's close to finished, I think. But I may tinker with it a little more once I get away from it and come back again.

Dad

This might be how I'll look in twenty years. Well, actually I doubt Dearest would let me shave off my beard, and I don't have the earlobe that comes down from my Dad's mother, but in other ways...

I made a number of discoveries recently, which led to this portrait.

First, I knew my blood pressure had been climbing a bit, and I do have a cuff to check it. So I went ahead and measured it last night and this morning early, after a good night's sleep and sitting quietly for five minutes before pumping and listening. 142 over 105. Those are not good numbers, I found out on the Mayo Clinic site. Those would be stage 2 hypertension. I'll be watching those number closely and making an appointment.

I realized that I've been working too hard and too constantly. It has contributed to the item above, I suspect. I like the work; I'm passionate about it; it matters a lot more than anything else I've done in my career. But balance...

I found an interesting piece of advice. It said, "Do what you're good at." Seems simple. Then it expanded on this, explaining that in the workplace most people spend a lot of time focused on the things they don't do well, trying to fix that part of their performance. Managers don't help, pointing out the weaknesses and bringing them up on performance reviews. (Actually my last three bosses all have let me do things my own way - I've been lucky, and they've been smart enough to know I work better and harder that way). No, the advice went on to say that if you have things you do exceptionally well, you should concentrate on THOSE and spend as little time as possible on the stuff you do poorly. I found this incredibly freeing. Due to some rearranging at our company, I'm covering four positions worth of responsibility at the moment (I'm hiring to help this). I juggle things as well as almost anyone I know, but I mourn and fret over the things I'm not getting to. Actually, though, some of the things I'm not getting to are things I don't do well, anyway - that's one reason they're at the bottom of the list. I feel a lot lighter now that I've set them down and walked away from them. I'm never going to get to them, and now I won't feel bad about that. At least until I pick them back up again from habit...

The museum trip in DC rekindled my desire to paint. It's just been sleeping a bit, never all that far from the surface. Today, after checking my blood pressure, it blew back over me like a balm. I knew I needed to paint as part of healthier living. The walks and trips to the farmer's market to buy lots more fresh fruit and vegetables, and eating less will also help - but painting is going to lower my pulse and help as much or more than changing my blood chemistry.

So today I stretched another piece of Arches hot press, and I will paint over two pieces that are stuck and which I don't want to paint, anyway. I have been bitten bad by that Vuillard painting I saw in DC, and it won't leave me alone. I feel like those cartoon characters that you see from the front, then they turn sideways and there is a small bulldog latched on to their butt like a bear trap. My bulldog has a collar and dog tag written in French. But it was fed on Hundertwasser and Redon, and Klimt, and Schielle, and it's fur is brightly colored, and it's eyes shine like flashlights. It's grinning with glee. So am I.

Today youngest is out playing with his friends, and the others in the house left at 1:00 to rehearse and work on scenery. I donned headphones, pulled out an Arches pad, opened up one of the photos I've been considering for a portrait, and spent three hours looking very carefully at my Dad.

Dad is a quiet man, with a peaceful face that shows his Magyar and English ancestors. To me, his face always seems ready to smile. He smiles often, though even his smiles are quiet, not usually showing his teeth. I think this is a better likeness of him than the photo from which I worked. That pleased me greatly - and encourages me to move on to other portraits.

Of course others might be harder - after all, this is as close as I can come to doing another self portrait...

Georgetown

After the first day of conference, all talked out from networking and steering lunch and break conversations to topics of interest to me and to the company that sent me, I took a long solitary walk from Dupont Circle to Georgetown, down P Street, and then up 31 and 32 Streets to Dumbarton Oaks. It was closed by then, though I would have loved to have seen the poplars in that garden, but I walked along the outside of the walls, to Wisconsin. Wisconsin is the retail heart of Georgetown.

On Wisconsin I selected my dinner, stopping in the Cafe Bonaparte for this delicious cheese sampler and pate plate. I added a glass of Reisling, and I spent an hour juxtaposing and combining the five cheeses, strawberries, sweet toasted walnuts, and the pate, and tasting or inhaling the aroma of the wine. It’s the intersection and the transitions between all the flavors that is the magic of French food. The slow kaleidoscope of subtle changes in the mouth and nose, and the arrival of the next morsel while the after affects of the previous are still apparent around the edges and back of the tongue. The wait staff smiled at me a lot (I was doing a lot of smiling with my eyes closed), and left me to enjoy myself.

For dessert I went back out on the street and ate the golden light on the long downhill run of storefronts and shops. I was greeted by Reginald Johnson, who did not ask me for money, but instead asked if I would buy him a sandwich. His good humor and straight open gaze into my eyes, made it easy to immediately agree. He's a professional. We walked together to the mall, a block away, and down the escalator to the food court, where the sub shop staff greeted him warmly and said, “Steak Sandwich?” He was a regular, often with a patron along to buy his dinner. He told me he had been on the street for fifteen years. He seemed happy, clean, healthy, and at peace with everyone. Quite different from so many of the other panhandlers I saw frequently throughout the city. I put a number of ones into a number of paper cups.

At the bottom of Wisconsin is a waterfront. This area was a frightening mess, as I recall from trips to DC in the 70s and 80s, but now it is in revival, and very expensive condos and restaurants are being built. The place in this photo was alive with music and the sounds of hundreds of conversations, all soothed and bubbled by the fountains in the middle, and bathed in the last hour of the late summer sun.

Just down the waterfront was yesteryear’s popular waterfront happening spot, now run down, in disrepair, looking dated and ugly, and put up just the day before for auction, with a starting price as low as one million dollars, because it’s estimated that one hundred million will be needed to renovate. Watergate. Half the shops were empty, the others were pretty sad looking and low budget enterprises. Most of the apartments and rooms looked vacant, as well. It had a lost and forgotten feeling, but I could see that forty or fifty years ago this was a big deal; this was a desirable address. So how will that glitzy location in the previous paragraph look in fifty years?

The News

As I walked back to my hotel in DC Tuesday, I saw a proud series of messages through the first floor windows of a plain brown building on my left. They were about news, and the freedom of the press, and the responsibility of and public trust in the media. It was the headquarters of the Washington Post. And as I was passing the entrance, I encountered a line of well dressed people, most of them carrying professional binders, some looking through them to make sure they had their resume and other materials in order. They were there for job openings.

And I wondered, sadly, how many of them had been employed by the Post until recently, when shrinking newspaper budgets caused their jobs to be cut, possibly after years with the paper. And I realized, as I photographed the scene, and many of these people noticed me doing so, that I was doing a little journalism of my own, seeing them and their story as newsworthy, due some attention, some thought.

DC Walk - National Gallery

Conference in DC this week. I got to town in time to walk over to my favorite museums on the Mall, before working in my hotel room into the evening. I wanted, in particular, to visit the Robert Motherwell painting in the modern building. This has been a favorite of mine since I first saw it. I can't decide why. I think it has to do with motion, repetition, and the ratios. It also seems to be escaping its frame, or the internal frame painted lightly around the 10 foot by 30 foot canvas.

And the Calder gallery, with the mobiles and stabiles and their changing shadows on the walls. This room would have pleased him, I think. It's a playful space, and the mobiles are in constant graceful motion. Today I noticed how much they owe to the split and arrangements of branches and leaves on certain species of trees. I am almost certain that's what inspired some of these.

I also had to visit the Matisse paper cutouts. Last time we were in this museum, a little over a year ago, I think, the cutouts were up in the tower by themselves, which gave a reverent, chapel sort of feeling to the exhibit. Now they are in a small gallery downstairs - still by themselves in the space, but not as set apart. I love them - this is the only one I photographed - the larger ones won't be captured.

As I was leaving the modern building, to head for the more traditional building next door, I saw one more little exhibition, of "Small French Paintings." I am so glad I took the time to go in there. They had a small room dedicated to small paintings by Vuillard, Bonnard, and one Odilon Redon. I could have eaten the tiny Redon canvas with a spoon like my favorite flavor of icecream, it was so delicious.

But my favorite in the entire building was the small Vuillard scene of fields in Brittany. If I could have any object in Washington DC, I might choose this little canvas, probably not more than 10 by 12 inches. The little works in that room inspired me all over again to paint.

And I stood for quite a while in front of Whistler's Symphony in White #1. This is probably my favorite of his paintings. The sad thing is that it probably contributed in a major way to his death. The painting is worked all over with the lovely, fat, creamy white he loved best - Flake white - a strong lead pigment. Jimmy Whistler worked with several brushes at once, and, as he switched rapidly between them, he held the extras in his teeth. He died of lead poisoning. Close by the Symphony, is a portrait of Vanderbilt - the first fortune maker, I think - the grandfather of the Vanderbilt who created Biltmore House in NC.

It was a warm day, but not as brutal as July should be in Washington. The walk was long, possibly five miles round trip, but I enjoyed it, and the hot dog with sour kraut I bought from a pushcart on the way. The cityscape, the people on the sidewalks, the light, the shops and restaurants - DC has so much variety. The smells on the streets were also a constant whirl of change, pleasant and unpleasant.

I worked hard today, absorbing an 84 page standards document for tomorrow's session, plus the long drive up here and several hours of answering e-mail. But it was lovely to have a brief chance to get out into this American city, hear snatches of conversation all around me, many in languages I did not recognize, and watch the world rolling by as I strolled through it on my way to absorb some art.