A Change in the Wind

For Mother's Day, a spiked New Yorker cover

From a fun new site called Blown Covers, a New Yorker cover that could have been:

 

Eulogy for a watershed: Tam Valley in Marin County

My good friend David Healy sends along a touching/troubling essay about the development of his Marin County town, Tam Valley, in the days of his and my youth, approximately fifty years ago. 

When I was a kid in the valley, we didn't need "facilities." We had the hills to hike in and the fields to play football in. Recreation was spontaneous, creative, inventive.

I remembered again Coyote Creek made sterile, and Corte Madera Creek and Tamalpais Creek, and the creeks of Terra Linda, Lucas Valley, and Novato following suit. I thought of all the marshes long since filled, like the ones where Redwood High School and Mill Valley's new Middle School now stand, and I wondered what the students in these schools know about the heritage that could have been theirs.

Not much, I guess. They study biology in text books while the great marshes rot under them, beneath six feet of "clean fill."

I thought again about my Tam Valley childhood, and I realized that almost everything I know about the natural world I learned during those years. Most of what I studied in college text books I have forgotten, but childhood experiences have stayed with me. Those years cannot be repeated; every wild place of significance which I knew as a kid is gone, transformed, sanitized, "brought up to standard." I realized, standing in that desolate asphalt and weed covered school yard, that when I wrote LIVING WATER, a story about the Sierras and the mighty watershed of the Sacramento River, I was really writing a eulogy for the little watersheds of my childhood creeks, and that THIS LIVING EARTH, which traces the learning process my wife and I experienced in the San Geronimo Valley and West Marin, is just as much an epitaph for the house--covered Tam Valley grasslands.

Though published in l973, David Cavagnaro's writing remains as potent and as relevant as ever.What will our future look like, when kids today -- in Marin County and around the world -- grow up away from nature? 

At least we have some idea of the past. Here's a favorite painting of Marin by William Keith, from 1869, before it was "brought up to standard." 

It's called San Anselmo Valley near San Rafael. 

Rilke: gathering the sweetnessnesses of plant love

While walking the Appalachian Trail with a friend a couple of weeks ago, all through Georgia and into far western North Carolina I found myself in the company of wild violets. Brought to mind this quote from the fourth of Rilke's wide-ranging and ever-fascinating Letters to a Young Poet:

...all beauty in plants and animals is a quiet enduring form of love and longing...patiently and willingly uniting and increase and growing, not out of physical delight, not out of physical suffering, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain and more powerful than will and withstanding. O that man might take this secret, of which the world is full even to its littlest things, more humbly to himself and bear it, more seriously and feel how terribly difficult it is, instead of taking it lightly. 

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling [the mind] with sublimity and exaltation. And those who come together in the night and are entwined in rocking delight do an earnest work and gather sweetnessnessses, gather depth and strength for the some of some coming poet, who will arise to speak of ecstasies beyond telling. 

The feminism of The Hunger Games: Katha Pollitt

It's cultural news when an esteemed writer/critic/poet goes head over hells for the latest in pop culture. Expresses his or her love for a work's artistry, even if a million other people love it too, even if it's making a gazillion dollars. To a believer in democracy, this ardency speaks for itself.

Philosophers such as Plato and Kant say that's wrong, but I say the human response to an artistic offering deserves to be a part of the weighing of its worthiness, if not the only part. 

So let me turn this space over to Katha Pollitt, who in The Nation marvelously explores The Hunger Games. After gushing for a moment about the book and the movie, she turns to well-accepted interpretations of the story: 

There are many ways to analyze The Hunger Games. You can see it as a savage satire of late capitalism: in a dystopian future version of North America called Panem, the 1 percent rule through brute force, starvation, technological wizardry and constant surveillance. The Games exemplify these methods: as punishment for a past rebellion, each of the twelve districts of Panem must sacrifice two teenagers, a boy and a girl, to come to the Capitol (sic) and compete in a televised ritual of murder and survivalism until only one is left. Tea Partiers can imagine an allegory of oppressive Washington, and traditionalists can revel in the ancient trope of the moral superiority of the countryside: the district people are poor and downtrodden and wear Depression-style clothes but they live in families, sing folk songs and have a strong sense of community. In the Capitol, which has the dated-futuristic look of a fascist Oz, the lifestyle is somewhere between the late Roman Empire, the court of Louis XVI and the Cirque du Soleil. You can also read the book as an indictment of reality television, in which a bored and cynical audience amuses itself watching desperate people destroy themselves, and the movie plays this angle for all it’s worth.

Much to unpack here, but note how she catches the movie's ability to avoid taking sides politically. To reach young and old, leftists and Tea Partiers. And that's not even mentioning its feminism:

The element that is the most striking to me, though, is Katniss, portrayed in the film by the splendid Jennifer Lawrence. Katniss has qualities usually given to boys: a hunter who’s kept her mother and sister from starving since she was 11, she’s intrepid and tough, better at killing rabbits than expressing her feelings, a skilled bargainer in the black market for meat. No teenage vegetarian she! At the same time, she’s feminine: never aggressive or swaggering, tenderhearted and protective of the defenseless—when her little sister Prim’s name is chosen for the Games, Katniss volunteers to take her place; during the games she risks death to protect the lovable girlchild Rue (Amandla Stenberg). Not to get too literary about this most popular of popular fiction, you can see Katniss as a version of the goddess Artemis, protectress of the young and huntress with a silver bow and arrows like the ones Katniss carries in the Games.  

Elizabeth Taylor: The accidental feminist

A new book titled The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We were Too Distracted by her Beauty to Notice argues that the movie star's explorations of gender in (National Velvet) desire (in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) and rage (in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) changed our understanding of women and men. 

It's occasioned a lot of wonderful commentary, such as this open from Larry McMurtry: 

If one is attempting to judge the depth and force of a woman’s feminism—the woman, in this case, being the American actress Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011)—surely the first thing to do is to determine exactly what feminism is. The most succinct opinion I’ve seen is the famous doormat quote from Rebecca West:

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist when I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

And in BookForum, Rhonda Lieberman brings examples:

 In National Velvet(1944), Liz is a "twelve-year-old warrior against gender discrimination." A Place in the Sun(1951), in which Liz is the ultimate dream girl, Lord says, "is hard to view as anything other than an abortion-rights movie . . . [dealing] with the tragic consequences of stigmatizing unwed pregnancy."... In Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), Liz's character crusaded against lobotomies for inconvenient women. (If that sounds far-fetched, Lord offers as context the appalling story of Rosemary Kennedy, who in 1941, at the age of twenty-three, was lobotomized at the request of her parents, Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., for being "disruptive.")

I'm convinced. 

[Taylor in l954, photographed  by the best studio still photog, Cecil Beaton]

The sound of climate change: Tom Toles

From the Washington Post's Tom Toles, of course:

Editorial cartoons: The candy of political opinion-making

Joel Pett, with his squiggly lines and understated style, may be the most charming of editorial chartoonists today (although not the best self-promoter, as it's often difficult to figure out where to go to see his work). While I'm off for a week with a friend on the Appalachian Trail, I thought might be nice to put up some pre-dated posts, and begin with Pett, from a Kentucky paper.  

Editorial cartoons are the candy of political argumentation. Even when they reach appalling conclusons, their bite-sized charm can make them irresistible. 

The fun of ignoring climate change: Ted Rall

Ted Rall said he enjoyed drawing this 'toon. 

I think he deserves credit for putting together two impressive stats (even if I can't find the number for those Americans who don't think climate change is a problem, one-third of voters is in the ballpark). 

Cherry tree in the wind

The incandescent writer Terry Tempest Williams -- whom you must go see read if you ever get the chance -- sends along a print called. Cherry tree in the wind. 

The artist, Ethan Friedland, says this is a pencil and charcoal drawing tinted yellow. 

Williams says he's twelve years old. 

Kathleen Edwards: Never Gonna Feel the Same

On tour last night in Ventura, the increasingly popular Kathleen Edwards concluded with her near-hit Change the Sheets, which opens:

My love took a ride on a red-eye plane
Going home
And we're never gonna feel the same
Change this feeling under my feet
Change the sheets and then change me

This central idea reminds me of what a true rock and roller, Craig Goris of Ojai's much-loved Char-Man band, said to me a while back, a year or so before he passed away, far too young. I had expressed the idea that rock was fundamentally opposed to the idea of "the same" and Craig said:

That's what rock and roll is always about. That moment when everything changes.

I'm paraphrasing from memory, but that's what I believe he said, and I think it's true. 

Edwards knows it. She can be gritty:

Asking for flowers
Is like asking you to be nice
Don't tell me you're too tired
10 years I've been working nights

She can be classic, in Neil Young's From Hank to Hendrix: 

Somewhere on a desert highway
She rides a Harley-Davidson
Her long blonde hair is riding in the wind
She's been running half her life
The chrome and steel she rides
Colliding with the very air she breathes
The air she breathes

And she can be tough, in her crowd favorite Back to Me: 

I've got lights you've never seen
I've got moves I've never used
I've got ways to make you come
Back to me

Whether or not she becomes a big star, Kathleen Edwards rocks: