Stéphane Hessel, born 100 years ago today, was a French Resistance hero and Holocaust survivor. He gained particular fame in France when he published a best-selling call to action, “Indignez-Vous!”, at the age of 93, invoking the ideals of democracy and the Resistance. Read more about Hessel here in this 2011 piece and read his publication in English here. Hessel died in 2013.
Category: arts and letters
Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA
Tonight’s New York Times gives us a report on an expansive art extravaganza with extensive Latino art coverage that gives some of us even more reason to want to visit L.A. soon. (And, by the way, one of the featured illustrative photos in the article depicts a piece from my old friend, Judy Baca. Pacific Standard Time will also feature Judy’s work on the “Great Wall of Los Angeles“, a project that was in progress when I worked with her in the 70s and 80s.)
For more on Pacific Standard Time, see these sample articles from the LA Weekly and The Guardian.
Sapiens
It’s coming at almost a perfect (and miserable) time. Basically confined to the indoors by the worst air quality I can remember anywhere, anytime (remember that I lived in Los Angeles for thirty years), I am finally getting around to reading a 2015 book that SIL C.S. and I discussed at least a year ago. And I had also come upon a TEDTalk or two by the book’s Israeli historian-philosopher author Yuval Noah Harari.
This has to be one of the most thought-provoking things I have read for a very, very long time. It is keeping me going despite that I feel worse than I have for a very, very long time — sneezing, coughing, running nose, watering eyes, splitting headache. So we continue to stay indoors and run filtered fans in the house where I can read so long as my eyes hold out (and then it is time to turn to stuff like The New Yorker podcast — hope to listen this afternoon to Miranda July reading from her new story — and Fresh Air). Not nearly finished with the book yet, but I know already that it is a definite recommend (hey, I just now see that Amazon sez that it is “A Summer Reading Pick for President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg”), and have alerted the local library to get me on the waiting list for Harari’s 2017 book, “Homo Deus”.
[rDay 898]
rDay Eight-Hundred-Ninety: At The Library
Today, another library day.
The local public library has to be just about my favorite (and arguably the most-effective and best-managed) of our local government services. I discover that Josh Tillman (aka Father John Misty), for me a current favorite on the music scene, makes the cover of Revenant magazine, which I find to be a Christian publication for twenty and thirtysomethings. Then I settle down with the current issue of T Magazine — the New York Times Style Magazine, always an eye-opener, not just for the quality of its photography, including its advertising (the first 92 pages were ads, but mostly with stunning photography), but for the visual sense of everything that pervades its coverage. As I looked up from my reading, I saw an unexpected and striking sense of style displayed by a nearby patron. And I wandered throughout the Library, always finding something new. Finally, I happened into the men’s room and, being mindful of the literary, I thought of Don DeLillo and his remarkable 1971 short story “In the Men’s Room of the Sixteenth Century” *, so I did a commemorative selfie.
RELATED:
https://relevantmagazine.com/magazines/septoct-2017/
* “In the Men’s Room of the Sixteenth Century”
First published in Esquire, Dec. 1971, pp. 174-177, 243, 246.
A very baroque tale of a police officer who dresses in women’s clothing and is on the streets of Times Square from midnight to six am, on the anniversary of St. Thomas More’s beheading. While on his rounds, he is known as Lady Madonna, and he runs into such characters as “Burgo Swinney, the eunuchoid pornographer,” and “Longjaw Ed Jolly, a man who claimed to be the last living member of the Castrated Priests of Cybele, a self-mutilation cult.”
Havana Street Art by Alice Arnold
My brother Dennis directs my attention to a photo essay of Havana street art by his friend and photographer/filmmaker, Alice Arnold.
http://streamingmuseum.org/street-art-in-havana/
Architecture and Your Brain
Brother Dennis makes me aware of this intriguing interview with architecture critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen on her new book, “Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives“.
Jeanne Moreau, RIP
Okay, I admit that I have been a fan since even before adulthood, watching her films in the late 50s and into college in the 60s. And just add a little Miles Davis to the mix and … !!!
In the Bathroom of Jax Dog Cafe
Not only a wonderful place to eat, but with subtle touches of art here and there, like Man Ray, Sir Henry Raeburn, August Sander and others …
[rDay Eight-Hundred-Forty]
Acid Test and Vietnam
Ran across this book in the “New” stacks at the local library the other day. As is my frequent custom, I sat down to read the first ten or twenty pages, but this one was so absorbing that I had to take it home with me.
While the central subject matter — the growing evidence that some illegal pariah drugs, including LSD and Ecstasy/MDMA, have legitimate clinical and medical uses and could even represent breakthroughs in dealing with some anxiety and psychological disorders (like PTSD) — was compelling enough, I was especially riveted with patient accounts of their war experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, Viet Nam. As you may know, almost anything related to Viet Nam is of particular interest to me, owing to my (non-combatant) experience there in 1967-68 during that war, and having friends directly adversely affected by their time in combat.
Now, today on July 4, I find myself receiving periodic newsletters from the New York Times on its “Vietnam ’67” project series. Check out an example here and subscribe if you care to.
ASIDE: Perhaps you have noticed differing spellings of that Southeast Asian country: Vietnam, Viet Nam, or even VietNam. Viet Nam is closest to the original way that Vietnamese people spell it, and that is how, as a US Government employee, I was instructed to use it (with VietNam a frequent variation in the context of governmental acronyms, etc.) However, I think the contemporary usage throughout most of the world is now “Vietnam” and I see that to be the New York Times convention.
We Gotta Get Out of This Place
Almost no sooner than I had come upon the previously-discussed Smithsonian history upon my last library visit, this morning I ran across this one. And proceeded to read the first twenty pages (but didn’t check it out; the print was dreadfully small!).
This thing is a fascinating sort of historical account of the music that came to be the anthem for the war. And other music that was heard by combatants and civilians at the time, with comments often in their own words, serving to mark those times even more strongly in our memories.
Never will I forget hearing Filipino and South Korean rock bands, often in go-go attire, perform the Animal’s “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” as well as Los Bravos’ “Black is Black” and Dylan’s cover of “Fixin’ To Die” and many other 60s hits, in Saigon bars and officers club venues. Particularly vivid is the recall of an open-air hotel rooftop setting with this music, bar girls, black market beer, all with a backdrop of the fireworks of the war in the distance from the city at nightfall. This book brings it all back.