Hedge Society

Prelude to a pie post.

Click for larger view.

Ohhhhh, I get it.

I posted here the other day about a recent puzzling experience at the Pompidou, which houses the national museum of modern art in Paris. I thought the display of two photographs taken off the internet and filtered through some greens that took up an entire wall was artistically underwhelming. I couldn't figure out why that counted as art important enough to be displayed so significantly. In Paris. At the Pompidou.

But then I came across something by Stephen Weil, who was a foremost commentator on museums, and he cleared the whole thing up for me. In his book Beauty and the Beasts, he wrote: "But there is, I think, a great deal of harm in permitting the public to misinterpret what we are showing and why we are showing it. And to understand that, I think you must turn and look at how the public sees museums, especially art museums...

We who work in museums know that they serve a great many functions...But to the general public, I think, connoisseurship is what museums are about...To the public, museum is not merely a noun, a place; it is also an adjective, meaning 'quality,' meaning 'the best.' When the public describes something as 'a real museum piece,' I think it is referring to that object the way Matthew Arnold referred to certain things as 'touchstones,' specimens of the highest quality."

He continues: "The questions, then, are: What are our responsibilities when, as we constantly do, we show specimens of less than the highest quality?" (Note to self when I read this - WHAT?!?! Museums CONSTANTLY show specimens of less than the highest quality?? I am truly Joe Public. Jill, actually. Or maybe Joan.)

And then he tells this story.

"I was in a large midwestern art museum a few weeks ago with somebody who was quite knowledgeable about paintings but not about museums. In one of the impressionist galleries, there is a particular spot that is clearly the most prominent place in the room: a panel, running from floor to ceiling. You see it - a very long view of it - when you come in. On it was a Degas sketch that was, I thought, one of the weakest things in the gallery. There were marvelous paintings on both the side walls, with just this sketch hanging on the panel. The woman I was with looked puzzled and said, 'I just don't understand why that's hanging there.' I said, 'I'll bet you anything that it's the only thing in the room from a living donor.' It was. It was there to please the donor, and the public had no way to interpret that. They just had to believe that the museum thought it was the finest painting in the room."

Clickety-clickety-click (the sound of things in my brain sliding into place).

2009: Ashes to Alvin

I read this article every Ash Wednesday.

Ashes to Alvin by Anne Lamott

My father's ashes have poured through my fingers like sand. So have my friend Pammy's. I poured their ashes off sailboats out on San Francisco Bay. I poured my father's into the water near Angel Island, late at night, but I was very drunk. And I tossed a handful of Pammy's into the water way out past the Golden Gate Bridge during the day, with her husband and family, when I had been sober several years. And the second time I was able to see, because it was daytime and I was sober, the deeply contradictory nature of ashes, that they are both so heavy and so light.

They're impossible to let go of entirely. They stick to things, to your fingers, your sweater. I licked my friend's ashes off my hand, to taste them, to taste her, to taste what was left after all that was clean and alive had been consumed, burnt away. They tasted metallic, and they blew every which way. We tried to strew them off the side of a boat, romantically, with seals barking from the rocks on shore, under a true blue sky, but they would not cooperate. They rarely will. It's frustrating if you are hoping to have a happy ending, or at least a little closure, a movie moment when you toss them into the air and they flutter and disperse. But they don't. They cling, they haunt. They get in your hair, in your eyes, in your clothes.

Food, take two.

(Photo: Sharks for sale at the fish market in Dubai.)

I've been thinking a lot about food lately, what with the 2008 Chinese tainted milk catastrophe, the 2008 Canadian listeriosis outbreak via Maple Leaf foods, the 2009 U.S. salmonella outbreak via Peanut Corp, and life sciences companies like Monsanto, most famous for its genetically modified seeds, its attempts to patent a pig, and its fight to control milk production. (Please, Monsanto. You are famous enough. Stop now.)

(Photo: Greengrocer in Dubai.)

Food just isn't what it used to be, and I'm feeling more tentative all the time about what's available in grocery stores. I'm starting to daydream about some land where I can run a little hobby farm and grow a huge kitchen garden - where I'll harvest all my own organic vegetables from heritage seeds instead of genetically modified ones, spend the extra dollars for organic eggs if the chickens don't lay, and weed the old-fashioned way - by hand, and not with herbicide. It looks like I'm not the only one. People are talking about growing their own fruits and vegetables or even their own wheat. Sure, it's hard work. But urban gardeners like Mary Seton Corboy claim that physical labor matters: "It is an integral part of the process, and I want to be part of the process, the beginning, the middle, and the end."

After all, if we keep going the way we are - antibiotics in our cows and chickens, mercury in our fish, hormones in our milk, and fewer nutrients in our fruits and vegetables - going back to doing things ourselves might eventually be the only way left to us. Then again, there's got to be a reason human civilization was agricultural for thousands of years. Ever wonder if industrial society with its mass production is a little 200-year blip on the scale of human history? Something we'll look at another 200 years from now and say, boy, was that ever a mistake. And a close call.

Small can be big.

Here at the hedge, we keep an eye out for good things happening all over, and today we came across this Very Good Thing: SmallCanBeBig.org.

Small Can Be Big is a site founded just last year that works a lot like Kiva.org, except they're more locally based, working with needy families in Massachusetts. 100% of every donation goes to help a family at risk of becoming homeless get back on their feet. Families have been screened by reputable local charities, and any size donation is accepted, from $1 to whatever you can afford. All you do is visit the site, read the stories, and then choose to help who you will. I wanted to give some hope to this family: a 16-year old boy who's helping his mom fight cancer. They need help with the rent by March 7th or they'll lose their home and have to go into a shelter.

I am a huge fan of opportunities like this. Awhile back, there was a year or two when I struggled to pay my rent because of a confluence of choices I had made, some good, some bad. What I remember most about that time is lying awake at night worrying, trying not to worry, trying to figure out how things would work out, praying, praying, praying for the problems to be solved, for the chance to figure out how to solve them.

Having gotten past that, I can now say that that was one of the best experiences of my life, because I don't think I would ever have really understood what it's like to lie awake at night worrying about money until it happened to me. It's a desperate feeling - and there were times when something that looked like magic happened - a new opportunity, something in the mail, whatever, that would make me cry because I was so relieved, that made me feel there was something unseen at work in the world. And I've always wondered since then what it's like for all those people who aren't bad off enough to warrant help through the established channels, but who just need a little bit of something to help them through.

I think one of the most beautiful things we can do for each other in this world is to give each other hope, to hold out to each other, as Rumi says, the "secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can't hope." To whisper the fragile belief that things really will be OK. To say along with Julian of Norwich, that in the end, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

Friday Roundup: Film

Oh, 'tis the season when marketing companies go into high gear and try to convince the world that the Academy Awards are the high water mark in international film making. A little good does slip in here and there but there are many ways of seeing films outside of the studio system and if you can't afford to go to film festivals there are more chances to see a few things online. It's imperfect but still a way to whet the appetite - like looking at paintings in art books until you get the chance to see all the brush stokes in person. 

If you've read a Canadian news or social media site you will know that the National Film Board of Canada has released many of their films online. You may want to relive the glory of The Hockey Sweater but this little one minute film of morphing Canadian faces had me transported back to Saturday afternoon pauses in between Bugs Bunny cartoons.

And speaking of animation, Doug Cummings who keeps the blog Film Journey and wrote a Beyond magazine column of the same name points this out:

I've been raving about "Sita Sings the Blues" this year, an animated feature done entirely in Flash by a New York animation instructor named Nina Paley. She funded the film on her own (printing it on 35mm theatrical film) and is in debt up to her ears now, so she can't pay for the music rights or distribute the film beyond festival and special venue screenings.

The excellent Cartoon Brew blog has posted the first eleven minutes, which will give you a taste of the rest--definitely worth watching.

If the Oscars truly mattered in any sense, I'd say she was robbed of a Best Animated Feature nomination.

Doug has also given us some hints about where to find films if we have limited access to funds and festivals. We'll post those and start our own little cinema here at the hedge over the next few days.

Who knew

According to an economist, "Beethoven and Michelangelo, who sold their artworks for a profit, were entrepreneurs and capitalists." So participating in a system makes you a noun in that system? I guess that means growing vegetables on my balcony makes me a farmer! Good to know.

Pourquoi pas toi?

I was lucky enough to be in Paris just before Christmas and got to wander around the Pompidou for a couple of hours looking at contemporary art. Last time I was there I really enjoyed myself, but this time? Not so much. I wasn't sure what to make of some of it, and that's pretty normal for modern art, but still. Take this for example: two huge green, grainy pictures took up an entire Pompidou wall, and you've got to figure space is at a premium in a place like this. One of the photos was of a group of teenagers with their backs to the camera, and the other was a photo of two teenage boys looking at the photographer, with more teenagers in the background. 

I stood there looking, wondering exactly what this was about. I thought, OK, maybe the idea is FANTASTIC and explains whatever this is perfectly. As the Chinese proverb says, if an idea is present, the brush may be spared performance. But this is what the artist's statement said:

Translated, I think this means that if you take somebody else's photos off of the internet, point out that a photo is "a moment suspended in time" (which we have known since 1827), say "hey, who and when are these people anyway?" (which you don't know because they're not your photos), and say what's new for you is the color green, you too could be celebrated as a modern artist in the Pompidou. Which maybe is why this sign was posted down by the museum entrance the day I was there - in English: why not you?

Sounds like Twitter, 25 years too early.

"The competitors [for private recognition] speculate on the market, intrigue against near rivals, and bargain for small gains: I'll admire you if you'll admire me. They exercise power, spend money, display goods, give gifts, spread gossip, stage performances - all for the sake of recognition. And having done all this, they do it all again, reading their daily gains and losses in the eyes of their fellows, like a stockbroker with his morning paper."

Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 1983

You grow, girl

In a 4-minute radio essay, Mary Seton Corboy, an urban gardener in Philadelphia, explains why she believes in physical labor:

 
"A small fortune and a whole lot of time was spent on my education, so I could choose my employment and would never have to resort to picking up a shovel or digging a ditch to make a living. But in spite of the careful planning to ensure me a clean-fingernail future, I find my job, the job I relish on most days, is digging some version of a ditch. Of course, some of these ditches are metaphorical, but others are the old-fashioned move-the-dirt-around kind. And that's alright with me. In fact, it's what I want. I enjoy the ditch-digging part of my work because it's just one component of the how and why and what I do every day. My job calls for a lot of thinking and problem-solving - the how-to of what I do - and an equally heavy dose of community interaction - the why of what I do.

In my life as an urban farmer, it's as if I try to build a well for my neighborhood to draw from, start to finish, every day. There are many people who believe I should figure out how to pay someone to design the ditch, hire someone to dig the channel, and charge the people for the water that comes from the well. And then, having emailed, faxed, Excelled and Powerpointed all day, use the money I made from the well project to hire someone in a leotard to make me push a ball around a gym, and wrap my leg around my head. That would be their idea of success, but not mine.

Simply put, we aim to be too good to do physical labor. The thing is, I want the physical labor. It is an integral part of the process, and I want to be part of the process, the beginning, the middle, and the end...Physical labor creates the elusive bond that moves my work from cerebral and calculating to meaningful and engaged." 

(Photo from WHYY's This I Believe Philadelphia)