Looking and Seeing

My little girl found a flower "falling apart" in the backyard this evening, and gathered these petals, placed them in a bowl of water, and set it on our table.



I don't know how long this fetish about colors in bottles at different lights will last. My obsessions, serial in nature, usually go on until I figure out the problem is I feel compelled to solve. These various photos probably seem identical to my readers; but they all represent different arrangements and different combinations of colors through time.

This set tonight was backlit as the sun fell toward Twin Peaks in the west.

I did something similar a couple years ago, before I was a Blogger*. Maybe I'll dig out those photos one of these long summer evenings. In that experiment, I filled water balloons of various hues with water, then arranged them in what (to me) seemed to be color patterns.

I've always loved colors, they seem magic to me. I don't have a particularly sophisticated color sense; many years around designers has led to this piece of self-knowledge, but I somewhat make up for this deficiency with my passion.

During my brief career as an art dealer, selling Rauschenberg paintings for hundreds of thousands of dollars per piece, I began to appreciate Rauschenberg's various obsessions, including the color palette that he employed over and over again. Even so, when it came to color, he often made me mad. For example, the subtle greens and browns he used for an Earth Day painting, a signed print of which my second wife and I received as one of our most special wedding gifts (it now hangs in her home), riles me up every time I look at it.

You could say I'm more of a Primary Colors kind of guy.

Still, Rauschenberg did produce one richly colorful piece during the period I was representing the owners of his works -- a deep red rendition with an image of an egret -- way back somewhere on this blog, I posted a photo off that piece, which is no longer available for purchase, sadly.

I believe I could still wrangle a piece free if anyone had about a million U.S. dollars they wanted to drop. Last time I checked, it could be had. It is a huge piece; you'd need the walls of a mansion to properly display it (or a museum). But, as it is essentially an ode to his favorite first assistant, himself now a successful artist on his own, the story behind the painting would make this kind of price a bargain once the last of our great American artists from the post-war abstract expressionism/pop art phases passes on.

Prices are always about relative value. That's what makes art such a strange commodity to trade. The death of an artist automatically results in an uptick in his market valuation, simply because (s)he, finally, is done, and the finite number of works (s)he has produced now stands as her/his legacy.

***

Looking up into the weekend sky last Saturday night, I saw Jupiter juxtaposed with a slender slice of the Moon. Did you know that when you look at the sky, you are looking back through time? This is a sample of the kind of knowledge contained in a new book by Natalie Angier, called "The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science."

***

Today, a slender Siamese cat I have often noticed several yards away was on my housemate's back stairs. My housemate, meanwhile, is in Mexico, working on her tan lines. I do not know whether this cat is young or old, but I do know she was in some sort of quandary this morning.

She kept trying to figure out how to navigate a narrow rail of the steps past some heavy vegetation that hangs over it. She would start to try and circumvent the blockage, then lose her nerve, and retreat. Then she would slink into a narrow space between two planks that caused her to stretch out narrowly like a ballet dancer imitating a snake.

She wanted something; what, I am not quite sure. But, given where her eyes kept roaming, I think she wanted to get back home. Home happens to be where that Asian family lives, an old man, an old woman, and a beautiful young woman who often smokes on their back porch.

I watched this cat for what seemed to be hours, but must not have been, because I was not late for work. Eventually, she gave up on her quest to solve the mystery of how to circumvent the vegetative block on the rail to descend the stairs and run across our yard, hop the fence, and return home to her family.

Much later, after an absence of many days, the young Asian woman appeared on her back stoop. The cat looked happy. The woman looked sexy.

I looked on peacefully, knowing all was once again right here in this little secret corner of our universe.

* This blog started in April 2006 and has been updated on a daily basis, with a few interruptions, and often multiple times a day ever since.

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One Prayer

"Hey, Dad, why doesn't our family name follow the i-before-e rule?" asked wily Dylan, aged 11.

"I don't really know," I stumbled.

"Because we are awesome!" interjected Dylan. "We break the rules."

My own Dad used to enjoy pointing out that a "weir" is a dam in old English, as well as modern British English (we never use the term over here in the colonies.) Dad loved to say that it was fine for people to say "those damn Weirs," because they were just being descriptive (or more precisely, redundant.)

I'm thinking of my father tonight for a number of reasons. None more immediate than the fact that my sole surviving blood relative from my parents' generation, Uncle George Anderson, underwent a risky surgery today, and I'm thinking about him, Aunt Reta, Dan, George and Betty, especially because they all are still recovering from losing the youngest boy in the family, Gordie, earlier this year.

If I could pray without being a hypocrite, I'd pray for Uncle George to have a safe recovery, and remain in the world with us. As it is, I'll just say that. You are in my mind tonight. May you recover, and have a healthier future than otherwise would have been likely.

I respect my uncle -- a lot. I know he had to travel across state lines to get this operation, which is not necessarily recommended for a person of his age and in his shape. But his quest is to live more fully, or not to live at all.

My mother, his sister, made the same choice four and a half years ago. In her case, technology did not present an acceptable (to her) option. In her little brother's case, technology, albeit risky, does.

So he's going for it. I love my extended family, with so many courageous people, each in his or her own way. They've all fed my spirit these 60 years; if I can give anything of value back, may it be this: Us Andersons and Weirs are first-generation immigrants in this strange world. We are tough; we know how to survive.

Let's continue to do so, and show others that the only hope you need to have is your own. Stay hopeful; there's so much to live for, at any age.

***

Meanwhile, I got the invitation at the top of this post from my youngest today. Her animal? A Siberian Tiger. I'll be there.

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Madam Speaker

Photo by Megan Kung

My MyWire colleague Megan, who's a talented photographer, captured Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and therefore holder of the highest post in the Presidential Line of Succession of any woman in the history of this country, at an event here in the Bay Area.

Though still early in her term, Pelosi has already had a major effect on U.S. foreign policy, by visiting with various leaders in the Middle East, and forging new communication channels in the region. She's succeeded in pressuring the Bush administration to renew diplomatic efforts that had been languishing.

Ultimately, if the chaos in the Middle East eventually diminishes, and the warring parties sit down to negotiate the issues that they currently are fighting over, we may have Nancy Pelosi (who happens to represent my district in Congress) to thank.

She's also been leading the effort to get Bush to establish an exit strategy for U.S. forces in Iraq, and so far, she has been less successful in that. The difference is that under the Constitution, the President is Commander in Chief, with greater war powers; but Congress has a central role in conducting foreign policy.

The overall framework for next year's Presidential elections will likely be primarily determined by two people not on the ballot: George W. Bush and Nancy Pelosi.

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Traveler's Tales

If you devote a portion of your life to visiting distant parts of the globe, you'll often end up bringing back some exotic mementos. That certainly happened to me, although those pictured above are not mine, but a friend's.

These antiques come from Tibet, China, Nepal -- mostly from the Himalayan regions. There are antique daggers, religious artifacts, gems, carved ivory, hand-painted containers, and ancient coins.

A friend brought them by recently to show the kids and me. Of course, the large dagger from China caught their imagination, as they all crowded in to slide it out of its sheathe and admire its possibilities.

We lost most of our Afghan and Indian antiques when our van was burglarized in the alley next to our SunDance office at 1913 Fillmore Street in late 1971.

I filed a police report but nothing ever was recovered. The cops said I should cruise the many pawn shops then in San Francisco, and I did so for months, but to no avail. What we lost was priceless, not so much in monetary terms (we'd never had them evaluated), but as memories of two years in a distant land that all too soon was going to be essentially obliterated by unending decades of war.



I still have a few tiny things from Afghanistan and Kashmir hidden away so thoroughly than not even I can find them easily. But my friend's collection inspired me to look for them. Someday soon. Each and every item has its stories, of course, packed away inside itself. How and when and where I obtained these things is the only part of their stories I can tell --the rest have to be imagined.

I like it that way.

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Coming and Going

You're up, then down; back, then forth; sad, then happy; bright, then dull; your boss likes you, then hates you; you win the game, you lose the game: you're a hero, you're the goat; she loves me, she loves me not; you're young and smooth, then, all of a sudden, you are old and wrinkled; you feel brilliant, then stupid; you're in a car on a dark night. I touch you there, you touch me here. We lift up this, and pull down that.

The sun comes up, the sun goes down. The tide comes in, the tide goes out. If you pay close attention, you can spot the tide line, the place where opposites meet, with lots of stuff floating along the crooked line it etches across the top of the bay.

Friends come and go. Kids grow. Some of your former students disappear; others stay in touch, add you to their Facebook "friends" list, etc.

The flowers open up to the sun and close down to the night, precisely as a woman welcomes you and then rejects you, in the natural order of things, from a man's point-of-view. Your eyes struggle to see without squinting in the brightness; your pupils expand to help you find your way through the night.

Your pupils also expand when you stare into the eyes of someone you find attractive. You are helpless in this. You can't regulate attraction. It's the sparkle in the eye, the smell, barely perceptible, the voice, the hair, the lips, and the connection no less intense than electricity.

We live, we die. At birth, the baby struggles into this world with an intensity of purpose that is almost freakish. (S)he will not be denied. At our final moments, it is a struggle also to die. The body does not let go easily. Finally, after a period of quiet, there is restlessness, some shudders, a final physical goodbye.

The sun shines, the rains fall. Your luck seems good. You win at the slots. You find a $20 bill on the street. You're luck deserts you. The credit card debt feels overwhelming.

The words come easily; the words don't come at all. You do everything you can imagine to get them moving. You make some coffee, you water the plants, read the paper, clean up the kitchen, maybe, and finally, you masturbate, just to get it out of your system.

Then, after all this and more, you write. First the words inch into your fingertips; soon they flow like a waterfall in Yosemite. Yes! Now, you are on a roll. The story is coming, much as a lover is cuming. The intensity is volcanic.

Finally, your story can be told.

***

I tried to post several pictures but somehow this interface failed me. What worked was a collection of my favorite baseball cards. Heroes of mine, every one.

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Attachments\

Here's the backside of a silver dollar that was minted in 1884. Where were you that year? The answer, for all of us, is nowhere, because we would have to be 123 years old to have been on earth when this coin was minted, and there simply is no one in North America that old tonight.

Here is what was happening when this coin was born: The Democratic convention was held in Chicago in July 1884. Grover Cleveland was the front-runner from the opening of the convention. The only major opposition to Cleveland was from the New York Tammany organization. Cleveland received the nomination on the second ballot with 683 votes. Cleveland's opponent in the election was James Blaine of Maine. President Arthur attempted to receive the Republican nomination, but had little support. The only individual at the convention who had a chance to receive nomination other than Blaine was General Sherman. He ended speculation that he would run by making what has become known as a Sherman statement: "If nominated, I will not accept, and if elected I will not serve." Blaine won the nomination on the fourth ballot.

The major issue in the election was the integrity of the candidates themselves. Blaine was attacked for his close relations with the railroad interests, from which it was claimed that he received financial benefits. Blaine's opponents published what were called the "Mulligan Letters", which purported to show that Blaine received bribes. Cleveland, on the other hand, was attacked for being immoral for his affair before his marriage with Maria Halpin, which produced a son. The Republicans would chant, "Ma Ma Where's my Papa". Cleveland was able to defuse the story by telling the truth. Cleveland received the support of many reformers including several leading Republicans. Cleveland won the election in a close vote.

(courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Just imagine if this coin could talk, what she could tell us. How many hands have held her, felt her sensual thickness, rubbed her sweet spots. On her front side, the date of her issue is almost imperceptible; thus I asked her to turn over before photographing her.

Lady Liberty graces her front. For almost a century and a half, she has been passed, from hand to hand, much like some women are treated by men. Finally, now, she has found a safe home with me and mine. We don't treat the women we love like objects.

Still, a dollar is a dollar, right?

I suspect this one is worth a great deal more than that. Are there takers? After all, we all have a price, as do our attachments, right? If somebody wants to bid on this particular Lady Liberty, tell me.

But be prewarned, the markup may be great. After all, I don't give anything away cheaply, unless, of course, it is in exchange for a great story.

Because stories, unlike coins, save lives.



Oops. She has turned over. Here is her front!

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Bygone: The Age of Romance

These stunning images came to me today courtesy of my relative Mike Dormer, who's visiting San Francisco for a few days. His father, Bob (I knew him as Uncle Buck) Dormer, was in naval intelligence inside China in WW2, when the U.S. and China were allied in repelling Japanese aggression in Asia and the Pacific Theatre.



Besides his old B&W images from inside China (some of which I'll publish in time), Uncle Buck saved these amazing hotel cards from the great colonial hotels throughout Asia, where he traveled during and after the war.



Mike and his brothers grew up for their formative years in Japan, just like his cousins, my first ex-wife, her sister and brother. I first met Mike and his older brother Bob on Sanibel Island in the late '60s.

We were aged as a group from 16-21 or so, and we were infected with the idealistic mood of our generation, not yet cynical about our chances to change the world. Naively, we plotted revolution, just like cells of kids did all over the country in that era of the civil rights struggles and the anti-Vietnam War movement.

One idyllic night, there in a true paradise, in the Dormers' house on San Carlos Bay, the five of us were having one of our 'heavy' conversations when Aunt Ellie Dormer cheerfully broke in on us, "Would you kids like some popcorn?"

***

Decades have passed, as they always do. The WW2 generation, our parents, have passed on, all but the last few. Our generation, the Baby Boomers, may be renamed in retrospect the Seekers, for all our wandering, our restlessness, our sense that what we have known can't be all their is.

To a man or a woman or any other of our genders, we Baby Boomers remain oddly optimistic at one moment, plunged into hopelessness the next. Jimmy Thompson captures our essence as certainly as anyone right now. Rather than pathologize any one of us, for our depressions, our addictions, our breakups, our odd discontinuous lives, it is time that social-psychological-anthropologists start analyzing the way this first post-modern generation has adapted to a world of continuous, massive change.

(Here, a note: I'm not ignorant of history, so I am not arguing that this is the first such generation. There will be time for historical analogies later; or my favorite Australian reader may contribute his ideas, always fresh, in "Comments." But my sense is that ours is the first generation to attempt to come to grips with our documented ability to end life on earth.)

The ethical dilemmas that soon will confront humanity dwarf any in our collective memory. But not, apparently, from the history written in the layers beneath our feet. What's this I read in this weekend's news? That there is evidence that the northern hemisphere was ignited in a giant fireball when a meteor exploded too close as it passed earth in space some thousands of years ago, extinguishing cavemen in the process?

Who knows what calamities preceded us here. Almost every culture has stories, myths, traditions that have emerged from the oral traditions that are layered beneath our written eras. These ancient tales came down father to son and mother to daughter from times so distant that no one can say whether they are "real" or imaginary.

All we know is that, as stories, they have the capacity to make us shudder, even today.

Many times, as a youth preoccupied with the threat of nuclear war, which would have obliterated all human life, and the first post-war plague (polio), which though horrible and immediate in my youth, was but a weak precursor to the terror of AIDS, I wondered why I should be here, in such a violent place?

Inside my own mind, I was a gentle, soft person, sensitive to the movements of clouds, the songs of birds and frogs, the patterns of numbers, the compositions of classic pianists. I felt out of synch with this world. Eventually, as I grew to my full height, six feet, and my shoulders broadened, a line of muscles formed across my upper back, my legs became iron-strong, and my sexual drive coursed through me, demanding pursuit of potential mating partners, I stopped thinking of myself as gentle and sensitive.

In sports, no one considered me a softie. I hit, and took hits, bouncing up laughing every time -- in hockey, football, baseball, basketball. For a career, I chose investigative reporting, or it chose me.

But that's another story. The cinema may romanticize muckrakers, like it does detectives, as tough guys, and sometimes, some of us are, or were. But it didn't take long for me to recognize that my chosen work was actually much more intellectual than macho.

That can be another story. The waves of time bring nostalgic times alive that I never knew. These images of Mike's, of Uncle Buck's life, conjure a world that was effectively ended by the time my cohort came on the scene.

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