The right stuff for a snowstorm binge

A recent pre-snowmageddon visit to the Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum included the Imax 3D film about the Blue Angels and a planetarium show about asteroids, planetoids, comets, and the technology exploring them.

At the museum, I was most inspired by the films and banners paying tribute to women pioneers of air and space, from Bessie Coleman, Amelia Earhart, and Jackie Cochran to Katherine Johnson, Sally Ride, and Amanda Lee (first female Blue Angel demonstration pilot).

Glamorous Glennis, Chuck Yeager's sound-barrier-breaking craft

All this inspired me to compile a playlist for the upcoming hibernation. I didn't realize I had so many air-and-space and problem-solving women DVDs in my collection, but there it is. 

• The Right Stuff, which is, as everyone should know, the best movie ever made. (Right, I'm just supposed to say whether I liked it, leaving out "good" or "bad." What do I know?) You think it's about competition: test pilots competing with each other, Americans competing with Soviets, astronauts competing with each other to be the leader of the group and/or the first to ride the rocket. But really, it's about relationships--among men and among women and among men and women. Anyway, as they all figured out, "we've got to stick together on this." The cooperative model wins.
• Hidden Figures, the story of the brilliant women working behind the scenes for NASA's missions, including Mercury (as in The Right Stuff) and Apollo (as in Apollo 13 and TV's Timeless episode on the attempted sabotage of the Moon landing).
• Apollo 13, which should have been a logical sequel to The Right Stuff, but for various reasons I was a bit disappointed. Great story telling (working the problem of a crippled craft), but the soundtrack full of angel choirs and soaring emotional crescendos annoys me. But: Tom Hanks, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise, Kevin Bacon. You know.
• Forever Young, just to jump back in time for more test pilot stuff, plus work toward future space missions via the cryogenics experiment that catapults Mel Gibson 50 years into the future. Also about relationships, Elijah Wood's need to replace his missing father, and some pretty good aerial cinematography. More, please!
• Deep Impact, launching us into a planet-rescuing space mission to thwart an extinction-level event--a comet discovered by Elijah Wood. Téa Leoni stars as an ambitious cable-news reporter who inadvertently discovers the meaning of E.L.E. Great cast in this film, led by Morgan Freeman as a pre-Barack Obama president and Robert Duvall as the aging astronaut bringing his real-world experience to bear on a younger crew trained on video games. (Competition, again, before cooperation takes over.)
• An Officer and a Gentleman, again a film about manly competition giving way to the cooperative/supportive leadership model. Great training sequences, including the female officer candidate struggling with physical inadequacy (vis-a-vis the males) but asserting her mental resilience. Really more of a relationship movie (men and men, women and women, men and women). The Cinderella ending bothered me for a long time, but it's iconic now and gets me every time.
• Top Gun, the original. I should include Top Gun: Maverick for the essential air-and-space training and relationship storytelling, but I don't happen to have it in my DVD library yet. Anyway, I only watch the original because the DVD has a commentary track featuring real flight instructors like my high-school classmate, Michael "Flex" Galpin. Mike's the one telling all the "that's accurate" or "that's not how it works" stories. I especially liked his description of one officer's home decor, which featured an "I love me" wall of photographs. 
• Contact, so let's get back to women as problem solvers dealing with male competitiveness. Jodie Foster discovers a message from another star system, and Tom Skerritt, whose character tried to thwart her SETI research, steals her thunder and takes her place on the mysterious transport through wormholes. Again, one of the best cast of actors among all these films, including Matthew McConaughey, James Wood, John Hurt, David Morse, Rob Lowe, and Angela Bassett.
• Courage Under Fire, and I don't care if everyone else thinks Meg Ryan was miscast as a helicopter pilot in the Gulf War. She pulled it off, and with an incredible array of male crew and castmates, notably Lou Diamond Phillips and Matt Damon. Her part of the story is told in flashbacks from different points of view, while the other part of the story is Denzel Washington's investigation of the incident that may or may not earn her a Medal of Honor. Scott Glenn, not incidentally, pitches in as a Washington Post reporter.
• Proof of Life, returning to the miscast (NOT!) Meg Ryan as a woman whose husband (David Morse) is kidnapped by narco-terrorists in a fictional South American country. She works with a specialist in the kidnap-and-ransom (K&R) business, trained in military intelligence, special ops, and hard-core military machismo. That would be Russell Crowe.

Technically, I could have ended my binge here, but it's still too cold outside. Besides, I noticed something about my playlist: a lot of crossovers in both the cast and characters. This made it essential for me to watch that Timeless episode featuring Katherine Johnson and Silence of the Lambs featuring Jodie Foster, Scott Glenn, Diane Baker, and Anthony Heald.

Here are some of the obvious cross-overs:

• The Right Stuff - Ed Harris (Apollo 13), Scott Glenn (Courage Under Fire, Silence of the Lambs), Pamela Reed (Proof of Life).
• Hidden Figures - Katherine Johnson (character, Timeless), John Glenn (character, The Right Stuff).
• Apollo 13 - Ed Harris (The Right Stuff), Gene Kranz (character, Timeless)
• Forever Young and Deep Impact - Elijah Wood.
• An Officer and a Gentleman - Taylor Hackford (director) and David Caruso (Proof of Life).
• Contact - Jodie Foster (Silence of the Lambs), David Morse (Proof of Life), Tom Skerritt (Top Gun).
• Courage Under Fire - Scott Glenn and Diane Baker (Silence of the Lambs), Meg Ryan (Proof of Life).
• Proof of Life - Meg Ryan (Courage Under Fire), Taylor Hackford and David Caruso (An Officer and a Gentleman), David Morse  (Contact), Pamela Reed (The Right Stuff), Anthony Heald (Silence of the Lambs).
• Silence of the Lambs - Jodie Foster (Contact), Scott Glenn (The Right Stuff and Courage Under Fire), Diane Baker (Courage Under Fire), Anthony Heald (Proof of Life).

Now I might go back to all my Jane Austen productions and other British dramas. Lots of cross-over casting there, notably with Downton Abbey.

Love, hosaa
hibernating

3D ready at A&S

Audience for an Audience for the Sun

A fun thing to do in downtown Washington, D.C., on your lunch break is go visit a museum. The Smithsonian, National Gallery of Art, and a lot of others are available, mostly free, and if you're in the neighborhood, even a quick visit is rewarding.

By quick, I mean, spend at least a few minutes really looking at something and thinking about it. This week I chose the Smithsonian American Art Museum, or SAAM, randomly got on the elevator around from the G St. entrance, went to the second floor, and was immediately floored by this:

People in the Sun (1960), Edward Hopper. SAAM. Photo: C.G. Wagner

The "really looking" prompt comes from the inspirational and insightful Amy Herman, author of The Art of Perception and Visual Intelligence. She spoke at a convention I worked at last year, and the latter book was one of my Metro Book Club selections.

Amy Herman book signing, ISRI2017. Photo: C.G. Wagner

So what did I see when looking at people looking at the Sun? Amy suggests starting with the basics: how many people, how many men, how many women, children? What are they wearing? What are they doing? She would advise not ascribing emotional undercurrents to the subjects but describe behaviors and any visual cues. What looks out of place? What is missing?

With this in mind, I see five people: two men and two women in front, and another man by himself in back. The people in the front row are looking ahead, and they're more formally dressed than the man in back, who is reading something. (Note to reader: I just edited "looking" in the previous sentence; I originally used "staring," which has emotional or non-emotional undertones.)

Beside the man alone in back, there is a chair that has a green blanket or other object in it. The people are together in the left side of the composition while the right side shows the environment they're looking at. It is a landscape with a low row of evenly sized hills or mountains, with a field of golden brown grass in front. The people are seated in rows, as in an outdoor auditorium or waiting room.

The portion of the composition with the most "activity" (human beings being alive on the Earth) is crowded and visually alive, and yet the actual subjects are not engaged either with each other or with their environment. One man has a pillow behind his head and is slumped more than the others. The blonde whose face cannot be seen appears to be turning slightly toward the man next to her, and her arm poised on the armrest, perhaps to move forward in the next moment.

Amy wants us to ask questions. What don't we know?

1. Are the people waiting for something, or are they already there, watching?
2. What are they waiting for, or watching?
3. What is the younger (I think) man in back reading?
4. Is what he's reading connected to what the others are watching/waiting for?
5. Is he related to any of the others?

The storyteller in me wants to say that young man a rogue nephew along for a free trip but unwilling to enjoy himself. Either that or he is the only one truly engaged in the moment, reading the brochure as I read the captions beside the paintings in the museum.

---

Since everything is related to everything, I'll mention that I just finished my latest Metro Book Club selection, 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. (It's actually his novelization of the screenplay for the film, which I've never been able to sit through in its entirety.) In it, Clarke's description of the sunset as seen from within the rings of Saturn is breathtaking (surely it would get a rise out of Hopper's passive audience):

As Discovery curved still closer to Saturn, the Sun slowly descended toward the multiple arches of the rings. Now they had become a slim, silver bridge spanning the entire sky; though they were too tenuous to do more than dim the sunlight, their myriad of crystals refracted and scattered it in dazzling pyrotechnics. And as the Sun moved behind the thousand-mile-wide drifts of orbiting ice, pale ghosts of itself marched and merged across the sky, and the heavens were filled with shifting flares and flashes. Then the Sun sank below the rings, so that they framed it with their arches, and the celestial fireworks ceased.

While I applaud from the audience gallery, gazing into the yellowing pages of a 95-cent paperback (printed about 8 years after Hopper painted his Sun-gazers), I can only wish Sir Arthur had been alive to inspire the voyager NASA is sending to the Sun tomorrow. Godspeed, Parker Solar Probe.

Love, hosaa
inspired by the Sun-inspired

Reflections: Art Day Out and Old Friends

Always take the opportunity, when you can, to let art expose itself to you. Downtown for an "informational interview" yesterday, afterwards I found myself once again in the neighborhood of the divine National Museum of Women in the Arts, where I got to visit a few of my old friends - Alice Neel, Frida Kahlo, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, et al.

I also took more time with some other, iconic pieces in the New York Avenue mansion, including Ellen Day Hale and Lilla Cabot Perry occupying this cozy niche:

Another is Alice Bailly, whose selfie features a peculiar reflection across the lens of her monocle:

Alice Bailly (Swiss, 1872-1938). Self-Portrait, 1917. 

According to the caption, this side of her face is apparently painted out, "reflecting what may be a dissociation of the artist from her own image--in short, an identity crisis." More likely, IMO, it reflects a real reflection, the movement of light across her face at that moment in time. That is, after all, what cubism and the futurist movement were about, incorporating the third and fourth dimensions on flat 2-D surfaces.

But the greatest pleasure is in welcoming some newer (new to me) sisters now exhibiting in the third floor permanent collection, including these sadly sweet kiddies by Amy Sherald:

Amy Sherald (b. 1973, Columbus, Georgia). They Call Me Redbone But I'd Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake, 2009

Amy Sherald (b. 1973, Columbus, Georgia). It Made Sense...Mostly in Her Mind, 2011. 

The captions were helpful to me here; the flattened style was the result of treating the skin tones in "grayscale" (there is some tint, you can see, even in these very poor reproductions. Sorry). The children are dressed playfully, but their somber and expressionless demeanor illustrates a deep-seated sadness. Still, the bright, primary colors in which they "play" give me a sense of innocent hope for them.

The other piece that captivated me at the museum was this (again, playful) Edwina Sandys bronze in its own stairwell niche:

Edwina Sandys (b. 1938, London, England). Flirtation, 1994.

Edwina Sandys (b. 1938, London, England). Flirtation, 1994.

Edwina Sandys (b. 1938, London, England). Flirtation, 1994.

I don't suppose the fact that I'd just had pears and bananas for breakfast had anything to do with why this piece caught my eye! Face it, who doesn't like flirty, birdlike fruit.

The second floor was closed off for between-exhibitions reconfiguring, so my visit was a little shorter than I would have liked. (And when, oh when, will the Mezzanine Cafe ever serve food? Nary a morsel in any of my visits.)

So over the blocks I go toward the Smithsonian American Art Museum to see what's what, and what was what now was the fabulous Richard Estes exhibit. Speaking of old friends! Estes was among the "superrealists" I covered in my senior year seminar on modern art. That was decades ago, and the man is still working his magic!

Okay, I don't want to go to Copyright Jail, so go here to see an example of what Alice Bailly started with that reflection in her monocle:

https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/estes

Bus With Reflection of Flatiron Building (1966-67)

Checkout (2012)

What we see are multiple images, reflected, contorted by other, overlapping realities. In many of the images, people are seen from different angles. The effect of the pictures, though serene in tone, is a taut reminder that we not only see, but are seen by others, whose eyes may see us in twists and turns, fractured and filtered through many surfaces.

Love, hosaa

reflecting on art

P.S. - I still love the old Greyhound Bus Station on New York Avenue. The birds loved it, too:

All photos posted here are by C. G. Wagner. If you use them, credit them, and link back here. Thanks.

Survivance and the American Indian

The little red squiggly line underneath the word "survivance" tells me that it is not an accepted English term, but it is the dominant theme of the National Museum of the American Indian, one of Smithsonian's less-traveled treasures. It's a block past the Air and Space Museum as you come from the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station. It stands between Air and Space and the Capitol dome.

All photos by C. G. Wagner; please credit and link if used.

Some takeaways, including the official museum book and a button commemorating today (Nov. 23) as Native American Heritage Day

View from the fourth floor.

Maidu Creation Story (2001) by Harry Fonseca

Background: Kiowa moccasin leggings

Inset: Kiowa Aw-Day (beaded sneakers) by Teri Greeves, 2004

The term "survivance" is attributed to Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor in the 1994 book Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance and means "more than survival," according to the museum exhibit notes. "Survivance means redefining ourselves. It means raising our social and political consciousness. It means holding onto ancient principles while eagerly embracing change. It means doing what is necessary to keep our cultures alive."

I admit I came to the museum today with no idea that it was Native American Heritage Day (or even American Indian Heritage Month). The day after Thanksgiving is just a good day to explore the unknown parts of my own neighborhood. And I take the broadest sense of that word: the cultures I walk among that are largely strangers to me.

So ignorant am I of this subject matter that, literally, the first I'd ever heard of Squanto was just last night, watching the Peanuts Thanksgiving special (the "Mayflower Voyages" half). So I was happy that the first exhibit I saw today had to do with Squanto, the Patuxet who was kidnapped by Europeans and, upon being returned to North America as a fluent English speaker, helped the Pilgrims adjust to the harsh land and climate.

The signage in the museum directs you to start on the upper floors, where you begin with the beginning, the mythologies of the universe and of creation. I stopped to watch a video presentation of a Cheyenne story about how the Big Dipper was formed. (Down in the bookshop, I could find no book or video or any souvenir of that charming and even tear-inducing story, but here it is at First People's Legends page: "The Quill-Work Girl and Her Seven Brothers.")

You can't help but be impressed by how fully integrated the indigenous peoples of the Americas were (and are) with their environment. It is embedded in the DNA, this reverence and respect for the natural world. I followed the crowd to a display of Alaskan wares, where there was a sheer coat made of an unusual, diaphanous material. Since I was the one standing next to the caption, I identified it for the group as "seal gut." Oooh! was the response. "They didn't waste a thing.... Waste not, want not." We all wondered how it could possibly have kept anyone warm.

"Waste not, want not" needs to apply to people. After having just seen Lincoln and the battle for treating slaves as human beings, I stood there wondering who had been treated worse--Africans who had been kidnapped from their homes and enslaved, or the indigenous peoples whose lands were stolen out from under them and killed outright. (Some of this murder was apparently an accident; the Europeans brought diseases to which natives had no immunity, and their populations were decimated.)

Death and destruction of culture continue even through "modern" times, as Native Americans have had to fight even for the right to educate children in their own languages and customs, and not be confined to a "choice" of either Protestant or Catholic schools.

I have no claims to a religious worldview, but the spiritual connection of humans to each other--and to animals, the land, the elements--makes a lot of sense to me. We are connected to everything and must be, lest we waste whatever it will take for all of our future survivance.

"Limit chaos
And cultivate order:
By singing, dancing, and
Talking to each other.

Realize life is short,
Respect your elders,
And recognize that death
Is a part of living."

--excerpt from "The Maidu Creation Story," told by Henry Azbill, 2002, and put to verse by Judy Allison

Corcoran, Close, Renwick, and Rockwell

Back from the Corcoran and Renwick galleries, so also catching up on the Norman Rockwell exhibition I saw earlier in the week. Corcoran is an independent institution, while the Renwick is part of the Smithsonian's American Art Museum, which hosted the Rockwell exhibition. I like pairing Corcoran and Renwick because they're only a couple of blocks apart; Renwick is off the mall-beaten path for most Smithsonian goers and so less densely populated with tourists.

Today was Corcoran's last "free Saturday" of the summer, where the doors are open for the public to sketch live models in the lobby. Fortunately for me the Chuck Close exhibit was extended, so I got to participate in art and see the exhibit.

This was my first taste of the open sketching event. I like to doodle wherever I go, but my skills were far behind those who attended today, so I gave up. I enjoyed the view of other participatants much better.

In addition to sketchers, there were singers: a performance by the Washington Revels was going on upstairs, just outside the galleries containing the Close exhibit.

The Chuck Close prints exhibit was interesting to me because I hadn't studied his work since college, which at the time would have stopped with his photorealism work. After that, he began experimenting with materials and techniques, from paper pulp to his own fingerprints.

This work would seem to me to fall more into the realm of craft, which is what the Renwick specializes in.

The Renwick's permanent collection features paintings that most of us would consider art, but also pieces that showcase the skill (craft) of working with materials such as clay, glass, fabric, and wood.

Grand Salon, Renwick Gallery

Blanket Cylinder Series (1984) Dale Chihuly

The featured exhibition at Renwick was "The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942-1946." The objects in the collection were largely made of found materials--scrap wood, metals, shells, and other pieces.

This demonstrated an impulse to create that transcended the degradation to which humans had been exposed. It would be the same impulse that led Chuck Close to continue to create and experiment and express his vision despite physical disabilities.

Returning to the Norman Rockwell exhibit, "Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell. From the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg," I'm drawn to the "realism" of his technique, much as I was to Chuck Close's earlier works. Whereas Rockwell's realism was more idealized, Close's was more hyper-realistic. Both forced an idea of reality onto the viewer that is actually quite artificial. One did it with whimsy, carefully casting his scenes with real actors and constructing the sets, and the other with a startling focus on that most intimate of subjects, the face, decontextualizing it through sheer scale.

Before I even decided to see the Rockwell exhibit, I'd read a review (rant, actually) that lambasted this art as propaganda for an idealized America that never existed. Rockwell was a commercial illustrator; of course the images were selling something. I've never felt that diminished the work as art. My favorite piece in the collection, showing a writer dreaming of Daniel Boone, was an ad for Underwood Typewriters.

Back over to the Renwick, I loved the objects in the permanent collection, though I have to say I am bitterly disappointed to have bought a book from the gift shop that featured only one of the objects I saw today (Chihuly's glass cylinder; see above). The book, it turns out, was published in 1998. That's like a century ago, right?

Anyway, the most popular piece today was this glass dress by Karen LaMonte.

"Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery" (2009)

I say it was a popular piece because I had to wait about 10 minutes to get a clear shot of it. There were three women who took turns taking photos of each other with their heads sticking up out of the neckline of the glass dress.

Actually, it made me smile to see that. What started over at the Corcoran a couple of hours earlier--a day of people experiencing art at a very personal level--was just being carried over by these ladies enjoying a work of exquisite craft.

It is why we create, is it not?

love, hosaa
observing observers of life and art

Credit: All photos by C. G. Wagner