Apocalypse: Missing Engraved Stamps

The Robt. F. Kennedy 15 cent

I’m old enough to remember when postage stamps were engraved.  The Post Office switched to various litho processes in the 1980s (they’re all printed by commercial companies, the government doesn’t produce any stamps).  Today finding something that’s actually engraved is rare.  Currency is about the only engraved paper you’re likely to hold in your hand and the sloppy printing job done with the black overlay of today’s paper money makes it no pleasure to spend.  No, it was fun to watch the new stamps become available at the post office, the amazing skill engravers employed weaving lines to render a wrinkled face or jacket lapel.

One of the ‘last hurrahs’ of the engraved stamp was the Robert F. Kennedy stamp of 1979.  The square format, the extreme close-up–in profile, printed in Royal blue (Duke blue!) made it one of the most dramatic designs ever issued by USPS.  I’m not a stamp collector but I went out that month in 1979 and bought a sheet which I carefully kept in the first volume of the Picasso catalogue raisonné I own because it was the safest and flattest place I had.

Part of the slow apocalypse we live in is how you don’t have a choice in quality.  You can’t chose to buy the engraved stamps at three cents more;  one can only buy offset postal stamps that look like the stick-ums your kids get at the doctor’s office.  And if you do bother to go to the PO for an actual stamp, you’re likely to be given a choice of patriotic subjects like “muscle cars” or Elvis.  Enter the four horsemen.

I also miss lick stamps.  If you owned a business, wet-adhesive stamps were a drag.  That was an awful lot of saliva to put on your direct mail. But licking a couple of George Washingtons at home (two for Grandma’s, those letters were always so fat) was enchanting.   Something for a kid to do.  At a flea market I came across a porcelain office stamp wetter.  It looks like some objet d’art now, a harmonic combo of circle and square, like Goethe’s monument to genius.

Perhaps the ‘honey’ in all this.  The start of my porcelain collection.

Apocalypse: Rhymes with “Mindless Technology”

Are computers making people more stupid or are we just tending that way anyway (references to John Boehner not withstanding)?  If so, we’re not only drinking the hemlock, we’re adding a bit of chai as well.  It’s tasty and the barista says it won’t do any harm.

The other day I looked up the word ‘catafalque’ online to be certain of its spelling–mind you, I own a third edition Websters standing in the next room but I still use the internet.  One of the high-ranking pages that popped up in my search for the word was the above site, “Rhymes with CATAFALQUE.”

Nothing rhymes with ‘catafalque.’  Nothing.  It’s a French word and the ‘L’ should be nicely inflected before the hard consonant.  Not ‘baby talk,’ not ‘belle époque’ (as if this were the answer to someone writing a poem and belle époque magically fit the next line), not widow’s walk, not . . .   Well, you get the idea.  It’s not that technology can provide so many useless diversions–consider the site that takes any internet text and rewrites it as if Elmer Fudd had said it,

• De ahwa day I wooked up the wowd ‘catafawqwe’ onwine to be cewtain of its spewwing–mind woo, I have a thiwd edition Webstews in the next woom but I stiww wooz the intewnet–and one of dee high-wanking pages dat popped up in my seawch was the abwuv, “Whymes wif CATAFAWQWE.” Nofwing whymes wif ‘catafawqwe.’

–it’s that the internet can be programed to render so much content automatically bad.  I’m waiting for some group–most likely funded by Citizens United–to develop a web translator that perverts every fact on a website.  Sort of the internet version of Fox News.  Or a translator that modifies everything internet text into happy news.  Or a site that modifies everything into an aspect of tire rotation (funded by Discount Tires).  In the meantime we’ll have to be content with an automatic rhyming dictionary that rhymes with the acuity of Mother Goose verse.  “Said my mother to your mother, ‘It’s chop-a-nose day.’!”

Honey: Louise Nevelson Toilet Paper

In our bathroom we hang our towels elsewhere than the porcelain-and-plastic towel rack that came with our 1980s home.  I put a couple of tasteful brushed-nickel towel racks next to the shower for serious towel disposition.  What we like to have in the lavabo (Latin: “I wash my hands”) is plenty of toilet paper.  Not the one discreet roll hidden under a fabric pall (I always think of my great Aunt Marie who had one of the knitted TP covers that looked like a hat) but a slew.  It’s the only decoration worthy of the bathroom*.  Toilet paper doesn’t need hiding.  Everyone knows what it’s for;  children instinctively pull an entire roll on the floor if they’re left to themselves because, well, that’s part of its toilet-paper-ness.

Awhile ago I suggested we load up the towel bar with spare rolls in a minimalist way.  We began à la Donald Judd doing the understated thing:  “Eight White Cylinders, 1986.”  Soon however, the history of art took over. We skipped Andy Warhol (“Charmin Rolls, 1964”)–we’re not into branding–briefly did Jeff Koons (“Ilona with Toilet Paper, 1991″) but finally settled on Louise Nevelson.  Nevelson’s great assemblages of discarded objects seemed perfect for the medium.  It’s a pity she didn’t apply herself to the scatological paper art form.  But as she did not, it’s up to us.  

Toilet paper as an element allows an interesting array of possibilities.  It’s a cylinder, a rectangle–viewed from the side–a circle (on end), a hole (negative space–dig the esthetic connotations here!) all in grisaille.  To buy pastel colored toilet paper would be to leave the avant garde. It stacks sometimes haphazardly, sometimes solidly.  I don’t know which of us it was who first came up with the idea of setting some rolls on their sides or precariously at the tip of another roll.  But after that, the spirit of Louise took over.  I notice of late a little Robert Indiana creeping in, vid. the jaunty angle of the top left roll in this blog’s example, above.

It’s also performance art (don’t make me explain this in too much detail) but at the very least, the rolls disappear.  They leave and are replaced in a different way.  Guest generally don’t restack the arrangement, a fact that saddens me.  How cool would it be to inhabit the “little boys’ room” and witness the arrangement of John T–?  Visitors are loath, it seems to mess with success.  Or they’re not principally thinking of art when they’re in that room.

Jean Claude Amande once wrote that every generation must reinvent beauty as truth.  I’ll go with that.

 

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*I once visited the White Fish Bay (Wisconsin) home of the art collectors Abraham and Hope Melamed.  They were the foremost collectors of Cubist prints and their collection today is part of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings.  In their bathroom over the toilet reservoir hung one of Picasso’s Vollard Suite etchings.  That, perhaps, the only real decoration for a bathroom.

Honey: The Back of a Statue’s Head

Very seldom do you stand and contemplate the back of a statue.  Most aren’t interesting.  Most are pushed into niches or back against walls.   Statues contain space–that’s why they’re 3D–they inhabit our world, but they’re not meant to be gazed at from all angles.

Costanza Bonarelli from the Piccolomini family was the lover of the great Baroque sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini.  She was also his buddy’s wife, and, in the great Italian tradition of semper non fidelis, enjoyed the male terrain of Rome in general.  Bernini loved her though.  No casual spring fling here.  He carved this portrait for himself at a time when portrait sculpture was earning him big bucks.  In other words, he took time out of his game to play a round for himself.  She was a beauty in the Lazian sense, zaftig and sensual with a strong political sense to her.  Those kind of women have never had to have been drop-dead gorgeous to be in a position to choose their lovers.  Bernini was the most post powerful artist in Rome at the time and her earthy kind of elegance must have hard to resist.

The statue is one of deep affection.  Art historians–this work shows up in every discussion of the lyric–contrast this bust with official sculpture of the time.  It broke convention–her mouth is open–and her gaze is slightly wild and with an implied eroticism (this from the sculptor you brought us the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni!).  The treatment of the hair says it all.  Just look at the half-coiffe and braid at the back of her head.  The kind of thing a guy runs his hands though before intimacy.  The kind of hair to be let down.  Bernini treated the hair with his roughest chisel to show its wildness, to show her personality–one only partially tamed.

Of course, all this lust comes to no good.  Gianlorenzo discovered his brother was doing her, too.  Machismo being what it is, you blame the woman.  Bernini had her faced slashed and he gave away the bust.  Costanza survived and got the message and Gianlorenzo was sent to anger management classes.  Today they’re both pretty much carbon, margherite che crescono, as the spaghetti western cowboys might say.  She looks a lot better in marble today than either one of them do.

Looking at the backs of things, statues, post cards, books, tells us a whole lot.  It’s a fragile habit of the inquisitor, a level of acumen.  Know every woman by how she bobs her hair.  The devil, the saying goes, is in the details, but I’d also venture to say, details divulge the love.

Addendum:  I’m most indebted to Sarah McPhee’s book Bernini’s Beloved (Yale, 2012) for the facts here.  Well worth the price.

Apocalypse: Discarding the Necessary

The neighbors are divorcing.  She’s already moved out.  Odd things come and go.  This morning their (adult) son’s rocking horse sat by the curb for the garbage collection.  It would be one thing to see it with a bunch of refuse bins and bags.  But it sits there by itself.  A horse in motion not in motion.

It’s important to discard what you must and divorce is one of the those moments.  You throw out a lot.  From my own experience, the children are always the biggest casualties and it doesn’t matter if, as in my case, you set ground rules not to involve them.  They get hurt.  Along with all the other stuff at the curb or the box marked for Vets pickup.  It seems to me it all stands by the curb.

So, I pass this happy horse each morning as I head to work, on his way to the dump.  Alles Vergänglicheist nur ein Gleichnis.

Apocalypse: Love isn’t defined by Not Hating

This is not about the gun or abortion issue.  This is about people who assume they can reverse the logic of their opposition and it’ll work for them.

The conservative bumper sticker “If you don’t like guns, don’t buy them!” is a simple flip to the pro-rights slogan, “Don’t like abortion, then don’t have one!”  The original right-to-chose sound bite here is pretty straightforward:  abortion is a moral issue.  It’s fine if you don’t approve of abortion, but don’t make laws to force your convictions on others.  Agree with it or not, that’s the stance.  That particular slogan must have really annoyed conservatives.  Instead of thinking of some clever slogan for their cause, a cute saying like “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” to convince others that carrying lethal weapons everywhere is a good idea (I know, about as cute as the biker shirt, “If you can read this the bitch fell off”), they appropriate the very slogan that annoyed them and turn it on its head to mean something they do agree with.  Except it doesn’t work like that.  The technique is, in fact, childish retribution and the result is non-sensical.

Consider the argument behind the slogan.  If you don’t like abortion, you don’t have one.  You save the life of your fetus.  If you care about other fetuses, you can work to care, feed, clothe, educate and raise those children who would have potentially been aborted (except, of course, the anti-abortionists never do).  But that’s the spirit of the slogan.  However, asserting gun rights by saying, “don’t like guns, don’t buy a gun” doesn’t help all the people Adam Lanza or Dylan Klebold or Eliot Roger murdered.  People for safe streets can refrain from buying all the guns they (don’t?) want and there will still be the same number of gun deaths.  You can’t mirror an argument (i.e. produce its exact inverse) of a conclusion you don’t agree with to get one supporting your side.  This is a pretty simple piece of logic, I guess that’s why it doesn’t work well with conservatives.

The reason this is apocalyptic is that so many people buy into this reverse logic.  Again, I’m not so concerned about the issue as the fact that there are voters out there who swallow the opposite of something they don’t believe as automatically the truth.  Just think, most auto deaths happen at speeds under 55 mph?  Best take your seat belts off on the highway.

 

Honey: Bali Restaurant post card, 1950s?

restaurant indonésien
19 Rue St-Roch
Paris 1

About five years ago I found myself in Saratoga Springs, NY, my wife and I staying with friends (and wedding matron-of-honor and groomsman) Harv and LeAnn.  I’m a poker and a prodder.  A prowler.  Down one street I discovered a basement curio shop, junk more than antiques but with a bin of over-priced old post cards.  Though I have roughly 4-6,000 post cards, I’m not a collector (long story, another post).  For some reason, one card I found of a Paris restaurant called “Bali”, a cartoon rendering of a patron being pampered beyond belief, intrigued me.  The current Djakarta Bali eatery on the rue Vauvilliers in Paris is not this one.  No, this is a place that was once and is no more.  All that’s left is a color postcard that cost a buck.

I took it home (paid for it, actually) and sat it on our kitchen book shelf in a frame where it’s been for the past five years.  It’s strange to display a card from a restaurant that you’ve never been to–one that you couldn’t possibly have been to–among your cooking things.  It’s from a time when restaurants provided post cards as a way to advertise.  In the U.S. in the 1960s Holiday Inns always provided free cards of their cheesy restaurants, cards that we as kids took five or six of on vacations to send to our incomprehending friends or to tape in our “vacation scrap books.”  Restaurant post cards, like cartoline postali everywhere, are dying out.  Go ahead, try and find a post card stamp even at a post office.

We love ‘Bali Paris’ in our kitchen.  It sits on the book shelf next to the 1986 series Canadian $5 bill.  It reminds us of a magic weekend with Harv and LeAnn in upstate New York.  It reminds me of the M. F. K. Fisher stories I read at the behest of fellow graduate student Mary Harvey.  It reminds me of cooking at all levels, of how every meal should have seven attendants standing around you to be certain your meal is perfect.  It reminds me of places I only go in my mind, of places that never were but which appear intermittently in my kitchen.

Among the pots and pans.