Richard Cooluris

Richard Cooluris is such a new and obscure artist that I can't find out anything about him online. He shows his work at a semi-pro collective called East Bay Open Studios, where he has posted this line:

I draw out the shapes and patterns in the stars. I create precise portraits of the night sky, then allow life-forms to emerge from these constellations.

Nothing else. (The Phoenix and the Turtles, 2015)

There is a Richard Cooluris who is a successful art director for various tech firms, whose resume boasts that he has done the art direction for many apps, including one that is the best seller in 90 countries. I am guessing that they are the same person. Both live in Oakland, and these paintings suggest a tech background to me. But the art director's resume says nothing about his paintings, and I can't find any sort of bio for the painter, so this remains a guess. (Tree of Life, 2016)

I discovered Cooluris from a great art Tumblr called The Curve in the Line, and I wonder if the anonymous creator of the Tumblr is a friend. Or even the same person? (Death's Head, 2015)

So, a mystery. And I have to say that I am getting a hipster thrill from discovering an artist before he even has an instagram devoted to his work, or a wikipedia page. (Perseus and the Bat, 2016)

These are mixed media paintings on wood panels. I think some of them are great, especially one at the top of the post. (Polaris and Vega, 2016)

So if you're in Oakland and you like these you might consider popping over to the next East Bay Open Studios event and see how much these cost, before he gets famous. (A Rattlesnake Will Eat the Moon, 2016.)

Star Map of Cancer, 2017.

The Garden on Labor Day

The garden is a bit of a mess after two weeks of cool, rainy weather, with a couple of windy storms thrown in that knocked down most of the remaining sunflowers. But the argeratum is putting on its pale blue show, and there are some lovely dahlias and zinnias.

John Milton, Italian Sonnets No. 3

As on a rugged hill, when evening falls,
The skilled young shepherdess
Waters the strange and beautiful plant
That can scarcely spread its leaves

So far from its lifegiving native springtime,
So on my agile tongue love awakens
The new flower of a strange language.

To sing as best I can of you,
So gracious and lovely,
I give up being heard by my own countrymen
And trade familiar Thames for the fair Arno.

Love so willed it, and I, from the sighs of others,
Know that love never willed in vain.
Ah, if only my dull heart and stony breast
were as fine a soil as for heavenly seed.

Compendium of online translations, with some additions by me. Below, the original.

Qual in colle aspro, al imbrunir di sera
L'avezza giovinetta pastorella
Va bagnando l'herbetta strana e bella
Che mal si spande a disusata spera

Fuor di sua natia alma primavera,
Cosi Amor meco insù la lingua snella
Desta il fior novo de strania favella,
Mentre io di te, vezzosamente altera,

Canto, dal mio buon popol non inteso
E'l bel Tamigi cangio col bel Arno.
Amor lo volse, ed io a l'altrui peso

Seppi ch'Amor cosa mai volse indarno.
Deh! foss'il mio cuor lento e'l duro seno
A chi pianta dal ciel si buon terreno.

American Utopians

Michael J. Lewis has an excellent long review at First Things of several recent books on America's Utopian experiments; I highly recommend the whole thing for anyone interested in those strange sects. Here he is on Chris Jennings' Paradise Now:

Jennings profiles these four well-known communal societies [the Shakers, Oneida, Brook Farm, and New Harmony] as well as Icaria, the little-known French utopia that settled in Nauvoo, Illinois, after the Mormons moved out. They were startling in their diversity, veering between secular socialism and radical Christianity, democracy and autocracy, free love and celibacy. But they also had a great deal in common. Private property was abolished and all possessions were held communally; new recruits would sell what they owned and hand over the proceeds when they entered. (Members of Oneida who resigned would be given back their contribution, without interest.) Life and labor were communal, as in a monastery, and the building types that emerged were distinctly monastic: communal dormitories and refectory-like dining halls. They also tended to adopt distinctive forms of dress and hairstyles to distinguish themselves from the outside world. Finally, all of these communities insisted on the equality of the sexes, although they enacted it in different ways—the Shakers by the segregation of the sexes in work and administration, the Oneidans by freely mixing them or inverting traditional sex roles.

Jennings is an engaging writer, and his account of the curious practices of these societies makes for entertaining reading. At Icaria, for example, a 6 a.m. bugle call started the day, and “right out of bed, the men all took a single shot of whiskey before heading for the fields and workshops.” At Oneida, the women abjured makeup, cut their hair short, and wore a specially designed “uniform of a vital society.” And there is no end of amusing prohibitions in the obsessively comprehensive Millennial Laws of the Shakers: no pets, no rugs, no indiscriminate mixing of plants in the garden, and no more than one rocking chair in a room (simultaneous rocking being suggestive of carnality). In all of this is a certain plaintive earnestness that is the inevitable by-product of the attempt to sweep away all of existing society, habits, and customs, and to invent an entirely new social order overnight.

The 21st century has seen a resurgence of interest in these Utopian experiments for reasons that Lewis explains very well. Both Thomas Moore's original Utopia (1516) and the surge or experiments in early 19th century America happened at times when profound economic changes were shaking up communities and depriving thousands of their livelihoods:

All this is spelled out in the first of Utopia’s two books, which most readers skip to get to More’s diverting description of his island republic. But this prelude is essential to understanding the purpose of the book. More understood that the supply of labor, the price of grain, the distribution of land, and the rule of law made up a seamless fabric. One could not tamper with one without affecting all. Piecemeal reforms could treat symptoms, but not heal the system itself. That system, of course, was modern capitalism, which was beginning to sweep away the feudal structure of European society and to convert land from something vested with social, customary, and legal attributes into a mere capital good. And this More lamented: “While Money is the Standard of all other Things, I cannot think that a Nation can be governed either justly or happily.” Utopia was his thought experiment in imagining a society that was governed justly and happily, precisely because it did not rely on money.

It is the fey coincidence of history that the economic developments that had disturbed More would culminate at the precise moment that a field opened for the kind of daring social experiment he proposed. Just as the Industrial Revolution was convulsing the Western world, the United States offered a kind of tabula rasa for the building of new towns and new societies, largely independent of the prying eyes of church and state.

And this, to Lewis, explains why the interest in Utopian experiments is to strong in our time: because millions of people are profoundly dissatisfied with our economic arrangements and looking around for radical alternatives. I share the interest in new ideas about how we might reorganize our world, but I very much doubt the answers are to be found in the constitutions of obscure religious sects, or among the abandoned buildings of failed utopias.

Today's Place to Daydream about: Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is Argentina's city of  "faded European grandeur and Latin passion." Both faded grandeur and passion seem appealing to me right now, trapped in my extremely un-grand, un-passionate suburban house by two days of hurricane-remnant rains, so let's send our thoughts there and see what we find.

The city of Buenos Aires was founded by a 1536 Spanish expedition as Ciudad de Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Ayre – "City of Our Lady Saint Mary of the Fair Winds". This was in gratitude to Our Lady of Bonaria, a local Virgin from Sardinia much beloved of Mediterranean sailors, who had saved the expedition from a fearsome storm. But she was not much use on land, and that colony was driven out by hostile Indians. The site was such a good one, though, that another colony was refounded on the same spot in 1580, and that one lasted.

In Spanish colonial times the town was run directly by the crown as an essential port for shipping South American silver to Cadiz, and the local residents had even fewer rights than most Spanish subjects. This led to a culture of resentment against authority that still thrives in the city. By the 1790s Buenos Aires was a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment and radical agitation, with committees issuing manifestos day and night.

Argentina achieved independence in 1816 but that only inaugurated 170 years of conflict between the city and the rest of the nation. Buenos Aires was modern, European, and radical, its population often dominated by immigrants, and it seethed as part of a mostly rural, Catholic, conservative country. In 1853 the city and its province actually seceded from the rest of the nation and formed an independent state, which was not conquered by the rest of Argentina until 1860.

Because of all this political trouble, Buenos Aires was stripped of all local political authority in 1880, and from then until 1996 the city was ruled directly by the national government, its mayor appointed by the president.

The city's loss of political independence corresponded with the beginning of its great era of growth. Buenos Aires rode the wave of 19th-century globalization to status as a great world city. Investment poured in from Britain and France, paying for the construction of an enormous railroad network with Buenos Aires as its hub, drawing all the produce of the nation to its wharves, and all the business action to its stock and commodity exchanges. A flood of immigrants, especially from Italy, transformed the culture.

Some of the money earned in this great era from 1870 to 1930 was spent creating the marvelous central city you still see today, with its squares and parks and boulevards of lovely buildings.

The famous opera house, the Teatro Colon, opened in 1908.

The most visited landmark of that era is the Cementerio de la Recoleta.

The city's most famous art form, Tango, took off in the 1920s. The city also saw a great wave of artistic and literary creativity; Jorge Luis Borges, born 1899, was the greatest of a whole generation of writers who came of age in this time, and they were accompanied by painters, architects, and pioneers of cinema.

But the Depression hit Argentina as hard as anywhere else in the world, and the prosperity came to a crashing end. This was followed by, and maybe led to, fifty years of political instability under dictator Juan Peron and his successors. In the 1950s and 1960s, as growth resumed in the rest of the world, Argentina stagnated. In the 1970s Buenos Aires was the epicenter of the "Dirty War" in which 30,000 foes of the dictatorship "disappeared;" Los desaparecidos became the martyrs of the city's opposition to tyranny and a dominant theme in its culture. (Photo shows the presidential palace, with the balcony from which Juan and Eva Peron made their famous appearances to their followers.)

One of the flash points of conflict between the city's radicals and the government was the dictatorship's plan to construct a network of freeways through and around the city, bulldozing through old neighborhoods. So great was the opposition to this plan that only three freeways were ever built, and they remain widely hated by the city's radicals as symbols of both tyranny and modernizing indifference to the happy life of urban anarchy. Of course this conflict has played out all over the world, raging hot in Baltimore at the same time; sometimes the things that people attribute to local causes are really just reflections of worldwide patterns created by underlying economic and technological change. (Juan and Eva Peron on that balcony)

Speaking of which, Argentina rejoined the world economy in the new globalization wave of the 1980s and 1990s. Renewed growth sent the population of the metropolitan area above 15 million, and the city's skyline was transformed by an amazing array of skyscrapers.

The city's culture has also been re-invigorated; you may have seen pictures of El Ateneo Grand Splendid, a marvelous bookstore opened in an old theater in 2000; acccording to some sources Buenos Aires leads the world in bookstores per capita.

The city is famous for its cafes; google Buenos Aires and half the pages that come up are lists of the ten or twelve best in the city.

Of course the city is also mad for futbol, with 24 professional teams; the top professional rivalries in Argentine soccer are not between teams from different cities, but teams from different neighborhoods of Buenos Aires.

The city's people have a reputation much like that of Parisians or New Yorkers: they are clever, inventive, and passionate, but also cynical and mean; they stay up late, drink too much coffee and wine; they are lax in their morals but firm in their friendships; they are always arguing, often about politics or art; their status as real Argentinians is open to debate. They also love their own city as much as any people in the world.

So today I imagine myself in their home, seeing what they see.

To the Moon

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, —
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson (1884-1965) was a Swedish modernist who usually signed himself GAN, because that's that sort of thing modernists did.  I'm not crazy about most of his work but I love these illustrations.

Overdose Deaths Still Rising in Ohio

In Ohio, overdose deaths rose 33% from 2015-2016, a staggering amount. Most are from the synthetic opiate Fentanyl or its close analogs.

This is the sort of problem we ought to be working on solving, instead of shouting insults at each other.

New Optical Illusion

1000 Trees by Thomas Heatherwick

Mixed-use development under construction in Shanghai.

The Indonesian Girls' Heavy Metal Band, or, How Social Change Happens

Heavy metal is huge in Indonesia, where the president likes to be photographed in his Megadeath t-shirt. So it has been big news there that three teenage girls – 17, 17, and 15 – have formed a hit band:

The three teenage girls — shy and even seeming slightly embarrassed as they peer out from their Islamic head scarves — do not look much like a heavy metal band.

But a dramatic change occurs when they take the stage. All pretense of shyness or awkwardness evaporates as the group — two 17-year-olds and one 15-year-old — begin hammering away at bass, guitar and drums to create a joyous, youthful racket. . . .

But beyond blowing away local audiences with their banging music, the three girls are also challenging entrenched stereotypes about gender and religious norms in the world’s most-populous Muslim-majority nation.

In finding their voices and becoming a band, they say they have endured criticism from their families, friends and neighbors, and have received hundreds of online death threats for supposedly blaspheming Islam and not acting like proper Muslim girls — in other words, submissive, they said.

One night, while riding motorcycles home from a recording studio, they were pelted with rocks wrapped in paper inscribed with profane messages.

But they have fought back, through songs about intolerance, gender equality and the rights of young people in a country where issues like forced underage marriage are still prevalent, especially in rural areas like West Java.

Because I read a fair amount of conservative writing on social change, and have spent a lot of time myself pondering why freedom and wealth have not made us happier, I often wonder what it would take to stop the transformation of our societies. And the answer is, beat up girls like these and chase them back into their parents' houses. That's what the Taliban would do.

And that, I say, is why change will not be stopped, and why most of the American and European conservatives who rage against it in their essays are really on its side. Because we lack the faith, the determination, and the nastiness to enforce social rules against charming young people determined to break them. For every conservative who really believes in an idealized Victorian past and hates everything that has happened since there are ten who turn out to be closet Rolling Stones fans or openly gay or just plain soft-hearted. You often see conservatives complain about the acceptance of single motherhood, and say that it ought to be more stigmatized; but if their own niece got pregnant in high school, do you think they would shun her? Not a chance.

One of the best things about our society is that we are more open, tolerant, and accepting of difference than any other people I know of; and we, including most of our conservatives, are proud of this. The rise of Trump has shown that there is a strain of repressed intolerant nastiness in a wide swath of America, people who miss the good old days when retards and pansies could be mocked with impunity. But turn a camera on them and most would disavow any such sentiments. This, like much of what passes for conservatism right now, is an angry spasm rather than a determined reactionary program. Trump after all is a promoter of professional wrestling, casino gambling, divorce, philandering, and a contemptuous attitude toward any sacred cows other than the flag and the military, so he is hardly the one to lead us back to the 1950s. His popularity is a sign of the collapse of social conservatism, not its strength.

Change will continue, because in our world even the meanest are too soft and forgiving to stop it.

Men of the Titanic Memorial, Washington, DC

I've spent a fair portion of my career woking along Washington, DC's river fronts, and I thought I knew them pretty well. But when I asked for obscure monuments to feature in that post, a friend called my attention to the city's Titanic Memorial.

The monument is dedicated

To the brave men who perished in the wreck of the Titanic - April 15 1912. They gave their lives that women and children might be saved.

Some of the wealthy women who survived the disaster organized a competition for a monument to their lost men in 1914, entries limited to women, and the winning design was submitted by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. She was an accomplished artist who was also a Vanderbilt married to a Whitney — that must have been some wedding. But it took until 1934 to raise the funds and build and install the memorial. It was originally in a prominent location at the west end of the Mall, just north of the Lincoln Memorial, but it was moved in 1966 to make way for the Kennedy Center. It now resides where the Southwest Waterfront meets Fort McNair.

You may perhaps have heard that the sacrifice of upper class men on the Titanic was not really so noble, and that they put themselves on the boat before lower class women. To disabuse you of such cynicism, here are the numbers. Only 706 passengers survived and 1,517 perished; most of the crew who survived were the ones who had to be in the lifeboats to operate them. So most of the men on the ships did die. By contrast almost all the children in first and second class survived, and most of the women. The small total for first class male survivors was inflated by a couple of gentlemen who held out until the last minute but then jumped into lifeboats as they were being lowered, figuring that if there was space (and there was; more than a hundred spaces in the lifeboats were not used in the chaos) they might as well take it. The survival rate for all the people in steerage was low partly because they were in the bottom of the rapidly sinking ship and some just did not make it; but then again that may be because nobody tried very hard to get them out. Anyway it is simply true that very few men tried to board the lifeboats until all the women on the deck had been accommodated.

Can Everyone Be on the Losing Side?

David Brooks:

Today, the world feels like a hostile environment to. … well … everyone. I had assumed that as society got more equal we would all share a measure of equal dignity. But it turns out that without an obvious social hierarchy we all get to feel equally powerless.

To me one of the strangest things about America today is that people in every faction feel like they are losing. Liberals look around and see Trump in the White House and Nazis marching in the streets; conservatives see gay marriage as the law of the land, Obamacare thriving, and Hollywood obsessed with providing the correct gender and racial balance in every film.

The media culture of our time is obsessed with losses, slights, and dangers. With Obama gone, what major public figure takes a calm, long-term view of events? Everything is dire and catastrophic, or at least suspicious.

We have divided into two teams, and on each team people only count their losses. The result is a foul national mood.

We need to step back, breathe deeply, forget about trivial slights and scandals, tone down our anger, and work toward compassion instead of hate. If we stopped shouting at each other and tried working together to solve a few of our problems, we might find that we are not as far apart as we suppose, and that things are not as bad as we fear.