A comparison of two comic strips from the same day shows a typical portrayal of fathers (Marvin) and a more respectful portrayal (Baby Blues.) In the bottom strip dad is caricatured as a clueless dolt; in the top strip dad takes on a thankless role of leadership. I enjoy both strips generally; both have good writing and visual style.
This example from Marvin is typical of media portrayals—dad as a usually good-hearted and usually incompetent bumbler, who usually needs rescue by his spouse. We can do better. And would culture / audience tolerate this Marvin strip if mom was the clueless dolt? (I think probably not.)
Golden ratio: proof positive?
Mathematician George Markowsky wrote an article in 1992 (The College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 23, No. 1) that debunked popular misconceptions about the golden ratio. I'd like to note two items included in his article.
First, a major point of Markowsky's critique of misconceptions is: since "measurements of real objects can only be approximations," and since "inaccuracies in measurements lead to greater inaccuracies in ratios," then most demonstrations of the golden ratio are enthusiastic and convenient rather than methodical and provable.
Second, Markowsky calls into question, rightly so, the precise role of intention in historical designs, as intentions are self-proved by retrospective speculations and demonstrations. For purposes of his rigorous disproving, modern speculations and their attendant demonstrations regarding designs of the Parthenon and Leonardo's St. Jerome are easy targets. Neither example falls within his acceptable tolerance of ±2% for ratio.
While Markowsky's careful mind catches sloppy or sensational claims made for famous examples, his eye is blind to the intuitive process of the skilled designer. Never mind that Markowsky's own methods can be problematic, he seems unwilling to acknowledge that designing minds intuitively select approximations of the golden ratio because the approximations are functional and pleasing.
Jazz: not usually sublime
Aesthetics-ally speaking, the sublime refers to something different than sublime in common usage. While we might commonly call a jazz composition or performance "sublime," jazz is rarely sublime in the way that Kant described the sublime: "provided that our own position is secure, (its) aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness." The sublime properly has an awesome greatness that inspires fear in a safe observer. As a concept, the sublime is usually associated with an experience in nature, whereby the observer feels small in proximity to the astonishing size of a natural phenomenon.
Jazz music does not typically possess this sense of scale and grandeur. The jazz idiom is typically small-scale and relatively incidental? This distinction does not diminish its value or significance, of course.
A more knowledgeable listener might be able to provide numerous examples of the sublime in jazz. For me, there is a sense of the sublime in John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, especially in the transition from "Acknowledgement" to "Resolution." Sonny Sharrock's "As We Used to Sing" also comes to mind, and similarities between these two examples probably betray a bias in my interpretation of the sublime.
Bell-wether
Roger Fry portrait of Clive Bell, c.1924
Art critic Clive Bell (1881-1964) wrote a powerful, small volume, his ars poetic, in 1913, simply titled, Art. In a chapter on modern art's debt to the painter Cezanne, Bell applies his formalist proposals to the example of Cezanne's life, claiming the painter's work is significant due to his conscious intent to be only an artist.
I will paraphrase the end of Bell's chapter, as if he is giving advice to young designers: "To be a designer, for the designer, ought to suffice. Too many designers have become less by trying to become something else."
The brief binds
In the normal, mundane, workaday world of designers and their clients, designers are not usually hired to exercise their own preferences; they are hired to effectively solve clients' problems. The design brief is not a suggested option among others; the brief is not license for the designer to try something else if the designer's whim or will is in conflict. Most briefs are not the client's invitation to the designer to execute a signature artifact. Unless the designer has successfully created a reputation or style for "genius," which can precede negotiations usually involved in a brief, most briefs represent the client's authority to require that expectations will be observed and met. This authority does not make the client good or bad, right or wrong, but the brief does have a moral aspect—it is binding.
Early 20th-century American office buildings
Take a walk through downtown of any American city and look for a well-preserved example of early 20th-century steel-framed office building. I've seen examples in Portland and Savannah, Louisville and Indianapolis, Boston and Chicago (of course.) Not yet skyscrapers as we think of them today, the style seems to combine American new-classicism or neo-renaissance with an aspirational, pre-modernism connected to the Chicago school. The best examples have preserved or restored lower levels, usually with elaborate ornamentation intact.
What I like most about the examples are their grid-like, intellectual organization of horizontal layers, which divides the tall facade into proportional thirds—a one- or two-story street level, a cellular body level, and a top level with an articulated cornice. These buildings are primarily utilitarian, meeting a socio-economic need of their day that has survived to our time.
Because I'm not an architectural historian I don't fully understand the examples for structural or stylistic considerations, and a greater understanding would enhance my visual appreciation of an example's intellectual appeal. Trying to photograph the examples is an exercise in frustration; rarely are the conditions right for capturing the sense of intellectual / visual whole.
The elegance of Grandpa's Angel
I mean elegance in the sense that the handling is just right and the end result seems inevitable. The concept of elegance is aligned with a gestalt-like unity, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Jutta Bauer (b. 1955) is a German writer and illustrator. She received the Hans Christian Andersen Award for illustration in 2010. In my opinion her book Grandpa's Angel achieves elegance on a number of levels. Certainly her light touch as an illustrator and page designer is just right. The book has plenty of visual interest, and illustrations include a dash of perfect details (a bedpan, an airborne dog and bloody nose, a bandaged angel, a reluctant benefactor, and a tightly gripped shark.) The narrative moves along at a very natural pace, much like the writing of M. B. Goffstein, so there is elegance in the writing. But the biggest achievement of Grandpa's Angel is the elegance of its concept. As a retelling or memoir of life in Nazi Europe, which could be a heavy or overwhelming subject in this genre, Bauer handles the concept with exquisite grace—not too much and not too little. This is a rare thing.
Fans of William Steig and M. B. Goffstein should take a look at Jutta Bauer. What the world needs more of?
The limit of limits
In a previous post I proposed that a compensation is required when limits are ignored or resisted. Here's another way of thinking about the "compensation" or push-back on the inevitability of limits:
In a recent Downbeat article on the anniversary of Duke Ellington's Money Jungle, MMW bassist Chris Wood alludes to the force required to overcome conventions or limits. He quotes guitarist Marc Ribot's mantra: "If you're gonna do it wrong, do it strong!" That's worth remembering.
The power of limits
In his book (1981) on harmonic proportions architect Gyorgy Doczi posed two crucial questions: 1. Have we as a society lost sight of the power of limits?, and 2. Is it possible for us to recover the value of "proper proportions"?
Doczi understood that limits have creative and restrictive effects. As such, limits are part of a natural discipline.
Proper proportions are the natural and logarithmic patterns that produce pleasing differences in a set. These harmonious relationships are universally true. For example, the golden section combines minor (0.618) and major (1.0) parts in a pleasing and functional relatedness.
In my own teaching on limits, I argue that if limits are ignored or resisted then a compensation is due or required, a compensation so extraordinary or unnatural that in the end a limit has been observed.
Getting it better
This image is another that I "rescued" from among a pile of old canvases. Notice the immediate impact of straightening the horizon. Generally, the revision brings greater clarity to relationships of form and color. I was reminded of Professor Robert Grilley's advice to base a painting's color on a triad; I think he preferred variations of red, blue, and white. My revision ends up being a triad of blue, yellow, and red, with support from a little green, violet, and orange.
Who gets what
Is it interesting that Ramesh Ponnuru, a Roman Catholic and conservative, Bloomberg View columnist, claims that Pope Francis confuses the free market with abuses of extreme individualism? Ponnuru claims that history is on his side when he argues that free markets can "enable a creative form of community." Whatever that means must include a trust in self-interests of the rich naturally creating economic benefits for the poor. Does he mean self-interests unrestrained or uncorrected by government and regulation?
Tony Judt has questioned whether our free-market pursuit of economic self-interest has ever been connected to such things as altruism, self-denial, and collective purpose. He asks, from historical perspective, why have the potentially self-destructive systems of the free market lasted. . . . "Probably because of habits of restraint, honesty and moderation . . . values derived from longstanding religious and communitarian practices." If he were alive, Judt might clarify the Pope's argument and push back against Ponnuru's assertion that free markets can be trusted to build community.
Disability and dysfunction
Why is it so difficult for us to even imagine a different society?
Why does it seem beyond our reach to conceive a different arrangement of things for a common benefit?
Why must we doom ourselves to lurching between a dysfunctional present and fear of a changed future?
("Our disability is discursive: we simply do not know how to talk about these things any more." Judt)
Tony Judt frames these questions in the context of economic politics—the so-called free market versus so-called socialism. I think these same questions are useful to most organizational systems and can be effective to analyzing operational and philosophical issues as they relate to change.
Topsy turvy
What began as a conceptual demo for my illustration class became a satisfying exercise in technique. The assignment is to paint a topsy turvy cake concept using a soft-tone approach. I decided to informally arrange cups in a pile that nearly tips over. You can see that choices about color are cued by the source still-life and have been extended into playful chromatic chords.
Sometimes, much can be gained by starting with a little thing and exhausting its modest possibilities.
Home of the brave
The American concept of individualism, often expressed in extremes, is the image of the self-made person and ignores the individual's dependence on essential services and protections. For example, without help from some kind of system (private or public) the individual is not able to furnish himself with a minimum of health care. The great majority of individuals can't doctor themselves or afford the services of a doctor.
In addition, an extremist view of individualism is anti-moral and not Christian. The commandment to love one another implicates or obligates the Christian to be loved by others, and the commandment to love God before all things runs against the idolatry of individualism.
The value of editing
Editing, done by an other, provides a check and balance against two common inclinations found in self-published expressions: the inclination to make public what is essentially private, and the inclination to attract attention by being vulgar. The first of these inclinations overvalues a kind of narcissism, and the second devalues hard work and difficult concepts.
An editing process reminds the author of his / her responsibility to audience and to art itself; a good editor corrects the author's natural inclinations and raises expectations for art.
An unchecked and unbalanced emphasis on needs of the individual over needs of society can result in decreased value for editing. Also, consider how tired and banal are iterations of themes of human sexuality in a vacuum of rigorous editing.
The state and collective good
When an elected leader of the state says that top priority for social programs run by the state is to safeguard taxpayer dollars and not to make sure people get help, he is misplacing the state's mission in providing protections for its citizenry. When he calls out a distinction between people who warrant the state's help and people who don't by using peculiar definitions for categories of "able-bodied" people, his rhetoric suggests that all people are in control of their own welfare, which is specious, in view of experience that shows many people are not, for a variety of reasons.
If help is to be good and effective, both for the giver (as a noble burden) and for the receiver (as needed aid), then it must necessarily involve a degree of messiness or looseness not comfortable to business models of efficiency or accountability. The more one's help for another is restrained by business concepts or by warrants the more help becomes limited—philosophically and practically. Help becomes less noble for the giver and more stigmatized for the receiver.
(This post prompted by Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land, 2010.)
Blues
"So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word (blue) the way lint collects. The mind does that. A single word, a single thought, a single thing, as Plato taught. We cover our concepts, like fish, with clouds of net. Cops and bobbies were blue. We catch them and connect. Imagined origins reduce the sounds of clash and contradiction, as when one cries out blue murder in the street."
From On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, William Gass, 1976.
On Being Blue is a beautiful object (blue cover, ivory vellum paper, generous margins, and Montotype Dante typeface.) This naughty little volume by a superior writer is accessible intellectual exercise on concepts of language and the interior mind.
Out from Gilead
Just finished reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (Picador, 2004.) From page 242:
"It was just that kind the place was meant to encourage, that a harmless life could be lived here unmolested. 'There shall yet old men and old women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, and every man with his staff in his hand for every age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof.' . . . (the prophet Zechariah) says it will be marvelous in the eyes of the people, and so it might well be to people almost anywhere in this sad world. To play catch of an evening, to smell the river, to hear the train pass. These little towns were once the bold ramparts meant to shelter just such peace."
Our sad world, indeed. Who can find such peace? And how? Robinson's description is not really about little moments, noticed and remembered. Robinson's description is about a way of life, in a place.
Temporal
While old cemeteries and their littering of ruins can awaken our nostalgia for an imagined and projected history, they also are unavoidable and not-so-tidy reminders of our own mortality. Certainly time, carried by the passing light of daytime hours, is kinder to older, more honest tombstones than it is to newer, polished iterations—their reflective surfaces and unthinking design attempt to preserve an odd physical presence, a presence that came more naturally to hand-carved letters in limestone.
Notice the crack in this example, which seems in keeping with its ruin.
Pace of life
From Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
"People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was 24 hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people. . . ."
I just finished rereading this great American novel, which moves along at its own pace. How to desire to reclaim a similar tempo for life without being motivated primarily by nostalgic impulse, huh.