—1 —
A year ago, we were here…sigh.
I am certainly missing traveling (except for the spending money part), but also am realistic about it. Our travel was a privilege, and if that type of travel doesn’t happen again, oh well. We saw some wonderful things and had great experiences – and there are wonderful things and great experiences where I live, as well. I came to travel late, but was determined to see what I could of the world in the time I had, shaped by a couple of background experiences: My dad hadn’t started traveling until he was in his early 60’s and always regretted it, and then my husband dropped dead at the age of 50. Anything can happen. Who knows how much time I have? Who knows how much time I have to share experiences with the kids still at home – and even those who’ve moved on? (Son #2 and his family joined us in Spain)
— 2 —
Meanwhile, I began to notice that, as kid culture filled up most of my days, I had been exiled from adult culture. Or rather, I began to notice that parents in the US lived in a strange, lonely and depressing gulf between two opposing cultures: one designed entirely around the fantasies not necessarily of children but of parents imagining the kind of uber-stimulation and play their children might need; the other designed almost entirely for single people or couples without children. Mixing these cultures is taboo. It was utterly surreal and hilarious to take my little brother, a single, 29-year-old musician living in Sweden, to the Children’s Museum – ‘What is this place?’ he kept repeating. It was also surreal and slightly stressful to take our daughter to certain restaurants and, once, to a bar in Portland at midnight, or out for the evening with adult friends, and it was off-limits to take her to many shows and performances.
Our ‘family life’ was not supposed to intersect with our ‘adult life’. Being a family meant that we were eating at the local pizza house with its colouring pages and sticky booths; going to the event sponsored by Massive Corporation X or Y, where kids could jump in bouncy houses and glue-stick feathers to construction paper; spending our Saturdays at the playground. Then maybe we’d indulge in a ‘date night’ at some hip izakaya in Lawrenceville, downing cocktails while bleeding $15 per hour for a babysitter.
The New Zealand philosopher Brian Sutton-Smith, the 20th century’s leading play theorist, suggested that, as US society generated more amusements for adults – think of goat yoga, onesie bar crawls and Harry Potter-themed adults-only parties at the art museum – the need to distinguish adult ‘recreation’ or ‘entertainment’ from the play of children became paramount. Young adulthood, or childless adulthood, has roped itself off from family life, letting parents know that adult recreation is not child’s play….
….Kid culture fully subscribes to the idea that children need to inhabit a world unto themselves that has been carefully organised and constructed by adults; that their childhood must be meticulously cultivated in a Petri dish of intentional experiences; that their growth into healthy and happy human beings is contingent upon the number of hours they spend navigating climbing walls or scooping trays of ice into buckets; that ‘good’ parents will rearrange their entire lives to create opportunities for their kids to sit on the grass and watch a librarian act out the story of Hansel and Gretel with finger puppets; that ‘family life’ means doing something targeted specifically or exclusively toward children. It’s the idea that to become a parent is to forfeit citizenship of a larger culture, reinforced by the sly, ubiquitous US capitalist pressure to consume and experience one’s way through a competitive childhood…
….
— 3 —
The director of one of the world’s oldest and most prominent art museums, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, has suggested that religious artworks residing in institutional collections should be returned to their respective places of worship. Eike Schmidt, who has led the museum since 2015, told the Art Newspaper that “devotional art was not born as a work of art but for a religious purpose, usually in a religious setting.”
Schmidt cited a specific example from the Uffizi’s own collection, the “Rucellai Madonna” painted by the Sienese artist Duccio di Buoninsegna in the Middle Ages. The gold-ground panel of the Virgin and Child enthroned, the largest painting on wood from the 13th century known to date, was removed from the church of Santa Maria Novella in 1948.
Viewing such a work in the context for which it was created, says Schmidt, is not just appropriate from an historical perspective, but could also connect the viewer with its spiritual significance.
…Schmidt’s proposal has been received with hesitation, with the archbishop of Florence, Cardinal Giuseppe Betori, saying that “every case would have to be considered on its own merits.” Mark Jones, former director of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, echoed Betori’s words, acknowledging that art is “better in its own context” but telling the Newspaper that decisions would have to be made on a case-by-case basis.
— 4 —
(Which is the motivation for my header-of-moment up there – filled with images of me, Gender Non-Conforming since 1960! As well as one of my late mother, Gender-Non-Conforming since 1924!)
— 5 –
Movie/Writer Son has a post about 1917, which he liked more than I did.
Scofield’s emotional journey, though, is the real center of the film as a whole. When he starts the film, he’s recently traded away his medal that he was awarded for fighting at the Somme for a bottle of wine. The idea of glory has been eroded to nothing with him, and it’s through Blake that he begins to open his eyes again. That’s why the meeting with the French woman is so good. Scofield has made a promise to see the mission through, not because it’s his mission but because he’s forced himself to adopt Blake’s sense of duty and dedication. Almost by osmosis, Scofield has begun to be less cynical towards the fight around him. He goes from, after barely escaping the booby-trapped German line, nearly walking back through No Man’s Land to the relative safety of the English line to offering up everything he has to a stranger. It’s the enormity of the experiences that he’s going through that are changing him, from a close death to a near death experience and finally to the sight of a lone woman with a baby not her own, desperate to survive for just one more day, that pushes his worldview so that by the time he does get up over the lip of the trench to run through those green fields to deliver his message faster, it’s a believable moment of selflessness from him.
— 6 —
Continuing our piano presentation, here’s some Prokofiev:
Tomorrow: St. Anthony of Padua:
From The Loyola Kids Book of Catholic Signs and Symbols.
And then Sunday, Corpus Christi.
For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!