Lady Durer's Canvas

you're breaking my tender heart

2012-02-07T19:23:00.000-08:00

You're breaking my tender heart academia.
How can you of all things let me down?
There reaches a point when the ivory tower sinks so low that it sises to be a tower. I arrived at your door with hiking boots laced up, not glittery pumps and a red plastic party cup. Don't give me a handrail. Give me a skylight.

If I was an uppity-know-it-all I wouldn't be here. I am ignorant, but what I am not is disrespectful, common, distracted, disengaged, or unconscious.

I attend UC Berkeley, one of the world's leading universities. And I was bored for five hours straight today. How is this possible?

No one pushed me today. No one challenged me. No one presented me with something new. No one inspired me. Everyone forced me to walk at a horrifying communal speed.

And what hurts is that I showed up so ready this morning at 9am. I was 20 minutes early to class and sat reading an extra book for the course to supplement my own interests. I'm already even reading ahead (and I'm the kid who gets migraines from reading...) because I'm thursting for new information.
More to my point I was so ready inside, I was waiting to be delighted and work hard.

I showed up, dusted off the stage, and raised my hand.

I can make good bad jokes about this and we can laugh it off. We can say its only two years of my life. I can build you intellectual and social arguments for how my fellow students apparently all got high scores on the SAT but need iconography defined for them in class. I can complain, rage even. I can carefully separate my fellow students into good listeners and bad listeners, individuals who came from educational privilege like me and those who are just trying there best, and judge where I shouldn't. I can blame. I can be mean. I can be reasonable.I can be uppity. I can be rightfully disappointed.

But the point tonight is this and only this:

I actually want to cry.

I'm not just angry that I am bored.
I'm broken about it.

I'm a student. This is how I spend my days. This is what I do. How can I learn meaningful content if the process is devoid of meaning in its unique and potential filled articulation.
I'm not being fixed or even broken into fertile pieces that want to re-grow better. I'm just slowly becoming a Miss Havisham, dusty.

I have to finish a paper tonight. I was really excited about the paper this morning when I planned out my day. But now...I'm more than uninspired and I'm not angry enough to be indifferent. I've got this burning lump inside my chest. its getting slushy and now I just feel sick.

I'm just broken. And all from the weightless, smothering othello-bedsheet of undeserved boredom.

blah.

...Obviously I need to watch youtube clips of The Dead Poets Society tonight...maybe quite a lot of clips :-) ....The casualties could be your hearts and minds boys!!!

-your lady

{musing - mother teresa}

2012-02-05T12:30:00.000-08:00

‘People are often unreasonable, illogical and self centred;
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone may destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway..

...It was never between you & them anyway.'

{Mother Teresa}

architect's fish and chips

2012-01-24T22:05:00.000-08:00

watch the other episodes.
'nough said.
xoxo,
Lady D.

journal excerpt 1/20, rothko people

2012-01-20T23:09:00.000-08:00

{journal excerpt, january 20th}

I've just stuck a rothko postcard from the national gallery on my wall that arrived (appropriately considering its sender) with the last of my byzantine art history books for the spring term today.

Some people are like really good Rothko paintings. They challenge how dark the light can be made. But it is always light to me. It's potent. Its real - they are real like the skinhorse and the Velveteen Rabbit - everything reverberates no matter how sad. I know people like this and I love them with a burning passion that makes life strong in the face of all the darkening light.

They will never be ugly to me - no matter how frustrated, confused, depressed. They will always be rothkos.

"The historian is in danger of forgetting that his subjects spent much of their time asleep, and that, when asleep, they had dreams." I am not very good at being simply happy. I am not very good at going to sleep after a long day. Maybe I want to much. Maybe I want to specifically - That hand against that open book on that narrow, old marble table.

Those words. Not the other ones.

But when I look at when I am most happy it is because of un-planned, but willfully embraced happenings.
It is this storm that is engulfing my small hobbit-hole. This stack of minutely recorded notes and half read volumes. This letter I just wrote to a friend (whom I miss enough to just chuck the computer on the floor and have a good cry...or an imaginary, jumping-from-bed-to-chair-to-desk-to-bed pillow fight because, heck, at least I know I can love this much.)

This hour. These past hours. The fact that I can be touched by the words in a history book. The very human confusion over being so many things at once. It can get exhausting...being happy and sad at the same time. Being lonely and yet genuinely wanting to be alone.

Is life always going to be like this?
Will it always be a cliff? A great ocean?
A Rothko on a blank wall.
I think, definitely maybe, I might, probably, be ok with this (?)

xoxo,
Lady Durer

this I pray

2012-01-17T22:59:00.000-08:00

I pray that you will be bold in the holding of another's hand.
I pray that you will get lost and found in a deep river or a crowed bookshop
or between the pages of your own words.

I pray that you will stand in the rain and luxuriate in getting drenched.
Utterly drenched.
(I pray someone will make you hot tea.)

I pray you will have adventures, and warm socks,
and if you must have heartbreak, I pray it is life affirming.
I pray that your fingers tingle, and that your life gets saved in all those little important ways -
that people tell you you are pretty when I can not
and make you french toast and yell your name on the street.
I pray you buy yourself tickets to the symphony. And wear velvet.

I pray that your days may be short, buoyant, and swift
like the downward tilt of the meadow lark against the mountain.

I pray that your hours be long so that you find a new symmetry for your breathing.

I pray that you will come to know how to pause in your hours
- how to be still, quiet, real, and bold in desire.

{photograph: summer in penn's wood, goodbye before the train. photographer: Jessina Leonard}

shy one

2012-01-11T23:24:00.000-08:00

Shy one, shy one,

Shy one of my heart,

She moves in the firelight

Pensively apart.

She carries in the dishes,
And lays them in a row.
To an isle in the water
With her would I go.

She carries in the candles,
And lights the curtained room,
Shy in the doorway
And shy in the gloom;

And shy as a rabbit,
Helpful and shy.
To an isle in the water
With her would I fly

{photograph - Bill Brandt, poem - W. B. Yeats, from Crossways. My golden shepherdess introduced me to this Yeats tonight.}

{musing - peter pan)

2012-01-11T14:40:00.000-08:00

{These were the good days.}

(image from wellcurated.blogspot.com)

“You know that place between sleep and awake? The place where you can still remember dreaming. That’s where I’ll always love you. That’s were I’ll be waiting.”

{Peter Pan}

the kiss

2012-01-09T21:24:00.000-08:00

hills and Nemerov

2012-01-09T21:00:00.000-08:00

Waked in the morning with the dog. Gratitude for skype and lady lyd's pretty smiles. Read about the birth of Slavonic linguistics. Listened to the bells. Wrote a letter to one of my ladies of Penn's wood. Took a walk in the berkeley hills with a poetic friend. He shared the following by Nemerov:

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow 
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

{musing - Sodergram}

2012-01-08T15:30:00.000-08:00

                             My soul was a light-blue gown, sky-coloured;

                          I left it on a cliff by the sea

                   and naked I came to you, resembling a woman.

-Edith Södergran

(Life's just a matter of selkies lost on the shore. Surely this is the problem.)

xoxo,

Lady Durer

always rilke

2012-01-08T15:07:00.000-08:00

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

—	Rainer Maria Rilke, from Sonnets to Orpheus (translated by A. Barrows and J. Macy)

Neruda's "it is born"

2012-01-08T12:59:00.000-08:00

{Whistler. Nocturne. Blue and Gold. Southampton.}

Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.

- P. N.

this remarkable woman

2012-01-08T11:59:00.000-08:00

"One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying."

—

Joan of Arc

This is Joan of Arc's signature.
Somedays she is my rock of Gibraltar, as Captain Jack Aubrey might put it (I started O'Brian this morning...oh such tall ships upon such rough seas.)

There is a burning peace that I think Joan knew. An active peace. The peace that comes from standing calmly for all that is good, and old, and honorable, and mostly forgotten. The peace that comes from respecting one's womanhood and faith, while insisting that everyone, even those you could so easily forgive, respect it too. The peace that doesn't come from, but is honesty - honesty of character, honesty of heart, honesty of soul, honesty of union with others.

When I was a little girl Joan was there in her shinning armor complete with that seldom genuine mix of historical truth and heartfelt mystery. If I have ever prayed to a saint - which is another confused conversation mostly secluded in the mist and fog of childhood - it was Joan. It stands that she - regardless of gender - is the only seventeen-year-old to have commanded an army. My little self in overalls thought she was a woman worth climbing trees with.

When I grew out of the overalls, but hardly my spunky attitude, Joan was still there. Now garbed in deep purples, rusty gold ribbons entangled in her hair, she held the banner for women's rights. She was there in the rickety hallway of the Seawall Belmont House when I correctly named the marble busts, one by one, for the willowy tour guide. I pointed, saying the names of women who had stood up for me without ever knowing me...who had stood up for respect, for self-respect. "Susan b. Anthony, Elizabeth caddy Stanton, Lucretia Mott..." the names echoed down the stairs.

Entering college Joan was there again. This time my father drove me to an old theater - a beast of elegance from the lost 1930s - and we sat while the saint's final days played out in heart-wrenching black and white. The theater was silent except for the Einhorn score performed live by over 100 voices in the orchestra seats. A week or two later I went to a philosophy professor's office hours, tripping and falling over my words as I tried to explain the experience, as I tried to talk about faith. He let me lurch, and stumble enthusiastically searching for phrases like "quiet in the soul" and "transcendent...," but better. When I was out of breath he smiled and said, "I know. I was there last saturday evening too." I dared to hope we could be friends. Now, a year later, we are. (and I've gotten better about talking about the quiet, about faith.)

Now, a young woman, Joan has sat down on the park bench. She isn't wearing heavy armor, not even chainmale. There are no garish purple drapes nor golden, braided ribbons. She doesn't need to lead armies, hold banners, or even divulge the troubled, sacred truths of her purposeful living.

She just sits in gentle, homemade dignity. A maid, a woman with cropped hair and work-worn hands.

I am filled with a knowing and an invitation when I think of Joan of Arc. And I am reminded of the importance of respect. I am reminded that it is always the right time to stand - to stand calmly, no need for fuss or loud shouts - for honor and kindness.
She helps me know peace, that active kind, and she invites me to pursue it on hope's white steed, the gallant hounds of the hunt at my bare heels.

something new

2012-01-03T08:47:00.000-08:00

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can.
And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”

—

Neil Gaiman

(tumbler source for image)

wing of a lark

2011-12-27T22:22:00.000-08:00

There is a deft curve
to the wing of the lark
that circles like the spherical, ocher stain
in my coffee cup

a dark, upward thrust
in the pale heavens.

Edges, and caverns, are made on my earth
(my earth in your sky,)
each scar birthed from the tip of the wing.
I am traversed and traveled.

An orb hangs aloft.
is it an egg? a new moon? a child's eye?

The bird, fragile creature,
plunders the glory of the white cliffs.
She falls and drops
ebbing continually, taring herself asunder

a feather here, another there.
Here, just here.

She comes to the water.
desire. desire.
(a drum in the night.)
she falls once more.

a crushing fiction.
I exhale for her.

A cathedral
of white spray and foam
ascends into the air above the surface,
tumbling back. It dissolves into itself.

waterlogged.
brown turns black.

Seaweed, entangled in dark feathers
and hollow bone,
dries, caked with sand.
Sun bleached, it becomes a single color.

a new ocher.

white cliffs. wait. watching.

(All this inside my coffee cup)

shhhhh

2011-12-25T00:39:00.000-08:00

“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn?
Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends?
Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven’t the answer to a question you’ve been asked, or the hush of a country road at night,
Or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak,
Or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes

and
you’re alone in the whole house?"

Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

little names

2011-12-24T23:55:00.000-08:00

"You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves
like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.
Do no now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
(Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

...

"Jo.

Such a little name for such a person."

...

I adored this scene as a child because I too have a little name.

bookhead

2011-12-12T22:07:00.000-08:00

Let me prefice this post with the following sentence: I have three final exams in the art history department this week.

Last night I stayed up memorizing 106 northern renaissance paintings and learning more than I care to relate about just how much I am cursed with the blessing of caring too much. In other words this is really not the week to go on a bookhead binge. Its just not the time to re-start my affair with beautiful bindings, my obsession with the IT couple of translation Pevear and Volokhonsky, or buy a 600+ page volume on an artist who will not be featured on any of my exams. Nope. Not the week.

Hummmbug, eh Ebeneezer? ('Tis the season for Dickens quotes my fair ladies and fine gents!)

So let me spill the dirt.
Frankly, I just couldn't stay away any longer. I had to luxuriate it in...the tall wobbly shelves and sun bleached bindings. The little hand written notes indicating where humor had moved around the far corner to the back of anthropology. The comfort of knowing that an older man in flannel plad and eye glasses remains ever ready bellow the collector's editions of Shakeseaper's histories to remind you of who wrote Brideshead Revisited if you should forget as you peruse the pocket fiction. The decided pleasure I retain from silently allowing my lips to form the names I see in every direction.

I really have no idea of quite how long I spent in the coradors formed by the stacked shelves that are laden with volumes like some perpetual and slowly yellowing farmer's stand.
But I know I luxuriated. Which is exactly what I wanted and needed to do.

There is very little that a good used, authentic bookshop can't solve. It is like walking inside myself, with myself, and without any self all at once.

And the bountry? The loot??

Simon Schama's Rembrandt's Eyes
Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories (Pever & Volokhonsky)
Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited
new Rilke collection by modern library (Stephan Micheal)
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Essays: Unpacking my Library, The task of the Translator, The Storyteller, Some Reflections on Kafka, Theses on the Philosophy of History, and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.)

and on the bedside from the last few weeks/birthday hording:
Woolf's The Waves
Woolf's Jacob's Room
Alice B. Toklas Cook Book
An art history book by Cormack mostly on Russian byzantine icons in the British museum.

What do I read first??

Now the question remains...make Poussin flashcards or read another chapter of Waugh...oh the throws of a good dilemma *cough...cough*

{Musing - Rilke}

2011-12-07T15:13:00.001-08:00

Going Blind

She sat just like the others at the table.
But on second glance, she seemed to hold her cup
a little differently as she picked it up.
She smiled once. It was almost painful.

And when they finished and it was time to stand
and slowly, as chance selected them, they left
and moved through many rooms (they talked and laughed),
I saw her. She was moving far behind

the others, absorbed, like someone who will soon
have to sing before a large assembly;
upon her eyes, which were radiant with joy,
light played as on the surface of a pool.

She followed slowly, taking a long time,
as though there were some obstacle in the way;
and yet: as though, once it was overcome,
she would be beyond all walking, and would fly.

Rainer Maria Rilke

growing. up.

2011-11-25T17:45:00.001-08:00

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically.
We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present.
We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”

{Anaïs Nin}

Emmaus

2011-11-19T20:30:00.001-08:00

This is my weekend:

Caravaggio is a joy to write about. There is an ease to the word play.
Because he says a lot with little, so we are able to say lots about his little...which is a lot.

Its like sitting down at a deceptively simple feast. Like eating at Emmaus and only suddenly - in an active moment of pause - realizing what you are consuming. You take another sip of wine and smile into the sturdy, yet translucent, glass. Did anyone see? probably not.
So you continue your meal at Emmaus...

deep forest

2011-11-12T16:58:00.001-08:00

This is by Albrecht Altdorfer. It's an etching with added watercolor from 1521.

I'm planning on getting lost inside it. (Come with?)

My golden shepherdess is reading this right now, and I think it is beautiful.

"After all, is love to be a compromise?
Should it not be born continuously out of a struggle
for the love of another human being?
So I fought for Stefan’s love,
ready to retreat at any time
if he did not realize the sense
of the battle.
In the end, however, shall I forgive?
Or is the rift to be permanent?
It is very hard, this borderline
between selfishness and unselfishness.

- Karol Wojtyla, The Jeweler’s Shop

the return of the aunties

2011-11-05T23:09:00.000-07:00

One of my dear friends, she's just such a peach, dazzling really, likes to remark that having a gaggle of aunties is really much better life insurance than a fairygodmother. I must say I concur. To be quite candid, I cheer such sensible sentiments. mhmm.

I am fortunate to have 5 aunties and a mother of my own - sisters all. "Dee-girls" after the Scottish river and their maiden name. What women. Really. Intelligent, mountaineering, picnic basket packin' irish-blooded mothering, ladies. Women. Real women.

Today, this here gorgious baylands saturday, was an 8 hour week.
I mean just listen to my loot list (as Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes would say):
-one peperment pasty
-one carmel nibble
-TWO virginia woolf novels (The Waves, Jacob's Room)
-half a cup of Blue Bottle Coffee
-assorted farmer's market cholcolat samples
-uncatalogued number of Labrador snuggles + kisses
-fresh baked bread (before lunch, before dinner, during dinner)
-cowgirl creamery cheese
-farmer's market chicken-basil-crape-who-knows-whats-it
-black and white photographs of family
-several glasses of kombucha (nettle, hibiscus)
-I love you (plural)
-estimated 2-3 bites of elmwood cafe choloclate chip cookie

But this blog post is not about decadence. Its about something harder to name.

I'm trying to grasp why life always feels so short and then today it felt so long. There was time for all the living...
I spent the morning with Nitszchi over buttered toast. (now the question is would he have buttered his toast on both sides?)
The mid-mourning at the farmer's market - trenchcoat, big shall, old brown lace-up macasins, soo much chocolate. Lunch time pulling homemade cookies out of the ovin. The afternoon at Mrs. Dalloway's books with two auntie, two uncles, a favorite cousin and my mother. The late afternoon witnesing an extrordinary meal apeare in my home kitchen while gosiping about the Pourtinaries (They were such Hans Memling hogs! Yo, buy a new dress Mrs. P!) and art history students' good taiste in 1970s italian sweaters. The late afternoon eating cowgirl creamery cheese and drinking nettle kombucha while trying to ignore my new virginia woolf books and watching my father laugh. (I love it when he laughs. I've never loved a laugh more than his. And I never will.) The evening cuddling with my sleepy black labrador and putting a bowl under the leek from the storm and eating. (oh-my-dinner.) There was even an earthquake to boot and apple gallet and birthday candels and rain, sunshine, wind, and fog...How did this happen? all today??

It wasn't luxury that made the day long. It was how we luxuriated.
That John keats knows how to talk about this. He says you understand poems like this, like how you luxuriate in a lake. After all its the whole point of being in a lake: be in the lake. Be with it. Its hard.

It was about how we had to have a conversation about all the food, all the time. It was how we talked about all the cousin's first sentances, and watched Uncle Mitch sneak chocolate after dinner.

There was some secret in today about how to live a good, long life in the span of a few days. I'm still teasing it out from between the auntie hugs and apple gallet. But its there, its here in the warm glowing house after everyone has gone to bed and crossed the bridge back into the big city, ocean bound.

And there is time to name it. Time to pin it up on the refrigerator and say to myself every morning: dare, dare darling to be ravishingly elegant.
dare to luxuriate in your life (And its the way you eat the chocolate, not how much of it you have.)
dare to be bold and intelligent. (And those two thing are beautiful on a backpacking trip or at the symphony or slaving over the stove or in the title of a school paper.)

And eat toast over "On Tragedy"
And buy beautiful rusty, alburn pears at the farmer's market
And say, like Virginia Woolf,

"I shall be miserable, or happy; a wordy sentimental creature, or a writer of such English as shall one day burn the pages."

...Because you should always dare, and always luxuriate, and always say this is the day I have time to be bothered with all this bounteous living...

So goodnight moon, goodnight titanium backpacking spoon, goodnight childhood song so very out of tune, goodnight imaginary midnight loon...And goodnight to Virginia Woolf whispering HUSH.

the diary of a homeschooled girl (University, part 2)

2011-11-04T22:07:00.000-07:00

Thank goodness its autumn.
If autumn were a man, I'd marry him. mhmmm.

You're lady is discovering all sorts of intriguing things this first term here at university.

Case in point: dressing up as an esoteric pun for Halloween (Meet "Leo Tolstoy's Favorite Train wreck") serves as the the most effective boyfriend filter I've yet to invent. (Me: get it? I'm Anna Karenena. Him: who? Me: From the Leo Tolstoy novel. Him: who's Leo Tolstoy? Me: next boy please....) I do need to work on whipping the look of pitying disgust off my face and the urge to say "where did you grow up? A school??" (sorry, that was for the homeschoolers, born and bred, in the audience.) But, really if they all get to tease me about not knowing pop music or video games or celebrities then I get to throw a few punches for Leo and friends. Deal? good.

Next on the agenda: arsonry.
(Wait, I promise I have a point.)
You always wanted to know how many art history majors it takes to build a campfire right? One. If that one is me. At a recent party escaped I was startled to witness a first hand demonstration of recent park service statistics: Americans are having trouble effectively interacting with nature. It's true folks, the ratio of individuals for whom the word "kindling" wasn't simple an entry in the dictionary last friday night was 1/15 here at good old UC Berkeley. My friends experienced the full benefit of my backpacking skills when they tasted their marshmallows: gosh, these don't taste anything like lighter fluid!! (Lady Durer: facepalm.)

It should be noted that I built the fire, chopped wood, and climbed a tree for marshmallow sticks all in a vintage high-waisted skirt.
Lets rephrase Oscar: a gal can never be overdressed, over educated, or over practical after dark.

I've learned that academics don't have time for long hair. I've learned that having your friend pierce your ears in the kitchen is the best way to spend a friday night.

I've come to see how quiet I really can get.

I've re-affirmed my commitment to settle for nothing less than a boy who can wear tweed and ask intelligent questions of articulate professors (yes, one or two such specimen have been sighted. But my love life is probably on hold 'till grad school...Ah gradschool, thou are a magical place with personalized library desks and premium library lending privileges and MEN. Notice the two things I am interested in are the quality of bookbinding and gentlemen. Hey, a gal's gotta have priorities.)

I've learned that listening to medieval madrigals while doing art history research is a major plus when it comes to study endurance.

I've realized how much doing real work means to me and getting real praise. I've learned how very unpleasant I am to be around when I'm in long-term pain. I haven't learned to say I'm sorry enough yet.

Something else I haven't discovered yet this term is the limit on University Library loans...
This is what I had to move at 4am to go to bed last night:

(It should be noted that about 2/3 of this is for one paper. And I have nowhere to put any of it. And I will need a granny push cart to return it all. *sob*)

However, something I have more acutely and importantly realized over the last few months is this:
You need to love what you love.
And you must do it, really love.
You must. Otherwise everything will speed by. Fast. Zooom. Gone darlin' on the 10am train.
And you woke up at 10:30.
poof.

You must be bold and call it by its name and dazzel it with your passion.
Whatever it is, whoever it is.
You must learn your loving well.

No matter how well you know yourself, trying to keep what means the most to you center stage is hard.
(what is actually important to you?)
But when you are sitting there in the front row, the curtains drawn back, and your heart leaps up and says "yes, this is what they call living," you know you are in love again. I say again because we spend so much of our lives slumbering, blumbering around, grasping and falling out of love simply because we are disengaged with what really means the most to us.

I know myself well enough to engage. I'm not going to settle for anything less.
(yes, I'm on the dead poets society's life insurance plan. I skipped lunch thursday to feed my soul instead by staying at a Aimé Césaire reading. I then ravishingly ate my real lunch while standing in the rain outside the library. So happy. So happy inside.)

Because we are only fulfilled when we love like this, when we let ourselves fall inlove with life's daily articulations - that walk down the marble hall to the waiting desk in the library, pencil ready, pale fingers wrapped around the corner of that old, old volume that you need to have a conversation with. The fog dazzling the window pains in its moist, salty way. The seagull.

This is the love from that deep still well of water down in our core. The love that makes us come home smiling.

A love from a deep knowlegde of what is waiting to spring forth in our irresistibly complicated selves.

("When I was a younger man art was a lonely thing...But it was a golden age. We had nothing to loose...desperately searching for those projects of silence where we can root and grow. We must hope we can find them. " - Rothko)

xoxo,
Lady Durer

the lighthouse

2011-11-04T21:14:00.000-07:00

{California coast, near Half Moon Bay}

When I was a little girl I loved lighthouses. They had a dignity and a whimsicality, a private strength and a way of giving to the world without being corrupted by it.

They were lonely, but the world needed them somehow and from that they got their genuine knack for generosity.

When I die I think I want to be a light house. I want to be worthy of the kind of beauty that is quiet and strong, elegant and homemade, daring and intelligent, loving and individual. The kind of beauty that knows itself very well and tries to know the world too, tries to see instead of just look.

There is something kind in a lighthouse. The way they choose isolation so they can prevent others' isolation. There is a feeling that they really know what it is to passionately miss and steadily, life-affirming love.

Do you ever get that feeling inside of looking at your life, of watching its articulation? Its waiting like a fine spider web in the dawn, and everything is making eerily too much sense.

You become a whole world in the least self-consumed way.

You have a ground, you have some continents that are not necessarily grounded, you have a sky. There are things in your sky. Bellow your sky is the sea. Sometimes they change places.
You see how you come to make sense because of the many strange things relating to each other inside of you.

They are forming thin lines on foldable maps, these strange thing, - maps that you drew on a paper napkin in a cafe while trying to explain to him or to her what is important, important about this living.

Do you ever feel that you are the only person you could ever make sense to? You're just too deceptively explainable but complicatedly incomprehensible.

What a beautiful muddle.
You are.

How do you ever explain your constellations? The ones that have fallen in love with a sea bellow. They are sinking into the embracing kelp forests, sinking like Trojan treasure in the Adriatic...How to explain your interior castles...your glass jars filled with the conversations you've collected and arranged in a very specific order on the shelf of your heart?

You want to be crisp like a really good photograph emerging out of the dark room, but you also want to be comfortable with fog, all that mist off the water.

You don't want to be monochrome after all, and you're not.

{Fort Ross State Historic Park}

And you wonder if anyone will ever look at you like a black and white photograph,
like a lighthouse on the shore,
and say "oh, I see. "

"I see."

-your lady

P.S.
If you do not love, your life will flash by.
- tree of life

a beautiful excess of tweed

2011-10-25T22:29:00.000-07:00

According to my Chinese German Studies professor, who speaks upwards of five languages fluently enough to translate Kirkeguard between them, America has a lot of things to learn.

His gripe is with this continent's lack of ability to contriubute to the genre of Tragedy. (Can't argue with that. In his words, "america is just too young, stupid, and opptomistic.")

But lady D's gripe (for today) is all about tweed.

America doesn't seem to know what the stuff is.
However, this restores a little of my faith in us colonial castoffs.

So darlings, LETS BRING BACK TWEED. After all, its autumn - that glorious time of golden mornings and burnished dusks and tea saucers and Irish sweaters - what are you waiting for?

In other worlds, as the ever witty Mr. Wilde would put it, "you can never be overdressed or over educated."

Rugby Tweed Run Highlights from RugbyRalphLauren on Vimeo.

{photo credit to From Me To You Blog, see more tweed cycle run photos here}

{musing - Mary Oliver}

2011-10-18T16:47:00.000-07:00

My simply wonderful lady of A Knock At The Door, posted this recently and Lady D here heartily approves.

(Oh Mary Oliver. How you articulate the graceful layers of our living. Last time I read you I was on a grassy lane and a fawn with its mother wondered by. It felt like a dream, but a solid thing too...How life could be if I learn how to be still and speak with purpose.)

you do not have to be good.

2011-10-05T21:04:00.000-07:00

you do not have to be good.
you do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
you only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.
tell me about despair, yours, and i will tell you mine.
meanwhile the world goes on.

meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
call to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

- MARY OLIVER

Pieter Bruegel on the silver screen??

2011-09-29T20:07:00.000-07:00

I have no words, only eyes. This looks incredibly genuine.

The Mill and The Cross, Sundance 2011 selection
Showing for one week in downtown Berkeley!

The film tells the story of this one incredible painting:

xoxo,
Lady D

{Musing - Hepburn}

2011-09-28T15:55:00.001-07:00

I was born with an enormous need for affection,

and a terrible need to give it.

- Audrey Hepburn

Perugino's bride

2011-09-24T15:02:00.000-07:00

{Julia Margaret Cameron - After the Manner of Perugino 1865}

"The kingdom of heaven is movement and then repose."

St. Thomas

"Be kind, becuae everyone is having a really hard time."

Plato

"It is God's nature to fill us, but he can't get in becuae we are too filled up with ourselves."

Eckhart

* * *

...Flipping through an old notebook from last term...

"Because we do afterall want to be whole people, and that, as the buddha says, starts with seeing that we are not."

"A rather non-descript star in a rather non-descript galazy...most ordinary and extrordinary story...and its all true."

"How free are you interested in being?"

"Be the thing your actions are trying to corespond too."

"As with most very important things it is best not to say too much. So lets quit. Class dismissed."

- my favorite philosophy professor

a tenacity of intimacy

2011-09-23T22:25:00.000-07:00

There is an inherent instability to a really good Vincent van Gogh painting. It isn't just instability, its a heightened sense of what it means to see, what it means to perceive this world.

These paintings have a tenacity of intimacy.

We should spend our time getting very far away from them. But they offer relationship, and no matter how unhealthy, we choose relationship with the world instead of isolation. However, to be with a van Gogh painting is to reveal the part of oneself that is usually at home with isolation. Its all a messy paradox, just like those entirely too bright suns.

I don't think van Goghs are jolly. Happy is insultingly simplistic. And colorful deceptively suggests a creation of light that they do not concern themselves with. They are anything but easy canvases.

I've always thought they hovered between terrifying and beautiful, perverse and holy.

Sometimes looking at van Gogh is like homeopathy - you take a little bit of the poison to negate the real illness. We want art to be our secret keeper. We want it to understand us so we don't have to do the dirty task ourselves.

van Goghs are detached from this world and yet they are the most fervently intimate paintings.

How can this be?
How can something's own modes of seeing alienate it from what it intuitively knows so well.

Sometimes I think I live like this. More than sometimes. (How does everyone go about their living? I ask over and over again. Doesn't anyone else think the sun is entirely too bright?)

Sometimes looking at a van Gogh is like seeing one of my migraines - everything is so acutely perceived it is painful and relationship is alienating even through the modes of intimacy.

Yes, van Gogh is a migraine in the National Gallery.

I am not saying this is bad art. I am proving just the opposite.

Its the sunflower-man anomaly. Its all backwards, like turning around in Plato's cave, but for me its true:

These are paintings about pain.
The pain of seeing. The pain of intimacy.

on the steps of the museum,
Lady D

A little Uncle Walt for your monday

2011-09-18T23:00:00.000-07:00

Its important to sound your barbaric YALP.

(And don't forget, this is a war! And the casualties could be your hearts and souls!)

galavanting in Ghent

2011-09-12T17:37:00.000-07:00

Its 1432 and the talk of the town is Jan van Eyck's new masterpiece...Here's what you need to know for the cocktail gossip:

- Its all about the book! Count them. Redemption through Sacrifice symbolically communicates itself to us continually, summarized overall in the imagery of the Lamb of God. This is the first time this theme from the writings of St. John the Evangelist has been seen on panel outside of the bindings of a book.

- Everyone is here and no one is late. Emerging out of the woods on the right in the central panel the virgin martyrs have even bothered to arrive in alphabetical order!

- The threesome at the top represents the Virgin, arguably an embodiment of the Trinity (see three part papal crown,) and St. John the Baptist.

And we'll skip the rest of the iconography encoding in my notes...

- Historically speaking:

1432 Completed
1566 Iconoclasm, altarpiece hidden in attic
1751 Adam and Eve removed for being indecent
1794 Entire piece stolen by French soldiers, side panels sold in Berlin
1816 Central panel returned
1822 fire damage, side panels in Berlin cut in half for more inventive display
1919 stipulation in the Treaty of Versailles returns the whole altarpiece to Ghent
1984 Disgruntled stock broker steals side panel and demands ransom. Ransom never payed, far right side panel is a facsimile. Rumored locations include the Bahamas.

Yours 'till the iconoclasm strikes,
Lady Durer

the college list (1)

2011-09-11T14:23:00.000-07:00

What I've learned so far at University:

- I never want to build a Japaneses Pagoda out of toothpicks (or anything else for that matter.) Ever.

- Certain valuable details about being a Netherlandish Prince in the 14th century including a recipe for exploding blue sheep pie. Good to know, Prof Honig. (Will this be on the midterm??)

- That somewhere (potentially in the Bahamas) a now quite old, and probably still disgruntled, stock broker is eating his breakfast in front of a panel of the Ghent altarpiece. (The Dutch government doesn't seem to know how to use the postal system in conjunction with the ransom money.)

- I take poetry breaks instead of cigarette breaks.

- While contrapostilly challenged men speak Latin, God apparently got bored with declining everything and by 1420 started using French. See illuminated manuscript evidence, Rohan Master.

- That Caravaggio both had even better hair and sorely worse manners than I previously believed. The things you learn when you read 500 pages on a man.

- Taking a Graduate seminar in a language department you have no familiarity with is the best excuse to read classic European tragedies in single sittings. (How else are you going to keep up with people who actually already have degrees in this stuff??...best excuse for bookishness ever.)

(Also I should name a future pet Phaedra. I first wrote "child." Then decided that would be inconvenient for them.)

- I officially use books as security blankets. Sometimes I feel the need to have more than one with me at all times.

- Conversations are still the best way to learn.

- Instructions: "Write 300 words..." Result: 3 pages. (Something is wrong in my brain. Evidently. Not that we didn't already know this. Can I blame this one on the dyslexia too?...I think this problem runs a little deeper.)

- It should also be noted that Michelangelo is really rude if you ask him about anything North of the Alps. (Get off your high neoplatonic horse!) Professor Olson has given me permission to have conversations with dead painters. I am incorrigible.

- Apparently the Mikaeri Amida Buddha has a neck ache. (More on this later)

XOXO,
Lady Durer

put it in a jar

2011-09-10T16:00:00.000-07:00

“I shambled after as usual as I’ve been doing all my life after people that interest me, because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing.. but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.”
- Jack Kerouac

This then, is it. Really it.
If you come across me (or have) at the end of the day drugging across campus having accumulated even more books than I started with at 7:30am, empty lunch pale, pencil in hair, bookish blazer, squinting tired eyes, you can go read this quote and understand.

The ambition of my life is to have great conversations.

Conversations with dead painters (thanks for the phrase Professor Olson), and dead poets (nod to Uncle Walt,) with the articles I read, with the books I don't have time to finish and leave like love affairs. (I write in books to talk back to them. Do you?)
Conversations that begin with knocking on office doors, with a friend sitting by a lake for four hours, with a teacher who I thought had nothing meaningful to say to me and promptly made me choke up. With a man in a wheel chair who I admired from afar all semester and now I get to call a friend.

And conversations with you.

See, really what I've always wanted was a Bloomsbury group of my own. I'm not looking for specific people. Its autumn and I'm leaf peeping for passionate people. People who aren't too cool to be really interested. Interested in living and dieing and everything in between.

Like the people who wait outside the library for it to open so they can go sit in the same place everyday. (They might not have most things in life figured out - most of them haven't bathed in awhile, probably haven't eaten breakfast either - but they've got something figured out.) Like the boy you don't notice at the party until he sits down at the piano and plays Rachmaninoff with real heart. Like the moment you get your friend's first published poetry in the mail and and the year you wait to hug her over her beautiful words.

These are my Bloomsbury moments, Virginia Woolf. I'd like to gather them all up and put them in the cozy corner of a bookshop cafe or spread them out for a picnic.

If I could have a super power today it would be the ability to scoop up really great conversations and put them in a jar, screw on the lid and leave them for a rainy day.

Please add to my collection. The jar is always open.

xoxo,
Lady Durer

(image - SF Public Library Blog)

{Musing - D. H. Lawrence}

2011-09-05T11:22:00.000-07:00

“[she] went for walks in the park and in the woods that joined the park, and enjoyed the solitude and the mystery, kicked the brown leaves of autumn and picked the primroses of spring. But it was all like a dream: or rather, it was like the simulacrum of reality. The oak-leaves to her were like oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was a figure somebody had read about, picking primroses that were only shadows, or memories, or words.”

—	D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

{Musing - Billy Collins}

2011-09-03T21:13:00.000-07:00

"It seems only yesterday i used to believe

there was nothing under my skin but light.

If you cut me I could shine."

-Billy Collins

When wheet is gold and crows are black

2011-09-02T13:03:00.000-07:00

{I wrote the following in 2009, but thought it worth re-posting.}

Who but Vincent van Gogh can take the most bold colors and blunt strokes, only to contrive them unto the expression of loneliness and inactivity. Its a tad bit frightening - all the color put to such silence, like voices to a score.

When loudness is silence, when definitive strokes come from a life's insecure footprints, when wheat is gold and crows are black, but nothing else is as it seems: then is art the introverted being's extroverted expression.

The best part of this painting is that it was not premeditated. Not commissioned, not asked for, not wanted. A bit like the man who created it. There is no artillery of clever tricks, hidden metaphors, nor contrived private smiles. No one was ever particularly supposed to look at this painting. But here we are...looking.

There is no wink-wink, nudge-nudge to be found with in it's thick oils. No jokes or references, I promise.

It just is.
It just is genuine. And yet, so much more then genuine. It's breathing - you can match your exhales to the undulating surface and feel harmoniously, singularly alone.

Van Gogh: the sunflower man.
We like van Gogh's because they make us feel good - bright, bold, definitively cheerful.
We should like van Goghs for making us awaken to the deeper, more genuine, visceral within. When not just looked at, but instead seen, they make us recognize the lack of understanding for the way we are told things aught to occur.

I do not look at a van Gogh for the sunflower. I look for the petals that fell off the blossom onto the artist's studio floor.

Van Goghs can be difficult. The core of affection must be sought out - try too hard and you will miss it, shorten your sight and you'll walk right into it.

A van Gogh is not what is, should be, or has been. It is the calm, open declaration of what might be. It is the picture of desire, before the storm of reality: a Beautiful, and terrifying place of the mind.

At first when I look at a van Gogh everything is perfectly still - not a whimper of wind, nor dash of movement escapes the confines of its canvas. After I have looked for a very long time the painting simply collapses. It is shaken to tiny bits along with my security.

We all have storms. we all have wheat fields. we just don't all paint them. Thankfully, Vincent van Gogh did.

( Wheat Field With Crows,Vincent van Gogh, 1890, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, Natherlands.)

what I pray

2011-09-02T08:04:00.000-07:00

“To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury,

and refinement rather than fashion;

to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich;

to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart;

to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never;

in a word to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious,

grow up through the common — this is my symphony.”

- William Henry Channing

{P.S. Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries - Theodore Roethke}

keep calm

2011-08-29T21:47:00.001-07:00

{sing it too}

a painting a day/keeps sorrow at bay (The Met)

2011-08-29T21:20:00.001-07:00

I've said it before, I'll say it again: I'm no fresco gal. Its all about works on paper for me.

The vulnerability. The essential nature of the thing itself. The human hand at work. The silence.

Oh heaven, that ever implied, but never confirmed, silence.

Pause. Stillness. Greatness conveyed by the lack of all unnecessary intonation.

Silence.

I long for that.
Sometimes I feel as though I will scream for the lack of it. (An unproductive impulse.)

"Negress" Lying Down, 1658
Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) (Dutch, 1606–1669)
Etching, drypoint, engraving

3 3/16 x 6 1/4 in. (8.1 x 15.8 cm)

Shaw's the man, Candida's the wife. The play's the thing.

2011-08-26T22:57:00.000-07:00

Shaw. Shaw. Shaw.
How does he do it?

First, everything is allowed to be utterly itself.
Humanity is left to humanity
muddle to muddle
wit to wit
sensitively to sensitivity
each player unto his part.

and then the curtain is up and we are there and it is there and somewhere in between is incite and real heart and real truths, if you can use such a word, all fluttering around like larks in the wind of the world.

Nothing fighting to get seen, nothing imposing itself.

Because real things know that they do not have to fight or impose. They must only love and to really love you must be yourself.

This is Shaw. Yes, this is how he does it.

The California Shakespeare Theater has proved, yet again, with their 2011 August to September run of Bernard Shaw's Candida that what they can do is this. Shaw. Wilde. Vanya. Take your pic but keep it old school European. Ever since their, nothing less than brilliant, adaptation of Dickens's Nichols Nichleby into a two part living proof of theater's relevant process and not just potential product, they have been indicating that their genuine talent lies not in the production of their name sake's work. Instead it is in bringing to life scripts that walk from page to stage without interference or interpretation that manifests in themed costume choices. Especially in the hands of veteran director Johnathan Mascone, the 19th century talkies are this theater company's real offering to the soulful visitor to their golden hill, star ceilinged abode.

Candida is about truth. About the truth of an individual - whoever she is seen by, loved by, claimed by, owned by. (is what we see just a reflection of who we actually are? Is this why we can only really love another thing for what it truly is when we can see our own selves clearly?)

Its witty. Its subtle. Its comic. Its honest from all angles - angles you didn't even know existed. Its about men and boys and marriage while all at once being domestic and transcendent of anything remotely close to domesticity.

Its Shaw.

And of course its about love. But not as you will formulate in your head as you read this. No, its about why a man needs not just a woman, but his wife. And why she stays and what she knows and who they are together and for each other.

Just like humanity that is not afraid to be itself, it is courageous and therefore it can love.

Yes, this work, this play, can love. Its is that real.

It breathes, not be cause it takes your breath away - stealing exhales for its vanity - but because it gives you a little bit more of your breath back than you bargained for.
(What are you going to do with those extra breathes? What are you going to do? How are you going to do it?)

However, as Cal Shakes remarks with Shaw, "neither the answers nor the questions are clearly cut."

And one more thing on honesty...

{Act I}
MORELL Look here Burgess, do you want to be welcome here as you were before you lost that contract?
BURGESS I do, James. I do - honest.
MORELL Then why don't you behave as you did then?
BURGRESS O'w d'y mean?
MORELL I'll tell you. You thought me a young fool then.
BURGRESS (coaxingly) No, I didn't James. I-
MORELL Yes, you did. And I thought you an old scoundrel.
BURGRESS No, you didn't, James. Now you do yourself a hinjustice.
MORELL Yes, I did. Well, that did not prevent us from getting on very well together. God made you what I call a scoundrel as he made me what you call a fool. It was not for me to quarrel with his handy work in one case more than the other.

And something on poets...

{Act II}
PROSERPINE (nettled at what she takes as a disparagement of her manners by an aristocrat) Oh, well, if you want original conversation, you'd better go and talk to yourself.

MARCHBANKS That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them.

And we are back to love...

{Act II}
MARCHBANKS Hush! I go about in search of love; and I find it in unmeasured stores in the bosoms of others. But when I try to ask for it, this horrible shyness strangles me; and I stand dumb, or worse than dumb, saying meaningless things--foolish lies. And I see the affection I am longing for given to dogs and cats and pet birds, because they come and ask for it. (almost whispering) It must be asked for: it is like a ghost: it can not speak unless it is first spoken to. (back to his normal pitch, but with deep melancholy) All the love in the world is longing to speak; only it dare not, because it is shy shy shy. That is the world's tragedy.

* * *

Still bundled in scarf and tweed from the theater,
your lady

a painting a day/keeps sorrow at bay (Brooklyn Museum)

2011-08-25T17:46:00.000-07:00

{Brooklyn Museum - The Sisters - Abbott H. Thaye}

I think this is utterly stunning, especially how space is used and not used in this configuration...Like they are walking out of a memory - an undefined room. They are so completely and genuinely themselves we don't need to see any context. If I owned a Salon, I would put this on the wall. If I could paint, I would aspire to this.

Instead, I have a sister, and I will try to live like this and love her dearly.

XOXO,
Lady D

Enter the Merzbau

2011-08-23T13:26:00.000-07:00

You know an artist had a good sense of humor when the way he signs his work is by cutting his name out of contemporary newspaper announcements and reviews and pasting it on the new piece. Such a creative, engaging, and aesthetically cohesive artist was German born Kurt Schwitters. Exhibited until late November, this post WWI Dadaist and "Merz" categorized artist of the old country brings class and grounded, earthy minimalism to the bay area art scene via the dedicated staff and crew of the Berkeley Art Museum.

Although known for the (bellow) "Merzbaum" (an "abstract sculpture into which people can go") recreated from photographs after the original's destruction in WW II and still quite a giant jigsaw puzzle to construct, Schwitters spent the rest of his time on paper works. Bridging the expanses between at once Dadaism and constructivism, Schwitters somehow leaves the impression of an earthy minimalist. Dadaism is a movement I love for the fuss of the thing, the mindset of these artists living for a few years in what felt like an almost post apocalyptic Europe after the Great War. I do not love it for any stand alone results. It was a thing of the time and best left in context. However, perusing the spacious BAM galleries at the Schwitter opening I was touched to find a class of aesthetic consciousness all its own among the paper scrap reactionaries.

I think perhaps two things must be noted and given at least partial credit for Schwitter's beautiful cohesive body of paper works. First is in the process: instead of carefully arranging his colleagues and then pasting all the bits down, Schwitter developed a technique of wetting his selected scraps - torn newspaper, tick stubs, bits of colored wrapping paper, railway maps - and moving them in unison around the background until the work evolved together into place.

{Kurt Schwitters: Mz 601, 1923}

The second is Schwitters ability to be almost conscious of light, and the creation of light while working in a medium outside of even painting or drawing. Hoffman once remarked something along the lines that while light created color in nature, color creates light in art. This is certainly, and unexpectedly true in Schwitters work. The earthy hues beacon with an almost Vermeer effect on the human pupils. They encompass, encase. They hold us in place, hold us in place in our humanity even.

This pull towards an inner humanity is what ultimately enables Schwitters to fly above his fellow Dadaists into the realm of moving, authentic aesthetics.

on not going away for college

2011-08-21T13:15:00.001-07:00

The happening, the fuss, the c r o w d s...its all begun. University. Fall undergraduate term 2011.

There are a few unusual things about my impending college career, namely this fall is my junior year while still being my first semester, I'm only moving 23 1/5th paces meaning I still get to horde all my family's old Arden Shakespeare books (the bomb diggity), and I'm registered for a graduate student seminar in a foreign language department where I do not yet speak a word of said foreign language (way to go Lady d. You never learn do you.)

With renovation to the "cottage," "hobbit hole," or "Nest" (Vote please?) progressing as fast as my remarkable can-do-anything-museum employed father fits copper piping together and sends my mother and I on hardware store runs at 5 hours intervals, thoughts of 'packing' have been crossing my mind.

I mean this is what one is supposed to do at my age right? Pack for c o l l e g e.

Frankly, when you are only moving 23 1/5th paces for University you get to keep nearly all your books, bobkins, and bits. Well, nearly. I don't know how I would do it if I had to really move.

I mean, I really don't know.

I posses three bookshelves and still - even with double layering the shelves - I now have multiple piles of volumes on the floor and teetering precariously near where I lay my head down for a snooze every night. A sensible woman endeavors to posses bookcases and books in proportional, complimentary capacities...(unity, peace, harmony,)...Lady Durer is not a sensible woman evidently. (disjointed, chaos, library fines.)

(True story: I've taken to actually having to just leave books next to me in bed on top of the covers when I finish with them in the evenings because to pile anymore on my bookshelf/bedside table would be to concur the wrath of my parental earthquake safety squad. Maybe I should just pile my text books at the foot of the bed...I'm only a little over 5 foot...Its not like I'm using the space down there...hmm)

Speaking of books, (really, when isn't one not?....and when shouldn't one?) I am now the slightly aww struck owner of Phaidon's Caravaggio volume which is positively better than any pony, Andalusia or no.

Its silver. Its huge. Its a looker.
Its really quite sexy frankly. I mean the thing is so beautiful I can't quite get over it. I just keep staring at the cover, (imagine how tantalizing it will be to actually flip the pages, read them. imagine that. r e a d them. know what this book is thinking...ok enough book pornography.) I can't believe I only payed $50 for it this morning. This is a book that deserves a price tag.

But back to college packing.
Here are a few of my favorite things as of the last week:

- A facsimile of the 1899 Merck's Medical Manuel. This little black book is going to be my go to ailment manual, so watch out if you come knocking at my door with a hangover - you might just get a tincture of silver nitrate with opium and essence of arsenic.

- The character Alyosha from Dostoevsky's Brother's Karamazov. I'm in love. Its hopeless. I suddenly want to spend thousands at a store that only sells dresses in one color. 'nough said.

- Oxford school shoes. Bought with my lovely sister for a whopping $20 at Urban outfitter's sale rack...best worn with little folded over socks. I'm ready for the yellow brick road now (or the past hours corridor maze to Main stacks.)

- Homemade pink dress (pictured on right) Vintage replica print by Everything But The Kitchen Sink Fabrics.

- The Bade Biblical Archeology Museum...click here for upcoming lectures and exhibits.

- Straw hat. Also an Urban outfitter find. From dog walks to laying pipe and brick to strolls to Mrs. Dalloway's its my new favorite companion. Classy/practical/hugable = my clothing motto.

- Peach and I's new reading nook. (yes, its on the second floor marble facade of one of the countries largest research libraries. If you have a fear of heights or edges you should stay inside the library.)

- The thought of still being able to burst in on my family and tell them how excited I am about living and learning even if I'm not homeschooled anymore.

XoXo,
Lady Durer
a.k.a. the bewildered and cheery new university student.

{Musing - Miss Dodger}

2011-08-18T09:55:00.000-07:00

At a certain point in your life,
probably after too much of it has gone by,
you will open your eyes and see yourself for who you really are,
especially for everything
that made you different from all the awful normals.

And you will say,
"but I am this person,"
and in this statement there will be a kind of love.

- Phoebe In Wonderland

(Picasso)

the speck of dust, the gentleman

2011-08-15T00:23:00.000-07:00

Dear Future Gentleman Caller,

I want to sneak into your pocket
and run along the waves in old rubber boots lined with thick woolen socks.
I want you to wear thick woolen socks too 'cause the seaside is chilly this time of the year.

I will trust you. I will laugh with you. I will cry for no good reason.
I will eat a peach, and lay down my backpack, and you will move my hair off my neck.

You will will think I'm the bomb diggity. A sea creature maybe. You're not sure.
You will hang out on the clean back porch, and babble to me in your fake British accent about Bloomsbury revivals.

We will "measure out our lives with teaspoons," and star charts.

And this will be our love affair.
It will be hours of month long days and a breath's worth of years.

I want to understand something great and terrible and sad like the gray dove dead against the pavement about your heart. I want to know where your burning place is. Where the speck of dust that is not your own, that you were not born with is lodged inside of you.

You will say, it is under my extra rib, I won't believe you, so I'll count.
there, there. here, here.
Your chest it is a cathedral of arching bone, sinew, and stretched skin.
I'll touch it, my bare hand. (Imagine. my bare hand.) Isn't it amazing we have hands, I'll say.

And I will believe you. I will trust you.
Put my forefinger over the speck of dust
That speck of dust that is a soul which you do not call a soul.
A speck of dust for the messy poet and the hapless lover and the man who will someday be old and own a dog and tell our daughter about her mother who looked for his speck of dust and lay her bare palm over its hiding hole and kept his secret.

I want a boy with a dusty soul because this will mean its been around for long enough to tell me stories of Prussia and lost telegraph signals, and books with thick paper, and a time when no one had ever seen a photograph of themselves. It will mean its been drenched in musings, and the orchestra score for Swan Lake, and railroad maps.

It will also mean that he needs a bit of polishing, just a little.
My eye lashes will be a feather duster and soon we'll sneeze as the dust floats out the kitchen window over our eggs and toast and teaspoons.

xoxo in advance,
Lady Durer

The Fort, photography

2011-08-11T19:00:00.000-07:00

{Dawn breaks admits the fog and the time machine gets to work.}

{Travel} Ascension to Mt. Evans

2011-08-09T13:39:00.000-07:00

{Journal Excerpts, August 8th - Colorado, USA}

We are so close to the clouds it is almost unnerving. They have a grandeur, and an unwavering foreign, humanity about them that hangs, seeming inches above our heads. They tremble with the light as we traverse the extremely narrow 13 mile cliff road up Mt. Evans.

It takes no mental musings to convince the nervous system that this is the highest paved road in North America. Our designation? 14240 ft. above where I am used to skipping about by the tides, comfortably drenched in the plentiful air. Denver, CO has long receded behind the rippling waves of craggy rocks and pines. Soon the air will be noticeably thinner. Whenever we are about to turn a corner the road appears as though it will propel us, not into oblivion (although that will probably follow,) but into the picture book perfect sky of the Midwest.

Occasionally ravens catch a low wind, drift over the scattered rock meadows only to hover again by my open car door window. We are many miles above the tree line now. There is a feeling that we - small boned, thin skinned creatures - aren't suppose to be here. The higher we go, the more terrifying the potential fall becomes. We pass not one - but two - "road narrows" signs. More ravens circle up and descend back to below our eye line.

My sister parks the car 1/4 mile from the summit, leaving us a few switchbacks of bolder strewn peak to ascend. This is my first 14000, her second. The last one she hiked up. All the way. In Converse. (Yeah, we always knew she was hard core...but...)

The peak is astonishing. Now the cloud cover - not that there is much of it, the light is so pristine - is really upon us, on top of us, descending as we ascend. Will we meet? Who can say. This is too high even to beg council of the local mountain goat herd. The top of the world must talk to itself in a different register because it is so very quiet here.

Astonishing.

I lay back on a boulder and just watch this part of the world staying put and existing for its own magnificent self.

This is the last page in my journal. We are back in the car now, four eyes on the twisty decent. The car stereo gurgles out tunes off a CD that it decided to permanently digest a year ago. Apparently you can't barf cars like babies. Its ok 'cause my sister does a darn good Bob Dylan imitation. At this point we've opted for simply driving on the wrong side of the road - getting skilled at cliff avoidance we are - and stopping for mountain goats that are as luxurious and white as a new bed comforter.

I've got deep blue shoes on. They remind me of the home that is so very far bellow us still - sea level isn't even in sight. Its taken me approximately 14 1/2 cement miles to eat a whole tub of blue berries. The edge of the road is lined in snow melt - pristine puddles - and Indian Paintbrush. The marmots perch and pose. Elton John comes up on the stereo and the cliffs plunge and plunge and plunge in layers like unfolding brocade. (...Pretty eyes, pirate smile/Ballerina/You must have seen her.../Now she's in me - always with me...)

Now I'm thinking this is a darn good last journal entry.

As we get lower there is a forest of Ent ghosts and more wildflowers. As we drop still further there will be birch and endless rivers of narrow erect pines.

A raven flies high, scoping out the road directly in front of us, then veers to the right consumed by all the other wild things.

Out of paper.

{All photography credit to my sister}

Vicky and Alice

2011-08-06T19:24:00.002-07:00

{Meet Vicky and Alice. Grand children to England's first and last Victoria.}

Maybe life is all a matter of gardens and skies.

My sister lives in a urban fairy tale apartment building. All brick. One on top of the other. The doors have brass door nobs, the cubby holes for milk deliveries are still here, we could take the almost spiral staircase down 7 flights if we fancied it, and we must pull open big, heavy wooden doors to enter the elevator.

We cook a lot. (We hang out in the vegetable ile and get excited about purple bell peppers at the farmer's market.) We make paper cranes. (Someday I'd like to fill a whole room - scattered over the hardwood floors - with paper cranes. I'll fold everyone, each birthed from the four corners of a square.) We are always there for each other. Even if there isn't the same as here.(We should have bought stock in an air plane company a long time ago.)

But back to the gardens and sky. I mean its like this: gardens you have to cultivate and skies you just have to remember to notice...life feels oftly like a combo of agriculture and astronomy then. Intentionality and awareness.

The sky over my sister's apartment is beautiful. Up here in the mountains my sea side lungs feel awkward but my eyes are wide, wide just like the big sky. Its blue and the light has squabbles with the clouds making the most beautiful lovers quarrels in the heavens. You could paint it. People have.

If life is like gardens and skies, then family is too. You have to engage - show up, care, give that spontaneous hug. But you also just get to notice - because, like life, they aren't going anywhere.

to sisters,

Lady D

The bus stop and the wild thing

2011-08-02T23:05:00.000-07:00

The bus stops at my corner. When its quiet at night and my front window is open (which it always is - I don't like to shut the dark night out) I can hear the automatic announcement...College and Parker. Crisp. Then it moves on.

It's like I live in a train station. Or on some science fiction flight path stop. Or in a corner of the afterlife that people can cruse through - stop and have a swig of kombucha if their up to it. It makes me feel very far away from everything and like the world has many many bus stops and that each stop is a little compartment in the world's messy spice cupboard.

I've got another scene for my novella project. The creative process is really some wild thing - un-tamable, disinterested in hand outs and predictability, it can't abide my calender. Its like spending your afternoon searching for condors and suddenly noticing their shadows - those huge wings - falling over you, just for a moment. Then they are gone, but you are a bit more of yourself for having been with them for that moment.

It reminds me of this quote

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.
A bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”

- D.H. Lawrence

Speaking of things that are difficult to speak about, I want to see this film...

Veiled, Marble by Monti

2011-08-02T10:39:00.000-07:00

Lady D has a new favorite sculpture. I mean just look at this. (really look - try and find out who they are. They are no one in particular, but they might have stories or better they might be waiting for you to make a story up for them. Maybe it will be your story, thinly veiled...like everything we communicate.)

Raphaelle Monti has one of the shortest Wikapeadia entries in the book (ahem. Fake book. world wide web thing.) I'm headed over to the central library tomorrow morning to pic up some art history books recommended by a prof (and a few I added into the stack for good measure. I mean when an Italian art text is called "only connect" you know the author has read Forster...) so I'll look him up properly.

But the quick tomb stone version is this:

Milan 1818
- great dad -
- poetically, artistically inclined chap -
- London by 1848 - known for works in marble, also porcelain -
- snuffed it by 1881 -

Bye, bye Monti.

cheers,
Lady D

an ocher summer

2011-08-01T14:05:00.000-07:00

{Preview of the art corner for the Summer issue of Joy Today Magazine, Editor Emily Gordis}

"The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning." - Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt

A season is like a stately woman's gown. It can be confining or expansive, blowing in a wind who's direction is implacable. It can be drenched in deep hues of color or find its airy expression in translucent lace.

John Write Alexander may not have intended to personify summer in his "A Ray of Sunlight," 1889, but the folds of his lady's ocher gown speak of little else to my eye. I'm admittedly susceptible to it - the pull and tug of the elongated folds like the months between spring and autumn. Summer starts out light and airy like spring, a romance of white and pale yellow. Then it turns a bend in its own seasonal expanse and calls out in full throated golden glory. The rest just falls and drips and swims down to the ocher hem line before autumn rust accumulates.

Portraiture, if not of seasons but rather of persons, was Pittsburgh born painter Alexander's choice activity. Working his way from telegraph boy to Harper's Weekly illustrator to respected artist his wide travels instructed his ultimately very late 1800s American style. After passing through the Netherlands, Munich, Bavaria, Venice, and Florence with his paintbrushes and canvases he settled in New York. While on the road he was fortunate to study with Whistler during the prominent artist's stay in Italy. Alexander's portraits of women bare a sweet admiration for aspects of his mentor's style such as the brush work and the extended, lush gowns. What is perhaps both unique and crippling to Alexander's female portraits is that they never quite escape his mindset of the illustrator's aesthetic. Never the less, canvases such as "A Ray of Light" are luminous and enchanting.

Although the intended subject (the figure with her cello, and pure elegance of arching neck) disperse in significance and eye catching prowess when faced with the hue of the yellow-gold gown, the painting does not suffer this imbalance. Again, it is such an expressive color that the whole of a season is encompassed with in its folds. And one painting is but a small challenger to the remembrance of an entire season.

{Closet} comming up roses

2011-07-31T20:06:00.000-07:00

Inspired by this weekend's Russian women's delight in covering their heads with beautiful contraptions of flowery scarves, I've been perusing the work of Baltimore based artist Emily Zych

Musing (Hugo)

2011-07-31T19:12:00.000-07:00

"He would sit on a wooden bench leaning against a decrepit trellis and look at the stars through the irregular outlines of his fruit trees. This quarter of an acre of ground, so sparingly planted, so cluttered with shed and ruins, was dear to him and satisfied him. What more was needed by this old man, who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime and contemplation at night? Was this narrow enclosure with the sky for a background not space enough for him to adore God in his most beautiful, sublime works? Indeed, is that not everything? What more do you need? A little garden to walk in, and immensity to reflect on. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate on; a few flowers on earth and all the stars in heaven."

- Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

{travel log} Ross, preparatons

2011-07-31T18:45:00.000-07:00

{Early in the foggy morning we women cart lanolin filled wool, the golden draped bishops bless the church to the sound of elderly Russian voices raised in song, and "Leo Tolstoy" practices his penmanship.}

{travel log} the golden cave

2011-07-31T17:02:00.000-07:00

{Journal Excerpt}

July 29th, California Coast past Jenner, door step of Fort Ross
Laying here in my circular nest of knee high golden grass is like sinking very deep in a soft, sweet smelling fairytale sea
and remaining for a very long time. The field is so sun drenched, even through the fog, that I have had to take off my clothes and wrap myself in a light weight shawl. Even if I sit up I can not be seen, nor can I even perceive the outside world, the grass is so tall. There is a cliff - a sharp drop to the sea bellow - 20 paces to my left and the Fort walls another 80 to my right. Between cliff and watch tower there is a dusty road to the cove. It veers my direction but does not find me out.

I am playing sea selkie down here with my few treasures in this golden cave. We saw a few seals on our stop for fresh smoked salmon mid-morning. One blue-gray and navy dappled creature had the unearthly elegance that accompanies our magical breed. It turned, revolving slowly on the spot, its refined sea creature head out of the calm dark surface. Curiosity for the mixing of air and water captivating her no doubt. We leaned over the walkway railing and watched her - just a few feet from us. Then her selkie husband - dark, with a pronounced nose - swam past shaking the fish clasped in his muscular jaws.

Auntie Ann knows all the right words and important memories about this place. She knows that the best of me grew up here - the wild, free bits and the quiet, nurturing bits. She knows about waiting to catch the first glimps of the sea battered fencing twisting through the low rises to beckon us closer to the Fort. And just as we are quite close - driving along the cliffs with the broken off bits of cliff in the water, great pounding bodhrans for the surf - she brought up Sarah, Plain and Tall. ("Whats your favorite color?"/"Blue, gray, green. The color of the sea.") She also hums like I do while going about her living.

In my golden cave, the wind off the water comes to visit gracefully and then gleefully retreats. When I lay down I am utterly gone...submerged. The fog rests reasonably high - only the tops of the pines congregated on the hill ridges behind the fort are ebbing into its pallet of translucent grays...such a gray, like Bilbo's gray heavens.

prussian blue, moss green ribbon

2011-07-28T20:36:00.001-07:00

Carl Ferdinand Sohn (1805-1867)

{Study for "disappointed love" 1936}

{back to the fort}

2011-07-28T10:18:00.000-07:00

Packing list:
clogs and moccasins
Bloom's The Best Poems Of The English Language
blue journal
writing notebook
Russian hat,
captain's hat,
straw hat
night gown, bloomers, unwhisperables
3 sweaters (one with elbow patches)
ink
paper (lots of this)
pickled beet and mushroom polenta
embroidery
thread
the voice of John Keats (I can pack nearly anything in a hamper)
Sleeping bag
tent
brother's french bread
wool blanket and two shalls
Mrs. Dalloway, (but not her flowers)
red sash
hair pins and ribbon
definitely Checkhov

time traveling again (don't forget the picnic basket!)

2011-07-24T23:06:00.000-07:00

“Give me books, fruit, french wine and fine weather,
and a little music played outdoors by someone i do not know.”
-John Keats

...And old fencing swords, wild blackberry bushes, a child to tell stories of dragons and selkies to, and hand stitched clothes...

When I go historical re-enacting I leave my period clothes on for as long as possible (I should be in pajamas at this very moment...but, no). My bother does too. I told him tonight, "I just feel more myself like this."

And its true. And don't think I don't get around having adventures in my long skirts! I still fence, ramble barefoot down the path with the blackberry bushes, chase the dog, and climb trees. My body finds modern clothing so compartmentalizing - bits and pieces. You say it makes you free - its doesn't. (Freedom is what you do with your body, not how you prepare it for the world.) I feel naked when I wear a long gown draped over my edges, I feel whole and like spinning in the tall grass for a very long time. Being whole is being free. Free to be yourself. (Find this whatever way you can.)

On my hands remain most of the necessary evidence to reconstruct the day's more choice events. I have a blood blister on my right hand from learning to fence. Smashing good time of it we had. The local park going pedestrians eyes' popped a bit. My nails are dark-rim-lined with dirt and blackberry juice. We ate every last one. And my right wrist and palm splattered with black ink from teaching my four year old companion to use an ink well and 19th century fountain pen. She learned quickly.

And to think. To think! This is how people spent their hours. blackberries. Bocce ball. empty wine glasses. straw hats. poetry read aloud to amuse in the shade. Children left to speak loudly of magical things in open spaces and white knee high stocking. Simple joys and little beauties right down to the stitching on an apron to the delight of an afternoon nap after the duel. One has what one has. Simple joys and little beauties.

And time is enchanted by our living and walks slowly by, lingering with us. She lets us picnic a few hours more than she would have if we'd brought plastic forks and Arctic blue coolers. This is part of the magic of beauty. Its not vanity. its proving you notice, appreciate, and seek to perpetuate those little moments that renew life's grand splendor.

xoxo,
Lady Durer

Photographs By Auntie Ann!

dog days

2011-07-19T13:36:00.000-07:00

My dog and I do lots of things together that dogs and daughters usually don't. Because we are both anti-social-historian-wanna-be-tea-lapping creatures we watch the RSC's Hamlet on DVD instead of going to the dog park.

We both love with an unlikely enthusiasm for better or worse, have a sometimes disastrous insistence on being involved in everything, and we both feel the acute need to now exactly where all our beloved ones are at all times. We are moody, need our space then conversely don't need any space what so ever, like kissing, and enjoy cheese and crackers. We have nice legs and both think its weird when people mess with our ears.

Right now we are about to have an impromptu minnie french new wave film festival in the living room and watch Breathless together (one of us is also now eating homemade baklava thanks to our very own Imfadora Tonks - yes, Aurors can cook, especially vegan Aurors. The other one of us is extremely jealous. They are now pouting and refusing to look at the screen.)

Last night we read a new Pablo Neruda poetry collection about the sea aloud while sharing the last of the cheese and crumpets (And no, the sheets are not full of crumbs because one of us is very meticulous about cleaning up and gulping down.) Then we fell asleep after fighting over the pillow - I won hence my stomach became second prize for the sore looser.

This morning we took our black and whit camera out on a walk and snapped pics of fog and castle turrets (we tend towards exaggeration...) and construction and one of us peed on the university's rugby field. Ops.

Mischa, You're the best disaster that ever came yelping into my life and stayed for good.
Don't go anywhere.

Tree of Life

2011-07-18T23:27:00.001-07:00

Time is a strange convenience, a convergence really of necessity and some kind of space we can never quite hold in our arms but must let move through us continually. I remember time not as it occurs, but rather in abstractions that take on their own density and elasticity in my mind. A mire set of hours with one individual translates into a season in my soul, and two days with my sailor brothers take up months of significance. In the simplicity of our games and adventuring they know me better than most who spend real months with me - this is how I know they are family.

Family and time are rather similar. They are both what you make of them. They will both have to be remembered when they themselves are no more. They are things that have a very close relationship with intentionality. Most of the people on my family tree I have adopted in answer to the timeless tugging they produce on my heart strings.

Terrance Malick's Tree of Life knows all about family and time. Its a film about so many things - things that aren't really things if we would fall back into them and not be so easily pleased or compartmentalized or drugged by our everyday living. Its a film about family of course, fathers and sons, a mother's rhythm of love, a block in a small town, a planet in a galaxy, an egg, a death, comprehending, and, again, love.

But really, to me, its a film about grace. A grace that is courage with gratitude mixed in and with no need for resolution. Sometimes its about God, sometimes its about us, sometimes its about utterly everything - can we even comprehend that? - but always its about relationship. The film is whimsical and grounded, soulful and non-denominational, produces a sensation of being held and needing to hold in return. It is abstract, tangible, artistic, unconventional, fluid, sparse on dialog, drenched in depth of communication.

I was mesmerized by curiosity, beauty, and a certain rare insistence on letting grace move the hands on the clock instead of our anticipation. Tree of Life is a film for the children in us who have grown up, as we must, and now face the terrifying significance of everything moving through us, of having to learn how to remember time and family as they felt not as they were.

The child in me watched this film, while the woman listened calmly in the back of the theater. They both walked out feeling understood and understanding. (There it is again - grace. Relationship. Good art insists and facilitates relationship...grace.)

The picnicing kind

2011-07-18T22:32:00.000-07:00

Eat outside as often as you can.
Write a long letter and know what it it to be a creature of longing.
Watch a sunset or a sunrise at least once a month.
Find someone who can finish your sentences and kneel down in the grass.
Braid your hair. (Or someone else's if your going bald on top.)
Take lots of books with you wherever you go - piles of them - hug them close.
Read aloud.
Find a passion, loose a secret.
Gulp life.

This is your work.
Do it, and then be still.

XoXo,
Lady Durer

Ophelia's Repose - Read aloud!

2011-07-14T00:26:00.001-07:00

black and white, hide and seek

2011-07-09T14:51:00.000-07:00

(Champs Elysees - Kertesz, 1927-9)

Who can list what joy is to be unraveled in a day. (Joy not happiness. Joy is something not compartmentalized like sadness and golly cheer. Joy is sorrow's bride and constantly holds his steady hand. She does not mind his black attire. She loves him for exactly who he is. And he the same to her. Even the least complicated photograph needs both light and dark.)

(A snapshot - Stieglitz, 1911)

The little experiences of beauty save me a thousand times over, over, and over again. I am a melancholy child of this world. I ebb and flow with the tides and hide away in my words and between the paintings on the wall. I play hide and seek with the hours of my days. Sometimes I do not love them - the hours, these hours always passing. Sometimes I am sick for devotion to them, this living - this articulated living that we are all going about. Sometimes I ebb quite away from nearly everything, but am drawn back to the moist soil all over again - to stand bare feet in this mud and catch a bright star in my mind's eye. (someday in my open palm.)

(The Vampire - Negre, c. 1853)

* * *

"One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel."
-Madame Pompadour

* * *

Thus wonder my angels today....

---The way you stood in the market. Saturday fog clearing. Arms full to over flowing with kale and chard, green things, and things from the earth. (I will always see you like this through my camera lens. I'm waiting for you to be saved in my darkroom memory: all a wash of black and white. Bright eyes. Beautiful bright.)

---Reading Oscar Wild aloud on an old house's swinging bench in gregariously loud and bad British accents. Home-cooked lunch long gone. My hands smelling of rosemary from making the potatoes. A darn, good friend. I love making her happy.

---The gurgle of water in the darkroom. I watched red-light outlined forms move slowly through the fish tank like room. Feeling at home plopping my film into the shimmery bin. Feeling like I was under water. Deep underwater. In the place where the waves are only a distant rush and tug above.

--- Bright Star. My soul fell back into its nest when I played the soundtrack and discovered that its tracks are a mix of Keat's poetry read aloud by the ever genuine Ben Whinshaw, and the melodies from the film. Nothing close to average or expected. Several tracks are even simply letters read aloud. Suddenly I felt held. ("still, still to here her ever tender taken breath!")

Miss B: I still can't make out poetry.

Keats:
The point of diving in a lake is to not immediately swim to the shore. But to be in the lake.....you do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to except mystery.

Miss B: I love mystery.

* * *

Yes, these are my angels for this hour. I tried to leave the demons on the library shelves. There was just enough room to squeeze them in between the photography books after I had selected a few to carry home. I'll collect the creatures when I return my books.

I never abandon them - I'm a good mother. I love all my children equally.

But sometimes I let the fifth floor babysit them. The ones' that make my insides turn still. Quiet.
Too quiet.

xx,
Lady D

old souls

2011-07-05T22:34:00.000-07:00

I like the very young and the very old. Poets who haven't yet been published, and Walden ponds a little worse for wear around he edges. People with braids and ribbons in their hair and people with very little hair to speak of.

I'll let you in on a secret of mine.

I'm not really me.

Well, I am...but its just a wee bit complicated.

Let me explain.

Shhhhh.

See these legs? These dancin' feet and uncooperative curls? They are just for show. I'm actually nearing 112. I celebrated my 111th with Mr. Baggin's last year. (Great fireworks and all. You know - Unpredictable wizard stuff.)

You see if you look closely at my hands its starting to show. They are a bit more wrinkly than they should be if this body was as important as all the fuss about being youthful makes it out to be.

In the important sense of reality I'm quite wobbly at the knees, my joints actually have creaked and cracked to the disturbed tune of friends' rolling eye since my playground days, and I've got white hair down to my elbows. I adore my white hair.

Its complicated this body stuff. This soul stuff. I'm old. I'm lovin' it.

My preferred brew is a good jar or tea cup with saucer (I'll skip the mug thanks,) full of good herbal or green tea. I'm too old for alcohol. (Vodka once in a while when Dr. Zhivago is on re-runs and Chekhov is begging to be dramatized aloud. We all have moments. But cans o' beer? You have to be Audrey Hepburn to make that look classy. Let me know when you come close to the hair alone.)

I'm pretty certain my last name might be Woolf. I've got no talent for Scrabble but play because my buddies do (last night I got bloodily beat over cherry pie. maybe I need brain surgery like my partner.) I probably have exquisite taste in solo piano music and wear especially Victorian unwhisperables and brown clogs. Yup. Clogs are the way to go especially when matched with walkers. I cook too, and enjoy being read aloud too. (Sadly I'm a little short on readers at the moment. Come read to me?) Sometimes I garden when my back isn't too sore. I always write in the garden.

I'm even terrible at using the Internet. Really, I can't find anything when I need it and stick to familiar turf. Its simply more efficient for me to go to the library, even though after a good 112 years I'm still learning my ABC's.

See I'm just a lupine lady growing old (older) by the sea.
Its a good life. Especially when my meds kick-in and I get to forget I have to go be a college student. Oh what a fuss. Psh young people. Over rated.

(And this is totally how my sweet heart dresses: http://www.thesartorialist.com/photos/61710Brownlinen_2598Web.jpg)

I'm just one of those women who "come and go talking of Michelangelo"

because...

"There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time for a hundred indecisions,
And time for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo."

xoxo,
Your lady,
a little worse for wear around the edges.

postcards from Lady D

2011-07-05T17:18:00.000-07:00

(Postcard was sent to my great grandmother, photographs are my own)

works on paper

2011-07-05T01:30:00.000-07:00

Some people are a novel, even a trilogy. An epic! Some people are a sentence without a period - you know, Virginia Woolf-ish. Some people are an apple that won't sit still for Cezanne. Some people are the edges Picasso got famous for.

The Bay Area is fortunate to play hostess to over 100 works by Picasso through October 9th at the big city's De Young museum's traveling exhibition galleries. What is remarkable about the show, titled simply PICASSO: Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso, Paris, is not any one canvas, but instead the dynamic testament to the diversity, the complexity that one human being can demand be witnessed by the rest of us. Tomato/Tomato, Picasso/Picasso. Love him or hate him, walk by indifferent or run to by that postcard - but as you pass take the time to tip your cap to a man who wasn't afraid to be himself in one of the most important realms of reality: creativity. There actually is something for anyone, for everyone in the Musee National's selection - maybe you'll only find one print that you like - but you will walk away having had a conversation with a genuine artist. You don't have to like him, but you do have to stop and chat. Picasso is complex, dynamic, whole. He is not a cube. Never was, never will be.

As usual, I found myself utterly captivated by the selection of works on paper. The Met was the same last month. The Small gallery that most museum visitors use as nothing more than a traffic path from 19th century Europe to the American Wing with their white wigged presidents, was my destination. Room 690 was the place to be and stay for your Lady here. (She even found a bench - look to the left, four Durer's/gaze to the right, four Rembrandt charcoals. More on this later.) Etching, print, lithograph, pencil, charcoal - they are what we have of the curves of Picasso's hands.

Works on paper are essential. When we look at a painting - Such a lush thing! Such an evergreen forest! - we must travel, we must journey and seek out the genuine line that, lacking such a curvature, the overall creation would loose containment of its soul.

With a work on paper your attention is demanded by being so immediately presented with the opportunities to comprehend. You have arrived. You don't get eased into Picasso. You fall and land and know all at once. A lithograph or an etching - its bare, its like the skeleton of a barn that for all but practicality's sake is utterly knowable...and what did practicality ever have to do with great art.

Paintings can be naked. They can be simple, in your face affairs. They can be bold and basic. Works on paper are never naked. Their bareness is one of subtitles exposed and left un-adorned because they are enough simply being themselves. They are nude. The actor with out the costume who has not forgotten her lines. The book without its cover jacket. The artist without his pallet - only texture and a need to be with his audience, to really be seen.

I'm not a novel. I'm complex and I don't use punctuation very tidily. I'm no epic. I'm not round enough to roll away like an apple and I like my current room with a view. And, although I've got edges, I'm not the one's anyone will get famous for.

I'll tell you a secret.
I've got a grand ambition to be a work on paper.

As Picasso said "give me a museum and I'll fill it."

xoxo,
Lady Durer

(Pablo Picasso, drypoint etching, "Le Repas Frugal")

"Somethings rotten in the state of Denmark"

2011-06-29T18:42:00.000-07:00

{The Royal Shakespeare Company gives you...HAMLET!
The philosophic thriller. The play that's most certainly the thing.}

Its the play of plays. Denmark's man is the prince of theater. They are the lines that strike and strike again at our breast and ply our minds with a necessary indulgence of bitter and biting musings. But its funny. And we never spend a quicker three hours. Its also a thriller while being a philosophic trance...Well, its Hamlet. To be, to be. So that's that.

Shakespeare wrote for the stage; a round stage where people stood for three hours at a time. Our expansive choice of performance mediums for his work is now quite boundless and experimental. However, nothing is better than when it is allowed to simply be itself. There is no replacement for stagecraft, a seat in a spindly pew, or the vulnerable breath encapsulated in real time. The theater is the theater, and Shakespeare is Shakespeare, and Hamlet is both.

However, for those of us not fortunate enough to deposit our monthly pay checks into a little silver tea tin labeled "cross continental and oceanic plane ticket fund," The Royal Shakespeare Company's effort to responsibly share, across the real globe, their 2009 production of the prince of Denmark is a worthy runner up. With great integrity to their primary craft, and only script writer, the David Tennant and Patrick Stewart lead cast collaborates with skilled directors of photography, stage, music, and sets to produce a production of Hamlet. The result hovers between the genuine rawness of theater and the accessibility of film.

The greatest blessing perhaps of the altered medium, beyond its universal distribution, was for me the intimacy. There is intimacy within the theater - it is why we go, why we stay, and why we leave altered, inwardly re-organized. However, there is a practical side to producing intimacy that film readily accommodates. The simple, close up camera work employed allowed the skilled actors to use their stage smarts while not a. having to project to a multi-hundred strong audience, and b. utilize the most subtle facial moments. As Hamlet (Tennant) remarks in an interview about the production "you can choose when you share lines directly with the audience and take them away." The privacy of the soliloquies are captured in an uncommonly genuine sense due to the selection of camera angles. Nothing beats sitting in a dark theater, but film does produce gifted intersections with Shakespeare.

Naturally something must be said of Hamlet himself. Its been a few too many years sine I have seen the often adored, and sometimes hated Kenneth Branagh Hamlet (in fact I have a fond memory of sitting as a little girl amidst my friend's older brothers and having them selectively cover my ears and eyes at various moments. So I should update my opinion.) I heartily enjoyed Tennant's work on this production. I would have adored to see it on stage. Something that makes this film version special - and again, in no way a movie - is the fact that the entire cast had actually just gotten of a run of the play on the stage together when they began work with the cameras. Tennant had the opportunity to work through and into Hamlet in his natural environment - the stage - before having to displace him and re-orient him. Lady Durer gives this Hamlet a thumbs up. (and Ophelia would steal the show if everyone else was not so bloody brilliant. Not to mention she actually looks like my mind's Ophelia which is convenient.) Polonius's lines are delivered with an expertise expected of a RSC actor- we actually feel the boredom born by his fellow men. These are the best Brits doing their homeland's best playwrite. Its a good combination.

Naturally there were choices over the course of the three hours and five minutes that I didn't adore. And yes they cut. But goodness, they always cut. However what is remarkable about this filmed production is that the play really shines through due to the respect and genuine experience the actors have with their characters and lines. Its is no wonder, as the team came from the theater world, that the language never gets abandoned, abused, twisted, overshadowed or swallowed. Hallelujah.

"I wish everyone could have a go at playing Hamlet" cheerful remarks Tennant in his thick British accent off set. Every time I read Hamlet or see it I am caught up by different lines from which the rest of the narrative, language, and characterization articulate themselves. This time?

"This to all, to your own self be true."

And finally the mark of a good Hamlet production? lets just say I actually checked the back of the DVD case to make sure I got my full three hours worth. It felt like ten minutes...maybe I've just traversed Denmark too much, but I hardly think that's likely.

At a certain point with Shakespeare all you can strive for is to have your production come off with the wind of integrity. You don't need fancy costumes, big audiences, or apparently stages to accomplish this and accomplish it well.

Watch the three hour production on line at Great Performances:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/episodes/hamlet/watch-the-film/980/

cheers,
Lady D

whimsicality

2011-06-28T10:24:00.001-07:00

Hilda Cowham

Hilda Cowham (1873-1964)

Katherina Cameron

Katherine Cameron

Dr. Barns At Merryon House (part 1)

2011-06-28T09:06:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time (and very nearly to the end of this year,) existed (and just barely exists) a museum hidden in the lush woods of Pennsylvania. It is really just a very large, and very old house. However, instead of predictable flower vases and poorly done prints, its interior walls are ornamented with some of the great art of the 19th and 20th centuries. This is Dr. Barns' house and in its corridors you will be cordially introduced to Matisse as he finishes a mural, Renoir as he paints his umpteenth nude, and, lacking Cezanne, at least his left over apples...

Welcome to The Barns Foundation...Do come in. I guarantee, you never seen anything quite like it. (And, literally, never will again.)

In one of the less-then memorable weeks before the commencement of my spring term finals, I can recollect little more than constantly fixing my gaze on the Barn's Foundation website when not directed towards my half written papers. Ever since learning of the work of Dr. Barns, a turn of the century American business man possessing two highly useful attributes - i.e. good taste and an abundance of hard cash - I had hoped to visit the house in Merryon. The Barn's Foundation, as it is known, has for all its endowment of art, good intention, and admirable purpose, been bashfully un-endowned with good luck.

Originally, the collection was to stand for eternity as both museum and studio for students of the arts, presenting its, simply put, phenomenal collection in an intimate European, salon viewing style. Dr. Barns passed away assured that the strong statements in his will would leave the work to the benefit of a black college, and soundly protected from prying hands who might seek to separate his framed charges or, worse, dislocated them from their purpose infused house in Merryon.

No such luck. Through entanglements and minor disasters involving less than minor amounts of money and, I dare put forth, abuses and mis-understandings, Dr. Barns' collection will be removed against the dictates of his will to a new gallery space in down town Philadelphia by the dawning of next year. (Thievery! Outright shameful.)

Leaving art world politics aside, The Barns Foundation stands in peace for a few more blissful summer months. A solitary hold out against the commercialization and compartmentalized viewing of art, Dr. Barns' dreams are appreciated by the last devotees and gallery shop volunteers. The difference between the Barns Foundation and other museums or collections does not simply exist in the high up realms of mission statements and philosophic idealism. The house in Merryon does more to respect, and engage with great art, then I have otherwise come across. You don't just think it is different. When you walk into the catacombs of cozy galleries you see and, because you see differently than you thought possible, you come to know it is different. You leave tipping your hat to the ghost of the Dr.

I arrived at the Merryon House arm in arm with a dear friend, both of us a bit swept away by the forgotten majesty of it all - such a big house, formal gardens, lush green grounds, all of it wound about with a tall rusting wrought iron fence. We had packed a lunch and quickly disappeared - we were like children suddenly given a life size, pop-up version of our favorite story book mansion to play with - into the grounds to settle on a Walden pond-esqu picnic spot. The galleries opened at noon and we clutched our tickets - tickets I had purchased on an uprising of hope and determination before I had even secured a plane ticket to the other side of the country.

We were off to meet Dr. Barns...

Affection. Today.

2011-06-26T17:23:00.001-07:00

Solo piano music. big trees and wadding in water. homemade. someone falling sleep in your arms. wet hair. midnight biscycle rides over empty streets. dusk. vermeer's light. hugs where you get picked up in the air. good conversation. bookish. what I may be and what I might already be. motherhood. sad books. singing along. picnics. selkie stories. rooms with views. the ocean. being reached for by a very small child. Mrs. Dalloway.

xx,
Lady D

Mary Oliver, poem

2011-06-22T10:44:00.000-07:00

"you do not have to be good.
you do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
you only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

tell me about despair, yours, and i will tell you mine.
meanwhile the world goes on.
meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
call to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."

-Mary Oliver

Got this from my lovely lady of at http://whatevergatsby.wordpress.com/

Fictionally factual

2011-06-22T09:45:00.000-07:00

I think Woolf got it right when she wrote of Emily Bronte, "Her's, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts;" I've been re-reading Wuthering Heights in the opening weeks of this summer, partly for my own indulgence and partly for my schooling as a writer, (maybe just as a human being too.) Woolf continues that our author can "with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body." What interests me most in this quote from Woolf's essay on the two sister authors are the words free, dependence, and fact.

Truth and reality are not always quite the same thing. Sometimes religions understand this, a philosopher or two, but the concept is most reliably found in good fiction. The human race lives by the stories it tells itself because we are associative, conceptual thinkers. As readers of books, as listeners to fairy stories, we grow up thinking we have thousands of pages of worlds to escape into. However, we realize, on some distant day in our small lives, that all these stories are closer to truth than most of the particular moments of reality we live.

It is hard to talk about something real, something true, without making up something fake and worshiping it or compartmentalizing the feeling with too many facts. Religion often falls into the first trap - but not always - and science the "age of Reason" the later. Fiction is responsible pretense. Its Tolkien's "true myth." Fiction is aware of its craft and so can never be fake, but Heathcliff and Cathy can be more real than the toast I ate for breakfast while flipping their prison pages. This is because toast is particular and factual, and characters, ideas are expansive and fictional.

Don't we all want to live free from our dependence on little facts? Facts are building blocks and although we can describe our castles in the air by naming their particles, wouldn't it be more to the castle's essence to tell a story about who built the structure? Facts describe. This is fair and good to understand. Fiction is free to be insightful, take a step beyond what facts communicate. It dares to be more than what we are at first glance and more than what reality can ever be, only to come home inside of us - in that tight burning place between our ribs - to prove its self a reflection of our own truth.

musing...
Lady D

Muncha's poppies

2011-06-20T22:20:00.001-07:00

Colour Lithographs Ca. 1902

Artist: Alphonse Mucha

Jefferson's advice

2011-06-20T22:06:00.000-07:00

(Whenever I am feeling unproductive I think of this letter which my mother read to me at some point when I was quite little - Jefferson wrote it to his eleven year old daughter - and which stuck in my mind. Somehow it always inspired me and convinced me that I would have like the people in the past a great, great deal :-) As a frequent maker of ridiculously unrealistic schedules - my current one involves 7am runs or German diction practice etc. I feel a kindship with dear Patsy. Maybe its all just the homeschooler in me.)

"Annapolis, Nov. 28th, 1783

My Dear Patsy

After four days' journey, I arrived here without any accident, and in as good health as when I left Philadelphia. The conviction that you would be more improved in the situation I have placed you than if still with me, has solaced me on my parting with you, which my love for you had rendered a difficult thing. The acquirements which I hope you will make under the tutors I have provided for you will render you more worthy of my love; and if they cannot increase it, they will prevent its diminution.

Consider the good lady who has taken you under her roof. . . as your mother, as the only person to whom, since the loss with which heaven has been pleased to afflict you, you can now look up.

With respect to the distribution of your time, the following is what I should approve:
From 8. to 10. o'clock practise music.
From 10. to 1. dance one day and draw another.
From 1. to 2. draw on the day you dance, and write a letter next day.
From 3. to 4. read French.
From 4. to 5. exercise yourself in music.
From 5. till bedtime, read English, write, &c.

..I expect you will write me by every post. Inform me what books you read, what tunes you learn, and inclose me your best copy of every lesson in drawing. Write also one letter a week either to your Aunt Eppes, your Aunt Skipworth, your Aunt Carr, or the little lady from whom I now enclose a letter. . . . Take care that you never spell a word wrong. Always before you write a word, consider how it is spelt, and, if you do not remember it, turn to a dictionary. It produces great praise to a lady to spell well...

If you love me, then strive to be good under every situation and to all living creatures, and to acquire those accomplishments which I have put in your power, and which will go far towards ensuring you the warmest love of your affectionate father,

Th. Jefferson

P. S. - keep my letters and read them at times, that you may always have present in your mind those things which will endear you to me.

daughters of the desert: E. C. Parsons

2011-06-20T10:11:00.000-07:00

"The new woman means the woman not yet classified, perhaps not classifiable, the woman new not only to men, but to herself." - Elsie Clews Parsons, Social Rule, 1916

On my last day of excavation at a Sinagua pueblo ruin in northern Arizona, the chief archaeologist handed me a book entitled "Daughters of the Desert: Women Anthropologists and the American Southwest 1880-1980." He said it was to prove that you didn't have to be a scruffy bearded white man in an Indiana Jone's hat to do something worth talking about in the world of archeology. Flipping through the book makes me miss the dry pines and pottery shards along with the group of guys who took my 11 year old self under their wing and into the dusty trenches.

Elsie Clew Parsons certainly got around to doing stuff worth talking about. An adventurous and by all accounts energetic woman, Elsie made her mark on both the world of sociology and anthropology. Born into the New York business world she soon proved unconventional, dividing her time between writing multiple volumes on feminism, lecturing on the college level, exploring the southwest, and publishing such important works as a comparative encyclopedia of "Pueblo Indian Religion" (1939.) She was the first woman to serve as president of the American Anthropological Association and remarked on the southwest, "Whether Indian or White one was fortunate indeed to live for a time in a world of such beauty."

By 1899 she held a PhD from Colombia University and was well on her way to doing as Alfred Kroeber remarked "Her society had encroached on her; she studied the science of society the better to fight back against society."

Elsie possessed the appealing intellectual combination of being both conscious of the past, enthralled by its relics, and engaged with her own time. She wrote in one of her articles "It is interesting to reconstruct cultures of ancient town builders, but more interesting to study the minds and ways of their decedents."

For all her intellectual, scholarly, and forward thinking endeavors she escaped to do field work in her beloved southwestern deserts as often as possible, arriving back home "looking perfectly dreadful." (I imagine her saying so with a decidedly satisfied twinkle in her eye.)

Thanks Elsie,
Lady Durer

secret keeping (The Met)

2011-06-19T22:48:00.000-07:00

Sometimes paintings are so intimate that you don't want anyone to see you taking them seriously.

You daren't speak the dream that the brush strokes contrive to expose in you. You daren't let it show on your face in the cool, chatty gallery. This gallery here. The one that is full of warm bodies and distant eyes, a few pre-dinner-conversation rambles about Rembrandt's later work producing bouts of indigestion. (I guess his eyes can be a bit much to look into, especially before you're lulled into life by desert.)

Maybe it is such a simple dream - this dream you don't want speculated upon by Miro's morphing bobbles. Maybe it is something infinitely complex that you see connecting, each part to a limb of your existence, like Van Gogh's constant, culminating figurative fractures. Maybe it is something you don't talk about - Whistler's paintings don't have proper names either. Maybe it's a dream you always talk about - you talk about it so much that you have forgotten how raw it really is (Why did Cezanne paint so many apples? Why not tangerines?)

They are not overtly prying paintings. I can walk by them in the gallery and, unless I give myself away by looking out the corer of my eye to see if any one in the gallery is watching me watching it,...nothing will have happened. But I do look. I look every time. I make a terrifying hobby of looking. (And being looked at...See this is what people forget: They think being with art is a solitary adventure. It is, instead, confrontational more than it is comforting, humiliating, hungering, and haunting to be candid.)

But if I didn't look. If I didn't engage. If I didn't show up.

All my secrets would be safe.

And whats the point of hiding something if it is not someday to be found out? There is a difference between destroying a part of yourself and hiding a layer of yourself.

It takes one to keep a secret, one to give it away. But a painting and myself to keep it and give it away all at the same time.

Signing off from gallery 631 of The Met,
Lady Durer

(Above: The Denial of Saint Peter
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) (Italian, Lombard, 1571–1610)
Oil on canvas 37 x 49 3/8 in. (94 x 125.4 cm)

P.S. This painting doesn't seem like much when re-produced. But her eyes...in the gallery this was one of the best paintings I saw at the Met simply because of her eyes. She is the accuser in this work. She knows all the relevant secrets. She knows a few of mine now too. Whether they are relevant or not I do not yet know.

fresh peaches for Papa (and Uncle Walt)

2011-06-18T16:34:00.000-07:00

I like Saturdays. Just the sound of the word is appealing - its got an inkling of eating outside, and old books, and an insistence on convenient weather encapsulated between the syllables.

Today is a Saturday. No wonder its been a good day. Everyone seems to be going to weddings today but me - my parents, my sister, my friend/Mexican, Catholic, Indian. But I don't mind in the least. I've been busy filling up the hours. Like I said: its a Saturday!

This morning Mischa played with her red ball while I scribbled notes for my book. Over lunch I ate banana pancakes and blue berries while reading the opening chapters of Sophie's World aloud to one of my dearest friends. We talked of mothers and forgiveness and space and Indian food and children and PhDs...She's a wise one. As the priest from Ondine says to Syrcuse, "Misery is easy, happiness you have to work at."

Then the market. Tomorrow is Papa's day. In preparation I gathered a few treasures:

For Cake:
2 zee fire peaches
1 princess spring peach
1 may red peach

For Table:
by golly, simply the best smelling bottle of Bernie's Best Raw Apple Cider Vinegar (purchased from said Bernie if the portrait on the label is a reliable likeness.)
2 cases of blackberries

For Keeps and Treats:
1 bag dehydrated Blossom Bluff "Gold Nugget" mandarins

...I'm planning a wheat and glutton free almond, vanilla cake with egg-white icing topped with fresh peaches. Mhmm.

(Above: I think these two make a good pair.)

When I managed to tare myself away from the buckets of blue berries and gorgeous purple carrots, street musicians and happy Berkeley babies in sun hats nearly as big as mine, I discovered I'd missed the bus. Taking a side alley along tie-dy-shirt ornamented Telegraph I slipped into the friend's of the Berkeley public library's book store. (Note for non-natives: a legit, grass roots Chomsky and Marx stocked, political, revolutionary philosophy book store is located directly opposite from my choice of alley way vendors.)

For the girl in the hat with the apple cider vinegar:
1 Leaves of Grass (c. 1925 publication purchased for a whopping 2:50)
1 Plays of Anton Tchekov (I kid you not: apparently Chekhov was spelled differently in the west in the 20s. curiouser, and curiouser.)

Hmm...saturday.

To peaches and Papa.
To The Three Sisters and, of course, dear Uncle Walt, ("O Captain, my captain! Rise up and hear the bells")

-Lady D.

P.S. When vacuuming in an empty house practice your admittance speech for The Dead Poets Society - YALP - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLFQYbjYsso

wupatki at sunset

2011-06-17T13:00:00.000-07:00

Less than 800 years ago Wupatki National monument, a pueblo structure nestled in a cradle of fertile volcanic ash and ocher red rock, was populated by tribal people. When I was 11 I watched a sunset at Wupatki on my family's weekend off from a near by archeological dig out side of Flagstaff, Arizona. It was one of the best sunsets I've ever seen - coyotes, bats, and red, red rock.

Today I found these pictures. My lungs are craving the air off those red rocks now.

My parents drank wine out of camping cups, I stood under a lamp post and let the bats swirl around my head catching moths. The park ranger told us we were a great family.
Apparently nobody hangs out at ruins.

When I have a family, I'm going back.

Shakespeare Wallah

2011-06-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

"Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings" quotes a member of James Ivory's fictional Shakespeare troop from Richard II. Shakespeare Wallah (1965) falls as a cinematic experience somewhere between the sublime and the consciously directed, the whimsicality and the soft sadness of an era of art coming to its closure.

There is an articulate grace in Ivory's tale of an English Shakespeare troop traveling the landscape of India as the native culture revives, the Richards and Princes of Denmark becoming, yet again, the stuff of western parlor bookcases. The small family, namely consisting of a daughter played to perfection by Felicity Kendall, presents Antony and Cleopatra in an Indian prince's palace one night only to perform Hamlet the next after sleeping on the train platform. Forever living from rags to riches and back to rags, the only constant features of their lives being a set of costume trunks and their genuine love of acting, the small troop progresses from venue to venue. However, when Lizzy (Kendall) falls for a young chap of the burgeoning Indian bollywood film industry (a well cast Shashi Kapoor) the layers of life's desires unfold at a slightly more rapid pace than the curtain can contain. The birth of love coincides with the last breaths of life for Shakespeare who is rapidly loosing his Indian Audience.

There is a sadness and a genuine joy to this film making its delightful, and yet fading, portrait of another era of Shakespearean acting and cultural interaction captivating. Given the exquisite taste and directorial skill of the Merchant Ivory productions (known for such films as A Room With A View, Howard's End, Remains of the Day, The City of Your Final Destination etc.) it hardly seems to matter where the actual narrative begins and ends. This is a brief waltz to be enjoyed and then accepted in its passing. Filmed in black and white, the aesthetics support the grace and quiet delight of Shakespeare Wallah from the longer camera shots to the juxtaposition of full scenes by the Bard and 1960s automobile caravans.

My favorite films are those where the details of the narrative fall away into its overall emotional and intellectual trajectory and one is left altered in some slightly un-graspable way. The process of the film is so good that it doesn't really matter how it ends. Shakespeare Wallah, based in fact on the real life experiences of Felicity Kendall's parent's traveling acting troop, is a gentle love affair with artistry and genuine, good people. With music based off of Indian ragas and sequences of Shakespeare prose, the melding and cracking of a relationship between two cultures is eloquent. This is not a political pieces about colonialism any more than it is a drama filled portrait of stage actors clutching to the last opportunities of their trade. However, it holds commentary that goes to the mind as well as the heart about the people themselves in culturally diverse situations. Unlike most films about the intersecting of British and Indian, it is a welcome break from the oppression/revolution dynamic. This time the English are poor and the Indians have something cultural to gain from them.

The title of the film roughly translates to "the people who do Shakespeare." Wallah is an Indian term meaning something close to 'those you are associated with' or sell or trade something. But it is much more than an economic categorization. It is a deeper labeling having to do with someone's associations to their parts or activities of living. Shakespeare Wallah is a lovely portrait of a small group of people who live the most famous Englishman's whimsical and terrifying dreams upon the stage in a far away land. The land is populated with different, but not strange, people who no longer remember to buy tickets...and yet, the play must go on.

On Art: "The new MBA is the MFA"

2011-06-10T08:07:00.000-07:00

{Thoughts on the arts, showing up, and the creative mind}

The arts, as we call human creativity is a game for two. Expression demands engagement from both creator and audience, initiator and observer. Relationship, conscious communion, always grows new knowledge, holding burgeoning potential for understanding and mutual exchange. We are forced to learn in order to continue to relate. Interaction is never fruitful when based on the repetition of knowns. Art is about relating whether the artist is relating to herself or taking the work out into her environment, relating herself to the world - challenging the world to relate to her. This dynamic duo of expression is valuable I think, whatever form it takes - literary, visual, bare hands on piano keys. We wish to relate - to ourselves, to a God, sometimes to others, even to the world. We wish to be seen. Why? Because to be really seen is to be understood.

In the very last row of seats on a night bus out of New York City I found myself caught up by musings and mental wanderings on the above topic. After a day at the Metropolitan Museum such thoughts were probably inevitable. I turned towards the wide window for what light I could catch from the ambling freeway.

I think part of why the study of visual art history holds me so inescapably is because it insists, sometimes inconveniently, on the process and presence of looking, of seeing. I can not buy a stack of books like a literature major can. I must travel 4000 odd miles - clear to the other side of a country - to the territory and home of a work and sit in its gallery. I must go and be with it - said painting or sculpture or installation. My one self to its one self. This insistence on wholly showing up to the task of experiencing draws me. The process of what it takes to look at these works is a powerful element of their insistent existence. (And if living isn't about process then what is all this unfolding about? Art, simply through how I come in contact with it, reminds me of process - no, better, it unapologeticly demands it.)

In life these days, in this post modern, mid industrial, pre techno-centric world we are separated from being in relationship and from falling into process. Art - human expression - insists upon both: a game for two and an exercise in showing up to life. Sleepy and foot sore, I felt alive stationed on that back bus seat in the dark. More alive for having made eye contact with Caravaggio a few hours before then I could have if I'd spent the day staring into a web cam or surrounded by good society. Society tends to over explain itself. Caravaggio waits for you to catch up. Missed it? Your loss.

The ambiguity of art is not just a clever trick. Of course Rothko knew that rich colors pop if you put them on a dark backdrop, but that's hardly what we are brought into relationship to unravel. That's just the beginning of his process and the thin surface, technical awareness of ours. When people "don't get art," its not because their isn't something to see or hear or gather up from the poetry or prose. Its because either side of the relationship isn't showing up, isn't conscious of their relating. There's poorly done art, no doubt about it. However, more than naught their is poorly accomplished looking. We are loosing the talent of sight. We are slipping as a society onto one side of Plato's dividing line. Soon we will discover that it is not a brick wall but a teeter-totter that, when left unbalanced, sends its occupants sliding off onto the cool, clammy ground. We are about to fall hard. Maybe we have already fallen.
Someone recently said, "The new MBA is the MFA." My complaint is not that we have become a practical society of men and women in constant contact with pocket watches and, we think, each other. My concern is more subtle. Its about how we are going about our living, our learning. As art becomes more and more a mother's day obligation to trot out to a nice white washed gallery and all but the "ninga turtles" remain household names, we suffer. We suffer in the deep inner metropolises of our beings and soon our physical cities will tumble too. They will fall off the wrong side of Plato's line because the consciousness that art awakens in us towards relationship, process and ambiguity will be left on the shelf with the dusty volumes of Chekhov and Lao Tzu.

The arts - whether a school chamber music performance, scripts for the next Broadway play, half used up canvases, or a beat poet's babble challenge us, because, unlike facts or reason that teach us about very particular things and engage very particular parts of us, art asks for all of us. As we remove theater, music, painting from our schools we remove this demand for showing up, for wholeness, for unanswered questions and newly articulated answers to the challenge of living. We don't all need to be artists, but we do all need to learn to look, to listen, and to be present.

In a world continually mechanized we don't need our minds to make toast in the morning - our brain understand how to interact (not relate - this relationship is one of daily repetition,) with the toaster oven. "The New MBA is the MFA," because whether we call ourselves artists or not we must learn to call our means of living creative. Creativity is what separates brains from minds. Maybe the toaster oven has a brain. It cycles through life extending practicalities - it takes in power, it uses that power to the best of its structural design, it sputters out the expected and sometimes faulty results. It is a toast making thing. But it will never make toast differently. It will never be the Picasso of toaster ovens. It is this way because it is brain, not mind. We are brain. But we can also be mind. The mind bit is a choice however, its not about functionality its about fulfillment.

In this possibility, this invitation for relationship, process, and articulated ambiguity of answers, our potential lies in wait. In potential rests real human identity. In realization of ourselves lies a balanced Platonic line - a more happily constructed inner and outer metropolis.

-Lady Durer

Bookish in overalls (summer begins)

2011-06-09T16:56:00.000-07:00

Ahoy, there summer. Its been awhile. A long winter, as the Russians would say. (I feel I've got cause to remark so too.) Recently, I've been reclaiming all that I've missed over the past dutifully, academically spent months.

I'll jot down a quick list:

Books and real intellectualism. (I was a bit giddy when I remembered in the library this morning that I could have as much of whatever I pleased as I pleased...hmm. yum. book binding.)

Labrador. My tall, black Lab and I are very good companions. She makes me laugh, she doesn't mind Tolstoy read aloud, she loves cuddling, and she tolerates most music (something about Verdi LPs though...) We're best friends. Its love. The real thing.

The grand and exquisite activity of refraining from looking at the clock. This is quite simply put one of my favorite things to do. Funny thing is, I always get more done the less I compartmentalize time...

Walden etc. Open space and the garish antics of early morning birds. All the trees in their disorderly arrangements teach me more about my living then most sets of people who line up to help. (still reading Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. Good times, my friends.)

Daughter. I'm a daughter. I'm a good one too. But now I actually have the time to be the one I want to be. Attentive. Maybe a step ahead of the dishes.

I've got no grand plans. These days that are coming are going to be at ease with themselves. The dress code is old overalls and lip stick. Its a good combo. I'm convinced that chucking my desk top calender out of a very tall building's window lattice would feel really, smashingly good right about now. But, having neither said very tall building nor the desire to completely abandon effective organizational planning, I'm content to just let the thing get berried under art postcards from my latest east coast museum adventures (more on these later.)

This morning I got up early and was joined by a very happy Labrador for a run (She's got the old me back at last.) Then, still in massive book re-organization mode from yesterday's discovery - apparently adding a mere 5 newly acquired volumes to the 'main stacks' calls for nothing short of shelf building or highly creative stacking - I pulled on m'overalls. I handily caught a ride with my french-onion-soup-cooking mother to the steps of the library.

Although, I am a frequent visitor to the halls of mysterious catalog numbering and temptations rapt in protective clear plastic volume covers, I was somewhat surprised to witness a line out side the main doors. Gathered about, some standing at attention others (the more patient) sitting idly on the steps, were the Thursday am shift holding ten o'clock vigil for the precious corridors of learning (and for many a dry, comfortable chair) to open. I felt oddly at home with this bunch even though, unlike most, I was under the age of 53, smelt of dog instead of street pavement, had washed hair and money in my pocket. They seemed to accept me well enough into their ranks. (Afterall, I'm just a wee thing - not much of a threat to their favorite chair.) I appreciated this. Soon the doors opened and we all dispersed to our preferred nooks and crannies. I went to find Bronte, they to find those dry, comfortable chairs. I think they - the miss-fits, homeless, just plane awkward - felt even more at home in that place than I did. I don't see why it should be any other way. The books love them, if only that was enough.

Now its late afternoon, most of the displaced volumes are back on my three book cases - well if not on, at least on top of (Its all the same to Plato and Chesterton right?) I'm waiting on the light to change just a little more...I like dusk best of all. It makes my inner Vermeer happy.

Everything that's just been sitting on the shelf is about to come tumbling off. I'm ready. So very ready to get drenched in good living and deeper thinking and quiet breath articulated out over the days.

In other words: Pay attention/Be Astonished./Tell about it. - Mary Oliver.

So Here we go. S u m m e r. ("Elope with me miss private?")

XX,
Lady Durer

Emerson on a swing set

2011-06-04T10:26:00.000-07:00

I've spent the last hour of my day on someone else's child's swing set with Emerson. My bare feet bruised the soft green grass. Emerson's feet didn't touch anything because he was stuck between the covers of a penguin classic. We existed like this together in someone else's yard being barked at by another someone else's small dog. And we were happy being so common place, and out of place, in this green land far away from the sea.

The sun is going to bed in a light all of its own creation - peachy cadmium, scarlet blue. Her night gown is tainted white and she has business with other people's days. My setting is their rising. Its a happy exchange of responsibility for this world.

The birds are the true companions of dusk. They call and babble, exaggerate their living and then get calm. They listen for me to learn how to make noises that are not concrete like they do. I have not learned this yet. Knowing this, they fill up the air again.

There is a rough, but tidy fence running through the fields. It doesn't feel compartmentalizing. Its just marking space. I like trail signs and how roads get their names, but I do not like clocks. The distinctions between oaks and pines and birds with different sized beaks make me notice the diversity of life. The labeling of time only constrains and constricts my living. When I am unaware of its imposed divisions I do not live divided. It is a luxury perhaps, but it is one I will work hard through life's practicalities to obtain, applying it to periods of space like this field.

I went to a lake today. I can't be around water without introducing my skin to it. I have to be with it, raw, naked - vulnerable. Small in its vastness. I become less and therefore more gets in. (If God is to get in the creature must get out as Mister Eckhart would say) I counted three water snakes - two large at four feet or so, and a baby lifting his little head high. A fish bit my Achilles's tendon, startling my wadding companion and I. Then I dove: full pale body into dark, silken waters. "Only connect," Foster's women would say. Its important to get drenched when you can.

Now, hair full of lake smell and body content in blue linen, the edges of my bathing suit hugging my torso, tied around my neck, I wait for an excuse to fall asleep in the grass under the swings. My fingers smell like fresh pasta with basil and tomatoes, lake rushes and blueberry preserves. I think if I get close enough to all this green, then I will actually become it. Become that which is tender and lays down, and lays out its lush giving for giant creatures to walk over seldom glancing down. Glancing up I notice a flock of birds flying in a perfect V across the rose sky. Scattered, Pollock clouds and colors from the last of the Sun's plummet down form their stage set.

"In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life...the cool night bathes the world as a river, and prepares his eyes again for a crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never more happily displayed." - An address delivered before the senior class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday Evening July 15th, 1838

- Lady D
Penn's Wood

P.S. Fireflies really do exist. Who knew selkie singing in the dark would draw them close.

paper ghosts: the art of Isabella de Borchgrave

2011-05-15T11:40:00.000-07:00

The gallery is full of ghosts. Calling them life sized paper dolls would underestimate their presence, for all it would recall their whimsicality. There is something odd about a room full of unwearable dresses. How would the paper feel to slip over your head and let drape (would it drape? Or would is just crackle?) over the edges of your smooth, skin-stretched body? As I walk by the hanging kimonos they sway with the slight alteration of air I have left in my receding path - ghosts, all paper ghosts.

In a corner, almost floating, stands a body-less gown of ethereal white. She, although there is no “she” to be found wearing it, exhibits an air of separation from those exclaiming over how shear, how delicate, how thin her overskirt is. People meander, shuffle, pause, meander, shuffle, pause. They spend about 2 1/3 seconds with this Emily Bronte-esque ghost. They don’t get to know her very well. I wonder if they imagine an invisible figure within the paper or do they just see an object to be bought in a shop. I’ll call her a she because I cannot ignore the work’s presence. I cannot forget what I do not actually see – the woman wearing this regency evening gown. The human in this art is more striking in its absence than if the artist had tried to mold her out of paper too.

She is a little taller than me. I would have to hem this dress least I trip on the elegant over skirt of painted “lace.” It would be paradoxical to describe the fabric as being as thin as paper, but it is true in more ways than one. The skirt attaches to a thin waistband that sits below the breasts and shortens the bodice giving the gown an irreplaceable, extended elegance. The skirt is two fold, an under layer of paper damask and an over layer of paper lace. The top layer is transparent and subtly covered in painted flower and leaf motifs. I can barely see the miniscule paper fibers overlapping to create the smooth surface. The neckline is scooped and rounded meeting blossoming cupped sleeves that taper to thin edging that matches the simplicity of the waistband. The paper forming the bodice is the same white cream as the underskirt and, for all its immobility, does not appear stiff. The crinkles, soft here unlike static electricity, form little sideways waves over the surface of the bodice, gathering between the waistband and the neckline like the finest damask.

She leans forward slightly into space, as if expecting something. However, I have no sense of movement. She waits and I sit on the bench next to her. I keep telling myself she is just an empty dress. She is not even a dress really. She is a fake dress, a giant paper doll. But in her game of make believe she has become something real: a waiting ghost from history. The consistency of the cream pallet of which she is formed draws the viewer in with its simplicity, but captivates when all the small textural differences are comprehended. There is space between how the outer skirt hangs over the inner. They would move separately, not in tandem, if the ghost were to step down from her pedestal. The cut of the neckline would reveal her receding collar bones. The back train, a subtle one-foot extension at its outer most curvature, would slither against the wood paneled floor. The paper can be seen gathered at the back of the bodice in neat little rows like piped icing on a powered sugar dusted cake as she walks away from me. The paper is so thin that it doesn’t make a sound as she escapes back to the history book where she came from.

I am almost convinced that if I go back to her corner in the gallery, she really will be gone.

A few gallery rooms later the ghosts have outdone themselves. Ten of them fill a large room as butterflies disperse in a garden. They are the Medici women and are represented by the most available means for their self-expression: their dresses. The gowns at once overwhelm and invite inquisitive viewers to approach their gathering. These women’s identities once preserved in paint are now three-dimensional relics made of paper. It strikes me for the first time, beyond the visual sense, that it is paper. Eleanor of Toledo, Joanna of Austria, Maria de’ Medici…these women aren’t the stuff of lasting history. Their positions in society were as flimsy as paper and they knew it. But how, like a flock of butterflies, that lives for a short time and for a confined purpose, did they decorate their lives! It appears to be an appropriate re-creation then. Fabric would be too permanent. Paper on the other hand is cheap, abundant, flexible beyond belief, but extraordinary if given time to articulate itself – just like the women of the Renaissance.

Every species of courtly lady is bedecked in her finest, wings spread and lace collars extended over narrow shoulders. Ensembles of stiffened and floating paper exude pairings of bold colors: one black and white and gold, another blue and white and gold. Joanna of Toledo has stayed true to her portrait by Bizzelli and adorns herself in a mossy green over an ocher yellow. The green over skirt continues up merging into a fitted bodice complete with piped sleeves and a train that start at the nape of the next, extending all the way to the pedestal below. There is a mannequin beneath this gown, as with all the other Renaissance women. However, if anything, it detracts from the personality. Art is better when it takes into account our imagination. Joanna is the dress not the paper textured, paste white mannequin. The underskirt of ocher also makes up the centerfold of the bodice beneath the green. Out from the piped sleeves run ocher sleeves until they end in spiderweb lace cuffs. The white lace collar is not intrusive and only subtly shows off the versatility of cut and sculpted paper fibers. The texture of the gown is mostly created by added paint and not contrasts of paper consistency. In matching colors the acrylics build up the stiff paper to almost the surface consistency of brocade. The edges are piped, not with fabric or even rolled paper but with built up paint. Other less three-dimensional patterns of flowers and twisting lines are printed on the gown’s panels, increasing the visual palette.

A string of paper pearls drapes about Joanna’s neck and falls below the central interception of green over-bodice and ocher gown. The train that is more like a cape appears to pull the figure off balance backwards as if it really was a heavy piece of brocade instead of stone-still paper. Atop this ensemble rest a small, round, black hat contriving to counterfeit for velvet. The deep, dark consistency of the black paint meets an exotic saffron yellow protruding feather. It falls in layers of finely cut paper over the back of Joanna’s neck.

...A rain storm, some afternoon wind, loose matches and the towering ghost of green and ocher would slowly and definitively collapse leaving again only an oil painting of her head and torso for us to remember her by. The paper fools me at first. It is so convincingly invested in being taffeta, and silk, brocade and linen. But the more I look at it the more I imagine it disappearing like the impermanence of a flock of colorful, garish even, butterflies. It’s not going to last just like the women it is honoring. And somehow I am perfectly fine with this knowledge as I leave the gallery. I have been walking through un-wearable dresses - ghosts, all paper ghosts.

(Legion of Honor, SF, Special Exhibition Spring 2011)

comicly enclined

2011-05-01T12:06:00.001-07:00

These are a few of my favorite things...

2011-04-29T11:09:00.000-07:00

As of April...

Picture perfect: Edmond-François Aman-Jean

Bookish: Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

La Cinema: Jane Campion's The Piano

Lend me your ear: Fun's The Gambler, Aim and Ignite.

Poetically speaking: New find -> Jack Gilbert's The Rain

Sitting on the shelf: The second haves of Tolstoy's War and Peace and Schama's Rembrandt biography. Eckhart and St. John of the Cross.

Quoting: Pessoa "...my soul is an arch the sea as its end..."

Reminiscing:...Riding shotgun in an old pic-up on dusty sierra roads, head and shoulders leaning out of the open window. Wading in a natural hot spring under the stars. Pine needles for a pillow.

Curiouser and curiouser: Le sang d'un poète (Jean Cocteau's 1930 The Blood of a Poet, part one of the Orphic Trilogy)

Inspired: Herold Bloom's literary observations, incites, and elegance of expression. (Currently reading, "The Best Poems of The English Language")

Wandering: Used book store halls. still green hillsides. the corridors of imaginary cities.

Lost in: Ondine (2009, Neil Jordan)

Thinking on: Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity

Dreaming of: Tall ships with white sails. My own hobbit whole.

In gratitude: loaned books, and postage stamps, and hugs where you get picked up in the air. Nicknames and loving.

Waiting on: "where dreams go when they do not come true" (new one-man play)

Reverberating:

And something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and I suddenly saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open.

-Neruda

Missing: Many.

with Love,
Lady D

She came from the water

2011-04-29T11:03:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the truth is not what you know, it is what you believe. If you only look at the warp you see one story, look at the weave and the loom tells another. Ondine (2009), a film by writer and director Neil Jordan is not about denying reality; it is about how we choose to see reality. A simple story soon reaches the hights of fairytale and myth, while sinking down into the depth of bad luck, addiction, and loss. “Misery is easy,” Syracuse, a fisherman is told, “Happiness you have to work at.” Life is more subtle than we think. When we fall into the subtleties we see the magic. And it is more magical than we could have ever dreamt.

“She sings to the fishes and he catches them,” whispers Syrcuse (Colin Farell) to his daughter, Anne, as she receives a blood transfusion for failing kidneys towards the beginning of the film. We know that the story he tells is at least partly true, but where the warp and the weave of fairy tale and the harsh reality of a small, costal fishing town converge we cannot yet make out. We do know that Syracuse will return to the small cottage by the cove where he docks his boat, seeking to learn more about a strange woman (Alicja Bachleda) he pulled up in his fishing nets the day before. She is shy, beautiful, speaks with an un-placable accent, and appears to bring good luck. “Is she a selke?” asks Anne of the story her father spins in the hospital. “What’s a selke?” asks Syracuse in return. It is not long before Anne realizes there might be more truth to his simple story than imaginable. Perhaps we have to learn how better to dream before we can awaken to reality.

Ondine is a film about hope, and trust, and how we dare to believe uncommon things that might just bring us to see uncommon truths. It follows a small cast as they are pulled and tugged into believing and hoping for the first time in their lives that, “the world they have to live in” might just be a story worth telling. The skill of the film lies in its ability to pull and tug at us too. We are not sure how far to believe and of what to be skeptical as this Irish mystery of a woman named Ondine unfolds. Is she remembering her aquatic webs when we see her pull a fishnet stocking over her splayed out fingers? The beauty of the film rests in its ability to truly hold its own as a modern fairytale, spanning the divide between whimsicality and genuinely lived lives. Only what is relevant is presented. The question is what are we to make of it? As Anne puts it when Ondine asks who snow white is, “It doesn’t matter. She didn’t swim.” The film is just as uncontaminated. It finds all it needs and more inside a few character’s hopes and broken stories and an old myth.

A lonely fisherman. A woman who might be a seal. A sick child. An Alcoholic. A father’s love. A pallet of forever sea blues, coastal greens, and ebbing greys. They all congeal with a script that enters the observer’s mind like a great novel and a bedtime story all at once. Ondine is a film for the children in us who have grown up, but never forgotten what it feels like to run barefoot on the shoreline.

Everyone talks about hope, many seeking to make art or cinema about it. However, hope is one of the hardest things to convey, to write a script about and to conceive a genuine context for. Ondine is a film to watch whether for its artistic, visual conception or its beguiling story line. However, it is a film to watch more than once due to its graceful commentary on the human condition of hope. “I’m beginning to hope Father,” says Syracuse to the local perish priest. “I know something wonderful or terrible is going to happen.”

(Paul Gauguin, Ondine, 1889)

A box of wings

2011-04-16T22:03:00.000-07:00

The fresh, dusk light of spring is here at last. We can wonder in the woodlands looking for discarded fairy wings...search the tide pools for a crown of sea urchin spines and dream of gathering lupine buds in our small open palms...

I often wish I could carry the vast, wild woods and shallow, treasure filled tide pools in my pocket, place seaside air and pine bark in a glass jar...but I can no more do these things than neatly box up my dreams.

But it doesn't hurt to try...In honor of a dear friend's birthday I made the following contraption out of wings, paper, an old painting print, and string. Spring break has made me rather whimsical.

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild...

-Yeats, The Stolen Child

The top of the box is a cut out design from a shopping bag of all things layered over a small print of a painting with rubber stamps added.

To create this box of butterflies all you need is a shallow cardboard jewelery box, a magazine or web clip art cite to cut butterflies out of and a needle and thread. Stringing the butterflies onto pieces of string with beads as stoppers on the ends works best and adds the glitter of the beads to the dangling wings. I covered the inside of the bottom of the box with a painting of the forest floor, and placed the birthday card inside for safe keeping.

with fondest affection for the birthday girl,
Lady Durer

watching: De Sico and Truffaut

2011-03-19T12:36:00.000-07:00

When I was a little girl my mother, in a loving attempt to keep the horrors of the world at bay, did not inform me that The Sound of Music had two parts. Until the age of eight I believed my favorite movie ended after a ball where true love failed to triumph. The coming together of a father with his children and the re-enlivening of a house with music were instead the only culminating graces to a story of Austria in the 1930s.

The unintentional consequence of this motherly act of cinematic censorship was that while I remained un-traumatized by the definition of "Nazi," I instead became oddly accustomed to and understanding of subtle tragedy at a young age. The first day that the TV clicked off after Maria walks out of The Von Trapp's with her little carpet bag and no wedding ring, the damage had been done. I believed life was complex and beautiful and could be enjoyably witnessed as so without the expected resolution or even resolution at all. Life just was. Art could just be too. It didn't have to fix anything about life to be worth waiting around for.

However happy I am that Maria and the Captain do get to climb the rolling hills and craggy mountains to Switzerland afteral, I've always fallen back on my old tendency of appreciating the depth and opportunities to really be touched inherent in more sorrowful or unresolved piece of literature, film, and art. (I remember gleefully unwrapping a children's picture book biography of Mary Shelley one Christmas...whoever decided that that woman's life and work is appropriate for children is probably as bonkers as I am.)

Lately, I have been exposed to two films that dare to impose this tantalizing, unresolved feeling on their audiences that, however sad and contemplative it is, I still deeply crave in art. We live in a world of neat ends, if often messy beginning in creative expression. I am still trying to pin point what I love so dearly about sad things and why I think them so beautiful...perhaps it is because often consciously sorrowful work (not tearjerkers or brutal shockers, there is a difference) is tangibly genuine. Happy things can be genuine too. But either way, joyful or sad, the genuine is beautiful. It captivates, alters us, and that alteration lingers in our chosen ways of living. And what would be the point of art, of living with art, if it didn't alter us...if we didn't let it alter us?

In 1943 an Italian director broke the mold of Mussolini approved cinematography with a film entitled The Children Are Watching Us. A few years later in 1948 he made international headlines with his Ladri di Biciclette or The Bicycle Thieves. Italian Neo-realism had found its ultimate "auteur," Vitterio De Sica set standards for the use of amateur actors, on location filming, relevant stories, and the blending of message and aesthetic.

The Bicycle Thieves had no need to steal my heart. I willingly handed it over at the end of this beautiful film.
The story is simple: A poor worker must traverse the city of Rome with his young son to find his stolen bicycle. The impact is nothing less than complex. Upon finishing watching the film late one evening (or should I say early one morning) for an upcoming lecture, I wanted to hit rewind and watch it all over again despite having spent 12 hours at school that day. Here is a scene from the film:

The captivating quality of genuine story telling presented in movements like Italian Neo-Realism caught on in France over the following decade. Directors like Francois Truffaut called for a "New Wave" of french cinema and were not afraid to draw on personal experience when searching for that artistic window onto the lives of their contemporaries. Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) is another story featuring a young boy in a big city. This time the story is more complex and the characters numerous compared to De Sico's Thieves. We meet young Antoine at school and following him over the course of a sliver of time in his life. There is no great quest to be completed, no love to even find much less save, and no blatant moral theme. Instead subtleties abound and internalization is unavoidable. Here are the opening credits...

I still remember the day I sat wide-eyed in front of my grandmother's television in the back woods of Montana watching an entire hour and a half more of film footage of Maria and the Captain and his seven children blissfully pass by: Nazis, nuns, wedding gowns, and all. What was this new happily ever after?

- Lady Durer

"Indeterminate Stillness," Whistler at BAM

2011-03-06T11:30:00.000-08:00

Its no secret: I adore Hammershoi. I get lost in them and yet inside myself all at once. I am happy utterly alone with his door frames inviting, gently compartmentalizing my thoughts.

If some one could paint my inner metropolis this should be the view to the west from one of the wide boulevards before small corridors and alley ways weave catacombs to the sea. All the edges and walls are tinged with saffron yellow age, sun burnt joys and sorrows that meant something someday and now fade. It doesn't matter that we have forgotten them. They have not forgotten us. They linger in that tarnish, that texture about the edges of our souls.

It reminds me of Whistler. Not the Whistler of big canvases and mothers, but the Whistler who sat on brick walls and sketched the Thames, who traveled to Venice and watched with his pencil the child approach the gondola waiting for her to bend over, a small hand extended into vast currents.

The Berkeley Art Museum is currently showing "Indeterminate Stillness: Looking at Whistler" until April 10th in one of the upper galleries. The exhibition is captivating in all its smallness - little sheets of yellowing sketchbook paper smudged and printed with mixed gray and black tones. If you are only familiar with Whistler's canvases take a trip to Venice and London with his intimate sketches produced for publication as sets. On view at BAM are the "Venice Set," 1879-1880, the "French Set," 1858, and the "Thames set," 1859.

None of the works are even close to poor and many encompass more than the expected degree of endearment and delight usually found in such 19th century western popular prints. Every few frames you are reminded why Whistler is one of the greats. Something about the composition, something subtle about the textures, something about the street at saverne will make you pause. You don't have to be passionately moved for a piece of art to be good, sometimes you just need to be invited to pause and let the picture unfold.

(I think Whistler liked tall ships nearly as much as I do.)
looking for a place to sit on the docks,
Lady Durer

windows, views, and frames

2011-03-02T18:45:00.000-08:00

Sometimes one feels so far away from other people's lives. I feel like a Rapunzel adorned with discombobulating inconvenient realities. I'm walking around my tower room hands full of long curly locks putting one ringlet in place only to trip over another coil at the great impatience of everyone down bellow. I do this until I flop down in all of the mess and stop even bothering to try to figure out how to ask for help, too worried I'll impose my imprisonment on another.

I want to be home.
not "I", something deeper, better than me, but still me wants this.
It seeks aimlessly
for the wind off of the cliffs to toy with its hair.
for the stench of fresh pressed apples to inhabit its wool sweater.
for a sensitive, subtle conversation turning philosopher and student into friend and friend.
for the opening strains of a childhood melody, translating comfort onto a piano's silky keys.

Instead this complicated I that I am sits on the basement floor and tries to gather up the window frames in life. Sits on the tower floor and attempts to turn her attention from finding an external key to building an internal sky.

Lately, I have been reminded of what it means to look at one's life and see a wall of windows even as you fumble with the keys to your bedroom door, a long night’s rest an illusive commodity.

I have been reminded that life is not about accumulating, it is about unfolding.

I have been reminded that life isn't what you manipulate it to be. Life is cultivating grace.

Hair still pinned up from a night out at the opening of Swan Lake, I sat in the dark, bare feet on an inflated therma rest, knees pulled up to my chest, across from a true friend. She gently reminded me, corrected me, as I lamented over how life gets tight, and snug, and impossible to fly freely through sometimes.

I talked about being closed in, about being unexpectedly separate. So busy, so stressed, so constrained. She turned my words around. She stood them on their ends.

Its easy to laugh at your fears when they are doing hand stands across a bed room at 2 am. She firmly said the windows were still there. They were just different than I had planned. She only had to say it once. We get so sick of hearing common sense from ourselves that when another voices it it we assimilate it as wisdom. This is a great gift of friendship.

And its true. The architect over indulged artistic expression. 21 units, two part times jobs, and missing loved ones is too creative for my style. but I can still make this house a home.

...because the point is not to be perfect. The point is to be whole.

And because doors close, but windows open.

So you fling them wide open. Open. And some sky gets in, even a few stars. And you keep on learning.
Learning to build genuine frames for genuine lives, all while sitting on the edge of an open window sill.

And soon Rapunzel has forgotten the knots in her hair and is sitting mesmerized by her room...with a view.

Yours in gratitude,

Lady Durer

Lady Durer's Canvas

you're breaking my tender heart

{musing - mother teresa}

‘People are often unreasonable, illogical and self centred; Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; Be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; Be honest and frank anyway. What you spend years building, someone may destroy overnight; Build anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous; Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough; Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.. ...It was never between you & them anyway.' {Mother Teresa}

architect's fish and chips

journal excerpt 1/20, rothko people

this I pray

shy one

{musing - peter pan)

the kiss

hills and Nemerov

{musing - Sodergram}

always rilke

Neruda's "it is born"

this remarkable woman

something new

wing of a lark

shhhhh

little names

bookhead

{Musing - Rilke}

growing. up.

Emmaus

deep forest

the return of the aunties

the diary of a homeschooled girl (University, part 2)

the lighthouse

a beautiful excess of tweed

{musing - Mary Oliver}

you do not have to be good.

Pieter Bruegel on the silver screen??

{Musing - Hepburn}

Perugino's bride

{Julia Margaret Cameron - After the Manner of Perugino 1865}

"The kingdom of heaven is movement and then repose."

St. Thomas

"Be kind, becuae everyone is having a really hard time."

Plato

"It is God's nature to fill us, but he can't get in becuae we are too filled up with ourselves."

Eckhart

* * *

a tenacity of intimacy

A little Uncle Walt for your monday

galavanting in Ghent

the college list (1)

put it in a jar

{Musing - D. H. Lawrence}

{Musing - Billy Collins}

When wheet is gold and crows are black

what I pray

keep calm

a painting a day/keeps sorrow at bay (The Met)

Shaw's the man, Candida's the wife. The play's the thing.

a painting a day/keeps sorrow at bay (Brooklyn Museum)

{Brooklyn Museum - The Sisters - Abbott H. Thaye}

Enter the Merzbau

on not going away for college

{Musing - Miss Dodger}

the speck of dust, the gentleman

The Fort, photography

{Travel} Ascension to Mt. Evans

Vicky and Alice

The bus stop and the wild thing

Veiled, Marble by Monti

an ocher summer

{Closet} comming up roses

Musing (Hugo)

{travel log} Ross, preparatons

{travel log} the golden cave

prussian blue, moss green ribbon

Carl Ferdinand Sohn (1805-1867)

{back to the fort}

time traveling again (don't forget the picnic basket!)

dog days

Tree of Life

The picnicing kind

Ophelia's Repose - Read aloud!

black and white, hide and seek

‘People are often unreasonable, illogical and self centred;
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone may destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway..

...It was never between you & them anyway.'

{Mother Teresa}