Roger O Green

Leonardo da Vinci: Machines in Motion

you were encouraged, to touch the pieces

Machines in Motion In the Berkshires, we had a hearty and complicated breakfast involving a dozen people. Our daughter was invited to go out with her parents and look at some art. She didn’t want to leave the company of her three cousins, two of whom have since already gone off for their first year of college.

my parents-in-law, my wife and I went to the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, MA. I believe it was my first visit there. The big attraction was Leonardo da Vinci: Machines in Motion. The exhibit has been extended through September 8, 2019. It was fun to see the innovations “first-hand, exploring 40 full-size, true-to-design working models of his Renaissance inventions.” Many of them you were not just allowed, but encouraged, to touch.

“Each mechanism was meticulously built by a group of scientists and skilled artisans in collaboration with the Leonardo da Vinci Museum in Florence, Italy, and the artist’s instructions were carried out using the tools, techniques, and materials that were available during his era.”

My MIL was particularly fascinated by Objects and Their Stories: Shoes, on view through November 3, 2019.

Like similar facilities, the Berkshire Museum has far more holdings – more than 40,000 artworks, specimens, and artifacts – than can possibly be displayed at any given time. In fact, about 75% of the collection is in storage. It’s a small place, two stories, plus the basement that had the aquarium. The elevator has been broken for some time.

Some of the permanent collection is similar to things I’ve seen at the New York State Museum in Albany: rocks and minerals, stuffed animals, and the like. Because we all had memberships with other museums – my wife and I with the Albany Institute of History and Art – it was free for all of us.

We stayed for 90 minutes, which was more than enough time. It was also the length we could park legally on the street, as there was no parking lot.

1619 to eight encouraging minutes

I need SOMETHING to hold onto

It’s very easy for me to become discouraged about issues of race and ethnicity in America. Every once in a while, I say, “Ooo, I like that!”

HISTORY

Both the New York Times and National Geographic have extensive pieces on the year 1619, 400 years ago, when “enslaved Africans first arrived in Virginia.”

A New York Times magazine article suggests America Wasn’t a Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One, by working towards its 1776 ideals. It’s a slow process: Here’s, for instance, the shameful story of how one million black families have been ripped from their farms.

Meanwhile, their U.S. roots date back centuries, but some Latinos still wonder if it’s enough.

Check out the funny-if-it-weren’t-so-pathetic When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers.

NOW

It’s to a point where most Latinos now say it’s gotten worse for them in the U.S.

This Week Tonight with John Oliver unpacks Bias In Medicine, based on both gender and race.

Voter suppression is as alive now as it was in the 1960s and earlier.

The conservative Foreign Policy suggests that white supremacists want a dirty bomb, and the regime “is letting them get dangerously close to acquiring one.” It’s no surprise that the Department of Justice HID a 2018 report on white supremacy and domestic terrorism.

When you talk about these things, those who disagree accuse you of just being PC. It has become “a rhetorical reflex.”

AND YET

I watch the Vlogbrothers’ four-minute videos a lot, and it’s not just because their surnames are Green. The authors have an outsized influence on their online community of Nerdfighters.

I was surprised and pleased when John talked about How I (barely) Passed 11th Grade English, which includes a paean to Toni Morrison. Then Hank responded in …Not My Proudest Moment, which was eerily similar in some respects. In both cases, they acknowledged their privilege and part of that was a result of their skin color.

Undoubtedly I’ve said before that I LOVE it when white people talk about white privilege. When black and brown people talk about it, too often it falls onto deaf ears.

I KNOW it’s a small thing, in the grand scheme of four centuries of racialism in what we now call the United States. Still, I need SOMETHING to hold onto, some sliver that it’s getting better, not worse.

Annie Lennox: ‘Now I Let You Go…’

Who will remember us — and for how long?

mass moca.annie lennox The family, including all of my immediate in-laws, spent nearly a week in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts There’s a lot of cultural landmarks there, including the Norman Rockwell Museum, which I’ve been to at least thrice.

This year, my wife and I attended three other museums/galleries. First up, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, generally referred to as MASS MoCA.

One of the first things we saw was Annie Lennox’s ‘Now I Let You Go…’. This link will tell you most of what you need to know. A docent pointed out one thing I DIDN’T notice, that a piano on top of the pile shows up in shadow on a far wall, and it’s quite affecting. The musician had a vision for the piece, and contacted MASS MoCA, according to a radio interview. She writes:

We interact with an infinity of objects from birth to the grave.

Over time our ‘belongings’ become more steeped and resonant with memory and nostalgia.
In many ways, personal objects express aspects of who we are — our identity: our values: our statements and choices.

The passages of time through which we exist become defined by the objects with which we interact.

The artifacts contained within the earthen mound — partially buried — partially excavated — have all played a part in my life.

I have had a special connection to each item presented — a connection that has been hard to relinquish.

In time, we will all disappear from this earth.

This is our destiny.

What will we leave behind? Who will remember us — and for how long?

I heard music in the background that sounded like Eurhythmics’ Sweet Dreams Are Made of This, yet not exactly. It was the song played backward, it turns out.

Coincidentally, two other female musicians also had displays at the museum, but I saw neither. Unfortunately, the paintings of Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders leave at the end of August 2019. The work of Laurie Anderson will be there through 2020, but one has to make an appointment in advance.

Things we did see included Still I Rise (through May 2020), the ceiling lights of Spencer Finch’s Cosmic Latte, and the most impressive Hello America: 40 Hits from the 50 States, a new wall drawing by Joe Caldwell (the latter two through 2020 at least).

Admission is $20, but you can come back the next day for free. If our schedule had permitted, we would most certainly have done that. Since the last time we went – could it have been in 2007? – it had taken over far more repurposed old factory buildings than the handful where the museum once existed.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

complicated love/hate relationship with the place

When I was in Indiana, the youth director of my church had recommended the movie The Last Black Man in San Francisco to the teens in our charge. As it turned out, my wife and I had seen it at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany a couple of weeks earlier.

I hadn’t written about it, partly for time, but mostly because I was stuck in describing it adequately. The IMDB posting says, “A young man searches for home in the changing city that seems to have left him behind.”

Rotten Tomatoes (93% positive with critics, 84% positive with audiences) is more descriptive: “Jimmie Fails [Jimmie Fails] dreams of reclaiming the Victorian home his grandfather built in the heart of San Francisco. Joined on his quest by his best friend Mont [Jonathan Majors] Jimmie searches for belonging in a rapidly changing city that seems to have left them behind.”

Looking at the reviews, I’d agree that it is fresh, original, poetic, an aching portrayal, well-acted, “leaning into its ambiguity, humanity and a quizzical moodiness.” More than one critic notes the “complicated love/hate relationship with the place he calls home that makes [director Joe] Talbot’s love letter to the city so riveting and rewarding.”

So you get the sense of loss, a metaphor for the current housing shortage in the city by the bay. It’s perhaps confusing at first, these skateboarding buddies, one who wants to do upkeep on property not presently his.

Eventually, the story by Fails, Talbot and Rob Richert makes sense to me. There are some great performances by Danny Glover as Montgomery’s blind grandfather, plus Tichina Arnold, Rob Morgan, Mike Epps, and Finn Wittrock.

My friend David Brickman says it’s the best movie of the year so far, and he may be correct.

You probably won’t find The Last Black Man in San Francisco in theaters at this point. If you watch it on pay cable or on DVD/BluRay, you might well find it challenging but, I hope, rewarding.

Georgia on my mind

key lime pie

midnight in the garden of good and evil I’ve been to Georgia twice. The first time was to Atlanta in 1995. The city was/is a sprawling entity. On one particular 10-line highway, we repeatedly saw cars exiting to the right, crossing three or four lanes quickly, usually directly in front of us.

What made it worse was that it was the year before the Summer Olympics, so there was plenty of construction everywhere.

I was there with my girlfriend, now my wife, visiting friends of hers. We also got to see part of the Martin Luther King Museum. Our visit to CNN involved sitting in on some program we have on a VHS tape, and nothing to play it on!

My second Georgia was to the coastal city of Savannah, in 1998, for a work conference. It’s the oldest city in the state and had some interesting historic structures. It was particularly proud of its connection to the book and then-recent film Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

But the best part is that my father drove down from Charlotte, NC to hang out with me. We both arrived on Saturday night, and the conference didn’t formally start until Monday morning, so we walked around the city with some of my friends, eating key lime pie or recalling tales of my growing up.

He LOVED the city by the Atlantic Ocean and said he’d like to move there someday. Unfortunately, he died less than two years later.

Songs about Georgia:

Oh, Atlanta – Alison Krauss
Midnight Train to Georgia – Gladys Knight and the Pips
Georgia on My Mind – Ray Charles
The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia – Vicki Lawrence
Jug Band Music – the Lovin’ Spoonful

GA Georgia. Historic abbreviation: Geo. Capital and largest city: Atlanta.

GU Guam, an unincorporated organized territory of the US, Capital: Hagatna (Agana); largest city: Dededo. How the United States Ended Up With Guam

For ABC Wednesday

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30