In just a little while I'm off to the A-1 Storage center on the San Fernando Road with the hope of being able to empty out and close down the bin we have been renting there for several years now. There are boxes of books--mostly, I have to say, large numbers of mint copies of my own novels that were published back in the 1980s and were sent to my by the publisher presumably in lieu of the money that they (and I!) failed to earn on them; and family photographs and memorabilia; and quite a lot of art works for which we could find no space on the walls of our small house when we chose to downsize several years ago. Learning that the storage company have decided to cut off climate controls was enough to spur us to action, and we have now made what we hope will be sufficient space in our garage to store what we really need to keep.
Have you ever watched that cable television show about those professional scavengers who join in a weekly bidding war for abandoned storage bins, or those whose owners have failed to pay their monthly fees? The bidders are allowed only a glimpse inside, through an open door, before making their own best-guess judgment on that the contents might be worth. Sometimes they lose, sometimes they win out big, when they unearth a Tiffany lamp or some such marvelous treasure amongst the junk. Well, I have to say they would not have much luck with out bin. Still, it has to be cleared out.
All of which affords me the opportunity for a little Buddhist reflection on the things we accumulate in our lives, and to which we attribute different kinds of value--whether monetary or sentimental. Ellie is more attached, perhaps, to family things. I have found it hard--well, to date impossible!--to throw any of my books or manuscripts away. Is this with the delusional thought that some one, in a hundred or so years time, will rediscover the writings of the forgotten Peter Clothier and scour through my earliest manuscripts for evidence of my genius? Unlikely! Is it that I still cling to the young Peter who wrote those pages, some in tiny and illegible script, others hacked out on the trusty portable typewriter that accompanied me for many years on my travels?
Simple reason and common sense tell me that these boxes of books and papers have no value, really, and should be recycled. Will I be able to bring myself, today, to do it? Or will I weaken, give in to the hoarding instinct, and bring them back to the garage to be preserved for yet another few years, until my daughter has to make the decision for me?
What would you? Do you hoard useless old trash? Or do you follow the wiser, healthier path and chuck the stuff out? I'd like to know... But anyway, wish me luck!
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 7/12/2012
"It is under the greatest adversity that there exists the greatest potential for doing good, both for oneself and others."
~His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Why Buddhism Prospered in Asia but Died in India.
The story that unfolds describes a perfect storm that developed against Indian Buddhism. It's an epic history of Moghul invasion, Hindu persecution and a split within Buddhism itself. A saga that is captivating, insightful and perfect for a film adaptation. Click on this sentence to read the full article at "The Buddhist Channel."
~I bow to the Buddha within all beings~
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 7/11/2012
"A great rock is not disturbed by the wind; the mind of a wise man is not disturbed by either honor or abuse."
~His Holiness the Dalai Lama
MADE IN L.A. 2012
I'm afraid I feel much the same way about the sprawling "Made in L.A. 2012" show as I did about this year's Whitney Biennial in New York: unqualified to offer particularly useful or informed commentary. I just feel completely out of touch with what most of these (mostly) young artists are up to. My head and heart seem these days to be--aesthetically at least--planted distressingly in the past.
Which does not prevent me from making judgments, no matter how unwarranted! Of course, I could throw up my hands and say, I just don't get it, but the truth is that I find there's not a whole lot to be got. I think that the art school system--mea culpa: I was a part of it for a while in the 1970s and 1980s--has a lot to answer for. My first judgment: the system has become a self-sustaining production line, putting out more nominally "professional" artists into the world than can plausibly survive as professional artists. Second judgment: it has done many of these graduates a grave disservice in its over-emphasis on aesthetic theory and idea-based art. Ideas are thin gruel, in my view, whether in visual art or writing. The substance of art work is the rich texture of lived experience--the physical, emotional and, for want of a better word, the spiritual, along with the intellectual.
As a result of this, the "artist's statement" seems to have become de rigueur for anyone wishing to be taken seriously these days. More's the pity. I find it not just unneeded--the artist's statement, surely, is the art work itself--but actually harmful. It risks limiting not only the viewer's experience of the work but, worse, the potential of the artist's imagination. The very act of its formulation channels the mind into its narrow (and language-based) vision, closing off the otherwise infinite possibilities of the imaginative process. Its outcome is often to reduce art to what can first (or subsequently) be expressed in words.
Okay, rant over. Well, not quite. Back to "Made in L.A. 2012" and another, slightly different beef with art schools: perhaps because of the proliferation of graduates and the struggle to achieve just a glimpse of recognition, the obsession with originality has never been greater nor more damaging in its outcome. It's not new, of course: the whole idea of originality came along with the Romantics, at a time when art shifted from being of service--to church, to patron, to aristocracy--to being a form of self-expression, for its own sake. It's the same insistence on individuality and individual that inspired the growth of democratic movements everywhere. Given the proliferation of young artists alluded to above, it's harder and harder for young people to create truly original art, and the struggle manifests in work that simply seems to try too hard to be different.
Such observations make me feel like a grumpy old man, so let's take a look at some work included in "Made in L.A." that I really did like--some of it quite a lot. At Barnsdall, for instance, I particularly liked the installation by Miljohn Ruperto...
...consisting of a row of pedestal-mounted video monitors and a backdrop of replicas of a single large-scale painting by the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich--made in China. The fake paintings, installed in moody half-light, offer a counterpoint to the broken narrative of the non-sequentially timed video playing on the monitors in the endless loop of a mystery story that engages--and, yes, amuses--the viewer's mind in its repetitive rhythms and discontinuities. The mind likes resolution, and is teased into the vain effort to interpret and resolve. We are offered the rare opportunity to watch the mind at work.
I liked, too, the multimedia work of Cayetano Ferrer...
...whose colorful cut-up and reassembled sections of carpet form a delightful jigsaw that invites the engagement of the eye in sorting out its parts and putting them back together into a coherent whole. Ducking under a low, ceremonial entryway and looking back (see above), the viewer is then confronted with a comparable patchwork of constantly shifting, patterned light projections that play on the relief surface of the wall that separates the two installations, contrasting the stasis of the carpet with a sparkling kinesis of brilliant illumination. My mind took me back to a long-forgotten reading of Rimbaud's proto-psychedelic prose poem, "Les Illuminations." A dance with color, pattern, light and motion.
There were paintings, too, at Barnsdall that I liked: Allison Miller's...
...quirky fantasies that play with geometric and organic form and flirt with a kind of clumsy, almost slapstick humor in the juxtaposition of abstraction with quasi-representational parts; and the mural-scaled "comic strip" by Nery Gabriel Lemus, with its riff on the conventions of the political mural and its inquiry into issues of ethnic identity, equality and social justice. In a related vein, I liked the chamber of curiosities--a mini-museum, really--assembled by Vincent Ramos...
...with its maze of display cases and memorabilia, a treasure house of family and community history in an endlessly complex and fascinating socio-historical context.
Over at the Hammer, more paintings to look at. I found particularly intriguing those of Zach Harris, whose intricate, patterned work with the pictures' frames is as engaging as the visionary miniatures they enclose. They invite a hallucinatory play between macro- and micro-space, evoking the exotic--and erotic--pleasures of Indian mogul art. At the other end of the scale, Mimi Lauter's...
...extra-large pastel drawings on paper evoke vast, imaginative, primeval landscapes inhabited, if you allow yourself a touch of fantasy, by mythical beasts. Meleko Mokgosi's...
...epic works recall the grand old tradition of historical painting, alluding to the continuing struggles of whole populations in the post-colonial era. I thought of Leon Golub--though Mokgosi's work is more dispassionate and analytical than Golub's. Same outrage, same need to share it on the canvas.
You begin to see my preference for painting... Might as well confess it: I love the figure, too--as in Mokgosi's paintings and, though in a quite different mode, the work of Thomas Lawson...
...whose boldly outlined nudes are eloquent in posture and relation to each other and whose "masks" explore the human physiognomy and hark back humorously to ancient Greece and Rome. In 3-D, Ruby Neri...
...uses clay and color in works that frankly recall her father, Manuel's work--and why not? Her figures recall the work of untrained artists everywhere that summon the spirits of the dead. And speaking of clay, I liked very much the odd, rather clumsy and reductive vessels of Caroline Thomas...
...and the colorful fantasies of Roy Dowell that function playfully in the ground between painted abstraction and utilitarian object.
Oh, and I couldn't close without a mention of the most senior of the "young" artists included in this exhibition, Channa Horwitz, who--dare I say?--at the start of her eighth decade continues to produce her meticulously lined and colored musical graphs, whose rhythms at once delight the eye and engage the mind. It's gratifying to find her work included in a show intended to represent the current energy of Los Angeles art.
Which does not prevent me from making judgments, no matter how unwarranted! Of course, I could throw up my hands and say, I just don't get it, but the truth is that I find there's not a whole lot to be got. I think that the art school system--mea culpa: I was a part of it for a while in the 1970s and 1980s--has a lot to answer for. My first judgment: the system has become a self-sustaining production line, putting out more nominally "professional" artists into the world than can plausibly survive as professional artists. Second judgment: it has done many of these graduates a grave disservice in its over-emphasis on aesthetic theory and idea-based art. Ideas are thin gruel, in my view, whether in visual art or writing. The substance of art work is the rich texture of lived experience--the physical, emotional and, for want of a better word, the spiritual, along with the intellectual.
As a result of this, the "artist's statement" seems to have become de rigueur for anyone wishing to be taken seriously these days. More's the pity. I find it not just unneeded--the artist's statement, surely, is the art work itself--but actually harmful. It risks limiting not only the viewer's experience of the work but, worse, the potential of the artist's imagination. The very act of its formulation channels the mind into its narrow (and language-based) vision, closing off the otherwise infinite possibilities of the imaginative process. Its outcome is often to reduce art to what can first (or subsequently) be expressed in words.
Okay, rant over. Well, not quite. Back to "Made in L.A. 2012" and another, slightly different beef with art schools: perhaps because of the proliferation of graduates and the struggle to achieve just a glimpse of recognition, the obsession with originality has never been greater nor more damaging in its outcome. It's not new, of course: the whole idea of originality came along with the Romantics, at a time when art shifted from being of service--to church, to patron, to aristocracy--to being a form of self-expression, for its own sake. It's the same insistence on individuality and individual that inspired the growth of democratic movements everywhere. Given the proliferation of young artists alluded to above, it's harder and harder for young people to create truly original art, and the struggle manifests in work that simply seems to try too hard to be different.
Such observations make me feel like a grumpy old man, so let's take a look at some work included in "Made in L.A." that I really did like--some of it quite a lot. At Barnsdall, for instance, I particularly liked the installation by Miljohn Ruperto...
...consisting of a row of pedestal-mounted video monitors and a backdrop of replicas of a single large-scale painting by the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich--made in China. The fake paintings, installed in moody half-light, offer a counterpoint to the broken narrative of the non-sequentially timed video playing on the monitors in the endless loop of a mystery story that engages--and, yes, amuses--the viewer's mind in its repetitive rhythms and discontinuities. The mind likes resolution, and is teased into the vain effort to interpret and resolve. We are offered the rare opportunity to watch the mind at work.
I liked, too, the multimedia work of Cayetano Ferrer...
...whose colorful cut-up and reassembled sections of carpet form a delightful jigsaw that invites the engagement of the eye in sorting out its parts and putting them back together into a coherent whole. Ducking under a low, ceremonial entryway and looking back (see above), the viewer is then confronted with a comparable patchwork of constantly shifting, patterned light projections that play on the relief surface of the wall that separates the two installations, contrasting the stasis of the carpet with a sparkling kinesis of brilliant illumination. My mind took me back to a long-forgotten reading of Rimbaud's proto-psychedelic prose poem, "Les Illuminations." A dance with color, pattern, light and motion.
There were paintings, too, at Barnsdall that I liked: Allison Miller's...
...quirky fantasies that play with geometric and organic form and flirt with a kind of clumsy, almost slapstick humor in the juxtaposition of abstraction with quasi-representational parts; and the mural-scaled "comic strip" by Nery Gabriel Lemus, with its riff on the conventions of the political mural and its inquiry into issues of ethnic identity, equality and social justice. In a related vein, I liked the chamber of curiosities--a mini-museum, really--assembled by Vincent Ramos...
...with its maze of display cases and memorabilia, a treasure house of family and community history in an endlessly complex and fascinating socio-historical context.
Over at the Hammer, more paintings to look at. I found particularly intriguing those of Zach Harris, whose intricate, patterned work with the pictures' frames is as engaging as the visionary miniatures they enclose. They invite a hallucinatory play between macro- and micro-space, evoking the exotic--and erotic--pleasures of Indian mogul art. At the other end of the scale, Mimi Lauter's...
...extra-large pastel drawings on paper evoke vast, imaginative, primeval landscapes inhabited, if you allow yourself a touch of fantasy, by mythical beasts. Meleko Mokgosi's...
...epic works recall the grand old tradition of historical painting, alluding to the continuing struggles of whole populations in the post-colonial era. I thought of Leon Golub--though Mokgosi's work is more dispassionate and analytical than Golub's. Same outrage, same need to share it on the canvas.
You begin to see my preference for painting... Might as well confess it: I love the figure, too--as in Mokgosi's paintings and, though in a quite different mode, the work of Thomas Lawson...
...whose boldly outlined nudes are eloquent in posture and relation to each other and whose "masks" explore the human physiognomy and hark back humorously to ancient Greece and Rome. In 3-D, Ruby Neri...
...uses clay and color in works that frankly recall her father, Manuel's work--and why not? Her figures recall the work of untrained artists everywhere that summon the spirits of the dead. And speaking of clay, I liked very much the odd, rather clumsy and reductive vessels of Caroline Thomas...
...and the colorful fantasies of Roy Dowell that function playfully in the ground between painted abstraction and utilitarian object.
Oh, and I couldn't close without a mention of the most senior of the "young" artists included in this exhibition, Channa Horwitz, who--dare I say?--at the start of her eighth decade continues to produce her meticulously lined and colored musical graphs, whose rhythms at once delight the eye and engage the mind. It's gratifying to find her work included in a show intended to represent the current energy of Los Angeles art.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
OUTCOMES
I'm getting hooked on the Tour de France again this year. It's my annual sports event--the only one I follow with any real involvement. Basketball, football, tennis, golf... none of these catch my interest. When I lived in Canada, years ago, I used to watch the National Hockey League games avery week, but I only recently returned for the Stanley Cup finals, when the L. A. Kings were in line to win. Hockey, in Los Angeles? And the players, when I used to watch in Canada, were nearly all French Canadians. Now, I discover, the sport is internationalized.
The same with the Tour de France. It used to be pretty much a contest between the French and their Spanish and Italian neighbors. Nowadays the riders come from virtually every part of the world--from Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, the Far East; last year's winner was the Australian, Cadel Evans. This year, for heaven's sake, it's an Englishman who's the favorite! Bradley Wiggins...
... won Monday's individual time trial with convincing ease.
As I say, I'm hooked. Which gives me the opportunity, once more, to reflect on my addiction to outcomes. I love stories. I want to know what happens next, I want to know how it all ends. In the Tour, of course, it's first and foremost a matter of who's going to end up in Paris with the winner's yellow jersey, after twenty grueling stages, five of them in the high mountains of the Alps and the Pyrenees--the equivalent of twenty marathons and more, on nearly consecutive days. It's a feat of endurance unrivaled by any other sport. As long-time readers of The Buddha Diaries know, I have been watching, on and off, since I was a lad with my own bright red racing bike in the 1950s, in the days when derailier gears were a lot less reliable than today's--and certainly not electronically controlled. The technology of the bicycle has, shall we say, evolved considerably since my day.
Doping. It's a shame. I sometimes wish that instead of banning the stuff they would just legalize it all and ensure that everyone has the same opportunity. It's the hidden edge of drug-enhanced performance that casts a real shadow over the entire sport. Still...
I'm hooked. Love to watch the sport. Need to know not only the big outcome, but all the little ones: will the breakaway succeed in outfoxing the peloton today? Who's going to be the first over the next hill, or reach the summit of the mountain first? Who'll emerge unscathed from the next disastrous pile-up along the route? Who'll prove the fastest sprinter, the fastest time-trialist? Which rider will drop out from injury or sheer fatigue? There are a thousand stories happening at once in this great tour, and I want to know the outcome of each and every one of them.
So, yes, it's a good lesson. I not only indulge myself and my addictions, I'm offered the opportunity to stand back and observe them. There are more important and compelling things in life than the Tour de France, more stories in progress in which I am personally involved. As I have said often in the past, my main problem with the prospect of having to die is the reluctance to let go of any of these stories, my need to know how they turn out. Will Luka one day be someone's grandfather, as I am his? Will a human being set foot on the planet Mars in 2030? It pains me that I will not be around to know such things, and for this reason struggle with my mortality. The achievement true happiness, Buddhist wisdom reminds me, depends upon a person's ability to surrender this addiction and accept the fact that everything is impermanent, even life itself.
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 7/10/2012
"Human happiness and human satisfaction must ultimately come from within oneself. It is wrong to expect some final satisfaction to come from money or from a computer.M Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment."
~His Holiness the Dalai Lama
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