Art-Hounding Hits a Snag!

I've been furiously looking for paintings by the artist Milton Resnick ever since I first discovered him earlier this year. There are a number of artists whose work I eagerly view at any opportunity. But Resnick, unfortunately, hits me a different way. When it's time to leave the museum, I find that I hate to say goodbye to his paintings. That's never happened before.

I've been to many beautiful and famous places, having toured as a musician in something like 21 countries, and I've enjoyed them all greatly. But one attraction alone, the Alhambra, palace of the Moors in the south of Spain, hit me in a different way. I have no desire to do anything more than visit the Louvre, the Japanese Imperial Palace, or most other World Heritage-ish sites, awesome though they are. But the Alhambra...the Alhambra I'd very happily live in. It's not that it's more beautiful; there's just an undefinable something that makes me yearn to inhabit, rather than just visit. When it was time to leave the Alhambra, I recalled the tale of the expulsion of the Moorish King, who was said to turn and look back at his palace with tear-filled eyes. It's important to note that Moorish Kings weren't known for being the weepy type. But I understood how he felt.

I'll never move into the Alhambra, alas. But if I were to find a smaller Resnick painting, from outside his most prized period (1959 to 1965 or so), and found myself compelled to throw away way more of my savings than would conceivably be prudent, and not replace my five-year-old car any time soon, I might imaginably come to own something by him, if I hold out for a dark horse bargain. Never having been the itchy acquisitive type, I'm shocked by how persistent the compulsion has been. I suppose it mostly boils down to this: I've spent hours staring at several Resnick works, and have hardly begun to plumb the depths of any of them. These are not paintings to view, they're paintings to live with. They can't be fully experienced in mere hours. Imagine if you were a big Mahler devotee, but had never heard any of his symphonies all the way through.

I've approached a number of art dealers, mostly snobs who glance at my zhlubby appearance and cheap sneakers and resolve to waste as little time with me as possible. Roughly half the works for sale I've viewed have been counterfeits (one can easily tell; a real Resnick spews ecstacy, a fake just lies there). And everything's been either overpriced or underwhelming. So I've bided my time, placating myself by thumbing through reproductions in old exhibition catalogs, sighing heavily like a childless young Mormon woman.

With much detective work, I learned that, as of the late 1970's, a certain university gallery had a Resnick painting. The gallery no longer existed, but still more detective work revealed that while the painting was all but forgotten by the university, which long since had lost interest in art, it was currently hanging, unannounced, in some cheesy conference room. I learned which room (yep, I've been working hard), and the kindly Conferences Director agreed to bring me over to view it. When he opened the door and turned on the buzzing, throbbing overhead fluorescent panel, I saw a masterpiece, cheaply hung, unspotlit, and drooping a few inches to the left. Decorating the wall of this small, grim institutional room, it might as well have been a "Hang in There, Baby!" poster. There was no protective glass pane; I was surprised some student hadn't scrawled "Kimmy and Dom 4Evuh" in the corner.

I've since considered all my options, including outright criminality, and decided my best bet would be to try to ingratiate myself with the university president, tell him my tale, get him caught up in the whole chowhounding ethos (my fascination with this third-rate abstract expressionist is art-hounding, pure and simple), offer to teach a class in ethno gastronomy for free, and see if he'll find a way to let me either buy the damned thing or else borrow it in exchange for a generous donation. So I wrote him a long, passionate, super-enthusmo letter, which I fear he may not read all the way through. I'm also afraid the board of trustees will either nix the sale or else, their curiosity piqued, confer with a zillion sleazy art dealers who'd promise unrealistic megabucks while tying up the painting for an eternity. I haven't mailed the letter.

This is a private university, not particularly prominent, and currently featuring a mostly pragmatic vocational type curriculum. The painting is a bit out of place there. It would be much, much happier with me.

Any clever suggestions?

More on Perfect Pitch

Some interesting comments were posted in the "Is Perfect Pitch Dying Out Like the Honeybees? entry. Thanks! I've found some interesting information, though not an answer to the mystery:

From an Interview with Joseph Chilton Pearce

"My very young pre-school son learned to play the piano quickly and easily, sitting in my lap—to the point that by age five he was considered quite precocious and was studying with an excellent pianist. His mother, however, was concerned that he would become “one-sided” if he went on being completely absorbed in music and insisted that he attend school and learn to read and write. We put him in a small private school, and within a few months his freely-expressed musical facility began to falter. Little by little his coordination between the hands was not as good, nor his sight reading. Even his perfect pitch declined, and by age seven he had lost much of that original spontaneous capacity."

This next one's particularly interesting to me, as I've always wondered how "tone deaf" people manage to communicate in Asian societies with pitch-based languages, e.g. Chinese or Vietnamese). From an article by Jonathan Ames:

"... psychologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US...think perfect, or absolute, pitch - the ability to precisely recognise musical notes - is what actually helps babies to learn to speak.

Once this task is achieved, perfect pitch is lost - unless it is deliberately cultivated in some way, either by learning a musical instrument or by speaking a language that conveys subtle meaning with different tones."

More on that same theory (courtesy of this discussion): according to this National Geographic program, the human brain goes through two stages of cutting off unused connections: in early childhood, and again at adolescence. So, again, if you don't use your perfect pitch, you might lose it. 

But wait! What does "using your perfect pitch" mean? Music's everywhere! Is perfect pitch more of a skill than a faculty, involving an intentional, conscious processing of what's being heard? I believe people with perfect pitch don't experience it that way. Also, the reports I'm hearing are of adults losing this faculty, not children.

Those Freakin' Whiners...

Click photo to see larger version...

Godin Retrieving

Welcome to those clicking in from the recent links in Seth Godin's blog. You may want to have a look through the previous entries, most of which are non-time-sensitive. The following are some recommendations selected for a Godinesque crowd:

Ad Blocker Exceptions Are the New Online Tip Jar

How to pick out shill-reviewed places on Trip Advisor

Aztecs in Austria

How to Smuggle in Cuban Cigars....Legally!

God As Dude

Eating by the Numbers

How to Enter Sensitive Passwords on Public Computers

Always Talk to the Mask

Indie Filmmakers Won't Let Me See Their Films

Belonging

Ten Terrific Films You've Never Heard Of

Hillary, Sexism, OJ, and an Apology to the Right Wing

Milton Resnick: Ecstasy Made Visible

We've Gone Completely Jungian

Oh, and here's why you'll eventually wander away.

In Twenty Years, We'll All Drink Daily Milkshakes and Be OK

The NY Times reports that scientists have identified a mutation which shuts down the function of the human apoC-III gene. This results in an enhanced ability to quickly break down fat, and it lowers LDL cholesterol and raises HDL...plus, just for the heck of it, keeps arteries plaque-free. Not bad, huh?

On the other hand, I worry about the unintended consequences of shutting down this gene. I'd like to talk to the folks with this mutation before I get all excited about one day choosing to have my own apoC-III knocked out of commission. It might turn out they can't correctly punctuate sentences or appreciate flamenco or crack their knuckles.

Devil's Advocate on Gay Marriage

I'm particularly fond of arguing against my own core beliefs. As a young philosophy major, I was taught that the best way to examine your assumptions is to attack them with everything you've got. With practice, you develop a faculty sorely lacking in most people: empathic insight into the minds of your ideological opponents.

On a recent Daily Show, host Jon Stewart was debating Mike Huckabee on gay marriage. And as has often been the case, I felt that the socially conservative side failed to ably communicate the gist of its position. Since I, myself, oppose most socially conservative positions, this failure to articulate should delight me. It means, after all, that "my side" wins the argument - as Jon Stewart clearly did this time.

But what's the prize? Minds are not changed by debates. And rifts can never be bridged by poor communication. It's in everyone's interest for differing positions to be as clearly explained as possible. A principled opponent with whom you disagree on ideological grounds, after all, is an opponent you'd be less likely to dehumanize. Wouldn't it be fantastic if we lived in an age so enlightened that each side helped the other articulate its message? (If such a scenario seems unimaginable, we ought to reconsider how "modern" our society truly is!)

The Daily Show debate reminded me of a dialog that took place in the comments beneath this Slog entry. I tried to articulate the conservative perspective on gay marriage in a way that's at least understandable, if not morally justifiable. Since not everyone reads comments, I've reposted the discussion here:

Commenter Jon:

For the life of me I can't see how gay marriage threatens anything or anyone

My Reply:

Really? It's awfully clear for me. It means cementing, legally, a cultural change that is not in line with the way things have always been, and which makes them uncomfortable (being pro-gay rights, my reply is "well, too freaking bad", but that's my reply, not their feeling). There are homophobic bigots out there, but also plenty of nice (and, in my view, wrong) folks who are not quite ready, psychologically, to accept daddy/daddy and mommy/mommy marriages as a normal part of their cultural landscape. Shoot, I'm not sure you or I would have been hip enough to feel comfortable with that back in, like, 1975! We're ready, they're not. Again, too freaking bad for them, I say. But it doesn't make them homophobic bigots. Just people used to things the way they are and not in a rush to keep changing that status quo. Conservativism. It's a valid way to see the world, generally. Certainly not unfathomable.

They don't want their cultural landscape changed our way. But we don't want ours changed their way, either (creationism in schools, anyone? banning of stem cell research? etc etc). That's the point of my entry. We get lost, just as they do, in our certainty that our changes are good, smart, reasonable ones. Both sides think the same, but they never argue on the same plane. That's the impasse.

Eventually, with the application of steady gentle pressure and greater interpersonal contact, the mainstream everywhere will feel more "comfortable" with gay marriage, and homosexuality generally. As I've been writing for the last few weeks regarding political antagonists here and abroad, the ultimate solution is greater familiarity and bonding between actual people. Symbols and strawmen are easy to demonize and fear.

But, in the meantime, this is a civil rights issue, and legalization of gay marriage ought to happen now, regardless of comfort levels. Justice vastly outweighs comfort.

RADIOLAB

Public Radio's "Radiolab" has been quite good this season, particularly this recent provocative and interesting show on Race, which offers some intriguingly counterintuitive viewpoints on that combustive topic.

The producers use some unconventional editing techniques which may annoy listeners expecting the usual public radio soundscape - not an inappropriate expectation given the program's unabashed debt to This American Life (e.g. the program's host positively channels Ira Glass). But I grant them slack; it's admirable to see radio people stretching for some new tricks, and one can't, after all, expect every experiment to work.

You can subscribe to Radiolab via itunes.

Is Perfect Pitch Dying Out Like the Honeybees?

Over the past few weeks, I've heard several accounts of perfect pitch recently starting to fade for people who'd possessed the faculty all their lives. Other musicians have reported hearing the same.

I'm no expert on perfect pitch, but, as a musician, it's something I've been around for years. (I, myself, don't possess it - and wouldn't want to, as it would annoy me when listening to musicians tuned above or below the standard A440, or using non-traditional and microtonal tunings.) But I've never before heard of perfect pitch fading. I'm guessing it's a new - or, at least, newly common - phenomenon, and surely a great subject for some enterprising psychology graduation student to study.

"Bag of Hurt" Watch Part 6: I'm Goin' YIDDISH on Y'all!

The phrase "Bag of hurt" has dropped further to 157,000 Google search results (if you haven't been following along with this saga, you can read up on it here).

The algorithm controlling all this is so piss poor that I find myself straining for Yiddish curses to hurl at it. The problem is that I don't speak Yiddish. So I'll have to settle for sputtering furiously about how this farshingenpaskudnyavershlimkenkukh search engine is absolutely kerplongenshlimfashlugnyishkep.

Update: it dropped another thousand results in the past 45 minutes, to 156,000. Unbelievable.

Ballasting Happiness

If you know a worrier, you've surely discovered that such people play a perpetual game of "whack-a-mole". Alleviate a worry for them, and they'll instantly find something else to worry about. It's all about the mindset, not the worries themselves (if there are no real worries at hand, silly ones will be manufactured). They think they're plagued by worries, but, really, they're plagued by the desire to worry.

When you try to alleviate the circumstances that make an angry person angry or a sad person sad, nothing is accomplished because circumstance doesn't create the mindset, it's the other way around. The mindset comes first. Slings and arrows are sought out and eagerly grabbed at.

Your Uncle Louie is not an Aggravated Person because things aggravate him. Things have aggravated him because he's an Aggravated Person.

How does this happen? Everyone, at a certain point, decides how happy they will be (as with most such choices, cues are taken from the happiness of family members and others around them). This decision becomes a bedrock part of identity - the "I am this kind of person" inner narrative we all maintain.

Aside from truly dramatic life events, people maintain a remarkably consistent happiness level over time. Even moody "up-and-down" types are consistent in their range. We maintain the equilibrium our self-image requires by taking on and discharging ballast - like a ship. And, just as we choose our happiness level, at some point we choose our ballast of choice: worries, anger, sadness, aggravation, etc. The ballast enables us to maintain our happiness at the correct level.

The world does not lack for ballast. In fact, potential ballast is infinite. Yet isn't it interesting how people vary in their eagerness for the stuff?