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If you were to ask an art historian about landscape painters, two names that would probably come up are Constable (above) and Ruisdael (below). John Constable was an English painter born in 1776, the year of the American Revolution. Jacob van Ruisdael was a Dutch painter who lived a century before him. They had some similar ideas about how to paint a landscape. For instance, they both considered the sky a matter of maximum importance; they thought of it as a dome of light that controlled the appearance of every other part of the painting. But in one important way, they were diametrically opposed. Ruisdael felt free to paint from his imagination and "improve" on reality. Constable felt that imagination could never surpass reality. For him, the highest goal of a landscape painter was to observe and understand nature.

Should art try to be better than life? Or is that merely self-delusion? Both sides have a point, but I'm a fan of better-than-life. Sure Constable is the purer artist, sticking to his principles... but his pictures don't make me long for another time and place, the way Ruisdael's do. What's wrong with a little outrageous invention if it produces pleasure? For me, enjoyment is everything; artistic principles are nothing.

Speaking of landscapes giving pleasure, my friend ShirlT made and sent me a beautiful painting for my birthday. Deepest thanks, Shirl! Her paintings can be viewed online here.


(The first painting is John Constable's Stour Valley and Dedham Church. The second is Jacob van Ruisdael's Bentheim Castle.)

Given the high regard in which Greek architecture is currently held, it's easy to forget that it wasn't always so. During the period of High Modernism, many architects took it for granted that buildings like the Parthenon were inelegant and essentially dishonest. Their opinion was based on the fact that Greek buildings (at least the surviving ones) are made of stone--but pretend to be made of wood. The entire form of a Greek temple, from the fluting of its columns to the dentils on its entablature, was invented by woodworkers, for execution in wood, as expressions of the properties of wood. A Greek temple is therefore a rendering in one medium of ideas and techniques that make sense only in another. It would be like building a modern hydrogen-powered car in the exact shape of a Model T, including pipes and gears that no longer served any purpose.

That's what I was thinking about last weekend while I was at the Sunset Celebration Weekend in Menlo Park, CA. I went there mainly to see the exhibition houses, one of which was supposed to demonstrate a new material for American home construction--canvas. I was hoping to learn about the amazing possibilities of fabric as a building material--a medium that curves, folds, hangs, flutters, and a dozen other things that traditional materials can only make metaphors about. But instead all I saw was an ordinary gabled-box house, with canvas instead of bricks. Then I realized how stupid I was for thinking that Sunset Magazine would ever do anything innovative. My bad!

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Just wanted to point out that Republicans and "terrorists" are the same type of people. They both believe in guns, war (especially the "holy" kind), god, religion, creationism, militarism, authoritarianism, "family values," patriarchy, oppression of women, moral absolutism, political absolutism, forcing their views on other people, crushing dissent, and persecuting anyone who looks, thinks, or acts differently from them. Also, they both hate pacifists, atheists, Communists, homosexuals, intellectuals, science, liberalism, humanism, pluralism, ethnic diversity, freedom of speech (except their own), and anyone who dares to disagree with them.

Goya made this picture in the last years of his life and painted it directly onto a wall of his own house (his dining room, in fact). Part of a series called the Black Paintings, it is based on a scene from Greek mythology. The titan Saturn (Greek: Kronos), upon hearing a prophecy that he will be overthrown by one of his children, determines to eat them all. Jupiter (Greek: Zeus) escapes and later returns to take revenge for his cannibalized siblings; thus the attempt to circumvent fate provides the impetus for its fulfillment. Why would Goya put something so horrific (not to mention unappetizing) in his dining room?

One explanation lies in the other deity with which Saturn was traditionally conflated--Chronos, the god of time. Perhaps Goya, then in his seventies, wanted to reflect on the cruelty of time, which destroys life so relentlessly and indiscriminately. Another explanation is that the painting is an allegory of the civil wars which raged across Spain in the early 1800's and which became an obsession for Goya. This interpretation has particular relevance today. Napoleon, in command of the most powerful military machine the world had ever seen, invaded Spain on the pretext of "liberating" it. He had expected to be greeted with flowers after a quick victory on the field of battle. Instead he faced an unending stream of insurgents and "terrorists," against which his mighty army was powerless. In the end, he succeeded only in splitting the country into factions that spent four decades slaughtering each other.

To me, the picture has a more basic meaning. It represents the damage that current generations are doing to future ones without even thinking. The vacant stare in Saturn's eyes reminds me of the heedlessness with which we gorge ourselves on the luxuries of modern life, regardless of the cost to our children. Whether it means racking up huge debts that they will have to pay, or bankrupting the government that they will need to protect them, or destroying the planet that they will have to live on, we seem to be concerned only with satisfying our own monstrous appetites.

(The painting is Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son.)

Compare the realism of the sculpture above with that of the painting below. Notice how palpably Laocoön seems to be straining and struggling, whereas the best thing you can say about baby Jesus is that he looks a bit like Jackie Gleason. Now consider that the sculpture was made 14 centuries before the painting (and don't go thinking that I picked some no-name amateur for this comparison--Giotto is regarded by many as the greatest painter of his generation). That, in a nutshell, is why classical culture has long been revered as the unsurpassable peak of human achievement. It took Europe over a millennium to get back to where the Greeks and Romans had been, and much of what they accomplished has never been excelled by anyone, anywhere. Even we, who take so much pride in our modern Western civilization and feel it our right--our duty, even--to impose it on the rest of the world, have done scarcely anything to distinguish ourselves. In art, in religion, in ethics, in beauty, in decency, in love, in human happiness--in everything except science and technology, we have yet to outdo our forebears of 2,000 years ago.


(The sculpture is Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus's Laocoön and His Sons. The painting is Giotto di Bondone's Madonna in Glory.)

The exoneration of David Evans, Collin Finnerty, and Reade Seligmann is a victory for justice. It should be noted, however, that when black men accused of raping white women have exculpatory evidence to share, it is not featured on 60 Minutes (twice, even), and the false accusers are not then pilloried in the national media as "hoes." It would have been a terrible injustice if these innocent (white, wealthy) men had been punished for a crime they didn't commit. But that same injustice is visited upon other innocent (black, poor) men every day.

One of the greatest mysteries of our universe is its silence. If, as many of us have assumed all along and recent evidence is beginning to confirm, planets meeting the requirements for biological evolution are quite common, then why have we seen no sign of "extraterrestrial intelligence"? Most of the obvious hypotheses (extrasolar planets are rare, water is rare, etc.) are falling by the wayside as more and more variables of the Drake equation are shown to be significantly greater than zero. David Brin has a more disturbing hypothesis about the silence of the universe, and in this open letter he suggests that there may be a very good reason why extraterrestrial civilizations do not want to talk.


"Life arose and endured on planets for billions of years, but throughout that time it was mute. Civilizations sprang from it: not to perish but to transform themselves into something extranatural." (Stanislaw Lem, Fiasco)

When I first saw this picture, I was filled with outrage and disgust. But then a great ambivalence overtook me. On the one hand, there is no question in my mind that whales are just as capable of feeling pain, fear, grief, and many other emotions as humans are. In that light, the hunting of whales is an act of brutality, pure and simple. The hunting of whales with industrial weaponry is in addition cowardly and venal. The hunting of whales by Japan is, on top of everything else, cynical and deceitful (how many "tissue samples" do they need, and what exactly do they learn by eating them?).

On the other hand, who are we to tell other countries how to behave? Are our values and customs really so superior to theirs? Let us all remember that what we are doing in Iraq is also an act of brutality. And Iraqis are not merely "just as capable of feeling" as humans--they ARE humans, whose lives are every bit as precious as those of American soldiers (though some people seem not to recognize this)! When you start a war on false pretenses, invade and occupy another country, torture your prisoners, and slaughter civilians by the thousands, you can't expect other people to take your moral objections very seriously. And if you then make it crystal clear that you're going to keep on behaving however the hell you want, you have no right to criticize others for doing the same. That's what it means to be the bad guy.