My Dirty Little Life

It's 10:35pm and I'm laying on a velvety soft comforter atop my unmade bed eating sweet high-calorie pastries while listening to mellow evening jazz on the radio (first Billie Holiday, now Louis Armstrong...).  It's such a comfortable, sensuous delightful moment that I actually find the broken closet doors next to me charming. Just as I do the filthy stained carpets here in my cheap little house in the poor part of town, and I even bet the toilet could use a good scrubbing. Clothes are in piles on the floor, dishes are stacked in the sink and papers are everywhere. It's a dirty little life, but it's mine, and it's comfortable!

Beauty In Simplicity

One can make pretty pictures full of detail, but to me the most satisfying art is a simple object against a blank field. For example, simple brush strokes depicting bamboo in a Chinese painting. Or in Japanese flower arranging, the vase and flower placed in an empty location with nothing near it.

In Asian art, beauty is revealed in masterful presentation of the simple and familiar.  Lifetimes are devoted to learning the qualities of something so the beauty of its essence can be presented. There is beauty in minimalist architecture, flower arranging, or brush strokes of calligraphy. When I toured through Japan, I watched the ritual precision of the Tea Ceremony: whisking the tea, turning the cup two quarter-turns, presenting the cup to the guest, and so on. The ceremony is always the same, and beauty is in the grace of execution as well as the variety of variable elements such as apposition of a round kettle to a square plate and in the variety of sound the boiling tea kettle makes: does it suggest water flowing over rocks in a creek, or rain in a forest?

In simplicity, subtle variations become major statements.  In one of my favorite movies, the 1953 film by Yasujiro Ozu, "Tokyo Story," an elderly couple are seen in a distant shot sitting silently on a stone wall watching the ocean. This single shot continues quite a long time. Eventually the woman slowly stands up - a routine movement - but then falters. That very subtle error is emotionally devastating: you know immediately that she is falling ill.

I just stood in my early morning springtime backyard and looked around. All the detail of grass, hedges, fence and so on fell away and my eyes saw only certain elements as if in a Japanese painting:  almost bare grapevines stretching across the trellis (with splashes of new-growth green); in the southern sky, the half moon hovered between wispy clouds; across the fence, a neighbor's small tree presented tiny buds of green on its dark branches.  An ability to see simple objects of beauty among the clutter can make one's day so much more pleasant. I recommend learning to do it.

You Are What You Think About

On a radio talk show this morning a woman involved with a charity said, "what you think about creates you. So what do you want to think about? Do you want to think about petty politics and gossip TV shows and fill yourself with garbage or do you want to think about something that could make a difference and help someone?" 

Good point. The charity she works with is www.mmfc.org, Medical Missions for Children, Inc., a not-for-profit organization created by Boston area doctors and nurses that provides free reconstructive surgical and dental care to children born with cleft of the lip and palate, deformed or missing ears (microtia), and other congenital deformities, as well as severe burns at zero cost to the patients.  The surgeries they provide cost so little yet change people's lives.  "But there are so many people here in our own country that need help; why go there?"  Wherever your heart takes you with a desire to help is good. Here, there, wherever.  But be a person who helps. This issue, another, whatever. From this page http://www.mmfc.org/what.htm:

In underdeveloped nations, cleft of the lip and palate are 2 of the most commonly occurring congenital deformities.  The deformities of the children cause physical pain, and foster shame, isolation, and sadness as the afflicted children grow older. Deformed children feel different from peers; in many cases, other children ridicule and ostracize them. The deformed children’s lives become lonely, isolated, and hopeless. These children are also plagued by chronic infections, at which point the deformity becomes dangerous – and sometimes fatal.

Help wherever you can, in any way you can. There are many ways to help. If you can't help financially, you can spread the word about the need and the organization.  Doing so, you might let someone know who CAN help financially. And, you'll help others become a better person by making them think about something other than petty politics and gossip. So here I am, spreading the word about www.mmfc.org which operates on a mere 3% overhead; the rest all goes to funding missions around the world. The doctors contribute their time AND money.  Please visit the website and watch the videos on the left margin of their homepage, then at the very least share the link to their site. If you can, and if your heart feels moved to do so, give financially.

Think back to your childhood: how could your childhood have become so much easier and happy if someone had just done something really nice for you.

Charm and Delight

My last post inspired a new thought. In my previous post I commented that only people who lived during the time of a certain entertainer or social movement could fully understand it for what it was, and this appreciation is lost on later generations who can only look back academically on what came before, devoid of emotional understanding of the era. Ah! But now I realize that later generations gain something unique.

Nowadays, only BECAUSE we live in times of redefined values and changed experiences can we now find previously unknown delight and charm in old things. Back in the 1950s, for example, advertising style was just what it was. Nothing particularly charming at the time. But nowadays, the 1950s style of illustration, catalog photos, drive-in restaurant neon signs, movies, and even furniture, cars and small home appliances is looked back on as charming and delightfully retro! Because we consider our world today as complicated and with utilitarian design and cheap construction, we look back on 1950s advertising as charmingly naive and 1950s design as more colorful, whimsical, sparkly, hefty and all kinds of adjectives. These adjectives didn't describe style IN the 1950s; it was just what it was. It's today's values that give us whimsy, charm and beauty in old things.

At the time it was created, the above photo (movie still) was just the style of the day and nothing special. But in today's world of flat lighting and bland color, the photo appears endearingly charming. A souvenir from a more __________ [insert your interpretive adjective] time.

An Advantage of Being Older

Reaching birthday #__ was really bad for me.  On my Facebook account I wrote that "I honestly do NOT see any advantage to getting older."  However, I recently thought of one advantage:

Older people enjoyed fuller experiences of performers and entertainments that are now considered "legendary."

As a teen, I watched the "Carol Burnett Show" every week and so I've seen every sketch they ever did, and I often laughed literally until I cried. Today, young people have only selected "best of" DVDs of the show available to them, not every skit the cast ever performed. This limits later generations' appreciation because they won't experience the breadth of humor in EVERY sketch they ever did, but more significantly it's impossible for young people today to watch the show in the context of the time it was presented originally. Cultural references and a sense of humor, defined by the time, are gone. So only those who watched the program in the 1970s can understand what really made it great.

I lived The Beatles in their heyday, and had innumerable additional experiences of them that later generations will never enjoy. And Johnny Carson, and... the list goes on. Every generation has its own list of "legendary" entertainers.

Being young certainly has its advantages, but understanding the cultural context of entertainment and social movements gives understanding that later generations will never genuinely feel (they can only understand it academically).

For example, the lifestyle and music of the "hippie" 1960s and the disco '70s.  I was there!  I was under 10 years old but I remember walking through San Francisco's Golden Gate Park with my older brother and cousin in about 1967 and seeing all the hippies. My mother had told us not to go to the Park because "those people are dirty and dangerous." However, I remember "those people" saying "Hi" to me, a little boy, with friendly smiles (including one particularly pretty blond girl). And then, when my cousin was hit by a car on our way back, I remember that everyone came running up to help. These were friendly helpful people, not dirty or dangerous people. And so I understood these young people's complaints about how older people ("the establishment") didn't understand them because my mother proved them correct. And as a pre-teen witnessing the Vietnam war on TV and Watergate, I understand the feelings of the time that made art and poetry in song such strong powers to energize and unify a generation in protest.

And in the 1970s, I HATED disco!  Young people today might look at all that with fun, but lemme tell ya, living in that time was HORRIBLE!  [2011 edit: ok, maybe disco DID have some catchy tunes...]

Only people who lived through the time of what is now "legendary" can fully understand why.

(PS: the photo on this article is my grandfather, after whom I was named. He certainly understood better than I ever could what life was like in Bohemia the few years on each side of 1900, then as a Czech officer in Russia after their Revolution, then living in China in the 1920s, and of coming to America in 1924 for a freer life of greater opportunity. I can only look back objectively, academically.  I cannot feel his fear at lying to officials about his travel plans so he could escape the tyranny of the times. Nor can I feel his hope and relief while aboard a ship bound for America.)