pnArt

As both an artist and buyer of art, few activities are more delightful to me than a good open studios or art walk.  Throw in live music and a nice June afternoon and I’m the happiest camper you ever met.

Sunday my wife and I attended the annual Beacon Hill Art Walk in Boston.  It had everything: art, music, sun, June.  Plus Porta-Potties -  no art event is complete without bathrooms.

In preparing for this blog entry I wanted to research similar events throughout New England.   But it’s impossible because there are so many of them!  

Boston alone hosts at least a dozen such events including this one along with open studios in the South End, Jamaica Plain, Fort Point, East Boston, and others throughout the calendar year.   In Cambridge, Somerville, Newton, Brookline, and on outward blossom countless more.   In Lowell we’ve had open studio and similar events for years, thanks to the efforts of some now defunct local arts magazines, artists’ groups such as the Arts League of Lowell and the Western Ave Studios, and various local civic organizations.

When my wife and I travel to Vermont and Maine in the summer and fall most years we seldom manage to get back home without spending some time at some local open studios we pass on the way.   This cottage industry seems to be growing so fast it makes Web 2.0 look pokey.

The Beacon Hill Art Walk has been going for 19 years.  It’s just on the Boston Side of the Salt and Pepper bridge over the Charles River.    The artwork, and the artists, are tucked into all the little alleys and courtyards and interior gardens that surprise and deflight visitors who, from a distance, only see solid brick residencies in that neighborhood.   And for artists who couldn’t claim a garden or courtyard for their work, tents and stalls were set up on sidewalks, in the Vilna Shul, and even under the elevated Red Line tracks.

The sheer artistic eclecticism of the Art Walk was amazing.  I think I saw every medium and style I’ve ever heard of, not to mention a few new ones.   The artists were all happy to describe their methods and techniques and I took notes in case I get the itch to try a few new things myself.    The quality was variable, but generally high.  Some of the artists were clearly professional and others were talented amateurs.    The prices were lower than what I would have expected at a show of this caliber.

One thing that sets the Beacon Hill Art Walk apart from others of its ilk is the music.   -  5 chamber ensembles - 2 string quartets, a string trio, a flute ensemble, and a string quintet.  Plus two klezmer bands, fiddle music, guitar music, Armenian music, Greek music, and native American flute!    This is due to the efforts of Ivy Turner, the Art Walk’s music coordinator and the very talented musicians who donate their time.   Musical art and visual art go together so well that I don’t know why all such events don’t do this.

Yesterday I took advantage of some recent tick-killing freezes to descend into the woods behind our house to cut firewood. A large red oak died last year, but had the courtesy to remain standing while its wood seasoned, before it fell recently so I could reach it with my bow saw. A chain saw would make much faster work of this but a bow saw cuts both pushing and pulling so it’s great upper-body exercise for all the opposing muscle groups in my arms, back, and chest. I also like its quietude - I can hear the birds and the deer and chipmunks all around me as I saw and I can start early in the morning without disturbing neighbors.

Later in the day I harvested my remaining apples. My wife and I have a tool used to change lighbulbs in our high ceilings - an extendable pole with a sort of spring-loaded basket for the bulb. This was perfect for picking high-in-the-tree apples and filling a utility bucket with them. After dinner I used some of the apples to make apple-cranberry crisp from a Jane Brody recipe I like.

Then I went to Westford, to the Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston (ATMoB) site, to take more photos of Comet 17P/Holmes.

I’m not actually a member of ATMoB. I used to be, back in 1997, when I was shooting comet Hale-Bopp. So I felt a little guilty setting up in their field in pitch blackness at 10PM, surrounded by the disembodied voices of the real members, discussing variable stars and galaxies that they were looking at through fancy, expensive telescopes. No one said a word to me, nor I to them, as I set up my little old Nikon D100 and el-cheapo FJR equatorial mount.

The light pollution was only marginally less than at my house in Chelmsford but I did get a slightly better comet photo than a few nights ago . . .

I then tried to photograph M31 - the Andromeda Galaxy - but the automatic noise reduction feature in my geriatric Nikon D100 camera picked that moment to fail so I got a shot resembling what you might see in good binoculars or a small telescope - you can just make out the dust lanes, but that’s it . . .

. . . still, the thought that I’m seeing light from two and a half million years ago is thrilling. This was the Andromeda galaxy before there were humans. This was the Andromeda galaxy back when there were mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers, and when the ancestors of camels trod the plains of North America. And I just took this picture of it last night.

I’ve never understood how anyone in this universe can stay bored for long. I assume most of my blog readers inhabit the same universe as I do, so don’t you agree that this is a damned interesting one, as universes go?

Take this exploding comet, for instance. Up until a few days ago comet 17P/Holmes was an obscure 17th magnitude snowball orbiting the sun at a distance ranging from about Mars to Jupiter, i.e., pretty far out there. Suddenly on October 25 it exploded, increasing in brightness by a factor of a million literally overnight. It’s easily seen now with the naked eye at prime time by anyone who just turns off their TV, goes outside, and looks up. Tonight I took a picture of it from my deck:

For the technically-obsessed, this was taken with a Nikon D100 at ISO 1000, using a Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 lens, 20 second exposure. That slightly dark ring around the center is not an artifact - it’s really there. The stars are slightly streaked because I was still adjusting my equatorial mount settings when a bank of clouds rolled in and spoiled the party.

This comet is just plain weird - its orbit is less eccentric than most comets; its behavior and appearance are way more eccentric. The usual wackos have been emerging from the web woodwork, suggesting that it’s the fulfillment of a Hopi prophesy, or positing that it’s an alien spacecraft uncloaking itself or experiencing a reactor core explosion.

But I have my own theory. Remember that witch from the Wizard of Oz - Glinda, the good witch of the North? She was never seen slumming it on a broomstick. Instead, she always travelled around in a bubble, and I think the resemblance is striking:

Now, I’m not making any predictions here; all I’m saying is that it might not be a bad idea to apply for membership in the Lollipop Guild.

You know,  just to be on the safe side.

Finally.  We got a freeze last night.   The weather forecast gave fair warning so I took in the last of my basil yesterday and made pesto - mixing it with sun-dried tomatoes as I’ve learned to do in recent years.

While I ground and pureed the ingredients I watched the Patriots do the same to the Washington Redskins on TV.   Before the game there was anticipation about how the irresistible force of  New England’s league-leading pass offense would fare against the immovable object of  the Redskins’ league-leading pass defense.  The final answer to that philosophical conundrum was: irresistible force 52, immovable object 7.    The Boston Globe’s headline:  “Washington Slapped Here”

A few hours later my wife and I turned the TV back on to watch the Red Sox complete their sweep of Colorado in the 2007 World Series.   I was reminded again of why my interest in baseball has dissipated in recent years.    Near  the top of the 8th inning something came across the newswire about A-Rod leaving the Yankees.   And from then through the top of the ninth, all the Fox announcers could talk about was A-Rod’s contract.  The fact that there was a game going on in the background and the Rockies had pulled within a run of the Sox seemed like an annoyance to them (”Turn off that World Series  game - we’re trying to discuss baseball here!”)

I got more of the same driving to work this morning.   I had tuned in to a football-talk radio show (WEEI’s “Patriots Monday”)  not really expecting to hear much about the Patriots.  It’s understandable that Beantown is all a-twitter about the Red Sox winning the World Series.  But during my commute the whole conversation was about  Mike Lowell’s free-agency and whether the Sox should sign A-Rod, and how much they should spend to buy or retain this player or that.   If the game had anything to do with a bat, a ball, and bases, instead of lawyers and bank accounts, you’d never know it from that show.

Back in my callow youth, before I met my wife, I dated another Jewish woman. When she described Yom Kippur, I said something like, “you mean it’s a really serious, solemn day when you’re supposed to reflect on all your sins and moral shortcomings, and confess and atone for them?  That sounds depressing! Why would anyone want to do that?”

Since that time I’ve attended Kol Nidre (the evening service of Yom Kippur) for over a quarter century, mostly at Congregation Shalom in Chelmsford where I went tonight. “You don’t have to be Jewish to like Levy’s Jewish Rye”, and you don’t have to be Jewish to experience the cleansing benefits of reflection and confession and refreshed resolve.

Sometimes it’s a challenge - tonight I was melting in my suit. My wife suggested I dress casually because of the temperature, but the idea of attending a religious service in anything less than a suit and tie seems disrespectful. The synagogue was packed - I’ve never seen it so full. And I almost immediately acquired a new thought to atone for when a tall, gorgeous young woman wearing what I can only describe as a cocktail dress, revealing lots of beautiful thigh, sat in front of me.

The choir was very good and the cantor sang in an angelic soprano, but her voice was often forced to compete with this year’s solo instrument - a euphonium. To be fair, it was played well, but there was just a little too much of it for my taste. In the past we’ve had a cello, and more sparingly. I like that better.

Behind me sat a family with two little boys who fell asleep and snored in stereo during the rabbi’s sermon.

Rabbi Shoshana Perry’s sermons have gotten better and better. I used to prefer the previous rabbi - Terry Bard. His sermons were abstract and intellectual - he would take some point of Jewish tradition or liturgy and expand on it, discussing its history and meaning, like a college professor. I relate well to that, and when Rabbi Perry took over - 8 months pregnant - I found her sermons too maternal, or (dare I say it?) too female. She would reflect on her feelings while bathing her baby but I’m not a parent and I could only take her word for it all.

She still sermonizes about her personal experiences - tonight she confessed the dark and empty recesses in her thoughts while she’s alone in her car. But she’s much better at expressing their universality, in this case bringing it all around to the core Jewish identity of questioning and wrestling with the ineffable. Unlike bathing babies, this is something I can understand: the questions, the doubts, the struggle. Tonight she made me feel like a kindred warrior.

But I really wanted to talk about confession. Kol Nidre is about confession. And I’ve often said that this is where the Jews and the Catholics have an insight into human nature that most Protestant denominations lack. My family is Lutheran but, as kids, we went to a Congregational church because no Lutheran churches were handy.

It’s not that the Protestants don’t see the benefits of confession and the healing powers of forgiveness. But what the Jews and Catholics “get” is that people sometimes need a little encouragement to face their shortcomings and to confess. So it helps to institutionalize it in a prominent way, which the Catholics do through the Sacrament of Confession and the Jews do through Yom Kippur.

That’s why it was interesting to read in today’s Wall Street Journal that the Lutherans are reinstating it. In Confession Makes a Comeback, Alexandra Alter reports that in many Protestant churches and all over the secular web confession is the new black. I hope this is a fad that sticks.

We went to dinner for Rosh Hashanah at our friend Naomi’s last night.    We supplied some of the the dessert - an apple crisp made by my wife and our very reliable ginger pear crisp that I make every year - all the apples and pears were from our trees.    Many of the people were from our usual music crowd and it was a great pleasure as always, but I was disappointed that we missed one tradition - usually when we get together on Jewish holidays the musicians play Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes, but it needs a clarinet and Peter, our outstanding clarinetist, had to leave early.

I was also disappointed that I sat at the wrong end of the table to take part in a lively discussion on the other end about  the Patriots’ scandal.

I know this isn’t a sports blog, but I’m so incredibly pissed about this.    I’ve been a Patriots fan since the third grade back at the Warren School in Wellesley, when I was a classmate of Patrick Sullivan, whose father owned the team.  We used to hang out at his house on Bay State Road  and play tag football in a small field on Orchard St across from our friend Cynthia’s, house.    It was the Boston Patriots, in the AFL, in those days, and they used to play on some obscure college field, I think.  I attended one game and I remember nothing about it except rain from gray skies and mud and half-empty stands.

Being a Pats fan, lo these many years, has meant enduring a lot, but the new era of Bob Kraft and Bill Belichick and Scott Pioli and Tom Brady made it all worthwhile.   The Patriots were the cream of the crop, the team to emulate, the team to beat, and if there were murmurs of dissent and intimations of Pat’s classlessness from around the NFL, well, that  was probably just sore losers and sour grapes.

But the murmers have become harder to ignore with an unseemly victory display after the San Diego game last year, Belichick knocking over a cameraman, Rodney Harrison’s HGH admission (but I give him credit for manning up to admitting it), and now “videogate”.

I don’t care whether “everybody does it” or whether the Jets ratted out New England as part of some feud between Belichick and Mangini.   None of that changes the fact that it was still an incredibly stupid thing for the “smartest coach in the league” to do.    Already, all over ESPN and Sports Illustrated and reporter phone conferences with NFL players, and a thousand sports forums and blogs on the web, people are asking one question.  How much of the Patriots’ success in recent years and their three Super Bowl Wins was due to cheating?   Personally I don’t think it was a factor.  But that’s irrelevant.  In many people’s minds, now, the stats, the accomplishments, the Super Bowl rings and everything else achieved by six years of hard working, well-prepared, self-sacrificing Patriots players will appear next to little asterisks.

And that’s the other damnable thing about this.   The Patriots don’t need to resort to subterfuge.  They have so much talent, and they are so well prepared and coached that for them to cheat is like Bill Gates holding up a liquor store.  There is nothing to be gained and everything to lose.

This morning was cool and damp and gray.   The ground was sprinkled with the fiery leaves of fall.   There was a child’s kickball in my driveway – white and blue and pink.

Yesterday I was returning from a run during halftime of the Patriots’ game and I was eager to get home and treat a blister and to resume watching New England trounce the Jets.   A young black lab I had never seen before jumped out of some bushes across the street and charged right at me.   I like dogs but I used to be a paperboy and a census taker and I’ve been chewed up a few times, too.  I had a split second to decide whether I was about to get hurt or make a new friend and luckily I saw the ball by the side of the road.  I grabbed it and rolled it toward the dog.  He soccered it around a few times and picked it up in his mouth – the ball was slightly soft – and brought it back to me.  The game was on.   We played soccer and catch and  fetch all the way to my house where I abandoned him in my driveway looking sad and disappointed when I went inside.   He must have left the ball there when he departed.

Saturday was humid and in the 90’s – maybe the last really hot day of the summer.  I enjoyed it by working in my garden.

One of my blueberry bushes has died.  It could be from our recent drought but it also might be BSV – Blueberry Scorch Virus.   Unfortunately here in Massachusetts we have no Agricultural Extension Service to call on.   By “we” I’m referring to home gardeners.   The state, in its finite wisdom, decided to cut back the extension service to only commercial growers.  So even though I’m paying taxes for it I don’t get to use it.    If they had eliminated it entirely then commercial alternatives would have arisen to provide plant testing and parasite and plant pathogen lab services that growers need.    But since the state is skimming the cream of that business they short-circuit those market forces so backyard gardeners are stuck with nothing.

Saturday night we had our friends Connie and Mark over for dinner, which included our pears, tomatoes, basil, rosemary, mint, raspberries, and apples.  They just returned from a bike trip in Switzerland where they were scouting out new routes for a bike touring organization.   When they’re not bike-touring they’re building their new house – with their own hands -  an amazing solar-powered, energy efficiency showcase that they designed.   I even got the recipe for the dessert I made on Saturday from Connie.   They also have day jobs.   Whenever I feel tired and listless I think about them and the inspiration renews me!

In the early hours of Sunday morning a thunder storm kept me awake for a long time.  The lightning flashes were so frequent and the thunder so continuous that I couldn’t count the seconds between flash and boom to estimate the distance.

Wellfleet was beastly hot, and Aunt Sukie’s B&B had only a box fan in the window. At night I turned it up full blast and lay on top of the covers, naked, sweating myself to sleep. My wife curled up under a sheet next to me. Usually it would cool off a bit around 3 or 4 AM and I covered myself with some bedding in time to protect the sensibilities of the guests who would gather on the deck outside our open windows for breakfast in the morning.

We’ve been coming to Wellfleet for so many years now, staying at Aunt Sukies or renting a house on the beach, that we feel no pressure to have goals or an agenda. The B&B faces the water across a salt marsh which is crossed by a narrow boardwalk. We spent lots of time on the beach reading - my wife was under the spell of the last Harry Potter novel and I was reading Don’t Stop the Carnival by Herman Woulk. I also passed the time transcribing comments on my poems from the workshop. Once in awhile we ventured into town to go to galleries or to eat - on Friday we had dinner at Winslow’s Tavern and on Saturday we ate at the Bookstore Cafe. Both times we dropped over $100 - I can’t believe what it cost us to eat on this trip.

On Friday we attended a concert in Wellfleet by the Borromeo String Quartet, joined by Jon Manasse, clarinet, and Jon Nakamatsu on piano. We heard Tennebrae by Golijov, the Piano Quintet in G by Shostakovich, and Mozart’s Quintet in A Major (K581). The Shostakovich is one of my favorite chamber works and they played it very well. The Golijov was interesting - it was perfectly accessible and pleasant, unlike much of the academic and clanging work of many contemporary composers, and it certainly had its moments, but it seemed to meander a bit and would have made good background music for something. I made a note to check out more works by this new composer. The Mozart was competently played but I’m not a big fan - I find Mozart a bit dainty and courtly and can’t help thinking about powdered wigs and ruffled sleeves whenever I hear it.

I don’t want readers of my blog to think that gardening, for me, is just an endless battle with squirrels and groundhogs. No, sometimes it’s a battle with birds.

I love birds. I’m a card-carrying member of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and I even have the Peterson’s Field Guide Eastern/Central Bird Songs Collection as MP3’s on my iPod. But when they go after my blueberries, relations become, let’s say, a little strained.

My blueberries extend down several terraces of my hillside garden and so are hard to net without an elaborate framing system. In years past the birds have taken so many berries that I didn’t even have enough left for a muffin. Then, a few years ago I hit on a new scarecrow strategy - helium-filled party balloons. The first year it was Tweety Bird and the outcome was this:

Last year it was Shrek, with similar happy results.

In general a good scarecrow balloon should have an irregular shape so that it presents a varying aspect to the birds. It should be big, and preferably have a few appendages hanging down. It should be tied down loosely enough to bounce and move about a bit in the wind, but not so loosely that it gets tangled up in the agriculture. Another important feature is “eyes”. Many birds are wired up to fear anything that looks like a pair of eyes - I suppose because it reminds them of predators. Some moths and butterflies capitalize on this and have circular designs on their wings.

My blueberries have just started to come in and it looks like it will be a good harvest. So this year I got a 4 foot “Elmo” balloon. I’m not quite sure who Elmo is - a character from a children’s TV show, I think - I don’t watch TV. I don’t know if he’s a good guy or a bad guy or a member of SAG or whether he’s controversial or just checked out of rehab or whether he supported the Iraq invasion. And frankly, I don’t care; I’m willing to put the past behind us as long as he does a good job guarding my berries.

We are spending the weekend at the estate of a friend on Cape Cod. My wife and her friend are both active in the greater Boston amateur chamber music community and every June we come here along with two dozen other musicians - plus a few non-playing spouses such as me - for weekend of wonderful music and food in a gorgeous beachfront setting. The house is large enough that we can have a piano quintet in the living room plus various string quartets, trios, or sextets scattered among the other rooms.

I’m not a very happy camper this weekend because I have a painful contact ulcer on my larynx and my doctor wants me to rest my voice. But how can I in such a social atmosphere, and especially given that I normally have an atomic-powered motormouth? So I’m being very bad about obeying doctor’s orders, and I’m paying the price in throat pain and delayed healing. I suppose there’s something karmic about the fact that it hurts for me to talk, since for years it’s often hurt to listen to me!

This is a bad setting to disobey doctors’ orders. I’ve never encountered any pastime that attracts so many physicians as chamber music. We may have a half-dozen doctors in the house right now. Recently at a workshop my wife, a pianist, was playing a quartet and all the string players were doctors. And when it’s not doctors, it’s professors, Harvard or MIT deans, business owners, research scientists, and other high achievers who seem to be attracted to chamber music. Why? Lots of hobbies attract their share of learned people but I’ve never seen such a concentration as I’ve seen in chamber music. It makes for wonderfully stimulating conversation at social gatherings and the average chamber music sextet abandoned on a desert island could probably re-create civilization.

To avoid talking I’ve banished myself, with my laptop, to the far corner of the vast pool room, while string ensembles play Brahms and Beethoven at the other end. The weather outside is bright and the yachts in the harbor gleam in the sunlight. In fact, the yacht club is supplying my internet connection, since they rent wireless access to visiting boats for a very modest fee and for their purposes right now I’m a yacht.

Here, in my lonely corner, I’ve been doing my little bit to stop the war in Iraq : I’ve created a parody of the movie poster for “The Endless Summer”, called “The Endless War”. And for more proof that this contact ulcer hasn’t shut me up, a couple of days ago I made my first YouTube video - . it’s just cutesy little woodland creatures around my office park set to music by Rossini. I just did it as a practice exercise for a new camcorder and video editing software I bought recently but that’s a topic for another day.