Historic Garden Week is a perennial favorite

18.05.12

 

If you’ve ever spent a snow day sketching your spring plantings or awakened from a hammock nap with potting soil still under your fingernails, you get it.

If you’ve ever drooled on a seed and bulb catalog, or gotten so distracted at the grocery store that you went home with geraniums instead of toilet paper, you understand.

But even if you don’t know the difference between humus and hummus, an afternoon’s walk in a blooming landscape can be all it takes to explain the mystique of the garden.

A successful garden will have an entry point for every observer. Some visitors will linger on roses, snapdragons or peonies; others seek out statuary. Others insist on function and won’t stop looking until they’ve spotted at least a kitchen herb or two.

Color, contrast and fragrance all have their fans, as do stonework, water features and artful nature-vs.-nurtured balances.

Source: The Daily Progress

On learning how to embrace my grandson and my ghosts

18.05.12

My first grandchild drew his first breath in a birthing clinic in Frankfurt, Germany. Just three weeks earlier, he had been on stage at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Chicago, turning somersaults in the womb to the thunderous applause greeting Richard Strauss’ wondrous opera “Ariadne auf Naxos.” He kicked when the tenor hit his upper reaches. But when his mom’s silver voice spun diamonds in the air with the German libretto, he settled in quietly. Strauss and Mozart were his evening bedfellows in his natural sound environment for months.

He entered the world on Jan. 3. We received the news of his imminent birth in a predawn phone call from Germany. My husband, a very pragmatic Israeli, hugged me, turned on his side and went back to sleep. “This could take a while,” he mumbled.

I couldn’t sleep. Like moms the world over whose daughters are giving birth for the first time, the images in my mind rotated like a kaleidoscope, magically chaotic, happy and bright. From across the ocean I imagined I could time my breath to hers as I remembered her entry into the world at the Sanz Medical Center-Laniado Hospital in Israel — then a small maternity hospital at the end of a dusty road near the cliffs of Netanya — whose founder from the Chasidic Sanz dynasty had lost his wife and children in the Holocaust.

Source: The Jewish Journal of Greater L.A.

UK screen representations of youth in austerity

18.05.12

Brigade broadcast their bile in a prompt chorus of class-hatred, as if the perpetrators of anti-social crime were restricted to archetypal, opportunistic, small-time hoodies and arsonists. As if it had nothing to do with a wider, more deliberate orchestration on an apocalyptic scale, thanks to elite financial obscenities mugging the 99% and foreclosing on the mortgaged futures of global and local populations.

But why do the revolting poor come as such a surprise? After all, despite unhealthy upstart idealisms regularly messing up business-as-usual elsewhere, a mythic enlightened middlebrow rationalism is normally alleged to have bewitched this geographic idyll. Early last century it even gave birth to that dispassionately charitable media empiricism called ‘documentary’ or ‘social realism’. This has remained at the centre of the country’s fantasy factories ever since, despite infernal colonisations by vulgar American kitsch and purist continental aesthetics. And its cultural paraphernalia of institutional and representational patterns, disciplines, practices, and rhetorics has always taken as its very special scientific project the minute observation and adumbration of the travails of the poor. In other words, where was the careful data gathering, processing and interpretation, on large and small public screens, when the think-tanks, policymakers, police, and movers-and-shakers seemingly needed it? Accepting that current predicaments set-in during Thatcher’s yesteryears, not yesterday’s recession, this essay subjectively surveys twenty years of austere growth in British poverty porn. Dissecting grim-up-north platitudes, perilous-down-south perambulations and sundry slumming-it social-realist serenades, an attempt is made to see if the national film oeuvre ought to have opened any eyes.

Source: libcom.org (blog)