Picasso at the Lapin Agile

Last night saw Picasso at the Lapin Agile at St. Louis CC - FV. It was a great set by Marie McCool, and a wonderful production, directed by Chris Stephens, by a combination of seasoned and new actors/resses.

I have a lot of axes to grind with Picasso from the time I started to learn about painting, but I still see him as one of my gods. It hurts me that he is projected as such a womanizer and egotist. (When I mentioned this to my wife she was unsympathetic, saying that he was all that.) I didn't have as much problem with Einstein, another hero, though I would have like to learn a little more about him in the play.

This all follows a series of depictions that gnaws at my sensibilities: Jackson Pollack, Diego Rivera, Frieda, and on and on. These individuals made enormous contributions to civilization and to be only represented by their frailties is hurtful. Would we do this to Jesus? Does it help or hurt the public's view of modern art?

I don't know.

Yikes

In the last month or two I've lost the ability to multi-task. Can't do the radio in the car, or the TV when I'm doing stuff on the computer. I read that older people can't multitask as well. Maybe I'm older?

Sometimes when lots is going on I wonder how Obama survives a day. The number of pies that he has his fingers in has to be close to the number of stars in the sky. How does he do it?

So finally people came for the dirt. Just took the ad off Craig's list... and turned down another taker. Tomorrow the gravel arrives. It will be quite an epoch day to go from mud to red paths.

Tonight I go to a play, Picasso at Lapin Agile. I saw it three years ago and wrote a little bit about it.

At my favorite Mexican restaurant this morning I told the owner that they make my favorite food in the world. I said that when I'm on death row I'm going to order it as my last meal. Then we started talking about food in Mexico and I said the ingredients are better there. I was at a farm in Mexico and the grandmother was grinding the corn on a stone on the floor of the barn... and the chickens had just laid some eggs. She said "when was that" and when I told her "1981," she laughed and said "not any more."

It was a good production... but I never like to see the characters of my heros defined by their shortcomings (Picasso/womanizer and Einstein/klutz). These guys are my gods.

Then arrived home with our yard flooding. Yikes! That's what you get for trying to get a sprinkler system fixed. Yikes! Yikes!

Buddha’s decision to hold up a flower was entirely spontaneous, as was a brush stroke by Picasso or a note played by Pablo Casals. Buddha wasn’t a newbie. He had paid his dues. For 500 lifetimes he’d been the attendant for previous Buddhas. He knew his way around the block. When Ananda stuck a blade of grass in the ground, Buddha saw that now there was a temple. There doesn’t seem to be in Zen a correlation between the time spend in deliberation and the quality of the action. Holding up the flower was a masterful stroke of genius, and yet, it was the result of genuine flow rather from racking one’s discursive brain to come up with the perfect testing instrument. “May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke

Let the fear of Heaven be upon you. (More Talmud)

3. Antigonus of Soko received from Shime'on ha-Çaddiq. He used to say, Be not as slaves that minister to the lord with a view to receive recompense; but be as slaves that minister to the lord without a view to receives recompense; and let the fear of Heaven be upon you.

Rosedale Tar Drip

I don't know why so many of these wise Jewish sayings have three statements in them, and the first two are much easier to take than the third. They are almost like a syllogism:

No lazy people pass exams.
Some students pass exams.
Some students are not lazy.

You agree with the first two statements and then feel like you've been sold a bill of goods. You know "students are lazy." That's why they are students. And professors are lazy too. Even Picasso had those moments drinking wine and chasing after women. What a waste that was!

The Jewish pearls of wisdom are like Buddhist koans. It is easy to buy the idea of not doing things for recompense (or gain), and it is a fine idea to work for the lord (esp. when the lord is defined as "all things"), but how can one do any of this with a fear of Heaven? Is this a fear that if we do things for gain, and we are not ministers of the lord, we'll be struck dead?

Beats me...

“I Want to be a Better Person.” “Really?”

Me?

Something feels wrong about trying to be a better person. We talk about changing a lightbulb but we really don't do that, rather, we replace it. Come to think of it, most of my life I've wanted to be someone else. A full replacement.

And that's sick!

I used to think that it would be cool to be Babe Ruth or Einstein, but they are both in pretty bad shape right now. So I’ll nix that idea.

Then there was Picasso. Yes, he was some artist, but some of his personal life wasn't very artful, and I'd hate that.

I guess this urge to be someone else is like playing hopscotch and wishing you were playing croquet. Is one game better than another? I don't think so.

So how do I go about life without being engulfed in fantasies and pipe dreams?  What does it take to just accept the cards I was dealt?

There are a few parts that couldn't be improved. I'd love the two inches back that I’ve shrunk. I'd love to be the athletic star that B was in high school though I wouldn't want his illness or bum leg. And this list goes on and on.

Someone this morning was saying he wouldn't get married because he only wanted someone he'd be super proud to be seen with. I didn't have the heart to tell him that beauty fades, even with seemingly perfect people.

So the remaining problem: should I get that one wish from a genie—who will I choose to become? Me?

—Kim Mosley

Fixed

Making art is like making life. My teacher told us, “take care of your life and your art will take care of itself.” Alois Senefelder, the inventor of lithography, said, “Take care of the edges and the center will take care of itself.” Alois was talking about grinding a litho stone. I didn’t believe my teacher. I thought I could just do art. Maybe part of me still does, deep inside. So I wake up in the morning and I wonder what picture will come from today. I could try to repeat yesterday, esp. if yesterday came out well. No, I say to myself, “that never works.” Then I think about the masters. They worked in series, like Picasso’s did in his blue period. They try something over and over again because it has something that they are still curious about. And some go on longer than they should, having already expired the idea. I’ve been stapling for 30 years or more. I’ve been doing my figure for 60 years. Jews say the same prayers over and over again. Some say “enough is enough.” The test for me is to try to do something different and then to watch it come out looking the same. I told Mensa the other day that I always do something different and she laughed. Our voice has a signature that is unique.

Labrinth

My graduate school classmate said that we don’t give artworks life, but rather they take on a life of their own. I really like this. Words are so approximate. Someone said that the artist is not the best expert on their work. Some artists don’t like that statement. When Robert Frost was asked to explain a poem, he said, “would you like me to tell you in other and worse language?”

This is a labyrinth day. It is a long path, and I don’t know where it will lead.

P.S. As I “meditated” today I imagined what Jackson Pollock might have done had he lived another 30 years. Would any of his work surpass what he had already done? Probably not. It was his lack of skill that gave his works their punch. If he became too good at it, his work would become couch art. I had an art history teacher who wrote a book on the 20th century. He claimed Picasso fizzled out with synthetic cubism (1914). I like the idea that we don't give art life, but rather we become witnesses as it takes on a life of its own. That is more aligned with what happens with our kids as well.

Dana, and Gratitude for Bill Gates

One of many examples of unintentional giving

“As in Judaism, the dynamics of sacrifice is interiorized and spiritualized in Buddhism, which goes all the way in emptying sacrifice of its physical substance. Thus the perfection of giving, when grounded in the perfection of wisdom, is marked by the disappearance of giver, gift, and receiver. The objectification of any of the three taints the pure freedom of emptiness.”
http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/11/sacrifice-and-self-immolation-in-buddhism.html

When I hear the idea of “not separate” I think of the giver, gift, and receiver as being indistinguishable from each other. The giving that Bhante (our Burmese monk who teaches us the words of the Buddha) was referencing in his discussion of giving (dana) was lay giving, as opposed to enlightened giving (as he noted).

Here's an article on the Charitable-Giving Divide
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22FOB-wwln-t.html
“In 2001, Independent Sector, a nonprofit organization focused on charitable giving, found that households earning less than $25,000 a year gave away an average of 4.2 percent of their incomes; those with earnings of more than $75,000 gave away 2.7 percent.”

I think the fallacy here is that one is talking about percentages rather than looking at both percentage and amount. I assume that much of the giving of those who make less than $25000 is to their churches. 4.2% is $1050 or $20 a week. For many churchgoers, this is the cost for being in a religious community. Many would be embarrassed not to put money in the bowl as it is being passed. Those making $75000 give $2025, almost double. Who is the more generous? Who worked harder or more hours to earn their money? Who invested four to six years of their time and money to get a higher education to earn more? Some look at the person who earns $1,000,000 and asks why they only end up paying 20% of their income in taxes ($200,000), where someone making $100,000 might be paying 35% ($35,000). Is it fair to say that the millionaire isn't paying enough, even if it is 5.7 times what the one who earns less pays in taxes?

The biggest issue I have with the discussions of "dana" is that they seem to gloss over the fact that most of our material world and infrastructure wasn't generated from "an open heart" yet gives us innumerable pleasure and freedom. Artists, for example, create beauty because they have the urges and abilities to do so. Their motivation might not be to enhance our lives, yet our lives are enhanced by their actions. Picasso may never have given a penny to charity, yet our lives are enhanced immeasurably by his actions. Grande Communications, in an effort to make more money and compete with Google, now provides 1 gigabit Internet service. A great gift, in my book, though perhaps not done from any altruistic intention. Are their efforts deserving of gratitude?

I forever return to Milton Friedman as he describes the lesson of the pencil. Numerous people with numerous skills all work together to creates a pencil, making it possible for me to make a drawing. None might have had the slightest ambition to “give” yet their gift enables many to have richer lives (monetarily and emotionally). Are they bodhisattvas? Perhaps.

I've created my own parable about giving. Imagine that Schindler had only one ambition in hiring Jews for his manufacturing company, and that was to earn greater profits. He discovered that he could hire Jews for less money, and that they worked hard. On the other hand, Schindler (in my parable) had a brother who was a good Samaritan. He wanted to save as many Jews from the Nazis as possible. In my parable, Schindler was very good at making money, and in his “greed” to turn a profit, he saved hundreds of Jews from the death camps. On the other hand, Schindler's brother was klutz. For every Jew he saves, ten more are shipped off to the concentration camps. I now ask, who is the better person? Many say that it is Schindler's brother. And then I ask, if you were on a space ship taking you to one of two planets where you'd live your life out, and one planet was full of Schindlers, and the second was full of Schindler's brothers, which planet would you choose? Here I usually get the answer of Schindler.

Yes, Bill Gates gives a lot of his money away. But that is a minor part of his humanitarian gestures. His greatest gifts are his contributions to enable us to learn and communicate easily and efficiently. He deserves our gratitude for that.