Flechado

centuriespast:

Cliff End, Studland, Dorset [1909-10]
Harry van der Weyden (1868–1956)
Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum

(Source: bransonreese)

Let us now praise prominent bar rock bands of the early nineties. Or, at least, talk about my deep, non-ironic nostalgia for Cracked Rear View, Hootie and the Blowfish’s 1994 debut.

My favorite music writer (well, one of two) got a gig at the New Yorker. I was reading a recent column of hers on Darius Rucker, and his kind of singular position as the black guy in country music. Darius Rucker was also lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish, and something about the article laid bare that a lot of who I am comes from a kind of joke of an album that somehow made it into rotation in my parent’s car.

It’s not a great album. The lyrics are a slightly more worldly version of the “tear in my beer” lyrics of country music a decade before, and there’s something about the production that saps some of the immediacy from it. But it has its moments. Rucker has a really affecting voice, a kind of bellowing, intense call that seems heartfelt in ways the lyrics don’t always merit. From Petrusich’s article:

Yet Rucker’s voice is extraordinary: rich, round, and full of nuance. Take “Let Her Cry,” a soft-rock ballad that’s melodically and structurally benign […] In the video, Rucker wears a faded Dartmouth sweatshirt. “So I sat back down and had a beer and felt sorry for myself,” he bellows. He is trying to make sense of a curdling relationship. Then, about three minutes in, at the very end of the bridge, his voice rises a bit, cracks: “Oh, mama, please help me,” he implores. It is a surprisingly dark and moving moment.

That song holds up. I think a few still do.

But the truth is, I love this album for what it means to me, for the way it broadened my horizons and for the memories of the long drives it accompanied. It was a window into worlds that I had no real view into. Emotionally, it was broken and usad in a way that the weird walled musical garden I lived in wasn’t.

There were four, perhaps five, kinds of music in the Cave household, save for what crept in on the radio. The first was Dad’s prog rock: Genesis, Styx, Kansas, and the like. Fun, ambitious, but not exactly a cri de coeur. There was also relentlessly positive Christian music; the Elton Joel/Billy John piano dude dyad; a guitarist (and Christian musician, despite the lack of words) named Phil Keaggy; and the Harry Connick Jr. Christmas album. And in the midst of that sat this album about dead mothers, alcoholic girlfriends, flirtation, and temptation.

It was also, as laughable as this sounds, one of the few black things in my life. We lived in mostly white suburbs, went to a mostly white church. I was homeschooled until I was nine, and when I rejoined polite society in fourth grade, what diversity there was came from Latino kids. It wasn’t until middle school, a few towns over from ours, that I met African American kids in any real numbers. So this (and that one Seal album) was my sole view into art made by black people. Through the lyrics of the song “Drowning,” I learned that the Confederate flag bothered black people, and decided that that thing was bad, which is an opinion that hasn’t exactly waned. It was a weird, narrow, more or less comfortable window, but it was still a window.

As I grew up, the walled garden began to expand, but this album shaped my taste in ways that continue. I sought out folksy and sad things, things that reminded me of my beloved Hootie and the Blowfish. The unlisted bonus track, a cover of “Motherless Child,” was my first exposure to the blues, and to the weird, old music of the South. I sought that out too, and was compelled by the search for that feeling into the nerdy, sad life of the white guy who likes old, scratchy-sounding blues recordings mostly by long-dead black people.

So let us now praise Hootie, and his Blowfish, and all the other slightly unhip things that shaped us, and made us who we are.

jacobvanloon:

Jacob van Loon
Morning Absent
Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on panel
12x16″
2017

(Source: jacobvanloon)

If I am being intellectually honest, this scene in Amelie shapes me and my work as much as any book I’ve ever read.¹ The sense of synchronicity, of connectedness, of the life of a place, are all things I try to do in what work I’ve done as a historian. I am in love with vignette and with connection, and as I look back at the chapters of my dissertation, I see how I tend towards it even without thinking.

I’ve been thinking lately about my love of America, and what that love means. I’ve never loved the flag, or the songs, or any of the mandatory dross of the Fourth of July. No, I love it for what it is, which is an incredible range of places and peoples, and a vision of all these places and people as one nation.

Current events have not been kind to this vision of Us, even before we saw children be separated from their mothers because of where they were born. The day after the election, stunned, I took to the woods outside of my town, past the pastures and the neighborhoods to the creeks, woods, and high trestles along the path. I played a podcast that had come out before the election, and it was exactly the balm I needed: A calm voice reading Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” ²

It was a reminder that even in the 19th century, we could conceive of this near-continental nation as what it was: a teeming, expanding, vivacious, varied whole. Whitman’s self expands out to encompass the nation, and with it, the unobserved moment, the adobe house, the landscape, the animal and plant. It is omnivorous in its appetites and omnipotent in its point of view; narratively bisexual, sensuous, and open-minded. I keep it on my phone, as a bulwark against the anxieties I feel, and the disgust at the news I see. It came before the election, but it is the walking companion I need after it.

#NowPlaying Everything Is Free (feat. Flock of Dimes) by Sylvan Esso

(Source: Spotify)

laughingsquid:

Melissa McCarthy Brilliantly Channels the Combative Style of Press Secretary Sean Spicer on SNL

huntingtonlibrary:

The matchup that really matters today: #SuperBowl vs. #SuperbOwl

images:
Bob Stocksdale (1913–2003), Footed Bowl, 1973, black walnut from California. Lent by the Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation for Arts and Crafts.

G. Haven Bishop, An owl on a perch, 1912, glass plate. Southern California Edison Photographs and Negatives. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Frederick Hurten Rhead (1880–1942), Bowl, 1913–17, glazed earthenware with slip decoration. Courtesy of the Leeds Art Foundation.

[Owl], printed by L. Prang & Co., 1895, uncolored lithograph. Jay T. Last Collection of Graphic Arts and Social History. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Maker unknown, Punch Bowl, undated, China, porcelain. Promised gift of Thomas H. Oxford and Victor Gail.

Harry Aleson, A Floating Owl, Dec. 1970, photographic print. The Otis Marston Colorado River Collection. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Maker unknown, Punch Bowl, ca. 1720, England, tin-glazed earthenware. Promised gift of Thomas H. Oxford and Victor Gail.

Cover of John Martin’s Book, A Magazine for Little Children, published by John Martin’s House, Inc., 1913. Diana Korzenik Collection of Art Education Ephemera. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Maker unknown, Bowl, 19th century, China, porcelain. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

John James Audubon, Plate CLXXI, Barn Owl, from The birds of America: from original drawings, 1833. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

centuriespast:

Field of Rye, Barbizon

Egerton Bush Coghill (1851–1921)

The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology

samanthamashillustration:

The fisherwoman and the storm, you can see process work of this (and hopefully the tutorial version soon) at my Twitter.

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