MotherPie

Ramble: Skulls as Art and other Heady Things...

Georgia O'Keeffe was attracted to skulls and saw the art in them. Antlers sit on a back porch bench at la Casa de MotherPie, bleaching in the sun.  Antlers were the only art on this line-shack, right, at the Casa de San Isidro in Corrales, New Mexico, reminding me that art in nature is perhaps the best  free gift around.  This photo is colored for emphasis.  Just to make you think of heady things...

Color in New Mexico has always been profound.  Indigo and cochineal reds were the color tools for the Navajo art weavings.  Jemez clay colors walls a deep red.  Micaceous clay puts sparkle in Taos pots and figurines. Acoma clay puts pink atop adobe: who needs paint?

Dead Pawn & Indian Jewelry...

At the edge of the Navajo reservation lands west of Farmington, New Mexico, my cousin took me to a trading post and there were shelves and shelves of turquoise silver jewelry, some for sale, some not.  Dead pawn is the word for the used jewelry that is for sale.  Dead Pawn?

Navajo silversmiths craft beautiful works.  I had my husband pull out the bolo tie that his father wore in these parts because that is the tie most seen around Santa Fe... if the men wear ties.

Horses & Cowboys...

Where have all the horses gone? That is what I've been wondering.  To make cute pony-hide shoes? I've seen cowboys checking fences on four wheelers.  I've seen, across the west, big pastures that once held horses turned to corn fields, unfenced. 

When I lived close to Central Park in NYC, I couldn't wait to ride horses in the park, only the stables on the Upper West Side closed before I got the chance.  Now the PETA brigade is trying to ban horse-drawn carriages from the Central Park. Horses are a relic of the past, like mules.

These chap-covered, cowboy-hatted dudes were for crowd control for the Pilgrimmage to Chimayo north of Santa Fe and its the first time out-and-about I've seen horses with riders since last summer at the rodeo. 

Nuns on the Pilgrimmage...

These two nuns were the only nuns I saw trekking the 20-plus miles from Santa Fe to the Santuario de Chimayo for the pre-Easter traditional celebration.  This annual venture pulls thousands to journey along stations of the cross set upon the hilltops of the high desert.

We have our women in burquas, too, but we're not used to seeing them on the Christians.  Nunneries are in decline and there is only one nun left in Santa Fe who belonged to the Sisters of Loretto.

3/30 Update: The Vatican just announced that Islam has surpassed Roman Catholicism as the world's largest religion.  Catholics make up 17.4 percent of the world population but Muslims make up 19.2 percent (all Christians, including Catholics, make up 33 percent of the world population).

 

Money, Sex & Politics...

The Wall Street Journal today juxtaposes the leading issue on collective minds -- the woeful state of the economy -- with a political economic story on the topic above the masthead and a fed economic story on the top right under the masthead.  Link one to the other, business-wise and visually via the astute layout, as the WSJ paper did, and this catapults a candidate to the positional lead. At least on this topic. 

Hillary is swimming ahead with the economic issue (where CNN has been noting Obama had swum ahead).  Earlier I noted that swim, swam, swum, the race is far from done.

Well, sex, politics and money are the three hot topics so I'll just juxtapose the latest greatest New York Magazine cover in this post to have all three covered.  Their inside article, Why Stand By? took my post Wife, Thy Name is Support, to an interesting area: "Silda Wall Spitzer was caught in a trap she’d inadvertently set for herself. Like half of the best-educated and most-privileged women in this country who have babies, she relinquished her high-powered career to devote herself to supporting her spouse and caring for their three daughters. However traditional this idea of wifely duty, it was an open-eyed decision, mulled over endlessly and made on modern, postfeminist terms.  ...In a way, it’s the saddest part of the story, and it exposes the risks women take when they make certain kinds of choices—things that, after Silda, they might not think are safe."

Haggard Hillary & Presidential Obama: Swim, Swam, Swum...

Never talk politics, religion or money at the table: politesse.  Well, politics is passionate right now and it is the subject of every gathering, bar none. Why, as women, do we need to talk about how Hillary looks haggard?  Well, she does.  She swam and she still keeps swimming. And we women had to talk about how haggard Silda Spitzer looked, too.  Whose the haggard-est? Be careful, we discuss. Why does this matter, we think?  Careful. Women, not men, get botched (think Pricilla Presley).

Looks Matter  in our culture - that is what I wrote when I picked out Hillary's fresh face at one of the important televised debates in October, photo at right.  Life doesn't keep you fresh, though.  Swimming for a long time can be pruning. 

Meanwhile, Obama has used the presidential-looking, symbolic stage for his race speech and those since and that image keeps playing, echoing in the media.  What props! Blue curtain! Flag in the background! Slogan above the head, to the right: read him, read message.  Hillary's tag line is her name.  This is important. Slogans matter.

But what caught my eye, really, is the CNN scrolling caption when Obama was on Larry King (again, the candidate controlled the symbolic stage for his interview!). Swum?

Has already a swooming swum been done?

Swim, swam swum: the race is far from done. 

It is making this soccer mother haggard, too.

Related:
The Art of Campaign Visuals,
Word Art: Talking Points

Where You Live When You Die: Croaker Houses...

The Croaker House is where you are gonna be living when you croak. Are you living now in your croaker house?  We don't think we are, but we've been talking about this ever since my friend in Houston showed me her new house, one that she had designed and built and the one that would soon be empty with all of her children off to college.

"This isn't my Croaker House," she told me.  She has plans to start over and do a smaller house.  That's where she'll breathe her last breath, in the smaller house.

Croaker houses.  That was a new thought, or a new way to put it.  Joared wrote about Living in Place and I just am not ready yet to think about those things, or even think about Community Croaker Homes or reserving your ticket in.  Having parents alive will do that for you,  keep the wall of death way out there for awhile.

The Influence of Dads & (Mylie Cyrus) and 3-D Media...

The role of Dads is out there, big time. For girls, a good Dad is essential and I'm thinking of the Dads in the spotlight at the moment - Billy Ray Cyrus, featured on the cover for the lead story of April's Cowboys & Indians magazine with his daughter Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus (Miley is short for Smiley, her nickname).   Britney's Dad has control and she's better off for it.  My Three Sons and Leave it to Beaver has shifted for today's appeal to Dad and the Daughter?  Motherhood 101: Dads.

My teenage daughter watched, with her dad, the Disney Hannah Montana shows while we lived in NYC.  It was cute to watch them watch -- my father-daughter duo watching another duo. 

Digital arts is impacting films and Mylie's latest venture shows the appeal of this form which can allow 3-D movies.  10,000 movie theatres are being converted to digital technology capabilities over the next three years.  "Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert," a 3-D movie, pulled in $31.3 million in its opening weekend on just 683 screens, (most wide-release films open on more than 3,000 screens and make half that amount).

Innate Desire to Create: Are We Born With It?

We are.  And we should foster art appreciation. Look at children at play.  At some point art and creative works become things that are judged.  Do we create for ourselves or for others?  If for others, when does creative expression become categorized as folk art, personal art, outsider or fine art?  Is the cost the determiner?  We're missing out on art as a way to live.

Are Smart People Drawn to the Arts or Does Arts Training Make People Smarter? I'm glad to see this getting attention, as two of my children participated in a parent-volunteer program, Art A La Cart -- with a k - 8 curriculum taught bi-weekly for art appreciation.  I think it does make a difference ; the article says, "children motivated in the arts develop attention skills and strategies for memory retrieval that also apply to other subject areas...to discover how the performance and appreciation of the arts enlarge cognitive capacities will be a long step forward in learning how better to learn and more enjoyably and productively to live."

You, too, can have this art poster by Andy Warhol.  Although he is most famous for his pop art, his love of popular culture, his passion for collecting, his personality and his sayings are fodder for study as expressions of our times.  He is most famous for his saying that we all have our 15 minutes of fame.

I think to be we have to create and this act of living is crucial to our very being. What happens to how we do this is something I am curious about and I wonder if this is telling about our society.

But this quote - art is what you can get away with, is a cultural statement more than anything.  I might change it to art is what you do to enhance your life. Would you agree?

Ramble: Purgatory & Pregnant Ideas...

Purgatory isn't Purgatory anymore. It is now called Durango Mountain Resort, purportedly because when you google the name of the place, the latter is a better name for modern day marketing for the southwest Colorado ski area.  Hellishness.  Santa Fe and Taos, though, rank right under Wolf Creek and Telluride for the amount of snow this season, many at record levels.  Durango/Purgatory is #5. The skiing in High Country has been heavenly. The snowmelt will bring the highest water levels in the Rio Grande in the past three decades and Taos opened its skiing to snowboarders last week, making the front pages of all the newspapers around these parts.  There are only three ski areas, Deer Valley & Alta in Utah and Mad River Glen in Vt. still closed to snowboarders.   Ski season is winding down...

Pregnant ideas?  How about this fun sign in a parking lot in Bernalillo, NM?

Santa Fe is ranked #22 in the top 100 walking cities. Public space and street life is important.  It is why I enjoyed New York City so much during our short sabbatical there. My birthplace, Oklahoma City, is dead last on that list.  Newsweek writes this week about Creative Classes in the Cities,  and how place really is important as part of a triangle of career, family, and the place you live.  The article wrote that there are 210,820 more single women than men living in the New York metropolitan area. I was there with a husband and daughter and had a blast, but knew lots of single chickadees coming out of college and perching there so I can tell you that figure must be true. 

If Obama is bi-racial, why do we box him in the black box? He's the only one who has released recent relevant tax returns and earmark lists.  I read Obama's riveting speech on race and most liked his quote from William Faulkner, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.”  It was only  in 1967 that mixed marriages were no longer illegal in many states. 

The Peace sign is 50 years old this Good Friday weekend.   Peace Out Cheers.