MotherPie

The Stone of Scone, Reparations and...

This is totally random, I know.  The new Greek and Roman wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, (pictured below, left) has a bunch of great (old) art and artifacts and articles have been written about verifying the provenance of such things. I went there the week the wing officially opened and took this photo of one of the beautiful nude male sculptures with a missing member. Recently I wrote about Napoleon's thang being lopped off and how his body part is  a modern-day relic.  What has happened to all of those sculptural private parts?  Was it a priestly interest, like Napoleon's part was?  Did the priests lop them off in the early years of Christianity, just like Oliver Cromwell knocked off the noses of the saints in England during his rule?  Where are they now?

The Stone of Scone was returned (finally) to Scotland after sitting in Westminister Abbey under the coronation throne.  The Elgin Marbles are still in the British Museum but the subject of reparations is a hot one in all cultures.   Amer-Indian grave belongings and bones are being inventoried and returned.  How would you ever know which thing went with which statue?  And females statues remain intact. What does this say?

Perhaps it is just me and my move, thinking of things that have been separated, parts of me in places here and there and the provenance of self. Fertilized eggs sitting unclaimed are very different from household goods in storage, but really, where do things belong and how does separation impact identity and ownership?  I don't have fertilized eggs out there anywhere but the idea of unclaimed and claimed ownership leaves many things (like Paris Hilton's diary) up for grabs and disposal of eggs means a debate about tossing out a (potential) life.  Sometimes the parts are more valuable than the whole.

The David's thing was still around for Queen Victoria to have it demurely covered with a fig leaf for her viewing when she visited Florence and it - the statue - has been carefully guarded all these many years.  But missing male statuary parts are more common than not. Where are they and why were they lopped off? Reformation or after? 

It had been a long day at the museums and this was my take-away.

Bridge as a Metaphor for (My) Life...

Where is your place, my place?  Where do we fit, where do we belong?  Right now I'm  bridging between places and I'm confusing myself and my readers (including my husband) with my writings as I'm in transition. Part of me is still in NYC and will be for awhile, even after the moving truck pulls away towards the end of June.  I'm moving back and forth between places. Part of me is in our second home in Santa Fe which will be our only home.  Part of me remains in places where I have lived, even, like in Guanajuato, Mexico, or Grenoble, France, for very short periods of time as I studied the languages and cultures of those places as a student.

As I write MotherPie posts, I write with different places in mind and post them sometimes for future publishing so even time is bridged as well as place. I even used the bridge as a metaphor for one of my major studies of online identity in the new media of blogging.

Even my identity as defined by roles of work and relations is changing, from the role of corporate wife and graduate student to that of???  Not being a corporate wife anymore allows me to be more open in this space so I actually feel I can be more real. I'm bridging to a different form of motherhood as my last child heads off to college and my oldest of three marries and I become a MIL (mother-in-law, not missing in la-la land).

So for those who may be confused, here's a brief of the t0-and-from: Born in Oklahoma City to a third-generation Oklahoman (that is as far back as you get without being Amer-Indian) and a Texas Daddy (both parents descended from Yankee heritage), my first five years were spent in places in the South and West.  My father finished his Air Force reserve duties in Amarillo, Texas, near his childhood home in the Texas Panhandle, and that is where my first memories were formed.  From kindergarten through highschool I lived in Oklahoma City and just like my mother, I went to O.U. and met a sixth-generation Texan (with Southern roots), fell in love and married.  I've lived as an adult in Dallas, Oklahoma City, Houston, Atlanta and New York City and Santa Fe.  Our shared interested when we fell in love was our love of New Mexico where we have spent, as our ancestors have before us, many years vacationing.  We have family in NM, so we are returning to a place we've always loved and a place that has roots and connections going back to an ancestor who was a territorial marshall.  We maintain bridges in the present to places in the past belonging to ancestors in England.

So where I have been, where I am going and who I am is a bridge. To get even deeper, philosophically, my  life is rhizomatic with connected nodes that expand with my experiences.  Rhizomatically there are no external boundaries to growth and movement.  The metaphor of a tree implies roots and a sense of unchanging place.  A window represents a view from one place out to another.  A door signifies a way in and a way out.  A strong and stable bridge allows connections and movement.

Hence the idea of bridging along a many-forked life path that can be lived recursively or adventurously.

The Ladie$ with Brain$ and Buck$...

Just thought it was worth noting that in the cover story in Forbes May 21 issue focusing on the best bosses for the buck, Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay, (Forbes spells it "Ebay") it notes that she brings home a reasonable salary averaging $1.7 million a year in the last six years.  What I noted, though, is that with her eBay stock ownership she is, as Forbes writes, "one of only ten self-made female billionaires on the planet."

Writers never rake it in like corporate kings queens but J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, made $75mm in 2006, according to Forbes story, Pantheon of Pay, on executive pay. 

Oprah, the media queen, made $225mm in '06, according to the same story and has been described as the richest African-American of the 20th century.

If a female were to become president, she would earn $400,000 a year.  If a female was in the top 20 of the hedge fund managers, she would have earned an average of $658 million in 2006.

For those coming out of college, engineering, computer science and business majors fare best.  Those with the lowest starting salaries out of college? Based on starting pay for the class of 2004, liberal arts graduates occupy the lower rungs of the pay scale.  Starting pay for English majors rose to $31,113,  psychology majors have entry-level salaries averaging $28,230, entry-level pay for industrial and manufacturing engineers was $46,036 and starting salaries for history majors was $30,344.

It is a point worth remembering that most people don't end up working in their main career right out of college.  Oprah was into oratory and beauty pageants as a teenager.  Whitman earned an M.B.A. and Rowling taught English as a second language.  Then there are ladies with brains earning zero bucks from blogs.

Tulips...

These might not look like tulips but they are.  You can take tulips and bend the petals back and it creates an entirely unique bouquet.  Try it.   After a few days of a normal tulip bouquet, opening them up will give them a little zip.

This is one of the bouquets I had out the day the offer came in on our NYC residence.  Fresh flowers and plants help make a home and I had everything snappy and green and colorful.

I never even got to the next "sell the house" trick: fresh blueberry muffins in a basket on the kitchen counter with the smell lingering and creating a powerful subliminal scent of happiness.  Flowers aren't really a trick.  They are gracious living sprinkles. 

Home is where the flowers are.

Blog Your Life & Social Media...

Isn't it interesting how blogging is a play in identity formation?  A NYTimes article last week on formulating narratives caught my attention as I wind up my media studies and turn to just play with the form  as I take a sabbatical, a life interlude...

This has been a new media outlet adjunct for my studies and a creative space for me but just as I'm transitioning out of school and out of NYC, the blog and its form and shape as far as content will surely change as well and it will become more... ?  How I will change and this space will change is still something I'm thinking about.  Some people blog to drain the brain, some for a creative outlet, some for networking and social outlets, some for documenting lives, some for entertaining, some for an adjunct to work or roles and some as a hobby. There are now over 80 million blogs.  It is more than a pet rock thing.  When Google pays $100 to buy Feedburner, a blog feed business, then it must be getting serious.

Technorati  bought Personal Bee in April and says that conversation can happen around things without having to have a blog.   David Sifrey, founder of Technorati, writes, "Social media has always been social for the people creating it, and now the people consuming it will get to join the fun. Anyone can be a publisher without having to write a blog, create a video, or anything else. All of us, the people formerly known as the audience, can create and publish collections of many forms of media, and attract our own audience if we choose."

Publishing and sharing their ideas...engaging the writer and reader in an open conversation -- this is shifting the internet paradigm, yes, but how is this changing us? Is it democratizing or mediatocracizing?  Will the amateur beat out the professional and will the best sink?  What will command attention?  Big questions.

Oklahoma...

Most of my growing up years were spent in Oklahoma.  The entire state has less population than Manhattan and Queens.   Manhattan is the most densly populated county in the U.S.   My Dad, born in the Texas Panhandle and living in Oklahoma City all of his adult life, keeps commenting on the amount of people every where we go here.  Since leaving Oklahoma City after college, I've lived in the four of the top ten major metro areas in the U.S.  in  three states: Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and New York City.

We've talked about Oklahoma topics: the centennial, the design of the new quarter and how pretty the scissortail flycatcher birds are  and the new dome on the State Capitol.  We've also talked about how safe Manhattan is and how intimate it feels with local little delis and shops still run by moms and pops -- something disappearing in the heartland. 

People are moving into the heartland -- it is a new migration pattern in the U.S.  Dallas is now larger than San Francisco, Houston is now larger than Detroit, Atlanta is now larger than Boston, Charlotte is now larger than Milwaukee.

Count me in with the inmigration trend as I head out of NYC into the country's interior.  Living in a small city with wide open spaces will be a new experience I've not had since my childhood.

Blog Friends to Read...

After finishing up my study, as I begin the packing process, I thought I'd share some of the blogs that I've enjoyed as I (slowly) work on my blogroll update.  Janet takes the most gorgeous photos of her rural life in the mountains of Colorado and blogs about it.  She is pretty good with working the html of blog design and I enjoyed commentary from blog friends who responded to her need for help in figuring out blog banner problems.  That is how I discovered CeeCi, who loves the geek side of blogging and has taken on the mission of teaching regular folks tricks and tools of blog design-- how to manage the back side of blogging.  She love the geeky side of her self that can find expression in blogging. The html and css part of web site design is hard for me and she'll be a good source.

Panhandle Poet is a new blogger with lyrical talent.  I discovered him shortly after driving through the Texas Panhandle over spring break.  My first memories were from living in Amarillo so I enjoy his writing about that part of the country.

Other new blogfriends: Whitterer on Autism has a take on being a transplanted Brit and Belleza has some thinking pieces and is an avid reader and her participation in her blog's commentary is to be admired.  It is a prime example of how conversations can flow in this medium.

Joared and Tut-Tut  and Susie J will soon be on my updated blogroll, too.

I've just written my last post for Found Around NYC since I won't be finding things here in the big city anymore. 

When It Rains...

When it rains, it pours, or so the salt company motto says.

Sometimes you want the rain to hit you in the face, to taste every drop of time, to feel every nuance of temperature, to hear the lightest shift in new directions.

Sometimes you want to brave the elements, to move forward and embrace everything life has to offer.

Shaking off rain, tasting every drop.

Lots and lots and lots to do and be.  Turning heads to the sun.

When it rains, it pours?  Put on galoshes.

The Classes of 2007...

These kids and those in the classes around them were born to parents who watched Dallas and M*A*S*H and remembered when the preppie look turned to grunge and piercings were limited to ears and sailors got tatoos. Their parents did aerobics to Jane Fonda and umbrella strollers were new things . 

Their parents used terms like dork or doofus or dweeb and "radical, cool and shit" were common words, not "dude, awesome and f*ck."  Unlike their parents, neat handwriting doesn't matter and texting is the most common form of communication.  They want i-Pod speaker systems and don't think they will want to list silver on wedding registries and vinyl records have always been relics.

The classes of 2007 knew jellies were shoes and not something you put on toast, just like thongs were panties and flip-flops went on feet. They buy DVDs and have no idea what 8-tracks were and girls grew up with Mary Kate and Ashley.   They wouldn't consider buying a camera that uses film.

This next generation learned to live life in front of camcorders, were born after the CD was invented, and anorexia seems common and came out of the closet after Karen Carpenter died (but they wouldn't remember her).

And...btw...there's more...

Flush Times, Art & Otherwise...

It was the stunning Van Gogh exhibit at the Neue Galerie on 86th and Fifth Avenue that was the draw,  showing his influence on modernist painters more than a decade after his death. 

Standing in front of Gustav Klimt's fabulous Adele Bloch-Bauer, now part of the collection of the Neue, I remembered that it sold last year for $135 million, the highest ever paid for a painting.

A Warhol just sold for a record $71 million, four times the previous record for his work (his Mao sold last year for $17.4 million).  A Mark Rothko sold last week at Sotheby's for nearly $73 million, a new record for postwar art.  A Jasper Johns also set a record, $17.4 million last week at auction at Christie's.

Shopping recently at the huge daddy watch store of them all, the Tourneau store on Madison, I noticed the latest styles are full of bling and zing - pearl faces, diamonds and sparkle.  The over the top flashy trends that were popping out before the last time the market tipped way down.  The looks are celebratory, the styles are not toned down or understated anywhere. The Dow is setting records - up 74% from its October 2002 low and the hedge fund cowboys are riding high. Forbes in the May 21 issue's article, Top Guns, wrote that the 20 top Wall Street fund managers earned an average of $658 million in 2006 versus $145 million for the 20 highest-paid chief executives.  James Simons, top of the Top Gun list, earns $850 million more than the top-earning chief executive, Apple's Steve Jobs.

I was in Oklahoma City when Penn Square Bank fell and in Houston when Enron seemed to be an ephemeron (and in Atlanta when it fell).   Funny money. NYC feels flush.  Eyebrow raised,  I wonder: too, too much?