MotherPie

A Parenting Confabulation: Privacy & Online Revelations...

Know these things:

1) Anything you (and others) put online is there forever.

2) Anything you (or others) put online becomes difficult to own and control.

3) Privacy is a thing of the past (anyone in public can be photographed by anyone legally but now everyone everywhere can capture anything anywhere and publish everything wherever).

4) You aren't in control of who you are anymore because when you choose to go online or others put you online, others then have the ability to define you.  Nothing you do or say ever can go unnoticed anymore. (did it, anyway?)

We are becoming naked to the world and privacy and identity are changing with virtual and real life merging in ways beyond our control.  What is that photo above?  I found it by snooping.

O'Keeffe: Art, Grey Hair and Place...

Georgia O'Keeffe was simple and natural with her hair.  I'm not there yet -- grey or natural.  But I'm a big fan of O'Keeffe.  She took the natural landscape and with her sense of seeing, created her art with such a modern twist, unlike her hair. She became my second-favorite artist when I was still in my teens (after Andrew Wyeth).   This year the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe is celebrating its tenth anniversary. 

O'Keeffe might not have made her mark, found her style, come into her own had she not come to this place, this land that spoke to her soul.  Perhaps she might not have had the courage to pursue her vision had it not been for the encouragement of other women.

She came to New Mexico for the first time in 1929 with a girlfriend (the wife of Paul Strand, friend of O'Keeffe's husband) and went to visit Mabel Dodge Luhan.  Luhan, an eastern heiress married to a Taos Indian, Tony Luhan, reported that O'Keeffe exclaimed on that first visit, "This is wonderful.  No one told me it was like this."

Now lots of people know about Santa Fe, the New Mexico high desert and O'Keeffe, the latter especially with her nakesake museum that has so many of her paintings referencing this land, sharing her vision of how she captured her surroundings.  What would her life had been like had she not ventured out with a girlfriend, had she fussed a lot with her hair or had she not owned (and shared) her sense of place? 

Art: a way of being, living, caring, sharing and creating. 

Sunday Soapbox: Real Issues & Media & Farmer's Markets...

You are what you eat (and read and watch). I hate to be stupid. Stupidity is my biggest pet peeve so I berate myself when I fall for dumb hijinks.  Especially when I'm supposed to be smart about some (media) things. You know.

Some things just get attention.  Attention sells.  Corporate media subsists with advertising.  Entertainment entices what some in politics call "the lazy middle" and distraction is tool.  I know this.

Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears are sad stories.  I can tell you more details about them and get more conversations going with trash trivia than I can about things that are important. It is sad that they get so much attention and distract us from more intelligent matters. I detest that this is so.

Who has time to dig deep and do more than skim the surface?  It is summertime, anyway, right?  Politics in the summertime? Boring unless it is YouTubed.  Still, I try.  I really try  to be smart about important matters, to think and to understand deeper issues.

Regional Art: Spanish Market...

Faith and tradition as expressed in the family is part of the artistic style here in the West. Spanish Market in Santa Fe is one of the biggest events of the summer and one of the oldest media forms in western art traditions will be on display. Unlike the European artists who depicted the Catholic saints in three dimensional forms and with baroque folds, the New Mexican Hispanic artists began making retablos with flat, one-dimensional characters and using graphic designs that were indigenous to this area.

The Spanish Colonial Art Museum  has a good collection as does the Museum of International Folk Art, both in Santa Fe.  The retablo pictured is in the latter museum's Spanish Colonial collection and is typical of the style that is practiced today.  The rainbow at the top echoes that element that is used by the Hopis and other Native American tribes. The figures, outlined in black, reflect the black-outline flat figures that Native Americans used in hide paintings. New scholarly thinking is that these art forms were not naive or primitive, but ones that took regional artistic elements that had existed for hundreds of years, if not longer, in combining them with the new European forms in novel interations.  The oldest American original art forms were appropriated and reinterpreted with the new influence of the padres and conquistadors.

These art forms and the culture that surrounds the style is one that I've long appreciated.  You'll find me today and tomorrow studying and admiring the work of these artists all around Santa Fe's plaza and visiting with my favorite artists.

Mom & Aprons...

After posting about aprons in the sense that they are not as culturally relevant in the heat-em-up kitchens of today, lo and behold my mother's 35 year-old prayer-and-share group gathered in Tennessee this year and one of the members made everyone aprons, pictured at right.  "There's a new book on aprons out and I'll send you the title," Mother wrote, after she read my post (she's only commented once here so this is via email).

The tale of aprons came up awhile back when my youngest daughter became intrigued about women and the cultural role of aprons in the past.  I told her of my memory when I was about five or six and how my mother made up aprons that tied at the waist with a big pocket on the front left (housewives always needed pockets) and  a terry-cloth hand towel sewn on the front right.  They were such functional aprons that they were very popular gift items among her friends and relatives.

Inventing a Better Future: WAR

A facial reconstruction surgeon took a job in Atlanta in 2004 because the returning injured soldiers were surviving with injuries that would have caused death in earlier wars.  The difference: advances in protective gear. This doctor had just moved from NYC and told me that medical advances were sure to be an outcome of this war because of the challenges of dealing with the severely wounded.

Today's photo on the White House website showing President Bush jogging with two veterans who have lost legs in this war is a good illustration of advances we are beginning to see.  Bush says he is inspired by these two Walter Reed veterans. 

America's losses in this war on terrorism , including 9/11 victims and all U.S. military personnel killed in action in Afghanistan and Iraq, total about 2 percent of the forces we lost in World War II and less than 7 percent of those killed in Vietnam. 

Traditions: Sticky Gifts That Keep on Giving...

This mask is one used by traditional Michoacan dancers and we watched them perform on the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga in Patzcuaro, Mexico in the afternoon on the day my daughter turned 15.  A memory was made.

At dinner in the courtyard of our hotel on the little town plaza, I gave her this mask.  She's since thrown it out repeatedly as she cleans her room.  In Atlanta I kept it from going to the Goodwill.  In New York I snatched it from her trashcan. I keep rescuing it.  It is a folk art piece that holds meaning and I'll keep adding layers.  She doesn't like other things I pick out, anyway, this finicky teen principessa.  Mother and daughter were immersing in Spanish and learning the ways of another culture, then.  We've never stopped our adventures.  Maybe I can't bear the idea of letting her part from me so I keep giving her a new layer of an old memory.

She has no idea she'll get it again, now that she is turning 19.  I held it up against a hook on the wall that makes the eyes seem to have real eyeballs.

Spooky how these gifts keep gaining meaning as they resurface. Layered memories -- don't we all have them? Aren't there things we can't part with?

Loretto's Staircase: Miracles & Models & Brides...

Seven Brides of Christ, Sisters of Loretto, left Kentucky for the West last century at the invitation of the City of Holy Faith's Archbishop Lamy.    That is where the story begins.

Today the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe is one of the most popular sites for weddings.  I checked it out this spring as a possible venue for my (then) newly engaged daughter, going from NYC to Santa Fe to faithfully begin planning the architecture of their wedding celebration. The chapel is legendary for being a site of miracles and the tale, one of faith, has long been told about the lone carpenter who constructed the mysterious miracle spiral staircase ---a real faith tale that still had those who remember when it was built surviving into the latter part of the last century.

While planning the wedding, I was also visiting musuems in NYC and the Smithsonian's design museum in the old Carnegie mansion on Fifth Avenue was just a couple of blocks from our Manhattan bird perch.  Miracles, design, French things and brides sort of merged in a confluence of ideas as I ambled in both places, thinking about how things are designed, constructed and how they last.  Stories and real things...

The Cooper-Hewitt museum in NYC  just completed an exhibition of staircase models, most of them from 19th-century France and in a private collection.  The models were stunning, especially to anyone familiar with the Loretto staircase. One can easily see how the French influence of design and architecture was brought by the French Bishop Lamy to Santa Fe, even in the Loretto miracle staircase.   The French staircase model masterworks from the Thaw collection were made by members of a French guild system called compagnonnage, which existed from the Middle Ages and reached its zenith from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.

A nice slideshow of nuns commemorates the anniversary of when sisterhoods first came to the U.S. in 1813.  I think the early history of the Sisters of Loretto, the first nuns dedicated to teaching, would push that date back.  The church was deconsecrated in 1971 and is now a museum.  I've no idea how many brides of Christ from Loretto are still living in Santa Fe but the Sisters of Loretto carry on elsewhere.  Miracles of love and marriage continue and the miracle of legendary design is perpetuated.  What stories are told in this 400 year-old city of faith. 

Self Esteem & Women: This is Bad For You...

Can we just get real? Redbook Magazine is one of the worst offenders of promoting the idea that YOU ARE NOT OK.  They are notorious for using photo manipulation to create perfect women on their covers.  What does it tell us when we don't see Faith Hill as she really is (at right), but a touched-up version of idealized beauty? I especially like the subhead on the right on the magazine cover, "what's normal about them" and find that ironic. 

The way the magazine frames stories to sell to the insecurities of women only promotes bad self-esteem.  I wrote about this last year with links to studies that show that exposure to idealized images lower subjects' satisfaction with their own lives.  Studies show that 80% of women are dissatisfied with their bodies and the media have pushed this unnatural body standard on women. 

The best deconstruction of this Redbook cover is from  Jezebel and an excellent comparison of the touched-up photo cover versus what would be the "real cover" is worth seeing.  I came across this via blogger Mella.

Linens & Lace

Hand-made treasures.  What could ever be more fine than exquisite wrought lace? It isn't easy to find anymore. These crafted items are not sought or valued as they once were.  Fine ladies, fine lace and intricate linens.  Who has time to create them?  Who has time to maintain them?  Who cares to use them?

These once sprinkled homes, passed down from generation to generation, the skills mastered near the lap of a mother.

My daughter will wear, as I did, a beautiful lace veil.   Will it be tucked away and never used again? Will it be another hand-made item that ladies in my family have used/created that I lovingly care for and store, but hardly ever ever pull out?