From the Gallery of Heroes - Beatrix Potter

As an only child (until the age of 13), growing up in the 1950's in suburban California, I was the focus of my parents' expectations regarding my future potential as a well-rounded adult. As "respectable" lower middle-class Midwesterners who had grown up before World War II, they were raised in an atmosphere of deprivation and social embarrassment, which they thought of a a normal state of affairs. Nevertheless, following the prevailing social mores of the time, they believed that reading to children constituted almost a christian duty, something good for its own sake, and a crucial element in juvenile education. Perhaps this is one reason that reading had so official and important place in our sense of daily life; it was something you could do in privacy, and it didn't involve any interaction with society. Reading, as a form of cultural enrichment, was a discipline and a pleasure all parents should strive to pass on to their children. They had both been avid readers in their youth, though my mother tended to read books less often as she aged.

Hence, from the age of 3, I was introduced to the world of juvenile literature, mostly by being read to, out loud, on a regular basis.

Among the many titles I was read was Beatrix Potter's classic children's story, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Like many children, I learned the words to stories by heart, through repetition and emphasis, and could anticipate nearly every sentence or phrase as it was read to me, as I was encouraged to do. As each page was turned, and I saw the illustration, I would begin to speak the next sentence before Dad would say it, a kind of anticipatory proof of memory, and interest.

A lot of stories for children are "softened" to make them less frightening, but Peter Rabbit, like the Pooh stories, or Raggedy Ann, weren't particularly strong stuff to begin with. I'm not sure why, but I rather imagined as a child, that the author, Beatrix Potter, must be a late middle aged matronly sort of woman, modest and reserved, perhaps even a bit smug. But I was surprised to learn, looking her up lately on Wikipedia, that she was a rather liberated 19th Century woman, self-supporting, forward-looking, with wide interests, an active life, and a great talent for writing as well as drawing and painting.

There are artists who lead lives of outward simplicity, but whose inner life is busy and fascinating. Then there are artists (or writers) whose artistic endeavors are but one facet of a varied personality. In Potter's case, her art work and her interest in biology and farming and (what would one day become known as) "ecology" (conservation) were melded into an integrated life of purpose and value and meaning. Upon her death, her considerable real estate holdings in the Lake District were donated to the National Trust, and her land became the basis for the Lake District National Park. But my purpose in addressing a child's tale--a genre which some of my readers may think I fail to appreciate, based on my criticism of Tolkien and Rowling--is to explore the feelings this story inspired in me as a small child.

I have reprinted the whole story here--without most of Potter's exquisite illustrations--since it's such a model of economy and concision. Rhythmic language and the characteristic intonements of grammar and syntax are employed with great subtlety, to manipulate a child's emotions in ways that are powerfully persuasive and effecting.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit

by Beatrix Potter 

Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names

were--

           Flopsy,

       Mopsy,

   Cotton-tail,

and Peter.

 They lived with their Mother in a sand-bank, underneath the root of a

very big fir-tree.

  'Now my dears,' said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning, 'you may go into

he fields or down the lane, but don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden:

your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs.

McGregor.'  'Now run along, and don't get into mischief. I am going out.'

  Then old Mrs. Rabbit took a basket and her umbrella, and went through

the wood to the baker's. She bought a loaf of brown bread and five

currant buns.

  Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail, who were good little bunnies, went

down the lane to gather blackberries:

  But Peter, who was very naughty, ran straight away to Mr. McGregor's

garden, and squeezed under the gate!

First he ate some lettuces and some French beans; and then he ate

some radishes;

And then, feeling rather sick, he went to look for some parsley.

But round the end of a cucumber frame, whom should he meet but Mr.

McGregor!

  Mr. McGregor was on his hands and knees planting out young cabbages,

but he jumped up and ran after Peter, waving a rake and calling out,

'Stop thief!'

  Peter was most dreadfully frightened; he rushed all over the garden,

for he had forgotten the way back to the gate.

He lost one of his shoes among the cabbages, and the other shoe

amongst the potatoes.

After losing them, he ran on four legs and went faster, so that I

think he might have got away altogether if he had not unfortunately

run into a gooseberry net, and got caught by the large buttons on his

jacket. It was a blue jacket with brass buttons, quite new.

  Peter gave himself up for lost, and shed big tears; but his sobs were

overheard by some friendly sparrows, who flew to him in great

excitement, and implored him to exert himself.

  Mr. McGregor came up with a sieve, which he intended to pop upon the

top of Peter; but Peter wriggled out just in time, leaving his jacket

behind him.

  And rushed into the tool-shed, and jumped into a can. It would have

been a beautiful thing to hide in, if it had not had so much water in it.

  Mr. McGregor was quite sure that Peter was somewhere in the

tool-shed, perhaps hidden underneath a flower-pot. He began to turn

them over carefully, looking under each.

  Presently Peter sneezed--'Kertyschoo!' Mr. McGregor was after him in

no time.

  And tried to put his foot upon Peter, who jumped out of a window,

upsetting three plants. The window was too small for Mr. McGregor, and

he was tired of running after Peter. He went back to his work.

  Peter sat down to rest; he was out of breath and trembling with

fright, and he had not the least idea which way to go. Also he was

very damp with sitting in that can.

  After a time he began to wander about, going lippity--lippity--not

very fast, and looking all round.

  He found a door in a wall; but it was locked, and there was no room

for a fat little rabbit to squeeze underneath.

  An old mouse was running in and out over the stone doorstep, carrying

peas and beans to her family in the wood. Peter asked her the way to

the gate, but she had such a large pea in her mouth that she could not

answer. She only shook her head at him. Peter began to cry.

Then he tried to find his way straight across the garden, but he

became more and more puzzled. Presently, he came to a pond where Mr.

McGregor filled his water-cans. A white cat was staring at some

gold-fish, she sat very, very still, but now and then the tip of her

tail twitched as if it were alive. Peter thought it best to go away

without speaking to her; he had heard about cats from his cousin,

little Benjamin Bunny.

  He went back towards the tool-shed, but suddenly, quite close to him,

he heard the noise of a hoe--scr-r-ritch, scratch, scratch, scritch.

Peter scuttered underneath the bushes. But presently, as nothing

happened, he came out, and climbed upon a wheelbarrow and peeped over.

The first thing he saw was Mr. McGregor hoeing onions. His back was

turned towards Peter, and beyond him was the gate!

  Peter got down very quietly off the wheelbarrow; and started running

as fast as he could go, along a straight walk behind some

black-currant bushes.

  Mr. McGregor caught sight of him at the corner, but Peter did not

care. He slipped underneath the gate, and was safe at last in the wood

outside the garden.

  Mr. McGregor hung up the little jacket and the shoes for a scare-crow

to frighten the blackbirds.

  Peter never stopped running or looked behind him till he got home to

the big fir-tree.

  He was so tired that he flopped down upon the nice soft sand on the

floor of the rabbit-hole and shut his eyes. His mother was busy

cooking; she wondered what he had done with his clothes. It was the

second little jacket and pair of shoes that Peter had lost in a

fortnight!

  I am sorry to say that Peter was not very well during the evening.

His mother put him to bed, and made some camomile tea; and she gave a

dose of it to Peter!

'One table-spoonful to be taken at bed-time.'

  But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail had bread and milk and

blackberries for supper.

  THE END 

Critics of children's literature have observed the division between some of Potter's illustrations, and the course of the narrative text. But that kind of observation isn't something that would occur to a child to notice. I'm not sure why children accept anthropomorphic projections with such ease, but I never saw anything unusual about dolls or animals having human characteristics, such as higher cognition or the ability to perform complex human movements. Animal or doll characters become stand-ins for the childhood identity projection, they live through these personifications, and experience their world as if they were living inside the character's bodies. Their travails and pleasures and perceptions become theirs, and they suffer or delight right along with them.

The idea that animals might be sympathetic creatures, whose plight humans could appreciate, was a fairly new idea in the 19th Century. Children's Literature, as a distinct literary genre, was just getting its start when Potter began to conceive of turning her own efforts into publications with a wider audience. The "child market"--which we think of today as a major commercial enterprise--was a novel notion in 1900. Potter herself ingeniously understood this untapped market, and copyrighted knock-offs of all kinds based on her popular children's books, authorizing the production of dolls, toys, board games, wallpaper, etc.; it was an early version of the merchandizing of paraphernalia which has become commonplace since the 1930's, and has grown into the huge advertising machines of our day, which play off of movies and popular genre books like Star Wars, Harry Potter and Spiderman.

Peter Rabbit departs from the manageable child story in several respects, which is one reason why it became so popular, and has endured. To begin with, Peter is a "bad" little rabbit (or boy). Ignoring his mother's advice to avoid Mr. McGregor's garden, he heads straight for it and immediately puts himself into jeopardy. In my mind, this meant two things: One) Peter was naughty, but much in the same way that adventuresome children often are, insisting on following their curiosity where it will lead them, and Two) Peter was a brave boy, who was willing to face danger head on in order to seize pleasure or excitement wherever it lay. I rather assumed that Peter's three sibling bunnies were girls, which would explain why they were timid and did their mother's bidding, avoiding mischief. Too, though I identified with Peter (as if he were a kind of hybrid "human" boy--in rabbit's habit) his entering the "human world" of Mr. McGregor was like entering foreign territory, an alien precinct. I was thus identifying with the non-human world, siding with "nature" against mankind's ordered appropriation of landscape. The rabbits exploit their environment in much the same spirit as mankind, though they also "steal" the gardener's product. This parasitic dependence never entered my mind as a child, but it conditioned me to think in terms of wild, undomesticated animals (like rabbits) as having their kind of integrity (their own discrete domesticity). Peter's family has a home, and tasks and responsibilities.

Peter's father, who has been caught, killed, and eaten by the McGregors--"put into a pie" as Peter's mother puts it--is gone, no longer able to provide for, or watch over, his family. Peter is thus, in a way, the "man in the family," who must step up and become the brave man we imagine his father must have been. Peter's adventures therefore are an admixture of foolish derring-do, and masculine heroism--not qualities, obviously, which Victorian parents would be likely to encourage in their children, for whom obedience and devoutness and mindfulness were the prevalent, preferred virtues. One can see Potter's own independence of mind and identification with nature in Peter's character, though his innocence and unmanageable temper are aspects of his youth and daring.

I can still recall clearly my sense of fear and loathing, feeling Peter's terror as he rushes into the tool shed, and jumps into a watering can full of cold water. No matter how many times I read the story, I felt near hysteria as Mr. McGregor began turning over pots trying to locate Peter. McGregor tries to step on Peter, but misses. Did I think about what fate might befall him if the gardener actually caught him? Did I imagine that Peter could be killed? Probably unconsciously.

As a child, Beatrix Potter had had rabbits (as well as other non-domestic animals) as pets. She and her brother Bertram were raised by enlightened, well-to-do parents, both artistically inclined. The children were encouraged to follow their interests, she becoming absorbed by natural history. Beatrix kept an intimate diary, in which she records her growing interests in nature and science. She became an expert in the study of mushrooms (fungi), and wrote an illustrated paper, which was submitted by proxy to the Linnean Society (because she was not allowed to attend due to her sex). (Were she to have been born a hundred years later, there's little doubt that she could have had an important scientific career.) Potter was born in 1866, seven years after Darwin published The Origin of Species. Much of the anthropomorphic content and meaning of stories like Peter Rabbit derive from the unified ecological theory of nature which Darwin's theories embody. Potter clearly understood the symbiotic interconnectivity of life forms, both as a force and as a principle.

Though Peter Rabbit appears to us now as a straightforward narrative combining elements of the adventure story and classic nature myth, it had a revolutionary quality in its time. Rather than a mysterious, hostile context, nature for Potter is "home"--not just an external precinct filled with danger and hostility. The human world of Mr. McGregor and his cultivated garden is in open competition with the rabbits for food, and control of the environment, but though they vie for common ground, they are part of a whole system, none of whose inhabitants have moral superiority over another. The birds, and the cat, and the mouse all belong to a world whose ultimate reckoning of life potential is shared. Animals (and plants) aren't provided merely for man's enjoyment and exploitation, but as different forms of organic development with equal claims to survival.

Though Darwin didn't know how genetics works, he understood the inter-relationship of environment and evolution. With enough time and pressure, and the occasional favorable accident (mutation). . . .

The lessons which Peter is learning will enable him to survive to adulthood, provided he isn't caught or killed in the process. Mr. McGregor, and the cat (a carnivorous predator), are the savage cannibals in the world of this story. The rabbits are vegetarians. But they're also opportunists--thieves. They see garden vegetables simply as part of nature's bounty, which exists for the taking. They don't comprehend ownership, or trade, or private property. Peter wears a little coat, and shoes, but he doesn't wear any pants! He's a little rascal, but as children we want him to succeed. With him, we suffer danger, discomfort, fear, illness, and the relief of home and a nurturing mother. But these are all presented as perfectly natural conditions, within a context that is not limited to human ingenuity and invention.

As a fable of Man versus Nature, The Tale of Peter Rabbit is a cautionary moral tale, but ambiguous in its message. As products of a liberated "new (British) woman," and a frustrated would-be scientist (biologist/botanist), Potter's juvenile stories are seen in the context of a campaign to husband in a new view of life. Her intended marriage to her publisher, Norman Warne, ended in tragedy, as he died a month after their engagement. Later, she would marry the town solicitor in Sawrey, who had helped her acquire properties in the area she had marked out for preservation. She became an accomplished farmer, and was active in community affairs, while continuing to publish numerous juvenile titles with Warne. Peter Rabbit was published when Potter was only 36, an age in Victorian times when a woman's life would be well-established in habit and role. But for Potter, it was just a beginning. Her art, her skills, her mercantile instincts, her scientific interest in nature and domestic cultivation and conservation, her marital alliances--everything was coordinated and fed into an integrated purposeful life.

Peter's return from the danger of the alien human world to the comfort of home and its homely virtues parallels Potter's destiny as a skilled country wife, dedicated to regional improvement and preservation. She had previsioned her own future life, which would be a fulfillment of her early interest in nature and science.

As a child of 4, I could hardly have dreamed of how worldly and accomplished Beatrix Potter had been. I doubt that my parents did either. All I knew, or needed to know, was that a little Rabbit wore shoes and a coat with brass buttons, and mischievously stole carrots and lettuce from grouchy old Mr. McGregor's garden. Would Peter survive into adulthood, or fall prey to a hunter's gun? Would he one day father a generation of his own "-opsies" in the British countryside?

Two on the Aisle

One commenter recently accused me of being a lush. Alcoholics Anonymous generally recommends that people who have a weakness for alcohol addiction, refrain from all intake--to go cold turkey forever.

Most people who do some drinking regularly must address the issue of their possible addiction. In my experience, serious or addicted drinkers care less about what they drink than they do about reliable intake. In addition, serious addicts usually are compensating for something in their lives; the alcohol is a crutch which allows them to relax or cheer up, against depression or frustration; and then, the alcohol itself becomes part of the problem, or the major problem in your life.

I grew up in a household of addiction. Both my parents were heavy smokers--two-pack-of-unfiltered Camels-a-day smokers. The house had an oppressive odor, my parents had yellow teeth and yellow eyes, and yellow stains on their fingers, and there were ashtrays (and old grey ash) everywhere. Both had "smoker's cough"--a wretched, bent-over hacking cough that never went away. Both of them died, having lived their whole adult lives as nicotine addicts. But they were adamant about my not starting, and, watching their travails, I had no desire to start myself. Being around addicts also taught me about the self-justifications, the excuses and complacencies people invent to allay their sense of guilt or fear for their health. It isn't pretty.

Though I never took up smoking, and did no more than try marijuana briefly in the 1970's, I do drink coffee, and wine, and spirits. I drink coffee nearly every day. In the past, to prove my independence from it, I have gone off it for months at a time. Though both my parents were classic "addictive personalities," I myself have no tendency in that direction. I think you "know" when you're addicted to something. When I go on field trips, I feel no sense of loss or need. Like sex or a desire for sweets, alcohol is a pleasure, but I don't need it all the time, and can do without it without any secondary consequences. In my 20's and 30's and 40's, I occasionally drank wine. In my 50's I began to sample single malt scotches, more as a hobby than as an indulgence, and began to have fine wine with dinner, frequently when eating out, and in the last 10 years, I've been on a campaign to mix many different kinds of cocktails. It's a hobby. The inebriation isn't the point, as I rarely have two. At 6'4" and 250 pounds, one drink has almost no effect on me at all. I could give up alcohol entirely and not feel any psychological or physical consequences. I exercise regularly, and eat very well, if a bit too much.

A lot of people will say that anyone who drinks alcohol regularly is an alcoholic. This is obviously not true. They will also say that anyone who makes a fetish out of a habit, is really addicted to the habit, and that whatever they may say about that habit is therefore a self-serving excuse-making lie. That is also obviously not true. You can't equate ethical innocence with teetotaling, it simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny. But I'm aware of the risks of over-indulgence--they're the same for everyone. Addicts know they're addicts--if you are one, you know it, and that's the truth.

In any case, addressing the issue of alcoholism, honestly, is something anyone who drinks must do. Alcohol addiction takes two forms, usually in conjunction: Psychological dependency, and physical dependency. Those with the serious physical dependency usually end up with very serious health problems. Those with psychological dependency may have a better chance to conquer the condition, but the risks to their lives are as great as those for "chemical" alcoholics. I may decide at some point, as I grow older, that drinking spirits is too great a challenge to my physiology. In the meantime, I take it in moderation. Having more than four drinks in a week is probably just a bit too much, but less, given my size and weight, presents no problem.

Here are two concoctions I came up with recently. The first was invented in my home bar. The second was invented on the fly at a restaurant recently. You can't be as creative when drinking out, since most bartenders either don't have many different ingredients, or are too lazy or impatient to follow new recipes. The whole point, it seems to me, with mixed drinks, is to experiment and discover new combinations, but there are many people who insist on having the same drink over and over. There are people who've consumed thousands and thousands of dry martinis without ever even having tried anything else. Kind of unimaginative.

At some point, I'd like to publish my own collection of cocktail inventions. There are a lot of books like that, in print and out, but most of them simply repeat the classics and timidly suggest "variations" on these. From time to time there are attempts to revive the classic era of cocktails (the 1920's during Prohibition), but the associations of that effort would seem to beg the question. Cocktails aren't about being naughty, or irresponsible. They're just a pleasurable libation, good with or without snacks or food.

#1 - by proportion as always

3 parts gold rum

2 parts watermelon liqueur

1 part Goldschlager

1 part aquavit

juice of 1 lime

#2 - makes one drink

3 parts dark rum

1 part Triple Sec

3 shakes Peychaud Bitters

--both served up without garnish. They're both heavenly tastes, and worthy of being repeated. Nevertheless, I'm too curious and adventurous to do that. I'm already conjuring different combinations!

The Lincecum Conundrum

Sometimes you wish you could be wrong. Your intelligence says one thing, while your heart tries to pull away, refusing to acknowledge the obvious. It's painful to witness failure, especially when you suspected, secretly, that failure was a very real possibility.

Watching Tim Lincecum pitch early in his big league career, I always had the distinct feeling of fragility.

When my son Randy was a pitcher in the local little league, I used to have that same feeling. Randy was a juvenile diabetic, who had to be given two injections of insulin a day, and his metabolism was subject to wide mood-swings, sudden crushing fluctuations in energy and focus. He was a fine little pitcher, but it was always a nail-biting affair, watching him in tight situations.

Lincecum has always seemed to be that same kind of player. He seemed too young, almost child-like, and physically small, delicate, vulnerable. It wasn't clear how he could generate so much arm-speed, and seeing him stretch out, flailing his arms around and catapulting the ball, or "whipping" it towards the plate at 98 mph, was breathtaking. It seemed a very improbable phenomenon. Opposing batters frequently shook their heads, leaving the batter's-box after striking out, as if they couldn't believe what had just happened. It defied common sense.

Like all magical things, a small pitcher who lives on speed and challenge, is a kind of contradiction, liable, at any moment, to fall apart. A finely tuned machine, but delicate, and subject to failure at any time.

Back in September of 2011 [Season Wrap-Up--Giants Drop out of Contention] I posited the idea that the real ace of the Giants pitching staff, the man with the biggest future, was not Lincecum, but Madison Bumgarner. In that speculative piece, I said:

"It's been obvious to students of the game that Tim Lincecum's mechanics constitute a recipe for physical problems. The windmill motion, and the stress on his slight frame. Traditionally, smaller pitchers who rely on a fastball to conquer opposing batters, usually have short careers. The most famous example is Sandy Koufax, whose Hall of Fame career ended at age 30. Generally speaking, successful long careers aren't built on flame-throwing. Exceptions, of course, are well-known--Nolan Ryan, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Bob Gibson--but they're as often as not taller men, with efficient, economical wind-ups. Long careers usually are characterized by great control combined with an easy motion (which puts minimal stress on the arm)--Warren Spahn comes to mind (5243.2 career innings pitched!). Up through age 42, Spahn averaged over 25 complete games a year; Lincecum has only thrown 8 in his whole career. So the tendency is to see Lincecum as a short-career star, whose best years may well be already behind him.

"In terms of wins, there is no question that on almost any other team in the league, Lincecum would have had at least 2, maybe 3 twenty-win seasons by now. His run support has been historically low, and he's routinely opposed by the other squad's ace starter. But there have been disturbing signs. His velocity has decreased steadily. He rarely throws a fastball over 92 mph these days, and hitters are beginning to figure him out in early innings. In 2008 and 2009, Lincecum seemed capable of a no-hitter on any given day, and frequently would go for 5 or more innings before anyone broke through. His strike-out to walk ratio is declining, and despite having added what has been referred to as a "deadly" change-up, he has a great deal more trouble finishing batters off after two strikes. What does the future hold for Timmy?

"Bumgarner, on the other hand, displays the kind of stuff, and mental concentration, normally seen only in veterans. He has an easy sweeping delivery, using all of his 6'5" height (the way Randy Johnson could). He seems not to tire in late innings, and his potential, assuming no unforeseen occurrence, looks to be unlimited. If Lincecum could be washed up at 34, Bumgarner might pitch for 20 more years."

Way back in May 2009, I commented on Lincecum's fragility [Tim Lincecum - Fragile Phenom ?], and wondered about his longevity, given the delicate balance of his physical skills and build:

"Tim Lincecum's star has risen as fast as any major league prospect in recent memory. Acquired by the San Francisco Giants in the first round of the 2006 Amateur Draft, after having been drafted twice before by major league teams (before he was ready to become professional)-- from the start, his potential and promise has signified greatness all the way.

His high school, college, and brief minor league careers were all marked by precocious dominance, and that promise was fulfilled when he won the Cy Young in only his second year in the bigs, posting an 18-5 record (which could have been even better, had his team given him more runs in a few games), with 265 strike-outs.

Blessed with a high-90's fastball, and a complete arsenal of three other pitches--a wicked sharp-breaking curve, a deadly slider, and a change-up to die for. Hitters comment that his stuff is the best some of them have ever seen.

What is Lincecum's ultimate destiny?

The Giants have had phenoms before, whose careers blossomed early, only to fade fast. Think of Ron Bryant, John 'the Count' Montefusco, Atlee Hammaker, Scott Garrelts, Kelly Downs, Trevor Wilson, Osvaldo Fernandez, Noah Lowry, but especially Shawn Estes, another fire-balling left-hander, winning 19 games in his first full season (1997) while striking out 181. In the years since, Estes is 79-80, with six losing seasons for various clubs, and this year he's down on the Dodgers' Triple A farm club.

Short, thin left-handers don't wear well in the majors. A Ron Guidry, or a Sandy Koufax may have marvelous years, but their careers are often cut short by injury or exhaustion. Lincecum has a big, flailing delivery which some have compared to Juan Marichal, whose marvelous, high leg-kick wind-up may have helped him generate velocity, but also made it hard for hitters to pick up his delivery, and it was a thing of beauty to watch. Watching Lincecum unwind a torrid fastball, you wonder how long he'll be able to sustain that much momentum on his relatively modest frame. Are left-handers more prone to arm stress and injury than righties? I have no idea, but I presume someone has--baseball is, after all, a numbers game--produced statistics to mark that comparison.

Longevity in the bigs is a combination, usually, of superior physical skill, guile, and adjusting your style as you get older. The old fireballer--like Nolan Ryan, hard-thrower into his forties--is quite the exception. Even with modern "sports"-medicine, and delicate surgical procedures, a fragile arm will usually spell the early end to a promising career.

My guess is that Lincecum will probably have about 3-5 years of impressive dominance, averaging 15-18 wins a season, averaging 230 strikeouts, but that it's unlikely he'll still be vying for Cy Youngs into his thirties. His body is just too small to sustain the beating it's likely to get over that period, piling up 200+ innings per year. The quintessential durable pitcher is someone like Jack Morris, who averaged 212 innings per year over an 18 year career (and probably belongs in the Hall of Fame). Who is more valuable, in the long run, to a contending club--the 3 year phenom who wins 50 games but quickly disappears, or the workhorse who can give you 15 wins a year for 10 years?"

As events have unfolded, my predictions and precautions have, unfortunately, been born out. Lincecum's career, which had displayed a steady decline in performance over the period between his last Cy Young years (2009), and the current year (2012), now appears to all intents and purposes, to be on the verge of a total collapse. Aside from his strike-out total, which seems to be his most reliable method of getting anyone out, his numbers are at rock bottom at the All Star break:

3-10, with a 6.42 ERA, 69 earned runs, 11 home runs, 50 walks, and 10 wild pitches--in just 96.2 innings. In 18 first half starts, the team is 4-14. These are numbers you expect to see of a pitcher whose career is teetering on the edge of oblivion.

And that seems very much to be the mood of the team's management and coaching staff. For a team in close contention, with other hurlers performing at the top of their potential, the only thing standing between Tim and the bench is his past, and the success of his fellow-teammates. How long can a team in the middle of a pennant race keep running out a pitcher who gives up 5-8 runs in a game?

Obviously, I don't have a solution for Lincecum's problems. There are clear causes to his demise, duly noted in the press and by the radio announcers: Slowing fast-ball, loss of control, especially in clutch situations, a tendency to throw fat pitches over the plate at crucial times. When everything was going well, Lincecum, ever the cheerful, gregarious fellow, never said much about how he'd done what he'd done; it was a "gift" which he neither questioned, nor apparently gave much thought to.

There have been pitchers, like Lincecum, who began their careers with lots of power and then, having lost it to injury or age, "adjusted" by developing other kinds of pitches, fine-tuning their control, or moving from starting to relieving roles. I have no doubt that experts around the league have offered their advice, and there's no question that they know better than any fan like me, what the problem is, and what might be done to remedy it.

It might take a complete revamping of his approach to delivery. It might be some kind of strength conditioning, which enabled him to generate more leg push, or more leverage in his pitching shoulder. Pitchers who rely on speed typically have very strong legs.

On the other hand, there may indeed be some kind of injury, which Tim is concealing from everyone, or perhaps he isn't even quite aware of it. It often turns out that a sudden loss of ability is due to a physical condition, which is not revealed until somewhat later, after a player has finally capitulated to necessity and sought medical advice or treatment. In a way, I'm almost hoping that this is the case with Lincecum, since it would be easier, in a way, to deal with, than some kind of mental weakness, or inexplicable physical decline, like an insidious neurological or muscle disease.

_______________

Footnote to post, 7/16/12:

On Saturday, July 14th, Lincecum started against the Houston Astros, a team over which he has an historical dominance. Timmy's performance was statistically impressive, striking out 11, allowing no runs and 5 hits, and walking just 1, in 8 innings. His fastball velocity was in the 87-92 range, and several balls were struck briskly by the Astros that ended up as outs. Removed after 8 innings, his team lost the lead in the 9th, though eventually triumphing in bottom of the 12th inning. The contact which hitters have been making against him continued in this start, a trend that continues to be an issue. When hitters make good contact, luck may result in those balls being caught, but if they aren't, disaster may result. In this sense, the outcome was not completely satisfying. Lincecum is a strike-out pitcher, not a junk guy who lives on ground-ball or fly-ball outs. As his career develops, he may find more and more that tricking hitters into making outs is a more reliable strategy than trying to whiff everyone. It's perfectly possible to be a great strike-out pitcher--such as Nolan Ryan was--but to give up a lot of walks, a lot of runs, and to lose a lot of games. Obviously LIncecum doesn't have Ryan's stamina and overpowering speed, but living on the strike-out is a risky approach to success against major league hitters. Great pitchers who don't live on strike-outs, but lull opposing batters into a "comfort zone" of weak outs, or ineffective productivity (winning without piling up strike-outs), can be a career-prolonging recipe. A pitcher who can win 20 games with an ERA of 4.00 and fewer than 160 strike-outs in a season is probably doing more for his team, than a pitcher who wins 14 but strikes out 250. High strike-out ratios rarely can be sustained for more than three or four years in a single career.

Lincecum's last start was a relief, but the problems will persist as long as he continues to rely on strike-outs as his primary weapon. 2012 is cautionary. If he can break even in wins and losses this year, say, going 15-15, that would be great: The Giants could probably easily win the division, given the effectiveness of the other starters so far. But the team needs him to step up. Also, a little luck would be nice. Pitching in PacBell Park certainly helps, with its wide-open spaces in right and right-center field. Unfortunately, half a pitcher's starts are generally on the road.

Apres Nous

The famous phrase, attributed to Louis XV, the next-to-last resident of Versailles, "apres nous, le déluge," is supposed to serve as an ironic caution to overindulgence and selfish disregard of those less privileged. And undoubtedly, in that monarch's case, it could never have been more apropos. But the other side of that old coin is this: That we--no matter who we are--may indulge in the expectation that the bounty we enjoy, may never again be available, and that our descendants, no matter who they may be, will not have what we had. Is this vanity?

History rolls over us, and we are squashed or lifted up on its successive waves. If we are lucky, we live in interesting times, though perhaps not too interesting. Violent change usually leaves casualties strewn about. Quiet times are safer, but may also be less rich.

There are some who speculate that we may be at the end of a wave of prosperity, that humankind may never again be privileged to indulge in as much reckless consumption as it recently has. If that is true, are we guilty of historical selfishness? Moderation would suggest that we should not follow our appetites too far.

How much of the good life do we deserve? Is what I take in effect stolen from another? Are we entitled to only so much pleasure, and no more? Or are we chosen, more or less at random, to be humankind's stand-ins, or proxies, designated by some capricious higher power, to taste and appreciate and discriminate aspects of the fine, the rare, the rich?

To some extent, we may make our own opportunities, or, as it is said, "make [our] own luck." What's your pleasure? Wine? Women? Song? Food? Sport? The delights of the mind?

Best to contemplate these things with a bit of stimulation to lighten the mood. Here's a straightforward construction guaranteed not to offend. It's quite traditional, emphasizing the citrus side of flavor. I wonder what Louis XV would have made of a sip or two of it, on a hot Summer day beneath an embroidered canopy. I venture he'd have liked it. Cocktails didn't exist in the France of the 18th Century, but there were other "consolations," as we say. He needed only to raise his hand to summon them.

Proportions as fractions of 1, per usual.

3 parts canadian whisky

2 parts Aperol

1 part Mandarin liqueur

1 part limoncello

1 part lime juice

Swirled and served up, preferably on the back deck at sunset. Perhaps with some freshly ripe avocado, salted and peppered and dribbled with fresh lemon juice. Apres nous!

Build It, and They Will Come

On July 5th, the California State Assembly approved the issuance of $4.6 billion in state bond funds, and opened the door to obtain an additional 3.3 billion in federal grants, for the first stage of the projected High Speed Rail project, planned to create a rail system connecting Sacramento, and the Bay Area to the Central Valley, and Southern California (Los Angeles and San Diego).

High speed rail has already been developed in Japan and Europe, where trains have become more important and traditionally relied upon than in America, where our interstate and intrastate rail systems have been declining for half a century.

The advent of the automobile in America tended to move other kinds of land-based transportation aside. And the growth of commercial aviation, and not just in America, also had a negative influence on the use and development of alternative kinds of human and goods transport. Our highly elaborated road and freeway system was the primary generator of the post-war boom, facilitating an economic prosperity that flowed across our broad land like life-giving blood. The automobile, of course, transformed our landscape. It caused the decline of our major urban centers, and led to suburbanization. As we moved from an agrarian to a manufacturing economy--and increasingly, now, to a "service-based" economy--the automobile was a two-edged sword, creating convenience and independence, but also congestion, pollution, and--in some respects--a degraded quality of life.

For the last quarter century, or more, there's been a strong reaction against the effects of the triumph of our automobile-based culture. Automobiles are "dirty" technology, and their mass proliferation has fueled rapid, uncontrolled growth. Though many advocate policies which do not place the automobile at the center of our regional and state-wide planning, there are serious reasons to question how alternative transportation models might actually work, especially if society is considering throwing large swaths of its diminishing resources into vast new systems.

The official primary driving motivation behind high speed rail, is the assumption of a continuing growth model for the larger society. California, like much of the American Southwest, has been growing very fast. In the last century and a half, the population, and man's"footprint" has increased exponentially. Though there is usually common agreement about the need to check this increase, most political and business initiatives seem to presume a continuous trajectory of growth, and to assess priorities strictly in terms of unlimited expansion. You will hear advocates of growth speak blandly of "our growing need" for water, waste treatment, highways, services--the whole panoply of human consumption and dependence--as if an endless, open-ended process, without any natural barriers, were to be contemplated. Hardly anyone asks, simply, whether such expansion is either inevitable or necessary, or good. You never hear "practical" solutions which take into account, for instance, the ultimate limitations posed by natural resources. If mankind needs more water, or land, or food, or metal or glass or plastic or wood or garbage dumps, we will just have to continue to find them, develop them and consume them.

This is pretty much the spirit of talk with respect to our transportation networks. Every town and city must have better and better roads, and these conduits must be continually expanded and improved, so that more and more vehicles can use them, and more and more people can be moved from one place to another.

The expansion or "growth" paradigm has been a guiding light to our society for three hundred years. When our continent stood "empty" and inviting at the beginning of colonial times, any kind of expansionism seemed possible, if ambitious. Thinkers of the time thought it might take a thousand years to "fill up" the continent. We know now how wrong they were, how much faster technology and human ingenuity work than they did in the 18th Century.

Our American culture has come to accept the "growth" paradigm as a sacred cow, not to be questioned. Human society must eventually come to resemble bee-hives or termite mounds, as if all our ingenuity should culminate in a crowded, buzzing mass. Nature must be transformed, pushed aside--a total annihilation of the pre-industrial landscape.

The decline of rail in this country took us on a path away from the dominance of large inner cities. America's economic decline paralleled this urban decentralization. The contraction of our tax base and the shrinking middle-class, along with the growing awareness of the scarcity of natural resource and the need to conserve and protect, have brought the permanent growth paradigm into question. The American Dream of continuous expansion, of generational advance, is finally coming to be revealed as the fantasy that it always was. A future model of "prosperity" based on a constant growth in population and consumption of resource is finally coming up against the wall of limits--as it was always destined to do.

And yet we still think, selfishly, complacently, that our economic future lies in expanding our "infrastructure"--and the promotion of rail is one part of that pipe dream. When I was growing up in the 1950's in the Bay Area, there was a train system, the Key System, which connected points along the East Bay corridor, and to San Francisco via the lower deck of the Bay Bridge. This system, which I can distinctly remember taking, with my mother, as a small boy, was efficient and clean. But it was dismantled in 1958, encouraged in large part by the Teamster's Union, which desired to replace it with busses. The AC Transit System, which replaced it, was followed, in turn, by the Bay Area Rapid Transit System (or BART). Despite the existence of AC Transit and BART, and even the Ferry System which still runs between San Francisco and Marin County, vehicular traffic in the Bay Area typically exceeds capacity, suffering from the same congestion and inconvenience experienced in all major American metropolitan centers.

American city planning theory, throughout the post-war period, was based on a reactionary pre-modern European model, medieval in its origins, of a "pedestrian" urban culture, imagined as a vital, intimate, body centered matrix where goods and people mix and interact, casually and naturally, in an atmosphere of mutual interest and trust, of common shared purpose. But this vision was a fantasy. The idea that one could impose a pre-industrial, pre-modern urban paradigm on American cities, fostering pedestrian city centers, by force and regulation, was a manifest disaster wherever it has been tried. With a few exceptions--such as small, utopian communities laid out according to strict diagrams--cities grow "organically" along the transportation grids, accommodating the prevailing modes of movement. Pre-industrial European cities, with their squares, narrow streets and pathways, grew up in a time when walking and riding horses or wagons--or as in Venice, boating--were the prevailing modes. Despite the discrediting evidence of the failure of "retroactive" city planning theory, the anti-modern, anti-vehicular sentiment continues to influence planning and regulation in our time. Cities keep trying to figure out ways of thwarting automobiles and trucks, as if accomplishing this would automatically make their downtowns pleasant, prosperous destinations. But American cities belong to a later epoch: You can't plop down Venice in the middle of Berkeley, California. You can't have San Gimignano in the middle of Chicago. You can't turn downtown Los Angeles into the Left Bank.

The confusion created by the competing visions of the ideal city and its arterial routes is perhaps nowhere more evident today than in California's imagination of the probable value of high speed rail, as a conduit to facilitate movement and commerce between its northern and southern regions. It has been recognized for at least a century that the "interests" of north and south do not coincide, and that this "partisan" separation should be realized by splitting the state into its respective factional regions. Historically, too, there was never very much need to unite the coastal urban centers together. With the existing north/south freeways--5, 99, 101--driving between the two centers has never been an especially daunting proposition. Those wishing or needing immediate access could fly in airplanes. Rather than trying to pull these geographically separated regions closer together with increasingly sophisticated, and expensive, and inconvenient modes of transport, the logical step should be to improve the quality of life within the limits of manageable regional master-plans, strengthening their internal conduits, based on sustainable self-interested initiatives.

And the growth of our communication system--notably the internet and the new advanced phone devices--has drastically reduced the need for business or vacation travel. What may have begun, 30 or 40 years ago, in the imagination of city planners and transportation theorists, of a "bullet train" whizzing up and down the coast, connecting LA and Frisco, now is clearly a pipe-dream, whose practical value has, in many respects, been rendered irrelevant by new technologies. Rather than building in dependencies upon distance and remoteness, regions should become more self-reliant and independent.

As if this weren't frustrating enough, the declining economy and attendant shrinking tax base have left most states in the nation without the means to embark on large public projects. With the enormous short-falls in funding, the state has announced the anticipated indefinite closure of many of its public parks. Many of the roads and freeways, constructed as much as a half century ago, or more, cry out for repair and resurfacing. Our public school system is in a shambles. Police and fire departments are subject to cutbacks. And the existing public transit systems are all financially strained.

Everywhere we look, we see diminishing resources, and yet lawmakers apparently believe that all this is just a temporary set-back. Clinging to the sacred "growth" paradigm, they believe that building another, new, highly costly train system will foster more future growth and prosperity.

But even if this pipe-dream were true, what would the construction of a vast new train system actually cause? We know from historical evidence that transportation routes "create" growth, rather than simply meeting existing needs. The route of the transcontinental railroad "created" towns and cities where there had been none. Old Route 66 was like a charm bracelet, along which commercial centers popped up like weeds. Simply put, connecting towns throughout the planned pathway of the new bullet train would immediately lead to accelerated growth all along the route. Hot outposts in the sweltering Central Valley like Stockton, Modesto, Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield--already easily accessible by car or truck--would all grow in response to the new stimulus. The obvious intent beyond rail connectivity is more growth for all the points along the planned route. Rather than moderating the tendency towards commutation and needless travel and portability, additional rail would encourage population growth, more suburbanization, and "service" industry expansion.

In addition, several uncomfortable facts present themselves. Projections of the cost to the state, originally estimated to be 40 billions of dollars four years ago, have now been revised upward to 68 billion. In a project that is likely to take decades to complete, that estimate will undoubtedly double, and even triple. By 2025, for instance, its cost could zoom upwards to 200 billions of dollars. Questions have been raised about ridership and maintenance. Traditionally, rail ridership in the U.S. has been on a steady decline. What would lead one to expect that Californians would suddenly jump on board a train for a trip to Bakersfield or San Diego, especially if, having arrived there, they immediately needed to rent a car "just to get around" in the most automobile-friendly system in the world? Travel between Los Angeles and points north has been adequately handled by the existing highway systems. A trip between LA and the Bay Area usually can be completed in less than one day with little fuss, and when you arrive you have the convenience of your own car. Even with gas prices pegged at $5 a gallon, that's a thrifty alternative to the inconvenience of a big train. How fast, indeed, might one expect to be able to go, with so many anticipated "stops" along the way? And how much would a system like this one need to charge its riders for the pleasure?--$25? $50? $100? Even paying, say, $50 would seem exorbitant when compared to a small passenger vehicle.

Advocates point to the economic advantages of such a large, open-ended construction project to the state. But large public projects of this kind are usually subject to wasteful overspending, and delays. It's true that lucrative employment of various kinds would be needed, but at what cost? Plopping down a huge new rail corridor involves displacements of various kinds. Many of the communities along the intended route have already decided that they don't want the bullet train to plow through their existing town systems, and are going to court to challenge the eminent domain (or right-of-way) the state intends to invoke.

Finally, the funding for the whole project is in doubt. It's quite likely that, even if construction is initiated, the project won't be completed due to significant budgetary short-falls. Promoters believe, based on past projects of this kind, that once the project is underway, money will somehow be found to complete it. At a time when the state is facing the greatest financial crisis in its history, this is no time to be planning expensive new boondoggles like high speed rail.

My personal belief is that the growth paradigm--based on vast increases in population and economic exploitation of land, resource, and public revenue--which is the driving motive behind high speed rail in California, is pushing us towards disaster. I think we have to move in a different direction.

Accelerated suburban expansion, without significant growth in manufacturing employment, means that the standard of living of the great majority of those living in this state, will steadily decline. That prediction would be true of almost any part of the nation. The distribution of income, the declining middle-class, and the increasing manipulation of government revenues by corporate interests, all point to a condition in which public policy is directed towards the interests of a very few, whose power far exceeds that of the greater population it's intended to serve. That means that those who stand to gain most from a boondoggle like High Speed Rail, will have the most influence on the decision-making process, as was proven last week in the legislature.

Californians don't need high speed rail, but it's being shoved down their throats--in the same way that the unnecessary new eastern span of the Bay Bridge was. Behind the slick public relations campaign run by the contractors, the unions, and the politicians who have federal dollar-$-signs in their eyes, there's a quarter century of cost over-runs, 300 miles and years of messy, inconvenient construction, delays, and a mountain of corruption--all to give us a cool new aerodynamically-contoured toy, poorly patronized, expensive to run, and expensive to ride. Even the most optimistic estimates of completion will mean that most people of retirement age today, won't live to experience the ride. It might take 20 years to complete, and by that time, the scandal of how it was sold to the public will be like a sad old elegy. When completed--if it ever is--it will be another white elephant, made out of greed, credulity, wastefulness and exploitation. Californians have been sold another bill of goods, for which they'll be paying and paying and paying for decades.

Paul Strand's The Family

In the past I've hesitated to discuss the work of Paul Strand, because of the various difficulties one encounters in trying to define its divergent tendencies and probable meanings. Those who love Strand's work tend to forfeit any objectivity in defending its strengths, while seldom admitting its ambiguities and underlying rigid and sometimes even haughty presumptions. The significance of Strand's mature work grows out of a philosophical and political context that almost died out with World War II, and the subsequent embarrassment of Communism in Russia and China during the following decades. Had the fascist reaction of the 1930's and 1940's not occurred, it's interesting to speculate about how we would view Strand today, or any of the other Leftist artists entre les guerres. In the atmosphere of the prosperity of the post-war West, Strand's work takes on a certain idyllic, bourgeois charm, as if the social deprivations and dislocations--which are the raw matter (primitive indigenous cultures or war-ravaged landscapes) from which his major work is largely constructed--he chose to depict, were somehow symbolic, on the one hand, of an eternally repressed cultural guilt, or, on the other, of an adamantly retrogressive proletarian bitterness--like old Basque Separatists cleaning their rifles in closets at night.

The Family, Luzzara Italy 1953

The two primary strains of Strand's early work--formal, experimental Modernism, and social commentary documentation--are later joined in a unitive vision which employs powerful visual constructions to make broad political statements. During the 1930's, he concentrated on film, in an attempt to put his art at the service of progressive Left principles, reemerging in the early 1950's to create a series of "country" monographs, which explored the static documentary potentials he had earlier exploited with his film work on The Plow That Broke the Plains [1936], and Redes (aka: The Wave) [1936], Heart of Spain [1937], Native Land [1941]. These documentary books--Time in New England [1950], Un Paese [1955], La France de Profil [1952], Tir A'Mhurain [1962], Living Egypt [1969], and Ghana: An African Portrait [1976]--comprise a sort of comprehensive presentation--part social document, part artistic statement, part nostalgic retrospective--which Strand appears to have conceived as restatements of the same ideas he had expressed in the film work. Though the films had had a "public" side, Strand's own still image-work had been more personal, and experimental. But with Time in New England, the abstract studies and larger landscapes were united with portraits and indigenous folk pastoral, bundled and sequenced into coherent records of specific places, to offer direct evidence of the "unspoiled" or faux-"primitive" pre-modern, pre-industrial cultures--on the ground, un-self-conscious, honest, plain, basic.

The obvious difficulty in attempting to present documentary evidence of unspoiled culture is that you have to go "out of your way" to find it. Then, having found it, you have to present it in such a way that your very cosmopolitan, artificial aesthetic intentions don't distort the very qualities which you are trying to reveal. There is a balance between identifying these elements, and making from them positive, unpretentious tableaux. If you ask someone to "pose" against a building, especially people unfamiliar with the process of making compositions, there is the very real danger that their interest or fascination with the novel quality of the process may taint the result. His skill at making his subjects "behave" before the lens has been remarked, for instance, as just another aspect of his technical apparatus.

Each of the six "country" monographs--New England, Italy, France, Outer Hebrides, Egypt and Ghana--is a combination of broad landscapes, portraits (both posed and candid), and "telling" details, though often chosen as much for their pure artistic quality as for their relevance as thematic characteristics. In them, "local color" and touristic curiosity are melded with proletarian sympathy and celebration of riparian culture; and photographic skill and a straightforward no-nonsense approach are put at the service of a purposeful task, so that the personality of (Strand) the photographer is subsumed inside the higher calling of the "dignity" of the "common" man. But regional, ethnic and racial identities can end up being co-opted into a superimposed program, ultimately dictated by self-interest, in the same way that the United Nations is.

Is it possible to view a Strand portrait or group portrait, such as "The Family" above, either as pure organized composition, or as an indignant/dignified portrayal of subsistence/poverty and/or casual, relaxed daily life, uninfected by envy, suspicion or greed? Is it possible to see adult men, shoeless, probably unemployed, in conditions of deprivation, as colorful "primitives"--without our wanting or needing to think of the economic implications of their plight? Or does Strand intend that we should see them as both simultaneously, as beautiful victims of the incursions of the modern world's rapacity, or, conversely, as hold-outs, vestiges of an earlier, simpler bargain with necessity? Since the audience for Strand's monographs was clearly prosperous middle- and upper middle-class consumers, whose social conscience he was trying to invoke, the ironic tension between the complacent picturesque, and the militant subtext could hardly have been more obvious.

There is a temptation to set such considerations aside, and deal directly with Strand's mastery of his medium. Working with a 5x7 negative format--a sort of ideal compromise between the convenience of small formats, and the bulky, awkward scale of 8x10--Strand was able to achieve the print detail and tonal scale he sought, while not sacrificing the convenience and portability of a handy tool needed to move freely through an unfamiliar environment. How much preparation went into the construction of the scene above, in which six people, arranged artfully in differing attitudes of attention and apparent laxity, wait patiently for the photographer's work to be concluded. The scene seems so much a posed event, that it's impossible not to feel a sense of fabricated drama. Strand's work on the 30's social consciousness films seems to have been carried over directly into the monograph sequences. Might he have thought that his artistic sense--working to place objects and angles and tonal variance into an integrated whole--could be a sort of theatrical/cinematic director's control, as the auteur of successive images, like stills from a movie? This is a thematic thread that runs throughout each of the regional monographs.

"The Family" is certainly a "beautiful" formal construction. Balance and imbalance are perfectly interlocked. The dark doorway is set just to the left of center. The verticals of the doorway, lintel, stoop, exposed brick, and street-line, are contrasted against the eccentric angles of the limbs, the circle of the bicycle wheel, the man's hat. There is a sense of inclusion in which the whole grouping seems perfectly right; even if these six people are not directly related, though they may well be, we are not particularly curious about that. Which is more important?--that they seem united by a common circumstance, or that they somehow "belonged" in a photograph together? How, for instance, would a parallel group of Americans in a suburban neighborhood, appear to our eyes? Certainly, from Strand's point of view, this possibility was very immediate: Time in New England contains several posed portraits of people in their doorways or yards. It was precisely his point that our recognition of their honest rusticity links/ed them to each other, in the universal human theme of lives lived in direct connection to the earth, and to their need to live in the nobility and solemnity of their homely ordinariness.

These were qualities of aesthetic regard which were under fire during the McCarthy years. As those in the West chased the ever-receding mirage of economic prosperity and fake bourgeois respectability, older artists like Strand and Eugene Smith and Evans reminded them of the ambiguity of their position. "The Family"--like The Family of Man [1955], the famous exhibition curated by Steichen--is intended to glorify and epitomize an attitude that survives in our public imagination as a distant memory of hard times. Strand's work is journalistic and crusading in spirit, but the delicate fulcrum of its value is forever poised between vicarious sympathy--cheap in its simplest form--and a more informed recognition--that trying to believe in universal cooperation and common interest is ultimately a form of disrespect for difference and origins--the specificity of vernacular identity. The presumption of our Western notion of aesthetic picturesqueness is really nothing more than an extension of the old colonial paternalism of the pre-industrial era. To make a religion of class conflict and proletarian sympathy, superimposed upon little pockets of rustic provincial outback, is to mistake our motives of artistic condescension for compassion, and our pleasure in unspoiled places for good works. Visiting an isolate community, taking pictures of it, and then selling those pictures to the public, doesn't constitute an altruistic political act. Strand may have thought that what he was doing was somehow more dignified than just taking pictures of leaves in his garden, but in the end, its meaning is really the same.

In the movie Saving Private Ryan [1998, Dreamworks SKG], Spielberg--consciously or unconsciously--undoubtedly was aware of Strand's image, when he set up this shot towards the end of the movie, which occurs just minutes prior to the ultimate battle scene in a small French village. In France de Profil, Strand took pictures of the devastation of architecture caused by the War. In Spielberg's version, we see the historical record in purely aesthetic terms. The picture of four men, arranged conveniently and artistically against a partially demolished building, is pictorially inspiring and "pretty"--the tragedy and heroism of the men is like a footnote to the set-piece of their casual talk and nervous humor in anticipation of approaching terror. It's like the stage in a theater, the theater in this case, of war. 46 years separates Strand's and Spielberg's respective visions, and yet, the world they address and intended to portray is remarkably close--and based on some common themes. Strand's is art at the service of an officially discredited political end, one to which the larger society paid half-hearted homage; in Spielberg's, it's art in the service of as a debt to a dying commitment, a war now mostly consigned to fantasy.

Jeux de vagues

Ocean Waters in Rockport

My old friend from high school, Sunny (Hindes) West, who lives in Ipswich, Massachusetts, is a plein air painter who maintains a website here, recently posted her latest effort above, accompanied by the following comment: "I especially love the colors and excitement where ocean waters reach the rocks on shore. I tried to capture that energy and excitement by painting this scene loosely with thick paint from a palette knife."

Jeux de vagues ("play of waves") is the name given to the second movement of Claude Debussy's symphonic poem La Mer [1905], a work which might be called, or considered to be, a true three movement symphony in the 19th Century sense, but for the fact that the early Impressionists (of whom Debussy is undoubtedly the preeminent figure, in music) were at least as interested in "programmatic" applications, as they were in "pure" music conceptions.

As Sunny says, the "excitement and energy" of the collision of water and shore produces wondrous, expressive images. In photography, this involves not the construction of moments of such excitement, but timing and calculation. Waves, and the spray and thrust of water, occur quickly, boisterously. A photographer has to be ready. The moment you click the shutter is a combination of anticipation and exact timing, and you usually don't get a second chance. No wave is ever precisely the same, though certain points of impact may be potentially promising.

The photograph below was taken at Point Reyes National Seashore Park, beside McClure's Beach, in 1986, with a 4x5 camera using Tri-X film [320 ISO]. The tumultuous flux which occurs here offers dozens of different possible angles and views. What especially appealed to me about this vantage was the replication of rocky diagonals creating dramatic V-shapes, which, contrasted against the impetuous, effervescent foam, criss-crossing wave-currents, pull the eye forward and back and across the composition. In the distance, a wave crashes against a big protruding boulder, as the wet hiss of receding water distracts you at your very feet. I'd had to climb up gingerly to a vantage that barely permitted the placement of my wooden tripod with steel spiked points. Spray and mist dampened the dark-cloth and my camera bag. I stood there with my camera pointed and adjusted for near and far focus for several minutes, watching the play of the waves, and gauging the interaction between the sequence of great and small wave actions. (As a footnote, this is the same thing that occurs in the movie Papillon [1973], where the hero, played by Steve McQueen, who has been exiled to a small island with no access to the shore (only high rocky cliffs), "times" the pattern of waves in a narrow inlet, in order to learn the precise moment to leap into the surf with a coconut raft, to swim to freedom.)

I waited for the moment when the big wave impacted the forward positioned rocks, and pushed the shutter cable. I wouldn't know, of course, whether or not I'd gotten it just right until I'd developed the negative back in the darkroom. (Today's digital cameras, of course, provide "previews" within seconds of an exposure, giving the user immediate feedback, something which was impossible, with the old organic chemistry processes. Has this made taking such photographs easier, or more reliable?)

The manipulation of subject, and image composition, seemingly gives painters a tremendous advantage over photographers in action scenes, who are limited by the "real" event. But painters also have the challenge of determining how "realistic" their portrayal of such pictures will be. It's possible to make paintings which challenge our ability to know whether or not they're photographs or paintings; but taking the exactitude of representation to that degree seems to beg the very question posed by photography. The new digital technologies, as well, which allow the manipulation of images--both photographic and non-photographic--makes both kinds of image-making more ambiguous than ever before. Making things look other than they really do--or did, in reality--may be a useful and valuable option, but it also has the probable effect of devaluing the skills (or limitations) associated with the crafts of painting, and photography as well. Photography, invented in the 19th Century, and refined over the last century, has had the intermediate effect of devaluing mere verisimilitude. Making recognizable images of reality as a skill or tool has been aesthetically demoted, though it is no easier to accomplish such effects than it ever was. Of course, the ability to make a great portrait, for instance, on a level with Raphael or Da Vinci or Tintoretto, would still be considered an impressive elaboration of genius; and the loss of the motivation for artists to perform this feat, may be one of the casualties of technology and scientific advance. The progress of civilization opens new doors as it closes others.

The debate over the alternate values of two-dimensional representations of reality is an old question, but it isn't settled yet. I've never felt the desire to paint, but part of my Landscape Architecture degree program included a free-hand drawing course, in which I explored line-drawing as a medium, making pictures of buildings, flora, and other kinds of objects (chairs, shoes, etc.). This was an exercise designed to sensitize one's eye to the visual aspects of a scene, and to see the relationship between the perception, and the manipulation, of a space. Copying shapes and textures is a discipline which every representational artist must master, at least to a certain degree. Creative representation, of course, stretches the meaning of reasonable recognition well beyond this simplistic definition. Modern and Post-Modern artistic movements have taken aesthetic arguments well beyond the dialectic of the reportage or documentation versus artistic license. The natural world is no less fascinating to our eyes than it ever was to the ancient Greeks, or to the great Renaissance painters. But the uses we may choose to make of it now feel much more various, and complex, than they may have seemed to those earlier epochs. Our knowledge of the intricate and mysterious workings of matter and perception are many times more profound than they once were; but the means of our mediation between the "external world" and how it is perceived by the human mind have changed, and will continue to change over time.