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Coporaque

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Poster Celebrating the 185th Anniversary of the Town

Now that I am retired and living on a fixed income, I like to remember some of the places I’ve been that impressed me. I spent only one night and part of two days in Coporaque, Peru near the north rim of Colca Canyon, but I wound up liking it more than Machu Picchu.

The area is split betweeen three ethnic groups: the Cabanas, the Kollawas (Collaguas), and the Ccaccatapay. The Canyon at its deepest point 3,400 meters or over 11,000 feet , almost twice the depth of Arizona’s Grand Canyon. Curiously, it’s not even the deepest canyon in Peru: nearby Cotahuasi Canyon wins that honor.

What comes to mind when I remember my visit to the area is that it is surrounded by volcanoes, one of which—Sabancaya—is in a permanent state of eruption. The terracing for agriculture goes back to the Incas.

Agriculture Terraces Going Back to the Incas

I wouldn’t mind going back to Colca Canyon, even though its 11,000-foot altitude requires that I chew coca leaves to avoid keeling over. En route to the canyon, we went over a mountain pass at Patapampas where the altitude was over 15,000 feet (4,572 meters). As I stepped out of the van to check out the view, I started to fall flat on my face, but was prevented from doing so by our Peruvian guide.

The Little Ice Age in Holland

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Skating on the Ice in Holland

One of the exhibits I saw at the Getty Center last week was a collection of drawings depicting cold weather in Holland during the 17th century. According to the Getty website:

In the 17th century, frigid winters and unusually cool summers blanketed northern Europe in what became known as the Little Ice Age. Dutch artists depicted this persistent global cooling in scenes of daily activities like ice skating and fishing. Highlighting human vulnerability and resilience in the face of a changing climate, these works offer opportunities to reflect on our current environmental crises. This exhibition features works by Hendrick Avercamp and other Dutch artists of the 1600s.

It was during this Little Ice Age that the Greenland colony of Scandinavian and Icelandic colonists was abandoned at some point between 1350 and 1400.

Dutchmen Playing Ice Hockey

I have always been fond of Dutch art, and that was only reinforced when Martine and I visited Amsterdam more than twenty years ago. Uniquely, it seems, Dutch painting elevated the humdrum to the level of high art in the works of Vermeer, Rembrandt, Hals, Bosch, and Bruegel.

As I looked at all the drawings of the Dutch enjoying themselves in what looked like wickedly cold weather, I wondered if the global warming that the news media talks about is a permanent feature, or just another of earth’s mysterious centuries-long cycles that we don’t understand. Not that we shouldn’t do everything in our power from making it worse than it is, but it does make one think.

“A Song on the End of the World”

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Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)

Born in Lithuania, but known primarily as a Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz is perhaps my favorite Eastern European poet of the 20th century. In 1980, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here is one of my favorites among his works, written in Warsaw in 1944:

A Song on the End of the World

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

On Doubling Down

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The Term comes from Blackjack

If winning is everything, it is important not to ever appear to be a loser. In reporting about politics, one often hears about someone “doubling down.” What that usually means is that one takes a position and sticks with it come hell or high water.

Probably the best example is Donald Trump who after four years still claims that he won the 2020 election, and that the Democrats and Joe Biden cheated him out of the presidency.

The term comes from the card game Blackjack. According to Technopedia:

Double down in blackjack is an option where you add an extra bet, equal to the initial one, and you only receive one extra card in the hand.

This feature is available in most blackjack games and is required for optimal strategy. However, it can be a risky move since you stand to lose more money in the hand. That is why it is very important to know when to do it.

Eric Cartman

Other than Trump, the person on television most associated with the practice of doubling down on almost every issue is Eric Cartman on the cartoon show “South Park” Typically, he will take a wrong-headed stance and hold to it until he fails openly and utterly.

This type of behavior is associated with a fear of making mistakes. The fact that we are human means that we will often make mistakes. It is far better to own up to them and learn from them than to double down on a dubious position. As writer Neil Gaiman wrote:

hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something.

IIn my life, I have always distrusted people who always claimed to be right. That’s just one of a thousand reasons I would never vote for Trump or any of his ilk.

An Architectural Marvel

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The Getty Center in Los Angeles

In general, I am not a big fan of contemporary architecture. I get tired of giant rectangles constructed of steel and glass. Ever since it opened its doors in 1997, I have come to love the Getty Center. (I also love the Getty Villa in Malibu, but I’ll save that for another time.)

Architect Richard Meier spent thirteen years designing the center, with the kind of attention to detail used to site ancient Egyptian or Meso-American temples. For instance, some of the buildings on the campus are oriented north/south. Others parallel the line of the I-405 freeway, which is 22.5° degrees off the north/south axis—which is exactly one-half of 90° and one-fourth of 180°.

The buildings are faced with blocks of travertine from Italy or aluminum tiles, both of which are 30 inches square (or 76.2 centimeters). Below is a close-up of one of the highly textured travertine walls:

Travertine Blocks Forming Getty Center Outer Wall

When I open the front door of my apartment in the morning to pick up my copy of the Los Angeles Times, I can actually see the Getty Center atop its hill some 4.5 miles (7.24 kilometers) as the crow flies. For more info about the Center’s design, click here.

In the Shadow of (Male) Genius

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French Sculptor Camille Claudel (1864-1943)

The 19th century was not a good time for a female artist of genius to enter the orbit of an older male genius. Can one ever escape that orbit? The above photo was taken of Camille Claudel at the age of nineteen, when she started working in Auguste Rodin’s sculpture studio.

Now there is no doubt that Rodin was one of the greatest sculptors who ever lived. I visited his museum on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris over twenty years ago. In fact, there was a whole room dedicated to the work of his young protegée.

But she deserved more. Today, I visited the Getty Center, where there was a traveling exhibit of Camille Claudel’s sculpture. Seen by itself, it was nothing short of amazing.

“The Age of Maturity” (1902)

There is something particularly poignant about Claudel’s female nudes. I was particularly struck by the pleading figures such as the nude in “The Age of Maturity” (above). Another impressive nude appears below:

“Wounded Niobid” (1907)

There was also something wounded about poor Camille. Around the time of the above sculpture, she appeared to be suffering from mental illness. In fact, in 1913, her younger brother, the famous French author Paul Claudel, had her committed to an insane asylum, where she lived out the last thirty years of her life. Was she in fact mentally ill? Some say yes and some say no. In any case, it is a tragedy considering what a great artist she was.

In 1988, a film of her life called Camille Claudel was made in France by Bruno Nuytten, starring the lovely Isabelle Adjani as Camille. When I first saw it years ago, that was the first time I had heard of her. Now, with this exhibit at the Getty Center, I think she is one of the all time greatest sculptors whose work I have ever seen.

Tolstoy on the 2024 Election

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Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Well, of course Tolstoy did not write anything about our upcoming presidential election, but what he said back over 125 years ago can still resonate with Americans today. Below is an excerpt from his diary entry for February 7, 1895.

The situation of the majority of people educated in true brotherly love and now oppressed by the deceit and cunning of those who wield power and who force the majority to ruin their own lives—this situation is terrible and seems to offer no way out. Only two ways out present themselves and both are barred: one is to break violence by violence, terror, dynamite bombs and daggers as our nihilists and anarchists did, to smash the conspiracy of governments against peoples, without our participation; the other is to enter into agreement with the government, make concessions to it and, by taking part in it, gradually unravel the net which holds the people fast and free it….

Dynamite and daggers, as experience shows us, only provoke reaction and destroy the most valuable power, the only power in our control—public opinion; the other way out is barred by the fact that governments have already come to know how far to tolerate the participation of people who want to reform them. They only tolerate what doesn’t destroy the essentials, and are very sensitive about what is harmful to them, sensitive because it concerns their very existence. They do tolerate people who don’t agree with them and want to reform the government, not only to satisfy the demands of these people, but also for their own sakes, for the sake of the government. These people would be dangerous for governments if they remained outside these governments and rose up against them; they would strengthen the one weapon which is stronger than governments—public opinion—and so they need to make these people safe, win them over by means of concessions made by the government, render them harmless like microbe cultures—and then use them to serve the aims of governments, i.e., the oppression and exploitation of the people.

Both ways out are firmly and impenetrably barred. What then remains? You can’t break violence by violence—you increase reaction; nor can you join the ranks of government. Only one thing remains: to fight the government with weapons of thought, word and way of life, not making concessions to it, not joining its ranks, not increasing its power oneself.

From Ghoulardi to Rollergirl

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Heather Graham as Rollergirl in Boogie Nights

She’s an attractive young star in the stable of go-to actresses around Burt Reynold’s porn studio in the 1970s and 1980s. Called Rollergirl because she never takes off her inline skates, even during sex, she helps to recruit Mark Wahlberg by seducing him in the nightclub where he works as a bus boy. She is an intriguing presence in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Boogie Nights (1997).

Decades before the film was made, the director’s father, Ernie Anderson, was a big star on WJW-TV, Channel 8 in Cleveland. He played a character named Ghoulardi who hosted horror films between 1963 and 1966. In between scenes of the films he showed, he made fun of Cleveland¹s Polish population with their polkas and white socks and flamingo lawn ornaments, and particularly when they lived in the southwestern suburb of “PAHR-ma?” His catch phrases were “turn blue” and “stay sick.”

If you were a teenager in Cleveland during the 1860s, you watched Ghoulardi and adopted his mannerisms the next Monday in the school cafeteria.

One final note: If you watched reruns of the Carol Burnett Show, you may recall that in the opening scene, when Carol comes out on stage to answer questions from the audience, she occasionally gave a call-our to Ernie Anderson, who was a frequent member of the studio audience. Ernie typically smiled and gave a little wave to acknowledge. That was Ghoulardi, who had come to Los Angeles and served a number of years as announcer for the show after Lyle Waggoner had left.

It’s a long way from horror films in Cleveland in the 1960s to his son’s explicit study of the emerging L.A. porn scene filmed in 1997.

My Cities: Cleveland

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This is the first in a series of posts on cities where I have lived or traveled to or even just yearned to visit. It is natural that I begin with the city in which I was born, namely, Cleveland, Ohio. Once I left to go to college in 1962, my visits have all involved school vacations, family visits, or family funerals. In the 1960s, Cleveland was a city that was going nowhere. Jobs were vanishing, particularly from what had once been a healthy industrial base.

And, to make matters worse, my parents’ marriage seemed to be coming apart, after almost twenty years. (Fortunately, it never did.) Nonetheless, I didn’t want to stick around for the escalating nastiness.

So when, during a family truce, my folks drove me to the wilds of New Hampshire, I was already not planning ever to return to Cleveland unless I had to. It was only when I wound up in Los Angeles to attend grad school that Mom and Dad realized that I would never again live in the family home on Lawndale Drive.

Yet after almost half a century on the West Coast, I no longer have any negative feelings about Cleveland and the monster that, according to Seymour Krebs of “Dobie Gillis” fame, devoured it. On the other hand, there is no longer any reason for me to go there. My mother and father have both passed on (in 1998 and 1985 respectively), and my brother now lives in the Coachella Valley of California. My uncle and aunt are no more, and my cousin Emil is also gone. The only remaining members of my family are my cousin Peggy and her three daughters—but I was never particularly close to them as I was to Emil.

Cleveland has some wonderful museums, a world-class symphony orchestra, and some top-notch colleges and universities. But lost forever is the Hungarian neighborhood that helped nurture me—all moved to the distant suburbs and become deracinated.

Morning

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The following short poem from William Blake’s MS. book and is typical of his best work early in his career (around 1800-1903).

Morning

To find the Western path
Right thro’ the Gates of Wrath
I urge my way.
Sweet Mercy leads me on.
With soft repentant moan
I see the break of day.

The war of swords & spears
Melted by dewy tears
Exhales on high.
The Sun is freed from fears
And with soft grateful tears
Ascends the sky.