Music I'm Listening to: Tracy Silverstein (and my son) with the Santa Rosa Symphony

Some photos from last night's Santa Rosa Symphony concert. Maestro Bruno Ferrandis conducted Prelude and Liebestad from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, The Dharma at Big Sur for Electric Violin, by John Adams, and Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky. Tracy Silverstein was the soloist on electric violin, Jacalyn Kreitzer (mezzo-soprano) was soloist in the Prokofiev, which also featured the Sonoma State University Symphonic Chorus. My son, Warren, played a solo piece before the concert Rhapsodie for Solo Clarinet, by Giacomo Miluccio (1928-1999) as part of an appeal for donations to support the Santa Rosa Symphony Youth Orchestra's upcoming European Tour, in June, which will take them to Salzburg, Vienna, and Budapest. The photo above shows Warren, Principal Clarinet of the Santa Rosa Symphony Youth Orchestra with his teacher, Roy Zajac, Principal Clarinet of the Santa Rosa Symphony. Below is Tracy Silverstein with his six-stringed electric violin.

Rain: Storms Bring More than Three Inches

Storms yesterday and last night brought us 3.15 inches of very welcome new rain. That brings our total for the 2017-2018 rain year to 21.45 inches at my location in northeast Santa Rosa. Average rainfall on by April 7 in Santa Rosa is 32.67 inches. So we are more than 10 inches below normal but yesterday's storm was a significant help. More please.

[Thank you. Heavy rain on April 11 added another 1.95 inches, bringing our total to 23.4 inches. Better, but still well below normal.]

Art I'm Looking At: The Cult of the Machine at the De Young

Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930
Museum of modern Art, New York

The Cult of the Machine, now on view at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, although promoted as a look at Precisionism in general (and it is that), is a veritable Charles Sheeler retrospective. It includes some of his most important works—photographs, paintings, and drawings. It was a pleasure to see in person so many Sheelers I've long admired in reproduction, particularly the paintings he made from some of his well known photographs of Ford's River Rouge plant, and his Upper Deck (1929) and Rolling Power (1939)*.

Installation view:
Shadows cast by Shaker furniture

There is less familiar work here, too—by Sheeler, by other familiar names, and by names new to me. Besides paintings, photographs, and objects of design from the period during which the Precisionist style flourished in the United States (roughly 1915 to 1945), there is a display of Shaker-designed household items that echo in their simplicity the stylized geometries of Precisionism. The venue is also showing the brief 1921 film Sheeler made with Paul Strand, Manhatta, that looks at a day in Manhattan, inspired by Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and a looping clip from Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). The Shaker items are artfully backlit, their shadows projected onto a screen. When viewed from behind, the shadows look like one of Sheeler's cityscapes.

Strand is represented by several well-known images such as Wall Street (1915) and The Court (1924). Several of Sheeler's photographs of the Doylestown Quaker meeting house are here, as are painted and drawn versions of views he photographed there, allowing side-by-side comparisons. There are a couple of good Paul Outerbridge photos and work from photographers less familiar, such as Anton Bruehl. His Untitled, a 1929 shot of part of a Cadillac engine is striking. Some of the photographs of my grandfather, Warren R. Laity, would have been right at home here.

Anton Bruehl, Untitled, 1929
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Warren R. Laity, Mail Plane, circa 1930
(Not in show), Private collection

Gerald Murphy, Razor, 1924
Dallas Museum of Art                               

Also striking is a 1924 painting entitled Razor by Gerald Murphy that immediately brings to mind paintings from the same period by Stuart Davis that draw on advertising imagery and bright colors for their impact, works that anticipate Pop Art. There is nothing by Davis in the show and I was surprised to see only one piece by Charles Demuth—the name, along with Sheeler's, that comes to mind most readily when thinking of Precisonism. But most of the artists associated with Precisionism are here, including Joseph Stella, George Ault, Niles Spencer, Morton Shamberg, and Edmund Lewandowski. George Ault's Bright Light at Russell's Corners (1946, Smithsonian American Art Museum), a moody night scene dominated by eerily lit barns, and Lewandowski's small Furnace No. 5, are particularly attractive.

Francis Criss, Waterfront, c. 1940
Detroit Institute of Art

New to me were the painters Francis Criss, Elsie Driggs, Bumpei Usui, and Peter Blume. Criss's highly stylized Waterfront (c. 1940) reduces a waterfront industrial scene to its geometrical essence, using starkly contrasting saturated colors, a lamppost vestige of an earlier age, and a bold yellow-gold frame to heighten the effect. The frame is one of many in the show that are beautiful in their own right. Usui's 1924 New York cityscape 14th Street is a strong piece, with its cubes, cylinders, and pyramidal forms in a style reminiscent of some of the WPA frescoes of the period (and the show includes a painting by John Langley Howard, among those who contributed to the 1934 Coit Tower murals, a WPA project). There are also a couple of paintings by Georgia O'Keefe likely to seem surprisingly unlike her to most viewers. They differ markedly from the style she's best known for. One is a view of barns at Lake George. Another is a New York cityscape done from an elevated perspective—from the window of a high-rise apartment she shared there with husband Alfred Stieglitz.

Charles Sheeler, Upper Deck, 1929
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum

Precisionism was an extension of cubism in its attention to the underlying geometry of things, in its interest in architectonic form, an extension of Futurism in its obsession with the modern and with machinery, but I'm not sure how coherent it was—if it was recognized at the time as a movement at all. Perhaps underscoring that is the fact that "precisionism" was only one of several contemporary terms used to describe the style. The painters were sometimes known as "the immaculates" or they were referred to as "modern classicists." "Precisionism" is the name that has stuck. Names aside, the work on display is quintessentially of its time.

Bumpei Usui, 14th Street, 1924
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

"Precisionism" was a label given to the American expression of anxieties common between the world wars in rapidly industrializing societies globally. The paintings and photographs of the period reflect a fascination with machinery, with scale, with industrial might, but they also betray a deep, veiled fear. The clean lines, the simplified forms, and the tendency to eliminate human beings from angular cityscapes all suggest a need to slow things down, to examine reality in an artificial, controlled way, to tame things before they spin out of control. As the Cult of the Machine wall texts point out, these anxieties are familiar today, with technology rapidly outpacing our ability to adjust to it. To express the angst caused by forward leaps of technology, artists of the early twentieth century turned to depicting the physical manifestations of rapid change—to depicting bridges, dams, turbines, factories, propellers, ocean liners—large, tangible objects that overwhelm, things built not on a human scale. Artists of the early twenty-first century perhaps have a right to feel even more overwhelmed and anxious, handicapped as they are by the seemingly insubstantial nature of the technology that today drives so much change. Our technological marvels do not have an oppressive physical presence. They are not built on a grand scale. They are miniaturized and hidden behind sleek, portable steel and glass packages, hidden inside phones and tablets. They are barely visible. There is nothing to see.

The Cult of the Machine is on view at the De Young Museum (50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr, San Francisco, CA 94118) through August 12, 2018.

*It's worth noting that, in addition to the River Rouge pieces, both Upper Deck and Rolling Power were originally done as photographs (the Upper Deck photo is in the De Young show). There are many other examples of Sheeler working in a highly realistic style from photographs. I'm not aware of Sheeler being considered anticipatory to Photorealism, but surely he was, even if he usually took stylistic liberties a strict photorealist might not have.

Charles Sheeler, Rolling Power (1939)
Smith College Museum of Art

Books I'm Reading: The Second Amendment: A Biography

It seemed an appropriate time to buy The Second Amendment: A Biography (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014) when I picked it up, remaindered, at a local bookstore last year. That was before the Parkland, Florida shooting. It now seems even more appropriate to have acquired it. Having just finished the book, I can say it's an excellent introduction not only to the historical context of the 2nd Amendment's writing but to the transformation it's undergone in the past few decades—its transformation from a clause written by the founders out of fear of a standing army controlled by a tyrannical government into a statement of a fundamental individual right to own guns, a transformation effected by controversial court decisions that have had and will continue to have tragic consequences.

The Amendment, stated in full, seems simple: "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." It is one of the shortest amendments to the Constitution. It has engendered disproportionate discord. While its interpretation—notably, whether it guarantees an individual's right to own and use guns—was first challenged long ago, by 1840 the idea was firmly established that the object of the Amendment was public defense not private gun ownership and that the term "bear arms" was understood to have a military meaning. This view was made explicit in a Tennessee Supreme Court ruling in that year stating, in part "A man in pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms...."

The push to subvert these ideas began in the 1950s and gained steam in the 1970s, although the individual rights view long remained a fringe view even then. By 2008, however, District of Columbia v. Heller had overturned about 200 years of precedent. What made that possible, was intense lobbying by the NRA. Author Michael Waldman points to a survey of law review articles on the 2nd Amendment from 1888 to 1959 and notes that not a single one in that period concluded the Amendment says anything about individual gun rights. The first to contradict that idea appeared in 1960, the start of a flood of writing supporting the view. Waldman quotes one Carl Bogus (a real historian, despite his name) who points out "From 1970 to 1989, twenty-five articles adhering to the collective rights view were published [in law reviews] (nothing unusual there), but so were twenty-seven articles endorsing the individual rights model. However, at least sixteen of these articles—about 60 percent—were written by lawyers who had been directly employed by or represented the NRA or other gun rights organizations." Thus, through strategic long-term planning, the NRA and its supporters were well on their way to success in changing the legal meaning of the Amendment already by 1989. Still, Waldman argues, historians had not at that time (and largely still haven't) changed their view of the meaning of the Amendment—despite subsequent legal developments—which is to say that current law, underpinned by Heller, defies logic and the majority view, reflecting a minority viewpoint vociferously defended by the NRA and other lobbyists for gun manufacturers.

It would take almost 20 more years to get us to the Heller decision, and a willingness to toss aside the 2nd Amendment's initial clause "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State...." Waldman points out that Justice Scalia, in his majority opinion in Heller, essentially ignored that clause, as does the abridged quote of the Amendment on the wall of the lobby of NRA headquarters, which reads only "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" as if the prefatory clause does not exist. What allowed the Heller decision to, as Waldman puts it, use "pages of highly selective historical readings from two hundred years ago that ignore the history of the past hundred years" to essentially rewrite the Constitution was a shift in public opinion among a disproportionately vocal minority, coached and underwritten by the NRA. Essentially, the Heller decision became possible because of NRA influence on public opinion. The 2nd Amendment doesn't and never did mean what Heller proclaims it to mean, but Heller has established a new basis for interpreting the Constitution.

Waldman's book is well worth the time it takes to read for the deep context it gives to the current difference of opinion about gun law in the United States. The essential conclusion I have drawn from reading the book is that I have been right in my conviction that the 2nd Amendment's meaning has been perverted, that District of Columbia v. Heller, like Citizens United, was a disastrously misguided decision, but that we are stuck with it. We are forced to live with it and to die with it, for the time being, at least.

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 198 (Santa Rosa)

The first successful collage I've done in too many weeks. Sometimes they are a struggle. I'm now quite pleased with this—a much-simplified remnant of a larger piece that stubbornly refused to come alive.

This is Untitled Collage No. 198 (Santa Rosa). April 2, 2018. Acrylic on paper, acrylic monotype, graphite, archival marker (fragment of a doodling robot drawing), collage. Image size: 13.5 x 12.3cm (5.3 x 4.8 inches). Matted to 11 x 14 inches. Signed on the mat. Signed and dated on the reverse.

For more of my collage (and other) work, visit my website at http://ctalcroft.wixsite.com/collage-site.

Serendipitous Art: Scratched Door (March 29, 2018)

Scratches on a metal door looked like art to me. Unintended art.

Click on the image for a larger view. For more unintended art, see my blog Serendipitous Art.

Music I'm Listening To: Gil Shaham with the San Francisco Symphony

I attended the March 23 performance of the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall. MTT conducted. Gil Shaham performed Berg's Violin Concerto before intermission. Mahler's Symphony No. 5 followed the intermission. Although I have two recordings of the Berg concerto, a recent one by Gil Shaham (1930s Violin Concertos Volume 1, Canary Classics CC12), the other from 1984 (the first CD I ever bought) by Kyung-wha Chung, (London 411 804-2), I don't know the piece well enough to have a strong opinion about the interpretation, but I enjoyed watching the performers, particularly as the session was recorded for the purpose of a release on CD. The soloist was flanked by a pair of microphones and there were several in positions not usually present, although all San Francisco Symphony performances are recorded for the archives, I believe.

It was particularly interesting to watch Shaham with concertmaster Barantschik and associate concertmaster Nadya Tichman in some of the more lyrical passages where the two lead violins seem to double the soloist. I noticed also that the antiphonal seating arrangement was used for this concert, presumably because that's what Mahler would have imagined. In this arrangement, the first violins are where we are used to seeing them in the US but the second violins are on the other side of the conductor, where we normally would expect to see the cello section, with the violas toward the middle but closer to stage left (audience right), the cellos toward the middle but closer to stage right (audience left), and the basses more or less behind the first violins. Doing a little research, the familiar arrangement with the first and second violins stage right, the violas in the middle, the cello section stage left, and with the basses behind the cello section was apparently thought up by Leopold Stokowski and the change is referred to as "the Stokowski shift." Watching a live performance always highlights the sort of thing you might not notice listening to a recording.

I'm generally not a fan of MTT. In fact, when buying subscription seats, we usually go out of our way to avoid him, choosing the guest conductors instead. I suppose mine is a minority opinion, but when I've seen him conduct, he often seems aloof—bored even, simply going through the motions. I've never really been impressed. Watching him conduct the Mahler 5th was different. He seemed quite the opposite—intensely engaged throughout the performance, keeping the orchestra with him the entire way.

And a long way it is. The performance lasted 82 minutes. While that included longer breaks between movements than would be typical in a recording, I'd say it was just under 80 minutes of actual playing. I went back through my various recordings of this piece. The shortest of them is 62 minutes, a 1975 recording on LP from Maurice Abravanel and the Utah Symphony (Vanguard Everyman SRV 321/2), the longest 74 minutes, a 1969 recording by Barbirolli and the New Philharmonia Orchestra re-released on CD in the early 1990s (EMI Classics CDM 7 64749 2). Coincidentally, the three others I have are all 69 minutes--Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic recorded live in 2002 (EMI Classics 5 57385 2), another live recording, this time with Solti and the Chicago Symphony (Decca 433 329-2), and a recording by Sinopoli and the Philharmonia Orchestra (Deutsche Gramophon 415 476-2). All of which is to say that MTT's reading was a very slow one, yet it felt perfect. In fact, much of its strength seemed to come from his willingness to resist the temptation to rush in places where the temptation must be great. This was the first time I'd heard MTT doing Mahler (for which, he is known, of course). It was a very persuasive performance indeed. The performers were superb throughout. In places the clarity and precision of the playing was breathtaking. Perhaps MTT is just lackluster when he's bored?

Photo of Gil Shaham by Luke Ratray. Photo of MTT conducting by Kristen Loken. Photos courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony

Plants I'm Growing: First Blooms—Flowering Crabapple, California Poppies (March 26, 2018)

Yesterday, March 26, brought the first blooms on the flowering crabapple in the side garden. The first California poppies in the garden bloomed yesterday, too, although they've been blooming in various places around town for the last week or more. This is fairly typical for the crabapple, which usually blooms in the second week of March in early years, the last week of March when it's later, and for the poppies as well. In past years they've opened as early as the first week of March and usually always before April.

Miscellaneous: The March for Our Lives (March 24, 2018)

It was heartening today to see Santa Rosa's Courthouse Square filled with protestors of all ages demanding better gun control, but particularly heartening to see so many young people participating and speaking out. Maybe we really have reached a tipping point? I say, from now on, let an "A" rating from the NRA be a new kind of scarlet letter, standing not for "adulterer" pinned on the breast of Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, but standing for "accomplice" and "accessory" to murder. Let the NRA "A" rating be no longer a badge of submission to the NRA worn by spineless representatives in thrall to the gun lobby, but a guide to voters no longer content to tolerate politicians ignoring the will of the majority of the people on this issue.

Rain: A week of Rain—March 19-22, 2018

Rain the past few days, at times hard, has added 1.65 inches of new precipitation to our total at my northeast Santa Rosa location. That brings the total here for the 2017–2018 rain year to 18.05 inches. That's a good bump, but normal for March 22 in Santa Rosa is almost 31 inches, so, we remain well below normal. It's easy to get tired of rain, but we need much more.

[Subsequent showers added another 0.25 inches to bring the total to 18.30 inches as of March 25.]

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 197 (Santa Rosa)

My most recent collage. A small piece that once again includes a bit of hand-written music from a stack of old music given me by fellow collage artist Sherry Parker. The music has a seductive charm of its own, but here I've used it purely as an abstract design element.

This is Untitled Collage No. 197 (Santa Rosa). January 29, 2018. Acrylic on paper, acrylic monotype, found paper, collage. Image size: 13.3 x 12.0cm (5.2 x 4.7 inches). Signed on the mat. Signed and dated on the reverse.

For more of my collage (and other) work, visit my website at http://ctalcroft.wixsite.com/collage-site.

Books I'm Reading: Heisenberg's War

I've read a number books about the development of the atomic bomb and a detailed biography of Robert Oppenheimer. These books focused on bomb development efforts in the US, only touching lightly on German efforts to build an atomic bomb during WWII. Heisenberg's War (Knopf, 1993) looks at German progress toward a nuclear device in detail by examining what Werner Heisenberg was up to during the lead-up to the war and during the conflict and what the allies thought he was up to.

During the war, Heisenberg was regarded by the allies and his peers as the most important scientist in Germany. If anyone could build a bomb for Hitler, it would be Heisenberg, and fear of Hitler with an atomic bomb was the primary motivation behind the Manhattan Project, the concerted US effort to beat Hitler to the punch, at least at the outset. It was unclear, however, whether Germany was attempting to create a bomb. A great deal of intelligence gathering was aimed at trying to piece together a picture of German bomb plans. That uncertainty was a spur in the flank of the allied bomb builders. Signs coming out of Germany were ambiguous. Clearly the Germans were interested in heavy water, but, oddly, German scientific journals following the discovery of fission (not long before the start of the war) continued to publish routine articles about nuclear theory as if it was of no immediate importance except as a potential source of energy. The US enforced a moratorium on articles about nuclear research of any kind; the government did not want to arouse suspicion that it was interested in the subject, nor did it wish to give away any useful information. But routine public activity among German scientists might have been part of a deception....

As for theory, there was disagreement among scientists around the world about the nature of the nuclear chain reaction we now know is required to produce an explosion and about how much fissile material would be required to sustain such a reaction and a detonation. If tons of uranium would be required, it would be impossible to make a bomb small enough to transport by air to any target destination (early on there was talk about exploding a large bomb on a boat in an enemy port). In the early days, there was disagreement about whether such a reaction was possible at all, although scientists in the US (many who had fled Europe) were fairly quick to understand that a bomb was possible and what it would require to build a bomb--either enriched uranium or plutonium.

Natural uranium consists of two isotopes, Uranium 235 and Uranium 238. The heavier isotope, U-238, predominates. If my understanding is correct, U-238 absorbs neutrons to the extent that it hinders the chain reaction while U-235 does less so. Therefore, a bomb can be made with a much smaller amount of U-235. With an enriched mix of the two isotopes (more U-235 than in a natural sample), critical mass, it was understood, would be about the size of a pineapple and even smaller using pure U-235. The problem is that separating the two isotopes is a slow, expensive process. Many physicists at the time concluded that a bomb would take many years to develop because of the time required to separate enough U-235 to do the job. Meanwhile some physicists surmised that certain reactor designs could be used to produce plutonium, an element that had been discovered only recently. Plutonium is much easier to produce in quantity than enriched uranium. It was a U-235 bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima, but the Trinity test detonation was a plutonium bomb, as was the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. That is, ultimately the Manhattan project succeeded in enriching uranium, in producing plutonium, and in developing explosive nuclear device designs that worked both with enriched uranium and plutonium, but, as history has shown, it was a massive effort involving more than 130,000 workers, multiple production sites, and the equivalent of about US$23 billion in today's money.    

Despite worry in the US about Hitler acquiring a bomb before the allies, German scientists appear to have believed the idea was impractical (essentially that it would have required far more money than was likely to be available) and that it would be impossible to build an atomic bomb quickly enough to win the war with such a device. They also clung much longer to the idea that tons of fissile material would be required. Scientists in Germany did understand that it might have been done if there had been a will to do it (as the allies proved), yet they never asked for funding or much other support from Hitler's government. Author Thomas Powers suggests persuasively that that was a reflection of moral compunction. Few German nuclear physicists wanted a weapon of mass destruction at the disposal of a man like Hitler. More pointedly, Powers suggests Heisenberg deliberately exaggerated the difficulties of making a bomb and never let on that he understood the physics as well as he did, giving the lasting impression of relative German incompetence. When asked, Heisenberg repeatedly said critical mass would be a ton or two of fissile material long after he appears to have understood that was not true. Heisenberg attracted suspicion and mistrust in the scientific community worldwide because he decided to remain in Germany after most others had fled the country and Nazi-occupied Europe. He remained in Germany throughout the war. There was much speculation then and later about his loyalties, but he appears to have been fiercely loyal to Germany rather than to the Nazi Party.

The book does not read like an apology. It seems even-handed. It appears to be well researched and meticulously documented. Its arguments are compelling. The book is interesting for the broad sweep of history it presents as much for the intimate details it offers of allied monitoring of German bomb development, often drawn from primary sources. Recommended, although Heisenberg's War may offer a little too much detail for a reader only casually interested in its subject matter, a problem compounded by the fact that it becomes clear fairly early in the narrative that the Germans had no hope of making a bomb before the end of the war, in large part because no one in Germany was trying very hard.

Rain: More Rain (March 11-12, 2018)

A good storm yesterday and today left us with 1.15 inches of new rain, bringing our total so far in the 2017-2018 rain year to 14.65 inches. Normal for March 13 in Santa Rosa is going on 30 inches, however, which means we are way behind where we should be. Rain is forecast for tomorrow again. The more, the better.

[Update: More rain on March 14-15 added 1.65 inches to our total, which now stands at 16.30 inches. Better, but we need much more.]

[Update: Rain again since last reporting has brought the total as of today, March 18, to 16.40 inches.]

Plants I'm Growing: First Blooms—Species Tulips, Michelia Yunanensis, and Two-toned Daffodils

A little warmth in the air today and a lull in the rain has coaxed out some new flowers in the garden. Today, March 9, the first species tulips bloomed (in this case Tulipa bakeri). First blooms today also on Michelia yunnanensis, a small tree related to the magnolias. Belatedly, I report also the first blooms on the two-toned daffodils in the garden, which opened on February 24.

The Cocktail Glass Collection: Neon Cocktail Glass with Unusual Garnish

Here's another neon cocktail glass to add to my collection. Until now, I've found such signs only in front of bars, so this one's an outlier. It's not in front of a bar but in front of one of San Francisco's North Beach topless clubs--which explains the unusual garnish. It reminded me of a Mel Ramos painting. Is that a very large olive? A melon, maybe?

For more, click the "Cocktail Glass Collection" label at right at the top of the page.

Rain: Finally, More Rain (February-early March 2018)

After a very, very dry February, we've finally had a little real rain again (on the night of February 25-26 mostly), adding 0.30 inches. More rain is in the forecast for the coming few days. The more the better. So far, our total stands at only 10.95 inches, which is well below normal for the end of February. We'll see how much new rain we get in the coming week.

[Update: On the night of March 1, very heavy rain added 1.35 inches to our total. We now stand at 12.30 inches for the year as of March 1 noon, but more rain is forecast for tonight.]

[Update: As of noon on March 3, we've had an additional 0.90 inches, bringing the total to 13.20 inches for the year so far.]

[Update: Another 0.30 inches brought the total as of March 8 to 13.50 inches. It's supposed to rain for much of the coming week.]

Miscellaneous: Mass School Shootings--Here We are Again

Personally, I believe the 2nd Amendment doesn't (and was never intended to) guarantee an unrestricted right to all citizens to own any kind of firearm. I believe the NRA and gun rights supporters have perverted the meaning of the 2nd Amendment, but, let's set that aside for a moment. Let's assume it DOES guarantee that right. If it does, then, on the face of it, it imposes no restrictions on the kind of arms citizens are allowed to bear (throwing out the well-regulated militia idea as well, for the sake of argument and ignoring the fact that "bear arms" was never, until recently, understood to be the equivalent of "own a gun"). Logically, that means all US citizens have a constitutional right to own and use ANY kind of arms--simply, "to bear arms"; this is the NRA position. There seems to be a logical inconsistency here, though. Why stop at an AR-15 then? US citizens, by this interpretation have the right to own bazookas, cruise missiles, even ICBMs with nuclear warheads, if they can afford to buy such a thing. Further then, the authorities are failing to uphold the Constitution if they refuse citizens the right to buy nuclear weapons, cruise missiles, bazookas, machine guns--anything.

Crazy? Maybe, but even the Lapierres of the world seem to balk at claiming an individual's right to own an ICBM. To own a cruise missile maybe? Probably not. To own a bazooka? Maybe: I think there are probably a few gun rights activists who are angry they can't own a bazooka. So, even the staunchest gun advocates draw a line SOMEWHERE--somewhere just beyond a bazooka, perhaps. If so, that means even gun rights advocates recognize a class of weapons the ownership of which is NOT protected by the 2nd Amendment--that is, that the 2nd Amendment does not guarantee an individual's right to own ANY kind of weapon, that there are exceptions, limits. This is the common ground between gun control advocates and gun rights advocates.

I have to wonder: on what basis do gun advocates concede (if they do) that the Constitution does not guarantee citizens the right to own certain kinds of arms--say, a cruise missile? Presumably they would acknowledge that it is because such a missile is a weapon of war designed solely for the purpose of killing many human beings quickly. That suggests an obvious question: is an AR-15 different? I don't think it is. Someone please explain to me how an AR-15 or similar small arm is different in that respect from a bazooka, a cruise missile, a nuclear ICBM?

But, of course, this is all nonsense. The Amendment was written to protect state militias (well-regulated state militias) from the potential threat of a tyrannical government wielding a standing army against the people, and, historically, "to bear arms" has almost always meant "military service," not "own a gun." The Second Amendment says nothing about a private right to own weapons, and virtually any child can see that a right to the possession of anything has no place trumping the right to live in safety and with piece of mind.  It's time to take back the 2nd Amendment.

Art I'm Looking At: Robert Rauschenberg and Walker Evans at SF MOMA

Robert Rauschenberg, Collection (1954/1955)
San Francisco Museum of Art

I recently saw the Robert Rauschenberg retrospective now on view at SF MOMA (November 18, 2017 through March 25, 2018). I think the most striking thing about the show is the impression it gives that Rauschenberg was, essentially, a collage artist. Often his work actually was collage (or assemblage, the three-dimensional version of collage), but even when he was not making collages or assemblages, his sensibility remained that of a collagist to a remarkable degree; it was his instinct to juxtapose fragments of things.

Robert Rauschenberg, From
34 Illustrations for Dante's Inferno (1958-1960)

He came into his own at the height of abstract expressionism and matured as pop art emerged, but, looking at his work, he seems to be of neither movement. He worked large, but I don't feel he was concerned about the idea of the heroic painter. Although he incorporated commercial images and everyday objects into his work, I doubt his intent was to comment on consumerism and consumption or on how the media represent the world. He was an aesthete. What seems revolutionary was that he succeeded in created so much visually engaging work without using pretty materials. Up close, many of the pieces are messy (sometimes made out of actual trash), but ultimately they always seem to be about composition. Radical approaches and materials never trump composition.

Walker Evans
Garage in Southern City Outskirts, Atlanta Georgia (1936, printed 1972)

I also saw the large Walker Evans retrospective (closed February 4)—one of those shows that puts the best known work of an artist into perspective, teaching that the most familiar work is not necessarily the most representative. I had seen mostly Walker's familiar depression-era photographs before, but not a lot else, I realize now.

Walker Evans
Tin Snips by J. Wiss and Sons Co. (1955)

The exhibition looked at Walker's career from the perspective of his interest in the everyday, his implicit rejection of the formal, highly aestheticized conception of photography in the work of photographers like Stieglitz. Walker was interested in the things around him and in revealing them as they were. I think it was Ansel Adams who once said you don't "take" a photograph, you "make" a photograph, emphasizing the control of the photographer over the viewed world that resides in the finished image; the photographer is seen as a manipulator of the seen world, but Walker would have rejected that idea. His interest was in recording the present, taking what was there for what it was. A comparison with Atget is an obvious one, but I wasn't aware that Walker was conscious of and inspired by Atget. Apparently he was. Walker had seen and studied Atget's photographs (several of which appear in the show near similar views by Evans). I especially enjoyed a series of photographs of everyday objects shot almost as if intended for a sales catalog, such as the tin snips shown here. An enlightening show that was well worth seeing.  

Michael Christie and Anna Fedorova with the Santa Rosa Symphony

I had the privilege of being the backstage photographer at the Santa Rosa Symphony again on February 13 at the Green Music Center. Santa Rosa Symphony director candidate Michael Christie led the Symphony in Bernstein's music from On the Waterfront, Prokofieff's Piano Concerto No. 3, and Dvorak's Symphony No. 9. Anna Fedorova was soloist in the concerto.

Wines I'm Making: Bottling 2016 Zinfandel and 2017 Rosé

I finally got around to bottling our 2017 rosé last week and it was time to get the 2016 Zinfandel I made from our neighbor's grapes into bottle as well, so I spent a day at it. I designed labels for the two wines as well as for a few older bottles of rosé that hadn't been labeled. Everything looks pretty good.

Plants I'm Growing: First Blooms--Yellow Daffodils (February 4, 2018)

The yellow daffodils in the front garden starting blooming yesterday, February 4, 2018, in response to the unseasonably warm weather we've had this week. It seems like spring already, with highs in the 70s. That said, this has been typical. These flowers have frequently bloomed in the first week of February since I started keeping track.

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 196 (Santa Rosa)

A new collage. This is Untitled Collage No. 196 (Santa Rosa). January 26, 2018. Acrylic on paper, acrylic monotype, graphite, found paper. Image size: 16.4 x 20.3cm (6.5 x 8.0 inches). Matted to 16 x 20 inches. Signed on the mat. Signed and dated on the reverse.

For more, see my collage website at: http://ctalcroft.wixsite.com/collage-site

Music I'm Listening To: San Francisco Symphony led by Thierry Fischer, Soloist Gautier Capuçon

I attended the January 28 evening performance at Davies Symphony Hall. Conductor Thierry Fischer replaced Charles Dutoit on the podium, but the program was otherwise unchanged. He led the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The concert opened with Debussy's Petite Suite, followed by Haydn's Cello Concerto No. 1 and, after intermission, Stravinsky's Firebird Suite. Gautier Capuçon was soloist in the Haydn concerto.

Technical brilliance is by no means the only measure of a performer or a performance, but Capuçon is one of those who enters the stage with an aura of utter confidence and plays with such surety that, as a listener, you can take in a live performance with no anxiety—knowing that whatever happens on stage will be right. He is entirely persuasive. His performance of the Haydn concerto was taut with energy, passionate and gritty in places, yet lyrical where lyrical was called for.

Maybe it's just me, but when I listen to cello performances, I often find the four strings can have rather obvious differences of tone that don't always mesh well. The high string will be strident relative to the others or the low string too boomy. I thought Capuçon's cello unusually in synch with itself. According to Wikipedia, he mainly plays a 1701 instrument made by Matteo Gofriller, but also has a 1746 instrument by Joseph Contreras (both on loan to him). I don't know which he played on Sunday, but I liked its sound.

The audience was very appreciative. Following an extended standing ovation, Capuçon played El cant dels ocells (Song of the Birds) as an encore, supported by a number of cellos and basses in the orchestra. This Song of the Birds, based on a traditional Catalan song, seems to be a favorite encore among cellists following in the footsteps of Pablo Casals who regularly played it after concerts as a form of protest against the fascist Franco regime of Spain. I've heard  Zuill Bailey play it as encore as well.

Debussy's Petite Suite is always pleasant and it was fun to hear The Firebird Suite live. It's one of those pieces that offers a lot to look at on stage. I thought the performance of the latter a bit lacking in coherence here and there, but good overall. The audience was again very appreciative, offering another long standing ovation that resulted in another encore, the orchestra doing a lively run through something from one of Bizet's L'arlisienne suites. I noticed the Royal Philharmonic seats its musicians a bit idiosyncratically. Often European ensembles put the cellos stage right (while we usually put them stage left). In this case, the cellos were stage right but on the inside with the violas on the outside, closest to the audience. I noticed also that the Royal Philharmonic brought its own music stands.*

[*Correction: It appears that the San Francisco Symphony has acquired new music stands. They were still present at the next concert I attended. They're attractive.]

Photo of Thierry Fischer by Marco Borggrove. Photo of Gautier Capuçon by Gregory Batardon. Photos courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony.
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Books I'm Reading: The Drunken Botanist

Amy Stewart's  The Drunken Botanist (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2013), is a versatile book likely to be of interest to anyone with even a passing interest in the things we drink and the plants we grow. The main text is divided into three sections: a look at fermentation and distillation; a look at the main plant ingredients of the liquors and liqueurs that go into alcoholic beverages; and then a look at various plants used in mixers and garnishes. Within these sections, short briefs (one to four pages each) treat the plants covered. Interspersed are cocktail recipes that use ingredients described and even short notes on how to grow some of the plants mentioned. Thus, the book is part plant dictionary, part cocktail recipe book, and part a grower's guide. The main sections are subdivided by type of plant. For example, section two is divided into herbs and spices, flowers, trees, fruit, and nuts and seeds. That arrangement, alphabetical listing within sections, and a good index make it easy to use the book as a reference, but it's engaging enough to read straight through.

Books I'm Reading: The Billionaire's Vinegar

I recently finished a book about forged art (specifically, about fake Vermeers). Mentioning that book to a friend prompted her to lend me The Billionaire's Vinegar, by Benjamin Wallace (Three Rivers Press, 2008), another book about forgery--in this case, forged wine. The emergence in 1985 of bottles of wine from the 1784, 1787, and other vintages purportedly owned by Thomas Jefferson, supposedly purchased by him during stays in Paris at around that time, was big news taken up by newspapers and news magazines around the world. I remember the stories. Skepticism wasn't far behind. The Billionaire's Vinegar is a nice piece of investigative journalism that goes a long way toward unraveling the mystery behind the discovery of the wine, its sensational sale for hundreds of thousands of dollars, the doubts about its authenticity and the authenticity of other antique bottles, and the investigations that ultimately exposed the Thomas Jefferson wines as having been faked by one Hardy Rodenstock, whose real name was Meinhard Görke.

Rodenstock was a genuine connoisseur, it seems, and, at least at first, had a talent for discovering genuine old bottles, usually buying them from forgotten cellars at old estates in Britain and Europe. He was something of a showman, too, and became known for staging incredible vertical tastings of some of the world's most sought-after wine. Inevitably, the supply of genuine bottles (small to begin with) began to dwindle following a boom in the world of fine wine actions that fueled demand, prompted collectors to sell old wine, and spurred old wine sleuths to find it. Rodenstock turned to forgery. As is so often the case with good forgers that eventually get caught, he began to get a little reckless--coming up with finds that began to seem too good to be credible. However, in a familiar pattern, some who initially judged some of his questionable wines to be genuine stubbornly stuck with him even as suspicion grew, because their reputations had become entangled with his. Michael Broadbent was the main casualty. Jancis Robinson was peripherally tainted, although less so.

Among those who bought fake wine from Rodenstock were the Forbes family and billionaire Bill Koch who brought his wealth to bear once his suspicions were aroused, funding an extensive (one might say obsessive) forensic investigation into the Jefferson bottle and others he had bought. Koch ended up spending several times the $150,000 or so the Jefferson bottle cost to ultimately determine that not only was it a fake but that Rodenstock had sold a string of highly questionable bottles over the years, notably old vintages of Chateau d'Yquem and other old Bordeaux in great years and in large-formats (imperials of 1921 Chateu Pétrus, for example, although the chateau had no record of any such bottling)--precisely the sort of rarity that collectors lust after. As in the case of Han van Meegeren's forged Vermeers, Rodenstock's forged wines cannily exploited the desires and assumptions of their victims, along with sometimes sketchy record keeping and simply the passage of time.

Koch ultimately filed a civil suit against Rodenstock in 2006 and won a judgment against him by default in 2010. Broadbent, meanwhile, unhappy about how he was portrayed in The Billionaire's Vinegar, sued Random House (which initially published the book) for libel. The dispute was settled out of court but the agreement stopped publication of the book in the UK and, according to the Wikipedia article on Hardy Rodenstock, the settlement forced Random House to state in court that allegations in the book were untrue, yet the company made no changes to the text and it appeared in all other markets. Given that and the ease with which books can be acquired from anywhere through the Internet, the stay of publication in the UK seems to have been a fairly hollow victory for Broadbent. The Billionaire's Vinegar is a mystery solved, a tale of greed and big money, and a cautionary tale all in one. Well researched, briskly written. Recommended.
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The Cocktail Glass Collection: Pop's Bar, San Francisco

I think this may be my new favorite neon cocktail glass sign in San Francisco (hitherto, the sign at The 500 Club at 500 Guerrero St. has been my favorite, and it's still pretty fabulous). I love the bright neon doubled lettering, in particular. There's a nice mix of colors here, too--with white, pink, orange, yellow, and green tubes. The effect is enhanced by the Christmas lights wrapped around the tree just outside the entrance. This is Pop's Bar, at 2800 24th Street (at the corner of 24th and York St.).

For more, click the "Cocktail Glass Collection" label at right at the top of the page. Click the image for a larger view.

At I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 195 (Santa Rosa)

My latest collage. I was in the mood for yellow. I started out with the idea of doing something entirely in shades of yellow, but the process has a way of taking over. Collages have a way of going where they will, and this is where this one went. This is Untitled Collage No. 195 (Santa Rosa). December 20, 2017. Image size: 25.7 x 34.8cm (10.1 x 13.7 inches). Acrylic on paper, acrylic monotype, found paper, graphite, collage. Matted to 20 x 24 inches. Signed on the mat. Signed and dated on the reverse.

Books I'm Reading: The Forger's Spell

Edward Dolnick's The Forger's Spell (Harper Perennial, 2008) is the story of one of the biggest art hoaxes of the 20th century, the story of how Han van Meegeren, a disillusioned, unappreciated Dutch artist duped a host of collectors, connoisseurs, and wannabe connoisseurs, including rapacious Nazi art thief Hermann Goering. Van Meegeren turned to forgery largely to get back at an art world that neglected him. He specialized in creating fake Vermeers—a comparatively easy target given that artist's small output and only sketchily documented life.

The book reads in places like a whodunnit, compelling for details of how forgers work (particularly, how Van Meegeren discovered he could quickly dry and harden fresh oil paint by mixing it with Bakelite and baking his new paintings in a slow oven); for the story it tells of competitive art looting between Hitler, Goering, and other top Nazis; and for its detailed chronicling of Van Meegeren's initial success as a forger, his unmasking, trial, and downfall, and his later rehabilitation in the popular mind as he came to be seen as a hero for fooling Goering. Having said all that, The Forger's Spell is perhaps most rewarding for the answers it suggests to perhaps the most interesting question about forgeries that have been revealed; how do clearly bad paintings take in people who really should know better?

As the author points out, many of the paintings by Van Meegeren that fooled scholars and collectors alike were clearly bad. His biggest success was perhaps his sloppiest. Van Meegeren's Christ at Emmaus, pictured above, was a crude attempt to suggest what Vermeer might have done with this Biblical subject under the influence of Caravaggio. The experts wanted to believe in the authenticity of the work because many believed Vermeer had been influenced by Caravaggio and that, in some sense, there ought to be such a painting. What is startling is that the obvious Vermeer-esque touches in this generally crude painting were enough to convince so many people. They include the single window to the left with light raking in from the side (although Christ's face ought to be in deeper shadow); the use of blue and yellow; the composition itself (roughly taken from a Caravaggio depicting the same subject); the placement of the hand on the table (a reference to a genuine Vermeer, The Astronomer, in the Louvre); and the jug on the table, an element in several genuine paintings by Vermeer. Van Meegeren's forgery is an object lesson in the power of playing on what people want to believe, and, in some instances, need to believe to preserve their standing among professional peers once committed to an assessment. Author Dolnick persuasively suggests that forgery done well (in the sense of forgery done successfully--setting aside the quality of the work) usually involves the people fooled doing most of the work for the forger. A committed believer will work hard to preserve his reputation.

Well researched and well written. Recommended.