Thomas Hart Benton: “The best damn painter in America”

Persephone by Thomas Hart Benton hangs in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Last Sunday I saw an article in the Kansas City Star Magazine about the Thomas Hart Benton home and studio in Kansas City.  Enticed by the promise of the 13 Benton originals that the article said hang in the house, I went yesterday.

Thomas Hart Benton might be the first artist I admired.  I don’t recall ever being taken to an art gallery as a child, but I was taken several times to the Missouri Capital Building in Jefferson City and, on the guided tour, saw The Social History of Missouri in the Legislator’s Lounge.  On one of those visits, I remember taking it all in and deciding I was proud to have been born in Missouri.  I later picked up a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at an age at which I was still young enough to be shocked (and deeply impressed) by its irreverent insights, and I was drawn to the book, in part, because I recognized the image on the cover as a detail from that impressive mural by Benton.

Touring the house and studio really is like walking back in time – back in time to the life of a well-to-do elderly couple in the 1960’s and ’70’s.  Their clothes hang in the closets.  Their linens are on the beds.  A handwritten shopping list is stuck to the old-fashioned fridge.  I noticed the toilet in the Thomas Hart Benton bathroom is identical to the one in my own house, obviously old but still flushes pretty well.  When I was house shopping recently, I walked through many houses owned by and still lived in by very old people.  I got a similar feeling walking around the Benton home, like I was snooping.

None of the originals displayed in the house are what I would call impressive, but several were interesting.  Three are small sculptures.  A still life is on display together with the vase that was used as the model.  There is a watercolor.   And a small abstract work painted in 1973 that looks nothing like the work of Thomas Hart Benton, but is.

Benton converted part of the adjacent carriage house into his studio.  He painted over certain windows and had others installed to admit the right kind of light.  The studio is still cluttered with his tools, paintbrushes and easels.  Like the house, it feels like a working studio.   We were told he spent most of his time there, alone.

The tour guide told us he died there of a heart attack.  Britannica agrees.  But Wikipedia, citing PBS, has him succumbing at a second home in Martha’s Vineyard.  It’s a mystery.

Other places to see Benton’s works in Kansas City are the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art which has  26 works of Thomas Hart Benton including Persephone.   Harry Truman, who called Thomas Hart Benton “the best damn painter in America” commissioned Benton to paint the mural Independence and the Opening of the West for the Truman Library.

Quote for the Day: J. D. Salinger on “Goddam Stupid Useless Conversations”

I figured I could get a job at a filling station somewhere, putting gas and oil in people’s cars. I didn’t care what kind of job it was, though. Just so people didn’t know me and I didn’t know anybody. I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf mutes. That way I wouldn’t have to have any goddam stupid useless conversation with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life. Everybody would think I was just a poor deaf mute bastard and they’d leave me alone . . . I’d cook all my own food, and later on, if I wanted to get married or something, I’d meet this beautiful girl that was also a deaf mute and we’d get married. She’d come and live in my cabin with me, and if she wanted to say anything to me, she’d have to write on a piece of paper, like everybody else.

- Holden Caufield in The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, 1919 – 2010

My New Piano

I’ve been in the market for a piano for some time.  My wife and I occasionally check Craigslist for pianos for sale in the area.

My wife was checking recently and came across a listing for a thumb piano. She decided it should be ours.  The guy selling the instrument didn’t know what it was and said he bought it in a box of other stuff at an estate sale.  He wanted 20 bucks for it.

So now I am plunking away on it.  It’s not quite the piano I’d imagined, but I’ve been having some fun with it.

We were interested because we saw the film Throw Down Your Heart in which Béla Fleck tours Africa and plays his banjo with a variety of local musicians.  The banjo, in an earlier form, made its way to America on slave ships.  Fleck wanted to reintroduce and reintegrate the banjo with other African instruments and styles of playing.

In several songs from the film he plays with the thumb piano as in this scene:

In the scene,  Béla Fleck plays along with Ruth Akello’s thumb piano.  She sings the repeated phrase, “Jesus is the only answer that I know.”  It’s a catchy, irresistible song.

“In commemoration of the conquest of the air…”

I paid a recent visit to North Carolina’s Outer Banks and the site of the Wright Brothers’ 1903 flights.  The Memorial Tower isn’t especially large, but its spirit reminded me somehow of the Tower of Babel.  It stands atop Kill Devil Hill on a pentagram base with views of the sea to the east and west.  Engravings portray various episodes of ancient mythology depicting humankind’s long held aspiration to conquer the sky.  The tower bears in large, encircling, all-caps letters the chest-thumping phrase “In commemoration of the conquest of the air by the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright conceived by genius achieved by dauntless resolution and unconquerable faith.”  I loved learning that Orville himself attended the dedication and that an American flag was ceremoniously unveiled to reveal the word “GENIUS.”

What was most fun about the Memorial though was the flight path.  A large granite marker stands on the spot the 1903 Flier lifted off the ground on each of its flights.  Four more markers stand on the spots that each of the flights ended including the fourth and the longest flight 852 feet from the takeoff point.

I love so many of the photos of the Wright Brothers like the one here.  The photos depict men of science and of action, iconic American ingenuity.

That impression, that mystique surrounding the Wrights arose, I begin to see, from a very deliberate effort on the part of the Wright Brothers themselves.  Lifelong bachelors and very conscious of their public image, Wilbur and Orville Wright poured tremendous effort in a competitive field into becoming known as the inventors of the airplane, and on so many fronts – scientific, legal, public relations, marketing and lobbying, and, of course, through careful documentation. Their own ever-present camera recorded each take-off of each secret flight on the remote and obscure dunes of Kill Devil Hills and this was hardly a trivial effort at the time.  Despite freezing temperatures the morning of the 1903 flights, the Wrights were photographed dressed, as dapper and camera ready as ever, in formal jackets and starched collars: gentlemen inventors, international heroes of science and innovation.

But what seems to have motivated the Wrights even more than the desire for a legacy might have been the desire for money.  They threatened to do business with foreign governments when the US military failed to jump at a contract to buy their planes.  And they tarnished their own reputation and alienated some friends and admirers over the course of multiple lawsuits aimed at defending against perceived theft of their patented designs.

Sylvie, her mother and her aunt aboard a model of the 1903 Flyer.

Be that as it may, I’m satisfied that the brothers are appropriately lauded as “the inventors of the airplane.”  They were more than mere tinkerers who got lucky.  They appear to have been years ahead of their competition and, in fact, the only ones even on the right track in terms of engineering controlled flight.  Those successful flights in 1903 happened only as the culmination of years of unglamorous study and experimentation conducted in their Dayton office, including hundreds of tests in a small, homemade wind tunnel.

Another reason to admire the Wright Brothers: one can divine they were not blindly optimistic positive thinkers.  No happy-clappy, yes-we-can thinking inspired them.  Of course, they were hopeful and determined.  But many of their comments indicate they entertained the real possibility that their hard work would finally prove that flight could not be achieved as a practical matter.

A Free Bit of Cheer (While it Lasts)

Vampire Weekend is streaming their new album in its entirety leading up to its release on 1/12.  The perfect antidote for the post-holiday blues.

Thank You for the Goodness: A Christmas Story

A few years ago I wrote a short Christmas story.  The story is set in Tonga and the idea for the story sprang from my observations about the way Tongans deal with religious diversity.  By way of introduction, here first is an excerpt of an email I sent earlier this year in which I am discussing with a Mormon the impact of Mormonism in the South Pacific and attempting to make sense of the informal separation of church and state that  I witnessed on one remote, outer island of the Kingdom of Tonga:

Here’s another way the presence of Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses liberalize the outer islands: their presence in the society adds to the cultural mix and forces a kind of separation of church and state – at least on a local level.  This is hilarious to think about, by I’ve witnessed school superintendents and teachers forgo government mandated religious observances of the state religion (Free Wesleyan Methodism) at school functions – yes, breaking the law – out of deference to the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses present.  The village allowed the school principle to NOT fly the Tongan Flag on the school flag pole, because it’s presence offended the Jehovah’s Witnesses who believe flags are idolatrous.  Their were only three JW families on the whole island and that flag pole stayed empty!  The majority decided those three families were more important than their own flag.  Isn’t that remarkable? This is what was weird about religious diversity in Tonga.  There was so much mutual criticism and condemnation and intolerance inside the churches, and so much tolerance and even accommodation in the village.

And the short story:

“They teach a funny religion over there!  And they are pitiful today because they do not remember the birth of Sisu,” accused the Tongan in a mighty roar.

The boards creaked under the weight of his shifting, heavy frame.  He pointed from his pulpit towards the corrugated metal hut across the Ha’apai village where three families met each Sunday morning.  The congregants knew he meant the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

In the pew, old Maukie nodded his head and wondered at the folly of these believers in false doctrines, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons.

“We must protect our children from their lies!” the minister added.

“True,” Maukie said.  The word was a lilting, three syllables in Tongan and Maukie said it slowly in unison with other Wesleyan men around him.

He was relaxed from the kava he’d drank that morning and his mind quickly drifted away to his day yesterday fishing with Inoke.

Aisea Uele, Tengei Tatafu and I embark on a fishing expedition.

Maukie fished with Inoke every week.  Maukie’s family thought he was a much luckier fisherman than he really was because of Inoke’s skill.  Maukie returned the favor by pretending he didn’t know Inoke regularly dug up taro and yams from his plot in the bush.  They did not speak to each other all that much around the village.  They didn’t go to the same church and couldn’t sit around the kava circle together because Inoke’s church forbade drinking kava.  They kept their distance and didn’t really know what to make of each other.

It was different on the rolling waves beyond the reef.

The day before, Maukie dragged the dugout canoe down the beach and paddled hard against the waves.  He could see Inoke out where the surf was breaking against the edge of the reef.  The sounds of the village faded behind him and, shortly, he was alongside Inoke’s canoe.

“Find fish?” he said.

“Lots of fish,” Inoke said.  “Too much to eat.  My wife’s butt will get bigger tomorrow.  That’s fine with me!”

The two of them laughed and grinned at each other.  They made more jokes about their wives and watched their hand-held lines cutting through the waves.  They talked to each other and to the fish they were trying to catch.  They used words they would not use in front of their children.

“We’re just men out here,” Inoke said at one point.  “Just men.”

“True,” said Maukie.  He intoned the word slowly like he said it in church.

The two were close enough to the island to see the village’s five churches but much too far away to hear the competition of the evening service bells.

When the sun dipped below the horizon, Inoke started throwing fish into Maukie’s canoe.   “Fish, fish, lots of fish!” he said.  “Eat yourself to death, tomorrow.”

Maukie had to walk by the corrugated metal Kingdom Hall on his way home from church.  He saw Inoke come out with his family.  Inoke wore missionary pants and looked very foolish to Maukie.

Maukie nodded at the group of Jehovah’s Wittnesses and, having just been reminded they believe there’s something wrong about Christmas, gave the standard Tongan greeting that literally translates as Thank you for the goodness on this day.

Inoke said the same.

Maukie went home to a big Christmas feast with all his family.  His family congratulated Maukie on his fine catch.  They sang and prayed and celebrated the birth of Sisu.

Part of Maukie wished he could be out to sea fishing with Inoke.

Will Sylvie be an Orchid, or a Very Impressive Dandelion?

Multiple studies involving hundreds of rhesus monkeys have produced data that support the orchid/dandelion hypothesis.

I just finished reading this piece by David Dobbs in The Atlantic.  In it, he outlines the orchid/dandelion hypothesis which posits that certain genetic variants dispose one both to social dysfunction and marked potential for success depending on one’s environment.  In other words, researchers are beginning to find the upside to having “bad” genes.

This new model suggests that its a mistake to understand these “risk” genes only as liabilities.  Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts – but they can also enhance function in favorable contexts.  The genetic sensitivity to negative experience [...]are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience.

Cuter than a rhesus monkey, but sharing about 95% of their DNA and a common ancestor some 25 million years ago, Sylvie's cute temper tantrums suggests the 5-HTTLPR gene that she shares with rhesus monkeys is either S/S or S/L thereby endowing her with orchid potential.

So whether Sylvie is an orchid (requiring greenhouse care to flourish) or a dandelion (will flourish pretty much anywhere) may depend on whether or not her serotonin-transporter gene is of the short/short or short/long variants (orchids) or the more efficient long/long variant (dandelion).  I won’t be having her genes assayed and it’s probably too early to guess.  Bur her cute temper tantrums suggests the gene in question is either S/S or S/L thereby endowing her with orchid potential.

Healthy orchids are prettier than healthy dandelions, of course.  So that’s the potential downside for us dandelions.  Yes, I’ve got myself pegged dandelion.  I’ve heard I was relatively easy child to raise; and if I have inner demons like the ones the orchidaceous Lincoln wrestled with, for example, they have let me be so far.  I haven’t achieved the level of success Lincoln did either and don’t have my sites set anywhere near that high (lowering expectations: how dandelionish of me).

So far as Sylvie’s genes are concerned, she’s going to be getting the full greenhouse care treatment.   My hope is that she’ll either blossom into the flourishing orchid her genes intended, or into a very, very impressive and hearty dandelion.

Puke Loi pe Puke Mo’oni?

Meet the children of Ha’ano Government Primary School classes four, five and six.  In this clip, I introduce each of the students present, and we discuss the health of an absent student named Lu’isa.  Her classmates carry on a debate about whether she is puke loi (pretending to be sick) or puke mo’oni (truly sick).

“Expansive, Intoxicated, Happy”

Watch how she moves her hands and her body at the close of the song: graceful, climactic, and utterly hypnotic.

The View from My (Office) Window: A Thanksgiving Reflection

I am at work today on the Friday after Thanksgiving.  I was feeling bored and slightly annoyed to be here.  Until I read this article and began to feel like an ungrateful schmuck – and on the day after Thanksgiving!  So I must reflect on how thankful I should be to have a good job that pays the bills and even allows me to support my wife through graduate school.  I won’t thank God for this.  I’m supposing he would help the unemployed  Christians and the starving kids before he would do me any favors.  But I definitely have a lot of people and circumstances to be thankful for – including my damn good luck.  So here is the view from the window beside my desk.  I do not think it is such a bad view.

View from the Cass County Information Center, Harrisonville, MO 11/27/09, 4:00 P.M.