Franklin Einspruch

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The Lanès whom you loved is not here

Journal entry for 16 Aug 2010 | Link

BRS, RIP

My review of "American Moderns on Paper: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art" for Big Red & Shiny will unfortunately be my last for them, as they are ending their six-year run with Issue #135. This is tragic enough to warrant a funeral. BRS has been a significant force for local art coverage in Boston and beyond for all this time and both Matthew Nash and Matthew Gamber deserve great credit for what they have done. Bonus images for the article follow below.

There was so much more to talk about: the Prendergast watercolor/pastel, the astonishing Glackens street study, the Stuart Davis, the Hoppers. But I had already blown my word count by a long shot and I'm glad they put it up as is.

Robert Aitken, RIP

While I was quoting from a book by John Tarrant last week, I did so not knowing that his teacher, Robert Aitken, had just died. Aitken discovered Zen while interred in a Japanese prison camp with R.H. Blyth, and he returned to become one of the first Americans ever sanctioned by an Asian lineage to teach Zen. His introductory book Taking the Path of Zen is as good as any and better than most. (Yes, that is a Morris Graves on the cover.)

I'm nearly through Tarrant's Bring Me the Rhinoceros and it leaves me with the impression that Aitken must have been an extraordinary master. There's a koan:

Someone asked Zhaozhou, "Why did Bodhidharma come from the west?" Zhoazhou replied, "The cypress tree in the garden."

Tarrant comments:

An artist found this koan appealing and carried it around with him day and night. He remembered his personal barbarians [Bodhidharma is usually characterized as a barbarian - F.], his auntie in Los Angeles who drove a T-Bird convertible, carried a baby bottle full of vodka in the front seat, and came home at dawn in a black dress to crash on the couch in her own living room. He remembered his father who had been an orphan, then a policeman, and always carried a .45 in his pocket, and whose idea of good food was eating three meals a day. While he had thought of these figures as belonging to a life he had escaped, under the influence of the koan they began to change, became mysterious bearers of questions and kindness. He painted them as Buddhist teachers, versions of Bodhidharma, and wrote their stories on his paintings. Then he looked at trees. His discoveries didn't feel personal; he didn't think them up; it was just that while he kept company with this koan, a larger point of view appeared. He and a tree were both an act of imagination on the part of the universe. In some way he could honestly say, "I am a tree."

He also said, "With this koan there was a period when I identified with everything. I would go for a walk downtown and become the Styrofoam cup, the tree, the dog, the homeless person. I had always identified with the foreground of life, but now I was identified with the background. At first I knew that I was the tree but I didn't yet know that I was Zhaozhou. I went to art school in the days when we used to sketch all the time. One exercise was copying the old masters. So we'd copy Leonardo, or Raphael, or Corot in precise detail. I started seeing things the way they did. With this koan I am copying Zhaozhou, and through that he appears, he lives again. It's not in some removed way—through fame or remembering. He actually becomes me the way the cypress tree does."

Eggplant, RIP

It was delicious. Allendale Farms has been bringing these gigantic eggplants to the local farmers market lately.

Babaganoush ensued. Eggplant is not really so daunting to roast after all—35 minutes in a 400° oven did the trick. Taking it out of the oven and plunging it into cold water made it peelable by hand. Into the food processor it went with tahini, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, and salt and pepper. Two and a half pounds of eggplant makes about fourteen gallons of babaganoush, which came in handy for a party down at the studio thrown in honor of everyone renewing their lease and otherwise for the hell of it. Next time I'm adding parsley, not because taste requires it, but because babaganoush may come closer than any other food worth eating to 50% gray. Selling it to noshers unfamiliar with it required a promise that despite the resemblance, it did not taste anything like oatmeal.

Cavafy

One of the pieces for the upcoming library project is going to include an excerpt from the great Konstantin Petrou Kavafis, whom I've been reading with great pleasure lately. It won't be this one, so I note it here for truth:

In the loose living of my early years
the impulses of my poetry were shaped,
the boundaries of my art were laid down.

That's why the repentance was so fickle.
And my resolutions to hold back, to change,
lasted two weeks at the most.

In note of the above passings (maybe not the eggplant) I entitled this journal entry after the first line of The Tomb of Lanès. May we all keep looking forward.