FUNK

 I woke this Monday morning in a horrible blue funk, dreaming of fire lines approaching a city with a mayor who could or would do nothing, and images of a patio covered with fresh dog shit that no one had picked up. Sound familiar? The profound depression in my mind was matched by a body in pain everywhere, mostly (age-related!) aches in every joint, and muscles that felt depleted of all physical strength. 

Not a good way to wake up!

Meditation was a challenge, with words darting everywhere in my head--words trying to describe what it was I was feeling as I sat. Well, "writing." It's my mind's way of dealing with what's troubling it. Namely...

... a country in chaos, with one political party mindlessly obstructing every effort of the other to reach out and help the millions of Americans who are out of work, hungry and, too many of them, sick and dying; with a leader coming in from the golf course to issue senseless and unhelpful executive orders in an attempt to project the impression of powerful action; a leader who so badly needs adulation that he calls in dozens of his hundreds-of-dollar annual fee golf club members to applaud him loudly at a "press conference..."

... a country riven by discord, mutual hatred and mistrust, one-third of them fed on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour diet of misinformation and outright lies, and driven by a hateful fear of the invented specter of "liberals" and "socialism..."

... and a personal sense of dislocation and disorientation: what am I even doing here, in this, my adopted country, that now feels so alien? Where do I belong...? 

I breathe in, I breathe out. That's one saving grace. The other is more mundane: it is that I have enough "English" left in me to get up from my chair and head off to the kitchen to brew up the solace of a morning cup of tea.

Alice Neel: The Movie

Alice Neel is one of those many artists who were sidelined, for too many years, by the great sweep of 20th century modernist abstraction and the "conceptualist" trend that followed in the last years of the century. It was a time when portrait painting was given short shrift, and Alice Neel was a portrait painter. She has, of course, since been rehabilitated in the eyes of the art cognoscenti--what little they know!--and is regarded with belated esteem for pictures that penetrate their subjects' heart and soul.

Now comes this documentary movie, Alice Neel, from her grandson Andrew, just recently made available on Netflix. It's alternately touching and infuriating--the latter, for me, at moments when it gets to be entirely too arty, reflecting on the process of the documentary itself more than on its subject. Get over that, and you'll enjoy this tribute to a feisty woman who cared little for anyone's opinion save her own.

It's clear from this story that Alice Neel lived to paint. Marriage, children, and the other contingencies of life seemed to happen along the way to the studio--a tiny apartment in Spanish Harlem that was cluttered with the results of her labors. Here her sitters sat. She painted them most often face-on, wide-eyed, unsmiling, stripped bare--whether clothed or naked. Neel shuns superficial physical beauty in favor of the deeper human qualities her studies reveal. Her people evince a peculiar, unpretentious nobility, a kind of stoic acceptance of what life has brought them by way of both body and social standing. If her painting seems rough, even at times unkind in its realism, it also reflects a profound compassion for her fellow human beings. Rooted in the expressionistic, leftist social realism of the pre-WWII period, when she started out, her art never wavers from its attention to the human predicament. Here's her picture of a young pregnant woman, a striking image that evokes all the joys, the anxieties, and the physical discomforts of that condition.



And here's a self-portrait that speaks eloquently of the aging process:



And the portrait of a fellow artist, Faith Ringgold:



The movie is the portrait of an artist, a mother, and a grandmother, and the picture it paints is a complex one. Neel emerges as an energetic, focused, uninhibitedly emotional woman, intellectually sharp, with a touch of lively cynicism in her view of human nature. Even in the year or so before her death, when the film was made, the juices flow. Asked about the appearance of multiple penises in one of her paintings, she responds exuberantly that it's not that she enjoys looking at them, it's that she wants to have them in her! She quite clearly loves the human body, loves nudity, loves the flesh. We see her, in a clip from a videotape made years earlier, delighting in the nudity of her grandchild--later the maker of THIS movie--as he delights in it himself, as children do, prancing around the studio while she paints him. You have to love this joyful part of her, thoroughly engaged in fleshiness of life and its rendering, through painting, into art.

The film does not flinch, though, from exploring the dark side of this woman whose art-making came first and foremost in her life and who seemed unable to form a stable and lasting relationship with the men who were attracted to her. The outcome of early broken marriages and separations, her family relationships are almost too byzantine to follow. Andrew's film offers acerbic sidebars with another grandchild, the daughter of a daughter Neel virtually abandoned as a young mother, allowing the child to return to the father's family in Cuba--and failing even to recognize, let alone acknowledge her at an art event later in life. Neel's two sons, Andrew's father and his half-brother, appear in the film as adults clearly suffering, each in his own way, from parental neglect and maternal narcissism. Neel was too busy in her devotion to her art to notice that her younger son was being subjected to physical abuse by his stepfather.

A complicated family life, then, and one that bequeathed these two sons with a mixture of bemused adulation for their mother and--in the latter case, particularly--bitterness and barely concealed anger. In the broader view, this is not just a film about AN artist, it's about the self-involvement that drives some artists--not all, by any means--in the conduct of their private lives, outside the studio. It can lead to behavior that is destructive to the point of cruelty. Those who take a more romantic view of the artist than I do will argue that this kind of singleness of purpose is the necessary path for a great artist. I recognize the trait, but do not myself subscribe to the notion of its necessity.

At any event, I'm glad to have seen this film, and glad to be reminded of the celebration of humanity that is the work of Alice Neel, the painter. In one of my own former lives, back in 1983, when I was Dean of the arts at a Southern California university, I was proud and pleased that our gallery pioneered a substantial exhibition of her work in the days work before the "art world" began to deem it acceptable again. We invited her out to our campus for a lecture, and were captivated by the astute observation and the delightful wit of a woman who was already in her eighties and as full of life, it seemed, as ever. She died, as it turned out, just one year later. After seeing the movie, I pulled out a copy of the catalogue from our art library shelves and found it dedicated "To Peter Clothier from Alice Neel '83." Quite a thrill!

The Right Medicine?

After reading this report on the presidential and vice-presidential candidates' health by Dr. Lawrence K. Altman in Monday's New York Times, I was jolted once more into a frightened understanding of just how reckless and cynical was John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running-mate. While the medical information remains incomplete--Altman's article calls urgently for more complete records for all the candidates, but particularly in the case of John McCain--enough of the Republican contender's has been made public to alarm any thinking person. In addition to his age, McCain's history of malignant skin cancer should be enough to require from him a vice-presidential choice who is truly capable of stepping into the office of the presidency at any moment.

Sarah Palin is apparently not even to be trusted with a serious, probing interview or a press conference. If this is the case, how in God's name can she be entrusted with the most powerful office in the history of the world? For reasons that are inexplicable even to ourselves, my wife and I sat through a rerun of last weekend's Saturday Night Live, which started with a mock press conference with Tina Frey playing the part of the VP nominee. Standing in the wings, the real one--playing the "good sport"--insisted that this was "not a real depiction of the way my press conferences might have gone." "One of"? "Might have?" She has not held a single one, and has been protected obsessively from all but the most Palin-friendly media.

I have to say that I found the whole performance at best adolescent, if not childish. From the (unrelated) "fart-face" skit--please!--to the mock news desk scene that included Palin, the level of humor was depressingly juvenile, and the parts she was entrusted with were pathetically small. The sight of the vice-presidential candidate sitting behind the news desk dancing with her arms whilst other performers did the song-and-dance work that the piece required was definitely not the least bit demonstrative of her performance skills, or even particularly of a sense of humor. She seemed not to get that she was encouraging the audience to laugh at, rather than with her. They say that humor is the best medicine. If this is the prescription the McCain campaign has to offer, I'd rather take my chances without swallowing it, thank you.

Last night, I watched the first part of the biography of Lyndon Johnson, up to the point where JFK was shot and killed, and Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One in a hastily gathered ceremony. Though his presidency was eventually marred by the tragedy of the Vietnam war, he was surely one of the great presidents in what he managed to achieve for the poor and disadvantaged. I was unable to watch his swearing-in, however, without thinking about Sarah Palin, and what McCain's election and subsequent disability or death would mean for this country. Obama, of course, is at a different kind of risk, one that I deeply dread in the atmosphere of barely supressed violence fostered by the Republican campaign. In that dire event, I would trust Sen. Biden to rise to the occasion.

(There is a follow-up on Dr. Altman's report, by the way, in the form of a lead editorial in today's New York Times. I trust that that this issue will receive greater attention and more thoughtful response in the days to come.)

A Fistful of Bills

Remember my old friend Bill and his notion of Sacred Lifeboats? I was writing about him just a short while ago on The Buddha Diaries, and his conviction that the big boat is sinking, that we need to prepare ourselves for that catastrophe by building our own lifeboats now. By lifeboats, as I understand Bill's thinking, he means small, mutually supportive communities of like-minded people who share values and a commitment to the survival of the human species and the human spirit on this endangered planet.

I was thinking of this old friend Bill as I sat at lunch yesterday with another old friend Bill, Bill Megalos, a documentarian whose films on people of different cultures throughout the world will be familiar to those who watch public television, even though his name might not be. Bill has been traveling the world recently with Prof. Muhammad Yunus whose pioneering work in the field of micro-credit for "leveraging small loans into major social change for impoverished families" earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006; my friend has been privileged to meet numerous world leaders in the company of Yunus, and has developed a new direction of his own. These days, much of his energy goes into teaching, and his goal is to create workshops and schools, especially in poor and underdeveloped countries where control of the media has been restricted to the powerful. In passing on his technical skills and film-making experience to the less privileged, he hopes to empower them to bring change to their communities in ways similar to those effected by Prof. Yunus.

The past ten days are nothing, surely, if not a reinforcement of my first Bill's thinking. He is further along the line than I am--I who believe that we have not yet reached the tipping point, that we can still work to achieve the changes that we need. But the meltdown of the financial markets and its revelation of deep cracks not only in the world-wide credit system but more broadly of the magical thinking that goes into the free market system with its unconscionable exploitation of the planet's resources and a belief in endless "growth." In this context, my second Bill's actions are a positive and constructive move towards a future in which human beings of all classes and cultures are equally empowered to live their lives according to their own values and traditions, and not some version of a terrifyingly global "American dream."

I am encouraged that there are people in America who are thinking in these ways--and of course not only in America. Bill's (the second) good faith is manifest not only in his large scale thinking about global challenges, but in his small-scale actions: for years he has been devoting precious time from his weekends to the needs of the homeless in his home town of Santa Monica. His gift to them is a special one: he cuts their hair. This intensely personal act of compassionate, physical closeness has earned him the lasting affection of people on the streets, who receive too few such gestures in their often desperate lives.

As we finished our lunch and prepared to leave the diner where we had met, we caught a glimpse of another old friend Bill, this one Bill Clinton, being interviewed presumably in connection with the Clinton Global Initiative, set up to support precisely the kind of community action that we're talking about. Seeing the familiar face on the television screen, I couldn't help but have that momentary cringe, recalling the contrast between the Clinton administration's engagement in the world and our current petulant isolationism. I also remembered those FOBs--the friends of Bill--and reflected that I seem to have a collection of OFBs. Old friend Bills.

Which reminded me to make a call this morning about another OFB, to see whether I might go over this afternoon to sit with him a while. This Bill, a physician, a distinguished teacher, and a writer of many articles and books on the important topic of health care provision, is now himself suffering from the early stages of a debilitating disease. It has been too long since I stopped by...

A Movie...

... we just couldn't bear to watch, even though I suspect that it's a very good one: The Savages. It had been sitting on our Netflix shelf for a few weeks, neglected for reasons unknown to myself but better known to Ellie, who had read about it, and we took it down last night and slipped it into our DVD player. Twenty minutes later, we pushed the eject button on the remote. Too raw. Too close to the bone. It nettled all our fears about growing old and dependent on others for our care.

I understand that the movie is really about the brother-sister relationship between the younger characters, but the first twenty minutes, at least, were devoted to their aging father and his "girlfriend," who in one memorable early scene sits rigid in front of the manicurist who is pandering to the last vestiges of her vanity. "Very sexy," the manicurist declares, delighting in the color she has just applied to a fingernail and looking up at the wrinkled face in front of her... just as the old woman topples over and dies. Ah, eros! Ah, thanatos! The old man, her boyfriend, the father of the squabbling siblings at the center of the story, is rapidly approaching dementia. Incensed by the insolence of his care-giver in scolding him for not having flushed the toilet, he returns to the scene of the crime and smears the word "PRICK" in his own feces on the bathroom mirror.

We did not reach for the remote, however, until the scene where the old man is strapped by airline officials into a wheelchair to be loaded unceremoniously onto the airplane to return him from Sun City, Arizona, to the nursing home facility his son has chosen for him. (Great exterior shots, by the way, of the Sun City location: curiously symmetrical homes and landscaping, almost surreal, overly bright, and distinctly scary.) Caught short on the plane, the irascible old geezer preremtously yells "Bathroom!" at his accompanying daughter, and again, "Bathroom! Now!" Struggling with tiny, painfully slow steps down the narrow aisle in the crowded plane, both he and she are ignominiously shamed as his pants fall down around his ankles amid the pitiless stares of fellow passengers.

Well, it happens to be my birthday in a couple of days. Not a Big One--no zeros. But the first number in the double digit figure is higher than I'd like it to be. A friend pointed out yesterday at the gym that she still manages to feel young when the second digit is a low one, as mine is. A nice conceit. Still, I have been feeling the weight of years. I notice that my steps are sometimes slower, lacking the energy of youth, and I consciously make the effort to appear more sprightly. I notice with aggravation that those things I liked least about myself--my impatience, say; a tendency to testiness--become more pronounced, and harder to contain. I think much more often about the inevitable end of life. My greatest fear about growing old is the dependency depicted in that movie, the loss of simple dignity, the need for others to take care of me, prop me up when I walk, feed me, clean up after my eliminations...

Which is why the most meaningful part of my metta practice, the first and last moments of my daily meditation, is that line from the chant on the sublime attitudes that comes after "May I be happy" and "May I be free from stress and pain": May I look after myself with ease. It's not often that a film is just too intense for me, but this one was. I never even learned the end of the story--a loss that, as those familiar with The Buddha Diaries know, is a serious one for me. But at least a fine metaphor for the experience of life itself, whose end we are rarely privileged to know.

I'm sure I'm not alone in any of these feelings. I'm hoping you might share your own...