Tag: culture

Postcards from MoMA

Today’s post brought to you by the color turquoise:

Images from my modern art day, or, Why We Are All Going Mad. Queens

I took the subway into Manhattan twice this week, once to a checkup (doing okay, generally) and another for a day off, wherein I went to MoMA(s). For the first trip in, on Wednesday, I walked from my apartment up the street to Queens Blvd. On arriving at the corner light, I looked up to see this man from the neighborhood, maybe 6’5”, always in workout gear (this time a white tee shirt and dark nylon sweats), earbuds in, carrying a blue sack, the kind of plastic bag a lot of stores used to use. He’s tan, with barely graying black hair, probably a few years younger than I am. Without speaking, I have never liked him. Once, twenty years ago at least, Lydia, who used own the corner Chinese restaurant (with her husband before they were able to retire at age 45 or so, having worked for 25 years, 7 days a week, 15 hours a day, no vacations, two boys put through college; they moved to the Chinese enclave, Flushing; I miss them) tried to introduce us, “You both single,” she said as we were waiting for our takeout. We regarded one another, he sitting, I standing, and did not like one another on sight. I saw in his face echoes of that man I dated a few times, the one whose first comment about me was, disappointed, “Oh, you’re smart.”

So for twenty years, we’ve pretended not to see one another—but of course we do. Lots of people in my Queens neighborhood pretend not to see you—they like their privacy, walk in apparent trances, but no one in New York survives walking in a trance; it’s like people put up a protective shield to avoid getting caught up in someone else’s weirdness. I’d tried to greet many of these people and gave up, but now that we’re old, a few of the older ones will kinda meet your eye, a surrender that comes with old age and loneliness.

All of this is just to share one of the comical occurrences of coincidence that really do happen in this city: so Guy I Don’t Like (and whom I rarely see) is at the corner on Queens Blvd, crossing, as I am, over to the elevated 7 Train. Okay. One coincidence. Then, we both turn left up the stairs (he’s on his bluetooth on the phone the whole time), so another one. (Note: I turned left so I can get out at Queensboro Plaza for the N-W to 34th St near the front—since I want to exit the 32nd St side of 34th St stop—you learn these things—so I went in the front of both trains, as the front of the train heading downtown is closer, see?). We each, however, went into different cars. I got out at Queensboro Plaza.

So did GIDL. Seriously? Fortunately, he made a point of heading even farther down to another car.

The N train comes; I reached the Manhattan station, one of dozens of potential stops. I got out to exit up the stairs at 32nd St (my doctor is on 31st St), and, you guessed it, there was the tall white tee shirt and blue sack. HOW? And I know he saw me because I was in a bright turquoise blouse. More than that, at street level GIDL headed toward 7th Avenue and Penn Station, which is where I was headed (to go to the ATM), but all this was creeping me out, so I ditched that plan and headed straight to my doctor’s office at 31st St near 9th Avenue.

And you think, “What am I supposed to learn from this?” Why must my morning be made somehow uncomfortable—he really does give me the creeps—and the truth is, I don’t know.

After the appointment, I decided to take the 7 train from 34th St. Hudson Yards, by way of an ATM for my bank near there…and no, I don’t see GIDL, because that would be Twilight Zone creepy. I only just made a train in the station heading toward Queens. At Times Square, the next station, an Asian woman (I hate to be general that way—I’d like to say “Chinese,” but I’m just not sure, and after all, I’m “white,” so) a bit younger than I am, got on, simple blue shaded top and slacks, a big purse, and when she saw my face, she smiled a twinkly smile. It’s something I’ve noticed we older women do, a kind of acknowledgement of our survival to this point.

During our ride, we bonded over Surprise by Buskers—the first a (not that) young Black man with boom box (oh dear, showtime), whose tricks—swinging on the poles, flipping, kicking the hat up to his head—were so, so old (like doing vaudeville schtick during a standup comedy set) that I found myself giggling, trying to imagine other objects he could surprise us with to kick onto the top of his head—but it’s an attempt at performance art to a deeply indifferent midday subway car; he asked for applause (even he looked bored), and I offered it, and a dollar; the Asian woman across from me then also pulled out a dollar. “Anything for art,” I said, and it heartened the performer, “Thanks to the front row seats,” he said as he got off at the next stop. At the stop after that the mariachi band got on (four pieces!), and the woman and I looked at each other and started laughing. I threw up my hands, “It’s our lucky day!” The band was so out of tune and flat—instruments, singing, all of it—you had to laugh at their loud boldness. Again we pulled out dollars. At my stop, she’d nodded off, and I touched her wrist upon leaving, “Have a good day,” and she roused and smiled and said, “You too,” and off I went home to my “office,” late for a meeting but better for it.

The next day I was off, and as I say, it found me back out searching for signs of art in the universe, and maybe some answers.

Here’s a question: Why are all the literary and artistic icons old? How is it that Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Lena Horne (1917-2010) and Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) and Yoko Ono (1933-present), or Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Harry Belafonte (1927-2023) and Salvadore Dalí (1904-1989), are the faces on the postcards in the gift shops? How is it our kids and grandkids still know the Beatles as well as they know Taylor Swift (and how long will Taylor Swift last)?

Paul McCartney said on James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke, of the Beatles, “We thought it would last ten years, but it keeps going on and on and on.” I watched a Rick Beato YouTube segment dramatically titled, “Old Music Is Killing New Music.” Beato, who listens to all the latest as well as classics on Spotify and YouTube, wondered why it was that ca. 1970 bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival or the Doobie Brothers could still get one billion streams, while many newer artists had a fraction of that. It was a fascinating analysis, starting with the fact that the music business—a 20th Century phenomenon (before recording, the only music anyone heard was live)—was about what teenagers were listening to. The fan girls of Frank Sinatra (the original bobbysoxers) were younger than the singer; the screaming fan girls of the Fab Four, who were around age 20 when they broke through, were younger teens. So music is generally for young people, and young people age. And also our cultural tastes change, and while not displaced totally by trends, in popular terms orchestral music gave way to jazz, which eventually gave over to ballad and swing crooners, and then the years of crooning gave way to rock ’n’ roll, which was popular concurrently with heavy metal, soul, techno music, R & B, rap, and hip hop, back to the power ballads.

And I think today’s pop music is often way less interesting than the old stuff. I found myself thinking again of Aristotle (if you follow my posts), “The ideas are hard, and so the reading is hard.” To produce a record in the age of Autotune and synthesizers and songwriting by committee, there’s less craft than at a time when four guys who played their own instruments, and well, sat with mixers in a studio for hours and days and weeks, going sound by sound by sound to get the tracks (written by one or two people) and record right.

Listening to new popular music, I’ve found the subjects of contemporary songs are as follows: love, sex, getting high, surviving a breakup. That’s about it. The subjects of songs in the 1970s include but are not limited to: love, sex, getting high, breaking up, sure, but in wildly poetic, varied, and nuanced ways (Blue, The Stranger, Born to Run, Rumours, Rocky Mountain High, Bad Girls, Blood on the Tracks, Wish You Were Here, Led Zeppelin III come quickly to mind, with more song subjects than those noted, and really I could just list and list and list) and in there was also political protest, environment and natural world concerns, seeing America, living out dreams, ending the Vietnam War—so many one-hit wonders as well as continuations of long careers.

Because it’s all about careers. Music—all art, really—changes with the years, the developments, the technology, the culture. Or it should. Most bands, let’s face it, have short careers, and they make room for new artists.

Does the continued presence of the long-lived artist kill new artists? Why the longevity?

Talented as they are, I can’t really imagine the faces of Billie Eilish or Drake or Ed Sheeran selling on post cards at a MoMA gift shop. You know what I mean? No one now feels like they’ll be iconic in their artistry like that. (Maybe Adele?) I tried to name a visual artist and picture their face. First, can you name a museum-quality famous contemporary visual artist? (Kara Walker came to mind, and Kehinde Wiley). Second, can you picture their faces? (No.) And maybe that’s unfair—everyone knew Hemingway and Picasso and Stein and Van Gogh, but I have no idea what Cezanne looked like. Not everyone is an icon that way. And we do love icons.

I’m not sure why I think any of this is important, but with air buds and phones, everyone on the subway or at home is having an individual art experience, streaming from Spotify or going down a Google Choose-Your-Own-Adventure rabbit hole (without know that the “rabbit hole” is not a “worm hole” because it’s an allusion to Alice in Wonderland, another old work of art in our curiously limited common culture that we still reference because there’s been nothing to replace it, and why is that?) And who’s to know what’s not AI?

It’s why I cherish theater and live music and trips to museums. You see and hear the work of human hands in the presence of other humans, even if we are having our individual experiences. At MoMA I saw the Marcel Duchamp retrospective, and what a great time. I smiled all the way through it—what a range of creativity, an artist who helped break open the art world, followed his own voice, changed it up. I couldn’t believe all those works were by the same person.

(I think that’s why I love Billy Joel so much as a musician—the same guy who wrote Glass Houses and “Uptown Girl” did The Nylon Curtain. I love to see creative forces adapt to the changes in the artists and the times.)

In a time of so much distress, existential crises of our making, and indifference to suffering at levels I cannot imagine at least partly as a result of state run media suppression of truths, I’d like to encourage you to get out there at get your art on, find good stuff, share it, promote it, enjoy it with others.

I ended my week at Jar Bar here in Queens with a young artist from my building, whose husband tends bar there, and her mom and friend—we three were aged 62-64, and we chose music for the digital algorithm-infused juke box, and we all agreed on Yes, “I’ve Seen All Good People.” We closed the bar down. So there is something for your Sunday.

Sending love, art, hope, DAMMIT,

Miss O’

The Power of Our Myths

Waxing a little philosophical in the heat

This morning being cool-ish and tolerable after last night’s storms over New York City, I walked to the farmer’s market early, picked up a few things at the grocery store, came home and make hummus and tabouli with the fruits of my purchases, and sat down at the ol’ desk to do a little art—the past few months, I’ve taken to making bookmarks using Kleenex box pull tabs as a base. It takes a while to gather materials, so no rush. Did I tell you this already?

Bookmarks by LO’H, 2026.

While working on those last two up there, I turned on PBS, where I found a rebroadcast of Bill Moyers’s wonderful 1988 series, The Power of Myth, with Joseph Campbell. I came in where Campbell is explaining that the desire of our lives is not meaning, or shouldn’t be, but rather “the experience of being alive,” and that this is the source of myth, “that which cannot be named”—“some call it God.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about something a content creator (there’s a weird title) said recently, that humans have a need to make, to create, and not merely to consume—we need to feel alive—and this connects to Joseph Campbell, too. (I think this is why, for example, we march when we feel helpless after consuming all that independent news content—and why we build cathedrals and temples and even office buildings, when we aren’t crafting little bookmarks—we have to make to feel alive.)

Campbell talked, too, about our Western trap of living in dichotomies:

Good and evil

Male and female

Being and nonbeing

Right and wrong

Dead and alive

Knowledge and ignorance

To which one might add…

Republicans and Democrats

Patriots and Fascists

The Old Man and The Sea

I told you about that fallen urinal divider at Bread Loaf, the Writer’s Conference and School of English in Vermont—some literary type started a trend that others followed, with a situation that looked something like this:

Author’s rendering from limited memory; my male friend who told me about it realized that the game had devolved past help with that last one.

Dualities—we love them in our literary titles as much as in our myths.

Man, Campbell points out, is “in the field of time”—good and evil are temporal (and some of us would like to move our awful times along already, but it doesn’t work that way), but our mythology is rooted in this duality—it’s ethical at its base, sin and atonement, right and wrong (the word versus apparently lives in our marrow); it all begins with us humans as creatures: god and man start out the same; man and woman eat of the tree of knowledge; god becomes God, and man and nature then become opposed, man and woman are opposed, God is against man—all this against-ness; we are not in accord: we fight with nature, we fight amongst ourselves (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam)—all of ourselves is corrupt; nature is corrupt—this myth of opposition has determined all of our Western civilization. (There is something to sit with.)

This oppositional view of being alive on earth, Campbell notes, is counter to all the Eastern religions (Hinduism, Buddhism), as well as to Native American religions, to take only a few examples. In Japan, for instance, there’s no idea of “a fall of man”—natural impulses are not to be defeated or fought but only acknowledged (at best) or sublimated (when hurtful or not useful).

We have only to look around America in 2026 to see where opposition as a lifestyle has gotten us. That’s all I could think as I tore up a map, opened the Mod Podge, took a paint brush, and started one more bookmark collage.

This life in the West, Campbell says, “is an opera”—we all choose the roles we play in it; and that this life is, in reality, our eternity; if you don’t get it here—“it” being whatever experience you will have as a being—you won’t get it anywhere; this life is a poem, our acts and adventures; a poem connotes something transcendent.

We have to acknowledge that this life is our only shot. Then what would mankind do? Imagine.

As Moyers questioned the validity of faith, Campbell insisted that every mythology and every religion is true—but don’t let it “get stuck in the metaphor”: Jesus didn’t physically ascend to heaven, he went into the heart, and to read that story in any other way is to get stuck in prose instead of transcending through poetry, Campbell says, getting caught in “denotation instead of connotation”—poetry gets past the concept of “reality”—it’s about connection.

And in the United States, we Americans have lost our connection, our mythology, and so, our moorings. I think this is why The Odyssey (which I still haven’t seen, but my classicist brother, Mike, went today and called it “good stuff”) is currently capturing the national imagination. We’re starving for a solid mythology.

Campbell, a true teacher and lover of learning and travel and discovery, says we are all manifestations of Buddha consciousness—the Gospel of Thomas (deliberately excised from the original Bible) says this, too— that we find the Jesus inside ourselves; heaven and hell are within ourselves; and the Upanishads said this in India, centuries ago—there are energies within us, in conflict with one another—brain wants one thing, heart another, intestines demanding attention. There are oppositions enough inside each human without adding oppositions to one another and to the earth.

At one point, Moyers talked about how Conservatives (and this was filmed during the end of Reagan’s presidency, remember) were demanding a return to old time religion, “a fixed star,” Moyers calls it; but times have changed—science and medicine changed the myths, and the moral order, Campbell says, must catch up with the moral necessities. There is no going back. What I heard is that we can’t let go, let God, but instead we have to look at the actual crisis of the climate that we humans are creating, for example, and solve for that. We live on a big planet now, and we can’t pretend we don’t: for most of human existence, most human centers around the world were unknown to one another—the Egyptians didn’t know about Aztecs—so of course, the more we learn, the more we affect one another, the more we change. We have to change.

The three religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—fight because they “won’t give up the metaphor” and accept the need to find the truth, and to separate that metaphor from what Campbell calls “the temporal inflection,” our reality. Campbell notes that new metaphors are needed—Star Wars, for example, (kin to The Odyssey before it, with the focus on the father and the son, the hero’s quest and a people’s future) addresses the big question, Is the machine going to crush humanity or serve humanity? Darth Vader, more machine than man, is playing a state role, Campbell says, not a human role—when unmasked by his son, he is revealed to be a worm, really, unformed, malformed, no longer recognizable or powerful. We need metaphors to access truth—not to cling to a metaphor (Vader as machine of the state) for its own sake.

So I think we have to ask, today: Are corporations serving us, or are we serving them?

Machines are our new mythology, and there’s no turning back. Campbell and Moyers talk about President Eisenhower visiting a room-sized early computer. Eisenhower asked the computer, “Is there a God?” After a few minutes of lots of noise and beeping, a slip of paper printed out: “Now there is.”

The creation of computers, Campbell acknowledges, is astonishing, but there is “a determined code,” one we make. He finds a metaphor here: each religion is a kind of software—but a lot of codes won’t talk to each other. We have to talk to each other.

Our new mythology, whatever it is, has to incorporate the machine—not act the other way around, where the machine incorporates us. But as Campbell points out, while the world is changing too fast to have myths, still we can’t survive without them. This leaves all the work to the individual. And the artist.

Above all, myths serve “a pedagogical function”—they teach each of us how to live a life as a human. Watching this show again, I (a former teacher) was reminded how desperately we need teachers. At The Butcher Block this morning, I saw a New York Post headline that infuriated me—telling the Teacher’s Union that they had no business asking for raises when the kids can’t “reed.” And I was telling my friendly cashier what I did for a living and why headlines like that enrage me—that the problem is the goddamned technology forced on all of us by Big Tech, that all the studies show kids learn best with print books, pen, and paper; reading on screen affords almost zero comprehension—but Zuckerberg forbid we listen to actual reading experts.

We have a whole culture that attacks the educated, attacks the experts—Dr. Fauci is but the latest and most absurd example (the grandstanding Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) not bothering to show up for the “contempt of Congress” vote he forced, his big show of knowing stupidity being over). Interestingly, we know this sort of thing happens because the ignorant are not only not curious, they are terrified of what they don’t know. Yet I have to point out, these same folks ironically embrace a fairy story in a book from 2,000 years ago, set in a totally different landscape and time, featuring no real technology beyond basic tools, ink and parchment, and the wheel, and call it reality. They say they hate being told what to do (wear a mask, distance socially), while demanding all of us follow their Ten Commandments, even as they all defy the very Commandments they say they revere—comfortable with molesting children, abusing wives, committing adultery, being greedy; to say nothing of the stuff in the red letters, like throwing those stones. How does anyone keep up with this?

I really like how Monte Mader explains about the myth that AI, that there really is no such thing as “artificial intelligence,” but only “human made intelligence,” fed into machines of human design (for corporate profit). As you saw if you watched the video, that is what true desecration looks like—the rape of our sources of knowledge, spine by spine, and tossed and lost forever like so much trash by Big Tech. And to what end?

Mythology—its creation and keeping—now is the job of artists—Campbell points out writers such as Joyce and Mann, artists such as Klee and Picasso, not a woman or non-European named, or anyone more recent than early 20th century, but you see the idea. And I was telling my dad, Bernie, only this very morning that I was thinking about how grateful I was that he and my mom Lynne were always creating—whether it was growing spring vegetable seedlings collected in containers set on a card table in the little upstairs living room at the bay window; or going to the nursery to buy shrubs for the yard; or building our toy boxes out of orange crates from his job at Safeway; or Mom making decoupage plaques and footstools for household art, and creating our Halloween costumes by hand; or even their cooking our meals from scratch, and me baking cookies—we were surrounded by making, always. And out of our making, we O’s became.

Thanks, internet.

Keep making and telling your stories, Americans. Make us US.

Sending love among the ruins,

Miss O’