... where were you in 2002?

(Images explained here. With more at "Only reason to analyze art is to figure out how to copy it.")

ADDED: I'm fascinated by what I missed/changed in trying to memorialize a drawing I wanted to be able to use. I put the top left eye outside of the line of the face and missed the way the right eye's edge extends just a tad over the line of the face and obviously didn't want to bother with that business hanging down from it. I lost the scrunched-uppedness of the nose and mouth on the lower face, and — as I see it now — have ended up with a caricature of my own mother. Meanwhile, Klee's face looks a bit like Roger Ebert.

"... or taken straight to a quarry... Nor would I be surprised if I were to suddenly hear the reveille and wake up in my prison cell, and then, with great bemusement, proceed to tell my fellow prisoners everything that had happened to me in the past six months... The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher I am, the stronger my suspicion that there has been some mistake."

Czech President Václav Havel said in 1990.

That's my insight — probably intended as a bit of a joke and not a 100% truth — written in a notebook in 2002 as I studied the exhibition "Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation" at the Hayward Gallery in London.



You can see the "→ Only reason to analyze art is to figure out how to copy it" appears after a quote from Paul Klee, which I transcribed from the gallery wall into the notebook: "Visual art never begins w/ a poetic mood or idea but with building one or several figures, w/ harmonizing a few colors & tones, or w/ calculating spatial relationships." I found this old NYT review of the exhibition, and it contains the next sentence after that: "Whether an idea then joins in is completely irrelevant; it may do, it doesn't have to.''

At the top of that notebook page is what — in this series of blog posts on the notebook — should be called Lesson 5 of How to draw/paint like Paul Klee.

• leave white blank small hole in gray washed rectangle. Add subsequent gray wash to build a pattern of black & gray squares surrounding. ("Study in Chiaroscuro.")

How delightful to read those old instructions and be able to find the artwork in question. An amazing amount of artistic crapola comes up if you do a Google image search on that title. But I restricted it with the artist's name, and found — after eliminating this — the painting that it must have been:



This success makes me want to go back to the 2 works analyzed in yesterday's post, the ones where I'd failed to record the title:

• Make a city based on placement of vertical lines on a field of unevenly spaced horizontal lines. Erase some of the horiz. lines to make "buildings," make lines in the sky closer together & lines in the foreground farther apart. add some deep doorways & steeples

• Start center bottom & build a structure of whimsical heads & bodies balanced one atop the other. At the top a head w/2 unequal eyes & a tear-like "fishing line" hanging from the bigger eye. Give whole structure a sense of weighted balance.

Ah! Success! The first one is almost surely "Picture of a City (Red-Green Accents)":



The second one is undoubtedly "An Equilibrium Caprice":

ADDED: In the comments JSD said:

I only remember him because a musician friend of mine pointed him out on the street one day. He was very emphatic about his legendary stature. I still have the Les McCann Eddie Harris "Swiss Movement" record. "Compared to What" was a pretty incendiary song in the 70's. The Roberta Flack "Feel Like Makin Love" was good too. Not many black people in Maine, so I thought it was unusual but cool.

Here's Eugene McDaniels, acknowledging that he's a "hermit" in Maine and reminiscing about "Compared to What":



Here are Les McCann and Eddie Harris doing "Compared To What":



McDaniels died in 2011. From the obituary:

His hits of the early 1960s... cast him as a suave performer of upbeat pop songs aimed at white teenagers; in his last years he would occasionally take the stage to deliver standards with all the graceful inventiveness of the great jazz singer he might have been.

In between came the event that changed his life, when his protest song Compared to What became an unexpected hit after being released on an album recorded at the 1969 Montreux jazz festival by his first employer, the pianist Les McCann, and the saxophonist Eddie Harris. The song went on to be covered more than 270 times by other artists, including Ray Charles, Della Reese and John Legend. Its success enabled McDaniels to stop performing in night-clubs, an environment he detested because of the lack of respect he felt was shown towards the music by their audiences....

His later years were spent by the ocean in Kittery Point, Maine. In 2010, he performed an acoustic version of A Hundred Pounds of Clay to a group of teenage girls attending an arts outreach programme....

Here are the lyrics to "Compared to What." Excerpt:

Slaughterhouse is killin' hogs
Twisted children killin' frogs
Poor dumb rednecks rollin' logs
Tired old lady kissin' dogs
I hate the human, love that stinking mutt (I can't use it!)
Try to make it real — compared to what? C'mon baby now!

AND: The same commenter, JSD, had wondered "why this is being posted today." Perhaps he thought it might have some connection to the racial discord in the news lately, but that's not why. As I answered in the comments, it came up in the context of a conversation with Meade that I wasn't able to reconstruct for the post. I remember where I was standing and where Meade was sitting when I brought up the old song.

Meade was analogizing something to the wedging of clay (and activity he's done much of in times past), and he seemed to remember that we were discussing the phrase "ashes to ashes, dust to dust." That makes me think it was part of our discussion of this BBC article about Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was subjected to a staged fake execution, and years later said: "I cannot recall when I was ever as happy as on that day." And that might have come up in connection with the subject of the U-shaped — smile-shaped — curve of happiness, which depicts the puzzling/understandable phenomenon of happiness increasing at the end of life.



So maybe there was something about the closeness to death, something about endings and new beginnings, perhaps, as one returns to earth and becomes subject to wedging into clay.

I don't know enough about the movie to know what this might mean for the new generation. "Frozen" sounds like an antidote to hotness, but presumably the girls who are embracing the ice queen archetype have seen the movie, and I've got to assume that the story has an narrative arc that ends in warmth.

From the linked article, a bit of a plot summary:

Without going into too many spoilers, let's just say that Frozen's climax does not involve a man coming to the rescue of a starry-eyed princess. The princesses at the center of this story—sisters Elsa and Anna—are defined by their unique upbringing and estranged relationship to one another, not by the men in their lives. They are fully fleshed out characters with a wide spectrum of human qualities including love, fear, loneliness, anger, frustration, bravery, and vulnerability. What drives the film is Anna's longing to connect with her sister and Elsa's struggle to protect Anna by keeping her distance. The stakes couldn't be higher for them. Romantic love is an aside, a subplot; the men are supporting players in this love story between two sisters. I have no problem with them being role models for my daughters.

Meanwhile, in the background, there's the original Hans Christian Andersen story "The Snow Queen," which I haven't read in a long time. Its ending is distinctly religious:

... Kay and Gerda...  both had forgotten the cold empty splendor of the Snow Queen, as though it had been a dream. The grandmother sat in the bright sunshine, and read aloud from the Bible: "Unless ye become as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven."

And Kay and Gerda looked in each other's eyes, and all at once they understood the old hymn:

"The rose in the valley is blooming so sweet,
And angels descend there the children to greet."

There sat the two grown-up persons; grown-up, and yet children; children at least in heart; and it was summer-time; summer, glorious summer!

Unless ye become as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Here's my idea for a novel I won't write: A dumb but saintly American adult encounters that challenging advice — which is a weird combination of charming and dire — and dedicates himself to following it, using the anachronistic example of modern American children.

... and I can't believe you'd go out shopping. Or would you? I do my shopping on line, in the intervals between blogging, all that hardworking blogging I do for you, dear readers, you, who can so easily show appreciation — without spending any extra money — by entering your shopping experience via The Althouse Amazon Portal.

... from the point of view of Nancy Grace.

What I read between the lines is that she's frustrated that what could have been handled as a public trial, to be dissected, witness by witness, on high-rated commercial television, happened in secret, with the evidence dumped all at once and with the outcome already known.

Now, just because media commentators have an obvious and strong interest in fomenting suspicion and outrage does not mean that the evidence should not be analyzed and questioned. But even as they are suspicious of the various witnesses, I am suspicious of them. They do not want peace, love, and harmony. That's no kind of show. 

This question will cause many people to think of the old joke with the punchline "I don't need to run faster than the bear: I only need to run faster than you." That is, you might think that the young man who got killed by the bear was simply the slowest in the group.

But the young man's cell phone was found in the woods, and it contained photographs of the bear moving toward him.

... I hope you've had enough.

(Photo by Meade, from The Puparazzo.)