Running for Your Life Notes from “The Long Run”

There’s a cool, off-the-grid show you’ll not want to miss at the Museum of Modern Art.

It’s headlined, “The Long Run,” and dedicated to keeping alive artistic inspiration.

Nothing new on God’s green Earth? Think again.

It am sitting before the living, breathing panels of Agnes Martin, American, born Canada, in a room called “With My Back to the World.”

What is interior? Exterior? Showing the courage of a commitment to show it all. Not just in the beginning of your artist life, but during the middle and later years.

“Leave it all on the trampoline.” That’s was what super long shot gold medalist, Canadian, born Canada, Rosie MacLennan, told the press when she surprised the nation with her championship performance at the 2016 Summer Olympics. That's what these artists do in "The Long Run." They leave it all on the "trampoline."

The “Long Run,” as described in the show, celebrates the “ceaseless desire to make meaningful work.” And not always in the limelight.

This is from artist Louise Bourgeois: She worked in peace for forty years. Success eluded her during that time, but she calls that a blessing. “My image(s) remained my own.”

Then there is Gerhard Richter, whose room explores the mystery of evil, a story of domestic terrorism. Terrorists incarcerated and murdered in their prison cells.  Not the banality, rather the impish, the all-too-human. What are the masks the terrorists wear? And how they reveal nothing.

Each viewer will see something different; we detonate the idea of a universal truth.

Running for Your Life: A Week Till Pittsburgh!

Running for Your Life: Stop Talking About 2016, For Crying Out Loud

Okay, so I’ve been reading this book-length reportage by Luke Harding called “A Very Expensive Poison: The Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin’s War With the West,” and it’s got me to thinking about our menacing moment in the social and political life here in the United States.

Say, I were a member of the national security team seeking to protect the president – and our very democracy – from harm.

I would be building out defense strategies upon an imagined scenario, to wit:

That Russian agents, similar to those who traveled to London and killed Putin foe Litvinenko, were to target our president with a deadly poison, and then in the aftermath, set murder evidence traps that lead to those Democrats who have called for severe censure, if not removal, of the head of our country.

Republicans, who have to date shown zero interest in demanding thorough investigations in matters that would threaten their purchase on power, would be willing dupes to this scenario.

If the objective in the "War With the West" is to destabilizing a democracy in the most devastating way, what better plan than this? Just try to imagine the repercussions of such an attack.

The threat is before us, not behind us. Isn’t it time to start to get ahead of this story?

Running for Your Life: Notes from “The Long Run”

Running for Your Life: Mueller Muddle

We are asking the wrong question, our heads in the sand.

A group organized by Russian “KGB” moles “influenced” the 2016 US Election to such a degree as to tilt the result to one candidate, Donald Trump.

We shorthand this fact to say we must double-down to expose “Russian” propaganda on social media (see previous blog post).

Horrors! Millions have been infected by the “fake news” perpetrated by those forces of evil.

Not. Consider that our spiritual founding father (the other guys being slave owner, philosopher-types, notwithstanding), PT Barnum, and the phrase closely associated with him:

“There is a sucker born every minute.”

The question is, How did our society get to such a depraved state in which the Barnum line supplants our founding fathers' “Out of many, one,” or E pluribus unum?

Next: Stop Talking About 2016, For Crying Out Loud

Running for Your Life: Notre Dame Mood

There is a power, a soul, that one feels in sacred spaces. What Yeats writes in “Prayer for My Daughter”: To be “rooted in one dear perpetual place.” Why tears flowed when Notre Dame was burning, when the first images came into view.

Just before M and I left for a visit to Paris last October, I found a book on the street. Judging from its condition, “Notre Dame of Paris” by Allan Temko (1924-2006), published by Time Inc. in 1952, had spent a lot of time in someone’s basement. It’s brittle cover sheered off in my hand when I cracked the book open. There is still a musty smell to it.

But Temko, whose ardor for the cathedral never lags, thrilled me with his writing, a portion of which is excerpted  below.  In fact, it reminded me of John Ruskin’s “Stones of Venice.”

During these days of pain and loss in the aftermath of the fire’s damage, find and buy a copy of Temko’s book. There is so much to admire here, so much for those in need of healing following this painful event, to wit:

“The first Parisians settled in the Ile de France, bringing with them their gods and their arts, for the two were inseparable. On a bend in the Seine they found an island naturally suited for defense, with a low hill on its eastern point; and since the summits of the hills were sacred, they built a temple of branches and leaves at the crest and installed their gods on Ile-de-la-Cite. Paris then could not have look anything like Paris today, but the gods bear some resemblance.

Men adored a stone, a spring, a green tree. They sacrificed to the sun and the moon and to the brighter stars. They dedicated altars to beasts and reptiles and various birds – to the hawk, the serpent, the hound and the bear. They worshipped a powerful wind which sometimes swept over the uncultivated fields. There was a god in the white waterfall, in the solemn lakes, in every well, in caverns, or where paths met, on hilltops. The gods were numerous, fierce, jealous, and as complicated or uncomplicated as the humans who enshrined them; but among the gods was a mother deity, a neolithic madonna who occasionally held a child in her arms, and both mother and child have had a certain following in France to this day.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Notes from “The Long Run”

Running for Your Life: "Media" and the Election

OK, like it or not, the run-up to the great US Vote is in full swing.

Everyone is staking out a position.

Here's one as a career journalist, a survivor in the media profession. Back when "media" hadn't been drained of its meaning. Before the juggernaut of social "media" revolutionized the way people consume news:

I would like to be a part of an interest group that would support a candidate who would pledge to only discuss matters relating to social media by agreeing to acknowledge the bastardization of the term "media" to describe what constitutes what most people read, share and endlessly talk about.

I would support the first presidential candidate -- from any party, or independent -- who would, when talking about what people call "social media," rephrase it to say "social propaganda."

That train may have left the station. But with all the non-news about to find its way into people's brains and run throughout their conversation over the next many months (10 months till the Iowa Caucus!), I see it as the kind of noble, moral step that the right candidate would get behind.

Next: Running for Your Life: Pittsburgh 2019