Throwback Thursday: It Happens Every Spring

It happens every spring. Baseball returns, a new season begins. Here's a blog post from April 2011 with a few memories about the game I loved while growing up.

This week I finished Ken Burns' epic documentary Baseball which is a masterful re-telling of the history of baseball from its roots to the present. But it is more than about baseball. Burns chose to use Baseball to tell America's story, a story filled with mythology and with many unpleasant realities we sometimes close our eyes to in order to enjoy the dream. One of those darker shadows in our history is race relations, and Burns handles this with such finesse while unflinchingly keeping it in our consciousness that we have a problem here.

Joseph Campbell once wrote, “Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.” Baseball has been a very public dream in America. We love these heroes, the gods who descended Olympus to be with us for a few seasons.

I grew up watching the Cleveland Indians in the fifties, glory years of the Yankees, our arch-adversary. Mickey Mantle was in his prime then, and when we moved to New Jersey in 1964 I had the privilege seeing the Mick play in Yankee Stadium as well. My biggest thrill was Bat Day in the mid-1960s, a game in which Mantle did not start but watched most of the game from the dugout. In the bottom of the eighth, with the Yankees down 2-1 and the bases loaded, Mickey Mantle was called in to pinch hit. The entire stadium was on its feet holding their bats skyward screaming for their hero to come through. The voltage was so high in that electrified crowd that would couldn't imagine it going higher. Suddenly the pitch and a swing and that most beautiful sound in the world (no doubt drowned out that afternoon by the noise, but I can imagine it because it is the most beautiful sound in the world, the meat of the bat striking a baseball). The ball shot out like a cannon burst in a line drive deep into left field, striking the grass and bounding on one hop over the wall, a ground rule double. The two runners who scored put the Yanks up by one, and an inning later that's how it ended. Every person there was satiated. They had feasted on the Mick, and the Mick did them good.

Mantle is the subject matter of Jane Leavy's The Last Boy, an audio book I started reading yesterday and which promises to be good. Mantle, like many American heroes, is a flawed man. His time in history was a period of innocence in which the sportswriters knew he was a man different from his iconic image. In those days the sportswriters could lose their jobs for writing some of the things they knew, Leavy notes. And today sportswriter might lose their jobs for not writing about what they knew. We live in a different time, a time of innocence lost.

When I was a kid you bought baseball cards both for the players you idolized and for the noise they made in the spokes of your bicycle. During the baseball card craze of the early nineties, kids bought cards looking for the ones with potential, sometimes throwing the rest straight into the garbage. Sometimes throwing them all straight into the can.

Ansel Adams said, “Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world.” Perhaps this is what Jane Leavy and Ken Burns are trying to do when they examine the mythological heroes and legends of our history, trying themselves to understand something about themselves because they are themselves one of us.

Food for thought as you await the next pitch.

Related Links

Ken Burns' Baseball and a Memory of the Mick

Baseball

John Updike On Ted Williams

A Pearl of Strings: Notebook Excerpts, Part One

In the early Nineties, when I was more single-mindedly devoted to writing fiction, I thought it might be usefl to sift through my previous years of journals to see what I might find that could be of use for future projects. It was not anentirely futile search, but it did surprise me how little of real value there was. 

Someone once wrote, "Writers’ journals are sacred chaos—raw, unpolished portals into the mind’s wild dance. Unlike polished novels or sculpted poems, these pages pulse with immediacy: scribbled doubts, half-formed dreams, and fleeting epiphanies snatched from the ether. They’re the writer’s petri dish, where ideas mate and mutate, unshackled by perfection’s glare." 

Virginia Woolf once called her diary a “capacious hold-all,” a space to wrestle demons and chase muses. For some, it’s a mirror; for others, a map through creative fog. What follows are a few excerpts from my 1980'a journals. I won't describe ay of this as "glimpses of genius in the rough" but I did find some fragments that might me considered stimulating or amusing.   

* * * 

A mind whose feet teetered under the weight of a thousand rickety tensions.

Sometimes life gets in the way of living.  

What do you demean by that?  

How'd they get so jaded?

Waisted Minds slogan: A Waist is a terrible thing to mind.

"Red is the soil of Burma, Red also are its cliffs." (from The Harp of Burma)

The great battle for significance is a battle against irrelevance.

"If I'm so successful, why am I so lonely?"

How to get blessed: Be a blessing.

Why are Texans so Austintatious?

Song of the Matrix

The Four Atomic Sons of Madame Fauvre [title]

Jimmy Johnson's Message to his team after Super Bowl Victory: "This feeling of love that you share right now you will have the rest of your lives."

A man who needs nothing can afford to risk everything.  

Freestyle Frost Flicker --> Name of Product for cleaning windows

"The melancholy of all things done." (Buzz Aldrin, after returning from moon)

"The footprints we left on the moon were not ours but were for all mankind." Aldrin

His blood turned to wine and sang through his veins.

Knitting his brows, he lapsed into an introspective state, his lips moving as one who uttered mystic nonsense.

"I'm gonna max out my Monkey card." (newspeak)

The Power Cafe (name of a restaurant)

* * * 

If you're a writer, do you keep a journal for capturing ideas and observations?

A Century of Rebellion: Exploring 20th-Century Art Movements

Henri Matisse. Woman with a Hat.
Public domain.

The 20th century was a crucible of chaos—wars, tech booms, cultural upheavals—and its art mirrored that turbulence, violating norms and redefining creativity. From Fauvism’s wild colors to Conceptual Art’s brain-bending ideas, artists didn’t just paint or sculpt; they revolted, experimented, and dreamed. Here’s a romp through 10 art movements that left their mark, each being an influence in various ways, upon impressionable fine arts students like myself. 

The century kicked off with Fauvism around 1904, when Henri Matisse unleashed bold, screaming colors and fierce brushstrokes. Forget realism—these “wild beasts” (fauves) shocked Paris salons, paving the way for Expressionism’s emotional roar. Growing up in JerseyI had the privilege of having access to so much art it was mind-blowing. On one occasion saw a Matisse retrospective beginning with his very first painting all the way through to the end of his life.

Then came Cubism in 1907, where Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is regarded by many to be the birth of modern art.  It wasn’t just painting; it rewrote how we see space—sculpture, even architecture, felt the ripple. It was a break from tradition that incorporated primitism and scandal, though provocative subject matter wasn't really all that new in the art world. Nevertheless, the piece made an impact n art hisory.

By 1909, Italy’s Futurism roared in, led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, author of The Futurist Manifesto. The movement was obsessed with speed, machines, and modernity. I recently watched Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times and it's easy to see the energetic dynamism of a world in motion. Loud and aggressive, the movement briefly flirted with fascism before fading. 

"Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp
Photo by Alfred Stieglitz
Public domain

In Zurich during the second decade of the century World War I gave birth to Dadaism, a middle finger to logic and tradition. When Marcel Duchamp plopped a urinal on a pedestal (“Fountain”) and called it art, critics debated whether there was profound seriousness here or a profound joke. The Dadaists generated pure chaos. (If you're in the neighborhood, there is a room at the Phildelphia Museum of Art with a collection of some of Duchamp's most famous works including Nude Descending a Staircase, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors and Chocolate Grinder No. 2.

Out of the chaos of dada came  Surrealism, André Breton’s lovechild with Freud’s psychoanalysis. Salvador Dalí’s melting clocks and Max Ernst’s eerie landscapes, unearthing images from the unconscious and captured in paint.

Post-WWII, New York stole the spotlight with Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s. (For context, keep in mind the German occupation of Paris, which drove droves of artists, writers and thinkers to America and elsewhere.) Jackson Pollock became a sensation by dripping his soul onto canvas; Mark Rothko’s vast color fields swallowed viewers whole. America was now the art world’s heavyweight.

The 1950s brought Pop Art, where Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein raided comic books and ads. Campbell’s Soup Cans became icons—high art meets low culture--and the line blurred. (I myself never "got" Lichtenstein. It seemed boring to me.)

Then Minimalism stripped it all back in the ‘60s—Donald Judd and Agnes Martin went for clean lines, simple forms, industrial cool. No emotional mess, just detachment. 

It was during this same period that I myself was in the fine arts program at Ohio U. Happenings, Foreign Film Festivals and all manner of experimentation was taking place. Op Art tricked eyes with Bridget Riley’s dizzying patterns and Victor Vasarely’s pulsing grids, a scientific twist on perception. Through I never aspired to do Vasarely-like work, it did impress me.

The turning point here was Conceptual Art that flipped the script. Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth said the idea outranked the object—art could be instructions or a dictionary definition. Art became a mind game. It wasn’t about beauty; it was about thought. Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word was a scathiing dissection of this game.

As one who loved the act of laying paint on a surface, of creating visual imagery in whatever medium, Conceptual Art was a throwback to where I'd started my college studies: in philosophy. (You can read my take on this in my story Terrorists Preying.)

These movements weren’t just styles—they were the 20th century’s pulse, reacting to its madness. Take Dada, for instance. As a young art student, I fell hard for Salvador Dalí’s incredible precision (whose gift matched the classical mastery of Vermeer). His surreal clocks led me to De Chirico’s empty plazas, Ernst’s haunting woods and strange birds, Yves Tanguy’s alien blobs, and Magritte’s sly riddles. Somewhere along the way, I learned Surrealism drank deep from Dada’s well. 

At the time, my mind latched onto this story of Dada's roots: European artists in 1916 Zurich, sick of war, picked “Dada” randomly from a dictionary—eyes closed, finger pointed. Anti-art, I thought. While digging deeper this week, I found that tale to be a little murkier. Some say a knife stabbed the page for drama; others tie it to Romanian artists Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco muttering “da, da”—a sarcastic “yeah, yeah” in English, “yes, yes” in Romanian. And Dada wasn’t anti-art—it was anti-war, born in WWI’s heart. Their work mirrored the senselessness of a world gone mad, and artists held up the mirror.  

So what’s art reflecting now? War’s echoes, AI’s hum, NFTs, the dehumanizing effect of technology? Cultural fragmentation? These 10 movements of the last century show that artists don’t just follow; they provoke, question, redefine. Who are the most influential artists today? Where is the center of the art world today? Is influence the measure of great art, though? Perhaps the truly great work is being done by people who are beyond the need for recognition, fame or fortune. Or who will not achieve the recognition they deserve until another lifetime comes along. 

Related Links

Why the Urinal is #1

Renegade Theater's RED Proves Worthy of John Logan's Masterful Play

The Andy Warhol Museum: Reflections of the Contemporary American Soul

The Enigmatic Whisper: Da Vinci’s La Scapigliata

Photo by the author

From the first time I saw Da Vinci’s La Scapigliata in an art book I loved it. Beauty and simplicity co-mingled. Though aware of it for more than half a century, I never dreamed that I would actually one day see it. Here's a little background about the painting, followed by an anecdote about that unanticipated encounter.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Head of a Woman, dubbed La Scapigliata—the disheveled one—hangs on a wall in Parma’s Galleria Nazionale, an unfinished marvel from around 1508. It’s not the Mona Lisa with her poised enigma or lavish scenery; it’s rawer, simpler—a woman’s face emerging from earthy browns and ambers, her wild hair swirling like wind-tossed waves. For art lovers, it’s a jolt—not a shout, but a whisper that lingers.

The sketchiness is what hooks you. Leonardo’s brush dances, half-formed, as if he paused mid-breath. Her hair spills free, untamed, framing a face with eyes turned away. Sfumato softens her edges, blurring lines so she floats, ethereal yet rooted. It’s not a finished portrait; it’s a moment—genius caught off-guard, teetering between thought and stroke. The tension is magnetic.

From my very earliest years I've been fascinated by this magical power artists have of conveying three dimensional objects on two dimensional surfaces. See how the light makes her face glow, how the face emerges from the background.

A Wikipedia entry states the work was "mentioned for the first time in the House of Gonzaga collection in 1627. It is perhaps the same work that Ippolito Calandra, in 1531, suggested to hang in the bedroom of Margaret Paleologa, wife of Federico II Gonzaga. In 1501, the marquesses wrote to Pietro Novellara asking if Leonardo could paint a Madonna for her private studiolo.

Some have called her a study, perhaps for a lost Leda and the Swan, but she feels too whole in her incompleteness. The delicate cheekbones with the light brushing her skin conveys an intimacy, like a secret shared. She’s no icon on a pedestal; she’s a muse, human and fleeting. 

Art lovers chase that paradox—timeless yet fragile, simple yet profound. She doesn’t demand attention like Picasso's Guernica or Michelangelo's David; she just is.  

I'd come to Parma after three full days of gettng dazed with paintings and sculptures in Florence. After taking in some of the history and architecture for a couple days I ventured into the Galleria Nazionale, which was directly across the street from the very inexpensive AirBnB I'd booked. As I walked and gawked, my brain slowly began to fog, overwhelmed by everything I was taking in. While walking down a huge hallway in my "eyes glazed" state, I was stopped in my tracks by the presence of this gem, which--I should note--everyone else was walking past without seeming to even notice. There were no big signs saying "Look!" or "Check this out." It was just another painting for visitors already inebriated by art.

What surprised me was how small it was, painted on a small walnut wood panel, measuring only 9.7 x 8.3 inches.  What also amazed me was that the painting was behind a plexiglas shield that enabled me to stand with my nose just inches from this painting. Somewhere I read that her expression was like a faint smirk, but I didn't read it that way. I see angelic modesty mixed with mystery. 

As with the Mona Lisa, I suspect her mystery is the point. Da Vinci left her undone, and that’s her magic. 

If you haven't yet grasped it, this was a very special moment for me. And just one more reason I fell in love with Italy.

Almost Wordless Wednesday: The Many Faces of Ennyman

I find faces to be endlessly fascinating.

What do you think?

Visit "The Many Faces of Ennyman"

The Geometry of Innocent Flesh on the Bone, Explained

Here's yet another psychologically stimulating painting by Dylan interpreter Daniel Botkin. Read Botkin's commentary below then click image to enlarge.

"The Geometry of Innocent Flesh on the Bone." The Hebrew text at the top of the parchment says emet, the Hebrew word for “truth.”

Emet is a combination of the first letter, the middle letter, and the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. If you have only aleph + mem, you have the word em, “mother,” which is where life begins. If you have only mem + tav, you have the word met, “dead,” which is where life ends. Therefore emet, “truth,” is a blend of the beginning of life (em, “mother”) and the end of life (met, “dead”). This truth is our inconvenient truth. The two words em and met (read from right to left) appear below the word emet.

The alphabet above the baby is the Hebrew alphabet in its ancient and modern fonts. The alphabet below the baby is the Greek alphabet in its lowercase and uppercase forms.

The cursive Hebrew text around the innocent flesh of the baby in the amniotic sac is Isaiah’s prophecy, “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. There shall be no end to the increase of his government and peace upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will perform this” (Isa. 9:6f; 9:5f in Hebrew Bibles).

The painting is done in yellows and browns, but I painted one letter in Isaiah’s text bright pink and enlarged it to draw attention to it. That letter is a closed mem in the word l’marbeh, “to the increase.” A closed mem is supposed to be used only when it is the final letter in a word. If mem is at the beginning of a word or anywhere inside a word, it is written with a small opening in the lower left corner. (See how em and met and emet are written at the top of the parchment.) Yet Isaiah defied the rules of Hebrew orthography and wrote a closed mem in the prophecy of this special child. Why? See my article “The Mystery of the closed Mem” in the Article Archives at gatesofeden.online.

A silhouette of a pregnant virgin appears on the horizon in the upper right corner, below the constellation Virgo the Virgin. The cursive Hebrew text coming out from between the feet of Virgo and pointing toward the descending arm is the opening verse of Isaiah chapter 53, “Who hath believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?”

The silhouette of a cross on a hill appears on the horizon in the upper left corner, below the constellation Ophiuchus the Serpent Holder and Healer, who restrains Serpens, the Serpent who tries to obtain Corona, the crown that is worn by the one who rules. Ophiuchus’ foot crushes Scorpio the Scorpion, thus fulfilling Genesis 3:15.

To contrast the idea of innocent flesh on the bone, in the bottom left corner Galileo’s math book is thrown at the worthless Delilah, who sits laughing and holding scissors in her right hand and Samson’s seven locks of hair in her left hand as a trophy. The carnal Samson, blinded by his enemies, is forced to push the grindstone for the Philistines in Gaza.

In a nod to Leonard Cohen’s song "Hallelujah," Samson is also pictured tied to a kitchen chair above Delilah, as a precursor of King David’s fall when he was tempted by Bath-sheba. Also in a nod to Leonard Cohen’s song "Last Year’s Man," “the corners of the blueprint are ruined since they rolled far past the stems of thumbtacks that still throw shadows on the wood.”

Satin Prints on 24” x 30” x 1.5” stretched canvas available, $285 plus shipping.

Related Links

An Introduction to the Story of Samson and Delilah

Daniel Botkin's Riddles for Fans of Bob Dylan: Riddles and Trivia All Rolled Into One

Flowers Are Red: A Very Sad Song

The other night I was talking with a group of people when the topic of conformity came up. I shared how I'd written about this theme more than once, and mentioned one of my blog entries from a couple years back about coloring outside the lines.

In response another fellow, we'll call him Tony, told us about the Harry Chapin song "Flowers Are Red." Tony said that when you get to the end it's one of the saddest songs ever.

Naturally, I had to scribble a note to myself to look up the lyrics when I got home, which I did. And indeed, it's a very sad song. A statement about conformity, about our education system and about life...

Singer/songwriter Harry Chapin's life was cut short at an early age but his songs live on. You most likely know him best for his song "Cat's in the Cradle." Here's another of the songs he left us.

Flowers Are Red
The little boy went first day of school
He got some crayons and started to draw
He put colors all over the paper
For colors was what he saw
And the teacher said.. What you doin' young man
I'm paintin' flowers he said
She said... It's not the time for art young man
And anyway flowers are green and red
There's a time for everything young man
And a way it should be done
You've got to show concern for everyone else
For you're not the only one

And she said...
Flowers are red young man
Green leaves are green
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen

But the little boy said...
There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun
So many colors in the flower and I see every one

Well the teacher said.. You're sassy
There's ways that things should be
And you'll paint flowers the way they are
So repeat after me.....

And she said...
Flowers are red young man
Green leaves are green
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen

But the little boy said...
There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun
So many colors in the flower and I see every one

The teacher put him in a corner
She said.. It's for your own good..
And you won't come out 'til you get it right
And all responding like you should
Well finally he got lonely
Frightened thoughts filled his head
And he went up to the teacher
And this is what he said.. and he said

Flowers are red, green leaves are green
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen

Time went by like it always does
And they moved to another town
And the little boy went to another school
And this is what he found
The teacher there was smilin'
She said...Painting should be fun
And there are so many colors in a flower
So let's use every one

But that little boy painted flowers
In neat rows of green and red
And when the teacher asked him why
This is what he said.. and he said

Flowers are red, green leaves are green
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen.