New Years Eve -- Milna

Milna has its first ever New Years Eve fireworks!  If you look closely, you can just make out the figure of Slavko directly beneath.

Fwd: I have been writing about Picasso and his Art since 1974.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: charles grimes <charlesgrimes9@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 9:36 AM
Subject: I have been writing about Picasso and his Art since 1974.
To: charlesgrimes9@gmail.com


I have been writing about Picasso and his Art since 1974.

I wrote a senior thesis, if you will accept that concept, on the Russian Ballet Troupes ballet Parade that was first performed in 1917 even while the guns and bomb blasts  of world war 1 could be heard just outside of Paris

The ballet was conceived by  Jean Cocteau and the music was scored by Erik Satie (whom i was most interested in at this time).  The Ballet Russes  producer Diaghilev agreed to perform the piece if Cocteau could produce an artistic director.
Without hesitation the young Cocteau sought out the greatest artistic talent of the day and without fail Picasso agreed to work on the ballet and most astonishingly even agreed to travel to Rome, Italy to work on the sets, costumes and to complete the glorious post cubist curtain for the production of Parade which was to be first performed in France.

I can to this day remember the heady days I had writing this piece, the morning sessions I  spent researching in the archives of the Suzzalo Library and then the late afternoon strolls  I would take home with my head in the rare atmosphere of the  collaboration of Satie, Picasso & Cocteau.

My memory is also complete with the remembrance of having a casual girlfriend help me prepare my photographs of the artists and the ballet for my thesis binder.

At this point in my life I over thought myself as a suave scholar of  history and literature and jazz and  i always assumed an air of self imposed arrogance and after my friend Laura, an  advanced Art student, squeezed my hand and beckoned me forward i was willing to try anything to advance my erudition.  Laura had the brilliant idea of using a  heat transfer piece of equipment in the Art Dept to attach my photos to paper.   She assured me she would run interference for me if anyone in the Art department complained if a History student had the audacity to use Art department equipment.  After she gave me another squeeze I was willing to give this a go no matter how wrong it might be for me to use  equipment I had no right to.  Love in the moment confused my sense of morality.

Well shortly into our project two Creative art thugs walked up to me in the Art studio and told me to get my hands off their equipment .  I paused for a moment and thought two of them one of me but then Laura returned from a quick departure and she smiled at the roguish brothers, yes they were brothers, and told them to dry up and blow off.  The boys huffed and puffed but my project was finished, although in a hurried fashion, and I left with my exciting and sensual accomplish, my project under one arm and the other hand pointing to a place where we could sit and enjoy the photos and plot our next adventure together (of which, sadly, there were none as it appeared she wanted a real boyfriend and not a boy who only wanted to be in love for a few days).

But then I digress so back to Picasso and the fascinating journey of becoming a writer of history and art and how I was launched into the future.

Writing about such brilliant artists like Picasso and Satie opened me up to what I later termed as the potential of the human spirit.  What each one of us can realize with our collective talents is the reason to give us hope for humanity.  Once a friend of mine asked me why I bothered to spend the hours researching and writing about Picasso and I was dumbfounded.  I ran home and gathered up some newspaper clippings about an installation of Paul Gauguin  at a New York City museum and returned to show my friend a painting by Gauguin and said I work at my Art because Gauguin painted like this.  I believe it is inherent in me to want to create because I have seen what the great masters have created.  Even though I know I cannot breath the air that they did I at least am doing my best to feel that air if only in a fleeting moment.

I would like to thank my professor Reed Merrill for allowing me to have such comparative and explorative experiences writing my paper and sending me off on a lifetime journey of writing, painting and discussing the historical context of Art and especially Picasso and through the production of my paper becoming a keen observer of the power of women.   Although, I am sure that Reed would have preferred it more if I had just stuck with writing about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky like he had advised me  so many times.

PS. A short anecdote about Reed Merrill.

As a student I loved to visit with Reed during his office hours in the Literature Department.  These visits were grand verbal jousting matches with the many witty students, the local part-time intellectuals and the King of Wit himself Professor Merrill.  We  would gather in his book lined office and spend hours being schooled by Reed's razor sharp  intellectual banter.  I loved to get there early and grab a chair and study all of the fabulous  books on display.  In terms of the Great Ideas of History all of the scholarship you could ever desire was right there on those shelves waiting for you to pull them down into your inquisitive hands and to start turning the pages.  From medieval poetry to Mircea Eliade to the new paradigms in scientific thought on Physics  a student could find no grater resource library.

However, one day after I had graduated, I went to visit Reed in his office and all of his books were gone except for one small zippered covered leather bound  edition of the King James Bible.  Astonished by this turn of events I looked at Reed and quizzed him.  "Reed what has happened here?"

Reed leaned forward in his chair, with his rounded shoulders slumped towards me, and wryly smiled and said. "I had decided recently to devote myself to the word of The Lord but then the damn zipper stuck.  I now have to re-think this new intellectual posture."

Reed then chuckled, leaned back in his leather bound office chair and  started to talk about South American authors and we drifted off discussing the dusty confines of the ancient library of Jorge Luis Borge.

That was the last time I saw Professor Merrill.


Sent from my iPhone

Just another sunset at Eliot and Kyra's.

Eliot's Renovation

A while ago, Slavko inquired as to the extent of the renovation required
at Eliot's new house. I didn't reply. Now, as a reply, I post photos
of two of Eliot's 4 bathrooms. This is typical.

(That's the basement that you can see beneath the joists.)

Happy Solstice

Once again, it is up from here . . . !  HOO-RAY!!!!!!!

(A view from Eliot and Kyra's new house.)

All in a Day's Work

Just a photo of Eliot after a day's work in the weather . . .

Friday Morning

Now We're Getting Somewhere

"Beyond making calculations easier or possibly leading the way to quantum gravity, the discovery of the amplituhedron could cause an even more profound shift, Arkani-Hamed said. That is, giving up space and time as fundamental constituents of nature and figuring out how the Big Bang and cosmological evolution of the universe arose out of pure geometry.

“In a sense, we would see that change arises from the structure of the object,” he said. “But it’s not from the object changing. The object is basically timeless.”

from Wired, "Scientists Discover a Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics"
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/12/amplituhedron-jewel-quantum-physics/all/

Charles Writes: Partisan Picasso

Partisan Picasso by Charles Grimes

After the liberation of Paris in August of 1944 Picasso was the mythical, but very much alive, King of France.  American soldiers were sleeping in the hallways of his home just to be near him, Western dignitaries saw him as a symbol of freedom for staring down the Nazis and the face of Picasso was on every tabloid in Europe.  Picasso was adored by the French Intellectuals for the simple reason that he came out from under the Nazi Occupation as the boldest or at least the least politically embarrassed of the French intellectuals in Post War France who had lived in a France governed by the fascists.   It was thought that over 40% of the French people collaborated openly with the Nazis and Picasso had had none of the collaborating, a lot of the suffering and most of all kept on working at his Art no matter what the consequence might be.  Although Picasso was the painter of Guernica and was a noted anti-fascist, Picasso lived openly in Paris.  And even if he had to keep his nose clean and his head down, he somehow managed to live through the four years of dreadful hostility and miserable living conditions while the Germans were running the country. On top of this Picasso even managed to acquire a new twenty-one year old girlfriend named Francoise Gilot who was an other worldly catch for a sixty-three year old Spaniard.  And she was smart and painterly to add to her qualities of beauty.  As always, Dora Marr was, as well, patiently waiting for his attention and living around the corner from Picasso vigilantly prepared for him to call at any moment.

Picasso was doing very well, it seemed, in August of 1944.

Then, in less than three short months later, Picasso becomes the anti-hero to the West.  Picasso joins the brotherhood of the Communist Party.

How did this happen?

Let me paint you a story about Partisan Picasso:

Birthday Camp Out

A photo from my birthday night 'picnic' at Eliot and Kyra's new
construction project/ house. Eliot and I take a break for dinner that
Kyra, Julia and Eason brought over.

Anniversary

Happy Anniversary to John and Julia! Us!

44.

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday to me, Lynne and Sam!!