The soul has greater need of the ideal than the real for it is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live

Friday, January 16, 2009

Here we go again. Plus Hot Guy Friday!

Yesterday a human being did an incredible thing. He met a challenge he had prepared for and trained for all his professional life. In so doing he saved hundreds of lives. Yes, I'm talking about Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III of Danville, CA, who landed a US Airways plane in the Hudson without killing anyone.

Sully did what he was trained as a pilot to do, he not only did it incredibly well, he was the last person to leave the plane.

And the poor guy can't get a break. He's been upstaged by God.

IT'S A MIRACLE!!!!!! Screams everyone on the tv and in the few remaining newspapers we still read.

No it's not you fucking idiots. It's a guy doing a good thing! Give the poor bastard some props will ya?

Like God had something to do with it. It just pisses me off that all you good Christians can't give credit where credit is due, you just gotta give it to some mythical being, cause humans can never do anything that well.

Which kind of thinking is exactly the reason we're in the mess we're in. No one thinks people can cut it. The American Disease of not accepting responsibility extends to robbing those responsible of credit where credit is seriously due.

I knew no one on that plane, I haven't flown US Air in years, I do not know Sully Sullenberger.

But on behalf of all those ungrateful sons of bitches who won't give you the proper credit Sully, I'd like to say thank you.

Thank you for being a master at what you do, and thank you for believing in integrity and staying with your plane until all the passengers were out. You're truly a man of honor in my estimation. Thank you again.

And Anrew Wyeth died yesterday. The following excerpt from the AP article on Wyeth today explains why I love his art:

-"The world has lost one of the greatest artists of all time," George A. Weymouth, a friend of Wyeth's who is chairman of the board of the Brandywine Conservancy, said in a statement.

A Wyeth retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2006 drew more than 175,000 visitors in 15 1/2 weeks, the highest-ever attendance at the museum for a living artist. The Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, a converted 19th-century grist mill, includes hundreds of works by three generations of Wyeths.

It was in Maine that Wyeth found the subject for "Christina's World," his best-known painting. And it was in Pennsylvania that he met Helga Testorf, a neighbor in his native Chadds Ford who became the subject of the intimate portraits that brought him millions of dollars and a wave of public attention in 1986.

The "Helga" paintings, many of them full-figure nudes, came with a whiff of scandal: Wyeth said he had not even told his wife, Betsy, about the more than 200 paintings and sketches until he had completed them in 1985.

Wyeth's world was as limited in scale, and as rich in associations, as "Christina's World," which shows a disabled woman looking up a grassy rise toward her farm home, her face tantalizingly unseen.

"Really, I think one's art goes only as far and as deep as your love goes," Wyeth said in a Life magazine interview in 1965.

"I don't paint these hills around Chadds Ford because they're better than the hills somewhere else. It's that I was born here, lived here — things have a meaning for me."

Paradoxically, he said, he loved Maine "in spite of its scenery. There's a lot of cornball in that state you have to go through — boats at docks, old fishermen, and shacks with swayback roofs. I hate all that."

Wyeth was a secretive man who spent hours tramping the countryside alone. He painted many portraits, working several times with favorite subjects, but said he disliked having someone else watching him paint.

Much of Wyeth's work had a melancholy feel — aging people and brown, dead plants — but he chose to describe his work as "thoughtful."

"I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future — the timelessness of the rocks and the hills — all the people who have existed there," he once said. "I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape — the loneliness of it — the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show.

"I think anything like that — which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone — people always feel is sad. Is it because we've lost the art of being alone?"

Wyeth remained active in recent years and President George W. Bush presented him with a National Medal of the Arts in 2007.

Wyeth remained active in his 90s, but his granddaughter, Victoria Wyeth, told The Associated Press in 2008 that he no longer gave interviews. "He says, 'Vic, everything I have to say is on the walls,'" she said.-


This guy knew me, I swear.

Farewell Andrew, I'll think of you this weekend while I'm at the gallery looking at your work.


And now for something you'll really like.

This week I thought I'd do a little sports feature since Tom Brady was out this season after his little incident locally, and the opportunities to gawk at him were few. And since I'm having serious baseball withdrawal I'm combining David DeJesus and Tom Brady into one glorious HGF post.












A little side note on David, last summer I was working at the grocery and this really cute hispanic guy comes up to me and starts asking me questions about where to find stuff and of course I was more than happy to help. So while I was finishing up I asked him for his card that the store ostensibly uses to dispense discounts, but actually uses to track marketing trends, and when I scanned it the name popped up on my screen David DeJesus. I was near to swooning to realize I'd been talking to my idle for several minutes without realizing it. Luckily I managed not to gush. I figured he didn't really want to be recognized, and I didn't really want to look like a goofy fan with a crush. I smiled and nodded. He smiled and blushed. It was a near perfect moment.

So Happy HGF! Enjoy your weekend I'm riding horses in the cold and snow and then I'm looking at Andrew Wyeth paintings.

Love