1. I have days, like today, when I want to learn more about artists and the making of art.
So, I took the Echo Dot into the front bedroom where I am slowly and surely working to get papers and books organized so that we can send the single twin-sized bed in this room over to Carol and Paul's to make room to create our home office.
So, how does artistic genius emerge? How does creativity play out with certain artists? In the first season of his podcast, Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell addresses these questions in Episode 7, entitled, "Hallelujah". He looks closely at the evolution of Elvis Costello's 1984 song "The Deportee Club" which he later reworked as "Deportee" and at Leonard Cohen's 1984 "Hallelujah" and draws parallels to the way they labored over these songs with the way Paul Cezanne labored over his paintings. He contrasts the Cezanne method with Pablo Picasso's path to creativity and looks at Bob Dylan and Paul Simon's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" as examples paralleling Picasso. If you'd like to ponder this question of creativity and learn more about Elvis Costello and Leonard Cohen and their creative genius, just click here. I know one listen wasn't enough for me and that I'm going to take it all in again.
2. I finished listening to Gladwell's "Hallelujah" and suddenly I realized that it had been several months since I checked out Tamar Avishai's scintillating monthly podcast, The Lonely Palette. I went to podcast's website, here, and saw that her latest episode explores the history and genius of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. I chuckled and wondered if da Vinci was Picasso or Cezanne (he's Cezanne) and tuned in to this fascinating episode and enjoyed Tamar Avishai explain what makes Mona Lisa such a compelling painting and how it embodies da Vinci's experimental bent. I especially enjoyed Avishai's riff on Walter Benjamin's seminal 1930's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and her reflections upon how the ideas of this essay apply to our experience with Mona Lisa. If you'd like to take some time and immerse yourself in art history and some aesthetic theory and learn more about Mona Lisa, just click here, click listen, and sit back and take it in.
3. Many of us who come from the Silver Valley have been torn between the pull we feel to stay home and live where we know people and where we can enjoy the beauty of the area's mountains, rivers, and lakes and the desire to see more of the world and to pursue educational and vocational opportunities not available in the Silver Valley. I know when I was a teenager, my father, teachers and counselors at the high school, adult friends of our family, and guys I worked with at the Zinc Plant repeatedly told me I needed to get out of the Valley.
And I did.
And now I'm back.
Over the past couple of years, I've been checking in on West Virginia Public Radio's superb podcast Inside Appalachia. I am consistently struck by the similarities between life in rural Appalachia and life in the Silver Valley and I enjoy host Jessica Lily's interviews and stories about Appalachian life, politics, and difficulties. She's never left Appalachia. She's thoughtful, respectful, and sensitive. I love how she's so intelligent and, at the same time, has never got above her raisin'.
If you click here, and scroll down, you can see that episodes of Inside Appalachia regularly focus on the struggles of people who stay put in the region and do their best to make a living in a depressed economy and to endure the terrible things that happen because of friends, family, and other residents addicted to opioids.
But the episode I listened to today focused on people who left Appalachia and who are homesick, who long to return. It's entitled, "Homesickness and the Struggle to Come Home to Appalachia" and you can find it right here. I have listened to it twice and I'm not done. Soon, I'll tune in again.
BONUS: Today, we took another step toward making our house into what we want it to be. The Furniture Exchange delivered the comfortable living room chair the Deke picked out on Friday. Our next move will be to decide on end tables, plants, lamps, and what to hang on the walls. No room in our house is completely what we want it to be just yet, but we aren't in a hurry.
Slowly.
Surely.
We are figuring it out.
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