11. Visit the aquarium

We spent the afternoon at the Georgia Aquarium
What an amazing sight, especially seeing the whale sharks in person! What huge creatures, yet so graceful. It was a beautiful fall day and the crowds were not too large. I could have sat for hours at the viewing hall watching all the fish move in a ballet of fluid movement. How peaceful it was.

I also loved seeing the jellyfish. Such beautiful, glowing, orange, strange creatures that are absolutely fascinating, looking like parachutes rising and falling against a blue glass background.

It was the perfect time to visit. I even brought home a souvenir paperweight with a beautiful blue glass jellyfish encased in clear glass to remind me daily of the liquid day.

Book Review – The Root of Wild Madder

An American journalist living in Greece, Brian Murphy, had considerable and travel experience in Iran and Afghanistan when he became interested in the mysteries inherent in Persian carpets. This led to a quest to become more knowledgeable about the spiritual aspects and the significance of Persian carpets for those involved in making and trading them. This book is also a record of what are undoubtedly vanishing skills and ways of live for carpet weavers, dyers and carpet traders in a part of the world that is increasingly cut off from the west. The madder root of the title is the source of many of the oranges and reds found in Persian carpets made from naturally dyed materials.

The book is a mixture of many things: a travelogue through Iran and Afghanistan, a political analysis of their regimes, a socio-anthropological treatise of their people, but most of all, it is a book about carpets, and about those who weave them, those who dye them, those who trade them, and those who adore them. Brian Murphy uses a very poetic language to present all the above. And the book itself is a pleasure to read, with lots of stories, information, human conditions, and knowledge.

Whenever I come across a passage or phrase that catches my attention in a book, I tend to dog-ear the page so that I can come back to it. I’ve dogged-eared quite a few pages in this one. Rarely have I read a book that so readily captures the magic of what fuels the fiber enthusiast. These textiles are about stories captured in fiber and structure. Meanings and symbols may or may not give up their secrets outside of the carpet weaver’s mind and hands. Here is such a passage:

“My grandmother made this carpet when I was a boy…I must have been very young, because I can remember only little fragments of her making this carpet. There was a big pot where she made the dyes from different things. There were some leaves and dry plants. I remember the colors so well. I had never seen such things. It was from nature, the world where we walk, but also—how can I say?—part from somewhere else….When my grandmother died, I was still young. I remember whispering into the carpets, thinking my grandmother could hear me….I think what we make, what we say, what we do are all little parts of our soul. We leave these things for others to find and collect. This carpet was from my grandmother’s hand and her mind. It is now with me and my family….Life is in this carpet. So why is it wrong to believe that my grandmother is not still connected to this carpet she made; that she can feel the love we put in keeping it clean and repaired?”

I got caught up in the author’s carpet education and the insight he gained for appreciation of the poetry and imagery of Persian carpets.

44. Find a good Italian restaurant and have dinner

So I accidently found a good Italian restaurant, or I should say... re-discovered a good Italian restaurant that I liked but now there is a branch near the office and I don't have to go to the other side of town to eat out.

The office staff went there a few weeks ago when we were treated to dinner by some guests and I was in heaven. The place is called "Ippolitos" and it reminds me of the northern West Virginia Italian food I grew up on, a place populated with many Italian families.

Check it out, maybe you'll like it too. I can't wait to go back.

http://www.ippolitos.net/

88. Go to my 35- year high school reunion

I'm back from my weekend at the high school reunion. It was kinda weird. I'm at the age now where I hardly recognized anybody and, if they did look familiar, I couldn't remember their name. The name tags had a not-very-user-friendly font so that I had to practically stand on top of people in order to read the name to figure out who the heck I was talking to. Who let all those old people in the door?

Geeze... most of the people I hung around with in high school didn't show up. I'm still not sure if I had a good time or not.

About 120 (including spouses) people attended, which was a pretty good number to have at the dinner/dance after 35 years. What stuck me as sort of odd was how many people still lived in the area. Since I haven’t lived in my home town since the late 1970s is it any wonder I don’t recognize anybody? Hubby’s class is much more widespread geographically and he was only two years ahead of me in high school.

The best part of the weekend for me was the tour of the high school. The main building is still the same although they are currently doing a renovation at the front and the office will be moving to the new area. The school was built in 1919 and currently has 1700 students. I think when we were there the student population was about 1500 but we only had three grades then. The main building still has the same marble hall floors and stairwells, wooden panels lining the walls, hardwood floors in the classrooms. The library was exactly the same except the card catalog is gone and there are some computers on tables. It even smelled the same.

There are a few new additions: like a new cafeteria, basketball court and science classrooms wing. The auditorium still has its original 1940 chairs and stage and is in need of major fixes. It was a like being in a time warp to be in those buildings again. Thank God I am not that age any longer.

After the school tour some of us took a faux trolley bus ride around the university to visit some of its new facilities. I'm in that picture but I'm not pointing myself out. Luckily, I grew up in a big university town. Back then the college students seemed mature and adult. Now they look like little kids.

I can’t win this age thing can I?

#14 Listen to a live jazz band

Bonsai!
I unexpectedly completed one item today in the most unlikely of places.
I went to Japanfest this afternoon. http://www.japanfest.org/

This event used to be held outside at Stone Mountain but this year moved to a new location inside the Civic Center. The new location is a lot more convenient for me to get to but I’m reserving judgment on whether or not it is a good move as there was a lot of bottlenecking in the layout of the place and events. Too many people crammed into too little space. Hopefully, if they keep it in this location, they will learn from this year’s mistakes.

However, I really enjoyed having the musical concerts inside the Performance Arts Center area. Here is a real stage with good acoustics and adequate seating. So, in a very happy mix of things American and Japanese I listened to not one but two live mini concerts.

"Autumn Breeze" Jazz Concert by Shunzo Ohno and a Blues Concert by Tomi Isobe.
Both had great musicians and good music. Cool man….

My other great find was the good kimono vendor booth and treating myself to two silk haori jackets that were on the special sale rack because I simply couldn’t choose between them. Here is what a haori jacket looks like.

http://www.kimonosource.com/japanese_kimono_information/about_haori.htm

I bought myself a grayish blue-green one and an old rose colored one. Very soft, toned, colored silk, unlike the loud, garish, too-bright colored stuff most everyone else was looking at. What can I say? My artistic training by my Japanese professor has finally sunk in to appreciate the more subtle color palette the Japanese would prefer for themselves.

A beautiful fall day was had by all.

Book review for The Subversive Stitch

This book is a history of embroidery from the mostly English point of view. Written in 1984, it is a study of women’s history and women’s role in society as it is reviewed through the shifting notions of femininity and the roles ascribed to women through samplers, decorative arts and dress and a touch on modern fiber art, though this aspect could due with a more recent look at current artists who use stitching as a medium for expression.

In the middle ages women worked alongside men in embroiderers’ guild workshops as apprentices, designers, and stitchers of gold, silver and silk and embroidery was thought to be equal of painting and sculpture. But, by the eighteenth century embroidery was considered to be a task exclusively suited to women, and by the nineteenth century the fine stitchery expected of women of the upper classes and the skill work extracted for slave wages from working-class women, had become both a symbol and instrument of female subservience.

Drawing on household accounts, women’s magazines, letters, novels, and the art works themselves, Rozsika Parker discovered pockets of resistance: paradoxically, while embroidery was employed to define femininity in women, it also provided a way to negotiate the constraints of the feminine role. “Polly Cook did this”, one eighteenth century child’s sampler states, “and hated every stitch she did in it.” Good for Polly.

The images of the embroideries were amazing work. The writing itself was a bit dry and academic, which I suppose is to be expected given the subject matter.

Book review - Things I Didn't Know

I first heard of Robert Hughes some years ago when I was watching a PBS television series, American Visions. He struck me then as a brassy Aussie who knew his art stuff but was also quite bombastic at times in his tendency to get carried away. His memoir is oddly compelling and frustrating at the same time. Here is a review that I mostly agree with so I will try to not repeat the same stuff.

http://www.powells.com/review/2006_10_30.html

It opens with the horrendous car crash that nearly killed him several years ago. This was an opening story that really grabs you. Then it proceeds to his childhood, which was not too awful except for losing his father early and for the requisite catholic boarding school which seems to be an excellent way to turn most people who are exposed to that particular brand of education off of religion in general.

His personality is oversized and he has made his share of enemies as well as a ton of friends. The description of his first marriage is blunt and apparently was such a train-wreck that I felt sorry for his baby son who was stuck with parents who clearly should not have been parents at that point in their lives. To later find out that he and his adult son were estranged prior to the son’s suicide is very tragic. But Bob has no fear in exposing his less than endearing traits as well as his talents and strengths. I think that writing about one’s own life must be incredibly challenging and making it readable even more so.

My main complaint about the book is that it took so long to get to his arrival in America (this book is 395 pages) that it suddenly ends in the early 70s. So we don’t find out anything about him for the past 35 years of his life except for the car crash that was at the beginning of the book. He was an art critic for Time magazine for 30 years. Where are the rest of his stories?

This book left me wanting more.