Kiss Me and Smile For Me

Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary died on September 16, 2009, at the age of 72. She was born in 1936 in Louisville, Kentucky, which is also my hometown. Driving home from Louisville today after spending the Thanksgiving holiday with my family, we listened to a Peter, Paul and Mary "greatest hits" tape, and the song "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" brought back some memories. "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" was the first pop song I remember hearing and loving, and wanting to hear over and over, and learning the words so I could sing along. Surely I must have heard other songs on the radio (remember "If you want it, here it is, come and get it" - my brother and I kept asking my mom what "it" was), but 40 years later this one still stands out as my "first."

Peter, Paul and Mary's version of "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" (written by John Denver) became a radio hit in 1969; that was the year my parents divorced. I didn't realize until much later that the song's blend of heartache, remorse, and desire resonated with me because of my own loss.

My parents' divorce was the end of my childhood. I was five years old when they split up, maybe six, I don't remember exactly. I remember my life before the divorce in idealized terms - I know it wasn't a happy time for my parents, but for me it was the happiest time of my life, when I had no problems, no cares. My family was my universe, and when it fell apart, I knew real pain for the first time in my life.

Mary Travers gave a voice to my pain and longing. If the divorce was the end of my childhood, then pop music was the beginning of my adulthood. I'm not sure that was a good thing. Don't get me wrong, I love pop music - it's fun, and it can create beauty out of the banal or even the ugly. At the same time, though, it provides formulas. For me, this formula meant that a romantic relationship (preferably heterosexual, definitely monogamous) defined the ultimate terms of love, desire, and loss. Never mind that it was my parents' divorce that created my tragedy; finding a husband became the prescription to cure it. (Or at least, finding a boyfriend.) To make myself perfectly clear, I don't feel that this is a positive benefit of pop music; it may even be harmful. But I still love "Leavin' on a Jet Plane."

I don't mean to make too much out of this. One song is not going to have that much influence on anyone's life, it's part of a much larger and much more complex culture. It's just funny to me, when I hear that song, to think back on my 6-year-old self (in 1970) and my 4-year-old brother being so moved by it at such a young age that it could almost make us cry. Where did that impulse come from? It had to come from something outside the music -- the emotional devastation of having our family broken apart. When I say pop music was the beginning of adulthood for me, I guess what I mean is the ability to find some hidden meaning to a song.

My four-year-old son still thinks that "Bungle in the Jungle" is just about animals; I hope it stays that way for a long time.

Now the time has come to leave you,
One more time, let me kiss you,
Then close your eyes, I'll be on my way...

Robert Rauschenberg (Obituary)

The revolutionary postwar American artist Robert Rauschenberg died on Monday, May 12, at the age of 82, as reported in the New York Times on May 14 (obituary written by Michael Kimmelman). Along with Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg was one of the most important artists to react against the high-seriousness of modern art as represented by Abstract Expressionism. He revived the subversive, playful spirit of Dada artist Marcel Duchamp in his various collages, assemblages, and combines, including Bed (1955) and Monogram (1959). The former "combine painting" represents a bed splattered with paint in an Abstract-Expressionist manner; at the time, the New York Times described it as a “police photo of a murder bed after the corpse had been moved.” With his Neo-Dada artistic strategies, Rauschenberg attempted to bridge the gap between art and life, thus helping to expand our definition of art.
Rauschenberg was awarded the Grand Prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale, the most important international art exhibition. That's pretty good for an artist who never even saw a painting until he was an adult, a medical technician in the Navy Hospital Corps during World War II.

Rauschenberg's work in the 1950s and '60s, including many works on display at the 1964 Biennale, were fairly unmistakeable cultural and political commentaries on America's growing cultural hegemony. In Retroactive I (1963) Rauschenberg collages together images of American astronauts and President Kennedy, emphatically repeating Kennedy's "pointing" gesture, just one year after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Likewise, Rauschenberg's collage called Coca-Cola Plan (1958) - three Coke bottles with wings, above a small globe - refers to global domination, and is a play on the Marshall Plan, sending Americanism over to Europe in the form of commercial mass culture.

Kimmelman's obituary is a must-read for anyone interested in American avant-garde painting, with lots more information about what Rauschenberg was up to during the past four decades. A fascinating scholarly account of the 1964 Venice Biennale can be found in Laurie J. Monahan's “Cultural Cartography: American Designs at the 1964 Venice Biennale,” in Reconstructing Modernism, ed. by Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990).


Also seen in the New York Times:
Austrians Strip for Lens
(Monday, May 12, 2008)

"Spencer Tunick, the photographer known for his mass nudes, did his thing on Sunday in Vienna, where hundreds of Austrian volunteers stripped in Ernst-Happel Stadium. It is the site of seven matches in the Euro 2008 soccer championships next month, , including the June 29 final, Reuters reported. Mr. Tunick said on his Web site, spencertunick.com, that the 'ephemeral installation' was 'devised to capture and combine the spirit of sports, the grand sweeping waves of stadium architecture and the abstract relation of the human form to modern structures.' "