Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Behind Bars

Slate magazine has a wonderful section called the Explainer that answers "your questions about the news," and in light of Mark David Chapman's recent parole hearing (John Lennon's assassin), they published information on how to pass a parole board interview. Now hopefully most of us will never need this kind of counsel, but if you're anything like me (perhaps due to way too much television as a child, or being a librarian, or a combination of the two) I'm always interested in any kind of useful facts I can get my hands on...because one never knows when one might end up in jail and facing a parole board. Right? This coupled with the fact that we have a program coming to Central Library this month on the role prisons serve in our country and about alternatives to incarceration, got me thinking about the prison system in America and what it means to be incarcerated.

If this is a topic that also interests you, we have a variety of resources that look at the history of the U.S. prison system. We have some books that are very thorough and academic, such as Setphen Cox's The Big House, but the one I found most interesting and easy to read was Locked Up by Lauara B. Edge. She does a good job presenting the facts in an appealing manner, with bold section headings, attractive color schemes, images, quotes, photographs and a useful time-line in the back. And the information is well researched and solid.

Sometimes, I find the best way to really explore something is through the art it generates, the images and sounds a particular place or situation gives birth to. I remember recommending a work that looked at the art created by prisoners of the Japanese internment camps a while back. I am doing the same here. Prison/Culture is a book that explores the experience of incarceration through art. The editor Sharon Bliss and others have pulled together artwork, created mostly by inmates, that is varied, beautiful and heartbreaking. Along these lines, I would also recommend the zine Tenacious: Art and Writing from Women in Prison, which is filled with stories, drawings, and poetry from women incarcerated all over the country.

And recently a friend and fellow librarian recommended a new fiction book, aimed at teen audiences, that looks at imprisonment. Incarceron looks at the future of prisons - prisons unlike you or I could imagine.  The Incarceron prison is a sentient being, morphing and responding to situations, and to those trapped inside. The author, Catherine Fisher, tells the story of Finn, an inmate of Incarceron and Claudia, the warden's daughter. It has a complex plot that not only follows the struggle of these two to meet one another, but also examines the philosophy of imprisonment. I mentioned earlier that this book was written with teens in mind, but honestly, the teen fiction genre is putting out some of the most engaging reads out there (Hunger Games anyone?!). I'd recommend giving it a try!

Space Geek

It's been a while since my last post on space, but as a full-fledged space geek I couldn't help but get all excited hearing the news around space shuttle Discovery's landing this week.  I'll admit I was a bit bummed on Sunday, when I first read about Discovery's long low Earth orbit landing path, and realized that it was not going to be flying over Portland.  But for those in its flight path, who saw the streak and heard the sonic boom, you are so lucky!  

The library has so many great things for my fellow space geeks, for instance, NASA's Mission Reports and this documentary, but if you are specifically interested in the space shuttle program, it's history and forthcoming retirement, check out Final Countdown by Pat Duggins.  Duggins, National Public Radio's space guy and shuttle expert, takes a look at the space shuttle program from its conception in the 1970s up through its impending retirement this year.   And perhaps most interestingly, Duggins looks forward to NASA's plans for the future of space exploration.  And it's not all science and technology, it's full of personal stories from astronauts and others involved in the space program.  An entertaining and insightful read!

Another lovely book that talks about the history of the space program and the experiences of those involved is Voices From the Moon by Andrew Chaikin.  Chaikin (obviously another space geek) writes tons of books filled with first-hand accounts and breathtaking images of space.  This one in particular looks back at the epic Apollo missions and I highly recommend you read Chaikin's introduction.  He eloquently describes what it was really like for the first men on the moon; engineers, military men, and "ultimate left brain thinkers", who since their return to Earth have been constantly bombarded with questions like, "how did it feel?"  Chaiken, with his wife Victoria Kohl's help, gives us a sense of what each individual astronaut did feel, and accompanies it with NASA's beautiful, high resolution scans of the photographs taken during their missions.  Though Chapters 11 and 12 have some of my favorite images, for me Chapter 10 was the most interesting, with quotes from the astronauts on what life was like after a trip to the moon.  And on page 157, you get to see Apollo 12's lunar module pilot turned artist, Alan Bean, painting away in his Houston studio.

Speaking of beautiful photographs and astronaut artists, we have a wonderful oversized book celebrating 50 years of NASA-inspired art called NASA/Art: 50 Years of Exploration by James Dean and Bertram Ulrich.  Back in the early 1960s, during the heyday of the space race, NASA's administrator decided they should use "the field of fine arts to commemorate past historic events."  And this book shows you some amazing works of commemorative art, from painter Normal Rockwell to photographer Annie Leibovitz, and all sorts of folks and mediums in-between.  As Michael Collins, astronaut and former director of the National Air and Space Museum, states in his forward to the book, "the artist fills the great gaps left by the astronaut and his camera."  Personally, I'm rather fond of artist William Thon's gap-filling 1969 images of Apollo 11's launch, on pages 72 and 73.  

I now have the overwhelming urge to watch The Right Stuff for the umpteenth time...I'm going to place it on hold!

For Your Education

I have an aunt and uncle who are Japanese American.  My uncle was born here in the States and is a second generation Japanese American, or Nisei.  He was born in 1928 and spent time as a young man in the Gila River Relocation Center near Phoenix, Arizona.  Obviously, this had a huge impact on his life and every time I visit my hometown and see him, he brings me something new to read on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, he says it's for my "education".  I always look forward to seeing him and to receiving another book, article, or government document to add to my personal library on the evacuation and detainment of Nikkei (people of Japanese descent) during World War II.  And I will pass along what I've learned to my own child, not only because this happened to a member of our family, but also because these are the moments in history we should never forget.  When I saw OPBs story on the Portland Expo Center's role in the internment of Japanese-Americans, it struck a chord in me and prompted me to look again at our library's collection of materials on this subject.  

This library has hundreds of books on the subject of the evacuation and relocation of West Coast Japanese Americans.  I decided to focus on some that for me, make it more real.  For instance, in 1942 photographer Dorothea Lange was commissioned by the U.S. Relocation Authority to photograph the evacuation and relocation process of 110,000 Japanese Americans.  She not only photographed life in the assembly centers and the Manzanar Relocation Center, but also what these people lost due to their imprisonment: their homes, farms, businesses, and careers.  All of Lange's photographs were confiscated during the war for being too controversial.  The negatives were thankfully held at the National Archives and now many of them are available in different collections.  One collection I particularly like is Impounded in which Lange's photographs are beautifully displayed, along with the notes she wrote for each.  This book was edited by Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro.

In a similar vein we find the book Placing Memory, by Todd Stewart.  Although it's been 65 years since a Supreme Court decision in favor of Mitsuye Endo paved the way for the opening of the relocation centers and the unrestricted release of their inmates, those camps still exist in the minds and hearts of those who were confined there.  And in some cases, they still physically exist in the areas they occupied so long ago.  Many of us have seen black and white images from inside the relocation centers, showing how families took what little they had and bettered their living conditions.  What is also important is to see, is the larger landscape in which these families found themselves.  In his book, Stewart combines archival photos, maps and color photographs of the sites as they exist today.  Imagine coming from the hustle and bustle of Portland to the harsh, bleak landscape of the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho.  Or coming from the lush and fertile California coast to the hot, dry desert of the Gila River Relocation Center, dotted with Saguaro Cactus.  This book will help you do that.

I mention above the families who took what little they were given and managed to build a home and a community.  The next book I want to mention really highlights that amazing spirit and the importance of art in creating such spaces. The Art of Gaman by Delphine Hirasuna explores the making of arts and crafts in the relocation centers, which she describes as "both a physical and emotional necessity for the internees."  The items contained within this book are stunning and I promise they will absolutely amaze you.  The first thing you must do is turn to page 74 and gaze upon the Japanese-style vanity made of persimmon wood by Pat Morihata, who was confined at the Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas.  You'll find it beautiful and will be amazed to know that this vanity is made completely without nails, but is instead held together by a perfect dovetailing of pieces.  Morihata made this vanity for the woman he was wooing; she said "yes".

In May Sky, by the late Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, we see more of the art that came from Japanese American internment.  De Cristoforo, a poet who was interned at the Tule Lake Relocation Center in Northern California, spent years compiling haiku written by others in the camps.  I am an admirer of haiku, and this is some of the most beautifully written and heartbreaking poetry that I have read.  Take these three pieces, from the famous haiku poet Neiji Ozawa who was interned at the Gila River Relocation Center:

Sensing permanent separation / As you left me in extreme heat / On gravel road

Even babies born / Inside barbed wire fence / Mingling on New Year's Day

From the window of despair / May sky / There is always tomorrow

For each haiku de Cristoforo provides the original Japanese characters, the romanji (romanized form of Japanese) and an English translation.

Street Art 101

I am a wannabe artist and I love art of all kinds: dance, music, theater, and the visual arts.  I've been to the Louvre and seen da Vinci's Mona Lisa and I am lucky enough to own a couple pieces by some very talented Portlanders. But honestly, some of the stuff that has moved me most, I've seen just walking down the street.  I'm talking about what is commonly referred to as graffiti, street art and murals.  Much of it could be described as crude, youthful angst spray painted onto a wall, but some of it is thoughtful, poetic, powerful and even inspiring.  Have you seen some of the beautiful City Repair projects, or the whimsical little horses around town, or just what some extremely talented individual has done in the dead of night with some spray paint and a vision! As part of their Pictures of the Day series, the Christian Science Monitor pulled together 14 images of graffiti from around the world.  

The library has many books on graffiti and street art and murals but I want to point out one in particular, the bible of graffiti if you will, The Faith of Graffiti with photos by Mervyn Kurlansky and Jon Naar. This work was originally published in 1974 and is often referred to as the "classic text" on the birth of urban street art, focusing specifically on the emergence of graffiti on New York City subway trains.  It is an oversized book with pages and pages of amazing images, with the 2009 edition including some additional photos that Naar has taken through the years. And both editions have a mind-blowing essay on street art by Norman Mailer. Here is a taste:

...the unheard echo of graffiti, the vibration of that profound discomfort it arouses, as if the unheard music of its proclamation and/or its mess, the rapt intent seething of its foliage, is the herald of some oncoming apocalypse less and less far away. Graffiti lingers on our subway door as a memento of what it may well have been, our first art of karma, as if indeed all the lives ever lived are sounding now like bugles of gathering armies across the unseen bridge.

If, like me, it's the images you are interested in, take a look at the zine Scrawl.  In this zine, author Amy Adoyzie includes photographs of graffiti she took while in Asia.  In her introduction she says "it's a sample of art from kids in developing nations...taking back space with their own aesthetics."  You'll note that even though the languages (and the alphabets, for lack of a better term) are different, the graffiti looks reassuringly similar to right here at home.  It's well laid-out with vibrant pictures.

If your inspired to create your own street art now (though you should know that "unlawfully applying graffiti" is a Class A violation in Oregon) the library has a book for you!  Check out Graff by Scape Martinez.  Martinez is a veteran artist from San Jose, California, who goes into step-by-step detail on how to take an idea from paper to wall. Plus, it's fun for learning some of the lingo around this art form, and thankfully a glossary is included. Speaking of which, if you need some help deciphering our own local world of graffiti, Portland's Office of Neighborhood Involvement has created a guide on how to read graffiti!

The last book I want to share has nothing to do with spray paint or markers on walls, but it does, in the most wonderful way possible, capture the beauty that is street art.  Slinkachu is a street art/installation artist who takes hand-painted figures, or "little people", and photographs them in the big city (mostly London and Manchester).  This is difficult for me to describe in words, but I ask that you take a look!  The book is titled Little People in the City and it is a wonderful, whimsical collection of photographs.  As The Times so perfectly put it, "even when you know they are just hand-painted figurines, you can't help but feel that their plights convey something of our own fears about being lost and vulnerable in a big, bad city."  This is definitely my favorite book right now.

Cultured Crime

Art theft is a glamorous, intellectual sort of crime – or at least it is in our collective imagination. Thieves who specialize in stealing art objects, jewelry, and the like are generally portrayed in fiction and drama as clever, humane individuals who practice theft as a skilled trade, eschewing violence and intimidation – picture Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, Robert Redford in Hot Rock, or Nick Nolte in The Good Thief. The reality may be quite different, but crime is not a business that operates in public, so it's hard to know. Certainly I have little idea what art thieves and art theft are really like – but reading last week that more than two dozen works of art had been stolen from a private villa in the south of France – the second major art heist in less than a week – I began to wonder more about what motivates art theft, who pays for it, and how it works. And so, of course, I turned to the library.

I found a good place to start with the coffee-table book Museum of the Missing. Art journalist Simon Houpt starts with a basic premise: art objects are only worth stealing if you can command a high price for them, and that's why art theft has been on the rise since auction and sale prices began to rise dramatically in the 1950s. Houpt relates the stories of noted art thieves and those of the detectives who hunt them down, and talks about what the loss of an art object means for a museum or collector. Every single page is illustrated with reproductions of stolen art pieces and photographs of the human element: collectors, curators, gallery owners, art detectives, and thieves.

To get a little more in-depth, I turned to investigative journalist Peter Watson's rather sensational Sotheby's: The Inside Story. It's an exposé of borderline shady deals done by major museums, auction houses, and collectors – in particular, Watson makes the case that Sotheby's has systematically participated in smuggling, helping to transport antiquities and artworks across international borders in violation of the law. This is real, old-fashioned gumshoeing, and although sometimes Watson and his investigatory colleagues seem nearly as shady as the art smugglers they're tracking, it does make for a fascinating story.

The Mona Lisa is perhaps the most famous painting in the world, and at this point, one of the most challenging to steal – but it has been stolen and recovered before. When it went missing from the Louvre in 1911, Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire were among the top suspects (darn those pesky radical artists!). The public mourned the painting's loss deeply, thronging to the Louvre to visit the blank space where it had hung, and expressing their sorrow with flowers and other tributes. R. A. Scotti's The Vanished Smile examines how the Mona Lisa came to be such a meaningful symbol, and along the way, tells the story of its theft and recovery.

Looking for information on this topic, I found myself almost overwhelmed by the huge number of interesting-looking books on various aspects of art theft. As I mentioned above, there are many novels and films about art thieves and the detectives who investigate their crimes. But there are also lots more true-story books, on grave robbery, the theft of antiquities and archaeological artifacts, and the systematic looting of European art by the Nazis during World War II, among other things. Perhaps one of these books will be just what you're looking for! Of course, if not, you can always ask your friendly librarian for more suggestions.

The Webs We Weave

Last year, a spider built her web at our house in a very lucky spot: on one of the widows of our glassed in porch, affording her a smorgasboard of small insects drawn to our porch light. We watched her grow over the weeks and repair her web, a thing of beauty if ever I saw one. Textile maker Simon Peers obviously sees the beauty in spider webs, but he took it one step further. He paid local weavers to gather over a million spiders and "silk" them for what is called dragline silk, the strongest type of silk a spider makes. They make several types, did you know that? Me neither. Mr. Peers and his weavers created an 11 by 4 foot golden tapestry, now on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

This extraordinary story got me thinking about other ways we use animals in art, either as subjects or as objects themselves. Rarer, though, is the phenomenon of animals as artists. Monkey Painting is a serious look at monkeys, apes, and other non-human primates as creative beings. Thierry Lenain's volume explores attempts by researchers to connect the artistic abilities of primates to early art by humans. Monkey Painting also reproduces some of these works in full color. A delight to behold! Lest you think this is a tongue-in-cheek book, know that Mr. Lenain is a noted French writer of both art criticism and children's books.

A title that does play around a little bit is Why Paint Cats: the ethics of feline aesthetics. This is from the team that also brought us the original Why Cats Paint and later, Dancing With Cats, two titles that know how far to go in the pursuit of silliness. I'm sure some people took the phenomenon of cat painting very seriously as proof of cats' higher intelligence, but I'm not sure their intelligence can be vouched for if they were willing to sit still long enough for the creation of these startling images of cats painted as a butterfly, an American Flag, and a clown, among other things. Burton Silver and Heather Busch must be experts in the near impossible job of cat herders.

The first time I saw this book, I immediately sat down and started turning pages, despite the fact that at the time, I was supposed to be shelving books, not reading books. Outrageous colors, impossible shapes, and incredible animals fill the pages of Ernst Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature. I was sure these most of these creatures were imaginary, until I learned more about the man. He was a trained physician who changed careers when he read Darwin's Origin of Species and became an expert in comparative anatomy, specializing in invertebrates. These illustrations are now in the public domain and are available on several websites, but we also have a few versions of the book, including one that has a clip art CD-ROM so you can download the images to your computer.

Natural Disasters and Art

Last week's earthquake in the central Italian region of Abruzzi killed more than 200 people and destroyed many homes, businesses and other buildings. But life, limb and livelihood are not the only things to have been damaged – churches, castles and other structures important to Italy's cultural heritage were damaged by the quake also, and Italy is asking other nations to help with the restoration process. This aspect of the tragedy reminds me how often we are unprepared to manage material threats to our cultural treasures, and of how gracefully people sometimes come together after a disaster to help restore buildings and art, and help communities to heal.

In November, 1966, the Arno River topped its banks in the Italian city of Florence, flooding the city and eventually rising to 22 feet in some neighborhoods. Florence is an ancient city with a huge store of libraries, museums, and private collections of paintings, sculpture, rare and antique books, and other treasures, many of which were put at risk by the flood's water and mud. Art conservators came from around the world to help restore Florence's books, paintings, and other artworks – these cultural lifesavers became known as angeli del fango or “mud angels.” In Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces, Robert Clark provides a broad view on the story of the 1966 flood, and on the many floods that preceded it. He begins with a history of flooding in Florence and how it intertwines with the history of the city as a center of fine art, and then goes on to discuss the world's response to the 1966 flood, and the disconnect between Florence, the city of fine art, and Firenze, the practical, working city in which Florentines actually live.

For those of us who prefer novels to nonfiction, there are still ways to learn about Florence's flood. Robert Hellenga's debut novel The Sixteen Pleasures follows Margot Harrington, one of the “mud angels,” who came to Florence to share her skills as a book conservator. After suffering under the unlacquered sexism of the leading mud angels who coordinate and assign book conservation tasks for the various libraries, Margot is assigned to lead restoration of the library belonging to a small convent. Short on money, she moves in with the nuns, makes friends with the mother superior, and discovers some unexpected treasures in the convent's library. The Sixteen Pleasures is a vivid, exciting story despite its mild-mannered setting in the book stacks, and careful readers will note that the technical details of book construction and conservation are both accurate and clearly described.

Of course, natural disasters have struck beloved antiquities in other places as well. In 1927, an earthquake damaged the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which marks the site where many Christians believe Jesus Christ was crucified and buried. This most holy of Christian shrines is managed jointly by several churches – chiefly the Armenian Apolistic, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox churches, and the balance is a tenuous one. Monks and priests working at the church have regularly, if infrequently, come to blows over territorial claims and purported slights. For decades, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre sat damaged and in danger of falling in on itself. Yet somehow, the churches came together with the aid of popes, kings, architects, and many others, devised a plan to rebuild the church, and managed to begin to carry it out. Raymond Cohen's Saving the Holy Sepulchre traces this remarkable story from its roots in the unusual management of the church over time through the restoration now underway.

But these books all raise another question: what do we learn from the experience of cleaning up after a flood, earthquake, or other calamity? In Planning for Disaster, William G. Ramroth, Jr. looks at how events like the 1666 fire of London, the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, and the 9/11 attacks in New York City have affected how we build buildings and plan cities. When have we learned our lessons, and when have we simply repeated past mistakes?