Go See Van Gogh

When I was a student at Kutztown State College (Pa.) back in the early 1970s, one of the courses that was required was art history.

Van Gogh's 'Bedroom in Aries' in 3-D

 I have no idea why. I was studying to be a U.S. history teacher, and later, when I decided I couldn't speak in front of groups of people who knew more than me, I switched to Liberal Arts English and became a sports writer. 

I think the idea behind requiring art history was to help make us informed and well-rounded citizens of the world. It probably didn't hurt that Kutztown was a teachers' college that massed produced art teachers for public education. Anyway, as I recall, the textbook for the class was outstanding, and I wish I still had it. To this day I can close my eyes and see selected works of such artists as Delacroix, Monet, Manet, Czanne, Seurat, Gauguin and Van Gogh virtually jump from the pages and into my mind's appreciation vault.

I was fascinated.

So, decades after my introduction to art history, the Van Gogh Immersive Experience showed up in Winston-Salem last month at the former Jo-Ann's Fabrics Store off of Stratford Road, I had to go.

Kim and I went last week, and we thought it was spectacular. As you enter the exhibit, you get to see at least 100 copies of Van Gogh's work, accompanied in most cases with explanatory text. Then you enter the immersive room, the crown jewel of the place. Projections of Van Gogh's artistic style swim across the room and floor, literally engulfing you with stimuli as you relax in folding chairs or bean bags. You can let yourself float upstream and into the Starry Night.

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I wasn't a very good student at Kutztown. I was a commuter who drove 45 minutes each way in my Volkswagen Beetle, five days a week, to keep my tuition down to around $50 a semester. No student loans for me. Much of my day was spent just trying to stay alive making the commute.

Anyway, as noted, Kutztown specialized in graduating art teachers, and every once in a while, those art students would hold exhibitions in the school's modern and spacious library.

I had two good friends that I'd meet with at the library most days, and instead of studying, we'd mess around, talking this and that, checking out the women instead of books. Stuff like that.

One day, we noticed one of those student art exhibitions going up. I decided to participate.

I took a sheet of composition paper and, with my multi-colored pen, drew four parenthesis (the singular of parentheses) in a single row, each parenthesis a different color. Like this: (  ) (  ). Then I ripped the page out of my composition book and placed it on the floor, near the other exhibits, which I feel certain to this day were being graded. We chuckled and didn't think much else of it.

Until the next day. My work was still on the floor. As it was the next day, and the next, and the day after that. We couldn't believe it. On one of those days, we saw a library worker vacuum around it. On another day, we saw a patron walk up to my work, stop for a few moments and rub his chin in contemplation as he took it all in.

I was beginning to think I had accidentally created a study in philosophical rhetoric: What is art? I never did find the answer to that.

Apparently I had switched my major yet again, this time from Liberal Arts English to Liberal Arts Smart Ass. 

As it turned out, my work stayed on the floor for the entire two weeks of the exhibit. It was the first and only time I've ever been displayed in a gallery. True story. Thank you very much. 

 (The Van Gogh Immersive Experience will remain in Winston-Salem through September. It's $35 per adult on weekends and $25 on weekdays and begins at 10 a.m. each day. There are small discounts for seniors, etc, so ask if you qualify.)

 

 

 

 

The Beatles: Her First Concert

She probably couldn't know it at the time, but Midway's Jane Pacific was kissed by stardust in August 1964. She was gifted a memory that only a fortunate few can ever share with the rest of us because, well, you know, that's how stardust memories work.

She was an eyewitness to Beatlemania. 

Jane Pacific with her Beatles ticket stubs.

 "I think I was around eight years old," said Jane, who grew up in Lakeview Terrace, Calif. "My parents got us tickets to see The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl.

"It was my first concert. 

"Yes, I was young, but I was still old enough to know what was happening," said Jane. "My older sisters, Karen and Kris, were into The Beatles, and my mom and dad both loved The Beatles. And so did I. I knew all the songs and loved them." 

The first of three Hollywood Bowl concerts – now iconic in the lush lore of Beatlemania – came only seven months after The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February. That televised moment changed everything about the way we listen to popular music, from stage to studio.

Ironically, Jane couldn't hear a note The Beatles sang that night at the Hollywood Bowl. The nonstop decibel-splitting shouts of teenage girls drowned out The Beatles and their hopelessly inadequate amplifiers. Basically, Jane and her family attended a screamfest. Welcome to Beatlemania.

"I don't think we did any screaming," said Jane, whose family had pretty decent seats about halfway up from the stage. "I know my sisters said they didn't scream like that. But, yeah, the screaming is what I remember most. Not being able to hear the music as well as I wanted to. The whole concert was like that.

"I remember standing on the top of my seat because everybody else around me was standing, too." 

What the fans who were interested in the music missed was a setlist that went like this:

1. Twist and Shout

2. You Can't Do That

3. All My Loving

4. She Loves You

5. Things We Said Today

6. Roll Over Beethoven

7. Can't Buy Me Love

8.  If I Fell

9. I Want to Hold Your Hand

10. Boys

11. A Hard Day's Night

12. Long Tall Sally

And that was it. Twelve songs, clocking in at just under a half hour. G'night, folks, and thank you very mooch. Tickets went for $4.50 then, which comes out to about $46.00 per ticket today. Is that good enough for a half hour of The Beatles? That, my friends, is a rhetorical question. It needs no answer.

Anyway, Jane's family enjoyed the experience so much, they did it again. This time, they went to see The Beatles perform two years later at Dodger Stadium on August 28, 1966. By now, Beatlemania was shedding some of its luster. Beatle John Lennon had alienated a number of fans a few weeks earlier when he famously suggested the Beatles were bigger than Jesus Christ, and they weren't selling out some of their venues.

 But, you know. They were still The Beatles.

"What I remember about this concert is that from our seats it seemed like they were very far away and small," said Jane. 

Baseball stadiums can do that to you. The setlist at Dodger Stadium included:

1. Rock and Roll Music

2. She's A Woman

3. If I Needed Someone

4. Day Tripper

5. Baby's in Black

6. I Feel Fine

7. Yesterday

8. I Wanna Be Your Man

9. Nowhere Man

10. Paperback Writer

11. Long Tall Sally

"Sometimes I can't remember which concert was which in my memory," said Jane. "But it was pretty much the same thing at Dodger Stadium: screaming girls and a lot of people standing around me. I do remember my parents taking my hand and dragging me through all the people to leave."

As it turned out, Jane was witness to another bit of history. The Beatles performed at San Francisco's Candlestick Park the next night, and then they immediately gave up touring to focus solely on studio work. So she saw the next-to-the-last Beatles concert ever (the Savile Row rooftop doesn't count).

"Is that right?" said Jane. "I didn't know that."

Soooo, 60 years later, Jane can produce several ticket stubs from both the Hollywood Bowl and Dodger Stadium concerts. Who's smart enough to think to do that?

"When I was a small girl I had a little box that I kept stuff in," said Jane. "That's where I kept my tickets. I even have my Mom's ticket stub. It's just a box full of keepsakes that I'll never let go.

"They have real emotional value for me."

 Indeed. How could it be otherwise?

Note: https://youtu.be/KqOsmUthz74 is a link to The Beatles 1964 Hollywood Bowl performance. When Jane's husband, John, showed the video link to her several weeks ago, she said it brought tears to her eyes. And why not? Stardust memories, you know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Women, good and bad

Unless you're an Atlanta Braves fan, this one might have slipped underneath your radar.

But Major League Baseball made some significant history Saturday in its doubleheader sweep of the Florida Marlins. Jen Pawol became the first female to umpire in a regular season game when she took the field behind first base in the first game of the twinbill, which the Braves won 7-1.

Jen Pawol

 She covered third base in the nightcap without incident as the Braves won 8-6.

Today, she is scheduled to call balls and strikes behind the plate in what should be another historic moment. What's her strike zone like? She'll be in the spotlight and in clear focus. After all, nobody ever shouts "Kill the ump!" at the first-base umpire.

I suspect she'll do well. She was the first woman to umpire a Triple A championship in 2023. She also was the first woman to umpire in a spring training game last season. She is the seventh woman to umpire professionally, but the first to reach the major leagues.

A former three-time all-conference softball selection at Hofstra, where she played catcher, Pawol started umpiring softball in the early 1990s. What followed was a steady and yet passionate climb up the ladder, finally reaching her professional pinnacle yesterday.

"The dream actually came true today, and I'm still living it," said Pawol, 48, between games of the doubleheader. "I am just so grateful to my family, to Major League Baseball for just creating such an amazing work environment. To all the umpires that I work with ... it's just amazing camaraderie."

In today's political atmosphere, I wonder how long before some MAGA freak suggests that diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) was involved, even though women have been calling games in the NBA (six females) and NFL (three) for several years. The question for baseball is what took so long? And what is the NHL waiting for?

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While Pawol has given most of us reason to celebrate the accomplishments of women swimming in vats of testosterone, we have Ghislaine Maxwell to consider

Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for her part in the sex trafficking crimes as Jeffrey Epstein's associate in procuring minors for sex work.

But suddenly, Maxwell finds herself moved from a Florida prison to a new minimum security facility in Texas MAGAland. This came about when assistant attorney general Todd Blanche paid Maxwell a visit behind closed doors in Florida last week. Within days, she found herself in a very different circumstance.

Kinda makes me wonder if this is the Trump version of DEI. Trump, a convicted felon who is also an adjudicated rapist who happens to be president of the United States, is frantically trying to disassociate himself from Epstein after it was learned that Trump's name appears in the Epstein files.

Do you suppose Maxwell didn't incriminate Trump in her interview with Blanche in hopes of receiving a presidential pardon? Speculation is that she did not implicate Trump of anything improper. Imagine that.

The cruelty behind all of this is astounding. Brown-skinned people who don't speak English (now the country's official language) are being rounded up by the SS, er, ICE, for either deportation or detention, often without due process, and often labeled by Trump as the worst of the worst.

Meanwhile, a pedophile sex trafficker might potentially wrangle a pardon from a criminal president for one of the worst crimes an adult can commit against children.

We are living in strange times where the Constitutional guardrails are being disassembled in front of our very eyes.