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Cowboy Festival

Blessing enough to be a cowboy or a poet. Baxter Black answers to both identities. In addition, he is a former large animal veterinarian, DVM. I guess that means horses and cows.

On National Public Radio, cowboy-poet Black says things like, “Always drink upstream from the herd.” If you‘ve listened to his cowboy twang on NPR, you probably remember it. He says he still doesn't own a television or a cell phone, and his idea of a modern convenience is Velcro chaps.

Black will be one of the featured artists at the 7th Annual Southeastern Cowboy Festival and Symposium at the the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville Thursday through Sunday, Oct. 22-25. His concert is scheduled at 7 p.m. Saturday Oct 24.

Featured Painter and sculptor Buck McCain, currently a resident of Santa Fe, will present a lecture Thursday at 7 p.m. on his artistic style and career highlights and will be available to sign copies of the official Festival & Symposium poster in the Museum Store afterwards. McCain will present an artist’s workshop from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Friday, October 23

Other highlights of the festival will include art lectures, cowboy and cowgirl singing, fast draw competitions, three performances of re-enactments of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, traditional Native American dances by the Big Mountain Family, and living history encampments with demonstrations of pioneer skills.

The Kids Corner of the Festival and Symposium will feature a variety of free activities: creating a slinky snake or a hand print horse, painting the “yard art” ponies, calf roping, and face painting. There will also be pony rides available for a small charge.

For detailed schedule, click here.

I have mentioned previously how much I love this museum. In case you missed it, click here. Directions: Via I-75, exit for Main Street, Cartersville. Signs downtown point the way.

It Ain't Necessarily So

My wife Annette wanted to go to Charleston for her birthday. Since I knew where the party was being held, I enjoyed some of the cake. You can ask Annette how many candles, if you want. Charleston is a little like Savannah or New Orleans, only more New World American than Old World European. The old stuff is what people want to see. They could stay home and visit suburban shopping malls. Maybe the most famous thing about Charleston is Fort Sumter, out in the harbor, guarding against threats from without. South Carolina secessionists fired the first shots of the Civil War against United States military forces at Fort Sumter. You can buy boat tickets for Fort Sumter at the U.S. Park Service at the end of Calhoun Street, named for South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, vice-presidential running mate of Stephen A. Douglas against Abraham Lincoln, ending decades of flawed compromises to preserve both the Union and slavery. The Visitor Education Center recaps the history nicely, including quotes from those who lived it. “The Union cannot survive half-slave and half-free”—used by both sides. An enigmatic editorial from a Southern newspaper of the time: “There is no freedom without slavery.” The ferry ride to Fort Sumter takes 30 minutes. One hour after landing, the return trip departs. We were back on the air-conditioned boat in half that time.

Charleston Plantation Slave Cabins

Back on the land that I lub, we took the Gullah Tour of Charleston. Operated by Alphonso Brown, licensed tour guide, this is where to go for some personality and point of view. After a charming orientation to the Gullah language, the creole patois spoken by coastal South Carolina and Georgia islanders from the time of slavery, Mr. Brown described historical Charleston’s early African Americans, both slave and free, craftsmen, artisans, and intellectuals, and stopped at their businesses and homes, including those of Richard Edward Dereef, himself an owner of 16 slaves, “which was a lot for even a rich white slave owner,” and who was “exempt from paying the freedman’s tax because he claimed Native American descent.”

Master blacksmith Philip Simmons, whose 77 years of ironwork still adorns homes, churches, and gardens throughout Charleston, is a focus of Mr. Brown’s Gullah Tour, with long, lingering stops at the Charleston Visitors Center gate, the Harp of David gate at 65 Alexander St., and The Heart Gate at Saint John’s Church, 93 Anson St. The Gullah Tour visits the Simmons workshop and home, listed on America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.

Band director in Simmons ironworks shop

Mr. Brown, a former band director and teacher in the Charleston schools, points out “Catfish Row,” made famous by George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, but known to natives of Charleston as “Cabbage Row.” Also in the category of It ain’t necessarily so is Porgy himself, “depicted in the opera as a fun-loving, easy-going cripple….who got around in his goat-drawn cart” and based on a Charleston character named Sammy Smalls. According to Mr. Brown, “In real life, Smalls is said to have lived a cruel and murderous life, in which beatings of his common-law wives and girlfriends were part of his daily activities.” Bess, you is my woman now, indeed.

Alphonso Brown’s book A GULLAH GUIDE TO CHARLESTON is available at the Charleston Visitor’s Center and on line.

The Met Live in HD at the Movies

The Met Live in HD opens its fifth season at a Shopping Mall Movie Theatre Near You.  Prices vary: Adult, Senior, Child -- more than the latest Brad Pit charmer, less than the Atlanta Zoo.


Click Here For Details and Tickets

Wagner’s Das Rheingold

Live Sat. Oct. 9 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. Oct. 27 at 6:30 PM.
3 hours.
Conductor: James Levine. Bryn Terfel sings the leading role of Wotan for the first time with the company, heading an extraordinary cast. Director Robert Lepage brings cutting-edge technology and his own visionary imagination to a great journey.

Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov

Live Sat. Oct. 23 at 12 Noon. Encore Wed. Nov. 10 at 6:30 PM.
5 hours.
Singers: René Pape, Aleksandrs Antonenko, Vladimir Ognovenko, and Ekaterina Semenchuk. Production by Stephen Wadsworth. Valery Gergiev conducts.

Donizetti’s Don Pasquale

Live Sat. Nov. 13 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. Dec. 1 at 6:30 PM.
3 hours, 30 minutes.
Singers: Anna Netrebko, Matthew Polenzani, Mariusz Kwiecien, and John Del Carlo. James Levine conducts. Production by Otto Schenk.

Verdi’s Don Carlo

Live Sat. Dec. 11 at 12:30 PM. Encore Wed. Jan. 5 at 6:30 PM.
4 hours, 30 minutes.
Singers: Roberto Alagna, Ferruccio Furlanetto, Marina Poplavskaya, Anna Smirnova, and Simon Keenlyside. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts. Director Nicholas Hytner makes his Met debut with this new production

Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West

Live Sat. Jan. 8 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. Jan. 26 at 6:30 PM.
3 hours, 30 minutes.
Puccini’s wild-west opera had its world premiere in 1910 at the Met. Now, on the occasion of its centennial, all-American diva Deborah Voigt sings the title role, starring opposite Marcello Giordani. Nicola Luisotti conducts.

Adams’s Nixon in China

Live Sat. Feb. 12 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. March 2 at 6:30 PM.
4 hours
Baritone James Maddalena stars in the title role. Director and longtime Adams collaborator Peter Sellars makes his Met debut with this groundbreaking 1987 work.

Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride

Live Sat. Feb. 26 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. March 16 at 6:30 PM.
2 hours, 30 minutes.
Singers: Susan Graham, Plácido Domingo, and Paul Groves. Production by Stephen Wadsworth. Patrick Summers conducts.

Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor

Live Sat. March 19 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. April 6 at 6:30 PM.
4 hours.
Singers: Natalie Dessay and Joseph Calleja. Production by Mary Zimmerman.

Rossini’s Le Comte Ory

Live Sat. April 9 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. April 27 at 6:30 PM.
3 hours.
Singers: Juan Diego Flórez, Joyce DiDonato, and Diana Damrau. Production by Bartlett Sher.

Strauss’s Capriccio

Live Sat. April 23 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. May 11 at 6:30 PM.
3 hours.
Singers: Renée Fleming ,Joseph Kaiser and Sarah Connolly. Andrew Davis conducts.

Verdi’s Il Trovatore

Live Sat. April 30 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. May 18 at 6:30 PM.
3 hours.
Singers: Sondra Radvanovsky, Dolora Zajick, Marcelo Álvarez, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky. Production by David McVicar. James Lavine conducts.

Wagner’s Die Walküre

Live Sat. May 14 at 12 Noon. Encore Wed. June 1 at 6:30 PM.
5 hours, 15 minutes.
A stellar cast comes together for this second installment of Robert Lepage’s new production of the Ring cycle: Bryn Terfel, Deborah Voigt, Jonas Kaufmann, Eva-Maria Westbroek, and Stephanie Blythe. James Levine conducts.

The Metropolitan Opera of New York’s Emmy and Peabody award-winning series of live, high-definition performance transmissions has been a box office smash hit. According to Time magazine, the Met sold 2.2 million tickets last season for its nine live high-definition telecasts, 400,000 more than the previous year.

Perhaps this reflects an era of plus change. Opera singers were once judged by their ability to be heard in the last row of the balcony but now must consider wide-screen close-ups. Opera News on-line discusses opera blogs and connects to several.

Over 30 principal cast members and chorus of the Opera Company of Philadelphia production of La Traviata last spring infiltrated the crowd at the Reading Terminal Market Italian Festival and launched four-minutes of Brindisi as guerrilla theatre, winning a thunderous ovation that included both laughter and tears. Click here to watch.

排便 Happens

Help wanted--Immediate Opening: Nuclear Heroes.

Maintenance and repair workers needed for nuclear power plant at seaside location in beautiful Pacific archipelago. Record earthquake and Tusnami have created need for emergency workers to prevent catastrophic meltdown. Preference given older workers, who will probably die of something else before the cancer risks from radiation exposure.

Japan consists of 6,852 islands located in a volcanic zone of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Earthquakes pulled Japan away from the mainland of Asia about 15 million years ago.

The word Tsunami is Japanese for “harbor wave“ or “wave train.” Japan has experienced 195 Tsunami in its recorded history. Before Westerners learned about Tsunami, the same event was called a Tidal Wave. Television taught us the word Tsunami when one killed a quarter of a million people in Asia just a few years ago. During WWII, New Zealand attempted and failed to create with explosives a Tsunami for use as a weapon.

In addition to earthquakes and Tsunami, Japan has a vivid nuclear history and involuntary experience with radiation poisoning from Ground Zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So why did Japan build a nuclear reactor in an earthquake zone with an ocean view? Somebody forgot the famous maxim from the Shinto shrine: "排便 Happens." It does indeed. Serious 排便.

One good thing to result from the current disaster in Japan is the sudden appearance on television of people who actually know their isotopes from a hole in the ground, intelligent gray haired people who went to math and science classes in their youth.

Here’s a lesson from one of those classes:

About 70,000 years ago, a volcano erupted at Lake Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia, one of the earth’s largest known eruptions. It deposited a layer of ash throughout Asia. The climate effects of the Toba eruption triggered a global ecological disaster, including worldwide vegetation destruction, and severe drought. Famine and a 6-to-10-year volcanic winter reduced the world's human population to 10,000 survivors or perhaps a mere 1,000 breeding pairs.

The Lake Toba super volcano eruption was two orders of magnitude greater than the largest volcanic eruption in recorded historic times, at Mount Tambora, Indonesia, which caused 1816 to be the "Year Without a Summer" in the northern hemisphere.

Thimblerigger

The shell game dates back to the ancient world, Egypt, Rome, Greece. It is depicted in European paintings from the Middle Ages.

The game requires a pea and three shells, walnuts will do, but thimbles, cups, whatever is handy and covers the pea. This worldwide street swindle is usually played on a mat lying on the ground, sometimes a cardboard box.

The person handling the shells and pea is called the thimblerigger. He begins the game by placing the pea under one of the shells, then quickly shuffles the shells around. The Thimblerigger takes bets on the location of the pea. Maybe double your money back. The Thimblerigger's trick is practiced sleight of hand, removing a pea from under a shell and placing it under any other shell undetected by the mark.

Some of the excited gamblers may be part of the trick, working for the Thimblerigger. Such insiders are called shills. They also may serve as lookouts for the police and serve as muscle to intimidate marks who become unruly. One shill may pretend to disclose a winning strategy to the mark, needless to say, just a ruse to get the mark to place a large bet.

Any player who is suspected of understanding the trick, or does not place a bet and just wants to watch, will be quickly edged away from the table by the shills or the muscle, according to wikipedia.



"The Conjurer," painted by Hieronymus Bosch, shows a cups and balls routine, a variation of the shell game. A pickpocket, working for the conjurer, is robbing the spectator who is bent over.

The shell game can still be encountered on the streets of modern New York, Los Angeles, Moscow, Cairo, and Washington, D.C. Politicians a

Of All the Gaul

The U.S. Army stationed me in France when I was only a few months no longer a teenager, making me among the last in a line not easily kept down on the farm after they'd seen Paree. For two years, I lived and worked near the small French village of Saran, which is just outside the city of Orleans, 111 kilometers (66 miles) south of Paris. That was enough for me to become a life-long Francophile.

Now, I am trying to arrange a visit again to France. Possibly my last. We tried to rent a village house (550 euros --less than $800) a month in Marseillan, not to be confused with Marseilles, which is also on the Mediterranean but about 130 miles and many dollars converted to euros further east. Marseillan is the oyster capital of France and more like the Mississippi Gulf Coast for lower rent sunshine, sand, and seawater.



Alas, the village house in Marseillan reqired a minimum occupancy of six months. The standard tourist visa provided with a U.S. passport limits the stay in France to 90 days. A long-stay visa for France is pretty much out of the question, although the French consulate will not tell you that. In fact, they will not tell you much of anything; they just will not issue the visa.

So, now we have found a village house in Olonzac, in the south France region Languedoc-Roussillon. Olonzac is 20 miles from the Mediterranean, even closer to the Canal du Midi, and near historic sites of Carcassonne and Beziers, where Papal Crusaders masacred 20,000 in order to make memorable example of the Cathars, an early Christian sect that advocated heresies such as birth control. When the leader of the Crusade asked how he could identify the Cathars from the Catholics, he was instructed, "Kill them all. God will know his own."






Olonzac is two and a half hours from Barcelona. Some of the countryside looks like this.





If the bank that is too big to fail does not cancel my credit card before I can max it out , I will buy some postcards.

Lost Wax

I tagged along with painter and sculptor Richard Cecil, friend and former Pine Lake neighbor, when he picked up the latest edition of his beautiful bronze Ball Dancer from the Inferno Art Foundry in Union City. I like to take field trips as part of what you might call my self-directed continuing adult education ad hoc, non-degree, non-career, non-formal, personal enrichment and experiential learning. In other words, I was just curious.

In his East Point studio, Richard Cecil has shown me how he constructs sculpture from sticks, coat-hangers, wire mesh, old socks, anything that can be shaped and formed, secures it with string and duct tape, then covers it with modeling clay. His hands and fingers turn the clay into body parts, and he carves details with x-acto knives and dental picks and files. The Ball Dancer, dressed in a slinky ballerina leotard like a one-piece bathing suit, stands on one leg, the other lifted behind, both arms overhead holding a colored glass ball. According to Richard, producing a bronze sculpture no larger than a medium-size table lamp costs an artist $1,000 to $2,000 in materials and foundry charges. That does not take into account or set a value for the sculptor’s time and talent.

                 Ball Dancer, sculptor, metal chaser

When we arrived at the Inferno Art Foundry, Todd Fuller met us with the casting of Richard’s sculpture, bright and shiny as a newly minted penny. Richard calls Todd the master metal chaser, which is a respected and impressive title. Todd himself describes his work as “the fixer.” If you meet somebody at a party, what would you say your job is? “I’d tell them I am the manager at Wendy’s,” Todd replied as he completed some last touch perfections on the Ball Dancer, including removing any traces of seams or other evidence of the casting process, preparing connections for the marble base, and adjusting the figure to correct perpendicular. Richard and Todd worked together to accentuate details such as the shoulder straps on the ballerina’s leotard. Then the patina chemicals were applied by the patineur, with brush dabs and direct blasts of flame from a large blow torch, reminiscent of WWII combat documentary footage. The patineur wore a respirator like a HazMat first-responder. According to the University of California, Davis, bronze is an alloy composed of copper, tin and arsenic.

                 Patineur, brush, blow torch

Lost wax casting, sometimes referred to as cire perdue by those who do not believe anything is officially art until you say it in French, goes back 3,500 years to ancient Egypt and the region of South Asia that is now Pakistan. Uses included sculptures cast in copper and bronze, as well as jewelry and other products. The modern automobile industry has used a similar casting technique for the manufacture of parts, including engine blocks.

The Inferno Art Foundry in Union City is a warehouse space outfitted with all manner of tools and equipment more fascinating than Home Depot, hammers, drills, grinders, welding torches and masks, crates of 25-lb bronze bars like the gold treasure at Fort Knox, metal rods, kilns, cauldrons, discarded rubber, wax, and plaster molds.

Lost wax casting from an artist’s sculpture is similar in three dimensions to the one-dimensional process in traditional photography: using a negative image to create a positive one. “An image of the original sculpture is reproduced through molds. Flip-flopping of the image from negative to positive is repeated to produce the final bronze casting,” explains artist Richard Cecil.

Here is a YouTube that both shows vividly the Lost Wax process but also explains it clearly.

Famous bronze sculptors have included Michelangelo, Ghiberti, Rodin, and Frederic Remington. Degas and Picasso produced bronze sculptures. The “Charging Bull” on Wall Street in New York was created by Arturo Di Modica using lost wax casting. At the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Atlanta, Patrick Morelli’s lost wax bronze sculpture “Behold” was inspired by the ancient African ritual of lifting a newborn child to the heavens and reciting "Behold the only thing greater than yourself."

(Photos from the Union City foundry were taken by the author, and the images of original artwork are used by permission of the artist.  This article appeared originally in Like the Dew, a journal of Southern Culture and Politics)