Falling Water

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little weary of the second wave COVID-19 doomsday predictions, the George Floyd canonization, and the overall Trump Derangement Syndrome and unhinging of our collective sanity by the ravening mob of media fools. I thought this weekend I’d rather write about beauty, of things past, and hope – the latter not looking all that clear. So sometimes, it’s good to wallow in nostalgia – when things were cast in the black & white and sepia tones of now longed-for videos of yesterday. It all changed with WWI – what a fucking disaster for the modern that was, both during the war and the interregnum until WWII. Yet, the human spirit endures, and will survive until we collide next year with Mars. In a sense, COVID-19 has been like an alien invasion – we haven’t done a real great job of handling that but the next UFO motherfuckers had better watch out – we do get smarter over time, no matter how much it costs or how hard it winds up being.

So, there was a lot going on around the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries. I will try to limit my focus to the arts, and maybe a little allegory. The earliest progenitor of the modern was probably Frank Lloyd Wright, and all of the melodrama of his life and art. I’m reading a new biography about him now and learning that he was even a more complex and fucked up human being than I ever thought, yet, he gave us some of the most moving structures ever conceived by one man – Falling Water being a prime example. The house was originally commissioned by Edgar Kaufmann, a department store owner in Pittsburgh, but now is a shrine to architectural greatness and overseen by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. Be warned – there is nothing that can prepare you for the sight when you walk out from the visitor’s center, emerge from the tree cover, and really see it in real life – it nearly brought me to my knees.

Sergei Diaghilev – Master of les ballets russes

Diaghilev is an extremely interesting character and an huckster and impresario to rival P.T. Barnum from art and entertainment history. He left Russia early before the Bolshies, and set up shop in Paris. He collected a wide range of artists and performers into his mad vision of an intersection between art, dance, music, design, and politics. LesBallets Russes was widely regarded as the most influential ballet company of the 20th century. The list of artists, composers, and performers is pretty incredible when viewed in the rear-view mirror. He preceded Hemingway’s tenure in Paris, so Ernie never really wrote about him – lest he degrade his own legacy. Yet, there was the birth of the modern wrought by a Russian émigré who flashed briefly and started a fire that is still burning in many respects to this day. Besides, my wife is a ballerina and loves this stuff, so I have to pay homage. The richness of his art and artifice is now covered in a thin veneer of my making in the interests of brevity, so now let’s take a look at science.

Albert Einstein at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in 1921

It’s sort of a shame that we have turned Einstein into some sort of cartoon character. This man had the most fantastic brain that ever came to find the light of day, and then defined for us exactly what that was all about. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t read some S&T article somewhere that states that his theories were once again proven in some star eclipse that occurred 30,000 light years ago in a galaxy far, far away. In the age of COVID-19, the next time you walk up to a door and it opens automatically, it is because he figured out how that worked more than 100 years before. Yeah, we should all take a knee to this guy. But now, how do we really see the world that Einstein defined for us?

Picasso drawing a Bull with light…you should really watch the video

Picasso was one of the artists commissioned by Diaghilev for designing sets and backdrops for Les Ballets Russes. But he was already a character in his own right before then, and the immensity of his talent stands him apart from all others. Since I used to live in Spain, and Andalucia, and also a frequenter of Paris, I am a fellow traveler. I loved the story of how he used to carry around a pistol loaded with blanks, and would shoot any motherfucker who pissed him off – imagine doing that today…as if?
At any rate, his evolving artistic vision has ultimately led us towards the digital world, even before the IBM guys and RADM Grace Hopper got involved. He painted what technology would wrought, aided and abetted by Alexander Graham Bell and Gulglielmo Marconi, who gifted us with what is now modern telecommunications. But Picasso truly altered the way that we see things. And then there are the guys who changed how we experience nature – and since I am a sailor and once-upon-a-couple-of times a Rhode Islander, my final focus of this piece is on the yachting world.

Ticonderoga on Narragansett Bay – with a Bone in her Teeth

Unlike most Air Intelligence guys- AIs as we called ourselves- I didn’t go to AOCS in Pensacola, and instead opted for OCS Newport for the America’s Cup Summer of 1980. It was a heady time, and I got to learn about the vagaries of navigating Newport harbor, the bay itself, and Rhode Island Sound, as well as the bars down off of Thames Street. Up in Bristol, there was the L. Francis Herreshoff Museum, and we wandered up there one liberty weekend, and it was eye-opening. Tico still is one of the most amazing sailboats ever imagined. I’ve been alongside her underway a couple of times up in Newport before being left behind in a blizzard of spray and wind exhaust – she was and still is that fast and powerful. Herreshoff was a contemporary of Wright, Diaghilev, Einstein, and Picasso among others who thrived during the turn of the 20th century. He was a naval architect and engineer who invented many modern things about boats today, like underwater appendages and catamaran designs which are now the rage more than 100 years later. Who knew? And what does this mean?

George Orwell – Everyone likes to invoke his name, but no one ever really knew what he looked like, did we?

We who have completed a career in the military are the product of all of our collective life experiences. I still get asked by people who want to know where I am from – not sure if that is a good or bad thing, but probably more curiosity on their part. I’m still not sure how to answer that question. In a similar vein, I’m beginning to wonder about where we as a nation are from – everything is being challenged by the current PC mob mentality that seems to be hell-bent on eradicating the forms and structures of the past. I can’t remember where I saw this Orwellian saying but it was something like “We are going to control the future by destroying the past.” Well, I for one take that as a personal threat – they have started with statues and other symbols and when that supply is exhausted, a movement gathering momentum will need new targets to destroy, so the color of your skin might be a problem in some areas. There has been talk about taking their fight to the suburbs – I’m not waiting around to see what that means, just taking some precautions – like buying more ammo.

The birth of the modern times was a wondrous juxtaposition of many things and gifted, visionary people. The death of it may be just as cataclysmic but in a really bad way, like something out of the Road Warrior. The future is full of bad portent so I’m building up my stock of toilet paper, just in case.

I remain your faithful servant.

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http://www.vicsocotra.com.