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Mondrian & mysticism: "My long search is over"
On "Piet Mondrian: 1872–1944" seen first at the Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (December 18, 1994–April 30, 1995), then at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (June 11–September 4, 1995) and on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from October 1, 1995, through January 23, 1996.
The irrational bears the same relation to the rational that the unknown bears to the known. In an age as harsh as it is intelligent, phrases about the unknown are quickly dismissed. I do not for a moment mean to indulge in mystical rhetoric, since, for my part, I have no patience with that sort of thing. That the unknown as the source of knowledge, as the object of thought, is part of the dynamics of the known does not permit of denial… . We accept the unknown even when we are most skeptical. We may resent the consideration of it by any except the most lucid mind; but when so considered, it has seductions more powerful and more profound than those of the known.
—Wallace Stevens, circa 1937
What was the nature of the quest that moved the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) to abandon the representation of nature in favor of an art of pure abstraction? What, exactly, did Mondrian believe that he had achieved? In any attempt to address this question, we are obliged to deal with the fact that abstract art—and not only Mondrian's—was born of an alliance of aesthetics and mysticism. We are obliged to examine the ideas that shaped the artist's search for the absolute in art. Ideas, of course, are no substitute for the experience of art, and in Mondrian's case are certainly not to be taken to be the "subject matter" of his painting. Yet without some grasp of the intellectual history that led the artist to make his fateful leap into abstraction, the spiritual imperative that governed Mondrian's art is unlikely to be understood. This is a subject that takes us into the mind of modernism at one of the key turning points of its history. It therefore seems an appropriate subject to explore on the occasion of the great Mondrian exhibition that opens next month at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—and all the more so since the exhibition itself, as it was presented at the National Gallery in Washington this summer, gave the subject scant attention. In Professor Yve-Alain Bois's essay for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, for example, the author seems vaguely embarrassed that an artist of Mondrian's stature might be seen to be seriously implicated in a system of ideas and beliefs which for most of us cannot claim a very persuasive intellectual provenance.
It won't do to dismiss the issue with condescending references to Madame Blavatsky or attempts to substitute the ideas of more respectable thinkers like Goethe and Hegel in examining the intellectual origins of abstraction. For the problem posed by the relation that obtains between mystical belief and artistic innovation in the creation of abstraction is one that goes beyond Mondrian himself. In the period that saw the genesis of abstract art—roughly the decade beginning in 1910—what is particularly striking about the outlook of the artists primarily responsible for creating abstraction is their espousal of occult doctrine. So prevalent was a steadfast belief in the occult among the pioneers of abstract art—not only Mondrian but also Kandinsky, Malevich, and a good many of their disciples— that we have no alternative but to regard such doctrine as a basic component of their artistic vision.
It should be understood, however, that the particular school of mystical thought that exerted the greatest influence on the creation of abstract art—the system of occult belief generally known as theosophy— was in this period a widely established component of Western cultural life. While deliberately esoteric and by no means a popular creed, theosophy was not an interest limited to coteries of avant-garde painters and sculptors. Still less was it an interest confined to a circle of intellectual cranks and charlatans, though it did indeed attract a large number of crackpots and crazies. (It still does.) As Wallace Stevens was to observe some years later, "There are, naturally, charlatans of the irrational. That, however, does not require us to identify the irrational with the charlatans."
Still, it was an odd group of savants and mystagogues that shaped the course of modern theosophical thought, thereby exerting a decisive influence not only on the origins of abstract art but on other key developments in twentieth-century art and culture. The high priestess of the movement was indeed the Ukrainian-born adventuress Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), known to her followers the world over as H. P. B. She was said to have commanded occult powers from an early age. She certainly possessed a magnetic personality, making her way in the world—which in Blavatsky's case meant Europe, America, and Asia—as an emancipated woman without apparent means, yet always attracting (it seems) a circle of admiring men and women who believed in her spiritual gifts, supported her occult endeavors, propagated her theosophical doctrines, and remained undaunted by her scandalous reputation.
In New York, in 1875, H. P. B. founded the Theosophical Society, and promptly produced two large tomes—Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888)—that became the sacred scriptures of the movement. The claim advanced by this movement, which came to be called the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, was that theosophy had triumphantly resolved the conflict between science and religion caused by the Darwinian theory of evolution. "It was the genius of H. P. B.," writes the historian James Webb in The Occult Underground, "to apply Darwin's theory to produce a hopeful resolution to the human condition." Webb continues:
Whereas others saw only the destruction of the sustaining myth of man's divine origins, H. P. B. discovered that evolution could apply also to the "spiritual" aspects of existence. Man had evolved from apes—perhaps; but he had a noble destiny. Just as homo sapiens had evolved from a lower form of animal life, and that form in its turn from a lower—a vegetable, protoplastic, or unicellular existence— man as at present constituted was on his way to higher and better things. Evolution continued on a cosmic scale, with each individual born and reborn thousands of times until he had achieved earthly perfection.
To achieve the exalted goals that theosophy now invoked as a spiritual imperative for art, it was nonetheless necessary for art itself to remain firmly within the realm of aesthetic experience. An art born of an alliance of aesthetics and mysticism was still obliged to traffic in material objects, and thus remain accessible to visual perception, if its spiritual function were to be realized. It could not—or not yet, anyway—so completely dematerialize itself as to become invisible if it were to continue to function as art. When the Epoch of the Great Spiritual was finally attained in some faraway future existence, no doubt this last concession to material contingency would be dispensed with; and art, too—to the extent that it continued to be needed—would become pure spirit.
But meanwhile, in the spiritually imperfect present, an art that aspired to make itself the instrument of pure spirit—to align itself with what Kandinsky described in On the Spiritual in Art as "the struggle toward the non-naturalistic, the abstract, toward inner nature"—had no alternative but to make its case as an earthly cultural enterprise. It thus remained subject, in this respect, to the "laws" and conventions and material conditions governing the medium in which the artist worked. It was for this reason that even the most mystical of the pioneer creators of abstract art found themselves engaged in a dialectic that embraced two very different aspirations—on the one hand, that of advanced artistic thought, with its headlong drive to discover new modalities of pictorial expression, and, on the other, that of a spiritual ideal that looked upon art as a means to an end that transcended art itself.
For observers who mistakenly tend to identify mysticism with a retreat from the practical affairs of the world, it must sometimes seem a paradox, if not an outright contradiction, that artists of a mystical temperament are perfectly capable of pursuing their worldly ambitions with the kind of uncompromising zeal that we observe in the careers of the early abstractionists. But the truth is that in every realm of high endeavor in which we find mysticism serving as a spur and an ideal—in movements of political revolution and campaigns for sexual emancipation, for example, no less than in avant-garde art movements—this loyalty to occult doctrine has proven to be a powerful incentive to practical achievement. Within the imaginative faculties there is nothing that so stirs the will to accomplish extraordinary things as the conviction that one is possessed of absolute knowledge about the ultimate destiny of human affairs. This was precisely the kind of mystical conviction that the pioneer creators of abstraction brought not only to their own innovations as artists but to the formation of avant-garde movements that changed the direction of modernist art and greatly expanded the place it would come to occupy in modern cultural life.
It is this belief in the absolute that accounts for the speed as well as the confidence which the pioneers of abstraction brought to their break with what they saw as the last vestiges of representation in art, and for the success they achieved in winning converts to their radical view of artistic expression. These artist-acolytes of the occult really did believe they were fulfilling a unique spiritual mission in this fateful act of artistic innovation, and they persuaded a great many others to join them in that belief. Theirs was, in this sense, a religious movement as well as an artistic one, and they brought to it the kind of intensely felt faith that we associate with spiritual yearning and religious conversion.
Yet it was as artists first of all, and only secondarily as exponents of the occult, that they exerted their deepest influence on art itself. In the latest developments of the art of their time, which in the case of Cubism had already brought painting to the very verge of abandoning representation, they shrewdly discerned a "logic" that cried out for completion. This gave to abstraction a powerful sense of purpose—a kind of ontological imperative—that was all the more compelling when combined with the promise of a spiritual vocation. As artists, the pioneers of abstraction had largely mastered in their earlier paintings the rapid succession of styles that had moved from Realism and Impressionism to the Post-Impressionist, Fauvist, Expressionist, and Cubist art which dominated the European avant-garde in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. Because it was from inside this fast-paced arena of pictorial revision that Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich made their historic assault on what remained of traditional representation in art, their views as well as their example carried a special authority—particularly for the younger members of the avant-garde who harbored an intense appetite for the absolute and a headlong impatience to see it realized. For them, everything that had occurred in the history of painting from Courbet to Picasso was suddenly relegated to the past by this unexpected leap into abstraction. In their very different ways—for Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich, despite similar convictions about abstraction and the occult, were distinct individualists with quite separate programs for their art—the pioneers of abstraction opened up a new artistic world to their contemporaries. It was a world vastly different in its metaphysical and artistic outlook from that of the avant-garde movements which immediately preceded the emergence of abstraction.
Indeed, from the perspective of the modernist movement in Paris, where the prehistory of pictorial abstraction had largely taken place and which continued to command an unrivaled authority and influence as the capital of the international avant-garde, the new abstractionists signified something alien and suspect. The modernism of the School of Paris had been anything but monolithic, of course. Its cosmopolitanism was legendary, and it was justly famous for its receptivity to a wide range of advanced ideas and personalities. Theosophy and other theories of the occult were well-known there, too, though they did not lead to a movement advocating abstraction. In fact, none of the ideas contending for attention in the world of the Paris avant-garde openly advocated as a matter of principle the total rupture with representation then beginning to be championed by the pioneers of abstraction. Parisian modernism was, by and large, far too attached to the things of this world to forgo their pictorial representation as a permanent imperative. The Paris avant-garde was, in this respect, invincibly materialist in its outlook on life—still closely tied to observable sensation, and thus ineluctably earthbound in its basic character. However hermetic its allusions to the things of this world might at times become, Parisian modernism was nonetheless steadfast in its allegiance to them as an indispensable point of departure.
It was this allegiance to the things of this world that the mystagogic convictions of the new abstractionists now put into question for the first time, and it was for this reason, above all, that they were either ignored, rejected, or consigned to a marginal status by the Parisian avant-garde. (Even the quintessentially French color abstractions of Robert Delaunay, which the poet Apollinaire dubbed "Orphic Cubism" and which derived from the color theories of the Neo-Impressionists, were more sympathetically received in Germany than in Paris.) The doctrinaire abstraction that was rooted in theosophical ideas was therefore seen to constitute, in the early years of its development, a counter-avant-garde opposed to the mainstream artistic interests of the School of Paris. It was, as far as Paris was concerned, virtually an underground movement that did not enjoy the critical acclaim, or even the kind of critical scandal, that had marked the emergence of Fauvism and Cubism before the First World War and would again mark the emergence of Dada and Surrealism in the years following the war.
It was in advanced artistic circles outside of Paris—in Russia, Germany, and the Netherlands—that the new vision of the pioneer abstractionists met with the most combustible and consequential response. Of the vanguard figures who set out to create an abstract art based on a visionary synthesis of aesthetics and mysticism, only Mondrian lived and worked in Paris for extended periods of his development, first in the years between 1912 and 1914 and then again from 1919 to 1938. It was in the first of these periods, when he remained virtually unknown to the Paris avant-garde, that Mondrian created his earliest abstract paintings.
Mondrian had made the decision to dedicate his life to art long before he turned to the occult, but it was as a dedicated theosophist that he created his first abstractions. After a strict Dutch Calvinist upbringing, he found in theosophy a refuge from the religious turmoil of his youth and early manhood. For a time he even kept a portrait of Madame Blavatsky on the wall of his studio—an icon of his spiritualist endeavors. (As Yeats later recalled, "To [Madame Blavatsky's] devout followers she was more than a human being.") In later life Mondrian's friends often spoke of his "priestly air," and there was no question but that for him the artistic vocation would never be entirely separable from his intense religious feelings.
Born in Amersfoort, Utrecht, the Netherlands, in 1872, Mondrian was educated at the Calvinist Primary School in Winterswijk, where his father—a stern disciplinarian—was headmaster. This was the only formal schooling Mondrian received before enrolling in the Academy of Art, in Amsterdam, in 1892. In his adolescence he was given some informal art instruction by his father, an amateur draftsman, and by an uncle, who was a professional painter in The Hague. His own development as a draftsman was sufficient to enable him to qualify, at the age of twenty, for the modest post of teacher of secondary-school drawing. This was his situation when he entered the Academy.
Nothing in Mondrian's early life as an art student or as a young exhibiting artist gives us any hint of the gifts that would one day make him a leader of the international avant-garde. He was anything but precocious. He attended the Academy off and on until 1896, and began exhibiting in Amsterdam the following year. But the pictures he then produced—at a time, it should be remembered, when Van Gogh and Seurat had already completed their work, when Cézanne was painting some of the greatest pictures of his late period, and Art Nouveau was the fashion—still consisted of naturalistic landscapes and still lifes in the Dutch academic tradition. Even by provincial academic standards, moreover, Mondrian's early career was anything but promising. In 1901, at the age twenty-nine, he failed to qualify for the Dutch Prix de Rome, owing to a lack of proficiency in rendering the figure. Henceforth, until his turn to abstraction, Mondrian's principal subject matter was landscape. He was also devoted to painting flowers, a practice that provided him with a living of sorts even after he had turned to abstraction.
Following the Prix de Rome fiasco, nearly a decade elapsed before any significant trace of modernist influence made itself felt in Mondrian's landscape painting. This was slow in coming for several reasons. Holland in the nineteenth century had remained something of an artistic backwater as far as modern painting was concerned. News of avant-garde developments in Paris and other cosmopolitan capitals did not easily penetrate the provincial art life of Amsterdam in Mondrian's student days. ("Van Gogh was dead," wrote Michel Seuphor of this period in Amsterdam, "but still unknown.") Shut off from such developments in a very conservative cultural milieu, Mondrian himself did not awaken to the implications of modernism until he was well into his thirties. This awakening occurred, as it happened, coincidentally with his formal commitment to theosophy.
It was thus around 1909—the year that Mondrian officially joined the Theosophical Society of Amsterdam, with a certificate of membership signed by Annie Besant—that he belatedly developed the rudiments of a modernist pictorial style. It began with a modified version of Seurat's Pointillist method, combined with a Symbolist attitude toward color, that was applied to the rendering of Dutch landscape motifs—haystacks, windmills, tree forms, and seaside dunes. This initial approach to an independent style was already a step in the direction of abstraction, for nature was not so much described in these pictures of haystacks and dunes as made the point of departure for more emphatically articulated pictorial structures that relegated their subjects to a secondary status. Such pictures were, in any case, quickly succeeded by the artist's determination to submit these same landscape motifs to the even more radical Cubist innovations of Braque and Picasso, a few examples of which Mondrian saw for the first time in an Amsterdam exhibition in the fall of 1911. Those few proved to be enough to change everything.
Mondrian's encounter with Cubism was clearly the critical turning point of his artistic development. While it would be another year or two before he finally expunged the last traces of traditional representation from his painting, what can only be called his conversion to Cubism—now abetted by the anti-materialist imperatives of his theosophical faith—put Mondrian's life as an artist on an entirely new footing. Approaching his fortieth birthday, released at last from the tethers of academic tradition, philistine taste, and the provincial culture of his youth, Mondrian was ready to enter the ranks of the avant-garde. Artistically and spiritually, the obscure Dutch artist who finally quit Amsterdam for Paris in the last days of December 1911 was on his way to a new life—a life that in the coming decade would change the face of Western art.
"We may say," wrote Michel Seuphor in his study of Mondrian, "that it was in Paris in 1912 … that the life of the great painter began." It was, from the outset, a life of personal isolation, artistic dedication, and mystical reflection. The evidence suggests that it was also a life devoid of erotic engagement. Upon his arrival in Paris, where he lived and worked in a studio borrowed from a Dutch acquaintance, Mondrian had few friends, knew little French, and allowed himself almost no distractions. His first— indeed, his sole—priority was to come to terms with the Cubist ideas he had only just discovered.
To this task he now brought a sense of purpose that was entirely new to him. Quickly mastering the ambiguities that were central to the Cubist aesthetic—ambiguities that set the need for a recognizable motif dialectically at odds with a method of pictorial composition designed to eliminate its distinctive features—Mondrian painted with a confidence and drive he had never before enjoyed. His mission was at once exalted and implacable. Cubism became the battleground on which the artist who had been nurtured on the specifications of Dutch landscape painting fought his last protracted conflict with nature. In this struggle, Mondrian produced his first masterpieces—the series of Compositions based on tree forms in which the last remnants of naturalistic detail are no sooner evoked than all but extinguished in favor of pure painting.
Technically, Mondrian's tree Compositions of 1912–13 may not qualify as pure abstractions, for the presence of the fractured motif, while diminished almost to the point of extinction, is still minimally discernible. (This tends to be true of nearly all the earliest abstractions.) Yet aesthetically, in the way such pictures are experienced as integrated structures of pictorial form, they have unquestionably crossed the boundary separating abstraction from representation. And during the remainder of this first period of residence in Paris, Mondrian eliminated virtually all association with nature from his pictorial vocabulary. By imposing upon each successive painterly composition of soft-edged Cubist forms an increasingly insistent network of hard vertical and horizontal lines, he left no trace of—and finally no space for—an observed object or remembered motif.
The result was a series of paintings dominated by an irregular, improvised, and as yet unsystematic version of the abstract "grid" that, a few years hence, would become a compelling principle in Mondrian's classic geometrical abstractions. These first abstractions were not yet governed by any kind of absolute rule. They were not painted according to a theory. Mondrian was following the dictates of his sensibility —a sensibility that was then more confident, perhaps, about what it wished to eliminate than about what it wished to retain for painting—as he worked his way toward what he took to be "the logical consequences" of Cubism. Still, the artist who reluctantly returned to the Netherlands in the summer of 1914, on the eve of the First World War, had nonetheless succeeded in transforming the "logic" of Cubism into an art of abstraction. If he was not yet a recognized leader of the avant-garde—for abstraction was not itself a widely recognized artistic "cause"—he was already producing the kind of art that would serve as a foundation for a new movement. As Theo van Doesburg, the ideological leader of De Stijl, afterwards acknowledged: "Mondrian was the first to realize, in 1913, by a consistent elaboration of Cubism, this new plasticism as a painting."
What role did Mondrian's belief in the occult play in this headlong pursuit of abstraction? The notebooks in which he began, in 1914, to keep a record of his ideas about "Art and Reality" clearly establish the centrality of his quest for "the spiritual" in all of his artistic endeavors at the time. This is the key passage:
Art and Reality. Art is higher than reality, and has no direct relation to reality. Between the physical sphere and the ethereal sphere there is a frontier where our senses stop functioning. Nevertheless, the ether penetrates the physical sphere and acts upon it. Thus the spiritual penetrates the real. But for our senses these are two different things—the spiritual and the material. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. Thus the use of elementary forms is logically accounted for. These forms being abstract, we find ourselves in the presence of an abstract art.
Careful attention must be paid to the way Mondrian invokes the concept of "reality" in his writings, for in a very short time it would come to signify something very different—the exact opposite, in fact—from his identification of reality, in this passage, with the material world of "our senses." This is, of course, what most of us mean by reality. As he refined his philosophy of art, however, bringing it into stricter alignment with occult doctrine, "reality" became a term wholly reserved in Mondrian's later writings for the realm of "the spiritual." But this terminological revision does not reflect any change in the essential direction of his thought about abstract art. Fundamental to its creation, in his case, was a steadfast metaphysical belief in the division that separated "the spiritual and the material," and, as an artistic corollary to this, a further belief—which he was not yet ready to act upon to the fullest degree—in "the use of elementary forms" as the most expeditious means of achieving "the spiritual" in art.
We cannot know what immediate course Mondrian's painting—as distinct from his ideas about painting—would have followed if the war had not disrupted his artistic pursuits in the summer of 1914. Summoned to his father's bedside in July of that fateful year, he was not expecting this duty visit to his family to amount to anything more than a brief interlude. As it happened, of course, he soon found himself trapped in the Netherlands for the duration of the war. As the country was neutral in the war, Mondrian was never in any danger from the military operations that were devastating other parts of Europe. Yet he felt painfully cut off from the important work he had started. Separated from his paintings, which had been left behind in Paris, and from the milieu in which they had been produced, Mondrian lost some of his artistic momentum. Nevertheless, in this period of enforced repatriation he devoted a great deal of thought to formulating his future artistic program.
In this pursuit he soon discovered that he was by no means as isolated in his new artistic and philosophical outlook as he had believed himself to be. "The war," writes the Dutch historian H. L. C. Jaffé, "had brought many Dutch artists who had been working abroad, back to their native country and these came back to the Netherlands charged with the results of their studies and full of new and promising ideas. In the Netherlands they found an atmosphere of spiritual tension, generated by the fact of the country's being a neutral enclave, an oasis in a continent at war." It was thus in the war years that Mondrian came to know, among others, the painters Theo van Doesburg and Bart van der Leck, the architects J. J. P. Oud and Robert van't Hoff, the designers Vilmos Huszar and Gerrit Rietveld, and the Belgian sculptor Georges Vantongerloo—the artists who, with Mondrian, founded in 1917 the avant-garde movement called De Stijl (the Style). This was to have an immense influence not only on the future of abstract art throughout the Western world but also on modern architecture and design and on the aesthetic, social, and pedagogical theories that supported them.
De Stijl was, from the outset, something more than an art movement. It was a social and cultural program, based on a visionary amalgam of idealist aesthetics, industrial mechanics, and utopian politics. Its ambition was to redesign the world by imposing straight lines, primary colors, and geometric form—and thus an ideal of impersonal order and rationality—upon the production of every man-made object essential to the modern human environment. Rejecting tradition, it envisioned the rebirth of the world as a kind of technological Eden from which all trace of individualism and the conflicts it generates would be permanently banished. Its goal was to liberate European culture from the "archaistic confusion" of its past in order to create an entirely new and completely harmonious civilization.
In this ambition, notwithstanding its rationalist claims, a belief in the occult was to play an important role. In 1915, the Dutch writer M. H. J. Schoenmaekers published a treatise called The New Image of the World, described by its author as a work of "positive mysticism." This and a subsequent volume, Plastic Mathematics (1916), exerted a crucial influence on Mondrian and the other founders of De Stijl. According to Jaffé, "Both Mondrian and Schoenmaekers lived, at the time, in Laren and … saw each other frequently and had long and animated discussions." Schoenmaekers's ideas were directly incorporated into the De Stijl program, from 1917 onward, as well as into Mondrian's later theoretical writings. The very term that Mondrian adopted for the geometrical abstractions of his later years —Neo-Plasticism—was borrowed from Schoenmaekers's wartime writings.
Schoenmaekers was a Neo-Platonist in quest of a reality more absolute than any that could be discerned in the natural world without the aid of mystical illumination. Nature, from the perspective of this "positive mysticism," was looked upon as a mystery to be scrutinized and penetrated—a view that was more or less in accord with theosophical doctrine, and that also bore a distinct resemblance to the Symbolist philosophy of Mallarmé. Truth was defined as the reduction of "the relativity of natural facts to the absolute, in order to recover the absolute in natural facts." What was especially important in this theory was that art, if sufficiently awakened to its mystical role, was accorded a central place in the metaphysical process. "In art," Schoenmaekers wrote, mysticism "creates what we call, in the strictest sense, 'style.'" Style in art is characterized as "the general in spite of the particular" and the means by which "art is integrated in general cultural life." Thus the joint task of the artist and the mystic is "to penetrate nature in such a way that the inner construction of reality is revealed to us."
It was not only for its philosophical affirmation of the mystical view of "reality," moreover, nor for the role it envisioned for art in divining its "inner construction," that Schoenmaekers's theories were important for Mondrian in his thinking about abstraction. Schoenmaekers also specified the nature of the forms (rectilinear structures of the horizontal and the vertical) and the colors (the primaries: red, yellow, and blue) to be used in this artistic quest for the absolute, and then elaborated upon their cosmic significance. "This new plastic expression," Schoenmaekers wrote in The New Image of the World, "is of this world… . But it is a new earthiness, an earthly heaven." And an "earthly heaven," or some artistic analogue thereof, was indeed what the artists of the De Stijl group, Mondrian most conspicuously, were determined to create in their abstract art.
It must not be supposed, however, that Schoenmaekers's ideas triggered an abrupt or immediate break in Mondrian's pictorial practice. The purely geometrical, or Neo-Plasticist, abstractions with which Mondrian came ultimately to be identified, were never painted according to a theoretical formula, and there was certainly no sudden conversion to the purely geometrical as the result of his response to Schoenmaekers's philosophy. On the contrary, Mondrian seemed at first somewhat daunted by the vision of an art that might jettison all the variations in tone and contour that had remained a staple of his painting even when he abandoned conventional representation in the most highly developed of his "Cubist" abstractions. In later years, with his painting confidently entrenched in Neo-Plasticist principles, he might dismiss such residual signs of painterly tradition as a throwback to "Impressionism" or even naturalism; but during this difficult period of transition to a more absolute mode of abstraction, when every mark on the canvas was an exploration of the unknown, Mondrian nonetheless held fast to such vestiges of tradition even as he was inching his way toward a conception of painting that would finally do without them.
Thus, the pictorial means traditionally associated with the depiction of observable objects and the space they occupy—shifts of tone and color value, and the variations in drawing that serve to hold them in place— survived a while longer in Mondrian's painting even when their representational function had already been forfeited. Clearly it was not an easy matter for a painter of Mondrian's background and experience, even at this relatively advanced stage of his development, to bid an irrevocable farewell to such a fundamental pictorial practice. The depth of the perturbation caused by this radical option may be inferred from the fact that only one painting by the artist survives from the year 1916. This was the crucial period in which Mondrian was struggling to reconcile the demands of his art with the appeal of Schoenmaekers's ideas. The abstraction that he produced that year —Composition: 1916, now in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum—is at once a summation of the "old" painting and a partial preview of the new. Its forms are predominantly rectilinear but still soft-edged, "open," and irregular. Its black lines hold firmly to right-angled verticals and horizontals, but at the side edges of the painting they shade off into veiled grays. Its colors—blues and blueish grays, pinks and grayish pinks, yellowish ochres that in places turn brown—are cousin to the primaries, but remain equivocal, impure, and atmospheric. There is no discernible subject in Composition: 1916, but for anyone who knows the Pier and Ocean drawings by Mondrian that preceded it there is an unmistakable visual echo, or memory, in its fragmented grid structure. This is painting with a pronounced appetite for an absolute it does not yet command the means of realizing.
The breakthrough came the very next year. "For the moment at least," Mondrian wrote to a friend in September 1917, "my long search is over." While he had produced little new painting during the previous year, he had devoted much time and thought to the writing of a treatise of his own—"The New Plastic in Painting"—which Van Doesburg began serializing in the inaugural issues of De Stijl, the magazine founded in 1917 to launch the new movement. At the same time, Mondrian painted his first geometrical abstractions—the series of pictures entitled Compositions in Color or Compositions with Color Planes. These "flat" pictorial compositions of rectangles in primary colors on a gray ground closed the door on the kind of illusionistic space—the space of representation—that the artist had been struggling to transcend since his first encounter with Cubism six years earlier. In 1917, Mondrian had at last brought both the theory and the practice of pure abstraction into a satisfactory alignment.
"The New Plastic in Painting" owed a good deal to Schoenmaekers's mystical philosophy, of course, but it was more directly addressed to the problems of painting. It was at once a manifesto for a new pictorial aesthetic—an aesthetic of pure abstraction —and a restatement of the occult, anti-materialist doctrines that supported its creation. "The new plastic," Mondrian wrote in the introduction to this historic treatise, "cannot be cloaked in what is characteristic of the particular, natural form and color, but must be expressed by the abstraction of form and color—by means of the straight line and determinate primary color." What is remarkable about "The New Plastic in Painting" is not only its triumphal affirmation of pure abstraction as an aesthetic "absolute"—a word that was repeatedly sounded throughout the manifesto—but the anxious attention that is lavished on the need to emancipate painting from the thralldom of what is variously called "nature's appearance," "naturalistic representation," "naturalistic form," "naturalistic color," and so on. Nature haunts the pages of "The New Plastic in Painting" like a specter that can be neither exorcised nor appeased. It can only be resisted by an act of transcendent artistic conscience that makes the pursuit of the "universal" a quest so absolute that all the contingencies of nature are stripped of their importance.
Implicit in this view of what Mondrian also called "the style of the future" was an idea of evolution—the evolution of art in the service of the evolution of spirit—akin to the theosophical doctrines of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner. According to this conception of evolution, mankind had once "lived in harmony with nature's rhythm." With the development of human consciousness, however, "there automatically ensued a disharmony between man and nature." It was thus to be the function of the new abstraction, or what Mondrian sometimes called "abstract-real painting," to give us "the image of this regained harmony." This was to be achieved, Mondrian avowed, by the creation of a pictorial composition "more mathematical than naturalistic," an art of "pure relationships" that eschewed "all that was capricious" in nature in order to achieve "the most constant, the most determinate plastic expression of equilibrated relationship—composition in rectangular planes." (The emphasis is Mondrian's.) Hence the Compositions with Color Planes that set him on his new course in 1917.
"The New Plastic in Painting" concludes by celebrating the emergence of "a purer and purer mode of expression in art" as a triumph of the modern era, and Mondrian was himself to live by this artistic faith for the rest of his life and make it a source of inspiration for others. All the same, an existential uncertainty about the role of nature —in art and in life—remained a vexing issue for Mondrian, and his philosophy of abstraction cannot be fully comprehended in isolation from it. Toward the end of "The New Plastic in Painting," his ruminations on nature suddenly take the form of an arcane discussion of the male and female principles transposed to the realm of mystical archetypes. Identifying nature with the female principle and spirit with the male, he concludes that "The female and male elements, nature and spirit, then find their pure expression, true unity, only in the abstract." (Again, the emphasis is Mondrian's.) This is clearly the sheerest mysticism, and more the expression of a lingering anxiety about nature than a resolution of the problem it posed for a sensibility nurtured on the occult. Yet it was upon such an uneasy mystical foundation that Mondrian's absolutist aesthetic of abstraction finally came to rest.
In this amalgam of mysticism, anxiety, abstraction, and a search for the absolute, we are reminded, as we often are with Mondrian, of Mallarmé—especially of that passage in Mallarmé's prose in which the poet speaks so poignantly of "isolating oneself, disdainfully, in the serenity of abstraction." "Serenity appears as a quality both of the effect of the finished work," wrote one of Mallarmé's commentators, D. J. Mossop, "and of the artist's feelings during the act of composition. It is, in turn, inseparable from the idea of harmony. The poet achieves harmony and serenity in himself and in his work by withdrawing from too active a participation in the passions of his theme so as to abstract a perfect order from the disorder common to the impressions made by normal experience and the feelings of lyrical inspiration."
Such was Mondrian's outlook on art and life, too, as he finally achieved "the serenity of abstraction" and embarked upon the work that would shape the course of abstract art for decades to come.
Go to the top of the document.
- "Piet Mondrian: 1872–1944" was seen first at the Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (December 18, 1994–April 30, 1995), then at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (June 11–September 4, 1995). It will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from October 1, 1995, through January 23, 1996. A catalogue has been published by Leonardo Arte and Bulfinch Press/Little, Brown (400 pages, $75; $32 paper). Go back to the text.


text:
City releases text of letter reinstating East Providence Budget Commission
EAST PROVIDENCE — The City of East Providence Monday, April 22, released the text of the letter sent to it and the Budget Commission by State Director of Revenue Rosemary Booth Gallogly reinstating the Commission's oversight of all personnel matters.
The move by Director Gallogly, which came in written form Thursday, April 18, was seen by some as a response to City Manager Peter Graczykowski's decision to place East Providence Police Chief Joseph Tavares on administrative leave pending an investigation in his action's leading the department. Several complaints were filed against Chief Tavares during his three-and-a-half year tenure in the position.
According to sources with knowledge of the situation, Chief Tavares remains on leave while the investigation into those claims and a review of his performance is completed. Major Christopher Parella continues as acting chief, a position Mr. Graczykowski placed him in upon his initial decision to place Chief Tavares on leave Monday, April 15.
Below is the content of Director Gallogly's letter to the city:
Department of Revenue
Rosemary Booth Gallogly, Director
One Capitol Hill
Providence, RI 02908-5855
April 18, 2013
East Providence Budget Commission
City of East Providence
145 Taunton Avenue
East Providence, RI 02914
Dear East Providence Budget Commission:
At the March 28, 2013 meeting, the East Providence Budget Commission (EPBC) delegated its authority under RI Gen. Laws 45-9 to the City Council, School Committee, City Manager and Superintendent, in order to reinstate their authority as provided by the City Charter and Code of Ordinances. Effective immediately, I am rescinding that delegation of authority for all personnel matters. All personnel actions will need to be approved by the EPBC until further notice.
Rosemary Booth Gallogly
CC: Kathleen Waterbury, Human Resources Director
Kimberly Mercer, Superintendent of Schools
School Committee

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Can you give me the 411 on some of the latest iPod accessories? My granddaughter's birthday is coming up and I'd like to get her something that she can use along with her iPod. Any tips would be wonderful. Thanks!
Not a problem! This was actually a pretty enjoyable question to find the answer to. I don't have an iPod of my own, but lately, I've been thinking more and more about getting one and after seeing all of the extras you can get for them, my interest skyrocketed. So, if you have an iPod or if you know someone else who does (like the person who asked this question), this tip will surely put you on the right track to upgrading your iPod to be all it can be. Let's get started!
iPod Hi-Fi: I thought we would start with the newest iPod accessory on the market today. It's called iPod Hi-Fi and it's Apple's version of a stereo. It is a complete sound system that works with your iPod to give out the richest and most compact sound you've ever heard. If you want to use your iPod to fill a whole room with the music you have, this is the right accessory for you. Like I said before, it's just like a stereo, but with a little more oomph. iPod Hi-Fi comes with a remote control and it also has an integrated docking station where your iPod can sit while you listen to your tunes. Now, while this is a very cool feature, it also comes with a price (as I'm sure you already guessed). These start out at $349.00, so you might want to start saving!
Universal Dock: Are you always losing your iPod? If it were me, I would always forget whether I left it in my car or in the bedroom, etc. So, if you often have that problem as well, this universal dock may be the best thing for you. It's just a little docking station where your iPod can sit and relax. Along with that, it comes with a hookup for your computer, so you can charge your iPod and sync new songs all at the same time. Plus, it can be hooked up to your stereo or speakers so you can listen to your music out loud. This one works for all iPod models and it's great for keeping your iPod in one place, along with some other very cool features.
Apple Remote: Have you been yearning for a remote control for your iPod? Well, your wishes have been answered, because that's exactly what this is. With this remote, you can control your music from across a room. It works just like a TV remote and if you have a docking station, you can even hook your iPod up to a stereo, etc. and use the remote from there. With the Apple remote, you'll have control over your music, right at your fingertips!
Leather Case: I'm sure you've seen these before, but I thought I would mention them anyway. This case is perfect for keeping your iPod protected. It comes with a soft interior, so your iPod will have a nice place to stay and you won't ever have to worry about scratches or anything like that. It also has a built in ribbon that you can pull for an easy way to get your iPod in and out of the case. It's ingenious!
Socks: This is another great way to keep your iPod safe and it also adds a little decoration. These are like real knit socks and your iPod just slides down into them. They fit all the iPod models (except the shuffle) and it's just a fun way to keep your iPod protected. The socks come in six different colors as well, including green, purple, gray, blue, orange and pink.
Those are just some of the more interesting accessories I was able to find. Of course, there are several more available, but if I told you about all of them, we all would get a little bored! All of the above mentioned items can be found on Apple's Web site and you can of course, order them online if you'd like.
Now, we here at WorldStart actually have some pretty cool iPod accessories in our stock as well. We have earphones, a charger with a dock connector and even a wireless iPod remote. Along with those, we have a couple software programs that will accent any iPod player very nicely as well. You can purchase any of those items from our Web site right here.
Either way you look at it, iPods are very cool devices and it makes perfect sense to get all out of them that you can. The accessories listed in this tip can definitely help you do that, so be sure to check them out today!
~ Erin


text:
I just skimmed through the blog post and one of the items on the list said to update a current template and post it in your description. I thought about asking this a while back but thought I would wait and let the site age a bit before asking. Can we updates themes with somewhat big changes and release it as a ver. 2 etc.? This has been done for quite some time on Flashden and has proven successful for many. People ask for requests to themes but I'm not going to make changes to a current template without being able to re-release it.
That's what I did! I made the older version simple and added many advanced option on my second, which made more sales.
Well, I think if it's significantly updated nothing can stop you.
Thanks for the comments and ne-design I had no idea that someone had already done it, very nice. Jeffrey if you would comment on this simply for clarification…thanks!
Yes guys, version 2's are allowed but it needs to be enough of a change to consider it a completely different theme.
Look at it this way, it needs to be different enough that buyers of your first theme would want to buy the second one (this is not a rule, this is just an easier way to put it in perspective).
If you upload a version 2 that has nothing more than a different font color and a changed banner, that will probably get rejected. But lets say your first upload was static, and this new version contains jquery, new sub-pages, new layout options, etc.
I'll let Jeffrey comment some more.
Hi everyone. Sorry for the delay. Mark pretty much summed it up. You have to give us reason to approve a second version.
Otherwise, just update your original theme with the new files.


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Looking to revitalize your brand
or create a new one? LET'S TALK
A display that presents a product and provides additional information such as features and benefits.
This week's term:
Brand Identity Misalignment: Presenting a brand identity that does not reflect the strategic intent of the brand strategy. This often results in ineffective tactical decisions that damage both brand equity and brand value.
See: Brand Image Map
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text:
Nov 03 2008
Fall migration is bringing gulls to southwestern Pennsylvania. Yesterday at Moraine State Park their numbers were up considerably compared to my last visit in late September.
Though most people call them "sea" gulls, those who visit Pittsburgh breed in interior Canada and Alaska and spend the winter in similar habitat further south. Species who breed at the ocean don't tend to come here as there's no point in crossing the mountains. Gulls, however, are great for making exceptions to every rule – so don't quote me.
There's one gull who makes a radical habitat change from summer to winter, from nesting in trees in the taiga to wintering at the ocean. We don't see many of them here but it's my favorite gull, the Bonaparte's gull, named for Philadelphia ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte in the early 1800s.
Bonaparte's are smaller than most gulls, have bright white primaries (the long feathers at the end of the wings) and are easy to identify by their floating, mothlike flight.
That said, gulls are notoriously difficult to identify. They go through many plumages as they mature so if you're an expert – which I am not – you can tell the species, the time of year, and the age of the gull by looking at its feathers.
I usually can't do that but the Bonaparte's gull in Chuck Tague's picture is holding still so I can tell you it's in its first winter. That's because he has black lines on the outer edge of his wings and a black line across his shoulder that looks like an 'M' when he flies. Adult Bonaparte's have crisp all-white primaries above and below and no black shoulder line.
I would love to see more Bonaparte's gulls – and more often – but they aren't going to stay. They're headed for the Atlantic. As Chuck says, "My Bonnie lies over the ocean."
(photo by Chuck Tague)


text:
Hybrid Sight
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The Hybrid Sight is a mix between a Holographic Sight and an ACOG Sight. You can switch back and forth between the 4x Scope and Reflex any time you like by pressing the attachment switch button (LEFT on the D-PAD for Consoles).
The difference between the HAMR Scope and Hybrid Sight is the position. The HAMR Scope has a Reflex Sight on top of an 3x Scope. The Hybrid Scope has a moveable 4x Scope with the Reflex Sight.
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At this time, we do not have a 501(3)c status and all money to cover rescue, vet, and care expenses is coming out of our own pockets. Any help would be appreciated! Any donations, financially or supplies(collars, leashes, crates, food, flea/heartworm medication), would also be greatly appreciated!
We are a privately run rescue group dedicated to saving Australian Cattle Dogs and mixes of Australian Cattle Dogs from euthanasia in animal control facilities in Indiana and bordering states. Also in certain instances we will take owner surrenders. Once in our care, we fully vet and temperament test all animals before adopting them out. Once they are ready to be adopted, we look for forever homes for our beautiful ACDs, trying our best to match individual adopters with the right ACD for them.
If you are interested in adopting one of our ACDs, please contact us for more information on the specific dog, and we will send you our adoption application. An adoption application must be filled out first, so it is best to email us first before calling please. All adoptions are $200. We make no money at this. In fact we use our own money most of the time for these special dogs. If you would like to donate financially you can call our veterinarian, Jackson County Animal Clinic at 812-522-1152. ACD's are smart, quick learners, that excel in obedience, agility and herding trials. They bond well with the family but usually will pick out their special "human". If you are considering adopting an Australian Cattle Dog, PLEASE DO YOUR RESEARCH ON THE BREED FIRST! There are several websites that can give you lots of great information on what to expect from owning an Australian Cattle Dog. Here are a few we recommend: http://www.australiancattledog.com/ www.aucado.us http://www.cattledog.com/
Come visit these beautiful dogs on our farm. Just call us and we will set up an appointment.
The Outback Australian Cattle Dog Rescue
Seymour, IN 47274
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
Click here for a list of pets at this shelter


text:
The S-CDTA was not originally included in the Country Operations Business Plan 2013-2015. However, RGC request for the technical assistance to prepare the Flood damage Emergency Reconstruction Project - Supplementary Financing (FDERP-SF) is documented in a memorandum of understanding from the Country Programming Mission 2013. A reconnaissance mission was fielded 16-20 December 2013 to reach an agreement with the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF), as the executing agency (EA), and the proposed project implementing agencies (IAs) on the impact, outcome, outputs, implementation arrangements, and cost and financing arrangements for FDERP-SF.
This S-CDTA is proposed to provide assistance in the start-up phase for the FDERP-SF. Close coordination is ongoing with development partners (DPs) on damage assessment, mapping of DP activities, as well as potentials for co-financing.
Latest Project Documents
Project Data Sheets (PDS) contain summary information on the project or program. Because the PDS is a work in progress, some information may not be included in its initial version but will be added as it becomes available. Information about proposed projects is tentative and indicative.
The Public Communications Policy (PCP) recognizes that transparency and accountability are essential to development effectiveness. It establishes the disclosure requirements for documents and information ADB produces or requires to be produced.
The Accountability Mechanism provides a forum where people adversely affected by ADB-assisted projects can voice and seek solutions to their problems and report alleged noncompliance of ADB's operational policies and procedures.
In preparing any country program or strategy, financing any project, or by making any designation of, or reference to, a particular territory or geographic area in this document, the Asian Development Bank does not intend to make any judgments as to the legal or other status of any territory or area.


text:
Commerce Related Web Search : Current Trends
Spink, Amanda H. & Jansen, Bernard J. (2007) Commerce Related Web Search : Current Trends. In 18th Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS2007), 5-7 December 2007, Toowoomba, Australia.
|PDF (61kB)
The level of commerce related Web search is a major indicator of the growth of e-commerce. Web queries are a key element in how people purchase services and products via the Web. People create Web queries in order to translate their information problems into a demand for products and services. Our paper provides results from studies analyzing Web search logs to determine the level of commerce related searches on commercial Web search engines for 2005 and 2006. Within commerce, we include business, e-commerce, travel, employment or economic related Web queries. Results show that commerce related queries currently represented between 28% and 30% of Web queries. The commerce related terminology on the Web is incredibly various and often difficult for the average user to predict with total accuracy. The implications of the findings and further research are discussed.
Impact and interest:
Citation counts are sourced monthly from Scopus and Web of Science® citation databases.
These databases contain citations from different subsets of available publications and different time periods and thus the citation count from each is usually different. Some works are not in either database and no count is displayed. Scopus includes citations from articles published in 1996 onwards, and Web of Science® generally from 1980 onwards.
Citations counts from the Google Scholar™ indexing service can be viewed at the linked Google Scholar™ search.
Full-text downloads:
Full-text downloads displays the total number of times this work's files (e.g., a PDF) have been downloaded from QUT ePrints as well as the number of downloads in the previous 365 days. The count includes downloads for all files if a work has more than one.
|ID Code:
|Item Type:
|Conference Paper
|Additional Information:
|The contents of this conference can be freely accessed online via the conference's web page (see hypertext link).
|Additional URLs:
|Web search engines, commerce, queries, Dogpile
|Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification > INFORMATION AND COMPUTING SCIENCES (080000) > LIBRARY AND INFORMATION STUDIES (080700) > Information Retrieval and Web Search (080704)
|Past > QUT Faculties & Divisions > Faculty of Science and Technology
|Copyright Owner:
|Copyright 2007 Amanda H. Spink and Bernard J. Jansen
|Deposited On:
|07 Aug 2008 00:00
|Last Modified:
|29 Feb 2012 13:35
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text:
'Our Town': 75 Years on, Still Yours and Mine
"Our Town" by Thornton Wilder, now enjoying a splendid 75th anniversary production at the Ford's Theatre, is a paradox, a contradiction—in its aspirations and results, in the feelings it engenders and the way it has always and continues to be regarded. The play garners large amounts of affection with an almost equal amount of disdain and criticism.
Count this writer and critic in the affectionate corner, in regards to "Our Town," and more generally, the works of Wilder as both playwright and novelist. This is not the place to talk about "The Bridge at San Luis Rey," "The Eighth Day" or even Wilder's career. We're concerned with this production of "Our Town." At this time and without hesitation, I would urge anyone with a mind or half a mind to go see it, experience it. I would urge children—accompanied by adults, if not critics—and young people and old people however slow of foot, and the residents of this city as well as visitors to see it, or the transient, if not transcendental stewards of our government to go see it.
The paradox—for directors and less so actors, not to mention the audience—of "Our Town" is that its three acts are rooted in invigorating, palatable specifics of time and place, yet are presented almost as abstractions—bare stage, uniform costumes, minimal props as when the play first saw the light of stage many decades ago. In addition, the characters behave and talk and come armed with memories and knowledge only of where and who they are living in a small American town and place—Grover's Landing, N.H., in the early years of 20th century America. From the get-go, the play strives for the poetic universal, for the idea that its contents have wings and are ticketed to travel through time and universe. It means to echo and mirror whatever place, time and space it exists in a particular performance.
So, here we are in Washington in the year 2013, 75 years ago the play's first production, a little more than 100 years past the setting of the action of the play when it opens. Some of us have heard these words spoken before. These characters and citizens of Grover's Landing have lived for us before on some other stage, or on television back in the 1950s or more recently. The words are pretty much the same, and the characters are the same--but then again, they're not. How things are said will be different, and how the people look will be different, and so on. Somewhere in there, something in what's said, or a movement, or a voice, will strike someone differenty, maybe irritate them or pain them sadly. Important, too, is the fact that we are different.
Wilder shows us three things: a typical day in Grover's Corner, the courtship and marriage of George Gibbs and Emily Webb, the son and daughter of the town's chief doctor and editor of its newspaper, respectively, and then the dark third act where death and the meaning of the whole damn thing rears its clear-eyed head. He means to make us face our own lives, or more generously and broadly, have empathy for our humanity and its devastating limits. It is neither fully nor specifically a sentimental play for which it is often mistaken. In some ways, it is a remarkably cruel play--not because it is merciless, but because it is true. There is no question that the play has been played with sentiment and jerked for its tears the world over in all the languages known to man--and most publicly, for being the source of inspiration for the Sammy Cahn song "Love and Marriage." Yet there is little if any sentiment here. This production, under the direction of Stephen Rayne, moves unavoidably and bravely to its conclusions.
The portrait of Grover's Corner, it seems to me, is accurate about small town tastes, sentiment and rhythms, a town in Teddy Roosevelt's time, where you might spot a car or two, where the constable and milkman made their rounds, where Dr. Gibbs comes home from delivering babies and where the poor Polish citizens might live. There are secrets in this town, but they're of the kind known to and gossiped by everyone, especially the state of the clinically depressed church organist. We meet the Webb and the Gibbs family, see their children, Emily and George as teens and then boy and girl, who begin to get an inkling that they might love each other.
I think everyone here comports themselves as who they act to be—the anxious Mrs. Gibbs who wants to see Paris desperately, Dr. Gibbs who has adopted an avuncular tone of wisdom which seems to be expected of him, the resonating authority displayed by Editor Webb and the exasperation often displayed by his wife in dealing with gardens and children. The touchstones of the family seem so real that you might think, if you ever went to New England, you would find their names on tombstones in a town that doesn't exist.
There is always a person called the stage manager to lead us through his—I would bet he's been played in Moscow, or in Warsaw, or small town high school productions. I have seen Robert Prosky play him to fatherly ends at Arena Stage , I have seen Frank Sinatra—yes, the Sinatra—in a television production where Paul Newman was George and Eva Marie Saint was Emily. I have seen Newman play the part on television. The stage manager—has been played every which way, including by a woman, the fine actress Pat Carroll who herself once played not just Mother Courage but Falstaff. And now we see the African American actress Portia play the part, in a way that I think suited the place and the time and gave the play immediacy and accessibility.
Portia's stage manager is of the sort that is inviting. No nonsense, she is friendly, as if to suggest that this is important to the audience, but also a proceeding in which their presence is welcome, critical. She seems more plain spoken, a little more close to the audience than others, but always keenly aware that this is a matter of import, not in a pompous, church-and-classroom sort of way, but rather as part of a echoing conversation.
She talks about one of the town's departed, at a point already near the end of the play when you viscerally, if not actually, believe in the town and its people and the words, a young man who had fought in died in the Civil War to "protect the union even though he hadn't seen more than 50 miles of it." He died, she notes, looking up at the martyred president's box, to defend the United States. Then, you remember that, to these folks, Abraham Lincoln and the bloody war were recent memories not history.
This production also brings home to me that "Our Town" is a play about theater and its place in our lives—after all, we see the stagehands, the actors and such gathering on stage, one by one or in twos, finding their place, a chair, a corner—here comes the actor—the authoritative Craig Wallace, playing Mr. Webb, and here is Emily, sitting in a chair, and here comes Fred Strother who plays the constable, and John Lescault as Joe Stoddard the local historian, and Tom Story, bringing his Simon Stimson, the organ player on stage, and so forth.
By using the barest of stages and no props—you hear a horse whinnying, or the sad or loud notes of trains charging into town—you understand better what the theater has always done right from the first traveling story teller, to the Greeks in their amphitheatre, using masks, which is to imagine ourselves and times past and now. For a writer and journalist, I suddenly noticed a pretty blond girl sit down and pick something up and appeared to be holding and scanning. It was Alyssia Gagarin, who played Emily with poignancy and keen and keening awareness, as Emily holding up and reading a newspaper which wasn't there. It seemed to me at least a sharp, even wounding illustration of the coming fates of newspapers.
In this production, it's worth noticing the audience—this one, a day after the production opened seemed prone to want to clap with or without prompting, and seemed to be a part of an extension of the town itself.
On the 75th anniversary of "Our Town," this production is a showcase, not only of the gifts of the artists and actors involved, but also of the inventive spirit and imagination of Thornton Wilder, who in giving us "Our Town", gave us our towns and the places in which we live and the life therein.
"Our Town" runs through Feb. 24 at Ford's Theatre.


text: Jon Nakamatsu continues to draw unanimous praise as a true aristocrat of the keyboard, whose playing combines elegance, clarity, and electrifying power. Gold Medallist at the 1997 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, this Japanese-American pianist plays with "the calm assurance that comes of having both a solid technique and a gentle, introspective, interpretive spirit" (The New York Times). His brilliant but unassuming musicianship have made him a clear favorite throughout the world both on the concert circuit and in the recording studio leading to collaborations with such acclaimed conductors as James Conlon, Philippe Entremont, Marek Janowski, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, and Michael Tilson Thomas.


text:
Tesco has thrown in the towel on its American adventure, as the grocery giant admitted an exit from its US operation Fresh & Easy was likely after five troubled years and it parted company with the business's boss.
The world's third-largest grocer unveiled the departure of Tim Mason, a Tesco veteran of 30 years-plus, who is also the group's deputy chief executive, with immediate effect, alongside another fall in underlying sales at its UK business after a dire performance on non-food.
Credited with creating the Every Little Helps slogan, Mason is leaving after Fresh & Easy racked up losses of £850 million since it launched to a fanfare in California, Nevada and Arizona in November 2007.
Tesco has invested about £1 billion in Fresh & Easy and the group's decision to launch a strategic review of the business — which could lead to it selling, closing or seeking a joint venture partner — will pile the pressure on its chief executive Philip Clarke, 51, with questions already being raised about his position.
While investors welcomed him calling time on the loss-making 199-store US chain and its shares rose by 11.6p, or 3.6%, to 337.5p, the review of Fresh & Easy is the latest setback for Clarke since the Tesco lifer took the helm in March 2011.
Following years of its underlying sales trailing UK rivals, Tesco unveiled its first profit warning in 20 years in January and three months later a £1 billion investment to turn around its domestic business.
Mason, 54, who is also the group's head of marketing, is the latest executive to leave since its former boss Sir Terry Leahy handed over to Clarke last year. Former finance director Andy Higginson, e-commerce chief Laura Wade-Gery, Asian boss David Potts and Richard Brasher, who was its UK chief executive, have all left.
Clarke today said Fresh & Easy's underlying sales growth had slowed to a "trickle" of just 1.8% over the 13 weeks to November 24, admitting it had been "too hard" to convince US consumers to shop at its smaller stores instead of their traditional reliance on much bigger stores. Clarke hinted at a disagreement over strategy with Mason by saying: "I did not think it was appropriate for Tim to lead the review. I wanted a fresh pair of eyes to run the business so it was my decision [for him to leave]." While all options are being considered for Fresh & Easy after it hired advisers at Greenhill for the strategic review, Clarke said it is "likely, but not certain, that our presence in the US will come to an end." Tesco said it had received in recent months a "number of approaches from parties interested in acquiring either all or part of Fresh & Easy, or in partnering with us to develop" the business.
Mr Clarke described as "disappointing" a 0.6% fall in Tesco's UK like-for-like sales in the quarter, with him blaming weak sales of big-ticket items, such as electricals.
- More about:
- Food
- Retail
- Supermarkets
- Tesco


text:
YAN Model
Tom Taylor MaternityPhotographer Male Raleigh, North Carolina, US
My Website: Tom Taylor PhotographyMy MM URL: http://www.modelmayhem.com/tomtaylor2
Mayhem # 833335
About Me
I am an experienced photographer in Raleigh, NC. I have shot many things in the past 22 years: Weddings, portraits, sports, erotic, glamour, bands, and more. Currently, I am expanding into maternity photography.
I am always available for paid shoots, but occasionally accept TF* work. If you are an expecting mother and are interested in my rates, please contact me at: firstname.lastname@example.com .
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A priceless hoard of Victorian rubbish – including champagne bottles, tennis balls, sports shoes, bowler hats, medicine jars, clay pipes and tobacco tins – has been discovered bricked up under steps leading to the imposing courtyard at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich.
The haul is so precisely the kind of domestic junk that any untidy householder shoves into a cupboard before an unexpected visitor, that archaeologists wonder if it represents just that, a hasty cleanup before a grand event at a site where royalty were regular visitors.
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Your Dog, Your Life
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Dog of the Day
Photo Comments Age: 8 Years Sex: Male Weight: 11-25 lbs
Photo Comments
So I thought I started out really good, Charlie took me outside and then let me run around the house while Mom was sleeping. I had tons of fun I chewed up a book about scottish terriers, why would my Mom want that?! And I had to go potty but Mom was sleeping so I just went in the corner upstairs, I didn't think she would want me to wake her up. Well, I guess I was wrong, when she found the potty she got super angry. I was taken outside and I didn't have to go potty so I was sent to my crate. I ate breakfast, but I felt so bad that I made Mom mad that when she took me outside, I held in my potty... I didn't want to make her angry again. But I just got put right back in my crate. I finally did potty #1 outside and so she let me play in the house with Pippy while she was cleaning. I was very mad about being in the crate all morning so when she left I went potty right in the middle of her newly cleaned floor, a big stinky #2!! Well she threw me right back into the kennel for a time out. Then she took me to doggy school but I didn't listen very well, I was upset about being in my crate. I guess it made her angry, or something because when we were done with doggy classes she took me into the grooming salon and one of her groomer friends helped her pluck my ear hair. I HATE THAT!! I screamed and cried and it didn't matter, Mom just told me to knock it off and held me so her friend could pluck my ear hair. I eventually gave up and they got all of it out. Mom said I would feel better tomorrow, but right now I feel like I have an empty head. Mom says that I should be able to hear her now, without all that hair in there, so I have better listen when we do training tomorrow. I haven't decided if I want to be good and make Mom happy, or be bad to get back at her for spending so much time in my crate today. Either way, I am pooped (hehe)!
Yabba Dabba Doo!
We finally got Pippy's graduation pictures from her Intermediate Obedience class at PetSmart. She looks smashing! You should check out her dogster page where they put a few of the pics. (She is my sister so you can click the link under my family) My Mom said not to worry, that I would get to have my picture taken when I finish my Puppy Obedience class. I guess this means I have to study extra hard, or I might not pass class!! What would I do then!? I would be a puppy school drop out! There is just SO much pressure to do well, having a BORDER COLLIE for a sister is NOT easy! It's like she never does anything wrong. I get yelled at all the time, for diggin in the yard and going potty in the house. What do they expect? My Mom is more patient with me then Charlie, but I mean, come on I'm a terrier not a Border Collie!! They should know by now, I'll never be as good as she is. My mom says that I will be better then pippy one day, but I don't believe her, I'm genetically set to be inferrior. But Mom says that she is going to work hard with me, and wants to me be a therapy dog and next summer we get to do agility and she says I just have to be a little older is all. Well it's not my fault when I was born. Life is so tough being in the shadow of Pippy... Sometimes I wish I was an only dog! But then I remember how much fun we have when we play, and I like to steal her toys from her and make her chase me around... if she's so smart how come I can steal from her?! Hmm? Mom says I'm just at 'that age' whatever that means. If you have a doggie sibling and your life is tough, hit me up, I can sympathize!
Yabba Dabba Doo
I thought today would be like any other, boy was I wrong. This morning when Mom took me out to potty I saw a bird in the yard, and I know it's my responsibility to keep them out of the yard so I chased after it. Well for some reason the cable didn't stop me like it usually does and I almost caught the bird!! My Mom came running after me screaming "stop, stop" and waving her arms. I had no idea what was going on but then when I turned I saw a big red car headed right for me! I couldn't believe anyone would want to interrupt my bird-chase, I thought they were coming to cheer me on! My mom was very upset and said she had to get me a new collar... which is OK with me, the green one I have is getting old (and I've only had it a few months). She said somethin about a martingale, I guess it's like coach for dogs. I've got to make sure she knows I'm a boy I do NOT want a purse. After breakfast we had three new people show up, so I got to show them my tricks, sniff their shoes, and I stole one of their sandals and hid it. Mom decided we needed a dog park trip, so I spent over an hour chasing other dogs, humping whoever would let me and peeing on every chair in the park (over 20 at last count). After naps and snacks my Mom was very upset about her cell phone and I have to figure out how to get her angry about it becuase we got to go to the dog park again!! Twice in one day! Never in my life have I done anything so crazy and fun! (except for that one time with the toilet, but that's a whole different story). Now we're cuddled up and resting (boy am I tired) but there are all these crazy noises, like a really big thunderstorm, only scarier. My sister (pippy) won't even leave the house. I went outside and tried to scare the noises away by barking at them so Pippy could go potty but my Mom said she would just have to wait.
I am definiatly going to sleep all night!
Yabba Dabba Do!
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Deep Water Oil Well Drilling
The Next Generation of Conventional Oil
Editor's Note: To see how deep we now drill for oil, click here...
If there's one thing I wanted to hammer into the minds of my readers, it's that the oil markets are extremely tight. Not only are they tight right now, but oil supplies are going to keep getting tighter. In fact, I've been saying this over and over throughout the year.
On Tuesday, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) released their short-term energy outlook. I kept shaking my head while reading it. The report was predicting that oil prices would fall to around $86 per barrel by the end of winter. Word from the trading pit is that oil prices will push over $100 a barrel soon. Breaking through that benchmark price wouldn't surprise me.
But it's not this winter I'm worried about.
Let's say that oil drops (however unlikely) to $80 a barrel this winter. If we see the same jump in 2008 that we did this year, that would result in a $40-$50 rise in prices between January and July-the peak of the driving season. We're talking about oil costing $120-$130 a barrel by July, 2008.
And that's assuming, of course, that oil prices retreat to $80 a barrel.
That could have serious repurcussions at the pumps. Trust me, gas costing $5 a gallon will be a reality in 2008. I'd like to extend my sympathies for my UK readers, they've already shared enough horror stories from the pump to make me feel blessed with $3 a gallon.
After OPEC's refusal to increase output last week, it looks like we'll have to wait until February for another chance. The first question that comes to mind is, "Didn't they already raise output in November?" Unfortunately, the lag in shipping oil means that their November increase wouldn't have an effect until late December.
So why are we more worried about oil supplies more than other volatility factors?
Well, one reason is that the world's oil demand is growing at a much faster rate than the oil supply. The problem is that we can't expect OPEC to increase production. The cartel has their hands full. For example, producing countries are struggling to make up for the loss of production from field depletion.
But I don't want to go off on another doom and gloom tangent. Rather, I wanted to focus on where we're going to go to help offset this supply crisis.
Most of my readers don't ready my column for their health. On occasion it might be for enjoyment or even just to argue and point out any errors (sometimes it's both). Judging from the countless emails I get on a daily basis, the majority of my readers are looking for a place to invest their hard earned money. To that end, let's get into deep water oil drilling.
Offshore Profits in Deep Water Oil Wells
Last month, I briefly went into the boom happening in offshore oil drilling. At that time, I told you to keep an eye out for producers in the Gulf of Mexico, Africa and Brazil. Those three areas make up almost 50% of offshore spending.
In November, Brazil struck black gold off its shores at the Tupi field. The Tupi field could hold between five and eight billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE). In terms of size, think about this: That discovery accounts for about 40% of all the oil ever found in Brazil.
I imagine they're quite pleased. The problem now facing Petrobras (Brazil's government-run oil company) is developing the resource. If Petrobras is going to have to save up for developing the Tupi field, that'll open up new opportunities in other offshore leases.
Investors looking to get into offshore plays have several options. Many offshore oil drillers have had some tremendous success so far in 2007, no doubt aided by the record oil prices.
Personally, I like the success that contract drillers have had this year. Offshore drilling rig day rates have been hitting record highs all year, and I don't see demand weakening in 2008:
We've all seen Transocean's performance this year, but they aren't the only offshore driller making some serious gains in this industry...
Take a look at how Noble Corp. (NE) has been climbing in 2007:
The fact is that there are numerous plays in the offshore industry right now, and I always suggest investors do their homework before putting any money into any company. In the end, it comes down to your own decisions, so choose wisely.
Until next time,
Keith Kohl
Energy Demand will Increase 58% Over the Next 25 Years
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Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it. And the only possible way to accomplish this great change is to accord to women equal power in the making, shaping and controlling of the circumstances of life.Susan Brownell Anthony Jacob
Luxury, nowadays, is ruinous. We criticize, but must conform, and superfluities in the end deprive us of necessities.Pierre Ambroise Franois Choderlos de Laclos
Truth is too big a price to pay for the luxury of avoiding pain now and then.Vanna Bonta
If a man have a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.Friedrich Nietzsche
Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.Coco Chanel
Now, at a certain time, in pleasant mood, He tried the luxury of doing good.George Crabbe
I think it is a great error to consider a heavy tax on wines as a tax on luxury. On the contrary, it is a tax on the health of our citizens.Thomas Jefferson
When you are not physically starving, you have the luxury to realize psychic and emotional starvation.Aaron Ostrom
Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.Joseph Conrad
Blest hour! it was a luxury to be!Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Legionary life is beautiful, not because of riches, partying or the acquisition of luxury, but because of the noble comradeship which binds all Legionaries in a sacred brotherhood of struggle.Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contendMarcus Tullius Cicero
Wealth and poverty the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.Plato
Wealth and poverty: the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.Plato
Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.Edsger Dijkstra


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A man engages a duel with a bear at the Disney Store. Or was it the sudden memory resurgence of an old brown Teddy bear he knew decades ago ? (click on picture to enlarge)
Leica M9 with 35mm Summilux Asph at F1.4, 1/350, ISO200
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Indy 500 to beef up security after Manchester attacks
INDIANAPOLIS Security around the Indianapolis 500 will be beefed up this weekend following Monday's suicide bomb attack in Manchester, England, speedway officials said on Wednesday.
GULLANE, Scotland American Zach Johnson bucked the trend at bone-hard Muirfield on Thursday, snatching the driver out of his bag as often as possible to grab the early first-round lead on five-under 66 at the British Open.
Many of the players feel that using the longest, and riskiest, club in the bag is unnecessary when they are getting so much run on the ball by the banks of the Firth of Forth - but not the 2007 U.S. Masters champion.
"I'm very comfortable on the tee box this year, specifically with my driver," Johnson told reporters in scorching 80-degree temperatures on the east coast of Scotland.
"I know a lot of the guys are saying there are not a lot of drivers out here... but it's one of my best clubs so I'm going to take advantage of that when I can."
Johnson is one of several Americans high up on the leaderboard, with 56-year-old Mark O'Meara having shot a 67 and Dustin Johnson, Tom Lehman and Brandt Snedeker going round in 68. Phil Mickelson, Todd Hamilton and Jordan Spieth are a further stroke behind.
"Maybe they all have the same kind of mentality I have ... having fun," he said. "I'm staying with a buddy, my caddie and our physio guy and we're just having a good week.
"I love it because we don't have it in the States. We don't get to play golf courses like Muirfield.
"I appreciate how the game was developed and formed (over here). I just thoroughly enjoy it."
Johnson certainly enjoyed the blistering start he made to the round as he mixed an eagle three at the fifth with birdies at the third, sixth and seventh.
The American is renowned for a velvet touch on the greens and he prompted loud cheers from the crowd when he rolled in a 45-foot effort at the fifth and another 20-foot birdie putt on the 12th.
Johnson suffered the disappointment of losing out in a playoff to 19-year-old compatriot Spieth at the John Deere Classic in Illinois on Sunday.
"This game demands resilience, each round, each hole and day to day, and that comes with experience," he said.
"It comes with embracing what's happened and then also throwing it behind you and plodding along to the future. I felt great about last week, I'll be honest with you.
"I don't want to say I lost the golf tournament but I certainly had ample opportunities to win it," added Johnson.
"The last nine holes in particular I hit great shots, I just didn't make many putts. If anything from last week what I've embraced is the fact I'm playing great.
"I can put that into play and I'm certainly confident in what I'm doing."
(Editing by Pritha Sarkar)
INDIANAPOLIS Security around the Indianapolis 500 will be beefed up this weekend following Monday's suicide bomb attack in Manchester, England, speedway officials said on Wednesday.
La Liga club Barcelona have expressed their support for Argentine striker Lionel Messi and his father after the Spanish Supreme Court upheld their prison sentences over tax fraud charges, although neither are expected to go to jail.
Stuttgart Open champion Laura Siegemund has sustained a right knee injury and will miss next week's French Open, Germany's Fed Cup captain has said.


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21 - 40 of 475 Comments Last updated Thursday May 18
#21 Oct 27, 2008
It doesn't appear that many people who have posted have lived around Blacks or there wouldn't be so many positive statements. Welfare isn't the problem, it is a race of inferior people and their big chip on their shoulder. I don't want to live around Black people. That is why I live in Blairsville.
All the bleeding hearts who don't see skin color would quickly change your idea if your daughter or son came home with a Black lover.
#22 Oct 27, 2008
You better get ready because the african american Obama is fixing to completely run your life and this country, tax you to death take away your guns, and take your money and give it to welfare recipients. So maybe a Floridian isn't so bad after all!!
#23 Oct 27, 2008
Hey, he's gonna take all those things away from the Floridians, too. Actually, Obama will be redistributing your money to all the Negroes in the south.
#24 Oct 27, 2008
Wow that's completely untrue. I was born and raised in Blairsville, but I was not taught to hate. I even went to college in Atlanta and have friends from all different races. I don't judge people based on there skin color because it has nothing to do with who a person is. I didn't know the ignorance that comes out in your comments even existed anymore.
#25 Oct 27, 2008
Well said well!
#26 Oct 28, 2008
have you or your loved ones never qualified for "earned income credit" when you filed federal taxes??? Just a little redistribution of money which started many years ago. And if memory serves me right, it was started under a republican president.
How many here have kids that benefited from Peach Care or parents/grandparents that collect Social Security? A little more "redistribution of money."
The concept is not a new one in this country.
#27 Oct 28, 2008
Sorry, you've got to back further than that.
#28 Oct 28, 2008
It seems to me that most of the people near Blairsville are not racist, but there has to be a reason why blacks do not live there. It could be that most people are moderates, meaning that they like to live in an all-white community but deny the fact that they are racist because no blacks live in the town. In 1990 there were 564 whites living in the city of Blairsville and no blacks. In Union County, it is 97.8% White and 1.1% Black (based on the last census). A resident of Blairsville in the 1950's said that blacks were not allowed in the city. Based on that knowledge, it sounds to me that Blacks are not allowed today in Blairsville. Would you agree with that statement?
As for the comment about a low-crime rate, that is absolutely BS. That is like saying blacks are dumber than whites because of their genes. BS. Such a statement like that says that it promotes an all-white town and thus bringing in more racist (some being what you call the floridiots). Also, retirees looking to move up in the mountain areas often prefer a town that is all white.
#29 Oct 28, 2008
What is wrong with an all White town? It is a choice? I moved here because it is white.
Did I prove your point? Good.
#30 Oct 28, 2008
It seems that the hill people around here weren't edjumicated very well in school. The people who moved here from Florida are here supporting your economy. Thus keeping your stores and business open and prosepering and putting food on your tables. Granted there are some people who have bad attitudes from Florida but obviously the same is true for all of those people here who have bad attitudes about people from other states, races, religious backgrounds, etc.
Ther truth about Floridians is an extremely large amount of them are not from Florida but have migrated there from other states and countries. They arent true Floridians.
Furthermore, instead of worrying about Floridiots and blacks, you should be more concerned with the rampant drug problems here, lack of education of your citizens, and your narrow minded views. This community is supposed to be a church going community but there is an awful late of hate, gossip, drug use, adultery, and segregation. I dont think that is what your preacher teaches or how God views his children.
This is a beautiful part of the country and you cant blame people for wanting to enjoy it.
#31 Oct 28, 2008
Why do you say African American? Were they all born in Africa? I guess you should call me English-German American.
#32 Oct 28, 2008
Why do you call them African-American? Were they all born in Africa? Maybe I should be called English-German-American even though I was born here in Blairsville.
#33 Oct 28, 2008
what would you call an native american, or an chinese american, or an japanese american? It is just the proper way of calling someone with that descent. Foreign whites are normally called european americans. The right way to call you is a white american or a caucasian american because of your mixed family ties with english and germans.
#34 Oct 28, 2008
How many? A hell of a lot from what I can see. There are lots of people on public assistance programs here. Half the kids are eligible for free lunches.
That's fine. But isn't it comical that there are people here worrying about money being given to blacks or whoever else?
#35 Oct 28, 2008
spoken like a true floridiot.
just because people go to church doesnt make them infallible.
#36 Oct 28, 2008
Hey mama, go get my clean sheet and tell bubba to get a cross ready and buy the cheap gas. Us stupid hill folks is got a problem to solve.
Logical your an ass. You haven't supported me or put food on my table.
I have taken advantage of you by charging you a higher price when you walk into my business, then what I would my neighbors.
If Florida people are so great then why didn't they save Florida instead of tucking their tails between their legs and heading for the hills.
That's what I thought.
#37 Oct 28, 2008
do you attribute that to your low black population, or just a random comment?
#38 Oct 28, 2008
PREACH IT, LOGICAL PERSON,we are ALL GOD'S children!! this area is full of sunday go to meeting hypocrits that show up in church to be seen, then live the other 6 days without even THINKING about the BIBLE...
#39 Oct 28, 2008
ITS IGNORANCE AND INTOLERANCE LIKE YOURS THAT SOMETIMES MAKE ME ASHAMED TO BE A WHITE PERSON...YOU DEFINATELY HAVE NEVER LIVED AROUND ASSORTED RACES BEFORE...STICK YOUR "WHITE SUPREMACY UP YOUR BROWN hole...
United States
#40 Oct 29, 2008
in hell your fried and burned ass will be blackened. get a life
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