week 8 posts
Smells
Not to mention that if we always are plugged into our electronic devices then we do not leave ourselves time to think unimpeded by outside interference (see last week's post about the muse), there is lots to learn without ever turning on an electronic device and sometimes I think we hforget that. Steve Van Zandt, formerly guitarist with Bruce Springsteen, formerly Silvio Dante on The Sopranos, now host of Little Steven's Underground Garage, a music show that airs Saturday evenings on WFPK, talked last night about his predictions for the year 2030. As electronic devices are speeding everything up so much, he predicts a change in our brains such that attention deficit will no longer be a disorder but rather an adaptive strategy and in fact we will be taking drugs to help our brains work faster. Get me out of this world!
Today on the public radio show The Splendid Table, the host interviewed a woman who talked about smells and what they do inside our brains, and who leads smelling tours of English cities. Proust, who wrote  À la recherche du temps perdu  between 1913 and 1927, knew the power of smells as he wrote about madeleines, simple small sponge cakes, and the involuntary memories their odor produced. Scientists are now studying exactly what happens in the brain when we smell a familiar odor but I don't need to know. I know that the smell of muddy river, stale beer, and urine means I am in the French Quarter of New Orleans on a Sunday morning. I know that when I am walking from downtown to U of L, the smell of tomato and too many spices means that I am near the Paradise Tomato Kitchens on South Brook Street. The smell of lilacs in the spring is a memory of my childhood home. The damp smell of chlorine in an enclosed space brings me not only memories of my daughter's swim meets but also the sens of peace that I get when I swim, back and forth, following the black line, turning every 25 yards....  My favorite smell is perhaps the smell of rotten seaweed, evoking time spent at the beach, poking around at low tide. If you must have a link, here I hope is the link to the bit about smelling tours from  The Splendid Table. http://splendidtable.publicradio.org/www_publicradio/tools/media_player/popup.php?name=splendid_table/2012/03/03/splendidtable_20120303_64&starttime=00:01:20&endtime=00:08:23

Ruth Asawa artist and activist
http://www.ruthasawa.com
Ruth Asawa was born in 1926 in California to a family of Japanese truck farmers. Her Japanese immigrant  parents were neither allowed to become citizens nor to own land. As a child Ruth was always drawing and her artistic talent was acknowledged in school. After her family struggled to get through the depression they were deported in 1942 to an internment camp for Japanese Americans.  Ruth learned from other artists in the camps. She ended up in a camp in Arkansas and graduated from high school in the camp. She attended teacher's college but found that, due to lingering ill will toward the Japanese, she could not get a job. She deicided to support herself as an artist and attended to Black Mountain College where she met and worked with many influential artists as well as the man who was to become her husband. They decided to live in San Francisco where they felt they would encounter less prejudice. They had six children, which prompted Ruth to help create art programs in the public schools. While creating a huge body of work of her own in many media, she also encouraged children to be involved in the arts. She felt that " through the arts you can learn many, many skills that you cannot learn through books and problem-solving in the abstract. A child can learn something about color, about design, and about observing objects in nature. If you do that, you grow into a greater awareness of things around you. Art will make people better, more highly skilled in thinking and improving whatever business one goes into, or whatever occupation. It makes a person broader."

Ruth with work done by school children

One of Ruth's crocheted wire pieces