Midori Snyder's Blog, page 4

Emile on leave

I love this photo of my father at around 18 or 19 years of age. He convinced my grandfather to sign the papers to allow my dad to enter the Navy at 17 years of age and judging by how much more mature his face appears here (and his various uniform patches and ribbons) I am guessing this is after at least a year or two of service (mostly in the Pacific.) I am not sure where he is here -- but I am thinking France again, after the liberation of Paris in 1944, as other photos (below) from the same time show him posing with cousins. I love the pipe! Not sure what he was going for -- maybe a Bing Crosby look. I only ever saw him smoke Gauloise (a smell one can't ever forget!). [Ok...not so sure about the date of the photo above -- seems like it's summer? and in the other photos they are all wearing warm coats...so not sure where it was taken...]

I have learned a lot more about my father's flight from France during the German occupation of Paris (thanks to cousin Earl!). I have a photocopy of the manifest of the ship, the SS Excambion, that sailed from Lisbon, Portugal, January 10, 1941, along with 180 or so other passengers, many of them Jews (especially children traveling alone) hoping to arrive safely in the United States (which they did January 20th -- ten days at sea, on a ship stripped of everything except bedrolls and blankets to accommodate as many people as possible). Even though I knew they had fled Paris, it never seemed real to me until I saw their names listed as passengers and then again in the registers at Ellis Island. I confess, I broke into tears suddenly realizing what a frightening journey that must have been for the three of them.

And as it turned out, there is quite a bit of history associated with that particular ship and its crossing. In an article from The New York Times, dated 22 January 1941, there is an interview with ��ve Curie (Labouisse), the second daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, the physicists who discovered Radium and winners of the Nobel Prize. ��ve Curie wrote the biography of her mother, Madame Curie that won several awards and eventually became a 'hit' movie.  As it turns out, ��ve Curie was being interviewed on the SS Excambion shortly after her arrival to New York, after having just completed the voyage on the same ship as my father and his sister and his mother.

Lets Get This Party Started!!

Sometimes you just have to bust it out and have fun eating too much, running around to much and yelling out with joy! We are about to sit down with our family, including four rambunctious grandchildren and it's gonna be wild. 

 

The Boys hanging out at the Mountains and Lakes

              

                                         

Katherine Ace: The Open Ended Metaphor

I am bringing an old post back because I wanted to review again the fabulous discussion on women's art, especially the work of Katherine Ace and the events that surround and shape the directions of women's lives. And re-reading it again, I still find it as fascinating and with much to offer as when we first tackled the subject. Please feel free to join in with this ongoing discussion in the comments below. 

 

The structure of fairy tales and traditional folklore rests on the use of repetition to pattern the images into metaphors providing an emotional experience of transformation for the audience in the oral traditions as well as for the reader following them in print. Story tellers use repetition to shape the story and for emphasis on important details in each section of the tale. It begins with an interdiction at the home of birth, a repeated request to do or not to do something which usually by the third time is ignored. The middle section is a stripping away of identity and connection to the human world, the protagonist becoming lost in the woods, the veld, the sky, the sea. Swallowed up and sometimes ingested by the elements of nature and the fantastic.

Repetition helps to parallel the experience of the two separate moments: the repeated interdiction of "don't " becomes a new list in the middle of what must be done to survive. Feed the cat, oil the gate, clean the eyes of an old woman. But a price is paid, sometimes even a temporary death, as the old identity is stripped, and a new one is reformed in the fantastic world.  And the last section, becomes the return home, often perilous, success dependent on how well nature has communicated the rules of survival and how well they are followed. If in accordance with nature, the protagonist returns, restored to a new identity, a new status, and new purpose.

Each section of the narrative -- separation, initiation, return-- is patterned in a parallel fashion to the other. As in metaphor, there is a delightful tension between where it begins, where it meets with the impossible, and where it sublates the changes to become something new and unique. The dialectical journey in rites of passage, the death of the old identity, the reforming and re-emergence of a new identity, are combined into a single metaphor of transformation, revealed through images from the human world, the fantastic world, and the cache of inherited cultural archetypes in the narrative performance. 

All this is to explain, why I am so taken by the fairy tale art of Katherine Ace, who expresses her work with fairy tales in a very similar fashion -- painting the narrative with a series of visual metaphors folding in on themselves to express the unstable identities of the tales. She says this in her artist's statement: 

"The intersection of contraries fascinates me: ecstasy and agony; humor and tragedy; natural and constructed realities; experience and news. I find that I'm curious about the struggles of diversity vs. unity in human, animal and plant societies. I am captivated by complex issues that we all face, and yet experience personally, intimately. I am interested in the role of dark feelings, thoughts and states of mind in the process of transformation, l am drawn to fire beneath reserve."

And again here when she considers the evocative imagery in fairy tales that fuels her ideas as an artist:

"I am interested in complex story telling using cultural myths and histories that reach back into our collective and personal pasts. Figures and still life figures evolve as open ended metaphors for concepts and environments that are themselves also metaphors, and therefore fold - like fabric, time, or paint - back in on themselves. Like a poem, a painting is a surface. The depth is in the surface (oddly). It sort of dawns on you - like the way one remembers a dream sometimes, in fragments that float up all through the day, assembling themselves oddly, disturbingly..."

I find this description compelling -- for it is in the story tellers performance, or the writer of fairy tales to create the same tension between the surface of the tale, and the dream-like, metaphorical journeys as real and fantastic collide in the stories, and that it is the experience itself -- dreamlike and disturbing that holds our fascination with the tales. 

 The paintings from top to bottom: "The Juniper Tree," "The Frog King," "The Handless Maiden,"  "Six Swans," and "Many Furs."  (All my favorite tales!) For more information on Katherine Ace please visit her website.

I also found the collection of Sicilian Folktales collected by Laura Gonzenbach, translated into English. They are amazing and she was quite interesting.  

Happy Birthday EP

 

This is one of my favorite photo's of Eva, bundling the garlic. One can almost smell it coming through the screen.

 

 

Happy birthday to the Garlic Queen-slash-birthday pig! Hope you guys are able to take time out from farming long enough to eat something decadent and delicious.

Happy Mother's Day Mom!

Figured it was high time to post some pictures of my mother, Jeanette, and found this one of her just after I was born, as well as a strip of photo-booth pics taken when I was just a wee one. I've also included a photo taken just after my birth as I was the first baby of the New Year in Santa Monica that year, so this photo appeared in the newspaper. I love how young and glamorous she looks wearing what was probably a fabulous red lipstick just hours after delivering me. Even as a young woman (and she sure is young here, I think all of 22 or 23 years old when I born) she looks so sure of herself, with just a bit of attitude. Awesome. Love you, mom.

 

Tanuki:

Michael Monsoor: Congressional Medal of Honor

 Navy SEAL Michael Monsoor received the Congressional Medal of Honor for Military Valor posthumously today. I wanted to extend my deepest condolences to his family and fellow SEALS, especially those brothers-in-arms whose lives he saved while sacrificing his own. Read more about this remarkable young man, including the President's moving tribute, here.

Fair winds and following seas. Never forgotten. **A Post Script here in 2018. It has been many years since this young man died in combat, and still I cry every time I see his picture. We became a military family in the same year he died, and he has remained for me the figure for every young man in the SEALs lost in battle. Ever since his death, there have been too many who I have had cause to mourn, but this one, this loss wrecks my Mother's heart every time. 

I'M TURNING JAPANESE, I'M TURNING JAPANESE, I REALLY THINK SO!

We are dreaming about, thinking about, studying about, watching movies about Japan. We are soooo looking forward to a trip there next year, especially because we get to see Japanese friends from years ago. 

The Days Before My Birth

I love these old photos of my parents and brother under the bright California sky in the days before my birth. My father in his Dartmouth T-shirt, even though he was now a (still French) Californian. My mother was beautiful with her long braid and her hippish blouse that barely conceal the baby bump beneath the fabric. My birthday is January 1st and I would be born, alas too early for the tax deduction! I did manage to be the first baby of the New Year in Santa Monica, and got my photo in the paper!