…separates the wheat
from the chaff.

Halloween, Boston, 2015.

… about Wojciech Fangor, the Polish painter, who has died at age 92. UD knew him in the 1990’s, when he lived in upstate New York.

The interviewer turned out to be more interested in my describing our collection of Fangor paintings than in my memories of him; but in preparation for the interviewer, UD made some notes about Fangor, which she offers here.

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FANGOR ON THE FARM

Back in the 1970’s, Wojtek Fangor and his wife Magdalena Shummer-Fangor bought an 1887 farmhouse with 105 acres of land in upstate New York, about an hour from Albany. It was a big white rambling house with a very large porch overlooking a pond.

Wojtek, who had been living in New York City, bought the farm and moved there not long after his one man show at the Guggenheim Museum.

My father in law, the architect Jerzy Soltan, was an old friend and artistic collaborator of Fangor’s, and when some acres and a house adjacent to Fangor’s property became available, nothing could be more natural than for Soltan to buy it. So our family now had a house down the lane from Fangor.

This is an area so remote – by American standards – that only in the last ten years or so did our houses have addresses. It’s a very beautiful place, with dairy farms, lakes, and rolling hills. Wild turkeys, eagles, deer, coyote, and bears live in the hills. There are not many people up there. The Catskill mountain range can be seen in the distance.

Fangor was a very big, very masculine man with a low gruff voice – though this gruffness had nothing to do with his personality, which was extremely warm. He was always adopting stray cats, giving them ridiculous names, and treating them like royalty. He called one of them – a black cat – Stalin.

Fangor loved working with his enormous hands. The house had originally been a summer camp, and Fangor first tore down all the little cabins, and then got to work gutting and re-doing all of the rooms in the house. One of the biggest rooms became a studio for his artwork.

In the studio hung enormous paintings in progress – I remember heavily dotted images inspired by the television screen. I remember he also had gymnastic equipment in there – swings you could climb onto, and hang upside down from.

Fangor liked to sculpt the land as much he liked to design artistic canvases. He enlarged the pond in front of the farmhouse and shaped the hills around it.

One warm sunny day he took a bunch of paper towels out to the banks of the pond and twisted them into the form of an enormous rabbit. He had a wonderful sense of the absurd, a wonderful sense of humor. I remember one evening going to Wojtek and Magda’s room to say goodnight, and they were lying together on their bed laughing their heads off at some stupid American beauty contest.

Fangor’s most amazing building achievement was his observatory. This area of New York has true dark skies, with incredible views of planets and stars, and Fangor was fascinated by astronomy. So he simply built himself an observatory and got a telescope and spent many evenings gazing at the galaxies.

Magda, a superb cook, would prepare delicious meals for all of us in her kitchen overlooking their back acres, and after dinner Fangor and other guests at the table (Jerzy Soltan, my husband Karol Soltan, and visiting artists – I remember Jan Lenica, and various American artists who had houses in that area) would walk and talk together along the beautiful lanes around his property.

Fangor’s generosity was immense. I spent ten days alone at our neighboring house one year, reading and writing, and it was an excellent break from my routine. I had no car, however, and was quite isolated. I expected occasional visits from the Fangors and nothing more. But from the moment I arrived they took me into their lives. They brought me along with them on their many trips to country auctions in that area (this is where they found the fantastic old American furniture in the farmhouse), they fed me dinner every night, and they visited constantly to make sure I was okay.

From that time I got a very strong sense that Wojtek and Magda were at that point in their lives living an extremely happy, balanced, and enviable life. They loved each other deeply. Fangor owned so many acres that he was able to think of this portion of the earth as truly his, and he used his skill as an artist and a builder to make the place exactly what he wanted. Magda at this time was working on her own remarkable art, and it was delightful to watch them both, in that beautiful setting, engrossed in their craft and their visions.

Fangor knew what it was like to live in a politically unfree environment; here, he was radically free.

The main problem with life in the hills was the winter. Winters are long and harsh up there, and Fangor had to spend a lot of time chopping wood in order to have enough heat during the very cold days and nights. He shoveled the snow himself. He got too old for these tasks, and I think in general life became too difficult up there for him. He was such a strong man – he planted a long row of evergreens for us, for instance, on the road leading to our house there – but his strength was not as great as it used to be, and the rigors of country life were beginning to get to him.

After the Fangors left, we kept our neighboring house – we still love to go up there – but the feel of this beautiful corner of the world was very different. Less laughter and love.

From a Ben Brantley review of “Thérèse Raquin,” a play on Broadway.

The sex scenes between Laurent and Thérèse are so brief and blunt that they hardly seem worth killing for. Like these characters’ lives, their erotic encounters are nasty, brutish and short. That’s a fair description of the play in which they appear, except for the short part.

One of their players was just jailed for domestic violence; another is out with a concussion. After the worst loss in the school’s history a few days ago (58-0), the school fired the football coach. Virtually no one attended that game, so UM has to figure out how to get someone – anyone – to buy a UM football ticket.

Plus they’ve now got to pay the coach his no doubt enormous buyout.

And meanwhile they don’t have a coach.

The University of Louisville apologized to the school’s entire Hispanic community Thursday after a photo surfaced showing President James Ramsey among a group of staffers at a Halloween party dressed in matching stereotypical Mexican costumes.

They wore bushy mustaches and sombreros, and rattled maracas … Ramsey is seen smiling and leaning on a porch railing, wearing a sombrero and a rainbow-striped poncho trimmed in fringe.

He is surrounded by people clad mostly in black clothing with fake mustaches and beards stuck to their faces…

The photo emerged at an inopportune time for the university, which is already mired in a sex scandal.

A woman named Katina Powell released a book called “Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen” that alleged she was paid thousands of dollars by a former director in the university’s men’s basketball program to strip and have sex with recruits and players.

Why, asks this writer, is Temple University going to be the next school to screw itself over but good by building a new football stadium? Why? And why does no one ever ask why?

The question that we never seem to ask is why… What we won’t ask, what we never ask, is why a college such as Temple University – or any college, really – should care [so much about things like football and football stadiums]. We won’t ask how a Top 25 ranking or a visit from ESPN helps fulfill the mission of an institution of higher learning, or why such an institution should spend any of its resources pursuing them, particularly when those resources are financed in large part by taxpayer and student debt.

Take, for instance, the University of Akron’s stadium, “a $55 million project that would be funded exclusively by private donations and stadium revenues. When it hosted its first game in 2009, it was a $62 million project funded primarily by student tuition and fees… [This] year [Akron’s deeply indebted stadium] is attracting the lowest attendance in the MAC.”

David Murphy provides other examples. There are many.

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But okay. Let’s go there. Why? Big stadiums and big football programs have nothing to do with (indeed they erode) the academic mission which defines a university, and they will almost certainly do terrible damage to everyone at the school (via deficits and scandals) except for the athletic department and whatever trustees own companies doing sports-related business with the university.

Some people will claim that the mystery of the new stadium is essentially a religious mystery, having to do with the “unchurched” American’s evolution away from houses of worship and toward football fields.

Clemson University coach Dabo Swinney is aggressively Christian, even letting one of his players get baptized on the 50-yard-line during practice, never mind that Clemson is a state school.

A Georgia public school is looking into a mass baptism on its football field that was posted on YouTube but later taken down.

If your font is a fifty yard line, you’re stadium-building on faith, not reason. The economics of New Life Stadium are simple: The Lord will provide.

But there’s more to the stadium mystery, I think.

UD suggests that at some universities it’s a combination of not being able to think of anything else to do, plus sexual fantasy. The two things are related, because when people don’t have much to do, when their lives seem kind of drifty and pointless and empty, they’re liable to do a lot of fantasizing.

I think some leaders of universities – presidents, trustees – don’t know what to do with themselves. A very high-profile professor, a leader, at the University of North Carolina spends years negotiating pretend grades for pretend student papers and thinks nothing of committing the grade-haggling to writing in an email. What was Jan Boxill thinking? asks the Chronicle of Higher Ed. The answer is absolutely nothing, just like her colleague Julius Nyang’oro; they were just sort of drifting along, lost in erotic reverie about their beautiful athletes for whom they would do anything, including destroy themselves and their university. An assistant coach at the University of Louisville comes up with the idea of turning an athletes’ dorm into a brothel. Why? Popped into his head one day during a sexual reverie. Popped into his head while he was thinking hard about how to make his beautiful athletes’ lives even more beautiful.

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You have to have a high threshold of embarrassment to read people describe their feelings about football.

I loved football. I loved it desperately. Even now, four decades later, I remember endlessly damning myself for being too small to play it at a big-time college. I ached for it, for the violence of it…

Look at the shirtless boys with faces and torsos painted in the school colors; look at the cheerleaders on the fields, the ‘waves’ surging through the stands.

These men, either of whom could have written “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” represent countless sports-factory denizens spending their days in a haze of university-hatred and hormones.

Is hatred too strong? What sort of emotion allows you to seek and destroy any vestige of intellectual seriousness?

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One key here is hiring retired politicians as university presidents, good old boys who don’t give a shit about “academia,” whatever that is. The sort of men currently running, for instance, Florida State and Oklahoma University.

[The university’s academic unit can go, but] the football team must be saved because the intense tribal loyalty generated by big-time sports is one of the chief mechanisms employed by universities to create the illusion that they exist. I’ve lived in Chapel Hill and experienced the closest thing to full-scale Dionysian revelry one is likely to find in modern America, on Franklin Street after the men’s basketball team won it all. It was thrilling. It felt like we were one people, all of us, conquerors. But it was also an illusion (I wasn’t a student at the time), a false consciousness manufactured by the university to conceal its non-existence as an academic institution.

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Listen to this song. It also asks why. Listen to its lyrics, and imagine them sung by a university president as he or she thinks about one of the school’s football players. You just tiptoe into all my dreams…. It’s the kind of passion that will not be denied, no matter how many hearts are broken.

*************
UD thanks Ian.

How could you not fall for a kid who, while running for vice president of her elementary school in suburban Washington State, used the slogan “We built this city on rock ’n’ roll, but we should build this school upon leadership.”

Review of Carrie Brownstein’s memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, New York Times.

Christine Brennan, bless her, is an evolutionist. She thinks that if someone tried introducing football to America now, an America that has progressed significantly since the late nineteenth century, we’d all in unison say no.

For instance, on the high school level:

If parents and administrators living in a 21st century world without football were told [about the destructive violence of] this prospective new sport, they never would allow it to begin.

And on the university level? She doesn’t say, but you figure an intellectual institution informed of an almost-certain degree of brain damage, no less, to the student players of this just-invented game would shrink back, appalled.

I mean, that’s by Brennan’s reckoning… If you ask ol’ UD, she’ll tell you that things like football, hockey, and NASCAR are and will continue to be massively popular because they hurt people (“[Football] is literally killing the men who play it.”). Failing to see the matador gored is like going all the way to Tromsø and failing to see the Northern Lights.

But this is the first time she’s seen a doubleplusgood reverse Orwellian lay-up.

John Calvin (It’s a pseudonym because… I don’t know. Why would a person use a pseudonym to write about sports?) warns us that if we vacate the University of Louisville’s basketball championship just because of those ineligible receivers (if I may mix sports) everyone’s been talking about, we are ushering in Kim Jong-un.

[B]eware. History, like whiskey, is best served straight up, and there is something very Joseph Stalin and Kim Jong-un about rewriting an event that happened and giving it an alternate ending. Many are amused when Kim Jong-un Photoshops out Uncle So and So from all previous official images shortly after he had fallen out of favor with the Dear Leader and then executed. But don’t laugh too loud… Whether we are talking basketball, football, or a more serious subject matter the same principle of history should apply: the truth should be our barometer, even and perhaps especially if the truth is ugly.

The meaning of history is a powerful tool and George Orwell summed it up perfectly with, “He who controls the past controls the future.”

Lose the smirk. This is serious stuff. Perhaps you’ve not read Isaiah Berlin’s Basketball and Its Betrayal: Enemies of the Arena, which subjects foes of university basketball programs to a withering critique, and concludes with a famous warning: He who controls the free throw area controls the future.

… but the news editor of the University of Nebraska Omaha’s Maverick Daily is partial to white tulips as an illustration to accompany the publication’s announcement of a new non-credit course: Active Shooter Training.

White tulips symbolize innocence and purity. Blood-red poppies are all about war.

Why pretty things up? Why pretend? If you’re going to go with flowers at all (already a strange choice), put them on top of a coffin or in front of a grave. Let’s not have them thrusting up from the ground in springlike vigor.

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UD thanks Dirk.

Jalen Rose, on an ESPN podcast, said that such “bachelorette parties” are vital to the recruiting process. “As a 17-year-old, if I’m not getting (serviced), I’m not coming,” he said, pointing out that he visited UNLV, Syracuse and Michigan and “you know where I went (Michigan).”

Tacit? Thundering. It’s UD‘s Donald Trump point again (see this post). He’s doing brilliantly because lots of people in this country like despicable people and despicable business practices. Gordon Gekko’s an American icon, and so are all the despicable coaches that earn by far the highest salaries at our universities. The genius who came up with “Hostess 5.0” at the University of Louisville will be immortalized in case studies at business schools all over the country.

This much we know. But Gerald Gurney and Mary Willingham also touch on something UD finds of increasing interest:

Providing a quality education for all athletes has been sacrificed for a tribal fanaticism for college athletics.

Tribalism and fanaticism are precisely the sorts of things universities are supposed to stand against – to educate against. These profoundly anti-social and anti-intellectual motives have traditionally found a home in the private, peripheral space of the fraternities. How amazing, now, to watch tribalism and fanaticism infect entire American universities! To watch presidents and trustees who are just as brainless and belligerent as some of the school’s frat boys!

Recall Kevin Carey on the nihilistic tribalism of some American universities:

[The university’s academic unit can go, but] the football team must be saved because the intense tribal loyalty generated by big-time sports is one of the chief mechanisms employed by universities to create the illusion that they exist. I’ve lived in Chapel Hill and experienced the closest thing to full-scale Dionysian revelry one is likely to find in modern America, on Franklin Street after the men’s basketball team won it all. It was thrilling. It felt like we were one people, all of us, conquerors. But it was also an illusion (I wasn’t a student at the time), a false consciousness manufactured by the university to conceal its non-existence as an academic institution.

The source of the athletics fanaticism, from this point of view, is quite obvious. Increasingly, without the athletics, there’s nothing there.

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(Photo link is from a new sports cafeteria at the University of Oregon.)

…and has that ever paid off. Scenes from their most recent game.

There was booing …from the sparse crowd even before the first quarter ended, and the stands – where some fights broke out – were largely empty by the midpoint of the third quarter.

Miami, playing in an empty stadium, was held to 146 total yards and just six first downs. The 58-point loss was the worst in Miami’s history, surpassing a 70-14 loss to Texas A&M in 1944.

UM’s athletic director, surveying this empty stadium, blithely reminded everyone to “make sure we continue to support our team.”

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Yeah, it’s all gonna be okay. Maybe we’ll get a new coach.

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Miami’s AD doesn’t understand that if you want people to go to your games, you shouldn’t make them puke forever.