Just Between Us

Remembering American poet Adrienne Rich

Alfred DePew

Apr 26th, 2012

Adrienne Rich - ChilePoesía 2001

As with many of the books that shaped my life, I encountered the work of Adrienne Rich outside of college classrooms. In fact it was a friend who first handed me Rich’s Diving into the Wreck in 1973 at Left Bank Books, the St. Louis bookstore she now owns, when it was still on Delmar Boulevard.

Adrienne Rich is one of the through-lines in my life. I have carried her books with me across continents, boxed and unboxed them, added each new published volume to the worn copies of her previous books, reached for them on bad nights when the world seemed no longer viable. Her work entered my mind at such a depth, with such consistency, that it became part of my own history.

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After Japan's earthquake and tsunami, a shift in values

Alfred DePew

Mar 8th, 2012

"Green Wave" Alfred DePew 3/11/11 acrylic on paper

When the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan last March, executive coach and systems consultant Yuri Morikawa wanted to help. Like most, she wanted to focus on those hardest hit, the people in the Tōhoku region to the north of where she lives. But when she and her family evacuated to Nagasaki, she realized what she had already sensed—that everyone in Japan was in need of help, including her.

“Where I live [Tochigi, the prefecture south of Fukushima] also had high radiation,” says Morikawa. “So my husband and I decided to take our daughter to my mother-in-law’s house in Nagasaki.”

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Tahrir Square: the making of an Egyptian revolutionist

Alfred DePew

Jan 25th, 2012

Nadeem Abdel-Gawad

Twenty-one-year-old Nadeem Abdel-Gawad hopes to attend his graduation ceremony at the American University in Cairo next month. But that depends on what happens in Tahrir Square this week.

On Monday, when we spoke via Skype, he described how it felt this time last year to be part of the uprising that ousted then-president Hosni Mubarak.

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Egypt’s revolution, one year later

Alfred DePew

Jan 25th, 2012

Bashar Al Safadi and Iman Mandour, Cairo, February, 2011

When I reached Iman Mandour and her husband Bashar Al Safadi via Skype on what is Monday evening in Cairo, they told me that everyone in Egypt is watching TV.

“We have a House of Parliament,” Bashar said. “For the first time. That’s elected. There’s a lot of anxiety.”

“Everybody who is pro-revolution is swaying between two emotions,” Iman said. “Utter frustration when compared with what could be, and pride with what has been achieved compared with what used to be.”

Bashar is an organizational development consultant. Iman is a relationship and organizational coach, who is on the Board of Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance. They have two children.

Despite Bashar’s feeling that “nothing the revolution was asking for has been done,” he recognized a transformation in everyone around him.

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Seeing Red: a play about American painter Mark Rothko at the Vancouver Playhouse

Alfred DePew

Jan 22nd, 2012

Jim Mezon as painter Mark Rothko in the Vancouver Playhouse production of Red

“What do you see?” demands Rothko. “And how does it make you feel?”

These are the two questions that keep pulsing through John Logan’s play about Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko and his assistant. They are the questions that Rothko’s paintings themselves seem to ask, not only about paintings, but also about the world.

What do you see? And how does it make you feel?

I have to admit I went to see Red last night out of a kind of nostalgia for a time when America’s painters were most vital and important (as well as neurotic and self-absorbed and all the rest). And yet that was my fear—that I’d be seeing a period piece.

Me of little faith.

This is Rothko, after all, who stands before us and rails against everything we still cling to—real estate, money, appearance above all—everything bright and shiny—leisure and anything else that indicates status.

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What happens when you put an Islamist, a Socialist, a Christian, and a Liberal in an Egyptian garden?

Alfred DePew

Jan 21st, 2012

Click "CC" at bottom right corner to turn on English subtitles.

Imagine bringing together different factions of Egyptian society -- Islamist, Socialist, Christian, and Liberal -- to discuss their views in an Egyptian garden.

This is what Cairo management consultant Hesham El-Gamal wanted to find out when he invited people from a wide spectrum of opinion to participate in what he called a “communication experiment.”

He wanted to discover their common ground.

“In the early stages of the revolution,” El-Gamal said in a Skype interview earlier this month, “there was conflict about whether this was the right way to go about things. We thought about creating a one-day workshop to see things from a different light without judgment or attacking.”

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Eggnog, sauerkraut and cookies: feeding the ghosts of Christmas past

Alfred DePew

Dec 13th, 2011

Children at Christmas dinner. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Sauerkraut

Every year, my mother would put a large dish of it on the sideboard along with the carved turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce for Christmas dinner, and each of us would be obliged to have a small portion as a way of showing respect to my father’s mother, her sister, Florence, and their childhood friend Edwina, three ancient ladies of German descent.

My mother hated Germans, not so much because of the war, but because of her mother-in-law. At best, their relations were strained. At worst, they flared into open combat. At least as open as life in a 1950s St. Louis suburb would allow. Which looked a good bit more like the subterfuge that characterized the years of the Cold War.

The root of the conflict lay in the fact that they were a great deal alike in temperament. Both had strong opinions about how things ought to be, and neither was shy about expressing those opinions.

Christmas being what it is, one makes an effort to be of good will, and my mother’s goodwill gesture toward Grandmother each year was sauerkraut.

There was always a lot left over. Sauerkraut, that is.

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Art = Libération: Automatist Revolution comes to Vancouver’s Baron Gallery

Alfred DePew

Nov 15th, 2011

Pierre Gauvreau and Janine Carreau: “La jeunesse est en nous et nous sommes la jeunesse”

There are openings where the work seems almost incidental. People have come to schmooze. But last month’s opening of Art = Libération at the Baron Gallery was different.

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When a house was a home and not real estate

Alfred DePew

Nov 14th, 2011

The house on Pine Street, Portland, Maine

Even empty, even in the disrepair left by its last tenants, the soul of the house on Pine Street in Portland, Maine remains intact, palpable, and still welcoming.

In August, I walked through it for the last few times, showing it to friends and fellow artists who might be interested in buying it, talking to people from consignment shops about the five remaining pieces of furniture, and one last time to smudge it and bless it and thank it for being home to me for more than 15 years.

Before me, the house belonged to a colleague in the sculpture department at the Maine College of Art, and I had visited the back part, where the painter David Cedrone lived and had his studio.

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James Hillman: Jungian, iconoclast, philosopher and wizard

Alfred DePew

Nov 2nd, 2011

James Hillman on Curing the Puer, from "Senex & Puer" www.DepthVideo.com

Its imperiousness, its shameless elitism—the very things we love to love about the New York Times can just as often make me spitting mad. And this time it’s the NYT’s obituary of James Hillman, which calls him “a charismatic therapist and best-selling author whose theories about the psyche helped revive interest in the ideas of Carl Jung, animating the so-called men’s movement in the 1990s and stirring the pop-cultural air.”

So-called men’s movement? Stirring the pop-cultural air?

Am I over-reacting, or does that sound snarky?

And who am I—a pipsqueak journalist, from western Canada, no less—to argue with the Gray Lady?

In my view, James Hillman was among the most important American thinkers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. So there! He was a Jungian analyst, theorist, philosopher, author, mentor, mystic, lecturer, visionary, and enthusiastic gadfly. By turns brilliant and obscure, his presence in the lecture hall is hard to describe.

You just had to be there. And I was, on two occasions.

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Just Between Us

Adrienne Rich - ChilePoesía 2001

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