so, having some good feelings, i'd like to share them around. today, we'll be sharing the love with someone i met at the craft/art show (still working on that "craft" word) last week:
jose klein.
jose (and his too-cute family) were representing at the show last weekend with some plates. i didn't think much of it at first, like, "oh, plates." plates for eating, decorated plates like you see on late-night infomercials capitalizing upon the success of our most recently elected president, decorated plates that you see in terrible parade magazine and coupon inserts in the newspaper, china you got from some second hand shop and forgot and put in the microwave even though there's gold decoration on?
however, when i took a second to stop by his table a couple hours later, i was quite pleasantly surprised. by this:
"RUTH!" i shouted, having some sort of 13 year old riot grrl, who hungrily read ms magazine, and our bodies, ourselves, and naomi wolf and gloria steinem and even dworkin and mackennon (the last two not with complete agreement, but with interest anyway).
(see jose's Ruth Bader Ginsburg page here. don't worry, his approach to the english language is a little more professional than mine.)
here, at this craftshow in our unexpected basement location, i'd found another nerd. not the kind of nerd who made me wish that i'd brought my 12-sided die, but more like the kind that made me wish i'd finished my polysci minor. (it's okay, as the learning continues, and i still got so much valuable class time with the esteemed dr. saliyeh)
immediately i asked, but alas, no sandy. if i had a pair of plates honoring ruth bader ginsburg and sandra day o'connor, i would need a boudoir. a room that had my own private mirror so when i fortified myself for the day, i could look in the mirror and see these women over my shoulders and have a greater handgrip on something like resolve. on something like inspiration.
i digress, and jose even said that the pair, while not complete at this moment, could be arranged.
on his etsy profile, jose refers to a childhood tradition of plates and markers and reclaiming this- i see it as revisiting that prior, more innocent(?) experience of creation with all this baggage of accumulated experience and knowledge. i am particularly interested in those of us who revisit things we did in our childhoods; it makes for a long evolution. my great grandmother taught me about poetry and crochet when i was little, she crocheted constantly and was the only one of my relations that kept any sort of notebook as far as a knew/know. when we repeat these things we learned at such young ages, they are markings of our passage, cave paintings on the walls of our lives, if one will.
i also see a connection between drawings, oftentimes colorful and interestingly rendered due to the background of in-court drawings. court illustration is so obscure that looking up the history of the practice is somewhat frustrating to do on an "on the fly, while writing" manner. i know i've seen many many of them and am tempted to chalk it up to the practice of drawing the proceedings in a pre-video media era for wider dissemination and posterity. perhaps with a hint of the human tendency towards political cartooning.
but more on topic, part of the goal jose states is the effort "to put faces on the names buried in law school textbooks" and for that matter, the names and dates that we all ran roughshod over in highschool and college assorted history, government, and politcal science classes. these things that affect our every day lives, whether we realize it or not, these things woven into the social fabric of the time and place we live are as mundane and un-thought of as the plates we eat our food from. yet, one could argue, we'd be a great deal less civilized than we are now without them- with salad in our laps and a great deal of disorder.
in addition to images featuring supreme court justices, jose also makes plates representing different facets of law, focusing on "a set of important Interstate Commerce Clause cases, a set about punitive damages, the First Amendment and a set about executive detentions." this may all sound like dry stuff, but as previously mentioned, these things shape our daily lives and often go unnoticed. some of jose's images on the first amendment and executive detentions are somewhat chilling and thought provoking, to which i say "good!"
these plates remind me greatly of a show i covered in brief while i was writing little blurbs for the houston press. julie green does plates that she exhibits as a collection that she calls "the last supper". painted upon these plates, sometimes in pictures, sometimes in words, she features the published requests of death row inmates' final meals.
which is also quite interesting, in and of itself. i'm interested in this idea of plates, and by extension food, being so easily taken for granted; a symptom of a largely comfortable culture, survival wise. even the most foodie types among us who will spend half an hour in rapture over a cayenne accented dark chocolate truffle (who? me!) take it relatively for granted that we will have food over which to obsess and triumph. we take it relatively for granted, upon assumption, that the meal we're currently eating will not be our last. we take it relatively for granted, upon assumption that the products we buy are safe, that we can say what we like without being spirited away to some place either overdark or overbright in my imagination, for punishment.
to learn more about jose's work, background on cases and all kinds of other interesting thing, visit his blog at http://www.learnedhandmadeplates.blogspot.com/ and his website at www.joseklein.com
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i think sundays are a good day for sharing the love. look for this to become a weekly feature, like our weekly family dinner. i'd love to invite you to the latter, but we've only got four mis-matched barstools and one very tiny kitchen.
on the menu tonight? a very lowbrow american feast in honor of presidents' day- buffalo chicken dip, salad, veggies, some of my artisan bread and for dessert? in honor of the washingtonian whopper about the cherry tree, individual cherry pies, in tiny pie pans i've never used. we'll see how that goes.
