Lee Mendelson ~ RIP

Lee Mendelson, executive producer of the celebrated Christmas classic, A Charlie Brown Christmas, died on Christmas morning. He was 86. His son called the timing "serendipitous."

I didn't know he wrote the lyrics to the show's song, Christmas Time is Here, on the back of an envelope.


More memories here following the animated special's 50th anniversary in 2015.

The 15 most awe-inspiring space images of the decade

With a new decade coming next week, there are many best of the decade lists about books, movies, music, etc.

Outer space always gets my vote – The 15 most awe-inspiring space images of the decade.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory ~ Juno Spacecraft's JunoCam

Merry Christmas

Nick Downes ~ The New Yorker

Santa Claus is right - more toys!

More toys, iPhones and 4K, flat-panel LCDs!

2019's Word of the Year ~ They

According to Merriam Webster:

"English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to correspond neatly with singular pronouns like everyone or someone, and as a consequence they has been used for this purpose for more than 600 years. More recently, though, they has also been used to refer to one person whose gender identity is nonbinary, a sense that is increasingly common in published, edited text, as well as social media and in daily personal interactions between English speakers. There's no doubt that its use is established in the English language, which is why it was added to the Merriam-Webster.com dictionary this past September."

Everyone's a Comedian

The denizens of New York City have a sardonic sense of humor.

West 10th Street, Greenwich Village

Weill Cornell Hospital ~ East 70th Street

P.S. Of course, at Art Basel Miami Beach this week, sometimes art is honestly intended and titled.

Maurizio Cattelan ~ Comedian, 2019 

Hyperspace ~ "Gentle Existential Duress"

Beck always seems to be contemporary music's outlier. In and out, but when he's in he's in a league of his own.

More in The New Yorker ~ Beck is Home, by Amanda Petrusich.

"He's a smart guy – he understands the seasons, he understands the public temperament, he knows exactly when to show up," Pharrell Williams told me of Beck. "And it always feels good, because he delivers it his way. I've always loved that about Beck. He's out-careered all of his contemporaries. He was never really in the same lane as them. He was always this guy walking in a green pasture. They were on a highway in Los Angeles or Seattle, and he was in a green pasture in his mind."

Beck ~ Hyperspace – Chemical

Gahan Wilson ~ RIP

Gahan Wilson was one of my favorite New Yorker magazine cartoonists. Like Charles Addams, Wilson had a keen eye for humor and the macabre. He died last week at 89.

Gahan Wilson ~ The New Yorker

Fellow New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast shared this cartoon and Gahan back story.

Roz Chast ~ The New Yorker

Deep State

Drove up behind this driver this morning at a red light in Mount Kisco, New York.

Why isn't he testifying today in the House Impeachment Inquiry in Washington, DC?

Who is Michael Avenatti?

Last night during the semi-final of Jeopardy's Tournament of Champions with the best players of the season, all three were stumped by this clue.

It wasn't that long ago that Michael Avenatti appeared hundreds of times on CNN and promised a run for U.S. president.

Who?

Jeopardy ~ November 14, 2019

OK Boomer

When I was a teenager we said: "Don't trust anyone over 30."

Don't Trust Anyone Over 30 - Jack Weinberg

Nowadays, the president and most of the candidates for the Democratic Party nomination aren't only over 30, they'll be well over 70 on Election Day, with three pushing 80:

• Bernie Sanders – 79 years, 1 month, 26 days
• Mike Bloomberg – 78 years, 8 months, 20 days
• Joe Biden – 77 years, 11 months, 14 days
• Donald Trump – 74 years, 4 months, 20 days
• Elizabeth Warren – 71 years, 4 months, 12 days

Shannon O'Connor ~ OK Boomer Hoodie

OKboomer OUT NOW ON TWITTER DOT COM pic.twitter.com/AlRqhsCUbO

— a local (@jedwill1999) July 5, 2019

Election Day

As Time Goes By

Karl Stevens ~ The New Yorker

Trick or Treat

Steve Breen ~ San Diego Union Tribune

Dear Santa

Joe Dator ~ The New Yorker

Organ Recitals

Just the other night we were talking over dinner with friends about our various middle-age physical ailments. One called such conversations "organ recitals."

Roz Chast ~ The New Yorker

Chihuly Garden and Glass

Touristy and an iPhone Instagram orgy, and yet a phantasmagoric and sublime experience – Chihuly Garden and Glass at Seattle Center.

Chihuly Garden and Glass ~ Seattle Center

MLB Playoffs

It's October and that means Major League Baseball's playoffs.

Let's go Yankees!

Edward Steed ~ The New Yorker

P.S.

Joker

Political parody?

Tom Stiglich

Whack Job

Here we go again.

The New Yorker ~ Barry Blitt

Robbie Robertson – The Weight

Playing for Change . . . Song Around the World.

I'm Not On Your Vacation

The New Yorker ~ David Borchart

Which reminds me of this bumper sticker one finds on occasion on Martha's Vineyard.

Renoir's Nudes in the #MeToo Era

Pierre-Auguste Renoir ~ Blonde Bather, 1881

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute at Williams College in Massachusetts has long been one of my favorite museums – small, intimate, uncrowded, lovely grounds, and most important, world-class art. Now known as The Clark, our last visit was two years ago after a week of yoga at Kripalu in nearby Stockbridge.

Sterling Clark was an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune and used this good luck to live in Paris in the early 1900s, where he and his wife Francine became admirers and investors in French Impressionist artists, especially Pierre-Auguste Renoir, acquiring more than 30 of his works.

On the centenary of Renoir's death, The Clark is featuring an exhibition Renoir: the body, the senses, comprising some 70 paintings, drawings, pastels, and sculptures, mostly nudes.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir ~ Bather with Blonde Hair, 1903

And there's the rub. While Renoir's nudes have historically been revered as adoring, modest, beautiful, and innocent, today's critics tarnish history with contemporary political grievances. Martha Lucy, author of the exhibit's catalog, sets the tone with her description of Renoir as a "sexist male artist."  Peter Schjeldahl, art critic at The New Yorker, kicks the #MeToo door wide open in his review - Renoir's Problem Nudes.

"Who doesn't have a problem with Pierre-Auguste Renoir? A tremendously engaging show that centers on the painter's prodigious output of female nudes, "Renoir: The Body, the Senses," at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, sparks a sense of crisis. The reputation of the once exhalted, still unshakably canonical, Impressionist has fallen on difficult days. Never mind the affront to latter-day educated tastes of a painting style so sugary that it imperils your mind's incisors; there's a more burning issue. The art historian Martha Lucy, writing in the show's gorgeous catalogue, notes that, "in contemporary discourse," the name Renoir has "come to stand for 'sexist male artist.' " Renoir took such presumptuous, slavering joy in looking at naked women – who in his paintings were always creamy or biscuit white, often with strawberry accents, and ideally blond – that, Lucy goes on to argue, the tactility of the later nudes, with brushstrokes like roving fingers, unsetttles any kind of gaze, including the male. I'll endorse that, for what it's worth."

Roving fingers? Unsettles?

For what it's really worth, this is little more than a couple of art critics conspiring to create some attention, controversy, and ticket sales. Though the risk, of course, is that Williams College students will swallow the #MeToo bait, protest, boycott, and demand the college sell off the collection, or worse, burn them in a censorial bonfire.

Martha's Vineyard Summer Traffic

The Vineyard Gazette recently ran an online survey to solicit opinions about summer traffic. 2,200 residents and visitors responded. There weren't any surprises.

"The online survey, designed to gauge the impact of traffic on the island's quality of life, elicited a variety of reactions, but most agreed that surging summer traffic had negatively affected their enjoyment of Martha's Vineyard. As to what should be done, no clear consensus emerged."

For a hint of what's to come, the Steamship Authority continues to break traffic records and they're spending $80 million on more ferry slips and a new headquarters building in Woods Hole. And the Obamas just bought a home on Edgartown Great Pond for $15 million. 

Jimmy Cagney said it best more than 40 years ago in a telegram to Senator Ted Kennedy.

Oak Bluffs Fireworks

The annual August fireworks in Oak Bluffs Friday night were scintillating.

My iPhone tried to capture it below but not nearly as well as the second and third photographs by Vineyard Gazette photographer Mark Alan Lovewell.

Vineyard Gazette ~ Mark Alan Lovewell

Vineyard Gazette ~ Mark Alan Lovewell

Cape Cod - More Seals Mean More Great White Sharks

According to The Wall Street Journal's article, Cape Cod's New Normal - Sharks are Everywhere, great white sharks are as much a way of life now as the protected and flourishing grey seal population in Cape and island waters that's estimated at more than 50,000.

"Many people grew up or summered in the Cape without fear, lulled by an artificial environment cleansed of seals and sharks because of human hunting. Until last year, great whites hadn't killed someone off the Massachusets coast since 1936. The federal government passed a law protecting ocean mammals in 1972, bolstering a state halt on bounty hunting, and the seal population has flourished."

Another consequence of all the seals is far fewer fish for recreational and commercial fisherman.

Wayne Davis ~ Ocean Aerials

Wayne Davis ~ Ocean Aerials

"Sober Curious"

Fad, trend, or real change?

Beach Reading ~ Analog or Digital?

Felipe Galindo Gomez Feggo ~ The New Yorker

Heat Wave

Brendan Loper ~ The New Yorker

Chappaquiddick 50th

Dike Bridge ~ Vineyard Gazette

Just two days before the historic achievement of his dead brother's pledge to land men on the moon before the decade was out, Teddy drove off a bridge and left Mary Jo for dead.

"Today is the first day I've felt like going out to South Beach and just yelling at the top of my lungs," Police Chief Arena announced after the court proceedings.

He wasn't the only one.

More in the Vineyard Gazette: 50 Years Later, Chappaquiddick Still Reverberates.

Apollo 50th

50 years ago . . .

A full-sized, 363-foot Saturn V rocket is projected onto the Washington Monument 50 years to the day after astronauts Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin launched on Apollo 11, the 1st mission to land astronauts on the Moon, Tuesday, July 16, 2019. #Apollo50th https://t.co/wUm4JuUuVZ pic.twitter.com/ZqPKSJYs8H

— NASA HQ PHOTO (@nasahqphoto) July 17, 2019

Independence Day

Nike Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July Sneakers

President Barack Obama's Second Inaugural ~ January 2013

Tom Stiglich

Michael Ramirez

Whaley Lake

Whaley Lake ~ Holmes, New York

Wagging the Dog

The New Yorker ~ Tim Hamilton

San Diego Union Tribune ~ Steve Breen