Pushing Rocks

Objects, Metaphors, Venues and Money
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

Objects, Metaphors, Venues and Money

I am starting a new phase of the Blued Trees project with legal graffiti: @legalgraffitiAR.

Not much to show yet except some chicken scratches but it’s the revival of an opera I had been working on before the pandemic. The pandemic has changed so much about my thinking about platforming, venue and audience that my ideas about what I want to do and how have transformed my plans. It has also pushed me to consider how I want to present work that could be shown in more conventional indoors space, such as my brilliant young intern, Elia Min Emery recently assembled for my website https://www.avivarahmani.com/3d-virtual-gallery.

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Inexorable Hope
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

Inexorable Hope

As the holidays approach, my mind is on what I can be grateful for. In the image for this weeks blog I consider what the original Ghost Nets site looked like as the town dump when I purchased it in 1990, taken from a 1930 image from the Vinalhaven Historical Society http://www.vinalhavenhistoricalsociety.org.

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Silencing Calisto
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

Silencing Calisto

The image shown is a remarkable detail from Titian's Diana and Callisto in which Callisto is stripped to reveal her pregnancy as the result of Jupiter’s rape. What is astonishing to me in this vignette is the depth of Titian’s cold eye on the status quo of women’s sexual enslavement shown in the cruel expressions in the women’s faces and bodies- calm, relaxed imposition of the status quo. Cruel for how impassive they are.

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The Essential Question
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

The Essential Question

The essential question on display as we all watch the COP repeat empty promises for too little too late that many have now is how to we prepare the young for the apparently inevitable collapse of civilization in the face of an absence of adequate political will, for whatever reason it is absent.

This is the heart question. And before we prepare anyone else, it might be prudent to prepare ourselves.

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On Time, Timing and Deadlines
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

On Time, Timing and Deadlines

We are well into Glasgow’s COP26 https://ukcop26.org/and governmental officials are making promises about what measures will materialize by 2030. Neither Russia nor China deigned to attend. Deforestation, a major source of climate change was discussed. Previous commitments about deforestation were mouthed and ignored in previous COPs.

So how should the ordinary concerned citizen regard this disregard?

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On Writing
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

On Writing

I am not a writer. I write, read and admire people who are real writers, such as all the writers in the recent New York Times celebration of 125 years of the Book Review https://www.nytimes.com/series/book-review-anniversary. I mostly read either science or science fiction and have no patience for bad writing in the former. I define bad writing as shallow characters, lack of narrative tension, too much sex & violence, absence of any compelling question, like, what if dogs ruled the planet and humans chased balls? But in the process of writing two books recently, one of my own and another a co-edited anthology, I have learned a lot about writing.

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Going to Glasgow
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

Going to Glasgow

I think this is our last year to have a hope of surviving climate change, and even many, many of us are already casualties, as are so many other species.

Everyone I know has the COP26 Glasgow on their minds, even though the consensus is that fossil fuel corporations have a stranglehold on governmental outcomes which could reverse or even halt the worst of the ecological damage and therefore little will come of the meeting.

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Indigenous Peoples Day and the Italian Medici Family
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

Indigenous Peoples Day and the Italian Medici Family

The night before Indigenous Peoples Day, I reflected on what was evoked for me. Indigenous People’s Day, formally recognized by President Biden also happened to be the last day of the Medici Portraits and Politics 1312-1570 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so I went and continued my reflections.

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Nibbling On Hope at the Edge
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

Nibbling On Hope at the Edge

My story in the work memoir, “Divining Chaos,” ends just before the 2020 election and won’t launch until June 2022. I am now making final copy edits. That means I can’t add anything substantive but I can review what the publisher’s editor suggests and consider a word change here or there. So in my epilogue, I can’t write about the Biden presidency, the insurrection, or global wildfires. I have to raise any issues I've considered since November 2020,…

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