Marvin Gaye's legendary album, "What's Going On," released 40 years ago this month; and...

          Now, it's 40 years later. One ought well ask, again, today, now, with Gaye's lyrics in mind... what's going on?

     Gaye's album appeared during tremendous political and social chaos in the United States (and by extension, worldwide). The civil rights movement was dying a slow death. MLK Jr. was no more, and... neither was Bobby Kennedy. Richard Nixon had been elected president. The Vietnam War still raged despite its growing unpopularity. Millions of people in Southeast Asia were dead, and 50,000 U.S. soldiers dead as well. The "war on poverty" was over. Poverty's troops had won; riots had broken out in inner cities as a result with little course change.

     Marvin Gaye's album dropped into this, my, America on May 21, 1971.

     "What's Going On" cried for a world where war was not the answer; one where only love could conquer hatred. Quite the record.  "Inner City Blues" dealt with the problems of urban America. "Save the Children" focused on the children of the world. "Mercy, Mercy, Me" condemned environmental destruction. And etc.

     40 years later?

     We (the U.S.; the world) are still engaged in wars abroad that have (for good or naught) taken a huge financial and human toll. Today, racism still lurks beneath the surface (decidedly not good) of this, of my, America; and poverty and economic inequality remain with us around the globe... and corporate interests continue to (needlessly) destroy the environment.

      Indeed, what's goin' on?

     Pull out that old LP and listen again my friends; it's well time. Overdue, in fact.  Time, yes:  time, these two score years later.

Stephen Hawkings likely is correct; at the same time:

      "I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. 

       He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."


-American author, Nobel, Pulitzer, etc., Prize winner, William Faulkner

A FRENCHMAN was arrested yesterday in Poland...

for stealing two pieces of barbed wire from the Nazi German-era death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau officials said.  The man, in his fifties, was detained after a scanner detected the wire in his hand luggage during a security check at the airport in Krakow, 60 kilometres from the site of the camp.

     "He admitted having taken the pieces as a souvenir of his visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau," said airport spokesman Marcin Pulit.  The man's name was not disclosed.

     Jaroslaw Mensfelt, spokesman of the Polish state-run memorial and museum at the site, condemned the theft.  "This was an act of desecration of a place of memory. Every object here is priceless," he said.

     Auschwitz-Birkenau has become an enduring symbol of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany's wartime campaign of genocide against Europe's Jews.  A year after invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis opened what became a vast complex on the edge of the southern town of Oswiecim - Auschwitz in German.  They later expanded it at the nearby village of Brzezinka, or Birkenau.

     Of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, one million were murdered at the site, mostly in its notorious gas chambers, along with tens of thousands of others including Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.

Philip Roth, giant of American letters, has won the 2011 Man Booker International award.

The author, a perennial contender for the Nobel prize in literature, Pulitzer Prize Award winner, National Book Award winner, etc., was named winner of the Man Booker International at the Sydney Writers' Festival today, beating a stellar, if eclectic, shortlist. Also in the running were the British children's author Philip Pullman, award-winning Chinese writer Su Tong, American authors Anne Tyler and Marilynne Robinson, Australia's David Malouf and a reluctant John le Carré who had asked – unsuccessfully – for his name to be withdrawn from contention.  Announcing the winner, Rick Gekoski, chair of the judges, said that for 50 years, Roth's books have "stimulated, provoked and amused an enormous, and still expanding, audience".

Recommended organization/resource...

     As the largest and most comprehensive center of its kind in the nation, Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA) celebrates the book as a vibrant contemporary art form that takes many shapes. From the traditional crafts of papermaking, letterpress printing and bookbinding to experimental artmaking and self-publishing techniques, MCBA supports the limitless creative evolution of book arts.

     In 1983, a group of book arts practitioners and enthusiasts in the Twin Cities began plans to create an institution, a true book arts center, where artists could create, students could learn, fine art could be exhibited, and a generally under-acknowledged artistic discipline could be elevated into focus and take its proper place in the Minnesota arts community. Two years later, in 1985, this dedicated group opened the doors of the brand new Minnesota Center for Book Arts. MCBA's first public home was in the McKesson Building, on North Third Street in the Warehouse District of downtown Minneapolis.     

     After more than two years of research and planning, the Spring of 2000 saw Minnesota Center for Book Arts, The Loft Literary Center and Milkweed Editions become the principal tenants in the Open Book Building at 1011 South Washington Avenue in Minneapolis. The building creates a lively destination for a diverse public interested in books, book arts and literary endeavors of all kinds.

     The soul of MCBA is the studio spaces where you find masters and novices working at letterpress printing, hand bookbinding and papermaking. In addition to the studios, there is an exhibition space, a studio shop, an archive and reference library, and offices. Visitors are welcome to observe the book art activity close-up. MCBA serves artists, students, teachers, designers, writers, families, youth, and book lovers through a variety of participatory programs. More than 20 years after opening its doors, MCBA is the most comprehensive independent book arts center in the nation.

Picasso painted a famous portrait of her...

   Jacques Lipchitz did her imposing features in bronze.

   She was the subject of prints by Andy Warhol and Red Grooms.

   She made the cover of Time magazine.

   Best remembered now for her form-stretching prose, widely quoted apercus and bohemian panache, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was dominant in her day as a force majeure in the visual culture of expatriate Paris. A big part of that story has to do with the stellar modern art collection she and other members of her family accumulated and displayed in their Paris apartments.

   An exhibition devoted to the Stein collections, which includes Picasso's great Gertrude portrait, opens this week at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

   "Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories," which premiered last week at the nearby Contemporary Jewish Museum, offers a probing and intimate perspective on the visual realm Stein herself inhabited, projected and created. Comprising numerous formal portraits, photographs of her at home, clothing, domestic objects from her life with her longtime partner, Alice B. Toklas, rare film footage, books, theater posters and more, the show explores what co-curator Wanda M. Corn calls "the complexity of Gertrude Stein as a personage."

   The exhibition, a joint venture with the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, is divided into five sections, or what Corn regards as "at least five stories about Stein we don't know."

Some news am not sure what to make of...

     This week saw a rare find off Cape Cod as fishermen caught a yellow lobster.

     The crustacean was delivered to the Lobster Pot Restaurant in East Wareham. 

     Yellow lobsters are the result of a rare genetic mutation. The odds of finding one are 1 in 30 million.

     Owners of the restaurant will not be cooking the lobster (they assert). It is being donated to the National Marine Fisheries Service for their Woods Hole aquarium and research center.