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Monday, November 4, 2024
Via Daily Dharma: Receiving Is a Gift
Via White Crane Institute // ASSUNTA FEMIA
Died 
2006 -
ASSUNTA FEMIA, a San Francisco poet, actor, and political activist who admired nuns, died on this date at a friend's home in Oregon from liver cancer, secondary to hepatitis B. He would have been 59 next month. Assunta was born Francis Thomas Femia in December 1947, the son of an Italian-American father and a West Virginia mother. After growing up in modest circumstances in West Virginia and Philadelphia, and later serving time in federal prison for an anti-war protest, he arrived in San Francisco in 1975. Assunta started walking about the city dressed as a nun, which was a novel sight at the time, and began using the female pronoun for self-reference. Eventually, she changed her name to Assunta, which means "Taken Up," a title referring to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Assunta loved the nuns and the Catholic liturgy that she knew from childhood. However, she rejected the church's male-focused theology and scorned priests and the pope. She created her own special spirituality based on a sense of service to the divine feminine, traditional Catholic veneration of the Blessed Virgin, and fierce independence of spirit. Assunta's eye-popping spirituality struck a responsive chord in San Francisco's gay community in the 1970s and 1980s. She helped inspire the founding of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group that continues to this day. However, she was too independent-minded to spend much time with the Sisters, and she never adopted a mocking posture toward nuns. Assunta had made waves before coming to San Francisco. In 1968, at age 21, she was arrested, along with two other Catholic peace activists, for pouring black paint on draft files in Boston, to protest the war in Vietnam. As a consequence, she spent two years in federal prison in Kentucky, where she came out as gay. She said she preferred prison life in Kentucky to parochial high school in south Philadelphia: "Prison was a lot less brutal than high school. I never got beat up in prison." Starting in the 1980s, Assunta spent much time in southern Oregon, going back and forth between there and San Francisco. When in Oregon, she rented a small house in a wooded area outside the town of Wolf Creek, whose owner lived in San Francisco. A local homophobe firebombed the house, but luckily Femia was absent at the time. She became the butt of taunts and threats from redneck men in rural Oregon because of her feminine appearance. But her tormentors always backed off, sensing on some level that she was not someone to mess with. They were right. Tucked away in her colorfully knitted Guatemalan handbag, next to her favorite rosary, she carried a big handgun. During Assunta's tenancy, the Wolf Creek property was often visited by gay men seeking alternatives to urban life, and the land gradually took on the nature of a country refuge. Eventually, a collective of Radical Faeries from San Francisco, including followers of the late Harry Hay, came into possession of the property and turned it into a faerie sanctuary. A bitter conflict soon developed between the swarm of new faery landlords and the longstanding tenant. Things got off to a rocky start when Hay rebuked Assunta for including Catholic elements in her spirituality. The turning point came when one of the new faery occupants erected some stone phalluses on the land. Assunta regarded the phalluses as glorifications of male power in a place sacred to the divine feminine. She destroyed them all with a hammer, celebrating the feat with an triumphant poem, "i smashed the phalloi." Assunta proved to be too radical for the Radical Faeries, and a parting of the ways followed. She abandoned the land she had made safe for the new dwellers and the home that she and some friends had built to replace the one that was firebombed. "It was easier with one landlord than 200," she later quipped. Assunta performed in plays and musicals in both Oregon in San Francisco. In 1984, at the former Valencia Rose cabaret in the Mission, she played the lead role of the god Dionysos in The God of Ecstasy , a rendition of Euripides's play Bakkhai . When asked at a rehearsal by other members of the cast how she landed the lead role, she announced to all, "I slept with the director" (which was true). She was active in Bay Area Gay Liberation and also the Butterfly Brigade, a civilian foot patrol organized to combat anti-gay violence in the Castro. When the AIDS epidemic hit, she spent much time caring for the dying, both in Oregon and San Francisco, drawing on skills she had learned from a stint in nursing school. [Editor's Note: this bio is based in large part on Assunta's obituary in the Bay Area Reporter, written by Arthur Evans] | ||
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Sunday, November 3, 2024
Via FB
RELUCTANCE
IT’S FUNNY TO THINK BACK ON ALL THE TIMES HUMANITY TREMBLED AT THE THOUGHT OF NEW TECHNOLOGY CHANGING CREATIVE EXPRESSION. TYPEWRITERS, FOR EXAMPLE, WERE ONCE VIEWED AS ROBOTIC LITTLE BOXES THAT COULDN’T POSSIBLY CAPTURE THE FLUIDITY AND SOUL OF A WRITER’S PEN ON PAPER. WHEN PERSONAL COMPUTERS CAME ALONG, SOME CREATIVES FEARED THEY'D END UP SACRIFICING THE TANGIBLE, MESSY FEEL OF DRAFTING IDEAS WITH THEIR OWN HANDS. THERE WAS A BELIEF THAT TECHNOLOGY WOULD ERASE THAT PERSONAL, ALMOST SACRED, HUMAN TOUCH FROM THE PROCESS OF CREATING. AND NOW WE FIND OURSELVES HERE, LOOKING AT AI, A TECHNOLOGY WITH ABILITIES THAT GO BEYOND ANYTHING THAT’S COME BEFORE, STIRRING UP THOSE SAME FEARS IN NEW FORMS. WE WONDER: WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR OUR CREATIVITY IF ALGORITHMS CAN ALSO WRITE, PAINT, COMPOSE? IT’S AS IF BY GIVING PART OF OUR CRAFT OVER TO MACHINES, WE RISK LOSING SOME CORE OF OURSELVES, OUR SPONTANEITY, OUR AUTHENTICITY, THE VERY ESSENCE OF BEING AN ARTIST. AND YET, AS THE YEARS GO BY, WE’VE SEEN PLENTY OF CREATIVES NOT ONLY ACCEPT BUT EMBRACE THE TOOLS THAT ONCE SEEMED LIKE THREATS. MUSICIANS NOW USE SOFTWARE LIKE PRO TOOLS TO ADD LAYERS OF DEPTH AND DETAIL TO THEIR SOUNDSCAPES THAT ANALOG COULDN’T QUITE CAPTURE. PHOTOGRAPHERS TRANSFORM THEIR IMAGES WITH A SPECTRUM OF DIGITAL EDITS, MANIPULATING CONTRAST OR COLOR TO EVOKE EMOTIONS AND MEANINGS THAT THE RAW IMAGE ALONE COULDN’T. FOR EACH OF THESE ARTISTS, TECHNOLOGY DOESN’T REPLACE THEIR VISION; IT BECOMES A NEW BRUSH IN THEIR TOOLKIT, AN ENABLER OF IDEAS THAT, BEFORE, WERE JUST OUT OF REACH. BUT, NATURALLY, THERE ARE THOSE WHO HESITATE. TO THEM, CREATIVITY IS TOO DEEPLY, TOO INTIMATELY HUMAN TO BE SHARED WITH ANYTHING THAT ISN’T ALIVE, THAT DOESN’T FEEL, THAT DOESN’T KNOW THE WEIGHT OF MAKING SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL FROM NOTHING. IN THE END, THOUGH, IT’S NOT SO MUCH ABOUT WHETHER WE SHOULD USE AI IN OUR CREATIVE WORK BUT HOW WE CHOOSE TO DO IT. MAYBE IT’S LIKE AN OLD FRIEND WHO CAN HELP US EXPERIMENT, GUIDING US TO THOSE UNCHARTED TERRITORIES WE MIGHT HAVE SKIPPED OVER ON OUR OWN. IF WE THINK OF AI AS A KIND OF PARTNER, HELPFUL, BUT NOT A REPLACEMENT, IT HAS THE POWER TO OPEN DOORS TO WHOLE NEW WAYS OF SEEING AND EXPRESSING THE WORLD AROUND US. SO, INSTEAD OF RESISTING, WE MIGHT LOOK AT WHAT THE RIVER OF CREATIVITY CAN DO WITH AN EXTRA STREAM FEEDING INTO IT. HISTORY SHOWS THAT THE ARTIST ALWAYS FINDS A WAY TO KEEP THAT SPARK ALIVE, NO MATTER WHAT TOOLS ARE THROWN INTO THE MIX. IF WE MEET AI WITH CURIOSITY RATHER THAN FEAR, IT MIGHT SURPRISE US, HELPING US PUSH THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT WE THOUGHT POSSIBLE. BECAUSE IN THE END, EMBRACING THE UNKNOWN HAS ALWAYS BEEN PART OF THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY, A PATH THAT, JUST MAYBE, LETS US TOUCH A PIECE OF SOMETHING TIMELESS.
THE BEAUTY WAY 🌻
Via Daily Dharma: The Craving Itself
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Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Mindfulness and Concentration: Establishing Mindfulness of Body and the First Jhāna
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Via White Crane Institute \\ FRANCIS DAVIS MILLET
1848 -
FRANCIS DAVIS MILLET, born on this date, was an American academic classical painter, sculptor, and writer who died in the sinking of the RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912. At age fifteen, Millet entered the Massachusetts regiment, first as a drummer boy and then a surgical assistant (helping his father, a surgeon) in the American Civil War.
He repeatedly pointed to his experience working for his father as giving him an appreciation for the vivid blood red that he frequently used in his early paintings. He graduated from Harvard with a Master of Arts degree. He worked as a reporter and editor for the Boston Courier and then as a correspondent for the Advertiser at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.
Millet became a member of the Society of American Artists in 1880, and in 1885 was elected as a member of the National Academy of Design, New York and as Vice-Chairman of the Fine Arts Committee. He was made a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and sat on the advisory committee of the National Gallery of Art. He was decorations director for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, with claims he invented the first form of compressed air spraypainting to apply whitewash to the buildings, but the story may be apocryphal as contemporary journals note spraypainting had already been in use since the early 1880s. His career included work on a number of worlds' fairs, including Vienna, Chicago, Paris, and Tokyo, where he made contributions as a juror, administrator, mural painter/decorator, and adviser.
Millet was among the founders of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and was influential in the early days of the American Federation of Arts. He was instrumental in obtaining the appointment of Emil Otto Grundmann, an old acquaintance from his Antwerp days, as first head of the school. Millet was involved with the American Academy in Rome from its inception and served as secretary from 1904 to 1911. He was a founding member and vice chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.
In addition to his work as an artist, Millet was a writer and journalist. He translated Tolstoy and also wrote essays and short stories. Among his publications are Capillary Crime and Other Stories (1892), The Danube From the Black Forest to the Black Sea (1892) and Expedition to the Philippines (1899). He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects.
A noted sculptor and designer, Millet designed the 1907 Civil War Medal at the request of the U.S. Army and United States War Department and the 1908 Spanish Campaign Medal. He executed the ceiling of the Call Room of the US Custom House at Baltimore, Maryland.
Millet was close friends with Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Mark Twain, both of whom attended his 1879 wedding to Elizabeth ("Lily") Greely Merrill in Paris, France; Twain was Millet's best man. The couple had four children: Kate, Edwin, Laurence, and John.
Millet was acquainted with the famed American portraitist John Singer Sargent, who often used Millet's daughter Kate as a model. He was also close to the esteemed Huxley family.
Millet lived with Archibald Butt, who called him "my artist friend who lives with me", in a large mansion at 2000 G Street NW. They were known for throwing spartan but large parties that were attended by members of Congress, justices of the Supreme Court, and President Taft himself. There is some speculation that Butt and Millet were lovers. Historian Richard Davenport-Hines wrote in 2012: "The enduring partnership of Butt and Millet was an early case of "Don't ask, don't tell". Washington insiders tried not to focus to closely on the men's relationship, but they recognized their mutual affection. But they recognized their mutual affection, and they were together in death as in life."
On April 10, 1912, Millet boarded the RMS Titanic at Cherbourg, France, bound for New York City. He was traveling with long-time friend Archibald Butt. Millet was last seen helping women and children into lifeboats. His body was recovered after the sinking by the cable boat Mackay-Bennett and returned to East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, where he was buried in Central Cemetery.
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation \\ Words of Wisdom - November 3, 2024 💌
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