Excelsior Restaurant Tour 3-7-2012
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Filed under food, Uncategorized | Comment (1)Summer Reading Assignment
I hope you have a wonderful summer out in the sun and getting a lot of exercise!
But I also want you to keep up with your reading habits and exploring your curiosity.
Before next school year, I want you to read a recommended book from the San Francisco Public Library Lists and post your review on this forum.
You will get credit for writing the review for the first quarter of the Fall 2011 semester whether you are in my class or another English/ELD teacher’s.
Have a great summer break!
See you when we get back.
Splendors of Faith/Scars of Conquest
This is the title of the current exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California, one of the most people-friendly, interactive, provocative museums in the free world. The title refers to the powerful and iconic paintings, sculpture, murals, scrolls and prayer books, and more that are part of the Spanish conquest of the Americas.
The images range from doe-eyed saints to bloody and horrible depictions of war, torture, massacre, dismemberment, and domination. Saints stand on the heads of angels, Jesus is bleeding and staked to the cross, his blood deep red on hundreds year old wood crosses. One mural that nearly takes up an entire wall details the horrific execution and martyrdom of a group of Catholics by non-believing Protestants. Eyes gouged. Hearts devoured as the victims live to see the act. Bodies dismembered.
The iconography of God’s will is depicted in many images of the Spanish missionaries building their fortresses along the Pacific Coast along Mexico and up California. Occasionally, Indian faces replace the cherub faces of angels.
The overall experience was both awe at the commitment of these missionaries, most zealous believers in their faith, some who tried to build more humane relationships with the natives; and an overbearing weight of the way imperialism and greed changed the course of human history during the time of this art. The exhibit tells the tale of human struggle, as and ideal of hope and a reflection of the terrible truth. The world changed irreversibly.
I am reminded of another recent museum visit. This was the Asian Art Museum’s Bali show that just started. It is an amazingly deep and colorful exhibit that emphasizes the everyday in the art of the a country. Despite the less friendly more hands-off nature of the show, the Bali exhibit showed the life of the country-side as well as the imperial courts, and gave us a glimpse of imperialism’s effect on an old way of life. In modern Bali history, the country was divided into kingdoms, and the Europeans, specifically the Dutch, wanted to make sure no other European country could stake out the island. A series of campaigns were launched to claim the kingdoms. But rather than being met with resistance, the Dutch armies were met with mass suicides in anticipation of the eventual massacre of their people. Each court that the Dutch soldiers visited were met with a similar act of sacrifice. It is overwhelming to think of the history that shapes the world we live in today.
We are all part of the world that we are born into. An American, no matter what your background, has an ancestry that either brought good or bad into this world. It is the challenge of one’s life work to make this legacy better or worse.
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