The Importance of Art.

 RHYS BOWEN:  I've been spending a lot of time sitting in my living room lately as John recovers from pneumonia in his recliner.  This has given me time to look around and realize the importance of the art on my walls.  We have art on the walls of every room in our house. In fact sometimes we are on vacation and we see a lovely piece of art work and want to buy it. But then we look at each other. Where would we put it? No walls left.  John has even suggested getting a bigger house to allow for more art work. 

But I do enjoy the art we already own. The major piece in our living room is a simple sketch. Can you guess who it is by? 

The answer is Gaugin. Not his usual style or part of the Earth. We acquired it when John was helping a friend with his moving business when we were first married. He was emptying a house for a woman after a nasty divorce and she told him to take what she didn't want.  He brought home this picture. We loved it. And didn't think any more about it until we were at the Gaugin museum in Tahiti and there was its sibling, identical. So we came home and looked and it is a numbered print!  Not worth as much as an original Gaugin but definitely not to be sneezed at.

Apart from that we have a lot of Chinese plates I'm not very fond of. But they came from John's grandfather when he was the British district officer in Malaysia.  I'm sure they are valuable too, but I don't really care.  I like art that means something to me:  my favorite piece is this:

I was in Cornwall with my daughter and son-in-law and we visited an art gallery. We each decided which work we liked best and Tom and I agreed on one of St. Michael's Mount.  Behind my back Tom had it shipped back to me for Christmas... best Christmas gift ever!  I sit on my sofa and stare at it and sigh.

Also in the living room we have a print of Sutton Place, which was where his grandmother grew up. When we took our daughter Anne to visit she asked "And why did we give this up?"  Good question.

But most of the other art on our walls is only of sentimental value. It reminds me of places we have loved. So I suppose that art has to mean something to me personally, to take me somewhere and provide beauty. I have no abstract art at all. I certainly wouldn't want anything too unsettling or unharmonious on my walls. We also have a lot of family photos in hallways and in my office are framed Edgar certificates and other awards.  And there is my award shelf, halfway down the stairs, which gives me encouragement when I most need it.

So how about you?  Is art important to you? Do you have a particular piece you love?

Are you there, God? It's me, Rhys.

 RHYS BOWEN:  Dear God, if you're listening and you don't mind I have a small question.  Why did you create fruit flies?  And for that matter house flies that only spread disease or mosquitos that spread disease and also bite? What use are they in the great fabric of things?  Fruit flies breed on decaying fruit and as far as i can see don't do anything useful.  In fact they infect good fruit and here in California where the fruit industry is huge, we are supposed to trap and eradicate them.

Were you not concentrating the day that fruit flies were made? Were you already bored or tired after the creation of large things like dinosaurs and wooly mammoths so that you handed over the last few days of creation to a lesser heavenly being, one slightly less competent? 

Anyway this blunder in creation has turned a peaceful, gentle being like myself into a ruthless killer. It all started a week ago when I brought home some organic tomatoes.  When I opened the plastic box one small creature flew out. One tiny, harmless flying thing.. or so I thought. Until the next night when I was sitting, enjoying a glass of wine.  I looked up and two tiny creatures were happily swimming around in my glass.

Then it was quite a few around the flowers I had just bought. I carried them out to the garbage bin. But the darned things kept appearing.  I Googled and tried various traps: apple cider vinegar (didn't work). Honey (didn't work). Red wine... works well.  At one stage my kitchen counter looked like a science experiment. 

Where were they coming from? I had put all fruit and veg into the fridge but there they were, sitting on the rim of the bowl containing the wine. And cunning little buggers too.. If I moved my hand near to squash them they flew away. I tried bringing down the fly swatter rapidly, thus knocking them down into the wine.  They swam across to the side and started to climb out. I squashed one on my thumb, then watched as he readjusted his wings and tried to fly off. 

It was only when I found some in the pantry that I learned the horrid truth. At the back of the potato bin was a rotting potato where they were happily breeding. I've taken it out, scrubbed it, scrubbed the floor and now I hope it's just a case of rounding up the last survivors.  But I've been spending half my day killing!  Every time I come into the kitchen I see one, sitting at the edge of the wine. I creep up, fly swatter in hand and bring it down. Only to find the wretched thing has escaped again. It is becoming an obsession.  So... if anyone knows a brilliant way to get rid of fruit flies, please share.

And God, if you can share a moment from more pressing things like defending Greenland from invasion or protecting innocent people from ICE, could you possible un-make the fruit flies?

The Reds On Magazines

 RHYS BOWEN: At the beginning of the new year my daughter-in-law suggested we make vision boards. I’ve done this before with her and find them very revealing. This one I made once and keep in my office to look at when I work.

The problem is that to make a good vision board you need a selection of magazines and we don’t get any magazines any more, except for Consumer Reports. And I can hardly make a vision board out of washing machines and mattresses.

I suppose one of the reasons we stopped taking magazines is that we live in two places so the magazines just pile up in California when we are in Arizona. But also it’s so much easier to look at magazines online.  I don’t even do that much any more. Magazines seem to be a thing of my past, which is a shame, as I really used to enjoy them.

When I was growing up there were several magazines for children. I got GIRL magazine and another one I can’t remember the name of. They had stories in them about adventurous girls, Patsy of the Circus who was a trapeze star, was my favorite. I played at being Patsy and made my own trapeze, doing stupidly brave things on it.

My brother had Eagle, and Boy’s Own. They had stories like Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future.

Every woman in England got Woman and Woman’s Own, and Woman’s Weekly with their recipes and knitting patterns and romance stories.

When I married and lived in California I took Redbook and Good Housekeeping. We also had National Geographic and Time and Life, oh and Reader’s Digest. I suppose now that things like Facebook make up for them… snippets of information and entertainment. But they don’t really. I miss them.   When I’m in England I browse through English women’s magazines but they are different now. Much more celebrity oriented, certainly no knitting patterns.

So, dear Reds, do you still take magazines? Do you miss them?

JENN McKINLAY: I love magazines. Probably, because I spent my teen years in my room reading Seventeen, Teen, Tiger Beat, etc. As a mom, I got all the parenting magazines - my fave was Family Fun - so many great activities. Now I get Prevention, which I got hooked on when I was a librarian for the Scottsdale Hospital and Atomic Ranch because we live in a mid-century ranch and that magazine has gorgeous houses that our humble abode aspires to be.  

LUCY BURDETTE: I love magazines too, though like Rhys I stopped ordering them because of my two addresses–impossible to keep up with the mail. My first love was Tiger Beat–I had to work to persuade my parents this would be ok to read. I remember getting MS magazine, maybe Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and Ladies Home Journal which had the column “Can this marriage be saved?” My favorite read! I also took Bon Appetit for a long time, and Cooking Light. Our Key West librarian reported recently that the most popular e-read these days is The New Yorker. I’m going to try that this year!

HALLIE EPHRON: Gosh, I haven’t gotten magazines in years. I miss The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Boston Magazine… but the truth is they just piled up unread. I am SO tempted by the Atlantic Monthly because of their stellar recent reporting, but I’d be signing up for their e-zine, nothing I could cut up for a vision board. 

On the newspaper front, I do get the Boston Globe delivered, and try not to think about how much it’s costing me. It’s just one of those luxuries I’ve agreed to give myself.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Oh, I love magazines! I used to get [MORE] and a very cool women' s magazine the name of which I can never remember but it was not Ms. Does anyone remember?  I grew up reading Vogue with my mother, we loved it,  and it was where mom taught me the difference between clothes people wore in magazines and what people wore in real life.  Now I get The New Yorker, cannot live without it, and New York, and Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic for solidarity. They all come in digital and paper, and I read bits of both depending on what's convenient.

(I have never made a vision board, though…)

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Hank, I had a subscription to [MORE] as well, and I wish there was something like it still out there. Like most politically aware adults in the pre-internet age, Ross and I got TIME and Newsweek, and for a while, he subscribed to Foreign Affairs (pricy!) Of course, we subscribed to Sports Illustrated, and had National Geographic because according to Ross, our kids would grow up illiterate without it. (He was VERY keen on geography!)

I still get HGTV Magazine and House Beautiful in the mail - to me there’s a noticeable different in photos in full-sized print as opposed to on a screen. For text-based periodicals, I have digital-only subscriptions; The Atlantic, New York Magazine and The New Yorker. One advantage of those as opposed to the print editions: you can share articles without clipping them out and mailing them!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I do still get magazines. Bon Appetit, although I use my digital subscription more than the actual magazines. D Magazine, which my daughter sends me–great for local stuff. We also get print copies of The Economist and The Atlantic. My subscription to The New Yorker, alas, is just digital. We used to take Rolling Stone but finally cancelled it as it had become so expensive.

But my passion is print copies of the magazines that require a trip to my local B&N; the UK edition of Country Living (so good, nothing like the US version,) The English Home, UK House and Garden, UK Homes and Gardens. I don't manage to get them all every month (ouch!) but it's such fun when I can snag an issue or two.

A fun note–I was a dedicated Gourmet subscriber for many years and was heartbroken when it folded. But, now, apparently, Conde Nast has let the copyright expire and some new food writers have taken it over and are publishing a monthly digital edition, for people who really like to cook (rather than get dinner on the table in thirty minutes.) Sounds fun but they don't give you a free issue and I'm not sure I'm interested enough to pay $7 a month.

_._,_._,_

RHYS BOWEN:  It was only as I put this up to be published that I remembered what today is. How dismayed he would be to see what was happening now. But remember what he said: THE ARC OF THE UNIVERSE IS LONG, BUT IT BENDS TOWARD JUSTICE.  We'll keep hoping.