American Painter and Printmaker Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) is known for the compositional rhythms, bold coloration, and sweeping gestural brushstrokes of her large and often multi-paneled paintings.  Inspired by landscape, nature, and poetry, her intent was not to create a recognizable image, but to convey emotions.  Mitchell's early success in the 1950s was striking at a time when few women artists were recognized.  She referred to herself as the "last Abstract Expressionist."   Inspired by the gestural painting of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell's mature work comprised a highly abstract, richly colored, calligraphic manner, which balanced elements of structured composition with a mood of wild improvisation.  Mitchell rejected the emphasis on flatness and the "all-over" approach to composition that were prevalent among many of the leading Abstract Expressionists.  Instead, she preferred to retain a more traditional sense of figure and ground in her pictures, and she often composed them in ways that evoked impressions of landscape.  Read more at http://www.theartstory.org/artist-mitchell-joan.htm  See pictures of her works at http://joanmitchellfoundation.org/work

The Solanaceae, or nightshades, are an economically important family of flowering plants.  The family ranges from annual and perennial herbs to vines, lianas, epiphytes, shrubs, and trees, and includes a number of important agricultural crops, medicinal plants, spices, weeds, and ornamentals.  Many members of the family contain potent alkaloids, and some are highly toxic, but many, including tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, bell/chili peppers, and tobacco are widely used.  The family belongs to the order Solanales, in the asterid group and class Magnoliopsida (dicotyledons).  The Solanaceae consists of about 98 genera and some 2,700 species, with a great diversity of habitats, morphology and ecology.  The family has a worldwide distribution, being present on all continents except Antarctica.  The greatest diversity in species is found in South America and Central America.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanaceae

Donald Trump says that a painting he owns is Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 1881 masterpiece Two Sisters (On the Terrace) worth $10 million.  Art historians say it’s counterfeit.  The Art Institute of Chicago, meanwhile, is pretty sure it’s got the real one.  Might this all be a high-stakes game of Parker Brothers’s “Masterpiece” being played out on the world stage?  “Masterpiece:  The Art Auction Game,” introduced in 1970, features characters like Dietrich von Oberlitzer (“a rogue, but a shrewd and highly successful one”) and V. Elton Whitehall, Esq. (“once London’s top criminal lawyer”), vying for iconic works of art priced as high as $1 million, with at least one unlucky player trying to pawn off a forgery, according to one gamer site’s description.  Brian Boucher  Read more and see pictures at https://news.artnet.com/art-world/trump-fake-renoir-parker-brothers-masterpiece-1122221

When writing about the novel that was turned into the classic 1947 movie Out of the Past, there’s just no way around commenting on the film.  Ask 100 film noir buffs to list their all-time top 10 examples from the genre, and my guess is at least 80 of them (if not more) would include Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 masterpiece on their tally.  Yet I wonder how many of those 80 or more have read the book--Build My Gallows High (1946), penned by Daniel Mainwaring under the pseudonym of Geoffrey Homes--that is the foundation of the big screen feature.  I’ve been an avid watcher/reader of both noir film and fiction for decades, first saw and was blown away by Out of the Past many years back, but I’ve only just now read the novel.  In both the book and film, the full tale is woven by alternating past events with the present.  In the novel, Mainwaring/Homes handles these alternating perspectives seamlessly, bringing the full tale together in a way that is more interesting and more suspenseful than it would have been if he’d simply told the New York part in full, then forwarded to the Bridgeport piece and then the San Francisco subplot.  Brian Greene  https://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/2014/09/lost-classics-of-noir-build-my-gallows-high-by-geoffrey-homes-brian-greene  Build My Gallows High, the final published novel by onetime San Francisco newspaper reporter Daniel Mainwaring, is available electronically at https://www.scribd.com/document/63561702/Build-My-Gallows-High-Geoffrey-Homes  You may also find the book on the used book market and in libraries.

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

exclosure (ik-SKLO-zuhr)  noun  A fenced area, especially in a wide open area, to keep unwanted animals out.  An enclosure keeps wanted animals in, an exclosure keeps unwanted animals out.  The word is modeled after the word enclosure, from ex- (out) + closure (barrier), from Latin claudere (to close).  Earliest documented use:  1920.

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From:  Robert Carleton  Subject:  exclosure  Exclosure!  Here in New Mexico, we are a “fence out” state.  Cattle are not required to be secured by fences.  Rangeland can be open.
From:  Reuben Kura Sanderson  Subject: exclosure  I live near a very large and very valuable exclosure, the predator fence surrounding the Karori bird sanctuary near central Wellington.  New Zealand has no native mammals apart from a rare and shy bat, and so its birdlife evolved into trusting, flightless forms.  Many species are already extinct, quite a few are heading that way, and keeping rodents, cats, etc., out of reach of the remainder is vital to their survival.
From:  Grant Agnew  Subject:  exclosure  In Australia we are very familiar with the idea of exclosure--we have twice tried to keep certain animals (rabbits and dingos = native dogs) out of certain areas by building fences running for thousands of kilometres.  We are therefore also very familiar with the fact that exclosure rarely works.  These fences were successful in greatly reducing numbers, but not in creating rabbit-free and dingo-free zones.

  

October 14, 2017  Three years ago, I wrote one of those anniversary pieces that columnists love so dearly.  It marked 50 years since two devastating wildfires raged through Sonoma County at the same time, threatening both Santa Rosa and the Sonoma Valley.  The Hanly fire and the Nunn’s Canyon fire of late September 1964 were tagged in our files as the most devastating in the county’s history.  The column revisited the Hanly fire, suggesting that there were lessons that week might have taught us.  But didn’t.  It all began early on September 19, 1964--a Saturday morning--when a deer hunter dropped a cigarette on a wooded slope below Highway 29 as it winds up Mt. St. Helena from the upper Napa Valley.  By 10:15 a.m., flames were seen behind Hanly’s tavern, an old, familiar stopping place on the right side of the narrow road.  The new fire was moving fast down the hill toward Calistoga, growing as it traveled.  Through the weekend into the Monday that followed, firefighters and volunteers armed with garden hoses and wet gunnysacks battled to save the up-valley town, holding the damage to about 40 homes on the northeastern edge.  When the winds died down on Monday morning, Calistoga gave a collective sigh of relief that echoed over the surrounding hills and valleys.  All too soon.  On Monday night, the winds returned and the fire moved west with breathtaking speed.  It created its own wind as it moved at 40 mph along Porter Creek and Mark West Springs roads into Sonoma County.  This is an old familiar story, which many of you have not only heard before but told often, particularly as we watched the changes to the burned-over acreage that was once among the more successful 19th century American Utopian communities, the domain of an enigmatic leader named Thomas Lake Harris, who had a thousand followers on two continents.  Long after Harris left and took the “Home Centre” of his Brotherhood of the New Life with him, Fountaingrove remained important as a destination for famous visitors and a gathering place for Santa Rosa’s elite.  Over prolonged protests from early environmentalists who saw great potential as public land with grassy hills, and exotic trees, ponds and lakes left from “Father” Harris’ elaborate estate, Fountaingrove Ranch was developed.  The first sale was to computer pioneer Hewlett-Packard for a state-of-the-art campus, a decision that most found acceptable—if the rest was considered for parkland.  It never was.  Through a series of owners, each with their own plans--Fountaingrove emerged in the new century, a high-end golf course around the lake, two hotels and high-end homes, dubbed McMansions by the flatlanders, growing more expansive and expensive as they moved upward and north and east into open land beyond the ranch boundaries, ultimately going all the way to Mark West Springs Road.  The parkway, also protested, connected the newly important north end of town with Rincon Valley.  It was, planners explained, the first leg of a proposed "beltway" circling the town.  Gaye LeBaron  Read more at http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/7382773-181/gaye-lebaron-tubbs-fire-revives?artslide=0  See also a biography of Thomas Lake Harris and find information on his society that became known as "Brotherhood of the New Life" at https://allpoetry.com/Thomas-Lake-Harris

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1787  October 20, 2017  On this date in 1873, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Rutgers universities drafted the first code of American football rules.  On this date in 1973, the Sydney Opera House was opened by Elizabeth II after 14 years of construction.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_20