Museum Legs

Fall 2010, part 2

2010-11-28T23:37:00.000-08:00

The fall has fallen into a toggle between getting settled into New York and traveling out to California. On my third trip, two things happened: I stopped through LA to go to a William Eggleston opening at LACMA (Mark of the Egg's photo above). And I happened to be out in the SF area during Giants fever -- horns honking, strangers celebrating together, and these airport workers decked out.

I had just seen Secretariat and was reminded of the idea of certain athletic phenomena being great equalizers -- Secretariat across hippies and all walks. Re the Giants, I was in a management consulting office for a meeting, and a senior seeming woman was wearing a Giants letterman-style jacket with her black skirt -- and a stuffed panda hat tied around her chin as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

The Eggleston opening was the last stop on an around-the-world tour that began at the Whitney a couple of years ago. I took my college friend Smith -- here we are with two people from LACMA.

In a bout of small world (of the absurdly close variety that usually happens to me), Smith went to one of his high school proms -- in Massachusetts --with the woman we are talking to.

I spent the day in Venice Beach, which I love. It feels like, in the words of art critic Dave Hickey writing about Las Vegas, like one of the new indigenous landscapes in America. It's kooky and quirky. I loved this window display of endless cakestands:

By the time I went to the opening, I had started to come down with a cold. Smith confirmed on the way there that, as it felt to me, only one of my eyes was watering, and we stopped at the CVS and pounded airbornes. (When I said to Smith this felt like drinking in high school, he looked at me and tossed the empty water bottle in the back seat in faux cavalier tribute. . . ) The opening, in all its wonder and people-watching glory, can best be summed up by Eggleston the man himself. Here he is in white dinner jacket with white wine signing books at the end of the evening:

Here I am with his son Winston:

I've actually never officially met Eggleston himself, though Winston is a class-A lovely guy.

I had intended to fly back to New York very early to make it to the opening of Emma Spertus' first show at White Columns, but I just couldn't get on a plane without rest. (Emma's blog and Emma's website.) On the way home, Smith took me by Jerry's Deli to get the chicken noodle matzo ball soup his girlfriend always wants when she is sick. (Let me say, his girlfriend knows what she's talking about -- I felt noticeably better, then spent a week pining for LA matzo ball soup back in New York.)

Here is Venice Beach:

Right before I went to walk on the beach, I got a smoothie at what was clearly an institution and it felt like an equally incongruous and fitting part of the experience that the couple in front of me in line got a parking ticket on the honking huge Land Rover while we were all there, contemplating the menu of protein add-ins and wittily named fruit combos.

I finally recovered from being sick, thanks to Dr. Guy Lin, a great, inordinately kind ENT. (If you ever need an ENT in New York, I sincerely recommend.)

And then it was time to head to California again for residency 4. I stayed at Emma's. Here is her housemate Mark, master of sewing very cool messenger bags I'd post a picture of here except I'd hate for anyone to borrow his designs.

Their house is wonderfully full of old industrial (working) sewing machines and unexpected art (a probably 10-foot tall cut-out painting of a tree on the staircase landing) and an artist-palette array of grains and things in glass canisters ringing the kitchen counters. I watched Heroes for the first time with Emma's housemates.

In Economics class, we had our first guest speaker, Eric, who heads executive compensation at Google.

He was fascinating and enthusiastic in equal measure, someone who brings -- as he said -- a Meyers Briggs "T" kind of analytic thinking to the explanation of human motivation, along with an uncanny ability to tie nose-to-the-ground staffing decisions to the very economic concepts (eg, principal-agent problems) I was trying to teach. Here we are at lunch:

At the end of the day, I saw my students do a traditional d-MBA assignment for one of their other classes: Teach Us Something in Seven Minutes. Here, a team teaches double-entry accounting as if it were a new-age spiritual practice, in cult-guru performance mode. Fantastic:

Here, another student tasked with explaining the Invisible Hand does an improv routine where people shout out products and he runs through how these three factors -- self-interest, competition, and supply and demand -- all interact in each case. Strong showing in composure on a few of the terms that got thrown out:

These students built a bar out of cardboard:

Afterwards, I took a picture of some of my students (including Ardy in yellow glasses frames who is not in my class):

The next day, I went to visit Peter and Jeanne, age-old business school friends I used to stay with in London who are now in Marin -- and with whom I hadn't connected too long a time (save the pumpkin curry Peter and I had for lunch in residency 3). We went hiking with their kids (that is, walking, with Jeanne and Peter holding an impossibly small bicycle while their son stepped in every puddle).

We stopped for lunch in a charmingly new-agey food shop where they had a notice up that their chicken was ethically sourced and free range -- and the only thing surprising about the sign was that they served chicken at all and weren't, say, vegan. There was also a sign on the bulletin board about spirituality and UFO sightings.

Then Peter and I stopped in ProofLab, a surf shop owned by my teaching assistant Will. Spoiler alert: if I have not finished my Christmas shopping by next residency, I will be getting everyone gifts there. Will has a lot of these quilted button-downs I think could phase nicely into my brother's wardrobe.

The place is great. I realized afterwards I was probably pretty dorky introducing myself to Will's colleagues (who were doing cool things like putting wheels on skateboards) in Will's absence for class. I got a couple of t-shirts to give away in my final lecture.

Here's the family portrait of Peter and Jeanne and kids:

Action photo of Alice:

Peter's hat is, incidentally, from the surf shop:

Peter encouraged me to take a picture of this inexplicable and, as time goes on, disturbing, window of a children's toy store in the neighboring town of Mill Valley. . . .

The more I look at it, the less I understand.

Fall 2010, part 1 - the Move-in, and the To-ing and Fro-ing

2010-11-28T23:05:00.000-08:00

The craziest thing that happened in the early fall is that I won the Citibank customer service drawing. As Sean, from the office programming team, aptly put it: I can now say you've done something that no one else has. I didn't actually think those drawings were for real. There is a story of how it happened, but first:

I returned to VSC to the wonderful presence of visiting poet Adam Zagajewski. Here is a view of the party celebrating his reading.

And here he is with his translator, Clare Cavanaugh:

I feel that I am a better person, and I am sure writer, just from being around him.

So, you have to imagine I wasn't living anywhere else while I was in Vermont. We're practically in Canada -- sap lines to all the trees, a small town with no pharmacy but a store that sold empty maple syrup containers to the trade. My belongings are in storage or fit in my car. I drive back to New York to find an apartment. This is big.

Meanwhile, RISD sends official photographs of my talk which I insert here because they are beautiful:

Somewhat miraculously, Veronica--provider of famous artist pet names--also realizes her sister needs a dogsitter at exactly the time I need a place to stay in New York to look for apartments. Not just that, the dog herself, Bella, should be loaned out to anyone doing something as stressful as navigating the New York real estate market. Bella is a bit like a cross between the Dalai Lama and the kid from Jerry MacGuire. She is full of love and guileless. She will literally decide to befriend people while out for a walk. If she likes you--as she especially does a certain doorman named John--she will get up on her hind legs and spread her arms and jump forward -- part pogo stick, part bear attacking, in stance. And she will lean into the tension on her leash until the person comes toward her and then melt into the floor to get you to scratch her belly. I digress. Here is Veronica, the aunt, and Bella exhibiting great intellectual curiosity toward the dishwasher:

Me with Bella:

And the apartment I eventually found. Curiously, this is the sign visible from the window:

So back to the story of the customer service drawing, it is in the process of getting all the apartment paperwork in order that I receive some extreme helpfulness from Mildred of Citib, so helpful I am moved to fill out a Citibank customer service form.

Before moving in, I head back out to California for class two. I get to meet Sabrina's kids, who are genuinely compelling:

We head to the California Institute of Science with the boys. I wear a baby bjorn for the first time. Where I sometimes feel that people bump into me as a single, childless person, wearing the bjorn (and probably an unmistakable look of plaintive newness), people are fantastically helpful. A guy carries my tray, etc. This is instructive and part of what Teddy my dean constantly calls "empathy bootcamp," something he seems convinced is a solution to many problems. (I, and Adam Smith, would agree. . . .)

Here is Sabrina with them both:

And here is just one remarkable site from the aquarium, the jellyfish:

These pictures were taken on my phone -- the real thing was at least that amazing. And just the species of animal -- I still cannot believe there are sea horses that look like tree branches. It's amazing.

Back in New York, my things get pulled for a customs exam in the port of New York. The port workers had been on strike for a couple of days the week prior. I could have gone to stay with my sister but wanted to be in my own space. Not only does the exam cause delay and necessitate 'urban camping,' it also costs about 700 dollars. (The karmic set-up for the drawing bounty. . . .)

Finally, the movers arrive, with this big single crate on the back of the truck. That's when international moving starts to seem uncannily like the 24th mile of a marathon. The crew of movers are late. Just the guy who has brought the truck is present and everyone else is stuck in horrendous traffic, about five miles away. That's when the mover starts telling me the customs exam never happened. He is wrenching off the crate. Nothing has been touched.

This is already the end of a very long, complex process with movers and agents on both sides of the Atlantic. Finally, the stuff starts to get into my apartment. The plates are not broken, miraculously, and we turn a corner where I can see that this will eventually be my home (aka, mile 25.5). I am being reunited with stuff I haven't seen in over a year. My mom is in town, and she and my sister stop by, which also helps.

My mother and I go see Brief Encounter, which is lovely in its staging:

And the next week, I get a call on my cell phone from Canada. Who would be calling from Canada? Well, it turns out that is where Citibank's customer service team is (a separate firm), and they explain I have won a drawing. It essentially covers the cost of the customs exam. I am to fill out paperwork, and arrange with the branch for the awards ceremony. Here is me with Mildred at the ceremony:

Everyone at the branch is so nice I decide I am going to pretend I live in a small town and they are my local bank.

October gets in full swing and we go visit my brother and family since my mom is in town. Here is a picture of nephew Jack with Phoebe ("the older sibling") at the pumpkin patch. As Jeff pointed out, it's good Phoebe didn't move because it didn't seem like Jack would have let go.

Now back in the city, I am starting to reach out to friends. Here is Galen, at dinner with Darby and with Juliette's sister Emma. Galen is wearing the signature sticker of the Providence / Betaspring incubator company, ManPacks (a company I seem always to try to call ManPants. . .):

And so starts the 'personal infrastructure' phase that is the fall -- painting the chest of drawers from the tag sale in Williamstown, unpacking boxes,

and generally doing the reverse of the phrase "scattered to the four winds" with my belongings. Reversing that phrase is a bit like solving a Rubik's Cube in illustration of some basic law of entropy in which it is far easier to break than fix a plate.

Postscript: On the topic of home, here are interns Sarah and Roland in their kitchen with a painting I lent them, after the most wonderful meal they made for us:

I am reminded of hospitality as sometimes space-necessitating, but also entirely space independent.

September: The Great Time Compression

2010-11-28T22:12:00.000-08:00

Shortly before Museum Legs came out, a writer friend (Michael Joseph Gross) said: When you have a book come out, you think your life is going to change all the sudden. That doesn't happen. But a year on, you can look around and see some changes. And so it happened that, almost exactly a year to the day, I left a writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center for a week that included: teaching my first economics class at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, flying back to the east coast the next day to give the keynote to new students at RISD, flying the next day to Philadelphia to talk to a closed session of museum directors as part of a Penn Urban Institute Roundtable on museums as anchor institutions -- and then flying back to Vermont, where it is beautiful, even at its most industrial:

I made a new friend at VSC, Ethan Hayes-Chute, a lovely artist (miniature paintings of beautifully exploding junk balls and life-size houses built of scrap wood).

It turns out Ethan went to RISD and when I asked him about it, one detail he mentioned: some kids are really earnest and dress up for the Artists' Ball as 'I'm a gouache tube!' (this is an opaque watercolor-like paint). I asked if he would listen to my talk and keep me from being a gouache tube costume (aka dorky dad vibe). I had to give a talk and then get roughly 400 people across the street to the RISD museum for a drawing project without its seeming like a TSA queue. I had thought I would divide them into teams by putting colored squares on the seats. Ethan (of the junk balls) said, "It would be nice if you could put something on the seats that they might want to keep."

The whole time I had been planning the talk, I had wanted somehow to draw a bicycle because that is a famous part of the entrance exam to the school. You have to do three drawings (a bicycle, a drawing that is inside and outside, and a third that uses both sides of the page). It then occurred to me that I had to fly to California before the talk and would see age-old friend Sabrina who has a letterpress company. She said she could work it in. So, one morning, I started to draw a bicycle:

Considering how rusty I am at drawing, it started out okay. Then it hit that point where I started to think, I am about to mess it up -- at which point I adjourned for lunch. I told Ethan I had started drawing it. His response, when he heard the wheels weren't drawn in perspective at all: "You wouldn't get in."

(He was kidding, though that's probably true.) Meanwhile, I made an ink version which Sabrina and team graciously cleaned up and printed.

A couple of days later, under the heading that most important things in life involve great sleep deprivation, I left Burlington Vermont and the bucolic Vermont Studio Center

to fly to San Francisco

for my first economics class at California College of the Arts. It is a low residency program that meets once a month for four straight days. This means I give an eight hour lecture in economics, the equivalent of taking all of us on a very, very long run through the hills and valleys of neoclassical market theory.

First, a few moments of, you know you're in an art school when:

1. The inside of the school is the most beautiful aircraft hangar you have ever seen:

2. With these sorts of inexplicable folded sculptures, just around:

3. Casual display of pigments:

4. You go to wash your hands and the soap is gritty, to get off real-deal paint or other materials:

5. The waiting room in the academic affairs building looks like this:

6. A mysterious baby-blue padded, audio-blasting van out lingers out front:

7. The general lay of the land:

8. Classic incongruity -- the Jessica McClintock outlet (the original manufacturer of '80s prom dresses) is right across the street:

I have to wonder how many people wander in unironically:

San Francisco has wonderful signage in general:

When I have visited San Francisco in the past, I have often felt like it is a dream state, but now that I am under the umbrella of a community, I have more traction and notice more.

Class concludes with a barbeque at which (a) my dean offers me and Stuart the futurist half of his burger after asking Stuart to cut it with a fork and (b) I share a can of beer with one of my students while listening to (c) an excellent, mood-lifting DJ the likes of which I do not remember from my own business school experience.

I head to the airport the next morning for a day of connecting flights via Minneapolis. I feel a bit like this guy (on the floor behind the desk):

Landing very late in Providence, I receive a text from Raj, the dean of students, welcoming me and saying he is picking me up at the airport. It's as if Raj is family. He gets me checked in. The next morning, I prepare, and my friend Veronica arrives via train for moral support. We spend the afternoon at Olga Cup + Saucer, a near Platonic ideal of brunch spot.

John Maeda, the president, hosts us all for dinner.

John is in the background, student government leaders up front:

Veronica to my right:

We head to the auditorium to prepare for the talk:

John's picture of me talking to a slide of a Backstreet Boys concert:

Talking to a student afterwards:

Veronica with Jason, head of the grad student union:

Sarah Ganz Blythe, my collaborator at the RISD Museum (where she is director of education), with Veronica. They worked together at MoMA:

Thanks to Veronica, I dismissed teams to the museum not just by color-coded pedal of the bicycle drawings, but by teams named for the pets of famous artists. Veronica emailed one day to say this might be funny, giving as an example Picasso's dachshund named Lump. I agreed but told her I'd topped out my Google research skills. Without telling me, she caucused in the art historical community where, amazingly, people know these sorts of things. Frida Kahlo? Spider monkey named Fulang Cheng. Caravaggio? Black poodle named Cornacchio. Baldessari? Dog named Giotto. Even Sarah Ganz Blythe added Bonnard's dog: Pouce. There were about ten in all. And once you know, you start to see the animals in the artists' work. Another Bonnard of a woman submerged in a bathtub? There's a dog on the bathmat. Or, want to find Frida Kahlo with a spider monkey? Turns out there's a self portrait with about five of them. . . .

I didn't have a feel for how the talk had gone because I didn't do a Q&A to try to stay on schedule. However, I can't say how moved I was to see so many people drawing in the museum. People were sitting all over the floor, in groups and in moments of solitude, just drawing. Fantastic.

I tried to balance leaving people alone to draw (since I figured I had temporary authority figure status) and wanting to talk to them. This is Arthur:

Here I am listening to someone tell the story of the Barnes Collection, which is fantastic, in his own words:

This is a furniture designer Raj was recruiting to make something:

An interesting piece in the RISD collection, a pregnancy dress:

Raj, the man himself:

The assignment was to draw an artwork as if it were a portrait of a person. They drew on postcards left on the floor Felix Gonzalez-Torres style.

They were asked to write on the postcard the nicest thing anyone had ever said to them about their art, or what they wished someone would say. Then they addressed their card to a student box number. When people arrived they listed their own number, anonymously, and when they left they crossed out another one that they used:

As it turned out, there were students who left box numbers but didn't leave cards. I told Sarah I'd cover the difference. This turned out to be about fifty postcards. Back at the VSC residency, I asked for help, which I got from fellow writers and artists. I still ended up in postcard production the next week.

But before that (and after fun late night drinks with Raj, Veronica, and Sarah), I flew on to Philadelphia to talk to a group of museum directors.

The Penn Urban Institute had convened a few museum directors and their senior staff to talk about art museums as urban anchors. Above, the directors speak on a public program the night before at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They represent Dallas (Bonnie Pitman), Philadelphia (Timothy Rub), Atlanta (Michael Shapiro), and Chicago (James Cuno).

At the end of the conference, I hung out with the staff of the Urban Institute, and my fellow speaker, Matt (front left):

Here I am with the lovely Amy Montgomery who invited me (and whom I have managed to dress exactly like):

On the way back to the hotel, I drove past the scaffolding for the new Barnes Collection. Somehow, I had thought it was still up in the air whether it would move. This looks pretty certain:

After legging it around various airports, there by the grace of the airport mechanic staff, never once stranded or even really late, I arrived back in Vermont, a state that looks beautiful and calming immediately, even from the airport parking deck:

Despite the tranquil view from my writing studio

It takes me at least a full day to fall back into the envelope of the place and under the surface of work. Here's a meal with lovely Cynthia Colebrook, fellow writer:

She is a funny and authentic writer of a memoir about going to live full-time on a boat with her husband, Teddy, who paints compelling domestic interiors -- of homes and even art museums.

* * *

Some odds and ends from the end of summer, the other compression of clearing the decks to go write:

We had twenty summer interns, about half of whom were British. on the last day, we walked by the site of the mosque near ground zero en route to final dinner. Here is Roland Scarlett soaking up the experience:

Rory with Roland, Peter, and Sid in front of the Stock Exchange:

The crew posing in front of a video camera billboard (it is filming me taking the picture in the far background):

Other Peter and Sid:

Me with Sarah and Isabel:

The whole crew in front of the office:

A subset I took to see Veronica's Lee Bontecou show at MoMA:

Isabel and Peter at MoMA:

Our final outing with the British interns (the American universities started back a week early) was a Backstreet Boys concert. This slide made it into my RISD talk, after Isabel dragged us all from the back (where this picture was taken) up into the fray, a reminder of the importance of participating and being game:

After the concert -- note Isabel's t-shirt:

I left at nearly the same time as the interns, an intense period of packing up the place where I was staying. I cut through Williamstown to and from Vermont Studio Center and saw my old friend Jen -- here with her daughter Mads in the house they are building:

Here's Mads with Jen and Tom:

One of the first things you see at the writing studio at Vermont Studio Center is this sign explaining the studio name. If you are a writer who has ever worked as a copy editor, the first thing that jumps out is "independantly":

It turns out they knew the sign was wrong but hadn't had a chance to fix it. This called to mind Bruce's exclamation in art school, "This is a place where you can fail!" Except that failure has more artistic purpose at the point you don't yet know whether you are failing.

I fixed the sign.

At the Providence airport, they sell chocolate syrup. In reading to see if it was a local product or otherwise understand the logic for why it was there, I noticed it is made by a company called Autocrat Inc.

On the way to the airport, it turned out the cab driver had just received his US citiizenship a half hour before he picked me up. He showed me the certificate, and I was elated. I took his picture and emailed it to him. I'd post it here, but it contains the certificate and probably some social security kind of number if you blew it up. It was a happy moment.

Postscript: This painting is in the main gallery of the Rhode Island School of Design. No one could decide if she was dying or trying to seduce someone. Thoughts?

Pig Roast - Out of Sequence

2010-11-28T15:13:00.000-08:00

The annual pig roast is out of space and time, in its own way, so less a problem it's out of sequence on this blog. What normally happens in June happened this year in August, the Peter Ireland Invitational Pig Roast in Vermont. The beautiful field above is the tent city next to the farmhouse home, view from the hayloft where I always end up.

Although there is occasional coming and going from the main house, mostly it's by people with young children. This year, amazingly, this outdoor kitchen got built:

In its entirety, out of scrap appliances and sinks and things, plus the whole wood structure:

The first morning, I heard about the Marina Abromavich piece at MoMA from one of the performers (below). Although all of them were on an ayurvedic diet, he said he developed a habit early on of stopping for donuts on the way there, to fortify himself for the long, strenuous days of performance. What I took away: donuts = good performance art.

Here are Judd, Pete, and Becky, also listening to story of performance art, over more than outstanding zucchini chocolate chip loaf.

Jorge, resting his head:

The style factor and adorableness factor for small children, huge. For instance:

Wardrobe level for adults, note the suit:

Seems a bit macabre, and also glorious, the pig. Every year, the roasting technology changes and (to my untrained eye) improves. This year, the cinderblock pit:

A view of the covered porch where the DJ magic and food buffet are:

Nathan and Judd:

With the lovely Deedee and her son Henry (I am nearly certain). I hadn't seen Deedee probably since college, so this was a super exciting run-in:

Darby and Galen, outfitted for pig in a shark tee:

Galen's mom, Juliette, with Nathan and Darby (outfitted for pig in a pig tee):

I didn't remember a camera battery, so my pictures are slim, apart from the long film of grass Galen took. The arrival of the pig in the early afternoon Saturday was followed by the traditional you-must-carry-a-beer-while-running-bases game of kickball -- this includes a pink princess kickball itself, a few international guests getting up to speed on the rules, and a miraculously uncharacteristic catch by me in the outfield (where a large bottle of bourbon also seemed to circulate). At once point, mutinous wuffle-ball players tried to steal the keg, but kickball triumphed, at least temporarily.

One of the great things about the pig roast from a culinary standpoint is that it is also home to amazing: spring rolls, homemade falafel, and vast crates of the best arugula I have ever tasted (thanks to Chris Kurth, an organic farmer, who brought some of his own).

I drove back to New York with Darby and Juliette, solid play time with Galen. . . .

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

2010-09-19T12:59:00.000-07:00

The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski is in residence at writing camp (aka the Vermont Studio Center). He is funny and erudite at the place those two converge. We are all here for a few more days.

Here is his poem that was printed on the back page of the New Yorker the first week after 9/11:

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

---

If you want to get a book of his poems, Without End is the title of the 'new and collected' volume.

Italia

2010-08-23T21:50:00.000-07:00

This blog entry is in honor of Candy, fellow traveler, who had read the blog beforehand and handily teased me about blogging the whole trip in grave detail, giving emphasis to all jokes that could be taken out of context.

I rarely post on this blog something that is just a personal trip, but I also rarely go on personal trips. It occurred to me that I travel a lot but very rarely go on vacation. So, in the spirit of sharing the sorbet course of the Museum Legs year, here is Capri:

And less of a bird's-eye view:

In summer kitchen still life:

And environs:

The great thing about traveling is that it starts at the airport. There you are in an unglamorous, interminable line at JFK and you look over and think, I defy you to find an American who owns those trousers. (Note cinching behind the knees and asymmetric stitching.) That man is European. Already. Even before security.

And then on the other side of security--and the Atlantic Ocean--everything looks so interesting and different. The train station in Rome:

The countryside between Rome and Naples on the train ride down:

I happened not to sleep at all on the plane, on account of sitting next to someone who was chatty, and interesting, and the fact that on an Airbus A-300 the flight attendant call button is in the armrest--easily hit by accident with your leg--and was short-circuiting anyway. The call button went off at irregular intervals about every 10-20 second. It was like alarm clock meets Chinese water torture. Absolutely impossible to sleep. (In desperation on the way back from the lavatories, I reached up and turned off the call button of a man who was sleeping. Then the woman sitting next to him, trapped by the window, said she was in fact waiting for someone to bring her water and asked me to do it -- in that way older women somehow ask where no is not an option.)

I was a bit the worse for wear getting into Naples and adopted the strategy of staying constantly in motion. By the way, if you ever want to buy knock-off designer bags or sunglasses, they are better on the streets of Naples than anywhere I have seen. The guidebook said only half of the stuff that comes into the ports of Naples clears customs. By extension, I imagined the bags looked so good because occasional real ones were mixed in. A weird variation on lottery tickets.

Not to say Naples was without the fantastically tacky:

Nice use of Latin.

My first stop was da Michele pizzeria, which I suspected was the Eat, Pray, Love one, and which I can now report (having returned to New York and seen the film) was at the least the location site for the pizzeria in the film. It was a charmingly spare, vaulted room with a level of learned precision and execution you'd more normally see in a surgery suite. I took pictures over people taking pictures, and took one with this charming proprietor,

and of the pizza man, a man with a big spatula,

before taking my pizza to go and eating on the steps of the Duomo.

Stop number one on the 'staying in motion plan' was a Carravaggio, which looked surprising in its natural setting. (I forget how "decontextualizing" museums are, to borrow a word from my friend Isabel.):

Then I set out to find the modern / contemporary art museum, known for having an actually pretty great collection, and a set of murals by Naples native Francesco Clemente. Here is a replication of my process of finding the museum. (1) Hmmm, is that the museum building? It's somewhere around here on the map. . .

(2) Well, the windows look pretty pristine, sort of like they have a scrim around them. This could be a modern art museum. . . .

(3) I think that's the street number, let me check. Rounding the corner. . . .

(4) Oh. Wow. It's definitely a contemporary art museum.

In case one were going to forget this while in the common spaces, the stairwell, for instance:

Those are pieces of paper above the pole on the right.

I went to look at the art and fell asleep on a bench in front of the paintings, waking myself with a snort and a start:

(These are details of much larger works)

Then there was this room of sofas, I think with television monitors:

And an appealing sea of fabrics:

And then I learned I wasn't supposed to take pictures.

It's hard to walk around in Naples and not want to photograph all the narrow passages between buildings, all different and all the same:

On the walk back to the train station, a parting shot of Naples, Madonna of the Fanta:

I met the crew at the ferry and we headed over to the island. Saying that Capri is idyllic is like saying the Vatican is religious.

The ferry ride in rough seas was a little less ideal. While I was off to try not to be sick -- banging my head on a pole as I made a swift exit as the sea swelled -- two or three other members of our group were sick too. An auspicious start of sleep deprivation and lost luggage and disagreeable inner ears. These are the little things that remind you it is not all just a dream as you are whisked away in one of these open air taxis. A shop called Exciting Linen sponsors them:

I love this phrase out of context. I even thought it could be a great girl band name. Candy hinted a few days later that the connotations might not work so well there.

We spent a week in Anacapri in a lovely state of reading, eating, basking in sun, planning lunch, planning dinner while still eating lunch, and--for the jetlagged among us--being offered a glass of wine fairly shortly after waking up those first couple of days. The town square in Capri is called the best drawing room in the world. There was some champion people watching. And here I am with Poppy, lovely daughter of a couple on the trip:

An Italian bride has to dodge a bus on a narrow road out of town:

Here she is again:

We went to Amalfi from Capri:

Where I was reminded of a little known Sol LeWitt book called Sunrise and Sunset at Praiano, in which he simply photographed the sunrise and sunset each day for a period. The book reads like an arrangement of color. I can see how he got the idea.

I took an early morning car to Naples, driven by a lovely Italian man whose cell phone rang incongruously to a Celine Dion track. I took an early train to Rome. It was August in Rome. The abundance of tourists made everything feel like being inside a Thomas Struth photograph. At the Pantheon:

Which, in fairness, was no less majestic for the crowds. You can take a picture like this just casually turning your camera to the ceiling:

A man outside reading and snoozing in his chariot:

The accidental Fiat 500:

And, although I didn't photograph it, I sat in on mass at St Peter's. When everyone got up to get communion, it made me cry, the throngs of regular everyday people of all walks of life making an individual effort that then looks collective. At any rate, I was moved by it.

RISD, Keeseh, Raj

2010-08-23T20:20:00.000-07:00

I spent a day in Providence to talk about the courses I will teach there this spring and to meet entrepreneurs with Raj Bellani, the associate provost for student affairs. On the first, I will be teaching economics -- both as a studio art course and as a graduate seminar. If I described things in grander terms, I would say I am founding a field of creative economics. I love that one of the economics courses is drawing based. On the second, Raj has spearheaded a big orientation for new students. I expressed interest in getting to know Providence better (so I wasn't welcoming new students in the manner of Spinal Tap -- "Hello, Cleveland!"). It turns out, Raj is an amazing tour guide, not to mention astonishing PR, and kind and fun. He gave me the grand tour. Here's Raj in the woodworking studios we visited (more later).

He and Mara, a special projects person in the president's office, picked me up off the train and we went straight to Betaspring, an incubator, for an open house.

When we returned to BetaSpring the next day, I met the founders and spent a long time talking to the entrepreneurs behind a company called ManPants:

Skipping immediately into entrepreneurial case study: ManPants is a venture that turns a staple like underwear into a perishable good. The premise is that men don't buy new pants often enough. So, you sign up, they mail you new pants about once a month, on a schedule that replaces your drawers every two years. They have hundreds of these stickers (I now have about thirty). We joked that you could know to renew your underwear when the sticker got this worn.

The larger conversation was pretty hilarious in the application of "business principles" and "design thinking" to the problem, e.g., whether you could stamp expiration dates on pants or do something like that blue section of an Oral B toothbrush that "lets you know" when it's time for a new pair -- or use different colors of thread to stitch the pants, or have different labels every year. Here are the men of ManPants (minus their colleague):

I met some other teams, including this one with a new job board idea:

It's a proper incubator, including requisite storage room of bikes, gear, and incubator-looking detritus:

Betaspring is housed by RI-CIE ("ricey") -- the Rhode Island Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, a very interesting organization in its own. Raj and I spent time with the director. In general, Rhode Island was the first industrialized state in the union. It then had a fantastic art and design school grow out of that. And now it's a hotbed of genuinely interesting industrial life again.

The next day, I spent the morning in academic and adminstrative meetings about the courses I will teach. After lunch, Raj very kindly took time to show me around. Here's a sense of what a gorgeous day it was:

Our first stop was Keeseh, a woodworking studio run on a gym membership model where people can use machinery and space on a similar basis. The founder is RISD alum Asher Dunn.

Asher has the greatest energy and is infectiously nice to be around, even when he is telling you please not to photograph their prototypes.

I love being in working environments run by artists. You get this order to detritus. Asher said they swapped shopping carts with a homeless man who asked because he wanted a metal rather than plastic one.

Asher, good energy in evidence:

I've caught him and Raj at the high arc of their laugh, which gives it a devilish air. They were really, really fun:

Asher's team:

More of these "office still lifes" brought on by the artist influence:

The setting was really beautiful in this low key, industrial, good-bones, factor sort of way. Providence's aesthetic agrees with me:

We then went by this new office complex made out of repurposed railroad cars:

I'm fuzzy in recall, but I think the guy let his girlfriend choose the paint colors:

The courtyard:

A bit of a "before" picture of the construction still underway:

Pictures from ducking into the RISD library, a remarkably cool space, off the charts in modern intervention hits gilded good-bones space:

As a postscript, here are pictures of the bar that was also part of the Raj tour. Mara, Raj and I stopped in long enough to see it, but took a raincheck on a drink. These are all wood carvings:

Hello, ~~Cleveland!~~ Providence!

Art and Sport -- Caroline's studio, Alice Austen, Charles Burchfield, World Cup Fever

2010-08-17T10:47:00.000-07:00

This is a library.

Behind a box if kitty litter.

At this scale, and full of books.

It is in one of the studios in a building run -- collectively organized -- by Caroline Woolard, a founder of Trade School (left):

I went to see Caroline in Bushwick on the L train, to see what the space was like, to have lunch and understand the business management side of their running the space.

It's a beautiful building, sturdy with good bones, industrial history, and quiet workaday elegance.

And, de rigueur, steep steps with a bicycle.

Everyone who takes a studio space has to find their own doors. The solutions are infinite and kind of captivating.

Our first stop was Caroline's space. She has incredible material resourcefulness, always building things she needs. A few of the many examples:

A filing system (those poles slide and the folders are fabric):

A storage platform (sections of the planks lift up like trap doors):

A different filing and storage system:

A hugely admire Caroline as someone with both a creative instinct and a tendency to simply do things. I would call her an Action Nerd. A thinker but a doer. She and friends managed to take on the commercial lease of the building and were figuring out real economic questions like how or whether to get paid -- against ethical standards of masterpiece proportion -- when they spend a lot of time, struggle to make ends meet, take on a lot of risk and responsibility, and still charge themselves rent.

We had this discussion over homemade quiche in the kitchen, then, having lost track of time, I had to take a car service clear across Brooklyn to meet Mark of the Egg at his Dumbo office.

The tour of the studio also included. . . the jumbly:

And the spare:

Interesting items, items everywhere. From the person who worked with nature:

To the studiomate who worked abstractly with electrical wiring:

To the body caster and sculptor:

To that art studio standard, the storage of goods/incidentals in a way that takes on a narrative quality:

World Cup Sunday, I took a group of Museum Legs interested people on a fieldtrip to the Whitney Museum. The genesis was an email from a guy I'd never met called Jonathan Ellis who read Museum Legs and got in touch. He is, incidentally, a top hire for any museum finance department needing new staff. If memory serves, he is in law school, has a finance background, and also an art history major. He's also a really nice guy. Amee, my good friend, then put me in touch with a colleague of hers, Frank, who is devoted to the arts and spends much of his spare time going to museums. We all -- plus Amee's husband Michael and visiting old friend -- set out to see the Charles Burchfield at the Whitney. Here's the group after lunch at the end:

And at the beginning. . .

I had wanted to see the Charles Burchfield, recommended by Mark of the Egg (whom I seem to keep mentioning but, in fairness, with whom I also have a regular ongoing conversation about museums on account of our work). Mark had seen the show where it originated at the Hammer in LA. What's most unusual about it is that the artist Robert Gober (of the wax leg sticking out of the wall in Museum Legs, The Insulated Judiciary chapter) curated it and wrote all the wall labels. Being an artist himself, he wrote the labels with fantastic restraint about explicating the work. Gober shows instead of telling. He lets the painter speak for himself, mostly by quoting Burchfield's diary. Burchfield was an honest scribe of really dark inner thoughts, which add immensely to looking at landscapes that are, in some cases, Liberace meets Bob Ross.

I am a fan of the work, sometimes for reasons I don't even understand myself. And the catalog was so good I almost bought one. Example: Dave Hickey saying Burchfield's work is the kind of thing best encountered by accident in someone's home, like in the hallway on the way to the second bedroom or the bathroom.

We also visited the Christian Marclay show, a more participatory affair in which a vast gallery wall had been covered in blackboard paint and lined with musical score. Whatever notes people added in, the artist would play. There was a man in the gallery who was packing up after a performance whom I could only glean was Christian Marclay. We spoke for a while and then our group adjourned for lunch at Via Quadronno, an experience of being in Italy on the Upper East Side.

After lunch, half the group went across the park to watch the World Cup Finals, something we wouldn't have missed for the Whitney. Art never trumps sport to that extent -- even for me -- and we had moved our museum date early to make that work. In the end, I watched the game in a restaurant that had stopped serving at 4. The entire staff of the kitchen, mostly Hispanic, had come out to watch. I had started the match cheering for the Dutch, but then when they started playing really dirty, it was pretty hard not to cheer for Spain. Especially with all the guys from the kitchen behind me. I got to share their happiness and pride when Spain won, and to ask them to translate when the Spanish player who scored the winning goal stripped off his shirt to reveal a vest with a written message. (It was a tribute to a teammate who had died of exertion suddenly the year before.)

From there, it was back from sport to art as I raced for the Staten Island Ferry to make it to an art opening. Here is the ferry captain's team allegiance on view (a picture I endured yelling to take since it meant stopping even for a split second in the middle of a throng of people advancing onto a boat as if a wave ourselves). It's that orange jersey behind the flagpole:

I never tire of this view:

The show was at the Alice Austen House, known to taxi drivers on Staten Island as "Alice House." It is celebrated as the home of Alice Austen who was a photographer, among other things, and more generally a polymathic Victorian woman who left the house and had a creative life.

Above is what the inside of the house looked like with the art up, below the outside:

More aptly, the originating aesthetic of the place, shown in the foyer:

The house overall:

And its flourishes in the details -- e.g., this birdhouse:

And vignettes:

There were vistas too. Many people there were professional photographers. There was a lot for the taking, with this kind of light, except I (and many others) didn't have the cameras on hand to capture it. You can imagine the shot you could have gotten with more zoom and an ability to foreground that red boat but still make it look at sea (and in front of a towering skyline).

And you can imagine the portraiture available here, with that kind of light on people's faces, again, given a better lens (or walking legs and sense of social adventure).

Indisputably, there was also Tonto the pug to appreciate, a lot easier to photograph.

And Michel and I played a long and hilarious game of badminton with two twenty-five year old actors recently relocated to New York City, with that kind of energy of youth and possibility and dreams. I think they had no idea our age. One of them in particular had such comedic body control that whenever he served he would make himself into the lithe yet formal caricature of a badminton player out of the 1920s, and it always made me laugh in a way I think was part of his competitive strategy.

Here Michel and Mike Ducklow (photographer), fellow Memphians, are on the ferry back. The badminton team:

And the very mundane yet wonderful view of people looking at the Statue of Liberty:

My next art outing was the Matisse opening with Veronica at MoMA. It was one of Veronica's last weeks at work, and the invitation came out of an offer on my part to help her pack up boxes. The show itself was surprisingly cool -- some Matisse paintings like a bowl of apples on a table that I had never seen. I also hadn't known Matisse was such a gifted traditional painter. MoMA, to its credit, had figured out how to xray the central painting of the show to create an animation of how it was painted, as if you were walking into Matisse's studio periodically over the life of the painting's creation.

At the reception, I got to be a fly on the wall as people told Veronica how much she would be missed. I was incredibly touched on her behalf, especially as some of the art handlers told her, rather matter-of-factly and without pretense, how much she had the respect of people in the institution who made art themselves, many of whom had worked there long enough to cut their teeth on the job alongside curatorial greats like Kirk Varnedoe. V with one well wisher:

And leaving through the garden as the party cleared the other direction:

V with colleagues in their offices:

Many books packed and carted down, we got through just before the doors were closed by a guard who looked too young to have worked there about twenty years.

Birthday

2010-08-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

A few years ago when I spent a summer living in Williamstown, I made a birthday cake that became known as 'cake in a bowl.' I had baked a Magnolia Bakery yellow cake and tried to stack the layers before the cake was fully cooled. Then I stacked them the wrong way -- flat over round. As my friend Becky arrived, I was bent over the cake holding the top layer with both hands, as if putting a ring around it, to stop the plate tectonics slide of splintered sections off the slick of warm icing below.

I had made a double-batch of icing. And I owned a large ceramic salad bowl. So we made the cake into a giant parfait, essentially submerged in icing in a bowl. Needless to say, it was delicious, if not awfully pretty. Becky is trained as a pastry chef, so this was a bit like asking a master builder to help you pitch a broken tent.

This year, the lovely Mo offered to help me bake a cake. Mo is Southern and moves around the kitchen like the modern version of my Southern grandmother, always in motion, never appearing to work, making stuff happen, then constantly tidying to make the work vanish and food appear. In the middle of this, Mo tasked me with greasing the pans. We used Crisco instead of butter and I didn't use a lot. Mo went to turn the pans over and out fell the middle of the cake. Then the chocolate glaze was coffee flavored and got transformed into a buttercream. (If you've ever tried to make a glaze into a buttercream, then you know that, four boxes of powdered sugar later, you have about a gallon of icing and the ire of dentists everywhere.)

We tried to fix the landslide erosion situation by applying a pancake-makeup quantity of icing and immediately putting the cake in the fridge to set before a section fell off. Mo's boyfriend Sean was the first other person who saw it, by which time some of the icing had started to droop giving the cake the jowly face of Jabba the Hut. Sean winced instinctively (and kindly couriered the cake to the party the next day). I love that cake the way you love an ugly baby. And it made me laugh. Here is Mo with it before it set in the fridge:

I spent my birthday more generally on the patio of the Maritime and at dinner at Cacio e Pepe, a lovely Italian in the East Village. (For example, when I told David that is where we were going, he said without joking that we had a 10% chance of running into his Roman friend Mario by chance, since it was one of Mario's favorites in the city.)

Summer birthdays are wonderful but many people are also out of town. I was so worried literally no one would come to afternoon drinks after the volume of regrets I received that I asked my sister to come hang out at the beginning, even though she had a conflict between then and dinner. Sweet Stacey brought beautiful sunflowers and, of course, herself.

Drinks started at 4 and at 4.05 Greg of Greg and Julie appeared. Julie appeared ten minutes later. I don't seem to have their picture. Also present were Carina and James. Carina is someone I have been trying to track down for about five years. She hired me into my first job as a MoMA intern. Then she became Rob Storr's assistant. Then I didn't know what happened. I even once asked Rob Storr after a panel -- weirdly in line to speak to him between two collectors -- if he had her email address. There must have been a limitation to my research because it turns out she is first.last@google. She wrote me on facebook out of the blue and I was ecstatic.

Carina had been very involved in negotiations last time MoMA curators went on strike. Rumors she had become a lawyer or started making baby clothes--both in circulation--proved untrue. She had been working in the arts outside of New York. Here she is with her husband James, an artist:

David appeared toward the end and walked over with me to dinner in the east village. Cacio e Pepe were lovely hosts and even shaved down the stems of the sunflowers so they would fit in carafes as vases:

Here are some pictures from dinner, courtesy of Stacey. From the left, Bader, me, Mo, Sean:

Amee and Michael, who have since become new parents of Max:

Michael and me:

Amee and me. . .

The sorellas, sunflowers in evidence:

Stacey's lovely husband Paul:

The whole group, including down the left side Mackinnon, Veronica, David, Paul, Adrian:

Cacio e Pepe is named for this dish, spaghetti served in the rind of the cheese with lots of nearly whole black peppercorns:

Amee being served:

And then it was time for dessert. . . and the cake. I hesitate to put a series of pictures of myself on my own blog, but take this as a snapshot film of how much pleasure I got out of the cake:

And, brace yourself for it, the cake itself:

Finally, as transformed by the loving Cacio e Pepe staff:

It was, needless to say, absolutely delicious. The co-chefs:

I later showed Mark of the Egg project the original photo of the cake as it first set into its Jabba face in the fridge. His immediate response, "That looks like meat."

Museum Legs Events in June

2010-08-17T08:09:00.000-07:00

The lovely Andie Sehl hosted a Museum Legs party in her home. I completely forgot how knowledgeable New Yorkers are about museums. Andie happens to live a stone's throw from the Museum of Natural History. I spoke briefly and then the first question was only answerable if you had read a particular article in the New York Times two days prior -- which miraculously I had. Overall, it was the most spirited and informed Q&A on the Museum Legs record. Sometimes I participated and sometimes I watched. Someone clearly knew line items of the New York Historical Society budget. These institutions were their neighbors over decades. Everyone had well seasoned opinions and insights.

It was also a collection of Andie's old friends, and so there was a lot of love in the room, and really good fun. We were under the umbrella of Andie's demonstrable hospitality:

Here's Andie, left, with her longtime neighbor and friend, Sydney:

I was lucky to have a second Museum Legs event of the month, speaking to the assembled students of the Smith College Summer Institute in Museum Studies on their fieldtrip to New York. The event took place at the Kress Institute on the Upper East Side. Here are their fearless leaders, Katy Kline and Marion Goethals:

I had come straight from the office on a day I had also experimented with wearing a new Uniqlo dress which, it turns out, has a really short hemline. Here I am, sweater over lap for the panel. I also seem to be very busy eating a sandwich:

The purpose of the talk was to educate students on paths in graduate study and career placement in the arts and museums. The other speakers, apart from one conservator, were actual representatives of institutions of higher learning. It went from 'here are the many programs of Sotheby's,' to 'here are the many programs of Bard,' to 'here I am to tell you about the wholly unaccredited program of a little bit of everything in a non-linear path.' I tend to be a very private person, but the Q&A included some personal and financial questions one feels compelled to give an honest answer to, since a lot of people suffer lack of information and conversation, particularly around taking out debt for school.

I had happened to know Marion Goethals slightly from her job as a deputy head of the Williams College Art Museum and my illustrious and brief early career as a relief receptionist for someone on maternity leave there. But I was invited by Katy Kline, mother of my friend Ethan, and former director of Bowdoin and MIT museums. Katy is also someone to whom I am forever indebted not just for her thoughtful responses and offers of conversation as a reader of Museum Legs, but for spotting what I hope are the last two typos in the book, literally the last day before it went fully to press.

Ethan jokes that art historians overuse the word "juxtapose." So we were given the assignment to document out meet-up using this word as a theme:

Ethan is also coiner of my all-time favorite line about art. If you don't like something, you simply say, "I don't have any affinity with that work."

It's shocking how often that sentence comes in handy. And how often you find no word buy "juxtapose" will do.

Christening, Orientation, Orientation Redux

2010-08-17T07:33:00.000-07:00

Nephew Jack was christened in June in Fairfield. Here's the nuclear family:

And the other nuclear family:

Jeff's best childhood friend Hugh (of the May wedding) was up as godfather:

I never tire of seeing men in seersucker, as coordinated here (Lisa in the background):

Paul's tie, though it looks modern, belonged to his grandfather Bus. (Uncannily, we also had a grandfather Bus.)

After the service, we adjourned to Jeff and Alexi's for much food -- and a surprise birthday celebration for both me and cousin Anna. Anna is one of those fearless kids who suddenly becomes shy when the spotlight turns on her. Here, she's doing her best Cousin It impression:

Alexi and her mother, Bilha:

Jack has changed into casualwear and is clearly busy eating:

Family occasion two was meeting the family of old college friend David. I've known him for 15 years and he and his brother organized a brunch so we could all meet his parents. Somewhere between his father being a particle physicist and his mother recommending really interesting Buddhist books, I got a sense of where David's analytics and fatalism come from.

The office was still in full swing of start-up mode. Here, colleague David assembles Ikea filing drawers in our new space, after spearheading a massive office furnishing push before intern arrival:

Rory welcomed two classes of interns, a start date corresponding to American and British term schedules. Here he is leading off orientation one:

A classic moment, rarely caught on film, the double high-five:

The setting was the pretty spectacular new tower overlooking Bryant Park. Being walked to the meeting by a receptionist, I asked her if she ever got used to the views. She said she was actually afraid of heights.

Orientation 2 happened a couple of weeks later. Not only were we greeting students from British universities, Rory literally went straight off a long haul flight and into this presentation:

This is the summer team now completed. The offices are furnished, and we are off and running for this chapter.

The Egg project continues, with our weekly meetings in Dumbo offices, the loud trains, delicious Almandine cookies, and occasional vistas:

Early Summer

2010-08-16T19:06:00.000-07:00

Early summer was full of friend visits, art openings, a field trip, work deadlines, and everyday life. This figurine is from the Dreamaway Lodge, of which more soon.

Ethan and Sally were in town from London Memorial Day weekend for a wedding, which was hugely exciting. In New York fashion, many of their friends were free for exactly an hour here or there. I am a writer so I blocked out a whole day. We spent an unstructured Monday afternoon having lunch and wandering up through the West Village. Ethan sports a t-shirt from an annual breakdancing festival in London that really is one of the more amazing things I've seen.

Mysteriously to me, I was invited to the closing party of the Judd Foundation house in Soho, the artist's once home and the last single use building in Soho. The structure itself is remarkable -- the surface area is something like 55% windows. And the party was great: a letterpress invitation announcing: vodka, beef, and Mississippi mud cake. All of this was true. I took Mark, partner in crime (and head honcho) on the Eggleston museum project. Her he is with a friend, Fairfax, in from Marfa for the occasion.

Where we happened to be when the reception stopped to let the remarks begin, Mark and I were inadvertently flanking Rainer Judd, one of the artist's children, as she stood on a wooden bench in an elegant floor-length black jersey gown to read prepared remarks. Mark and I stood by, feeling the oscillating fan, sipping dangerously deep thimble glasses of vodka. Rainer said the kinds of things you can only say if you grew up in Soho, the child of an artist like Judd: We'd like to thank our friend Giorgio down the street who made all this amazing food. That's Giorgio Deluca -- as in founder of Dean and Deluca. . .

We toured upstairs -- no photography permitted. To opine: no doors anywhere, including bedrooms and bathrooms, and the kind of beds you would have if you wanted to discourage house guests: literally wooden platforms with rugs. In Judd's lifetime, the house was incredibly full of life, raucous dinner parties, much conversation, an industrial scale kitchen, all of Judd's minimalist furnishings the ultimate neutral backdrop for the human drama. Now though the background is the foreground as it enters a museum context, something I have mixed feelings about despite the obvious best intentions of preserving the place. It seems impossible to preserve a space that was also about it's being a container for people. The one place in the house that is mesmerizing is the top floor bedroom -- a red Dan Flavin goes down one whole wall -- maybe thirty feet -- casting the most beautiful warm glow you can imagine on a John Chamberlain mash-up sculpture. I've never seen a Chamblerlain look like it was cast in sepia tones that way.

Downstairs, there are also early Dan Flavins where the artist's hand is still evident (as if a canvas dipped in colored encaustic, a corner whacked off with a colored round light bulb added). It's fun to see his process.

I can understand how some people will love the house as a museum, and I do, and they use it for other things like corporate away-days. But, for example, in the kitchen there was a single block of really good parmesan cheese -- basically a half wheel. That size food felt right in the space. And the achingly well design chairs seemed best with gangly or lithe or round people sitting in them, to go with the huge number of dinner plates still stacked on shelves and the half empty bottles of liquor that seem now incongruously untouched.

That same night, I went to a 'Room to Read' benefit, invited by former sublet roommate Angie and our common friend Veronica. We sat asocially on this couch the whole night and caught up. If you do this, people will try to take your wine glass often.

Veronica and Angie:

It was a week of art events as Mark of the Egg project invited me to a Bronx Museum benefit honoring Memphis art leader James Patterson. Here is Mark with Jenny Dixon, the director of the Noguchi Museum:

The event took place at the Trump Soho. What looks here like a conference room, or at least a party space, is in fact a bathroom in one of the hotel suites.

The artist Lawrence Weiner was honored at the event and gave beautiful remarks about his own early forays into being an artist and the central role the Bronx Museum played. He said he told his mother he wanted to be an artist and she said, "Larry, you'll break your heart. Being an artist is for rich people, and women."

A leisurely weekend followed that included meeting up with Veronica at the Anthropologie in the Chelsea Market. Exhausted, we lounged on that sofa women's clothing stores have for men. Much to the consternation of a few boyfriends, we stayed there a while trying on necklaces. Then we discovered the Maritime Hotel patio, where we ran into Greg and Julie:

Work followed, including late nights, one of which I joined here. This is part of a photo/video series we send to the programming team who've finished milestones:

An Eggleston fieldtrip took me to Williamstown, with Mark, to meet an esteemed architecture professor and Memphis native, and then to drive south through Berkshire County, stumbling on a monstrosity of stacked wood, worthy of pulling the car over, on the way to the Dreamaway Lodge. . .

Greg and Julie had first put me onto Dreamaway Lodge in that lazy post-Anthropologie stupor on the Maritime Hotel patio. I had mentioned a newfangled idea that all art museums need outdoor fireplaces (and bowling alleys. . .) and they'd said Dreamaway had a great one. And was a magical place. Sure enough, here is the bar of the Dreamaway:

Those colored squares are breaklights from a certain model of late 70s / early 80s car.

To really appreciate this bar, you have to understand that it is inside this house:

In this bucolic and unassuming landscape:

But full of accumulated knick knacks elevated by years of gradual layering and an almost de-facto-diorama sense of arrangement. Everywhere you look, a composition:

The strength of the compositions takes nothing away from the individual items. Here we have a book from the 'reading basket' Men Who Knit and the Dogs Who Love Them:

A basket of tambourines, for instance:

The porch somehow segues from the outside to the inside:

Mark with the founder Dan, who is an accomplished actor with an uncanny story about how he came across and knew he wanted to take over stewardship of Dreamaway:

Back in New York, I audited the Op-Ed Workshop again, and passed these Antony Gormley men coming and going.

Without going into specifics, I had a conversation at the happy hour afterwards that reminded me about cognitive frameworks, e.g., when something is a legal problem and when it is a creative one. If I had one wish, it would be for presentmindedness and manners and some quality of attention toward strangers. If I had two though, it would be for more mental elasticity on the part of people trying to solve real problems in the world, with great heart, but sometimes without nimbleness or flexibility or, in some cases, trust in the good heart of other people.

Thanks to the asynchronous wonders of forgetting to download pictures from my phone, here's a postscript of the Maine lighthouse, as seen from the parking lot of the lobster pound, circa the May workshop with Mo.

Fluxus and Friends with Art Shows: Queens College, Bontecou, Pneumatic Trash Systems

2010-05-30T13:53:00.000-07:00

In April, two friends curated shows for the first time, and I taught Business School for Artists in Maureen Connor's "social practice" class at Queens College. First, a preview of Veronica's show:

Maureen Connor is a former Fluxus artist who has taught at Queens College for years. She also has an interesting body of current work, one project in particular called Personnel (the fifth segment of which is called Casual Friday). I met Maureen because she learned about Trade School but couldn't go, and so asked if she could barter something for me to come speak to her class. She arranged a small honorarium and offered to videotape the lecture as an exchange. When I met her for my ride out to Queens and saw the video equipment she was lugging, I realized the likelihood that a former Fluxus artist is also an ace videographer. Here's Maureen:

Here's her class:

I gave the original "what do art and business have to do with each other?" lecture that kicked off Business School for Artists, and then did a round robin to hear about their own projects. Maureen had structured the class where a social agenda or idea would become each person's artwork. Then she explained to me that this is in fact a field of artistic practice called "Social Practice." Fair enough. I was impressed by how many people had full-time work outside of school, and the age range might have been twenty to sixty, and included people unafraid to give pushback (E.g., when we collectively realized the ways in which Porter's Five Forces does not suit social work. For instance, are your competitors the other people championing your cause, that is, your peers, or the people championing your adversary's cause, that is, the pollutors or whoever else keeps you from realizing your mission?) It was really fun, and seemed both energizing to them and to me to see them get tools they might use.

In a resurgence of museum-going post-Museum Legs--now that it's not a working holiday--I went to Friday at the Met with Billy. I almost successfully jumped high enough to photo Temple of Dendur event causing it to be closed:

And then we got a better angle, and earshot of the chanting, from the Japanese big wooden table room above.

As last men standing when the museum closed, we were officially part of the "guard sweep" of the hallways, raking all remaining visitors to the front doors. I can't say they were psyched to have their picture taken.

It was an exciting week of Friends with Art Shows. In this case, friends who are curators. 1. Veronica (Roberts) curated her first show, a collection of Lee Bontecou's work at MoMA. She was chosen as both a Critic's Pick in Time Out and a best upcoming exhibitions (presumably in the world) by Artnet.com. The night before the opening, she invited a group of us to a private walk through. It was as if there is a Newton's second law of equal and opposite reactions re the guards above, as we all walked in to the empty, closed galleries, unencumbered:

Here's the assembled group in the elevator (me behind the camera):

Veronica and me in the gallery:

The installation shot of everybody just sort of taking it all in, before V gave us a guided tour:

The gentlemen overlooking the garden:

Lee Bontecou (bon'-teh-cue) was one of the only women represented by Leo Castelli Gallery, alongside the big boys of Pop and Abstract Expressionist art in the 1960s. She then became reclusive. Several years ago, a curator discovered her in her rural studio in Pennsylvania, and was shocked to learn of ethereally beautiful sculptures she had been working on, uninterruptedly, over an eighteen year span. (As Veronica put it, anticipating her audience, a curator's wet dream.) This centerpiece of the exhibition is one such work:

And check out the shadow cast on the base.

I have to think Veronica's work lighting a Calder mobile show once (the early wire coat hanger mobiles) helped here. Here's Veronica giving us a talk on the work -- the usual combination of passion and good humor and easy erudition, to say nothing of the speaking presence and charm and ability to project that makes her a popular lecturer in the octogenerian set.

I was wishing I could recall everything Veronica said.

The second show was Juliette (Spertus)'s "Fast Trash" on the pneumatic trash collection system on Roosevelt Island, where I had never been. The buildings near the F train (an astonishingly short 90-second ride from the office, which seems a world a way) are modern, but with a wall of appealing green on the Manhattan side.

Here is the inside of the gallery( Juliette in the middle, back toward the camera) watching a video Greg Whitmore made. The clear tube snaking around the wall is a pneumatic demo, more on that in a second.

In all seriousness, it's possible some of these people are very senior in the Department of Sanitation.

Here's Emma, juliette's sister with her boyfriend Mark who had named her "the motherfurker" on account of a particularly involved Tofurkey at Thanksgiving a couple of years ago. They were in from California for the occasion. Emma's an artist (and also click here for her blog).

Small children were enthralled by the pneumatic tube (think ATM teller at the drive-thru) that went around the gallery:

It was pretty great, with an uncanny, swooshing uptake noise and roller coaster trajectory. Some general installation shots:

Darby and Galen, husband and son of the curator, with Jerusha:

Gallery visitors, including a radio host and Roosevelt Island resident and friend:

Jerusha with Lindy:

I had to leave early to go to a Cowboy Junkies concert I had long promised Adrian I would see. I was stand-in since his wife Bader was traveling. (I think he unabashedly jokes, "fake wife.") How much did I appreciate the signage at the venue, the Society for Ethical Culture:

I had no idea and was cheered to learn that the Cowboy Junkies are a family band -- two brothers, one sister -- and a Canadian family band at that.

On the way there, I didn't appeciate so much, but found remarkably striking, that Whole Foods started offering plastic cutlery, wrapped in plastic.

Does that seem tone deaf re their mission? I can't tell if this is one more sign people have generally stopped noticing things. How else would it be possible at the Brooklyn Half Marathon weeks later for so many eleven-minute milers in headphones to hang out in the frontrunner lane, after a race official had cleared traffic for the front runner starting to lap people? Do you not notice you are being passed by someone running twice as fast as you? Over and over again, sometimes by groups at a time?

Noticing often repays effort, as in the Antony Gormley installation "Event Horizon" at Madison Square Park, men on buildings:

Apparently enough people did notice the men to call 911 about building jumpers. Here is what they look like closer up:

I visited the men this time en route to an Op-Ed Project refresher. I heartily recommend!

Postscript, Op-Ed Happy Hour:

And picture from after the Brooklyn Half Marathon, Christine and Adrian at Steve's Key Lime Pies in Red Hook:

The Memphis Wedding in May, the Yale Event in New York, and Girls' Dinner

2010-05-30T10:55:00.000-07:00

When my mother was in New York at Christmastime, we made an express visit to this lobby (below) to photograph (endlessly) this Jeff Koons balloon dog, so imagine my surprise when my Yale School of Management Museum Legs talk was scheduled to take place in the same building.

As part of the school's "Salon Series," I was invited by Jorge Maldonado (of the alumni board) and Jeanne Hayes (head of alumni relations) to give a talk on creativity, art, and public institutions. Here are my kind hosts:

A few less than exciting, but still scene-setting photographs I took:

Jorge is a consummate host of the, "of course you're having wine before talking, but would you prefer red or white?" variety. The first two guests to arrive where this charming couple, she an alum and he an art-interested trustee of the Norman Rockwell Museum. They were extremely funny and had just returned from a scuba trip.

The room filled up, and we ended up with a good crowd whose work lives spanned Davos, the Bronx Zoo, green venture capital, education reform, and--thanks to my colleague who came--my own outside-of-writing work.

Here's Dean, Bader, and Andie, with big thanks to Andie, also of the alumni board, who introduced me to Jorge and Jeanne to make the program happen:

I joined in, somehow blurring the photo:

Afterwards, we went for burgers at P.J. Clarke's, from left: Dean, Andie, Billy, Christine, Adrian, me:

The next morning, I left for a family wedding in Memphis, joining brother Jeff, Alexi, and Jack on his first airplane trip:

Fortunately Jack finds extreme turbulence fun, so when I looked to my brother, a seasoned flyer and airplane expert, to gauge any panic (as people often look to the flight attendant but I couldn't see her), Jeff was looking nonchalant, as he might have anyway, and also downright happy.

I enjoy that I keep calling it a family wedding because technically it's not. Hugh, my brother's oldest friend, and his family are like family though. The Friday was my sister Stacey's birthday. She and Paul had gone to Jazzfest the weekend before in New Orleans and road tripped, via bourbon distilleries and the like, to Memphis. Here they are with Stacey's birthday cake, an inspired recommendation from Mark of the Memphis museum project -- Sugarees caramel cake:

A crack-like proper, original, Southern caramel cake: (www.sugarees.com)

After the cake interlude, we went to Beauty Show, a restaurant and bar where I could probably have ordered everything or anything on the menu, had we not been headed onward to the rehearsal dinner.

Paul and the Birthday Girl:

Me with my mom and Martha O'Neill, childhood bestie I still call Crabtree:

(Me and Crabtree:)

Here's a feel for the place overall. If you're in Memphis, I highly recommend (South Cooper neighborhood):

And, the peanut machine in the hallway near the ladies':

The "wedding eve supper" took place at the same spot where Martha had had her rehearsal dinner, which didn't stop me from getting lost and overshooting it by half a mile. Here's a feel for the party, the out of doors toasting part, after a delicious catfish fry at which I uncannily matched the dinner napkins:

The Mallorys, our hosts, including Hugh's sister Virginia and her husband Brett, along with Albert and Penny and Hugh's now wife Lisa:

Just a photo of my mom and brother together:

Early in the evening, one of the bartenders had been pointed out to me as a Memphis fixture -- "the B.B. King of bartenders," someone who had tended bar for fifty years and who would sit in a folding chair to pour drinks. Toward the end of the toasts, he got up unsolicitedly and spoke on Hugh's behalf.

I can't imagine he does that very often. It seemed a high compliment. Even when part of his advice was to pass along from his father to "remember, son, always keep the cook happy." (Other toasts might have covered that Hugh in fact loves to cook.)

The next morning, we surfaced for the wedding itself:

My brother and Alexi:

Re the outfit, true to Hugh's hospitality, he had recruited his friends--save one man to stand with him at the front of the church--to be ushers, as if they were all helping Hugh host the party that was his wedding. (As a side note, am I the only person to whom it was news that Men's Wearhouse has that unusual spelling of "Wear"?)

Stacey and Paul:

Me and Mom:

A series of Jack with his father and godfather (aka the groom), after he made his entrance at the reception:

For the afternoon, we headed over to Crabtree's. Her husband Barry graduated from college that morning, leaving Martha "just sick" that she had a conflict with Hugh's wedding, but otherwise in the midst of a fantastically elating, happy celebration. Here's Martha with Margaret, with cookie:

And the three Carr Avenue best friends, me Crabtree and the lovely Fones:

Later that night, we also celebrated at Hugh and Lisa's party with Barry, the graduate:

I had the pleasure of being a reader of his final paper, an inventive take on the importance of basic skills training and upkeep for firefighters -- a mix of original empirical research and drawing in models of skills practice from fields as varied as art, sports, military, and music. He got a perfect score.

Between Martha's house and that party, we took Alexi for her first Corky's barbeque:

Here's the crew waiting outside, with valiant patience especially considering the combined prior night's sleep for the new parents in the middle could probably have been counted on one hand:

The morning after Alexi was welcomed into her first Corky's barbeque experience, Jack was welcomed into his first mother's day, a double header of a celebratory brunch, kindly hosted by J and A:

Having a later flight back than everyone else, I hung out with Fones for the afternoon. We went to Target where I was treated to the reassuring "you should totally buy that!" school of shopping with her. (Memphis has more on offer in the Zac Posen for Target category than the New York Target would unless you were there the first day.)

Back in New York, I brought a little bit of the South with me. On an excursion with Billy to spend time with some of his oldest friends, I got to shoot a BB gun for the first time. (Surprisingly fun! Who knew?)

With Veronica's dad and stepmom visiting from California, I got to go to ladylike, idyllic tea that next Sunday afternoon.

And midweek, I hosted girls' dinner. Mo, fellow Southerner, helped me make shrimp and grits for the first time. If this number of slightly repetitive photos from dinner seems excessive, you should see the amount of repeat pouring of the half-and-half the recipe called for:

As a postscript, some things in New York are cliche, but still charming. For one, fountains in summer:

Two, silhouetted birds on a lamppost below Central Park (best appreciated from a distance, even if backlit):

And, three, Carnegie Hall, where I heard the magic of transcendent piano playing, of Baroque pieces I was surprised to love, by a woman with a withering stare I had to get on board with because it enforced the old school norms I love of audience quiet and kind attention in the face of the newfangled idea that the curtain call does not mean game over for latecomers and that it's okay to shift noisily while someone is playing:

Boston, Maine, Audrey-Boo, and Television

2010-05-30T08:57:00.000-07:00

I'm starting it off with some family pictures: Gail my college roommate with her husband Jim and their daughters, Audrey, who can be coquettish and charming, and Amelia, the little explorer. Skepticism towards strangers is a quality I admire in young children, and I enjoyed the process of their warming up to me by the time I had to leave. A family diptych:

I stopped to visit Gail and family both weekends en route to and from a personal and professional development retreat in very southern Maine. Here we are:

And here's the whole family including Gail's parents:

Everyone remembers the story of the first time Gail and I spoke on the phone, her slight trepidation at being a Bostonian with a roommate from Alabama, only confirmed by my making the standard joke, "I like both kinds of music, Country and Western." She said later she was much relieved when in the same conversation I mentioned having an L.L. Bean rug and wondering if we had space for it in our room.

Speaking of freshman year, I went to lecture in the class of my art school friend Matt Templeton at Suffolk, the New England College of Art and Design. It was near the end of term and I think everyone was exhausted, but it was fun to do "Business School for Artists" in the context of a class that is essentially designed to help freshmen decide if they want to study the fine or applied arts (i.e., painting or graphic design).

Matt videotaped the class, and when I learn to retrieve video stills, perhaps I will have more varied documentation. After class, I legged it to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, on strong recommendation from Gail's garden-loving mom, to see a three-day annual show called "Art in Bloom." Local gardening and flower groups or shops interpret various works of art in bouquet form. Here are some examples, the Botero (the next to last) a favorite:

While at the MFA, I went down memory lane and visited the gallery where the Museum Legs chapter First Friday is set. With regard to royal children scurrying around with royal dwarfs, in proximity to Mannerist depictions of the dying Christ, exhibits 1 and 2:

This is the larger room, though you can't get the feel without Billy Ocean and the teeming, dancing groups of (Karen's phrase) "divorcees in bad shoes."

That Tuesday, Mo, a new, New York friend, picked me up to drive to York Harbor, Maine, for the workshop, a place you can, among other things, turn aspects of your life into Jungian symbols, to great effect:

It was a beautiful setting, where we were treated to a near complete spectrum of New England weather -- shown here, the breezy, bright sun, rather than the hail forecast:

Our fearless leaders from Dialogos:

And, an approximation of our lovely group of women attendees:

This was part of a very panoramic-formatted photograph in the inn's hallway. I would include lovely pictures I have of the actual participants, and I doubt people would mind, but on principle, I'll not. Here's the lighthouse view near where we went to the lobster pound the last night:

Returning to "civilization" where Jungian symbols are also actors and much of life is in the fray, I accompanied Gail, Jim, and the girls to a Kentucky Derby party where I was summarily robbed of the coveted last place finish prize. My horse came in next to last. (I find it is part of good manners of being a tag-a-long to a betting party to perform very poorly, or so has been my entirely accidental strategy at two different Oscars parties.) How fantastic is this horse:

It doubles as a flashlight:

Whoever wins it, wherever they are in the world, they get it back to the hosts in time for the next year's party, with the urgency of businesses filing year end paperwork with tax consequences.

The girls are not allowed much television, and they were absolutely delighted with the colors and fanfare of the horses. Amelia spent the race up on her knees, hands above her head, mostly clapping. Audrey has slightly more television experience. (Gail said someone asked Audrey once what she likes on tv and she said, "I like to watch Mickey Mouse. And people talking." Gail explained that "people talking" was her impression of all adult programming across all genres.)

The next day we ventured out through Harvard Yard (here in front of the statue of John Harvard that Audrey likes without ever feeling a sentimental or superstitious need to rub his foot for luck):

Still life of sleeping baby in the double-wide:

Audrey with her uncanny, oddly photogenic doll, Audrey Boo, whose hair, Audrey will tell you, is "white, like the doctor and the tailor."

We ventured over the a street fair and got there toward the tail end. The keeper of the bouncy castle agreed to let Audrey go in, even on the late side, but Audrey is cautious by nature and by the time she worked up her courage, it was closing time. So, we sat in these folding chairs, were given free popcorn in end-of-the-day generosity, and watched the bouncy castle be deflated. This is an oddly compelling thing to do, and part of access to that childhood feeling of rightness and simplicity in the world:

Audrey was inspired by nearby music and started dancing. Not pictured, I taught her a dance move: "up to the sky, down to your shoe" -- the John Travolta classic Stayin'Alive, Saturday-Night-Fever, finger-pointing hip waggle. Later that night at dinner, Audrey started miming and whispering with her coy smile, "up to the sky, down to your shoe."

Audrey Boo in her curious, arrestingly photogenic state. (Her eyes do not close.)

And with her faithful protector:

That weekend, one of the chief water mains in Boston broke. Strangely, Cambridge was unaffected because it gets its water separately from a reservoir. I totally forgot this and so when I went to the train the next morning, it was downright difficult to find a cup of coffee. Here is a picture of "Starbucks at Rest" across the street from the train station. They were only selling bottled water and pastries.

I stopped in Providence on the way back, and returned to the city.

The Alsdorfs, the Cecil-Kirks, and Talk 20

2010-05-29T21:19:00.000-07:00

Tom Kirk, my high school friend Grey's husband, kindly invited me to participate in a rather ingenious--though he said wholeheartedly copycat--program called Talk 20. Periodically, his architecture firm, Bohlin, Cywinski, Jackson, invites eight or ten people to give talks in succession. Each person gives 20 slides for 20 seconds each (6-7 minutes), so the whole program runs about an hour. BCJ is known for many things, among them the Apple stores:

On the scheduled day in February, I took an early train to try to avoid a snowstorm, but once I got to Philadelphia the program was postponed for weather. Grey had just had a second child, and her parents--my hosts in Birmingham on the book tour--were there too, so it turned into a big family visit.

Brigham, the architect who was organizing the program, could not have been nicer or more apologetic. We rescheduled for the following month, and it all actually happened.

While killing time between the train and the talk, I sat in a coffee shop Brigham had recommended, where I couldn't help but try to recreate the Bar at the Folies Bergere painting:

Now I realize how different the painting actually looks:

Arriving at the firm, I met up with Tom (pictured below) and Brigham, who showed me all the plans for the new Williams library.

The firm had a happy hour beforehand, at which I met this collaborator of Tom's:

She asked how we knew each other and we both paused -- me because I think in the workplace the person who actually works there should get to tell any personal stories -- and this caused her to tease Tom in an almost British way, seeking innuendo with missile clarity. Here's a sense of the place, and the party:

(I'm pretty sure I own exactly this chair (a Modernica replica of an Aalto) but in red.)

We spent most of the time talking to my fellow presenter -- also a friend and invitee of Tom -- named Arika Okrent. She wrote a book called In the Land of Invented Languages (that I am reading now and keep recommending to people).

BCJ was founded in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania which, by coincidence is also the hometown of my first art history professor from college who knows a couple of the partners. I seem to thrive on this sort of small world connectedness. In this picture, Brigham, who also MC'ed, is in the back left corner, with Bernie, the partner who gave an introduction and a synthesis at the end.

Here's how it all began. They would tee up someone's powerpoint, look to the presenter, who'd call him or herself out of the starting blocks, and we would be off. The slides were auto-timed to change over every twenty seconds, which can be surprisingly hard to judge precisely. Most people seemed to have done what I had done, which was to have slides nearly entirely free of text. Much easier to finesse the transitions of pictures.

As Bernie said to us speakers, "Once you are on the slope you can only get off at the bottom." By the end, the biggest theme to me seemed to be about the limitations of invention and the pleasure of repair.

We were started off by an artist named Nora Chase who made abstracted works based on patterns in the human body. They would be absolutely beautiful and fastidiously made, and then you would realize each square in the series was a different skin rash.

Arika summarized her book on invented languages as, "900 languages, 900 years, language wins." This is, by the way, a cautionary tale for anyone who works at a company trying to create what is essentially a business language. She showed one slide of Charles Bliss, the founder of Bliss symbolics, a language of pictures meant to be universal. It was, instead of being adopted by everyone, adopted by a facility for children with cerebral palsy, in Canada. She talked about a feminist language with as many languages for menstruation as Eskimo words for snow (okay, they had six words). She had fantastic photos of attending a Klingon conference.

The third guy was an extremely cerebral academic who was "reconciling poetics and ethics," and talking about a "science of imagination solutions." My fravorite notion from it was (and this might come from Alfred Jarry-- I can't read my notes) in order to truly demolish something you have to demolish its ruins too. You use the ruins to build beautiful new buildings.

Also from my notes, "The best thing you can do for sustainable design is to make beautiful things people won’t want to tear down." This may have come from the fourth speaker who talked about a building project in a remote Ecuadorian village, reachable by long bus ride, followed by three-hour canoe ride.

Jamie Montgomery, whose company is called FieldDesk, ended with a fantastic talk on repair. His charming refrain was, "Sometimes I feel mad, sometimes I feel lucky." He would buy things that were broken that he knew he would need to repair (but he is lucky because he knows how to do it and therefore can buy nice things). His motto might have been "Build well, well built." And his goal was for everything he built to be "worthy of repair." He spoke about the notion of wanting to make something right again. "I want to feel my world is intelligible so I can respond to it."

He showed us how Tokyo phone poles are made for repair. The bottom always rots out first and needs to be repaired. There, the poles have joinery for the lower part to be detached and restored. He showed us the men in his family's tendency to buy dilapidated log cabins (of the sort where you can hardly make out that it's a standing structure) and then to rebuild them. He showed us how he re-shingled his roof.

Somehow, the combination of repair as a badge of honor, the impossibility of inventing a language from scratch, and the limitations of economic masterminding of art or museums all formed a hopeful vision of chaos, a deeply human imperfection, and an ability to right ships, to fix things, and to design them to stay around for a long time. It's refreshing to think whistles and bells are only great when one needs an actual whistle or an actual bell, and that one wants the whistle or bell to be simple and well made.

Grey stayed home with the boys and we caught up the next day. Here she is in their cheerful and beautiful kitchen with their littlest one.

And the family portrait:

In honor of the big brother, I create here a photo essay of his airplane collection. These are for me to show to my brother, a lover and expert about planes, so he can help us ID the models:

The artist (aka big brother) at work:

On the way back, I was nearly dumbstruck by how calmly people queue for the train in Philadelphia. Not in New York:

postscript: The Alsdorfs, Sarah and Bob, the tragically underdocumented (read: unphotographed) hosts of my book tour trip to Seattle, came to New York to visit their son Matt, my college friend. We all went to the Whitney Biennial. Judge Alsdorf (aka Bob) has a wonderful way of deadpanning titles to abstract sculptures that sound plausible, and are not at all true. Here we are afterwards:

MediaBistro and Telluride - March 9-16

2010-05-29T09:07:00.000-07:00

The next time I play two truths and a lie, I have one of the truths sorted out: I have spoken on a panel with a man who wrote a book about the mystery of Jesus Christ's missing foreskin. Not just a book, apparently a very good one.

On March 9^th, Mediabistro, the professional organization for writers, hosted its first "book group" and I was lucky to be selected for the line-up of four speakers.

Sort of fantastically, we met at an Irish sports bar in Gramercy Park. St Patrick’s Day decorations already in full force:

They turned off the large sports screen overhead of the panelists –which was sort of disappointing. I always like to see art and sport close together.

The bar filled up with literary hopefuls, friends of the panelists generally and, at the last minute, friendly faces in the form of Kari Elassal, former colleague, and Matt Alsdorf, college friend (we spent a year together as advisers in a freshman dorm).

The din of sports still carried from the front of the bar, causing one to have to project in a way that would have made my communications studies aunt proud.

We were all asked to read a two-minute excerpt from our respective books, and harkening back to a deep seated kindergarten feeling, I seemed to have been the only person who followed these directions, lending my non-artistic interpretation of our brief an unintentionally radical cast. The author of the foreskin book went first and read “the one bad review” he got. His book was accidentally assigned to a religion writer somewhere in Minnesota who was offended but also gave a good plot summary.

The mystery writer, author of Cemetery Road, read a longer excerpt, as it's a bit hard to get the arc and characters of a mystery introduced without a bit more time. The third speaker, who had written a novel about the college admissions process read a summary of a scene, which she had written expressly for this event.

I literally read the first page and a half of Museum Legs. I had timed myself to exactly two minutes on the walk over, which was a good thing as it was a hard to drown the noise for any great length of time and you didn't want to still be speaking when a team scored.

The next day, I flew to Telluride, Colorado, to visit my old college friend Cornelia. (She was a freshman dorm adviser the floor above Matt and me, and is also originally from Williamstown.)

Cornelia had recently left graduate school when her mother had become ill and, after her mother died, come to Telluride for the winter. Telluride is a town full of interesting people -- a place, as one of her friends said, "people come either to escape or to heal." Points if you can surmise where or how Cornelia got this hat:

I arrived the 10th, in anticipation of celebrating her birthday on the 12th. The timing was lucky, as I proceeded to spend the first two days with terrible altitude sickness, only really returning to the land of the living on the birthday morning. As someone who loves her sleep, I have no developed coping skills for insomnia, which, as you will read on the internet as you have ample time to do while having insomnia, is a key symptom of altitude sickness, along with feeling like you have the flu--with a racing heart--and a profound feeling that your body is not working and might break completely at any moment. Cornelia, bless her, got me a lot of saltines, soup, and ginger ale. A gallon of gatorade and some of the most delicious saltines I've ever tasted later, I was well enough to ski on her birthday.

We started the day with breakfast at the New Sheridan, the anchor, old-school hotel in town. Cornelia noticed that the artist whose work was on the walls, Roger Mason, was from Chatham, near Williamstown.

The clerk heard us and said, “He’s actually right outside.” Cornelia asked a guy on a bench, “Are you Roger Mason.” Just as he was saying, “No, I’m so and so” in a near perfect deadpan, our gaze adjusted behind him to a man (a) standing in the middle of the street, (b) with paintbrush and easel.

He is a man who seems to find synchronicity, smallworld-ness, and lack of surprise in this sort of run-in. He let me put paint on his canvas. He may or may not have flirted with Cornelia. Or he may be one of those people who is in a constant state of flirtation with life – he had fantastic stories. He said that whenever he has to come up with a title for a show, he asks a comedy writer friend. My favorite: Roger Mason: Light and Astigmatism. Here is the series of him and Cornelia in the street:

Here's a close-up of one of his paintings from a hallway at the New Sheridan. I love them because of the color and light. It's like he actually loves to paint, and it shows.

He let me (cheerfully insisted that I!) paint part of the snowy white at the top of one of the mountains of his work in progress mid-street.

We spent most of the rest of the day going cross country skiing – which Cornelia is gifted at and I tried gamely to do, feeling like I was doing a robot-man dance, since, as compared to downhill skiing, the motion is very much on a grid, not in the slightest curvy. Cornelia glides.

Telluride is an old Western town nestled in the box canyon (read: one way in, and one way out) that forms the mountain basin. Some local color:

The fabulous bookstore, where you can (a) happen to run into Kati Martin, the well known writer, bouncing in to sign books, or (b) sit in the back amidst "Ski. Sleep. Read." t-shirts having a coffee, or (c) browse for a vacation read and inadvertently end up with a Tom Wolfe tome (I Am Charlotte Simmons) that lodges in the brain with the same weight and staying power as its doorstop-like physical format.

The local bakery, a magical realm of cupcakes and sandwich boards and wild salmon and nice people and bright sun:

Odds and ends around town:

Super-local color of Cornelia and her dogs:

My favorite piece of local color was the "Eric Corff. . . What a Douchebag" campaign.

When I first arrived in town, I heard the story that two guys were escalating pranks and this was one.

Later the story turned into a version of "Eric Corff stole my girlfriend, not even in an inventive or chivalric way, ergo. . . ." You have to admire the simplicity, pervasiveness, and, well, message:

Telluride connects via a gondola to a more recently constructed ski town called Mountain Village, which is modeled on a European ski village. You could write a whole book about conversations that happen on the gondola – everyone has a story and the sheer slice of life angle is compelling. On the gondola over to get lift tickets sorted and sign up for the next day’s ski class, I road with two incredibly polite 10-year-old-ish boys. Them to me: “blah, blah, blah, half-pipe, broken collarbone.” Five minutes later, me to them: “Er, I have to be honest, I didn’t totally understand what you meant!” Further explanation ensued, bringing me up to a 25% comprehension.

At birthday dinner with Cornelia and her friend Kate – from high school, coincidentally lives there – we sat by chance next to the kids and their parents and grandparents. Small town. A certain breed of exceedingly polite, naturally athletic kids who ski with the ease I have walking.

We spent the late afternoon celebrating Corn's birthday with some of her friends, at a place that serves the "pizza dough meets donut" equivalent of a fried dough ball called "Beer Nuggets." Cornelia tries to call them "Beer Pods."

Telluride being a special town, you can meet all kind of people at the local bar (reference Cornelia's earlier hat photo). That night out, after Cornelia and I, surrounded by twenty three (and possibly sub-twenty-one year olds) got approached by the two oldest men in the bar, both demonstrably, objectively too old, ended up meeting a whole group of Croatian and Slovakian heli-skiers. Well, they had been heli-skiing that day and were recovering. (For people with ski knowledge like my own – it’s where a helicopter drops you at the top of a mountain so you can ski in untracked powder. But in a geologically unstable terrain like Telluride’s, they literally blast the mountain with dynamite before you can ski. If that causes an avalanche, you don’t ski. If nothing really moves, you are okay.)

The next day, I spent the morning in a group ski lesson that everyone but me no-showed, leaving me a de facto private lesson with the Zen ski master, Spike. Then Corn and I headed out for the day, joined by Alex of the heli-skiiers who was only able to stay remotely in range of my own skiing because he was "taking it easy" and on telemarks, instead of his regular snowboard. It was a little overcast, but you get a sense of the terrain:

The next day, we were joined by the assembled heli-skiiers, en masse. There was fresh powder and so, after a few practice runs, they headed up to the high chair lift. I don't mean to sell my own skiing short -- I love to ski and, for someone who grew up in Alabama, am intuitive and unafraid. I just don't do sheer cliff faces, or even garden variety moguls, and I adore the meandering, high-up-the-mountain greens and blues that are wide open with trees you can weave in and out of, the rhythm of distance running. It stresses me out to ski with people who are so fast and fearless I think I am making them wait all the time. Cornelia loyally stayed with me on the lower trails.

We met up with the heli-skiiers again later and their first question was about Karen. How did they know who Karen was? They were reading the sample chapter of Museum Legs on the high chair lift on somebody's phone. I think it's safe to say this is the most extreme athletic situation in which my (or maybe any) museum book has ever been read--even including the Grammercy sports bar. Alex's friend Branyo later explained, kindly and matter of factly, that he absolutely could not comprehend my style of writing. All the words made sense, but not the order.

A couple of days later -- after all the skiing, and the nice meals and festive mojitos at the bar, and time out on the town with Cornelia's friend Gena, and dog walks, and apres ski hot chocolate, and even a spot of shopping at "The Toggery" -- I headed back. We meandered on the drive out of the box canyon, stopping a couple of times to take pictures. Here is Ralph Lauren's local museum, when he's at the ranch:

And a few other things I stopped to photograph across the street:

We stopped to photograph because I hadn't called ahead to know that my flight had been cancelled. So, I arrived at the gargantuan (and unpatriotic) Montrose airport, to be told that I was a bit SOL and would likely get in the next day.

With some real luck and initiative on the part of the gate agent ("look I totally understand, but I actually do have a work meeting. . . "), I crammed one bag into another to make the carry-on limit, sacrificed a couple of full-sized beauty products at the x-ray machine, and--having come full circle from the earlier altitude sickness--absolutely legged it, sprinting across the tarmac and just barely making a flight that connected through Chicago. By coincidence, the same family with small children who had been on the flight there were on the flight back. Landed in New York late, late, and made it into the office the next day.