December 5th - New York Return -- beginning where it ended

You know you've been away from New York a long time when this sight inspires nostalgia and elation:

I was returning to the New York skyline after nearly three months, and nearly 10,000 miles of driving.  

For weeks on end, I have been passing prairie land and tunnels, rolling farm hills, shockingly large midwestern skylines.  But I hadn't been here since September, but also not since before the adventure of the tour.  Any adventure changes you, in whatever small way.  An adventure has the character of an art project, a process that changes the outcome.

I have returned to New York on this particular day for a wedding, and it bears mention whose it is, because the book tour started and ended with this one.  There are not many people for whom I would host a bridal shower the day before my book came out, but Amee is one of them.  Her other best friend -- also named Amy -- was in from Paris for one weekend and one weekend only, in September, and it was the one my book came out.  

So the day before the Brooklyn Book Festival (the afternoon before my mom, Greg, and I raised champagne glasses in the St. Francis school lunchroom), I helped host a shower. I lugged a group-gift espresso maker from the Upper East Side here, at Bread on the Lower East Side:

(It's nice to co-host a shower with someone who is a food writer.  With a dessert specialty.)

Here is the mother of the bride, taking the house down with her toast:

I don't have any pictures of the wedding.  I am still too old-fashioned (and have too small an evening handbag) to carry a camera to a wedding.  It was at the Yale Club, portraits of Bill Clinton and both George Bushes looking on from the back of the room.  You felt like if we hit that part of the liturgy where they ask for support of the marriage and everyone says, "We will" that we might get some barritone back-up from behind us.

It was Christmastime in New York.  There was so much to look at.

And I was seeing it still with travelers' eyes.  There was the dog on my street

There was the office holiday party, atmospheric and very fun:

There were things I didn't have time to catch on camera, like a car with a huge silver menorah mounted to the roof, as if narrow set, perfectly symmetrical reindeer antlers.  There was the neighborhood bakery, tiny and steamed up and full to the brim with loaves of bread so large they wouldn't fit on most tables in Manhattan.

There was the Mud coffee truck, with its yellow flowers:

And Christmas tree markets, that smell of pine needles, like the breath of fabric softener walking past a laundromat:

Arriving back, I got keys to the apartment, and my sweet sister met me with a dress for the wedding, and time for a coffee at Mud proper on East 9th Street.  We visited with Monique, the Polish facialist and proprietor of Monique K (East Village gem), who is as much life lesson herself as enforcer of respect for the skin.  She was moving back to Poland in retirement to spend time with her sister and to volunteer in an orphanage where she is qualified to teach ballet, languages, music, and a few other things, but where she is most interested in helping children also to know that they are loved.)  In her appealing way, she explained that my having written a book meant my family should walk around "with their noses to the sky."  This is a bit of a before (or after driving) picture for me, though Monique always looks beautiful.  My sister and I have known her for years, and this was one of the last times we would see her before her departure.

It was a beautiful wedding, one of those where the groom beams and the bride walks in and everyone looks for a tissue, in the nicest possible way.  I admittedly limped through a little bit of the hits of the eighties at the end.  It was snowing in New York.  

It snowed again the next week, covering the tables outside shops, 

causing clerks to hit awnings with broom handles to beat out accumulating drifts, leaving the city in that gauzy half-light of falling snow.

Meanwhile, Museum Legs starting turning up on a couple of New and Noteworthy tables, totally without my doing.  At the Museum of Modern Art:

At the 86th Street Barnes and Noble:

I spoke at the Art and Beauty reading group at McNally Jackson, a favorite independent, where a man named Eddie and I had a spirited back and forth about whether, as he thought, there should be an economic charge for most everything, museums included, because the changing hands of money represented the flow of energy in the world.  (I tried to joke about whether he should be paying me for the reading group.)

And I was a guest at my sister's book group, a charming and interesting collection of people who quipped that my presence meant they would actually have to talk about the book:

(You'll note from the table and background that it is a culinary club as well.)

I went to Jane's MoMA leaving party:

I went to Dave's Eggnog Party--in the peak of the snowstorm.  

A group called Grand Opening has a space on Norfolk Street (between Rivington and Stanton).  They convert the space into different things.  Before it had been a Vegas-style wedding chapel.  At the holidays, it was a tree trimming and eggnog party space that you could book in two-hour increments. 

Next, it is slated to be a Trade School where people teach things on a barter economy.  I am on deck to teach Business School for Artists.  I haven't yet decided what barter request I will make of my students, but I am hoping it will involve Twitter-blog-Facebook-web tutorials, snacks, and vegetarian recipes.  And maybe some good music recommendations too, and some trawling through listings of bands' live shows.  

I appreciated that their ornaments still had K-mart price tags

and their paper garlands looked like cut-up Excel charts.  I talked for a while with Ben, one of two Canadian brothers who run a design firm out of the back and who collaborate with artist friends who run an artist-to-artist barter website.  The entire team had had a holiday party the night before and he claimed to be the worse for wear.

And work is good.  I love to write but I also love having colleagues.  Everyone needs a workplace where you learn the little things. Rory: "The subway has a schedule."  Even if it doesn't stick to schedule, you can know whether it's on a four minute or eight minute interval, to arb the difference between stations.

My mother arrived in town and my nuclear family ended up gathering for sushi takeout at mine, since I was living in take-out range of a favorite sushi restaurant downtown (that I have always called "Tah-mo-ee" but have just learned is "To-mo").  In honor of my sister's firm, here is the sign in their window:

Christmas took us to Fairfield where the main event was, in this picture, sitting in my sister's lap:

Nephew Jack.  He usually looks a lot happier without the hat, and actually has a pretty winning smile.  

The day before Christmas, the woman whose place I was staying in left me a voicemail.  The day after Christmas we finally spoke, and I learned that her landlord wanted me to vacate immediately, with threat to her lease.  So, in an uncomfortably biblical turn, I looked to friends and family back-up as I packed my bags against what was to be several days of creative projects rabbit hole.  A crack team of Taylor-Arnaizes in Houston arranged for me to stay in her brother's room in Brooklyn, while they sent me keys to their own place too.  Sweet, sweet other people offered back-up plans, called doormen, proffered kindness.  My brother repeated his standing "twenty minutes" advance MetroNorth-warning open-door policy.  My mother invited me to join her at a Philadelphia conference.  Mental note to self to get a permanent home soon.

I finally got all my things loaded into a cab to go to Brooklyn, full sets of papers for two books in progress.  Having been in dealer mode, it wasn't until I got into the cab that I felt the floor fall out and wanted to cry, and then I arrived in Brooklyn to find the roommate of my friend's brother making vegetarian dinner for his two younger sisters who were all warm and hilarious.  So, all ended well -- in a household of musicians where you can count about eight keyboard devices in the living room, where the dinner menu is an appealing tour of great grains of great empires (farro, quinoa. . . ), and where maybe anther book project will yet take shape.  

The writer Dave Hickey, who lives in Las Vegas, once described the relief of returning to his home city after time on the road.  Traveling as an art critic, he felt like, in his words, an aging gigolo asked to conjure responses to increasingly abject works of modern art.  Thus, it was a relief to return to one of the only, again in his words, indigenous landscapes on the North American continent.  A place where there was everything to see and nothing asking to be looked at.  

Returning almost anywhere after travel feels a bit like that last part.  In my case, seeing visual thinking everywhere (e.g., a barber shop where you can point to the wall):

It has never felt so good to have both feet planted on the ground.  But I am looking forward to book tour visitors to New York.  And I'll be in a plane again in February if not before.  Please look me up in New York in 2010, and in London in early Feb.  

In the meantime, thanks for reading this. I imagine reading a blog is a bit like having a conversation about this trip, but I am looking forward to pulling up to the other side of that table myself.  Cyberspace does, after all, have its limitations.  As to Cyberspaces's advantages, I consider this blog a book of sketches.  They will get edited and sorted.  And I will add some pictures I have been given, in particular by my kind colleague David Haber, of the book launch party.

And as to the far dimensions of a blog, as a form, I am not someone who thinks "private life" is an oxymoron.  If your story appears at all in these pages and, for whatever reason, you would rather that it didn't, just let me know and I will make edits, and amends.  With that, I hope to see you soon.

p.s. The bride of this post, and of the tour bookends, was also the host of the very first Museum Legs event, a pre-tour "What Would Leonardo Do?" brown-bag lunch at her place of employment, a very large US corporation headquartered in the New York area.  The talk was about creativity in everyday life, which in professional life is finding prosperity in the broad sense and in personal life is finding one's life's work.  Here are the pictures:

December 3-4 - Pittsburgh

The last official stop of the Museum Legs book tour--a non-commercial tour about the importance of non-commercialism in the arts--was the home turf of one of the most honestly commercial artists of all time: Andy Warhol's Pittsburgh.  

I was lucky to be hosted by the lovely Tom Sokolowski of the Warhol Museum, and to have a day to take in a bunch of other art sites there.  Here is a close-up of the gift shop at the Mattress Factory:  

The plan was to arrive in Pittsburgh the 3rd, speak at the Warhol the 4th, then start the drive back to New York that night, in time for my dear friend's wedding in Manhattan the next day.  


If you visit Pittsburgh, the Priory is a lovely place to stay, a converted monastery near an interesting neighborhood with a great general store / post office where you can overhear all local news and a restaurant called Serendipity.  I holed up and finished the last Harry Potter book, precursor to the end of the tour itself.

Art stop, no. 1: The Mattress Factory, which looks like an art institution on one side, and is accessible via residential alleyway on the other:

Nicole of the front desk kindly forwarded news of my reading to the rest of the staff.  I spent time in the non-arts parts of the museum.

The Mattress Factory is a contemporary enough space I truly do not mind paying the $10, though had to remind the bookstore worker of this fact when he tried, in "would you like fries with that" manner, to upsell a membership.  He doesn't know that I don't even have an address, much less one in Pittsburgh.

I loved Yayoi Kusama’s permanent installations.

 

The installations are like a visual surround sound, including a painted floor and mirrored walls, with doors that close flush behind you.

But the first thing you see is this:

The basket full of blue "shower cap" shoe covers.  

I was creeped out and captivated, in turn, by this Paul DeMarinis piece that changes over the course of five minutes or so as these laser beams, a bit like the one-pass light bar of a Xerox machine, articulate the photo until it is destroyed as if by ink bomb, mutated in that film noir police photo sort of way.

A list of materials you don't see everyday: computer, video projector, photoluminescent powder, bass speaker, and an artist who used to collect photographs of missing children.

The fourth story installation was a hole in the ground that went through a third story window.  For me it instantly called to mind tort law.  For the couple thinking of planning a wedding there and seating guests somewhere maybe it called to mind their eccentric cousins and where to seat them.

 

As the museum's materials said, the artist Sarah Oppenheimer "opens apertures in existing architecture."

The view from the floor below:

Another room showed people dressed up as the Statue of Liberty.  Part of my interest in these pictures was that I dressed up as the Statue of Liberty for Halloween at least three or four years running, thanks to a costume my mother made in which the crown was stuffed like a pillow and the torch, also stuffed, occasionally bent over if you held it too tightly.

As it turns out, the artist Greta Pratt photographed these people because they were already dressed as the Statue of Liberty for work.  It was their job to stand on a street corner dressed like this and dancing to try to drum up business for Liberty Tax Service, a tax preparation firm.  

The second floor of the Mattress Factory was nearly pitch dark, another work calling to mind tort law.  Each hallway had just enough light to get you around a corner to see something like this: 

The works were by James Turell, whose light studies I have loved before -- whether a square hole cut in the ceiling framing the sky like a painting so you can watch sunset at P.S. 1, or anytime at the Nasher Sculpture Garden.  The red square above is flat, levitating in a corner.

I have loved Tony Oursler's work in the past.  This one was intimidating, lots of yelling:

(This is the size of a room)

Outside the Oursler was this captivating installation of two stereo speakers covered in red powder that jumped (low and wide) across the surface which vibrated for no apparent reason.  It's a permanent installation by Rolf Julius:

And if you can judge an art gallery by its bathroom, or the contrast of chair to exit:

Art stop, no. 2: I moved on to a much, much larger museum.  A bit like going from a charter school to a big ten university, here is the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh, art and natural history, which are adjoining:

I started at the gift shop, a marvel of women's clothing:

Then, for the second time, had the wonderful if dubious distinction of trying to chat someone up to suggest stocking Museum Legs, only to have them pull it from the shelf.  The man working, Jerry, was really kind, and also introduced me to the front desk staff who gave me free admission into the museum.  

The Carnegie has an installation that (unless you know your way around the museum better than I do), forces you to experience art in a Begin and the Beginning way, with a side, parallel-track photography show that lets you opt out of the French decorative furniture section (as I did).

In honor of E and S, "bottoms!":

Much of the museum collection originated with the Carnegie International, a still lively, juried show of contemporary art that started in 1896.  They have a lot of interesting work that is atypical of the given artist.  For example, a Degas bath scene:

An Edward Hopper sailboat:

Though, under "typical", yet another Bonnard of a naked woman in a bathtub:

Diebenkorn, darker palette than usual though not so atypical:

But an Alex Katz with much, much smaller people:

Though I recognize the woman on the right from a painting in Cleveland.  Under truly "atypical," Pittsburgh also had a huge orange Alex Katz of a bunch of leaves.

Under "art I liked," Nam June Paik's The Thinker, after Rodin:

Here's a classic piece of video/filmic installation art, one of those where you round the dark corridor having no idea what to expect and immediately come upon a siren:

That cuts to an owl, and back, etc:

There seemed to be a lot of symbolism here:

I enjoyed seeing a Rachel Whiteread up close:

They had a whole Mel Bockner room.  I think of Mel as being a close friend of Bruce, the head of painting when I was in art school.  In addition to being a fixture at Bruce's house, he is a charming and, I thought, rather funny artist.  Here's a plant with its growth chart on the wall:

We all know this feeling:

This seemed like an earlier version of what Fiona Banner got a lot of credit for doing first:

These were just things I thought were pretty.  These sugar cubes were part of a series of photographs:

I liked these colors:

 If this isn't the Pacific Coast Highway just north of LA, it is at least an Impressionist color palette of what it feels like to be stuck in traffic there.  (Please write in if this work is in fact a coded essay on something like global warming and I will update.)

Art stop, no. 3: Later in the afternoon, I arrived at the Warhol in plenty of time.  I consider it supremely welcoming that they have art on view right when you walk in, before you stop to get a ticket.

On into the galleries, there are proper places to sit.  The Warhol room at the Dia Beacon has similarly plush sofas, and I imagine whether there was a stipulation in the artist's will.  (This seems like an artist stipulation I might try.)

I met a lot of the staff in the gift shop and at the front desk 

(Alex in the middle)

(Paul and Jason)

and then met with Tom, the director, kindly introduced by Katy Kline. 

As Tom pointed out, Pittsburgh has a history of industrial magnates, but also of Scotch Presbyterianism, and is small enough a town that people never felt the need, or moral justification, to build, wear, or do anything ostentatious to demonstrate their wealth because everyone else already knew who they were, and it would have been tacky, in the Calvinist sense.   Tom is charming and immediate, the sort of person who speaks his mind on everyone and everything, lulling you into doing the same, which can be dangerous, but very funny.  He reminded me graciously of no promises on attendance and invited me to work in their conference room, which I did:

On tour of the museum, who knew there would be a taxidermized lion in the stairwell:

Ryan, my events host, introduced me to the auditorium, and pointed out the dividing line between their new and old chairs, hence the color change:

Ryan (on the left, is not standing on the stage, with the super-helpful tech, a very kind man who had a really unusual name I will remember shortly):

In the front hall having a glass of wine with Tom and Ryan before the talk:

After the reading, Tom took me to dinner.  And after dinner on the walk to the car, we were talking about Harry Potter and how much I appreciated the values in the book that there is a time and a place to vanquish Lord Voldermort and a time and a place to work and have friends and family and be a good, obscure contributing member of society.  He told me that in the 1980s he was part of the group Visual Aids, who came up with the original red-ribbon campaign after people in the group had so many friends dying.  I love when people share one of their defining stories.  (I would, weeks later, meet a woman who got into publishing because she was a tennis pro and tried to help a man having a heart attack on the court.  He didn't survive but his friend invited her to lunch to thank her.  She arrived at the office of a major publishing company where he worked, asked the receptionist what he did there anyway, and the receptionist replied, "He's the president of the company."  She happened to be an even more avid reader than tennis player and the rest was history.)


I got in the car from the Warhol and drove.  Western Pennsylvania has tunneled roads through big iron ore mountains, vertiginous and surreal.  You could be underground anywhere:

I stopped for the night at about two in the morning, checking in behind a guy paying in cash from a large roll of bills.  I got into the car the next morning to the first snowflakes since Idaho, and started the official homestretch.