January 19-20 -- Williamstown

The book tour continues on into the new year in a trickle, an event every other week.  It is good to have feet on the ground, as opposed to on the gas pedal, though without knowing it, I seem still to be in a treading water phase of life, a bit constantly on the go.  Going to Williamstown is always a pleasure.

And so the third week of January, I went to visit old friends and to do a Museum Legs reading at the venerable Water Street Books.  This time the year before, I was living in Williamstown teaching Entrepreneurship as an Art Form for Winter Study.  Here are my students, in the art studio building (next to student Robbie's sculpture):

And at dinner with entrepreneur guest Rory:

I arrived into town on the train, catching a ride from Albany with the lovely Audrey Thier, whom I am lucky to know and consider family along with her husband Peter Murphy.  They included me in actual family dinner, and we had a celebratory meal out with their daughter Ruthie.  I was touched.  I didn't take any pictures, but here is Peter from the Elvis party the prior year:

Peter is properly an English professor, whom I know through his larger role as dean of the college when I was in school.  I have never taken a class with him, but you can't know him longer than five minutes without being struck by his command -- dry and spare and thorough and unshowy, and nicely complemented by things like a love of sport and an atunement to politics-- of the English language.  I was hugely complimented they both said it was well written.  Audrey said it in surprise, of a sort that brought peals of laughter from both me and Peter, as she good naturedly tried to dig her way out (of what was not actually a hole).  

The next day, I had coffee with Brooks, a patron saint of the book tour, who runs much of alumni relations at Williams and who had, along with Rob Swann, kindly put me in touch with lots of regional groups.  In honor of Brooks, here is a mini-photo essay of Williams showing up all over the country.  If memory serves, Northern California:

Wyoming, I think:

Hayward, Wisconsin:

I didn't take a picture with Brooks, but here he is (holding baby), at the 2009 Elvis party, with Matt Harris and Matt and Jess' Baby Campbell:

I met Mihai Stoichu and Ed Burger, of the math faculty, in the local Indian restaurant for lunch.  Mihai had kindly arranged and hosted us.  Ed, who had just won a very celebrated teaching award from Baylor, is also known for his study of creativity, and his propensity for teaching it as part of the math curriculum.  Click here to read about Ed's class.

On the topic of Mihai and creativity, I once went to an art show with him in London, Cildo Meireles at Tate Modern. We walked into a room of hundreds of wooden tape measures hung from the ceiling in a labyrinthine spiral.  The walls were covered with a thousand white plastic clocks.  On these, the artist had moved the numbers and minute hash marks so they were clumpy -- as in the real passage of time, some places time passed quickly, others it dragged.  Mihai looked at them, then at me, and said, "This is exactly like my research."

In fact, Mihai studies--at the point where physics runs tangent to math--things like the distribution of molecules of an alloy, so you can know something like the breaking point of the metal of an airplane.  As a convention in his field, people model the distribution of particles around a circle.  If the distribution is perfectly regular it is called a clock distribution.  More likely, it looks like the Meireles.

So, there we were, me and the two math luminaries discussing creativity over fritters, which was great fun.  

The reading that night included Mihai and his mother, who was visiting from Romania,

Also attending were Peter and Audrey, Jen and Tom and Maddie (of the book festival in Brooklyn), several others, including a few of my students from Winter Study the prior year, my friend Andie's son, and a woman who had interned in our office.  The Winter Study students had actually started a company, and showed me one of the ID cards from it.  I seem only to have taken pictures with Mihai:

Jonnie and his girlfriend Cindy were there, and they and Jen and I headed out for dinner at the local Thai.  Jonnie (aka Dr. Cluett) is a college classmate and was my host.  In the time since I had been there last, Jonnie not only got a dog but chickens. Jonnie's fridge contains a huge number of small, differently shaped and sized eggs, all shades from brown to white-ish. 


Dr. Cluett's chickens, in winter:

The next morning, I took a cab to Albany.  

The cab company booked me with another person without telling me.  On the plus side, I got a lens into recruiting in the economics faculty.  On the minus, I missed the train as we had to take the guy to the airport first and then the next train was delayed, but all was fine in the end.

Memphis and the Great Egg

The Memphis airport smells like barbeque -- a thick dense cover, like a heat wave, right off the flight.  It's astonishing and compelling in equal measure.  I got picked up at the airport by Mark, my host and a

lawyer-photographer-creative-producer, who has been planning and strategizing the possible creation of a new museum.  Mark pulled up to the airport in the large, sleek, black sedan that would be our touring home, investigating many different neighborhoods, good and bad, quizzical eyes on us as we pulled through a trailer park, relieved eyes as Mark offered directions to tourists from Oregon who had detoured down around one of the deserted bases of the bridges across the Mississippi.

I was there to check out some sites, get the lay of the land of town and, off the agenda, to catch up with old friends, experience Payne's barbeque, and have my first Krystal burger in literally two and a half decades.  The weather, shown above, was forecast as "windy and gloomy."  I'll leave the artist's identity loosely unspoken, not as a great mystery, I suppose.  Here is a tribute to his work, a small vista on a small rusty staircase at the top of the biggest building I have ever been inside:

An artist at war with the obvious, chronicler of the most beautifully mundane, odd moments; a bit wild and a bit of a Southern gentleman.  We drove by his house.

Memphis was my home until age almost eleven.  It's hard to drive around and not compare it to my mental catalogue of the city from the seventies and eighties.  Memphis has a real energy and a lot of variety of neighborhood on most dimensions you can imagine, including safety.  There are long stretches that are old highways:

Shops that haven't been updated, ever, like this Antique Mall on Summer Ave:

A trailer park we were sort of dying to turn into an artists' residency program, if it were in a better neighborhood:

The lively Memphis tourists might know, Beale Street there to the left:

The gorgeous, magnificent engineering feats of the old bridges across the Mississippi, austerely beautiful steel frame:

Marx and Bensdorf's, a bar soon to be opened by an Irish man who coached soccer at a local university -- carrying on the great tradition of combining soccer and drinking: 

We went to a birthday party here and, failing to reach the Rendezvous for barbeque by about twenty minutes, we headed to Krystal.  I had not been since approximately 1983.  It was a beautifully minimalist order.  I offered to treat before I knew that two Krystal cheeseburgers and waters comes to $2.03.

We ventured out the next day to look around some more.  Here is a Memphis College of Art building in the park:

A beautiful house opposite the park, with classic Memphis architectural features and proportion:

And an old Sears Roebuck distribution center that is 1.6 million square feet:

Before posting the inside of the building, which is astonishing, here's the local funky coffee shop around the corner:

Complete with an Elvis devotional in the front room:

And a diagonal of tiling in the bathrooms that would be unfair to anyone already predisposed to be sick.  The coffee shop is a bar by night. . . 

I'm a very amateur observer of the tone of signs people put up in the bathroom, whether stern or overly gentle and casual, or in this case:

Coffees in hand, we headed back to the Sears building to walk around:

The building was a distribution center for the Sears catalog, so there are vast floors where people sat to fill orders at desks, and vast floors where merchandise was stored and people moved around on roller skates (literally) to find items and place them on reassuringly mechanical devices rehearsing all the machine inventions of a basic physics class: pulleys, slides, etc.  I framed this shot of the desks where workers sat filling orders (that arrived by conveyance through the ceiling, onto their desks) in the manner of Industrial-Revolution-era child labor photographs -- except it is so incredibly pastel:

All of these deeply mechanical devices, simple, hulking, painted in seafoam green or light turquoise. 

The entire building is covered in the most unbelievable, untouched peeling paint:

As if watching the creation of the Grand Canyon by water, except the stalactytes of Sherman Williams by sheer force of time, gravity, and earlier cracking.  Here's more paint, on the accordion contraptions through which products slotted down the chutes from upper floors reached individual people doing the stuffing:

The view outside:

From the kitchen, an almost post-apocryphal smorgasboard of industrial cafeteria equipment:

This industrial dishwashing device is almost exactly identical to what was known in college as "the flume."  Many bets were made over having to flume other people's trays:

Mark photographing the flume:

And a composition Mark first eyed and titled "Dan Flavin at rest:"

Minimalist Robert-Ryman style white on white compositions abound:

We made it all the way up ten stories to the roof, me winded on the stairs in a way that felt less cardiovascular and more case study in building materials.  The skyline from the roof is magnificent:

The tribute:

Windy and not so gloomy:

Mark and I went a couple of places you couldn't really take pictures, but suffice to say: Have a muffalato at Quik Chek, a convenience store turned into the best sandwich shop in town.  And go to Payne's for barbeque, a place our architect friend Carlos called the Rothko Chapel of BBQ.  The same woman has run it for thirty-six years, next to her thirty-five year old son.  They have huge meat cookers with heavy iron doors, but then a simple four-burner stove with a pot and ladle for the sauce.  The curtains are pulled down giving the whole place a cinematic quality of half-light.