Early Summer

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.