Fall 2010, part 2

 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.