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.

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

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

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?