Museum Legs: December 2-3 - Cleveland -- The Barking Spider and the Happy Dog

Driving from Detroit, I kept seeing signs for Sandusky, Ohio, which was always the hometown of the group of teenagers who move to New York in the '80s dance movie, renovate a derelict house in a sped-up montage scene, and then make it big, after finding their voice dancing on the sidewalks.

Cleveland proper has the kind of industrial magnate history of philanthropy as Pittsburgh, though I am told that the two cities are similar enough they don't like to be compared any more than Williams and Amherst students.

I was hosted in Cleveland Heights by a wonderful neighborhood bookshop called Mac's Backs - Books on Coventry, and specifically by a woman named Suzanne. The introduction came from Ann Weatherhead via her niece Claire, whom I know from the Junior League in London. (Technically speaking, Claire and I dropped out the League around the same time.) Ann is nicknamed The Shug, short for Sugar Aunt, and was delightful, as was Suzanne:

Suzanne decided to have the reading at a literary arts center called The Lit, where she is a board member. It seemed like a great idea / honor, except that the Lit is downtown, and so my reading there was in the rain, in the dark, in an old industrial building with a locked front door and access only via a freight lift in the back. The building itself had some features that reminded me of art school, most easily noted in the bathrooms and freight elevator itself.

While we were there, most other people were artists preparing for an open studio that weekend. The elevator operator told a charming story about one artist with a license plate "other 45," as in the rest of the time outside one's fifteen minutes of fame.

Besides me and Suzanne, only one person attended the reading: Sean, the organizer of the Williams alumni listserve of Cleveland, also one of two Seans who are proprietors of a bar called The Happy Dog. In the vast, airy loft space, Suzanne, Sean, and I pulled up three stuffed chairs and, rounding up, spent fifteen minutes discussing the book.

The talk mostly felt like giving Suzanne product knowledge. The art museum in Cleveland is free, so Sean already had the sorts of museum-going habits I would espouse, the casual drop-in, the tendency to visit individual paintings he loved in childhood. His close friend, who couldn't attend the reading on account of a work commitment, is a senior curator of the museum. In short, I preached to the choir, briefly, and then we all adjourned to a bar called the Barking Spider to meet Ann / The Shug. Her boyfriend, a blues musician, was performing, hence her conflict with the reading itself.

Ann is lively and generous and immediate, with a ready laugh and genuine presence, and a quiet sense of discernment too. She is a magistrate. She bought us more than one round while we weren't paying attention. Her friend brought the biggest dog I had seen in a while, especially after spending Thanksgiving with the lovely, svelte greyhound-like German pointer, Flicka, Becky and Pete's dog. This dog is much, much bigger than as appears in these pictures, a back like a flattened barrel.

Sean and I headed to the Happy Dog too, where he had in theory offered to host a gathering of Williams alums after the reading but which ended up being the two of us sitting at the bar. Cleveland--and this was my first trip--has a lively alternative music scene, part of which was on view at the Happy Dog. If, in the next five years, a wave of interesting indie bands gained national prominence out of Cleveland, I would not be surprised.

The vibe of the Happy Dog could otherwise best be summed up by two facts: (1) their mix and match hot dog menu and (2) the fact that some patrons had chosen to get married there earlier in the evening. In reverse order, Sean had said he might be late to the reading on account of a wedding in the bar at 6. When we got there around 9 or 10, the bride and groom were still hanging out, radiant as if at a reception (which they were. . . ). This was their Christmas card this year:

Re the hot dogs themselves, the Happy Dog has a menu, a bit like the a la carte sheet in a sushi restaurant, where you can mix and match toppings that range to include: chorizo chili, american cheez whiz, saffron aioli, baby bok choy coca cola stir fry, and brazilian chimichurri. I went classic with coleslaw and a barbeque-esque sauce. Sean got the grossest sounding combination that happens to come together perfectly, much to anyone else's surprise: mole sauce, onions, peanut butter.

I tried to write down the name of the bands we saw, but my brain is a sieve for anything as hip as knowing obscure bands of Cleveland. I think we saw a couple of guys who are brothers and play in a range of each others' bands, all with great names like Doug McKeen and the Stuntmen and The Bedroom Legends.

I believe I also learned that the Happy Dog has the shortest tap line for Guinness in the city.

Interestingly, from an art-business standpoint, Sean has a day job totally separate from the bar: he runs part of global risk in an investment bank. He spent years as an SEC lawyer post-9/11, looking at global currency movements (e.g., whether anyone was shorting airline stocks) before 9/11, and ended up in a group of people writing international money-laundering standards. Speaking of firewalling and the monitoring of borders, he keeps two entirely separate desks, one for the bank:

One for the bar:

The second includes a white board with the band schedule:

He said one of the nice things about the bar, when one's work is of the single-point failure mode (e.g., not letting a single instance of money-laundering go undetected, a law-enforcement kind of strategic thinking) is that the bar is a place where he can fail, without too much consequence. If they stock a beer or invite a band no one likes, you get back on the horse, so to speak, and carry on. And probably, when it's that easy to dust yourself off, it becomes easier to experiment in the first place.

The next day, I saw the Cleveland Museum of Art, a beautiful original building, next to a hole in the ground where an expansion is under way. I was told subsequently by someone in the art world -- gossip / incorrectness warning! -- that the director had used funds earmarked for acquisitions to pay for part of the construction. Then they had run out of money midstream, and the director had taken a post at another museum where they have a wonderful Asian art collection, his original specialty, and he had cited that as the reason for his moving. (Art world people: I do know the names of these people and places, just demurring here on their behalf.)

I am including some images of art I simply liked. A Manet (I think, and not a Toulouse-Lautrec):

An unusual and magnetic Monet:

Van Gogh:

How great is this guy, and how modern:

This is an 1837 portrait of Nathanial Olds by Jeptha Homer Wade.

From one of the museum's sculpture galleries, you can see the top of a Gehry-designed Peter B. Lewis building that is part of the business school.

I visited the Lakeview Cemetery -- burial site of many industrialists including Rockefeller. One mausoleum was so grand it even had a rubber doormat at the start of the walkway.

Perched up above the city is this monument to President Garfield:

Eliot Ness is also buried there, off to the side in a quiet spot.

Before starting the drive to Pittsburgh, I stopped in at Mac's Backs, which really is a lovely store. The television photo at the start of this post is the sight above their register. ("Surgoen Generel's Warnig: Telivison Promots Iliteracy.") Museum Legs was placed on their "Recommended" shelf, incidentally next to Logicomix, which had a great write-up in the Financial Times a while back: