October 10 - Dallas with Rosie and Dick

From Arkansas, I arrived in Dallas to stay with Rosie and Dick, my sister's parents-in-law (pictured here in the modern art museum in Fort Worth).  

Rosie and Dick are among the patron saints of the Museum Legs book tour.  I stayed in their apartment in New York the last two months of the summer, and here I was on a scouting trip.  I was to speak at Rosie's book club, and to have planning meetings at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center.

Rosie and Dick are the sort of methodical, seasoned travelers who do not baulk when you wheel into their kitchen with the suitcase that is disorganized in its packing and the size of a house (one of those improbably large transatlantic ones that busts through the weight limit if more than half full).  Rosie immediately started getting out all manner of netted bags and delivering both help and a tutorial in laundry, namely how to wash fine washables in the machine.


The next day, Rosie and I set out for her book group, a collection of women who have gathered for about twenty years.  We read a book called The Leopard, which I told someone I hadn't read, right before someone else asked Rosie if I had read it and Rosie said of course I had.  (This is no more or less true that my performance in many a summer reading conversation in high school English class.)  We settled into the sofa of a beautiful home that was new to the owner (much art around to admire, and dainty miniature muffins that spoke to yours truly, a sampler by nature).


The woman who had chosen the book led the entire discussion and, to her credit, there were many more people who liked The Leopard by the end of the session.  The book is about things like death and plotlessness, hence the limitations of the form, despite its lyricism.  There was a show of hands at the beginning to see who had liked the book, and the hand count was at about one and a half.


We were treated to an announcement by another book group member who was working on the openings of the two performing arts centers.  I had the distinction of being through town the week before the most culturally important week in Dallas in decades.  The New York Times arts section was indistinguishable from the Dallas paper as a Rem Koolhaas and a Norman Foster performance / opera space opened across the street from each other.  As we were told in book group, this was the largest performing arts opening in America since Lincoln Center.  (For more on the Wyly Theater and the Winspear Opera House, click here.)


Afterwards, I spoke for a bit about Museum Legs, tying the book into themes from The Leopard (e.g., plotlessness and death, or in this case, the part of the definition of museums that is the desire to resist mortality by preserving things).  


Then Rosie and I went for a hilarious lunch with our book host and another woman from the club -- a restaurant with a magical souffle specialty, and the sort of bottle-green French glasses that do not in fact break when one that is full of diet coke is knocked off the table and onto the floor by way of Rosie's lower half.  It is an accurate description of the whole meal to say this all appeared very, very funny.


Rosie and I headed on to my first arts planning meeting at the Dallas Museum of Art.  Rosie, I only learned that day, had once been a board member at the DMA and I am not being modest when I say it was entirely to her credit that I was there.  In fact, I would have hired Rosie as a publicist in a heartbeat, so kind and extensive her outreach on my behalf.  We chatted with a few members of the education department, sitting in the board room.  


They have some really interesting programs, one in particular called Arts and Letters, that brings writers to the museum.  (This is one of those experiences as a first-time author where they give you some material and you say, on the one hand, I would absolutely love to do this.  On the other, I know the names of all the people on your current roster, and the New York Times editorial offices and bestseller list are lighter for their temporary absence to come to Dallas.)


Afterwards, Rosie and I strolled around the museum (always something better to do beforehand, but we were caught up at lunch), and then crossed the street to the Nasher.  I should also have been to the Nasher before, in particular because my sister's engagement party was there.  I absolutely loved almost everything about the place.  The guards couldn't have been friendlier, and the feng shui of the place is understated and interesting.  Everything feels comfortable, nothing empty, nothing overstuffed, at scale to a person, lots of light.  (It's a Renzo Piano building.)  The inside was taken up with Norman Foster's architectural models, and some sculptures more permanently there.  The outside was an oasis of quiet and padded-feeling grass, a James Turrell installation at the far end.  (I apologize that I had not yet started compulsively photographing everything at this point, so I can't post what we saw.)  My favorites, apart from the Turrell, were the Antony Gormley -- one of those men made out of railroad nails so that he looks ethereal and like a swarm of flies suggesting a man -- and a Borofsky of people climbing toward the sky (this piece or a similar one was in Rockefeller Center a few years ago).  


In the downstairs, they had Norman Foster drawings.  Had he not become a famous architect, he would have been a brilliant cartoonist.

Rosie and I adjourned to "the living arts" (aka shopping) and went to Northgate, the shopping mall that Raymond Nasher had founded.  

Fascinatingly, Nasher was a shopping center magnate, but he also believed in putting art in malls.  

Northgate, built in the 1960s, had loads of art that we would see again the next day in museums.

Rosie and Dick are proper foodies, in an unshowy, real appreciation of the food itself sort of way.  So that first night, we went to a favorite place of theirs that is, in the exterior, an informal enough building (possibly a gas station), we essentially parked in what used to be the driveway.


The next day, Rosie, Dick and I went on an art fieldtrip to the Kimbell and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.  The modern museum had a Felix Gonzalez Torres pile of candy, and the museum itself appears to float in water, a vast reflecting pool whose height coincides with the bottom of the building.


We played that game where you can choose five works to take home with you.  I topped out entirely (I love Gerhard Richters from the 1960s), while Rosie and Dick chose very little.  


As a high point, we went to the gift shop where I signed their stock of books.

We started at the Kimbell in the gift shop, where none of us could tear ourselves away from considering the stuffed animals they have after famous artists.  Frieda Kahlo has a unibrow that is like the flattened, curvy M shape of the bridge over the Mississippi River in Memphis.  Frank Lloyd Wright looked a little shifty and the worse for wear.  You could imagine the odd combinations of people you could pose on your sofa, a subtle way to make people feel uncomfortable in your home.


The Kimbell is well known as a Louis Kahn building, a study in forms and lighting.  But we had the best time in one of the installations.  The museum had commissioned a filmmaker Philip Haas to make work in response to their collection.  In one room -- one of those darkened hallway video installation rooms it is easy to blow right past since you don't know what you are going to get -- the artist recreated a Tiepolo painting on the ceiling.  The painting was a study for one of those ornate Versailles-era ceilings with the frou-frou cupids, trappings of a feast, some obscure animals, and enough mythological content to justify a number of topless women.  (The title was Apollo and the Continents.)  The video started with close ups of all of these and then at some point, there was to be a god of some sort on a cloud in the center of the composition.  All the people we had been seeing close up became this live diorama around the border, and then the god appeared on the cloud very small, and he simply enlarged, zooming forward.  It wasn't kitsch or camp like a one-liner, but somehow extremely funny -- enough to get peals of laughter from Rosie and a decision by all of us to crane our necks (all sitting on the floor) to watch the part of the sequence we had missed.


In another installation, the artist had reenacted a butcher scene, and also filmed the painting up very close, interspersing the almost gruesome physicality of the paint (that will be the most art historical sounding phrase on the blog) with the meat itself.


We adjourned and headed back to Dallas for foodie meal number two -- literally, we ate in the kitchen of a neighborhood restaurant.  They put a table in the chef's office, so there is a window onto the prep area. We shared the meal with some lovely friends of theirs, with exceeding good humor and knowledge of art.


From Dallas, I flew to New York for work meetings.  I didn't strictly have to be there, as I have an inordinately understanding, artist-like boss.  But a project I have worked on for more than five years, since it was a hare-brained scheme (or more accurately, a set of ideas close enough to their inception to feel impossible to judge or know the sanity of, only possible to pay the compliment of 'carry on'), had grown to enough scale that it was having its first meeting announcing that it would be come an investible product, a real live fund.  It was gratifying to be present.


I may have mentioned earlier that the publicist for Museum Legs left the project the day after the book came out.  Editorializing how or why this happened is somewhat beside the point and sure to be subjective, but the timing had a more objective badness about it, and I had been limping along a bit in a vacuum.  I was beyond my wits end, in desperate need of help.  So, I was following all leads, much like someone who is dating and says ' I will go on a first date with anyone.'  A guy in DC had seemed very promising, clearly good at what he did, but he wanted to meet in person.  I basically turned myself into a piece of paper that goes through a mail slot and emerges on the other side as a person, in order to get to the airport in D.C., where he kindly offered to meet me.  About fifteen minutes in, after we had already talked about salary and the budgetary limitations of its being a small press, he explained to me what his standing fee structure was.  I couldn't help but wish he had done it before I had gone to such lengths.  It felt like one of those times where I am naively shocked by people in the arts who are so demonstrably about money.  Don't get me wrong -- I honor and value this guy's work and know the importance of freelancers or entrepreneurs sticking up for their rates.  But I am also lucky to work for one of these small outfits where everyone is reasonably honest and above board, and it felt like 'foot in the door' or 'lowballing' social psychology, like he could have told me earlier.  Maybe he was very accurately reading my desperation to find someone, but the upshot was that I arrived in Dallas disastrously late, from a polite houseguest standpoint, and missed the chance to have dinner with the Gutmans who had stayed up to let me into their house and generously coordinated for someone to pick me up from the airport -- all the day before they themselves left for France.


It was one of those times I was wishing I was actually British so I could say something--just to myself--that was terrifically understated, 'well, that's not ideal, is it?' and vaguely mean it, or at least say something that was the bald-face truth -- 'that is a disaster' and subtract out the emotional content.  As it was, I got in late, felt I had done everything I could do on the PR front, made my apologies to the Gutmans, and carried on.

The next morning, a bit the worse for wear, I headed out of town by way of a meeting with the lovely director of external affairs and education contact at the Nasher.  On my way in, I had seen a very tall man in a lime green sweater (more chartreuse, really) peering into the windows of the Nasher, while being followed by a younger man, shepherding a wheelie bag suitcase.  I imagined to myself it was Norman Foster, whom the man didn't *not* resemble, coming to check on the installation of his models.  Either Lord Foster is very clever or I was very wrong (or both) because then the man in green starting speaking to the other man in an American accent.  


The director of external affairs did say that Foster was in town.  We talked about the story of the Nashers -- shopping malls and 'art in everyday life,' and agreed to be in touch about a possible program.  I went onward to a Starbucks that backs up to the Fairmont Hotel, whose kitchen makes all of the Starbucks pastries (excellent), and sat there to write a fellowship application, which I took on to the nearby Kinkos, wishing the woman who worked there was more helpful so that I could have sent the application in better karmic humor.  And then I got in the car and drove on west, to visit my cousin Hazel Doris in Odessa, Texas.