October 24-27 -- Big Sur to San Francisco

From LA, I headed north up Highway 101.  For old time's sake, here is the Madonna Inn, the bathroom as proxy for the decor of the whole place:

In actual fact, I was in spectacular nature, more of this stripe:

The Dalai Lama and I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway which is surpisingly winding.  I was listening to a book on tape of The Art of Happiness, expansive and hopeful stuff about finding a sense of community and finding commonality with others and joining things.  

It's jarring to drive up the PCH at night by yourself.  You sort of know that the guardrail on the left drops down immediately into the Pacific Ocean but you can't see it.  And I was headed to an unfamiliar state park checking in in the dark, still wearing a skirt and Keds from the day in LA.  Craig of the state park said offered that I shouldn't worry about any large animals but that I should try to avoid skunks.  Somewhere in that disorientation, I was feeling a little overawed by nature, big and small, needing to build my openness, as the Dalai Lama would say, my trust toward uncertainty, skunks and all.

Craig had said the key to my room at Big Sur State Park would be taped to the door and sure enough it was.  It was a relaxingly spare room, the kind of place that would seem the height of luxury if you had been sleeping in a tent for a week, all hot showers and clean corners.  I got into bed in my clothes and slept like a rock.

The next morning I went for a hike, through the redwoods, which was amazing, and up to a view of the Pacific Ocean that was incredible if also slightly -- comically -- marred by this structure right at the lookout point:

I got back in the car and headed to San Francisco, stopping at an artichoke farm where I bought the best almonds I have had in my life.  (A month later, an east coast chef friend would concur, 'oh yeah, that's a joke in California.  The almonds that get sent out here have been in storage for a year.')

On Blogging and Private vs. Public Information. . .

In San Francisco, I stayed with old friends, S and J.  I hadn't started blogging yet at that point, and we had a conversation over dinner that pointed out to me one of the best qualities about blogging so far:


We live in a time when people talk about the death of the newspaper and of traditional publishing.  But what is also true is that we live in an age of specialization, when to really understand something, you might have to do it yourself.  Journalists have natural advantages of professional writing and generalist reporting, but disadvantages, when it comes to specialized topics, of not having experiential knowledge.  This was right around the time that the Rolling Stone article came out calling Goldman Sachs a vampire squid.  J pointed out that the vampire squid writer got so much so right, but at the same time didn't nail it.  It was more like he was corralling an argument than pinpointing it.  On the other hand, J works in a financial services area and had a career-making ability to predict this banking crisis far enough ahead of time he probably seemed crazy.  He would be a great writer on finance but never under his own byline because it would interfere with his work. 


 This leads me to believe that there is much public debate that is now private -- smart people working inside smart companies writing for other people who are, like them, practictioners in industries. This drains public debate down to people who can comment publicly. If you believe that you know something by doing it -- in this case that you understand legitimately complicated financial mechanisms by working in the field -- then that leaves professional journalists to talk about fields they don't technically work in. The result is commentary followed by legislation of the financial industry that corrals rather than nails an understanding of something like, for example, credit default swaps or exact mechanisms of Federal Reserve maneuverings.  I am now starting to see that blogs are in fact important for legitimately democratizing information, the real information, the experiential knowledge.  (For example, see the blog called Calculated Risk.)

Of course, I am not about to explain credit default swaps, just, for now, the story of Museum Legs hitting the road, a book tour that also provides a framing device for driving around the country, and a bit of a "Where to Live" experiment and excuse for a life project.


Having lived in England on and off for a number of years, driving around the country is a way of intuiting and knowing where I am from probably better than I ever have.  All those little things -- like public transportation and local coffee shops and radio stations -- are as telling about where you can live as anything else.  For example, Palm Springs has not one but two Musak stations, whereas you can easily hit the dial in a few places in Philadelphia and come up with almost the entire selection of BMG music club albums I owned freshman year of college.


Reading in San Francisco. . .
I was in San Francisco to speak at Green Apple Books, a lovely, rambling independent, 

and to give a talk at Google.  The reading ended up being a small gathering, if delightful gathering:

And the people at the bookstore were super-nice.  It's one of those used-new bookstores where the used books live in the shelves next to the new books so you can make a buying decision with perfect information of that stripe.  


Giving a talk then tends to place your book on an exciting shelf like this:

I bought some books on tape for the car, and went with friends to a bar that happened to be the same exact bar I had been taken to the night before by a different old friend -- they've not met -- who lives in their neighborhood.  I have a fantasy about all of my old friends getting to meet each other, not thinking they might cross paths by accident all the time. 


Authors@Google

I headed to Menlo Park the next day, in advance of giving a talk at Google.  I was hosted by my friend Claire from business school.  I stayed the night before with Claire and Jesse, and hung out with their lovely children Chloe and Miles, who staged a dance-off in the kitchen.  I bunked in with Miles who shares a bedroom with the guest sleeper sofa.  The next morning at breakfast, he gave me a very funny look of recognition, even though he is too young to speak.  On the theme of noticing the character of places by their radio stations, you can add to that list the mood of law enforcement: I parked overnight on their street, which is not allowed, and received not a ticket or a warning but a "courtesy notice."

Google is the first place I have signed a non-disclosure agreement without reading it.  I can't imagine I have anything secret to share.  Google has a wonderful Authors@Google program that is volunteer run and involves bringing in all kinds of interesting speakers.  They post all of the talks on their YouTube channel.  Among others, I watched one by Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the The Pentagon Papers.  In a best-ever introduction, his cousin, who happened by coincidence to work at Google, said that Daniel had asked what to wear.  The cousin explained the casual dress code and offered that Condaleeza Rice and Henry Kissinger had spoken there in suits.  Ellsberg said, "well, if I think I am going to get arrested, I like to be wearing a suit.  That way, people see a man in a suit get arrested and think men in suits are not above the law."  Ellsberg has been arrested more then seventy times. So, I enjoyed watching his talk, also to see that he turned up in a button down and sleek version of a Members Only jacket.

Claire is a seemingly effortlessly gifted speaker who gave me a really kind introduction.  I gave my talk and then she, Peipei (my host), and I had lunch in the Google cafeteria.  I got to see Eric Schmidt make himself a panini, as pointed out "there's something you don't see everyday."  

Peipei has a really interesting job as part of the team that determines the boundary of what is allowed to be on Google search engines in countries around the world.  This means everything from child porn (a grayer definitional line than I've ever taken pause to consider) to things that are illegal in one country but available in others.

Driving back from Google, I watched a British Airways plane land at San Francisco Airport in that state of suspended animation that is what it looks like when planes kind of hover in toward the ground.  I imagined the land far away the way and thought of those people who had boarded that silver bullet over in England and were about to touch down.  It was the same way I used to imagine the land across the ocean from the Brooklyn Promenade when I first moved back.

The audio track for San Francisco was a newfound love, the Flight of the Concords soundtrack. I heartily recommend overall.  Even now, I laugh when I think of that line, “She’s so hot. I want to tell her how hot she is.  But then she’ll think I’m sexist.  She’s so hot she’s making me sexist. . . . Bitch."

I headed for the California College of Arts and Crafts to meet with a brilliant man named Nathan Shedroff who is starting a design MBA program -- that is, an MBA program situated within an art school.  (This appealed to me for a number of obvious reasons, raised my skepticism, and caused me to volunteer to teach, all in one go.)  Many thanks to Sunny Bates, again, recurrent patron saint of the tour, for the introduction, and to Nathan for his time.  Having gone to art school myself in a windowless gallery space for two years, I found the light at the CCAC breathtaking, comfortably spare.

Back at S and J's, she made corn chowder and we watched real live Flight of the Conchords episodes and went to bed.  Leaving town the next morning, the Bay Bridge was closed and I drove up over the Golden Gate and into Marin County.  Sonoma County looks like France.

This was to be the start of driving through essentially European landscapes -- France above, England in Oregon and, in western Idaho, Norway, I think.

I spent the rest of the day in the alternate universe of a very long drive, listening to Harry Potter  through a beautiful farm landscape on 5 North, loving the grain elevators in the bright sun, happening on my first snow covered mountain.  The Lake Shasta area has this impossible formation, vivid deep blue well-like expanses, with a sandy base rising to evergreen trees.  Even the gas station in Calistoga had the feel of being deep into a wooded hike.  It occurred to me for the first time in my life that Shasta cola has a connection to nature, and might have even come from here.

October 18 - 23 -- Palm Springs to LA

I have never been more lost in my life -- in a place with one main road -- than arriving late at night into Palm Springs.  I had called the hotel for directions and the guy had assumed without asking that I was coming from LA.  The directions also included "drive toward the mountain," in the pitch, black dark, in a windstorm.  I eventually rolled up,

a little the worse for wear, having an internal conversation about what the Dalai Lama would do.  The guy eventually gave me free breakfast, and showed me to a room that, I am pretty sure, is the sample in their brochure.  (It bears an uncanny resemblance, and would seem hard to duplicate exactly.  I unpacked and repacked the car while I was there, making it more cluttery in my photo.)

I was staying at the Viceroy in Palm Springs, a Regency style resort with white stucco bungalows and rooms, a few manicured pools, and surprisingly good food -- the kind of place where the bun is not taken for granted, as in, if you order a turkey burger and the bun is not mentioned on the menu, it comes over salad.  (Maybe this is just California.)

I found the place as a Mr. and Mrs. Smith property, so I shouldn't have been surprised that there were many people of British accent floating around.  The second night I was there, I went to eat dinner in the outdoor cafe, and tripped spectacularly over a raised stone -- in red keds and a sundress.  The waiter kept checking to make sure I was okay, which always makes me feel like they are making sure I am not going to sue them.


The next morning, I went for a walk into town.  Even when I have gone somewhere for the express purpose of sequestering myself and checking out, I always want to see where the people are.  The nearest shopping strip was of the sort with literally nothing to buy -- unless you were in the market for postcards, t-shirts, and whimsical crafts sold at a gallery called "Cilantro."  Thus, I landed at the Starbucks.  (There would be a long, local coffee shop streak, starting in the next city.)


I struck up conversation with a woman who lives in Berkeley, is trained as a lawyer, and deals in art.  Twenty minutes later, she said something astrological, and I asked her about my own sign (Cancer).  She said Cancers have been tied in knots, very boxed in for about five years and they are now getting free.  She thought I would enjoy this and look for companionship, but not want to get married anytime soon, just have fun for a while.  (I couldn't tell if her soon was in months or years.)  


From Palm Springs, I awoke early on the 23rd and, in the span of a day, drove to LA, spent the day in the city, and then headed all the way up the coast to Big Sur.  It felt really normal to be in California.  Palm trees, low-slung desert, hard to believe I had driven all the way there.  

Some radio stations and songs are suited to their places.  American Pie, Don McLean, driving into LA, from the east, these big mountains and impossible palm trees and bright sun and erratic drivers. Perfect.

Having really not liked LA the first time I was there I have to say I do sort of love the place.  Soft spot.  And the effort to listen to the whole Don McLean was richly rewarded with The Romantics, Talking in Your Sleep, as I came into LA from the east on I-210.  If cities have their nature, there is something about LA that is about openness and speed.  Everyone’s rolling along in their car, Nate Dogg Regulate is on the radio.  There is simultaneously energy and floating, like the city is a big swimming pool.  It is so hard to recollect cities after the fact, a bubble of awareness easily punctured by an experience of another place. The feel of LA sticks with me.  On some trips, San Francisco washes over me, feels like a dream.

There are crazy amounts of old school rap on the radio in LA, in contrast to the not one but two Musak stations in Palm Springs.  On the way, I stopped at a gas station and saw a man in monastic robes (young and nice seeming and not un-handsome) pay for gas and then get into a car with a  bumper sticker that read:

"Half of all women who go into abortion clinics don't make it out alive." 

My first response was that the math is wrong -- more like a third, since only half of the fetuses are female, so twice as many mothers as female babies, re the total woman count.  

Something like that happens that is jarring and then you get back out on the road and have that swimming pool feeling again.  There is always something to look at.  I saw my first ever soft top Camry gold trim silver body tan top.  Otis Redding came on the radio, followed by American Pie again, making me wonder if it was a Buddy Holly anniversary.

I stopped in Pasadena, went to Vroman's independent bookstore, tooled around.  Here is a picture of Museum Legs at Vroman's:

I am lucky alphabetically that it ends up to one of my favorite books, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, by Lawrence Weschler about Robert Irwin.

I visited Book Soup in Hollywood, which is a great bookstore recently bought by Vroman's.  Excellent stationery buyer, who was also at the register. 

Onward to the LA County Museum of Art, where I had promised to sign their stock of books.  I met the lovely Felicia and Ben in the shop and sat at the cafe table outside to finish an essay from the Op-Ed Project.  LACMA is a hulking behemoth museum, many blocks long, of the same size as Detroit's Institute of Art.

Here is the sign for the New Topographies show, featuring the work of Frank Gohlke, fellow Hol Art books author.  The guard very kindly let me in to the member preview that day.

I was headed to Venice to see one more bookstore before driving north.  Driving through Culver City, down Venice Blvd, I started to think it looked familiar, like exactly the nondescript place where the Museum of Jurassic Technology is. 

Sure enough it was, so I parked and went in.

I asked the front desk person, Rachel, if Alexis Hyman was in because I had called her out, inadvertently, in Museum Legs -- printing her job title -- administrator - archivist - florist -- without remembering to ask.  They said Alexis was out and when I explained why I was looking for her they said she was out because it was her birthday.  I got to leave her a book as a gift.

I headed on to Equator Books in Venice, recommended by Amee's now husband Michael. Max Wheeler, the proprietor, is also the artist of a print I would have bought if it hadn't been over a thousand dollars.  In white spongy paint over baby blue background, it said "This is not an Ed Rushay" with curious line breaks.  The shop is beautiful, warm polished plywood -- it's not easy to be warm and minimalist at the same time, though serving Blue Bottle Coffee helps.  Max was super nice, though I felt, self-consciously, decidedly unlike a surf chick against the vibe of the store.

I didn't get a photo of Equator Books, but I did, without realizing it, commence the local coffee shop tour.  Down the street from Equator was, I think, Intelligentsia.  I didn't love their coffee, but I did love their space:

Here are some pictures of the Pacific Ocean, from Venice.  I had officially made it to the west coast.

Leaving LA, it was really bright in that flat white trafficy way.  Destined for a big traffic jam. I love LA in the mornings.  Jury’s still out on the afternoon.  Maybe I just like LA when I’m not driving into the sun.

Postscript:

A few days later, I got an email from college classmate Smith Glover asking what I was doing in Equator Books.  Smith lives three blocks around the corner.  Though I am really sorry to have missed him, I still have no idea how he knew I had been there.

October 15-17 - Odessa, Deming, Tucson

Odessa is the hometown of my cousin Hazel Doris.  The last time I visited her there, she, her bridge partner Phillis, and I road-tripped (in Doris' off-white Cadillac coupe) to Marfa to see the Donald Judd (what Phillis called 'the big tin boxes').  This time, I didn't take any pictures, but here is one from Marfa -- Doris is in white, Phillis in orange.

This time, Phillis was out of town. I was there just to see Doris, and was also in need of down-time.  Our itinerary: I slept way in.  We read the newspaper and watched TV news.  Although Doris may be the most liberal member of her immediate family because she believes in drinking and dancing, she and I have very different politics.  She is open to discussing politics with me, and I enjoy the extreme sport of trying to find common ground (e.g., that George Bush is a little bit corny).  This time, we talked about the separation of church and state.  


Then we went for a drive and went to see a matinee.  Doris suggested I chose, so we went to see Whip It, the Drew Barrimore roller derby movie with Ellen Page and Kristin Wiig and Juliette Lewis.  We were the only two people in the theatre.  


Afterwards, I asked Doris if it was the worse film she had ever seen and she said cheerfully, "Well, maybe I've seen two or three worse."  I enjoyed the film but couldn't help but see it through Doris' eyes. There was one line in particular that was incredibly rude, after which Doris leaned over and said, "I can't really hear everything they are saying."  I don't know if that was true or if she was being gracious since you could see me blush to the ears even in the darkened cinema.


We ventured on for dinner out at Doris' favorite fancy Italian.  I had delicious scallops and we watched a procession of people out for date night.  Then we went to the grocery store (me driving Doris' new Cadillac).  She opts for a motorized cart, really because I think it is zippy way to get around.  Periodically, I would not know something like what kind of tomatoes she wanted, and she would hop up out of the cart, more spry than anyone else in the produce section.  On the way out, she confided that that particular cart didn't have as much 'get up and go' as usual.


We saw no museums in Odessa, though I had been to one on the prior visit where they had a captivating garden designed for blind people.  We hung out more then next day and then got on the road to start the drive to Tucson, where my publisher lives.  

Odessa was mostly about seeing Doris and being off the grid, which is nice because 'off the grid' is how the landscape feels as you get further west.  I dipped down so close to Mexico near El Paso, I literally went through border patrol.  I asked the border officer to make sure I wasn't driving into Mexico, and he gave me a look before shaking his head.  Border control is a bracing reminder of the authority of countries.  And I was close to Juarez, which hadn't exactly been getting good press with regard to the drug trade lately.  One does not have to be overly imaginative or paranoid or xenophobic to find it unsettling.


In North Carolina, my aunt Beverly had given me a book on tape called The Rain Gods, about a "host" of killers (as Beverly said, "oh, there are a lot more than that!") that takes places in exactly the terrain I was driving through.  I had resolved to finish the book before I got there, creeping down Doris' street at about five miles an hour while the last few pages played.  Even still, I was in a frame of mind that the spareness of the landscape supports.

I stopped for the night in Deming, New Mexico. 

Deming happens to be the name of my friend Jen's mom, and I emailed Jen who replied straightaway (with the timing of someone breastfeeding twins in the middle of the night) to say someone had once sense her mom a mug from the town.  I spent the next morning doing three things: 

1. Getting a Deming souvenir -- the fire department gave me a patch that looks very much like the close-up on their truck:

2. Goin to WalMart -- I was standing in line behind a guy buying Ghirardelli white chocolate and the full BBC set of Pride and Prejudice.  I saw him in the parking lot, getting onto a hulking motorcycle.  I was buying San Pelligrino.


I did not take a photograph of the Wal Mart, but I do have an unfortunately near photographic memory of the souvenirs section of the store -- a case study in people in China having to stamp "Deming, New Mexico" onto a purple, glittery calculator that is both a clip and a refrigerator magnet -- all alongside a maddening array of things almost tasteful, but that just said New Mexico.


I did love this sign:

3. I became obsessed with these sorts of 'unfussed with' architectural structures:

How great is this gas station?  It looks like a painting -- both a particular painting that I think is by Ed Ruscha,

and in general, like you would want to paint it.

This gas station is to other gas stations what a dive bar is to a "Dive Theme Bar."


It was Sunday morning, in New Mexico, listening to Stax Records compilation.  Big, big sky.  There is nothing more magnificent than driving through the expansive Western landscape listening to early blues rock n roll coming out of Memphis.  Recorded with pre-famous verve by people talented enough to later be famous, into big blue skies, really loud.  If an activity can be inherently happy-making. . . 


You pass flat, flat land, mountains you get near enough after driving toward them for an hour to see are really jagged piles of individual rocks.  Exactly the same road sign saying next exit museum and next exit rodeo, and then I'd passed a sign for “museum” plastered onto the side of a roadside attraction called The Thing.  


I arrived in Tucson mid-afternoon, and my publisher Greg and his wife Kate threw a party that night -- both for Museum Legs and for Hol Art Books, the press.  I got to meet another Hol writer, Frank Gohlke, who was traveling with an old friend and fellow photographer named John.  The two of them together were such a stand-up comedy show, without at all trying, that Kate, Greg, and I stood for a couple of hours after the party listening to them, before we all realized we could get chairs.  Frank was in a show called New Topographies in the 1970s, when landscape photography was redefined to include much more than Ansel-Adams-style nature against a horizon line -- more of the built environment, like parking lots or trailers.


The LA County Museum of Art reprised the New Topographies show, and Frank's Hol book -- a collection of his thoughts on landscape photography was published by Hol around the time of the opening.  (Frank is a beautifully spare writer -- was an English major at Yale.)  


Frank's friend John, a well-known photographer in his own right, is also an old friend of William Eggleston's.  I heard some stories that are, I am sure, entirely true, and not for me to tell.  


Frank and John also told stories on themselves -- Frank had been trying to photograph the front of this woman's home and she had not been pleased.  Frank is incredibly gracious and you can imagine that many people would not notice or mind if he were doing this, but that once he noticed that they minded he might find a bit of humor in being a little unforthcoming.  We suggested he go back either with a whole group of his students to all photograph her house, or that he go alone and photograph every other house in the neighborhood.  (I relate to these problems as an artist, wanting to document people, which is a negotiation of when you are telling someone else's story or your own.  I don't creep people out though -- I have that look that says 'please ask me for directions' which helps me look unsociopathic when caught taking pictures.)


Here is me, Greg, and Frank, the other Hol author:

At the party, I also met the press' publicist, Laura Adams, who was funny and smart and laughed easily and had major experience, and covetable shoes.  She said she would take on by book in conjuction with her work on the press.  Museum Legs had a publicist again, at last.


The next day, Greg and I sat at the table and had a long and fruitful debrief, considering how it had been putting Museum Legs through its paces as the inaugural book of the press.  Then I went to be a guest spaker in Greg's wife Kate's class at the university.  

Kate is a photography expert who happened to be teaching a museum studies class.  The topic for the day was the Sensation controversy -- the Saatchi collection show at the Brooklyn Museum.  I talked about "The Insulated Judiciary," which accounts for the group portrait of the US Supreme Court on screen under "These People?".  

It was interesting, having gone to art school in England, how much I knew about the Sensation artists that I didn't realize I knew, or didn't realize other people didn't know, just by sheer virtue of familiarity (and time spent early in art school wondering who people were talking about.)

Driving around the country speaking about museums sounds, to me, a bit like a vacation.  But actually doing it proved very busy.  So from Tucson, I stopped for a few days to catch my breath, in a strange and beautiful land between Tucson and LA, where heavily watered grass backs up to craggy mountains, where the roads are named for Bob Hope, where a woman at Starbucks is a lawyer and reads your horoscope, unsolicitedly, and where, truly, the man behind me in the drive through at the other Starbucks was in a convertible Rolls Royce: Palm Springs.

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.