The newspaper of record

   On June 29, 2011, The New York Times posts this correction on its web-site:  

   An earlier version of this article contained a dateline that incorrectly referred to "Nantucket, R.I."  Nantucket is in Massachusetts.

   On June 30, 2011, I see this article online and consider a new blog label:  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

An unfinished basement

   The house I grew up in was built in the 1860s or thereabouts.  So my parents told us, and so we were happy to believe.  It meant we could say our house was built during the Civil War.  It made it seem historic, and not just old.  

   But old it was, as we were reminded by door frames that weren't close to being square to the ceiling.  Or anytime we went down into the cellar, with its packed dirt floor and stone foundation walls.  The foundation must have been dug by hand, something I never thought about in the fifteen years that I lived there, or the couple of summers I came back before I didn't.  Like a lot of things, it just didn't occur to me at the time.

   The cellar smelled faintly of earth and stones, because that's what it was made of.  And, because of my father, it smelled like metal and paint and chemicals for cleaning paint and the electric motor of the grinding wheel on the work bench and the cold sparks that flew from it when my father was sharpening the blade of the lawn mower or some tool that would just work a lot better if you took a few minutes out to sharpen it.  

   The dirt floor had a think covering of gravel that my father put down, a bucket at a time.  It made a crunching, scuffling sound as you walked around, your head stooped a bit from the low ceiling, to fetch something you had been sent for or to hold something down that needed to be steadied while it was cut or drilled or nailed or screwed or glued.

   In the back, behind the rows of shelves that held all the paints and stains, was a potato crib, made of boards and old shutters, that my father made to hold the potatoes that he grew in the big garden at the bottom of the back yard.  And behind that was the bulkhead with its short set of wooden stairs that led up to the same back yard.

   This was the bulkhead that the skunk walked up.  The skunk that fell into the cellar after he knocked in one of the little windows along the top of the foundation.  The skunk my father found in the basement when he went down one evening to do something or other, before beating a hasty retreat.  This was a problem.  He thought about various ways to catch the skunk and get it out of the basement.  But all manners of catching skunks involve the obvious risk of getting sprayed.

   And then I offered up the notion that if we just opened the bulkhead and waited for a while, the skunk might be able to walk up the stairs and just take himself out.  I think my father was the one who quickly yanked the bulkhead door open from the outside, before we all peered out the window, straining through the gloom, to see if the skunk walked out.  Which soon enough it did.  A big one, too.

   I remember this not so much because of the skunk, but because it was the first time I ever figured out something my dad didn't.  I didn't care for it then.  Nor now.  

Herd mentality

In a store window at the mall there is a herd of running elephants.  They are each about the size of a hand.  They are chrome or maybe silver-plated, with brass tusks.  They are identical in form, but vary a little in size.  Individually, it is not an elephant figure that I like at all.  But the whole of them, as a running herd, is captivating.  Like the herd of giraffes in the next window over. 

And so it is with any animals, as I think of it.  The single wildebeest on a television nature show is what?  So much ugly food for the wily crocodile hidden in the mud.  But a herd of them moving across the plain – that is a sight to behold.  So, too, a hillside of buffalo.  A school of any fish.  A flock of geese.   

The many moving as one.  Is it some hunter’s instinct in us that is attracted to this? 

The boy from Barton Road

Megan’s high school graduation was a couple of weeks ago.  So she is in that short little part of life where one is neither in high school nor in college.  That ends soon.

Only now, these weeks after the ceremony, does it occur to me if the boy from Barton Road was there.  Barton Road is home to the housing projects of Wellesley.  The kids there go to Schofield Elementary, as our girls did.

There was a morning in October, when Megan was in the second grade, when a boy who lived in Barton Road came to school in his bare feet.  The mother left the house early every morning to get to her job.  The boy’s uncle was supposed to come over and get the boy off to school.  But that day he never showed up and the boy somehow ended up locked outside his house, without his shoes.  He walked to school, about a mile away, in his bare feet.              

This was in October, when there can be some pretty decent days in Massachusetts.  But then there are some other days. 

I forget his name, if I ever knew it.  It seems, like a lot of folks, I wasn’t paying as much attention as perhaps I could have.  But hey, we’re all busy.  Right?

I’ll have to ask Megan if he made it to graduation.  And if he did, if he had some family there.

For those of you sitting on the other side of the plane

Much is written these days about the information that corporations are collecting about all of us every time we use our credit cards, our phones.  Perhaps every time we log on to what my brother calls the inter-web.  They track what we buy, where we go, how we get there, how we pay for it, and so on, all of which in the end paints some kind of pixel picture of us.  The major air carriers have collected some information about me that for some reason has caused them to program my seat assignments such that, no matter what airline I travel, no matter in which direction, I am always seated on the opposite side of the plane from which, the captain tells us, the passengers seated on that side will shortly be having an excellent view of the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, or whatever it is that is worth coming on the radio to mention.  What I have done to deserve this I know not.

Postcards from San Francisco

   On the way to San Francisco for a conference, I suffer all the little common worries of the modern traveler.  Will there be room in the overhead for my suitcase?  If I have to give it up here at the gate, will it really make it into the belly of the plane?  Will the person sitting next to me be obese?  Will they give us the whole damned water bottle this time, or just a stupid plastic cup of it?  And so on.  It’s ridiculous, of course.  Especially once you’re up in the air and soaring west and further west, across the vast plains, the mountains, the deserts.  

   Five hours in and one to go.  You’ve done your work for the day, read the interesting bits of the Sunday Times (of which there were too few), and your back is sore.  But still, you are making good time, incredible time, flying in this rocket ship.  Below, the occasional highway looks like a dusty trail.  Your sore back and cramped legs are nothing compared to those of the pioneers who set out, not so long ago, to cross these lands in hard wagons, or walking alongside them, trying to stay in the wagon’s shade.

   Somewhere over Utah (I think), I hunt through the journals on my laptop for the notes I wrote of my last visit to San Francisco, which turns out to have been eleven years ago.  I don’t date what I write (I should), but there is this reference to Miss Megan being six: 

   We are at war in Iraq, and with Al Qaeda.  The news contains rumors of terrorists in the U.S., or perhaps elsewhere, armed with surface-to-air missiles and the intention to take down commercial airliners.  I am about to fly to San Francisco for a conference on asbestos litigation.  A colleague at work asks if I am nervous about flying.  I respond as Churchill did to his aides who urged him to take cover during the Blitz.  “I am protected by the impenetrable shield of probability.”  At home in the evening, talking to my 6-year-old who does not want me to go away, it is harder to feel sure.

   Megan, of course, is long over any separation anxiety around my business trips.  Sadly, incredibly, we remain at war in Iraq and with Al Qaeda.

   I did a good job last time getting out of the conference hotel and exploring the city, and ate well, too.  Strolling The Embarcadero, checking out the sea lions at Pier 39 and gazing out at Alcatraz (La Isla de los Alcatraces, The Island of the Pelicans); Fisherman’s Wharf, looking for actual fisherman and fresh fish, not just chowder in bread bowls; and Ghiardelli Square.  Riding the cable cars.  The park at Fort Mason.  The marine museum at Aquatic Park.  The buttery swordfish atop a spicy, colorful curry with lemon, mango, red jalapeno peppers and coconut at Ponzu; a salad with Dungeness crab and bay shrimp at one of the places along The Embarcadero; and the whole roasted fish and two fine glasses of wine at The Slanted Door, at the corner of The Embarcadero and Brannan Street. 

   Brannan Street, I later learned, is named for Samuel Brannan, who on May 12, 1848, rode through the streets of San Francisco waving a bottle of gold and shouting, “Gold!  Gold!  Gold from the American River!”  So began the great Gold Rush.  One wonders what else might be named for Brannan, besides this one street, if only he had kept his mouth shut for a little while.

   Strolling through Chinatown, with its grocery stores and meat shops and fish shops.  Fish lie gasping, flopping, bleeding in tanks and tubs that range out onto the sidewalk.  Large eels rope around on top of the ice.  Enormous, phallic clams hang out of their shells.  Striped bass are plentiful, the schoolies laid out whole, the large ones hacked into big chunks, some proudly displayed with a good portion of entrails attached.  Heads for sale.  Tails for sale.  Heads and tales and who knows what, all tied up in a plastic bag for sale.  A buck fifty.

    And when I have seen it all, I haven’t.  There in the back, on the floor, were two boxes with dark, green turtles in them.  Live, low-to-the-ground turtles.  One of them out of the box, heading slowly, steadily, knowingly it seemed, toward the front door.  I looked away, so as not to tip anyone off.

   The notes I wrote last time seem pretty poor now.  Not much more than "I did this, and then I did that.  And then I ate this and that."  Except maybe the bit about the turtle, which I still like.  And maybe this, about my stroll one night after dinner.

   The walk back to my hotel takes me past the Greyhound bus terminal.  A big, desolate place, with the long, high-backed benches that you see in all the old bus terminals and train stations.  It looks like the loneliest place in the city, right now.

   A sad sigh wells up as I remember the nights my dad took me down to the train station in Bellows Falls to catch the Montrealer down to Philadelphia.  What did my dad think while we made small talk and waited for the train?  Did he try to imagine what college life was like, not having gone?  Did he look at me the way I now marvel at my girls?  Did he wonder if I’d be hungry on the train?  Or was he lost in thoughts about the work ahead of him the next day, and the extra cup of coffee after lunch that this late-night excursion would require?

   The sadness is immense at times.  That I can’t talk to him about any of this.  I miss him.

One for dinner

   Ah, the glamour of business travel, manifest this time in the dinner I have scarfed at the Chinese restaurant at the Marriott Residence Inn in White Plains.  I have complied with the good traveler's rule never to eat at the hotel unless absolutely necessary only because of the absolutely necessary part, as I need to take only a quick break for fuel before getting back to my room and my work.  The food is decent -- a little plate of pickled cabbage, a small bowl of hot-and-sour soup, a plate of stir-fried shrimp and vegetables -- although I  could have done without the adjoining table of mom, dad, three very small loud and whining children, and mom's parents.   Grandad:  "Jimmy went pee-pee today for me, and showed me his big boy underpants!  High five!"  Grandmom:  "I think my lower lip went numb."  And so on.

   On the way out, I see a woman about my age sitting at a table just behind the hostess stand, across from the obligatory fish tanks.  By herself.  Another road warrior.  It should be rude of our innkeepers not to at least have suggested we sit together rather than dine alone.  It should be rude of me not to at least stop and say hello and make some small talk, rather than just leave her sitting there by herself, looking adrift and uncomfortable.  But instead, in this so-called modern world, the opposite of these things is true.  

Speaking of Charleston

      

Standing around the fire pit outside my brother’s house, drinking beer and doing the casual grilling that is left to men, while the major cooking and talking goes in inside.  One way or another the conversation comes around to my family’s April vacation trip to Charleston, which gets me saying to my brother the things I now say to everyone about Charleston. 

I talk about the horse carriage ride we took around the old part of the city (actually just part of the old part of the city) the afternoon we arrived.  How the old city is terrifically beautiful and historic, huge chunks of it saved, ironically, by its own post-bellum poverty.  For decades no one in Charleston could afford to tear down the old crumbing homes and put up something better, so the old homes and streets remained in place until the money finally came, by which time the urban planners and regular folks generally had come around to the obvious – that it was better to preserve and restore the historic than to knock it down in the name of progress.  And so the streets of colonial Charleston go on for blocks and blocks, on a scale that seems far greater than anything that remains of the other great colonial cities of Boston or Philadelphia or New York.   

I tell my story about our tour guide, a cheerful, roundish fellow with a melodious voice and an easy calm delivery.  He knows his stuff and his genuine love for Charleston shines like a gloss on every sentence.  He is, on the whole, terrific.  Except when he tells us that all the history books get it wrong when they say the first shots of the Civil War were fired from Fort Sumter, which was manned by federal forces, when in fact they were fired at Fort Sumter, by cadets from The Citadel who – my words now, not his – could not wait any longer to begin the violence that inevitably came with secession. 

The history books that I have read, not surprisingly, get exactly right this business of who first shot at whom, but that’s not my issue with our guide.  Rather, it’s the bitterness he reveals a few minutes later when he criticizes the Union forces that came back to Charleston later in the war and laid siege to the city for over 500 days, blowing cannonballs through the streets of “the most beautiful city in the South” until it much of it lay in ruins.  To which there are a couple of rejoinders that I decide not to make out loud.  The first being that the siege would not have gone on for 500 days if the good folks of Charleston had the common sense to put up the white flag a bit earlier.  The second being, what the hell did Charleston think was going to happen when they so proudly shot up Fort Sumter and drove the tiny federal garrison away?  Can it be that they thought then – and still think now – that think having started the greatest conflagration this continent has known, there should not have been any shooting back? 

If you’re going to start a fight, you better be prepared to win it or quit it fast or get your ass whipped. 

I talk about the rest of our week.  How we take a guided kayak tour through the salt marsh and ride horses through the low country woods.  How we see dolphins from the kayaks and the beach, and alligators in the ponds and even a big one in the surf.  Lone blue herons and white egrets.  Squadrons of brown pelicans.  The blessing of the shrimp fleet.  Eating shrimp and grits and gumbo and fried tomatoes, fried pickles, fries hush puppies, fried chicken.  Washing it all down with lemonade and the ubiquitous sweet tea. 

Our last day we go out to tour Drayton Hall, a great square brick mansion, sitting in the middle of a vast lawn on the bank of the Ashley River, miles upstream from Charleston. It has, against all odds, survived largely in the same shape that it was built in 1738. 

Like Charleston itself, it is beautiful but bittersweet – built with the riches of “Carolina gold” rice.  Every grain of it planted and tended and reaped and processed and loaded and shipped by slaves, working under the hot sun and the whip.  The sun is the same one we stroll under as we cross the grounds to tour the grand old house. 

The whip they don’t show here anymore. 

So this is what I talk about when I talk about Charleston, a place I would soon return to and explore a great deal As it turns out, even as I was telling my Charleston stories by the fire pit at my brother’s house on a Sunday evening, talking about the remnants of the old rice plantations and all that was built from them, The Sunday New York Times Book Review that was sitting on his kitchen table (which we hadn’t yet looked at that day) had a good review of a new book, Saving Savannah, about the Savannah region during and after the Civil War.  Savannah, another place still to visit.  Not far from Charleston, at least these days.  Part of the tidewater region where, as the reviewer put it simply and starkly enough, "small armies of slaves spent their days knee-deep in the stagnant water of the paddies, churning out the profits that made their masters spectacularly wealthy."  More notable than the review itself was this accompanying picture of slaves plowing a rice field near Savannah, circa 1855.   

We know the history of man, and so we are used to the awful notion of slavery.  But it is another thing to see it in actual pictures, to think that slavery has existed into an age modern enough for photography.  And to walk into the remnants of a rice field slaves carved with tools like this into the swampy pine forests of Carolina and Georgia.  And to walk the floorboards and stairs and porches of one of the grand homes that was built from such as this.
Truly, we have no idea.  But the remnants, in so many ways, remain.

Late March on the Lexington Battle Road

  Late March in Massachusetts.  A ring appears on the surface of the pond at the train station.  And then it disappears.  Another one appears, and then is gone.  A fish?  It seems too early.  Too cold.  But maybe.

   The ringleader of our Sunday morning softball game sends an email to the group.  Opening day will be put off a week at least.  The field is too soft.  More rain is coming.  And the temperature Sunday is expected to reach 40 at best.

   There is still snow up in the mountains.  My ski pants hang in the entryway, where I left them after skiing two weeks ago.  If there will be no softball this weekend, perhaps I should go skiing again.  It’s that time of year, when the end of winter and the beginning of spring stare each other down.

   Late March in Massachusetts.   Patience.  Patience.  The fish are at the bottom of the pond, but they will rise. 

   The following weekend is a touch warmer, but still not dry enough for softball.  The urge to be outside is overwhelming.  But I have had enough of my winter walks down along the Charles.   So I drag my bike out of the back of the garage and load it in the back of our van – portaging up to the trail that follows the Lexington Battle Road.  It’s dry enough for a good, fast ride through the woods and open fields and past the historic homes, but cold enough for several layers and some gloves.

When I stop for some water at Merriam’s Corner, where I will turn around to head back, a small detachment of British troops disembarks from their sedans and minivans, pulling on the straps of their historic gear, tucking their cell-phones out of site into baggy woolen pockets.  They must have come to rehearse for the Patriots Day activities that will occur in a couple of weeks, when great crowds will watch reenactments of the opening battles of the Revolutionary War – the quick, deadly clashes at the Lexington Green and Concord Bridge.  The Redcoats form up for their officers and march off to the sound of pipes and drums.

I ride ahead, pausing here and there to watch the troops come forward along the old Battle Road, through the trees, through the meadows and past the low stone walls.  This must be how it would have looked to the Minutemen who snuck through the woods and harassed the British column as it marched back to Boston.  Sniping with my camera instead of a musket. 

Here and there along the old road are walkers and bikers, out for some fresh air and exercise on a Saturday afternoon.   Oblivious of what marches toward them down the road.  As I ride well ahead of the troops, looking for a new vantage point to take a photo or two, and nod a greeting to travelers coming my way, I resist the urge to say it.  But once, when I pause next to a young father with his two little girls on their bikes, I find I can’t quite resist it any more.  Just as the sound of fifes and drum start to come around the bend, and the girls start to wonder what it is, I have to tell them. “The British are coming.  The British are coming.”  

Salem Old and New

   
   A sunny Friday morning in April, in the Family and Probate Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, County of Essex, sitting in Salem.  Judge Sahagian’s session is on the second floor, in a high-ceilinged room that runs the length of the east side of the building, with tall windows on three sides.  Beneficiaries of trusts seek accountings and the appointment of new trustees.  Divorce matters of all kinds are screened for mediation.  A woman seeks to compel the disclosure of her former husband’s tax returns.  And so on.
   The lawyers have dressed for court, as lawyers do, but the parties for the most part have not.  One man has bothered to put on a sport coat and a turtleneck (a turtleneck, in April?), and a couple of women wear skirts and blazers.  But the rest appear in their jeans and sneakers, their hooded sweatshirts, their t-shirts that expose their tattoos.  At either end of the courtroom, portraits of long-dead justices stare down disapprovingly. 

I sit by an open window in the sun, looking out on a cherry tree just starting to bud and the Congregational church with its fine white steeple across the street, wishing they allowed cameras inside so that I could snap some pictures of this odd, old courtroom.  The plaster walls are pierced here and there by devices invented long after the courthouse was built.  Electric lights.  Thermostats.  Speakers that connect to some hidden audio system.  In the back of the courtroom sits a ridiculous, old television with a bent coat hanger for an antenna.  A sign on the old wooden door reminds everyone to turn off all cell-phones and beepers. 

It all feels out of balance.  A strange mix of the old and worn, the very old but timeless, the new, the relatively new but already decrepit. 

    The most enduring things are both the best of it and the worst of it:  the thick granite walls, the judge’s black robe, the endless procession of pleas.

Back to DC

   

   DC, as always, evokes.  I fly into Dulles, thinking I haven't been here in many years.  But then the people mover reminds me I was here just last summer, connecting on my way to meet the family in Japan.  Just outside the arrival gate is Chipotle, where I had some sort of southwestern salad that time.  Not a great meal, not by a long shot, but memorable for the happy feeling I had that evening about being on the way to an adventure, and on the way to see my girls.  

   I get to the Fairmont at 24th and M, check in, and wheel right back out for a nighttime stroll up M street, across the bridge into Georgetown, past the familiar gas station on the corner and the old Vietnam Georgetown across the street.  Another place not memorable for the food, but for the warm memories I associate with it.  I came here in the two college summers I lived in DC; then again years later on a business trip with Ralph Gants; then again a few years ago on our family trip to DC, after our long, hot ride up and down the canal in a barge that was pulled by a mule.  Along with our spring rolls and noodles, we drank ice water as fast as the waiter could bring it.

       Tonight it's just a bit too late to stop for a meal and a Vietnamese beer.  But next time.  I'll be back.  

Modern Art - The Quiz

Photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art ... like I asked.

In New York on a Monday afternoon, late in the month of June, I find myself spending a few hours at the Museum of Modern Art.  My visits to significant art museums have been relatively few – the Louvre in Paris, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery in Washington, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, and of course the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston.  Probably one or two others that don’t presently come to mind.  None of them were devoted, as MoMA obviously is, to modern art. 

I walk in lugging a heavy bag of skepticism about modern art.  A bag I acquired about twenty years ago in a small gallery in Los Angeles.  It was owned by my wife’s mother’s cousin’s wife, Kiyo Higashi, who had started the gallery three or four years before, when the second of her two daughters was about to finish college and head for law school.  Kiyo needed something to do with her time; she had a passion for modern art; her husband had enough money to set her up in a gallery; and so, into the art business she went.

The gallery occupied what used to be a Spanish-style house, the first floor of which had been converted into three large rooms for Kiyo’s art shows, while the upstairs contained another show room, some storage space, and Kiyo’s office.  The gallery rooms downstairs had light hardwood floors, off-white walls, skylights, and track lighting.  That much was predictable.  But other design elements were not.  The interior doors all slanted down to one side.  The hallway that went from the front door toward the rear of the house similarly slanted down toward the left wall.  Kiyo told us this created “a feeling of being pulled along the corridor,” of “endless space reaching out ahead of us.”  The hallway was about twelve feet long, and rather than creating a feeling of endlessness, at least for me, it created a feeling that the left wall was about to fall down on my head. 

The gallery rooms had no corners.  Instead each wall curved to meet the next where the corner ordinarily would be.  This, Kiyo told us, prevented any shadows.

Kiyo, at least at the time, was devoted to minimalism.  Not merely in the artwork itself but in her display of it.  When we visited she had hung just a single painting in each of the three rooms.  “Anything more would be too distracting,” she said, with a little wave of her hands, as if she were shooing away any distracting thoughts that may have snuck in when she opened the door to greet us.

To my regret, I have forgotten the name of the artist whose work Kiyo was showing that day.  I remember it was a woman, and I remember distinctly her work.  Each painting consisted of four bars of solid color placed vertically on the canvas.  Each bar was about eight inches wide, the painting about forty inches high.  The first painting was something like this:  a black bar at the left, next to a red bar, next to a teal bar, next to a bright olive green bar. 

We spent a few minutes looking at it while Kiyo told us how difficult this kind of painting was.  “What she achieves with color,” Kiyo sighed, “is so difficult technically.  To get the colors just right, she sometimes applies as many as sixty coats of paint.  Other artists just love her work, and buy it for themselves.” 

Clearly this was meant to be high praise.  And clearly Kiyo had never done any painting herself.  Or, if she had, she clearly didn’t know she was talking to a housepainter’s son, who knows that after two or three coats of the same paint, when you have completely covered whatever was underneath when you started, you then have a surface that is the color of the paint you are using, and applying another fifty-seven coats will not achieve any greater intensity or depth of color.  Only a greater depth of paint.

When Kiyo decided that we had enough time to appreciate this technically difficult work, we walked successfully across the endless, pulling space of the falling-down hallway into the next room.  The picture in this room also had four bars of color.  Something like this:  a red bar next to a black bar next to a dark blue bar next to a forest green bar.  Kiyo became more animated in the presence of this painting.  She talked about the “completely different statement” it made from the first one.   She studied it quietly for a few minutes more, while my wife and I looked on politely and wondered what time we would get to go have lunch.

We went to the third room to see a final painting of four colored bars.  Here I finally had the nerve to ask what these works might sell for.  Kiyo said, matter of factly, about six thousand dollars apiece.

After viewing this artist’s three-painting show we headed upstairs to see Kiyo’s office and a large room in which works by a number of other artists were on display.  Kiyo pointed out a thin wooden bench, the top of which was in the shape of Manhattan, with a street map of Manhattan transferred onto the wood.  Instead of legs, the bench sat on what looked like a sturdy brand of chicken wire that ran around underneath the perimeter of the bench.  “You see,” said Kiyo, “this bench is tremendous.  The wire base signifies how imprisoned one always feels in New York.  It’s so perfect.”

On the wall above the bench was a painting in two pieces.  Each piece was painted a solid, off-white color.  The two pieces were hung on the wall so that if the space in between them were filled in, the whole would be a perfect square.  “This is tremendous use of negative space,” Kiyo said.  “Very, very exciting.”

Also in the room were three glass cubes sitting on top of white pedestals. Kiyo explained that these cubes represented the “very important early work” of an artist who had moved on to “much more challenging media.”   The largest of the three cubes, about nine inches in each dimension, cost sixty thousand dollars.   

I now see, many years later, that these must have been made by an artist named Larry Bell, one of the California minimalists whose work recently was curated in New York and reviewed in The New Yorker by Peter Schjeldahl, who describes them thusly:  “Take Larry Bell’s glass boxes:  chrome-framed cubes, vacuum-coated with vaporized minerals (usually grayish but gold in one instance).  The transparent objects admit your gaze.  The space inside them is a continuation of the space you occupy, simply inflected with misty tones. … Mystery-free, they leave you nothing to be conscious of except yourself, affected by their presence. … They are as obvious as furniture and as dreamy as any mood you’re in.  Not only elegant, they precipitate a feeling of elegance:  ease, suavity, cool.  They look expensive, not just in their lapidary craft but by extension, assuming ambience of taste in key with themselves. …”

Yes, take Larry Bell’s glass boxes.  Please.

So now, twenty years after seeing Bell’s boxes for myself, I wonder if MoMA will really be any different from Kiyo’s gallery, or just a bigger, grander, more famous collection of silliness.

It doesn’t start well.  The first gallery we enter is an enormous open space, in which a black electric fan hangs from a forty-foot wire, swinging around the room in various arcs.  We look at it for a few moments to see if it creates any impression other than that of a black fan swinging around a large room on a long wire, which it does not. 

In the next gallery we are confronted by the work of Sigalit Landau, a young artist who, the accompanying commentary tells us, “has produced several works that explore her native Israeli landscape in a performative way.”   The work we see today is Cycle Spun (2007), which comprises three separate video loops, running simultaneously on different walls of the same room.  “Functioning together as a trilogy and a triptych of moving images,” we read, “the videos each depict a performative act of spinning, or circular motion, against a landscape backdrop in Landau’s native Israel.”

The one that first grabs your attention is the wall-sized projection DeadSee, in which a cord connecting five hundred watermelons creates a spiral-shaped raft on the salt-saturated waters of the Dead Sea.  “Secured within this sculptural configuration, the [nude] artist floats with an arm outstretched toward a collection of ‘wounded’ fruits, their intensely red flesh revealed. The nautilus form gradually unfurls, leaving the surface of the water a nearly monochromatic azure and the artist’s body exposed.”

On the next wall is Barbed Hula, in which the artist stands naked on a beach, swinging her torso in the familiar way to keep a hula hoop swirling around her – except the hoop is made of barbed wire.  “In each cycle, the barbs graze the flesh, compromising the integrity of the body.  Enacted at sunrise on the Mediterranean coast, her methodical body movements resonate with the rhythm of the waves in a nearly ritualistic repetition.”  Just where the lines are between “repetition,” “ritualistic repetition” and “nearly ritualistic repetition” is not apparent to me.

The third video loop is Day Done, which “reinterprets an ancient Jewish custom in which an isolated area of a newly built house is intentionally left unpainted or unfinished to symbolize the remembrance of destruction. The video documents an inverse gesture—the painting of a circle around a window from inside the house, marking it first with a black stain and then, as night falls, tracing over it in white.”  

So there we have three major works of Sigrit Landau.

A small sign in the gallery notes that “[t]he Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series is made possible in part by The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art and the JA Endowment Committee,” and that “[a]dditional funding for this exhibition is provided by artist.”  It is not surprising, but still saddening, to learn that Ms. Landau apparently had to pay MoMA to get her work shown here. 

MoMA of course has much to offer besides the swinging fan and the trilogy and triptych of Ms. Sigalau.  Some of it is even more ridiculous than these – such as an exhibit of ugly things that people have glued, screwed, or otherwise affixed onto books.   Some of it is quite famous, and yet entirely uninteresting – such as Andy Warhol’s paintings of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe.   But then some of it is both famous and entirely more alive and beautiful first-hand than any photograph of it has ever been – all the Jackson Pollocks, for instance.  And some of the photography is entirely captivating – such as Bernd and Hilla Becher’s black and white photographs of mines and steel mills, and Diane Arbus’s photographs of the developmentally impaired at play.

And then, up in the galleries devoted to modern painting, we find a series of works that might well have inspired the artist featured twenty years ago, back at Auntie Kiyo’s gallery.  Here was Kazimir Malevich, who at least as far back as 1918 was making “suprematist” compositions of solid colors.  “Suprematism” referring to “the supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts.”  As, I guess, in this work White on White. 

And here were a number of pieces by Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt, many from the 1950s, in which they created paintings of solid colors juxtaposed against each other.  Some – the Rothkos – with large blocks of contrasting colors and blurred edges; others – the Reinhardts – with smaller blocks of only slightly different colors in sharp squares.

Mark Rothko - Brown Blue

Mark Rothko - Untitled

So here’s the quiz.  Just two questions.

Question 1.  Consider this next piece.

Is it:

(a) a Rothko

(b) the artist from Kiyo’s gallery, ripping off Rothko

(c) a Malevich

(d) the work of another artist who followed Malevich and preceded Rothko

(e) none of the above

The answer, of course, is  … (e), none of the above.  It is a digital photo of one of the support columns on the commuter rail platform at Back Bay Station in Boston, where I stand to catch the Framingham-Worcester local at the end of a day.  A somewhat different shade of gray paint from the original has been used to cover up some graffiti.

Question 2.  Is it art?

I guess that’s for you to decide.  But here’s the card I wrote to hang next to this picture at my first show.

Voice of Authority (2008).  The work is at once an homage to the compositional elements of Rothko’s gray-on-gray Untitled, the paint roller technique depicted in Sigalit Landau’s Day Done, and the silenced voices of the graffiti artists whose original work was painted over by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. 

Actually, it is an homage to another artist whose identity I don’t know.  When I was in college, there occasionally were art installations on the stone plaza in front of McCabe Library.  One was an abtract modern sculpture, which consisted of several piles of twisted metal set a few feet apart from each other.  On the second day it was there, someone had removed one of the bike racks from the library entrance and leaned it against one of the piles.   

Now that, my friends, is art.