Packard Plant color scheme redux

At the old Packard Plant in Detroit. It looks like paint but it was "just" pigment, all dusty and ready to cling to your shoes. Megan, Matt and I clambered about in the Packard Plant when I was in Detroit last week. It was glorious fun. A couple people told us there was a scavenger hunt going on and we should look for pink balloons. Matt noticed one down in the subterranean tunnels and climbed down in to get the balloon and attached envelope. Inside the envelope were several UPS labels with images added and a one-dollar bill with a rubber stamp. Matt gave me the label with some old cars driving into the background.

It's end-of-year time for the art students at Alfred University and there have been a bunch of shows in various buildings in Alfred and Hornell and outside too. One of the Freshman Foundations student memory boxes reminded me of the Packard Plant spilled pigment. My time in Detroit for the Society of Architectural Historians conference was absolutely fantastic for a variety of reasons: staying at the Hostel Detroit with several others from SAH and several Brits, a German, and a Tatar; discovering that a pottery graduate from AU last year was renovating a rowhouse next door to the hostel; meandering the city, on foot and in my car; supper with Megan and Les and Matt and Michel in a Mies van der Rohe rowhouse; the conference; visiting Michigan's largest used bookstore, John K. King Used and Rare Books. I might get another blog entry done about Detroit and perhaps Cleveland where I spent a couple days on the way back to Alfred. Meanwhile, there are pictures on my Flickr photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/56294332@N00/

small world all o'er the place

Someone said in their Facebook feed that the world is small, based on some coincidence. I've been having those too recently ... as if it wasn't always the case. I just started reading Hadrian the Seventh about a peculiar Englishman who gets selected pope in the most peculiar way. I'm less than 200 pages into the book and discovered there's a new movie called "We have a Pope" that was just reviewed by Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. The review is entitled "A reluctant pontiff escapes to the streets." Hadrian isn't reluctant, he's got an agenda, and he takes to the streets.

I mentioned in a recent blog post that I was going to Detroit and staying at the Hostel Detroit that had been mentioned by my artist-friend Vagner Whitehead. It turns out that my step cousin who lives in Detroit happens to know the guy that manages the hostel and that his partner is a librarian AND that she's inviting us all over the supper on Saturday night AND that four of the six people in that crowd have forenames beginning with M.

My next cataloging gig is based at Columbia and I'm going down to the City for some training later this week. I just got back from an artist talk here in Alfred and get a pretty good diet of it. Still, I was excited to see that there was a panel on the "queer piers" show at Leslie/Lohman on Thursday night. I thought: OK. And then I read that there's a talk on Bosch and The Garden of Earthly Delights on Wednesday night.

Small world, full of coincidences, indeed.