separated at birth: person as poem

The Sunday Times had an article on Grete Wiesenthal and the influence of the Viennese waltz on modern dance. Wiesenthal moved off the vertical axis of the ballet dancer and added curves and extensions. She toured with her sisters Elsa and Berta. (I have a sister Berta, short for Roberta.) After the sisters performed in London, the Dancing Times is quoted as saying the sisters "were not mere performers; they were poems."

Photographs by Rudolf Jobst, Östrreichisches Theatermuseum

(from the NY Times article)

When Alexis Rose meets Mutt's new girlfriend Tallahassee, er, Tennessee, Alexis says she is like a poem, like a pretty poem. Totally Alexis.

the books I read in 2020

 You'd think a year of lockdown and isolation would vastly increase your reading. It didn't work that way for me. Here's the list of books I read this year, in chronological order.

• Europe without Baedeker, by Edmund Wilson (1947) - impossible not to think of E.M. Forster's chapter in A room with a view about visiting Santa Croce without a Baedeker
• Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan (2018)
• So you want to talk about race, by Ijeoma Oluo (2018) - hard not to reflect on spell check having no problem with Wilson and Forster but not recognizing Esi, Edugyan, Ijeoma, and Oluo
• Fascism: a warning, by Madeleine K. Albright (2018)
• The great believers, by Rebecca Makkai (2018) - read this while at College Art in Chicago; parts of the book are set in Chicago; the book resonated in a number of ways: "Wi-fi seemed wrong. In her mind, Paris was always 1920. It was always Aunt Nora's Paris, all tragic love and tubercular artists."; the main protagonist Yale wasn't named after the school but after his Aunt Yael; "Being on an airplane, even in coach, was the closest an adult could come to the splendid helplessness of infancy."; standing up in an auditorium and screaming
• Manhattan memoir by Mary Cantwell (2000) - a one-volume gathered edition of the author's Manhattan girl, Manhattan, when I was young, and Speaking with strangers
• Michael Tolliver lives, by Armistead Maupin (2007) - a continuation of the Tales of the city
• Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers (2009)
• Amiable with big teeth, by Claude McKay (written in 1941, published in 2017)
• Inside a pearl: my years in Paris, by Edmund White (2014)
• Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan (2008) - movie tie-in edition
• Midnight in Sicily, by Peter Robb (1996) - this book had been on my shelf for a long time, calling me but I was afraid it would be just too filled with mafiosi; it was filled with Sicily more than Mafia and really quite a page-turner
• How to be an antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi (2019)
• Necessary errors, by Caleb Crain (2013)
• Mapping the territory: selected nonfiction by Christopher Bram (2009)
• Romance in Marseille, by Claude McKay (written between 1929 and 1941, first published 2020)
• The nature principle: human restoration and the end of nature-deficit disorder, by Richard Louv (2011) - what about urban-deficit desire?
• The Mussolini canal, by Antonio Pennacchi (2013) - translation of Canale Mussolini (2010); my bookstore friend Fred from Sundance Books in Geneseo had to get this from England (buy from independent bookstores as much as you can)
• Stories of God, by Rainer Maria Rilke - translated from the German, published 1899; the Alfred libraries didn't have an edition and I had to order it on interlibrary loan; Daniel had noted that the German title is Geschichten vom lieben Gott but most English editions leave out the "lieben"
• The Blackwater lightship, by Colm Tóibín (1999)
• Building and dwelling: ethics for the city, by Richard Sennett (2018)
• The overstory, by Richard Powers (2018) - about a quarter of the way in; so far, a panoply or perhaps a cacophony of mostly unrelated stories but each involves a tree or a bunch of trees or a species of tree; the table of contents seems to indicate that the second, third, and fourth sections are different in structure (not chaptered)

Looks like eleven each of fiction and non-fiction. As I reviewed the list of books read last year, several of the titles were fonder in memory than in recall as I started this recounting. Some were quite forgettable but then I have also forgotten many of the films and TV episodes that I watched over the course of the year.

P.S. You can see the illustrated version of this compilation at Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2020/6837039

separated at birth: Hans Scharoun and RBG

Julia apartment tower

(the Romeo tower is adjacent, here to the right)

Zuffenhausen-Rot, on the outskirts of Stuttgart

designed by Hans Scharoun, 1954-1959

(screen grab from Google Maps)

My Avery indexing included a review of Hans Scharoun and the development of small apartment floor plans: the residential high-rises, Romeo and Julia, 1954-1959 by Markus Peter and Ulrike Tillmann (Park Books and Akademie der Künste Berlin, 2020). I was not familiar with these buildings. There was a conflict on another record about the buildings so I borrowed the Peter/Tillmann book on interlibrary loan. The book has nearly twenty pages on "Polygonal apparatus." Either in that section or somewhere else as I read about the project, someone compared the building plan to a lace collar.

These days, when someone says lace collar, one almost certainly thinks of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

official Supreme Court portrait, 2016

(from Wikipedia)

And a few short months later, I meet the Cat and Dog Houses, aka Houses of Cards, built for two sisters in Torrazza Piemonte, not too far from Turin in northern Italy.

designed by Elastico Farm

Palladian in front, modernism out back

Today's indexing included an article in Antiques about Chick Austin, art historian and longtime director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. His house is sort of a folly based on Palladian houses he and his wife saw in Italy on their 1929 honeymoon, especially one by Vincenzo Scamozzi. The house is 86 feet long and 18 feet deep. It looks like a theater backdrop because it is indeed theatrical and the Austins entertained enthusiastically. I've had a book entitled Magic Façade: the Austin House for some time so I went down and looked at it when I was done indexing.

What I'd not paid attention to before is that another bedroom was added on the second floor, providing also a covering for part of the rear terrace. It is designed in a boxy Italian modern style, of which I am enamored, especially since visiting northern Italy in 2018. If you delight in geometric shapes and glorious fenestration, the rear side of the house is an exquisite Venturian decorated shed.

Thinking of the house and the Wadsworth Atheneum reminds me of a Thanksgiving visit in the early 1980s to Hartford. I was visiting a Cornell piano grad student and silent film accompanist who lived in West Hartford. We visited the Wadsworth and there was a Sol LeWitt exhibition on view. My friend was very spiritual and the LeWitt works freaked him out and we had to leave the museum. Somehow I've never been back to the museum or Hartford. Maybe I should move Hartford up the list for post-covid travels.

oops, continuity issues in Schitt's Creek

 When you've watched a television series a gazillion times, you notice some funny things like ...

• When Moira gets the proposed contract for the Crows movie and David is reading the terms, he mentions that her pay will be in Baltic money. Make that Balkan since they're filming in Bosnia. I do forgive them because I really have to think about Baltic/Balkan. Moira does later correctly say Balkan Peninsula or some such thing when she's referring to the filming.
• When the family is at the Amish family's house, Alexis is sitting at a picnic table. The conversation continues and, all of a sudden, she's on the other side of the table.
• Bob's got raw milk for his coffee. Johnny "borrows" some. When they're talking about it, the lid is on the bottle and then off the bottle and then back on the bottle.
• In the "Bachelor Party" episode, Alexis's pen jumps around on her journal/calendar. She is pretty agitated and the jumpiness may be contagious.
• Stevie sets her glass down twice on the table at the "Surprise Party" before she and David dance together.
• Roland's name tag wiggles around on his jacket when he and Moira are at the RAMC conference.
• Sebastien Raine says Room 5 would be just fine. Stevie gives him the key. When Moira comes to the door to challenge Sebastien, the door has the number 4.
• Johnny and Moira are arguing in "The Motel Guest" about the little quirks that might drive each other crazy. There's a white bottle cap or something next to Moira's teacup after a while.
• Ken borrows a pen and paper from David to write down Patrick's number. When he leaves and Patrick comes over to David and Alexis, Patrick has the paper but the pen has disappeared.
• I think the only time anybody is in Room 8 at the motel is during the "Moira Rosé" episode when Patrick is watching the game with David before David runs off with his mother.
• In the episode about Ted's coded booty call from Heather, Alexis says that Lisa called about stopping over after work. It's confusing whether the name is confused or both a Lisa and a Heather live at the farm.

None of this is a problem for me. It's more fun than disappointment that these things happen. It's a little like LC cataloging copy or the New York times. There used to be layers of proofreading of such things as cataloging copy or newspapers. Now, the cataloger or journalist writes and types the copy and mistakes are more likely to happen without an extra pair of eyes looking over the copy. No more layer of typesetter eyes.

Since I've been known to draw parallels between Schitt's Creek and Downton Abbey, I probably should mention that Thomas's collar escapes for part of the episode wherein he hides Lord Grantham's dog Isis. The flyaway collar happens when he meets Lord Grantham on the front walk after the dog has been found.

When I ordered my rosy peach t-shirt from Etsy, it came with a Rose Apothecary shopping bag.

without wax

Alex Wisniewski was a good and dear friend when I lived in Ithaca in the 1980s. He was an MFA student in painting at Cornell. His lover, Vic Cardell, was the assistant music librarian at Cornell. Alex did wonderful things in his art, graphically and literally, with words and statements. We would sit and talk for hours, drink gin (straight), and smoke cigarettes (unfiltered), listen to Philip Glass or David Byrne (loud).

The poster for his MFA show was graphically busy with letters and numbers along with the information about the time and space of the show. Alex was interested in etymology of the words too and somehow got it into his brain that "sincere" came from "without wax." The "sin" was without in Spanish; the "cere" was like the "cire" in French for wax. You know, as in "cire perdue" or lost-wax casting. "Without wax" started appearing in his work. He may have mentioned it to me but somehow it became a thing in our conversations. He gave me a copy of his show poster with the words "without wax" in pink acrylic across it, like graffiti.

There's a bar in Alfred called Alex's. It happens to be owned and managed by a fellow whose surname is Wisniewski. I have to work hard to come up with his first name since Wisniewski is so associated in my memory with Alex the artist. Alas, Alex is one of those gay men that were taken from us too soon by AIDS. So I cannot invite him to come visit and we'd go to Alex's and meet Stan Wisniewski.

Back to without wax. It came up again this week during a virtual artist talk with Roberto Lugo. He started his talk with a short video and I about fell off my chair when he said the docudrama was entitled "Without Wax." He credited the phrase to sculptors who sometimes would inscribe the two words on their work to indicate that they had fully sculpted it without going through the wax model phase. The video is very moving and personal but I was sure set up for an emotional ride when he announced the title. Lugo's catchphrase is "ghetto potter and activist" so that all resonated at this moment.

We've all had some disappointments because of Covid restrictions of various sorts. Rob Lugo was supposed to have spent this year as a Rome Fellow at the American Academy.

Moira Rose is now working for Eli Lilly

Fake Eli Lilly advertisement at the end of Stephen Colbert's monologue

10 November 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WhQjgy96hE

(the last minute or so)

Moira Rose for Herb Ervelfingerlicking Fruit Wines

Schitt's Creek

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVojhvifruk

I Navigli di Milano, then and now

Two and a half years ago, we were in Milan, really enjoying the early evening cocktails and snacks, aka aperitivo. One of our most enjoyable evenings was along the Navigli (canals), on the south side of the centro. The remnants of the canals are there but it is now mostly social engagement territory rather than trade and warehouses. Last Sunday's Times had an article about the situation in Europe as coronavirus cases increase significantly. The article was accompanied by a photograph by Alessandro Grassani for the Times. He also has done significant series of photographs on immigrants and immigration. Now, the crowded streets of the Navigli are quite empty ...

A cyclist peddling down an empty street in Milan on the first day of a new lockdown on Friday.

(Alessandro Grassani for the New York Times)

telltale sentences, telltale words

The New York Times published a special DealBook section on September 13, 2020, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Milton Friedman's seminal essay in the magazine in September 1970. The essay was entitled "The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits." The 2020 anniversary section presents short reflections on sentences in the Friedman article, including descriptions of how Friedman's prognosis has played out and what the future might hold as we reflect in a time of reckoning on racial justice, economic imbalance, climate change, and pandemic. I recommend looking at the section but there was one sequence of Friedman sentences that just shouted at me with relevance for something that has been troubling me.

And I quote Friedman:

"The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned 'merely' with profit but also with promoting desirable 'social' ends; that business has a 'social conscience' and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are—or would be if they or any one else took them seriously— preaching pure and unadulterated socialism."

We have been hearing statements, often accusatory, that the Democrats are preaching socialism, as well as communism and Marxism, in this election season. I do not have a problem with socialism and hate to see it as a slam, especially an overly simplistic slam. But it was reading the last sentence in the quotation above that made me realize how bald the accusations are. I grew up in a solid anti-FDR anti-state household. My parents (and their parents, etc.) generally didn't support big government. They lived mostly in small towns and were active in church, relying on neighbors and church members for support when needed.

I worked in the ceramics library during summers and vacations in my undergrad years, the mid-late 1960s, when social-political action and anti-war discussions were common among college kids whether or not they were active protestors or building occupiers. (Of course, now they'd be thugs and terrorists.) In a discussion, one of my coworkers (Lynne Sootheran) said if people don't take care of people, the state has to take care of people. It was a Damascene moment for me, the moment when my socio-political leanings shifted from what I had inherited. Being small town folks, we were mostly oblivious to the world beyond our small worlds.

Reading the sentences from the Friedman article clarified for me how socialism could be a dirty word in some camps. I still wonder how my folks would have reacted to the takeover of the Republican Party by fundamental thinking. They had already suffered the fundamentalist takeover of their beloved Seventh Day Baptist General Conference. It would not surprise me if they had shifted to the Libertarian Party.

I am also very glad that my life since college has mostly been spent in cities. Even in little Alfred, I appreciate the ability to do most of my daily business by walking rather than driving and parking.

P.S. For Brett Stephens's take on traditional conservatism, this article from last week's Sunday Review on "What We've Lost" might be of interest.

site specificity redux

Site specificity came around again today. I'd done a post about it at the beginning of the month. I was working today with Bronwen on whether we should propose "Performance scores" for LCGFT and came across a webpage entitled In Terms of Performance which is "a keywords anthology designed to provoke discovery across artistic disciplines." It includes three short essays on site, by Simon Dove, Tania El Khoury, and Joanna Haigood.

As I looked for help in the Art & Architecture Thesaurus on performance scores, I was somewhat distressed to find "scores (documents for music)" and "dance notation" in totally different hierarchies (documents and writing styles, respectively).

In Janine Antoni's short essay on choreography, she lists "Ikea pictographic instructions for assembling furniture" in her list of references.

Lady Croft by Philip de László

 The Hon. Nancy Beatrice Borwick, Lady Croft (1884-1949)

Portrait by Philip Alexius László de Lombos

(viewed in email from the Royal Oak Foundation,

the American affiliate of the National Trust of England,

Wales and Northern Ireland)

Never having heard of Philip Alexius László de Lombos, I naturally (it being me) checked the LC/NAF authority file for the painter. I picked "lombos" as my entry word for a left-anchored browse and found nothing. Not Lombos at all. Never give up too early. Searched "laszlo" and found him:

010	__ |a no2004037532
035	__ |a (OCoLC)oca06327328
040	__ |a ICU |b eng |e rda |c ICU |d DLC |d FU
046	__ |f 1869 |g 1937 |2 edtf
100	1_ |a László, Fülöp, |d 1869-1937
400	1_ |a De László, Philip Alexius, |d 1869-1937
400	1_ |a László de Lombos, Philip Alexius de, |d 1869-1937
400	1_ |a László, Fülöp Elek, |d 1869-1937
400	1_ |a László, Philip de, |d 1869-1937

What? No reference from Lombos??

The Royal Oak Foundation email was about the "National Trust Property of the Week" -- Croft Castle in Herefordshire. The Crofts had settled there by the time of the Domesday Book and the castle dates to the 14th and 15th centuries. The Crofts lost the house in 1746 but were back in 1923. The house went to the National Trust in 1956, not that we'll be able to visit it any time soon.

site specificity

 Site specificity in art, as a concept, sometimes troubles me but especially when someone claims it to be absolute. All installations are at least somewhat specific to the place in which they are installed, and almost anything can be moved to another site or reproduced (reconstructed) in a new place. My interest was piqued when the Library of Congress added a subject heading for Site specific installations (Art) as distinct from and a narrower term than Installations (Art). If you click on the "troubles me," you'll be taken to a few earlier blog entries that dance around this matter. And now I've had a couple interesting experiences and readings with site specificity in the past couple weeks.

"Annie Jump and the Library of Heaven" was presented at Alfred University in mid September 2020 after being delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring. It is "a play for all audiences about finding your place in the universe and intelligent life in your hometown." The original plan was for a traditional theater presentation. COVID health concerns moved it outside and, mirabile dictu, the setting became the parking area at the observatory on campus with a couple bits actually taking place inside the telescope buildings. The story was all about Annie Jump trying to come to terms with life beyond this planet and how to deal with her quirky astronomer father. The play was pretty heartening but seeing it under the starlit sky at the observatory was fantabulous indeed. What a site for this specific play.

I love my indexing work for the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals. One of my titles is Future Anterior and an issue I just did -- volume 15, number 2, winter 2018 -- was on the theme "Ex situ: on moving monuments." That is, ex situ as contrasted from in situ. The issue includes a description by Ryan Mendoza of his deconstruction of Rosa Parks's house in Detroit when it was threatened with demolition and its reconstruction in Berlin. When its time in Berlin was ending, there was talk of moving it back to the United States but it has now been reconstructed at the Palazzo Reale in Naples. What a trip this supposedly immovable structure has been taking, and what a time this is.

I'm not sure either of these experiences has convinced me that Site specific installations (Art) is a necessary subject heading but they certainly have given me plenty to think about. I think I'd prefer Site specificity in art in combination with Installations (Art) when the artist really talks about the specific site of an installation.

Italians and Jews in Odessa

Episode "Traveling to Eat" was on The Splendid Table on NPR as I drove home from Wegmans this morning. One of the stories was a talk with Caroline Eden who has traveled around the Black Sea, investigating places and food. She did a couple road trips but visited Odessa and Istanbul as specific destinations. She considers Istanbul the most grand food place in the world.

Caroline Eden mentioned the significant evidence of Italian and Jewish food in Odessa. Though there were ancient and medieval settlements where Odessa now is, its modern origins date back to 1794 when Catherine the Great established the city and port on the shores of the Black Sea, now in the Ukraine. It was a free port from 1819 to 1858 and the fourth largest city in the Russian Empire, after Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Warsaw. There were Italians among the planners and developers and a large Jewish community developed in the 19th century. The Italians were mostly a legacy of Genoese colonies in the Crimea in late medieval times.

I've never known a great deal about Odessa though we did hear about it when Atticus Aldridge was explaining his origins to Rose and the Jewish refugees in York.

Atticus mentions to one of the refugees that his family came to England from Odessa in 1859 and 1871. The former nobleman says that he's not Russian, he's Jewish. There were several pogroms in the mid-later 19th century, including 1859 and 1871.

I hadn't known much about Genoa beyond art history classes until visiting it twice in 2018. I really enjoyed the city. The landscape is tremendous, the hills rise sharply from the harbor. The food is delicious. The art nouveau villas are stupendous, as they are all across Italy. Italians call art nouveau Liberty, from the store in London.

I probably don't need to mention how disappointing the pandemic-related travel restrictions are. It is soul numbing to not even feel that planning a European trip (or Canadian) is feasible.

separated at birth: Hoffmann & Ruby

Josef Hoffmann

Musée d'Orsay

(from the Wikipedia page for Hoffmann)

Sterling Ruby

Stove 4, 2013

(in the retrospective exhibition at the

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston)

Josef Hoffmann did plenty of design objects that have a slender shape and pierced metal. I thought of Hoffmann when I saw the stove by Sterling Ruby last week in an exhibition at the ICA in Boston. Evocative attenuation. Hoffmann is quite widely exhibited but I particularly remember an exhibition that I saw with Christie at the Neue Galerie in New York City. One of the objects was my introduction to shagreen, an untanned rawhide now mostly produced from farmed Asian stingrays.

Sterling Ruby addresses climate change with his stoves which were featured in a 2015 exhibition at the Musée de la chasse et de la nature, held in conjunction with the Paris climate summit.

Indonesian scarf, caught in the wind

"Last week, she told me to dance like an Indonesian scarf caught in the wind. I don't even know that that looks like."

Stevie Budd, in "The Roast" episode, Season 5

Schitt's Creek (2015-2020)

Yinka Shonibare MBE

"Wind Sculpture (SG) I"

Central Park, New York City

(photo: Jason Wyche)

separated at birth: military monuments

Les Invalides

Paris, France

(photo from Wikipedia)

Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces

Patriot Park, Odintsovsky District, Russia

(photo from Wikipedia via Architizer)

separated at birth: baseball players

Jason at the bat, with Whizzer

Falsettos, Live from Lincoln Center, 2017

(BroadwayHD)

David, Johnny, and Patrick, before the game

"The M.V.P." episode of Schitt's Creek, 2015-2020

(CBC / Pop TV / Netflix)

It's hard to believe that Dan Levy was unaware of the Falsettos precursor of his ball game in "The M.V.P." but he doesn't mention it in any of the YouTube videos about the episode. Of course he also doesn't footnote every costume. Karen Robinson does mention that, growing up, she was always the last person selected for the team. I'd hang out with her any time when the ball players want to play ball. We could sit in the stands and drink coffee and scoff, and cheer occasionally.

separated at birth: the illusion of space

David North

Doorway to Imagination (2020)

built by David North in his backyard (photo by David North)

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/871023673/2-uncles-and-a-doorway-to-imagination-spread-love-on-social-media

Robert Gober

site-specific installation (1992)

Dia Chelsea, New York City

(photo by Bill Jacobson Studio, New York)

https://www.diaart.org/exhibition/exhibitions-projects/robert-gober-exhibition

The title of the Gober piece reminds me of a subject cataloging conundrum from some years ago. LCSH had long had the term "Installations (Art)" for installation works, with the scope note:

• Here are entered works on a type of art form in which an entire exhibition space is transformed into a three-dimensional work of art by the arrangement of objects and materials within the space.

They added "Site-specific installations (Art)" in 2001 with the scope note:

• Here are entered works on art installations created for a specific site that use elements of the site as an integral part of the work of art and are intended to be displayed and viewed only at that site.

I tried to convince the subject specialists at LC that the new heading was not valuable. It might have literary warrant and one might take issue with either scope note. More important, trying to split "Site-specific installations" from plain old "Installations" seemed likely to lead a cataloger to use the words in the resource being cataloged rather than being able to make an objective determination concerning site specificity.

I looked at the LC record for the 1992 Dia exhibition at which the site-specific installation was shown. The record has "Installations (Art) -- United States -- Exhibitions" because it predates the establishment of "Site-specific installations (Art)." I am quite sure that I've seen the Gober work included in other exhibitions. There are internet pictures of the work at Glenstone.

Even though I didn't want the new subject heading, I was delighted to get a t-shirt that said "site-specific installation" at the Whitney.

Italian post offices

One thing I have really enjoyed in Italian cities are the post office buildings. Good public architecture. Today's Docomomo Italia feed on Facebook included this wonderful Palazzo delle Poste in Ostia Lido.

Palazzo delle Poste, Ostia Lido, 1933-1934

Designer: Angiolo Mazzoni del Grande (1894-1979)

(collezioni Casa dell'Architettura di Latina)

Our hotel in Ragusa was around the corner from the Poste and I have just discovered that it was also designed by Angiolo Mazzoni:

Palazzo delle Poste, Ragusa, Sicily

(photo from ragusaturismo.it website)

Our first B&B in Palermo was across the street from the Palazzo delle Poste. We had a small balcony in our room and could look up and down the Via Roma with the Poste as the centerpiece. I guess Angiolo Mazzoni was the post office architect as he is credited with Palermo too.

When Trump first started talking about infrastructure programs, I was glad to think of public money going to public works. It hasn't much happened and certainly not on post offices.

separated at birth: Apple Park & Solo House

Apple Park

Cupertino, California, 2018

Foster + Partners

Solo House

Matarraña, Spain, 2017

Office KGDVS (Kersten Geers David Van Severen)

For more on the Solo House, Caroline Quentin and Piers Taylor visit it in the Spain episode of The World's Most Extraordinary Homes (available on Netflix). Although the buildings share the basic shape of their plans, the Apple headquarters is huge, almost 3 million square feet and costing almost $5 billion dollars to build. The Solo House is mostly open but has three crescent shaped closed spaces for bedrooms, bathrooms, and whatnot. Quentin and Taylor decided the central space of the Solo House was "sacred." Circles and squares have always been rather ideal shapes. Think Palladio.

here and there

Here and there are concepts (words) that especially resonate during a pandemic with social distancing. You spend a lot of time here but wish you could be there. The headline of the lead article in today's Sunday Styles section of the New York Times is "It's hard when you can't go anywhere." It's a story about six people in an assisted living facility in Colorado who received cameras to document life during the coronavirus crisis. It's hard to see pictures of places that you've visited, imagine how empty they may be now, and how much you wish you could go there again.

Vittoria, Sicily, Italy: Piazza del Popolo

Lily had sent me a message about a virtual toast via Zoom for Milan who received this year's ARLIS/NA Distinguished Service Award. In my response to Lily, I said I intended to be there for the virtual toast but, in reality, I'll be here for the toast, seeing Milan and the others on a screen.

I was listening to Weekend Edition as I drove to Wegmans in Hornell to get my Sunday Times and some groceries. One of the stories was "Author Elizabeth Acevedo on her new novel 'Clap when you land'" (published by HarperCollins). The novel-in-verse revolves around two girls whose father dies in a plane crash. He had maintained two families, one in New York City and one in the Dominican Republic, and neither knew about the other. The girls deal with "the devastation of loss, the difficulty of forgiveness, and the bittersweet bonds that shape our lives" (from publisher's description) as they try to balance the particular here and there of their newly shared reality.

In a short sequence in the "Carl's Funeral" episode of Schitt's Creek, Bob is talking to Twyla at the Café Tropical. Carl was his brother and Twyla asks Bob how he's doing and says "Death is just life except you're not here. You're somewhere else. You know, but that's ok because at least you're somewhere. You know, when does somewhere become there, and when does there become here. And I ..." Bob cuts in to say "Just a coffee, please." Twyla asks "For here?"

showcase or sanctuary, probably both and neither

A simple sentence can resonate now in the time of coronavirus in ways that it would not have a year ago. This morning's indexing included a book review by Emily Guthrie of Get out of my room!: a history of teen bedrooms in America by Jason Reid (University of Chicago Press, 2017). The review is published in Winterthur portfolio, summer/autumn 2019. The sentence that especially grabbed me was "Others might describe the feeling that the room instilled, from the pride of a carefully curated showcase to the solace of a private sanctuary."

There is also a bit about the Princess telephone designed by Henry Dreyfuss in 1959. The phone was an icon of being with it, marketed to women and girls. I remember that Bill Murphy had one in Scotia, Nebraska. Imagine how different my life might have been if I had come to terms with my nascent homosexuality then, rather than sitting there near his Princess phone with a gaggle of giggling girlfriends. Sadly, I've never been able to learn out how Bill's life turned out but he was a careful curator before his time.

Coronavirus isolation also brings bingeing and, for me, that has mostly meant Schitt's Creek. The whole idea of children sharing a bedroom is fundamental to the series, not that the Rose kids are teenagers but being together in their motel room brings on teenage behavior. "Ew, burn, David!" The actor who plays the role of Patrick is Noah Reid which brings us around to the book whose author is Jason Reid.

general special

If you are new to applying LCC Class N, the Library of Congress classification schedule for fine arts, you may trip over a number that is captioned as "General special." For example, NA2540 is captioned "General special. Including hints for architects, orientation, etc." and appears under "General works" on "Architecture." Books in this class number in the LC catalog have titles such as

• 5 codes: architecture, paranoia and risk in times of terror
• Iconografie van de honingbij in de Lage Landen
• Architecture, culture, and spirituality
• Corporate architecture: building a brand

Or NA7125 which is captioned "General special" under "Domestic architecture. Houses. Dwellings"

• 36 propositions for a home
• House and home: cultural contexts, ontological roles
• House rules: an architect's guide to modern life
• Abitazione ed i maestri dell'architettura contemporanea

These are general because they don't deal with a topical, geographic, chronological, or other area that is enumerated in the classification schedule. At the same time, they are not general in that they only deal with one or more aspects of the more general topic. That is, they're special. A library patron probably would not want only one of these books if they wanted a general book on architecture or houses respectively. Also they probably would not want only these if they were looking broadly for building security, art nouveau ornament in Belgium, church architecture, corporate office buildings, etc.

When David Rose goes to file papers for his new store in the "General Store" episode of Season 3 of Schitt's Creek, he starts the overall description of his new business with "It's a general store, but it's also a very specific store." I don't know if David Rose or Dan Levy would ever want to work as a cataloger in a library but the script sure has the general special concept down. 

separated at birth: Sebastien Borgia

Cesare Borgia

The Borgias (SHOWTIME, 2011-2013)

Sebastien Raine

Schitt's Creek (Pop TV, 2015-2020)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Arnaud_(actor)

Jasper Johns in the snow

It's not like I was hoping for another round of snow in the middle of April but that's what we got overnight. It was glorious in the early morning sun under a nearly cloudless sky. The sun was beginning to melt the snow on utility wires and the snow was falling to the ground in random patterns of stripes a few inches long. I was reminded of works by Jasper Johns from the 1970s and 1980s.

Jasper Johns: Usuyuki (1981)

(screenprint, Simca Print Artists)

Metropolitan Museum of Art

As it happens, "usuyuki" means "light snow" in Japanese.

"Random patterns" may be an oxymoron. Lest you think that yesterday's obsession with Schitt's Creek has passed, "random" is a favorite adjective of Alexis Rose. She uses it to describe just about anything. The Met's page on this print uses "cross-hatching motif" in describing the work.

merrily we roll along

This time of in-person social isolation takes us down some quirky paths. I had heard of the television show Schitt's Creek but hadn't watched any of it until Mark posted the clip of "I'm Jake. Oh, of course you are" on his Facebook page. That caught my fancy and now, just a few weeks later, I've been around the first five seasons three times. That's all that is currently on Netflix and I don't have cable so no Pop TV for Season 6. The characters are deep in my thoughts and being with them is considerable distraction and solace in my alone time. Who knows (or cares) if it's a healthy diversion?

One manifestation of the S.C. penetration into my quotidian life (that use of a $10 word is for Moira and Roland) is its resonance as I'm reading about something else entirely. I was reading The New York Times Book Review for last Sunday (12 April 2020) as I ate lunch. In the review of Lady in Waiting: my extraordinary life in the shadow of the Crown, a memoir by Anne Glenconner, the reviewer Alida Becker quotes the first post-coma words of Glenconner's son who had been in a motorcycle accident: Lamborghini. The reviewer then says "Truly, the rich are different." Lamborghini also plays out in Schitt's Creek: in the words of "A little bit Alexis" and in the Christmas medley that Moira and David sing.

Another review in the same issue of NYTBR is on a book entitled The undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio. The author relates a story about a trip through a wealthy Miami subdivision on the way to a club. One of her friends says the big houses stress her "because it makes her think about having to clean them." The opening moment of episode 1 of Schitt's Creek is of a Latina in servant uniform answering the doorbell. It's not immigration but revenue agents to dispossess the family of most of their possessions. "Mrs. Rose, there are people here from the government."

But the most amusing resonance (sometimes, at least) is imagining the chapters of my dissertation in comparative literature "Downton Abbey and Schitt's Creek: a comparative study of the daily life of the rich in late Victorian and Edwardian England and in contemporary America." There will be chapters on raising children (spending an hour or two with the children when it's possible), Christmas specials, inter-class commingling, the power of language, and of course the predictable stuff like fashion. Some folks have said that Schitt's Creek works because its stereotypes aren't mean and I think that may be part of why Downton Abbey also worked in that even the villains like Thomas and O'Brien were sympathetic. Or maybe it's the script, in both cases.

There will also be a chapter on place. Though Downton Abbey was mostly shot on location in southern England, the fictional setting is Yorkshire and local information comes up pretty regularly. Also, some outside scenes are actually shot in York, like when the Dowager goes to visit Kuragin. Or maybe it's CGI. According to the creators of Schitt's Creek in various interviews on YouTube, the location of Schitt's Creek is intentionally ambiguous, not specifically U.S. or Canada. The Roses did apparently live before in downstate New York or Long Island. The bicycles were discarded in the Hamptons. David asks if it looks like he shops on Canal Street. The aerial view of the house is not Manhattan but could be outer Queens. The only time that there is anything remotely specific about the location of Schitt's Creek is when Mutt and Tennessee are going on a trip "up the coast" to look for pine cones.

That said, it's probably more likely that I'll go around Schitt's Creek again unless I break down and somehow get access to Season 6 so I can have the resolution of all the situations and close the book.

separated at birth: everyone knows how to make tea and fold in cheese

Piazza Cordusio, then and now

There's a wonderful photostream on Flickr with historic photos of Milan: Milàn l'era inscì Urbanfile  I'm not sure exactly what the name means and am guessing that it may be a regional dialect rather than mainstream Italian.

This photo has the caption "Via e Piazza Cordusio 1915-20" on Flickr. Piazza Cordusio is normally a busy space near the Castello Sforzesco and the Cadorna train station which provides a nice alternative to the central station when you're coming in from Malpensa airport, home to all kinds of shopping adventures and good restaurants. Very busy. It must be strange to be in Cordusio (as the neighborhood is called) at the moment of the coronavirus lockdown.

When I was in Milan in September 2018, a commercial "palazzo" around the plaza (formerly a post office) had just opened as the first Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Italy.

Six or seven streets come into the square, trolleys pass through, people wait for buses, tourists snap photos ... in normal times. Good memories.

hunker down? go on a cruise? tell stories in an Italian country villa?

At the end of my morning walk, Drew and Mary were walking down the other side of the street. Drew asked if I was hunkering down or on a cruise. He explained the latter by describing the student houses around town that seem to have taken on new life, at least on a warm day. Folks on the porch, laughing, carrying on. I'd noticed the increased activity around the houses too. There were nine cars parked at the house and a half just before the AU campus. The university is closing the dorms today so residents have been here to clear out their stuff, after spring break. I feel especially bad, in this regard, for the students that come from busy urban areas and live in perhaps small family apartments. I wish the university could have figured out a way to provide for social-distant housing for the rest of the term for students if they wanted to hunker down here in the country. Yes, I realize that dorms involve more than providing a bed, e.g., supervision, food, potential medical care and deeper isolation.

Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio

MS. Holkham misc. 49, fol. 5r

Miniature by Taddeo Crivelli, circa 1467

Bodleian Library, Oxford

(from the Wikipedia page for the Decameron)

Now, if an Italian villa seems a bit difficult at the moment, you might consider a visit to Holkham Hall, perhaps my favorite Palladian house in England. Better make that a virtual visit for the foreseeable future.

boundaries in a time of coronavirus

This month's Tentative List of LC Subject Heading proposals includes a proposal for:

Boundaries (Psychology)

The author of the proposal (an LC cataloger) found six occurrences of the use of Boundaries--Psychological aspects in the LC catalog. Since the scope note makes it clear that Boundaries in LCSH is used for borders between countries, states, etc., those six occurrences would be more relevant for books about being distraught about immigration or border wall issues. The work in question for which the new subject heading is being proposed is entitled Setting boundaries will set you free. These days, setting boundaries might also keep you for catching COVID-19.

Be well, all.

separated at birth: anagrammatic dates

Homage to Miro by Gordon Bunshaft, 1939

in a private collection

discussed by Nicholas Adams in Architectural Record, February 2020

Miró, Joan, 1893-1983

Bunshaft, Gordon, 1909-1990

Gordon Bunshaft was born in Buffalo and grew up there. He designed a new wing for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in the early 1960s. For a while, it looked like that wing would be shafted by the present project to build a new wing by Shohei Shigematsu of OMA North America but it's become a new pavilion on the other side of the original building. Thank heavens.

art and nature

Today I'm wearing the Tom Thomson t-shirt that I bought at the Art Gallery of Ontario many years ago. The text reads "Was his work more influenced by art movements or the movements of the wind and water?"

Today I'm reading about the Pritzker Architecture Prize 2020 being awarded to Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects. The article in the N.Y. Times about the prize includes this quotation from Farrell in response to a question about fame, recognition, and starchitects: "There are people whose work should be more recognized sometimes. The media goes for the easy thing -- eye candy. Architecture is much more. It infiltrates our lives in a much deeper way. It's important to remember that the earth is beautiful and sunlight is liquid gold. A lot of architecture excludes natural phenomena -- the rising and setting sun, the power of springtime moving up through the soul."

Daniel and I were talking about the glory of the winter sun as you go about looking at buildings.

separated at birth: eastern and western beasties

Fragment of a balustrade

Late 13th/early 14th century

Iran

Limestone with carved decoration

Art Institute of Chicago. The Orientals, 1947.521

capital, late 10th/early 11th century

Museo di Sant'Agostino, Genoa

Apple store grows in Central Park

It looks like the Apple store is in Central Park. This photo is by Peter Aaron from the Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (architects) webpage. The store is actually across Fifth Avenue from the Plaza Hotel, at the southeastern corner of Central Park.

https://www.bcj.com/

typewriter love

Working on some name authority records and came across this book cover:

cf http://shermaniablog.blogspot.com/2019/10/typewriters.html

October memories

the beginning and the end

In the greater middle portion of your life, you like to feel like you're in at least partial control. You may make mistakes but you may have some influence over the next thing to happen or tomorrow. You sometimes seem to have only yourself to blame when things don't go right, whatever that is seen to be. And then there's when you are really young or dead. It all just is. You can holler or struggle or just be still.

I'm reading The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai. There are plenty of good sentences but this one on page 16 stood out: "Being on an airplane, even in coach, was the closest an adult could come to the splendid helplessness of infancy." You're just there, for the duration of the flight you cannot move a whole lot, you can't pick from a variety of food and drink and activity. You can prepare but you're mostly helpless beyond a certain point. It's only good if you let the helplessness be splendid. My mom said I'd just happily sit in my playpen when I was an infant, probably running a little car back and forth. Her friends wondered if something was wrong with me, if I were perhaps a little "slow."

On the other end of life, we are often equally as helpless though maybe have too much awareness of our helplessness. There was an article in the New York Times on Thursday (February 20, 2020) entitled "Final moments for all to see" about taking pictures of people who had recently died. The online version of the story is called "The iPhone at the deathbed." The article also talks about the preparation of the body for the picture. There are various terms for the folks who will help you but I think I like "death doula" best. Amy Cunningham, a funeral director in Brooklyn, describes how she was talking to a group of Unitarians in Albany and said that she thought the dead person would want to look their best. A nonagenarian in the back of the room yelled out "You'll get over that!" Her reflection on that experience was that it "got [her] thinking. Wouldn't it be wonderful to die unfettered and free from worrying about how [you] look?" More splendid helplessness, even if you don't know about it.

You do know about how worried you have been all your life about how you looked. Another article in Thursday's paper, entitled "Paramedical tattooos: when ink is the Rx," was about tattoo artists who do healing tattoos like fingernail images on the tips of fingers which have been cut off in an accident. They also might do scar or blemish covering, the point being a subtle blending in with the rest of the person's skin. My nose reconstructions have left me not wishing to have my photograph taken and worried about the misshapen nose. Still I don't feel helpless (most of the time) and I'd rather tell the story about the scars than go through a bunch of operations to smooth it all out, especially since they'd probably not succeed. So the lesson is to do the best you can with what you've got and be patient if you're riding in coach. It will soon be over ... or not.

what did we use to say?

I was looking at the January 2020 issue of Art in America which is a theme issue on "Generative art: the history and future of creative machines." I wasn't familiar with the term in art and started investigating. The "Generative art" article in Wikipedia is quite mature and traces the history of the term in the arts back to the 1960s. A keyword search in the Library of Congress catalog yielded about 100 hits and about a dozen of them seemed to be relevant, that is, the phrase "generative art" appeared in the title/subtitle. I looked at some of the records and several had the subject heading "Computer art" along with other headings.

The Wikipedia article starts "Generative art refers to art that in whole or in part has been created with the use of an autonomous system. An autonomous system in this context is generally one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that would otherwise require decisions made directly by the artist." It's a little like social practice with a machine. You give it a situation and it proceeds as it can. Wikipedia also compared it with algorithmic art ("algorithmically determined computer generated work") but generative art doesn't need to be based in an algorithm, I guess.

It definitely seemed like it was time to work on a subject proposal for LCSH. I checked the Art & Architecture Thesaurus and they have a record for generative art. The scope note defines it as "electronic art that incorporates process in the creation of the work. The work itself is usually experienced through time and space, and may include sound, motion, animated graphics, sculptural elements, or any combination of these. Generative art has a performative aspect. For visual art that incorporates algorithms to produce static visual works, use 'algorithmic art.'"

And then the word "generative" started leaping into my life: right, left, and center. Not as part of "generative art" but, for example, to describe the origin of an idea. Sam and I talked around it after an artist talk a couple weeks ago. I was at the College Art conference last week and heard at least a half dozen speakers include the word generative in their paper. I was reading the January 24th New York Times after I got home and this sentence appeared in a review of a book entitled The longing for less by Kyle Chayka: "More generative for him are the examples of artists who became known as Minimalists even as they disavowed the term." What word would have been used a while ago? Not generative, I don't think. Maybe I'm just noticing a word that's been out there all along. Whatever, it's good to have an expanding vocabulary.

separated at birth: Abidjan and London pyramids

La Pyramide (1973)

Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire

Rinaldo Olivieri, architect

photo by Iwan Baan, from Architect magazine website,

review of Graham Foundation exhibition

Tate Modern extension (2016)

London, England

Herzog & de Meuron, architects
photo by Mara Brandl / Imagebroker / Shutterstock

from Art News article on Tate's "Head of Coffee"