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.