39 x 2 = 78

I do enjoy when numbers line up or add up as much as I enjoy a good sentence. Well, maybe as much. Words and numbers. Sometimes mirrored like palindromes. This morning, I stopped for gasoline before I went to Wegmans to get my Sunday New York Times. The total purchase was $20.78 for 6.078 gallons. Off to Wegmans where I picked up groceries along with the three papers for me and the two Lindas (Alfred friends for whom I pick up and deliver their Sunday papers). My Wegmans bill was $60.39, minus the $21 for the three papers is $39.39. Thirty-nine is half of 78. When I added the grocery total to my monthly food expenses, the total was $638.78. I guess it's just going to be a 39 and 78 kind of day but no "palindrome" yet.

One of the pictures you get when you search the internet for "39 x 2 = 78." It (39 x 78) happens to be the size of sheets for a twin bed.

Harmony Hammond at the Whitney Biennial

A wonderful paragraph, for a variety of reasons, from the review of the 2024 Whitney Biennial in the New Yorker by Jackson Arn entitled "The Whitney Biennial's taste for flesh." Posted March 22, 2024, to appear in the April 1 print edition:

By a close margin, the four fabric assemblages of Harmony Hammond are the fleshiest things in this show. They use a variety of materials to suggest a whole menagerie of bodies, from pimply-shiny to aged and chalky. Colors are subdued for the most part, and strategically so: when a touch of red shrieks out of the dirty white field of "Chenille #11," it almost hurts. Hammond has suggested that flourishes like this were meant to evoke "sexual brutality against women," but take a few steps back and marvel at how this only deepens her work's mystery -- if the red is brutality, what are the string, the smeared white, the grommets? Interpretation is interwoven with the sheer, thingy strangeness of the object, and can't be ripped out. Art like this is built to last, I would guess. But if you prefer your political messaging neat, no chaser, you are welcome to walk to the other end of the sixth floor, go to the terrace, and spend some time with Kiyan Williams's big dirt sculpture of the White House sinking into the ground, complete with upside-down American flag. There's a label in case you can't figure out what it means.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/01/the-whitney-biennial-art-review

Some of the reasons:

• descriptive words, rich and evocative
• I was lucky enough to spend time with Harmony Hammond when we were both active in the Queer Caucus for Art, an affiliated society of the College Art Association (now rebranding itself as simply CAA).
• particular memory of drinks and conversation after a caucus business meeting in Philadelphia when the last remaining folks in the hotel lounge were several older lesbians and me, and then we walked each other back to our hotels. The younger folks had gone off dancing.
• memories of visits to various Whitney Biennials; this one has just opened and runs until August so there's a chance I might get to the City to see it
• I actually said the word "chenille" today when a friend asked us what color we thought her sweater was. I asked about the material. "Is it chenille?"
• the ending of the paragraph

trying to remember the artist's name

Some months ago, I was reminded of the work of a contemporary artist who does watercolors of animals, usually with captions beautifully written in the image. Kind of Audubon-like. I tried all kinds of googling and just could not get a result that included the artist. I had become familiar with the artist when I worked at the Amon Carter Museum and I searched their collection online and that of other museums that might have had a work by him. I thought of sending a note to Milan (a colleague at the Carter) to ask about the artist. The desire to remember his name came and went. I cannot really say I was obsessed but I was frustrated. I felt like I could kind of remember his name but it's hard to search "kind of" on the web.

I hadn't thought about it for a while but, this morning, as I was reading the style section from last Sunday's Times, the social event pictures were from a centennial event at the Morgan Library & Museum which happened to mention that one of the guests was artist Walton Ford. Ta da! That's it! It is Walton Ford that I was trying to remember. Now I wonder what I just forgot so I have room for "Walton Ford" in my brain.

Walton Ford

"Dying Words"

Honolulu Museum of Art

(from his Wikipedia page)

Bute & Montmirail

This is a portrait of John, Lord Mountstewart, later 4th Earl and 1st Marquess of Bute. The portrait is now in the Getty and was one of the works in today's Artle. I hear "Bute" in the voice of Michelle Fairley who plays Princess Augusta in Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. Another of today's Artle works was a portrait of Charles Benjamin de Langes de Montmirail, Baron de Lubières. "Montmirail" was the noble name of the man who was obsessed by Dowager Countess Violet (Maggie Smith) in the second Downton Abbey film. He left his villa in the South of France to her. Perhaps I'm living too much in historical spaces as manifested in popular culture. Or perhaps the real world needs to be escaped from.