Sherman Maxon

I just finished reading Grand Wood: A Life by R. Tripp Evans (Knopf, 2010). It is well-written and I really enjoyed the telling of Wood's story by a gay art historian. It is written in a popular style, that is, footnotes are relegated to the back and mostly give citations for quotations and other facts.

Wood was certainly interested in young men, both in social action and as art subjects. As is probably typical for his day (1891-1942), it is not clear how much he acted on his homosexuality. After his mother's death and not so long before his own, he married Sara Sherman Maxon. She was a powerful woman and the marriage lasted only a few years and was not happy. Her son, Sherman Maxon, and his wife, Dorothy, came to live with the Woods in Iowa City where they had moved from Cedar Rapids and renovated a fine brick house on East Court Street.

Sherman and Dorothy modeled in 1936 for illustrations from Main Street by Upton Sinclair. "In The Radical, Wood's illustration for the character Miles Bjornstrom, Sherman appears not as Lewis's ragged, disaffected intellectual, but as a caricature of rugged masculinity. Wearing a heavy sheepskin-lined coat and hunting cap, he stands in a toolshed and brandishes a rather phallic-looking wooden baton. With his broad shoulders, muscular neck, and exaggerated mustache -- a feature neither Lewis's character nor Sherman shared -- this über-masculine figure is more Tom of Finland than the bookish Scandinavian of Lewis's novel." (Tripp, p. 223; illustration from ebay)

Sherman and Dorothy continued to live with Grant Wood after Sara left him and moved to New York City. I am not especially pleased that Sherman was a scrounger.

brutalism renovated, replaced by bland

When I was going to college at New Paltz State in the mid-late 1960s, brutalism was in high swing and Le Corbusier's La Tourette monastery was one of my favorite buildings. And then they started building the new science building on campus. It was designed by Davis Brody and stretched along one side of the main quadrangle with the old main building and the then library and student union on the other sides of the quad. It wasn't finished by the time I graduated but the concrete was beautiful and the stair cases were sculptural.

This picture is from a visit in 2009, along the side away from the quadrangle and toward the fine arts building and the dorms. The quadrangle side of the building was lined by a parking lot so it didn't form a fourth elevation for the quadrangle. Sad.

Like all buildings, a brutalist one needs loving care and attention to siting if it is to work in a friendly way. Not only was it a gray rainy day and there was a parking lot, the covered walkway to a neighboring building isn't particularly compatible. It blocked the view of the stair sculpture. Still, I really enjoyed seeing this building that had been so influential in my appreciation of 20th-century architecture, particularly brutalism.

Imagine my grave disappointment when I stopped by yesterday on my way home from a week of cataloging at Bard. I figured a visit to campus and the Dorsky Museum of Art would be amusing even though I didn't know what shows were on. I parked near campus, on the quad side. I rounded the corner of the wing of the old student union and saw:

There, where I would have liked to see the Wooster Science Building with a lawn up to the building, forming the fourth side of the old main quadrangle, were a construction fence, crane, removed stair sculptures, and new framing for replacement walls. They're "renovating" the building and giving it a new bland façade:

How could they??

The shows at the Dorsky? "Anonymous: contemporary Tibetan art" had some interesting works, way better than the rather hokey animation of the special on Buddhism we'd been watching the evening before. "Screen shot" also had some amusing pieces, including a video of women bodybuilders preening to a soundtrack of Falling in love again (as made famous by Marlene Dietrich), the title of the work by Rachel Rampleman.

no mail delivery, no land line: will I be ready for the new communicating?

As I drove home from Bard on Wednesday, two successive stories on All Things Considered had me practically weeping.

USPS has started using curb boxes or neighborhood clusters of boxes for new houses. Congressman Darrell Issa of California would like to make that universal. Click here for an article from matzav.com on this matter. The next story on All Things Considered said that Verizon is going to switch over from land lines to wifi-connected phones. That is (this is what I heard them say, not necessarily what they meant), the phone on your desk would connect to a wifi box that would connect to Verizon's service. It will save Verizon from maintaining all those deteriorating copper wires. Folks without consistent wifi service or those with health or other emergency needs would continue to be eligible for traditional land lines.

It's true that I use email for personal messages more than I send things via USPS. It's also true that paying my bills via USPS won't keep them afloat, nor will my continuing to use discs for my Netflix viewing. And I even have no problem with walking to the post office or some neighborhood box for my mail. I do finally have a cellphone but I prefer my land line phones, most of the time.

It's more the abrogration of the responsibility for our shared infrastructure and its maintenance that makes me weep. And pine for the good old days.

ants and collaboration

So I was warned by the bookshop owner at Calamus Books in Boston that reading Eminent outlaws by Christopher Bram would lead to a list of books to read. No problem. I went up to Herrick Library this afternoon to get Just above my head, the last novel of James Baldwin. I left with three other books as well: Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood; The dream of Arcadia: American writers and artists in Italy, 1760-1915 by Van Wyck Books; and Fictions of masculinity: crossing cultures, crossing sexualities, edited by Peter F. Murphy. On leaving the library, I was meandering home in the lovely but cool sunshine when I spotted three ants pushing along a one-inch long piece of something. I couldn't tell if the object was a twig or perhaps a caterpillar carcass. The two guys at the ends were walking sideways and the guy in the middle was walking backwards, and they were moving at a good clip. When they got to the edge of the sidewalk, they shifted to moving the object lengthwise instead of broadside. Under this blade, over those blades of grass. Quite amazing how fast they were progressing even in the grass. The grass appeared rather alive with ants so perhaps more were assisting in the more difficult territory.

Walking on, I ran into Lily and told her about the amazing ant show and she said she'd just been watching a video about ants and emergence, about collaboration. A search on Google for "ants emergence" will get you a bunch of responses so I'm not sure what exactly she was watching or reading. Still, it was amazing that we were both enthralled at the moment about the great collaboratory of the ants.

daughter, thought her, water and Sherman Alexie

Doug sent me a link to Sherman Alexie being interviewed by Bill Moyers and I am enjoying his reading of a couple poems: one about Yo Yo Ma's cello and another about Facebook. Now you can guess part of why Doug sent me the link to the interview but it's also interesting to listen to his words about being bi-cultural and bipolar and bi-political. Poetry is sometimes more about words than prose and rhyme is clearly word-y. And that brings back the wonderful rhymes of yesterday's concert of the Penn Yan Community Chorus. These words from the Neighbors' Chorus from La jolie parfumeuse by Offenbach especially thrilled. I loved the rhyme of daughter, thought her, and water.

Was she a very rich man’s daughter
Who showed that she was not all you thought her?
When with your songs of love you sought her,
Were you dowsed with water poured down from above?

Corita Kent and sig files

Our VRA Upstate Chapter meeting included a curator-led visit to the "Someday is now: the art of Corita Kent" show at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. I vividly remember seeing some of the works as they appeared in the later 1960s and 1970s and was a bit distressed to find that they read like sig files now. How is it that wonderful statements can be trivialized by being repeated at the bottom of people's emails? The work above is, however, from the Market Basket works which resulted from her art classes, still related to her good works on social progress.

a day in the life

The note in my calendar said that the Agnes Martin show at the Albright-Knox was closing on Sunday so I checked the mailing I'd gotten not too long ago and saw that there were a couple other shows as well that were closing soon. So off I went to Buffalo today. As I drove in the intermittent rain, I wondered why I'd go on a two-hour drive on such a day.

I got to the Albright-Knox at about 11 am and headed toward the tunnel galleries between the main building and the office building. There in the corridor gallery was a collection of contemporary photographs from the museum's collection. There were some very moving photos by Sophie Ristelhueber from her "Fait" series of images taken in Kuwait soon after the first Gulf War. Next to them were two portraits of veterans of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars by Jennifer Karady. I've been thinking a lot about war, terrorism, and Muslims recently, in light particularly of the Boston Marathon bombing and the reaction to the Tsarnaev brothers. My brother posted a link on Facebook to the New York times article on the dark side of the younger brother Dzhokhar. I posted a response wondering why an angry teenager turns to violence and a firestorm ensued.

As I was standing next to the Ristelhueber photographs, a docent was talking to some high school students about the photographs and said there was no political comment. Not overt maybe?!??! but it sure spoke loud to me. Rusted tanks and other military equipment littering the desert. No politics here?

The Agnes Martin works were as aesthetically moving as the photos had been emotionally disruptive. The show originated at the Harwood Museum of Art of UNM in Taos. There the show was called "Before the grid" but the Buffalo version was called "Agnes Martin: the New York-Taos connection (1947-1957)." What a wonderful gathering of works and mostly new to me. This image is "Mid-winter" from the Harwood Museum exhibition page. The painting is in the Taos Municipal Schools Historic Art Collection. This and others reminded me of Arthur Dove, a favorite artist.

The other shows were "Kelly Richardson: Legion" and "Dennis Maher: House of collective repair" with more thoughts of man and nature, man as a social creature.

Full on art, I went off to Talking Leaves Bookstore which has a branch a few blocks South on Elmwood Avenue from the Albright-Knox, stopping on the way at Saigon Cafe for some gingered vegetables. I bought a couple books at Talking Leaves and had a latte at Aroma which is adjacent and linked inside to the bookstore. I'm reading On Persephone's island, the second book on Sicily since I got back five weeks ago.

Not quite sated on books, I headed out to the main Talking Leaves on Main Street out by the UB campus. Ooops, six more, several were on the list. A couple were discoveries including Whistling Vivaldi: how stereotypes affect us and what we can do by Claude Steele. More thinking about how we characterize others and how it affects relations between the people of the world.

Getting sated now but since I was up in northeastern Buffalo, I figured I'd continue out Route 5 to Transit Road and stop at the Barnes and Noble. I have some gift cards, bought from my sister's partner's son's longtime girlfriend who never goes shopping though she likes to read. They even let you use the gift card in the coffee shop!

Off toward home. The town of Holland intrigues me for a variety of reasons: my good friend Geurt is Dutch, one of my favorite artists (Hieronymus Bosch) is Dutch, the Zider Zee restaurant has a mini windmill, there's this wonderful almost-semicircular car repair shop with stepped gables:

As I was driving through Holland, I noticed there was a little carnival happening. Drove by but then turned around. I was just a bit hungry and thought there might be some carnival treat. Nothing quite like getting some fried dough and taking a ride on a small ferris wheel.

To the Sicilians: Trattoria Bar Da Nino Titos, Ragusa

We walked down the Scala di Ragusa and then back up into Ragusa Ibla (the older part of town, the newer part being built after the great earthquake of 1693) and out toward the Giardino Ibleo. It was about time to eat lunch and we'd scribbled down the name of some restaurants out that direction. We passed the lovely Vecchio Portale di San Giorgio, all that's left of the Arabo-Catalan Romanesque/Gothic church. Whatever style, the great mix of Sicily.

The highly recommended Quattro Gatti, just beyond the old portal, was closed so I walked on ahead of Christie to see if Trattoria Bar Da Nino Titos was open. The door was open but there wasn't much evidence of business yet. I asked the fellow that came to greet me and he said that they were indeed open. I let him know that I had to go back to get "mi amica" and then we'd come for the big meal of the day. When we got back to the restaurant, they'd set up a table for us. Tablecloth, silverware, in a little alcove, etc. Most of the tables were uncovered.

As we were getting settled in, a group of young women came in, all bubbling. They had discovered the Harlem Shake meme and were getting ready to do one of their own. I hadn't heard of it but Christie recognized it. There was some international chitter-chatter understanding. All was well: international understanding beyond a shared verbal language, gracious hosting, good cheese antipasto and meal.

aging hippie, aging hipster, not hipster, whatever

So I've long referred to myself as an aging hippie. When I met Sharon for lunch in L.A., I started to show her my tattoo and she said she was mighty tired of hipster tattoos. Well, that put me in my place, or maybe not. You probably cannot be an aging hipster if you were never a young hipster. On the other hand, getting the tattoo was certainly inspired by looking at lots of hipster tattoos. What's a person to do to stay fashionable. Sharon did say she liked my tattoo OK but only looked with one sidelong glance.

infill

We really loved the art nouveau houses in Vittoria. The smallish one above seemed just about the right size for a pied-à-terre. But I also really liked the infill shop below, very attentive to detail, proportion, and context, yet thoroughly modern classical. It fit right in on the main shopping street of Vittoria.

After I got home, I was talking to another village planning board member about houses in the village and the sprawl that inhabits the hills around the village. Just think if we could fill in some of the vacant spots as intelligently as this building. No, I don't know what was in this spot before so leave me with my fantasy that no historic building was taken down.

More pictures of Vittoria:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?ss=2&w=56294332%40N00&q=vittoria&m=text