separated at birth? Troy, NY, and Palermo, Sicily

from the design collection

In the Italian market, Campari mixed with soda water is sold in individual bottles as Campari Soda (10% alcohol by volume). Campari Soda is packaged in a distinctive bottle that was designed by Fortunato Depero in 1932. (From Wikipedia, article on Campari, viewed December 9, 2013)

cultural missteps

Light snowfall in the air, off to the BFA senior shows and then the AU Symphony Orchestra concert. I ran into Lydia at the BFA shows. She had posted a note in Facebook on the listing for a show by Adam Katseff so I had assumed she was in New York City. But there she was, having returned in the last 24 hours. We compared notes on recent trips to NYC: where we stayed (Ridgewood and Bushwick), what we saw (Chris Burden, Mike Kelley), neighborhoods, where we ate. John and Ellen joined us and we sadly got into a bit of Brooklyn name-dropping as John and Ellen groaned. Both Lydia and I would love to live in the City, the art is so exciting and invigorating, so "sparkly" as Daniel said.

And then off to Miller for the concert. The house wasn't open so I took out Blasphemy by Sherman Alexie, my current reading. The next story was "Gentrification" wherein a white guy is living in a black neighborhood, the only white, but they're all just folks. Then the white guy does something that he perceives as neighborly, contrary to the customs of the majority black population. He becomes the unwanted. Culture is so inborn and it is easy to go astray.

Getting an apartment in an affordable neighborhood might very well mean living in a minority-majority area. It would be so easy to be "wrong." As I was walking home, thinking about the carol sing-along during the concert, I contemplated how, for some, singing Christian carols could be wrong. I certainly bristle when the Pledge of Allegiance is recited before Alfred Town meetings or the national anthem is played before village band concerts in the summer. No one from New York City would tolerate that. And I'm a child of the 1960s when those emblems of American allegiance got tangled up in the Vietnam War.

Rieu : violin = Rastrelli : cello

When we were in Capo d'Orlando, our B&B host, Calogero Nici, talked about his love of the violinist André Rieu who plays classical music with glitz and circumstance. Not actually to my taste. I prefer "real" (unadulterated) classical music, don't need it all popped up.

I had read a notice about the Rastrelli Cello Quartet coming to Houghton College as part of their U.S. tour. I read the notice to mean that they were something like a traveling Kronos Quartet. Their "non-traditional programming" is more in the lines of Rieu, classical music for the masses, than Kronos. More Vegas than downtown NYC. Or the Miller Theater at Columbia where I heard some great contemporary classical music when I lived in the City. They're good, don't get me wrong about that, and they played the glissandos and glitz with skill and musicality.

If you're interested, here's a link to the video page on the Rastrelli website. One of the things we really enjoyed was how four Russian guys, all playing the cello, could be so different in physical appearance and playing style.

Indonesia

I have been thinking about joining Nadine Hoover on one of her trips to Indonesia where she works with the Friends Peace Teams in Asia West Pacific. And today's Bergren Forum was Brian Arnold, photography teacher at School of Art and Design here; he talked on "Modernism and photography in Bali and Java." Intriguing. And now I know how to say Yogyakarta, one of the centers of contemporary art in Java. Or as Brian called it: the Chelsea of Indonesia.

Drawing by I Gusti Made Deblog,

from the Sutasome Story

"Gajahwaktra Fighting the Naga, before Sutasoma Comes to Bring Peace"

(ink on paper, circa 1950)

(photo from http://www.arcadja.com/)

Knowing how Brian said Yogyakarta is a bit of a librarian story. Some places in Indonesia used to be spelled with "dj" where the "y" is now. I learned about this from my cataloging, probably items at Cornell which has a magnificent Southeast Asian collection. Anyway, Yogyakarta is pronounced "djogdjakarta" or something of the sort. The authority record for Yogyakarta has several references with DJ, K, or J where other letters appear in the authorized form.

you can call me keith

So I was on my way home from the VRA/Upstate meeting in Salem, New York, at the McNish House, a project of Sheafe Satterthwaite. Sheafe is a part-time teacher and raconteur at Williams College, teaching American landscape history and other courses. The house is lovely, the 17th-century kitchen is remarkable, the book collection is stupendous. On the way home, after walking about some more in downtown Troy, I went over the Menands Bridge to Albany, walked about some more and went to the Albany Institute of History and Art. The mystery of the Albany mummies show had some wonderful Egyptian Revival tchotchkes.

Then it was on my way. As I neared Oneonta, I figured it was about lunch time and I could go to the Neptune Diner ... oh, no, I can go to downtown Oneonta and visit Green Toad Bookstore and eat someplace downtown. Green Toad is paired with a coffee house. I had on my Annie Leibovitz t-shirt with the picture of Keith Haring, from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

After I ordered my sandwich and coffee, the cashier asked if the guy on the t-shirt was me. No, but that's OK, you can call me Keith if you want to.

(Photo from http://www.artnet.com/auctions/)

Makoko Floating School

Makoko Floating School, Lagos, Nigeria. Designed by NLÉ, an architectural firm with offices in Nigeria and the Netherlands, founded 2010 by Kunlé Adeyemi. Picture from the NLÉ website which includes a slide show of this and other projects.

The building is a combination community center and school: community center on first level, school on second level, other educational facilities on top level. Learning about this was a gift from today's indexing for Avery. There's an article in the May 2013 issue of Abitare wherein the author compared the structure with Aldo Rossi's Teatro del Mondo but admitted it might be the particular view. Or maybe it's just a glorious wooden building rising above the still waters of a canal or lagoon. I love my indexing!

utopian benches

Utopian Benches, 2011, by Francis Cape, illustration from the Murray Guy website.

"A bench is a social sculpture, and this is why it interests Francis Cape." -- Frances Richard, in a review of Cape's show at Murray Guy, New York, in Artforum, October 2013, p. 293

reflection

As I listened in rapt attention at the UB Gender Symposium described in the next older post, I couldn't help but be distracted by the reflection of the Darwin Martin House behind the speakers. Here, Jack Quinan (retired architectural historian from UB) and Wanda Bubriski (Executive Director Emeritus, Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation). Bubriski moderated a panel with Quinan and Beverly Willis after the film A Girl is a Fellow Here, with "here" being the Taliesin Foundation.

case in point: Read Weber

As we artnacoisti get accustomed to the new fields in NACO records for attributes of the entity being established, the question of coding gender of persons has come up several times. I have told folks that they need to justify gender either by an explicit statement of gender or by use of a gendered pronoun. We should not assume that a Robert is male or a Susan is female. In most cases you'll be right but ...

I spent this afternoon, into the evening, at the "Building Talent: Women, Patronage, and Mentoring" symposium, coordinated by the University at Buffalo Gender Institute and held at the Greatbatch Pavilion at the Darwin Martin House. One of the features of the symposium, which was fantastic and inspirational, was a showing of the short documentary from the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation entitled A Girl is a Fellow Here--100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright.

One of the six architects featured in the film was Read Weber (1908-1990). She was listed as male in the registry of American architects of the American Institute of Architecture until 2008. The profile of Weber on the Willis Foundation page mentions this and below is an illustration of the Coney Island Hospital, designed in 1957 by Weber. (Photo credit: Stoller/Esto Photography)

In the film, several of the women are interviewed and express their appreciation of Wright's attitude toward women. That is, he was unwilling to give them any more credit than he gave his male associates.

The speaker that had me in the palm of her hand was Marika Schioiri-Clark, now principal of SOSHL Studio. I had seen some of her work with MASS Design Group as part of my Avery indexing. MASS did a hospital project in Butaro, Rwanda. Schioiri is now living in Cleveland and working on an artist housing and residency project among other things. Her key words are "empathic design" and her mission is founded in her studies at Harvard where aesthetics trumped social engagement.

They said they were filming the symposium. Perhaps it will be available one of these days.