plus ça change .....

The book I am currently reading is The shores of Bohemia: a Cape Cod story, by John Taylor Williams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022). We have just gotten through World War I and the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and execution. Plenty of writers and artists were involved in protesting the trial where the judge implied  that the fact Sacco and Vanzetti were immigrants was perhaps the greater crime. Sounds too familiar. It sometimes seems like Trump's bullying and nastiness are singular. His narcissism and glee in being mean may be singular but othering, alas, is close to eternal.

If you want to read a review of the book by Andrew Sullivan, this one (click here) appeared in July 2022 in the New York times.

brutalism to industrial

After several inspiring, friendly, and collegial days at the 54th annual ARLIS/NA conference, I took off this morning from the Hôtel Bonaventure in Montreal toward New York State. The Bonaventure is at the top (10th floor plus) of a brutalist masterwork built for Expo 67. I am fond of brutalism but the hotel is very much closed off from the outside world. There are courtyards (with ducks) as well as the swimming pool area. It was hard to know what was North or South when you were on the conference floor. Our hotel room looked out onto the city but other folks had courtyard views.

Since I drove to Montreal, it was possible to switch out the traveling a little bit. I went up to Montreal via Syracuse, crossing into Canada at Alexandria Bay. The flatness of the Ontario and Quebec landscape on the North side of the Saint Lawrence River was a surprise to me. I headed home straight South from Montreal, into the Adirondacks toward Albany in order to head over to Williamstown and North Adams, Massachusetts, for visits to the Clark Art Institute and MASS MoCA respectively.

MASS MoCA's shorter-term exhibitions for this year do not open until later in May but the spread out spaces of the industrial buildings with plenty of windows and a variety of things to view through them were an elixir for a tired brain. I had already seen the Jeffrey Gibson show but it was more compelling to just let it wash over me this time. Immersive, they say. I had seen the "New York State of Mind" show but the 1975 picture with Patti Smith at a political protest where the sign next to her says "Stop U.S. arming the shah's fascist regime" resounded quite differently than it did a year ago. One of the pieces in Zora J Murff's show was "Bully Pulpit" from which her recorded voice includes text inspired by Black radical activist and political prisoner George Jackson who was killed by guards in 1971. "When my people receive justice, I am sure I will receive it too." The text of Jimena Sarno's two-channel video installation "Las Tres Gracias" draws on creation legends and Third World literature. One of the days (ninth?) of creation "marked the nether world for those who have poison in their souls."

The picture is an aerial view of the industrial buildings that have been converted into the MASS MoCA campus in North Adams, Massachusetts, a few miles East of Williamstown.