writing in space

Sometimes my indexing or cataloging takes me to places I really want to go or where I have very happily been. Sometimes it's a bit of both. I really enjoyed my trips to Milan in 2018, including a climb up to the roof of the Duomo. Hanging out with the gargoyles. My indexing a day or two ago included an article about eL Seed in Abitare. His work usually includes some Arabic calligraphy and the work above was on the plaza in front of the Duomo in Milan. He is Franco-Tunisian so I assumed his nom d'art was derived from something like al-Said. But no. One of the bits of biography that I found on the web described his love of El Cid as a child and his appropriation and respelling of that name.

I often check the Library of Congress Name Authority File when I encounter a new person and want to see if their record looks ok. I was amused to note that the record for eL Seed was done at the Metropolitan Museum of Art so I sent them a note of gratitude. William claimed it.

Thanks, William, and thank you, Bassam Makansi on Facebook, for the good picture of the calligraphy on the plaza. The picture from the roof of the Duomo is mine from 2018.

visiting the Met with my older sister

My older sister Roberta lived in Queensbury, New York, about an hour north of Albany. She was a volunteer at the Hyde Collection, a museum in Glens Falls. Although she did various addressing and desk tasks, the task she talked about with the most warmth was sewing dust covers for some of the historic furniture when it was in storage.

Roberta came down to New York City for a day trip sponsored by the Hyde when I was living in the City, probably at least twenty years ago. The bus dropped them off in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Berta and I spent a couple hours or so in the Metropolitan. Since she was a regular seamstress, knitter, and crocheter, we went to the American collection and looked at quilts. It was delightful to look at textile objects with her. They were art objects but she talked about the bias of the fabric and how it worked with and against the design and preservation of the object.

We looked at other art and then walked across Central Park. We ate at a Vietnamese place on Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side. I don't remember what we did later in the afternoon other than getting her to the Radio City Music Hall neighborhood where the bus was picking them up for the return trip.

I have been thinking especially about Roberta because she died this past week. Just days earlier, she had been on an early 80th-birthday cruise on Lake George with her whole immediate family. That is, both kids and the grandkids. She had a pulmonary embolism about two weeks before she died and then was up and down. After a downturn, she declined returning to the ICU and died in her daughter's arms.

Naturally, she has been much in my thoughts. I went up to the library to drop off a note for one of my colleagues and also picked up the latest issue of Magazine Antiques which is one of the magazines I index for the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals. I was looking at the issue as I walked home and there was an article about the conservation of a canapé à la turque commissioned by Marie Antoinette and now in the collection of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. The subtitle of the article mentions its "prized if drearily upholstered presence at San Francisco's Legion of Honor since the 1950s." The sofa now has new hand-embroidered upholstery. 

Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

This picture, from Wikimedia Commons, predates the conservation and reupholstering. I was not familiar with the term "canapé" in reference to furniture. The Art and Architecture Thesaurus describes a canapé as an elegant sofa developed in France in the 18th century and picked up by Chippendale and others.

Berta would never have had such a fancy piece of furniture in her residence, unless maybe if it was handed down by an elegant relative. It wasn't money. It was common sense. She was the solid rock of us kids and I'll miss that.

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)

teardowns

I have been watching the 1981 version of Brideshead Revisited. Lady Marchmain has died and the London house has been sold by Lord Marchmain. Bridey has asked Charles to paint some views of the house before it is torn down, to be replaced by flats. But don't worry. The house will be saved and the flats will not be built. Charles will find his painting career with the success of the paintings. I know the house will be saved because it is also Grantham House, the London residence of the Crawleys from Downton Abbey.

This photo of the actual Bridgewater House, on the site of Cleveland House, is on Flickr, taken by jupiter1953.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/b1953/7616519714

I first watched the 1981 Brideshead at Judith Holliday's apartment in the Dewitt Mall Apartments in Ithaca. My then boyfriend Randy and I went over every Sunday night while it was on Great Performances on PBS. I had not had a television and bought a modest black-and-white television so we could watch the series. Randy also did not have a television. Judith had a color TV and it beat out my B&W model. I took along my copy of the book and it was amazing (and surprising) how much of the dialogue in the book made it into the telescript.

separated at birth: goats and antiquities

The Ortlip Gallery at Houghton University currently has an exhibition of "Lithographs of the Holy Land and Egypt by David Roberts, Royal Academician." I know I recataloged a bunch of large portfolios, including like Roberts if not Roberts himself, when I was in the reclass section at Cornell between 1969 and 1971. Here's one of the lithographs that especially caught my eye in the exhibition.

"Goats at the entrance to the caves of Beni Hassan"

David Roberts, R.A. (1796-1864)

Part of the reason it really caught my eye is that we had seen sheep and goats at the ruins of Solunto. We heard their bells before we saw them. We were heading along the northern coast of Sicily, about to return our rental car and spend a last couple days in Palermo before heading to Rome and home.

We also have seen goats being used for grass and shrub control in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. It's a fairly old park but not antique.

teary meltdowns in Cefalù

We stayed in Cefalù as we neared the end of our month's circumnavigation of Sicily in 2013. Our hotel was away from the center, near the sea. This view was from the deck outside our room. I was feeling quite teary about the impending return to the U.S.

The days before Cefalù had taken us from Taormina and the landscape around Mount Etna, through the mountains, along the northern coast, visiting several sites of the Fiumara d'Arte.

I am often taken back to Sicily in my thoughts, sometimes just flashback memories, sometimes by reading or films. I just finished watching From Scratch on Netflix. It's a love story of a Black American woman and a Sicilian man. She's an artist, he's a chef. He grew up in a small town not far from Cefalù. We didn't go through Pollina where his native town scenes were filmed but we were close. There was plenty of Florence and Sicily as setting, along with Los Angeles. They also thanked the town of Termini Imerese in the credits; we drove through Termini Imerese and discovered this wonderful 18th-century bridge.

At one point in the film, after Lino and Amy have moved to Los Angeles and before Lino has found his place in the sprawl, he notes that he is flummoxed by Los Angeles because there is no center. In Italian towns, even the small ones, the Centro is important. Amy, naturally and beautifully, says that she will be his center as he is hers.

Plenty to get sentimental about, as well as being tear-jerked by the story of Lino and Amy. I checked the IMDb page for Zoe Saldaña, the female lead and producer for From Scratch. She is also a June 19th-born person.

Black Manhattan

Sometimes you feel like you're having a virgin experience ... and you're not. When we were in Provincetown in early July, I had a drink at Harbor Lounge that they called a Black Manhattan. It was rye and amaro and angostura bitters. It was delightful as well as beautiful. So I had another.

I was reading some old journal entries a little while ago and noted that I had a Black Manhattan in January at North Square, a restaurant kitty corner from Washington Square in Manhattan, just "around the corner" from my old apartment. And just six months before the one I imagined was my first Black Manhattan.

Denver: 1972

In the summer of 1972, Carol and George and Dorothy and I drove straight through from Cleveland to Denver to join the family for a retreat in the mountains outside Boulder. We arrived in Denver early on a bright day. The Gio Ponti building for the Denver Art Museum had just been completed in 1971. Its glass tile façade glistened bright gold in the sunshine. I was smitten. We came back home through Denver a few days later. The skies were gray and so was the building. I am not sure if I have ever seen such an animated façade. This archival photo from a recent article in Architectural Digest is by Wayne Thom. It reminds me of us approaching that golden building with an elliptical entry portal, long before the museum opened for the day.

The Ponti building has now been restored and expanded by the Anna and John J. Sie Welcome Center designed by Machado Silvetti. The welcome center unifies the Ponti building with the Hamilton Building, designed by Daniel Libeskind and opening in 2006.

The Ponti building, now called the Martin Building, is the only building by Gio Ponti in the United States. My appreciation of Ponti's architecture and design expanded significantly in 2018 when I was in Milan and Genoa. Lots of buildings, mostly in Milan. Design objects at the Wolfsoniana in Nervi (on the edge of Genoa) and this wonderful lampshade in the Triennale Design Museum in Monza (just north of Milan):

This memory was enhanced by reading "Opposites Attract" by Ian Volner in the October/November 2021 issue of The Architect's Newspaper.

art with/by/for your neighbors

Two summers ago, Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr and Cassandra Bull co-curated an exhibition in Alfred entitled "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" in which an artist and a community member developed a collaborative work which involved the eventual audience also collaborating. Sam Horowitz and I developed a piece that we called "Time Becomes Us" based on our preparatory conversations. Sam built a wood trough in which we placed layers of natural and artificial materials.

Our object was on display in Cohen Gallery at Alfred University along with the works by other collaborators. Folks were invited to add layers to the initial ones Sam and I had done. We provided a few buckets of clay along with rocks and other objects we found. Some rocks, asphalt chunks, and bricks were collected from the Canacadea Creek behind my house. The Cohen show was up for part of August into the school term. After the show, Sam removed the trough and fired the contents. He's done plenty of experimenting with firing rocks, particularly the shales from this region.

This summer, we took some of the fired detritus of the piece and put it back in the creek bed behind my house.

This afternoon, I came across a video from the American Academy in Rome about their recent Streetscapes series of installations. The works were done by Academy Fellows, partly in response to the pandemic and the desire to have works that could be viewed from the sidewalks around the Academy. The director talks in the video about making the Academy more visible to its neighbors. One of the works -- Novissimo Landscape Goes Silver by Francesca Berni -- looks rather like it might have been mounted in the garden of the Villa Aurelia (one of the buildings of the Academy). Bill and I were lucky enough to stay in the Villa Aurelia when I was in Rome to do NACO training at the Academy.

This is a screenshot from the video. The material looks like soft aluminum foil and makes a fine crinkly noise as it waves in the breeze. How nice it would be to be in Rome and see the installations.

showcase or sanctuary, probably both and neither

A simple sentence can resonate now in the time of coronavirus in ways that it would not have a year ago. This morning's indexing included a book review by Emily Guthrie of Get out of my room!: a history of teen bedrooms in America by Jason Reid (University of Chicago Press, 2017). The review is published in Winterthur portfolio, summer/autumn 2019. The sentence that especially grabbed me was "Others might describe the feeling that the room instilled, from the pride of a carefully curated showcase to the solace of a private sanctuary."

There is also a bit about the Princess telephone designed by Henry Dreyfuss in 1959. The phone was an icon of being with it, marketed to women and girls. I remember that Bill Murphy had one in Scotia, Nebraska. Imagine how different my life might have been if I had come to terms with my nascent homosexuality then, rather than sitting there near his Princess phone with a gaggle of giggling girlfriends. Sadly, I've never been able to learn out how Bill's life turned out but he was a careful curator before his time.

Coronavirus isolation also brings bingeing and, for me, that has mostly meant Schitt's Creek. The whole idea of children sharing a bedroom is fundamental to the series, not that the Rose kids are teenagers but being together in their motel room brings on teenage behavior. "Ew, burn, David!" The actor who plays the role of Patrick is Noah Reid which brings us around to the book whose author is Jason Reid.

olfactory

I really enjoyed Sofija Stefanovic's essay "Smells Like Home" in the New York times a few days ago. She talks about how smells -- good or bad -- can take you to another place. For Stefanovic, who migrated to Australia as a child from the former Yugoslavia, the childhood smells of Belgrade can become like Proust's madeleine though totally unrecognized when she was in Yugoslavia.

I'm not sure my childhood had such evocative smells but today was an olfactory, or potentially very smelly, day. When I pulled on my jeans, I noticed the smell of the laundry in Turin. We were in Italy in March and decided to use a laundry rather than try to figure out the washer in our airbnb apartment. I don't normally use scented detergent so it was strange to whiff the Italy-laundered jeans and totally splendid to think of Turin.

Out for my morning walk. It's earlier than usual because I was heading out early to an ARLIS/NA Upstate New York chapter meeting in Corning. I was walking along in my morning quasi-meditative fog when I'm brought up short by the skunk just a few paces ahead of me. I crossed the street and he slunk off into the brush. Phew.

I got to the chapter meeting and one of my colleagues admitted that she was in the process of moving and had had trouble finding clean clothes to put on and hoped she wasn't smelly. Nope, you're fine.

Our chapter likes to do silent auctions at our chapter meetings. I don't know if it was the skunk, Proust, laundry detergent, or just the crazies but I bid on the little box of scented soaps. All the way home, the car interior was creating a whole new, very fragrant memory.

art and agriculture ... and life and liberal arts

The weekly Bergren Forum at Alfred University is usually held in the Nevins Auditorium in Powell Campus Center. It was displaced to Seidlin Hall 114 this week, for "131: Endeavors in Art & Agriculture" by Cassandra Bull who is working on a bachelor's degree in the School of Art and Design as well as an associate degree in agricultural technology at Alfred State College.

Seidlin 114 is where I had physics in my freshman year of college (1964-1965) with George Towe. He gave us a lot of pop quizzes. One day, he asked us to describe something that related to a campus lecture the evening before. The lecture was unrelated to physics but Professor Towe had been struck by the fact that none of us had been at the lecture. He taught me a lesson about the value of a broad liberal arts education and diverse interests.

It was therefore fitting that Bull's project mixed art and science. For one of her agriculture classes, she had to live with a cow for 24 hours. The hours did not have to be consecutive. At the same time, she had an assignment in an art class to pick 25 words and turn them into a project. Her words:

Watching cows strap into milking machines
I see all the injustice we're told is necessity
As I shovel shit for something I don't believe in

She turned her horror at the dairy industry into a thought-piece on how you live with your concerns, how calves are taken from their mothers, how you mix aesthetics and content, how art and science influence and need each other. Bull made a pair of coveralls from Japanese mulberry stalks (kozo) to wear while she lived with her cow whose "name" was 131. The coveralls quickly became dirty and torn. When the professor Diane Cox encouraged her to continue, she wrote her field notes and statements about her experience and feelings about industrial agriculture on the coveralls. She then did a performance for her class in which she took off her street clothes, put on the coveralls and read the text, and then returned to her street clothes. She showed a video of the performance as part of her presentation today. What a powerful statement it was, picturing her description of the project.

I also could not help but think about some of the things I saw on my March road trip: the feedlots near Dalhart, Texas; the long barns in central Arkansas, presumably for chickens; the cattle and bison in fields in Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, and Arkansas; the varying landscapes of the U.S. Lots to think about, mostly about how there is no absolute good, that art is mixed with life, that experience is important.

1968: Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, at New Paltz

So there I was, minding my own business in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. The Gregory Battcock Archive installation by Joseph Grigely was capturing my attention for a variety of reasons and then .... there .... on the wall was a poster for the Intermedia '68 tour by Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman to some SUNY campuses, including New Paltz. It's the lower framed item on the right wall in the picture above, image from the Grigely page on the Whitney Biennial website. Attending that concert is one of the most memorable, still in the mind's eye, occasions of my undergraduate years at New Paltz State.

The concert was so memorable for all the right reasons and for one more. At some point during the concert, a student, thinking this was participatory theater, threw a cymbal back on stage. All stage action stopped, Paik ordered that the student leave the auditorium. It may have seemed like chaos in the spring of 1968 but it was scripted theater and music, aka intermedia.

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.

Foster Lake

Bryan Daly read his Phi Beta Kappa "Wit and Wisdom" prize-winning poem "The artist on his shores" at today's Bergren Forum. He introduced the poem by talking about Eddy Foster who created Foster Lake in the middle 20th century. Some of the words I scribbled down as he was reading: the tarp of the sky, it's only irony (about the Segway inventor trying to fly in his Segway), how can I float so long?, eulogy (for Mr Foster) or elegy (for the lake). For Daly who grew up near a reservoir that serves as water supply for Boston, a lake is a deep body of water in which towns have been buried. Alfred's little Foster Lake is not deeper than twenty feet and resides at the top of a hill with two outlets that run to different watersheds. It "miraculously" filled the summer it was built (1950) ... with a bit of help from heavy rains associated with a hurricane. Daly's elegy to the lake was beautiful and thoughtful, and evocative.

His thoughts about Eddy Foster were tangled up with thoughts of his grandfathers. My first trips to Foster Lake were as a child when my family would visit my maternal grandmother and great aunt. And today would have been my father's 92nd birthday. The lakeside trees were small then, and now it's a forest. My mother was a legendary floater too.

We're still buried in snow here and Daly had lovely wintry photographs to "illustrate" his poem. The picture above is one I took last summer during a bird walk around the lake. The walk around the lake was one of my mother's favorite times. So today is for parents and grandparents and hope for spring.

remembering Christina Huemer

Christina Huemer died a few days ago and this leaves a big hole in the world, my world. She was one of the first art librarians that I knew and helped shape my view of art libraries along with Judith Holliday and Pat Sullivan, the other art librarians then at Cornell. We met in 1970 when she was the assistant librarian at Sibley Library and I was a copy cataloger in the main library.

Many memories of being with Chris are circulating in my brain and soul. One of my favorite times with Chris is probably a visit to a codfish restaurant in Rome, named simply Bacala, I think. They served filets of cod, deep fried, with paper wrappers and you just ordered as many as you wanted. As Chris, Christie Stephenson and I entered the restaurant, the waiters were having an argument about whether Bill Shatner had been in spaghetti westerns. The waiters recognized that Chris was fluent in Italian but American by upbringing so they engaged her in their lively discussion. Chris's fluent but non-native Italian and their fluent and native Italian were a beautiful mix. I don't think we resolved the issue but the cod was wonderful. The restaurant is on the plaza in front of the church of Santa Barbara, near the Campo de' Fiori.

Chris moved to Rome in the mid 1980s, starting at ICCROM and then moving to Florence for a while. She found Rome much more to her liking and I think my love of Rome is significantly due to her enthusiasm. Our discussion of the differences was mostly over a meal with Pat Barnett in Florence, during the IFLA art conference. Rome is gritty and busy, rather like New York City; Florence is rather more precious and a shopper's place. Great art and architecture in both places, undeniably.

After her stint in Florence, Chris became the librarian at the American Academy in Rome. They had been SACO contributors for a while and Chris arranged for me to come over to give some NACO training in 1998. She arranged for me and Bill Connor to have a room in the Villa Aurelia for two weeks as payment for a couple days of NACO training. There was a Sol LeWitt drawing on the wall near the staircase to our room. We had a wonderful time and went on an Academy field trip to the port city of Ostia. Bill and I also went to Fiumicino to see Chris in her apartment one evening. Fiumicino is on the coast and a bit like Jersey shore towns.

Chris usually did a drawing for her Christmas card and I especially remember one she did of the canal in Fiumicino.

I miss Chris. She was a fine person as well as being a good librarian. We shared lots of conversations in person and in letters and cards. On the bleaker side, we talked about our cancer: hers internal, mine skin. It was our enthusiasm for art and architecture, places, people, reading, and life that enriched our friendship. That will stay with me, even though Chris is now gone.

thinking about "insanity" and incarceration

The Willard State Hospital (1869-1995, originally Willard Asylum for the Insane) was open for tours yesterday, a fundraiser for the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Children's Center which occupies one of the historic buildings. My sister Carol and brother Doug, along with Carol's partner Barb, had gone last year. Carol, Barb and I went yesterday. The hospital site was originally the State Agricultural College at Ovid but Ezra Cornell convinced the state, with land and money, to move the college to Ithaca where it became Cornell University.

The hospital and village of Willard sit on the East side of Seneca Lake a ways South of Geneva. The setting is beautiful with the land rising from the lakeshore, not too steep but enough to give you good views from many places on the grounds.

The hospital plays a role in my family history in that Chester Smedley Clarke (1849-1925), my great grandfather, was a patient there for a time between 1904 and 1907. He worked in the shoemaker's shop and there was an old photo of the shop in one of the display cases in the administration building. As I was looking at the picture, some other tour participants were asking about the canary cages that are visible in the picture. The guide mentioned canaries' use in mining but wondered if it was a kind of Muzak for the patients. After being released from the hospital, my great grandfather settled in Binghamton and ran a shoe repair business, and was never in contact with the family again. My brother has the address of the business and it was probably in one of the wonderful brick four-story thin buildings across the train tracks from the current bus station. Several of the buildings have been torn down in my memory and replaced by simple (boring) buildings. Sigh.

There is now a boot camp correctional facility on the grounds of the hospital. It's for minimum security drug-related offenders who can serve 90 days there or several years or whatever in a traditional prison setting. The boot camp is strict and busy and attempts to build discipline and responsibility, no slacking. My nemesis Sonny was given the "opportunity" to serve there and only lasted a week or two. The state was, I guess, no more successful than I in building responsibility in his case. As I took pictures of the abandoned male dormitory, I could hear the prisoners chanting as they did calisthenics or some chore. Being on the grounds of the hospital with both of these personal connections was quite emotional though not spooky. When we were in the basement of Grand View, the old administration building, one of the women in our group shivered as she looked into one of the closet-like spaces in the basement. It probably wasn't a patient room but you couldn't help but think about being locked into a physical space while your mental space was probably troubling you as well.

Especially in the basements of Grand View and Hadley Hall, I also kept thinking about my visit to Eastern State Penintentiary in Philadelphia. I visited in 2005 when they had an installation by Janet Cargill and George Bures Miller. Sonny and I had been to the Cargill/Miller show at P.S. 1 and even though Sonny didn't have a lot of experience with viewing contemporary art, he loved the P.S. 1 show which was marvelous. The Eastern State installation was chilling in ways that the visit to Willard wasn't, perhaps the time, perhaps the space, perhaps me.

There are some more pictures of my visit to Willard on Flickr.

contemplative

Sunday morning. The Times and pancakes. Thinking about Woodstock, mostly because of Jan Pareles's memoir of that magic "moment of muddy grace." I didn't go to the festival though my sister and her husband got close. They were a couple of the people that parked miles away but didn't keep going when it was clear that the mud and craziness were pretty overwhelming.

The Woodstock article continued on page 22 and the continuation was face-to-face with a profile of Milton Rogovin, optometrist turned photographer after his business was decimated for not testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee. An interesting conjunction of peace, love, and justice. The words trip so easily out of the brain, and trip too on the thoughts of how the world could be better.

This weekend has been New York Green Fest 2009 here in Alfred. I didn't go, partly because the registration was $85 (not that I haven't spent $85 less wisely) and there seemed to be no session registration fee. My brother Doug, who has been involved with the planning, said I probably could just attend (aka sneak in). But I decided to do my own little green fest and picked up a bunch of cans, bottles, and trash from one of the sites on Pine Hill where people clearly go for partying. Most of the cans and bottles had been squished and broken so the can/bottle refunding opportunity was slight. But then I wasn't doing it for the money.

Maybe it's the misty air that's bringing on the contemplation too. No problem. I like thinking and musing.

moins ça change

My family lived in Boulder, Colorado from 1955 to 1961, after living in northern Wisconsin and before we moved to central Nebraska. This week, fifty odd years later, I'm visiting Boulder before ALA Midwinter in Denver. I walked several miles in Boulder today, passing the homes we lived in and the schools where I went to 4th to 9th grades. It was quite a day. As expected, everything looked a little small but, wow, what an expedition.

I'm staying with Elaine Paul, the art history visual resources curator at the University of Colorado, who couldn't be a more gracious and wonderful host. She lives in a house that was built about 1960, a low-pitched roof ranch house with a wonderful mid-century feel and a great sidelight window which is perfect for Annabella (dog) to look out of as she luxuriates on the big dog pillow. I've also visited with James Ascher (cataloger) and Lia Pileggi and her kids (Lia's the assistant VR curator at CU).

My pedestrian expedition today was anything but pedestrian. I started out from Elaine's on 35th Street near Baseline and walked over to the Chautauqua campus at 11th Street on the South side of Baseline. It is quite a bit higher than Baseline and the buildings are those wonderful camp meeting buildings one would expect of a Chautauqua. Back down 12th Street which was my Denver Post paper route when we lived here. Some of the houses seemed, at least generally, familiar: the type of porch I might have aimed a paper at. Midway between Chautauqua and the collegetown area is the Boulder History Museum, set in the Harbeck-Bergheim House which was built in 1899. It's a good solid stone house, not too fancy with historical exhibits and a dandy little bookshop.

After the museum, I checked to see if I could find the record store that had been mentioned on College Avenue. I didn't see it. When I asked if they had CDs at the Colorado Book Store, she said "like you mean pre-recorded." It used to be that "vinyl" seemed ancient but now who'd do anything but download music? More anon. I did find a record store downtown.

Back to 12th Street and down to University. When I got to Marine Street, I turned West since we had lived in the basement for a few months at 601 Marine Street while they got the parsonage next to the church ready. I remember the house as white clapboard with a pleasant peach arbor in the backyard. It looked really small, plaster, no peach arbor but some evidence of fancier backyard at some point in the past. My younger sisters used to take their baths in the laundry tub. We were rather camping out in the basement, the house being owned by one of the older couples in the church where my dad preached. I also remember my mom cooking what she called polenta there but now I'd probably call it corn meal mush (rather like Cream of Wheat but corn).

Continuing on, I walked on 6th Street to Arapahoe, past the house (I think) that retired Pastor Hurley and his wife lived in and where my grandmother stayed when she visited us after my little brother was born. Next door is a wonderful but boarded up classical revival house. When Elaine got home and I was describing my expedition, she told me about some women artists who did their inaugural ambush performance at the long-deserted house. The group is called The Bridge Club and their performance entitled "Pillows & Pantyhose" is described on their blog in an post from December 2004.

The Boulder house we lived in longest was at 1648 9th Street, next to the Seventh-Day Baptist Church. The house is now painted a creamy color. The church is now a social services agency. The big blue spruce tree in front of the church is gone and replaced by a deciduous tree. The back yard of the house now has a couple infill houses. Highland Elementary School (my 5th and 6th grade school) is kitty corner from the church and is now condos. The school grounds where Billy and I played cars is now mostly filled with additional condos and townhouses. Other than scale, it seemed pretty familiar.

I continued down 9th Street to Pearl, the main street in downtown Boulder with several blocks turned into a pedestrian mall. I stopped at Trident Book Store, found a Patty Limerick book for a good price, had a good cup of coffee (actually two since the refill was free) and read some more of Other Colors by Orhan Pamuk. After a bit of refresher, it was more Pearl Street window shopping and dawdling. I turned at 13th to go get a schedule for the Boulder-Denver bus and the post office. Back to Pearl and I even resisted stopping at one of the used bookshops but found an Alan Bennett book from some years ago for a dollar at another used book store.

A little further along, I turned up 20th Street to find Whittier Elementary School (my 4th grade) which is now billed as an international elementary school. It's a lovely building, very school architecture. I sat at the picnic table in the side yard and wrote postcards to my siblings.

I hadn't been able to remember the exact address of the first house we lived in in Boulder. We'd only lived there a year when the house next to the church came on the market and the church bought it. When Elaine and I were looking at the map to find Whittier Elementary School, I blurted out "1918 Bluff Street." Weird how memories can come up from the deep. Anyway, I went on from Whittier School to Bluff Street to look at 1918. Oh, it's a cute little house. The picket fence and yard were familiar but I don't think I remember a second floor (half a second floor, really) or that it was T-shaped. Perhaps we only lived in the back half of the first floor. The picket fence had a sign that indicated the owners had applied for a solar exception review. I'm sure my brother will be pleased to hear that. I sat on the retaining wall of the house across the street for quite a while, looking at the house. Of the houses we lived in, this was certainly the most attractive to me now. A nice little clapboard cottage, with some diamond shingles in the front peak of the roof.

On to 19th Street and I passed the house that I think the Halls lived in. In 1955-1956, we didn't have a television but they did. It was pretty exciting to go visit and get to see the TV. Back to Pearl and a stop for some lunch: nice spaghetti ($5.95 for all you could eat, and homemade spaghetti at that!). Satisfied, I continued on my way back to Elaine's, stopping at the Boulder Map Gallery. The fellow there had also first experienced Boulder in the mid-1950s so we talked a bit about the good old days. He had some nice postcards and wonderful little painted globe marbles which I couldn't resist.

Phew, tired feet, happy feet.

a full house

When your house is full of books, the last thing you need is 100 books and more checked out from the library. While I like the fact that they can be in perpetual renewal unless requested, it means you just let them pile up (well, *I* let them pile up). In order to retrieve some space, I decided that I could use LibraryThing with a tag of "checkedout" rather than the similar "unread" that is often suggested and used. Some of these books are not to be read but used. As I'm going through them, I'm finding some wonderful bits of moments from some time ago. The one in hand is Propos de littérature by Alain. The slip of paper in the book indicates that I was taken by a statement about memory but I have no idea where I saw the quote. The text in the book: "Il semble que le souvenir soir esthétique par lui-même, et qu'un objet soit beau principalement parce qu'il en rappelle un autre." Or as it says on the piece of paper: "It seems that memory is aesthetic in itself, and that an object is beautiful chiefly because it recalls another." I still like the quote, it still strikes a chord, now if I could just remember where I saw it.