Frank Gehry, rest in peace

Frank Gehry died yesterday, just a week or so after Robert A.M. Stern. You would not generally mistake the work of one architect for the other but they both designed some really fine buildings. I may get to Bilbao and Arles someday to see probably the most famous of Gehry's museums but I have seen the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi ...

as well as the University of Toledo Center for Visual Arts which is attached to the Toledo Museum of Art.

I also remember seeing a couple of Gehry's projects in Los Angeles: the Loyola University School of Law which I walked over to see maybe forty years ago, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall where I was lucky enough to hear an organ concert with Steve Ong probably a dozen years ago.

I was particularly reminded of these buildings as I indexed a house in Ocean Springs, just up the coast from Biloxi. But that was more Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown than Gehry or Stern.

Edmund White

When I review the books that I've read over the course of a year, the titles are generally split about equally between fiction and non-fiction. I am reading Edmund White's obituary (Times) and the author notes that Edmund White's more than 30 books are almost equally divided between fiction and non-fiction.

There is also a wonderful essay on White in the Times: The very gay life of Edmund White by Aaron Hicklin who is working on a documentary about White. Hicklin writes about how influential the cover of A boy's own story, as well as the story, was in his life.

Francis, pope 2013-2025

I've been watching some videos of the procession of the coffin of Pope Francis through the streets of Rome, from the Vatican where the funeral was held to Santa Maria Maggiore where he will be interred.
The NBC reporter on the street near the beginning of the procession was talking to some Americans who happen to be in Rome for a photography workshop. One mentioned what an honor it has been to be in Rome at a special moment. (The picture is a screen grab of the statues on the top of the facade of Santa Maria Maggiore.)

Francis has been special to me too, for personal reasons. We happened to be in Sicily when he was selected as pope in 2013. We had found a parking place and I went to call a B&B that looked promising. It was a few blocks from where we parked in the middle of Noto. Christie stayed in the car with her iPad, watching the papal news and studying the map and listings. It took most of an hour to call the B&B host who wasn't at home, walk to the B&B to meet him there, look at the room, accept it, and walk back to the car. The news of "Habemus Papam" (we have a pope) happened during that hour.

We moved the car closer to the B&B and watched some television in the room and in a nearby restaurant where we went for supper. We liked the location well enough to stay for three nights, using it as a hub for day trips to Siracusa and the southeastern corner of Sicily. 

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.

perusing the paper & architecture and politics

(NPS photo)

My nephew asked me about the obituary for Dr Lloyd Watson, a bee scientist who had been a major influence on my father as he was growing up. Enough that I was named after his son. The obituary appeared in The New York Times for February 27, 1948. I looked at the obituary on the TimesMachine so I was looking at the content as a newspaper page.

An obituary in a neighboring column was for a Dr William Maxon, a botanist and expert on ferns. Probably not a relative but I am related to Maxsons, a variant spelling of the surname. LCSH uses Maxson family with a reference from Maxon family and a couple other variants.

I couldn't help myself. I turned the newspaper back a page or two, noting book reviews, letters to the editor, opinion pieces, and other items that now seem less integrated in today's Times. Next to the main book review was an article entitled "Decision to stand on Jefferson Arch: prize-winning design for huge parabola is opposed here as similar to Mussolini's." The arch, designed by Eero Saarinen, is now known as the Gateway Arch and is part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.

The Jefferson Arch was criticized by Gilmore D. Clarke, the chairman of the National Commission on Fine Arts, as similar to a Mussolini arch. Mussolini had approved a parabolic arch for the international exposition in Rome in 1942 celebrating twenty years of fascism. The president of the Jefferson Memorial Association argued that the similarity of the designs was "purely coincidental." Saarinen described the parabola shape as a basic form and said he had never seen the Rome design. The connection of fascism to modern architecture, particularly in Italy, is troubling to me (and others).

As an aside, Gilmore Clarke is mentioned three or four times in the article and his "Clarke" is misspelled as "Clark" in the first instance.

 

Cleveland, architecture, and CWRU

James Polshek died a few days ago in New York City. His obituary in the New York Times says that he started his undergraduate studies in medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He took a course in modern architecture and changed his major. He transferred to Yale to get a stronger architecture education and stood next to Le Corbusier in a New York City elevator on his way to Yale.

When I was doing some itinerant cataloging at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson a dozen years ago, I fell in love with the Honey House, part of a group of dormitory buildings in the center of campus. I passed it every day at least once as I went about campus.

It has that wonderful balance and proportion that is so appealing to me in Palladian villas. I discovered later that the dormitory complex was designed by Polshek. He wasn't one of those architects where you saw the building and said obviously it was by him. But there is a care and quality that shows across his work.

When I was planning my 2015 road trip to Iowa City, Denver, Albuquerque, Fort Worth, and Bentonville, with other stops along the way, the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock was clearly on the list of sites/sights. It is also designed by Polshek, some years later than the Honey House.

The presidential library and museum is along the riverfront and near an old bridge, now for pedestrians. I wouldn't mind going back to Little Rock since the Arkansas Arts Center (now Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts) is building a new building. The expansion is designed by Studio Gang, another favorite firm.

When I was reading the Polshek obituary, I was disappointed that my graduate alma mater, Case Western Reserve University, had not satisfied Polshek's educational desires. It was an art history program, not architecture studio. I can't remember clearly but I think I took a course in American architecture during my first year of graduate study at CWRU. The professor was Edmund Chapman who was professor from 1946 to 1972. I was very satisfied with my CWRU education. Perhaps it was Dr Chapman that taught the modern architecture class that led Polshek to changing his major.

soundscapes / sound escapes

 Composer R. Murray Schafer died on August 14 and the obituary in the New York times talks a good deal about his thinking and writing, and composing, on the sounds of the environment. The soundscape.

The new academic year has begun and the village of Alfred has filled again with students and their vehicles. There's a house across the street and up a ways which has a sign calling it "Hick House." It also has a coterie of large pickup trucks with their engines set to be way noisier, and smokier, than necessary. One or more of the pickups also have a panoply of horn sounds, including a diesel train which is a bit startling since it sounds like the train is just outside the door. I like trains so it's a bit amusing. So far, I haven't heard it at two in the morning.

Thinking about the noisy trucks and horns after reading the obituary and Schafer's thoughts on how noises change our environment, I wonder how many birds and other wildlife have moved deeper into the woods or off to another area entirely. There was considerably more evidence of wildlife in the village during the early days of the COVID lockdown, a year and a half ago.

Out behind my house, I can hear the creek and birds, and sometimes the rustle of a woodchuck as it whizzes back to the burrow. Not so much on the front porch.

Frederic Remington

There was a memorial gathering for Winfield Fitz Randolph this afternoon. He had lived in Alfred until his wife Claire died in 2011, after which he went to live near his children in the North Country of New York State (near the Adirondacks, St Lawrence River, and Lake Champlain). Though I was acquainted with his sons and daughter from the 1960s, I don't think I'd seen them since then. Win and Claire were active in the Alfred Seventh-day Baptist Church so I had interacted with them in recent years, being back in Alfred.

The memorial gathering was hosted by the church in the Parish House parlors. I had helped (a little bit) in the setting up and was standing at the side as the folks came from the family graveside service to the reception. A woman came over and asked how I fit in the gathering. "A member of the church?" We got to talking and it turned out very quickly that we had Frederic Remington in common. She (Ann Spies, wife of Peter Fitz Randolph, son of Win and Claire) is on the board of the Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, New York, so she knew about the Amon Carter Museum which has one of the premiere Remington collections. As a matter of fact, back in the 1950s, the Carter had bought a significant number of Remingtons from the Ogdensburg museum which was in great need of replacing the museum building's roof. Note that this was back in the day when museums were not as severely blacklisted as they are now for deaccessioning. The Remington Museum is now doing quite well and Ann spoke highly of the current director. As a further matter of fact, the museum's International Advisory Board is this weekend on a trip to Fort Worth for a gathering at the Carter.

Ann and Peter have lived in New York City so we had that ground to cover, along with "how do you find Alfred after living in the City?" Mostly it's OK but sometimes I really need a big dose of urban.

Mrs Stevenson and Ada Louise Huxtable

Two great ladies in the arts died in the past few days: Ruth Carter Stevenson and Ada Louise Huxtable.

Mrs Stevenson was the president of the Amon Carter Museum when I worked there in the early 1990s as well as many years before and after. Though I didn't interact with her often, she was aware who I was and would greet me warmly when our paths crossed at the museum. She usually met with staff members every few years. One year, several of us from the library and others were in the conference room for one of these catch-up conversations with Mrs Stevenson. Milan Hughston, my boss, mentioned that he and I would be going to some conference in a colder clime. Mrs Stevenson looked at me and asked if I knew it might be too cold to wear Birkenstocks. I guess she knew who I was and something tell-tale about me. She said it with humor and generosity, which is not to say that she'd be caught wearing Birkenstocks to work.

I don't know what I would have done if I'd worked there the next couple of years after I left. The museum was going into a major construction phase and folks were told they had to wear closed-toe shoes until they moved offsite for a couple years.

The picture of Mrs Stevenson in the Amon Carter Museum galleries is from artdaily. The fellow standing behind her is not identified. There are also wonderful obituaries of Mrs Stevenson on the TCU website and in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. [The fellow behind Mrs Stevenson is Andrew J. Walker, director of the Carter since April 2011.]

Ada Louise Huxtable was the architectural critic at the New York Times when I first started reading architectural criticism. She was thoughtful and spot on, an urbanist and contextualist, opinionated. She taught me how to look at cities and architecture, along with Jane Jacobs and others. I cannot hear "Bruckner Boulevard" without thinking of her book Will they ever finish Bruckner Boulevard?

A recent exchange on Facebook moved The invisible dragon by Dave Hickey up the to-read list. Reading anew about Huxtable has moved her On architecture up the list too.

You can read more about Huxtable in her obituary in the Times by David Dunlap and in an appraisal by Michael Kimmelman, also in the New York Times. The accompanying pictures in each are also wonderful and evocative.

WEMI schmeemy

Why is it that I cannot get more excited about the FRBR Group 1 entities? The most recent moment of ennui (or more) came after reading an email exchange in a working group I'm supposedly working on. The discussion of whether subjects could apply to Expressions, Manifestations, and Items, or only Works, just saddened me. Isn't the ultimate model that you have an entity and relationships? Probably doesn't map well, or play well with others.

The WEMI model does have some strengths for collocating editions. It's hard for me to think outside the MARC box (aka catalog cards). The manifestation model that we've been using since way back (to the earliest library catalogs, I think; just go look at the old British Museum printed catalog) does a satisfactory job. If you had fields that would do more than simply index things the same way, you could get from a Manifestation or Expression up to a Work. I used to dream at Cornell of a way we could just add copies of Hamlet and other classic works rather than have individual records. The online environment should allow you to appropriate all of the common elements of the Work and add whatever is individual about the resource in hand; the user would get a cluster of editions.

And then there's real life. Today was the memorial service for Lois Smith who probably was my first model in life, that is, the first non-family, non-parent-selected, non-neighbor person who taught me how to get on in life. She was a librarian (naturally) and pacifist (also not surprising). I've done library and pacifist too but, even more, it was her way of living with enthusiasm, acceptance, and modesty that I credit as a good model for living. This would have been Mrs Smith's 101st birthday (she died during the summer and Alfred lives on an academic calendar).

Tonight they're doing a reading of "9/10" by Richard Willett, addressing the terror of 9/11, ten years later. As much as I feel for us Americans, perhaps especially those with first-hand connections, I cannot get over the tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan people who have been slaughtered in revenge. Your terrorist is my freedom fighter.

This was rather a ramble over a variety of territory. I recently was cruising the blogs of a couple friends and was struck by the thoughtfulness of their postings. And I was touched that a cousin of mine mentioned that she enjoyed my Facebook postings, particularly a rather dry and wry appreciation of Robert Ryman's "The Elliott Room" at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Donald Charles Seibert, 1929-2010

Today was the memorial service for Don Seibert, music librarian at Syracuse for upwards of thirty years until his retirement in the 1990s. One of the wonderful remembrances, by Dick Bough, was of Don as older brother and younger brother, mentor and joy-filled friend. Dick told a story of an Adirondack hike up some mountain. As they got to the top of the mountain, it started to rain. Don stripped and danced in the rain. I tried to find a picture of a man dancing naked in the rain but had no success. You have to do a brain picture of the joy.

Someone else mentioned that Don's name authority record had been updated for his death and included "Tchaikovsky scholar" as part of his accomplishments. Don would have loved that.

So here's to music, name authorities, and dancing in the rain, and to Don and his life well lived.

sunshine and cancer

"Frank C. Garland, an epidemiologist whose work helped establish a link between vitamin D deficiency and some cancers, including colon and breast cancer, died on Aug. 17 in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He was 60 and lived in San Diego." Dr Garland's research seems to show that exposure to sunlight's vitamin D lessens the likelihood of colon and breast cancer. Ironically, he died of cancer of the esophageal junction and had lived in a place with considerable sunshine.

In late 1997 and early 1998 when I was having a nose reconstruction because of basal cell cancer, my mother was dying of colon cancer. We don't know how we'll go but go we will and this conjunction of sun and cancer is especially compelling for me.

memorial moments

Randy Pausch, professor and author of The last lecture: He did, however, mention that he experienced a near-deathbed conversion: he switched and bought a Macintosh computer. (N.Y. Times, 26 July 2008)

Katherine Kinkade, founder of utopian commune: ... more pioneer than hippie ... "She was not fond of group hugs, had no interest in alternative medicine, nature-centered activities or tofu lasagna." (N.Y. Times, 27 July 2008)

she could have danced all night ... with librarians?

Mrs. Brooke Astor, great patron of the New York Public Library and other ventures, died last week. In the "Sunday styles" section of Sunday's New York Times, Bill Cunningham has a nice tribute entitled "She could have danced all night." When Mrs. Astor was asked whom she wanted as guests for her 100th-birthday luncheon, "she replied without hesitation: 'One hundred librarians'." And the potpourri of pictures was a collection of Mrs. Astor photos.

I finished Michael Tolliver lives, the latest novel by Armistead Maupin, on Sunday morning. It was good to be back in the company of Mouse, Anna Madrigal, and the crew from Tales of the city. It was especially poignant for me as it deals with death of parents (blood and "logical"), aging (I love Tolliver/Maupin's comment about the pursuit of boyfriends getting so "old" and undesirable though if one falls in your lap, no problem), memory, growing apart and coming together.

Mac and I went to "Los Jornaleros" at Cinemarosa yesterday. It's about Mexican day laborers in southern California. The characterizations are pretty stereotypical and the three "brothers" (actually cousins) end up fine. One moves in with a gallery owner, gets his green card, and accepts (more or less) his homosexuality. The other two get a truck and do some sort of work that involves them helping new day laborers. "Welcome to America." Despite the fairy tale ending, the overall impression is positive. If you google "jornaleros," the Amazon entry (a few hits down the first Google page) has a decent overview of the film.