I brake for chipmunks

This morning on my morning walk, I noticed a chipmunk was crossing the street about fifteen feet ahead of me. I stopped walking, just about as the chipmunk stopped moving. It seemed to be listening to see if those approaching footsteps were dangerous. It turned around, ran back in the direction it had come, and went almost up to the pine trees and stopped again. I didn't move. It reassessed the danger. Turned around again and ran across the street when it determined the footsteps were no longer approaching.

When I lived in Texas, I had a bumper sticker on my Isuzu pickup that said "I brake for Greek Revival." I think it came from the preservation society in Providence because Texans don't have quite so much Greek Revival as they have in Rhode Island. Bob drove the truck to work one day and one of his coworkers thought it said "I brake for Geek Revival." Not the same thing.

P.S. because it's a small world. I was looking for a picture of a chipmunk running across the street and one of the Google responses was from Dickinson, North Dakota, the destination of the road trip in Breakfast with Buddha.

walking and eating

The day before yesterday, I was meandering (walking) around the website for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, a museum in Lincoln, Mass., that I have visited several times. I was lucky enough to meet DeWitt Godfrey's work there before I met him on the CAA trip to Cuba in 2015.

This work was on display in the summer of 2014. I came across the listing on the deCordova website for a summer 2015 exhibition entitled "Walking Sculpture 1967-2015."

Sorry I missed it, particularly because I am fond of the art of Francis Alÿs among others. And I really like to walk so why not make art of it? The show included Bruce Nauman's Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square, 1967-1968 (illustration on the exhibition webpage, linked above).

My supper reading today included "Bruce Nauman, art provocateur, returns. Are you ready?" by Randy Kennedy from the New York Times last September 11, a review of shows opening soon after that at Sperone Westwater and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The principal work was "Contrapposto Studies" which revisits a 1968 video work entitled "Walk with Contrapposto." Circling around, always.

Randy Kennedy reports that during his interview with Nauman at his home in Galisteo, N.M., Nauman served a lunch of supermarket rotisserie chicken with cheese, bread, and apples. I happened to be eating bread, cheese, and apple as I read. My bread was probably more mundane than Nauman's (Wegmans multi-grain with peanut butter).

going to Buffalo, again

The VRA Upstate New York Chapter called a meeting for Thursday, November 13, in Buffalo. It was pretty exciting to get a notice about a planning lecture on the preceding Wednesday night by Emily Talen, with the topic "Walkable Diversity: Chasing an Elusive Planning Goal." The meeting got cancelled because not enough people registered but I decided to come up to Buffalo anyway for the lecture and to see a show at the UB Anderson Gallery.

The lecture was fine even though Talen admitted she was preaching to the choir about making cities walkable because that made them more environmentally benign, safe, beautiful, and diverse. She had originally called her talk "Neighborhood Diversity" but decided neighborhood was too complicated. Besides, she's working on a book on neighborhood and recognizes that diversity is meaningless without neighborhood, and vice versa. Strangers are important to a lively diversity. This talk came one day after an Alfred Village Board meeting with discussion of changes to the zoning code. Talen talked about the downside of zoning since it often codifies things that work against diversity, e.g., type of business, size of buildings. We don't necessarily all want to be zoning-free Houston but walkability is significantly enhanced by variety. Fortunately, form-based zoning is coming down the pike and we've been talking about it on the Alfred Village Planning Board. As an aside, Talen mentioned that students are good for street safety because they keep all hours and therefore provide pedestrian traffic pretty much around the clock. In a small college town like Alfred, student housing is a regular topic. Talen has great hope for community land trusts and using big data to strategize how to spend on urban development. For example, she and some colleagues got a grant from HUD to study location of public housing and found that 71% of public housing is in unwalkable areas; she argued for building more walkability into areas with affordable housing and vice versa.

As I walked back to my car, I was reminded of another aspect of walkability. Pedestrians have a fair shot in New York City. They might not survive a crash with a car, truck, or bus but they are respected in the City, at least in Manhattan. Cars stop before the crosswalk. No right turns on red. After the lecture, I saw two drivers doing mighty me-first actions. I was crossing Main Street near the South Campus of UB. A driver on Main Street went way through the crosswalk I was using, sucking on her Big Slurpy, ready to turn right on red, glanced at me and did her right turn anyway. I got to the other curb after she'd turned and a car came up Niagara Falls Boulevard and accelerated into the yellow light past a stopped car in the curb lane in order to make a left turn onto Main Street. Cars, actually drivers, need to be more respectful. That's my second amendment slogan: cars don't kill pedestrians, drivers do.

Today was art day. I started at the "Art = Text = Art: Private Languages, Public Systems" show at the UB Anderson Gallery. Mostly 1960s and 1970s work by folks such as Rauschenberg, Johns, Jess, Joe Brainard, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and William Anastasi. Also later stuff including a provocative "Constitution" (2004) by Annabel Daon in which she phonetically transliterated the U.S. Constitution into Arabic. Susanna Harwood Rubin is represented by "102 rue Haussmann," in which Proust's address is subtly drawn in a field of graphite. I also liked "Die Welt" by Ellsworth Kelly in which his normal color shapes replace the image portion of pages of the German newspaper. The installation was really inspired. Lots of queer content too.

Then over to the Albright Knox Art Gallery for some Helen Frankenthaler and Joe Feeley. The Frankenthalers were lovely. And another quick round through the printed works from the 1970s in the wonderful hemicycle gallery. Across the street to the Burchfield Penney Art Center. The Marion Faller photographs were OK but they were installing a show on Alexander O. Levy that looks really interesting. Thank heavens I don't need much excuse to make a trip to Buffalo.

After the galleries, I went down to India Gate and had some Indian buffet and then drove down to Allen Street. I walked around some streets that I haven't been on before even though with light snow falling, it wasn't a particularly commodious day for strolling or picture taking. When I was almost back to the car, I discovered that I was near Rust Belt Books, a pretty good used bookstore ... so I checked it out, escaping without any purchases. Part of me would love to travel light through life, just a suitcase or two. A bigger part of me knows the hardest part of that would be parting with books, even the ones I know are pretty readily available at some library.

Back in the car. I wanted to see what the East Side looks like. I keep hearing or reading that it's the poorer and more devastated part of town. Still, it amazed me how quickly the vacant lots and potholes multiplied as I went out Broadway from downtown. Amenities that make for a walkable area were few and far between.

After a breather at the Motel 6, I went up to Barnes & Noble on Transit Road. I asked the clerk if they had Why civil resistance works: the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict by Erica Chenoweth. No but she quietly mentioned a new bookstore Burning Books which specializes in political items. Something more to check out before I head back to Alfred. The reason I wanted to see the Chenoweth book is that she was being interviewed as I drove up to Buffalo but that station (WSKG) got out of range just as she was explaining how she, a security studies doctoral student, got into civil resistance and nonviolence.

walking in cities

Rachel recommended a recent article in The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik: "Heaven's gaits: what we do when we walk" (September 1st issue, p. 74-77). He describes the craze for walking as a spectator sport in the 19th century, based largely on Pedestrianism: when watching people walk was America's favorite spectator sport by Matthew Algeo. I didn't know. Gopnik also talks about A philosophy of walking by Frédéric Gros which begins "Walking is not a sport." Gros's theory of walking is that there are three essential kinds of walking: contemplative; cynical (from the Cynics of ancient Greece); composite contemplative cynic (the modern city walker, the flâneur). Gopnik expands on Gros's Parisian emphasis to talk about New Yorkers, looking to such authors as Walt Whitman and Alfred Kazin (A walker in the city, 1951).

Gopnik ends the article by talking about the stages of walking: peripatetic (walking where we will, as children); circumambulent (walking around our children); make an attempt at a pilgrimage, fail, and become immobile; walking outdoors to randomize our experience of the city. There's lots to think about in the Gopnik essay.

Toward the end of the article, Gopnik says "Walking for pleasure in cities is an occupation of the young. Only a very few older people of great vitality walk long in cities." Having just spent a couple weeks in Belgium and Amsterdam, I guess I am just one of those few older people. I don't always feel vital and sometimes I walk because it's too hard to figure out which bus or tram to take. But, boy oh boy, do I enjoy walking in cities, usually with a destination at least vaguely in mind, but enjoying the walk sometimes as much as the destination.

A couple pictures from Ghent. More on my Flickr photostream.

powers & the power of art

This month's bookclub selection is Three farmers on their way to a dance by Richard Powers, published about 20 years ago but suggested by Daniel who is reading Powers's newest novel. Three farmers has been occasionally confusing but wonderful. The section on Sarah Bernhardt, directly on Bernhardt, was especially great as have been several sections as I near the end. Here's a quote for you:

"I prefer walking to any other means of getting from A to B. It's a perversity on my part, pure and simple, but I enjoy the feeling of even the smallest, ten-cent errand taking up twenty dollars of my prorated time." (p. 261)

Talk about a different way to say "stop and smell the roses." Of course in New York City it is sometimes faster to walk but then that's just a bit more perversity that NYC spreads about.

That quote is from a section entitled "The cheap and accessible print" which is really a post-Walter essay on the photograph and whether it is more or less real than life. I might just have to take Illuminations with me to Kansas City so I can finally read the "mechanical reproduction" essay by Benjamin. Peter's trip to the catacombs with the bums of Paris is also extraordinarily good.

It wasn't the day I thought I'd have. After an expensive grocery shopping trip in the Bronx (the answer to the unasked question is "yes"), I decided I needed some art and went to the Guggenheim to see the Spanish show. It closes before I get back from Kansas City. It really had some wonderful paintings and not as many dogs as I'd been warned about. There were at least three still life paintings by Juan van der Hamen (signature: Banderamen), a couple of which had "sweets." In one, the cubic sweets looked suspiciously like Rice Krispie Treats. Who knew that RKTs were around in the early 17th century? Great portraits by El Greco, Velázquez, Zurbarán (St Isabel of Portugal), Sánchez Coello (is that Meryl Streep?), Goya. Some of the formulaic portraits had a strangely surrealist look, e.g., the Pantoja de la Cruz portrait of Don Felipe and Doña Ana. I remember having discussions in high school art class about what was Spanish in Spanish art. One of the Sánchez Cotán vegetable still lifes had little wings on the cardoon that Bosch could have painted. And a really wonderful early Picasso "Green bowl and black bottle" (1908, in the Hermitage) that was painted as the shapes were beginning to break up in the cubist melée. The last (or first) painting was the wonderful "Agnus Dei" by Zurbarán from the Prado. The painting was as alone on its wall as the shackled lamb is in the painting.