President Buchanan

How could I have forgotten official residences when I started using Pinterest a while ago? It goes way back: Judith Holliday was collecting library postcards and I loved finding her exotic (mostly not vintage) cards of libraries as I traveled about. She said I needed a category and I wanted something architectural and picked official residences. I quickly had plenty of postcards of the White House and the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg. I had spent much of my childhood in official residences; my dad was a pastor and we lived in the parsonage. What I mean by official residence is the domicile that comes with a position. I've got postcards of jailer's houses, parsonages, college president's houses, governor's mansions, palaces, and other types. I don't think I have a maid's room or the Downton Abbey lower level, but they'd fit. I include the houses of U.S. presidents other than the White House since many of the presidents used them during their term in a semi-official (or totally official) way. Besides, they're often nice houses.

Yesterday's New York Times had an article about "The other presidents' houses: lesser-known homes can have their own rewards" by Robert Strauss.

This is Wheatland, the Federal-style house of President James Buchanan, in Lancaster, Pa. The picture is by Will Figg for the Times and accompanies the article. Buchanan bought the estate in 1848 (before he became president, 1857-1861) and lived there until he died in 1868. He was the only bachelor president and has been rumored to have been bisexual or homosexual.

Just before the Civil War, Buchanan was upset that Lancaster residents weren't renting rooms to Franklin & Marshall College students when there weren't enough rooms on campus. So he rented out some rooms and got the neighbors upset. My mind, naturally, meandered to the pleasure of having some young men, presumably most of the students were men, around the house. Probably nothing in it since Buchanan was in the White House and they are only rumors but still ...

By the way, the lacuna of "Official residences" in LCSH was remedied about a dozen years ago when I proposed it as a new subject heading. The narrower term is "Parsonages."

adkins and motherwell

http://belfryarts.com/2015/07/28/kenneth-adkins-new-work/

I went to the exhibition closer for the Kenneth Adkins show at The Belfry in Hornell last night. I really liked the paintings and had a good talk with Ian McMahon, one of the gallerists. This painting is from the exhibition page and is one of his obituary paintings.

Now it's Sunday and I'm doing my regular Sunday duty at the ceramics library and looking at the 2002 MIT Press book on Black Mountain College. There's a show on Black Mountain College at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston that I'm looking forward to seeing when I'm there for ALA in January. Meanwhile, this Robert Motherwell from the Art Institute of Chicago (Málaga, 1950) caught my eye in the MIT book:

The background story is probably pretty different but the visuals resonate.

[sic]

This correction was in yesterday's New York Times:

A film review on Wednesday about Laurie Anderson's "Heart of a Dog," which is partly a meditation on loss and love, misspelled the surname of an artist who died in 1978 and was a friend of Ms. Anderson. He was Gordon Matta-Clark, not Matta-Clarke.

I would have loved to have him as part of the family.

Here pictured is Bingo, seen in the Urban Alchemy show at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts: http://mattaclark.pulitzerarts.org/ The work was done in 1974 and is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. It was on display at the Albright-Knox in the "Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-Garde in the 1970s" show.

Here's the review of "Heart of a Dog" by Manohla Dargis from the Times with a short video.

cities and Jews

This year's Lefkowitz Lecture in Jewish Studies at Alfred University was given by Deborah Dash Moore who teaches at the University of Michigan. Her topic was the "Urban Origins of American Judaism" which is also the title of her most recent book (published by University of Georgia Press in 2014).

I really enjoyed the lecture though she started out by saying that Alfred was probably as far from a city as she could imagine. Sigh.

Dash Moore divided her comments into three sections: synagogues, streets, photographs. The sections blended nicely. I enjoyed seeing the pictures of the Touro Synagogue in Newport (the only extant synagogue building from colonial times) and Plum Street Temple in Cincinnati which I was happy to visit when SAH met there some years ago. It's a Moorish Revival pile across the street from a Catholic cathedral and near a no-longer-standing Episcopal church, with the three religious buildings across the way from the city hall. She noted the importance of them near the center of civic power and prestige. Perhaps the Moorish Revival building brought in the Muslims too. Into the 20th century, she showed a picture of the Brooklyn Jewish Center (1920s) which had a pool, gym, and restaurant. She didn't speculate on whether the building of a Jewish community center was related to people not being on the street as much because they had bigger houses, or drove more, or wanted to be with their kind, or it was a reaction to discrimination. Other national and ethnic groups, of course, also had community centers, and I can blame almost anything on our car-oriented culture.

She talked for a while about the rhythm of street life following the Jewish calendar. That is, people shopped on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, in preparation for the Sabbath. I wonder if she knew that Alfred was observant of the Sabbath until the 1950s. The stores and post office in Alfred were closed on the Sabbath (Saturday) because the town was founded by Sabbatarian Baptists (Seventh-day Baptists). See, Alfred is more like a city than you might imagine.

Lots to think and muse about. I might just have to read the book.

refugees and peacemaking

Today's New York Times has an article about refugees stuck in a "grinding U.S. process" as they await permission to come to the land of the free. We've increased the turmoil with our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our adventures in Syria, Israel, and Palestine. We've helped make it well nigh impossible to peacefully survive in a wide swath of the Middle East and South Asia.

The Global War on Terror has been about as successful in bringing justice, liberty, and peace to the world as the War on Drugs. Perhaps the problem is the WAR part of both of these efforts.

Facing the article on the refugees is one about a concert in the Cathedral Plaza in Havana. There, Lang Lang played a Steinway while Cuban music superstar Chucho Valdés played another piano and the Cuban National Symphony Orchestra (conducted by American Marin Alsop) played Tchaikovsky, Gershwin, and works by Valdés and other Cuban composers. Steinway is contributing the piano to the Cuban Institute of Music.

I know it's not black-or-white, or just war-or-peace, and that it's been fifty years of embargo and distrust between Cuba and the United States. Cuban refugees have been mostly successfully absorbed into life in Florida and I wish more international relations and interactions could be on the music side.

Tania Bruguera

I had heard the name Tania Bruguera before I went to Cuba in May during the Biennal de La Habana but I certainly didn't know her work well. Others in the College Art group were well aware and Judith Rodenbeck participated in the reading of The origins of totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt at Bruguera's house. The September 2015 issue of Art in America has an interview with Bruguera by Travis Jeppesen. Just a few quotations:

"Also, we will have a big library [at the Hannah Arendt International Institute of Artivism]. We'll put shelves on the walls. It will be a specialized library, for people working in art, activism, philosophy and politics."

"I'm an anticapitalist. So I'm present in the discourse. I believe that socialism is a better model, even if it has some problems. I'm afraid that Cuba will go in a direction that is completely contrary to the Revolution."

"And racism is coming back. Yesterday I was talking to a former student, a black artist whose work deals with these issues. She told me that she will no longer go to some private restaurants, because nobody there is black -- not the cook, not even the person who cleans. Everyone is white. Racism is, of course, related to classism. This is something we haven't seen for a long time in Cuba. We were color blind. We saw people for who they were, how they behaved -- not how much money they had or the color of their skin."

As I walked the streets in Havana, there did indeed seem to be a diversity and mixing of people that was authentic and positive. I've been reading The New Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness by Michelle Alexander so colorblindness and racism are much in my thoughts. The interview shakes my idealism about the situation in Cuba, a little bit, but I am very glad that there continues to be movement on the normalization of relations between Cuba and the U.S.

Thursday adventures in Rochester

Thursday is usually one of my days to work at Scholes Library but I had a visit to the dermatologist in Rochester today. So it was off to the big city for a bit of adventure. I wanted to check the used bookstores to see if I could find of copy of The Gallery by John Horne Burns. I had finished not long ago the new biography on Burns entitled Dreadful: the short life and gay times of John Horne Burns by David Margolick. Imagine my delight that Greenwood Books had a copy and the added bonus was that it was a copy of the original 1947 Harper & Brothers edition that had belonged to the composer David Diamond. Franlee, the owner of Greenwood Books, said that she had bought several thousand of his books when his library was being cleared out. Normally I'd rather not have a marked copy but this copy had the marks of someone in whose notes I might be interested. On the way from the East End to the dermatologist, WXXI announced that they were going to be playing his fourth symphony tomorrow, 2015 being the centennial of his birth.

After I bought my book, I went over to Spot Coffee which is located in a former Chevrolet dealership.

I had last Thursday's New York Times with me, to read as I had a bagel snack and coffee. I was saddened to see the obituary for Phil Patton. I have enjoyed reading his essays and books since I was reading the chapter on Route 66 in Open road: a celebration of the American highway (1986) while sitting in a cafe named Route 66 in Amsterdam (yes, the one in the Netherlands). And I even saw a small version of the route sign on someone's mailbox post as I drove home.

Another article in the paper that especially caught my eye was a profile of fashion designer Nicole Hanley Mellon. She had been on a trip to Cuba in the spring. The article states that she "was initially confused by the Cuban capital. 'The first day we were there, it felt like there was no commerce. Each day, through conversation and observation, you peel off another layer.' She met a college student who was 'pretty candid and spoke about the way you're taught art to express a social issue or a political issue more than being personal, which I found interesting.'" This sense of the importance of social welfare and equality was something that seemed alive to me too when I was in Cuba in May. I just hope that Cuba doesn't become just another Caribbean island.

Hervieu: a fiction?

I just finished reading Fanny: a fiction by Edmund White (2004) which is a tale of Frances Wright and Frances Trollope. Both were English writers and lived in the first half of the 19th century. Neither called herself Fanny but White refers to them as Fanny throughout his fictional telling. They did interact in real life but, like any good historical novelist, White winds a good deal of fiction around what we know of their reality. (My mother was a Frances too and she didn't call herself Fanny either.)

One of the fictional bits, not surprising for Edmund White, is a romance between Henry Trollope (son of Fanny) and Auguste Hervieu, an French painter who was a confidante of Fanny Trollope in England and went with her to America when she visited, as a prospective resident, the utopian community Nashoba that was started by Fanny Wright. White also describes Mrs Trollope as amusingly unaware of the nature of Henry and Auguste's friendship. The Frances Trollope page on Wikipedia is illustrated by a portrait by Auguste Hervieu but he doesn't have an entry on Wikipedia.

When I googled "auguste hervieu," one of the hits was a drawing of two nudes signed "HERVIEU." Another couple clicks and I had arrived at "A couple of lesbians" by Louise Hervieu.

The drawing was for sale on antiques.com, available from "Erotic-Secret" at the Marché Malassis in Paris. The portrait of Louise Hervieu is from her French Wikipedia page.

Hmmmm. Perhaps just another little twist from our friend Edmund White.

the best way to find something new is to get lost

The wonderful thing about following someone else's blog about their trip, for example, https://reallynotlost.wordpress.com/ from Vicky Brown and her husband, is that you get to see some of the same things you've seen from different eyes, things you've always wanted to see but haven't, and things you can't imagine why they whizzed right on by. In a reallynotlost post from a day or two ago, they whizzed right by Basel on their way from Strasbourg to Luzern. How could they not stop to see the Beyeler Foundation or Vitra Design Museum? To say nothing of the many museums in Basel? Or look at the Mario Botta buildings? But then I've never been to Strasbourg to say nothing of Karlsruhe. Oh, you say they wanted to see the mountains.

When Vicky and Andy were in Brussels, they were loving the mix of buildings just like I do.

Their hotel was even not too far from where my rented apartment was, near the Central Station and Palace of Justice. I could tromp for many more days on the streets of Brussels than in the Swiss mountains. Each to his own (of course) and it might be different if my daily setting was totally urban.

The subject line for this post is the text from a bumper sticker from Scouting New York which is stuff found by Nick Carr, a location scout in New York City who shares his findings with us even if we're not looking for an event place or movie/TV setting.

You may not know where I've been lately since I haven't blogged for a while. I guess the March road trip and May Cuba trip posts wore me out but I have gone back and read them again and am filled with memories in spite of the NY Times essay on how video and cameras spoiled the family vacation and on whether you remember better by taking a picture. One cited study was on folks in an art museum: one group was supposed to go look at some works; the other group was supposed to take a picture of some works. The lookers had way better memories of their works. Not surprising to any of us who have watched museum visitors read the whole label, take a picture of the art, and move on to the next object. The internet does, by the way, know where I was not so long ago. I keep getting adverts for the Maine Coast Heritage Trust. The advert popped up on the NY Times and Scouting NY websites when I was checking for URLs. Does it know I posted those pictures from my late July trip?

One evening in Maine, we drove to Haystack to hear Maira Kalman speak. I was selected to be driver since it would be after dark even though I am less familiar with the roads. I studied the map but I got totally turned around (and turned around again) and would have gotten totally lost but I probably would have found something wet rather than new. The roads twist and turn because of hills and seacoast.

artists books and atriums

Back in the late 1990s, I bought a small artist's book at Printed Matter when it was still on Wooster Street. It was only a couple bucks and had no identifying text. The clerk said that the artist came in every once in a while, dropped off some copies of a book, didn't give his name, didn't ask for reimbursement, just left the books and left. Actually, it has no text at all; it is just drawings of geometric shapes looking like flags, floorplans, architectural details, or objects.

When I was at the Estudio Carlos Garaicoa in Havana a couple weeks ago, there was an artist's book that had a similar feel but rather larger in size and with less busy pages. It also had a title page and statement of authorship: Loidys Carnero.

I thought maybe I'd found my artist even though the geographic difference argued against it. I checked Carnero's webpage and he wasn't born until 1982 in Havana so not at all likely that he was dropping off books at Printed Matter as a teenager.

What I also discovered at Carnero's webpage were some pictures of his Visita Guiada (Guided Tour) project from 2012 in which he revisited the sites in a 2004 Stan Douglas photographic project which had appropriated the settings of a 1968 film "Memories of Underdevelopment" by Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Talk about layers of memory and revisiting. One of the images in the Visita is identified as the Presidio on the Isla de la Juventud.

(You can see a bigger version of the photo on the artist's webpage, this being the thumbnail from the webpage.) Those of you that followed me on the road trip in March will not be surprised that I was reminded of the West Baden Springs Hotel in southern Indiana.

For accommodations, I imagine the hotel beats the prison.