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.
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.
Some years ago, I wrote a blogpost entitled "rhymes and homonyms" about watching film credits and the marvelous things you can find there. I specifically noted the credit in the movie "Being Julia" for Loop Group to Sync or Swim. The rhyme in the credit caption and the homophone in the company name were just delightful. I now watch for loop group credits and don't see them very often. Just a handful in the ten years since that cited blogpost. The loop group, by the way, creates the crowd sounds in post-production on a film.
I was rewatching the "Downton Abbey" movie last night. Fade out. Cue the credits. Imagine my surprise to see there, there, was the Crowd ADR credit for Sync or Swim. It will not surprise you to learn that I had to look up what ADR meant: automated dialogue replacement.
This little revisit to Sync or Swim led me to study the distinction between homonym, homophone, and homograph. "Sync" is a homophone but not a homonym. And, besides, "homophony" is apparently only used in music. I was going to use "homophony" in the third sentence of the first paragraph.
P.S. Of course, the next day, I saw a Loop Group credit for The Loop Squad, in season 1, episode 1 of "The Chair" on Netflix. And 38 drivers!
P.P.S. Two months later, I decided to watch the final episode of "Downton Abbey" again (season 6, episode 9) and guess what. The Crowd Artists were Sync or Swim.
There was a roundtable discussion on the AU campus yesterday afternoon on "9/11 and Afghanistan: twenty years after." The panelists were a senior history professor, a veteran who served in Afghanistan and is now the director of the Military Aligned Program at Saint Bonaventure University, a junior history professor who did two tours of duty in Afghanistan, and a psychologist who was in Junior ROTC in high school. The panel was rather weighted toward military service, terrorism, veteran services, patriotism, American international operations, ineffective Afghan forces, and the messy departure from Afghanistan. Thoughts of the late 1960s efforts to get ROTC off campus were roiling in my brain, along with how there is now a military office on campus. I was feeling quite stressed (though of course I was also experiencing plenty of privilege sitting in a library meeting space on a sunny afternoon). The last question was "was the Afghan incursion worth it?" A veteran in the audience answered in the affirmative and talked about women's freedom, schools, and other good things that had happened. It is good that some of the Taliban tyranny of the 1990s ended but twenty years of costly and destructive warfare can't be the best method for achieving such social change.
Today's Environmental Studies speaker was K. Neil Van Dine on "Water and sanitation in Haiti." His group, Haiti Outreach, works with communities to get a sustainable water supply and sanitation. Many groups have helped with various relief efforts in Haiti but few have helped build the systems needed to manage and maintain the infrastructural improvement. Upwards of 500 communities, mostly rural, have received help from Haiti Outreach which builds community support before any well drilling happens. Van Dine noted that the UN/WHO Global Goal for Sustainable Development is for the water supply to be within a thirty-minute round trip. It's hard for us to imagine anything other than light switches, water faucets, and flushing toilets. But just think if the billions of dollars and hours of effort expended in Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of Vietnam and Korea and elsewhere, had been spent on sustainable development.
The Haiti talk will be posted on the Environmental Studies Speaker Series at AlfredU YouTube channel.
Maybe you had to be there. Matthew had his nineteenth-century dinner one evening in the mid-late 1970s in Pittsburgh. There were a couple dozen of us: grad students in art history, librarians, professors. The table stretched through the double doors between his living room and dining room. Several courses were served. I was costumed as Thomas Eakins. I don't remember who Dorothy dressed as. Julie came as Lady Hamilton, in a gauzy confection of white fabric. I so enjoyed meeting Lady Hamilton.
"In Rome I was glad to study: here [in Naples] I want only to live, forgetting myself and the world, and it is a strange experience for me to be in a society where everyone does nothing but enjoy himself. Sir William Hamilton, who is still living here as English ambassador, has now, after many years of devotion to the arts and the study of nature, found the acme of these delights in the person of an English girl of twenty with a beautiful face and a perfect figure. He has had a Greek costume made for her which becomes her extremely. Dressed in this, she lets down her hair and, with a few shawls, gives so much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, etc., that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes. He sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized before him in movements and surprising transformations -- standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious, sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite, alluring, threatening, anxious, one pose follows another without a break. She knows how to arrange the folds of her veil to match each mood, and has a hundred ways of turning it into a head-dress. The old knight idolizes her and is enthusiastic about everything she does. In her, he has found all the antiquities, all the profiles of Sicilian coins, even the Apollo Belvedere. This much is certain: as a performance it's like nothing you ever saw before in your life. We have already enjoyed it on two evenings. This morning Tischbein is painting her portrait." (J.W. von Goethe, Italian Journey, translated by W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, Penguin classics, 1970, page 208)
When I first read this paragraph an hour or so ago, I was smitten by the memory of the Pittsburgh dinner and Julie as Lady Hamilton. As I type it, the description of the tableaux vivants sounds rather like inappropriate behavior by older white men. Last night's group discussion was on "The new Puritans" from the October issue of The Atlantic. Maybe it's time to re-read The volcano lover by Susan Sontag.
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.
