As if all the Christmas Feasting wasn't Enough

I've been inhaling as many books as possible before the semester starts up at Brandeis.

Yesterday, while gallery sitting at the BCA, I finished The Painted Bird that Heath lent me when I was in Chicago. The book goes through a young boy's years on his own during WWII in eastern europe. Alone. His dark features get him into trouble, and he is amazingly adept at getting out of them. I am struck by the simultaneously rich language the author tries to pin on a seven year old, and how childlike some of his thoughts are. He is totally impressionable in a way I don't remember ever being, and he quickly moves between believing in witches, to catholicism, to believing he himself is evil (because of the dark features) to communism.

Today, again gallery sitting, I got into (and finished) Rebecca Solnit's Storming the Gates of Paradise. I especially enjoyed (as Heath said I would) her article "excavating the sky." Which I would recommend to anyone who is even remotely interested in constellations, place names, and metaphor.

I have two weeks left to read oh so many things! Next, John Berger's The Shape of A Pocket which I think I will send to Heath as a thank you for all the other books/recommendations when I am done.

A pocket is a powerful thing...but so is my bookshelf.

Group Work

I just finished reading Temporary Services book Group Work (available through Printed Matter). What a find / I should have read this right right right when it came out.

Go check it out of the library or purchase it immediately! It is so good.

Temporary Services explores the nature and complexity of groups through a series of interviews with different types of groups (though all in the creative vein). In the first few paragraphs of the introduction, they debunk the idea of having a book with a singular author by maneuvering through the process of writing, publishing, educating...

my favorite little bit is what they say about the entanglement that happens with group work (which is just reiterated across the interviews): "group work can happen in a myriad of configurations. Untangling a group's history can require a lot of patience. Many groups have a hard time just keeping their own histories straight."

"An Elite Experience for Everyone"

I've been reading Vera Zolberg's article "An Elite Experience for Everyone: Art Museums, the Public and Cultural Literacy." She asks the good questions of museum's mission to educate and entertain. Art museums in particular, it seems, have a hard time of balancing these two missions.

Why do art museums attract less of the general public than do science and history museums? because science and history museums do not attract scientists and historians, where art museums do attract practitioners(51).

Art objects are in conversation with other, past art objects, cultural symbols, historical events, making it hard to understand the work without a broad vocabulary of past works. That is not to say that a work of art can be enjoyed only when the entire body of knowledge is there, but that it is enhances with it, especially as works become more and more abstract. Two projects I have recently seen remind me of this: William Pope.L's amazing plexiglass boxes filled with ripped bags of potting soil. Inside the box, the moisture from the soil collects on the inside of the boxes, clearly reminiscent of Haacke's Condensation Cube from 1965. The other is Mark Wallinger's "Sleepers" that won the turner prize. My friend Heath and I watched this at Donald Young the other day for about twenty minutes. Ok, it is a man in a bear suit inside of an empty museum with visitors watching from outside the glass. But without reading the massive statement, we would have known nothing of this a) being set in Berlin and b) being a narrative about the name of Berlin as much as it is about sleeper agents, loneliness, etc.

Zolberg brings in Bourdieu to explain perhaps why museum education programs are the first to be chopped when the going gets tough. His notion of cultural capital is at work here: teach the pupil who is ready to learn rather than teaching the subject. The pupil will learn the vocabulary and do the reading, which is what art museums often, according to Zolberg, does. Zolberg takes Bourdieu's cultural capital to debunk the "teach the pupil" mentality. There is nothing inherent or natural about taste, but by assuming it is natural, we maintain "hierarchical distinctions among different social categories," leading to a cycle of taste-makers (55).

Dave's Down To Earth Rock Shop

Today, for the first time in a long time, I went to Dave's Rock Shop. This was an old childhood haunt, where we would go and stick our hands in buckets of rocks, look at trilobites, and Hopi katchina dolls. As with most things, after not being there for a long time, it felt different, some things were a bit weird (most notably the katchina dolls), but good.

The best part of this little gem (haHA!) in Evanston, IL is the Museum in the basement. As small museums go, this one is pretty good. It has the hokey thing going, which I think is fine, but is also filled up with a lot of really interesting information and things to look at. Fossils! Including the Illinois State Fossil the Tully Monster. The place hasn't changed (in fact, they haven't even changed the burnt out lightbulbs), but it is kind of okay. Lots of school groups come here and the owners teach them a bit about geology and they spend quite a bit of time down there looking at the cases, which are reminiscent of curio cabinets and wunderkammer. Semi-organized at best, this place is about looking for a long time with your face pressed against the glass.

**and you can buy trilobites upstairs for just a few dollars! can it get better? maybe the dinosaur bones by the pound?!

Lists

My mom and I were making a list this morning of the president's homes that I have seen:

1) George Washington's Mount Vernon. I was about ten. We bought my dad a puzzle, which is now framed, completed in our family room.
2) Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. Same year. I really liked this house; at the time I thought I wanted to be an architect. He had all kind of gadgets he had made.
3) James Madison's Montpelier. Not as pretty, same year. They were in the middle of renovating, so we didn't see everything.
4) James Monroe's house (don't remember what it is called). I used to really think the Monroe Doctrine was a smart document. But later on I understood how it was reinvented later by TR and others for our interests.
5) James Buchanan's house in PA. It was really dark inside. He was the only bachelor president, and his house is only minutes away from where my mom's parents live. On the way to the Hershey Factory, where we spent a lot of time.
6) Ulysses Grant's Galena, IL home. Not to be confused with his NY home. My grandpa used to ask us facts about the presidents on the different bills. Once he ran out of trivia, I asked him if he knew what the S. in Ulysses S. Grant stood for. He did not. It is Simpson (n.b. the only other president with S. for a middle initial is Harry S. Truman. The S. stands for nothing because both his grandfather's names started with an S. and his parents wanted to keep the peace).
7) Eisenhower. Dwight.
8) Benjamin Harrison. Indianapolis, IN. My grandfather lives down there, and we went when I was a teenager. The only president from Indiana, and he only served one term.
9) Abraham Lincoln. 'nuf said.
10) Hoover (!!) in Iowa.

SAIC: Gray Johns

(Image from AIC).

Today Heath and I went down to the art institute to meet up with Amber and her kids and see the Jasper Johns show. Disappointingly curated, let me tell you. They felt the need to include a few pieces from every series of work that might contain gray. We hit the reading room, and then the work from the 90's and on. We thought it was done, and it just kept going.

In the contemporary section, we got the surprise William Pope.L "the friendliest black man" focus exhibition, which was very nice. A selection of drawings and assemblages of his that I have never seen paired with one, very sloppy and beautiful installation.

Nice.

Herbert Hoover (!)

I am going to Herbert Hoover's House tomorrow on my way back from picking my brother up in Iowa City. Yes!

Yet another Presidential library and home that I can check off my list!!

OS has left the building

OS's mark.
Originally uploaded by k_hargrav

I am visiting champaign-urbana for a few days and stopped by the 12 E. Washington building. I like the fade.

CLUI

On Thursday I went to see Matt Coolidge from the Center for Land Use Interpretation talk at Harvard's Carpenter Center.

Coolidge spoke about the development of his organization, and fluidly wrapped it into a conversation about the projects they have undertaken, the types of sites they are interested in, their methodology, and as a special treat, some MA sites.

He began by speaking about what CLUI is. They are an organization, founded in 1994, interested in investigating the interpretation of the American landscape. Important in that statement are two words: Interpretation and American. I will go into the two separately.

More easily, CLUI has narrowed their scope to only the American Landscape. Good. Not only because I really really like America, but because can you imagine how big (and thus how incomplete) the database would be if it was the WHOLE WORLD! So they don't even go there.

More complicated (please bear with me for this paragraph) CLUI looks to the demarkation of landscape, and they ask what that demarkation means. For instance, when we go to Gettysburg, we look at the monument to the battle of Gettysburg, and often we look at reenactments of battles, see pictures of monuments, purchase souvenirs, and then go home and read books about the event. In that action, we first experience the physicality of the land. However, we are automatically distanced from the land by having so many pointers to deal with. Coolidge showed a photograph of an plaque on some piece of land. We look at an interpretive plaque on the land. And then a tour guide interprets this interpretive plaque for us. And then there is the documentarian making an interpretive video of the interpretation by the tour guide of the interpretive plaque on the land. And then, of course, there is the invisible (but important) photographer interpreting the scene so we in the audience can interpret it once more. This convoluted action is part of what CLUI is interested in.

Coolidge spoke about the ways in which they choose sites to be a part of their archive. It was, apparently, as simple as looking to extraordinary and exemplary cases. Personally, I have a bit of a problem with this as a strategy for investigation. How do they pick the exemplary cases, and more importantly, the extraordinary. I found myself thinking about my own research in Illinois, and my own problems with how I pick locations. It comes down to, for me, that every location has a story to tell, but without a lot of time and energy, sometimes that story will not present itself. For this reason, it is easier (and funnier) to pick names that sound whacky and assume their stories will be better for it. But what about Paris, Illinois? First, it is unique because of the bizarre name in Illinois. But there are 17 cities named Paris across the country, so it must be mundane, and maybe it will get picked for an exemplary case. But it doesn't have an Eifle tower, and its town hall had a tree running through the center, and a ton of other little tidbits could be found, I am sure. Point is, what is the larger method as to how we choose which sites are worth looking at, and then how do we make a schedule as to how we systematically explore all the other sites?

I thought the lecture was super good, he talked about the structure of their archive and database, and how most of their exhibitions are either theme based (like for instance a show on dams) or they are location based (like an exhibition on the hudson river), but most of the data is already collected, allowing for curated exhibitions to come together quite simply all in all.

After the lecture, I went out for a drink with a friend, and I am sure he was super annoyed with me talking about it. I don't think I could count how many times I said "at CLUI..." with an exited tone and a roll of the eyes from him....

Way to go Matt!

Miranda July makes me melt into a useless pile that wants to watch sitcoms, eat junk food, and call all my friends and cry.

I just started/finished reading No One Belongs Here More Than You by artist darling Miranda July. I began it yesterday on the train to school, read a few stories while waiting for a professor, read more on the train home, then finished it this morning. Yesterday, while reading it waiting, I laughed a lot at a story about learning to swim in bowls of salt water in an apartment. It felt like a text version of Learning to Love You More. Then on the way home, I read another story about an older man who is in love with his co-worker and to get close to him he pretends he has a sister. I was half way home on the train, and I had to stop reading because I felt so desperate. I came home, made some truffles, called a friend in LA because I was thinking about him because that is where she is from, then I watched reruns of sitcoms with my roommate (I haven't watched TV at all in months). I was sad, and I couldn't read any more, and I had to do some boring things to feel lonely and connected at the same time.

I think Miranda meant to do this to me.

I finished the book on the train today, and it was less sad, but still very dry writing that is very emotional at the same time.

Removal and Reclamation

When I was 12, I made a list of things I wanted to see and do by the time I turned..I don't know...21. On that list was see the Grand Canyon (I have a thing for superlatives--like the Great Lakes). For my graduation from high school, my dad presented me with a plane ticket to Arizona.

We saw the Grand Canyon, and I thought it was all around pretty boring, but that is not the story I want to tell here. On our way back to Phoenix to catch our flight home, we took the Apache Trail instead of the highway. Along this dirt road (that made me mostly very nervous as my dad sped along), we stopped at Roosevelt Dam and the reservoir.

Roosevelt Dam was one of the first reclamation projects in the southwest (one of the original five that TR signed, to be exact), and it is also the largest masonry dam in the US.

What is sort of interesting and poetic, is that it was removed from the National Registry of Historic Places, a list maintained by the National Park Service.

With over 80,000 places, buildings, and other landmarks on the list, it seems pretty silly to remove something from the list because of routine structural repairs, but this happened in 1999.

Assassination Vacation and Libra

I just finished (as in just, two minutes ago) Don DeLillo's Libra, which I have been reading between several other books. I love DeLillo. His writing is sharp and honest, he writes very little dialog, which is good because dialog usually sounds contrived, forced.

Anyways, I read the last fifty pages or so this evening. Starting just before the assassination up until they put Lee Harvey Oswald into the ground. Some of the facts don't match up with what I have read on wikipedia, but that could be either DeLillo's admitted embellishment or wikipedia. But the section right before JFK is shot, I was feeling physiological effects of knowing what was coming. My heart was pounding, my palms getting sweaty, and my shoulders tense. The sentences are short, telling the color of the car, how Jackie looked, and so on.

What is with this year and good books?

I just finished (yesterday) Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation, which is actually an accident....Randall recommended her other book, The Partly Cloudy Patriot which I ingested on Thanksgiving in lieu of turkey (which was another accident, as a large part of the book is about Thanksgiving and its all about American-ness). After reading that (despite realizing half way through that yes, this is the same Sarah Vowell as has the funny, annoying voice on This American Life), I needed more. More I got, and it was good. I couldn't stop thinking about her writing when reading DeLillo's book.

Super.

What next? I suppose I should get back to reading for all the papers due next week, hm?