Favorites of 2008

Goodbye 2008. It's been grand. Well, not really. But it's definitely been memorable.

Favorite News Moments

Not to be confused with most important news moments, although there is some overlap. These are favorites because they were enjoyable/diverting, with was not the case with Mugabe stealing elections or terrorists bombing Mumbai.

1. Obama presidential election victory speech: I love watching people cry in patriotic fervor
2. Giants beat Patriots: best, most satisfying game ever
3. Sarah Palin's convention speech: yep. that was fun.
4. Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich busted: lots of criminality and venality in 2008, but rarely with such jaw dropping anecdotes, tetchy gossip and theatrical hair. And he just keeps on giving.
5. "Boris vs. Ken" London mayoral race: or rather "bonking Boris vs. Red Ken"

Favorite Movies

This year my favorite movies are mostly popcorn fun flicks. Sorry.

1. Wall-E: I loved him from the very first trailer
2. Son of Rambo: P made me watch the original Rambo movie first but I love this one the best
3. Iron Man: and unlike Batman not a massive metaphor
4. Hellboy II: full of beautiful and inventive detail
5. Ghost Town: ricky gervais
6. Twilight:hated the book. loved the movie.
7. Redbelt: Rocky for those of us who like Son of Rambo better than Rambo

Here is a list of movies that are supposedly going to be on my favorite movies 2008 list when I finally see them all sometime in September 2009

1. A Christmas Tale
2. Slumdog Millionaire
3. Waltz with Bashir
4. The Wrestler
5. Wendy and Lucy
6. I've Loved You So Long
7. Tell No One

Favorite Music

This is not year-specific. Just a list of some things I enjoyed this year.

1. Spirit of the Century, Blind Boys of Alabama
2. The Crane Wife, The Decemberists
3. Wrecking Ball, Emmylou Harris
4. Spirit, Willie Nelson
5. Turn Around, Jonny Lang
6. Charles Mingus Plays Piano, Charles Mingus
7. The Greatest, Cat Power (yes I have her release of this year, but this I listen to more)

Favorite Books

Ditto the above category

1. Let the Trumpet Sound, Stephen B. Oates
2. Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
3. New Art City, Jed Pearl
4. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
5. Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky
6. Living Things, Anne Porter
7. Lalla Rookh, Thomas Moore (if you have a thing for overwrought romances of yesteryear, read this aloud with a friend and you will laugh till you cry)

Cold and Foggy Night

Walking around the Heights on Stonewall Road a block off Kavanaugh Blvd, just before heading over to Starbucks for something hot. The cold, wet, wintry weather makes warm interiors and fire places so much more inviting. Perfect for Christmas. I'm savoring it now because by Friday the forecast is a high of 67 degrees.

Arkansas Symphony Christmas Spectacular (and City Hall)

Robinson Center lit for Christmas

The other night P and I (boyfriend, I guess should specify, not brother) took advantage of the gift of some tickets and went to the Christmas Spectacular at the Robinson Center. On the way we passed City Hall, and P and I stopped to look at it. There was a lit Christmas tree inside and lit Christmas trees have a hypnotic power when you are out on the sidewalk looking in and it is freezing cold outside. I'd never even been inside City Hall. Shocking, I know, that in a childhood full of field trips we never visited city management but there you have it. So today on my lunch break I went by to have a peek.

Surprisingly, City Hall is still in City Hall. I half expected operations to have moved to some drab 80s-era municipal building with nothing left of the old enterprise but the words "City Hall" in stone on the lintel. But no, City Hall is still in City Hall! This was the big discovery of my brief tour.


Scott Carter, public relations guy for city management, xeroxed me some plans for the building and tossed out a few recollections of the site. Apparently this is the 100th anniversary of the building and the Arkansas Historic Preservation people put together a tour to commemorate the occasion. So maybe I'll look that up. But mainly what impresses is the quiet and order and stately calm of the interior which belies what most people know of city operations. You expect the dehydration and muscle strain unique to airports and modern bureaucratic office space. Instead you get smooth proportions, tall windows, and cool, gray marble. People were quiet, and moved purposefully between offices across atriums, and answered questions directly. If the feeling of an interior can lend itself to efficient bureaucracy, then City Hall should have no trouble developing a functionary soft shoe through the troubles of officialdom.

Welcome Home P

My brother says he was just mugged at gunpoint downtown. "It was clear the guy was new to mugging." Which made me laugh because being told someone has just had a gun on them is hard to absorb. P complied and A did too, which amounted to an empty wallet and a cheap watch, until the mugger saw A's iphone. So he demanded that. At this my heart constricted a little. Because A is poor but he does own this one beautiful thing, his iphone, and he loves that iphone. And P says that to his panic A refused. And told the guy what he could do with himself. And at this point of the narrative I remembered Richard Price's Lush Life and this is the point where the inexperienced mugger shoots the victim in order not to loose face. But possibly because the mugger had no friend around to see how it all turned out, or possibly because it was cold, or possibly because he was genuinely overwhelmed with curiosity, instead of shooting somebody (and I remembered Brian Beutler's account of being shot) he asked what the boys were up to with all those photos and adhesive and made small talk for a minute and then walked away.

And this was on a street downtown. Not a bad part of town, my brother says, although the details seem fuzzy to him. Just one of those streets parallel to Main. I've heard people who live downtown talk this way; people living on twelfth say it doesn't get bad till nineteenth and so on. And the rule apparently is that the area you are used to navigating yourself never seems dangerous to you personally. I am guilty of this myself. Little Rock has been famous for its crime in the past, but most of it is in a few particularly bad areas, so that whole swathes of the city are largely untouched by it. Yet I mentor in one of those few bad spots and have never felt any qualms about being down there by myself, often after dark. It's familiar. Only in the abstract do I acknowledge the foolishness of that arrangement.

Off To Work

Frozen on my windshield

cafe au lait

Gingerbread Baking

Courthouse Art Update

Artwork Tweaked To Satisfy Its Critics (But you have to sign in)

So, I've already blogged about the Echo Dynamics water sculpture out in front of the federal courthouse that has been raising local ire since it was unveiled in 2007. Now comes the announcement (scroll down to "Water Feature") that improvements to the tune of $120,000 are slated for the sculpture.

From the graphic links on the website it looks like the improvements are mostly landscaping. How to improve hated public sculpture 101: hide it behind trees.

Office Party

Yep. I won bingo. Watch out for re-gifting friends.

Iced In

We sit around drinking tea and eating through S's fruit tart since she had to cancel her party.

Liveblogging "It's a Wonderful Life"

1min
Altered it to fit in the time slot? But they haven't cut the title cards in the opening credits and everybody fast-forwards those anyway. Maybe this will be subtle...

10min
Little George sees the "Ask Dad" sign and goes running to the Building and Loan for his Dad. Whenever I see this scene I think of the 1950s sitcom Father Knows Best.

13min
15 minutes in and I'm already teary eyed. George gets slapped around by Mister Gower before the old gentleman realizes George has just saved his bacon.

Who is the actor for Gower? Is it just me or are bit part actors these days not nearly so good? And this movie is full of great ones. Also Beulah Bondi as Ma Bailey. I just saw her has Fred MacMurray's mother in the Preston Sturges Christmas movie "Remember the Night." She must have specialized in mothers.

25min
Violet coming on to George at the high school dance. Mama: that actress was Ado Annie in Oklahoma.

P: Do you know why this movie became so popular around Christmas? They forgot to renew the copyright on it. For years it was in the public domain and every channel could play it for free. It's only been in the last decade or so they regained control over it by asserting the copyright for the movie's soundtrack.

27min
Best "across the room" gaze in the movies: George's and Mary Hatch's eyes meet.

45min
George Bailey tells Potter where to get off after Potter denigrates the Building and Loan. When he's through Potter flicks his tongue briefly over his lips and an eyebrow stiffens. Lionel Barrymore is amazing.

1h
George and Mary share the phone and then fall into each others arms. Dad: Donna Reed and Jimmy Steward didn't rehearse that scene. Capra said he just told them where they needed to end up.

1h10
Bank Run. Goodbye Honeymoon.

Dad: "It's a Wonderful Life" or "How To Be Happy Without Ever Taking a Vacation"

Now George is giving away his honeymoon money to help Bedford Falls survive the Depression. "How much do you need Miss Davis?" "Can I take $17.50?" And then George Bailey kisses her. Mama: that actress played the grandmother in The Waltons.

1h25
George's wedding night. Taxi driver friend Ernie and cop friend Bert are helping Mary stage a makeshift fancy hotel. Bert and Ernie? Inspiration for Sesame Street?

1h47
The loose finial on the banister makes it first appearance.

1h48
Everybody joins the war effort. George misses the war while his brother gets the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Dad laughs at Potter growling "1A" over draft papers.

Paul: who is the voice of God in this? Good question. Although isn't it Joseph who is narrating mostly?

1h52
Uncle Billy accidentally hands his deposit to Potter while teasing him about Harry's medal.
Mama: If he just hadn't been gloating...

1h56
George to Uncle Billy: "Where's that money you silly old fool... One of us is going to jail and it's not going to be me." But we know it will be. Like somebody had to help his Dad with the Building and Loan. Like somebody had to give up a trip to Europe to help settle an estate. Like somebody had to send his brother to school. Like somebody had to run the Building and Loan once his brother was out. Like somebody had to provide honeymoon cash to coast his neighbors through a Depression. Like somebody had to stay home when everyone else went to war. This movie is all about frustration.

2h1m
George kissing his son desperately.
Dad: boy, he's a good actor

2h4
More finial trouble. It's the small details of frustration that Capra gets so right.

2h9
Potter asking George why he needs the loan. Playing the market? Another woman? What's really galling in all this is that he knows what happened to the money. He's got it. Worse, he has just seen George take responsibility for the loss when Potter knows Uncle Billy lost it. You lost it? says Potter incredulously. But he still can't resist crushing George while he has him.

2h16
George praying in Martini's bar. This scene is better at panic than the crazed stare into the camera George will deliver later. Then it is a bit campy horror. Here it is just sick and out of options.

George driving through snow.
Dad: they really do dark and sinister well.
This is where the movie starts to get surreal. This shift frightened me when I was little. The music goes creepy.

2h20
"...a bust in the jaw in answer to a prayer a little while ago"

"...angel second class" and the local guy falls out of his chair and darts outside. Dad: that's old Hollywood - the wide eyed gape.

2h22
"Comes in pretty handy around here, Bub." Meaning money, George to Clarence the angel. I wonder if more people will watch "It's a Wonderful Life" this year given a recession. And I wonder if it will strike people differently when they do. Or stand out again in a different way. The whole story (and George's life) revolves around the fortunes of a Building and Loan. And the run on the bank in the early part is a credit crunch in microcosm ("You're thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money's not here. Your money's in Joe's house... and a hundred others").

2h24
Clarence is about to take everything anyway, all the previous life with its difficulties and obligations

Everyone takes this upcoming sequence, where George sees what life would be like if he'd never been born, as demonstrating how truly valuable every human life is. But from George's standpoint surely the lesson is how cold and terrible it is to have no connection to anyone (that close up on George's crazed expression when his home is an empty ruin). When he comes back into his old life his joy is more about people knowing him and loving him than about the fact that he was effective in life after all.

2h35
George thrown out of Nick's bar. No drivers license. "There not there either." "What?" "Zuzu's petals."
Dad: space music!

2h41
Oh no! Pottersville! Jazz music!
Mother: Like Hot Springs
Paul: Like a little Vegas
Bars, girls, neon, and Ernie's broken marriage: Capra on social decay

2h48
"Where's my wife Clarence! Where's my wife!"
Dad: this part is a little overcooked

Q. How do you make Donna Reed look dowdy?
A. Library
This will be the last stereotype to go. Ever.

2h55
Town saves George. While singing Christmas carols. It's nice that they kept it in a big hullabaloo instead of spotlighting the individual contributions/testimonials with silence. The euphoria of a crowd makes it all seem more possible. And infectious.

2h58
Me: I love that movie!
Dad: Well, we've seen it again
P: In real life, he's still going to jail

Ahhh!

This makes me cringe.

Jolly Boots of Doom

Triumph of the Will, meet Kris Kringle

The Wire season six

For those of us who felt sad when The Wire ended after five seasons, reality has intervened: the Blagojevich scandal.

SS Stewart Archtop Guitar, c. 1920

Road Trip

Yesterday P and I joined D and Y and drove up to Mountain View / Blanchard Springs. As it turned out, we got to attend "Caroling in the Caverns" for free because the regular tours were canceled for the caroling program and the federal website hadn't been updated. P finagled it. When we returned to Mountain View the town was gathered in the square for the lighting of the Christmas tree.


"This is Christmas. This is really Christmas!" Y said as we came out from dinner onto the square. It did look idyllic. The Court House was lit and so was the Christmas tree. People were milling around after the festivities and a long line of children stretched across the lawn waiting to sit on Santa's lap.


The idea was to show Y some of Arkansas besides Little Rock and D had thought of Blanchard Springs. P said his grandfather (who due to a quirk of generations was born in the late 1800s) had worked to sink the shafts to the cave after it was discovered. "The only elevator in Stone County," said the bushy tour guide has we rode down to the cavern. Two local sights for the price of one.


It is very white here, Y said at dinner. That's because we are in the mountains, we said. This area has historically had small farms, cattle farming, nothing much that required the cheap labor of slavery or tenant farming. Go down to the Delta and the demography changes. Take music. In the Delta it is blues and BB King and Helena's King Biscuit festival and the origins of a lot of rock'n roll. In the mountains it is folk music. Mountain View calls itself the folk music capital of the world and makes more hand crafted dulcimers than just about anywhere. For "Caroling in the Caverns" the musicians were from Mountain View and there were two guitars, one mandolin and a hammered dulcimer.


"I'd rather poke my eye out with a fork than go to Little Rock," said the lady behind the cash registrar. It's a common sentiment. But what is odd about it is that it is based on the idea that Little Rock is a big city, which it really isn't. So Little Rock remains somewhat exotic, and Mountain View, which would be half as far away if there was straight highway connecting it and Little Rock, remains isolated at the other end of a tangle of mountainous roads. Behind the counter she and I compared IDs. My drivers license is my favorite. All the others - work, school, passport - are awful. She was fine with her passport photo. She has a passport but she never makes it down to Little Rock! But maybe this is what keeps Mountain View Mountain View.

An Auto Company in Winter

Driving up into the Ozarks you see lots of trucks. Yuske, who was with us, asked why the trucks had GNC on the grills. That's GMC, we said, the car maker whose potential bust we were just talking about. Oh, he said, so the drivers are not devoted to vitamins. Nope, we said, just to trucks.

It is kind of poignant that Yuske, who is from Japan, wouldn't recognize General Motor's insignia. Americans would have no trouble with the Toyota emblem. From what I read in the papers the American auto industry has pretty much ceded the car market (where it has been thoroughly out competed) to Japan and gets by instead on trucks and SUVs. Which of course Americans love, especially Americans from rural states like this one, where getting a truck can be a male rite of passage. But now, even it every vehicle sold in the Ozarks this year were a GMC truck, it couldn't save a company needing billions monthly just to keep afloat.

There is something defining and particular in the American love of the truck, and in a similar sense the auto industry and the big unions feel distinctive of a certain kind of American life. The auto makers are no longer captains of American industry. Their plants are no longer hooks for artists to paint mesmerized portraits. The American public no longer sits in theaters and gets dewy-eyed watching Henry Fonda as Tom Joad vow to unionize. Instead they watch The Wire, where union boss Frank Sabotka gazes out over abandoned factories and empty slips along the shoreline and is powerless to do much besides grease politicians. Sabotka calls a video of a super efficient Dutch port that requires only a fraction of the jobs he'd like to see on Baltimore's docks "a nightmare." And it is if you envision, as Frank does, your son knowing the life you and your father knew and working the same job too. There is human tragedy in the fact that economies evolve. You can see the continued loss of manufacturing jobs on the horizon, no matter what the government does. You can see the blow to unions as they are faulted for undermining the competitiveness of their own companies. GM can go cap in hand to politicians. Unions can ram through card check legislation. But that won't help them compete with Japan.

Pecan Pie

I made my first pecan pie this Thanksgiving



9-inch pie crust, baked
3 eggs
1 1/2 cup light corn syrup
1 1/2 cup dark corn syrup
1 cup sugar
2 Tb. melted butter
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup pecans

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Beat eggs slightly. Add other ingredients, mixing in the pecans last of all. Pour into pie crust and bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes, then another 30 minutes at 350 degrees (assuming a non-quirky oven, which would have been a fatal mistake at my grandmother's house).

This recipe is from Little Rock Cooks cookbook, which is a family standard, is missing both covers, and has its most popular pages encrusted and mummified for eternity. It also has the world's best recipe for cheese grits. More on that later.

1863, 1963, 2013

I've been reading Stephen Oates biography of Martin Luther King. Going over events again, it is amazing how much was encompassed in that one year of 1963. There was the Birmingham campaign, Letter from Birmingham Jail, the March on Washington, the murder of Medgar Evans, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I don't remember much being done to commemorate these events in 2003, which would have been the 40th anniversary. Will there be a 50th anniversary to any of these events? Will memorials be scattered, like say a celebration of the March on Washington, or a commemorative magazine issue on Kennedy? Or will the year be taken as a whole? Because it seems like a major aspect to the events of '63 is their compactness with everything else that was going on at that time, a sense of portentous events being wedged in tightly on on top of the other in a short calendar space. There is a fevered atmosphere in that jumble that a commemoration of only one episode wouldn't capture. The 50th anniversary of 1963 will be 2013. Having just finished the first term of the first African American president, will we be inclined to look back 50 years for our comparisons and contrasts of the milestone? 1963 was momentous in part because Kennedy and King were both looking over their shoulders to 1863 and Emancipation Proclamation, whose centennial was that year. History is like a backward glance sweepstakes; the present is always looking back somewhere and it is simply a question of in what direction the nostalgia tends.

59 across is "barren"

P is working a crossword and I am on google duty.

Asheville, NC

We always stop and shop a little. My sister S. loves her new boots, black suede with a lovely little button on the side.

Wow. Internet.

I'm not even poaching off my mother's iphone. Nice to see that Arkansas has beat LSU. Ahh, two years in a row of undeserved, unmerited success. Clearly the Rock City tshirts people are right:

Happy Thanksgiving to All

Off to North Carolina. I don't much care for the drive back, but I love the drive up: I-40 all the way up through Memphis, and Nashville, and Knoxville, and over the mountains to Asheville, then down to Greensboro where you finally turn off I-40. You take state highway 421 through a string of small towns and a torturous number of stop lights all the way to Fayetteville. And you're there.

The National Ornamental Metal Museum

The Jamie Bennett crates arrived today, enamels and metalwork for a show next month. Before coming to us the exhibition was at a little museum in Memphis, the National Ornamental Metal Museum. We went up this last summer to preview the show. The museum is housed in an old brick building on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi river.



It is a beautiful spot, but a little ghostly in just the sort of way that Memphis is inclined toward, living in the shadow of a former prosperity. The larger complex used to be a naval hospital. Now the main building is abandoned and the museum takes up a few adjacent buildings. The main building is impressive but crumbling, with windows out and the roof beginning to cave in places. Across the street are a couple of ancient Indian mounds (called the Desoto mounds for Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto), one of which was dug out and put to use as a munitions dump during the Civil War. By now the roof has collapsed on that too, creating a large bowl.





Leila the registrar pointed everything out and told me the names of birds and how the museum hopes not to lose the old trees. One bird had a name like the title of a poem, but I can't remember it now. I think I might email for an answer because I really would like to know but who wants to slog through a google search of Mississippi waterfowl? Not me. The bird whose name I can't remember reminds me of a poem by Jacques Prévert with a line that goes "the example of the feathers the wings the flight of birds" where a man marvels at birds that he has come late to love. I associate this line with the idea of continually coming upon fresh things to love, even into old age, although I am young. This is one of the nice things about being in the arts as well. There is the continual possibility of finding something new that you "appris très tard à aimer" (learned late to love) as the poem says. The Metal Museum might just be an example of this. I know little of metalwork, and forging interests me not at all, despite the lovely forge across the lawn, but ever since the summer visit I've been wanting to go back.

Highway 10 Showdown

Little Rock Christian vs. Arkansas Baptist basketball

Heard In Conversation

That French programs are struggling. That local parochial schools find it difficult to maintain enrollment for French courses. That Hendrix college only has one French teacher in a language department that runs the gamut of modern and ancient languages, and finds it hard to sustain even that one teacher.

French needs to re-position itself. Sure it is still an official language of diplomacy at the EU and UN, but that is more a nod to an old mode of operation than descriptive of current reality. And as the universal usefulness of French fades, it is falling between categories. It is not relevant enough to hold its own against Spanish in the modern languages category, and it is not dead enough to end up in the curiosity box of the ancient languages category.

Beware the loss of the hoi polloi! Actually that is probably a done deal. Internationally the hoi polloi want to learn English, and here in the US they want to learn Spanish. Take Arkansas: Spanish is king and Latin is on the inside track to become the niche language of choice. French needs to do better in the English-speaking market if it is going to stay relevant. Time to rebrand agressively for a downmarket product.

The Perfect Scone

S. says it is her magnum opus

De-Installation Week

For the last week I have been de-installing shows at the museum. First a private collection of drawing, then an annual juried competition of local artists. It is always a little disappointing to take down special exhibitions. The work is typically from outside sources and once the show is over it goes back to wherever it comes from. To the extent that a show speaks to you or seems especially successful, it is never only a question of broader themes but also of particulars, this or that painting, such and such pairing of work, a certain layout, the unique look of something under just that light in just that corner of the room etc. All of that comes down with a de-installation. So of course this is sad and invariably I find I've spent too little time with the exhibition. The paradox of museum work is that with all the handling and installing it is easy to neglect spending time looking at the work. The whole point is to provide people the space for reflection, but I seldom take advantage of it myself.


Shows like the Delta (the juried exhibition) or Visions (the private collection) are precisely what a museum like ours does well. The center of our own collection is in drawing, as is our expertise, and a feel for the development of that core tensile strength which underlies so much sound work regardless of the encrustations of style or the happenstance of position in an art historical dialectical schema is the bedrock of what we offer a viewing public. You could see the whole gamut in Visions, all that American twentieth century back and forth, the loose abstraction, the tight realism, the absolute empiricism of recording something fact for fact till like an object under a microscope raised to the highest power it itself begins to look like another kind of abstraction. And all that work and all those names paired and hung like a giant rendezvous of conversationalists on art, a Lee Walton (2002) hung with a Dorothy Dreher (1950) or Elaine de Kooning's portrait of Fairfield Porter, friends among friends. If Visions was a crash course in connections and names, Delta was a curb-side saunter, a Main Street eclecticism from back when Main Street was more than city firms and fast food spots. There was a Mom 'n Pop -ness to the show, a concern for the familiar, the intimate, the every day. This is often true of the Delta in some part, but rarely has it been so focused, brought in on a firm line and restrained. The quirky detailed obsessiveness of David Rose's miniature diner had everyone I ever saw pass it stop and exclaim. The oil paintings and photographs did the most of the heavy lifting for awards. But then there were also the textiles, an entire village crocheted in bright colors and set up in blocks like a candy colored Le Corbusier campus, or the delicate embroidered patterns in faint fabric that made a flimsy silhouette against the framing glass. Next year we have a big Egyptian exhibition coming to town. There is a lot of anticipation for this in the public and we have already had people coming to the museum looking for the show. It should be a great exhibition and we will undoubtedly see (for us) great numbers. I'm looking forward to working on it. But as I take down these smaller exhibitions this week, I doubt that the big ticketed show will surpass the pleasure of what we have offered for free these last few months. It has been the museum at its best.

Armchair Voyaging

Adam Gopnick, in his book Paris to the Moon, likes to contrast the monumental with the quirky particular. Deyrolle is one of his prime examples. The New York Times has an update on the strangest shop in Paris, which burned last February.

Deyrolle is a shop, but small museums are often the best for the bizarre and off beat. I've always wanted to visit the Musee de la Chasse, for example. And now there is a Soviet bunker theme park complete with gas masks and what looks like interrogations for masochistic Latvians.

Some people fantasize about life in a Soviet bunker. I fantasize about life in Argentina. Despite the grime economic news and dodgy politics, I bought a Rough Guide a few months back. El Ateneo bookstore in Buenos Aires looks amazing, however after finding this blog, with its beautiful photographs, I would consider skipping the big city for life in Patagonia.

Silver Clouds

The Warhol exhibition has an installation of Andy's Silver Clouds. These must be tended first thing in the morning by adding/releasing air and helium until they neither rise nor fall but float in midair. During the week I enjoy it. It is rather meditative. But the weekend is getting to be another matter.

Thanksgiving Dinner

Thanksgiving is an excuse to spend time in the kitchen. It is just a meal. That's it. Not anything else. Christmas has food, but it has lots of other stuff as well. Meanwhile, the canon of "Christmas Dinner Menu" is not nearly as strict as Thanksgiving. If you don't serve certain essentials at Thanksgiving, you might as well not even call it Thanksgiving. It won't be accredited. Because there is a Thanksgiving accreditation board. Not everyone applies to have their Thanksgiving accredited, but you could if you wanted to. But only if you serve the essentials. The accreditation board is like the Santa myth (sorry P) for Thanksgiving, with puritans instead of fat jolly men. That's why the standards are so pure. Anything goes at Christmas, but you also get hustled. Not only that, you get hustled earlier and earlier every year. Thanksgiving is nice and basic. It is an ode to fundamental moral arithmetic: Labor = Fruit. You throw in a prayer to thank God that the premise still holds and that's it.

You have to spend time in the kitchen and you have to cover the basics. So what is the point of the Dean and Deluca catalog? The whole holiday is the tradition of the home cooked meal. So if you care enough about the tradition you cook a meal. And if you don't care that much for the tradition then why would you spend $520 (or $280 if you require only a "small feast"- terrible oxymoron) to celebrate it? Even with dinner prices rising an Arkansas Thanksgiving is still only an average $40.97. On the other hand, maybe the fact that someone has found a way to sell Thanksgiving for $520 is a sign of hope. Thanksgiving's slice of the holiday calendar has been withering for lack of commercial hustle.

A Week from Today

I drive to North Carolina for Thanksgiving. I am really looking forward to this trip.

Please Sir, I Want Some More

Thanksgiving dinner costs increase in Arkansas

But we are still under the national average.

Sigh

Christmas ads on TV. Radio advertisements for Santa at McCain Mall. ARTament Bash at the Arkansas Arts Center. Holidays in Hillcrest open house shopathon. Thanksgiving doesn't feel impinged on. It feels skipped. Maybe retailers are nervous about sales this year and are trying to get a jump on the season. This definitely feels early to me for all the ho ho ho.

Public Art

We've had a couple of new installations go up around town this fall: some temporary bronze firefighters outside the Convention Center, some sculptural stars over the new sign at War Memorial stadium, and one new controversy. It would have been nice if it had been a full blown controversy, with fiery editorials and letters to editor pro and con and a bitter public debate. But no. Mostly people just groaned and then the administrative powers that be noncommittally hemmed and hawed and and the objectors nodded in a crestfallen way and that was it. What is sad is that the weakness of the whole watery little discussion. To summarize, we have a new federal courthouse downtown which came with its own brand new art installation out front. Objectors: we thought that was just left over building materials but you are telling us it is a permanent piece of art? Administrative defender: not everyone's idea of beauty in art is the same. Objectors: oh. And that was it. Clearly the objectors felt so off their turf that they didn't even try to argue it was bad art but simply that you couldn't tell it was art. Likewise the Administrative Defender didn't even try to explain or defend the installation but simply reminded everyone that their taste is no basis for absolute aesthetic judgments. So at no point was anyone talking about the the particular thing on the lawn but rather about generalities (shouldn't we be able to tell it's art vs. eh, it's subjective). This suggests that no one was comfortable even for a minute addressing the aesthetics of the thing itself. When it comes to talking about public art, the public is clearly at loose ends.

What is interesting about this too is that the objections were not moral. Just about the only time a public discussion of art seems to gather any steam is when a moral outrage is at issue. Then people feel like they have some ground to stand on, like they know their moral stuff well enough to call a spade a spade. But take away the moral angle and discussions of art with a general public descend to the anemic territory of generalities. Because people are prepared to be told (as they were here) that their aesthetic judgments are relative and incapable of interfering with whatever is before them and they are more than willing to believe it. So in a way maybe I'm lucky this little whisper of kerfuffle crossed the radar, because it just goes to show that people do have opinions even without the moral angle. It's just that 1. they aren't comfortable arguing aesthetics and 2. it is not important enough to take time to get comfortable.

Here is the offending art/fountain.


Someone commented it looked like the AC guys had left a stack of ducts on the site. To me it just looks like the sort of sleek anonymous pieces that hundreds of new governmental or corporate offices require every year, like impressionist washes in noon to three lunch spots. Still, it is poorly made, which ought to have counted for something. It is leaking, held together with metallic tinted silicone, and sprouting algae in the warm sun.

Teaser Anguish

It's going to be a continuing series...

Making up for computer-denied linkage earlier in the day:

Jogger runs mile with rabid fox locked on her arm

Morning After Linkage

I haven't read much that seems definitive of the moment this morning, but maybe that sort of analysis will come later in the day when reporters get a chance to recover from sleep deprivation. In the meantime, here is a smattering of some of what I've liked. Most of it is international, but then the time difference should have put them ahead in the sleep cycle.

Daniel Hannan gives our election process some love.

The Guardian reflects on the race angle here and here.

Europeans submit their wish lists.

This reaction (Fr) strikes me as typically French in good and bad ways.

Rod Dreher takes one for the team.

EJ Dionne takes a victory lap.

Finally, I knew I could count on The Huffington Post.

Caveat

Goodbye divided government. Tempering congressional democratic ideologues will have to come from Obama himself. Crossing fingers.

Out of the Park

Obama gives his victory speech. He seems somber. I wonder if he feels the prospect of the presidency - not weighing on him necessarily - but it must be a sobering thing to find the presidency no longer a prospect but a real and concrete future.

Election Morning

On the other hand...

Election Eve

Worked late tonight. The museum is a polling place. As I left long empty tables sat in the lower lobby and unopened boxes and "vote here" signs and election whatnot waiting for tomorrow.

Over the River

Fat vs. Thin: A Visual History

John Tierney has a report on advances in weight loss pills and wonders, "if anyone could take a pill to be thin, how many people would want to? Would being 'overweight' lose its stigma?" By which I suppose he means people care about being skinny because not everyone can be, but take away the uniqueness angle and skinny is as skinny does. But how does that cause being overweight to "lose stigma?" It's not as if being hefty is going to take on the old positive qualities of skinny. It won't look like it takes hard work, or lots of money, or tons of free time. It will just look like someone isn't following the fashion for the pill. The pill might make it easy to be skinny, but it won’t change our food supply. Our society will still be awash in cheap calories. It won’t make it hard to put on weight. Unless of course you live in a totalitarian evil brave new world where all are forced to take the pill, in which case I could envision a certain revolutionary chic to fat.

And all that is if you agree with the underlying premise that skinny is a status marker because it looks like it takes hard work and money (gyms, trainers, organic food, weight loss books by the dozen), the antithesis of an easy pill. But I'm not sure I agree even with this. Who cares if skinny looks easy? My suspicion is people are reactive in terms of what they think looks nice. Fashion set by money is reactive to old negative stereotypes of old fashions set by money. In other words, you could chart it through visual history. I don’t know what the market for art history books is, but surely it doesn’t hold a candle to the market for weight loss books. This leads me to this week’s get-rich-quick scheme: an art history book of fat vs. thin!

Sunday Morning Links

The earliest recordings of classical music ever made, believed to have been destroyed during WWII, have surfaced. They are going to be released on CD for collectors. I had a music history professor in Paris who collected rare recordings of classical music. He also introduced me to Guillaume de Machaut, the 14th century poet/composer whose Notre Dame Mass is the first cyclic mass conceived and executed by a single composer. Today Diabolus in Musica makes their American debut with Guillaume de Machaut's Notre Dame Mass. The term "diabolus in musica" (literally "the devil in music") is a medieval expression for a tritone interval. For medieval music only a pure fourth or fifth interval is harmonious and consonant. The tritone is especially bad, because it looks like the trinity (three whole tones), but sounds dissonant. Sound confusing? The Knights of the Round Table explain:

Halloween

Charlie Brown

Cowboy and Indian



Scariest costume

Pumpkin Carving

Teaser Anguish

Ever see a great link but can't click through because of the computer you're on? This happened to me today. So now here for you all, Vietman considers ban on small-chested drivers.

Obama Infomercial!

So, will you watch tonight? I'm not sure I care to sit through the whole thing but I am very curious to see what the ratings will be. Against it is the fact that it is essentially a 30 minute ad. For it is the public appetite for political theater. Against it the fact that normally for political theater you need the drama of an opponent. For it is the fact that people watch sermons on TV too. So who knows. Either way what an closing gesture, a 30 minute aria on a gusher of cash!

Ho Hum

Finley Farm

The girls were very excited about the bonfire, the hot dogs (C. 2, B. 2, W.4), the hayride, and the smores.


Especially the smores

Now He's Gone and Done It

Richard Dawkins vs. Harry Potter. He's writing a children's book, only this one will lift the veil on the insidious nature of fairy tales. It's one thing to go after the Judeo-Christian myth, but I think he is going to find the public a lot less receptive to giving up their Harry Potter. New Atheism is punchy and polemical in long essay form. Why expose its lack of charm to the rigors of the bedtime story?

Public Grief

Anne Pressly passed away last night. P. and I were coming home from the country when we received a call. It was a shock to me how affecting it felt, made worse I think by reports of her recent improvement. This morning at St. Andrews church, where Anne attended on occasion and was a member of a bible study, Philip redirected the tenor of his sermon to focus on recent events. He appeared to speak extemporaneously, and it was moving and direct. He said he had spent most of the week at the hospital. He fought back his tears at one point but many in the congregation was less successful.

Afterwards P. said it surprised him that people who did not know Anne would allow themselves to become so emotionally involved in her death. Then there was the item from the paper earlier in the week where coverage of the attack and the outpouring of public support drew the criticism that other violent crime hadn't produced the same result. Is there something selfish in participating in grief for someone you do not know? Is public sympathy undeserved or illegitimized if it is not dispensed equally?

To think that it seems you would have to pretend that personal knowledge is the only true ground for grief and that every death has the exactly same claims to symbolic or emblematic significance. Sure public grief can be outsized and massive. And maybe we find disproportionately compelling the deaths of the young or the attractive or the successful. But we are a society, and our sense of ourselves is not just individual but also collective. And in judging our collective status we rely on the emblematic all the time. It is not just the man who committed the crime or the young woman who suffers and cannot survive but society too that is guilty and victim. The shock of the unlooked for event, the unnatural interference of violence and death, they seem to me good reasons for public grief.

Another Minor but Nevertheless Happily Acknowledged Reason to Enjoy Faulkner

Reading Faulkner:

"- his conscience and the land, the country which had created his conscience and then offered the opportunity to have made all that money to the conscience which it had created, which could do nothing but decline; hated the country so much that he was even glad when he saw it drifting closer and closer to a doomed and fatal war... and so he would not be present on that day when the South would realize that it was now paying the price for having erected its economic edifice not on the rock of stern morality but on the shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage."

Faulkner doesn't really describe the financial transaction that is at the nub of this crisis of conscience. Apparently it is something to do with credit and "one of those things that when they work you were smart and when they don't you change your name and move to Texas." Let's just assume that it is genuinely fraudulent, since Faulkner's choice between "stern morality" and "sands of opportunism" only reminds me of how difficult it is to quantify acceptable financial risk in terms of righteousness. The deadly sin of usury anyone?

But leaving that aside, there is genuine pleasure in watching Faulkner combine the puritan and profligate critiques of America: the tender conscience on the one hand, the promiscuously abundant opportunity for money on the other. It is not simply an act of "moral brigandage" that offends Faulkner's merchant, although Faulkner himself calls it out, but rather that the country should have offered him (the merchant) the opportunity for such a thing at all. And that conscience, that could revolt at the lush seedbed of possibility that is the plain reality of the nation, is named as explicitly American made. What a conundrum between the puritanism of our consciences and the profligacy of our opportunities. And how topical, even without throwing in the specter of economic impotency in the face of a "doomed and fatal war." Economic edifices with sham foundations! Judgment on departure from "stern morality!" As I mentioned above I am a little skeptical of making too much of the morality point, failure to appropriately evaluate risk being not quite the same as an evil cabal. Still it is interesting how our current discussions fit so easily into old critiques, summed up beautifully here by Faulkner. It points to something touchingly constant in the national character.

Ahh Fall. The Cool Air, the Crisp Leaves, the Sense that Reformation Day is Just Around the Corner...

Martin Luther rap. Oh snap! He just called out Philip of Hesse!

Prayer Request

Anne Pressly is in critical condition at St. Vincent's.

While I am not close to her personally I know many people who are. Please keep her in your prayers.

1. Cup of

Missed the Last Debate

Donor preview of Warhol + Project Runway Finale get together = shirking civic duty.

But it feels perfunctory anyway. They have ticked off the last box. McCain could be a lot better candidate than he is and I think it still wouldn't matter much in the final going.

Warhol looks good if I do say so. Just one more hurdle tomorrow morning and I'm in the clear.

Hurray for Leanne! I liked Kenley's separates and Korto's color, but Leanne deserved to win.

Evasion Links

Evasion links are tricky. They have to be entertaining but substantial enough to burn up the clock over a long, dull stretch of duty calling.

First up, L'Hôte/Freddie DeBoer, who has a long post on the trouble with postmodern conservatism, a critique kicked off by Nicola Karras' existential crisis.

The L'Hôte response to Karras has provoked a couple of responses, most notably Eve Tushnet, who is herself link-rich and sent me to this delightful post.

State Fair

10,000 Hamburgers on the Hoof!

Gourmet Snow Cones!

Beef Sundae!

October 10, 2008

Yesterday was quite full and in a way representative of what you would like to imagine life was like when you look back on it in twenty years. It was moving between my job and a few things around town and larger events hovering over everything and sometimes even directly intersecting the day, like the stock market ticker tape over the door at lunch or the Clinton rally for Obama on the front steps of the Capitol. It will be nice to look back on it as a day that encapsulates all that was going on at that moment in time, and maybe it does encapsulate. But is it representative? Not really. Maybe that is why it is standing out to me today. Because yesterday broke up a continuum of jeans and t-shirts and crates in the galleries with Warhol work, and then coming home tired and to news reporting so intense you feel required to work it in to your day, that all of that was what was really happening in the world and if it didn't intersect the crates well that was just an illusion. Nevertheless you have no concrete memory to represent the fact that the stock market or the election was intersecting the unpacking of the crates. It was all just crates. But yesterday I dressed up some and got out a little and finally had a day that felt representative of the larger whole. Or encapsulates.

Yesterday P. was sworn in at the court house and there was a ceremony of giving the license. He looked pretty sharp once I actually got to see him. I went in to the courtroom and they had chairs set up behind the desks for counsel so I sat down there, and then the new lawyers L - Z came in and were layered in rows before the bench so that I couldn't see a thing.


While I waited I took in the courtroom, which is where the Supreme Court of Arkansas meets, and pondered all those new lawyers and whether they aspired to sit on the Supreme Court, and then decided if it were me it would feel like its own sentence to have to sit under the giant plush carpet seal of the state of Arkansas suspended behind the bench, which is so ugly it would daily discourage belief in higher and ultimate truths. But this is the sort of aesthetic overreaction that is supposed to happen to you working in the arts, so I guess it is taking.


Afterward P. and I went over to the bar at the Capital Hotel. We had it to ourselves and had a long lunch of sandwiches and iced tea and a celebratory moon pie.


The Capital Hotel is a relic fished up from the 1870s and restored by a local investment banker. It is a bit of a time capsule hauled into modernity with polished surfaces and, in the bar, flat screen TVs set to CNBC for the businessmen. The Capital Hotel is just across the street from Stephens Inc. investment bank. It felt anecdotal of the day that the ticker across the bottom of the flat screen TV showed the Dow down across the board and the bar was largely deserted. What now for those other restoration projects, the old Main Street Theater also owned by Mr. Stephens and indeed the rest of the street, which is mostly a shell. There is the old M.M.Cohn department store, for example, which a year ago a friend suggested as great place for a Halloween party because, according to him, despite closing decades ago the mannequins are still there and some of the old merchandise too and it would make for a ghostly dinner. Last year was when the last of the M.M.Cohn stores closed under a weight of corporate debt, and the Little Rock chain that had begun about the time of the Capital Hotel and then prospered a century and sold itself off to Texas finally died. So no more Cohn stores in Arkansas, no more employees, and now maybe no more restoration projects for a little while.

Sitting in the bar of the hotel, with the bright sky outside and the doom and gloom ticker tape inside, it reminded me of a fantasy I had as a little girl. Some report would be on the evening news of a terrible storm (this happened once or twice) and I would get a thrill at the taste of an adventure. How would we weather it? And I would imagine that the house on Edgewood was a fort during the French and Indian war and we had to stockpile to survive and every moment was precious. Or I would imagine we were a ship and a storm on the horizon line gave lie to the clear skies and we had to batten down hatches and trim sails and such. So I would run around squaring away my toys, which was hardly key to survival, and once I organized the pantry, which was a little closer to a realistic gesture. Anyway it was exciting. Almost exciting enough to look forward to the storm. If you were a child. Now as a young adult and being completely honest with myself there is a little romance in wondering what things would be like if everything were to change and how I would weather a defining challenge. But it is the unrealistic heart of a child that indulges that even for a moment, first to let your mind run to the worst possible scenario, second to embrace it without giving thought to what it really means. Hopefully the adult would triumph in the investment banker skipping lunch and (according to the Dow) dumping shares as if believing in a panic the worst case scenario. And hopefully the adult would triumph in me as well, eating lunch in the bar and flirting with a rosy fantasy of loss.

After lunch I went over to the museum and checked in on the vinyl signage going up in time for the donor events, and placed the last of the 3-D work, and made slow progress through some copy for extended labels. There is some irony in chastising yourself over lunch at the possibility of taking too cavalier an attitude at the loss of material wealth, and then come to work on Warhol whose unabashed celebration of surface deep material culture could give even the cheeriest capitalist pause. A generous interpreter would say this is what he intends, to both revel in the shallow surfaces of mass produced culture and raise the curtain on it, nevertheless generosity is involved. To the extent the show is taken seriously I expect it could have a queasy effect at a time like this, or maybe not and people will just be thrilled with a celebrity name. Anyway I started in on labels. I got stumped though at the medieval derivative stuff, where Warhol takes a unique single work from the history of art and turns it into a flattened, electric colored detail for screen print mass production. Nothing sounded right and still didn't at five so I emailed it home to myself for the weekend and grabbed my bag and headed over to the capitol.


Hillary Clinton was holding a rally for Obama. P. was out in the crowd with a clipboard signing up volunteers, but by the time every Arkansas democrat of any recent prominence at had a wack at the podium he was free and we stood together by the campaign table and listened to Hillary.


The campaign seemed mainly there to work the crowd for volunteers. "Are you not coordinating the rally?" I asked P. "Nope," he said, "in fact it is surprising how little we have to do with it considering it is for Obama." Why are these solo? Does Hillary not want to have the editorial interference? But it was a strong if routine endorsement and the crowd had saved the pitch of its enthusiasm for her. I couldn't help wondering how it felt for her coming back to Little Rock, mainly because I'm unsure about how she feels of her time here, but it hardly matters. She extorted the us to surprise the world again and turn Arkansas blue and blessed us and closed the evening. I felt overwhelmingly tired, probably from standing in uncommonly high heels all day long. P. and I made plans to meet up later and with that I headed for home.