To Do

Maybe I have not mentioned it here so much, but I am going away to the beach on Saturday and am very excited about it. Such beach excitement is unusual for me as I don't particularly enjoy sand. It's just that it has been so long since I've had a proper vacation.

So, now to clear the decks.

I need to go by the Hop one last time. This old diary bar on Cantrell road has been since before the dawn of time (or at least my time). Come August it will finally close up shop and officially move to a downtown sit-down restaurant that looks just like any other box serving food.

I should probably buy a swimsuit. The last one I bought was for my senior trip in high school. It still fit last summer, but shouldn't the elastic be disintegrating by now? Don't want a beach wardrobe malfunction.

I ought to go to the Cox building and rummage around the library resale shelves for good beach reads.

Goodbye Glass

A massive glass exhibition began to come down today. While I'm not the registrar on the show, it's big and will take at least all week to de-install, so I'll probably be spending some time in the gallery helping out.

It is a little sad to see the show come down. There are some beautiful pieces here, many of which are loans and will be leaving shortly. A life size Karen Lamont sculpture reduces Greek statuary to garment only. The molded glass folds around an invisible, empty core. If I could own one masterwork out of the show that would be it. A slightly more feasible (at least spatially) acquisition would be a Sonja Blomdahl bowl or vase. This became a popular game both with curatorial staff and with docents leading school tours: pick your favorite Blomdahl! The floating walls newly painted dark charcoal isolated the Blomdahls from the other two exhibition segments and caused the works to glow iridescent against their stark backdrop. That was my favorite room. A Kaneko work made up of striated glass panels formed a giant wave that visitors could walk inside (one at a time). It took a week to get it up, panel by panel, welded into place with a heavy application of silicone and bracing clamps.

The exhibition opened with a host of talks and tours and workshops etc., including a mobile hot shop down from Washington complete with two guys gamely blowing glass all day. They have no idea how lucky they got with the weather. Arkansas heat at its worst and open furnances... it would have been another contribution to the debate on what constitutes torture. Happily they got lucky, the weather was mild and the courtyard was shady and even the great Sonja Blomdahl came out to blow glass.

Scorcher

105 (41) Heat Index

Still There

Lecture at the Clinton School of Public Service tonight, Developing the Eye of the Collector, as part of their summer series. Local dealer Greg Thompson spoke and a small panel answered questions after.


I mainly went to hear what advice was being offered to local collectors, but couldn't help but admire the building. It was built in the late 1800s, a remnant of the railway wars between the Choctaw and Memphis Railroad and the Iron Mountain Railroad.


The Clinton School is in what used to be the old passenger station. The freight station also survived until 2001, but they tore it down for the Clinton Library. It is a shame really because the surviving building is a beautiful example of the craftsmanship that used to go into brickwork.


Notice the thin mortaring, the perfectly executed pediments over the windows, and all that ornamental decoration in the frieze of fruit and the elaborate cornice. I looked it up when I got home and apparently the contract went to Charles W. Clark of Clark Pressed Brick in Malvern, AR. These buildings were local brick, local craftsmen, and the one that remains is something to see.

Pen to paper...

Rising and shining bright and early. Today: begin work on text for upcoming Warhol exhibition. Yesterday the Brooks Museum in Memphis sent over some of their copy. Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum, where the show originated from, did not include textual materials, so the explanatory stuff is up to us. Plus the additional Pittsburgh pieces coming to us are apparently text free. More fun for me.

The Brooks exhibit has lots of great images. Warhol is pretty well known, though the iconic status of some subjects might have lost a little with time.... Is Ingrid Bergman still an icon in 21st century America? Probably not. Joseph Beuys? Definitely not. So some context will be in order.

Cicadas

Out on my back porch. Beautiful day. Very fragrant too. Is this because the hibiscuses are dying? The squirrels eat them. Who knew? I once was out here and I looked up and there was a squirrel peering at me through the foliage with a pile of guilty evidence around his paws.

Add to the fragrant air a chorus of cicadas. I associate them more with twilight and dusk. Is this because dusky evening scenes in the movies often have the hum of cicadas in the background? Then the central character stares off into the distance to a vanishing horizon with a blank expression that we know is full of pathos and possibly a tinge of regret. We know this because of the humming cicadas. How perfectly it all comes together! I am home alone (isolation), the air is fragrant (nostalgia) with dying hibiscus (death), and the cicadas are singing (moment of mature reflection). I suppose if it weren't midday it might add up to all those things for me. But it is midday. The sun is shining. And there is ice cream in my immediate future. I am re-christening the fragrant air and humming cicadas as hallmarks of a wonderful deep summer day.

Diana

Over on Gaines street is a long low building heading straight back away from the street. This is Camera Work. Moving art is always a hassel, but once you are in Camera Work the hassel fades. The studio is cool and gray and open. You pull up a stool and begin to wish your photography took longer than it does. The stools are part of the attraction, genius roller stools salvaged from a state gov furniture dump and so popular Cindy once had to re-purpose one as a Christmas gift to a deserving client.


Enough about stools. Now I have a new reason to admire Cindy's knack for the quirky-ly useful. Cindy was talking about her and her husband's vacation in the south of France this spring. Does a professional photographer take photos on vacation, I wondered? Yes, she does, but laughed off taking any of her fancy cameras. I just take a Diana she said. What's that? Here, and she rooted around and handed over a digny plastic camera with $1 in marker on the top of it from an old yard sale.


A little plastic camera. People aren't intimidated by cheap plastic, Cindy explained. They will let you come right up to them. You can't require much of them with a cheap camera like that. Focus you select from four general ranges. Aperture is one of three dials on the bottom: Mr. Sun, Mr. Sun and Mr. Cloud, Mr. Cloud. Then she started on all the things you could do with it, double exposures and whatnot, but who cares really. A professional photographer uses a non-digital vintage plastic point 'n shoot for vacations. It made my whole day.

June 2009

Still thinking about Ben Whitehouse. Our curator of drawings is organizing a show of his work for us for next year. Yesterday he came down to the museum to look at the space, present some of his work, discuss installation etc. I wish I could have gotten a close look at an actual painting, because apparently they are quite massive. On the web they looked to me to have an almost absence of gesture, like he was building them up in the thin washes of a watercolorist. In fact I thought of Thomas Girtin initially, although apparently this was barking up the wrong tree. Then we got into his presentation and the current work is more video and a series of painting exercises on the recording of light. The videos are 24 hour HD films of a single subject, which sounds wearisome (secretly how I find Warhol's Empire video) but which here in 3 minute clips of shifting light effects looked stunning. If the future exhibition includes all three sorts of work (oil landscape, oil light painting, video) the audience will see a real jump I think. And the reconciling of everything should be fun. This is what has me thinking.

I wish I could say more about this dichotomy in Whitehouse's work, but I still haven't figured out how far I should go talking about my job and/or artist's work intersecting it on this blog.

Delusions of Simplicity

No myriad of food stuffs at the Little Rock farmer's market. No bazaar of the exotic and the rare. There is a honey man, and the Amish Stutzman family sells breads/jams/jellies, but mostly it's all fruits and vegetables in booth after booth, and then limited to local favorites. (It is July in Arkansas, ergo everyone is selling blackberries etc.) There is no schizophrenic mandate to encompass the flavors of the world here, and this is just my problem. Every time I go to the farmer's market I am overwhelmed with delusions of simplicity. Visions of tailoring my shopping to just my most present needs fill in my head. Then I buy a watermelon. I can never finish them and last year one died of neglect in the fridge without ever having been tasted.





D and I went down to the market this last Saturday. Sermon theme from previous week: self control. Result: moderately focused shopping. On the one hand did lose circulation in pinky finger from plastic shopping bags, on the other hand encountered local produce and did not buy unnecessary watermelon. I did get some blackberries, but D and I had them for breakfast after while X played on the playground.

Simmer on Low

J is from Maine. She has been in Arkansas ten years, but originally she is from Maine. "You have to have grown up here," she said. We were at the River Market taking a break from the hot press of the morning veggie hunters.

"I love the heat, I love the humidity," said D. This surprised me as even Arkansans don't often say they love the humidity, but I knew what she meant after a minute. "In the winter my skin just shrivels up," D continued.

"I love porches," I said. "I love being in the shade in the heat."

I am on a porch now. The air is still and hot. It is the enveloping of the element that you miss in summers elsewhere. The way it wraps you up. How you are still in it so as to live with it. Not moving to fast. It is almost five in the evening now. There is thunder in the distance. I think it is going to storm.

Homer's

Homer's Restaurant is a cinder block building on a half asphalt half gravel lot out on Roosevelt Road by the airport. Around are mostly one story warehouses and shipping depots with long grass round the edges. Inside it's half collared shirts and business suits half service uniforms and trucker hats. The food is home cooking and great veggies. It's not that it's been around forever, it's just that it's cheap and not a chain and for that reason a little anachronistic. Though it does have a website.

E and I went down to Homer's for lunch. E is the local obit writer and brought a file folder of some of his finer pieces. Is there a more quotable state in the Union? I don't think so.

Data Entry Doldrums

Less than enthused about going into work this morning. Yesterday somewhere around the two hundred and forty-six-ish entry I had the bitter reflection that higher education was supposed to spare you from this sort of work, n'est pas? But for various reasons I can't farm it out to an intern. I love my job for its variety, it's just that once a year that variety includes processing hundreds of entries for our annual juried competition. Silver lining: you come across some fairly interesting stuff recording the vital stats on the artistic offerings of seven states. Black cloud: you have to record the vital stats on the artistic offerings of seven states.

Data Entry Survival Pack

1. My near 'n dear Tivoli radio
Gives me NPR for as many unending hours as I need it. Can sync with my ipod. Say no more.

2. Podcasts
Now every morning I load my ipod up with as much free stuff as it can hold. Some early hits:

Start the Week with Andrew Marr: a BBC RadioFour roundtable that is remarkably good, where a varying cast of three or four individuals sit around once a week and discuss each others newest work. I'd listen just to hear Marr segue between topics.

12 Byzantine Rulers: gripping and bloody and completely perspective shifting, perfect for data entry

BBC Farming Today: they have been debating culling badgers for three days now

Great

Borat Sighting?

If so Arkansas and Romania will have something in common...

Junction Bridge, Fourth of July

Retroactive Fourth posting... because I love the river and the weather was so fine that night it deserves commemorating. There was a breeze you see. It came up off the water. Imagine living in Arkansas, in the summer, and being out for a public event that did not involve stultifying humidity. Remarkable.


P had tickets to watch the city's fireworks from the Junction Bridge. The Junction Bridge is an old railroad bridge from the 1880s recently made over into a pedestrian walkway. The tickets were supposedly a goodwill gesture from a local philanthropist who rented the bridge (built with public monies), thereby excluding the public. Oops. They weren't allowing people to move between the upper and lower spans however, citing weight issues, as if this old Union Pacific freight line bridge would evince the slightest tremor even if you stacked it with walruses from one end to the other. So perhaps some private usage was still intact.



The Junction Bridge is just one up from the Broadway Bridge, where the fireworks were set off, so you couldn't be any closer. We got there a little before 9. The sun set over downtown. Up river at Levy a fireworks show was clearly visible. The Arkansas Symphony played pops from the amphitheater on the bank. Somehow Little Rock missed the 20th cen. encrustation of development right to the waters edge. Not prosperous enough prehaps. But this has served us well in one respect. For all the city's westward sprawl and midtown mismanagement, the river remains green.

The fireworks went off right over our heads.




The same philanthropist bankrolls the Riverfest fireworks and for a while it looked like that extravaganza would put the city's to shame. Toward the end though the the city pulled it out with help from a grand finale of multiple exploding rockets and the 1812 Overture.

Typical Fourth Things

Barbecue, picnics, baseball, fireworks....and now add antiquing with relatives

I-40 Antique Mall is on the classy side of the great classy/campy antiquing divide. Yesterday practically everything was on sale, including Jim Rule's Antiques and Fine Books stall where I found this



This is a curiosity. Ossian was supposed to be an ancient Gaelic bard. His epic poems were an 18th century publishing hit. Thomas Jefferson himself was a fan and is rumored to have built Monticello inspired in part by Ossian's romantic fantasies. Sadly, none of it was true. James MacPherson the "translator" was the author instead.



Crystal Hills Antique Mall is the campy yin to the I-40 yang. There is one booth with a great collection of prints, especially historic Arkansas prints from Harpers or Frank Leslie's Illustrated Magazine. Otherwise it is the great American garage sale. The ladies behind the registrar were all in red, white, and blue, plus flag pins. We missed the hot dogs but there were cookies and lemonade in the porcelains section.


Like a refugee from Toy Story


Aforementioned prints, unframed


Creepy Abraham Lincoln

Where are my strawberries and cream?

Watching Wimbledon in the morning. Are there any grass tennis courts in Little Rock? I don't think so. Somebody should put in a grass court. Then we all could wear white linen jackets and serve tea between matches and play at old style Anglophilia, a great Southern tradition.

Last summer my cousin J signed me up for a round robin tennis tournament on all three surfaces: hardcourt, clay, and grass. Minus J a point for not telling me in advance. Add J a point for how much fun grass was, like high-powered badminton on a lawn.

Later today, doubles with the cousins. And with DR, whose birthday it is today. Happy Birthday, DR.

Happy Fourth of July

Thanks, Founders

Really?

Cougar sightings in Arkansas


This 2003 photo was taken near the Winona Wildlife Management Area, not more than 20 miles from west Little Rock.

And this from earlier this year.