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.