Radical influences

I first visited Johnston as a high school senior on a sleepover visit in 1974 or early 1975. My high school guidance counselor recommended that I consider Johnston specifically because she thought I would be overly susceptible to radical influences if I were to go to Berkeley, which I must have mentioned to her as one possible place I was thinking of applying to. If asked, I would have described myself as a pacifist, and if asked again as an anarchist, in my political convictions. All the result of book-reading… I was reading books on “experimental education” that ranged from liberal excoriations of the discriminatory school system to instant anthologies of high school underground newspaper writing to absolute condemnations of all forms of education in schools as such, and skating across the muddle of positions both casually dismissive of and utterly subservient to my opportunities for achievement in high school: writing angst-filled pieces in English classes, taking lit and psychology and sociology through Moorpark, the local community college, and doing what needed to be done to get my A’s in everything else I had to take.

Back from Mendocino

We spent three days at the Cottages at Little River, very pleasant and perfect for families with small kids, though not cheap. Elena enjoyed kicking a ball around on the lawn, playing at the Wiggly playground in Fort Bragg, roasting her first marshmallows at the outdoor gas grill (we bought a S'Mores kit from the office), and watching Stuart Little with us from the sofa bed as a special treat before going to bed late... Nothing memorable in the way of meals, though the service was very good at the Mendocino Hotel and at a place called Egghead's in Fort Bragg which provided some wonderful Wizard of Oz action figures for Elena to play with while we waited for our brunch.

The great forgetting

            In spite of the great forgetting, I still find attractive the idea of texts giving a kind of derivative structure to my memories.  Perhaps it is now the concept of forgotten texts, rather than the great overarching “text” I had hoped to find and read to decipher that earlier self, but the structure of history seems surprisingly unaffected by the presence of particular facts.  And obviously, I have nowhere else to look.

 

A third explanation

            A third explanation is closely related to the previous two, and seems the most likely to me as I write.  It’s that in the first place, I wasn’t really paying very close attention to much of my reading because of the richness of the fabric of the nonliterary experiences to which I was being exposed for the first time (including, during my second year, daily exposure to certain substances at times when I might otherwise have been engaged in sober thought).  And in the second place, I really didn’t do all that much reading, and little if any of the difficult variety, because much of the focus of my “academic” life at Johnston was itself experiential, consisting as it did of classes in poetry-writing, drama, and experiential psychotherapeutic exercise, with my forays into literature and philosophy confined to the lighter classes on offer.  Others at Johnston were indeed reading the Greeks and Kant, but I breathed that smoke at second or third hand.

 

 

A second explanation

            A second explanation for the library of Johnston textbooks lost to conscious memory is that the missing books really weren’t very good or important, and that this is in fact demonstrated by my inability to remember anything from them of a substantive nature or applicable to my recollection of my life at the time.  This hypothesis grants a wondrous power of judgment and discernment to the mechanics of my remembering, and gives my unformed eighteen-year-old mind the great tribute of presuming it capable of understanding anything of significance that might have passed before it on paper.

Possible Explanations (the First)

            Several possible explanations for the lacunae in my readings at Johnston as now recollected occur to me.  The most obvious is just that over thirty years have gone by, and that’s long enough to bury most memories under the sheer volume of succeeding events, even if those events consist largely of getting up in the morning, going to work, and having a couple of beers in the evening.  The hope contained in this first hypothesis is that only a Proustian catalyst is required to bring back the lost memories whole and having a freshness which the stories I’ve told and re-told myself in the meantime are wholly lacking.

Archaeology of Knowledge

            Between 1975 and 1977 I attended Johnston College, a hippie school associated with the University of Redlands which at that time had its own independent accreditation.  I dropped out of school because of concerns about money and ideas about ideals, and within a year or two after that Johnston College was re-absorbed into the University as the Johnston Center, where it has thrived ever since.  I begin with the notion that the whole account of this, my purest attempt at a “liberal education,” might be structured through the books I read both inside and outside of classes while there.

            But in setting out my list, I discover that I’ve forgotten many if not most of the books I read in classes, especially the ones that would lend this exercise a certain kind of intellectual credibility.  What remains are for the most part either books that were best-sellers in 1976 and 1977, and justified in classes either by instructors or students like myself for their “relevance,” or more abstruse works that are the most obvious displays of the period’s intellectual fashion (post-structuralism rolling steadily into deconstructionism).  I find no foundational texts, nor even rigorous surveys of the fields of my interests except perhaps for Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism.

The Black Hole Wars

I listened to Leonard Susskind's The Black Hole Wars on CD in the car, meaning I probably didn't get half of what I was supposed to get, but on the other hand that I might have absorbed more (consciously or unconsciously) than I normally do when reading a book of popular science. The question of what the popular reader actually gets out of a book like this, which is really trying to communicate the content of the science as well as how the science is done, interests me a lot. Something like ten years ago I listened to The Origin of Species on tape while driving, and although again there was a lot that I missed (sometimes while struggling to maintain my alertness on I-5...) the experience of listening to Darwin's arguments "in their entirety" aloud was transformative, something like what I imagine it must have been like for citizens listening to philosophers in the agora. Susskind is attempting to convey the doing of science in the same way. It's a different kind of popular science from either Brian Greene, who as I see it is working to convey the beauty of the vision as a kind of done deal, a vision as it were of how everyone will see the universe working once string theory and its cosmologies have been proven out somehow; and different again from that of Not Even Wrong, whose argument derives from being "inside the argument" but not able to convey all of the things that make the string theorists wrong except at some point in a qualitative way (convincing as one reads long, convincing because of the philosophical holes the author seems to be illuminating in the Landscape theory, the basic weakness of the possibility that it might not be possible to ever verify or disprove the theory).

Nixonland

The town I grew up in, the city of Orange, was very close to Yorba Linda, where Nixon was from before his family moved to Whittier, and I tend to think of it in retrospect as part of "Nixonland." But that would be "Nixonland" in a different sense from that used in Rick Pearlstein's fantastic book of history of the sixties and early seventies. I don't know whether the adjective to apply to this epic is "Tolstoyan" because of its scope and moral vision, or something more comic because the times inherently have an aspect of slapstick and Rabelaisian excess. Either way, the book is an epic, the best recollection of all the insanities of the era I've seen. When I started reading the book a couple of months ago, I read (or skimmed through, rather, looking at the pictures) Barry Miles' book Hippie in parallel. Nixonland was a terrific antidote to the fundamental dishonesty of looking at publicity photographs and self-presentations as history; though on the other hand, the Miles book provided pictures where they were wanting in Pearlstein's, so all in all the less substantial and more one-sided book was still helpful. But Pearlstein's book is a non-fiction novel about both the character of Richard Nixon and the character of American democracy. He allots responsibility between the hippies, the liberals, and the right-wingers in a way that seems to me fundamentally just, though because he does it through storytelling, perhaps being deliberately reminiscent of the sixties' New Journalism (certainly Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson come to mind ) I'm not sure he can claim to have done so as a historian rather than as a brilliant novelist.

On Chesil Beach

I finished reading Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach two nights ago, a short, beautifully constructed novel with the resonance of a Philip Larkin poem.  The plot is not intricate, but the manner of its telling is, without being unnatural.  The past seems to take its rightful place in a movement toward an outcome in the present, the "present" being almost fifty years ago (the same general time period as the setting of Mad Men), the past reaching no more than two decades beyond that.  In the past, we are given both a development of character, and information about what might have shaped it, that information never conclusively tied to the characters' fates, which play out here to their sad end. Psychobiography is possible, even encouraged, but never necessary, for an evaluation of the protagonists' moral qualities and failures.  I liked this book very much.

The Plot Against America

We bought Philip Roth's The Plot Against America right after it came out, and I started reading it then, but somehow got distracted, both by what seemed an opening that was dictated by the overall historical setup of this alternative history, and by some reviews that deflated my enthusiasm enough to cause me to put the book down fifty pages in and not pick it up again for a year. Reviews will do that, even if I don't have any idea of whether the reviewer shares my tastes, thinks like me, etc. (That's the thing about "good" rhetoric -- it's effective on a primate level even when one is attempting to resist its irrationality.)

When I finally did give the book another try, I found it enjoyable and deep, though it still carries the baggage of Roth's trying to imagine a different route through the years leading to and through World War II. But over and above all of that "political" stuff (and it is by no means "political" in the formulaic way most politically correct fiction is now -- it's not, for example, an attempt to directly parallel a fictitious Lindbergh fascist presidency to Bush's terms in office) The Plot Against America reads as a memoir, of a time and place, and of a child's understanding of what his parents are and what they are able to do in the world, for themselves and to protect him. The book is an absolutely essential counterpoint to all the other pictures Roth has given of his parents, many of them comic and seemingly unsympathetic. Here he finds the heroic in the imagined actions of his father and mother under circumstances that never happened -- but what if they had? I tried to make the case to Jenny after reading this book that much of Philip Roth's moral vision has to do not with what people actually end up doing, but what they have the potential to do -- a potential that can only be explored through the medium of fiction, and best through the expanse of something like a novel, where the full case in all its ambiguity can be made.

On the Difficulty of Starting Again

There are no rules about what one needs to add or say. In spite of that, I've been thinking of adding an entry as an obligation I've been unable to get around to for a couple of months now. And after a certain period something like a hardening occurs, and it's no longer a question of adding an entry, but of starting again, re-starting if you will. Blogging is now something I've dropped and am attempting to get back into, like exercise. Starting again has none of the redemptive overtones of starting over, and in a sense I need a little redemption to really feel myself back in the swing of it. Instead of which, I have the suspicion that I may not get around to this again regularly, and that the activity has passed into the great pool of things I do or have done very occasionally, spend a lot of time thinking about as potentiality, but never realize. I guess we'll see.

Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth

We went to see the new Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I movie a few weeks ago, and enjoyed it enough to finally get the old one (as old as 1998? that was a surprise -- and to see that it was made the same year as Shakespeare in Love when we looked it up to see whether it had received any Oscars) and watch it on DVD last night. Jenny stayed up late to watch the special features, and pointed out to me just as I was going to bed that the director made no bones about historical accuracy not being the point of the movie(s): he started with the icon, and made the story fit the icon. Elizabeth I as super-hero, as it were.

Our famous doctor

Jenny's ob-gyn, Laura Minikel, is in Time magazine because of the long-distance relationship she's had with her husband for years. The image of her is in consequence a specially interesting one -- her face on TV, with her husband in Denmark looking on.

White Chalk

I got P.J. Harvey's new album, White Chalk, a few weeks ago, and have been listening to it in the car when there's an opportunity (Elena is very clear about her listening preferences right now, and if it isn't Raffi or Music Together or Les Garcons Joufflus, she wants me to change the music or turn it off). I have to admit that although P.J. Harvey's more raucous music has an energy I like, and which can become mesmerizing in concert (I saw her at Slim's with Stevie some years ago, and then at the Warfield a few years later with Richard Retecki), I can't listen to that side of her oeuvre over and over the way I can her more melodic work, like the very first album, To Bring You My Love, and the one she did with John Parish and now this one.

Back to Monterey for a day

We drove down last night, stayed at the Munras Lodge which is maybe a block from the much more expensive Casa Munras (justified only by its bloodwarm pool). The night manager was a friendly Pole who allowed me to practice my two Czech phrases on him after he noted that my name meant "freedom" in Czech, and that he was from Czech's "northern neighbor." We drove by Mexcal, hoping to have dinner there again, but the banner had been removed from the building and the place looked very closed, although there were no notices posted indicating it had closed for good -- just nothing that would indicate the restaurant was still a going concern. We went to Denny's instead and had food that was probably prepared from chubs. To the Aquarium today, where it turns out the area known as the Splash Zone, most suitable for toddlers, is closed for refurbishment and won't reopen until March 17 of next year. However, we did see a lot of wonderful fish, including the young great white shark, and had some enjoyable conversations with volunteers who know the place intimately. Then we had lunch for the second time at the Bistro Moulin, which makes a very tasty French onion soup and a fine platter of mussels. Finally, before leaving we played for an hour at Dennis the Menace park, where we met other parents and kids, including a woman from Czech with her two kids.

Before the Dawn

After reading Klein's book The Dawn of Human Culture I jumped right to a more recent book on the same subject, Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn, in hopes of learning where the science has gone in the three or four years since Klein's book was published. Although there was some good information about what has been happening in the field, chiefly due to the separate lines of scientific development going on in the application of genetics to the field, the presentation was totally different, and it took me half the book before I realized that what I was reading was journalism, not science. What it comes down to in my view is that journalists are willing to cut corners on science for a good story, whereas for a truly good popular scientific writer the science always is the story. There are intermediate cases: Brian Greene would be one such in my experience. His books about physics and string theory are meant to be popular scientific arguments, but it's possible that when the subject gets too close to the cutting edge that he too is guilty of cutting some corners. I mean, the guy in my opinion was almost single-handedly responsible for string theory being seen as scientific orthodoxy by the general public.

Anyway, Wade is ever anxious to point out the ways in which concepts like "race" actually do have scientific validity. His game seems to be to go over areas that touch on a lot of political sensitivities and see whether anything explosive, and yet "proven" by some combination of genetic evidence and probabilistic reasoning (which is never made explicit enough to be understood in the book itself), can be drawn out of applying natural selection to modern human history. Whereas an author like Klein is always willing to describe the paucity of evidence involved in getting to the prevailing view of human history, Wade always leans toward a sophisticated version of "the scientists tell you so" when discussing why a particular scientist's view is or is not orthodox, confirmable, or based on evidence that is still in a state of flux. Wade's book left a bad taste in my mouth, as much as I appreciate and agree with his foremost argument, which is that the idea that natural selection stopped when human culture arose is absurd.

Joseph Mitchell and Joe Gould

I finished Up in the Old Hotel, the collection of Joseph Mitchell's works, last night. The final piece in the book is "Joe Gould's Secret," which qualifies in my mind for the category of nonfiction novel and is a kind of depressing, but Borgesian, masterpiece. Joe Gould and his vast work-in-progress, the Oral History, both are and aren't (because the guy, and his secret, were real) stand-ins for the reader's and Joseph Mitchell's own highest aspirations. Mitchell doesn't simplify the moral dilemmas he finds himself in at any point, and there's a sense in which the reader becomes implicated as well, in his relationship with a mentally imbalanced, self-promoting homeless person who's capable of flashes of wit as well as delusions of grandeur. Where most of us would "do the right thing" in terms of what seems to be asked of us today and pull away (we've been taught by a kind of weakened, and evil, but comfortable, version of Alcoholics Anonymous theology that we are actually being most moral when we do nothing to support or interact with an alcoholic or person of similar disorder), Mitchell is unable to do so, and conveys a palpable sense of being besmirched by his choices with regard to Gould, no matter what they are. It's a marvelous, and still morally relevant work that Dostoevsky would be proud to have written, I think.

Mary Heilmann

Is the subject of cover stories in both Art in America and Artforum this month, and I received both magazines on the same day. Many of the same images are used in her stories in both magazines -- in fact, the cover image from Art in America is reproduced at almost the same size in Artforum. I almost never read stories straight through in these magazines, even stories about painters, so what's interesting for me at the moment is wondering whether the two stories might not even be identical -- I do remember the phrase "painter's painter," actually the phrase "painter's painter" itself already enclosed in double quotation marks, being found in both stories. But even if the two stories were the same word for word, I'd probably take them differently because of their subtly different contexts: the Art in America story being one that would present a less-known artist to the general "art public," whereas the Artforum story (which does have an additional article of objets "curated" by Heilmann to distinguish it) presents the painter as a source of both painting practice and conceptual theory. I could read the first story as an introduction to Heilmann's work, and then read the second one as an inculcation into her intentions, and disregard the fact that the words were the same in each story...

Garcons Joufflus

I've been spending most of my listening time in the car (driving to and from BART, or going to the library after work with Elena) on Stephane Calbo's Les Garcons Joufflus, subtitled "Muzak meets Pop on the Computer," an addictive and eclectic assembly of instrumental tunes that hearkens to Lush and shoe-gazing msuic of the early 90's as well as to the whole range of French, Italian and American pop of the 60's and 70's. It's an absolutely wonderful album that establishes its own unique world of emotional tonalities, all derived from but unlike the familiar ones...

Inland Empire

We've had David Lynch's move Inland Empire out from Netflix for a month, and finally started watching it last Saturday when we had our friends Michael and Lesley over for dinner. We made it through about an hour and a half of it at that sitting, and then I watched the remaining almost hour and a half later this week, albeit without my full attention. If I didn't know that the movie had been made by David Lynch, I might have taken the movie for the work of a younger auteur who wanted to construct an hommage to Tarkovsky and Sukorov (and probably Bela Tarr, but I have to admit I've never seen a Bela Tarr movie) and Lynch all at once. It's not just the fact that half the movie is made in Polish and apparently in Poland, it's the languorous shots, the use of shadows, and even one shot that looked like a direct reference to the fantastic scene in Tarkovsky's Nostalghia where the camera traverses a mini-landscape that appears to be located entirely inside a building.

The Lives of Others

The opening scenes of this year's Academy-award winning Best Foreign Film promised a compelling experience of going inside the head of a participant in a system of political belief we know little about, except that it is going to implode in a matter of three or four years. The question of how people in the secret police of a utopian world convince themselves that they're doing good certainly fascinates me and bears a relation to debates that might be going on, unknown to me, inside the "war on terror" in our own country. Unfortunately, after that promising beginning the movie for me was a long unravelling into implausibility and unmotivated sentiment -- a big disappointment.

The Dawn of Human Culture

Feeding my continuing fascination with the historical origins of consciousness and art, I finished reading Richard G. Klein's The Dawn of Human Culture last night. Klein demonstrates as well as any scientist I've read how well scientific practitioners (with a little help perhaps) can translate their work for a non-scientific audience. The book reminds me of the work of Ernst Mayr in that respect (I've never understood why Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould are considered such wonderful writers about science). The book is also an extended exploration of how difficult it is to make conclusive statements about human origins based on the available physical evidence, meaning the very meager collection of bones that Klein catalogues exhaustively through the book. Evolutionary theory is augmented by a kind of storytelling that is reminscent, as Klein points out, of the way legal cases are made.

Consciousness in the brain stem

An article in the September 15 issue of Science News claims that kids without cerebral cortexes display enough basic evidence of consciousness to invalidate the automatic identification of the possibility of consciousness with a human cerebral cortex. The implications drawn in the story range from questioning when a person can be considered to be in a vegetative state, to whether newborns can feel pain, to whether the form of consciousness achieved by these kids extends to all vertebrates. As I understand the hypothesis being proposed, all of these entities have in common the inability to retain any meaningful memory of what happened to them more than an instant ago, except through behavioral types of conditioning (which is still enough for some of the kids in the story to learn to associate sounds like "mama" with particular people for whom they feel emotions). So are we forced by our inability to treat brown rats as conscious beings with rights (at any rate, I'm certainly unable to do so) to insist on a certain threshold of continuing memory for full consciousness, and to devalue the actual experience of consciousness, where actual suffering and experience of pain and pleasure as well as "being in the moment" occur? Would our ability to somehow use the memories of others to replace our own (by using Google, for instance, or because someone's willing to take care of us) make up for our own lacks in guaranteeing our rights as conscious beings? Where does this slippery slope end?

It's about water

Final installment of my rant about global warming, for now, is to raise the issues I heard raised by Larry Dale, most recently as mentioned a couple of posts ago in a visit he and his co-researchers at the Climate Change Center made to a group of us at PG&E. The relationships of gasoline, coal and natural gas to global warming are obvious -- they're all fossil fuels (refined or unrefined), and the fact that they're in some ways substitutable for each other raises complicated and interesting questions about trying to limit their use. But water?

Well, from my perspective working at PG&E, water is a renewable generation source, again substitutable for other energy sources such as fossil fuels. But what Larry Dale's research has been about, the changes in how water will be "delivered" to the state of California by our friendly neighborhood climate, affects the use of water for consumption as much as it does the use of water for electricity production. What we think we know so far is that:

1) Global warming will reduce California's ability to store its annual water supply in the Sierra snow pack, effectively eliminating a huge state reservoir of all the man-made ones.

2) California may get almost the same amount of rain, on average per year, fifty or a hundred years from now as it does now. But the characteristics of the rainfall patterns may be drastically different: the general picture is of rains starting earlier and ending earlier, on average, making the storage of water to serve the period of its greatest demand, the dry summer, more difficult. Also, weather may be more volatile and more rain may come in the form of "extreme" events like larger storms.

3) Because of the still enormous supplies of water underground in the state, California is blessed or cursed with the possibility of almost directly substituting energy use for natural weather patterns in maintaining its water supplies. This doesn't mean our droughts haven't been real, as I take it, but that at a high enough cost in energy our essential needs could be met even under future scenarios that deliver a lot less water from the mountains to the farms and cities.

It's about coal

Continuing on with the subject of climate change, one of the presentations at the Rutgers forum I mentioned in my first blog post that really stuck with me cast doubt not only on emissions trading but on a carbon tax as a way of constraining greenhouse emissions. The point of this presentation was a simple one: both coal and natural gas produce greenhouse emissions, but coal is a much, much cheaper way of producing electricity (when it can be produced close to the source, that is -- otherwise transportation costs can change the relative economics). So in areas where coal is economic, a carbon tax is actually going to have the perverse effect of knocking the cleaner natural gas power plants (cleaner in considering all the other pollutants in addition to carbon dioxide that power plants produce, like sulfur and nitrogen oxides) out of the running before they do coal -- in other words, a carbon tax across the board will make coal more rather than less attractive as our major source of electric generation, unless a really massive amount of renewable or nuclear power is developed to knock coal out of the running as well as natural gas. And the latter development, in the proportions needed to have that effect, is probably a twenty year development project at least, so in the meantime (meaning most of the rest of my lifetime, at any rate) even with a carbon tax we're stuck with coal. And the corollary of this analysis is the equally grim point that if we choose to unilaterally abandon coal, we're probably back in the Laffer argument that the only way we can reduce greenhouse emissions in the short term by any substantial amount is by constraining economic activity... All of this thinking about coal is especially useful for those of us in California who don't use coal to generate electricity in the first place, and so tend to forget how important it is in the rest of the U.S.

It's about gasoline prices

I've been mulling a couple of issues related to global warming, the result of attending a forum on the subject here in the City a couple of weeks ago, and then having Larry Dale from the U.C. Berkeley Climate Change Center come to PG&E for an exchange of information just this week.

At Hanson Bridgett's forum on the state of renewable energy, the "least political" (actually maybe the most political) and most controversial speaker, as you might expect, was the academic, Severin Borenstein, the local media's favorite talking head on energy issues in the state of California. The main points I garnered from what he had to say were

1) Approaches based on decisions about how to reduce greenhouse emissions based on the current view and centralized incentive systems (renewable portfolio standards as well as cap and trade systems) are likely to have unforeseen effects and may not work. (I would note that Arthur Laffer has been campaigning recently against the cap and trade initiatives from the vantage of his pure free enterprise ideology, on what seems to me a pretty reasonable argument that caps may ultimately have to be implemented as pure constraints on our energy usage, if we can't find substitutes for fossil fuels like coal, so that there aren't enough carbon credits around to trade.)

2) The only approach that is really likely to work is a carbon tax, because the economic incentives aren't tied to any particular kind of technology (allowing new technologies or solutions to come into the mix on an equal footing with the current favorites), and because it's the best way to price externalities. Severin didn't go into the utter impossibility of proposing a tax that would be seen at the gas pump at a time when the Democrats, of all people, have made a huge issue of high gas prices...

3) The climate change deniers are mutating into climate change "adapters," meaning that the perspective of those who don't see a point to limiting greenhouse emissions is becoming that we can't do anything about reversing global warming, so let's make the best of it. Severin expressed his opposition to that perspective on the grounds that the "adapters" are thinking in terms of averages, whereas the catastrophic effects of extreme events are so drastic that we really need to be trying to change the trajectory rather than pretending that we can ride the wave. I'm actually not sure if that's the right approach to take: I don't want conservative ideologues controlling the debate on social adaptation to climate change, and ultimately I'm not convinced that science indicates we can do anything to change the trajectory (and that's not to deny the human role in climate change or the fact of its happening). But the moral part of his argument, which I take to be that those who have caused or exacerbated climate change bear moral responsibility when extreme events caused by that climate change affect others.

Sculpture versus the work

Lesley and Michael came over for potato pancakes last night, and we watched a DVD I've had out from Netflix since mid-July which turned out to be two distinct documentaries on Donald Judd and Tony Cragg. We've been talking about going to Marfa, Texas with Lesley and Michael for a couple of years, Michael having emigrated from Texas to California and still having family there, so the Judd documentary was like a vicarious version of our dreamed-of road trip. As for Tony Cragg, we bought an etching of his from Crown Point Press a few years ago without knowing anything about him, and all I had learned since was that he had won the Turner Prize back before that was the key to becoming a billionaire British artist. Watching the two documentaries in sequence was most interesting in terms of trying to get past the rhetorical devices that made Cragg "look bad" in the inevitable comparison between the two. It's clear, first of all, that Judd has a "theory" and displays work that has an attention to ongoing consistency and that these inherently play better when confronted with a video camera whose purpose, like Naughty Noo-Noo's, is to gobble up anything that moves. Tony Cragg's work, as viewed through a half-hour lens, looks like it's all over the place, the range being such that almost anyone is likely to wince at some piece of his even while considering a couple of others pretty interesting. Also, he's portrayed in the thick of managing his career as a sculptor as well as making art, whereas Judd is completely separated from either the creative or the physical processes that went into creating his works (which would have been great to see). It's Judd, by the way, who gets the chance before Cragg (the way this DVD is organized) to state that he never refers to his work as sculpture, a way of handily sweeping Cragg and his cohorts into the dustpan of history without ever even having a fair fight about it.

Ancient memories and spirits

Our friend David Miller has a really wonderful interview with Hiroshi Sugimoto on the subject of spirituality in his on-line SFGate column "Finding My Religion" this week. Sugimoto divulges some amazing information about the travails and costs of creating his "Sea of Buddha" photograph in the interview, and makes clear his sense of not being a Buddhist artist, at least not in the sense of what Buddhism means to him in Japan. I loved Sugimoto's comment that in the process of doing the conceptual investigations that are his art process, he "sometimes stirs up ancient memories and spirits" (hence the title of this installment). Given the overall tone of the interview, he could've stopped with the "ancient memories" and been a logically consistent skeptic -- but he added the "spirits," whatever those are, into the mix.

Back from New York

Jenny, Elena and I spent five days (actually, four full days and six nights, plus flight time) in New York City and got back yesterday. Traveling with a twenty-two month old was wonderful and frustrating. The opportunity to see the world again through utterly fresh eyes is one of the great privileges of parenthood, of course, but the counter to that is that one's own visions of how one is going to experience things tend not to work out as planned. The Museum of Natural History's dinosaur bones and dioramas were perfect places to point at things and ask Elena "What's that?" She's at a point where she has enough categories to place things in that she can come up with a plausible, and sometimes creative, answer to almost any question like that (so for example she tended to identify dioramas of antelope or deer as "cows," "goats," or "horses" even as she internalized the words I said to her, "antelope" or "deer" or better, "koodoo" or "okapi"). She's also a bit obsessed right now with sea creatures, and spent a lot of time looking at fish or the remains of fish in the museum as at the Central Park Zoo. In fact, she spent as much time looking for a sticker on the floor with a picture of a sea star (aka starfish) that happened to be repeated throughout the dinosaur exhibits to point toward a special exhibition, as she did on anything else, running excitedly to the next sticker and sitting down on the floor to look closely at it each time.

The other side of the coin was that I saw a lot of the paintings I was hoping to see, but for no more than five or ten seconds at a time. Matisse's Red Studio, Picasso's Demoiselles D'Avignon,
the huge Kandinsky paintings, the vast Pollock, all at the MOMA, and then the Van Eyck and Workshop Last Judgement at the Met, were all seen with half an eye. I was able to take a bit more time in the Neo Rauch exhibition, and looking at some of the twentieth century work at the Met -- maybe Elena was napping. Warhol's monumental Mao was one of my favorites.

A serious museum

Kenneth Baker delivered a balanced though slippery non-story about developments at the DeYoung Museum in the Chronicle yesterday. What it comes down to is that people are complaining about an apparent softening of content in exhibitions at the Fine Arts Museums, in spite of three very substantial shows either on now (Hiroshi Sugimoto at the DeYoung and a huge exhibition of works on paper from the Achenbach at the Legion of Honor) or coming soon (Louise Nevelson). The substantial shows have been counterweighted by a series of fashion and decorative art exhibitions, as well as a coming exhibition of glasswork by Dale Chihuly. I have to say that I don't think the criticism is very substantial, but it's a glass half full situation -- all a matter of how one interprets things through the prism of public relations. I really do think the Sugimoto show is one of the best presentations of contemporary art to have happened at the DeYoung, and in fact I think it holds its own against shows at SFMOMA because of the respect given to the Sugimoto's decisions about how to present his work. As a docent I've never seen audiences so engaged with contemporary work at the DeYoung, and it's been a great pleasure to tour the show with people willing to take time to respond to the work as well as ask questions and discuss their own responses to it. I don't remember any comparable exhibition being put on during the tenure of Harry Parker, so I give the new director the credit for bringing Sugimoto here and not doing it in a cursory way (i.e., re-hanging based on the previous venues).

As for the fashion shows, and likewise the decorative arts and craft art shows, I tend not to go through them myself (another example Baker could have highlighted was the exhibition of French jewelry recently at the Legion) even though in the back of my mind I think that as someone who wants to be an artist I should be looking at them as source material just as I do anything else that's in my world. But these shows are great favorites with my fellow docents, because of their personal tastes and also because they tend to be experiences that can be nicely augmented with information that can be communicated during a tour. I guess Monet in Normandy, the great "real art" crowd-pleaser of recent years at the Legion of Honor, was a more substantial program than the fashion shows -- but really, on the ground it all comes down to pleasure.