the color of my blog

As mentioned, I was in New York last week, as I mentioned. We had a Writers House event, then I got to see my pals - Jocelyn on Thursday night, Blake Friday morning, and Becky on Friday evening. Then there was the half-marathon in Brooklyn on Saturday morning. Not my best time ever, but not my worst either. Some photos from the jaunt are here and here. 

Speaking of New York, I believe I'll find out this week if I got myself a spot in the New York City Marathon this November. I just read (on my new obsession, the New York Times's marathon-themed blog, "Run Well") that only around 5600 of around 57,000 applicants get spots via the lottery, which is a much, much smaller percentage than I realized. I'm not very good at lottery, so don't hold your breath.
 

As I mentioned below, in addition to seeing my dear pals, I spent yesterday with Linden Frederick, William Eggleston, and Alexander Calder at the Forum Gallery and the Whitney in New York. I have to say, I was most excited about seeing Frederick's exhibition, which happened to be in its last day. I was first introduced to Frederick's work on a visit to the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine when Al, Jane and I visited Kristina Ford back in the spring of 2007. Frederick's paintings were the first of a New England artist that made me say, "Yes! That's where I grew up." There's a memoiristic quality to them, perhaps because I'm inserting my own memories into his gritty scenes of dirty snow banks and old roads, glowing tail lights on the horizon, or modest houses in the waning hours of daylight. For me, this is New England. What's isn't New England, at least in the primary sense, is a beautiful, "quaint" built up Cape Cod cottage, an extravagant Vermont ski lodge, or a picture-perfect covered bridge in the middle of October. Frederick not only includes what needs to be there, he focuses on it: power lines, an old basketball hoop, a Shell station. 

I have to say, there was something problematic about this trip to the Forum Gallery though. Here I was on Fifth Avenue, in a gallery literally nestled betweeen Bergdorf Goodman's and Louis Vuitton. I overheard a man ask for a price list and was told that all the pieces went for the same five-figure amount. I was shocked at first, but then I remembered where I was. Since it was the final day of the show, many of the pieces had red dots next to them, indicating that they'd been purchased. I wondered about the kinds of homes these paintings will soon be hanging in. Why do people who can pay this much for art want dirty snowbanks and gas stations? Or, why wouldn't they? Is there an element of "slumming" here? What does Frederick himself think about all this? He keeps it somewhat real, as far as I know, still living and working in the modest town of Belfast, Maine. I suppose what is dissonant about all this for me is that this art depicts real, unmanicured scenes that we all see (no matter how much money you have, there will always be dirty snowbanks, after all), but they were being displayed in an unreal place and sold at an unreal price. It's about the question of access, about form following function, in a way. It makes me think about my own writing work, I suppose, and about myself generally. After all, I'm someone who grew up in Frederick's dirty-snow New England who is now traipsing about Fifth Avenue galleries and feeling "moved" by these rundown, working class scenes. Is there anything irresponsible about this? I'm not sure. "Dissonant," is the most accurate word I've come up with so far.

But back to the art itself. I didn't realize that William Eggleston's photographs would complement Frederick's paintings so well. (Blake was the one to urge us to check out the exhibit - otherwise, I wouldn't have known about it.) First, on a technical level, the two artists are interested in drawing out color and light in their work in order to enhance the overall focus of the piece. Frederick's paintings use light - either the haunting purples of dusk or his seemingly magical depiction of man-made light: a lamp turned on inside a house, a street light, those aforementioned tail lights. Eggleston literally altered the color in his work, being the first to experiment this way with color photography and the technique of dye transferring. His reds become redder, a brown field becomes yellowed, a kitchen sink scene is somehow practically all the same shade. But it's Eggleston's idea of democracy in photography that mostly links him to Frederick for me (you know, in addition to the fact that I happened to spend several hours yesterday looking at their work). Eggleston throught, particularly late in his career, that no scene, image, or detail was any more important than another. I imagine Linden Frederick feels the same way. After all, why paint a gorgeous rocky Maine coastline when you can instead paint a falling apart sign on the side of the road?

It was Alexander Calder that tied this all together for me, with the help of my ol' pal William Carlos Williams, who's always tumbling around in my mind. Calder's art is quite, quite different from Eggleston's and Frederick's. He worked a lot with wire sculpture and eventually, after some conversations with Mondrian, moved to large-scale mobile-like sculptures that rely momentum and gravity based on the weight of the structure itself. This lead me to Williams: "So much depends upon ..." It makes sense, after all, since what I admire in these guys is their modernist quality, their ability to make beautiful what would ordinarily be passed over. In the case of Calder, so much depends upon the weight of the ball at the end of the wire, or upon the angle at which the small ball hits the can. The art literally hinges on itself. In the case of Eggleston, so much depends upon the redness of the child's sweater or the contrast between the woman's hair and skin. And for Frederick, so much depends upon the car's tail lights on the dark dirt road or upon the light at dusk and the lamp on inside the house or upon where the snow meets the sanded road. This art also hinges on itself, in a sense.

On the bus coming home last night, a big truck crept past us and I smiled in admiration at the glow of the tail lights. This occurred to me: has Linden Fredrick done to tail lights what William Carlos Williams did to broken green glass?
 

I took the Bolt Bus up to New York yesterday morning, primarily to meet Blake, Janine, and Blake's gentleman friend Greg for brunch at Morandi in the West Village. But, of course it made sense to make a day of it, so I first hit up the Forum Gallery at 57th and 5th to see an show by Linden Frederick, a Belfast, Maine-based painter I've come to admire over the last few years. More on that later. Then, I hopped on the E train to meet my fellow brunchers and we all enjoyed egg-and-focaccia creations, delicious americanos, and of course, each other's company. Following brunch, we went to the Whitney to see their exhibition on William Eggleston's photography, and their Alexander Calder exhibition. Again, more on that later. Things worked out nicely and after the museuming and a quick poke around Bergdorf Goodman's (where I witnessed a man trying on a $131,000 diamond bracelet and you know I was only in there because it's where Ms. Streisand taped part of her 1965 Emmy-award winning television special My Name is Barbra), I met up with Jocelyn and Alex. Jocelyn led us to Blockhead's Mexican Diner, a sock monkey-themed eating establishment with $3 frozen margaritas. It was glorious, to say the least. On our walk to my bus stop, we encountered none other than Mr. Spongebob Squarepants, along with his friends Elmo and the Grinch, at Rockefeller Center. I made Jocelyn take my picture. Or, she made me pose for a picture. I can't remember exactly how it happened.

Speaking of photos, I actually remembered to take some this time!

The photo above features snow dudes, which are two of the many Christmas decorations that adorned my father's house in Epping this year. They're my favorites. My mother made 'em a whole bunch of years ago. I've written a little ditty about snow dudes, which I'll paste below. Something tells me I might have posted this during a previous yuletide season. Forgive me if that's true.