Too Much To Write About
I have so many things rattling around in my brain that I’m not even going to try to connect all my ideas into a single coherent essay. This is a numbered list kind of day.
Pens
Have pens gotten better? When I was younger, pens smeared all the time. I’m a lefty, and the side of my hand was always covered in ink. Blue pens were particularly likely to smudge so I switched to black. But now ink dries faster and doesn’t smear as much. Am I making this up? Or are other people experiencing this as well? I’ve probably already said this before.
Road Trip!
A couple of weeks ago, my older son and I did a short road trip from Las Vegas to Salt Lake City via the state highways (i.e. back roads) of Nevada. The purpose of the trip was research for my novel, the first chapter of which was sent to paying subscribers a few weeks ago. It was immensely helpful to see the roads my protagonist drives and it will improve the story a great deal. It was also very fun to drive with my son. Road trips are the only part of American car culture that I unabashedly love. They are one of the best ways to get to know someone and become closer to them.
New York Minute(s)
After my adventure in Nevada (and a brief visit to Salt Lake City), I went to NYC for a friend’s birthday. Every time I’m in New York City, it feels like a mini-Amazing Race where we have to visit every possible cultural venue in the region, and last weekend was no exception. On Saturday, we saw the Jack Whitten: The Messenger show at the Museum of Modern Art, the Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers show at the Guggenheim, and two exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Superfine: Tailoring Black Style and Lorna Simpson: Source Notes. We also saw Oh Mary! More on that later.
Jack Whitten’s art, and the exhibit as whole, was the highlight of the day. Whitten was an abstract artist who was constantly innovating his methods of creating art. I’m not typically drawn to abstract art but his work was fascinating, beautiful, haunting - all the kinds of things you want art to be - and the exhibit really featured his voice explaining his work, which he was very good at doing. I thought the museum did a great job with this show. I left with a better understanding of Whitten, his work, and abstract art.
There was also an exhibit of Hilma af Klimt’s botanical drawings at the MoMA, What Stands Behind the Flowers. It’s a smaller exhibit that showcases Klimt’s technical skill at drawing and painting, along with her weirdo mind. I wish I had a tiny fraction of her abilities. I loved this show and want to see it again, preferably with fewer people there.
The Rashid Johnson show was not as engaging, except the final piece, which showcases a video of the artist, his father, and his son engaging in relaxing and reflective activities like looking at the ocean, preparing a meal, playing tennis, and wearing traditional African masks. The video plays in a room constructed of shelves covered with plants and books. The sense I got was that he had created a place of peace and self-care for Black men that is rarely seen (by non-Black people) and maybe rarely felt (by Black Men). That’s a theme throughout Johnson’s work but the other pieces weren’t as interesting to me.
Of the Met shows, I will say this: That place is too effing crowded to see art. Our societal failure to create new public institutions means that one single museum is expected to shoulder the burden of millions of visitors to a completely unfocused collection. Most of the stuff at the Met should either be in a history museum or at a smaller museum dedicated to particular periods and cultures. It’s too exhaustive and crowded to appreciate any single piece. The Superfine exhibit would have been a great place to stop and learn and think about the cultural phenomenon of the Black Dandy. Instead it was packed with selfie-takers and so many people that it was claustrophobic. A lot of people were very dressed up. It’s obvious that a lot of Black folks are very excited to have a forum to consider their own culture, and dressed accordingly. Which was awesome! And impossible to appreciate because of the volume of people trying to move around the room. I hope this exhibit travels to a lot of other cities where it might have the chance to be seen less encumbered by tourists.
Oh, Mary!
The play had some funny parts and the cast was excellent but I didn’t think it was as funny as people said it was and it was certainly not as funny as my fellow audience members thought it was. People were GUFFAWING from the very first minute, which made it hard to decide whether I thought any particular joke was funny. I tended to fall on the side of It’s Not That Funny because the audience seemed to be forcing itself to have fun, goddammit. The ending was funny and I would have watched a whole 90 minutes of it. I’d say that was best part of the show, along with its very short run time.
Music
That was just Saturday. On Sunday, we visited the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in the morning and then headed to Public Records for our friend’s party, which was really just an indie rock show that he’d put together. We saw The Ladybug Transistor, with whom I had not been previously acquainted but liked a lot; Ron Sexsmith, who was also new to me, not really my vibe, but a good singer; and The Magnetic Fields, whom I love. The last time I saw The Magnetic Fields, it was at the Fox Theater with 2,000 other people, so to see them in a basement with 150 friends and friend-adjacent people was pretty freaking great.
The whole show also reminded me of one of the reasons I love my friends: they love to make stuff for each other. The Birthday Man (not a boy; it was his 50th) wanted to share his favorite music with his friends. He’s also a musician but this was his way of supporting his friends and sharing music. He got another friend to make a limited edition run of beautiful posters for the event. Another friend brought him a set of the handmade 7-inch covers she had silk-screened for him 30 years ago. She also brought me a T-shirt she’d made back then that featured the 100,000 Theologians, which was a comic book that featured she and me and yet another friend. All of the creative stuff made me want to go home and make a bunch of cool shit and send it to everyone I know.
Stuff I’m Reading
My capacity to read new stuff waxes and wanes but I did have a good run a few weeks ago. I read Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong, which was a thought-provoking and interesting reflection on where (culturally) Asian Americans are situated in our cultural and the conflict and ambivalence Hong feels about being an Asian American. I also found it useful for reconsidering my own writing about being the daughter of a gay man.
I also read Many Hands Make a Quilt, a zine about Radical Quilting, which I am happy to lend to any of my sewing/crafty friends.
Two other things I read which are seemingly unrelated but which triggered some thinking in me: Bothroi at Centocamere by Jed Caesar and The Anthrologists by Aysegul Savas. Bothroi, according to Jed, are “pits associated with ritual feasting” that have been excavated by archaeologists to understand the “burial sites of sacred materials.” Jed sees the excavated items as totemic objects which may have been buried with a ritualistic or artistic purpose that is not preserved in the archaeological process. In The Anthropolists, the protagonist reflects on stones she sees arrayed around a sacrifical pool at an archaeology museum, “Of course, we reminded each other, these beautiful objects were buried underground because their invisible value was deemed greater than their beauty.”
Both these passages came to my mind the other day when I saw a woman carrying a doggy poop bag full of seashells. I’ve made my feelings about people removing shells from the beach pretty clear (I hate it, see My Millions). I truly believe that the transient beauty of removing objects from nature is less valuable than the purpose those objects serve in nature. All this, taken together, has me thinking about an art project that I might start as soon as I finish one of my many other projects.
What Else?
I had a whole other mini-essay planning about democratic socialism but I think I’ve probably said enough for now. Catch me later on this one.
Have a great week and go be creative and then make me something and then I’ll make you something and we’ll send our cool stuff back and forth in letters we write to each other like in 1993.
I read about your adventures and feel exhausted!