MOMA and Mom

Last weekend my mother, visiting from Maine, and I went to MOMA and took in the Joann Verburg photography exhibit, which was really quite something. Her luminous large format dyp- and tryptychs are incredibly lush and detailed, inviting and calm -- and an interesting juxtaposition to both Serra's rather cold gigantic curved sculptures and the Soviet Modernist offerings nearby. There's a nice interview with the curator here.

While in the cafe, I had moment of gustatory epiphany, having ordered the delicate cheese board with figs and the Italian semi-soft cow's milk sottocenere al tartuffo. Wow. I am in big trouble. Luckily, Murray's Cheese Shop carries it because I can't go on without it. It's really that good.

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Oh -- and I'd be remiss to not mention the time spent with my mother, a spry 70-something tennis player, reader, minister, and all-around good egg. She arrived with this huge packback, bearing books and unbounded enthusiasm for her 2-day stay that never flagged. Beyond the great food and art we consumed, my favorite moments were when she was taking a nap and I settled in to read her 20-page essay about her mother who died earlier this year. It was by turns devastating and hilarious and offered countless insights into a woman I barely knew and a life (my mother's) that I knew only tangentially. From ski outtings with ski poles made of broom sticks and boots afixed to skis with canning jar rubbers, kittens who drowned in a crock of fermenting beer ("Oh well, we'll drink it anyway!") to my grandmother's weaving business in Arkansas, the essay details an incredible life (lives) of poverty and loss but also rampant creativity and pluck. While immensely entertaining, it was also unbearably sad to read: "Her death broke my heart, cracked it open in its hard places, in my private, unprotected places -- and unexplored geography I'd never really visited." This essay did the same to me, on a microcosmic level, and left me sad, grateful, and wishing to tell my own stories, of my own mother, my own life -- her own amazing life -- and do it before it's too late. I guess I've started, here. Let's hope I have the energy and guts to continue.

Richard Rules: Serra at MOMA

Horrifed at my recent lack of cultural activity (I don't count reading*) I zoomed up to MOMA on Saturday to take in the Richard Serra show. Big. Big, big, HUGE pieces of metal, curved, rusting in the Sculpture Garden. You can walk between the four curves and get a lovely claustrophic feeling that I would liken to being trapped in a cargo ship's inner hull. I can't quite figure out how he made them; it must have been very difficult. What's easy is taking bad photos of them. They are NOT photogenic. Inside (where photography isn't allowed, dammit) there are even more wondrous... large curved things. The exhibit continues in the same theme, gigantic curved objects, some conconcave and some convex, so many that you feel lost among them. Neat!


Now, I must confess a love of going to museums alone. I have a very short attention span and usually die before the other person is finished perusing. Yesterday's outing, for example, took a grand total of 17 minutes (not including transportation). This way, every moment is... precious. Or something. Anyway, better photos and Serra himself here.

Of course, before posting this I had to google "que Serra, Serra" on the off-chance that I might be the first briliant humorist to use the phrase for a blog posting. Alas, no. But I did get a hoot out of this short mediabistro.com post.

Recent reading: Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns (phenomenal); Augusten Burroughs' Possible Side Effects (quite funny); Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A World History (salty!).

Catching Up at MOMA

Cleo and I went to the Museum of Modern Art to see the Jeff Wall photography exhibit a couple of weeks ago. I liked its vibrancy and surreal realism (?) but didn't understand some of them. We're talking about huge blowups of exquisitely printed shots, often semi-staged (or fully? I don't know) but always grounded in the everyday.

One of the most interesting was a view of a panorama (the photo itself may have been panoramic in some sense, but the subject was a museum-type panorama with painted walls from the past -- there were stagecoaches and possibly Civil War militia men -- but also, in the nearer distance, what looked like restorers working on the walls... so... layers of reality here, replete with a strange round observatory-looking thing in the middle.

"Restoration," said the artist, "has a postrevolutionary, even counterrevolutionary implication. I was interetsed in the double entrendre in the title, the idea that panorama and the "regime" of restoration of which it is involved could be identified with an ancien régime, which ironically we are preserving, and even resuscitating, bringing back to life."

Wow, just realized you can view what may be the entire exhibit online, complete with zoom-in and commentary -- thanks, MOMA. You rock.

Congrats to Nicole and Manousos on their new baby. Yay! Nicole is another friend from my tenure at Scholastic (like Cleo, from above). They now (Nicole and Manousos, not Cleo) live in Crete (how cool is that?) where she is being creative and entrepreneurial.. Note to self: plan a trip to Greece. I found an older picture of us (as usual, I'm not enjoying being photographed and hence look somewhat deranged and oddly like Drew Barrymore, who I don't think I resemble in real life. Yeah, that's me on the right. Where did that fabulous shirt go?? Nicole is the cute one on the left.)