ART / Barnes Foundation

On my first trip to Philadelphia, during one of the crammed days in between a meeting and a luncheon, I snuck away to the Barnes Foundation. My sister was also in the area at the time and was able to join me.

The most striking aspect as we walked up, is the architecture. It stands out amongst Philly’s Georgian streets and homes–a stately modern sandstone structure surrounded by benches and water features, it is drastically different and immediately calming in its visual quietness.

The deceiving exterior.

Inside, however, it is back to a historical, mish-mash of imagery. Matisse, Renoir, Cezanne, Rousseau, Cassatt. Mixed between old door hinges, metal shapes and tools, handmade wooden furniture and ancient Buddhist scrolls make up the frenetic galleries arrange salon style. It is strangely refreshing to see art displayed this way, perhaps how one would display them in one’s house. Not a hermetically sealed white room of refined cultural worship, but instead a casual viewing of objects made and collected over tangible lifetimes.

One of the mish-mash walls I loved.

This casualness adds to the shock I felt when I stumbled room through room to see Matisses I had never known existed, beautiful soft Rose Period Picassos (I will write another post about my fraught feelings about Picasso), and one particularly sneaky Bosch that I almost missed squished between a doorframe and a shaker chest.

The visual beauty of this painting in real life is shocking, no matter how you feel about the controversial life of Picasso. “Girl with a Goat (la jeune fille à la chèvre), Pablo Picasso, 1906.

It is an intriguing museum for other reasons, as well. As we walked in the sticky East Coast heat, my sister explained what we had just seen. A private collection, a controversial move, and I vaguely remembered learning about this in the so-so documentary “Exit Through the Giftshop” (as you can expect a post about Picasso, you should never expect I will write a post about Banksy). It was a small part of that movie, so I need to revisit the history and maybe explain how I had just wandered through an antique mansion full of priceless art, hidden within a modern architectural monolith where pieces are displayed like the set of an Anthropologie catalogue.

Stay tuned next week for the history of this striking art collection and museum…

The sneaky Bosch. “Temptation of Saint Anthony”, Hieronymus Bosch, Mid-16th century.

NOTICE / On the Train

I took the train home tonight. The sign above the turnstiles said that the next N Judah was in 15min, the following 16. So I used a trick I learned when I first moved to the city and got on a train headed in the opposite direction. Two stops later I hoped off, caught my train at its first stop instead of waiting on a crowded platform for a crowded train.

Because of all the delays, this train was still crowded. People jammed all next to each other in the weird formation that happens in the older MUNI trains–crushed together near the doors, carefully arranged in a slalom down the aisles since there is only really enough room for one person per pole. If you get in that lucky position, second only to actually getting a seat, you are still awkwardly hovering over the seated passenger in front of you, still awkwardly trying to balance your backpack on your feet so it doesn’t touch the floor, and gripping the pole or bar to steady yourself.

You also get an intimate portrait into your fellow passenger. Standing over someone for 45mins you inevitably stare at the top of their head. Is their hair died? Is it full of product? Seems to have been a long time since a wash. The woman in front of me was greasy–maybe she didn’t leave herself enough time this morning, or maybe she is trying the “no-poo” movement. I had lots of time to ponder this as the train slowly snaked through the streets.

The woman next to me, behind me sort of, did not follow one of the first rules of the train, which is to REMOVE YOUR BACKPACK. Remove it when there aren’t a lot of passengers, remove it when you’re sitting, remove it when you’re standing, remove it when you board in a station or hop on off the street. And most importantly, if, after my train ride, I could recognize the scalp of my fellow passenger in a police lineup, for God’s sake it was crowded enough for you to remove your backpack.

NOTICE / Increasingly SO

Age is upon me! Lo, it does not stop but barrels down the hill at a speed I thought would be familiar but is instead cold and calculated like a sharp wind across an icy bridge. Out of nowhere it snaps your neck back and whips your hair across your cold sweating forehead and there is no stopping it. 

Is there comfort in knowing? Comfort that comes from feeling the relentless chill of death as a friend, or not a friend but more like a neighbor that will be around forever. The dripping of the faucet. Lo! It is death, and you cannot escape. Even hiding behind these quippy metaphors one cannot really disguise the feeling that yes, death is looming and now, no longer in my twenties, it all matters and doesn't at the same time. 

In my early twenties, late teens? I read a lot of Joan Didion. It was slightly before she was a *sad girl with cigarette* darling, but not quite. I think I felt that and liked it, because like most young women at that age, I felt out my intellect, but wanted it to be as safe and male-friendly as possible. I wanted to be smart, but mostly smart so that men found me interesting, mysterious, beautiful and aloof. 

Joan did write, does write, worthy text, despite that sort of hipster pantheon she has been ascribed to. One of the most striking things of hers I read was, "That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it." 

It knocked me off my chair, off my stool, off my feel like a heady swig of wine, like a soccer ball to the gut. Oh no! It does all matter, it will not all come true. I will die without doing things, I will die without becoming all of the versions of myself I have been harboring. I am incapable of some things, and there is nothing I can do about it. All the fantasies and fairy tales are over. The rug is rolled up in the closet and it will stay there. 

Now, at thirty, I drive closer to the edge. If it really doesn't matter, if there are things that will never happen, if I really am going to be attached to every stupid thing I ever did, then I better just push through the mendacity as much as possible. The mental image of this feeling is that of carefully saran-wrapped deep bowl. I pull all the edges tight and smush it all down so it is taught and air-tight. Then I push my finger into the middle, getting the saran-wrap stuck on my finger, creating a belly-button in the middle of my work, and then breaking it open and touching the leftovers underneath. 

To push through, I’ve been living almost manically recently. Extra wine! Stay up late! Spend the money! Leave work early! Perhaps an unravelling but also I’m realizing maybe it doesn’t all matter. Playing by the rules is just well, if nothing else, boring. To go to work, to sit at desk, eat sad lunch, go home, do again tomorrow until the weekend when we burn through our money to forget.  

NOTICE / Coffee in the Afternoon

There isn’t a subject more written about than coffee. Love? Love and coffee and cigarettes. It’s romantic, it’s dangerous and possibly bad for you. You drink it when you think, when you’re busy, when you’re waking up, when you’re staying up all night worrying, when you’re waiting for the doctor to call.  

But also every morning. It’s a ritual to signal awakeness. It means the day has started. Even on vacation I need it to act as my lantern in the darkness. In Marojca we drank it overlooking the Mediterranean. Seated on the cool stones that made up our balcony, on the shaded side of the cove, the sun had not warmed or illuminated us yet. The sea below still dark and shadowy as the night rolled back at a gentle creep. The coffee we drank signaled it was morning.  

Drinking it at work is a small escape from work. It is special and fun and no one can argue with you that you “need” it. So I walk downstairs and spend the ten-ish minutes to make it. No one can question me, even though I’m really just escaping my desk and the yawning maw of boredom and repetition. The sleeping needlessness of the work that pays the bills.  

NOTICE / January 8 2018

It's raining today. A lot. A news headline mentioned it hasn't rained so much in San Francisco since 2014. Bizarre that that was four years ago. Freaks me out how much time goes by without me noticing. 

Rain reminds me of our house in Redwood City. We had a large window that looked out on our front yard and out to the tree-lined street. Pushed up next to the window was a long, grey sofa with blue and pink embroidered spots. There must have been a winter sometime in the early nineties with a lot of rain because I can distinctly feel the textured, wool couch as I sit perched looking out the glass at the downpour outside, content to watch, to listen, to smell the wet tanbark and leaves. Our street was on a slight hill and the water rushed down the gutters in smooth gliding streams. I know roughly when in my life that moment was, based on the house we lived in, how large the sofa is in my memory, but other than that it's stuck suspended in a non-time of endless, perfect stillness. 

That is where my love of sheets of crisp rain and leaves on the pavement, comes from. It is the sense of safeness, the kind that one can only know in childhood. A parent in the other room, the house feels large, like an entire world, that is yours and free and warm. The rain is thick, pattering, drowning out all other sounds. Schedules are postponed, days are re-arranged, plans are softened.

Looking out of my office window today, even at work, on a deadline, that feeling of safety and calm comes over me because of the rain. The coziness, but also the perceived cleanliness that follows. Fresh and new, like childhood. A cleansing we can never actually have, but can only taste in instances of rain, fresh snow, early morning. I am always a little bit melancholy when the sun finally comes out, when time keeps moving on.