RISK DELIGHT!

As I get older, time has changed. Days, weeks, months and years are compressed, whipping past me like greyhounds on Florida race tracks. But sometimes, minutes and hours drag and I find myself walking from room to room wondering what I should be doing with myself. Guilt sets in.

I went to a friend’s funeral earlier this month. Her accomplishments and involvements were thoroughly resurrected for scrutiny and admiration. She was smart and energetic and was committed to influencing the world she touched for the better. Listening to her accolades, I wondered how I could justify watching television…not just watching television but watching repeat episodes - movies that I’ve watched so many times that I nearly have the dialogue memorized! Or movies so bad that they must have been thrown in “free” when Turner Movie Classics bought out the  old studio archieves. 

I resolved - yet again! -  to make my life count for more. Stumped. I've set another trap to deflate the spirit. I am no good at volunteer work, too many aches and pains for a regular job and too impure to do much else. So what is left? And perhaps the larger question: if hers was a life lived large, can a small life count too? 

I read a quote by John Cage recently which seems to me to be the very essence of “optimism.”

“It is essential that we be convinced of the goodness of human nature,

and we must act as though people are good.”

For a good part of my life, I thought of myself as a pessimist. I was wrong.

Only an optimist could live as I have done. I didn’t pick the path that my friend followed but I believe in the basic goodness of human nature and allowed that to lead me most of the time. And that's no small thing.

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The Mint Museum Founders’ Circle - all 21 of them- visited Rochester last week and here are a few things they saw:  

Porcelain sculpture

CHRISTINA BRINKMAN

Steel and glass sculpture
ALBERT PALEY

 Ceramic sculptures
BILL STEWART

 Metal furniture
PAUL KNOBLAUCH

Wood furniture
WENDELL CASTLE

TROUBLE IN DALLAS

I never heard of Raymond and Patsy Nasher until recently.  Raymond was born in Boston and graduated from Duke University. Somehow he met Patsy Rabinowitz, the daughter of a Dallas, Texas, businessman and that was that. Nashers’ became leading citizens of Dallas and world class art collectors. 20th century sculpture was their speciality. Raymond  said “it was cheap in the 60s and 70s - nobody else wanted it.” 

The Nasher collection became well known in the museum world: the Guggenheim, the National Gallery in Washington, DC, and the San Francisco Museum all jockeyed for the collection.

Patsy died first and Raymond, known as a loner and a man who liked control, purchased 2.4 acres in downtown Dallas right across the street from the Dallas Museum of Art (1997). He hired architect Renzo Piano to design the Nasher Sculpture Center (Piano designed the new Whitney Museum, NYC.) and landscape architect Peter Walker as designer of the outside sculpture park in which the Center sits.  The $70 million dollar complex opened in 2003, the lynchpin in the Arts District of Dallas with museum, sculpture center and park, an opera house and a performance hall clustered in approximately 19 blocks.

So far, so good.  Then a new player entered. Financed by police and firemen’s retirement funds, Museum Tower was built a few blocks away and opened in 2013.

This is NOT a retirement home for public employees. The tower is 42 floors filled with 115 condos priced at approx. $825 per square foot.  Every amenity is included in this version of an urban gated community including a dog “park” for residents. It’s surrounded by a stone wall and people can live totally separate from the city at their feet. Museum Tower is the “mean girl” of the neighborhood.

In Dallas, Texas, the sun shines bright  - all day, every day. And it bounces off the 42 story glass clad (I’m sorry…it looks just like a giant penis). And the reflected sun zeros into the Nasher Arts Center and is killing outside planting and affecting the art inside. 

A mediator picked by the city’s mayor tried to find a reasonable solution between these two factions but failed. At this writing, Museum Tower is hoping for a technological invention that will magically …what? bend the light? It’s too easy to say “Mean Girl” is to blame for all this mess. And mostly, it is!

But I have a few unanswered questions. I suspect that Dallas - like every U.S. city these days - nearly wet their pants when Museum Tower was proposed! All that tax revenue! All that prestige that would come with all those rich people living downtown! I’ll just bet the town even gifted the Museum Tower developer with a few “incentives”…maybe tax abatement, or site prep at city expense or bending of a few “smallish” rules. Did they require a substantial escrow account to cover eventual “problems?” Probably not.

Dallas made a huge mistake - one being repeated everywhere - Rochester too - with the need to SAVE THE CITY AT ALL COST.   Sometimes the costs are just way too much! 

 These two shots: Museum Tower. What do YOU think it looks like?

 This last is an exhibit at Nasher Center by Guiseppe Penon.

A VACATION RENTAL RANT

A VACATION RENTAL RANT

I don’t know about you but I would try one of those “house swap” vacations, the kind where you leave your car, your cat and house keys totally in the hands of strangers who live on another continent and they do the same thing and you board a plane, find the environment to refresh your soul and meet whatever amazing adventures undoubtedly await.  What could go wrong?

It works in the movies. Didn’t everybody see that movie with Jude Law and whoever those women were? one who lived in a $15 million mansion in the Hollywood Hills and the other in a thatch roofed Cotswold cottage in snowy England?  That went perfectly for EVERYBODY even Jack Black (!) who got to kiss and woe Kate Winslet,  heretofore considered beautiful and SENSIBLE.

But what happens in the movies, stays in the movies. Real life vacation rentals - and I’ve known more than my share - are rarely as advertised and I and my husband just got home from another week spent in something called an efficiency condo on the grounds of Chautauqua Institution. 

Chautuaqua is what I describe as “Disneyland for Discerning Adults,” built on the shores of Chautauqua Lake and chock-a-block with intellectual courses, lectures and entertainment. It’s expensive. There’s a one time charge for a gate pass (something around $500 per person per week) and a parking pass (another hundred). Most “events” are free but not all. And then there’s the cost of accommodation rental.  

We paid $120 per night for a space approximately 10 feet wide and 18 feet long. A bathroom, kitchen and closet came off one end. The bed folded into the wall and sliding doors opened onto a small balcony on the other end. No maid service - no fresh towels every day - and as it turned out, no soap or shampoo included. The building did include WiFi and a flat screen t.v. that received 7 channels - 4 of which were National Public Broadcast and 1 twenty-four hour news and weather.

It also included….. 

27 threadbare towels

14 placemats

6 blankets/bedspreads

8 pot holders

china and flatware, complete setting for 12

enough serving pieces for Thanksgiving dinner

several drawers full of wires, remotes and misc. electronic stuff

2 vacuum cleaners

a kitchen cabinet filled with coffee mugs (but no juice glasses)

So here’s the thing: I understand that you landlords will charge as much money as you can but please, could you at least buy a couple of fresh towels and maybe sheets made after 2000? maybe put all your personal junk in one drawer somewhere so that I have space for my week’s worth of undies? And when did you last need baking dishes, serving platters, 2 massive barcaloungers, a desk and chair, a table and two chairs, a loveseat, coffee table and folding chairs? What kind of parties do you throw anyway? 

I just want a decent juice glass and a towel that doesn’t take my hide off! When I trade houses, I’ll ask more questions.

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We met a really interesting couple in Asheville,NY. Vince builds skyscrapers Monday through Friday but on week ends, he welds rusty found garbage into yard art. He says “To invent, all you need is a little creativity and a good junk pile.”