Found Art - Black Square Print Error

 

Limiting Factors.

I have been thinking a lot about traveling. As we can see the light at the end of the Covid tunnel, the very idea of traveling has come roaring back into my consciousness. I already have a trip booked with some friends NEXT WEEK! I am very excited. That trip kind of fell into my lap though because someone else organized it. By next Friday I will be sitting on the shore of a little lake outside Bellingham Washington, probably drinking a beer, soaking my feet in the cold cold water and thinking deep, deep thoughts. It is going to be great!

That will be an unusual trip because left to my own devices, I don’t usually take relaxing chill-out trips. I tend to take random wander-around-and-look-at-stuff trips. Last week I was making a list of the places I would still like to go wander around and look at stuff. I set some parameters: I focused on domestic destinations because it feels like international travel will still be sort of weird for awhile. Destinations also had to be somewhat reasonable. For instance, I can’t reasonably go hike the Pacific Crest Trail because that takes months and I have a job. However, I do want to see Great Sand Dunes National Park and that is reasonable because I have family in Colorado. For years I’ve wanted to go to Pittsburgh because I love bridges and I want to see the Cathedral of Learning. If I find cheap enough tickets, I could probably do that trip in three or four days. I’ve never seen Redwood National Park and it is a seven hour drive from where I live, so I could reasonably make that happen, but I’m not sure if I want to do that much driving. 

I want to go to The Rothko Chapel in Houston and Houston is a pretty big airline hub, so I can probably knock that out in two of three days. I want to go to Cleveland because I was supposed to go there last year on a work trip that was cancelled due to Covid and I feel now that I have a duty to make that trip. It is one of the very specific things that Covid took from me and as a personal little Fuck You to Covid, I’m going to see Cleveland, even if it is just out of spite. But anyway, I did some research on it back in the Before Times and I bet I could make a fun little weekend trip out of it.

The list goes on and go: I want to ride the Alaska ferries, I want to go to New Orleans, to Marfa Texas, I want to be on a boat on one of the Great Lakes, I want to walk the Skyways in the Twin Cities, I want to see Hawaii, I want to drink at a cool rooftop bar in Miami. I want to stand at 4-Corners (which is way in the middle of nowhere, BTW).

What limits me in all of this are the normal things that have always been limiting: time and money. What is no longer a limiting factor in these things is the dumb, deadly, airborne disease known as Covid-19. The world will likely never entirely return to whatever we mean when we say “normal” and probably that is a good thing, but we are very near to the world returning to life, and I am looking forward to that.

.

.

.

Failed.

As part of a failed November Nanowrimo project, I have been writing this weird series of kind of ekphrastic vignettes about pictures a person (who lives my fantasy life) might have in their phone. The post below is what that person might recall about Mark Rothko. Sort of. This is very first-drafty, cut me some slack.

.
.
.

Rothko.

This is a picture of Mark Rothko’s “Light Red Over Black” from 1957.

A red canvas and a light red rectangular smear hovering above a squarish black smudge floating over a more shadowy black brick.

This is one of my favorite things.

What can not be visually or abstractly or virtually understood - what thus far defies the digital reinterpretation of our physical reality - is the experience of being in the presence of a Rothko.

His canvases are huge.

18 feet tall, I think. 11 feet wide.

Each one painted on canvas made from the bleached hide of the last living specimen of an all but extinct species. A singular animal hunted across nocturne steppes in the dead of winter, stalked, killed, skinned just to this end. The blood still pumping warm through the heart, collected for pigments.

In every museum in front of every Rothko there is a bench because to be in the looming presence of a Rothko is to be cowered and the bench allows one the option to sit rather than kneel.

At the Tate Modern in London there is an entire room of them.

Ordinarily this is not permitted. Just as suspects are separated by police before questioning; just as the most irrepressible of prisoners are kept in a solitary confinement; just as the most powerful versions of gods are segregated into separate monotheisms; just as competing densities of gravity are stored on entirely separate planets; so too are Rothkos usually kept far apart.

It is for this reason that he never delivered on his 1958 contract to produce an entire series of his dark totems to the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building in Midtown Manhattan.  

He painted them, but then distributed them far and wide, to the Kawamura Memorial Museum in Sakura Japan, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the nation-state of LA, to the underground Houston Texas bunker of the Rothko Chapel, and to the Tate Modern in London.

The thing which is most important for a witch doctor to know, is how much black magic is too much.

But the Tate Modern, in its enthusiasm to collect as many of the monoliths as possible, installed an active noise control system in its Rothko Room, using anti-noise wavelengths licensed from the city of Taos New Mexico to cancel the ultra low-frequency hum emitted by the paintings, which had been correlatively linked to mass hysteria and also - conversely - to a debilitatingly deep, unremitting existential solemnity.

The room is quite large, or perhaps not. In a Danielewskian happenstance, no two people have ever measured the dimensions of the room similarly. Most agree that the room is vaguely rectangular in shape. That it has a slatted wood floor of burnished yellow pine cut from trees so young that the cutting itself was considered very nearly obscene. Most agree that the room is dim, held in perpetual shadow, an unending dusk, but for the slim dry glow around the paintings themselves, which are not artificially illuminated.

Most agree that despite the fact the ceilings appear rather low, they must actually be quite high, as all Rothkos are 27 feet tall, 13 feet across, and 2 feet thick.

The room is what a Bronte would describe as glum.

Given the sound canceling capabilities of the room, it is completely silent. Should two patrons find themselves in the room at the same time - which has never happened - they would hear nothing, least of all the accelerated beating of their own hearts, as the vibrations up through their bones would instantly be countermanded by the negative silence of the motion activated sound transceivers embedded in the ceilings, the floors, the walls.

This is the room I will go to when I die.

I have no spiritual reason to believe this, but I believe that when we die we go - alone - to a quiet and lonely and empty and eerily beautiful place.

For someone else I imagine this may be a golden midwest field of grain bending preternaturally in the not-quite-silent but unhearable breeze. For someone, I imagine, this might be an oak panelled room decorated with the stuffed heads of dead animal's; antlers and those obsidian black plastic eyes taxidermists use because light glints off of them in just the right ways. For someone, I imagine, it will be the observation deck of the Empire State Building looking down into a completely motionless Manhattan. This is what all of those shots of sun-dappled blades of grass are about in The Thin Red Line.

This is the room I will go to when I die.

.

.

.

So I Had A Birthday.

So I had a birthday.

Yeah, it happened.

I had tried to avoid it, but it try as I might, I wasn’t able to stop it from coming. I went through that thing that you go through where I just wanted to ignore it (because I’m getting old old and older), but eventually I did what we all must do, I accepted it (more or less).

And used it as a simple excuse to have a small party. A small party is almost always good for the soul. Things that you missed:

My nearly falling over while trying to walk in heels

Discussions of a writer’s duty to embrace his/her bad decisions as a kind of art-enhancing ‘performance literature’

Threats of forced live West Wing reenactments!

My extremely liberal use of martini shakers

Scarf wearing!

Sweet tea vodka Arnold Palmers

Elaborate diagrams of interpersonal relationships

Explorations of pigeon languages

Velvet jackets (that’s right, plural)

It turned out to be both fun and gratifying. I have always enjoyed (and often missed) having a group of people who could drink and talk the night away (I’m seldom as happy as when my life becomes a little Left-Bank-of-Paris-in-the-‘20s situation).

Then when I woke up on my actual birthday, my roommate Eggplant (still test driving blog names for her) had filled up the apartment with red and yellow and blue and green balloons that she had blown up herself in the dead of night (we have left the balloons out to roll around on the floor and scare the cats and I have to admit that it makes the mornings a little more fun when you have to kick your way through a field of colored balloons on your way to the door).

Later we ran around down in the LA and went to MOCA, (which I had never been to!) and I got to stand really close to some Rothkos . . .





. . . and lean in close enough to them to make the security guard nervous . . .



I also encountered a couple of painters I had never heard of but quite like now:

Mister James Rosenquist, who painted this on oil and canvas, entitled Vestigal Appendage



And Mister Antonio Tapies who painted this stellar-ly entitled word, Grey and Black Cross, NO. XXVII


And of course there was Mister Warhol:



The little quote on the plastic white plaque beside this painting said, “Everybody has their own America, and they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see. When I was little, I never left Pennsylvania, and I used to have fantasies about things that I thought were happening . . . that I felt I was missing out on. But you can only live life in one place at a time . . . you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one.”

Sing it brother.

After the museum we wandered down the hill into downtown and very nearly stumbled onto Angel's Knoll, a little stitch of a park (right next to and below Angel's Flight) on a hill overlooking part of Downtown. You, of course remember Angel's Knoll from that penultimate indie/hipster/film school (anti)romantic comedy (500) Days of Summer.

There are, BTW, significantly more bums in the park than in the movie, but it is a cool little place.

Later we meandered down through the (blingy!) Diamond District and then stumbled across to Clifton's Cafeteria (which I totally recognized from The Food Network). It is like an eighty year old cafeteria, an actual cafeteria, with plastic trays and everything! The interior is dark and cavernous and sort of like a forest. It looks like a cross between Disneyland’s Splash Mountain and Disneyland’s Splash Mountain eighty years after they stopped dusting and changing the light bulbs. If you find yourself there, get the macaroni and cheese, it’s so buttery and cheesy and greasy that it is almost soup. I’m still a little sick, it was the most disgusting/awesomest thing that I have eaten in ages.

Then later I got to see my parents as they passed through town and even later I got to log onto Facebook and look at all of the happy birthday wishes that people had left.

I try not to write too many things on this blog that are just about me and the humdrum mundane-ity of my life (this thing is supposed to be about the writing, after all), but it was my birthday, so I’m allowed to write things like this.

I wish that I had some newly discovered gem of wisdom to offer to you about getting old, but I really don’t. All I can tell you is that friends are good and that my roommate is awesome and sometimes it is fun to make museum security guards nervous. And otherwise, try to appreciate the good times when they come.

Okay, I’m done being all saccharin.



Thanks Jose for this awesome birthday video!

.
.
.