Katie Takes the T

As some of you may know, I sold my car before I moved to Boston.  Boston is not a great city for driving.  Almost everyone I know up here has a GPS in their car because the roads are pretty confusing.  Plus, if you’ve ever heard of the term “Masshole”…well, that sort of describes the typical driver on the roads up here.   There are other factors that make having a car a little more difficult.  For one, there is no parking for my apartment building.  This means I would have to pay over $100 a month to park on the street or something like that.  Not worth looking into, if you ask me.

So I’m saving the environment!  But as a result, I spend 3 hours a day on public transportation (15 hrs total for the week!), broken up between the bus system and the subway system, called the “T” up here.  It takes me 1.5 to get to work and 1.5 to get home, which is not a lot of fun, but as I’ve mentioned before, it allows for a lot of reading time.  If you know me, though, you probably know that I don’t like touching other people and I don’t like it when people’s music is turned up so loud that I can hear it coming out of their headphones.  And there are many, many other things that annoy me.  Basically, riding the T can sometimes be my own personal hell.  I’ve told my mom (and others) repeatedly that I am WAY too prissy to be riding public transportation.  This post, then, will be dedicated to the things that bother me the most on the T, and the  things that entertain me the most on the T.

Most annoying T moments (excluding the typical annoyances, i.e., loud music, gum smacking, loud talkers, mouth-breathers, smelly people, etc):

1. crazy people: Crazy people are…crazy.  And they seem to flock to the T.  The first time I ever realized that there were crazy people near me was the night that I was sitting on the bus, imagining what I would do when I finally got home, when I noticed that the man seated behind me was talking on the phone.  But he was talking so softly that I found it hard to believe that the person on the other end of the phone could actually hear anything he was saying.  Using the window opposite our seats, I was able to determine that the man was, in fact, not on the phone.  He was talking to himself.  And laughing.

The second crazy person episode came when I had just left the doctor’s office (strep throat!  ick!).  I was sitting beside a woman, and I did not have my usual armor of a book with me (helps keep the conversation away…like on airplanes).  She leans over to me, and I realize she’s going to start talking, so I prep myself to be all polite and nice.  But then she says something along the lines of “Isn’t it wonderful how you can watch them grow up??”  And I had nothing to say.  I had no idea what she was talking about.  Crazy.

2. water bottles:  One day, I received a Sigg bottle in the mail as a gift from my mom.  I was very excited.  This meant that I could take water to work with me and drink it all day!  And not be dehydrated!  So I filled it, put the cap on, stuck it into my lunchbox, and headed out for the bus.  It didn’t take very long for it to start leaking.  Pretty soon a little puddle had formed in the seat beside me.  I didn’t have any napkins with me, so I ended up having to rip pieces of paper out of my notebook to try and absorb it all.  Ok so this has less to do with the T and more to do with me thinking that my Sigg wouldn’t leak, but still.  It was annoying, and had I been in my own car, it would not have been quite as annoying.  No one would have wanted to sit in the water-filled seat in my car.

3. waiting for the bus/the 86: The 86 bus is the least reliable bus in the history of Boston transporation.  Ok, that’s not a fact, but it is rather hard to predict when it’s going to show up.  The MBTA website includes schedules of the buses, but in my experience, the 86 is usually late.  Waiting for the bus in the cold is absolutely no fun.

4. delays and other inconveniences: One night, after working until 9pm, I was taking the red line from Cambridge to get on the green line to head out home.  Unfortunately, one of the rails was down on the red line, which resulted in everyone having to get off the train at every stop and cross over to the other side to take that train down one stop before crossing back over, etc etc.  This required actually going outside at one point, crossing the street, and then going back underground.  Needless to say, I got home close to 11pm.  Not fun.

5. the ramp in harvard station: There is a ramp leading down to the inbound red line stop.  Signs say not to run down it.  But when you see your train pull up and know that it’s going to get away from you if you don’t run, it’s really tempting to run!  Ok, I do run down it sometimes.  The only night this really REALLY stinks is when I’m wearing heels, and since I’m not Carrie Bradshaw, I physically can’t run down the ramp without falling and rolling down the ramp and onto the rails.  So I just have to watch my train slowly pull out of the station, leaving me behind.  So sad.

Most entertaining T moments:

1. fun crazy people: Ok, this guy wasn’t crazy, but…Anyway, one day on the bus, a big,hairy, bearded man in a leather jacket covered in buttons (like pin buttons,  not just buttons that close your coat) sat down beside me.  He was reading a book for most of the ride.  I looked over to see what piece of anarchist literature was in his hands.  What was it, you ask?  The Complete Jane Austen.  Not kidding.

2. funny conversations: On the ride back from the doctor’s, two old men sitting across from me were having a heated debate on marijuana, it’s pros and cons.  One old man was insisting that weed is not bad for you, doesn’t harm your lungs, etc., just makes you hungry.  The other one was insisting that smoking anything does hurt your lungs.  Then the little tiny old lady sitting beside me gets up to leave and says, “Enjoy your Thanksgiving and smoking some weed with your family!”  Completely serious, completely happy.  Ah, I love living in a liberal state!

3. film strip ads: This is probably not the technical term for these things, but there are these ads that are placed along the walls of the subway, eye level with the windows, so that when you zoom past them, they make a little movie, each separate ad acting like a frame of a film.  It is so cool to watch!  The one that I see the most often now has these musical notes floating in and out of it.  I can’t remember what it’s for, though…But it’s cool!

4. express: One of my favorite moments on the T is when the conductor (or whoever) comes on the radio to announce that the T I’m currently on is going to become express!  I love those words!  I live at one of the major stops, so I’m guaranteed that whatever T I’m on is going to go express to where I live, not stopping along the way to pick anyone else up or let anyone off.  That is the best feeling–knowing that you are going to get home that much faster.

Katie’s Book Report

The one (and probably only) good thing about having an hour plus commute to work and back on public transportation is that I have plenty of time to read.  While many of my fellow passengers are staring off into space, listening to their iPods, I have been busy solving murders in 19th-century England.  (My sister recently recommended three different authors who write novels along these lines, and I’m steadily making my way through all of them.  I’m starting to realize she might be a sucker for historical fiction…)

I’m currently reading something completely different: The Genius by Jesse Kellerman.  My background in art history makes me particularly interested in fiction that deals with art, artists, the art market, etc.  (Other good novels working with these topics include Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Dara Horn’s The World to Come.)  The Genius is a mystery of sorts (one of my favorite genres, obviously) set in the world of art dealing.  Our protagonist, Ethan Muller, is a gallery owner who comes across drawings by an artist, Victor Cracke, who is not only unknown but apparently missing.  During the course of his search for the artist, and the uncovering of the artist’s seemingly murky past, Ethan gives us a glimpse into the world of New York commercial art galleries.

Early on in the novel, Ethan makes a point about galleries that is actually similar to one I made in an art history paper my senior year at Duke.  Ethan notes, “Without [art dealers] there would be no Modernism, no Minimalism, no movements at all.  All the contemporary legends would be painting houses or teaching adult education classes.  Museum collections would grind to a halt after the Renaissance; sculptors would still be carving pagan gods; video would be the province of pornography; graffiti a petty crime rather than the premise behind a multimillion-dollar industry.  Art, in short, would cease to thrive.  And this is because – in a post-Church, post-patronage era – dealers refine and pipeline the fuel that drives art’s engine, that has always driven it and always will: money (28).”  Basically, art galleries are at the center of the art market.  Galleries provide museums with a good indication of what the public wants to see or is interested in.  In addition, it is mostly up to galleries to “discover” new artists, get the public interested, thus inspirinig museums to collect the artists’ works as well.  While I’m sure the process is much more intricately detaile than this, and I certainly don’t claim to know everything there is to know about the relationship between galleries and museums, this is at least how I have witnessed it working during my time working at a commercial art gallery.

Ethan also develops a rather cynical view of the art market during the course of the novel.  However cynical it may be, it does strike me as rather accurate.  The truth is that selling art, while it has its positive moments, can be intensely depressing.  Your job is essentially to convince a filthy rich person to buy a painting/sculpture/photograph/drawing/other art object by an artist who is most likely struggling just to get by, living in a lower socioeconomic situation than the buyer.  The buyer and the artist can have radically different views of the art – one seeing it as an investment, as something that will make him/her appear cultured, and, in the worst cases, as a decorative object that will compliment his/her living room decor; while the other side typically has a more personal relationship with the art, thinking of it as a creation, a child, an expression of the self.  (Of course this is not how all collectors view art, but it does happen.)  As an art dealer, you have to reconcile the two conflicting sides, realizing that if you don’t sell the painting to the person who thinks it will look great with their couch, in the end you are hurting both yourself (the gallery) and the artist, even if you are trying to preserve the integrity of the work.  Essentially, you have to sell when there is a sale to be made, no matter how “undeserving” the buyer may seem.  (By the way, someone really did buy a painting from the gallery I worked at because they thought it would look good with their couch.  Painful.)

On the other hand, sometimes the dealer has to turn shit into gold, a la Piero Manzoni, selling a show that ends up being underwhelming, convincing the buyer that it is, essentially, a good investment because of the created brand name of the artist.

And this is the other point that Ethan is making in the above quote: the dealer is a creative force along the same lines as the artist.  While he seems to be boasting about the importance of the dealer, there is also a sense in his statements that it is not necessarily a good thing that the dealer has taken on this creative role.  Ethan’s own desire to create a market for Victor Crackes has resulted in his own ability to deny both the artist as human and the artist as creator.  Simply put, “A piece of art becomes a piece of art – and an artist becomes an artist – when I [the art dealer] make you take out your checkbook (29).”  This is hardly a new idea and certainly not one that artists are unfamiliar with; just take a look at the readymades (yay, Duchamp!) or the aforementioned Piero Manzoni.  It doesn’t matter what the artist creates, as along as the dealer can create a market for it.

The Genius is a really well-written book that also tells an insightful story, even if you aren’t as interested in art or the art market as this blogger.  As indicated by the title of this novel, Kellerman is really toying with the issue of what it means to have genius or what it means in our society to be considered a genius (a discussion also at the center of Smith’s On Beauty.)  Is this designation based solely on one part of a life?  Can an artistic genius do whatever else he wants in his personal life, no matter how antisocial?  Are such eccentricities perhaps even necessary to be considered a genius?  As the book jacket questions, “Is Cracke a genius?  A murderer?  Both?  Is there a difference?”  Not to wander too far off topic, I finished watching Spike Lee’s Malcolm X this morning.  There is a part near the end where Mr. X’s hotel room has been bugged, and two men are listening to his phone conversation with his wife.  One says to the other, “Compared to King, this guy’s a saint.”  And yet Martin Luther King, Jr. is the civil rights leader we learn the most about in school.  Is King any less of a role model because of his extracurricular activities?  Should we admire him any less since his philandering is in direct contrast to society’s morals?  Was Clinton any less of a great president because of Monica Lewinsky?  Obviously this is not how we approach the idea of a great “man.”  Does the personal remain personal?  How many people have to be affected by your deeds in order for it to tarnish your reputation as great or genius?

Ok, I may have gone off topic.  But I believe these questions are integral to the understanding of Kellerman’s novel.  One would assume there is a difference between murderer and genius, but can we divide a person into two entities like that?  Can we declare one part genius and one part murderer or do they inform each other?  Should a murderer be considered a genius in any realm?  Well?  What do you think??

Anyhow, I highly recommend The Genius, even though I haven’t finished it!  But don’t take my word for it…

Katie’s True Love…and The Ensuing Heartbreak

One of my favorite lines from Sex & the City is when Carrie says to her editor at Vogue (played by Candice Bergen), “Men I may not know, but shoes, shoes I know!”  If you know me at all, you know I love shoes.  I love buying them, I love looking at them, and I love wearing them.  A new pair of shoes makes me feel happy!  I may not know shoes as well as Carrie Bradshaw knew them, and I may not buy Manolo Blahniks (although I have tried some on!), but I do know what is in style and, more importantly for me, what I like.  The fact is, I don’t go for every fad there is in the shoe world.  I never bought Uggs, I thought Crocs were ugly long before Newsweek was writing articles on their horrendousness (not the mary janes of course, but the ones with the holes in them), and I’m not sure I like the current gladiator sandal and Oxford crazes (I prefer my heels to come without laces).  That said, I still like my shoes to have some flair to them, like my kitten heels that have measuring tape bows on the toes or my four-inch-heel pumps with hot pink flowers on them.  (Unfortunately, I don’t have Carrie’s talent for walking–and running–in four inch heels, so this last pair might spend the rest of their days in my closet.)

I once told my mom that I wanted to design shoes for a living.  She pretty quickly pointed out that I know absolutely nothing about what goes into designing shoes.  I have been faced with a new dilemma recently, however, that has once again forced me to consider becoming Katie the Shoe Designer (as the politicians would say).  As you may know, I now live in Boston.  It’s cold in Boston.  I’m talking highs-in-the-forties-in-October cold.  So obviously I need boots to keep my legs and feet warm.  And not cowboy boots like what I would have needed had I stayed in Texas, but sleek boots with pointy toes and stiletto heels and a zipper up the side.  

Therein lies the problem.  These type of boots are apparently made for women who have tiny little stick legs!  I am not a large girl by any means.  I’m 5′2″ and I weigh…ok, I’m not going to tell you how much I weigh, but I’m small, dammit!  I picked out a pair of very beautiful boots online, fell in love with them, went to the store to try them on and…I hate to say it.  My calves were too large.  The zipper only made it halfway up my leg.  So I went to another shoe store and tried on two more pairs of boots.  The same thing happened.  At this point, my self-esteem was rapidly sinking, so I was of course forced to buy two pairs of heels in order to feel good about the lower half of my body again.

But the boot search continued.  I went to Filene’s Basement with some friends and found, yet again, a wonderful boot.  This pair was even worse: the zipper barely made it past my ankle before coming to a halt.

“What’s wrong with my legs??” I asked my friends.  They attempted to console me with various explanations: “Shoe companies are crazy.”  ”Women are too thin.”  ”It’s in proportion to the size of the shoe, so if your foot wasn’t so small, then the calves would fit.”  ”It’s because you have muscular legs from running.”

Ok, grants, I do run five miles on my days off, but I’m not sure that’s what makes my calves larger.  They don’t seem that muscular to me.  Now I just view them as disproportionately fat things.  I avoided this whole issue at first by buying slouchy black boots that weren’t so tight, but for my brown boots, I really wanted something dressier.  My solution was to use my roommate’s tape measure and measure my calves: fourteen inches.  (Please don’t go measuring your calves and leaving comments that brag about how small they are.  That means you, Rainey, with your “best legs in Mville”!)  Then I went to zappos and piperlime, my two favorite shoe websites (zappos is the best, but its web design and boxes aren’t nearly as aesthetically-pleasing as piperlime’s).  For most, if not all, boots listed on these websites, a circumference is given, usually in the 13″ range, although some are marked “wide calves” or something like that.  (Sigh…)  Using these measurements, I was able to pick out a couple boots in my size, price range, and desired heel height that seemed like they would fit my mammoth calves.  Then I looked them up on the designer’s webpage to see if the circumferences given matched.  Here’s a tip: they don’t.  Zappos had one pair marked as 14 1/2″, while the designer put it as smaller than 14″.  I have no idea how they are measuring this, if it really does change based on shoe size and the circumference given is an average (my roommate’s suggestion) or if they just stink at measuring.  Anyway, I finally found a pair that was marked as 15″, so I bought them.  They came last night, and voila!  They didn’t zip up.  So what did I do?  I plopped down on the floor and pulled the zipper up with one hand while shoving my calves in with the other hand.  And eventually I was able to get the zipper all the way up!  For a while I was concerned about losing all feeling in my legs below the knee, but my roommate told me that leather stretches (I know, I’m a bad vegetarian), so I have stubbornly decided to keep them and hope that the red imprints on my legs caused by the boots’ stitching will fade with time.

And here’s where my desire to design comes in.  My boots, as well as many others out there, have this decorative buckle/belt-type-thing at the top.  Why not make it a real belt/buckle so that those of us with real-women-have-curves calves can actually wear these boots??  (Ok, all my curves are located below the waist and apparently not in the designer-friendly areas.)  This is such a simple solution that I”m concerned that either no one else’s calves are as large as mine or that shoe designers only want stick-thin women wearing zip-up boots.  As much money as I have given to shoe companies in the past, you’d think they’d help me out on this one.  Quit making it so hard for me to spend money on your boots!

Oh and now that I have dress boots, I’ve decided that I also need rain boots.  Unfortunately, those don’t have big enough circumferences either…I am destined to have cold, chubby, and rain-soaked calves.

Katie Moves from Austin to Boston (and throws a pity party)

I moved into my new place in Brighton (right outside Boston) on September 1^st. It’s a really cute two bedroom apartment that I’m sharing with one of my good friends from college. She’s going to law school at BC, and I’m…sitting around writing blog entries because I have nothing better to do. Seriously, I’m trying to find a job, but, in case you haven’t heard, that’s really hard to do right now. The economy is bad, people are getting laid off, which means that there are a lot of people with more experience than me out there applying for the same jobs. Now, I had no intention of writing a blog entry where I whine about my current situation because if you have talked to me in the past month or so, you’ve already heard it all. It has been my number one whining point for a while now for a few reasons. First off, I have no money. I’m trying to survive on the small amount of cash that I’m making from selling my textbooks on Amazon (so…maybe $50 a month if I’m lucky?). And it has been like this for a while now. Really ever since the beginning of the summer. Believe it or not, they quit giving you student loans to live on after you’ve graduated, and I think they might want me to pay them back at some point. I think that perhaps some of my friends out there who have never really had a moment where they’re struggling financially might not realize how hard it is, not just economically, but also mentally, physically. It’s draining! Every time you go to buy groceries, you have to determine what you can actually afford and what you just have to wait on, which means no desserts because there is no reasonable argument for spending your money frivolously on food with no nutritional content. And you can forget buying new clothes or new shoes because really you already have shoes and clothes you can wear, and you just know that if you get another credit card bill that you can’t pay, you’ll feel awful.

But, secondly, not having a job means you have lots of free time that you can do almost nothing with. Because you have no income, you feel bad going out and doing things that cost money, which is pretty much everything when you have to take public transportation. There are only so many walks you can take in a day, and most of those end up at places where you spend money, so it just defeats the purpose I suppose. And yes, readers, I have been to my public library, I know that is a good suggestion of something free and fun to do. I walked there, I checked out a couple books, I walked back, and now I can just sit in my apartment all day reading them because there is nothing better to do!

The real issue with not having a job, then, is that you feel bad about everything you do. You feel bad if you spend your time doing free things like watching TV or reading a novel because that means you’re not writing cover letters every moment of the day. And, honestly, you can’t write cover letters every moment of the day because it just doesn’t take that long! I’m trying to stick to jobs that are actually in my field or at least related, and in the past two weeks, I’ve applied for nine, which means there are some out there. There just aren’t billions and billions of jobs in the arts in Boston that I’m actually qualified to perform. And the ones I’m qualified for I can’t get because there are other people out there more qualified than me applying for them. Which means I have to look for jobs that require a little less education than I actually have if I want to get an interview. And then I might not even get hired for those because they think, “Hey, she’s sort of overqualified for this, there’s no way she’ll stay for very long.” It’s the catch-22 of trying to get a job in an economic climate like our current one: you can’t get the jobs you’re qualified for and you can’t get the jobs you’re overqualified for.

I’m not saying it’s never going to happen. I’ve gotten a few nibbles. But it does take a while and it is very tiring and trying. It crushes your self-esteem a little bit more each time you don’t get a job or you don’t get an interview, especially if you stupidly thought it would be easier than it’s turning out to be because you have a bachelor’s from a great institution and a master’s degree to boot, plus six years job experience.

Oops, I’m sorry, didn’t I say I wasn’t going to write an entry about trying to find a job? Poop. Ok, well here are a few things that I have done around town. I’ve been down to Newbury Street, which is essentially the gallery area here in Boston. I’ve explored Trader Joe’s, which is my new favorite grocery store because of how cheap and tasty everything is. I’ve been in the touristy part of town and rode those famous swan boats. I ate a grilled cheese sandwich at the oldest pub in America. I found a new great place to run (Chestnut Hill Reservoir) that allows me to just walk out my front door and start running (which saves a lot of time)…and I accidentally kicked a chipmunk during one of my runs (made me very sad because chipmunks are so much cuter than squirrels. But if I had kicked a squirrel, I probably would have freaked out because they seem like rats with fatter tails to me so I would have thought I had a disease or something). I got a pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks (dessert + caffeine + starbucks card your mom pays for = ok purchase) in celebration of the beginning of fall and being in a place that actually has fall. I went on a booze cruise with a bunch of law students, and then I had to explain to each one of them that I wasn’t in law school, I wasn’t in school at all, and I had no job. Oh, and then one of them asked me how old I was, which just made me feel more awkward for some reason. I got drunk on a booze cruise off of two of those tiny individual bottles of wine (classy). And then I had to pee really bad the entire hour it took us to get out of downtown.

And that’s about it. That’s Boston in a nutshell. Well, at least so far. Don’t get me wrong, I really like it here, it’s a fun city and the weather is great (so much better than Austin’s…although the Mexican cuisine is not, obviously).  Hopefully my next post won’t be such a downer. It will be more along the lines of “I have a fabulous job and I get to spend money again on really stupid purchases! Oh, and I can pay rent!” Until then…

Katie Wants to Take You to…H-Town

Ok, I’ve been remiss in my bogging duties, I know it. And what’s worse, it’s been about two months since I visited Dallas and Houston, so I’m starting to forget everything I saw there. But I promise I’ll do my best with this post. Hang in there.

The day I went to Houston was the same day that one of the many hurricanes this season hit the Texas coastline, so it was raining cats and dogs. Not fun weather to drive in, but definitely ok weather for hanging out in a museum all day. My first stop was the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Huge, absolutely huge. And it had this really weird floorplan because I think it was technically two buildings that had been linked by an underground tunnel (transformed into a Turrell piece, of course). Anyway, I wandered through pretty much all of the museum in about three or four hours, I think. There were some good shows going on, too. One was “In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet” which had some really great landscapes (uh…yeah, Katie, we got that from the title), some of which even involved sheep. I like sheep. You’re just going to have to trust me when I say that my papers on art for classes don’t sound this ridiculous…Read my thesis if you don’t believe me (hint, hint, family members). So while I’m wandering around this exhibit that is a mixture of photographs and landscapes from about the same time period, mid-1800s to late-1800s, I overhear a conversation between a grandmother and her grandson, where she explains to him that there are painted landscapes because people didn’t have photography back in the day. I’m not the type to step in when someone is clearly making a mistake in the education of their children, but I was wondering how she thought the little display of a mid-nineteenth-century camera beside an easel and paints fit in with the whole exhibit. Odd, very odd. Check out the dates on those exhibition stickers, lady.

I was a little disappointed by how few paintings and sculptures the museum had from the modern to contemporary time period. They had about five or six rooms of modern art, and pretty much just the one for contemporary. Granted, they had a really fun Oldenburg in the contemporary section (ok, aren’t they all fun?), some nice Rothkos, etc, but I needed more! Especially since my two Texas museum trips clarified for me that it is not really modern art that is my first love, but contemporary. I had no idea! Seriously, during one of the Greenhill symposiums at UT, a PhD student in modern art made an ill-advised comment at the end of his presentation about how contemporary art didn’t make any sense to him and seemed superficial or something like that, and I was thinking, “Well, I wouldn’t have announced that thought to the entire art history faculty and students, but I agree.” But now, NOW, I think that I’d much rather look at a Rothko or a Jasper Johns than a Picasso. And, really, it wasn’t that big of a leap for me, since Duchamp was obviously my favorite artist, and he had a huge influence on art from the late 1950s and on to the present. Ok, back to the story…

I explored everything in the first building, ate lunch, and then walked along the little Turrell tunnel installation to the other building, which seemed to be where they kept their non-Western art and temporary exhibits. One of the exhibits on display, “End Game: British Contemporary Art from the Chaney Family Collection,” was truly morbid. Other (better) bloggers have written about the dangers of censorship, but I have to say that watching a dad hold his child up so he could see a Model Village of the Damned was a little disturbing. I mean, yes, this model included figures not unlike the little toy soldiers that boys often play with, but some of these were missing body parts, hanging in trees, covered in something that looked like blood, tiny toy vultures poking at their carcasses. There were heads on stakes. You get the idea. I had a hard time believing that I would have wanted my little, sweet, innocent nephew to see art based on such horrific, although human, situations. The show also had several Damien Hirsts, including a canvas covered in housefly bodies, a bull’s heart with a dagger through it, and a medicine cabinet.

The second part of my day in Houston involved a trip over to the Menil Collection compound. This is in a really pretty part of Houston, but don’t ask me to get specific, because Houston is a quite large city (fourth in the U.S.), and I basically only knew how to get where I was going and back out again. The Menil Collection is made up of several different buildings spread out over a small area. There is a main building, containing most of the collection, then there is the Rothko Chapel, a Cy Twombly gallery, a Flavin installation, and a Byzantine fresco chapel. I had visited the Menil Collection one other time with my icons class, so I had seen the main building, the Flavin installation, and the Byzantine chapel (of course). This time I skipped Flavin and the icons and went to the main building, the Twombly gallery, and the Rothko Chapel. The Menil might be one of my favorite museum-type-things that I’ve ever been to. It’s right up there with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and MoMA. It’s small, so you can easily spend time actually looking at things rather than feeling like you have to hurry to see everything. And it’s mainly from the modern period on up, which suits my tastes. They have an amazing Surrealist collection, more Magrittes than they know what to do with, I think. When I visited with my class, we were taken back into their storage spaces, which had walls that were just littered with fabulous paintings. It was almost shocking to look at. I mean, you hear about how much art is kept in basements or warehouses because museums simply don’t have the space to show it all, but it is just truly remarkable to see it all grouped together in one place. Really overwhelming. And that’s why you should want to work in a museum—the access!

I think my favorite part of the Houston trip was the Cy Twombly gallery. Honestly, I was a little disappointed with the Rothko Chapel. I mean, Rothko is certainly not one of my favorites, but I do like his work. I guess I just wasn’t expecting what I got. It was so dark and all of the paintings were a variation on black, really. The Twombly space felt more like a place of contemplation to me, perhaps because I got stuck in there by myself during a downpour. The hurricane weather really kicked in while I was inside, and I seriously was the only person in there, the museum employee having his own little space outside of the main gallery. So I walked around the entire space, looking at huge paintings in every room, and then finally ending up in this one, long room, with a painting that took up the entire wall. It was amazing. I just sat there, looked at great art, and listened to the rain beat down on the ceiling.

And so my trip to H-Town closed, leaving me to head out of town during rush hour with almost no gas left. Seriously, I thought I was going to get stuck on the highway, surrounded by cars, with no way of getting home. I’m really glad I don’t have to make a commute from there everyday.

Katie is Famous!

Ok, not really.  Not even close.  But I would like to take a moment and brag about myself…Check this out, I’m in a library catalog:

click click!

Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about Houston.  That post will come sometime soon!

Katie Does Dallas…and Houston

Hmm.  Sorry about that title.  Anyway, about a week before I moved out of my apartment in Austin (that’s right, I no longer live in the lone star state), I decided to check out some of the art museums in Texas.  Austin is not known for having the best art scene (or, not in my book).  Music, yes.  Visual art, not so much.  So even though I completed my master’s in art history in Austin, there weren’t very many places in the city where I could see great works of art.  There are two “Austin Museums of Art”: one downtown and one on W 38^th Street.  I never actually got around to visiting the museum on 38^th, and I went to the one downtown all of once in my entire two years of living in Austin.  And that one time was during a visit prior even to moving to the city.  The downtown AMoA is a very small space that is used mainly for traveling exhibitions rather than art that is part of the permanent collection.  When I visited, a Christo and Jeanne-Claude show was up.  Unfortunately, they had not covered the museum.  Or any Austin landmark.  How great would it be if they covered UT’s football stadium??  Now that would take a lot of burnt orange fabric.

 

There are other places that display art in Austin.  West 6^th is a decent gallery district.  Right off Barton Springs there is an outdoor sculpture garden (Umlauf Sculpture Garden) that also has different exhibits in the indoor section.  The university has the Blanton Museum of Art, which is actually a pretty great museum but somewhat on the small side.  South Congress has a few galleries, although I quit going to one of them after the woman working in it asked me if I was lost.  Uh, no.  I’m looking at art, lady.  Don’t talk to potential customers that way!  Jeez.  There is also a gallery/museum near the downtown AMoA called MexicArte or something like that.  I have been in it.  That’s about all I have to say about that.  I guess, now that I’m thinking about it, it’s not so much that Austin doesn’t have great art to look at, it’s more like the city doesn’t have art that I want to look at.  (Feel free to argue against my point of view, all you Austinites out there.)

 

As a result of Austin’s lack of visual art resources, I decided to travel to two other cities in Texas that have much better museums: Dallas and Houston.  Both of these cities are about a three-hour drive from Austin, so I was able to do them each in a longish one-day journey.  One Tuesday, I woke up early and hit the road for Dallas.  What are the highlights of a road trip from Austin to Dallas you might ask.  Well, you get to see Waco!  Now that is exciting.  Besides that, there are a lot of doughnut shops.  Not your commercial-variety doughnut shops, either, but homemade(-ish), Mom & Pop doughnut shops.  I didn’t actually eat any, though, so I can’t tell you what they’re like.  I’m guessing large and fatty.  And therefore delicious.

 

I had been to Dallas one other time, for the annual College Art Association conference in February.  During that weekend, I did get a chance to go to the Dallas Museum of Art to see a Turner exhibit (really great), but I had to cut my time short and rush back to hear Yoko Ono speak.  That’s right, Yoko Ono.  It was awesome.  But since I hadn’t really gotten to spend as much time in the museum as I would have liked, I decided that it would be my first stop in my Texas museum tour. 

 

The Dallas Museum of Art gives the impression of being a really huge museum, and then you start exploring it and you think “Hey, it’s not that big.”  And then you don’t finish exploring it until three and a half hours later (that includes speed-walking through the boring art, i.e. portraiture…sorry, just my opinion, people) and you think “Uh, no, it really is that big.”  There’s something about the floor plan that leads you to believe that each gallery is relatively small, but that’s not actually the case.  You can wander for hours and see art that encompasses all time periods and locations.  They had some nice Mondrians on display when I was there, and the Wendy and Emery Reeves Collection was both intriguing and frustrating.  Intriguing because it was laid out so as to look like the donors’ French Riviera villa, and frustrating because this meant that the really wonderful van Gogh, Monet, Cézanne, etc. that they owned was placed in a recreation of a living room or bedroom blocked off so you couldn’t get close enough to really look at the paintings.  While I found some parts of the Dallas Museum of Art’s collection more interesting than others, I do think that there is something for everyone.  Plus, the museum has some of the friendliest museum guards I’ve ever talked to.  They were very helpful, knowing a lot about the rooms they were walking through and what was displayed within them and also seemed really to care about making sure the art was protected.  I definitely respect that.

 

After the Dallas Museum of Art, I walked across the street to the Nasher Sculpture Center.  I was pretty excited about getting to go to the center because during my last year at Duke University, the school opened its new art museum, funded by and containing some of Raymond D. Nasher’s collection of sculpture.  As a part of the celebration surrounding the unveiling of the museum, I got to hear the late Mr. Nasher talk about how he had collected art over the years, and I took a class with Dr Kristine Stiles on modern and postmodern sculpture.  That class solidified my love for sculpture.  I really prefer sculpture to painting in a lot of ways, so my trip to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas was a great opportunity.  (I should probably also mention here that the Dallas Museum of Art has a sculpture garden that was wonderful as well.)  Part of the Nasher collection is housed in a very open indoor space with plenty of natural light and hardwood floors.  A large version of Naum Gabo’s Head No. 2 sits in one corner—interesting for me because I wrote a paper about Gabo’s sculpture for an abstraction class I took during graduate school.  The basement has visiting exhibitions; on view during my visit was a Jacques Lipchitz show made up of work recently donated to the center.  The collection continues outdoors in what is now one of my favorite sculpture gardens.  The first piece I noticed was Jonathan Borofsky’s Walking to the Sky (2004).  I found this sculpture and the others by Borofsky in Dallas to be very intriguing; I wasn’t really familiar with this artist, but I think that I need to start researching his work.  Walking to the Sky consists of three figures standing on the ground, looking up a pole that points to the sky with other figures walking along it.  The figures are life-size, and every time I saw the sculpture out of the corner of my eye, I thought that the figures on the ground were real people.  Here’s what the map/brochure for the Nasher Center says about Walking to the Sky:

 

“Walking to the Sky continues Borofsky’s ongoing exploration of human ideals, dream life, and fantasy.  The sculpture was originally inspired by a story Borofsky’s father told him as a child about a friendly giant who lived in the sky.  During each tale, father and son would imagine walking into the sky to discuss with the giant what should be done to help everyone on earth.  Soaring 100 feet into the air at a 75-degree angle, this sculpture is one of the artist’s largest and most ambitious works to date.  Seven life-size figures walk briskly up the pole, while three more on the ground watch their ascent.  They are different races, ages, and genders and seem to defy gravity, ascending to new heights under their own compelling tribute to the power of our aspirations and the resilience of the human spirit.”

 

The other sculpture by Borofsky at the Nasher center is entitled Hammering Man, and its blurb mentions that it “signifies both the drudgery and heroism of labor.”  Borofsky himself states, “the Hammering Man is a worker, and I idolize the worker in myself.  At the same time, it seems that the boring, monotonous repetition of the moving arm implies the fate of the mechanistic world.”  The guide goes on to say that Borofsky’s art offers “another commentary on the fate of the individual in the world of modern technology” because the artist signs his works with sequential numbers rather than his signature.

 

Also in the Nasher Sculpture Center’s garden is the best Turrell I have ever experienced.  Turrell’s light installations can be both fun and disorienting, but Tending (Blue) in the Nasher center is calming and uplifting.  To get into the installation, you have to first talk to people working in the gift shop.  They will inform you that you completely missed a set of doors at the end of the garden and that you have to go back out there and confidently open them.  After you do that, you walk through a very short hall/tunnel that has a sort of blue light and emerge into a square room with tan, concrete-looking walls.  There are benches connected to all four walls, and above you there is a flat ceiling with a square cut into it.  Through this square, you look up into the sky, which appears much bluer than normal either because that is the way it has been all day and you haven’t noticed because you’ve had your nose stuck in art or because of the direct comparison you have between the sky and the light-washed walls.  (Apparently the interior of the “skyspace” has lighted walls, but you don’t really notice that while you’re in there.)  Be warned, however.  The guide says that this room is air conditioned “in warmer months”, but apparently this doesn’t hold true for the extremely hot months, like July, when I visited.  It was most certainly not air-conditioned, and Dallas is a muggy, hot city.  I hope they have fixed this problem since I visited.

 

All in all, I would say my Dallas trip was a success.  I got to see major works of art and a major U.S. city, although the majority of my time was spent looking at the art and not at the city.  It is so important to visit museums that are near you when you can because what is on display, both from permanent and visiting collections, is constantly changing.  You never know what you are going to get a chance to see.  Most likely something wonderful. 

 

At the moment I am very sleepy, so the Houston part of my tale will have to wait until next time.  Auf Wiedersehen!

Katie Loves James McAvoy, But…

Wanted was a very bad movie.  Just awful.  The only thing that redeemed it in any way (besides the fact that James McAvoy was in it…YUM!) was that I saw it at the Alamo, which meant I got to have a beer while I watched.  Double yum!

 

Wanted tells the story of a one-thousand-year-old group of assassins called the Fraternity whose main method of killing comes in the form of quite unbelievable stunts.  And I mean laughably unbelievable.  I think the first sign that a movie is bad is if your fellow watchers in the theater are laughing at parts that were not intended to be humorous.  The time I saw First Daughter, starring Katie Holmes, in the theater comes to mind.  While watching Wanted, I became aware of the laughter that seemed to accompany a lot of the movie, despite the fact that it had a serious tone and more gore than I’ve seen in a movie in quite a while (probably because I tend to stay away from horror films).  The part I laughed the hardest at was a stunt towards the beginning of the movie that should have warned me of what was to come.  Now, I’m pretty crummy at describing things, but bear with me.  This is a stunt that took place in a parking lot.  James McAvoy (I’m going to use the actors’ names because I am really bad at remembering character names and too lazy to look them up) was running away from a man who was trying to kill him—running away because he did not yet know that he himself was a killing machine with the ability to shoot the wings off flies.  (How in the hell did Morgan Freeman find those housefly bodies after McAvoy had shot the wings off in order to show them to McAvoy and convince him of his shooting skills?  I would have assumed that they landed in the trashcan that they were flying over and that Freeman would have had to sift through all the garbage with little hope of finding tiny little wingless fly bodies, but apparently Freeman has extraordinary fly-finding powers.  Anyway, back to the stunt.)  McAvoy is running through a parking lot, he is being chased by a man driving a dog food truck, and instead of running in between the cars that were parked, McAvoy insists on running in a straight line so that his only hope to escape from the bad guy is suddenly to be able to run faster than a vehicle.  But wait!  What’s this?  Angelina Jolie’s character is coming to the rescue in some kind of sports car (I know nothing about cars, sorry.).  And here is the funniest stunt of the movie: Jolie drives straight for McAvoy’s back, but instead of hitting him, she opens the passenger side door, hits the brakes, and slides the car so that it is going perpendicular from its original path, and McAvoy miraculously lands in the passenger seat.  What makes this so absurd is that if a car came at you, even sideways, going probably 50 mph, I’m pretty sure that you would be hurt, whether or not the door was open.  Since McAvoy had no way of knowing that this car was coming up behind him, he most likely would have been struck by the footboard around his ankles and ended up underneath the car, not in it.  I laughed for probably three minutes.  Maybe you just have to see it to realize how funny it is, but please.  Wait until it comes out on video.

 

The most prevalent “stunt” of the movie was another shooting skill.  Freeman, Jolie, and others teach McAvoy how to curve his bullets by bringing his gun behind him and then slinging it forward as he shoots.  I have no idea whether this is possible in real life, and I would really like to know.  I’m pretty sure that there are a ton of teenaged boys out there trying to do it after having seen this movie, which sort of scares me.  Although straight shots have killed people perfectly well in previous movies, almost every shot that these assassins took required them to curve their bullets.  If I were forced to go see this movie again, I would definitely take a tally of how often it happens.  Anyway, the main point that bothered me with this one was the poorly written script that accompanied the training sequence.  McAvoy is bewildered when he is asked to curve his shot so it can go around a giant dead hog hanging from a meat hook and hit the bull’s eye on the target directly behind it.  He stammers out, “How??”  Freeman wisely replies, “It is not a question of how, it is a question of what.”  No, I’m pretty sure it’s a question of how, Morgan. 

 

And on to the plotline.  I have no problem with the whole idea of “Oh, Mr. McAvoy, you are the best assassin the world has ever seen, just like your estranged father, whose death you must avenge.”  My problem comes with this Fraternity and how their assassination plans work.  Located in a textile factory (yeah, why do they have animal carcasses hanging from meat hooks in a textile factory?  That wasn’t really explained…) the Fraternity is able to “read” weavings they…receive, I guess, from Fate.  (I’m not all too clear on this point because I went to use the bathroom around the time it was explained).  The weave of these weavings tells the Fraternity the name of their next target, and because it is governed by Fate, we are able to assume that the person they are supposed to kill deserves to die.  And somehow, these weavings are able to communicate this name in code.  In binary, to be exact.  What?  So confusing.  I’m just going to leave it at that. 

 

Oh, and we are told by Jolie that it’s ok to kill these people unquestioningly because they are killing one to save thousands, or something like that.  But then Jolie does something stupid and drives a car into the side of a train so she can get out and help McAvoy kill someone on the train, which has the disastrous effect of getting stuck on the outside of a tunnel while the train is on top of an impossibly high bridge over a ravine, so that the entire train derails and slides down into the ravine.  I’m pretty sure she killed thousands there.  Oh, yeah, and they don’t really tell you how Jolie and McAvoy are able to escape relatively unharmed after the railcar they were in gets stuck sideways in the ravine…

 

(Spoiler alert for the rest of this posting!  Don’t read if you actually think you would like to waste an hour and a half of your life on this ridiculous movie!)

 

And, finally, the climax and end of the movie.  McAvoy suddenly realizes that the Fraternity has been lying to him this whole time, his father was not actually killed by this other group of assassins.  Rather, McAvoy was taken on by the Fraternity in order to kill his father, who had become a member of the “bad” guys (Star Wars, anyone?).  And he achieves this, killing the man who he believes murdered his father only to find out that he has, in fact, just shot his father.  So wait.  The Fraternity are actually the bad guys?  Yes, that’s right!  What a twist!  Oh my gosh!  I’m stunned!  And Jolie has been given orders to shoot McAvoy!  What is going to happen next?! 

 

McAvoy manages to get inside the Fraternity’s compound, kill everyone in sight except for a few who hold him off in his quest to kill Freeman.  McAvoy then informs them that Freeman has been undermining Fate by not passing on orders from the textiles.  McAvoy’s father was told to kill Freeman, so Freeman had McAvoy’s father killed by McAvoy, the only man Freeman knew his father wouldn’t kill.  Hey, that sentence makes sense in my head.  Go figure it out.  Anyway, Freeman shows Jolie and all the other assassins who have formed a circle around McAvoy that their names, too, have shown up in the weave, but Freeman has protected them and not let anyone assassinate them.  So really, he was just doing them a favor.  The expected result of this revelation is that they will all turn on McAvoy and kill him.  Unfortunately, Jolie is big on fate and, it being her duty to carry out fate’s plans, she determines that if the weave thinks they should all die, then they should.  So, in one final glorious stunt, she curves a bullet so it goes around the circle, entering the brains of the people standing around McAvoy and killing them, before she straightens up and accepts the bullet into her own brains.  That’s right, everyone dies.  And McAvoy kills Freeman.  And apparently it doesn’t matter to Jolie that the weave also told her to kill McAvoy because she doesn’t shoot him before she dies.  So much for duty.  At the end of the movie you have no idea whose side you are supposed to be on.  There is a general sense that Freeman is a bad person for having McAvoy kill his own father, but then again, McAvoy is rather evil by the end and is willing to kill everyone in sight.  And what is he going to do now that the entire of the Fraternity is dead?  Is he going to keep on reading binary code from textile samples in order to find out who to kill?  I guess we can only hope for a sequel.  Then again, maybe not.

Katie Napkins: Baby-Sitter Extraordinaire

Last week I had the pleasure of baby-sitting my seven-month-old nephew.  His mom had to take him to Passways with her, the camp her church’s youth group was going to, and she asked me to watch him while she would be out doing activities with her youth.  This ended up being a good portion of the day, so I was given a great opportunity to bond with little Zeke.

 

Spending so much time with a baby you love is a very rewarding experience.  This is not to say that it isn’t hard work.  Within the first twenty-four hours I had a new respect for what my sister does on a daily basis.  Really I had the watered-down version because 1. I did not have to nurse him (that would have been awkward, huh?  But it would have led to some great posts on breastfeeding…), 2. I didn’t have to get up in the middle of the night with him, and 3. I wasn’t balancing a baby with a full-time job.  And, honestly, watching a baby is a full-time job, so my sister really has two!  How she has managed to remain the kind, fun, thoughtful person that she is for the past seven months is beyond me.  The only explanation I can come up with (beyond the fact that she has a husband, church, and family who love and help her when possible) is that when Zeke smiles at you or laughs, most, if not all, of the stress and fatigue that has accumulated during the day seems to melt away.  As an added bonus for my sister, Zeke definitely knows who his Mom is and immediately lights up when she comes into the room (although this can make it hard when you’re baby-sitting and the baby is well aware of the fact that you are not who he would prefer to be with).

 

I know that the time I spent with my nephew last week is something I will treasure forever.  Yes, it was hard to get him down for naps—there is no worse feeling than having a baby scream and cry at you for an hour because he refuses to let go and drift off to sleep.  But the rest of the day outweighed those moments for me because there is no better feeling than having a baby smile his gummy little smile at you.  We went on walks outdoors, which he loved.  Zeke seems to be the calmest and happiest when he is outdoors, exploring the world with his eyes, ears and hands (occasionally mouth, as well).  We took a blanket out one day and lay on our backs looking up at a tree.  Zeke also enjoyed scooting to the edge of the blanket so he could pluck up stems of grass.  Often, however, we played inside, out of the heat and humidity that defines a Carolina summer.  One of Zeke’s favorite toys ended up being my cell phone.  Like most things, he insisted on gnawing on it, but the way it lights up mesmerized him—a fact that definitely came in handy when I needed to calm him down.  Babies are like pets, apparently, in that their favorite toys are not the ones you bought for them but the everyday items that they discover on their own, including cell phones, door stops, and a piece of yarn.

 

Some of the funniest moments of the week came during feeding time.  Zeke made hilarious faces as I tried to feed him bananas and applesauce, giving me looks that seemed to say, “What are you trying to pull?  This is NOT milk!”  Nonetheless, he’d always open his mouth for more. 

I also got to take him swimming.  He was pretty tired when we went, but he seemed to enjoy splashing and watching the other kids.

 

During the week I began to find it easier and easier to read Zeke’s body language.  I could tell when he was tired, when he was hungry, when he was overwhelmed.  I also found many ways to entertain him: standing next to a window so he could slap it over and over again with his chubby hand, dancing and singing funny made-up songs, playing peek-a-boo.  It was a great week, and I’m so glad I had the chance to be there with him, especially since it may be harder to do once I have a job and live in Boston.  I hope there are more opportunities for us to bond in the future and that he always knows how much I care about and love him.

Katie Celebrates

I spent most of yesterday celebrating a friend’s birthday and just generally relaxing.  My friend had picked a few activities that she wanted to do, so around 11 I met up with her and her husband at Zocalo Café for brunch.  None of us had been there before, but it ended up being really tasty.  I had the chilaquiles—very good.  I would definitely go back there if given the opportunity.  We ate outdoors as it was slightly overcast and therefore not as hot as it could have been, and then we hopped into a car and took off for Hamilton Pool, which is about a 20 to 25 minute drive from Austin. 

 

Hamilton Pool was a new experience for me, and I enjoyed every moment of it.  After doing a little quarter-mile hike from the parking lot, the noises of people having fun in water can be heard.  Turning a corner and crossing a short wooden bridge, you are left looking at a little oasis: a very short, pebbly beach that faces out into a swimming hole surrounded on its other three sides by large rocks.

Yesterday was really the perfect day for swimming and relaxing; it wasn’t too hot, but it was hot enough that you wanted to get into the cold water.  If you know me at all, you know that I love swimming, even if I’m not the best at it and usually end up doggy-paddling around.  Water trickles down from the cliff that hangs out over the pool, and you can swim under it so that it feels like you’re swimming in the rain.  The pool was deep enough so that you couldn’t touch the bottom for most of the area of it, but not so deep that you could dive off any rocks, although there were kids cannon-balling off some.  If I ever go back, I think I’ll bring a large float that I can lay on and maybe try to take a book out on it (although I guess it’d have to be one that I wouldn’t mind getting a little wet if that were going to work).

 

We stayed at the pool for a couple hours and then headed back to the car.  On our way back to Austin we stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall called Bert and Ernie’s General Store or something like that.  It had a small bar with a porch out back, so we ordered a few Coronas and sat out back drinking, talking, and laughing.  All in all, it was a wonderful day, and when I got back to my apartment, I felt lazy and exhausted in that really nice way that you get when you’ve spent all day in the sun and water.  A really healthy feeling.  It made me look forward to “camp” next week, when I’ll be taking my nephew swimming (although a chlorinated pool is a slightly different experience) and having a good time with him and my sister.