“Infinite Space, the first major retrospective of the work of award-winning, Los-Angeles-based, Turkish-born artist Refik Anadol, invites visitors to open their senses to the endless transformation and infinite possibilities at the intersection of man and machine.”
—from the program notes
That quote got me thinking about the endless transformation and infinite possibilities at the intersection of me and my vacuum cleaner, but perhaps I was taking it too literally.
The current environment in the main room at ARTECHOUSE suffered from a long, dull opening sequence that drove many of us from the room. It was only later that the artist gave us a taste of the mesmerizing beauty that keeps us coming back to the venue:
The walls in ARTECHOUSE’s main room are 30-feet high, so the video is best viewed full screen.
The real fun at this show was in the Infinity Rooms in the side galleries, where mirrored, angled walls created a high tech funhouse effect. Seeing two people who look vaguely familiar simultaneously approaching you from a corridor on your right and from a side hall on your left, and then realizing that they’re both you, is a wonderfully disorienting experience.*
If you wanted, you could be a one-person chorus line.
Two’s company, four’s a crowd.
Look closer. There are only four people in this picture.
“Infinite Space” will run through 2 September 2019.
The Lady From Shanghai That Scene from Orson Welles’ 1947 film noir.
*Even though those two people are considerably older and heavier than you are.
Regular postings will resume in the next few days. What follows here is a brief rundown on why I’ve been hors de combat since Memorial Day. It isn’t very pretty, and you may just want to skip this entry and wait for the new posts.
Summer of 2019 has not been anything close to the most wonderful summer of my life. In fact, I’d probably rank it near the bottom three, only slightly higher than the summer I spent in a Bulgarian prison (mistaken identity), the summer I got lost on the Appalachian trail and had to survive on berries and mushrooms for six weeks, or the summer when that Abercrombie and Fitch model kept calling me and emailing me and stalking me until I finally got the restraining order. (Actually, that one was rather fun.)
The season had started with such high hopes and great expectations! In late May I returned to Washington from a couple of weeks in gloomy and glorious Budapest,* restored, revitalized, and ready to live a much richer and more, well, elegant life. Think Gerald and Sara Murphy in Paris and on the French Riviera in the 1920s.**
The first warning signs came during an otherwise delightful visit by my Nevada brother and sister-in-law, when my long-standing pulmonary problems started to act up. I knew from experience that this meant I was in the early stages of a two- to four-weeks of low-level morbidity, marked by fatigue, marathon coughing sessions, and general yuckiness. And then The Flood happened.
Here’s where things get serious.
I wasn’t aware of it until later, but the whole mess—illness and injury, loss of autonomy and privacy, property damage and disruption of plans, and general uncertainty—left me seriously depressed and effectively paralyzed, unable to do much more than sleep, play online games, and watch immediately forgettable junk TV. I stopped returning phone calls and answering email. My big project for the year, improving my cooking skills? Abandoned. I had no desire to be in my post-Flood, chaotically disarranged kitchen, and no interest in exploring new restaurants. I survived on deli take-out and on great quantities of Diet Cherry Pepsi.
It was only just before Bastille Day, six weeks post-Flood, that I (metaphorically) slapped myself in the face and told myself that I couldn’t continue to live the way I’d been living, that the numbness began to diminish. I turned off the TV in the middle of an episode of Can’t Pay We’ll Take It Away and made reservations at regular hang-out ARTECHOUSE and at a couple of good restaurants. Not only would I get out of bed and dressed before 2 PM, but I would also actually leave the apartment!
And I did.
So while things here are still ugly—restoration of my condo and of the ~30 other units damaged by The Flood may not even be completed before the end of 2019—it seems life is finally, slowly, back on the upswing.
I’ll be spending the rest of my Unwonderful Summer posting here, dining out, and re-reading Living Well Is the Best Revenge and Tender Is the Night.
*It was my fourth visit to that endlessly fascinating city, my third in 18 months. I’ve told people that entitles me to honourary citizenship, but I may have been misinformed.
“There’s nothing like a catastrophe to take our minds off our problems.”
–Peter Devries
Unless things change, I’ll be posting little or nothing for the next couple of months. I’m a victim of The Great Memorial Day Flood of 2019.
As I wrote my brother, David:
“Our rooftop pool reopened about a week ago. Around 4 PM Monday, a pipe connecting to the filtering system apparently became detached, flooding the sub-pool maintenance area and overwhelming the two drainage outlets. Then the water, as water will, flowed downward, through the floor and the walls, flooding the units in the 10- and 11-tiers with more than half to contents of the pool. Since I’m in the 12-tier, I briefly thought I’d lucked out, until water started coming from the ceiling.
“The short version: I may have gotten off relatively easy, in that the only serious visible damage was to the carpeting. Yet to come, though, are the behind-the-walls and under-the-floor inspections, which will require moving and possible off-site storage of furniture and goods. This will not be fun, or cheap. If there are problems requiring demolition or reconstruction, it will be worse. Fingers crossed.
“The Red Cross offered temporary housing, but I spent Monday night on the dry part of the living room floor, while two of those big industrial fans blasted away at the pooled water. The electrician shut down power to everything except the fans, the refrigerator, and the kitchen light. Finally nodded off around 3 AM.”
Four days later, the situation is still, as they say, fluid. I’ll post an update if that changes, and an “All Clear” message when I resume postings.
Until then, I can only promise:
“As God is my witness, as God is my witness they’re not going to lick me. I’m going to live through this and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.”
Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India, was born on 24 May 1819, 200 years ago today.
That was “Victoria” by the Kinks, from the album Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire). Queen Victoria had been dead for 68 years when the Kinks recorded the song in 1969. Another couple of decades, and “Victoria” will be closer in time to the Victorian Age than to our own brave new world. Boats against the current….
“Canada to India Australia to Cornwall Singapore to Hong Kong From the West to the East From to the rich to the poor Victoria loved them all.”
If you pay close attention to the lyrics, you might catch hints of the band’s signature working-class rage peeking through all the exaltation, but we’ll ignore that for now. Victoria’s bicentennial gives good Anglophiles everywhere a reason to celebrate, from the West to the East.
Home Again
In lesser news, I’m back from beautifully gloomy Budapest, and ready to resume posting.
“When I first got off the bus years ago, I had the strangest feeling that I’d come home.”
—Laura Linney as Mary Ann Singleton in Tales of the City
Oh, yes, Mary Ann, in this you are not unique. The first time I was in San Francisco, I had exactly the same feeling.*
And now, thanks to Netflix, we’re going home again.
“inspired by the books of Armistead Maupin, the new Netflix Limited Series Tales of the City begins a new chapter in the beloved story. Mary Ann (Laura Linney) returns to present-day San Francisco and is reunited with her daughter Shawna (Ellen Page) and ex-husband Brian (Paul Gross), twenty years after leaving them behind to pursue her career. Fleeing the midlife crisis that her picture-perfect Connecticut life created, Mary Ann is quickly drawn back into the orbit of Anna Madrigal (Olympia Dukakis), her chosen family and a new generation of queer young residents living at 28 Barbary Lane.”
Tales of the City had its start as a three-times-a-week serial in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Author Armistead Maupin mixed real and (mainly) fictional characters to capture the essence of San Francisco in the 1970s. Maupin succeeded in doing for The City what Tom Wolfe failed to do for New York in Bonfire of the Vanities, probably the most overrated novel of the late 20th century. The column became must-read material, and a cult was born.
The first novelization of the serial was published in 1978, followed by five more volumes published at two-year intervals, with three more books released after a 20-year gap.
In 1993, Channel 4 (UK) turned the first book into a superb miniseries, which was shown on PBS in the US in early 1994. Here’s the trailer:
Good news! That original series is currently streaming on Acorn.
The new series will be released on Netflix on 7 June 2019.
Bonus Track
The great Laura Linney makes an uncredited appearance in this video for the also-great Aimee Mann. Watch closely, and see if you can spot her.
* Granted, I also had exactly the same feeling the first time I was in London, and the first time I was in Paris. Never had it in my own hometown, though, for some reason….
Remember the North Bergen (New Jersey) High School production of Alien that went viral last month? After audience members posted a few key scenes from the play to YouTube, it was praised by everyone from Phil Murphy, the Governor of New Jersey, to Ridley Scott, director of the original film, and Sigourney Weaver, who starred as Ripley in the Aliens movies. Scott was so impressed that he donated $5,000 so that the North Bergen kids could stage it again for a limited run. The encore production opened Friday night.
Guess who showed up to surprise the cast and crew, and to introduce the performance.
Redditor Gato1980 posted this video of Friday’s full performance:
Gato1980 also posted the timestamps for key scenes: The Face-hugger scene is at 29:00, the Chest-burster scene is at 48:30, the alien reveal is at 54:08, the alien attack scene is at 1:10:45, and Sigourney outro is at 1:24:50.
A headline that starts with the words “Florida Man” is almost guaranteed to be followed by a trip down Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole to a strange, exotic kingdom where the laws of logic and physics as we know them simply don’t exist. Things get curiouser and curiouser, as Alice herself once said.
So naturally, this happened in Orlando last weekend.
According to Click Orlando, “Apparently, the fight began when a man bumped into a woman and the duo began fighting. The video, posted by Instagram user Workfth, shows the Easter Bunny joining into the fight and throwing rabbit punches and haymakers.”
There were no arrests reported, this being Florida and all.
