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March 10, 2005
TT: Overegging the pudding
I returned from Washington this afternoon to find in my e-mailbox this note from a friend who's been worrying about my reputation:Remember when I said you shouldn't hit every deadline so reliably, because it will make some dunderhead think you're not an artist? In the same spirit, I want you to slow down a little. I want you to start spreading stories of your suffering--up at night, anguished at the burden of capturing such a great man's art, honored by the opportunity to find and focus on Satchmo, listening over and over to his early recordings, hitting the crystal meth a little too hard. (We'll think about that last one.) I just think many people are surprisingly primitive, even intellectuals, sometimes especially intellectuals, and are inclined to see truth in clichés--art is agony, etc. Which of course sometimes it is. But Van Gogh would have been great even if he'd kept all his ears. It appears I'm veering off course. Anyway let's blur your reputation for happy productivity a little....
Once I stopped laughing--which took a minute or two--I gave brief consideration to posting in more or less that vein about my back-to-back voyages to the nation's capital. Alas, the only suffering I underwent was outside the White House Tuesday morning, where I spent fifteen shivering minutes waiting for a cab in a cold, windy rainstorm. Beyond that, the only thing I can honestly tell you is that I'm bone-tired, for which reason the thought of spending the coming weekend writing, even about Louis Armstrong, is somewhat less than attractive. Nevertheless, I had great fun, and I came back with a gorgeous copy of Fairfield Porter's "Ocean II" to add to the Teachout Museum. If this be suffering, I'll have another helping, please.
On that ambiguously sunny note, here are some highlights of my recent travels:
- My Bradley Lecture to the American Enterprise Institute on "The Problem of Political Art" was well attended (by two different bloggers, among others). It was the first speech I'd given while wearing my new bifocals, and I thought my rhythm was a bubble off plumb as a result, but everybody was nice enough to tell me that I sounded just fine, so maybe I did. You can see for yourself on C-SPAN, which will be airing the lecture some time in the next few weeks. (If they tell me, I'll tell you.) In addition, a longer essay on the same subject will appear in the May issue of In Character: A Journal of Everyday Virtues, a new magazine published by the John Templeton Foundation. I'll post a link when one is available.
I dined chez AEI, whose in-house kitchen dished up a sit-down meal for twenty-odd invited guests. I got to eat some of the very good food (mmm, fresh asparagus) before the guests started pelting me with very good questions, some of which I apparently managed to answer to their satisfaction, since they let me have dessert.
- I spent the night in a boutique hotel around the corner from AEI. It shall remain nameless, but I do want to share a few details of my stay there, most of them culled from the promotional literature of what I'll call the Hotel Nirvana. The hotel's slogan is "Om Away From Home." The staff wears Indian-style attire, and the rooms are decorated accordingly. According to a brochure handily placed next to a complimentary copy of Yoga Journal:
From the opulent lobby to the fanciful guestroom, enlightenment pervades every aspect of the guest experience....As the door to the guestroom opens, visitors are drawn into their own pesonal sanctuary. This is their grounded center, their root of awakening. Like a belly laugh of Buddha, the room is both a temple to tranquility and a shrine to amusement....Here, employee of the month is the one who ensures the euphoric bliss of every guest. The concierge is a Sensei, the bellhop is a swami, even the valet is a guru whose every word or action is inspirational and divine.
As if all this weren't enough, three polished stones were placed on my turned-down bedspread in lieu of chocolates, accompanied by a printed card explaining that guests were invited to "use these stones for inspiration and to connect with the richness and magic of their imagination." I'm not sure exactly what they were supposed to do for me (other than break my teeth if I'd tried to eat one before reading the card), but the bed was perfectly fine, and when I finally stopped giggling, I got a halfway decent night's sleep.
- I awoke early the next morning to the sound of rain and the knowledge that my raincoat was hanging serenely in my closet in New York (the weather having been unseasonably springlike on Monday). I checked out of the Hotel Nirvana, caused a cab to materialize, and levitated over to what is now known as the Eisenhower Office Building, where I met a member of the Bush administration who escorted me across the alley to breakfast at (in?) the White House Mess. The gentleman in question, it seems, had read All in the Dances (you're surprised already, right?) and wanted to meet me.
The mess, which is tucked into a corner of the White House basement, is a small paneled room with a low ceiling and eight or nine tables, one or two of which are likely to be occupied at any given moment by people with familiar faces. I sat two tables away from Karl Rove (too far to eavesdrop), and President Bush's father strolled in midway through our meal (he didn't stay for breakfast, though). I ordered corned beef hash, which was served to me on a china plate bearing the presidential seal. I'm pretty sure it came out of a can (which suited me just fine--I love canned corned beef hash).
As for the conversation, I swear I'm not making any of it up. My host led off by telling me he was sorry he'd been unable to attend my Bradley Lecture, to which I replied that he was more than welcome to come hear my Phillips Lecture on Wednesday.
HE: What are you talking about this time?
ME: Well, it's part of the Phillips Collection's lecture series, so I'm going to talk about my own art collection, and how my taste was influenced by looking at the Phillips.
HE: And what do you collect?
ME: Mostly prints by American modernists.
HE (looking interested): Really? Do you happen by any chance to own anything by Fairfield Porter?
I managed to stammer out that I owned five color lithographs by Porter and was picking up a sixth one on Thursday, and that Porter himself would figure prominently in my lecture, but if a thought balloon had appeared over my head at that moment, it would have read, That's the last thing I ever expected to be asked over corned beef hash in (at?) the White House Mess. (Oh, yes, we also talked about Helen Frankenthaler.)
- From there I went to Union Station, climbed aboard the next train for New York, and watched the rain turn to snow as I rumbled north to catch the press opening of New York City Opera's revival of Candide, to which I took an overjoyed young composer friend who couldn't have liked it better.
- I got up unnaturally early the next morning to write my drama column for Friday's Wall Street Journal. Then I removed five prints from the walls (four disappeared into a garment bag, the fifth went under my arm), returned to Penn Station, and caught yet another train for Washington. It was a half-hour late, so instead of stopping at the hotel to freshen up, I went straight to the Phillips Collection and met my handler, who escorted me across Dupont Circle to the Women's National Democratic Club, in whose banquet room the two of us supervised the hanging directly behind the podium of John Marin's "Downtown, the El," Milton Avery's "March at a Table," Fairfield Porter's "The Table," Jane Freilicher's "Late Afternoon, Southampton," and Neil Welliver's "Night Scene." They looked just great, if I do say so myself.
Following a hasty drink at the hotel, we hiked back to the banquet room, where I delivered my lecture, "Multiple Modernisms: What a Novice Collector Learned from Duncan Phillips," before an audience whose post-lecture questions kept me hopping. Nearly everybody came up to the platform afterward to say hello and inspect the prints, after which I dined with Jay Gates, the director of the Phillips, and four well-chosen guests (one of whom I chose). I then retired gratefully to the Embassy Row Hilton, which does not promise its tenants enlightenment, merely a nice soft bed.
- I breakfasted in the hotel restaurant this morning, then went to the lobby to meet an "About Last Night" reader who had sent me an e-mail last month asking whether I was still looking for "Ocean II." He turned out to be a serious art collector who had run out of wall space and decided to dispose of a few superflous pieces. (Here's how serious he is: the cardboard box in which he delivered "Ocean II" was labeled Bonnard lithographs and watercolors. Note the strategic deployment of the plural.) I inspected the print, burbled with delight, took irrevocable possession, and headed one last time for Union Station, where an amused redcap helped me cart my six prints onto the quiet car of the Metroliner. Three and a half hours later, I was back in my Upper West Side apartment, looking for a place to hang "Ocean II" and wondering if it was too early to take a nap. It wasn't.
Tomorrow it's business as usual--I've got a chapter of Hotter Than That to write and yet another show to see--but I thought before I got going in earnest that you might like to read about four somewhat untypical days in my not uninteresting life. Now I'm going to borrow a ladder from my neighbor and see if "Ocean II" will fit over the door to my office....
P.S. It didn't. I hung it over my desk instead. I am now officially out of space.
Posted March 10, 2005 7:13 AM
