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May 30, 2006
Grant Wood Hereafter (Or, My New England Travels)
1350 miles, 7 states, 3 nights and 1 evening's hotel accommodation: I've just returned from a lightning tour of New England.
Here's the requisite slideshow, replete with abundant shots of the Hound in various stages of repose. Now if I was a true geek I'd Google Earth the itinerary, but even I've my limits.
It's a part of the world I've wanted to visit since picking up Walden, and I've long drawn the usual pertinent associations with Melville, Dickinson, Emerson, Frost and the gang -- not to mention John Irving and Stephen King. It did not disappoint, especially in the early going throughout the Berkshire Hills (Williamstown, Lenox, North Adams, Bennington) and Vermont's Route 100 and Green Mountain National Park. After New Hampshire, the only thing to get my pulse racing again was the electricity of Boston and a wet frolic in Harvard Yard, perfectly timed to follow graduation week.
My itinerary was a complicated exercise in toe-touching. I gave myself 6 days, not knowing where I'd stop along the way and for how long. As it turned out, the earlier half of the trip was by far the New England I will want to return to. Soon. Cape Cod, Maine and the usual suspects along the Eastern seaboard (Portland, Kennebunk, Provincetown, Newport) did really very little for me. Weather was mixed throughout but, wherever I was, it had a way of magnifying the sense of place.
Nowhere was this sense stronger than between the northern reaches of rural CT and the remote, densely forested stretches of Kancamagus Highway, NH. Here the trip was perfection. My photos do not really reflect these impressions as well as they might, but rest assured there was much more variety than I could have possibly captured along the way. Even with the weather constantly shifting, there was a painterly quality to the light, soil and foliage that is hard to describe short of saying I found myself in a kind of scenic afterlife as it might be rendered by Grant Wood.
I've never seen small-town Americana so appealing. Perfect touches of gothic foreboding throughout. I'll have to be on the look-out for getaways in this area. There is some serious cultural wattage in the summer theatre scene, not to mention relevant off-the-grid galleries like The Clark and MassMOCA. Colour me all kinds of smitten.
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May update
Nothing I can really share at this time. Except to say that I had a great housewarming earlier in the month and continue to settle in--this month was by far the most sane I've had here in NYC. The slowing pace of visitors has helped a great deal in that regard. That said, I was out and about at least as much as before; I think it's the new surroundings that are working their magic on me. Otherwise, there is much going on but nothing I can provide particular updates on -- not just yet.
Here's a tip for your aspiring reporters out there: never lose your notebook, as it will likely lose you an assignment or two! In my case I was lucky, but I did have to kill off something I was kindly asked for by Randi Greenberg at Metropolis. I've tried diligently to keep my notes both online and off, but the paper notebook has its disadvantages, and no backups is the biggest.
Oh, and I juiced my bio page a little, mainly to field those questions I get about "What is ideas journalism?" and, every bit as importantly, "Who was Super Jeffie?"
Posted by Jeff at 10:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 23, 2006
Carpe Diem Notebook
A mouse stirring in my heart. I'm off to New England the end of this week: to get out of the NYC hubbub, to relax and recharge, and to get better acquainted with the book project.
So yes, books are not the dominant cultural form they were in the 19th-century, and yes, some of these new forms have amazing complexity to them that we'd do well to understand and appreciate. But books still matter in this culture, and if you're trying to change the way people think about a complicated issue, the advice is the same as it was two hundred years ago: write a book.- Steven Johnson
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.-Herman Melville, Moby Dick
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May 4, 2006
Franklin Mint [Metropolis]
This spring Frank Gehry's star is shining bling-bright as Tiffany & Co. lauds his new jewelry line, but the leap from buildings to baubles is not an insignificant step in the career arc of the well-known American starchitect. The sculptural trinkets are crown jewels in a career that has made Gehry more constellation than star, an architect apart whose structures have come to personify the popular idea of contemporary architecture itself. Little wonder, then, that filmmaker and longstanding friend of the architect, Sydney Pollack has produced a friendly but perceptive documentary treatment, Sketches of Frank Gehry, debuting this week at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, that contemplates the curious alchemy of Gehry's career.
Documentaries about architects tend not to stray far from two narrowly prescribed story arcs: hagiography or tragedy. In both scenarios, the subject is presented as a relatively flat figure, a genius or would-be genius; the real distinction between the plot paths concerns career outcome, parental and personal capriciousness, or cosmic ennui. The genius shtick is rarely avoided. (A good exception is the delusions of grandeur farce, My Father, The Genius.)
Celebratory films are usually no better and are often vanity projects commissioned by the architects themselves as career capstones. Yet the plot points of this film are not sycophantic, and Pollack's naïf approach strikes an appealing balance between flattering his subject and demystifying him. The film also examines anti-Gehry sentiments at length. Sketches, in fact, does a reasonable job of expunging (but not exploding) the genius myth.
Given his background, Gehry nearly comes across as a tourist in his own profession. He failed his first drawing class: it was perspective, of course. He wandered into a ceramics class. He was an intellectually curious displaced Toronto boy who ran catering truck deliveries for Los Angelinos like Roy Rogers. His path, veering into architecture from fine art, helps explain his now trademark qualities: the obsession with shape, the extensive use of new and unconventional materials, and the performative, exhibit-like quality of his structures.
Pollack's film deglamourizes the architect's design process. The namesake sketches of the film's title, Gehry's starting point with all his projects, are about as mystical as the Gehry process gets. His methods for approaching his work and for discussing it with his team reveal a straight-talking, impatient craftsman. Films about artistic process often fail by relying on a protean myth of overwhelming talent: Gehry's chief skill, beyond his perspective and experience, comes off as his sheer playfulness. It is a playfulness, one interviewee alludes, made possible by technology.
Too often couch talk seems more prop or gimmick in biography--but any artist with a three decade flirtation with therapy warrants the focus. It seems to explain the heart of Gehry's development. The film's most amusing interview comes with Gehry's elder therapist of 30-plus years. Elsewhere, Gehry laments how his first wife pressured him to replace his Jewish birth name (Goldberg). The most telling admissions, however, are those wherein he considers his long-abiding sense of professional isolation--a castaway not fully belonging to art or architecture--and his flickering need for acceptance from both communities.
The real difficulty with Sketches, finally, is that Gehry's career conforms so readily to a Hollywood biopic treatment. His life is rich fodder for some future star vehicle. A vagabond architect who, largely without mentors, defies his professional peers. Hangs with likeminded outlaw artists. Flouts convention and develops brash, trademark style. Achieves greatness. Does not look back. No matter how Sketches of Frank Gehry--or any biography--might try otherwise, Gehry's example rekindles the myth of the architect as soloist.
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Elizabeth Spiers's New Deal [Institutional Investor]
Call it The Daily Show for the CNBC set. That's how Elizabeth Spiers, a former New York magazine reporter and founding editor of infamous celebrity-gossip blog Gawker, describes her new, satirical Wall Street blog, DealBreaker.
"The press does not talk about the things you talk about at cocktail parties," says the 29-year-old Duke graduate, who worked as an investment analyst for several hedge funds before launching Gawker in 2002. "Most mainstream financial coverage seems to imply you need to cover business in a deadly serious manner."
DealBreaker, which debuted late last month, is anything but dry. The site gossips about financial kingpins' foibles in much the same way that Gawker roasts big media swells. Mixed in with personality-driven commentary are generous doses of original reporting and entertainment. Among the site's first posts: fake contributions from J.P. Morgan Chase chairman Bill Harrison relaying his fixation on his maid, Lucia, and from "Muffie Benson-Perella," a privileged 20-something preppie-turned-investment-banking-associate.
"There aren't that many Wall Street blogs, period," explains Spiers. "The editorial route we're taking doesn't really exist right now."
The new venture has the financial backing of Vanderbilt heir Carter Burden, who's CEO of Web hosting company Logicworks, and Justin Smith, general manager of newsmagazine the Week. The partners intend to launch a Gawker-like network of blogs.
Spiers, who regularly jabbed at New York's financial elite when she edited Gawker, expects that Wall Street's penchant for secrecy means that its denizens will welcome a gossipy blog. She hopes that some of the site's content will come anonymously from people who work in the industry, as it did at Gawker.
"There are tons of financial sites out there," she says. "But there are none that cover the market like DealBreaker."
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