The New York Film Festival is winding down, but the highlight of the Festival has by all accounts already taken place. Despite being a documentary about an unlikely subject, it enjoyed highly enthusiastic, sell-out audiences who apparently couldn't get enough of this tale of one of the greatest private art collections in the world. I am referring to the Barnes Collection in Merion, Pennsylvania, about 5 miles from Philadelphia, where Dr. Albert Barnes so scrupulously gathered and displayed his extraordinary collection of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, long before they were popular or recognized as valuable, and which in time came to be regarded as one of the great collections of modern art ever assembled. The film is "The Art of the Steal," and it is a story, not just about that great collection, but even more about the tug of war between the purists who insist that Dr. Barnes' collection must never be disturbed and the Philadelphians who want to bring it once and for all to the big city.
Should this great collection stay in the little town of Merion, where visitors must schedule their visits ahead of time and are restricted to a limited number of dates, or should it be moved to the great city of Philadelphia, where it can be viewed by millions and, in turn, earn Philadelphia new bragging rights as the site of one of the world's great art collections? Dr. Barnes, we are reminded, insisted throughout his life that his collection should never be moved or disturbed. He was very clear about how the art should be displayed and how the different influences on the art should be demonstrated. The tranquil setting of his home, with its beautiful gardens and relaxing grounds is part of the appeal of this site, as is the way that he placed many paintings very close to each other on the same wall, to show their similarities and to help the viewer see how different styles of painting have evolved over time. This crowding of many paintings on a single wall strikes some critics as detracting from the art, but Barnes saw it as instructive and as part of the European tradition. It is worth noting that some of the greatest paintings in the world are in the Barnes, but perhaps the most noteworthy of them all is one that Barnes specifically commissioned from Henri Matisse and that is ostensibly forever emblazoned on the walls of Barnes' house, just below the windows of the very tall ceiling of his stately home. It is called "Dance II," and by itself is worth a visit to the Barnes.
In any case, in the end, the controversy over the Barnes Collection has little to do with the aesthetics of art, the thing that mattered to Barnes most during his lifetime, and much more to do with the economics of art. A collection like the one that Barnes compiled is big business. Where it goes means crowds, new revenues, new interest in any part of Philadelphia that can snare it. This represents the heart of the controversy and this hard fought issue becomes the main subject of this much praised film.
As a two-time visitor to the home in Merion who had to schedule special visits to the site and put up with all those great paintings crowded onto a single wall, I must admit that I prefer that the paintings be left undisturbed. Let the people do whatever is necessary to see these works on the site that Dr. Barnes designed for them. It is well worth the effort.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Central Park at Dusk
Riding the circuit on your bike in Central Bike is a delightful experience any time, but it can be especially nice at dusk. As you go around before the sun has actually disappeared behind the horizon, it is still light and the people continue to walk and stand and linger in the park. They don't want to leave. But as the minutes pass and the light begins to fade, so the people very gradually, one by one, seem to disappear. You don't really see them go, but you know that as you cycle through the Park there are many fewer pedestirans than there had been earlier and fewer still as you come around again. It is getting darker now, almost hard to see, but the afterglow of the sun creates brilliant and colorful reflections on the skyscrapers that surround the Park and the little streetlamps that can be seen so vividly now, even though they have been on for some time, add to the magic. Funny, even the street lights that punctuate the unacknowledged intersections of the park seem so lovely in their bright projections of green, yellow, and red, and the ponds that catch that evening light remind you of the rich black and white pallet that Woody Allen used in his greatest New York movie - Manhattan.
Now it's too dark to keep riding and the walkers are still more scarce. You look for your exit just past one of those glowing stoplights and just in front of a large statue of a Civil War hero whose name you can never remember. Reluctant to dismount, you continue on the cinder path that leads to the intersection of Central Park West and 69th Street. The street lights help but potholes and hidden perils abound that can upend a two-wheeler. Go slow and watch carefully, we repeat to ourselves. Almost home now. The light is fading still more and there is no more time for riding, but the City takes on its own electrified glow, a glow that cannot quite rival nature's but that for city folk has a beauty and charm that also merits our attention and our appreciation. Good night park. Good night potholed streets. Good night skyscrapers. Good night darkening sky. Good night moon. Another day in the city has come to a glorious end.
Now it's too dark to keep riding and the walkers are still more scarce. You look for your exit just past one of those glowing stoplights and just in front of a large statue of a Civil War hero whose name you can never remember. Reluctant to dismount, you continue on the cinder path that leads to the intersection of Central Park West and 69th Street. The street lights help but potholes and hidden perils abound that can upend a two-wheeler. Go slow and watch carefully, we repeat to ourselves. Almost home now. The light is fading still more and there is no more time for riding, but the City takes on its own electrified glow, a glow that cannot quite rival nature's but that for city folk has a beauty and charm that also merits our attention and our appreciation. Good night park. Good night potholed streets. Good night skyscrapers. Good night darkening sky. Good night moon. Another day in the city has come to a glorious end.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Rhubarb at the Theatre!
We were caught in a near riot that almost erupted into full scale verbal warfare last Saturday night during a post-performance discussion of the David Mamet play about a power struggle between a professor and his female student called Oleanna. Oleanna is a complex and often ambiguous story of a stormy relationship between an almost tenured professor and his troubled student, struggling to pass his course. They seem to need something from each other, as they meet something like four different times during the course of the play, all in the professor's office, but their attempts to communicate with each other only seem to make their situation progressively worse. As everything crumbles around them, especially for the professor who by the time of the fourth meeting has been accused of attempted rape and has lost his chance at tenure, he lashes out at his student when she chides him for calling his wife "baby" over the phone. As the play ends, the furniture is scattered all over the room, the student has been thrown to the floor, and the professor seethes with desperate anger.
The professor, who seems to want to be helpful can also be seen as sexually exploitative, while the student who strikes you as naive and confused during their first encounter comes across as manipulative and revengeful near the end. Who they are and what they really want is never made clear, but Mamet writes the play in such a way as to induce viewers to take sides and reach conclusions about motives and goals that are only partially supported by the action. Is the professor just a pompous and condescending pedagogue or really out to seduce his student? Is the student really as clueless as she seems at first, or is she doing this to somehow hold the professor accountable for his offenses with her, other female students, and institutional sexism in general? We really don't know, but the play seems to bring people's anger about such situations to the surface and tends to accentuate our leanings, either toward the male professor, on the one hand, or the female student, on the other.
In the post-performance discussion, which included a New York City Cultural Commissioner and a moderator, the audience felt restless and upset from the beginning. Before the first question could be answered, someone from the middle of the audience yelled, "go deeper!" and when the commissioner attempted to answer this first question in a somewhat stilted manner, someone else shouted, "you sound just like the people from the play." As the discussion went on, when someone either on stage or in the audience expressed support for one or the other characters, you could hear people exclaiming "Oh, give me a break!" Or "That's not what this play was about!" In general, I would say there was less sympathy for the female student and much more antipathy toward her than toward the professor. A number of men tried to lecture the audience about the true subject of the play - a well meaning professor manipulated by a power hungry feminist - but there were quite a few women as well who interrupted various speakers in mid-sentence, and who said things like: "That professor should have thrown her to the floor. I was glad to see him do that. She was begging for it." On the whole, there was this general unruliness that I guess is not unlike some of the healthcare "discussions" we have heard about lately. Are people more rude or impolite than in the past? Almost certainly not. I mean these are people in their 60s and 70s who are saying these things at the top of their voices. Surely, they learned how to conduct themselves in a public discussion. No, I think it is another sign of how fed up people are with a kind of political correctness, an expectation to act in a certain way, and the consequences that result when you're suckered into helping somebody out. We are entering the age of Ayn Rand again in some ways, where selfishness and self-interest are increasingly regarded as the wisest policies.
The professor, who seems to want to be helpful can also be seen as sexually exploitative, while the student who strikes you as naive and confused during their first encounter comes across as manipulative and revengeful near the end. Who they are and what they really want is never made clear, but Mamet writes the play in such a way as to induce viewers to take sides and reach conclusions about motives and goals that are only partially supported by the action. Is the professor just a pompous and condescending pedagogue or really out to seduce his student? Is the student really as clueless as she seems at first, or is she doing this to somehow hold the professor accountable for his offenses with her, other female students, and institutional sexism in general? We really don't know, but the play seems to bring people's anger about such situations to the surface and tends to accentuate our leanings, either toward the male professor, on the one hand, or the female student, on the other.
In the post-performance discussion, which included a New York City Cultural Commissioner and a moderator, the audience felt restless and upset from the beginning. Before the first question could be answered, someone from the middle of the audience yelled, "go deeper!" and when the commissioner attempted to answer this first question in a somewhat stilted manner, someone else shouted, "you sound just like the people from the play." As the discussion went on, when someone either on stage or in the audience expressed support for one or the other characters, you could hear people exclaiming "Oh, give me a break!" Or "That's not what this play was about!" In general, I would say there was less sympathy for the female student and much more antipathy toward her than toward the professor. A number of men tried to lecture the audience about the true subject of the play - a well meaning professor manipulated by a power hungry feminist - but there were quite a few women as well who interrupted various speakers in mid-sentence, and who said things like: "That professor should have thrown her to the floor. I was glad to see him do that. She was begging for it." On the whole, there was this general unruliness that I guess is not unlike some of the healthcare "discussions" we have heard about lately. Are people more rude or impolite than in the past? Almost certainly not. I mean these are people in their 60s and 70s who are saying these things at the top of their voices. Surely, they learned how to conduct themselves in a public discussion. No, I think it is another sign of how fed up people are with a kind of political correctness, an expectation to act in a certain way, and the consequences that result when you're suckered into helping somebody out. We are entering the age of Ayn Rand again in some ways, where selfishness and self-interest are increasingly regarded as the wisest policies.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Taylor Branch
Just a day after enjoying the privilege of seeing Robert Caro, I went to a local Barnes and Noble to hear the other great biographer of our time talk about his quirky new book about the Clinton Presidency. This person is, of course, Taylor Branch and his richly deserved fame as a biographer derives from his monumental 3-volume history of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In many ways, Branch's history is even more breathtaking than Caro's, because its sweep is so enormous and the number of secondary and tertiary characters so numerous. Branch is similar to Caro, though, in believing that he must tell long, deeply rooted historical narratives in order to capture the authentic Dr. King and the real story of how the Civil Rights Movement unfolded.
Branch was at the Upper West Side B&N surrounded by about 100 people when I arrived just before he began his remarks on Wednesday evening. This was nothing like the Caro talk, just an author and bookstore trying to sell some books, but this didn't prevent Branch from being an energetic and voluble storyteller who more than anything wanted us to know that it was Clinton's idea to have Branch compile these interviews throughout his Presidency in order to have an honest and relatively unfiltered account of what it was like to be President over the years Clinton served. What resulted was The Clinton Tapes, not a book that Branch particularly wanted to take responsibility for and that he eventually found difficult to compose, in part owing to the fact that it was impossible to write himself out of the story. Over 70 times during Clinton's presidency, Branch sat down with Clinton to get a first-hand sense of how we he was experiencing the Presidency. These interviews were conducted late at night at the White House, and when each was completed, Branch would drive himself home in his pickup truck back to Baltimore (?) and record his own remembrances of what it was like to interview Clinton. One of these Branch tapes actually opens the audio version of this book.
Who knows how The Clinton Tapes will be received, though it's unimaginable that it won't be a bestseller. What I do hope, though, is that this book will remind us how smart and wide-ranging Clinton's mind was, and what a tremendously bright and all-encompassing man we had in the White House for 8 years.
Taylor Branch, a great historian and a good friend, is himself intent on conveying this, as well as the fact that for all his flaws, Clinton's heart was almost always in the right place. As I listened to Branch talk about the Clinton book and how he had known Clinton for over 45 years, I also became convinced that Taylor Branch was a good and fair man who wanted to give us a revealing portrait of Clinton as President. I, for one, look forward to reading it.
Branch was at the Upper West Side B&N surrounded by about 100 people when I arrived just before he began his remarks on Wednesday evening. This was nothing like the Caro talk, just an author and bookstore trying to sell some books, but this didn't prevent Branch from being an energetic and voluble storyteller who more than anything wanted us to know that it was Clinton's idea to have Branch compile these interviews throughout his Presidency in order to have an honest and relatively unfiltered account of what it was like to be President over the years Clinton served. What resulted was The Clinton Tapes, not a book that Branch particularly wanted to take responsibility for and that he eventually found difficult to compose, in part owing to the fact that it was impossible to write himself out of the story. Over 70 times during Clinton's presidency, Branch sat down with Clinton to get a first-hand sense of how we he was experiencing the Presidency. These interviews were conducted late at night at the White House, and when each was completed, Branch would drive himself home in his pickup truck back to Baltimore (?) and record his own remembrances of what it was like to interview Clinton. One of these Branch tapes actually opens the audio version of this book.
Who knows how The Clinton Tapes will be received, though it's unimaginable that it won't be a bestseller. What I do hope, though, is that this book will remind us how smart and wide-ranging Clinton's mind was, and what a tremendously bright and all-encompassing man we had in the White House for 8 years.
Taylor Branch, a great historian and a good friend, is himself intent on conveying this, as well as the fact that for all his flaws, Clinton's heart was almost always in the right place. As I listened to Branch talk about the Clinton book and how he had known Clinton for over 45 years, I also became convinced that Taylor Branch was a good and fair man who wanted to give us a revealing portrait of Clinton as President. I, for one, look forward to reading it.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Something Small
The posts on this blog have been about such big subjects lately that I, for one, hanker for something small, something simple, something, you know, excruciatingly ordinary. And what could be more ordinary than the need to use the bathroom on the Staten Island Ferry.
Now, in all frankness, about the time I board the ferry I am primed, once we pull out of the harbor, to sit down to relieve myself. But on the ferry, interestingly enough, you can never have it all, and here's what I mean by this. There are something like 5 or 6 ferries, all slightly different models that rotate taking people back and forth between Manhattan and Staten Island. Some are older and some are newer, some have snack bars and some don't, but none is perfect, particularly when it comes to using the toilet, and you never know which disadvantage you will be facing. For some inexplicable reason, all toilets (and I mean all) that have actual wooden toilet seats do not have proper door latches and so the doors themselves cannot be fixed and are thus subject to even the lightest of breezes. So while your bottom may be relatively comfortable, you must suffer the anxiety of never quite knowing when the stall door will swing open to reveal you in this most humble of positions.
On the other hand, there are bathroom stalls whose doors work perfectly, but in all of those cases (and I mean all) the toilet seats are entirely absent and in their place all that is available are the coldest imaginable stainless steel rims. The only way to make a sit tolerable is by spreading shredded sheets of toilet paper on this thin rim of steel, which also doesn't work very well because the toilet paper itself often tears into pieces as you attempt to extract it from the roll.
So there you have it, a tiny little object lesson in not being able to get everything that you want, not even when you're trying to respond to one of the most basic requests that nature makes of us, right there on the Staten Island Ferry.
Now, in all frankness, about the time I board the ferry I am primed, once we pull out of the harbor, to sit down to relieve myself. But on the ferry, interestingly enough, you can never have it all, and here's what I mean by this. There are something like 5 or 6 ferries, all slightly different models that rotate taking people back and forth between Manhattan and Staten Island. Some are older and some are newer, some have snack bars and some don't, but none is perfect, particularly when it comes to using the toilet, and you never know which disadvantage you will be facing. For some inexplicable reason, all toilets (and I mean all) that have actual wooden toilet seats do not have proper door latches and so the doors themselves cannot be fixed and are thus subject to even the lightest of breezes. So while your bottom may be relatively comfortable, you must suffer the anxiety of never quite knowing when the stall door will swing open to reveal you in this most humble of positions.
On the other hand, there are bathroom stalls whose doors work perfectly, but in all of those cases (and I mean all) the toilet seats are entirely absent and in their place all that is available are the coldest imaginable stainless steel rims. The only way to make a sit tolerable is by spreading shredded sheets of toilet paper on this thin rim of steel, which also doesn't work very well because the toilet paper itself often tears into pieces as you attempt to extract it from the roll.
So there you have it, a tiny little object lesson in not being able to get everything that you want, not even when you're trying to respond to one of the most basic requests that nature makes of us, right there on the Staten Island Ferry.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Robert Caro on Sense of Place in Biography
This post offers just a few brief comments regarding Robert Caro's talk on the sense of place in biogaphy given at the Leon Levy Center for Biography last Tuesday night. Almost the whole talk was based on some comments I have heard him make a number of times before, but I loved every minute of it anyway. Caro speaks with tremendous energy and enthusiasm, sometimes a bit awkwardly; he is not at all glib or particularly articulate, but he gets the point across beautifully nevertheless. And his point, this time, was to convey how much a place shaped Lyndon Baines Johnson's life. This place was the Hill Country of Texas, which stretches for some 300 miles west of Austin and covers something like 24,000 square miles. When LBJ grew up in one small part of this vast area - Johnson City - and even when Caro and his wife and sole research assistant, Ina, went to live there for close to three years to absorb that sense of place, only a few hundred people were living in Johnson City. More than anything, what Caro wanted to get across was how lonely and desolate and isolated this part of Texas was, and how much LBJ and his mother, especially, hated this isolation, and the incredible drudgery that went with living in a place where neither electricity nor running water were available. In Path to Power, Caro's set piece of what it was like to do laundry with nothing more than lye and well water has become a classic, and he did not dwell on this in his talk. But he did recount how Lyndon and his brother Sam would sometimes wait for hours on the main road (or more accurately rut) of Johnson City just waiting for a car to pass and perhaps even stop for a chat in their tiny town. This rarely happened. Caro described the nights in Johnson City when the only thing that could be heard was the sound of animals gnawing on the bones of fallen prey, and he emphasized how hard this was especially on people like Lyndon's mother, who was nearly driven mad by the loneliness.
The reason all of this mattered so much for the life of LBJ was that when he finally reached Capitol Hill in the early thirties, as the hardest working secretary to any United States Congressman, he never seemed to stop moving. He was driven, as few people have been driven, to change the conditions of people's lives. And more than anything he wanted to "bring the lights" to the Hill Country, something he accomplished almost immediately upon being elected as the Hill Country's representative to Congress in 1937. The Hill Country made him, and how he lived there and what he eventually did about it would be most monumentally echoed in the torrent of Great Society programs that he signed into law in the mid-sixties as the 36th President of the United States.
I don't know of another biographer who is better able to explain through the accumulation of dozens of tiny details the psychology of why people do the things they do. And no one, perhaps ever, has shown as powerfully as Caro how place influences and motivates actions. For those lucky enough to be there, Caro explained it all on Tuesday night.
The reason all of this mattered so much for the life of LBJ was that when he finally reached Capitol Hill in the early thirties, as the hardest working secretary to any United States Congressman, he never seemed to stop moving. He was driven, as few people have been driven, to change the conditions of people's lives. And more than anything he wanted to "bring the lights" to the Hill Country, something he accomplished almost immediately upon being elected as the Hill Country's representative to Congress in 1937. The Hill Country made him, and how he lived there and what he eventually did about it would be most monumentally echoed in the torrent of Great Society programs that he signed into law in the mid-sixties as the 36th President of the United States.
I don't know of another biographer who is better able to explain through the accumulation of dozens of tiny details the psychology of why people do the things they do. And no one, perhaps ever, has shown as powerfully as Caro how place influences and motivates actions. For those lucky enough to be there, Caro explained it all on Tuesday night.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Robert Caro at Leon Levy Center for Biography
Robert Caro, the most arresting biographer of our time, spoke the night before last at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York Graduate Center at 5th Avenue and 34th Street. The event was first come first served, so I arrived about an hour early and was able to secure a good seat for myself and Karen. After holding Karen's seat for 40 minutes, I got up briefly to go to the bathroom. I noticed that the auditorium was almost full. As I did so, a very tall figure sidled over to us to ask if my seat was available. It was Bill Bradley, the former Presidential candidate and Senator and great basketball star. I told him that if he really didn't have a good seat, we would gladly vacate our seats for HIM, but it turned out that there were VIP seats waiting for him even closer to the front. This is just a small indicator of two things really: 1)how readily one encounters well known figures in New York; 2)how much people - both the ordinary (us) and the extraordinary (Bradley) wanted to see and hear this great biographical documenter of two transformative power brokers - Robert Moses and Lyndon Baines Johnson. I should add that Leslie Stahl, who looked stunning, was sitting about five rows in front of us as well.
And after the introductions were made and Robert Caro rose to deliver his talk on the writing of biography, you could feel the warmth toward this man and the admiration for his accomplishments. Caro himself, now almost 74, seemed incredibly fit and beamed with the radiance of someone who knew he had already accomplished a great deal. His work, which dazzles you with intricate detail, bold insights and startling new perspectives, not just about his main subjects, but about a whole host of secondary characters - from Sam Rayburn to Richard Russell - is as influential as biography gets. Indeed, his portrait of LBJ was seen by some historians as so biased and so one-sided, but also so definitive, that it led a number of them to write their own counter-lives, most prominently in the case of the scholar Robert Dallek, who penned a 2-volume account of LBJ's life that he consciously strived to make a model of balanced, unsensationalized reporting.
In any case, Caro's books are not only fascinating, they are fun to read. When the first volume of the LBJ biography, which became Path to Power, was serialized in the New Yorker back in the mid-1970s, I can remember waiting impatiently for the next week's issue to arrive. The story he was telling was that compelling and that dramatic.
On Tuesday night, he spoke about the Sense of Place in biography, and how biography cannot endure unless that sense of place is conveyed in the lives biographers recount. In the case of LBJ, he said that were two places, in particular, that needed to be captured for the reader: The Texas Hill Country of the 1920s where LBJ grew into adulthood; and the world that surrounded Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., which LBJ first encountered at the age of 23 in the depths of the Great Depression. More about the work of capturing that sense of place in tomorrow's post.
And after the introductions were made and Robert Caro rose to deliver his talk on the writing of biography, you could feel the warmth toward this man and the admiration for his accomplishments. Caro himself, now almost 74, seemed incredibly fit and beamed with the radiance of someone who knew he had already accomplished a great deal. His work, which dazzles you with intricate detail, bold insights and startling new perspectives, not just about his main subjects, but about a whole host of secondary characters - from Sam Rayburn to Richard Russell - is as influential as biography gets. Indeed, his portrait of LBJ was seen by some historians as so biased and so one-sided, but also so definitive, that it led a number of them to write their own counter-lives, most prominently in the case of the scholar Robert Dallek, who penned a 2-volume account of LBJ's life that he consciously strived to make a model of balanced, unsensationalized reporting.
In any case, Caro's books are not only fascinating, they are fun to read. When the first volume of the LBJ biography, which became Path to Power, was serialized in the New Yorker back in the mid-1970s, I can remember waiting impatiently for the next week's issue to arrive. The story he was telling was that compelling and that dramatic.
On Tuesday night, he spoke about the Sense of Place in biography, and how biography cannot endure unless that sense of place is conveyed in the lives biographers recount. In the case of LBJ, he said that were two places, in particular, that needed to be captured for the reader: The Texas Hill Country of the 1920s where LBJ grew into adulthood; and the world that surrounded Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., which LBJ first encountered at the age of 23 in the depths of the Great Depression. More about the work of capturing that sense of place in tomorrow's post.
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