MARFA, TEXAS: A Travel Log

Thursday, March 27

We indulged in the luxury of a car from home to the airport—well worth the extra expense over the long drive, the remote parking, the bus to the terminal.  We left at 6:45AM and arrived in comfortable time to check in and enjoy a leisurely airport breakfast before boarding our American Eagle flight to El Paso.  We had a three hour plus layover at this surprisingly big airport, but were soon joined by fellow travelers on the ArtTable tour.  Amazing, how we manage to spot each other in a crowd!

The bus awaited us outside the airport at shortly after three.  (Ellie followed the crowd to board, chatting away as usual—and realizing only as we approached the bus that she had left her suitcase and hand luggage at the spot where the group had assembled outside the Starbucks café.  Fortunately, our soon-to-be new friend Julie had spotted it and stood on guard until Ellie came rushing back.  I, meantime, was recalling all those familiar cautions about “unattended luggage” and injunctions that it be immediately reported to security; and was soon imagining robot IED sniffers, bomb squads, and a long delay for all of us…  (Ellie adds: I hope this will not be the way I’m remembered!)

It’s a three-hour bus ride from El Paso to remote Marfa.  We made a stop along the way to view “Prada Marfa”, a permanent installation by the team of Elmgreen and Dragset.  This wayside art work is a tiny, freestanding building way out in the middle of the desert…

 

(My pictures, as are all others, unless otherwise indicated)

 ...a half hour’s drive from the nearest  habitation and neatly, if sparsely, stocked with fancy Prada accessories—handbags and shoes—in the narrow space behind a non-functioning glass door and store front windows.  A nice, witty concept, an ironic social comment on the marketing of high end merchandise to the privileged few, and more than a little absurd in the context of the endless vista of Texas wilderness, where such items would be worse than useless to even the wealthiest traveler. 

Unfortunately—though perhaps, in a sense, appropriately—the piece has been badly vandalized with spray paint and other offensive stuff; its windows obscured, its awnings slashed...

The vandalism itself might seem like an ironic comment on an ironic comment, a street-level gesture of protest against social elitism and the elitism of the art world—an elitism that our group, to be honest, might be accused of representing!  (We learned later, from our well-informed waiter over dinner, that the vandal was actually the employee of a rival shoe company!  Nothing more than business competition, then, and perhaps a little product envy!)

From Prada Marfa we drove another half hour to reach the small town of Marfa itself, driving through the rather unkempt outskirts to the center of town with what seemed, through the bus windows, to be a handful of boutiques/stores and the kind of restaurants one would not expect to find in so remote an area.  Our hotel, the Paisano…

  ...has a large, old-Western style reception area, with stuffed buffalo and longhorn cattle heads adorning the walls…

 ...along with textiles and basketry, traditional paintings of Western scenes, and beautiful tile work ascending the stairs.  Comfortable rooms, and a friendly atmosphere.  We were granted a half hour to unpack before heading downstairs to join the gang for a short walk through the now darkened streets to dinner at Cochineal.  It was still warm enough for a number of us to eat outside at a long line of round tables, under the cheerfully-lighted trees.  We ate well, drank well (cocktails, and two bottles of Sancerre) and enjoyed the chance to get to know each other. 

Friday, March 28 (The Longest Day!)

Having eaten late and indulged in a cocktail (Perfect Manhattan: others tried James Bond’s Vesper!) as well as wine, I slept poorly and woke late.  Breakfast was, frankly—not just my opinion but by consensus—awful: a choice of packaged cereals and rather stale-looking pastries, odd pieces of fruit and hard-boiled eggs (no toast, not an English muffin in sight)—but complaints were few.  We’re not here for the breakfasts…

Our bus left a little after 9AM for the Chinati Foundation, where Donald Judd’s vision converted a former military base into a mecca for contemporary art.  We were greeted graciously by Jenny Moore, the current executive director, who passed us on into the hands of two docents, both of whom proved to be expert guides.  We split up into two smaller, more manageable groups, and the first stop for ours was one of the two huge barracks buildings that once housed German POWs…

(Judd was particular about preserving the original spirit of the building, where he could)

 ...and now are home to a hundred of Judd’s milled aluminum boxes, fabricated at Lippincott in New York and shipped here for permanent installation at what must have been vast expense.  Outside, a splendid vista of Judd’s concrete works amongst fields of golden grass, and beyond, cattle grazing in the distance.   

For those who, like me, have based our opinion of Judd on what we have seen in museums and galleries over the years, I can promise you an eye-opener if you visit these installations.  Judd’s vision, supported in the early years by the Dia Foundation (and Schlumberger oil and gas money), was to show his own art—and that of a handful of others whose work he particularly admired—in an environment chosen and created by the artist; and not for the duration of an exhibition here or there but, more or less, in perpetuity.

Okay, sounds (again!) elitist, maybe a little bit precious.  But the outcome of this vision opens up an entire new reappraisal of everything you might have thought to know about Judd’s work.  Minimalism, schminimalism.  Both these two vast spaces, with natural light and opening up to the natural environment beyond the windows, align the aluminum boxes in long, precisely parallel rows.  

Deceptively simple constructions in themselves, clever interplays between positive and negative space, they are milled and assembled with incredible precision; their matte, brushed surfaces change as you walk amongst them into bright, silvery reflections; between them, surfaces and reflections create a magical optical complexity, where you are never sure whether what you see is reality or illusion.  Gleaming bursts of light, reflected from the sunshine beyond the windows, alternate with sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic shadow in an ever-changing, infinitely complex geometric dance that enchants the eye and dazzles the mind. 

One of my fellow art tourists suggested that the installation summoned for her a kind of melancholy; the word that came up for me, I said, was serenity.  There’s something compelling about the juxtaposition of the sheer physical weight of these objects, lined with such precision, and the light that engages our perception and endows them with a quasi-spiritual presence.  To my eye and mind, their shape and volume suggest lines of hi-tech sarcophagi…

… creating of the ambient space a resting place that transforms the mortal, physical, mutable, into a deeply human—and therefore unattainable—bid for permanence in an ever changing universe.   (Curiously, it has been discovered that these monoliths have shifted, minimally, over the years; and will, at some point, need to be realigned to reestablish Judd’s call for absolute precision.  A strangely comforting thought.)

Thus surprised, delighted, and in honesty somewhat chastened in my previous assessment of Judd’s work, we moved on to a u-shaped barracks building with a Carl Andre installation at its center, alternating narrow rows of the artist’s familiar oxidizing steel plates with dark gravel in a manner that reminds one irresistibly of a Kyoto Zen garden…

(Thanks to Nuzhat for this picture!)

Entering the surrounding exhibition area devoted to Judd’s prints, I discovered more that I had not previously known about Judd in the deeply saturated colors and simple, geometric forms of the artist’s years-long work with woodcuts and lithographs, responding to each other eloquently, often through a simple process of reversal. 

I was mulling over these thoughts about Donald Judd as we stopped on our way to lunch at the barrack that houses an installation by the Russian émigré Ilya Kabakov.  It was a surprise to find the work of this socially-engaged artist in the purview of otherwise mostly purist Chinati, but we heard from our guide that Judd appreciated Kabakov’s courageous rejection of the Soviet-approved social realism—and indeed was instrumental, along with other American artists, in facilitating his defection.  The Kabakov installation is a reconstruction of the schoolhouse of his childhood, long deserted and suffering the effects of neglect and decay, as though abandoned in consequence of some Chernobyl-like disaster.  The ghosts of childhood friends and fellow-students haunt these spaces, surrounding a central yard where nature has been left to go through its own process of wild growth and entropy.  A lovely, if pervasively sad evocation of a vanished past…

Nadine mailed this beautiful picture to the group

Our lunch was served in the vast space of the “Arena”—a one-time military gymnasium reminiscent of Vienna’s famous riding school…

Nadine's picture

...converted first by a local rancher into a roping arena, and later by Judd into a reception area characterized by the simplicity of a Quaker meeting house…

(…and this one) 

Here we enjoyed an excellent picnic meal prepared by Food Shark, veggie and turkey bacon sandwiches with sides of carrot and bean and potato salads.  We were offered a choice of iced tea or lemonade, from which Ellie and I concocted Arnold Palmers. 

Then back to work.  We walked back through the campus to a complex of six buildings selected by Dan Flavin out of the generous eleven originally offered him by Judd, his close friend of many years.  Here, the simple principle of reversal that was evident in the Judd prints we’d seen before lunch formed the basic premise of the light/space installations for which Flavin is known…

(My pictures--not so great as Nadine's.  See below…)

Here's one of her spectacular images!

He explores a single concept sequentially through six of the spacious, two-wing pavilions, where his trademark neon tubes are used to create magical, mystical environments of color and light.  Four colors, pink, green, blue and yellow are enough to allow him to conjure light into a palette of colors whose counter-intuitive complexity sets the mind spinning in confusion.  Blue and yellow together create… green, right?  Well, no.  It seems that in Flavin’s cosmos they create pink.  Or orange.  Or mauve.  Or …? You walk, mystified, through these spaces, and eventually realize that what you believed to be the logic of color simply does not apply. One astute observer suggested that it was the difference between the physical properties of paint and light that caused the unexpected effects, which may well be true  Still, what you must do eventually is surrender to the profound pleasure of moving through those environments and allowing the sheer beauty of color, light and shadow to keep ringing its subtle changes in your mind.

We finished our Chinati tour with briefer stops at installations by other artists Judd admired: Roni Horn, whose two truncated, enormously heavy solid copper cones…

...laid out at a charged distance from each other on a barracks floor made me think of that line from “Ozymandias” (“two vast and trunkless legs of stone…”) There followed a whole space devoted to the extraordinarily fine, barely discernable graphite drawings on small white sheets by the Icelandic artist Ingolfur Arnasson, displayed in a single line along one wall; and, at each end of the space, a small painting by the same artist, grey on white on concrete.

(This picture doesn't do it justice.)

Next, a building devoted to the display of paintings by John Wesley, cartoonish, satirical…

...and strangely out of keeping with most other artists honored by inclusion at Chinati.  And finally, an entire space with display cases featuring row upon row of the typewritten word works created by Carl Andre—akin to the “concrete poems” by certain members of the Fluxus group back in the 1960s.  More there than the eye and mind could take in, in a single visit…

Our last stop at Chinati—as I suppose it must be at any museum!—was the gift shop.  Many of us, myself included, left the for the bus sporting brightly colored Chinati baseball caps: mine is purple, Ellie’s turquoise, nice souvenirs of a spectacular day spent at this very special place…

But there was still more to be done.  The bus delivered us next to the huge downtown building purchased with Dia money to house a permanent shrine for twenty-two major works by John Chamberlain, whose sculptures composed of the crushed parts of junked cars and trucks are monuments to a culture dominated in so many ways by these symbols of our means of transportation…

They are also, as I see them, bold, gestural three-dimensional AE paintings, converting the seeming intractability of metal panels into surprisingly flexible form.   And finally, after Chamberlain, a short bus ride to another large, abandoned industrial building, this one converted into a huge camera obscura by the artist Zoe Leonard.  The inverted image of the urban scene on the opposite side of the street was projected by natural light from a hole in the wall…

Thanks again to Nadine

… to occupy the full length of the far wall in the darkened space.  Up close, the surprise was to find the extraordinary detail of the image, the branches, even the tiny twigs of trees seen swaying in the breeze.

We returned to Paisano to enjoy a brief respite from a very busy day’s activities, before setting out again for a return visit to Chinati at sunset.  From the bus, we wandered down into the shallow valley where a row of Judd’s concrete blocks stretches for the length of a full kilometer, inviting constantly shifting interaction with the walker, dwarfed by the enormous weight and bulk of the dozens of massive objects…

Art and nature, playing off against each other, with the great vistas of the natural landscape eventually winning out.  Again, I thought of Ozymandias: “Look on my works, yet mighty, and despair!” 

Finally, as the sun set, we were invited back into the magical spaces of those two great pavilions that house Judd’s hundred aluminum boxes—a special moment to see them in the glow of dusk and the gradually fading light. 

What a day!  Eyes exhausted and minds wearied by the intensity of looking, we assembled for a late dinner at Future Shark, self-service style: beef stew, potatoes and leeks au gratin, roast vegetables, in a diner style environment; and wine served by charming young people who were themselves surely artists, or musicians, or poets…  And, after dinner, as though that were not yet enough, we joined a convivial gathering in the hotel lobby around a bottle of single malt Scotch generously laid on by our friends Julie and Fred.

Saturday, March 29

This won’t take so many words as yesterday, I promise!  We started out with breakfast in the hotel (though some were wise enough to scout the area and discovered a better opportunity elsewhere).  Someone must have approached the management on our behalf, because today the menu was enhanced by the addition of scrambled eggs and bacon—but still no toast!  Breakfast has become something of a running joke.

A leisurely walk to Ballroom Marfa, where our group arrived before opening time and dispersed for fifteen minutes of personal time.  Ellie and I stayed on, at the street corner, to pursue a political conversation we had started over breakfast with Steven and Sharon.  We come not only from opposite ends of the country, but also from opposite ends of the political spectrum.  I, for one, most often find myself preaching to the choir when it comes to political discussion; and we are so split in our opinions, as a country, that discussion is generally reduced to the exchange of polemics.  So it was refreshing to be able to listen, and speak frankly, find common ground where we could find it, and agree—agreeably!—to disagree where we could not.  Our discussion continued over lunch, and intermittently throughout the day. 

The cofounder of Ballroom Marfa, Virginia Lebermann, and its deputy director, Melissa McDonnell Lujan were on hand to greet us when the doors opened, and we enjoyed a brief, informal question and answer session about this not-for-profit institution that, in addition to exhibits of contemporary art work, promotes various performance, musical and other cultural events for the citizens of Marfa and its environs.  The converted dance hall provides generous exhibition space, with an adjacent open area ideal for exterior three-dimensional work (on this occasion, a whimsical piece comprising single pole at the center with a bulbous yellow light fixture at the top, and a lost cat poster attached below)

... and an office space across the other side, currently installed with an exhibit detailing plans for an ambitious new facility, a “drive-in” for movies, concerts, and so on.

Amazing that so small a community can support an organization of this kind, even though aided by government and foundation grants.

The current exhibition, “Sound Speed Marker”, includes three works by Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, who also co-curated the show.  “Giant” (2014), a 30-minute loop, is a beautiful, slow-moving exploration, on three adjacent wall-sized screens, of the site where the last of James Dean’s movies, Giant, was shot near Marfa in 1956.  All that remains of the great ranch house featured in the picture is the frame, with the remnants of the rest of the building scattered at its feet.  (“Ozymandias”, anyone?) The video studies the natural environment, from grand  horizon to individual plants and blades of grass, the effects of the constant wind, the persistence of nature and the impermanence of the man-made. “Movie Mountain (Méliès)” documents the dwindling residual memories of aging cowboys of a small Texas community, where a movie company (perhaps Gaston, brother of Georges Méliès?) rode into town years back to shoot a film.  It’s a poignant study of fading memory, of ambitions thwarted, of a community itself in decline.  Regrettably, I was unable to see anything of the third part of the show, a dual-image documentary video based, as I understand it, on the making of Wim Wenders’s “Paris, Texas.”  Seating was limited, as was the supply of needed earphones, and the 60-minute length of the video allowed only a handful of our group to see it.

With some free time on our hands (in contrast to yesterday!) Ellie and I wandered back along the main street back toward the hotel, with a brief stop at the book store where we found a nice show of paintings by Martha Hughes…

… tucked away at the back.  I hope that others chanced upon it as we did.  With Ellie more interested in the shops than I, I headed on with our fellow Californian, Marcia, to check out the local coffee shop, where Ellie joined us after a while and shared a latte.  At noon, we all met back at the hotel for another bus jaunt, this time to the outskirts of Marfa for lunch at Mandos, a local Mexican diner jam-packed with local families. 

Lunch was followed by the short bus ride to the Judd Foundation, where we warmly greeted and, again, split off into two groups, each with its own guide.  (Photography of any kind is forbidden within the confines of the tall adobe walls that set the foundation’s campus—a whole city block—off from the surrounding area; I’ll see if I can glean some images from the website, but I’m thinking they’re likely to be protected.) Our group began the tour in one of the two large studio buildings, sited parallel to each other and with, in between, a wide open space defined by the inner wall of a version of the “Pulitzer Project”—consisting of an outer wall, built level, that surrounds a three-sided inner wall whose height follows the topography of the ground on which it’s built.  The difference creates a challenge to the viewer’s sense of orientation and draws attention to the overall architectural structure of the site. 

The studio buildings were designed to provide working/thinking/planning space for the artist.  Each is divided by a central cut-out—in one case a kitchen/living area, in the other, a library.  To say that the vast, high-ceilinged studio spaces are sparsely furnished would be an understatement.  Each houses a number of Judd’s finished works—in the first we visited, an impressive display of four of the “stacks” for which he is justly famous—along with a free-floating bed, no more than a futon on a platform, where he might choose to sleep if he happened to be working in that particular space; and a few items of the plain furniture he liked to collect, all of which reflected some aspect of his aesthetic: Shaker and Stickley both well represented.  Evidence of Judd’s pleasure in collecting objects of all kinds was everywhere, from Native American textiles and basketry to fossils, tools and …  The library covered a vast range of interests, from ancient philosophy to the history of art, novels and poetry, technology and science.   Judd, it seems, was also a voracious reader.

Hard to imagine, though, what kind of man this was, judging from the environment in which he spent a great deal of his time.  One building on the campus is what was once the family residence, not open to the visitor except for glimpses through the windows on all four sides.  Here, the artist’s love of simplicity and symmetry is evident yet again.  Everything is hard-edged, geometric.  Most of the furniture is plain wood construction, with barely a curve or a soft touch anywhere in sight.  Everything is order.  Even the children’s rooms have virtually nothing in the way of adornment.  I was shocked, looking into one of them, by the sight of a red rocking-horse, as angular as the rest of it.  Only the rockers had a grudging curve—and I’m sure he would have preferred them straight if that were possible!

From the foundation campus we were led on to a tour of three quite different buildings that occupy the length of a nearby city block, purchased by Judd to extend his realm in Marfa.  The center building—the first visited by our group—has the architectural appearance of a group of tiny cottages.  Aside from the by now familiar sparse furnishings, the walls in these seem small, clean spaces are devoted to the exhibition of Judd’s early work, as a student at the Art Students League in New York and as a young painter looking for a place in the art world of his time.  A number of these early works are quite accomplished abstract paintings, though clearly, given the history, they failed to satisfy his developing aesthetic.  That he wanted to preserve them, however, in an environment he created especially for their display, is an indication of his desire to not completely disown this aspect of his work.

We visited next the neighboring bank building acquired by Judd to house his public, architectural and design work—work that he sought to keep separate from his art.  The interior space of the former bank has been stripped down to its raw structure.  To stand there, surrounded by the angularity of concrete pillars and flat walls, seemed to me what it might be like to stand inside one of the artist’s boxes.  The two floors above were split up into numerous small offices, with work desks, wall space for blueprints and drawings, and outstanding examples of furniture design, especially desks and chairs, created not only by Judd but other avant-garde 20^th century artists. 

Our final Judd Foundation stop was the third building in the block, a store-front space converted into the artist’s working studio for his art.  Here we found numerous works in progress, some rejected, some left unfinished, along with samples of materials, paints and tools of all kinds.  Of special interest were the gifts Judd received from Barnett Newman’s widow, at his death.  Judd was a big fan of Newman’s work, and the original print and the painter’s palette, still encrusted with that artist’s paint, must have meant a great deal to him.

Reflecting on Judd as I walked back to the hotel for a brief, one-hour respite before the evening’s activities, I found myself wishing we had seen the foundation and its neighboring spaces first, before Chinati.  The early paintings, the studio spaces, the design work and the work in progress all had their interest, as did the insight into the artist’s living environment and his life style.  Still, all these felt like something of an anticlimax when compared to the great, transformative experience of the magnificent installations at Chinati.  Still, hindsight affords a view that planning can’t always anticipate, and we ended up our art tour at Marfa well rewarded for the long journey to get there.  It has long been an intended destination, and we were more than delighted to have had the opportunity.  Kudos to ArtTable for a great trip, and to our fellow travelers for the well-informed and friendly companionship.

Still, we were not quite done.  There was one further treat in store.  After a convivial dinner at Maiyas, we piled into the bus for one more journey, this time a twilight drive up into the mountains an hour distant from Marfa to visit the MacDonald Observatory.  It was already dark by the time we arrived, and we joined a much larger crowd for an introduction to the night sky by a member of the University of Texas astronomy faculty.  There appeared at first to be an unpromising weather condition, with clouds obscuring much of the sky, horizon to horizon.  After a first, rather foggy glimpse of Jupiter…

... and a fascinating planetarium show inside the Observatory, we found to our delight that the clouds had cleared.  We stopped by one of the three domes for a clear telescope view of Jupiter and its moons; and other telescopes for views of the Pleiades and another star cluster.  Art, we decided on the way back down the mountain, has a hard time competing with the incomparable majesty of the universe.

Sunday, March 30

The last hurrah.  Much chatter amongst new friends on the three-hour bus ride back to El Paso for the airplanes to our scattered destinations.  I can’t speak for others, but Ellie and I, I know, will be looking forward to another ArtTable trip some time in the future.  Meantime, our gratitude for this one, and greetings to new friends throughout the country.  

SOMEONE PLEASE SEND ME A BETTER PICTURE THAN THIS ONE!

I'M BACK...

Just in case anyone was wondering... I'm just back from a three-day trip to Marfa, Texas, with a group from Ellie's professional organization, ArtTable.  I'll be posting at length about this exciting experience as soon as I get it written down and find the right images to post.  See you soon.

DEAR NEIGHBORS...

We have a request.  While we are sympathetic to the woes of a remodel job, having gone through a couple ourselves, I’m sure you know that we have endured an awful lot from your project.  We have lost a lovely hedge, replaced by a bland, and to us rather unattractive fence.  We have suffered through dirt and dust, the racket and vibration of power tools, the traffic problems incurred by pickups and cement trucks, the salsa music on the radio, the drilling and hammering, the piles of construction materials, the accumulation of debris, and the overflowing trash cans…  It feels like this has been going on for years.

After all of which, we long for the restoration of our lovely Buddha garden.  Time was, we would wake to the gentle sound of water flowing from the bamboo pipe and look out into a scene of tranquility and serenity that never failed to delight.  Now, we look out and see our fish pond emptied of water—except for the static pool at the bottom that we fear will serve as a breeding ground for mosquitoes; a once attractive wooden fence with its flourishing green vine, now gap-toothed and unfinished at the bottom, its vine long dead and withering; a lantern not yet replaced in its former standing position; a piece of cardboard filling a still-unfixed hole in the fence; a garden gate still propped open with a temporary brace…

I don’t quite know how to describe what this all means to us.  It’s a kind of permanent psychic disturbance, a loss of the serenity we treasured, the inner peace and quiet that the Buddha garden assured us every morning on awakening and every night on retiring. 

Is it not possible, now, finally, to expedite things on our side of the fence and have your workers properly restore this little garden to its former state?  To fix the fence—not just a patch job, but really fix it to look as it did before?  To refill the pond and get the water running once again?  To replace the lantern properly and get the lighting system working again?  We have been mindful about neighborly relations through this entire process; we have been mild and friendly, we trust, in our complaints and requests.  It seems to me that this is little to ask, after so much patience from our side of the fence.

Best, Ellie & Peter

PS  There is one other relatively minor issue: the two-by-four that was used to fill the gap behind our trash cans is shorter than is needed.  Check it out.  It's just a sloppy, thoughtless job, done in haste, without respect or care.  A minor irritation, but it could so easily have been done properly.

CUSTOMERS INCLUDED: BOOK REVIEW

I’ll confess I shelved this book for a quite while after receiving a copy in the mail from its co-author, Phil Terry.  It was the title and subtitle that provoked the initial—and as it turned out, mistaken!—reaction: this is not relevant to me.  Customers Involved: How to transform products, companies, and the world—with a single step, cowritten with Mark Hurst, seemed a far cry from my own interests.  I’m not in business, am I?  I don’t have a “product,” “customers”…

Still, I cracked the book open finally because I admired Phil Terry’s work in quite another field.  He founded, and heads, a loosely-knit organization called Slow Art Day, right up my alley as host of the “One Hour/One Painting” series that encourages, precisely, the practice of slow looking.  On Terry’s Slow Art Day, once a year, small groups gather in galleries and museums in currently almost 200 locations throughout the world to take a slow, mindful look at the kind art works we usually do no more than glance at in our haste to see everything and get on to whatever’s next.  A man who could conceive of this idea, I thought, must have something of interest to say in another field…

I was no more than a few pages in when I realized that of course I do have a “business” of a sort, though not one that’s primarily about making money.  And I do have “customers”—those people I encourage to come and join me as I sit in front of a single painting for a full hour, in a blend of the time-tested practices of meditation and contemplation.  So I found myself engaged in the book in an entirely unexpected way, urged to think more consciously about what I do, how I approach the participants in my sessions, and indeed how I conduct those sessions, whether or not to the satisfaction of their expectations.  Was my “product” serving them, as I had unquestioningly imagined?  Or could I serve them better if I understood more about the reasons they were attracted in the first place?  How could I appeal to their return business?  I soon discovered that I had much to learn from this book that had landed in my hands.  There are no accidents!

It is, I discovered as I read on, a truly excellent book.  Its thesis is a simple one: businesses thrive when they listen to their customers; they wither when they fail to do so.  Co-authors Hurst and Terry work through their consulting company, Creative Good, to help existing businesses improve their practices by “directly observing their customers, discovering their unmet needs, and getting the entire organization behind the effort.”  The “listening labs” they recommend as the most useful tool are organized not around focus groups, whose value they do not dismiss, but regard as limited; but rather around intense, one-on-one, hour-long sessions with actual people, customers, who are encouraged to be honest about their experience with the company or the product. The most reliable information, they stress, comes from observing what customers do, rather than from merely hearing what they say, which can often be misleading.  

There’s plenty of fascinating detail for the reader, here—the kind of analysis that makes for useful sales talk.  What kept me reading, though, was less the analytical detail than the stories it derives from, stories of remarkable business successes, and remarkable failures; of visionaries (Steve Jobs) and functionaries; of dreams fulfilled and the kind of absurd missteps that lead to disaster.  Hurst and Terry are good story-tellers, and seem to relish the telling, in writing that is crisp and to the point, avoids the kind of repetition that too often plagues the tomes that line the "how-to" shelves in the bookstore.  Clocking in at less than 150 pages (without the notes), their book is commendably short and to the point.  I myself value brevity.  I hate to have my time wasted by self-importance and hot air.  And despite my initial reservations, my (entirely misperceived) disinterest in how businesses are run, I came away with a big, useful piece about myself and my own practices.  For anyone who actually hopes to run a successful business, how much more useful this book would be.  

Eventually, it's all about service.  Service, as Hurst and Terry make clear, must precede profits.  If you're not doing something of value for your fellow human beings, your might as well forget it.  So when you think about it, it's all about Right Livelihood.  Customers Included is actually, also, a good Buddhist read!

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

It's a haunting, daunting question.  We usually use it to challenge someone's overly inflated ego, their high opinion of themselves, when they're "getting too big for their boots."  Do I remember it from a John Lennon song?   (Yes, it's Instant Karma... "Who on Earth do you think you are?  A superstar? Well, right you are.  And we all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun...")

And of course that's all we are, stardust, accumulating moment by moment into the constantly shifting forms we assume for the journey through our lives.  As to the rest, we are who we think we are--no more than the fabrication of our minds, a projected image on the screen of who we want to be, or alternatively fear we might be.  The flesh and blood part of us is transitory, no matter how long it lasts, the reality of at most a hundred years or so--or, in the thirteen point something billion-year history of the universe, by a factor millions of millions less than the blink of an eye.  A fast fleeting reality, then; and as such, the illusion of an illusion.

Still, the question popped unbidden into my head as I woke this morning.  Who do you think you are?  The context?  With my assistant, Maggie's help I have been sending out emails to museums and colleges, some on the East Coast, some on the West, hoping to attract interest in the presentation I have devised for a public lecture/demonstration, based on the One Hour/One Painting experience.  The latter, for those unfamiliar, is an hour-long exploration of single painting, combining the time-tested skills of meditation (closed-eye) and contemplation (open-eye) skills.

I have been offering these sessions for years now, in museums and galleries, mostly in the Southern California area.  I think--there I go!--that it's a great teaching piece, something I have learned for myself and am eager to pass on to others.  It's not only a great way to look at art, it's also a great way to learn the value of paying that kind of mindful attention to everything else in one's life.  Those who come to a session invariably have good things to say about the experience, and it's gratifying to know that I have managed to open a door for them.

But "One Hour/One Painting" works best only for relatively small groups.  How many people can sit in front of a single painting on the gallery wall, with the kind of sight lines needed to explore its surfaces as exhaustively as I intend?  The maximum, I've found, is a couple of dozen participants, give or take.  So something in me (ego? altruist? teacher? attention-getter?) wants to take this visual adventure further, to reach more people, and expand my reach to the East Coast, particularly New York, still the epicenter of the art world...

Call it ambition, call it intention, I don't know.  It's just something I have in heart and mind to do.  So I have devised a way of bringing the "One Hour/One Painting" experience to larger audiences, in this lecture/demonstration called "Slow Looking: The Art of Looking at Art."  As I envision it, it will allow me to use the technology of power point and a big screen to project images, rather than an original painting.  Pixels, I know, lack the substance of oil or acrylic paint, so the experience will necessarily involve more preaching than practice, more teaching than experience; but at least I should be able to convey something of the benefits of slowing down and paying attention (in this case to art) in a culture that seems too often to value speed and surface.  I believe it's wanted and it's needed.

But here's where the "who do you think you are?" conundrum sneaks in.  I think I have something of great value to offer and put out the offer into the world, and in response receive... silence.  I encounter the great, echoing void.  Though I have been writing articles and reviews for national magazines for decades, I can't pretend to have the "name" that generates instant--or even slowly dawning!--recognition.  Even in my own small corner of the art world, where I have somewhat greater name recognition, eliciting a response is problematic at best.

People everywhere are busy, naturally, with their own preoccupations and priorities.  And in part, of course, it's the competition.  There are so many brilliant minds out there in the public speaking market who have something of real value to offer.  Then there are the financial contingencies to be reckoned with: everyone is strapped for funds in the cultural world--schools, college galleries, museums... The steady withdrawal of public funds from the arts since the 1970s, has let to an increasing reliance on other than public resources--private patrons and supporters whose priorities must now include world poverty and hunger, medical research, and other pressing issues.

In which broad and increasingly urgent context, of course, I am brought face to face with that question: Who do you think you are?  So this was what I was wondering about this morning as I lay in bed, after waking with those words echoing in my mind.  Who do I think I am?  Which brings me back--my mind keeps coming back to this--to the question raised not long ago in my exchange with Ken McLeod: "When you say you see Peter, what exactly do you see?"  First thought: I see an image of what I imagine myself to be.  Second thought: well, actually, nothing.

Here's an invitation: try it for yourself.  Who do you (really) think you are?

DOUBLE CROSS

I'm always ambivalent about writing a "bad review."  Why bother?  And how does it fit in with what the dharma teaches us about "right speech"?  Better to remain silent, perhaps, than to tell what I perceive to be the truth.  Still, we're also taught to avoid doing harm, and my small voice will certainly not prove harmful to this best-selling giant of the publishing world.  Besides, right speech surely does not mean to be uncritical.  What if one sees a friend behaving badly?  Is it not an act of friendship to let him know?

These thoughts arise as I close the last, disappointing page of a book by James Patterson.  Double Cross was published in 2007 (I come to it late, obviously) and was sold at the time for $29.99, hard cover.  I picked up my copy for 25 cents at the used bookstore down below the Laguna Beach public library, where I often go when I'm looking for a few hours of escape reading--and regular readers know that I love the mystery-thriller genre, and have even written a couple of them myself.

I should have known from the first couple of pages that this was a badly written book.  I correct myself: I did know it.  I recognized the false note from the start.  It's best described as an absence of authenticity, a dishonesty in the writing of which it can only be said, in the cliche used by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stuart when speaking of obscenity, "I know it when I see it."  There's something in the way a paragraph is written that tells me whether it actually needs to have been written.  Do you know what I mean?  You can sense when a writer is simply going through the motions to churn out another book--or make another million.  The thing is market-driven, rather than coming from the heart and mind.  It's brain stuff: how do I put this thing together?

So why did I read on?  Because I'm a sucker for a story, even a bad story.  I keep turning the pages, and I suppose that Patterson gets (reluctant!) credit for keeping me at it.  I want to know how it all turns out.  Still, to be truthful, his story strains credulity beyond the breaking point.  It is, frankly, not only unbelievable, it's absurd.  Impossible to believe that his "characters"--poor cardboard creatures that they are--would behave in the way they are required to do by his authorial manipulation.  Impossible to conceive of law enforcement "experts" so naive, so readily deceived, so incompetent, unless in the service of a crime writer's "story."  And the lead character, this Cross, whose insights into his patients' neuroses are so uniformed and crude, is supposed to be a knowledge practicing psychologist?  And this is not to mention the dreadful, embarrassingly coy love scenes, the phony suspense, the stilted dialogue, the cliches...

Ah, well.  But the crowning insult, for me--as I say, I always want to know the end of the story--was to have allowed myself to be conned into tolerating all this, only to reach the final pages and find myself betrayed on the conventional agreement between author and reader to provide a satisfactory resolution.  In this case, a sub-category of evil-doers was indeed revealed and dealt with; but the plotter-in-chief, whose pawns they turned out to be, was allowed to escape the clutches of our heroes--presumably to allow the author to write a sequel "bestseller," one which I do not plan to read.  It's the reader of this book who ends up feeling "double-crossed."

Let that be a lesson to me.  Remember that name, James Patterson.  Do not pick up another book of his at the second-hand bookstore.  If you happen to do so, in a mindless moment, return it at once and pick up another thriller by someone else, no matter who.  It surely won't be quite as bad as this one, for which my 25 cents was too great a price.

There.  To satisfy my respect for the dharma, I send out goodwill to James Patterson, the author, along with my wishes that he find true happiness in his life.  And I mean it.  Really.

DODGING BULLETS

By curious coincidence, Ellie and I both had our health scares in the same week.  Monday, you'll recall, I had to go in for a follow-up CT scan to track the progress of a lump that had been discovered on my lung--not a good omen for a long-time smoker, even a long-time ex-smoker.  Friday, Ellie had to go in for a biopsy following the discovery of small areas of calcification in a mammogram.  Much worse for her than for me, since it involved an invasive procedure that left her painfully bruised and swollen.  But we were both left for days awaiting the results of the tests and dreading news of the "big C."

And both got our reprieves.  My result arrived a couple of days ago, Ellie's just yesterday.  No worries.  Nothing terrible to report.  I have to go back for a repeat CT in three months' time, Ellie for hers in six months.  The doctors want to keep track of things.  But we can both be grateful that our health is good, that we are strong, and that life continues to treat us kindly.

Needless to say--I wrote about this a few days ago--the whole experience was not without its benefits.  I had a good lesson, first, in patience, and my lack of it.  Something I still need to learn.  There is much in life that is beyond my control, and my attempts to control those things brings me nothing but suffering.  The anger that results from sheer frustration does the same, increasing the needless suffering.

The second, more important, deeper lesson was the invitation to consider my mortality.  The specter of what was initially suspected to be an airplane crash allowed me to confront the thought of having no more than five minutes to live; the prospect of lung cancer, one year.  Both useful meditation exercises. And a reminder that we all dodge bullets, every moment of our lives, as we drive on the freeway, walk under the proverbial ladder, feel the shock--as here, yesterday, in Southern California--of an earthquake...

A propos of which, I have to note that it amused us Angelenos and Angelenas, what a fuss was made in the media what felt like a quite minor seismic event.  I happened to be sitting in meditation at the time--6:25 AM--so I was aware of the initial shock from fifty miles to the north, and the subsequent few seconds of mild shaking.  Ellie slept through it.  Still, it was a reminder of the imminence of The Big One; and, in a sense, another bullet dodged.

THEY: AN ANSWER

GARY LLOYD at CSU CHANNEL ISLANDS

Confrontational art proved itself alive and well at California State University Channel Islands, where the Art Department sponsored an installation and accompanying performance by Gary Lloyd last Thursday, March 13, in a small gallery at their Camarillo campus.  “They: An Answer Driving the Problem, Revisted” took an updated look at work that has preoccupied the artist for many years, in an “interactive multimedia exhibition probing climate change and the impact of technology.”

“They,” as the exhibit and the artist’s gloss make clear, is actually “Us.”  The human species.  The overwhelming evidence—a good deal of it documented through a variety of media in the current show—is that our planet is in serious trouble.  With species disappearing at alarming rates, the ice cap melting, droughts, floods and fires in many parts of the globe, and so on—it’s a depressingly familiar list--the preponderance of credible science tells us that we are in danger of rendering the earth uninhabitable before the end of this present century.  Worse, we are rapidly approaching the tipping point beyond which all human efforts will be in vain.  This dire situation is compounded by the stranglehold in which the global ecosystem is held by corporate powers whose priority is profit, not the welfare of the Earth. 

Lloyd is convinced that we, the people of this planet, have “the answer”, if only we can find the will to use our technology in ways that benefit the earth rather than exploit it.  The technology, he insists, is simple, user-friendly, and as close to hand as a smart phone.  His performance gave him the opportunity to demonstrate his thesis, using Skype to instantaneously link like-minded people in China, Southern California and New York, in texts delivered in Mandarin Chinese and Spanish as well as English, in an offhand display of already ubiquitously existing systems we can use to facilitate communications and deploy our critical human intelligence in the resolution of our common problems.     

Intertwined with the communications issue is that of our energy consumption—and that’s not only the fossil fuels we Americans devour in vastly greater quantities than are our share as global citizens, but also the source of protein we use to fuel our bodies: meat.  The freeze-dried “meat axe” Lloyd created many years ago makes its doleful reappearance in the current show, reminding us of our ancient dependence on this food, and the only recently understood effects of its attendant demands on our natural environment.  Juxtaposed with his curiously “primitive” use of advanced technology, Lloyd’s trademark axes, skulls, and dug-out “book boats” remind us of the early roots of our human technology, and of the relatively short journey on which it has led us to wreak such havoc on the planet we inhabit.

Conscious that his performance was addressed primarily to college-aged art students, the artist was at pains to leave them a coherent, urgent and incontrovertible message: “I’m committed to this work; the planet expects—demands—no less of you.”  The performance ended on a deeply personal, confessional note, whose emotional intensity was unmistakable.  The father of two teenage boys, Lloyd made clear the responsibility he feels not only to the fragile and sorely tested Mother Earth, but to the family that is his own natural heritage.  It’s a responsibility that he poignantly required his audience to share. 

photo: Janice Tieken

Is, Is...

Once in a while I take note of a speech or writing habit that my pedantic self finds particularly annoying.  This morning, it's "is, is."  I regret to say that our President is Offender-in-Chief in this particular regard.  Have you noticed?  He's by no means the only one, but he should be setting a good example, shouldn't he?

It goes like this: "The problem is, is that..."  Or "What I know about this is, is [my friends on the Republican side of the aisle should...]"  And so on.  You'll know it when you hear it.  And what I have to say about this is, is that it's bad grammar, the second "is" is entirely superfluous, and it sounds faintly ridiculous.

Reminds me a bit of the old grammatical teaser: "John, where Jim had had "had", had had "had had."  "Had had" had had the teacher's approval."

Have a great day!

ANGER ARISING

I sat there and watched the anger rise.  Well, I wish I could say I only watched it, but that's just a small part of the truth.  I actually got engaged in it.  Felt it rising in the body--a heat, a palpitation of the heart, a clouding of the brain, an urgent call to action accompanied by a sense of impotence in the face of events that lay beyond my control.  And ended up pretty much possessed by the anger.

Not a pleasant feeling, and it didn't get me anywhere.  Also, its bad vibes certainly radiated out to those who shared the waiting room with me.

The anger, by all non-Buddhist standards, was completely justified.  Here's the circumstance: I had a 2:15 PM appointment in the Radiology department at Kaiser for a CT scan--a purely cautionary measure, I was assured, to check up on a tiny anomaly in the lung.  (Fear, then, may have played a part in the angry response; a long-time smoker like myself--though I quit the habit more than a quarter century ago--does not like to hear the word lung in connection with a medical anomaly.)

Anyway, I arrived for my appointment a little before 2:00 PM, more than the required 15 minutes in advance.  Checked in at the reception desk.  Used my credit card to cover the co-pay.  And took a seat in the waiting room.  Having saved a Sunday crossword for the occasion, I had been expecting a reasonable wait, but having observed after 45 minutes that those who arrived long after me were already being called, I began to wonder if I had somehow fallen through the cracks.

I spoke to the receptionist, who seemed surprised I had been waiting so long.  She put a call through to the operational side of things, beyond the magic door, and spoke at length to someone there.  Just a few minutes more, she told me.  Another 15 minutes passed.  I had now been waiting a full hour.  I returned to the reception desk.  More telephone exchanges.  Five minutes, I was told.

Ten minutes later, still no word from the CT technician.  The anger was now making its presence known, beginning to roil around ominously in the gut.  I could barely disguise it on my next visit to the reception desk, and it had begun to attract the attention of my fellow-patients--most of whom had spent far less time exercising patience than had I.  Perhaps my voice was raised.  Perhaps it had more than an edge of irritation.  Perhaps, in the course of the next half-hour--during which I was promised "five minutes more" on the occasion of each new visit to the receptionist--I began to make a bit of a spectacle of myself…

By this time, a good hour and a half after my scheduled appointment time, my anger was in full spate.  I have described it above as best I'm able.  It did not, I'm happy to say, explode, as it might have done.  But no amount of mindful breathing helped to reestablish the serenity my not-so Buddhist self would have wished to exercise.  I was, quite simply, mad.  And it hardly helped when the tech--a burly, six foot six, four hundred pound black man with a mass of dreadlocks to his shoulders: a man, in other words, you would not want to argue with--came out and called, not my name, but that of a fellow patient awaiting the same procedure as myself, a man whose appointment I had discovered was a half hour later than my own.

This time, I protested.  As nicely as my temper would allow.  And my fellow patient was kind enough to insist that I go in before him.

The procedure took all of 10 minutes.  I left, thanking the receptionist for her repeated attempts to help and apologizing for any anger I had projected in her direction.

But here's the thing: I have it on excellent authority (Thanissaro Bhikkhu) that the Buddha does not expect you to allow yourself meekly to be treated as a doormat.  Accordingly, feeling treated as such, I had stood up repeatedly to question what was happening but without result.  So what is an aspiring Buddhist to do when he's treated like a doormat anyway?  I guess you take a good look at the ego and the offense it takes.  Acknowledge what it's like to feel small and insignificant, unheard, neglected.  Passed over.  Note the feelings that arise--in this case, the indignation and the anger--and pass on the opportunity to get attached to them.  Instead, practice sending out goodwill to those who go ahead and taking in the pain of whatever medical predicament they find themselves in.

I wish I could have put that wisdom into practice; instead, I just got angry.  But at least I was conscious of the anger!