Done!

Since a decade or so, I’m all in one place; all my belongings under one roof.  After the ride and the unload, who knew that the shed in which I put the boxes for holding, had a leak.  The best way to discover a leak is to place a box on the floor and a couple on top of that.  The good of all that was that it forced me to open the boxes again and sort cull and send on to the local ‘goodwill’ shop here.  They love getting ‘out-of-the-ordinary stuff and I love them getting it.  So for 3 days I moved stuff around and and and… it is all done.  The shed is empty, the boxes are recycled and I am up to my ears in memories.  The photos in albums alone are enough to take one back for days. However I am a saver of words.  Cards. Letters. Thoughts. Ideas.  Short stories.  Long stories.  It is all there, waiting to be massaged into something.

The Library

It is an easy ten-mile drive, but a drive none-the-less. But the reward is great.  There is instant WiFi.    No idea if it is secure, and it’s not going to matter one way or the other, because to have instant access to every attachment and  an upload takes  a second, you have no idea how important that is.  Feel like a starved person who is given food and water.

Trains, Planes….

So many moving parts.  Thursday, at 7:45 I park my car, toss the keys in the box of the auto repair shop, and wait for the 8:10 local bus.  The 8:10 bus comes at 8:45.  It’s route meanders through many little towns before it connects with the next bus that will go to the City.   Early in the meandering, a man boards who is 65 and hyper as a toddler.  The stories with which he regales the driver, range from having FBI protection on his house to his girlfriend with whom he lives having 35 cats…I’ll spare you the rest of the crude joke, which he thought was the funniest thing he had heard all morning.  He said he was on his way to Venice, the Italy one, but before boarding he had stored his dilapidated bicycle under the bus in the baggage hold.  Again, Central Casting would have been wild to have him had they been looking for a loud-mouth who-thinks-he’s-educated-conspiracy theory-obnoxious man.  There are more adjectives but that will do.  At some point it was making me sick, so I got up and moved.  90 minutes later the bus arrives at the ‘hub’ and dumps us.  Some of us join a long line which rumor says is the line for the bus to the City.  It is, we board in ten minutes and two hours later pull into the Port Authority.  I have three appointments to get to, dragging my luggage which has not only clothes but those ratcheting bands for securing items in a truck.  My meetings are a success and I finally get to check into the nunnery where I will be spending the night.  Leave my luggage in the sparse room, and head out to meet a young friend for dinner.  She used to live in my West Village apartment building, now lives in Harlem and we are anxious to catch up and we do, over dinner.  Return to the nunnery and to bed.  In the morning when checking out I am gifted a rosary blessed by the Pope and a pen with light at the end.  I am now headed to the corner of 30th and 7th to catch the bus to WDC.  That bus has been rescheduled for 30 minutes later, but that should be fine.  In Maryland where the bus makes it’s first stop, I have to pick up a rental car.  We should arrive by 3:30.  Rental car closes at 6:00 pm.  Then the storm hits.  The bus driver was amazing.  He drove through downpours where he could not see ahead of him.  I could not look.  The lightening was immediate and felt like it surrounded the bus.  At one break in the storm, on the north side of I-95, a car was turned over and burning.  I had never experienced I-95 as the parking lot it was this day.  The bus reaches the first stop at 5:15.  I only have to walk a few blocks to get the car.  Rent the car, drive off to meet some friends for tea with the mandate to extricate myself in an hour to drive another hour to Virginia.  That all goes relatively smoothly.  I am spending the night in VA with family because the next day, I am packing up my ‘attic’.  When I moved to the City from VA, I had things I did not want to toss, abandon or ignore.  So I put them in storage.  One of the items is this six-foot by six-foot stain glass window.  In my former life, in Holland, it had been in a house we had remodeled.  The architect had insisted we take it out, so we did.  We carted it from there to the US to 5 different houses…. now and again we hung it, as it was framed in steel.  But for the last 20 years it has been boxed up.  It weighs at least 200 pounds.  Now it is Saturday.  The plan is as follows:  Arrange  the 10 foot U-haul, drop off the rental car, be picked up by another friend who has flown in at 5:30 am to have lunch.  After lunch drive the van to the storage unit in another village, and meet there two moving-men who will  load the window into the van.  This is all arranged.  When there are so many moving parts, something is bound to glitch.  And glitch it does.  The two moving men, are no shows.  Not only no-shows, but no shows with attitude.  And the van can’t be loaded until the window is loaded first.  It has to be flattened against the head of the box.  I hired these dilettantes through a California company -‘Hire-a-Helper.  They were wonderful.  It was two and a half hours later, but they eventually sent a replacement.  These two new guys drove an hour to fulfill the contract on a Saturday evening.  It was clear they had other plans, but bless their hearts.  They came.  One of them was the spitting image of a line-backer.  I dont know if he moved the truck or the window, but he rather ‘Shreked’ the window into the truck and within 20 minutes all was loaded.  I parked and locked the truck at the storage site and was picked up by family to have all the rewards that go with such a day.  Today, at 7:30, loving family member dropped me off at truck on his way to a golf tournament and  I headed out.  To get back to PA the route is VA, West VA, MD, PA, NY and then finally PA.  The worst part of the trip is gps-ing it from the major highway through the back roads of PA.  25 miles and it takes 85 minutes.  Want to strangle the GPS Lady.  6 hours later I pull into my driveway.  After all that time behind the wheel, I am only too glad to unload the truck myself.  I am waiting for my help here to show up to unload the window.  On the long drive i resolve to find the provenance of the window and with this firmly in hand, offer it to the museum of Glass in Corning.  I am done schlepping this piece of art!  Just as I finish unloading the truck, my local helpers show up.  Seven minutes later the window is stored.  I return the truck, to the rental shop which is next door to the car shop where my car is waiting.  Done! Cooked. Too many moving parts.

Unclebrother

This is an article from the NYT about this art food experience to which I took a guest on Saturday.

We were sat at a table with unknowns, who became knowns and then I saw another couple that we had met the week before and asked them to join us.  A grand time was had by all.  But first this:

In 1992, the art dealer Gavin Brown helped the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija transform 303 Gallery, then on Greene Street, into an operational kitchen for a part performance, part installation piece titled “Untitled (Free).” The seminal solo show, which found the artist serving up gratis curry and rice out of the converted gallery, represented a critical development in Tiravanija’s practice. It also marked the beginning of his friendship with Brown, who at the time worked as an assistant at the gallery. Now in the collection of MoMA, “Untitled (Free)” — considered a masterwork of relational aesthetics — was the first of many interactive projects realized by the twosome. Their latest scheme: a gallery-meets-kitchen in Hancock, N.Y. Lovingly referred to as Unclebrother (the name is an inside joke), the hybrid restaurant revives the generous spirit of Tiravanija and Brown’s inaugural partnership, but adds in a full-time, brick-and-mortar locale. “It’s the first time he’s had a commercial kitchen, so it’s a departure in that sense,” Brown says. “It’s a natural progression, in a way. It’s about entering into the same place but from a different direction.”

A three-hour drive from New York, Unclebrother’s inception sprang out of a real-estate opportunity in the rural upstate farm community — a longtime summer retreat for both the artist and the dealer. “It all happened very quickly; we acted on instinct,” says Tiravanija, who has also been working on opening a space in the city. “I am always interested in this idea of bringing art closer to life. This space provided a way to make this economically feasible.” He and Brown hope the gutted exhibition hall, formerly a car dealership, will serve as a gathering place for locals as well as fair-weather tourists. Rooted in the pre-existing agricultural community, Unclebrother operates like a site-specific work, engaging the native landscape as well as the culture. “When we started, we met all these artists and designers who had moved from the West Village and started farms,” the artist says. “It’s great to be able to tap into these social infrastructures.”

Tiravanija and Brown aren’t the only cooks in the kitchen: Assistants and guest chefs will do most of the cooking, spicing up the menu with personal touches. For the soft opening last summer, Brown matched works by artists like Joan Jonas and Sal Scarpitta with Tiravanija’s rotating assortment of dishes made from seasonal ingredients. “I think of the kitchen as a lab or a workshop,” explains Tirvanija of his approach to cooking. “It’s more about the process than the product.”

Currently on break for the winter, Brown and Tiravanija are already plotting Unclebrother’s spring relaunch, with a goal of being open every weekend. Their summer of experimenting helped them develop a program that will include a residency and a rotating lineup of artists and chefs. “It seems as though the center of things has become a little claustrophobic. The margins provide more flexibility and opportunity,” explains Brown, who has also recently opened exhibition spaces in Rome and the bottom floor of his Harlem townhouse. “With Hancock, nothing was forced. The space came about organically and has given us a platform to try something new.”

10 Days

of continuous guests and it has been wonderful.  It gives me opportunity to explore new places and show sights I have discovered, cook and share the views and joys of this beautiful place.  But it wrecks havoc with my writing about it. I explained to one guest that being physically exhausted in ways I never was in the City, leaves me too tired for intellectual pursuits, like writing.  I am going to have to give up some of the garden aspirations and physical labor in order to get more in line with some of my set goals.  Bear with me, it will all come together some day.

Traffic Choice

After my first attempt to obtain a safety inspection sticker for my car, which failed because I did not have the correct piece of paper – which the NY car dealer who sold me the car, said I did not need for PA.  Surprise, I did.  I asked the helpful garage owner which way was best to take to where I wanted to go.  Left or right?  ‘Well’, he says, ‘If you go right, you will have more traffic.  Left, less traffic more deer.’  Now what sort of choice is that!