First Friday In Ragtime: Get your lecture on

Yikes. I've realized that I've not posted in this space since the February First Friday when, due to weather, The Girls would've wanted a warm wrap. Not so much tonight, though a sweater would be appropriate, though in the crowded Broad and Main street venues, even that could get a little warm.

For those you not regular members of the billion-eyed audience: this image was taken, and not by yours truly, at an exhibition opening several years ago at the vanished Three Miles Gallery and this space, and the adjacent one, is today the bustling Tarrant's Café.

This pair of lovely Richmond lasses display the classic duality of Greek tragedy/comedy, and the predicament of existence, and how in general conditions are one or the other -- depending who you are and where your viewing booth is. If you are a bank executive receiving a federal bail out, for example, you may be the smiling woman. If you worked for Circuit City or Quimonda, or almost anybody else in the U.S. just now, you may instead resemble the woman on the left.

I'm the lady on the right. Well, not physically (though, imagine that...), but psychically. Because tonight and tonight only I'm giving a talk, "Reading, Writing And Richmond In Ragtime" concerning the authorial aspects within my Richmond In Ragtime: Socialists, Suffragists, Sex and Murder.

It's a tossup, I know. Good weather following an early week veering into snow and ice and actual winter. Now, 60s, a jumping downtown street to take in, all that art, all those people. Well. Come on in and get your lecture on; it'll be if not edifying then entertaining. Well. I hope.

Afterward, you should go to Quirk Gallery to see work by Susann Whittier, Ed Trask and Susanne Arnold.

The mechanical, sculptural elements of Whittier's work has phased into elements of textiles -- including the arms and legs of all those drawn models on the packages of McCall's and Butterick pattern books; there's a flowing array of hands, and bird-like cuffs, and collars with ties. This is wonderful work that looks like one thing yet converses with something else, as befits a show titled "Ever Expanding."

Ed Trask's vivid paintings -- I just love them at de luxe -- and like listening to Mahler, is best when viewed loud and large. These are smaller, intimate pieces though -- check out the birds -- but convey his sense of the rust, dust and sin, the nostalgic deterioration of highway and roadside culture in the South, of rusted metal and wind howling through busted windows, or across a damp field at night.

I need to get back into the Vault to see Arnold's boats. Maybe tonight.

Anyway, hope to see you on corner. I'll have books. You can buy them.

Update:

About 40 people came to the underground lair known as the Rare Book Room of the Richmond Public Library where I regaled the assembled about "Reading, Writing and Richmond in Ragtime" using the works and words of James Branch Cabell, Ellen Glasgow, Mary Johnston, John Mitchell Jr. and, naturally, Adon Allen Yoder. Received enthusiastic applause and sold some books -- and ran into my old Richmond Out of Stock repertory comedy colleague Jonathan Orcutt and his wife and daughter.

I went back to Quirk to see Susanne Arnold's ceramic boats and was captivated by the concept of Charon ferrying the dead across the Styx to the Underworld. Arnold supposes, though, that individuals of differing personalities and culture get their own version of the ride and ferryman.

Went into 1708 and thought I'd instead wandered into ada. "Rain or Shine" features Kate Bingaman Burt, Sarah Hollis, Ryan Mulligan and Stacy Searcy and I felt like I was in a big multi-partner studio cleaned up to receive guests. It's a vigorous, energetic show, and requries plenty of time to read and take in the multi-page and images of journal-like pieces. It's all about the raw discipline required to go into a studio and make art every day -- whether it's any good is up to the observer to decide. I need to go back when there's fewer people in the gallery and a list of places to go.

A pleasant surprise of the evening was Brooke Olivares at Ghostprint, and her "One Block Over." These figurative representative pieces using old school techniques really impressed me. Olivares is a young San Diego painter and though we're looking at contemporary mean streets the work is striking.

Amie and I took the Orcutts over to the exhibit at Linden Row, "Inaugural: History In The Making." The exhibition presents 36 pieces by encaustic artist Susanne Arnold, figurative yet abstract painter Ruth Bolduan, big and wide abstract painter Bill Fisher, renown jewelry-maker and sculptor Thomas Mann, painter Amie Oliver, mysterious and compelling figurartive drawings of Eleanor Rufty, the antic and curious mixed media pieces of Bruce Wilhelm, pinhole photography Willie Anne Wright and "house" painter Louise Poole. All of these will soon be joined by several globes created for the "Save Planet Art" auction show at 1708.

Post-Root Canal Ruminations
China Town bus to NYC; Don Fontaine and David Foster Wallace

Doesn't matter if it's art; it's just plain big. Jeff Koons Up On The Roof: image by Karen Jones via metromix. John Pereault's take on this exhibition in his Artopia says it far better than me, and you can see so here. I confess: I don't like the stuff, and don't care, and


Billion-eyed audience, never fear, I'm still alive just drugged after a root canal procedure, and missing Amie, whom I put on a plane to New Orleans for an arts conference on Monday.

I thought I'd catch up on a few random matters to enliven and entertain your perusal of the blogosphere.



Persistence of Memory

I got to thinking about memory when on WRIR I caught a broadcast of a RadioLab episode from earlier in the year about the ephemeral nature of remembering and forgetting. Fascinating stuff. Upshot is, according to the most recent science, memory is not like some big file cabinet, nor even computer storage, but it's more like painting. Memories are recreated even as they are stored. And we make them over, like a painter, sometimes adding elements that weren't even present when the even occurred. RadioLab is here.

Which flashed me into the Hadron Collider experiements -- the HLC, by the way, which is already experiencing engine difficulty. Before we can glimpse into the potential of other universes, the HLC needs to work in this one, as the Telegraph's Roger Highfield explains here.

But what if we find that the Big Bang turns into the Super Big Gulp, and comes out the other side as yet another Big Bang? The Universe recreates -- but not the same way every time.

This goes back to Chronon Theory that basically stipulates how reality can be broken into distinct and discrete particles of that are strung together like beads on a string, or even images in a motion picture. That like inhaling and exhaling, in each frame the universe comes into being and is "destroyed" in simultaniety. This gets into the Creator-Destroyer of the Hindu god Shiva.

What Chronon Theory suggests then like beads or movie images, there is a gap between them. There might be an "inifinite series of real, solid universes stuck into the probability gaps between quantum gaps of our own," as described by Cliff Pickover in Time: A Traveler's Guide, here.

And I thought of death, and how that experience may resemble going under in an anesthetic coma, and you fade away, and probably nothing -- unless you fall through the cracks into an alternate universe, as another entity somewhere else.

That's a huge amount of theory, and goes a long way to understand why we've devised gods and angels and demons to explain it all through metaphor. "My Father's house hath many mansions," yes, yes indeed it just very well may.

Cosmologist Paul Davies in his The Cosmic Jackpot theorizes that the Universe has engineered its own self-awareness. Mind and Life are fundamental particles in Creation. Life and the Universe that brought it into being are part of a explanatory statement. The Universe is a great cosmic computer, and Thought its software -- didn't we get this with The Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy?

He also states with great emphasis that you can't travel back in time or send information through. Humph. Near as I know, that's all still a theory. See Paul J. Nahin's Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction, Second Edition.

Davies says Mind and Universe will at some point in the future merge. What we do today, what human beings choose to measure, what gets measured today effects what happens in the distant past -- sounds weird but weird things happen in quantum physics.

Reality is an amalgam of histories of the past, thus, what we study today, affects the past. Mind/Universe is in a constant process self-revelation--computing itself; refining and polishing. Davies isn't partial to the idea that life was imprinted from outside. The Universe generated Mind. It's always thinking about...itself. What happens when Deep Thought reaches a conclusion?

Unique New York

I leave these cosmic considerations for a more urbane excursion; this past Sunday Amie and I took the 1 a.m. China Town bus from Richmond to New York. Her mission was to see the Louise Bourgeois closing that weekend at the Guggenheim, the nocturnal Van Gogh opening at MoMA and works of Girogio Morandi at the Met, which she'd never seen much of person, but in books. There's one at the Virginia Museum.

I carried with me the page proofs for Richmond In Ragtime and on various street corners, and in the hushed and bright courtyards of museums, and upon the splendid roof of MoMA with views spoiled by Jeff Koons, I power read and circled words that needed to be changed, lines to cut, repetitions to reduce. And all this while on vicodin.

How grand it is to enter the city just at dawn, and experience the place waking up to itself. The light and the shadows of autumn...an exquisite early autumn day in New York. I gawked at architecture, some of the buildings landmarked, others not. The Bayard-Condict halted me like a stunning woman.

This Louis Sullivan building is astonishing; without being fussy, it also like an elegant sculpted confection. I did not know this place and had to cross the street and learn its name. You can share the fascination here.

To cure my early morning grumpiness, we breakfasted at Le Basket, 683 Broadway, got an omelette and an outdoor table--those sleek, chrome cafe kind, easy to clean and durable-- and watched regulars come in and chat up the proprietor as the city stirred and hooted awake, and I had my New York Times and though the headlines were in almost every way dire, the day seemed impervious to disaster. The coffee was a tonic.

I will continue my varied ruminations about NYC, the collapse of the nation, and all that other stuff, later in the day.