Escaping Artist

It was a busy weekend in California, spent driving back and forth between Pasadena and Palm Springs. Five days should be enough time to see everyone and do everything planned, but the visit felt rushed and incomplete as visits always do. It’s hard to land in a place and pick up where you left off, so much has changed and happened since I was last there. It’s the seemingly small task of “catching up” that takes too much time and is so important, and the bigger tasks of seeing and doing that get put off. Arriving, a childhood friend retrieved me at LAX. Last time I saw her I was a bridesmaid in her wedding, this time she brought her two-year-old and the baby girl on the way. As much as I wish I lived near my oldest and best friends, I can’t imagine going home and having them be elsewhere. It is odd enough that my brother is no longer there. I think of certain people as belonging to certain places as strongly as I know those places themselves. It always surprises me that while I have lived most of my adult life away from the people I know best, they still understand me the most. Sharing a past seems to a lay the groundwork of trust that carries us through the unexpected twists and turns of our more adult lives.

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A friend of mine jokes that our similar interests tend differ when it comes to our preferred tastes, which break down something like the approval matrix in the back of the New York Magazine. Our combined personalities form a like grid of current events, interesting shows, and noteworthy articles of gossip, with my contributions covering the “highbrow” and his the “lowbrow,” and together we seem to cover almost the whole spectrum. Our highbrow/lowbrow tastes were exemplified this past Saturday on our day trip to Philly, an exhausting trip full of good food, bad good food, and sunny weather. Having read much of Bruce Nauman because of his representation of the US at the Venice Biennale last year, I was curious to see his piece reinstalled at the Philly Museum of Art. My friend, on the other hand, wanted to see the much blogged about Love Letters, a public art installation in west Philly by new york based artist Steve Powers. Both artworks were well worth the trip, and both represented the best aspects of the so-called highbrow/lowbrow art scene.

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February’s vacation to central Florida was somehow unintentionally timed perfectly between two snowstorms that draped a dense white blanket over the entire east coast. Flying down the morning before the first storm, I was thankful for my last minute decision not to fly the day of the blizzard. I watched instead on television in 70 degree weather as airlines canceled their flights to and from cities waiting for the pending snow. Flying from New York to Florida on a beautifully clear and crisp day, following the coastline like a compass south, allowed me to lust after every strip of beachfront property from Far Rockaway to Daytona Beach.

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I remember Chicago the way I imagine I saw it as an 18-year-old girl fresh from the southern California suburbs. Unlike Richmond it has been four years since I have seen Chicago, and it has taken me a long time to make it back. It was surreal, deplaning at O’Hare, to see a place I have forgotten so easily and yet somehow remember so well. My memory of Chicago, or my mis-remembrance of it, has a heightened sense of everything. I remember the city being bigger, busier, scarier, louder, dirtier, harder, more threatening, more overwhelming, more segregated, and much less enjoyable than it now seems. I was amused by how narrow and small the subway cars were, they seemed like toy cars with their fabric seats and tight aisles, and I was dumbly amazed when I stepped off at Logan Sq. and the platform was completely deserted. I can’t remember the last time I saw an empty subway platform that was in service. Much of this, certainly, is the direct contradiction with my current city, but more interesting is the fact that most of what I saw contradicted the images in my memory.

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Rode in on the Greyhound but I’ll be walkin’ out if I go
I was just passin’ through must be seven months or more

There are a number of song lyrics that lament about being stuck somewhere, someplace, that you just can’t leave. It is never really the circumstances that are to blame, though a lack of money, purpose, and motivation might factor in, but place itself that catches hold and never lets go. We all can commiserate. I remember being stranded temporarily in the Spanish desert, and feeling that rising desperation as a lack of sleep muddled my comprehension, and as a successful departure seemed more and more impossible to negotiate. Picturing the type of places described in such songs, I see movies concerning small towns, deserted and unlucky in their abandonment—High Noon, Don’t Come Knocking, Northfork—where people kill the town, or the town slowly kills the people. None of these songs or films, however, really describe why certain places are seen as inescapable. Birthplaces and hometowns can be understood this way, as even when you leave them they come uninvited behind you, but not many places can exert this same kind of influence. Wandering Richmond—this past weekend as well as during my visit in April—I wondered if the past, so strongly creeping over the present in this southern capital, lulling you back into a time already lived, could be an explanation for certain place’s sleepy addiction.

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