While it was a wonderfully warm summer, perfect for lazy beach days and long bike rides around the city, it was a dull summer for art. The usual museum blockbusters were not interesting, and the gallery scene was even worse. Judging from the number of guest hosts we were subjected to this summer on NPR, everyone either left the city or stayed home and deliberately forgot about their daily obligations. I certainly didn’t feel obligated to do much in the way of research, which opened up a lot of time for recreation, but left my writing in the lurch. Whitehot began publishing book reviews this year around the same time I began working my way through Patti Smith’s Just Kids, one train trip at a time. Impressed by the book, enamored with Patti Smith, and unable to find any gallery show worth writing about, I undertook my first book review. Books, I found out, are hard to summarize while elaborating on and analyzing their content. It’s easy to get lost in them, as there is so much you could say, so many different directions you could go in. With the new gallery season revving up, with openings beginning this week and going into the next, and with the first glimmer of interest returning to the museums—Lee Friedlander’s America by Car opening at the Whitney and Fred Tomaselli’s paintings opening at the Brooklyn Museum—I am glad I took the opportunity to write about an artist rather than art.

This year, Paul Taylor turned eighty. I find myself constantly chasing after figures in the arts that are getting older. Paul Taylor is his company, and without him there will only be the dances he leaves behind. I missed his February season at the City Center, but caught a recent free performance at the outdoor bandshell at the Lincoln Center. Despite the fact that we were promised rain, it turned out to be a fantastically clear, though dreadfully humid, night. I am always curious of the crowds such “cultural” events draw, and because this show was free it seemed more varied than most gatherings for modern dance usually are. Though it still consisted largely of Lincoln Center regulars, that elderly generation who have grown old watching dance, opera, and theater, more youths than usual peppered the amphitheater. I’ve seen dance outdoors in the past, though the last time was in San Francisco while I was training there for the summer. While that show was more of a family oriented, picnic style atmosphere with fireworks at the end, this performance was taken very seriously. As people fought for viewing space between heads, a general frustration and discomfort at being outdoors seemed rampant. Being outside was an odd feeling, as small distractions intensified: the constant chatter of people, the shuffling seat changes, the traffic on 9^th ave, a helicopter flying overhead, the sunset behind the stage. All this tore your attention away from the tiny dancers onstage. For me, however, it felt like a wonderful, guilty pleasure. I am convinced that if there is anything we are obligated to pay for, it is dance.

The evening began with two pieces performed by the junior company, Taylor 2. Performing a famous piece of Taylor’s, Esplanade from 1975, restaged here for six dancers, I was impressed by both the dancers and the selection. Finally a piece that young dancers can do well, perhaps even better, than their elders, and they brought a kind of natural spryness to the music and steps. Set to Bach, the music reminded me of the old vinyl records I used to play on my parents turntable, carefully setting down the needle and waiting through the scratching for the bounding music. I’d fill the living room with my own whirling and leaping, and Esplanade seems to capture this kind of physical freedom. Because junior companies are often treated like lesser visions of the real company, I was happy to see them take a piece from the older dancers and make it completely their own.

The entrance of the main company itself, as the sun set and the sky grew dark, was upstaged by the ending of Taylor 2, and the audiences overwhelming need for an intermission. The beginning of their first piece was lost in the general confusion of people who assumed there was an intermission when in fact there wasn’t. Airs is an odd piece for Taylor, so balletic that it seems to stretch the talents of the dancers. It was beautiful choreography, and though executed with a great deal of skill, it lacked a polished sense of movement. A few wobbly turns, some difficultly holding an arabesque or attitude, and you got the sense that you were watching a junior ballet company. Syzygy, sandwiched in the middle of the program, was the most impressive piece. The music, composed by Don York, was discordant sounding jazz, and the choreography was full of the Taylor athleticism and precision that makes the company’s dancers, the men in particular, so impressive to watch. There is nothing quite like the bounding leaps and casual rolls, or the split-second poses that catch your eye even as they morph into another movement, of a Taylor dancer. Like all great Taylor pieces, Syzygy leaves you feeling a little unsettled, but for somewhat ambiguous reasons. The last piece, Company B, was set to the various hit songs of the Andrews Sisters, reminding me of the tunes my grandpa used to hum, so full of second world war feelings. Though the songs are about romantic American sentiments from that era, the underlying theme of Company B is one of gender. As the men were pulled, poked, and prodded around the stage by women in Oh, Johnny! Oh, Johnny Oh!, and as insipid words belted from the speakers in Rum & Coca Cola, you could not help laughing and wondering who was getting the shortest end of the stick.

The evening concluded with an appearance by Taylor himself, towering onstage above his dancers, equipped with his gaping grin. As a delighted audience sang happy birthday, I thought, here really is a man who gets to stretch his birthday out for a whole year.

Women, famously noted by Laura Mulvey in the 1970’s, have the wonderful ability to be interested in films made for an intended audience that is certainly not us. While I don’t have any interest in giving up my ability to enjoy that which is not made from a female perspective or even with female viewers in mind, Matthew Barney’s Cremaster film’s for example, there is little movement from men to expand their preferred tastes. As I excitedly await the arrival of Jim Thompson’s gory noir thriller The Killer Inside Me, I can’t think of many men who delve, and with pleasure, into a genre of feminine entertainment. In this sense, there still is a discrepancy between gender and taste, a gap sadly maintained by willful ignorance, a dash of insecurity, and an absurd belief that a feminine perspective, this many years after female emancipation, has little to offer. While Sweden is implementing maternity leave for men, in general they still seem to feel that films about family are not for them.

The question of who these films are for is an interesting one because there certainly seems to be a demand for them. In recent years a number of films with stories of estrangement, disconnection, and dysfunction have been released, most of them from France—Summer Hours, I’ve Loved You so Long, and most recently The Father of My Children. This latest film suffers from three fundamental problems that result in a general disinterest of it: it is the second film impressively written and directed by 29-year-old Mia Hansen-Løve, it is about the life and death of a family’s father, and it’s title, The Father of My Children (Le pere de mes enfants), does not seem to have been a wise choice. The film is more about death, various different kinds, than it is about family, and it is more a film about the individuals who make up this particular family than it is about the drama of a family dynamic. It feels bizarre being reduced to arguing a good film’s validity based on the claim that it has misled people into thinking that it is about family.

The first half of The Father of My Children focuses on the life of the protagonist, our father figure, and his worklife. Grégoire Canvel, a Parisian movie producer played by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, is a suave, chain-smoking Frenchman of a different breed than the prissy ones I knew while living in Montpellier. Canvel, a formerly successful producer, is a man who risks his livelihood, and his families, on art. He finances the films of brilliant but impossible directors with the firm belief that his potential ruin could be worth the price of a great film. He spends what little free time he has reading the screenplay of a young boy, as he looks for future talent in the young and unlikely. More than family, this is a film about art and filmmaking, and it questions the price, both literally and metaphorically, of investing so much time, money, and faith in cinema. Patrons, philanthropists, and producers are sometimes the forgotten someone’s behind the life and work of a great many of our cherished artists. I was reminded of this most recently while reading in Patti Smith’s Just Kids an account of Robert Mapplethorpe’s forgotten patron, partner, and collector, Sam Wagstaff. This film tells the story of an unusual kind of creativity and vision, of an unglamorous, behind-the-scenes role, and the struggles of one man trying to work within a limiting system while still producing wonderful films. When he no longer can, he puts a gun to his head and dies on an abandoned sidewalk by the gutter.

Though the film focuses on Canvel, and is based on Hansen-Løve’s own experience of working with a similar producer named Humbert Balsan, Canvel‘s death leaves behind four women, his wife and three daughters, and his debt-ridden company. Though his wife does her best to save Canvel‘s company, his films in progress, and his portfolio, she does so with little success, and the second half of the film is about a very un-American kind of acceptance and perseverance. It does not dwell in grief or sadness, but examines a man’s legacy through the eyes of his young children. He wasn’t who they thought he was, he won’t see any of them grow up, but he was their father, and as their mother tells them, his death does not negate his life, implying that it was simply another component of it. Though the latter half of the film feels slightly flippant, like an overly objective documentary, I believe its distance makes the film more authentic. The horrific finality of the death of a depressed father is not what we want to feel while watching this film, though we certain do, it’s something we want to see. Because we wish to make tangible that which is lost, we need to see the repercussions of Canvel‘s suicide etched permanently into the character of the family. Loss and grief, however, don’t in reality exist that way no matter how much we want to see it. People don’t wear their tragedies like flashy garments, and its only once in a great while that you notice those feelings of sadness lurking in those who have suffered from this kind of loss. The real legacy of their father lives subtlety within them, and as the credits roll and the family drives away from Paris and into a future life, the song Que Sera, Sera accompanies them. Given the chance, The Father of My Children could prove more relevant than you might initially think.

As Shakespeare in Central Park and the food trucks in Red Hook say summer, so do the summer concerts. While seeing bands play in winter feels like a necessary escape, like beer bars and warm loft bedrooms, in summer it feels more like a leisurely pursuit. Summer, shortly after it “officially” started on the calender, might have actually begun at Greenpoint’s Newtown Barge Park and with the amusing, at times disgusting, antics of Les Savy Fav. Though I don’t really know their music I did appreciate the Nick Cave-like costumes, and the playful, absurd quality of the show. Music is still music even when it’s taken a bit less seriously.

Wolf Parade also had their long awaited show Tuesday night at Terminal 5, a large venue in an obscure location on the west side of midtown Manhattan. My first time there it felt like a midsized space trying to feel like a large space, with TV screens showing the band onstage in poorer quality than my eyesight. Dim, verging on downright dark, and packed full of people, it felt like a less atmospheric venue than other music halls. Wolf Parade, four guys from Montreal, played a set of loud, adrenaline rushed songs while the group visibly wilted from the heat. It was a good show, and from the balcony upstairs where the the view was better I could watch the devoted fans on the floor below. While Yeasayer attracted women writhing with adoration in the front row, Wolf Parade seems to touch the hearts of the opposite sex. Perhaps the combination of their somewhat experimental sound and lyrics evoke bits of the sardonic, sarcastic, or simply the absurd in their masculine audience. “I don’t think I should say sorry, for things I do in dreams, some people live like they’re falling, some people die in their sleep.”

Realizing I bought tickets back-to-back, Wednesday I saw the Heartless Bastards at Music Hall in Williamsburg. Music Hall is a nicer venue, smaller and slightly quieter, prettier on the inside with red lights, some bleacher-like seating, a nice upstairs balcony, and little round tables for the special people. After deciding to try out standing by the stage for the first time in a long time, I have since made the decision to always, always stay upstairs—looking down at the ruckus is much more appealing than being in it. From Cincinnati Ohio, the Heartless Bastards are a four-piece band led by Erika Wennerstrom. She has one of those haunting voices, distinctive and provocative no matter what she happens to be singing about. Watching her I was reminded of seeing PJ Harvey, as they both have a certain autonomy in an industry still dominated by men. Sexy in their own way, neither women seem eager to sexualize themselves in a manner that has become, at this point, so cliché. Seeing pop culture icons, sometimes even celebrities, who give you a sight feeling of hope for our gender is a nice, if a very fleeting, feeling.

Summer thus initiated, I look forward to recklessly whittling away at the next few months.

In New York, the space between what you want and what you’ve got creates a civic itchiness: I don’t know a content New Yorker.

Moving is difficult. It’s not so much the physical act of lugging your things from one place to another, albeit an exhausting experience beginning with packing the first box to unpacking the last, but the psychological aspect of being in transition that makes it so traumatizing. All semblance of a routine full of familiarity and comfort disappears as objects are moved, and rather than facing the fear we might feel at not knowing if a new home will become a home, even though they always do, it’s easier to cling to our belongings. I watched my Grandpa horde objects throughout my lifetime, loving his clutter so much that I associated his belongings with his person, and moving his furniture felt just like moving the displaced man himself. While watching his things disappear from a house I loved was like witnessing a small kind of death, seeing familiar, though just as displaced trinkets in my parents various apartments over the years act as a reassurance that they are still themselves. I think about the infamous wagon-wheel-coffee-table scene from When Harry Met Sally when I trash objects I myself fought so hard to keep in my possession. The things that surround us have a meaning we don’t really intend for them to have, and seem to be the most convenient tokens of displaced emotions. Moving this past weekend I realized, only when I was returning the van and all was safely moved, including my most precious yowling Boo, that everything was alright. It’s seeing our lives packed and placed in a homeless state that is so unsettling.

Ten moves in eight years, I keep grumbling to myself. I do love moving to new places, exploring new neighborhoods, but now that I have found somewhere I want to stay these shuffles from borough to borough feel like the precursor to settling somewhere for good, or at least for longer than I have ever lived before. Giving up my little apartment in Queens, the only place I have ever lived alone was the most bittersweet home I have ever given up. Wrapped into that place was a lovely freedom it took me too many years to find. Woolf was wise, and that apartment was my first room. It saw many quiet evenings, a few late nights, and a good many absences. I loved Woodside because it was my neighborhood, I discovered it, and lived in it myself. Perhaps it takes becoming an adult to remember the selfish independence we felt as children. I dreamed of that apartment long before I had it, and I changed my mind about leaving it more times than I ever hesitated about anything.

But Brooklyn and I fell in love from the beginning, and I am happy to be living in it. Carroll Gardens is pretty, full of tree-lined streets, babies, Midwestern styled buildings that vaguely remind me of Chicago, and friendly people who talk to you on the street, distantly recalling Richmond. Carroll Gardens will be a good stomping ground, a new place to explore. It was not where I had planned to move, and I came to see this apartment on Clinton St. in a moment of frustration, but could not seem to resist it once I saw it. Gopnik also says,

…what aspirations and accommodations share is the quality of becoming, of not being fixed in place, of being in every way unfinished. An aspiration might someday be achieved; and accommodation will someday be replaced. The romantic vision—we’ll get to the city across the river someday!—ends up harmonizing with the unromantic embrace of reality: We’ll get that closet cleaned out yet.

I’ll have my loft and studio one day, but in the meantime I have a new neighborhood at my fingertips.

New York City is a place that inspires a great deal of nostalgic sentiment, so passionate and opinionated that it often feels exclusive, like how we sometimes feel when talking to our grandparents. While the elderly tend to remember their past with exciting fondness, their dismissal of the present is always a little unnerving. Growing up with one great-grandmother born in 1905 instead of two younger grandmothers, I was always captivated by her quaint stories. At the same time I felt a bit wary of them, like the children in a Ray Bradbury novel who simply can’t believe that the elderly were once young. Just as we all feel a little like the first children to ever roam grassy backyards, it’s hard to accept that there ever was a time before our vivid present.

I have a similar reaction to nostalgic critiques of New York City. While I seek out stories of the city’s past, a past that goes well beyond its most remembered years—the creativity of the 1960’s, the violence and crime of the 1970’s and 80’s—and while I enjoy films that depict the city in past decades— Schatzberg’s 1971 Panic in Needle Park, or Jarmusch’s 1980’s Permanent Vacation—they all describe a city I will never experience. It seems foolish, from my point of view, to be nostalgic for something you will never see. I don’t even find myself wishing that I had known those times or that city, anymore than I wish I was born in a different era. I understand my time, am of my time, and am sure the same applies to the city: it’s the only one I get. I won’t see it as a “changed place” for many years.

My lack of a lengthy past makes it difficult to digest the idea that New York was once a place of vibrant authenticity, and today is a ghostly shadow if its former self. “Inevitably, behind cries of decline is a conception, consciences or not, of a time and situation that was better—when the city had a soul (Ben Schwarz).” That the city has changed is not the question to dispute, as it’s obvious that it has and that it must. The problematic question seems to be: has it changed for better or worse and for whom? This sort of wistful backward glancing, an activity I have spent a good deal of time investigating in the past, has become overwhelmingly prevalent of late, popping up across disciplines and outside the boundary of New York City.

My attention was drawn initially by a recent Patti Smith statement: “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.” This statement seems to reinforce an age discrepancy and the gap it creates between the prospective of different generations. Though the city is not what Smith remembers from her early days with Mapplethorpe, when I think of artists today grouping together in Bushwick lofts, New York still seems to find ways to accommodate its young, poor creative types. Atlantic Magazine’s literary critic Ben Schwarz tackles Smith-like nostalgia in his essay “Gentrification and Its Discontents.” The tagline for the article reads, “Manhattan never was what we think it was.” Offering a critique of a few recently published urban planning books that dwell on the soulless gentrification that has encapsulated New York City, Schwartz’s article considers the problems with idealizing fragmented pieces of history. For example, Schwarz points out that the SoHo we miss today was created by rapid industrial decline, “which made economically available to artists…those cool industrial spaces that in more industrially vibrant times would have been used by, well, industry.” This point is also underscored in a recent HBO documentary Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags, a film that documents the disappearance of the cities garment industry. When lamenting a time of profitable domestic production, it is also important to remember the immigrant filled sweatshops on 7^th Ave, and accidents like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

Nostalgia is a hard subject to tackle, requiring a good deal more research, and I find this nostalgic attitude creeping its way toward art as well. If nostalgia is a natural human tendency it seems best to understand the motives behind it, that we might catch ourselves before we romantically alter what we once remembered and experienced. Railing against our current time, even in a genuine effort to recapture authenticity, might prove as damaging as allowing our present to run rampantly unchecked. In an eloquent and provocative interview in The Times Quotidian, LA based playwright John Steppling speaks nostalgically about a time when theater and artists were less controlled and manipulated. I am less interested in the idea of going back to something pure, than I am in moving toward something messier and more current. I don’t think we ever get a clean slate for remaking our cities or professions as we might wish them to be, as they might have once been, I think we have to take on the messy business of reworking what already is. Mulling over these ideas, I was reminded of the introduction to Through the Children’s Gate, Adam Gopnik’s book about his return to New York City in the early 2000’s. He talks about the cities ever shifting landscape as one of the “truths” of the city, and he too humorously critiques the cities nostalgic naysayers.

“People who refuse to be sentimental about the normal things don’t end up being sentimental about nothing; they end up being sentimental about anything, shedding tears over old muggings and the perfect, glittering shards of the little crack vials, sparkling like diamonds in the gutter. Who cares if the snows were all of cocaine? We saw them falling and our hearts were glad.”

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.

Living at the foot of Mt. Wilson in Sierra Madre, Dad and I went hiking on a hot Friday morning, trekking 1.5 miles to First Water, the river that runs through the mountains, a short hike for him and an exhausting hike for me. I might be in good shape for urban walking, since I do so much of that, but I was sadly out of shape for climbing hillsides. While First Water was well worth the dusty, sweaty hike up, the landscape and vegetation alone was worth the effort. Nothing smells quite like native plants, wildflowers, dust, and rocks all baked together in the sunlight. I miss the produce of the west coast, and Dad’s farmer’s market avocados and strawberries followed me back and forth from his house to the desert, where Mom and I had pink smoothes all weekend whenever the desert heat felt too unreasonable.

Palm Springs never changes too much: it’s always hot, dry, and very much a desert resort town. No matter how much it actually changes, it still feels like the same city I used to visit as a child and teenager. I love the looming mountains, the wind turbines, the bizarre elderly people, and the thrift stores. It’s a great place to photograph, full of celebrity houses, movie people, and iconic hotels, and lends itself well to my Polaroid series of ironic places and histories. It’s a sad place for me, however, tinged with memories that are uncomfortable. I have made my peace, but the reminders are always painful. Sitting out under the night sky, warmth still rising from the pavement, looking at the stars on a happy night of wine and tacos, I missed Jon.

I have a good feeling about turning twenty-six. Twenty-five was a good year in some twisted sense of the word, a hard year full of changes and tough decisions. The twenties, I have decided, are much like the teens, where you are still growing, changing, and learning to live with who you are. If this levels out it certainly is not in your twenties. It was a mellow birthday, falling on an overcast Sunday that we spent at LACMA seeing the Robin Rhode show, whimsical and evocative enough to charm even Mom. The Broad was showcasing a new, or recently installed, part of the collection featuring a large exhibition of Joseph Beuys work: always interesting if a bit puzzling. We ate delicious Mexico City Mexican food at the Gardens of Taxco in west Hollywood, and I finished off the night with a strange encounter with John Steppling, and a fantastic bar chat and Old Town stroll with another old friend.

Flying home from California always reminds me of the first time I flew to Europe. I was on my way to Germany with my class, seated next to a young German girl who had been an exchange high school student for the past year. She was flying home and she cried the whole way. She kept looking at a card from her classmates, rereading their notes and well wishes, and stopped crying only to eat. Watching her meet her family in the Munich airport, I could never figure out if she had been crying because she was leaving her friends or because she was going home. I think both.

The latest review of a messy multimedia experiment.

Queens, for some bizarre reason, has a very bad reputation when it comes to its aesthetic virtue. In a show on NPR a while back the borough was humorously described as being less than picturesque, and I was appalled by its representation in the movie Julia & Julia, where shots of trains I take and buildings I walk by looked manipulated to make Queens even more discouragingly ugly than it actually is. Certainly it is not Manhattan, the island of architectural diversity and beauty, but I can’t make it less attractive than Brooklyn. I find Queens mostly made up of attractive residential buildings surrounding the train lines, suburban strip malls farther outward, and industrial warehouses along the waterfront. Beginning in recent years with Long Island City, the closest area of Queens to Manhattan, and working eastward, gentrification of sorts has slowly begun. LIC reminds me of what Williamsburg might have been a few years ago, after the artists but before the high-rise glass condos. While I love my neighborhood (Woodside)  with its little houses and tiny gardens, Colombian cafes and ethnic diversity, and its close distance to Manhattan and Brooklyn, it matters very little for my photographic purposes how picturesque Queens may or may not be. Often the “uglier” it is, the more interesting it becomes.

Having finished the Amsterdam walk and before moving on to my plan to explore High Bridge Park along the east river, I spent a day photographing LIC. Originally hoping to move there this summer, I was interested in exploring the area in terms of its livability, as well as to photograph what I often see from the train. LIC is more expensive than many other neighborhoods in Queens, partly because of its location and party because its inhabitants are becoming whiter and whiter—although I imagine the two are connected. What I find interesting about areas like this, neighborhoods known because of their gentrification, is that while you imagine an entire neighborhood full of little shops, restaurants, and bars this is not really the case. Rather, there are a few main streets where all of these things are located, and the farther you get from them the more the look and feel changes back into its original gray and worn self. One of the things I love about nyc is that it feels like a well used place, and has the interest and comfort of a hand-me-down. I was very happy to wander through taxi hubs, down deserted streets full of warehouses, around various construction sites, and in a park under renovation beneath the Queensboro bridge. I like not knowing what to expect, and Queens is good with surprises, as you never know what sort of bizarre business, building, or activity is going to pop up along the next block.

Continuing my exploration of Queens this past weekend, I decided to walk along the waterfront from Astoria to LIC, connecting my two walks together at the end but covering along the way completely different territory. Astoria to me will always be made up of lovely residential homes that rent only small shady basements to newcomers, and wonderful Greek food. I remember Astoria Park from my first time apartment hunting in nyc, and watching the sun set around the Hell Gate Bridge was one of the few pleasant moments of that traumatizing experience. Astoria Park, I found, is really the only large section of the Queens waterfront before LIC that has been turned into a pubic area. Leaving that long stretch of park I found myself amidst disturbingly quiet industrial buildings running next to sleepy houses. You can’t actually follow the water so much as stick close to the buildings keeping you from it. The waterfront then winds its way though a long string of projects, directly followed by a sculpture park promoting the work of local artists. After walking through a creepily isolated ghetto it was equally odd to find myself in a park with pale babies and designer dogs. Onward from that I found what I hadn’t known existed in nyc: a Costco.

All in all they were strange walks, and Queens is undoubtedly a strange place. It will take a while to cover enough ground to be able to know it really well, and even longer for it to lack surprises; even if they are as depressing as a Costco toward which the only other walkers gravitate.

Nauman, I find, is easy to dislike. Every time I see an artwork spelling out some new catch phrase in neon I find him completely at fault. His early works are low tech, boring, and sometimes self-indulgent. I keep running across his work, recently at the new wing of the Art Institute in Chicago where his clown videos are installed, and watching viewers react to them is entertaining. If ten seconds is the average viewing time for a piece of art, in general Nauman commands a bit less than even that, and what a shame. I enjoy his artwork, his early spontaneous performances and his later works. Living out west he has the kind of sensibly I understand. When interviewed he has an Eggleston-like gruffness and a ranchers bluntness: the antithesis to artist’s like Viola and his films drenched in emotion. Nauman’s literalness is often what allows his work to become metaphorical. Though he is usually featured in his own films as the performer, his videos don’t seem to be about him but about some sparked thought that came to him while he was sitting in his studio.

Nauman’s Venice piece, Days and Giorni, is a sound installation of impeccable simplicity and lasting intrigue. Though a cacophony of voices greet you as you enter the room, all speaking different days of the week in voices of different age and gender, they sort themselves out into patterned rhythms of individuality as you walk through. There is something playful in the sounds Days creates—it reminded me of hearing unexpected echoes or of making sounds with endless amusement on the piano as a child—at the same time that it speaks (literally) of timeless monotony. The days of our weeks have different meanings for all of us, though usually they divide into days of work or leisure in a calendar-based sense of time. These days of the week, however, and the anonymous voices speaking them, could also belong to anyone and in any calendar. Giorni is the Italian equivalent of Days, though the piece seems to be more about the words themselves than the voices speaking them. My favorite voice is that of a little boy in Days. Sitting on a stool, his voice battering each of my ears with different recorded patterns, he lists his particular days with the restrained eagerness that is the essence of childhood.

In striking contrast to the museum setting and the sound of conceptual musings, Love Letters consists of 31 colorful murals covering about 20 street blocks along the Market-Frankford subway line in west Philly. I remember the area from the Obama rally I attended before the election, and it reminds me of the rundown, non-white areas of Richmond. Originally from the area, and working with local residents, Steve Powers created humorous, slogan-based murals full of love and romance for an imagined someone. Written in fonts we recognize from retro ads, the murals pop out of the landscape in such a cheerfully clever manner they must be a welcome addition to the daily commute. Reading phrases like “open your eyes I see the sunrise” or “anyplace, anytime, anywhere,” it’s hard not to immediately smile. They are smartly designed murals, but they don’t require much more than your glance, and for once this seems completely appropriate. Considering their placement, the neighborhood, and Power’s general purpose of giving the city a little love, they are the most successfully integrated pieces of public art I have seen in a long time. Installed late last year, I am amazed how pristine they remain, perhaps a testament to their public success. Love Letters make nyc’s most recent pubic art installation in Madison Square Park, Antony Gormley’s Event Horizon, look shamefully boring and inadequate.