Englishman in New York

Has Ben Baruch surpassed himself with Part II of the Elijah trilogy?

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The dancer’s life can be a thankless life — a tough job a bit on the fringe, and a low-paying one at that. But Hiromi can rest easy in the fact that she has had a great career, and on her own terms. She has succeeded at something that many, many people once told her that, because of her size, she would never get to do. And in refusing to give up, she has brought joy to thousands of people who have both had the pleasure of working with her and watched her light up a stage.

In her bio on the Houston Ballet Web site, she describes a defining moment: “When I first asked myself how I could contribute to this world through dance. I realized that it’s to show the true essence of art, which transcends all that is purely physical. It is more than what the naked eye can see…it’s a mind and a heart that encompasses a love that gives.”

Jen at Nonsense Verse reflects on a dancing friend who has just retired at the ripe age of 30.

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Old Money details the specifics of this anti-middle class counter-mythology extensively enough, but I can’t resist adding another particular here. I thought of it while reading a brilliant article by Margaret Talbot in a recent issue of The New Republic. It was a compare-and-contrast essay on the subtler messages delivered by Julia Child and by Martha Stewart, Child’s successor as cooking tutor to the upwardly mobile. Talbot does the unthinkable in American journalism and attributes their stylistic differences, most invidiously, to their different class origins. She sees Stewart as a classic self-made woman who is endlessly anxious about making a perfect impression, not only on her servant-blessed Old Money predecessors in the domesticarts, but on her servantless New Money followers. Child, on the other hand, is a classic (Boston) aristocrat: gawky but at ease, with a warbling voice, and a bemused, gently ironic manner. Stewart’s message to her students is that things must be done right with “right” defined as looking beautiful and, most important, as proclaiming the enormous amount of “taste” and hard work that went into them.

Critics berate Stewart for her perfectionist expectations of ordinary housemakers, but they miss the point. In an update of Veblen’s “instinct of craftsmanship,” she is modeling the workstyle expectations of the new, lean and mean corporation: expectations of ever-higher productivity, ever more perfect goods and services, all yielding an ever more “competitive” bottom-line result.

Over against this grim and anxious vision of what cooking and social life are supposed to mean, Julia Child offers a much more relaxed, sensual and considerate view—one that Talbot (rightly, I think) calls aristocratic. She notes that Childs is almost cavalierly amused at her mistakes, and almost hedonistically delighted at her successes—not just (or at all) for the impression they will make on her family and guests, but for the fun of it, the fun of doing it and eating it. What impresses me as aristocratic, though, is how refreshingly antithetical Child’s example is to today’s fierce corporate obsession with results, and to its claims of perfectionism.

Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. in his introduction to Old Money, 1996.

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Lazy Sunday UK. A UK response to the SNL Narnia rap. (Language advisory: Foul.) Via Macboy.

More video fun here with the DEA officer who shot himself in the foot. Literally. Via Clive Davis.

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Anyone visiting a restroom in New York will be familiar with the ubiquitous “Staff Must Wash Hands” signage.

But staff at Bar Six on Sixth Avenue must be particularly dexterous considering this sign for staff to wash “all their hands.”

The question is, has an employee ever been caught only washing one hand? Or do they only employ people with more than two hands?

More hygienic restroom signage. (Via Matt.)
And more questionable signage here.

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We haven’t seen any mice since the pasta box incident last week, but by a happy (or rather unhappy) coincidence, our friends Simon and Heidi are moving into a pet-unfriendly apartment and needed to find a new home for their cat Mouse.

Mouse arrived on Tuesday. A pet psychiatrist would have a field day. Mouse is a rescue cat and Simon and Heidi were not her first owners. On the first evening when I sat on the floor and petted her she took a swipe at my face and cat-punched me in the glasses. Fair enough, I thought, she just wants to be left alone.

But the past couple of days have been like living with a feline Jekyll and Hyde. If I sit on the sofa Mouse curls up in a ball next to me. If I sit at the table to eat she lays next to me. And when I sit down to work she hops up onto my desk and sits in front of my keyboard.

But woe betide me if I try to walk across the apartment. She runs in between my legs, hisses, and hits me with her paw. Even cooking is difficult as she hisses and hits me as I move from work surface to fridge to table.

I’m hoping she will calm down given a few more days. She’s already far less tetchy than she was on Tuesday. Her stay is supposed to be temporary until Heidi’s brother moves into a new place in May/June but I can easily see Sofie and I getting attached to her.

On the flip side my eyes have been itching the past few nights, no doubt due to Mouse’s fine cat hairs. But what fine hairs they are!

(Long range photograph of Mouse taken because she gives me the evil eye when I point the camera at her.)

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We came across this as we were driving through Texas, heading from Marfa to El Paso to fly home from our holiday.

Marfa was the last stop on our holiday. It’s a tiny town (pop. 2,000) in West Texas, renowned as something of a minimalist art Mecca. The artist Donald Judd moved to Marfa in the early 1970s and installed his artwork in various aircraft hangars at the former Fort Russell. Today, Fort Russell is the site of the Chinati Foundation where tourists, mainly from New York and San Francisco judging by our group, are given a guided tour of the works of Judd and other minimalist artists like Dan Flavin.

Fellow Brit Felix Salmon, who I later found out visited Chinati the day after us, has some great photos here.

We spent the night in Marfa’s El Paisano hotel which is still trading off its fame as having been the impromptu headquarters for the filming of the James Dean movie Giant. One of our guide books said Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson had stayed there. The other said the cast and crew stayed there but the famous trio stayed out of town. We had fun in the bar talking to a group of bikers who had ridden up from South Texas and listening to two musicians from Austin playing folk and country music.

The next day’s drive along Highway 90 from Marfa towards El Paso was stunning. Endless land, endless sky, and an endless, flat, straight road which for miles ran parallel with the railway line. In the middle of nowhere we came across this.

Prada Marfa is a sculpture by Michael Emigreen and Ingar Dragset. Much as I enjoyed all the art we saw in Houston and all the art we saw at Chinati, Prada Marfa, sitting in the middle of the desert, had the most impact. You can find out more about it here.

Texas Holiday 2006: The End.

UPDATE: While working on a separate story I came across this great photograph of Judd’s boxes.

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