Gloss

The first photo in this exhibit is of a train station with no tracks. Moving north from there it’s one relentless tale of ambition and salvage in the Empire State. The sites up and down the Hudson River are in different stages, but they are all destined to follow one shared life cycle: 1. Nature; 2. Mansion, then/or Industrial factory; 3. Park, preserve, or museum; 4. Summer music festival. In 50 years, once Radiohead or Pete Seeger has performed at every one, they will return to the earth whence they came.

Up River
Center for Land Use Interpretation at the Parc Foundation
29 Bleeker Street, through June 14
Project Description

Related: FAIL

The New Yorker was kind enough to post Calvin Tomkins’s 2005 profile of Robert Rauschenberg, Everything in Sight. In the middle is this one little anecdote:

He was back in his chair, sipping from a fresh glass of iced white wine. Rauschenberg used to go through about a bottle and a half of Jack Daniel’s a day, and I wondered how anyone could drink so steadily and still function, let alone keep working at his level of energy and inventiveness. A few years ago, when his health broke down, he spent a month at the Betty Ford Center, in Rancho Mirage, California. He didn’t drink for a couple of months after leaving the center, and he still hasn’t gone back to whiskey, but he takes in more than a bottle of white wine a day, and when he goes out to dinner he sometimes allows himself a vodka-and-soda, or maybe two. “One of the things they teach you at Betty Ford’s,” he said, “is ‘Don’t ever be without something to drink.’ I still don’t enjoy wine, but it’s the easiest thing.” Didn’t “something to drink” mean something nonalcoholic? I asked. “That’s what she means!” he said, with his cackling laugh.

Ten years ago I heard this story about a writer, who when she was a young writer, scored the plum assignment of an interview with Rauschenberg. Arriving in the afternoon to find him still asleep, she roused him only to watch him pour a tumbler of whiskey and sit drinking it in silence across from her. When he finished, he went back to bed, but he forgot to show her out, so she spent the next several hours showing herself around his place, and she got her profile.

I mention these because the heavy drinking thing doesn’t fit the artist’s general rep. Rauschenberg was gregarious, but he was not a tragic, hopeless drunk, like Pollock and de Kooning were. He never lost control, except in the ways he wanted. He just operated on an alternative fuel. In his later years, we learn from Kimmelman’s obituary, he grew rich, expanded into philanthropy, and built a mini-real estate empire in Florida. Meanwhile, his works convey all the exhilaration of life as one long bender.

This one’s a bit of a rant, but let me explain. My lady friend and I finally moved to Queens this weekend. We’re psyched; Brooklyn’s gone soft. The week after we signed our lease, Katie forwarded me an Onion article, Report: Nation’s Gentrified Neighborhoods Threatened by Aristocratization. Its description of the city’s Stuff-White-People-Like neighborhoods was accurate enough, but the accompanying photograph was personally damning: it was shot on our block. Brooklyn’s a funny place now. My wife and I have made tangible career progress the last few years, but the borough’s growth outpaced ours. Issues of strollers and luxury condos aside, we can no longer, in our 30s, afford to live in a neighborhood that housed us comfortably at 25.

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