Heather King's Blog, page 41

DESIGNER RUSSEL WRIGHT’S MANITOGA

I have visited several art studios on my East Coast trip.

Manitoga, in Garrison (upstate) New York, is the former house and studio of industrial designer Russel (yes, only one “l”) Wright (1904-1976). The house, also known as Dragon Rock, sits on 76 acres of what was originally an abandoned quarry. Wright spent decades restoring the land, learning of its flora, fauna, rocks, trees, soil and water, and fashioning his own little world.

Several trails meander through the woods and I explored them first: brown-spotted ferns; acorns in gorgeous shades of palm green, coral, and gold; and fabulous stands of mushrooms: some scarlet, others snow white, and one fan-shaped ledge, growing out from a tree-trunk, bright orange.

The hour-and-a-half tour led up and down many sets of granite steps, through patches of mossy “lawn,” through stands of rhododendron and mountain laurel, and over bridges, all with a stunning view of the quarry, now a pond/pool (in which however no-one can swim as built-up silt and debris make it dangerous (?)).

WRIGHT’S STUDIO ROOF HAD STUFF GROWING ON IT!
THE ORIGINAL VIRGINIA CREEPER DUGS ITS ROOTS IN TOO DEEP
SO THE LANDSCAPERS HAVE RECENTLY SWITCHED TO SEDUM.

The house was both beautiful and completely impracticable with unever floors of granite blocks, “staircases” consisting of wide, uneven granite blocks that made for stairs of irregular height, and to my mind entirely too much darkness. That was true in fact also of Fonthill Castle and the Wharton Esherick studio/museum, the two other places I toured.

Maybe I have lived out West too long, but all three places were incredibly designed and fascinating and all promised to be freezing cold, damp, and terribly gloomy in the long East Coast winters.

Be that as it may, Manitoga had all kinds of inventive (for its time) touches. Formica, Naugahyde, fluourescent lights filtered through panels of burlap and waffled with fishing line filament. Styrofoam blocks for ceiling insulation, flexible black fireplace screen netting for curtains, a hidden drawer behind the dining room sideboard that slid up and down on a pulley and on which you could store dishes, glassware and such.

Wright switched out all his drapes, cushions, lighting fixtures and other accoutrements according to the season. In summer, he had long white strings depending from his living room floor-to-ceiling picture window and in winter, lengths of red ribbon (these both sounded kind of awful but you could draw them back and forth, like curtains, so that probably helped).

He pressed real leaves into one line of his dinnerware.

He lived more or less in the smaller studio and his daughter Annie (Wright’s wife Mary, also a designer, died in 1952) and her nanny lived in the house.

Those of us of a certain age will remember, at least vaguely, some of his designs. And he had one whole line made of Melamine, a substance I, for one, remember well.

We had a set of indestructible mint green Melamine dinnerware in my childhood home that we used for ages. Our dishes weren’t designed by Russel Wright, though; rather some nameless person with an eye toward an eight-children household, most of them boys, came up with a utilitarian design that would have served well for, say, an Army messhall.

I can picture those plates perfectly, having washed and dried them probably thousands of times. (Mom, always a fan of “elbow grease,” disdained a dishwasher and all these years later I agree with her completely).

Wright believed we would live happier lives if we surrounded ourselves with objects that were beautiful but not expensive.

All these years later, I agree with him completely, too.

FROM WRIGHT’S “AMERICAN MODERN”DINNER COLLECTION.
CHARTREUSE WAS ONE OF THE SIX ORIGINAL COLORS.

THE THEATER IS BACK! PATRICK KERR IN MY FAIR LADY

This week’s arts and culture column is a paean to my dear friend: the wonderful actor Patrick Kerr. 

He’s in a new production of My Fair Lady, on nationwide tour and opening October 7 for a three-week run at Hollywood’s Dolby Theater .

READ ALL ABOUT IT HERE.

SORROW’S SPRINGS

I have made it to Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

I’ve stayed the last two nights at what used to be a dairy farm in New Hope. Beautiful old stone house, surrounded by perennial beds–strawflowers, yarrow, morning glories, fuchsias, begonias, all evocatively decaying in early fall. The weather’s been unseasonably warm. Yesterday I was able to amble the path that’s been mown around the perimeter of the back field.

The grasses, the milkweed, goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace, the afternoon light–everything makes me want to cry. I grew up in New Hampshire, a few states north obviously, but the East Coast landscape is deep, deep and dear to my heart. I feel in one way that I never left. In some ways I wish I never left.

My bum leg (trip and fall in NYC) is healing by the day. The cane I bought at Duane Reade (Walmart) fell apart after three days. I patched it up and then it died yesterday while I was touring Fonthill Castle.

Almost at that exact moment, however, I found I could more or less walk unaided and in a couple of more days may even be able to climb stairs like a normal person, instead of both feet on one step, inching up one at a time.

I’m overwhelmed by the healing properties of the human body and the adaptability of the human spirit.

I’ve had a different kind of trip than I would have, and that’s been instructive and beautiful. On the other hand, the whole incident has made me newly aware of my fragility. I begin to see that old people, mostly overlooked by the world, play some mysterious role in holding the tension of the world.

When you’re young, you look at older people and sort of think, Well, they’ve had their lives and they don’t really care about or mind dying. It’s not quite that callous but on some level, that’s kind of the thought. The young are not equipped to dwell, and almost shouldn’t be dwelling, on death.

But if you’re lucky enough to make it this far, a whole new vista opens up. Another vantage point.

One main thing I see is the vitality of prayer. The years of prayer–however faltering, distracted, and lackluster; whatever form our “prayer” may take–have shaped and formed us. It’s one main thing we can continue doing, no matter how diminished we may become.

This lanscape–the colors, the bird calls, the cool, dew-laden air–all make me think of my mother. Think of her and long for her.

Jesus had it so right in giving us Mary.

SPRING AND FALL
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

AND I THOUGHT I WAS INVINCIBLE

I have had a bit of an accident!

Yesterday, my third day in NY, everything was going swimmingly.

I had seen the Cézanne Drawing exhibit at MoMA. I had visited Wave Hill. I had been to Mass at my beloved St. Vincent Ferrer.

I had another blockbuster of a day planned yesterday. I was to walk up to Orwasher’s Bakery on 78th, then  cut across the park, catch the A train and go to the Cloisters (another possible half-hour walk from train as the right stop is closed). And I was making my way up 3rd Ave (I think) or maybe 2nd , all of a sudden I took a giant giant header, splat onto the sidewalk.

Luckily I was clutching my rosary, just starting on the Agony in the Garden, and as I landed I saw the crucifix with a little teeny silver Jesus on it peeping from my left hand, cheered by the thought that if I died, I would be like Antonin Gaudi, on his way home from Mass when fatally struck by a streetcar. Such faith, I imagined people clucking sadly. Why she was praying as she drew her last breath.

I also instantly felt my right knee in pain, hoping it wasn’t too bad but sort of knowing it perhaps wasn’t good. A couple of people stopped to ask if I was okay and I got up and sheepishly grinned and said, “Yeah, I think I’m okay, thank you,” and started limping away up the street. The pain was dull, throbbing, deep, not the sharp pain that I would think indicates a broken bone.

Though who knows.

Of course I insisted on walking probably 7 or 8 blocks to the stupid bakery, for what turned out to be a lackluster almond croissant and an equally lackluster bagel. Then I had to double back, for by this time I had realized there was no way I could make it to the Cloisters, and by the time I was close to home could barely inch my way across 3rd Ave. I did have the presence of mind to purchase a venti Starbucks and then some ice and aspirin and to wend my way up to my fifth floor room, realizing by this time that my day, whole time in NY, and possibly whole trip might have been queered.

I’ve been icing, elevating, and resting, more or less, ever since. Yesterday afternoon I limped laboriously up to Duane Reade. I was going so slow I thought a couple of people might actually stop and offer me money.

My idea was to purchase a knee brace which I figured would both add the C to RICE and also help me walk. Then, once in the store, a thought came to me like a thunderbolt: cane! So I have also bought a freaking cane! And am doing my best as I hobble about to look melodramatically brave and forlorn, so people will feel sorry for me.

I’m so so grateful for my room, which is across the back courtyard from St. Vincent Ferrer and thus puts me in close proximity with the tabernacle, as well as the many priests who live somewhere on the premises even if I can’t see them.

My friend Sheila is coming to visit momentarily.

And all is well.

LILY PADS, WAVE HILL

BELOW THE EDGE OF DARKNESS

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Bioluminescence is oceanographer Edith Widder’s great obsession.

Put simply, bioluminescence is light produced by a chemical reaction within a living organism.

Fireflies and certain fungi aside, the vast majority of bioluminescence occurs in the ocean: fish, bacteria, and jellies, the most common forms of which are those creatures that float through the water with transparent bell-shaped bodies and tentacles.

There’s quite a bit of science in Widder’s new memoir: Below the Edge of Darkness: A Memoir of Exploring Light and Life in the Deep Sea. But you don’t have to be a scientist to be amazed and inspired by Widder’s life beneath the sea.

Born and bred in Massachusetts to academic parents, Widder was poised to become a biologist. But a spinal fracture, diagnosed during her college years, led to a surgery with complications that almost killed her and also rendered her temporarily blind. With amazing good humor, she emerged after four months flat on her back in a hospital bed.

“Fiat Lux” she names the chapter in which her sight slowly returns. Though she carefully refrains from labeling her recovery a miracle, it’s hard to miss the fact that out of this time of great personal darkness arose her life’s work, drive, and passion. 

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

Here are some things I’ve noticed about Tucson.

One is that I live in a wildlife park!

There’s a Cooper’s hawk, for example, that takes its kill to this one beat-up branch of the juniper in the front yard. I glanced that way the other day and there’s a total bird corpse with the tail feathers spread that I cannot bring myself to dislodge. I’m hoping it just disintegrates up there.

That was after reading an article somewhere in which the writer noted that zillions of birds die each year but that we don’t generally see them, either because they crawl into a bush to die, or something eats them right away, or they’re so light that they decompose quickly.

The very next day I unlocked my front gate as I do each morning and a dead bird was lying smack in front of it. A few weeks before I’d already found another dead bird in the side ramada.

So there’s that. Then the other day I spotted a Gila woodpecker, a bird the size of a pigeon, clamped onto and slurping away at the hummingbird feeder. Which is kind of like coming upon a high school linebacker drinking from a baby bottle.

Later in the day I heard this weird tapping/rustling sound coming from the kitchen and thought “Oh my God, is there a freaking mouse in the sink?” So I tiptoed out and after a while figured out that another (or the same, hyped on sugar) Gila woodpecker was on the other side of the kitchen window, viciously pecking at the main post of the ramada, hammering away and then craning its neck in the most fascinating way to angle its beak into the hole.

An armada of varmint squirrels keeps coming up onto the back porch and shoveling potting soil from my plants every which way.

I recently swept up a dead baby lizard on the front patio.

The place at night is…swarming might be too strong a word, but let’s say the moths make themselves at home. As do mosquitoes, small fly-like creatures, and any other number of minute zooming winged insects.

A corollary phenomenon: What with the general desert landscape and color palette, many many objects lying on or by the street could be dead animals–or they could be rocks, twigs, branches, palm tree refuse, or clods of dirt, mud or dust. So walking down the street, I’m sort of constantly jumping back or skipping a heartbeat or going “EEeeeek!” only to find that I’ve been frightened half out of my wits by a dessicated cactus pad.

Although the other day I was ambling down the sidewalk and briefly thought, “Why that looks like a dead squirrel up ahead, ha ha,” and when I came abreast it really was a dead squirrel. Though thankfully it had been dead for quite some time and was well ready to be made into a hat for Daniel Boone.

Also, this has happened many times, I’ll be wandering around the house and bend down to pick up what I think is a crumb or cracker fragment or squashed raisin and just as I’m about to pick it up, the thing moves!

For God’s sake, what am I, on safari? I wondered the other night.

Anyway, never a dull moment. I enjoy living so close to “nature” and look forward to many more adventures–with the living and the dead.

THE MARTYRS OF MAGADAN

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Magadan is part of Siberia, in far East Russia, and the capital of Kolyma, one of the most brutal sites in the Gulag.

The Gulag (1929-1953) were a series of forced labor camps established first under Lenin, then Stalin, as a way to implement the rapid industrialization of such resources as coal and timber. As well they became a place to warehouse political dissenters—anyone who believed in God was suspect—common criminals, the educated, and finally common people who were driven to exhaustion, starved, beaten and thrown on the trash heap. Many died of disease; others froze; still others were executed.

Fr. Michael Shields, born and bred in the Anchorage Archdiocese of Alaska, has been Pastor of the Nativity of Jesus in Magadan since 1994.

Having come back to the U.S. a few years—briefly, he thought—for a knee replacement, the Russian government suddenly informed him that he couldn’t return until December, 2022.  So he’s been serving his old parish in Palmer, Alaska, a rural farming community, and overseeing the Mission from afar.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

A SHORT WALK

Back at the beginning of summer, for a reason I can’t now recall, I subscribed to the Times Literary Supplement. There, I learned of a book called Scraps of Wool that comprised excerpts from various British travel writers.

Since then, I have read biographies of Freya Stark and Isabelle Eberhardt. I’ve read Bruce Chatwin’s essay/short story collection What Am I Doing Here? I’ve read Gertrude Bell’s Persian Pictures. I took a long detour into Gavin Maxwell, reading Ring of Bright Water and a couple of biographies (next up: House of Elrig).

And I’ve discovered Eric Newby. Newby’s best-known work is probably A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, a book I’d bumped into several times during the years but never read. Basically, Newby quits his London job in high fashion during the 1950s and decides to embark with his equally dotty (in a different way) friend Hugh to climb some impossibly treacherous peak in Afghanistan.

Neither has any real climbing experience. Hugh cares nothing for food; food is all Eric thinks of. Hugh is chin-up and debonair; Eric is a klutz–or paints himself to be. Actually the two of them were clearly highly intelligent, courageous, fit, and willing to endure copious amounts of suffering. As well as slightly to severely nuts. Anyway, the book is wonderful, not least because of Newby’s wicked, self-deprecating sense of humor.

Unwisely, we decided to carry loaded rucksacks. ‘To toughen ourselves up,’ as we optimistically put it.

“About forty pounds should be enough,” Hugh said, “so that we can press on.”

Our drivers were aghast. It was difficult to persuade Abdue Ghiyas that we were not out of our minds. With the temperature around 110 degrees, carrying our forty-pound loads and twirling our ice-axes, we set off from Jungula.

At first we congratulated ourselves on seeing more of the countryside on foot. What we had not taken into account was the diminished social status that was accorded to a couple of Europeans plodding through Asia with heavy loads on their backs. It was after a long mile, when we met two wild-looking crop-headed mountaineers coming down from above by a rough track, that we first realized that nobody admired us for what we were doing. They themselves were carrying immense loads of rock salt in conical baskets. We waved cheerfully but they uttered such angry cries and made such threatening gestures that we passed hurriedly on. They turned to shout after us. It was always the same word.

“What’s a sag?”

“It’s a dog.”

“Is it rude in Persian?”

“Very, they think we should be on horseback.”

Newby wrote a bunch of other books. A Small Place in Italy, which I just finished, is far superior to Under the Tuscan Sun–funnier, truer and a whole lot sadder. As a POW during WWII and on the run from the Fascists he’d hidden in the woods and caves of Tuscany, helped by many intrepid souls, one of whom, Wanda, he later married.

Don’t even ask about my Rilke/Rodin kick.

Anyway, speaking of travel, I myself am setting off next Tuesday for a two-week jaunt to the East Coast! A bit of a working holiday as I’ll be visiting lots of museums, gardens, and suchnot, but I’d do that anyway.

Six nights in NY, where I will stay in a Dominican guest room around the corner from St. Vincent Ferrer, onen of my all-time favorite churches, in the Upper East Side. Then down to Bucks Cy, PA, and then to the Woodstock area in upstate New York.

I haven’t been on a plane, or really anywhere, since COVID, so I’m excited and also nervous. Not so much about COVID, just about leaving the emotional safely of my little cocoon. Though I don’t feel all that safe anywhere, ever, so traveling probably won’t make that much difference.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying–how lucky can you get?

AND SO TO BED.

LA’S ACADEMY MUSEUM OF MOTION PICTURES

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

At last, LA is poised to have the museum it has long deserved: the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, opening Sept. 30.

I love that they’ve named it the Museum of Motion Pictures: not the Museum of Film, which would have skewed hoity-toity and auteurish; not the Museum of Movies, which would have gone too far in the other direction.

No, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is just right: a nod to the art form’s august history; an evocation of Hollywood’s rightful place as the heart of it; the reminder that this isn’t just an industry. It’s a craft that requires study, apprenticeship, and dedication.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

THE MYSTICAL BODY

The other day I went to noon Mass, Confession before. Around the responsorial Psalm, a woman arrived late, sat in the pew behind me, and immediately started rummaging through her purse, crackling, unzipping, dumping, rearranging. My God, I thought in my usually humble and contrite way, Shut UP already!

Of course she did not. And as my blood pressure began a precipitous rise, I suddenly realized that her external compulsivity exactly mirrored my inward compulsivity. The real reason I wanted her to shut up was that she was interfering with the loop that had been running through my sleep-starved brain almost since I’d woken that day.

“Should I go to Trader Joe’s after this, or do I have the strength? Maybe I should just stop at Time Market. But I want that soft blue cheese that they have at Trader’s Joe’s. Would the one up on Campbell be closer or should I go to the Grant Ave. one? Maybe I should just have crackers and cheese and take a nap. But no, I’m out of milk and eggs, too, so then I’d have to go tomorrow and I’ll obsess about that and what if I don’t sleep again tonight?”

Lord have mercy indeed. Compared to me, the woman behind me was QUIET.

I love when stuff like that happens. My heart opened to her, another suffering soul. Maybe she was checking the US Open scores on her phone, another thing I personally had been obsessing about for the past week.

And then about three seconds later, she quit rummaging around in her purse.

Hosanna in the highest.