Friday, March 3, 2017

My 52-Book-Year #1: Apex Hides The Hurt

Apex Hides The Hurt, by Colson Whitehead, was the first book I read at the beginning of January to kick off my 52-Book-Year Challenge. For a book that spends a lot of time talking about the importance of names, it was clearly a deliberate choice to feature a central character who remains nameless throughout the book. The man, referred to throughout only as 'he', is a nomenclature specialist. That is, a person whose skill in the advertising and market world is the naming of product names.

Apex, an adhesive gauze in the style of Band-Aids is our anonymous heroes career-crowning glory, and the product 'hides the hurt' in more ways than one. In fact, it is so good at hiding the hurt, that he loses a toe because the product masks an injury that festers and putrefies beneath the product's secure covering (sorry, did I just give away an important plot point? Not entirely, but never mind). Luckily, this is only part of the story Whitehead carefully unravels.

The main plot centres around our anonymous main character and his contract to help the council of the small town of Winthrop resolve an internal fight to decide on a new name. The three main choices being New Prospera, favored by a local software magnate; or to keep the existing name, Winthrop, favoured by a descendant of the town’s namesake; or to revert to the original name of the town, Freedom, since the town was originally founded by free blacks.

Written into his contract before our specialist agreed to take on the contract, was a clause that stipulated the town elders must accept whatever name he decides on. By the end of the book he decides to name the town… — oh, okay then, I won’t give that away. Before making this decision our protagonist must learn the history of the town, and that of its leading citizens, while getting to know the contesting forces, and forging alliances where he can. The book is filled with wry humor, and much insight into the world of the nomenclature specialist.

I was particularly taken with this sentence referring to the Hotel Winthrop where our consultant stays while working on the problem at hand; Whitehead observes—or is it our consultant—that, "It was a good place to make a bad decision, and in particular, a bad decision that would affect a great many people."

On its release, the book garnered mixed, but generally positive reviews with the New York Times placing it among its list of the 100 Most Notable Books of the Year. The Library Journal praised the book, noting that Whitehead does Shakespeare one better by posing the question, “What's in a name, and how does our identity relate to our own sense of who we are?” The San Francisco Chronicle gave the novel a mixed review, commenting, "It's pure joy to read writing like this, but watching Whitehead sketch out a minor character's essence with one stroke, while breathtaking, makes one wish the same treatment was afforded the people who ostensibly inhabit the novel's complex ideas." 

Finally, Jennifer Reese, writing for Entertainment Weekly, called the book "a blurry satire of American commercialism", adding, "it may not mark the apex of Colson Whitehead's career, but it brims with the author's spiky humor and intelligence." Ignoring the obvious pun in her comment, Jennifer was right about the book not being the high point in Whitehead’s career. That was to come ten years later when The Underground Railroad, his latest book, was published in 2016.

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Thanks to Wikipedia for providing some background information about Colson Whitehead, and for the various newspaper and magazine reviews quoted in this article.

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Readers interested in reading Apex Hides The Hurt, or The Underground Railroad may choose to do so by purchasing either the print or eBook versions via the links below. By doing so you will be supporting my blog at the same time. Thanks in anticipation.


Wednesday, March 1, 2017

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia

Tree form (detail).
Click here to see the full work... 



During my stay in Melbourne in January, I paid a visit (as I always do), to the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia (the initials stand for National Gallery of Victoria).

This is one of the great Australian galleries, and its proximity to Federation Square and the heart of downtown Melbourne ensures that there is a constant stream of local and international visitors strolling the centre's wonderful galleries and excellent exhibitions. Entry to the general collection is free, while special exhibitions require paid entry.

The Ian Potter Centre is home to some of the most iconic works of Australian art from many of the country's most celebrated artists. Here you will find Russell Drysdale, Albert Tucker, Frederick McCubbin, Tom Roberts and many others.
Collins St, 5p.m. (detail).
Click here to see the full work...
"In the early 1950s John Brack adopted Melbourne's urban environment as his subject, recording the shops, bars and workplaces of the city with an ironic edge. In Collins St, 5pm, Brack's depicts Melbourne's financial hub at the end of the working day, it's uniformly dressed office workers streaming homeward. By personalising each figure Brack points to the enduring presence of the individual."
"Shearing the rams, (see image below) by Tom Roberts, is a response to the nationalistic sentiment that developed in Australia during the late 19th century. It reflects the emergence of a national identity defined through heroic rural activity and the economic importance of the wool industry.

The painting is based on a number of preliminary sketches that Roberts completed on the spot at Brocklesby Station, Corowa, New South Wales, in the late spring of 1888. He returned during the following two spring periods (shearing season) to work on the painting."
Jarlu Jukarrpa (detail).
Click here to see the full work...
Paddy Japaljarri Stewart was an Australian Aboriginal artist from Yuendumu, in the Northern Territory. Wikipedia provides this introduction to Mr. Stewart:

Paddy Japaljarri Stewart (circa 1940–2013) was an Australian Aboriginal artist from Mungapunju, south of Yuendumu. He was chairman of the Warlukurlangu Artists Committee. Stewart was one of the artists who contributed to the Honey Ant Dreaming mural on the Papunya school wall in 1971 - the very genesis of the modern Aboriginal art movement.

In 2004 Stuart Macintyre wrote in a A concise history of Australia that Paddy Japaljarri Stewart "...evokes the continuity of dreaming from Grandfather and father to son and grandson, down the generations and across the passages of time..."


Lost (detail).
Click here to see the full work...
"The theme of the lost child in the bush had a long literary and artistic tradition in Australia and was still topical during the 1880s. Lost was the first of Frederick McCubbin's 'national' pictures: paintings of Australian subjects which culminated in 1904 with The pioneer."

There is much to see and enjoy here, and the Ian Potter Centre is one place I make sure I visit over and over again whenever I am in Melbourne. Don’t miss it.

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Location:
Federation Square: Cnr Russell and Flinders Streets
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. 
Ph: +61 3 8620 2222
Online at Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia... 

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Shearing the rams (detail).
Click here to see the full work...

Note: unless otherwise noted, text in italics indicates content adapted from the information cards placed alongside each of the above works of art in the Ian Potter Centre.

Monday, February 27, 2017

Santiago Calatrava’s New York City Oculus


The main concourse inside the Oculus
I know it’s a cliché to say, I don’t know much about art—but I know what I like. But in my case it is true. I also know little about architecture, but that has never stopped me from appreciating great examples of the form, be they magnificent Gothic cathedrals or cloud-busting skyscrapers; iconic bridges, or beautifully constructed Victorian homes.

On my visit to New York City last year, I often found myself surfacing from the bowels of the massive Fulton Street subway station, from where I made my way into Santiago Calatrava’s amazing Oculus, or to give the building its official title, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub. Calatrava seems to have become a somewhat controversial architect for reasons I don’t fully understand, and since I am not qualified to comment on them, I won’t try and explain them here. I have not personally seen any other of his architectural constructions, so I can offer no comment on those either.

What I have seen with my own eyes, however, is the Oculus that sits above the vast underground subway and Path train network that services New Jersey, and sends tendrils of underground railway lines snaking up the island of Manhattan, all the way into the Bronx, and across the East River into the heart of Brooklyn.

Each time I walked into the vast hall that sits below the soaring white ribs that form its outer shell, I have been awed by the grandeur and vast scale. I suspect many New Yorkers don’t take the time to linger in the building or pause to appreciate the towering interior. If that is the case, it is a great pity.

The Oculus seen from Brookfield Place
Might that be why the building has come in for much criticism? Even now that the building is complete, the Oculus comes in for regular bagging. Why? Is it the design? Is it the final cost, which blew out from an initial projected cost of $2.2 billion to around $4 billion? Is it because only 40-50,000 commuters pass through the hub on an average weekday? Is it because, as the writer Martin Filler describes it in his article for the New York Review of Books, headlined New York’s Vast Flop, nothing more than a glorified shopping centre? Maybe it is for all these and many other reasons. 

In the article (which is in fact a review of three newish books examining various aspects of what came to be known as Ground Zero), Filler complains that the construction of the Oculus was a “…stupendous waste of public funds.” To be fair to Martin Filler, the title and thrust of his review seems to be aimed at the whole of the World Trade Center complex, not just at Calatrava’s Oculus.

However, I just can’t bring myself to agree with Filler’s feelings about the Oculus, which, apart from the “…stupendous waste of public funds,” he variously describes as "...this kitschy jeu d'esprit" (meaning: a light-hearted display of wit and cleverness, especially in a work of literature.) Literature? Whatever...

The Oculus and WTC One
Martin Filler also talks about the “…maudlin sentimentalism of his [Calatrava’s] design," and in his most damning paragraph writes in part: “What was originally likened by its creator to a fluttering paloma de la paz (dove of peace) because of its white, winglike, upwardly flaring rooflines seems more like a steroidal stegosaurus that wandered onto the set of a sci-fi flick and died there.”

Wow. Don’t hold back, Martin. And he doesn’t. He goes on to write: “Instead of an ennobling civic concourse on the order of Grand Central or Charles Follen McKim’s endlessly lamented Pennsylvania Station, what we now have on top of the new transit facilities is an eerily dead-feeling, retro-futuristic, Space Age Gothic shopping mall with acres of highly polished, very slippery white marble flooring like some urban tundra.”

And further:
“Far from this being the “exhilarating nave of a genuine people’s cathedral,” as Paul Goldberger claimed in Vanity Fair, Calatrava’s superfluous shopping shrine is merely what the Germans call a Konsumtempel (temple of consumption), and a generic one at that.”

Whew! I think it’s pretty clear that Martin Filler doesn’t like the Oculus. Personally, I’m with Paul Goldberger from Vanity Fair. I love the building. I love the “white, winglike, upwardly flaring rooflines,” and I also love the “retro-futuristic, Space Age Gothic shopping mall” feel of the building. If it doesn’t turn up in a big budget, oversized superhero movie sometime during the next five years I’ll eat my hat.

Who, but a handful of New Yorker’s cares that the complex took twelve years to complete instead of the five originally planned for? Who, but a bunch of bean counters even remembers that the price of the building blew out to $4 billion? And does it matter that Grand Central Terminal has a daily commuter tally of 750,000 subway riders, compared to the already noted 40-50,000 that pass through the Oculus? Of course not. Nor does it matter, that it cost more than One World Trade Center.

What matters today is that the building stands completed, and that as long as it is maintained and cared for properly it will still be standing there in not just fifty years, but in a hundred years. Properly cared for and maintained, no one (apart from a few critics
Visitors gather for the official opening, August 16, 2016
and envious architects), will remember or care about the length of time it took to complete, or the final cost.

Finally, in his March 9, 2017 article, Filler writes that the Oculus "...opened to the public in March 2016. thought with no fanfare whatever." While that may have been the case, it is also true that there was in fact an official opening for the center six months after Filler's article was published, on Tuesday, August 16. I know this because I was there, as were thousands of other people.

Native New Yorkers, and the many thousands of visitors who pass through the Oculus will make up their own minds about how they feel about the building. I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of them will stop to look up and admire the sheer scale and beauty of this new architectural gem, which I predict will eventually go on to be lauded for the “retro-futuristic, Space Age Gothic” building it may well be.

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