17
It's about 10 p.m. on a Sunday and I'm on New York State Route 17, just outside of the village of Hancock. The night is crisp and autumnal, with just a faint and lovely precipitation that freshens and cleanses.
One day soon, this road will be a part of I-86, running from Erie, Pennsylvania to the New York Thruway at Harriman, New York. Perhaps it will fill with cars. Service stations might spring up. Policement might even start to patrol the highway.
For now, though, we're the only vehicle on an empty road in upstate New York (and we, too, are empty: I am on a dark and unpopulated bus, with the two front seats to myself and with almost nobody behind me). The view out of the front window is of stars, sky, unending highway, and darkness.
Route 17 winds through Fishs Eddy and Downsville, Killawog and Liberty and Horton. If this part of the country were not so poor, it would be idyllic, nestled as it is among the Finger Lakes and rolling hills of pleasant greenery. Right now, though, the winding highway is beautiful only if one ignores the tiny clapboard houses and broken-down barns that occasionally dot the landscape. Indeed, I-86 will be something of a catalog of American poverty in the Mid-Atlantic states when it is finished. Erie, Pennsylvania, in Appalachia, is surely the highlight of the route; it's a port city that has recently been growing in population and, though heavy industry is fleeing the area, it is being replaced by numerous light-industrial plants that suggest a promising future. Corning is a nice little town, too, home to the Corning Museum of Glass, a couple of IB World Schools, and the Corning Country Club where the LPGA makes a tour stop. Other cities on the proposed route are not so lucky, though: they include Jamestown (median per-capita income: $15,316, or $33,675 per family), Olean ($17,169 and $38,355, respectively), and Elmira (a horrible amalgam of jails, strip malls, and psychiatric hospitals--with a per-capita income of $14,495 and with more than 23% of the population living below the poverty line). I-86 will also go through Binghamton, the Carousel Capital of the World. I have a soft spot in my heart for Binghamton, a city characterized by great attendance at and affinity for minor league baseball games, and a kind of picture of an out-of-date Americana that is at once enticing and far past its prime. In New York state, high school students studying for their Regents exams have to learn that Binghamton is home to a thriving shoe manufacture industry--but this is false, and has been for decades; our facts have stagnated like the city itself. In fact, the biggest local employers include Lockheed-Martin, Frito Lay, and Verizon (which operates an enormous series of call centers in the city). Once-beautiful brick buildings are falling down. A greater percentage of the population lives in poverty in Binghamton than they do even in Elmira. There's a thriving university in Binghamton, but there is nothing else.
But those are just the cities. There are no suburbs here (though sometimes people refer to "greater Binghamton," but this is a way to include the folks living in Johnson City rather than a way to talk about urban flight), and the vast space between population centers is characterized by a few ramshackle houses, a racetrack, a coal mine, and several amusingly named rivers.
As we're driving down Route 17, there are several exit signs of the blue, federally-controlled, Interstate-highway type, which are awaiting the full inauguration of I-86 down this deserted stretch of road. At exit 92, there's a sign for camping spots and I learn that one can turn off for the Russell Brook Campground. At exit 89, there's a sign for food; there's nothing on it. At exits 96, 90, and 89, somebody has put up signs labelled "Gas"--but these, too, are blank. At exit 72, there's a sign for attractions. There's nothing on it but the label.
Of course this is not yet an interstate, and I know these signs will be filled in with the relevant restaurants and gas stations soon. I can't help thinking, though, that it is somehow appropriate to pass these signs, so optimistically erected, and to see that there is nothing on offer here in the middle of nowhere. And so we drive on.
It's So Much Cooler In Cross-Section
For my birthday, I recieved a surprising number of awesome gifts. (Surprising only because I thought I was old enough not to be GETTING gifts, you understand.) Somewhere in the midst of all my fantastic edible, imbibable, and readable loot was Kate Ascher's
The Works: Anatomy of a City. This is riveting reading. I could tell you all the amazing things I've learned so far--but then again, you could just go read the book yourself. I've decided to pare it down and offer instead only the three coolest things. Here they are.
1. The Verrazano Narrows Bridge is so long and so tall that its builders had to account for the effects of the curvature of the earth when designing it. That's right: cables strung at the top of the bridge had to be significantly, noticeably longer than cables strung at the bottom of the bridge, because, you know, the world is not flat.
2. Mail used to be shuttled around the city at a speed of 30 miles per hour or more ---through underground pneumatic tubes. The pneumatic post connected Post Offices on Manhattan Island (as well as one in Brooklyn). As late as the 1950s, canisters filled with 500 - 600 letters would shoot through the city faster than they could have moved by rail, carriage, or foot. (But then came the car, which replaced the pneumatic post. And then came rush hour. I doubt the cars move at 30 mph these days; perhaps we could reinstate the old, still-extant tube system...)
3. Those of you who grew up in a place that was not Florida may already have realized this, but some cities have steam pipelines. New York is one of those cities. And this was news to me.
I knew, of course, that radiators get hot when we let in the steam. Obviously, it had to come from
somewhere. But I figured that every building must have its own furnace or boiler room, the way my house did in college. Well, I was wrong. Get this: along with its subways, electricity lines, pneumatic mail tubes, telephone lines, and a million other buried systems, New York has an underground network of steam pipes (some as much as three feet in diameter). The Met Museum and the Empire State building are heated exclusively by piped-in steam. Laundrettes use the steam in creative ways: every morning, they just open a wall tube and use the hot steam to press suits, use the blotter (for stain removal), and even power the dry cleaner. New York City hospitals sanitize their instruments in steam rooms that tap into the central system, too. There's a whole unique economy in New York which is predicated on the existence of running, ready-to-go, on-demand steam. It's taken for granted the way you, dear reader, take for granted the electricity that you can turn on and off or the hot-and-cold running water in your morning shower.
New York's steam is administered by ConEd, our local electricity supplier; we pay for use the same way we pay for every other utility (though, since landlords are required to heat all New York apartments and to pay the heating bills, no normal renter ever sees an invoice for steam). (Incidentally, it makes perfect sense that our power company is the same as our steam company. When we consider how coal plants generate power, for example, we can see that you have to burn a lot of coal to move the turbines (that are connected to bundles of wire running through magnetic fields) to generate electricity. Given that setup, we may as well run big water pipes through the same burning-hot chamber, while we're at it. This, of course, will turn the water to steam, and from there it's a short step to piping the steam into the city alongside the power we're already generating.)
Cities are cool, no?
Museum Showdown!
Last Friday, I went to the Museum of Modern Art here in New York. (Allow me an unsolicited shout-out to Target and its free Friday MOMA nights!) I love the Met's historical bent, it's archaeological and cultural exhibits, and the expansiveness of its collection--but I hereby pronounce MOMA to be hands-down far, far better than the Metropolitan. Taken as a whole, MOMA's collection is much stronger then the sometimes-it-seems-like-they're-just-hoarding collection at the Met. Architecturally and spatially, MOMA's building is lovely, a truly successful marriage of form and function. And, most incomprehensibly, the curation at MOMA is
so much better than the curation at the Met that it borders on the embarrassing. The Met should be ashamed. MOMA has converted me.
"Modern art" is always a little hit-or-miss. I confess to being unconvinced by Martin Creed's
Work No. 227, The Lights Going On And Off (the curatorial note at this link is uncharacteristically bombastic and horrible, I would like to note). I am a fan Mark Rothko, but would say that some other adherents of the color-field movement are more provocative than painterly. Negotiating the difficult space of modern and contemporary art must be like walking a precipitous ledge: the view is amazing, but if you make a mistake, it's sure to be a doozy.
Maybe this helps to explain the fantastically good collection at the MOMA. There's a lot of deplorably poor "contemporary art" out there, but very little of it in this museum--indeed, the works at MOMA are almost consistently top-notch and moving. The Met can buy a painting from a 16th century minor artist and not be ridiculed ("not as good as a Da Vinci, but still a nice little addition to our collection"), but MOMA simply can't get away with buying modern art that's not particularly good--because it is so obviously, so clearly not particularly good. In consequence, the Met's collection, taken on the whole, simply can't hold a candle to the collection at the MOMA.
But even if it could, the MOMA is smarter. If the Met is about knowledge and learning--here's how a Baroque artist would have learned perspective; here's the story that's being told on that Egyptian roll of papyrus; here's a crucifixion whose significance you won't truly understand unless you know that this is the wheel of St. Catherine, that that's St. Stephen with the arrows in him, not to mention the whole of New Testament Biblical history--then the MOMA is about thinking. It is no coincidence that it was the MOMA that made the mistake of giving Creed a forum for his inane on-again, off-again overhead lights; indeed,
The Lights Going On And Off is in some ways an inherently thinking-man's work. It provokes conversation and consideration of artistic merits--even if it oversteps an indefinite boundary and leads all and sundry to conclude that, no, it's not any good, and, no, it's not art either.
The very different "knowing" and "thinking" models of art museums are both entirely viable, though perhaps almost mutually exclusive. There certainly are successful ways to approach the contextual project that characterizes the Met; to be sure, I love the opportunity that such a large and varied collection presents to immerse oneself in 14th Century Poland, or Middle Kingdom Egypt, or the Byzantine Empire, or even something so recent as fin-de-siecle France. If the Met wanted to make the most of its collection for the public, it would have curatorial notes that explained the context, relevance, and symbolism of its works--and this should be not just a cursory or obvious explanation ("This 17th Century crucifixion features a wounded Christ"--I mean, duh, I can see that by looking at the picture). Texts in other languages should be translated. A coin on a shelf should be labelled not simply "Coin with Justinian's Head," but should include some sense of who Justinian was, who might have made the coin, why it's an impressive piece of metalwork, and why it's phenominally interesting that this particular coin was dug up in China (which, as it is today, might not even be mentioned at all). A Metropolitan Museum for smart non-specialists needs to embrace context in a way that it emphatically does not do today.
The MOMA, by contrast, has a far lesser need for this kind of curatorial note (though that need is not entirely absent). For a couple of reasons, the works in that institution are less context-specific than those in the Met: first, we are more likely to be familiar with the world in which a contemporary piece was created (nobody needs an expert to explain the cultural significance of Maralyn Monroe or Campbell's Soup when trying to figure out what Andy Warhol was doing), so we don't need nearly as much coaching to see what's going on; and second, the works are far less likely to have been created for practical or useful reasons (a functional altarpiece, a coat of mail, a tomb, a table), the knowledge of which might give us a much greater appreciation of the object in question. What the MOMA does need are notes which, like many of the pieces within its walls, are thought-provoking. Both kinds of curation are trying to explain what's going on in a work of art--but what's going on in some art is primarily contextual, a question of story and style, while what's going on in some other art is primarily theoretical, a question of ideas and emotions.
So when I say that the MOMA is "smarter" than the Met, what I mean is this: its curatiorial notes succeed in making its works intelligently interesting in a way that the Met's notes do not. They explain what is going on, why the work is controversial (or much-loved or whatever), and why we should care about preserving it. To some extent, to be sure, the MOMA does this out of self-defense; nobody asks the Met to justify the inclusion of a 13th century figurative painting in the permanent collection, but we all want to know why an empty room or a monochromatic blue canvas gets to be included in a collection of the world's greatest artistic masterpieces. But this fact aside, MOMA's notes are well-researched and thought-provoking, and show a real consideration of the worth of the museum's pieces.
This curatorial consideration is extended beyond notes on the works and into the organization and structure of exhibits, as well.
Curation at the Met is lazy. Curation at MOMA is not. Galleries there are not the organized along the predictable "artist-region-year" vectors, but rather offer more carefully considered comparisons across artists and genres. Seeing Braques and Picasso side-by-side gives me a new appreciation for Picasso's superior ability not to lose the object of his paintings amid the complications of his Cubist style; looking at Chagall and Kandinsky in the same room is an exercise in how very different two works of similar colors, materials, and brush strokes can be; five sloping, modernist chairs presented together are just enough to consider their myriad differences and essential formal and practical similarities, without overwhelming a viewer to the point of saying, "Oh, look, it's yet another chair in this endless string of Chippendale chairs." Special exhibitions at MOMA are organized not by artist, but by theme. (The current special gallery is set aside for
Out of Time, a look into the ways that art in its various forms has played with conceptions of time and historicity. It's the kind of exhibit that could coherently accomodate both Dali's
Persistence of Memory and Warhol's
Empire, a movie showing the Empire State building as it changes in real time). A room of architectural drawings and building schemata is introduced by a compelling statement on the way that the size of an architectural work affects--or is affected by--the subject matter; viewers are invited to note how the bigger pieces in the gallery generally show the outsides of buildings--the "artist's renditions" of various finished structures--while smaller sheets of paper were devoted to careful diagrams and building plans. This was not precisely an exhibit designed to show off the thesis presented at the beginning; rather, it was a case of a curator looking at the MOMA's collection of architectural work, noticing something interesting, and pointing it out to viewers to give us a guide as to how to look at the entirety of collected works. That's a fantastic curatorial model.
In fact, the only one-artist room that I found in the whole of the Museum of Modern Art, a room full of Jackson Pollocks, also offered excellent, thought-provoking juxtapositions. All of the pieces shared the same energy--perhaps we should say, "the same sense of urgency"--but some were far more representational than others, and each was quite distinct in character. To be sure, it was not a room of endless and poorly-connected Pollock drip paintings, the likes of which are so common at the Met. Instead, like the study in architecture several galleries over, the Pollock gallery provided a carefully curated set of inviting comparisons. It was great.
So there you are. I recall reading that the average tourist is several times more likely to visit the Met than they are to visit any other museum in New York City. Well, average tourist, now I'm talking to you. Go to the MOMA instead.
You are what you eat?
Flipping through
The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, is an enlightening exercise in understanding one's food. Who would have thought that the calories we Americans eat are to an unprecedented extent derived from corn? Who considers the lack of a "food culture" in America to be an important factor in everything from dieting fads to obesity? Who, other than Pollan, is crazy enough to produce a meal by hunting and gathering, in this day and age?
Some of these insights about food are really quite shocking. In just one example, we learn that the energy in a chicken McNugget comes almost exclusively from corn--from the nearly-exclusively corn-fed chicken to the modified cornstarch that binds the meat together, from the soy lecithin for flavoring (the name is deceptive--it can be, and usually is, derived from corn) to the corn flour breading on the outside, and even to the corn oil that the thing is cooked in. In some very real sense, a meal of chicken McNuggets is processed corn held together by processed corn, breaded by processed corn, fried in processed corn. And don't even get me started on the sauces for this scrumptious meal. (They're full of high-fructose corn syrup, corn starch, xanthan gum, dextrose, and even caramel color, all of which are corn-derived.) It's an historical anomoly to eat like this: in other times and places, chicken feed off of wheat and grubs (which in turn feed off of myriad kinds of vegetable matter), corn and grass and millet and barley. Flour for breading might be wheat-based; flavoring would be herbal and therefore derived from a selection of varied and aromatic plants. Oil could come from corn, or soy, or olives, or sunflower seeds, or indeed from any number of available trees and plants. Sweetness (in a dipping sauce, for example) came from cane sugar, palm sugar, honey (flower-derived), or molasses (from sugar cane, the sugar beet, or sorghum). Corn-derived preservatives and colorings are a new culinary invention.
This is not to say, precisely, that there's a problem in depending on only one plant to convert solar energy into the bulk of our food, nutritious and not-so-nutritious--but it is to point out how strange this moment is in the history of human gastronomy. We Americans eat more single-mindedly than anybody else, ever. This represents a monocultured victory over environment: corn is a versatile, hardy, nutritious foodstuff. It's not crazy that we should depend on it more even than the Inuit depend on fish (which, incidentally, eat any number of varied aquatic vegetables anyway). Pollan does a superb job of showing how strangely we eat, however, and I find this rumination compelling.
But what's more interesting--and, sadly, less emphasized in Pollan's book--is the author's take not on food, but on people. He hypothesizes that the uniquely American dilemma of obesity stems from a uniquely American lack of a food culture. The French know how to eat healthily, Pollan suggests, because they have a long tradition of eating and eating well that has been passed down over hundreds or even thousands of years--and this tradition informs their food choices still today. Americans fall for ridiculous dieting schemes (no butter! no carbs! lots of protein! minimal protein!) because we don't have a strong cultural grounding in reasonable eating habits. The argument is a bit questionable, of course, if only because increasingly we are seeing that the "uniquely American" obesity problem is finding its way into numerous other countries with much more entrenched eating habits. Still, it's an interesting thought (and that always attracts me, what can I say). Moreover, it does seem intuitively true that a culture with no sense of "summer vegetables," a decreasing awareness of the starch-meat-vegetable mealtime trio, the need for a government-sponsored food pyramid, and no national cooking style, should be far less sure about what its people ought to be eating than another, more gastronomically aware culture.
The most interesting idea Pollan's whole book, though, is not even this speculation on the healthful influence of national pride through foodstuffs. It is instead an idea that Pollan tosses around in the introduction and then quickly dismisses as inessential to the main investigation of his text. That's a shame. Where our food comes from, and how it gets to our table, does make for interesting reading. But the idea that our biological ability to eat nearly any organic thing has made us smarter and more social--well, that makes for interesting thinking. And it's an idea that Pollan never follows up on, and one whose case he doesn't compellingly make.
I wish he did. For the Omnivore's Dilemma, succinctly put, is the question of what to eat. It's a question that doesn't plague many animals: "The koala bear doesn't worry about what to eat," Pollan rightly tells us. "If it looks and smells and tastes like a eucalyptus leaf, it must be dinner. The koala's culinary preferences are hardwired in its genes." But for omnivores like ourselves--and rats, for that matter--the question of what to have for supper is much harder to answer. The abundance of choice creates a stress where other species have none. At the same time, though, omnivory allows us great versatility: people (and rats) can live almost anywhere on earth (which stands in stark contrast to the Australia-bound koala). Our ability to eat almost anything shapes us in many more ways than simply determining the kinds of nutrients we ingest.
By far the most provocative claim that Pollan makes along these lines--the claim he doesn't follow up on, and the claim that I wish was the basis for this book--is that omnivory implies mental acuity. After all, Pollan says, unlike other animals, we have to have complex memory and pattern recognition skills just to eat. The fact that our food preferences aren't genetically hardwired means that we have to consider food anew each time we are hungry. What do I feel like eating today? Are those the same berries that made me sick last week, or are they more like the sweet berries I picked for supper a week ago? Is it better to roast my fish or eat it raw, like sushi?
There's a social and educational angle to this, too: maybe I've never encounetered these berries before, but my parents tell me not to eat them because they're poisonous. I was taught to cook my food, to grind my grain to make flour, to shop at Wegman's and to put the leftover chicken in the freezer. Baby humans starve when left alone; grown men have learned to feed themselves. For people, eating implies memory, learning, conscious consideration, and possibly even rationality.
This leads Pollan ultimately to suggest that "the reason we evolved such big and intricate brains was precisely to help us deal with the omnivore's dilemma" (though he foists responsibility for the claim onto "many [unnamed] anthropologists"). In other words, people are smart--at least in part--because it's impossible to survive as a dumb omnivore. If we were stupid, we'd starve.
Pollard's book is more about food than it is about people (grand designs to the contrary notwithstanding). But it seems to me that the smartness claim might be interesting and easy to test--and not by anthropological theory, but rather by hard scientific experiment. If we looked at the brains of people and of rats and discovered that they both had disproportionately large frontal lobes, for example--while intermediate, non-omnivorous species did not--that would provide some compelling evidence for a specific, definable link between what we eat and how our brains are wired. And
that would make for a great book.
