Notes on Nebraska

I'm back in New York now, but wanted to tell you about two places I enjoyed visiting in Nebraska. Last Saturday I had dinner at The Boiler Room in Omaha's Old Market neighborhood with my friends Stuart and Amy. It was beautiful, with crisp styling and a creative New American menu of local food. We shared nearly everything because it was divine! If you've ever been to Mercer Kitchen in SoHo, you can imagine the vibe, both of the restaurant and the neighborhood. On Tuesday in Lincoln, I visited the Philip Johnson-designed Sheldon Museum of Art. It's a lovely example of classic Modernism in an unexpected setting. I have a soft spot in my heart for university art museums, because of their ability to unexpectedly dazzle, and the Museum didn't disappoint. The permanent collection is strong in boldfaced names of the Old Guard, such as O'Keeffe, Diebenkorn, DeKooning, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Alice Neel, et al, as well as contemporary stars like Kara Walker and Alec Soth. And then there are the little-known bequests that show up as happy surprises, like Cornelis Ruhtenberg's Boy and Girl, a somber love story that predates Emo and Twilight by more than half a century. My greatest delight was found in the exhibition of Whistler prints, as I am a fan. Whistler's sometimes photo-realistic etchings and lithographs offer extraordinary depictions of everyday bohemian life, not the fashionable luxurious version that's commodified now, but more like the actual existence of being a broke artist just walking around. Standouts included straightforward industrial portraits Black Lion Wharf (1859) and The Tyresmith (1890), plus the more intimate and dreamy vignettes of Venus (1859), a nude in repose, and La Danseuse, whose entangled fingers suggestively spread her translucent cape. Speaking of riveting, a genius book that I read on this trip is my friend Rob Walker's Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, which I'll be thinking about for a while. It offers a deeper exploration of up-to-the-moment alternative models of information distribution vs. traditional communication channels for expression of cultural production in the marketplace than anything else I've encountered (besides Rob's regular "Consumed" column in the New York Times Magazine). When I got home Kaya Oakes' Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture was waiting. I'll turn to that next.

Comments

[Maitresse]

if you're a Whistler fan, you should check out his book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. Have you read it? It's genius.