Archives for April 2010

Thomas Mallon’s excellent essay on the novelist Muriel Spark is in the April 5 edition of The New Yorker, focused on her astringent and precise eccentricities. Her short stories in that magazine have been for me a decades-long treasure. From one I remember a sentence about champagne: “Through its murk bubbles climbed.”

Fallon quotes from Spark’s Loitering with Intent from 1981, her character Fleur Talbot, like her a writer:

When people say nothing happens in their lives I believe them. But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.

Because Mallon’s full essay is behind a subscribers-only pay wall, here are three more moments from it:

Spark in New York with an office at The New Yorker looks out a window and sees the flashing sign of the Time-Life Building. She told Shirley Hazzard that “When it says ‘Time,’ I write. When it says ‘Life,’ I want to go out.”

Spark on messages:

I haven’t got a message to give to the world, it’s the world that gives me messages.

And living in Rome, she loved what she called its “immediate touch of antiquity on everyday life.” Spark died in 2006.

Daws

Uh, Dad? That’s three words. On the other hand, it isn’t every day that a family farmer tips his hat to Deborah Butterfield.

Daws’ suite of four drawings photocopies collectively titled, Life on the Farm, is part of Made in the U.S.A. at Greg Kucera Gallery, through May 15.

Some people need to reintroduce themselves to reality.

Reality: The 74-acre Seattle Center is home to a failed, five-acre Fun Forest. Even at its peak, it wasn’t that much fun. I was there more times than I want to remember with nephews and nieces, pouring money down the drain of their frustrated desires. Now that the pseudo-fun is gone, what’s left is the asphalt on which it rested.

Three of those five acres are going to be open space with a children’s garden, a basketball court, a maze for kids to climb through and a big tent for big band dancing, with picnic tables for semi-outdoor dining during the wet season.

What’s left is the smaller kiddie ride parcel north of the Monorail and east of the Center House, a little more than one and a half acres. After the carousal and bumper cars are gone, there were no plans and no money to do anything but leave it as an asphalt wasteland until the economy improves.

Enter Jeff Wright of the Howard S. Wright family. He’s offering to spend $15 to $20 million to fill it with a temporary museum dedicated to Dale Chihuly. The museum would consist of a green-walled rehab of an existing shed-like arcade building, an open garden and a glass house. Chihuly would fill it with a rotating selection of his work and (potentially) the work of others, bolstered with a wide range of education programs.

Wright’s family helped build the Space Needle, and he was chairman of the the Century 21 Comittee that developed a master plan for the next 20 years of development at Seattle Center. He was also a major fundraiser for Seattle Center’s McCaw Hall, that houses Seattle Opera.

Why Chihuly? Because his work is its own kind of fun forest. Full of play and dazzling in its high theatrics, his sculptures give shape to excess and make it shine. They are an international draw, breaking attendance records whenever they are shown.

Then there’s the man. Thanks directly to him, Seattle is the Manhattan of glass art. There are now more glass blowers in Seattle than in Venice. Even though Chihuly doesn’t know more than a fraction, he’s the reason they’re here. More than anyone else, he created the environment that makes their careers possible.

Without him, there would be no Pilchuck Glass School and no Museum of Glass. No artist since Robert Rauschenberg has done more to create art opportunities for others. He was the prime mover behind the scenes at the Hilltop Glass program in Tacoma, which gives at-risk youths a chance to put hot air to practical use, a program copied in Seattle at Pratt Fine Arts Center and elsewhere around the country.

He supports more charities than Jimmy Carter. The list of institutions thanking him is nine pages long (single-spaced) and includes museums, art centers, hospitals, schools and health programs, nearly all in this region. Look in vain for this list on his Web site. It isn’t there. The master of self-promotion doesn’t promote his own good deeds.

Back to the project:

We’re talking about less than two acres out of 74 to be the temporary
home to this mainstream attraction. Even so, when plans for the Chihuly
museum were announced last month, the just-say-no crowd rallied its
forces. If the Space Needle were proposed today, rest assured that they
would bring it down. Who needs a giant Flash Gordon piece of kitsch? The
very idea is an affront to our civic sense of our self-importance.

Contrary to what has been charged, the museum is not a public-space giveaway. It’s a lease approved in five-year increments with a 20-year top, with projected revenues to the city running from $300,000 to $500,000 annually.

Who’s against Chihuly at the Needle?

1. City Council member Sally Bagshaw, who wants Seattle Center to be Seattle Central Park. (Never was, never will be.) Bagshaw appears to be following David Brewster’s musty, myopic lead. He wants a park. Yes to grass, and only if that grass doesn’t have any colored glass spears and orbs nestled in its shoots. She says she doesn’t want a Seattle Center facility to be a tribute to one man. (Is she planning to raze the Bagley Wright?)

2. Jen Graves, leading an anti-Dale campaign in the Stranger, here.

3. City Council member Jean Godden, who’d like to see a Chihuly museum in Pioneer Square. That’s nice Jean, but it’s not the proposal, the one that could actually occur in real time on earth. (I have hopes Godden will come to her senses before too much longer.)

4. Random Chihuly haters, venting on various Web sites.

I find the opposition bewildering. They want open space? Open space is not vacant space, and a public attraction is not necessarily a public nuisance. Seattle Center already has 17 acres of rolling greens and plantings. But it also has 30 for profit and nonprofit enterprises, including Pacific Northwest Ballet, Seattle Opera, Intiman Theatre, Bagley Wright Theater, the Children’s Theater, the Science Center and EMP.

Robert Nellams, director of Seattle Center, has sensibly requested other proposals for the site. Anybody else with an idea can let him know. There isn’t going to be another idea as good as this one, fully-funded with a top draw attraction. If sanity prevails, the museum will become a reality. The major risk is that Wright and Chihuly become discouraged by nay-sayers and withdraw. Neither has to do this project. If they feel they’re surrounded by boos, they won’t.