Yes, I know that I promised to take myself out of the headlines for this post, but, well, as we all know, things don't always go the way you planned them. Life has a way of getting in the way of big ambitions. Since my last blog post in July 2012, I have been extremely busy with all sorts of personal and professional issues that just did not allow me the time for blogging.
I am quite excited that I have signed up for yet another Memoir Writing Workshop at The Writers Institute of Miami Dade College. This workshop will be taught by Rosecrans Baldwin, May 8 - 11, 2013. Check out more about The Writers Institute of MDC at www.flcenterlitarts.com
Nevertheless, now that I am back blogging, this post will include both "vintage blogging" as well as new material from the second chapter of my memoir.
FIRST THINGS FIRST: MORE VISUAL ARTS NEWS ABOUT MIAMI
ART@WORK Presents Light Boxes, Exhibition of Works by Miami Artist Kevin Arrow. On view April 1 to June 7, 2013.
This should be a wonderfully artcentric event, and I certainly hope my readers will attend! Opening reception is 7-9 p.m. Friday, May 3, at Art@Work, 1245 Galloway Road (87th Avenue), Miami (Free parking is available across the street at the Central Bible Assembly of God on opening night.) It's possible to see this exhibit weekdays 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. by appointment. Email is artatwork@bellsouth.net or phone is 305-264-3355. As the press release tells us, "Kevin Arrow lives and works in Miami. He has studied studio art, anthropology, Tibetan and Bhutanese design and painting, photography and graphic design in the United States and India." Moreover, as I know for a fact, his totally intriguing art has been featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Bass Museum of Art, Carol Jazzar Contempory Art, and many other places.
Kudos to Rene Morales of Miami Art Museum for curating "Kimsooja: A Needle Woman," which I reviewed for the October 2012 issue of ARTnews. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation recently announced that Kimsooja is one of 175 Guggenheim Fellows for 2013. She won in the field of Creative Arts - Film and Video. Fellowships were awarded to scholars, artists and scientists, chosen this year from a group of almost 3,000 applicants. For more info, see www.gf.org/fellows/current/
Here's my ARTnews review: (copyright Elisa Turner)
South Korean artist Kimsooja's subversively poetic exhibition, "Kimsooja: A Needle Woman," combined performance art with multichannel video installations to document how congested cities are transforming the globe. Organized by Miami Art Museum associate curator Rene Morales, it highlighted the destructive consequences of an expanding international urban population.
In A Needle Woman (1999-2001), eight silent, synchronized videos capture busy city streets in Cairo, Delhi, Lagos, London, Mexico City, New York, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Life in some cities appears more comfortable than in others: smog coats Shanghai, and Delhi laborers struggle with cargo, while New Yorkers strut around in fancy sunglasses. In each video, the artist stands at the screen's center with her back to viewers. Her straight black hair flows down her spine in a ponytail. Passersby ignore or jostle her; others stare crudely or laugh. A car nearly hits her but she doesn't flinch, her rigid posture recalling the fearless performances of Marina Abramovic. Like a compass needle always pointing forward, the steady form of her body against the urban mayhem is a testament to personal courage.
A Needle Woman's eight videos were divided into two galleries and separated by a "buffer zone" that showed two single-channel videos on opposite walls. In A Needle Woman (Kitakyushu), 1999, the artist lies prone on a large boulder as clouds drift above her. The work's idyllic setting in a Japanese city known for its prominent steel industry underscores the fragility of earth's natural resources in the face of industry. This was echoed in A Laundry Woman (Yamuna River, India), 2000, in which the artist watches debris floating in the sacred, but polluted, Yamuna River. A "needle woman" indeed, Kimsooja gracefully stitched together moving portraits of an embattled planet.
Current working title: WHERE IS THE GIRL I USED TO KNOW? MY LIFE IN MIAMI AS A JOURNALIST AND ART CRITIC, A Memoir by Elisa Turner copyright Elisa Turner
Chapter Two
Once we settled in Miami in the scoring hot summer of 1984, all the summers thereafter would be insufferably sticky scorchers, especially when I was pregnant. When I would gripe about how weird I thought Christmas lights looked on palm trees, family and friends would roll their eyes. "There are no seasons here," I complained. "Yes, there are. They are just more subtle," people would say. "Well, yes, there are two," I would snap. "Hot and REALLY hot."
My first weeks in a place I would later learn had been christened "the Magic City" were not magical at all. Since the previous owners of our vintage cottage in Coconut Grove were not yet ready to leave the home they had lived in for years, we set up temporary camp in an apartment belonging to Eric's sister across the street from the Kendall campus of Miami Dade College--or Miami Dade Community College, as it was known then. How ironic, in a way, that this is where I have been teaching since 2009 for around 10 to 15 hours a week, now that my newspaper days are over for good. Because of ongoing health issues, I can't hold down a full-time job and now could certainly not do all the driving I once did as art critic for The Miami Herald, not to mention the overseas travel.
When I drove to Miami Dade College from my current home in Coral Gables for my job interview, once again I was back in that Kendall neighborhood during a blazing summer day. The intense Miami sunlight glared so brightly on cars parked on this commuter campus that it hurt my eyes and gave me a headache. When I returned a few days later to fill out more paperwork, I wore a broad-brimmed straw hat and sunglasses. I stopped by an office to get directions to a specific building and then asked for a campus map, which I received from someone who gave me the directions but wasn't sure I really needed a map. He assumed I wouldn't be returning to campus since I looked like "a lady from Coral Gables." "Oh, no," I replied, "I'm going to work here!"
But during that summer over 20 years earlier, we were more or less camped out in a confusing maze of boxes stacked throughout a Kendall apartment. Apparently all the boxes that the movers had packed up in our Brooklyn apartment and carried down the many steps to that moving van on Berkeley Place had reached Miami, but I still could not open the contents of most of them to make sure everything had arrived safely. I had to trust that the dismantled parts of our tenement table and Shelbyville bedroom suite had indeed come along for the ride with our other belongings. Eventually I would see everything all put back together, as Eric and his family kept assuring me.
In this small apartment, we did open a few boxes so that we could give ourselves some semblance of a daily routine. Tucked somewhere in the barely organized mess were my beloved winter clothes in shades of deep purple, cranberry, and forest green. They included sweaters, scarves, and the new royal blue wool coat I had bought shortly before we left New York, wanting to make sure I would have some elegant cold weather attire when I returned for what I had the audacity to hope would be frequent visits. That coat, with its dated 1980s shoulder pads, still hangs in my closet. I have worn it so infrequently that a fine layer of dust covers the coat's bulky shoulders, making its heavy royal blue fabric look a bit anemic. Now the garment I had once thought so stylish betrays the laughable similarity to padding for a NFL linebacker.
Once I became pregnant and was the mother of two small children, frequent trips to New York from Miami were an impossible dream. After more or less getting used to life in this city where, as a long ago tourist brochure once boasted, "summer spends the winter," I found to my chagrin that I had little wish to battle the weather in wintry New York again. The few winter clothes I still possessed were hopelessly out of style, and many of the others I had packed so carefully for their long trip to Florida I no longer owned. Not only did they look ridiculously dated, but they took up too much space in my closet. I gave boxes of them away to church-operated thrift shops.
During the day, while Eric was gone to his new job working with a family medicine physician in his office a few minutes away from our Kendall apartment, I moped around this temporary "home." It was furnished in classic 1970s décor, with screamingly loud "touches" of avocado green, yellow, and orange wherever I looked. This color scheme made my eyes hurt. When I tried to go outside to escape it, the humid heat hit me like a brick wall. You could practically see heat waves boiling up from the concrete sidewalks and parking lot surrounding the apartment complex. I do not see how Henry James could have written a novel in this place! In fact, on the hottest days of that summer, I swear I saw shimmering bands of heat coiling up from the roof of a parked car, distorting the air with queasy waves and slow wiggles.
Unlike Brooklyn and my beloved Manhattan, there was really no placed for walkers in the city to explore these outer reaches of Kendall, a sprawling suburb of Miami where we were temporary residents for a few weeks. Kendall seemed like such a wasteland to me then, with one nearly identical strip mall and apartment complex after another. I must say it is not all that different now, except that there's just more of this urban sprawl, especially given how real estate prices have climbed so high over the years in Miami's tourism and real estate-driven boom 'n' bust economy.
Yes, of course there are real neighborhoods in Kendall, but these can rarely be glimpsed when one navigates the busy six-lane highway of SW 104th Street running past the apartment complex where we first lived when we moved to Miami. A sidewalk next to this street, where cars whiz past, did and still does connect the apartment complex to a small mall opposite MDC, the favored short-hand name for this school now. When I first moved to Miami, I would occasionally venture out to that mall. All the sun, heat, and noise during that short walk to pick up some groceries or fruitlessly look for a copy of The New York Times made me more homesick than ever for New York. Now I think college students can congregate there to grab a latte at Starbucks, but of course back in 1984 Starbucks didn't exist.
Usually these brief outings on what passed for a sidewalk on a block in Kendall left me more cross and out-of-sorts than ever. I missed my friends in New York, I missed my favorite restaurants and bookstores, and I missed the fascinating sense of discovery that a walk down almost any Manhattan block would deliver. Hot and sweaty, I trudged back to our temporary home, carrying a bag of groceries with instant coffee, sugar, and half-and-half to support my caffeine habit, which I still possess, and a carton of Tropicana orange juice for Eric. No cans of frozen orange juice concentrate for this Florida boy! When we first met in college, he was appalled to learn that once upon a time I had actually liked Tang, the orange drink of 1960s era astronauts, which my mom would serve us for breakfast in Shelbyville. I had never tasted fresh orange juice, and I thought Tang was a fun alternative to those chilly cylinders of frozen orange juice concentrate that would plop heavily out of their icy cans into a pitcher of cold water, after we extricated them from our freezer.
When I opened the door to our Kendall apartment, I was glad at least to escape the relentless summer sun for the blast of cool air from our air-conditioned home for the moment. Ok, so maybe Henry James could have liked air-conditioning now and then if he had spent much time in the summer in Venice, but I am quite sure he would not have liked living among stacks of brown cardboard boxes and trying to make dinner in an avocado green kitchen. Thankfully, that summer the Olympics were being broadcast from Los Angeles.
I have never been much of a sports fan, but I do like watching some Summer Olympics sports, especially synchronized swimming, gymnastics, and diving. Diving and gymnastics especially always remind me now, as they did then, of ballet. So at least if I could not watch Baryshnikov or Peter Martins whirl through the air in person anymore, that summer there was the fabulous diver Greg Louganis to watch on TV. And guess what? Although he graduated from college at University of California, Irvine, he had attended University of Miami! So, as I recall, local TV stations seemed to give his spectacular diving wall-to-wall coverage. I had lots of chances to watch him, as well as other uncommonly toned and graceful divers, take running leaps off the diving tower and then fold his body into an impressive variety of shapes, almost like calligraphy in motion, before dropping headlong into the sparkling pool, toes pointed to perfection, creating barely a splash of water.
Years later, I would occasionally be reminded of those days, when I took my children for swimming lessons at the University of Miami swimming pool, where I saw a mural of Louganis and other famous athletes who had trained there. I may also have briefly recalled my rocky introduction to life in Miami when I negotiated the traffic on SW 104th Street to visit Miami Dade College Kendall campus art gallery in order to review an exhibit there for The Miami Herald. I'm sure I drove past that apartment complex, but I don't remember if I thought too much about our brief life there. Most likely I would have been thinking about the constant pressure of newspaper deadlines, what to cook for dinner that night, and calculating how long I should spend at the gallery taking notes so that I could still pick up my kids on time from school. I might have also been chastising myself about recently having arrived breathlessly with my son to his orthodontist's office, thinking that we were finally on time only to learn that his appointment had been the day before.
About the time Greg Louganis won his famous gold medals for spring board and tower diving, our Kendall sojourn ended, so we could finally begin our new lives in Miami in earnest. With lots of help from Eric's friends and family, we eventually moved all those boxes to our new home in Coconut Grove on Royal Palm Avenue, about five minutes away from the pink house on Natoma Street where Eric had grown up and where my in-laws still lived with the family matriarch, Mama.
While we were sorting out the logistics of this new life, I began my new job, teaching one course at
8 a.m. in writing, for freshmen at University of Miami. Desperate for at least some professional activity and identity when it was clear our move to Miami was going to happen, I had sent my resume/CV to the novelist Evelyn Mayerson in the University of Miami English Department. She was in charge of hiring for the freshman writing classes. In my cover letter and newly revised resume for life as a displaced New Yorker, I played up my teaching experience as a grad student at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where as a teaching assistant for the English Department I had taught classes in writing for freshmen. Additionally, I had worked as a "style grader" for the UNC School of Business, meeting students enrolled in the MBA program for tutorials about the stylistic and grammatical deficits in their papers, which had also undergone what was called "content grading" by business professors. To my surprise, I discovered that at least one MBA student thought that writing a sentence meant starting with a capital letter and then cramming together logic-defying strings of words into a chunk of prose that ended with a period halfway down the page. Despite my earnest attempts to persuade this student, whose earning potential was at least a zillion times more than mine would ever be, that this notion of sentence structure produced a mind-boggling mess, I do not think I really made much of a dent changing his already ingrained "style."
TO BE CONTINUED
