Once again my room faced inward, with a view of not only the rooms across the atrium, but the magical lagoon on the mezzanine (the little island at the top of the lagoon is a piano, and though I never saw a pianist there I truly hope he wears flippers and swims to and from each performance).
The orientation was great fun. We presented on living and researching in China to the whole cohort then broke into smaller groups with students matched to our regional and academic areas and fielded their many questions. They fed us wonderful food and at every mealtime we had opportunities to meet more of the bright and enthusiastic young scholars. It was a great pleasure to be surrounded by people I share a passion with and to feel as if I was helping them to have a better Fulbright experience: to engage more deeply with their communities and carry out successful research.In the evenings I met up with a few of my Beijing friends who now have jobs in interesting places in DC, going one night to an awesome bar called Church & State, with a stained glass window, a built in confessional adjoining a private room, and a menu fit for the most discerning nationalistic boozehound:
This is not a church
DC is not a state
But every bottle here, whether heavenly or devilish, comes from the United States, its territories, or its possessions.
We invite you to be free and brave.
I also spent heaps of time booting it up in the museums with friends. The National Portrait Gallery was only a few blocks from the hotel and had a beautiful exhibit of Alexander Calder's sculptural wire portraits (as I left agog one of the guards told me the pieces had a similar effect on most visitors) and this piece by the Korean-American artist Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway.
The piece was inspired by the artist's first few years in the U.S. in the 60s, when the interstates (and television) were still new and provided an intoxicating way to try to apprehend the enormity of this country. Each state had its own looping videos, and the more cliche the better (Indiana was footage from the Indy 500, Kansas was The Wizard of Oz), as they communicated how difficult it is for even a natural born citizen, let alone an immigrant, to have anything approaching a sophisticated conception of all our 50 states given the limitations of our time, attention span, and reptilian brains.I loved the piece so much I sought out Paik's exhibit at the National Gallery but I didn't like it nearly as much. Still there was much to love: the I. M. Pei designed East Wing, the sculpture garden, this Magritte:
and a whole room of Russian Constructivism (I think this one is Rodchenko)
I stayed another 2 nights in DC after the orientation, hosted by my dear friend Aaron, and on my final day we went shopping for supplies at the 亚洲超市 in Rockville so I could add a 5th city to the list of places I've cooked Chinese dinners since being back from Beijing in December. My comrades, all of whom have eaten many meals in China, dutifully gobbled down the dishes and I was proud as a peacock to have stuffed them silly.I didn't see half as many folks as I'd planned to in NYC, but I had known in advance that my usual habit of walking around Manhattan for hours wouldn't suit the boot, and it turned out Marybeth and her tornado of a toddler Avery didn't mind me hanging around their Sunnyside apartment in the least.
Resident pug/Yoda-lookalike Bruce also seemed pleased with my company. Did you know that pugs were once bred as bedwarmers for European royalty? I'll be requesting a team of them the next time I try to endure a Northern Chinese winter.
We took the dog and the tot to the park, where regretfully, I did not buy an ice cream.
And we took the train out to Flushing to explore a Chinatown more like contemporary China than any I've ever visited. They had delicious food (Marybeth boldly ordered 八宝冰, a sort of sweet bean sno cone and I snarfed a red bean sesame ball) and wonderful crap, featuring Grade-A engrish:
And inexplicably animal-festooned household goods.
On my final day I had a brunch at Popover with a beautiful actress and walked to the Whitney to meet Marybeth and Avery. We had high hopes for a video artist by the name of Cory Arcangel, said to be inspired by Christian Marclay, but I was much more taken by the gorgeous retrospective of Bauhaus painter Lionel Feininger who lovingly rendered social grotesques in vibrant colors. I irresponsibly ponied up for the exhibition book and didn't regret it afterwards for a second.Of course then we had to go lie in Central Park, where I admired the turtles on the banks of Turtle Pond stretching their necks towards the sun,
The flowers in the Shakespeare Garden,
And all those small lovely details one comes across ambulating through that great park.
Avery enjoyed himself as well.
Marybeth took my picture with the boot, which I have since been freed of. I'm sure I'll feel tremendously nostalgic looking at this in a few years.
The last item on the agenda was a visit to what a friend in DC had told me was a large room in an office building in Soho filled with nothing but dirt. Some research revealed it to be "The New York Earth Room", an installation by Walter De Maria that has been on display since 1980 and with the very same docent/security guard/keeper for most of that time (it was in fact he that I was told by the friend I had to meet).
I arrived just one minute past the closing time but I didn't much mind not actually getting in to see it. Thinking as much as I do about economics and culture and value (too much? no, not enough!) it did my soul good to know that somewhere in Manhattan is an office full of dirt, a space of no productivity but what creeps up from the soil (to be removed by the diligent keeper). I'll go next time, to be certain, but I've taken a certain sustenance from it already. Lovely art, spectacular friends, intellectual engagement. It was a nourishing trip indeed.