This is what we woke up to this morning:
Toppled
Fifteen years ago, a landscaper chose the wrong species of tree fern to plant up against the house, a tall one instead of one sturdier squat one. It grew away from the house and toward the sun until most of the foliage was on one side. Recent torrents of rain did it in.
Not a crisis, obviously, but startling. Now we'll get a squat one.
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A couple of weeks ago, I checked out the new UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which opened in January in the former campus printing plant. I like it--the light's good, the spaces feel friendly to visitors and art, and the cafe serves good food.
I've followed the campus art museum from pillar to post, starting in the winter of 1969, when I drove up to Berkeley from UC Santa Barbara with friends. At that time, the Art Gallery was housed in an old building near Sproul Hall:
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| The Old Art Gallery, as it's now known |
By the fall of 1970, I'd transferred to Berkeley, and from my window in a high-rise dorm I looked down on the back of the brand-new art museum, a gigantic Brutalist structure on Bancroft Way. One evening I looked out my
window and saw a guy in black rappelling down its side on a black rope. We all thought the new museum was the bee's knees.
The front of the old art museum
By the 1980's, I hardly ever went to the art museum because it was too hard to find parking, and because, with a few exceptions, I didn't think the shows were very interesting. I did, however, become a regular visitor to the campus printing plant, in downtown Berkeley, because by then I was a writer/editor in the Graduate Division.
Many years later, the massive concrete museum was found to be a seismically unsafe, so it was propped up and braced while people decided what to do about a new building. To my amazement, the new location turned out to be the now-abandoned printing plant, close to BART and restaurants. The 1939 building was going to be re-purposed to look like this:
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| At the corner of Center and Oxford Streets. Designed by Diller Scofidio & Renfro. |
This is what it looks like today:
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| Stretching the block between Center and Addison, across from the West Gate of the campus. To the left, the former printing plant, and to the right, an addition with a huge screen at one end. |
The screen faces Addison Street:
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| Walking alongside it |
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| The Center Street entrance |
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| A Rosie Lee Tompkins quilt |
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The Forum, where they were setting up for a dance performance
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| A view across Center Street, which is lined with restaurants, including Top Dog and Bongo Burger, Berkeley institutions |
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| Cafe Babette on the museum's second level; no outdoor seating, alas | |
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| The stairwells are ORANGE |
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| More orange |
The Berkeley Art Museum is open Wednesday-Sunday from 11 am-9 pm. General admission is $12; senior admission is $10. Free admission to UC students, staff, and retirees.
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| My First Lady archives |
I have something of a side-line in First Ladies. I read all the biographies and autobiographies I can lay my hands on, Republicans and Democrats, although I go only as far back as Eleanor Roosevelt.
These ladies range from feisty (Bess Truman) to Nobel-material (Eleanor Roosevelt) to silly (Mamie Eisenhower). Pat Nixon was piteous, and Babs Bush, however well-mannered she is, apparently can be downright unpleasant; one of her assistants said she's "a good person, but not nice."
Nancy Reagan, in my opinion, was insecure and sad. As a child, she was abandoned by her father and then, temporarily, by her mother. I don't think she ever got over it. She was very afraid of a) being alone, and b) getting it wrong, although she often did--buying new White House china during a recession and launching the "Just say No" campaign are two examples.
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| If only it were as simple as just saying "no." |
Long-time Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote that around the White House Nancy was known as "The Hairdo with Anxiety." Noonan herself tried to find a pillar to hide behind if she saw her coming, as Raisa Gorbachev probably did after this meeting, described in a puff piece produced by the Reagan Library: "Mrs. Reagan arrived wearing this Galanos gray suit. Raisa Gorbachev, in contrast, was starkly dressed."
Poor Raisa.
Nevertheless, when I heard that Nancy Reagan died, I thought, she's had some tough times and rest in peace. The internet lit up with very unkind, vitriolic comments, and I thought, why? She's gone, poor woman.
Then came her funeral and the likes of Judy Woodruff and the New York Times going on about her great romance with Ronnie (I'd call it an enmeshed relationship, excluding even their children) and her social graces as the queen of Camelot in 1980's-era Washington in her Adolfos and Galanos. Is this really admirable? Are we that desperate for heroines?
Back to Eleanor and her hairnets.
