Negative capability

I'm down in Kansas for a quick weekend visit - family birthdays, etc. Flew down Thursday afternoon after class, and will return to Mich. tomorrow evening. Colors this year are very striking, deeper and richer than they usually are in this part of the country.

I met up with Don - the Professor Don of Kansas City, not AV Don of Iron Harbor. Unfortunately Martina was busy at the Linda Hall Library where she works, but Prof. Don entertained me with details of his forthcoming "work" trips to Singapore and Barcelona; really it's a good thing that I don't have an envious bone in my body. We talked wine and beer, too, and shared a bottle of one of Boulevard Brewing Company's excellent "Smokestack Series" high-end products, a delicious "Seeyoulator Dobbelbock.

Then to lunch at Room 39: highly recommended! Don had breaded scallops with braised cabbage, I enjoyed spaghetti carbonara. Charming little cafe.

I got to Kansas City on a Frid'y
By Sattidy I larned a thing or two
'Coz up to then I didn't have an idy
Of whut the modren world was comin' to!
I counted twenty gas buggies goin' by theirsel's
Almost ev'ry time I tuk a walk.
'Nen I put my ear to a Bell Telephone
And a strange womern started in to talk!

Ev'rythin's up to date in Kansas City
They've gone about as fur as they c'n go!
They went and built a skyscraper seven stories high,
About as high as a buildin' orta grow.
Ev'rythin's like a dream in Kansas City,
It's better than a magic lantern show!
Y' c'n turn the radiator on
Whenever you want some heat.
With ev'ry kind o' comfort
Ev'ry house is all complete.
You c'n walk to privies in the rain
And never wet your feet!
They've gone about as fur as they c'n go

As the poet Oscar Hammerstein expressed in his perceptive lyric, Kansas City has always been a crucible of modernism, integrated with and accepting of contemporary social, technological, and cultural trends in a manner that sometimes is bewildering to the residents of nearby rural areas.

I've been enjoying my current sojourn here, sampling some of the current manifestations of that Kansas City creative spirit. With Don and Martina, I went out on Saturday night for the Mongol Beach Party reunion gig, and then on Sunday afternoon we foregathered with our friend Michelle and then proceeded to the All Souls U.U. Church on the Plaza for a concert. It was a performance of the Nutcracker Ballet by the People's Liberation Big Band of Kansas City, whose leader and guru Brad Cox is another former Linda Hall Library page. Our friend Brad's mission is to advance the cause of progressive jazz and free form retro joy music in the Heart of America. He and his fellow musical advocates have adapted, modernized, distorted and transformed Tchaikovsky's ballet score for a contemporary jazz band. The little is a little bit of Spike Jones, a little bit of Ellington, a little bit of John Coltrain, and a lot of pure inspiration. Brad's a good's fellow, oh yes.

http://www.myspace.com/plbb

Now in Kansas, I went with my mom yesterday to the Airline History Museum at the downtown KCMO airport. It brought back memories for both of us. I come from an airline family; my dad was a 37-year employee of dear old TWA, and my mother was a stewardess for Southern Airways back in the 1950s. They met at an airport Christmas party in Atlanta in 1958. (Back then, you couldn't be married if you were a stewardess, so my mom lost her job and started a family immediately after the wedding.) She used to work on the DC-3s, one of which is currently undergoing an extensive renovation and retrofitting at the museum. The DC-3 was one of those older planes which had its tail touching the ground when parked, so she remembered "climbing the hill" from the back of the plane to the front carrying her trays of coffee tea and cokes! The Airline History Museum takes advantage of the donations and the volunteer labor of hundreds of former TWA employees who worked in Kansas City when the airline had its operating headquarters here. It boasts that it is the only museum in the USA dedicated entirely to commerical aviation in the propeller era! The pride and joy of its collection is a magnificent Super Constellation, the pride of the skies in the late 1950s and 1960s before jets rules the skyways. This beautiful "Connie" is the only one of its kind which is still airworthy, and in fact was flown out to California where it appeared in Martin Scorsese's Howard Hughes bioptic "The Aviator." Interesting to see the how flying used to be during its Golden Age of comfort and luxury!

This weekend I had the chance to check up on some new "up to dates in Kansas City". By a happy coincidence, Eddie Thunder was in town for one of his conferences. I picked him up at his Suites and took him for drinks at Pierpont's in Union Station, whose bar is one of the loveliest in the flyover. Then we met up with my KC friends Don and Martina for a chins-up dinner at the newly opened "Michael Smith's" in the Crossroads. I had plucky ducky, exquisitely paired with an Oregon Pinot Noir. A major pleasure: Zagat Kansas City be advised!
The Crossroads district is at an interesting time, poised between shabby chic and bland condo-dom. I like that you can still find signs of its hard-knock life, side by side with its BMW future. The recent opening of the Sprint Center Arena is certainly going to accelerate its transformation into a urban playground for the upwardly mobile. I have mixed feelings about the Power & Light Distrct: not so much "instant urbanism" as "trop de faux". But it's good to see so much new construction in downtown KC, and maybe in 2008 it will become again as exciting as it was in 1908.

New York based architect Steven Holl won an international design competion to create a major addition to Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. In submitting his plan, Holl bravely broke the stated rules of the competion, which had called for the new building to be placed entirely on the north side of the existing structure. His design called for the creation of a long, narrow series of chambers that would "line" the eastern border of the museum grounds. Even more dramatically, the exterior face of Holl's structure is a new compound of hardened and light-resistant glass. In the summer of 2006, I took a stroll around the Holl addition to see how it was coming along. The Henry Bloch Wing of the Nelson-Atkins will have its grand opening in June 2007.

As you can see, although the external walls of the addition are made of glass, during the day the solid white panels more closely resemble sheet metal. At night, however, they glow with a unique and remarkable resonance.

This phenomenon has provoked an enormous amount of controversy in Kansas City, with many people complaining that the addition looks like a prefabricated metal shed. No other building in my memory has been so thoroughly discussed and debated during the process of its construction. Certainly it is an absolute contrast to the bulk, weight, and "stone-ness" of the neoclassical original building. And that's exactly what Holl set out to do. He expressly sought to create a structure that would be the antithesis of the 1930s art-deco pile next to it. In terms of weight, and bulk, and building material, and opacity, and so much else - no one will ever confuse the addition with the original.

And yet, as you are walking around the grounds, particularly on the expansive south lawn of the gallery, the Holl addition seems to disappear into the landscaping. If this was Holl's intention, he certainly succeeds in making the addition unobtrusive. On the other hand, why do build a $200 million structure, and then hide it with dense foiliage?

It's a building that does not shout out: "Look at me! I am a masterpiece!" (The antithesis of Calatrava's quadracci pavillion in Milwaukee, or Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao.) It's as if the artwork inside is more important than the external shell. Wow, what a concept! Actually, I like that idea. And I think it will be very suitable for the Nelson, which houses an excellent collection of Chinese painting and sculpture. Holl's addition seems very zen.

Everyone agrees that the Bloch Wing looks best at night. The glass panels glow like the lanterns they were meant to be. (Lanterns just aren't that interesting during the day, I suppose.) Eric Bowers, aka Tosspot, has posted some striking photographs of the addition at night, along with general pictures of the Nelson-Atkins, at the "Café l'urbanite" blogsite:

http://www.urbanphoto.net/cafeurbanite/viewtopic.php?t=28&highlight=holl

Of course it's too early for any final critique. And the true test will be how the space inside the addition works - how the art works respond to it - whether the flow from one gallery to another is successful. How good is the food in the cafe? And certainly, how big is the Museum Shop? But I general I like what I've seen so far.