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disastrous trip we took to North Adams
Monday, May 29 2017
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
Today Gretchen and I took advantage of my having Memorial Day off and the presence of a long-term houseguest to go on an overnight trip to North Adams, Massachusetts. Gretchen loves the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoCA), which is located there, and sometimes I like it too. Just because of the way the geography works, Google Maps sent us there mostly on little roads that wound through beautiful Berkshire farmland. (I'd thought maybe Google was just being weird with its algorithm, but that really is the only way to go; the Mass. Turnpike doesn't really help.)
It rained for most of our drive and continued raining as we attempted to park at MassMoCA. The place Gretchen thought we could go for post-drive coffee (for me) and snacks (for both of us) was a café called Brewhaha, but the place looked closed, perhaps permanently. Instead we got coffee at a coffee-only place at MassMoCA itself after lucking into a "one hour only" parking spot.
Gretchen was all excited because MassMoCA had just opened a new wing of floor space in yet more of the endless brick factory building it occupies. Sadly, there wasn't much in the art we saw today that was particularly interesting or even memorable. There was a lot of junky abstract stuff, and a large display of art based on miniaturized puppet-like (or animatronic) heads and bodies, all of them looking like the same individual. Further in, there was an exhibit some woman had made of the photographs of all of her Facebook friends, which she'd had to travel the world to compile. Gretchen (superconnector that she is) checked to see how many friends she shared with the artist and found that the number was two.
The most impressive exhibit was a Nick Cave work, this one consisting of thousands of reflecting disks hanging from thousands of wires reaching down the floor. The disks had been cut, often centering around the shape of a handgun because it was supposed to be a commentary on gun violence. Then the shapes had been distorted into three-dimensional spirals such that eash disk reflected intense flashes of rainbow colors when it twisted slightly in the breeze. There was plenty of that just from the people walking among them. Gretchen had never seen MassMoCA so crowded. It was a wonder the crappier examples of abstract sculpture weren't being ruined by the many tiny hard-to-supervise hands of all the children people had brought. I don't remember abstract art being anything but boring to me as a kid, though I kept hearing kids today telling their mommies that they were "scaiwed."
At some point, Gretchen got a text from Andrea back home saying our dog Neville seemed to be threatening her. He was growling in a menacing way and even running at her belligerently, the sort of crazed behavior I've only seen him exhibit when trying to guard choice bones. Neville had seemed a little hostile to Andrea even when we'd been around, prompting Andrea to ask "what neighborhood" he might've come from. But without us there, Neville was now finding Andrea intolerable. Perhaps, we soon concluded, this was due to racism. Andrea is, you see, black, and Neville might've been mistreated by other black people, and (as racists will do) he'd formed a generalization in his chassis-like head that all black people are terrible. A few texts laters, we learned that Andrea was terrorized enough by Neville's behavior to hole up in the basement guest room. Obviously, this was intolerable, so Gretchen began reaching out to her social network to find someone who would take Neville for the night. Happily for Neville, all the people available to ask were white.
By now, I'd had all I could take of MassMoCA. My lower back had begun to ache (perhaps this was related to whatever has been giving me phantom aches in my left testicle since February), and all I wanted to do, once we reached it, was to sit down on a green couch in a comfy hang-out area at the far end of the museum. Gretchen went off to look at more stuff, but she didn't see anything worth demanding that I also see.
Gretchen had gotten a good deal on a room at Porches, the fancy archipelago of hotel buildings directly across River Street from MassMoCA. Porches is tasteful in a Susan & David sort of way (indeed, they have stayed there and they love it), with minimalist antique charm and clean whitewashed surfaces. It's also got features Gretchen and I like, such as a 24/7 heated pool and hot tub that are a little McMenaminsesque (though Porches is a pale shadow of that experience). There's also a low-energy calico cat hanging out with a bag of catnip in the lobby. After we were done with MassMoCA, we checked into our room (which had no view whatsoever) and then checked to see what our local food options are. Despite the proximity to a college town (Williamstown) and MassMoCA's catering to refined sensibilities, northwest Massachusetts is something of a vegan-food desert. Looking at the local results from HappyCow.com, I only found a few options. There was BrewHaHa, which we knew to be closed, and Desperados Mexican restaurant, a few more formal restaurants, and that was about it. But Desperados doesn't open until 4:00pm, and it wasm then only about 3:30. So instead we decided to try our luck to the hot bar section of the Wild Oats Food Coop on the eastern fringe of Williamstown. The food certainly looked promising, particularly the vegan ravioli. But when we started tasting stuff, we soon realized the food was terrible. The faux "jerk chicken" seemed as if it had been made mostly from sawdust, and the black beans were cloyingly disgusting from the amount of molasses that had been added to them. The white bean & barley looked really good, but of course it had been made without any salt whatsoever. Still, we loaded up our plates and went through checkout (our two plates came to an absurdly expensive $27). The food continued to disappoint once we sat down and began eating. The ravioli, it turned out, had been made with a number of dissonant spices indifferently combined by someone with no real experience or concern. It all reminded Gretchen of the way food used to be in Harkness, the college cooperative dining hall where we met. One expects imperfection when idealistic teenagers from wealthy families are put in charge of menu planning and food prep, though Wild Oats shows that such problems live on far into adulthoods among the well-meaning Unitarian Universalist demographic. We briefly considered bagging it all and going to Desperados, but in the end we just ate what we could and went on with our day.I was already joking about the day from the perspective of an uncertain day in the future, saying, "Remember that disastrous trip we took to North Adams?"
Meanwhile, Gretchen and managed to get Eva & Sandor to pick up Neville and keep him for the night. So far he was getting along okay with their four cats and it was looking like things were going to work out.
Back at Porches, we decided to take advantage of the hot tub. The weather was still cool and spitting rain, but it felt great in the hot tub, though it should've been about five degrees hotter. Gretchen also tried to start up the sauna, but it never got hot. [REDACTED]
This evening, we drove into Williamstown with the intention of eating Indian food at Spice Root. But, being the kind of day this was, Spice Root was closed. So instead we went to the Sushi Thai Restaurant a couple doors down. The food there (we stuck with Thai) was pretty good, though (and Gretchen would agree) the Tom Yum soup smelled like stinky feet and might've contained a dilute concentration of dead fish. Also, the service was oddly terrible, which was odd considering how overstaffed they seemed at the time. Gretchen and I also split a "large" hot sake. We took a walk up and down Williamstown's one little stretch of mainstreet and I bought a fourpack of sixteen ounce Stillwater Super Hop "neo-tropic india pale ale" from the nice Texan manning the cashier at the downtown's only liquor store (evidently they sell beer in liquor stores in Massachusetts, though they also sell booze and beer at grocery stores). I would end up drinking two of those beers tonight; for me, the flavor was almost perfect for an IPA. As you may recall, I like my bitter to be mostly subsumed in the flavor of citrus.
Back in our room, we'd given up on the room's smart teevee's supposed abilities to play Netflix or Hulu, so we'd borrowed two movies from Porch's large collection of media in the increasingly-anachronistic Blue Ray format. We'd been meaning to watch Tarantino's the Hateful Eight for over a year now, and today we somehow managed to watch about two hours of it. But it was so heavy with dialogue and so devoid of any action to break it up that it felt like a play, and a kind of boring one at that. So we gave up on that (there was still nearly an hour left to go) and watched the 2005 movie Be Cool, in which John Travolta, his acting career completely restored by Tarantino back in 1994, plays the role of a new-to-music-industry savior of a talented young female singer working for a trashy pimp-like manager. Interestingly, much of the technology (and technological jargon) in Be Cool already seems dated. For example, they kept talking about "two way" with regard to their dumbphones, and I couldn't tell what that meant from context.
A palimpsest of a stairway on the exposed brick of the new wing of MassMoCA.
(Click to enlarge.)
A marble sculpture in the new wing of MassMoCA.
(Click to enlarge.)
The relaxing place at the end of the the new wing of MassMoCA.
(Click to enlarge.)
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