The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn’t change a proposed same-sex marriage law.
There are two ways of competing in this business - you can nickel and dime the competition to death, or you can take giant steps that distinguish you from them. But the only way to take giant steps is to have giants.
— Max De Pree, Herman Miller
color study, after Helen Frankenthaler’s Sunset Corner 1969
When we first toured the building, I thought to myself that the little space in the back, with the big windows and the café tables, would be coveted study space. But there’s never anyone here. Maybe it’s too fishbowly, too spare, too artless - not just for a museum, but for a room in general. There’s nothing human here, no signs, no gestures. An empty little box at the corner of an architect’s plan.
The latest rash of public ‘art’ - and I can barely even use that word, even uncapitalized - in town is enough to push me over the edge. Misplaced. Misguided. Miseverything. Someone has had a good laugh, selling this shit to the City Fathers. What a bunch of hick rubes, swayed so easily, not by the desire to do things well and thoughtfully, but by their lust for the shortest path between them and some Meaningful Award given by hacks no better equipped or educated than they are. The blind congratulating the blind.
Frost that lovely cake with the petty coldness and acts of social terrorism that happen in a town so small, so cliquish, and it’s enough to make one, or maybe just me, abandon all human contact altogether.
But instead, I’ll come here, to this beautiful building and its architecturally forgotten room. Just beyond the hallway are galleries full of past-tense communications created by a stream of people, some living but most dead, who were just a little out of phase with their times or their communities. I’m feeling a lot out of phase with mine, but then who in their right mind would want to be in phase with this provincial, egotistical burg anyway?
