If you're claustrophobic, don't go in there.

We've been on vacation for a week - the first week we spent in New York with the folks (a lot of fun, as always). We did not make it to a show, but did find two out of print Clusone 3 discs at the Downtown Music Gallery. A coup! AV also ate torchon of pig's head at Momofuku Ssam Bar (I had the lamb's belly). All in all, a success. We are presently enjoying the sand and sun of North Carolina, and we'll be here for a week and a half.

After the reunion (photos of people you don't know can be found here), I was feeling intellectually depleted. I should probably attribute this to my completing a full summer of brain drain at the hands of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, but in any case, for the last half of the week AV was gone at the handmade film institute until about last Wednesday I couldn't be articulate and most of my insights were about inessential things (like my nails, for example, or Harry Potter). Poor AV. He returns from a week of intellectual stimulation with what sounds like a group of very interesting people, and surprise! Your wife's an idiot.

On Thursday last week AV and I met a friend of mine at MoMA. AV and I were on a mission to see the Richard Serra retrospective. Richard Serra is a brilliant sculptor working in giant steel plates. It's pretty awesome stuff, and it's stuff you can walk around in. This proved to be an interesting catalyst for my emerging from idiocy. On the second floor there are two huge installations of Serra's work, which are pretty much like steel labyrinths. They're molded in such a way that you can't actually see what is in front of you - you're required to follow narrow the path created by the steel in order to move forward. Additionally, the steel occasionally takes a curve that requires you to bend at the waist and effect a kind of zig-zag position with your body in order to maneuver through the sections. It's engaging and kind of terrifying at once. My friend - who is a dancer by training - was explaining how the sculptures challenge the notion of "center," where movement originates from. We continually reported an off-kilter feeling as we were walking through. As we arrived at the center of one of the sculptures, something clicked in my head and I started spouting Merleau-Ponty (I'm not kidding). In an important way, Serra's work supports MP's rejection of "spatiality of position," the idea that bodies take up space according to a grid/coordinate position. Serra's sculptures confound the grid because we were forcing our bodies to move more organically than mechanically - evidence for this is in my friend WT's admission that the sculpture challenged the center.

I've been making a joke about my processing of major events lately as"clinical," meaning that I attempt to think phenomenologically through the problem - this was the case with my Gommy's recent stroke, and - much less seriously - the reunion (alter egos emerging into my perceptual field), but here's an instance when it works kind of innocuously. I wasn't expecting to experience these pieces the way that I did, and since the pieces demanded a bodily engagement instead of a mere visual engagement, my experience of them was more profound and a trigger out of my own doldrums. :)

Thursday ended up being one of the most fun days I've had at the museum in a long time - we were enjoying ourselves immensely, and I think Serra's work intimidated people enough that it wasn't crawling with individuals trying to wind their way through the pieces. Thank goodness, because having to step over people or move single file through a Serra would be a horrible experience, but an experience nonetheless.