Art Basel Miami 2

Miami Puts On an Arty Party
By GUY TREBAY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/fashion/07MIAM.html

MIAMI BEACH is the vampire city of American culture, perennially thirsting for infusions of fresh sustenance. It is not that the town suffers for a lack of cultural lifeblood so much as from a nagging local perception that everything of vital importance has to be hauled in.

Enthusiasts, therefore, were not hard to find when the directors of a significant annual contemporary art fair in Basel, Switzerland, announced their ambitious plans to set up shop here in 2001. That first fair, Art Basel/Miami Beach, postponed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, eventually opened last December, attracting broad media attention and more than 30,000 visitors. Last week the second edition of Art Basel/Miami Beach blew into town with the arrival of 175 international galleries at the Miami Beach Convention Center, followed by a giddy and nearly relentless round of parties, openings, video installations, open houses, cross-platform promotions, all trailed by the growing sense that Miami is now bidding to become an art capital in its own right.

It was already well known in cultural circles that a number of the world's most aggressive contemporary collectors lived quietly within 10 miles of the human silicone parade floats and steroid gargoyles of South Beach.

Some of those collectors had even begun to make their phenomenal holdings available to public view. But so far that had not been enough to establish the city definitively on the global art map. "Miami was a cultural backwater," said Donald Rubell, a gynecologist who, in collaboration with his wife, Mera, a real estate developer, has built one of the country's most formidable collections of contemporary art, which they house here. "I used to have to leave Miami for New York to keep my mind intact."

Not long ago, the Rubells sold their Manhattan town house and moved to Miami full time to be nearer their collection of works by Damien Hirst, Paul McCarthy, Charles Ray, Maurizio Cattelan and Inka Essenhigh. Hundreds of works by these and other blue-chip performers in the current art market are displayed at a 45,000-square-foot warehouse in the run-down Wynwood section, in a building once used by the Drug Enforcement Administration as a depot for confiscated goods. "Miami is not," Mr. Rubell said, "just bikinis and muscles anymore."

It is, for the weeklong run of Miami Basel, Prada suits and Kelly bags from Hermès, standard-issue items in the art-world uniform. It is Rolex watches, although never the gold timepieces favored by Latin American plutocrats or "Miami Vice" gangsters; an ostentatiously modest Rolex called the Air King is the Timex of the art elite.

It is an Art Loves Music party given by Lenny Kravitz at the Shore Club; an Art Loves Film presentation at Vizcaya with the film director Kathryn Bigelow as host; an Art Loves Ali party given by the publisher Benedikt Taschen to celebrate "GOAT," a $1,000 limited-edition book about Muhammad Ali by Jeff Koons; an Art Positions show of new artists and galleries set in a park by the ocean; and an art rock celebration of the same artists and galleries, valiantly performed in gale-force winds by Chicks on Speed.

It is dinner cooked by Eric Ripert, the chef at Le Bernardin, flown in by the hotelier André Balazs for a gathering in the penthouse of his partly renovated Raleigh hotel. At that meal for 100 or so of Mr. Balazs's newest intimates, the favored chairs were warmed not by the usual models and stylists but a medley of art-world insiders — Evelyn Lauder crammed next to Donald Judd's daughter, Rainer; Kenny Scharf alongside the light-installation tyro Leo Villareal.

It was the V.I.P. collectors and private consultants crowding the doors to the convention center Wednesday at noon, for a first crack at the dealers' wares, as frantic for the start gun as contestants on Supermarket Sweep. And when the doors opened, the race was on for the best merchandise, with more than a few people making a beeline for Barbara Gladstone's booth, where the immediate focus of attention was an open cube by Sol LeWitt.

"The condition is perfect, and I just got it," explained Ms. Gladstone, one of the country's pre-eminent dealers of contemporary art. Fifteen minutes into the preview, the $175,000 sculpture was gone.

"Everything's gone," remarked a shocked Mary Hoeveler, the managing director of Citigroup's elite art advisory service, at 1 p.m., still an hour before the fair opened officially to the public. And while Ms. Hoeveler may have exaggerated, a $15,000 suite of small drawings by the young artist Magnus von Plessen had already been spoken for, as had Do-Ho Suh's $45,000 soft mesh sculpture of a bathroom at the Lehmann Maupin exhibit and a $750,000 Ed Ruscha picture titled "Trade School" at Larry Gagosian's booth.

"I got a call from a friend who was at the sales," Ms. Hoeveler said of the recent contemporary art auctions in New York. "And he said, `It's over!' " Ms. Hoeveler's friend, she went on to explain, was referring to the recession. Whether or not that is so, there was no arguing with a sense at Miami Basel that contagious optimism had taken hold about the economy, at least among people of a certain echelon.

"They're coming in shifts," one dealer remarked, as New Yorkers like Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, who is chairman of the Estée Lauder Companies, were followed by Mark Booth, the European chairman of NetJets, Warren Buffet's fleet of time-share aircraft, and then by Mike Ovitz, and then by Beth Rudin deWoody, the real estate heiress, and then by a posse of locals like Craig Robins, a real estate developer, and Carlos de la Cruz, the Key Biscayne collector who is the chairman of the food giant Eagle Brands.

"We can't judge the fair in terms of sales figures; you'd have to ask the galleries for that," said Samuel Keller, Art Basel's 37-year-old director, who with his trademark slim suits and gleaming skull, has the sleekly packaged aura of luxury goods himself. "But more than 500 galleries applied to come this year, and that is a good sign."

As the director of the prestigious Art Basel fair, Mr. Keller was charged with grafting his idea of high culture onto Miami, a city better known for designer drugs and skate rats than cultural heft. Mr. Keller did so by luring to South Florida an assortment of dealers representing an international market elite, including galleries from Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa as well as the United States.

"Yes, Miami was a risky choice, and we could have done it somewhere else," said Mr. Keller on Friday, taking a brief pause from an assembly-line schedule of Champagne brunches, lunches on yachts, cocktail receptions and lavish private dinners at the gated island homes of South Florida's abundant plutocrats. "Here there is a huge potential, economically but also culturally," said Mr. Keller, adding that the city is "the gateway to Latin America, a melting pot of minorities from European to Jewish to gay."

Ella Fontanals Cisneros, a Venezuelan philanthropist, used the occasion of the fair to inaugurate a personally financed nonprofit museum, MAC (Miami Art Central) with a show titled "10 Floridians." "Miami has changed a lot because of Art Basel," Ms. Cisneros said. Part of that involves a newly found awareness of the depth of holdings across cultural lines.

Several of the town's important collectors are Hispanic, Ms. Cisneros and the de la Cruzes among them. Simply by putting their holdings on view, as they did last week, these collectors flouted misconceptions about the Hispanic market for art. "Latin Americans were admittedly a little slow in understanding contemporary art," said Ms. Cisneros, although one might argue that it was the rest of the art world that acted like provincials in failing to note an aesthetic burgeoning in the Southern Hemisphere. That all changed when artists like the Brazilian Vic Muniz and Guillermo Kuitca registered on the scene, and with the arrival of collectors like Eugenio Lopez, the omnivorous Mexican fruit juice heir, who was the largest single buyer at last year's Art Basel/Miami Beach. "We got into a niche," Ms. Cisneros said.

Although niche walls may not have crumbled during Miami Basel, the city has rarely looked so much like a chartered outpost of the Organization of American States. At the official opening-night party held poolside at the Raleigh, DJ LeSpam and the Spam All Stars played their signature funk-jazz mix as the seasoned art dealer Irving Blum expatiated to an audience of chic Brazilians. "There's so much going on," Mr. Blum said. "Foundations everywhere you look. I'm thinking of doing a foundation here myself." Wind whipped the flames on the tiki torches as well-heeled Venezuelans compared the kind of itineraries that define membership in a global elite. "I was just in Nicaragua for a wedding," a man remarked to a friend. "Then I was in New York for a couple of days and then in Arizona for Thanksgiving, and then after the fair I'm going to Argentina until Christmas."

Sipping Orange Crush cocktails (Smirnoff, pineapple and cranberry juice, not an orange in sight) clumps of expensively clad strangers stood serenely and ignored the waitresses circulating with trays of free Zino cigars. Oblivious to the wafer moon hung in a painting-on-velvet sky, they did as collectors always do when they gather. They compared. They provoked. They preened.

"Can you expose it all?" a guest was heard to ask a man whose collection, formed in just four years, is so rich in images by art stars like Andreas Gursky, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Rineke Dijkstra, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth that its cumulative value could probably help underwrite the International Monetary Fund.

"Oh, no," shot back the collector. "I have over 2,000 prints. We keep them in a room with rolling racks and just pull out a few."

South Beach: From Hot to Cold, Back to Hot Again

South Beach: From Hot to Cold, Back to Hot Again
By PAMELA ROBIN BRANDT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/05/travel/escapes/05SOBE.html

FOR the past few years, the word has gone out among the fashionable set: South Beach is so over. The litany of complaints piled up as this high-profile strip of Miami Beach seemingly fell victim to its own success. The place was too crowded. The traffic impossible. The hotel service inept. Ocean Drive now a fraternity-house nightmare of sports bars, fuzzy navels and hot body contests — a "South Street Seaport for tourists," in the words of Brett Sokol, a columnist for New Times, a Miami weekly.

And thus the hip crowd moved on in search of the new South Beach. But what were the alternatives? Rio? It's where the beautiful people are flocking, to be sure, but not for a weekend getaway. St. Bart's? No direct flights and prohibitively expensive once you get there. Jamaica? You're chained to your resort because of local crime and the lack of good restaurants. Puerto Rico? Fine for one visit to the Water Club, but that's it. The much-touted Fort Lauderdale? You've got to be kidding.

So, like swallows to Capistrano, the hipsters are returning to South Beach. And greeting them are signs that South Beach's glory days are indeed far from over, that the "new South Beach" may, in fact, be South Beach itself.

The Ritz-Carlton is scheduled to open a 375-room resort on Dec. 18. André Balazs (owner of the Mercer Hotel in New York and the Standard in Los Angeles) is giving the pioneering Raleigh Hotel a facelift, including sprucing up the most gorgeous pool in town and replacing the idiosyncratic outdoor gym with a beach bar. And in the last year, the coolly elegant Sagamore Hotel has joined the nearby Shore Club and the perennially booked Delano as a popular hangout for the boldface-name crowd. There are new clubs, hot restaurants, celebrity sightings and a resurgent real estate market.

Not since the original Art Deco renaissance in the mid-80's has South Beach seen such action. "I felt for a while that Miami Beach had lost some of its appeal," said DD Allen, a partner in the Manhattan interior design firm of Pierce Allen who has been flying down to South Beach since 1988. "I kept going, but I thought the magic was missing. The beach is getting that magic back again."

Kal Ruttenstein, the fashion director of Bloomingdale's, was one of the South Beach pioneers, first going there in the 1970's. He agreed that there was a time not too long ago when the SoBe scene seemed finished.

"It went through a tired period," he said. "There was a time when the bloom was off the rose. Now, I find good restaurants, and art galleries, and a lot of people are going there." But Mr. Ruttenstein added that the old South Beach, the one with the "Studio 54 feeling," was probably gone forever. "Now it's a restful, relaxing place with great weather," he said.

"Miami Beach is resilient," said Hal Rubenstein, the fashion director of InStyle magazine, who started going to South Beach in 1985 and bought an apartment there in 1991, around the time that the fashion designer Gianni Versace arrived on the scene. "When Versace moved there in 1991, everyone was trying to catch that Versace world, which was part illusion, part aura."

But Mr. Rubenstein said that while South Beach never quite lived up to its reputation — "It is not the American Riviera with playboys, supermodels and people pouring Champagne on each other," he said — people who go there now seem to appreciate it for its true virtues. "It's about sand, surf, getting greasy, not wearing a lot of clothes," he said. "It is younger, freer, easier, sexier in its own way."

Signs that South Beach is back (or perhaps never went away) were clearly evident this week, as Art Basel came to town. Last year, 30,000 people descended on Miami for this spinoff of the Swiss contemporary art show, and Norman Braman, the host committee chairman and a prominent art collector, predicts that nearly twice that number will show up this year. Most of the top hotels are fully booked (as many were last weekend for the annual White Party, a must event on the gay social calendar), and there are about 15 parties a night being held around town this weekend.

Mr. Braman said that visitors coming for the Basel show were "just blown away by the people who make up what South Beach is."

And while some big-name clubs — Liquid, Salvation, Warsaw — have come and gone, South Beach night life continues to reinvent itself. For a while, it looked as though Space, a new club in downtown Miami, would siphon off the SoBe crowd. But that club, while arguably popular, has opened and closed a couple of times already, and the South Beach scene is holding its own.

Right now, much of the club action is concentrated in a two-block area in SoBe's newly hot northeast area: Mynt (with its high model quotient on weekends and its popular gay night on Mondays); Skybar at the Shore Club; the brand-new Rok Bar, an 80's rock revival club owned in part by Tommy Lee, the Mötley Crüe drummer; and for private parties, the newly restored pool deck of the Raleigh Hotel.

If you're looking for the social epicenter of the new South Beach, head over to Lincoln Road, the anti-Ocean Drive. Here there are elegant restaurants (Pacific Time, Sushi Samba Dromo), hugely popular cafes (Nexxt and the finally opened Cafeteria), a popular Sunday morning farmers' market, and dozens of hip clothing shops.

"It's an incredible urban promenade," said Mr. Rubenstein of InStyle. "No Calvin Klein. No Prada. But great young throwaway fashion."

The resurgence of South Beach comes two years after what many locals see as its low point: The weeks following Sept. 11. "After 9/11 I can remember going by the Delano, and the pool area was empty," said Mr. Sokol, the New Times columnist. For several seasons the ever-present Hilton sisters were about as good as SoBe star-gazing got. "Now we're seeing celebrities coming back — J. Lo and Ben, P. Diddy, Cameron Diaz, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Matt Damon, De Niro," he said.

More than celebrities are returning to South Beach, according to statistics from Jeff Lehman, a board member of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau who is the general manager of the National Hotel. Miami Beach hotel occupancy for the week after Sept. 11, 2001, was 22.5 percent, he said. This past September, the comparable week's figure was 55.6 percent.

Further, seasons that have traditionally been too hot to be hot were strong this past summer. "Weekends in June, July and August, we were totally sold out," Mr. Lehman said.

At the all-suite Sagamore, next door to the National, the manager, Martin Larsson, agreed. "The hotel had 75 percent occupancy in July, 80 percent in August," he said.

The big news this month is the opening of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Well, soon-to-be-hotel, that is. The Ritz-Carlton, an expansion of the historic 1953 Dilido Hotel, designed by Morris Lapidus, was supposed to open in the summer of 2001 but was plagued by permit and construction delays. Now it's scheduled to open Dec. 18, though the curvilinear lobby and classic Lapidus grand-entrance stairway still segue into construction mess rather than into the planned Lapidus Lounge.

Ritz executives dismiss the notion that they may have come late to the South Beach party with a hotel that will charge $350 to $1,800 a night for its rooms (the smallest measures 450 square feet, a nice jump from the 275- to 300-square-foot standard rooms in SoBe's other luxury hotels).

"We certainly don't feel South Beach is over," said Ezzat Coutry, regional vice president of Ritz-Carlton. "We made the decision to open in South Beach five years ago and remain confident in our commitment."

When the Ritz does open, though, it will encounter a tougher competitive environment than it might have found several years ago.

"Service in SoBe in the 1990's was horrendous," said Steven H. Haas, an executive with China Grill Management. "The arrogance was incredible. The Ritz is going to force all others to get their service act together. Look at the Sagamore, the Raleigh. They already have."

True. Though from its renovation and reopening in 2002, the Sagamore has had a contemporary art collection that would rival any top gallery, it wasn't until Thompson Hotels took over management early this year that it "had things, like, for instance, a housekeeping system," Mr. Larsson said.

And since the start of the year, when Ian Schrager, the owner of the Delano, took over management of the Shore Club, that nearly terminally trendy hotel has undergone a radical attitude adjustment along with an exotic physical "Schragerization" into a sort of super-souk.

"You can't anymore just have the best bar," said Mathew Pargament, the general manager. "And the look; that'll bring someone back once. For repeat business, you have to have unconditional gracious, attentive service."

That South Beach continues to defy predictions of its demise is something that the locals have long accepted. "South Beach is the Madonna of the resort industry — reinvents itself every year or so to keep up with the times and the trends and the demands of vacationers," said Dindy Yokel, a public-relations representative.

Such was the mood at the recent opening on Collins Avenue of the new Von Dutch store, home of the $99 trucker's hat, a party that attracted a young and vibrant crowd. One of those guests, Tim Ronan, a fashion distributor who recently moved to South Beach from New York, seemed surprised that anyone might think SoBe's best days were behind it. "Over?" he asked incredulously. "It's all just beginning."

Mary Billard contributed reporting for this article.

KIKI SMITH

[missed the opening at QNS this week, but anxious to see her...]

ART REVIEW | KIKI SMITH
The Body in All Its Mortal Urgency
By HOLLAND COTTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/05/arts/design/05COTT.html

SUMMERS in high school and into college, I worked as an orderly in a small urban hospital where my father was a doctor, often in the emergency room, often all night. For a bookish, daydreamy kid, into Emily Dickinson and Italian opera, it was an experience. Fairly quickly, I think, it started to loosen up my view of the world, adding something large, and also something concrete and acute, a sense of life as a we're-all-in-it-together sharing, but also as solitary and unromantically finite.

These feelings got worked out afresh every time a police ambulance screeched up to the door. The hospital staff members were in instant motion, spot-evaluating damage, hunting for vital signs, examining wounds. If someone had died, we tried to yank them back to life with jolts and chemicals. Everyone sensed the clock ticking. Collective energy, an extremely powerful force, was poured into that one person, in distress, right there. If our efforts succeeded, a patient was off to surgery or intensive care. When they failed, I had a late-night walk with a stretcher down to the morgue.

In New York in the 1980's, the artist Kiki Smith — who has a big, rich print retrospective opening at the Museum of Modern Art, Queens today — trained as an emergency medical technician in Brooklyn. Maybe she did so because she needed a job. Certainly she had a long-standing interest in the human body, the main subject of her art, and wanted to learn first-hand how it worked, inside and out.

Her fascination also had emotional roots. She was raised a Roman Catholic, in a culture of martyr-saints, miraculous healings, vivacious relics and sacramental metaphors for mortality and incorruptibility. Also, around the time of her paramedical training, AIDS began attacking family and friends, including, within two years, one of her sisters. For Ms. Smith, as for many New Yorkers, the city itself seemed to be in a state of emergency.

That charge of urgency is forceful and insistent in some of the artist's early figural sculptures. It's more understated in "Kiki Smith: Prints, Books & Things," where much of the work, even when of substantial size, is graphically tentative and delicate and made with tissuey, membraneous paper. Still, gravity, tempered with humor, is there throughout the thematic survey organized by Wendy Weitman, curator of prints and illustrated books at the Modern. And it is particularly evident in the earliest material, dating from a few years after Ms. Smith — who was born in 1954, and is a child of the artist Tony Smith — settled in Manhattan in the late 1970's.

The city was in tough shape, and Ms. Smith's art was still very much in development when she became a member of Collaborative Projects, or Colab, a group of artists on the Lower East Side and in the South Bronx, who were communally engaged, politically active and, in a modest way, enterprising. Every now and then, Colab set up shop in a storefront and sold its art, cheap. Among Ms. Smith's first contributions to the inventory were plaster casts of severed fingers. Painted with watercolors, they could have been purloined from a reliquary.

The point is, her interest in the body was there from the start, often expressed in ways some might consider morbid or bizarre. It had its first major statement in a series of horizontally oriented linoleum prints begun in 1985 and titled "How I Know I'm Here." Each print consists of clinically rendered images of internal organs; "Grey's Anatomy" was Ms. Smith's bible. And they're set against sketchy images, based on photographs by the artist David Wojnarowicz, of Ms. Smith eating, grimacing and gestulating in poses related to the five senses.

From this point into the early 1990's, she repeated and elaborated visceral forms: silver-painted prints of kidneys, arterial systems made of colored glass beads. With the poet Mei-mei Bersenbrugge she made a book titled "Endocrinology" that turns the lymphatic system into a succession of floral still lifes.

Over-all, the work comes across as both cool and confrontational. Its spirit matches that found in Buddhist texts that teach disciples to overcome their terror at the prospect of dissolution by mentally dissecting the body and scrutinizing its parts: "hairs of the head, hairs of the body, nails, teeth, skin; muscles, sinews, bones, marrow, kidneys; heart, liver, spleen, lungs; intestines, stomach; excrement, brain; bile, digestive juices; pus, blood, grease, fat; tears, sweat, spittle, snot, fluid of the joints, urine." Ms. Smith's prints embody just such a litany.

Then at some point in the early 1990's, she began to pay more attention in her prints to the body's exterior. In the etching titled "Sueño" (1992), a life-size figure lies tucked in a fetal curl, its surface covered with patterns of hatching that resemble medical illustrations of musculature.

In fact, Ms. Smith was the model. Because she is largely self-taught as a printmaker, and constantly trying out new techniques, her approach tends to be unorthodox, immersive and improvisatory. For "Sueño," produced at Universal Limited Art Editions, one of several print workshops she has used extensively, she lay down on a printing plate while a technician outlined her figure, which she then filled in.

Self-portraits make up an entire section of the show. One of the most ambitious is the lithographic series "Banshee Pearls" (1991), a shadow-and-light mix of Ms. Smith's face in Warholian repetition, interspersed with skulls, and masks that might be from Africa or designed by the Bread and Puppet Theater, the populist street-theater troupe she cites, along with artists like Eva Hesse and Nancy Spero, as an influence.

In the sculptural "I Am" (1994), she depicts herself — as usual, unflatteringly — as a trio of three-dimensional paper heads hanging from strings, like lanterns or souvenirs of a guillotine. Then, in an attempt to create the graphic illusion of a splayed body, she had herself photographed with a special camera — only two examples exist — that recorded her likeness continuously as she rotated on a stool. In the photogravure that resulted, "My Blue Lake," her face is stretched out like flayed skin, or as if traveling at warp speed between two different bodies.

In the second half of the 1990's, she moved outside the confines of the human body altogether into nature. This led to some pictures of dazzling extravagance — no other word can describe the etching of a peacock, pieced together from several separate sheets of paper, that opens this section of the show — but others are formally spare and expressively subdued.

This is true of two series of etchings, "White Mammals" and "Destruction of Birds" (1998). In both Ms. Smith, working from taxidermic specimens, isolates small creatures on wide expanses of white ground, but renders their fur and feathers with an intimate tenderness that Dürer would approve of.

So, no doubt, would Elizabeth Costello, the animal-rights advocate in J. M. Coetzee's novella "The Lives of Animals." Her call for humans to exercise empathy across species — to treat their fellow nonhuman beings as they themselves would want to be treated — finds a visual response here. And it does again in more recent etchings, beautifully installed as a group, that include a postmortem portrait of the artist's pet cat, Ginzer; another of a youngish man who may be dead or sleeping; and a third, titled "Immortal," of a preserved specimen of a small monkey, looking like a space traveler or an unwrapped mummy, but with a string tied like a noose around its neck.

Among the attractive features of these prints is their lack of sentimentality, an attitude generally absent from Ms. Smith's art. Were it not, it would surely have turned up in some recent prints in the show's final section, which bears a label, "Feminine Contexts," that could easily apply to any part of a stylistically wide-ranging but thematically tight-woven survey.

Emily Dickinson makes an appearance here, looking cute and tough, as does a Netherlandish Virgin and a young bearded lady. But the principal work is a set of large-format illustrations for "Little Red Riding Hood" and Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" stories. Suffice it to say that Ms. Smith, in her first extensive use of full-color printing, does witty, terrorizing things with these narratives, turning them into adult dramas of guilelessness and violence facing off. For me, the outstanding late entry, though, is the single, booklike print titled "The Blue Feet," made in Mexico this year. A folding piece, it is meant to reveal itself slowly. Phrases by the 17th-century Mexican poet and nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz float across the sea-green Japanese paper, speaking of the sun, the moon, the stars, the Virgin, heaven itself.

Radiant stars are spaced evenly over the sheet, and filling the right side is an image of two bare feet, knotty with muscles or veins, possibly dirty or bruised. With their toes pointing down and slightly inward, they could be feet from a painted crucifixion, feet lying lifeless on a hospital sheet or ascending through the stars. In fact, a friend of Ms. Smith served as a model, which is probably why these particular feet look so particular. Homely but poetic, singular but universal, they self-effacingly take their place in one artist's cornucopian, ever-expanding portrait-from-life of the self and others.

a heaven in a wild flower

AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE
from Poems from the Pickering Manuscript (c.1808) [opening stanza excerpt]
by William Blake (1757-1827)

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

BEFORE THE FAT LADY SINGS

BEFORE THE FAT LADY SINGS (c1990)
by Raymond Joe

It was like when a glass slips,
the moment, just before it falls,
and you watch, motionless, as it leaves your hand.

That moment before a final exam,
when you don't want it to start,
but you know it will, now, in a second,
two seconds, three seconds...

Like those times when you're already late, but
you stop the car anyway,
and you look at the view you know
you may not see again,
all the time hoping, you will see it again.

Like the last week of classes
and there's no time to sleep,
but you want to spend it with __ .

It's like the moment the seagulls hover
on wind currents high overhead
before dipping and diving, right before
they stop playing--

It was like that,
it was that,
and it was grand.