Author Archive
A Week in Culture: Rita Konig, Part II
June 17, 2010 | by Rita Konig
This is the second installment of Rita Konig's culture diary. Click here to read Part I.
DAY FOUR
7:00 A.M. NPR. Turns out it is pledge week. That explains the intolerable service! I can’t retain any information other than the stuff they are giving away.
8:00 A.M. New York Times story on children’s menus. Nicola Marzovilla hates them1.
7:30 P.M. Times dinner at Bill Keller’s house. Walk into a room of faces I don’t know. See one I recognize across the room. Phew. Can’t think why I know him. Am seated next to him at dinner. Penny drops. I have been watching him (quite a lot) making stew on the screen in the back of my Jet Blue seat. He is Mark Bittman, food writer from the Times. So I tell him. “Sigh, Yes, I get that a lot.” Pretty much end of conversation. Ben Brantley, theater critic, on other side. Heaven. Realize this is my moment to ask about the shark fin in the Obama picture. So I ask: did they choose it on purpose? Was this a big joke at the Times? No one had noticed! Bill goes off to find a copy of the paper. Apparently, it is more likely to be a dolphin. Think I hide my disappointment reasonably well. By the end of dinner conversation has turned to Real Housewives.
DAY FIVE
9:00 A.M. Flight to Savannah for art classes at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Last April, sitting on a panel during their Style Week, I told founder and president Paula Wallace that I really wanted to learn perspective drawing. Presto! Am on my way for three days of private tuition.
10:00 A.M. Plane is TINY. Actually, I find that small planes are less scary than the big ones. We are jammed in like sardines. Read The Far Cry and eat mini pretzels. I am now loving the book2. Read it all the way to the end. It is such a Persephone3 book.
1:00 P.M. Get picked up at airport. Keith Johnson was on my plane and is also going to SCAD to shoot for his show “Man Shops Globe.” Arrive at Magnolia Hall and start lessons, almost immediately, in the Carriage House with Peili Wang. He has two HUGE plastic bags filled with art materials. The most exciting is a box with a grid of every color of marker pen! I feel about eight years old.
9:30 P.M. Back from dinner and get into bed with new iPad. Watch "Real Housewives Reunion.” Kelly Bensimon is so stupid, she is like Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda. Move on to Glee pilot. It is so cheery after all those bitching women. Want to break into song—“Don’t stop believing”—and I hate musicals! I do LOVE Jane Lynch, though. And she just got married. It was in the Times Style section4.
Annotations
- J’AGREE. Well, in principle. I always want to eat everything on them: grilled cheese, pasta, chicken nuggets and French fries. This article has a bajilion comments from annoying parents showing off about all the sophisticated food their children have been eating since the age of two.
- The weather has turned. Theresa is turning out to be such an interested child. She comes across all these characters on the boat, and where her frightful father either dismisses them (usually the women) out of hand or takes to them (usually the men) immediately, she is more questioning and of an independent mind. I am feeling very fond of her.
- Persephone reissues novels that have fallen out of print. Mostly 1930s and 1940s. I would think they’re quite feminine. I can’t imagine men being very interested by them. But they are brilliant, usually about human character and frailty.
- Was amazed she was in it. I can’t bear that section.
A Week in Culture: Rita Konig, Designer
June 16, 2010 | by Rita Konig
DAY ONE
10:00 A.M. Ojai, California. Visiting my friend Honor Fraser and her family. Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox is playing when I get up, and seems to continue on a loop most of the weekend. Dennis Hopper has died. More oil spilling. Picture in Times of Obama giving a press conference in Louisiana. There is a dorsal fin swimming about in the bay behind them. Has anyone else noticed?
2:00 P.M. Go up to Beatrice Wood1’s studio. Wood died when she was one hundred and five years old and worked as a potter right up until her death. Honor and I watch 1980s interviews2 with her. I buy her biography, I Shock Myself. I love reading about the unsuspecting feminists, the ones who lived their lives according to their own tune, rather than getting in a bate about women’s rights. I suspect that not all of her life was happy, as it so often is not when you take the road less traveled. I imagine it can be quite lonely between the glamorous and exciting stops. Still, she made a very spirited ninety year old.
7:30 P.M. Read "Little Red Riding Hood" to my godson three times, The Cat in the Hat once and “The Ruby Prince” twice. Roscoe is showing no signs of falling asleep. I can barely keep my eyes open. What is it about children that they like the same story over and over again? Am not into LRRH. I don’t remember this ending3 at all. The wolf eats the granny AND LRRH in one gulp each and the hunter comes along and rescues them by cutting open the wolf and there they are, good as new? Love The Cat in the Hat4. But find it exhausting to read. Are there ANY full stops? Think I will faint if I read it again.
Annotations
- Not wild about her pottery, even if it is worth a bundle, but the place is amazing, in the hills looking out over the Ojai valley. Spectacular, and so peaceful. At the front of the house is this old truck which runs on vegetable oil and a travelling band live inside it, the current artists-in-residence. It looks like a mobile trash can and must smell like a Krispy Kreme shop.
- Very Golden Girls: sitting-room sets with over made up middle aged women all using each other’s names a lot. Wood is dressed in sherbet-coloured saris and lots of large Indian jewelry. She attributes her longevity to a balanced diet of young men and chocolate.
- “The Ruby Prince” and LLRH are both from a book of what, I thought, were frightful fairy tales. Maybe too close to their original German. “The Ruby Prince” is about a Ruby that turns into a Prince. The Shah, who owns the ruby, sends the prince off to slay a dragon in exchange for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Of course!
- For those who, like me, are unfamiliar with it, it’s about two bored children sitting at home in the rain. Their mother goes out and suddenly in comes this crazy cat. The best part of the book, I think, is the bad-tempered goldfish who is always saying, “Don’t do that – you’ll break it!”
