A Birthday

And a few favorite things for year's end

Earle Olsen at his last gallery show in Athens, NY (2011).

Perhaps the most important single fact about my father is that his birthday was the day after Christmas— so this week was always all about him. In the best of ways— cocoa and crepes in his upstate home, decorated with tiny white lights instead of the Christmas colors he thought garish—and in other ways that were burdensome: he needed two separate presents for Christmas and his birthday. He’d unwrap them with child-like glee: "Mozart! My favorite!” He needed two separate feasts, back to back; one (ideally) would be beef bourguignon. It was never ever okay to combine the two holidays. And he needed our presence. When my parents divorced that meant a mid-Christmas-day move from one house to the other. After breakfast and presents with our mother we got in a cab (or the subway, later) and left for his midtown loft. Later, when our adult homes were spread out across two continents, we traded off returning to him or flying him out to us. He will always haunt this week.

I miss him.¹

The photo I include above is not from Christmas, but it includes many of his favorite things: red wine, paté on crackers, the color blue, the occasional extravagant outfit like this embroidered jacket, that was perhaps a thrift store find. And always, art— the silver spiral on the wall behind him is his.

For this bonus post, I’ll list a few of my favorite things from this year. In no particular order. I do track my reading, fitfully, but I haven’t catalogued all the exhibits and films and series I’ve watched by any means, so these are just what spring to mind today.

Reading: I devoured Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes in Dublin. I had missed it in the 1990s so I picked it up as a good match for my trip to Ireland this fall. I loved it all. The child’s point of view, the portrayal of childhood that is both ruthlessly unsentimental and still, somehow, loving and nostalgic. All the acclaim was justified. I read many many thrillers and mysteries too, finishing Tana French’s whole output and marveling over Ruth Ware’s amazing homage to Henry James in The Turn of the Key. Both French and Ware are what the book-bingers call “auto-buys” for me.

I also reread some romance and fantasy series that I had originally read out of order, just to enjoy them again in sequence. Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses and Ilona Andrews’s Hidden Legacy series are both favorites of mine, with memorable world-making of very different types. I’m hoping for sequels. Rebecca Yarros’s Iron Flame was a sequel that met my high expectations from Fourth Wing; I read it as slowly as I could. (Yes, I have very broad reading tastes. This year I also enjoyed rereading Dracula and The Moonstone, which were the “genre fiction” of their day. In keeping with this high/low theme, for 2024 I’m going to try to keep up reading War and Peace with

Footnotes and Tangents

: 361 chapters in a year— luckily it’s a leap year.)

installation view at the University of Michigan Museum of Art

Viewing: I was deeply moved by Hear Me Now, an exhibit of ceramics by the enslaved potter and poet David Drake. I saw it three times in two locations: Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor. The December convening in Ann Arbor, with talks by ceramicists Theaster Gates and Adebunmi Gbadebo, was especially inspiring for the artists’ attention to community and family as sources for creativity and craft. If you have a chance to see the exhibit in Ann Arbor or next at the High Museum in Atlanta, don’t miss it. I’ve never seen anything like it for impact.

Alison Elizabeth Taylor, The Sum of It (2017). Photo credit: Alison Elizabeth Taylor and James Cohan Gallery, NY.

Two unlikely Taylors also made a big impression on me: Henry Taylor’s retrospective at the Whitney and Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s one-person show at the Addison Gallery in Andover, Massachusetts. Take a look at “The Sum of It” (above) and then understand that it is entirely made from pieces of wood veneer! Like the Hear Me Now exhibit, this Taylor’s work makes you rethink the designation of craft as a “minor art.” (Theaster Gates spoke of the relationship of “minority” to the “minor” arts in his talk in Ann Arbor.) The other Taylor’s “i’m yours” (below) is a masterful visual representation of generations: the artist and his children, receding, advancing, and overlapping. All three figures meet our gaze and the artist seems to be tilting out of the frame, uncontained or uncontainable. Though widely different in materials and subjects, both Taylors are utterly themselves, with distinct visions for what they create: “This is how I see the world,” they say. “This is what I do!”

Henry Taylor, i'm yours, 2015. © Henry Taylor. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photograph by Sam Kahn.

Watching: For a range of different reasons, I delighted in Wes Anderson’s four short Roald Dahl films on Netflix, the first season of The Diplomat on Netflix, the second season of The Bear on Hulu (there’s a Christmas scene for you!), and the first few episodes of Gentleman Jack on HBO/Max, which people in England kept recommending to me. I’m slowly working my way through it, admiring the costumes and settings as well as the centering of queer characters in history. Memorable feature films I saw this year include The Banshees of Inisherin and Saltburn, which is still on my mind from seeing it last weekend. In both I admired the bold and unconventional approach to physical bodies in all their uncomfortable behaviors. That was not the main theme of either film, but it’s what I see in them now.

I will end here, with enormous gratitude for all of you bearing me company in the start of my Substack journey. I write into the void, but it’s nice to know there are a few eyes and ears out there. Thank you, most sincerely! I look forward to more art, more craft, and more interaction next year.

1. I’ll write more about grief elsewhere. My memoir is perhaps first a memorial or mourning ritual.