Off-Leash: Heaven in Brooklyn (excerpt)

"It was a cool spring Sunday morning the first time we went out. Doxy ran to her friend like she hadn’t seen him in weeks, and they immediately began doing the most beautiful thing, something I had not seen in a long time, nor quite understood the importance of missing: Running."

This essay, published on Feb 17, 2009 on Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, is forthcoming in an anthology from the site, Lost & Found: Stories from New York (Vol. II), which will be published by Mr. Beller's Neighborhood Books and distributed by W.W. Norton & Co.

Why Jeff Koons & the Château de Versailles Are Actually Just Like Peas & Carrots (excerpt)

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We took a day trip to the Palace of Versailles. “I love how everyone there will be walking around, in awe of the opulence and trying to put themselves in the place of Louis XIV,” said my husband, who had been there once many years ago, “but you will be so angry.” He meant that my politics are such that I would be interested in Versailles more as a cause of the French Revolution than as a thing of beauty to be awed by.

He was right. I was fired up and ready to go. But when I got to the Château, something stood in the way of the full force of my anger, making me, in a way, even more angry – just about something different – or maybe not. That thing was Jeff Koons’s art.

The first thing one sees upon arriving in the front courtyard of the palace is “Balloon Flower (Yellow),” an enormous twisted-up sculpture in yellow high chromium stainless steel that apparently is meant to recall childhood but to me instead recalls intestines or other unfortunately nearby parts. I was confused, as I had not looked up anything current about the Château before venturing there, simply wanting to experience it, and I did not understand why or how a very large and ugly contemporary piece of art had landed in the Great Courtyard. I tried to ignore it and we gazed around the acres – yes, acres – of the cobblestoned courtyard. Finally I gave in. “What is that,” I said to my husband. I know very well who Jeff Koons is, and I knew exactly what this thing was. “Let’s go in,” said my husband, not wanting to provoke me (yet).

I would have loved to have seen “Balloon Flower (Yellow)” in the Centre Pompidou, which houses the Musée National d’Art Moderne. There, I would likely have had the same reaction to the actual pieces (as I told my husband, on our way out, the title of this piece should be: “Jeff Koons: I Don’t Know”), but they wouldn’t have competed with their setting in the way they did at Versailles, where I was distracted by hanging lobster rafts, giant balloon creatures and old vacuum cleaners (for real). I was annoyed that I was looking at them and not the ornate obscenity that is the Château. (I was so bugged out, in fact, by the time I got to “New Hoover Convertibles Green, Green, Red, New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, New Shelton Wet/Dry 5-Gallon, Displaced Tripledecker,” a fairly self-explanatory “sculpture” in the Antechamber of the Great Dining Hall, that I had turned off the audio guide. So I don’t actually know what that’s supposed to be about. And I don’t care.) I wanted to be overwhelmed by the unrivaled display of ego and unfettered opulence and unchecked power that Versailles actually was. How often does one have the chance to visit a physical space that is so heavy with history, so saturated in the blood and spirit of revolution? You look at Versailles, and you do not have to try very hard to imagine why it angered the masses: Historian William Doyle calls it “a really staggering example of extravagance at the taxpayers’ expense” and describes how Louis XIV built his court there by richly rewarding its inhabitants and thereby domesticating even the people who thought they had power because they merely had the king’s favor. One of the greatest mysteries of monarchy to me is how so few bamboozled so many, and Versailles offers a window into that weird cocktail of class and power and timing and history that few other existing places can.

To be somewhat fair to J. Koons, any artist who had been curated there would have distracted me. The Château of Versailles is already a museum – it needs no additional pieces. “At the end of the Ancien Régime (of Absolute Monarchy), the palace was without doubt the most sumptuous royal residence in the whole of the Europe, and the works of art that the kings had accumulated there for over a century had turned it into an incomparable museum,” according to the hefty, 15 Euro Guide we bought in the gift shop. So, since the end of the height of absolute power of the king (the early 1700s), this place was a museum, and a world-class one at that. Even long after the days of absolute monarchy, when France still couldn’t quite rid itself of monarchs, Louis-Philippe toward the end of the empire in the 1830s decided to transform it into a museum dedicated “To All the Glories of France,” a slogan which still adorns the palace’s outer façade. The walls are covered in the art of Charles Le Brun and Jacques-Louis David, the furniture made by the best in the business, the sculptures contributed by Coustou and Puget and so many others (I haven’t even tried to mention the famed sculpture gardens outside that stretch for miles around this castle)…there’s not an inch of wall or floor or ground or fountain space left. J. Koons’s art is actually suspended from the ceiling in most instances. In other words, adding any more art to Versailles is like sprinkling sugar over ice cream: Who does that?

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The Green Bouncy Ball (excerpt)

For two days, I thought I had lost my green bouncy ball. On the second day, I woke up in a sweaty panic thinking one of the dogs had eaten it and would now suffer an intestinal blockage and probably die but I wouldn’t know to save them because I have to go out of town this weekend to Dallas. I had to take a Xanax at work to calm down.

I came into possession of said green bouncy ball by frequenting, every morning for a week, the one gumball machine in my neighborhood that dispenses bouncy balls. On my morning walk with the dogs, I would cross Court Street at the long block that begins at Degraw and goes to Kane and put a quarter in the machine that sits outside the brown-colored bodega on the corner. For days, all I got were swirls. Some of which don’t even bounce. Then, one day, I got the green one. It is all one color, the color of spring, opaque but with a tiny bit of sparkle. Great bounce, good sound, really the perfect bouncy ball.

The bouncy ball obsession began after I viewed a European commercial for a Sony flat-screen TV. In the commercial, a quarter of a million bouncy balls of many bright solid colors are dropped down a steep hill on a residential street in San Francisco. This creates a weather of colored bouncy balls as they fall like rain or hail or some other strange force of nature. A perfect beautiful sad love song plays during the commercial, and I became very wistful and creative when I viewed it on the computer. I wanted to have a bouncy ball. They are harder to come by than one would think.

Thus, the green bouncy ball I came by was special. Every morning I brought it to work, and it sat on my desk. I played with it a little, but mostly looked at it and thought wistfully of the commercial and my creativity. The commercial made me want to make something that beautiful. It made me look at the world in search of such strange beautiful things. I like that feeling, so I liked the green bouncy ball on my desk at work, where I don’t always feel creative and happy. Every afternoon I took it home and it sat on my desk at home, near two other inferior swirly balls, only one of which bounces.

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Rain Is For Roger (excerpt)

Is tennis supposed to be this sad?

In what is already being called the greatest match of all-time, Rafael Nadal derailed Roger Federer’s dream of winning, consecutively, six Wimbledons and his 13th grand slam. After a five-set, almost five-hour, thrice-rain-delayed contest that went down in the record books as the longest men’s final ever played at Wimbledon, Rafa won.

Why am I sad? Everybody loves Rafa. Wonderful, beautiful, humble Rafa, who beat Roger so badly at the French Open in June in three sets, surprising everyone and still singing Roger’s praises…Rafa, who made his own mark on history by following that victory with one at Wimbledon as one of only two men to do that…Sweet, family guy, unassuming Rafa, who broke Roger three times in the first two sets to go up 2-0 then doggedly fought off a champion who was not going down without a spectacular fight…Rafa, this athletic freak of nature who runs everything down and plays with so much heart on every point that you wonder how he has anything left to turn the blood through that body – he deserved to win.

My husband and I – both fans and players – watched the entire thing on TV, starting at 9:00 am, when the first rain clouds were opening, keeping Roger and Rafa from the courts until an hour later. It ended six and a half hours later, at about 4:30 pm, after two more rain delays drove the players off the courts, and falling night threatened to stop play.

“Rain is for both,” said Rafa simply when asked before the match about how the first delay had affected his preparations. But rain might have been for Roger, at least for a while. It could be argued that it kept him in the match. After Rafa took the first two sets 6-4, 6-4, it was beginning to look like a possible repeat of the rout at the French. But Roger came back in the third, winning his first set in a tie-breaker after the second rain delay. In the end, the gathering night, the final set, the crowd crazed on the highest amount and level of tennis possible, the crown of the most prestigious championship in tennis – it was all for Rafa. And the rain was all that was left for Roger.

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