Book Made a Forest

Book Made of Forest, Jared Stanley's first book, is out today.
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Extent: 80pp
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 5 mm
Weight: 120 gms
Check it out, California. I hear an ice cream truck in Merriam, Kansas. A train.

It may be hard to read, but this is a short article about my dad, a tour guide at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. That's him at the top of the page.

KANSAS CHAMPIONS!

Basketball!!

Our reading in Nebraska is sort of embarrassingly well-documented on some blogs that I won't mention. I will mention that the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery is a beautiful building with a really stellar 20th century collection, and our hosts were really wonderful. Thank you! Being cold is kind of interesting. The midwest deserves a lot of love. I saw some fabulous hills in northern Missouri, western Iowa, and eastern Nebraska.

I also spent some time eating ribs in Kansas City, having sing-alongs in Johnson County, and scanning old photos at my parents house. Too bad my computer won't read the CD I burned them on. Luckily I had a couple in my email.

The biggest news of the weekend concerns Will Oldham and a forthcoming issue of your favorite online poetry journal.

Here I am at the Apple store adding RAM to my parents' computer. I feel like a real computer nerd. Or just a teenager. This shopping district of Kansas City, The Country Club Plaza, is ridiculously full of touristy types from surrounding states...families oohing and aahing and shopping for back to school clothes. It used to be a more practical neighborhood with grocery stores and dry cleaners and the like. I grew up near here and my parents were always upset as more and more chain stores moved in. I think this was the first shopping mall, where one person/company owned the space and leased it to merchants. We used to come here for Thanksgiving to see the window displays with moving things and lights in the department store windows. There are some neat old Kansas City department stores still in existence, or maybe it's just Halls, but Halls is neat.

I'm now encouraging anyone in surrounding states (that includes Minnesota) to make the trip to Kansas City to see the renovation on the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. It's a really great new building, which I discussed in an earlier post. It's been written up pretty much everywhere. The photo above is from a Kiki Smith installation there, Constellation, on display through October 28th. Although I grew up blocks from the museum and took art classes there and ate lunch there and went there all the time, I had never before seen much of the museum's collection, which had been in storage due to lack of space. Now I get to see some really great abstract expressionist stuff, contemporary stuff, realism. There's an amazing American ceramics collection. There's also a super cool research library, the Spencer Art Reference library with 147,000 volumes open to the public. In the new coffee shop, all disposable containers are made of corn.

The train was amazing. We didn't want to leave the train. The train didn't take me all the way to Kansas City, but I'm here now. I ate fresh, warm tomatoes and basil from my parent's garden. It's so lush, I couldn't find the arugula. There are some people in Kansas City who watch movies, and they could talk about movies every night. Talked movies deep into the cool summer morning. List of movies-to-see not currently functioning. Back to sleep; more later about the train.

Kansas City

Steven Holl's addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City opened yesterday. I grew up a few blocks away. In April, I made a video of the Walter De Maria pool lighting the parking lot below.