Social Hermit
Moomins, Montreal, and Upstate Art Weekend
I had a big week.
First, last Wednesday the 24th, a talk and dinner celebrating the Moomins creator Tove Jansson at the Hotel Chelsea.
I was lured by both Sadie Stein and Nicole Eisenman on the bill, and with a hazy memory from childhood of this whimsical universe of trolls who look like cows allegorically processing nuclear anxiety. The promotionality of the event worked because I walked away Moomin-pilled and enamored by Jansson’s larger story. She is best known as a children’s book author though she also wrote adult novels (NYRB Classics has reissued a few over recent decades; they weren’t widely available in English previously). Born in Finland in 1914 (though she wrote in Swedish), Jansson lived fairly openly as a gay woman, and many of the novels share these parts of her. Jansson, however, waited until her mother had passed before she transitioned from writing the children’s books to the grown-up fiction. Her partner Tuulikki Pietilä (they were together until Jansson’s death in 2001) designed some of the definitive Marimekko graphic patterns (big power couple). The novel Fairplay tracks a longtime relationship between a writer and an artist. Stein identified herself as a Fairplay evangelist, claiming she keeps several copies in her home at all times, constantly imposing the book onto friends and associates. She said it’s as real a portrayal as any of a life shared between creatives across decades.
I think the largesse of the night was thanks to the success of Moomins merchandise. At dinner, there was only a passing allusion to a Moomins takeover at the New York Botanical Garden during a brief speech the CEO gave that was actually funny. The whole thing was a masterclass on elevating your IP. Granted, it’s a nice situation to have characters this cute scaffolded by a legacy of substance.
I’m always trying to do it all, so I got home from Moominpalooza at 10:30, fell asleep in my clothes, woke up a few hours later to pack, and was on my way to the airport by 4am.
I was headed to Montreal for a conference of independent art publishers organized by Momus. I booked a punishingly early flight because it was the cheapest and I was being frugal because I’d previously booked a flight, got a notification it was being rerouted through Toronto with a layover, and it’s been a saga ever since trying to get that first itinerary refunded. I’m still waiting. So this meant I arrived early in Montreal with no obligations until the evening. I spent part of the afternoon lying down in the hotel room reading about prediction markets. If I’m painfully honest, I still get a dopamine hit from absorbing a bunch of information and feeling smart about how terrible the world is. But that rush is a ghost of what it once was.
The title of the two-day conference, or a convening as they anointed it, was “Building and Sustaining.” Friday morning I spoke on a panel called “Building.” It was depressing to learn even Canadian magazines with grant funding for forty years are struggling to stay afloat right now. There were conversations around grants, nonprofit frameworks, philanthropists. The way you have to advocate for the value of your magazine to funders (it’s pro queer or pro woman or pro book or pro democracy and ergo makes society richer because of it). I wish everyone could just get universal basic income and if some people want to make and write for magazines, they can do that. If others want to play video games all day, that’s their prerogative.
I got dinner with Montreal friends at a Polish restaurant in the old port and then walked back to my hotel in Griffintown. Griffintown is almost unrecognizable from what it was like when I lived in Montreal 15 years ago. I mostly was thinking about how you turn around and things aren’t how you left them. Except kitty corner my hotel I sensed a familiar Montreal in a buzzing pizza restaurant with valet service and juiced-up guys packed into banquettes. Reddit confirmed I wasn’t the only one who walked by and thought “mafia joint.” Montreal when I lived there was very much a mob town. Around the time I moved away, the city was rocked by a corruption trial exposing illegal ties between the mayor and the construction industry. To understand what decades of mob contracts for city infrastructure projects looks like, google “Montreal sinkhole.” There are several dramatic examples, but 2013 might be the most legendary.
Saturday I woke up up again at an ungodly hour and took an early flight back to Newark, just in time to catch a bus Art Omi chartered to bring writers up for Upstate Art Weekend. Arriving in the Hudson Valley, we got a tour of the under-construction sister project Art Omi Pavilions on track to open next summer. The main attraction though was a dual opening at the original Art Omi for Tschabalala Self and Nayland Blake, two artists that epitomize the program Sarah O’Keeffe has nurtured there the past four years. (I’m excited to see what she’ll do at ICA Philadelphia where she’s headed next.)
We arrived as M Lamar, the patron saint of Negrogothic took to the outdoor stage in his signature wraparound shades and sculptural shoulders with a full band.
It was the East Coast premiere of Self’s Pioneer, a headless female torso mounted on horseback, originally commissioned in 2023 by Desert X. This 13-foot-tall bronze was activated through a lush pastoral reverie from DANIRO, accompanied on harp by Cassie Watson Francillon. The first shimmering notes filtered out into the sculpture park’s fields and groves, gathering more of a crowd on the grassy hill. DANIRO appeared as a maiden with a basket of fresh wildflowers, unhurried in her approach, before reaching the horse, stripping down, and joining the bronze figure astride. As a body in motion she rode, entering into dialogue with Self’s practice of evoking movement in static forms.
And it was also the unveiling of new work by Nayland Blake inspired in part by the historic figure of the Ornamental Hermit. There was a fad in 18th-century England for wealthy landowners to employ men to live on their estates as decorative presences—solitary, contemplative figures meant to signify the pre-industrial withdrawal of the medieval hermit. (A parallel could be drawn between these ersatz hermits performing melancholic reflection and what the contemporary art patron wants from the artist.) Blake’s Haunt: Being the Folly of One Victorya Spectre comprises a single-room cabin set in the woods and installations in the indoor gallery: one features a long grey braid of hair, another a photo slideshow made in collaboration with Sam Penn. Blair Witch Project was on their mood board.
I was part of a reading at the after party at the Pocketbook Hotel, and I riffed more on the Ornamental Hermit, compiling some newspaper ads from the period that detailed how employers stipulated that hermits could not wash nor cut their hair or fingernails for the length of the contract (often seven years). One hermit lasted only three weeks, discovered sneaking away to a nearby pub. I wove in some Craigslist ads, an article from 2012 about how GPS was misdirecting visitors to the wrong Walden Pond, and verses from the mystic Hildegard von Bingen, one of these medieval anchorites which the 18th-century hermits endeavored to cosplay. At eight years old, Hildegard was given to the church by her parents and enclosed in a cell with a woman named Jutta, serving as her companion and mentee until Jutta’s death. The tradition was to enclose anchorites in stone-walled cells often in total solitary confinement, with only a small opening for food and waste. No wonder they had visions.
I spent the rest of the weekend lounging around at the Pocketbook (mostly in the bathhouse). Since the hotel opened at the end of May, you’ve probably caught wind of some part of the story. Maybe the interiors by Charlap Hyman & Herrero. Or the in-room robes by Eckhaus Latta. And I’ll say, it all lives up the hype. The baths in particular are serene. Fresh sunlight coming in through the windows. Raw concrete accented by Rich Aybar’s semi-translucent amber rubber: these very functional seats and vessels accessorize the showers, pools, and steam room. You can access the baths with a day pass for $60 even if you aren’t staying at the hotel.
Upstate can sometimes feel fractured, a lot of driving from place to place. Pocketbook is an antidote. That’s something I didn’t fully appreciate until I got there. You get the bathhouse, multiple shops and showrooms, a restaurant, cultural programming and dance parties, a grassy courtyard where you can just chill, all in one site. I hadn’t realized how central it all was. This red brick 19th-century factory building is right in downtown Hudson. It was a seven-minute walk to the main drag. We were fine without a car.
The next night I went to another reading at 27 Cafe in the Catskills. Then we got dinner at Lil Debs Oasis which is closing soon. There was a full circle feeling to the weekend because the first time I ever came to Hudson I saw Shanekia McIntosh read, and Shanekia now works at Pocketbook and co-organized the after-party I read at. And that first trip we had dinner at Lil Debs. It’s cool that things have their cycles and seasons because now this new wave including Pocketbook and 27 Cafe are taking up the mantle as community hubs and job creators, the way Lil Debs has been for a decade.
We also got lunch one day at a Mexican restaurant El sabor de oaxaca. This place is amazing and right in downtown Hudson too. Get the fried tilapia. It’s the whole fish, bone-in, plus tortillas, rice, beans, and a salad with generous slices of avocado for $20. A beautiful family business.
We also checked out a group show Isaiah had work in curated by Niama Safia Sandy at this spot in Cairo called Shadow Walls. It’s an unconventional exhibition space housed in a half-restored Victorian home, part of a cluster of buildings that once made up the midcentury resort Eva’s Farm. The hermit surfaced one last time in the week. The owner, artist Anna Cone explained she purchased the run-down property after finishing her MFA, emboldened after drawing the Hermit card in a tarot reading. She talked a lot of ghosts and Facebook marketplace, showing us all the treasures she’s amassed including crystal chandeliers and pink toilet seats from the funeral home on The Sopranos.
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