Arnold Friedmann Talks About Classic Chairs
Classic Chairs of the 20th Century.
A slide lecture by Arnold Friedmann, retired professor of design in the Department of Art, Architecture, and Art History at UMass-Amherst. He will discuss chairs designed by Eames, Mies van der Rohe, Bertoia, and Thonet, among others.
Tuesday, September 16, 7:30 pm at Deerfield Arts Bank. Free to the public. 
Seth Schoen – Internet Security and Privacy
Seth Schoen gives a talk at the Deerfield Arts Bank on January 13, 2015 regarding Internet Security and Privacy. Produced by Frontier Commmunity Access Television.
Gift to the World
This is a transcription of Jane’s Memorial Service tribute to Sioma.
One day this last July, my father and I were reading poetry together: Rimbaud, Beaudelaire, Verlaine; and quite suddenly, her wrote in the book: “Je serais ton copain de la magie” (I shall be your companion in magic – or of the magic).
A striking idea, but what did he mean exactly?
The answer came to me several days ago as I searched my heart for the special gifts my father gave me. The most precious of all was the gift of magic.
– that sparkle that made him do things quite differently from other people, that made me always feel that I had a very special father.
The magic of clowning, of punning, or a curious sense of humor; of special insights; of demanding tastefulness in all things, and of the perfectly turned phrases, of course.
Nothing ordinary and nothing thoughtless.
His was a search for the amusing, the perfect, the unforgettable.
How many, many people have been recipients of “the Snow Goose” and how many bemused booksellers have wondered at the elegant gentleman who purchased that beloved story by the dozen?
Who in this room hasn’t received a short story or isolated chapter torn from its covers, separated from its neighboring pages – all because my father decided it deserved special attention. I myself own several of these small treasures.
There was no Papa like mine. None as demanding. None as playful.
He said, “I shall be your companion on magic”. But, my dear Papa, you always were.
The imagination to be different, albeit with style, that is the most precious inheritance my father has given me. And this I shall pass on to my children … Sioma’s gift to the world.
Father’s Voice
This journey began again when I was trying to remember my father’s voice. Some recess of my mind could still catch the tone, the lilt, the timbre, the accent. But it was so ephemeral that suddenly I realized that I might even lose that last slippery grasp.
I thought of who might have recorded him…ever. He must have been interviewed; but perhaps not. It was Pauline who shone, who was the icon, the star. He had set it up like that and then eventually hated the arrangement. So reticent, so accommodating, so back stage had he played his part in the partnership, that it succeeded all too well. He was not included in the limelight. Oh yes, an occasional toast in his direction, or a nod to his early years getting the business off to a running start. But the maintenance of it all, the steady steerage throughout the years… oh and also the enthusiasm you can count on. That was his job, I guess. He loved to plan. His early letters in France were full of plots and plans, full of energy and optimism. Steady motor, enthusiastic coxswain.
I did not get to see that. When I started to see my father, to look at him in an effort to understand who he was, instead of just having him as a father, instead of simply enjoying his whimsies or dragging along to his next appointment or task…he was already nearly 60. That’s a whole lifetime I did not see. He might as well have been my grandfather.
Once, I tallied up all the months and years I actually spent face-to-face with him. It was a shock and still is today. I figured that between birth and leaving for college, I saw him for 6 years and 10 months. Had those years been full of attentive parenting it might have worked. I think that is another story for another time.
I left NYC with my mother and 2 siblings when I was about 6 months for the south of France. He visited us there for what must have been at most one week. I was three when we left France, stopped in NY on our way to Argentina. My mother had remarried her first husband, the father of the two older children and we were following his job to South America. I assume my nanny and I might have spent 2 months in NY with my father. I have no idea.
And then the next 7 years, I traveled during the southern hemisphere summer break to a wintery NYC to visit my father. I calculated three months per visit. That adds up to 21 months or so. One of those visits must have been longer for reasons that no one, and certainly not me, remembers, because I was enrolled in school. Maybe not. Maybe I just was placed back in school because no one knew what to do with a 9 year old in the middle of the winter. So, let’s be generous and say 2 years.
My siblings were swimming and diving all summer long; I was going from overheated NYC apartment to apartment and to the theater and once to the opera. The owner of beautiful dresses and coats, but never a good swimmer or diver, but I saw My Fair Lady with Julie Andrews on Broadway seven times.
The family returned to the States in 1958, the year I turned 10. Four years in suburban New Jersey with alternate weekends adds up to about 200 days. That’s about 6 and ½ months. And let’s add another 6 months or so for summertime in the city with an aupair. Four years between the ages of 13-17 at the Lycee Francais next door to my father’s apartment, with two summers away—once to Mexico and once to Paris gives a total of 3 years and 6 months. When I add it all up I get, more or less, 6 years and 10 months.
I don’t know why that makes me cry. It does… and I do know. It’s not just because it is so little in an entire lifetime but because the effect is so profound. And the the calculated time does not account for the fact that my father was not there most of the time; he was working and even traveling sometimes. The nanny, Meme was there with me constantly from age one until seven perhaps. After that it was tutors and au pairs. Emma Durrieux, Francoise Duhamel, Margaret Morgenroth, Eliana something from Staten Island, and Jacques Karpo during the later years worked on my literary career.
So, I was talking about his voice. I found an old reel of some joint venture between Trigère, Inc. and an eyeglass frame company. My father is the voice of Trigère and demonstrates the aesthetics of choosing frames for different outfits. What could that have possibly have meant in the early 60’s or late 50’s? Were people supposed to buy many different eyeglasses? Ridiculous. But the more startling aspect is hearing my father’s voice in this old recording. It is high and weird, and of course, in his heavily accented English. My husband was surprised. He had not considered that my father had an accent. And today while we were remembering this incident, he was again surprised when I said that the recording was weird also because it was in English. My father spoke to me in French.
The un-thought of details are what make the stories.
For instance what is the problem with one town having streets named Bellevue and Buena Vista? None, if you are an English only speaker—none at all. But if you are a smart trilingual little girl, it is natural that you would ask why a town has two streets with the same name. And if you are enraptured by the beauty of the sound of the song Silent Night with no understanding of its meaning, you might really want to be selected to be the school solo, and not grasp at all that the school will avoid choosing the only Jewish child for the part.
The poignancy is in the disparity of the levels of understanding—the child’s versus the adult community. Two planes of understanding that do not coexist.
I have watched my grandson learn to understand his world. He is clearly very quick and bright. He grasps the connection between two comments and sees the humor in a joke or exaggeration. It’s remarkable.
I remember myself when I was very young.
Toiletries
Behind the kitchen is the realm for the live-in maid that, in my lifetime, never lived in. behind the kitchen a small room with bath exists in many Manhattan apartments. Sometimes it becomes the eldest child’s after the second bedroom gets filled by the other children.
This space behind the kitchen became my papa’s dressing room and personal refuge for his toilette when he remained. The closets and bathroom off his bedroom became his wife’s and this small space became his haven. The door to this steamy haven were narrow shutters closed by a simple brass latch.
The wall opposite the closet was covered with mirror from ceiling to counter. A shallow counter ran the length of that wall. It sheltered From it hung a curtain that hid a bed, a narrow one that would swing down on an axis that ran its length. Now I see how ingenious it was. An occasional guest could sleep over.
In fact, I now realize that some summers the space was given over entirely to an au-pair. My brother told me he slept there on a visit.
Three closet doors each storing a different kind of clothing. I only remember two of matching trousers. Not pants, nor slacks. My Papa wore only trousers. I don’t mean that you would call what he wore slacks and he would say trousers. I mean that he only wore the trousers part of suits. That is all he owned I think. Certainly that is true in my childhood… before the casualness of the 70’s and the influence of his youthful wife.
The far right closet door was the one I remember best because it was designed with many and various shelves, drawers, nooks and crannies for all the accouterments of an elegant gentleman. Shelves where all those French laundry shirts were freed from their buff blue cardboard boxes. Shelves of thin wood that invited caressing.
Special places for cufflinks, tie clips and tuxedo studs, cups for collar stays. Lots of little hidden spaces all explored by this inquisitive child who wished to understand everything that was beyond understanding and she thought the answers could be found here and in these things…in these mini decouvertes.
Old passports, old business cards from unknown people. Inklings of a past just beyond my reach, hints that had no meaning yet… and now those hints have been swept away with time.
The shaving cup and brush were covered with dried soap foam and the whole stuck to the surface of a small cabinet above the sink. Hanging on two hooks, the whole thing consisted of a shelf above a closed unit that had sliding doors and below a rod for hanging a towel. It nothing really. Plain non-descript wood brown wood.
Brown stained wood.
I painted it white one day. It’s still here in the ground floor bathroom of the Firehouse.
When I came to take things left behind from my home after my father and his wife moved to California… I came to an empty apartment save for a pile of things in the front entry.
Like a detective I walked around the apartment, in and out of rooms and closets looking for my history, my story… all the charm was gone. The marbled pained trim looked forlorn without the atmosphere created by furnishings and books. It was then that I realized that the fabulous closet of my Papa’s the doors were painted with a faux finish. All this had been done during the early years in the apartment when a designer
had been hired to “pull it all together”.
There were two things left that were not attached permanently: a metal beehive like item to store wine bottles and the hanging cabinet above my father’s bathroom sink. Two pieces of that elegant apartment. Well I also got the upright piano that I did not play and a miniature kitchen cabinet that lived in my bathroom. Despite having little intrinsic value they have survived until today. They both had a subtle faux-something painted
finish. They attracted no attention, so only I know their origins and travels.
That’s another story.
Father’s Cufflinks
Cufflinks come in pairs.
They can be silver, gold or cheap metal that looks like gold or silver. They can be cheap and cheesy or expensive and classy. They can have hinges, chains or be a single solid. They can have shiny semi-precious stones or a pretend family crest or snooty school seal. I have seen so many cufflinks.
My father wore cufflinks with all his shirts. My father’s were all simple, understated, and surely expensive.
The important thing about this piece of information is that he had shirts that required cufflinks! All his shirts required cufflinks. He did not have some shirts of different fabrics and colors and styles. All his shirts were identical and they were all hand-made for him in a downtown shirt factory. They all were made of ever-so-light cotton that was truly easy to iron. I know this only in retrospect. Then, when I lived in his home, we did not iron. The French Laundry ironed all his shirts and folded them and inserted thin cardboard in the last fold…to hold it just so. And then they packed this big stack of shirts into a dark blue cardboard box that was just the size of a folded shirt. The sides of the boxes were high so that they were able to telescope out or in depending on the amount of shirts. The final touch was the twine that held it shut. A perfect package for perfect shirts, that each required elegant cufflinks, for a perfectly elegant gentleman who was my father.
I see him in his white elegance. Thin fabric that flowed as he moved, but the weight of the cufflinks held the sleeves down around the wrists. He wore undershirts; that would have spoiled the look, the style of the shirt. And, yes, he changed his shirts several times a day. Over this came the the jacket of a bespoke suit of a bespoke suit with no equal.
I can see him inserting the cufflinks into the cuffs buttonholes. One arm outstretched and twisted in toward the center as the other arm maneuvers the object through the holes linking the two sides of the cuffs together, and the final flip that secures the link to the cuff. A cuff linked. Success! Success as seen my the make of shirt, the style and weight of the cufflinks and the know-how that pulls it all together elegantly.
That was my father. Elegance personified.
Emotion with no emotion being said.
Silhouette, pt. II
At age 7, I made the trip to the United States alone. From Buenos Aires to Miami took some 30 hours, I believe. I haven’t done the research to confirm that, but that is the figure I remember some adult stating long ago. It was a Pam Am flight and stopped like a milk train at every capital up along the western coast
of South America. After leaving Buenos Aires it came to Santiago, Chile; Lima, Peru with the llamas at the airport; Quito, Ecuador; Bogota, Colombia; and then… I no longer remember. We reached Miami, Florida finally. This was my destination; the flight did not continue to New York City, so my father met
me in Miami. We would spend several days there and then fly to New York together.
But this entry to Miami stays with me. I looked out the small airplane window as we coasted to the gate and searched the roofline of the airport for my father’s silhouette. In those days, safety and terrorism were not issues. Roofs of airport buildings were not off limits. Peering into the dusky distance, I anxiously hoped for my father’s shape, to know that he was there on time, and that I was safe.
Waiting for my father was always a given. The times that I would be left to guard our suitcases in an appropriately named airport waiting room, were so numerous that they all blend into one. He would return with a stuffed animal or with a chocolate bar. But his shoes were suddenly well-shinned and the tell-tale smell of shoe polish told me where he had been. Gifts made it all okay, guess. But I would gaze in every direction waiting and waiting….so patiently. It was the not knowing how long that was the worst.
When he would say that he would be right back…what did that mean to him? To me it made little sense because he never came “Right Back.”
Little girl, so bright and shiny sat on the hard metal bench and swung her legs to and fro. Echo-y messages on the loudspeaker announce far off lands—comings and goings.
So many strangers talking unknown languages rushing by—
Alone, needing to pee; holding it in—and not. Where is he, that roaming Papa?
Here he is. A magazine and gone again. Wheee.
There he is! So far away. Out of reach.
Send her postcards, gifts and custom-made dresses… hire tutors and au-pairs; buy tickets to the theater.
Get the Countess of Tolstoy to inscribe her book for the child.
Giftwrap it in gold paper; no ribbon. Send it to Argentina. It takes months.
Who is keeping track of time?
Thirty hours on an airplane is like a lifetime. It is a lifetime.
Away, away. Alone. A way of life that no one takes note of. Who among the adults knows what her life is like, what she experiences, is fearful of, her hopes, anything. She is a lovely package that goes back and forth. She gets wrapped in gold paper (no ribbon) and fly Pam Am to keep her parents together in her
world.
The little brain makes order of it all. Captures the languages and the meanings or lack thereof and makes it hers alone. A chocolate bar should keep terror at bay. But bitten fingernails betray the misery.
Dusk on Madison Ave. Getting darker. Horns honking, cars swerving, busses gasping. New York City in December. Lights twinkle everywhere. Crispness in the air and people bustling and rushing past. Rushing for bus, hailing taxis, Briskly walking. Home is the goal for most but we, my Papa and I open the taxi door and tumble into Georg Jensen’s for a gift buying session. My father needs to get some gifts; for whom I do not know. I am left gazing intently at very delicate blown glass animals while he finds his prizes and gets them wrapped in Silvery gray paper. Am I right? Is that the color of Jensen’s wrapping paper. What a strange thing to remember. Of course everyone knows that Tiffany has light turquoise boxes and paper and white cloth ribbons. I learned this week that the red star that Macy uses on all their packaging comes from the red star tattoo that the creator and owner sported.
What a scant assortment of things we archive from a lifetime. Can a lifetime amount to so little. I once calculated the amount of time I actually spent with my father. It was pitiful; and yet the impact on me is phenomenal… way out of proportion to the time together.
Milli Baskin comes to mind. I wonder what happened to her. She took me to see the movie Lilli with her daughter when she was 8. I think I was 8 when I first saw it. Why was that something I remember. Now I think that perhaps she, Milli actually may have taken me when I was 8. Oh dear my memory.
Why do I need to remember all this anyway? Why am I writing these fleeting memories. Is it for my children or grandchildren? Do they care?
Will they know me better when I am gone by reading this material?
A Piece of Chalk (A Globe)
Take a piece of chalk and hold it firmly in your dominant hand. Squat down and reach as far away from your body as possible. Put the chalk on the floor and start turning your body. Keep your one foot planted and push off with the other. As you turn, adjust so you do not fall. Keep turning and keep drawing. When you reach the beginning of your line make sure to match the mark so no one can tell where you began and where you ended.
That’s it. You have just drawn a circle around yourself. If you are descended from the Honi the Circle Maker, you probably can do some magic now and get God to bring rain or whatever. If you are not descended from this 1st Cent. BCE Judean, then you probably can’t. But others will not necessarily know that. Others will be impressed with your perfect circle—with no beginning and no ending. They will confer upon you powers of one sort or another. They will want to learn something from you. Get something from you or perhaps just being close to you. At worst they may want to own you, but that’s another story.
Circles, especially chalk ones are fragile. They do not withstand the assault of rain…but they may last centuries in the right environment like wall drawings in a cave that live on through multiple civilizations and upheavals: the 100-year war, the rise & fall of the Roman empire, the British empire, revolutions, new religions and expulsions…and that is certainly quite magical.
I have a piece of chalk. And with it I draw circles around myself and you and every story we have ever told. I want to cover my sidewalk with many circled stories. I come from two distinct circles and I am the resulting intersection. Since I have never been very good at geometry, I cannot tell you how much that intersection amounts too. If I am the center of the story, then that precious space should be quite large. But it isn’t. I have lived in a space that is small and confined even though it has spanned continents and oceans. Few people ever seemed to notice. Have any ever considered what it might be like to be me. “C’est tout petit chez moi”… (My home is very small.) St. Exupery’s Little Prince explained. He lived on a planet where the sunrises and sunsets could be experienced every few hours. The stranded aviator and the Little Prince came from different planets—actually and proverbially; they found it hard to understand each other.
That was me. I was the Little Prince—lost on several foreign planets and looking to tend a flower of my own and also somehow in the mess of lines and arcs and circles I looked for someone to tend to me. “Desine moi un mouton” (Draw me a lamb) he asks of the aviator. No drawing was adequate until in a stroke of genius the aviator drew a box with air holes and announced that the lamb was inside. Perfect. Our imagination is so much better than a finite graphite drawing.
There is a photograph of me at age 8 or so. Prettily dressed, as usual, I am perched on a chair and point to somewhere in the southern hemisphere of a lit globe. The countries on the map are pink and blue and represent the world we knew in the 1950’s. The globe has existed about as long as me. It has always lived in my father’s world in Manhattan, first in his library in the Madison Ave. apartment and eventually as my bedside lamp in our Fifth Ave. apartment. As a teenager I remember meeting a freshly squeezed glass of orange juice under this globe every morning. My father woke early—perhaps he did not sleep at all– and among his morning rituals like making filtered dark coffee in the Chemex, was squeezing orange juice for himself, for me and later also for his second wife. His father had died in his fifties of a heart attack on the streets of Paris, and therefore he attributed his own good health and long life to the fresh juice. He lived to age 82; I will not argue with his “science,” but I know that imagining oranges in Paris during his interwar childhood is a near impossibility. And all that vitamin C did not save him from the appalling endgame of loss of self through Alzheimer’s. I digress.
The globe is the three dimensional version of my world of circles. I point to somewhere, perhaps only as a struck pose. Someone asked me to point and so I pointed. There were many expectations in this northern hemisphere circle. In the southern circle, the one in Buenos Aires, I existed and do not remember that much was asked of me, expected of me… I was left to the care of my nanny. I called her Mémé. She lived in my little world, in the intersection of the circles… until she was sent back to her home in France.
I was 7.
At that time, I began to voyage between my parents on PanAm aircrafts. I think the trip lasted 30 hours. How do I check that piece of information? Was that just a wild exaggeration that has stuck as truth or was that really real? The flight started in Buenos Aires, Argentina and stopped at every capital going up through Chili, Peru, Ecuador and finally Miami Beach, Florida. There my father awaited—I hoped. After hours of sleeping, eating, playing, and of course brushing my teeth in those tight airplane toilets… I stared out the window toward the airport building. I was searching the roofline for my father’s sihouette. That’s where he said he would be and that’s where I looked. Anxiety, fear, and the urge to pee in my pants crowded out any other possible emotions or activities, except the nail biting, of course. That accompanied me everywhere and always and still does.
There! I see him! I know this is true because I feel it in my bones. I was able to identify my Papa simply from his form and movement on the roof of the building. Like a gosling that knows who their parent is among all the similar adult geese. Only then, did my unspoken terror subside, my nail biting moments of self-soothing are easy to explain. In the airplane cabin, with my temporary friends and caretakers, the stewardesses , I was safe. But now there came that chasm between safeties… between this and my father’s enveloping arms. There he was in his long black wool coat. It was winter in Florida. I was to miss yet another summer in Buenos Aires.
What I am reaching for, trying to explore are all those coping mechanisms we create inadvertently? They seem to see us through difficulties and then they become entrenched; the meaning or purpose lost. Why should a well-put-together woman such as I have bitten finger nails? It took years of self reproach to gain compassion and understanding. My fingers and their nails soothed me through many flights between planets, between my circles.
It serves no function now; just habitual nonsense that occasionally can be curbed.
A Room in Full Color
Lainie picked up a large striated rock and lugged it back to our car. This would be the memento of our pilgrimage to Dobbs Ferry and now is a door stop in my home. Andy, Lainie and I went on a journey to our earliest home we shared. They remembered it vividly and I, not at all. I was one or two when we left that idyllic place that never became my home but remained always my place of birth.
For a brief time, I lived within an hour of that house. It must have been at my instigation. When we arrived, my older siblings leaped out of the car in anticipation. Recollections stumbled out of their mouths. Neighborhood kids, a bike, our car, the schools they attended. I was quiet and took it all in.
The grand old fake Tudor stood in the acute angle of South Lawn Ave. and River Street. The garage was under the house and the driveway opened on River Street. But the change of grade was so great that the front door on South Lawn was way down an entire flight of stone steps. The house was poised between two streets at two very different altitudes. We walked around the property and lingered at the meeting of the two streets where we could look through the trees into the garden area. I recognized a doorway—not from actual memory but from photographs taken. There I re-imagined my father holding me in his arms. Who took the picture? In the garden, another photo came to life. I sat in Janet Artel’s lap under that tree.
When we had seen all that we could see and stood looking down at the front door and almost straight into the second story windows, one of us asked, “Should we ring the bell?” “Yes,” the others answered quickly and down the steps we went. Andy rang the bell. A high-pitched older woman’s voice called out, “Hello, who’s there?”
We three looked at each other bewildered. What to say? I took charge and used my full name knowing that if this woman knew the former owners of her house, she might remember my last name. My sibling have a different father and therefore different last names. It worked. “Just a minute,” came the friendly answer.
The front door opened and there stood the current resident of our home. We blurted out the purpose of our expedition. She was amused and graciously invited us in. As we walked around each room, anecdotes spilled forward from Andy’s memory. We ended up in the living room, sitting and talking like grownups. But my brother was eager to be 12 again and my sister was a well-behaved 5 year old. I, the baby, was still and focusing on details. All my first-year-of-life photos were taken in this room and now, I could finally place them… the very wide window sill where my mother’s hands held me as I looked out the window, the built-in bookcases where my sister was posed with her new doll—a reward for losing her place as youngest, the metal garden door with many panes of glass as the background for my father’s stance. There was my past; or at least two-three pages of my oldest photo album.
The woman’s chipper voice suddenly asked, “Do you want to see upstairs?” We all said yes, at once and a bit too loudly, and jumped to our feet. Again, it was my siblings who led the way. I felt more like a tourist in my own story. They could actually remember things. We followed our talkative guide up the staircase. My brother first, then me and then my sister. As we passed a doorway on the landing to the right, my brother, announced over his shoulder to me, “That was your room.” I stood transfixed. My sister pushed past me and added, “Your crib was here” pointing to a cabinet door. I looked at her and said, “Here?” But she was gone. Andy and Lainie were rushing to their childhood bedrooms. I was left to stare and ponder. What was this strange little room—my room?
I took it in very slowly. I opened the cabinet door. It was a linen closet. There was another door on the back wall. This was a linen closet with two doors. A dormer window was in the center of the longest wall. Opposite the closet and my crib, I instantly recognized the tall very narrow door of an old-fashioned built-in ironing board. I was standing in the ironing room of this grand old house.
As I took in the shades of warm light glancing off the various angles of the dormer, the shadows of the window muntons tracing along the wall, I could hear the soothing, repetitive sounds of ironing…the steam escaping as it hit the cloth…the utter peacefulness, as I fell off to sleep. Not now—then.
I had a camera, but forgot to take a picture. But my memory holds that room intensely. When I got home, I drew it in full color– that was not really there. It was the coloring of my child’s memory—of meeting the world and life in my first environment. It was the only time I lived with both my parents. My own Garden of Eden. It deserves magically bright colors.
But when I tell the story of that visit, what I entertain people with is my discovery of why I have always loved ironing. Mysteriously—but no longer—it has always been my meditative activity of choice. The garden of Eden is closed to us but the effects endure
The Copper Vase
A tell-tale ragged seam of brass:
One artisan’s skill repairing another’s creation.
At first, I was disappointed
But, as time has exposed my ragged seams,
I’ve come to appreciate the artisan who worked in brass.
I shine it regularly now
And turn the vase to show the seam.
As I march into my middle years, stately, firmly
I hear the brass—the trumpets, horns and flutes,
I comb my hair and let the gray strands decorate my years.
Jane Trigere Art 