WAY TO GO OHIO, part 12

winter shows signs of giving up soon, but then it doesn't. the big public art piece on the wall at 88 east broad street should be finished by the spring, but for now, amid a stirring medley of ice and snow and rain it reads: "columbus never came here, but when the city sleeps, what our dreamers discover is that we have always created our own collective inside joke, one still looking for a punch line, that begins with 'columbus never came here, but....' that's why our city, if we want it to, will wake up with," ... probably antibiotic resistant gonorrhea. oh man.too much about awareness and not enough action on prevention. oh man.

I'D LIKE TO THANK THE ACADEMY

it's been a long time since i've read a film review by andrew o'hehir -- and even longer since i've picked a bone with salon.com -- but the occasion of the 85th academy awards has given me occasion for both. i can't remember the last time that i'd made a point of watching the awards, and i hadn't seen a single one of the nominated pictures before going to see a screening of the oscar nominated animated shorts on friday. "serious" filmgoers can't, of course, be expected to take the time to consider the films being considered by the academy. and the award show itself is, of course, even more generally considered to be just a holywood marketing pageant. but i watched it this year because of a good beer drinking opportunity (and one for drinking good beer), and i'm happy that i did. andrew o'hehir watched it too, of course, because even the most serious of film critics are expected to weigh in with general cultural punditry when anyone involved with filmistry walks down a red carpet. so be it. but even so, i was surprised by mr. o'hehir's response. i turned down an opportunity to see "argo" the night before the awards, and even after an academy awards show that made me reconsider wanting to see the rest of the nominated films, i still haven't been won over on that one. that isn't to say, however, that i wasn't full of hope that the academy would snub ben affleck, who looked unsurprisingly smug whenever the camera found him in the audience. in the end it didn't, and although mr. o'hehir didn't think that "argo" deserved to win best picture, he did think that mr. affleck shone as a "class act" when he took the stage at the end of the show to accept his picture's award. so be it. but he seemed to think so because he seemed to hate the rest of the show. "Of course it’s standard operating procedure for someone in my position [o'hehir says] (or yours, for that matter! [damn straight]) to mock the Oscars for all kinds of reasons." i just didn't understand the bent of o'hehir's mocking. in his criticism of its selections, he seems to acknowledge that the academy of motion picture arts and sciences isn't really in the business of rewarding the best in motion picture arts and sciences, but seems baffled that its awards show -- which was dedicated to movie music -- should have been produced the way that it was. "I hadn’t grasped quite how odd the choice of MacFarlane was until the show started and I realized that not only is he not a celebrity, but that “Family Guy” fans and people who watch too many talk shows would be the only viewers able to pick him out of a police lineup," he says (and not at all seeming to be aware that serious and non-serious filmgoers alike have been watching a lot of television lately). "Eventually," he says, "it dawned on me that all this warmed-over and self-indulgent postmodernism didn’t have anything to do with giving awards to people who make movies, and that MacFarlane was just going to keep telling increasingly distasteful fat-chick jokes and domestic-violence jokes and John Wilkes Booth jokes until it was time to segue into 'Why is this show so long?' jokes." i'd questioned the selection of mr. macfarlane myself until abc gave me the theme of the show and macfarlane was singing "i get a kick out of you" while charlize theron and channing tatum danced onstage around him. (mr. tatum, for what it's worth, had either learned how to act in rehearsals or he and his partner had just spent some special time backstage.) while mr. o'hehir was taking the time to come to his own realization, however, the rest of us were laughing along with the audience in the dolby theater. and what mr. o'hehir called the "terrible musical numbers" and the "doomed attempts to seem hip and relevant" had already made the show a fun one before any (terrible, irrelevant) awards were given. what mr. o'hehir seems to have demonstrated with his criticism of this academy awards show is only the terrible irrelevance of his punditry as regards the terrible irrelevance of the academy awards. or something. to be fair, mr. o'hehir doesn't really seem to know exactly where he stands. he liked "we saw your boobs," but then again he didn't really. he loved shirley bassey, but then again he didn't really. his criticism of the 85th academy awards show is all "sic transit gloria mundi" (and, granted, with his usual stylistic aplomb), but that in reference to jla's falling on the stairs on her way to accept the award for best actress. but so be it. maybe mr. o'hehir just wishes so hard that the academy awards were relevant that he won't ever let himself have fun if they're not. or maybe the show was just super gay and we were drinking while we watched it. but so be that too. hollywood still managed to be dazzlingly, momentously irrelevant for the length of two feature films, and for that i would like to thank the academy. 

WATCHING THE CLOCK, part 4

exotic latino grill hocks its exotic latino grilleries out of a cart in a parking lot on the north side of the block of east hudson between indianola and summit. the menu wasn't what i'd expected (or, rather, had decided that it should have been), and neither was the exotic latina who took my order (something of the beauty who i hope still slings plates at the cart on north vancouver and fremont in portland). i did, however, manage to get myself a burrito (although the burritos weren't at all highlighted on the menu, and perhaps i should have gotten something more typically exotic). it's back to bitter cold, so i ate my burrito in the passenger seat of the car. (the wrapping was pretty, but the beans were too concentrated at the bottom and made almost for a mess.) then i took advantage of our position to have us drive to the goodwill down the street. but i didn't feel too bad taking advantage, even though the driver had regretted having already eaten after he'd had a bite of my lunch, because he also had a box of old shoes in the trunk that had been waiting to find its way to a donation site. and then (and maybe it might not have been there if i hadn't been there with someone making a contribution), i actually found the frame that i was looking for. the first one i'd found at the volunteers of america store in merion village, and this one (although it didn't turn out to be -- not exactly) looked exactly identical. the certificate of authenticity says that the photos are five by seven, but they're actually five by seven and a little bit more, which is apparently a standard non-standard frame size too, but just as easy to find when you're trying to find a frame on the secondhand cheap. but they had one! and almost exactly identical to the one that i already had, so now i had frames for two of three of the alexander guerra photos that a friend had gifted me because they were too gay for her boyfriend to have in the house. score (times two). and so i was happy when we got to the gallery to keep watching "the clock." i picked it back up just after three. and we got in almost two hours. john cusack gets considerable face time. and that's on top of what he gets from one-thirty to three, because it's as a result of having watched the clock that hour and a half that the artist lent me "the grifters." (i haven't seen annette or angelica again at the wexner.) audrey hepburn doesn't see anything, because in the clips of her excerpted from three to five she's blind. audrey tautou finally shows up in "amelie." four o'clock is big. there's commotion. chomping at the bit (although he's asleep next to me on the sofa). then, at four-twenty, not at all what you might think, but everyone's watching the clock. second by second, they're closer to getting out. except that at four thirty-five sissy spacek, in "3 women," is fantasizing about clocking in. shelley duvall is somewhere else and at another time. she's being given a watch. next to me the driver is squeaking back awake, and i feel bad again about taking advantage, because he hasn't gotten any sleep, and i know how that feels. the punch cards get punched out en masse at five, and a couple of minutes later we leave. "the good, the bad and the ugly," he tells me. and he tells me that it was fun going in and out. it's its own experience letting the images confront you after you've been woken up by the confrontation of the images. okay. score (times three). but we were there until just past five. quitting time.

OLD WORLD UNDERGROUND WHERE ARE YOU NOW? part 2; or, WAY TO GO OHIO...SERIOUSLY, WAY TO GO

one of the two susans who occupy the beautiful 3rd (?) floor space at the rear of the building at 26 north 3rd street in downtown zanesville is working on one of her (primarily) appliqued, quilted and embellished fiber art pieces, and at the center of the panels of the piece (still yet to be quilted) is a big, black, volant, wool crow. so i interrupt her, because i want to ask while i remember. we'd been walking, he and i (he, the artist, and i, who, well, just like art and stuff), from downtown to destinations as yet unknown the night before, and we'd decided not to take the y-bridge because it was a shorter distance to where we thought we might be going via underwood street, which is state route 60 until it goes over the muskingham and becomes adair ave and state route 146, and the north banks of the not so world famous underwood-adair (60-146) bridge across the muskingham are overflowing (you might say) with giant trees. i couldn't tell what kind of trees they were that night because we hadn't gotten into zanesville until after eleven and it was dark. but i could tell that the trees were giant, and that they were dark too. actually, i hadn't been paying any attention to them at all until we had already started crossing the bridge and had made noise enough to wake up several hundred of the crows that had been roosting in the giant corona of branches of one of them. the crows scattered, and i jumped into a crouch behind the artist's back with my hands gripping his shoulders so as to brace and direct him as my shield. so we decided to talk more quietly, even for our amazement at realizing that the giant trees had been so dark because they were roosted with thousands of tens of thousands of crows. (the bridge was tall, and it was literally up to there with them.) because if we upset any more of them there was the chance that the sum of the drama might get the artist pushed over the railing and into the muskingham.

we walked, then, not in silence, but in whispers: aware, and in awe, but not quite frightened. we did walk almost frighteningly close to the birds in the treetops that were closest to the bridge, but none of them moved and no one fell. then we were on the other side of the river -- moved maybe, but thankfully not fallen -- and we turned right off of aiden (which actually doesn't turn into 146 until 60 turns right at maple) and onto linden. that's where the internet said the bars were, and those bars was where we were headed because the internet hadn't had anything to say about things that might be happening downtown at close to midnight. we passed the first two of them and passed on both. the third looked okay, but we passed on that one too because we wanted the first place we went to have, if possible, more people. surely zanesville must go out to bars...but maybe it didn't go out to the ones on linden on valentine's day? and that's how we ended up at the blue front cafe. it's just a half a block up and across the street from the third place we'd passed, and at least (our thinking went as we passed the window next to the door) it was crowded.

at the blue front cafe we ordered a couple of bud lights, and we might not have stayed for more than those first ones if we hadn't met lisa. lisa was with a friend at the jukebox. the kj (lisa told us later that there was karaoke at the blue front on thursdays) had stopped playing dj, and a man who had been sitting among some patrons at the bar when we came in was now behind it and was yelling for people to play some music, buy some drinks and have some fucking fun. i don't know if we spent enough time with lisa to decided if she was fun. she was definitely something else. and she was definitely looking for fun (although her friend, who was just as conspicuously stuffed into what little she had on in addition to her scanties, was apparently just looking for songs). but when lisa found out that we were into art and stuff our conversation (which up until that point had only been between lisa and the artist) changed course. our beers were almost gone and lisa wanted to buy us more. it was our choice, she said (chirpy baby voice), we could leave if we wanted. we didn't necessarily want to leave, but we didn't feel comfortable taking lisa's money. we did, though (take the money, that is), although we didn't end up feeling bad about it because lisa helped herself to a couple of bottles from the crate on the bar when the bartender had taken a couple of bottles himself and had ducked below the bar to restock a cooler. she put them up on a ledge on the wall where we were standing near the jukebox and only needed to ask us once, indicating the ones on the ledge (sideways, chirpy...drawl?), if she could have one of our beers.

that night at the blue front lisa was wearing a giant red bow in her hair that either did or did not perfectly match the intersection of the persona she was presenting and the one that we presumed upon her. otherwise she was wearing stretch pants and a zane state t-shirt. she's a student, and despite or because of her age she assumes that everyone else she meets is a student too (although maybe, to give her the benefit of a probably unreasonable doubt, that's only at twelve thirty on a thursday night). lisa is forty-seven years old, and she'd never stopped liking art (and stuff). she got her associate's degree from the art institute of pittsburgh in 1985 and then moved to columbus, where she stripped. then lisa probably stole the tv. now she's back in zanesville and back in school. she's going to transfer to franklin, and she's going to be your therapist. she just moved her painting studio into her bedroom so that she can wake up and just be, like, fwaaaahhhhh! but in zanesville you can only really make money doing commissions, she says (and does the artist know what those are?). someone asks you to draw their dog, and you're like, how do you want your dog drawn, you know? that's why she's going back to columbus. and she just moved her painting studio into her bedroom so that she can wake up and just be, like, fwaaaahhhhh! you know? she was incredulous that we would have come to zanesville just to see zanesville. we asked her what there was to do, and she told us to check out the mall.

she also told us that if we were looking for fun that night we should hang out with her friend, because her friend knew how to have fun. at the blue front i thought that she'd said his name was trevor, but when he shook our hands at the goat (across the street, the third bar from before), he introduced himself as matt. he wondered what we were doing in zanesville, and he was incredulous. he wondered where we were staying, and we told him the econo lodge downtown. he told us that he lived downtown, and we asked him what was happening there. everything happening downtown happened at the econo lodge, he said. but it turned out that he wasn't just a motel whore. the bar there was apparently where they did all the live music in town. neil patel had suggested it when he was checking us in, but we hadn't gone because we wanted to make it further than there before there was nowhere else to go. it was half an hour before last call when matt suggested that we join him et al. back at his place. nothing weird, he said. (but he said it really weird.) we asked him about the crows, and he told us that zanesville is just where the crows came home to roost. it's probably difficult being the only one in the village, but matt didn't make it too easy for us to want to follow him anywhere (and i should underscore that sentiment by saying that at that point we wondered if matt or someone else from the blue front might follow us if we walked back downtown alone).

but we walked back downtown alone. we passed the other two bars that we had passed on before, and then we passed through the intersection of linden and adair without turning, which took us past two other bars. we decided that the lone woman playing keno inside the first one must have had an in and kept walk. terry's was obviously already closed. we kept making our way, crisscrossing linden to make sure we kept walking on a sidewalk. the factory at the end of the avenue (an old grain mill?) didn't appear to be operational. the light on in the basement storage (?) room lit up piles of trash and detritus. the artist counseled me against kicking the charity of out potential horror story too hard in the mouth by going inside. so we just let the world famous y-bridge ease us over the confluence of the licking and the muskingham, past the canal -- where we didn't press the flashing green button that was begging us to push it -- and onto main street, where the sheriff was doing laps. romance.

in the morning, we woke up and then went back to sleep. we didn't make it to the econo lodge bar, and we weren't going to make it to breakfast. when we checked out at a minute before noon, neil patel (who lives in a suburb of columbus himself) asked us how we'd enjoyed our night. had we been to weasel boy? i'd told him the night before that after years of driving through it on interstate 70 and seeing the churches and the courthouse from the highway, i'd only ever thought to visit zanesville after finding out that the brewery there made a beer that i liked (after finding out that there was a brewery there, really). (it was a version of the truth.) excuses, excuses, and all of them welcome. i told neil that we hadn't really thought about going until today since the brewery would have been nearly closed by the time that we would have gotten there the night before. so we'd be going that day after it opened at four. and in the meantime we could enjoy the city, neil said, maybe go to the mall.

we went to muddy misers. it's on another bank of the muskingham, across the river to the southwest of downtown. the restaurant is zane grey themed. (the author wasn't the city's namesake, but he was descended from the zanes.) when heidi the waitress asked us where we were from and why we were visiting, we told her something of a mix between what we'd told lisa, matt and neil patel. she was incredulous. but weasel boy didn't open until four, she said, so maybe we could go to the mall.

we left muddy misers and went up the hill toward pioneer park instead. the view of the city from the very top of the hill was probably even better, but the one we got from where we couldn't drive the car any further wasn't bad. we thought that maybe the park was closed for the season, but then we saw that the pedestrian ingress to the side of the driveway was permanently fenced off. (maybe we would have had better luck staying on the other side of the river and trying putnam hill.) the flight of cement stairs that led up from the brick apartment building at the front of the hill ended in chain link. we three pointed around and went back down into town via the crumbling asphalt drive in front of the apartment building. halfway down i asked the artist to stop. it did look like the little pool of water might have been part of a decorative waterfall or a fountain at some point, but it didn't look like anyone had paid any attention to keeping it circulating for a while. someone had, however, put a dozen or so thumb sized gold koi into the two inches of water that had accumulated in the two foot indent that was still in the dirt. and someone must have put them there just that day? someone should have told us about that.

we drove the three miles of state route out to the mall, but neither of us wanted to go in, so we drove back into downtown.

it was good, though, that we went, because the way that we went back in took us right by the muskingham county welcome center. maybe someone there could tell us what to do with our next hour and a half. the snow that had started falling was rainy, and we weren't much for walking around and finding something for ourselves just then. unfortunately, the woman at the reception desk told us, most of the museums were closed. and the churches were hit or miss. they didn't have regular hours for tourists, and it wasn't really the season for going around and knocking on doors. we did, however, get a guide to downtown that briefly described the histories of each of them, and we got it because i asked about one church in particular. it's christopher columbus, the woman at the desk confirmed when i asked her about the facade of st. nicholas. and yes, he has his foot on that native american's neck. the church was much older than i'd thought, and it sounded like the ceramic tile mural had the inertia of history behind it. zanesville, after it was the state capital, came to be called the pottery capital of the world (until it wasn't), and there are big, painted urns all over town (some of whom look like women lurking behind entryway pillars and smoking as the sheriff passes by again in the middle of the night). the internet had also told us that downtown was home to an artists' colony, although neither i nor the artist knew exactly what that meant. but at the mention of it a man came out from a back office and gave us another guide, with a map. he'd just come from studio 202 and told us that the susans should still be there if we wanted to stop by.

when we got there, the one susan was down on the main floor talking to mike, and the other was up in the loft. we looked at the art. then mike left, but not before giving us directions to his old studio (he was in the process of moving) and telling us that he would put out his flag. the space at the rear of the building at 26 north 3rd street in downtown zanesville is beautiful, and the space at the front is being made into apartments. we got a tour. the late middle aged professional artists of the artists' colony are gradually taking over more and more of the unoccupied spaces downtown and turning them into places like studio 202. the city's first friday art event is getting more and more popular. they may not spend the night, but people from columbus (and maybe from pittsburgh) probably visit the city to shop the (expensive, pottery heavy) antique stores on main street all the time. it needs more than a little work, she had told us, but there's a four story building downtown on sale for twenty thousand -- in case we were looking to relocate. i wanted to know about the crows. but the susan working on that fiber art piece with the crow in the center of it didn't have anything in particular to say about them. the banks of the muskingham are, apparently, just where they come home to roost.

the snow had gotten snowier during our time in the studio, so we decided to make our visit to mike's brief. (but we should at least go to say goodbye, we figured, since he'd been nice enough to make a point of putting out a flag.) i was cautioned against taking photographs of his paintings when mike saw my phone in my hand, but i did get one picture of the old masonic temple across the street through a window of the studio and the snow. mike explained to us how he paints with asphalt. i learned, in many ways, about lability.

when we left mike's the snow was coming down even thicker and had accumulated even more, and downtown zanesville looked entirely different than the place into which we'd followed the y-bridge the night before. it was a few minutes past four o'clock, but we went to take another look at the muskingham county court house before we went back across the river to the brewery. it has public restrooms with outdoor access, and you only have to press the button to get out. the court house was the ohio capitol from the fall of 1810 until the spring of 1812, but against my experience of zanesville i prefer to imagine that its more interesting history has been the one that decided to take up matt on his invitation that night at the bar. maybe the sheriff has been involved too.

across the river at weasel boy we run into one of his friends from the night before. he says hello and pats me on the back. i have a growler filled of the bitter sable imperial black ipa. the view of downtown through the window of the taproom and the snow is dreamy, and we've decided to spend the first hour or so of happy hour there. the snow looks wet, and it will probably be easier to drive through on the highway after it's been driven over for a while. i think that we maybe should have tried harder to get to the mexican restaurant where lisa works, but i also think that maybe we shouldn't. then i think about what we'd done instead. the canal had been frozen when we'd driven across it last. those fish we'd seen on our way down from pioneer park had never had a chance.

WATCHING THE CLOCK; parts 2 and 3

the goal was to be there at four when the gallery started its free thursday hours and watch as much of "the clock" as we could before it closed at eight o'clock. but, unfortunately, our stylist couldn't get us in until exactly then, and, admittedly, the confusion at the salon the day before had been half our fault. (when i was in the chair she said she had a surprise for me and took out some waxing strips to do my neck, but i suspect that she did it more to save time than as a courtesy. apparently we were all watching the clock that afternoon. i should have said something to stop her after the rash i'd gotten from my last waxing but i didn't. in the interest of time, perhaps.) then, after the both of us were finished, it made more sense for us to go pick up our third on the south side instead of having her meet us at the wexner center -- and then we were all hungry. so we didn't sit down in the screening room at the gallery until six forty-five, which, all things considered, wasn't that bad. on screen, the storefront shutters were going down and the people were sitting down to eat. (it would have probably been excruciating if we hadn't taken the extra time to have something ourselves.) nicolas cage was waking up to have a cigarette...maybe, although that might actually have been part of part one. unfortunately, maybe, it all blends together when you spread the twenty-four hours of "the clock" across so many more. then the kindly security woman kicked us out -- over-promptly at seven fifty-six. fortunately, it turns out that my second has a membership to the gallery which gets him free admission for both himself and a guest. but "the clock" had just been part of the plan for thursday, and anyway, that day it had turned out that we were three. plus, we still had time. and on saturday we had all night at the gallery, but as it turned out we were caught up in the game until midnight. then i can't say what happened for the following two hours -- or maybe i just won't -- but we didn't get to the gallery until two fifteen. (two thirty?) we made sure to eat (although and where all this time was katherine hepburn? was she there that night, or was that another time? or, maybe it was all three of them. from two fifteen (or two thirty) until four in the morning, watching "the clock" is strange. a sleepless night on screen is sympathetically consolatory, even for the knowledge that the people you're watching must be going through the same desperate circles and awful inquietudes as you've experienced in those sleepless nights of your own. more or less alone in the dark, you appreciate that you're not alone. then you're just happy for a cab.

and then three days later you're awake, sleepless, watching the clock, because even though you should think of the night as an opportunity -- that it's nice, for better or for worse, that right now all you have is time, and it's yours to do with however you please -- instead all you can do is watch the clock. then you're just happy for a xanax, and you accept your giving in because you remember that, at least, the least you can do for yourself is remember that, appropriately shot and edited, what's happening right now could be art.

CODEPENDENT THE BARBARIAN

whee! the members of team super awesome adventure princess know how to have a good time. well, they know how to try to make sure that the people around them have a good time, so when they all get together the times are more or less pretty okay. they talk about their separate adventures, and they commiserate. (they can commiserate.) and that's what they drove through the snow to do at the new rehab tavern in newly gentrifying franklinton (oh, the pathetic ironies...!), which turned out to be a pretty good place for super awesome commiseration and almost everything else -- save and except chicken wings. the nearly toothless woman with the winning smile who went way to far to try to give me the chair that was waiting for the friend she was expecting could probably have been on the team. at the very least she was a refreshingly welcome part of the cross-section of the city that was represented that night at rehab. i had dropped a pin, and the bat pod was there in...some dozens of minutes. elvira didn't want to take our quarters, so we played pool while we waited instead. when the team was all assembled we put ourselves on display at the table on the stage in the window, to watch the snow, we'll say, or to not be able to see the televisions so well maybe. but we did move down to the floor when there was space for all of us there, and that way no one needed to be at a table on a stool. we caught up, commiserated, rehashed the old adventures we'd shared, recommiserated, rehashed, recommiserated. our relationships needed work, but who's didn't? we needed, of course, to work on ourselves within our relationships, but that's always a thing. it would be a super awesome adventure! and, of course, we knew that without having to convene the meeting, but it had been a while since we'd all gotten together to commiserate. we all felt much better about our adventuring as a result. then we checked out of rehab and went to crash a party on the other side of downtown. because it isn't a party until you chase a cupcake sandwich with a sarsaparilla that a stranger spiked for you and the straight crashees get called hipster faggots by an angry wingman. that's right, ladies and gentlemen, we always aim to please. and then we wake up and remember that we were supposed to take some time to think about the boundaries we were going to set on the date we need to show up for in an hour. gonna have to rally the team back at rehab.

WATCHING THE CLOCK

way to go, wexner. no sooner is leibovitz gone (and almost forgotten) than they've put up something else with a special draw. and it isn't the more american photographs exhibition. that's what those are, to be sure, and we walked through them because he'd never seen the gallery and because everything's free to everyone on the first sunday of every month. you might as well. but no, we had gone specifically to watch the clock. and no, it's not like leibovitz or warhol. it isn't a first or an only. or at least not in any way big (its installation at the wexner center is, to be fair, its midwest debut). but christian marclay's twenty-four hour timepiece marathon of timepieces is definitely the stuff of legend -- and watching it on sunday while the rest of the city got ready to watch the super bowl meant that it was not only free but also blissfully accommodating. we had the afternoon -- and we had the front and center sofa -- so we sat down and watched. "the clock" is twenty-four hours long, and, to be fair, i should say that we only watched it for an hour and a half. (the front and center sofa affords a great viewing experience, but it does nothing for the neck.) still, even only watching it from one-thirty to three p.m. was enough to get a good sense of what it means to watch it. "the clock" is twenty-four hours long, and it's assembled from thousands of film clips "that are rationalized as kindred in that each of them contains within it a reference to a precise minute over the span of a day's twenty-four hours"* (and that precise minute is synched with the minute in which you're watching "the clock"). not only that, they're also organized by the progress of other visual themes, not to mention that some movies and television shows will recur as time has progressed (provided that time is of their essence). i'm not sure how some of the gallery goers on sunday were able to stay for only a few minutes. (maybe they were there to see the photographs.) it's not hard to appreciate how much research and planning it must have required to produce the work -- and we're given the metrics of time and assistants by the notes given by the gallery. but i also found it entertaining. it is, of course, clever, but it can also be funny or brooding, not to mention that its never ending span of twenty-four hours is also a mashup history of film and video. it plays, so to speak, with time. but for as much as it collects, it also keeps discarding and moving on. "the clock" is playful, but it's also daunting. before you can even think to find something to write on to record the time, the scene you didn't recognize but would have liked to remember is gone, and "the clock" marches on. then there's the other issue of time: "its duration qualifies it as an effectively 'impossible' task for a viewer to experience completely, i.e., to remain sensible and alert in its presence for its full rotation."* thankfully, the wexner center has lowered the threshold of impossibility for anyone who wants to watch as much of "the clock" as they can (even if they can't do it in succession). the gallery is scheduled to stay open all night for each of three more nights before the exhibition closes in april so that anyone who's interested can watch the hours of "the clock" that are impossible to see while the gallery is closed. plus, during those evening, nighttime and morning hours, the gallery reception desk won't be open to collect any entrance fees. there's also at least one more first sunday, not to mention that entrance to the gallery is free every thursday after four in the afternoon. it might not be an entire twenty-four, but that's more than enough incentive and opportunity for me to give "the clock" a few more hours of my own. plus, when you're inside you might have an overwhelming sense of being stuck in it, but you never have to check the time.

*bill horrigan, curator at large for the wexner center