Art Scatter doesn’t have much to say about this year’s MacArthur genius grants, half-a-million bucks, no strings, no waiting. We usually get a bit queasy when they are announced, not because we ourselves are expecting the phone call (even Art Scatter isn’t THAT delusional) but because we fear that someone we know will be on the list, someone we can’t abide. So we are happy this year. We don’t know a soul. (We just saw The Big Lebowski again and have determined that we don’t use “abide” nearly enough, as in “The Dude abides.”)
Truth be told, I always LIKE the list, mostly people I’ve never heard of doing things that sound amazing if not impossible, a sort of scatter in its own right. This year seems heavy on the neuroscience. I have great respect for neuroscientists. I have no idea how one spends her day, of course. Peering into people’s ears with one of those ear-examiner things with a little light, except it’s a laser and they are picking up electrical activity in one lobe or another? That’s a bit like what I imagine. Or on darker days, slicing fresh brain into ultra thin slices. I started to add, “the size my mother wants her cake sliced at birthday parties.” Sorry. I’ll spare you my astro-physicist fantasies.
I did recognize a few of the fellows (that’s what we’ll be called when we are chosen: MacArthur Fellows), especially the ones in the arts. Jennifer Tipton is an amazing lighting designer — techies rule! I saw saxophonist Miguel Zenon at a two Portland Jazz Festivals (don’t get me started: bring it back!). Is he “creating an entirely new jazz language for the 21st Century” as the MacArthur people suggest? Probably not, but he can really play and his combo of Latin, African and Caribbean influences IS really interesting and listenable. We’ve already written so much about Alex Ross, the New Yorker music critic who wrote “The Rest Is Noise,” that he probably thinks we are stalking him. No complaint there. I haven’t read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun about life in Nigeria after the civil war with Biafra, but the award makes me want to. And I don’t know Tara Donovan, who takes ordinary objects such as paper clips and straws and makes various sensuous shapes out of them. The photographs I’ve seen are pretty cool.
I think my favorite winner is John Ochsendorf, a structural engineer at MIT who uses the “wisdom” of ancient builders to solve contemporary engineering problems. He’s studied rope suspension bridges designed by the Incans, Romanesque church vaults and buttresses and he and his students designed England’s Pines Calyx dome, pictured above, “a robust, energy-efficient structure built from local resources using a tile vaulting system patented in the 19th century by Spanish architect Rafael Guastavino,” according to the MacArthur notes. My google-snooping suggests that this is exactly right. I think it’s important to our sense of history that we understand just how smart, just how adaptive those who came before us have been. So, well done MacArthur peeps, well done. (This is NOT sucking up!)