Saturday, February 16, 2008

James Turrell in Portland

So I was one of those losers who didn't call early enough to get a reserved seat (in fact, I didn't call at all) for the James Turrell talk today; instead, I stood in line for a possible standing room admission. I got there at 1:30pm for the 4pm talk, and I was the 5th in line! I was pretty confident I'd get in, but as we got closer to 4pm, the PNCA staff were walking around telling us that it wasn't looking good because it was taking them so long to check in the people who had reserved. Turns out, they had 600 people with reserved seats!

But miracle of miracles, we got in; and actually it looks like almost everyone got in.

James Turrell is very Santa Claus like, not at all the he-man that I had imagined. (C'mon, here's a guy who's digging a BIG hole inside a volcano, wouldn't you picture him to be a he-man type, too?) Pretty soft-spoken, and told some sexy jokes (I guess that's NOT Santa Claus like). And my claim to fame for the day? My question to him got picked (they only picked 4 out of the bunch from over 600 people), and it was the first one! Ha!

4 comments:

Michael5000 said...

I could look up who this James Turrell is, but that would deprive you of the joy of implying that I should have known all along.

fingerstothebone said...

You JUST, I mean JUST, missed my inserting the link to James Turrell on wiki. You would like him! Should definitely check him out.

gl. said...

but what was your question? :)

fingerstothebone said...

gl -- 'Do you know how your work is seen/perceived by people who are color-blind?' And he took a long time to basically say, no, he didn't know.

And I spelled 'Santa Claus' wrong! I guess I'll go fix it now. And I guess it's obvious my experience with Santa Claus is somewhat limited.