Sunday, January 19, 2014

Broaching the Subject

I was having lunch at Little Italy this past week when I noticed the art.

Okay, Max is a brilliant chef and his food is always first rate and even the Special is really special so there is just nothing negative to say about Little Italy, except maybe the art.

Now when you open a restaurant the last thing you think about is the decoration of the walls and that is after all just as it should be. You don’t often go to a great restaurant for the art.

Little Italy has the cozy thing down pat and even as I looked at the art I noticed with the first touch of Oregon sunlight streaming through the windows turning the main room warm with slightly orange light and it made me want to order a big glass of red wine, nothing great, a Barolo or a Valpolicella and kick of my shoes and sit back and spend the rest of the day lingering in the sun.

Okay so no one wants me to take off my shoes in a restaurant and even though Max is a superlative host I am pretty sure the turnover rate to sustain a solid business model wouldn’t allow for lounging in the dinning room over one lousy glass of table red well past serving hours and in direct conflict with the Croaker’s instructions for my ongoing recovery so it was just a fantasy, but the fact that I conjured it up tells you the dinning room is pretty terrific just the way it sits…but I couldn’t help wishing that the art was a bit more challenging for the eye cause the food would challenge any pallet and great food deserves a great location and the weather was cooperating so why not the art?

Well, insert dramatic pause, the purpose of a restaurant is not to display art. But maybe the skills which make for such an artistic expression in food limit the expression in the visual field? There are people and I deeply and truly hate them who have artistic skills in all things and I hope that they get crab grass or athlete’s foot or the heartbreak of psoriasis, but not everyone with great talent has it in all areas of endeavor.

Now since I have a bit of talent maybe I should take on the job of making an overture to Max about putting up some local art and I will take that under advisement, cause I don’t want to risk making him mad and getting banned and not being able to destroy my diet and make the Quack climb the walls when he checks my A1C and so maybe I will think about some other restaurant which needs local art but that doesn’t mean that you should and when you bring up the subject you won’t have to worry about the diet and the Quack and the being banned stuff and that will make it much easier.

But in order to do any of this broaching of subjects which is much more difficult than poaching an egg cause that is just a homonym and not to be confused with broaching which does not involve eggs at all you must first have something in hand which might just provide a better atmospheric ambiance than the usual Thomas Kinkade villages which seem to hang on every public wall and have no direct relation to what is being served there and that is not a good thing so check around in that shed you stuff all of your back stock in and try to find something that would actually fit in with the decor.

Now I’m thinking about those nifty, neat and cool microbreweries of which we happen to be lucky enough to actually have and they’ve done a pretty good job making the pub part of the operation look inviting and so to get Carmen to think about letting you hang something which you created in his fantastic place not to mention getting it past the Head of Operations or “She Who Must be Obeyed” if you are a PBS fan, it’s gotta be good, right and fit perfectly.

Which is why you should actually look at the place before you do any of that advanced broaching.

Now me I’m a photographer and I have an idea which is unusual cause usually I just sit around until the moss starts to block my vision but since I do have an idea I have to tailor it to not only be something that Carmen would like and maybe even get past the gimlet eye of Annie but it has to be something I can write about in this blog so it has to be something that you would want to read and that makes it more difficult but I have an idea and since it requires work that is all I will say until I have actually done the work and have the thing ready to write about here and that is all I can say for the moment.

But you probably have an idea that is ready right now and since you do you can put it into practice and get out there and start your broaching and get the ball rolling and then you can take a look at some other places which might just need an artist’s eye and that will make your own work more accessible and then you will sell more and get filthy rich and wind up doing an interview on the Today show and have Matt asking all those silly questions and then you will get invited to all of the parties and meet up with a Kardashian and get married…oh hell no, I don’t want that for any of you.

But the part about looking around for businesses which have a need for art is the right thing to do even if it does expose you to potential Kardashianitis.

So take a look at your art, then think about the places where you go all of the time and which need some better art and maybe you’ll get those paintings out of the shed and into the public eye and even broach the subject with Max so that I don’t have to and won’t get banned and can still make my Quack cringe when my A1C comes back!

1 comment:

  1. Great post! The fact that you means someone is reading and liking it! Congrats!That’s great advice.

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