Annie Liebovitz’s exhibition of her Master Set opened at the Wexner Center for the Arts in September. Hordes of beautiful and not-so-beautiful people showed up for the opening night to view the beautiful and not-so-beautiful people, the made-immortal icons of Annie’s art. The Cashes and Carters, the Obamas, the Neville Brothers. Meryl, Nicole, Whoopi. Emmylou, Lucinda, Roseanne, Patti. John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Billy Carter and Margaux Hemingway, Meg and Jack White. Soldiers, heads of state, longhorn steers, poets, politicians and their brothers, singers, dancers, cyclists, weightlifters, actors, artists. Indeed, Annie has described hers as “a life through a lens.”
Then came October, which ended in a storm of the century, though we seem to be having a lot of those lately. Katrina, Ike, Isaac, others in between. And then, like a sister that no one paid enough attention to, that sat around and fed off too many wrong-headed ideas about hurricanes, who loaded up on fistfuls of salted fish and seaweed, Sandy punched her way through the Caribbean and past the Carolina coast to fall hard on the Northeast, slapping Virginia and D.C. on her way up to New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. Not a nice girl.
Chloe is complicated, but November seems to have given her enough room to settle in. Not that she wasn’t already settled in. A tuxedo cat of large proportion and larger personality, Chloe seems to have decided that biting is indeed her preferred form of communication, the food bowl can never be full enough, and reaching through the open back of a chair to swat at fine-spun sweaters or corduroy trousers or whatever passes by is terribly pleasing. Much more pleasing than chasing the field mouse up the serviceberry tree and hours later giving up the pursuit to boredom.
Three autumn months gone, gone, going. Three names. Annie, Sandy, Chloe. Artist, storm, feline. Each has owned the world in her exceptional way. Vision, destruction, insistence. Focus, deluge, seduction. Film, surge, teeth.