There is a transparent plastic Buddha in the East River, floating just off the shore of Socrates Sculpture Park. It is called Floating Echo by Chang-Jin Lee, and is perhaps the most striking of many striking sculptures in the 2012 Emerging Artists Fellowship Exhibition. I had seen it yesterday from halfway across the river when I stood by the lighthouse on Governors Island. From that distance I wondered what it was. It appeared to be a strange shimmering buoy. This morning I saw it up close from the park. The Buddha’s head bobbed forward and back, gently, with the ripple of the water. As if she was laughing or bowing. The low morning sun flashed a vertical silver streak down her left hand side. It was echoed by the horizontal silver streak of the cars whizzing along FDR Drive in Manhattan on the far bank of the river.
(Written on 12 Sep)
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I’m in the last month of my maternity leave with CMH. It can be divided up into four month-long chapters. The first three were: post-natal weeks when Mum was staying (the chaotic and humbling delight of being in the presence of a brand-new-born); then the four of us, as in C, JNH, CMH and I hanging out as a family in Astoria’s summer heat (many pizza slices and ice-creams, playground sprinklers, and JNH practicing riding his new scooter); then London (pints in pubs in Greenwich, new AirLine cable car over the Thames, witnessing a pig race etc). Now during this last month, I’m alone with CMH on the weekdays as C is back teaching at La Guardia and JNH is at his Montessori.
We’re having some blissful city strolls. Each day feels precious and complete. To an extent I’m free to determine their rhythm, choosing which paths to take. Yet CMH also has a say, in that when he wakes up from a sleep I’ll stop to feed him or liberate him for a while from stroller or papoose – we’ll pause to absorb the environment wherever that may be. And I seek out parks and other quiet shady spaces more than I would otherwise.
Last Thursday we went to Flushing. I could tell the story of my time in NYC through visits to Flushing but that’s for another time. We got out of the 7 train at the 111th Street stop in Corona and walked a few blocks East to Flushing Meadows Corona Park. We skirted around the edge of the New York Hall of Science and the birdhouse of Queens Zoo, where through black railings, the curved glass and white metal frame of their enclosure and some dense foliage I glimpsed a scarlet macaw, preening itself. We crossed the roaring Grand Central Parkway on a narrow pedestrian bridge and walked towards Queens Museum.
A group of young people were gardening in a rectangular rose bed. One, who looked latino, said hello to us, and then when I asked more specifics about their work he replied by asking where my accent was from. When I said London, England, he said the usual “that’s awesome” (I never know why), and “I have a friend from Birmingham” (it’s not always Birmingham, but most people have an English friend they refer to). I’ve been here almost exactly five years now. So it takes me aback when people ask where my accent’s from. There are plenty of New Yorkers who don’t have a New York accent. Now I tend to tag “but I live here now” on my answer. The volunteer said that he’s originally from Arizona, and that the group do service in the park every Wednesday, and with that CMH and I went on our way.
In front of us was the unisphere. It is an enormous steel globe that was donated by US Steel to the 1964 World Fair. It has come to be a symbol of Queens, appearing on maps of the borough and in the opening credits to coverage of the US Open tennis (which happened to be underway at the stadiums right next to the park). This was the first time I had seen the unisphere with its fountains working. Big vertical jets of water formed a circle around it, shifting in height from low to high and back again. A woman was doing tai-chi type exercises. She seemed to be conducting the fountains.
Suddenly with a swoosh the fountains stopped. Their roar, which I hadn’t really noticed before as I was so struck by seeing them, was silenced. I stood still and listened to the sounds that emerged in their space. There were cicadas. Birds calling, one (perched on a dormant floodlight) with a regular shrill single cry. People talking on their cell phones. A lawn mower at work. The hum of cars on the close but unseen expressway. A light crunch of passing bicycle wheels. Footsteps. A cough. Cranking, as two men got to work fixing something on the fountains, which presumably was why they had been turned off.
I was reminded of an article I had read recently on soundscapes, by Bernie Krause. They can be used to measure the health of a habitat. For example the effect of even minimal logging activity in an old growth forest can reduce a cacocphany of sound produced by a wide range of species to the much thinner sound of just a few. A soundscape, Krause said, has three basic sources: the geophony (non biological natural sounds, like wind or waves); the biophony (sounds of animals other than humans); and the anthrophony (man-made).
In this case, we were in a city and the sounds were predominantly anthropomorphic. But at least, I thought, there were many of them. And at least, in the form of the bird and the lawn-mower, there were signs of nature-other-than-man surviving, and of man making an effort to ensure that.
I had intended to go to Queens Museum to see an exhibition on Caribbean art. But it turned out that the museum doesn’t open till midday and it was only 10 o’clock. So instead, after a pause to feed CMH on a bench, during which the flow of people headed towards the tennis tournament thickened, we crossed through the park towards Flushing.
We emerged onto College Point Boulevard a few blocks South of Flushing center. (Another Boulevard, in all its pedestrian unfriendliness). By this time I needed to pee. “Kane’s Diner” beckoned from the other side of the road. I went in, intending just to use the bathroom, but when one of the waiters greeted us with a smile and a “sit anywhere you like” I decided to stay for a late breakfast/early lunch. In fact there was just one booth free, so I took it, and CMH lay on the pleather-cushioned bench beside me, studying for much of the time the bottles of sauces gathered at the end of our table. The plastic-backed menu was an overwelmigngly dense collage of photographs of the food, with pictures of prominent republicans who had dined there worked in (Trump and Guliani both featured).
At another recent diner-visit, to Court Diner in Long Island City, I’d been thinking that what works about diner food is by no means the individual ingredients, but the combination of them – the fact you don’t just get an omlette, but an omlette with loads of stuff stuffed into it and potatoes and brown toast on the side and ketchup or brown sauce or both to go on top. And coffee refills. And the familiar diner decor and atmosphere of course.
Off we went again along the Boulevard, which is dominated by tile, bath and kitchen cabinet shops with the occasional anomaly like “Hisun LED”. Its lobby, aflame with neon, looked like that of a hotel from outer space. We hit the town center by “Bland Houses” housing project. I was thinking what an unfortunate name that was, when it was contradicted by a small, bright gardening plot by one of the entrances with a hand-painted sign, “the garden of life after death.” We went up Roosevelt Avenue to Main street and wandered into a few places along the way: swish, tempting Iris Tea and Bakery; St George’s Episcopal church, in which a helium balloon had got trapped on one of the helicopter-fans right up near the roof to be spun around and around; a boutiquey-shopping center connected to Flushing’s Sheraton hotel; and a Chinese food market on the corner of 41st Avenue and Main where the seething fish counter featured a tank of fat Baramudi fish crammed so tight they hardly had room to move.
It was time for a rest and more milk for CMH at Flushing library. Queens Library has just been saved from a massive potential city budget cut, after a passionate campaign to prevent it. As some pointed out, the library system is one of the things that make hyperdiversity work so well in the borough. Then it was back on the 7 train to Queensboro’ Plaza and the N up home to Astoria, wrapping up a day of the city delivering unpredictable delights. Since then we’ve been on wanderings in Roosevelt Island, Chinatown and the LowerEast Side, and Coney Island (the latter along with C and JNH at a weekend)...hopefully more on those anon.
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