NY missive no 183 – Fashion Institute of Technology, and “multiple pieces we can play with”

JNH, inspired by “Stranger Things”, has recently become interested in acting. This January he started classes on Saturday mornings at The Barrow Group in Manhattan. It’s near the 28th Street flower markets where we bought the pussy willow branches for C and my wedding, and near 333 Seventh Avenue where my office was when I first moved to New York. So bringing JNH here is like walking through memories. Those memories are seen through a lens of the pandemic – a fine, hazy film that shifts the way things look in retrospect but in ways that are not entirely clear yet, nor should they be.

Today, I spotted the costumes on display through the windows at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Their bright splashes of color are in stark contrast to the modernist gray slabs of the building itself. After dropping JNH off, I went to check them out. All the installations are created by students or teachers at FIT.

There’s “Walking Palm” by Woolpunk, a glorious spindly, stretching tree draped with mossy and occasionally shiny wool. On her website, Woolpunk explains: “Walking Palm is inspired by the tree on the verge of extinction which can be found in the Amazonian Rainforest. The tree has the amazing ability to re-root itself using stilt roots which is the ultimate sign of resilience.” There’s something of a contradiction in that; if it is so resilient, why is it on the verge of extinction, but that just makes you root for it even more.

Woolpunk's Walking Palm

There are breathtaking dresses by Esther Yitao, constraining and liberating at the same time, the wire of the dresses shaping and extending the forms of the women/mannequins who wear them.

Esther Yitao Li, Supima Collection

Esther Yitao Li, Sketch lineup of the "Distortion" collection

Melanie Reim found her collection of shoes in a closet during the pandemic. She decided to draw them one by one, accompanied by their story – stories of buying them, of wearing them, of the places where she was and the people she was with when doing so. “I am a fraction of the way through,” her exhibition statement says, “determined to continue, even as the world opens up, and it will be time for shoe shopping again.”

Melanie Reim, Shoe Stories

And there’s Anabella Bergero’s installation of dresses that emerged from a four-step exploration of the formation of her identity in Argentina and Mexico: old family photographs, including from the Argentinean village where her father was born, dress markets in Mexico where she had shopped for quinceanera accessories, wooden folk masks, and an indigenous festival in Oaxaca. 

“This project was building space for different configurations of identify by first acknowledging that we are not this monolith of how we were born. We have multiple pieces we can play with,” she says.

Anabella Bergero, Constructing Identities

Pieces do not always fit neatly together. Sometimes some are more in focus than others. That is certainly one thing that the pandemic has done, shaken pieces, set them adrift, broken them up or soldered them together, and we can respond - or not - as we feel is right in any given moment, or just watch, and reflect.

New York missive no 125: The Bronx is Burning, technology, Stumptown Coffee

I just finished reading Ladies & Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, by journalist Jonathan Mahler. C had recommended it to me, prompted by the death of former NYC mayor Ed Koch who features in the book. He pulled his hardback copy off the shelf and said “I think you’ll like this.” He knows I like reading books about NYC and enjoyed it himself. And it has added significance for him, as it recounts an era in the city’s life – 1977 –when he was a five year-old growing up in Washington Heights, just old enough to have some isolated memories. (It also happens to be the year in which I was born, in London).

When the September 11, 2001 attacks happened, Mahler was in the middle of researching the looting and arson that flared during the power-failure in July 1977, when the whole city was plunged into darkness. He acknowledges the events were not on the same scale – an act of terror that killed thousands, and a powercut. But he says, “both were extraordinarily trying moments for the city, and I couldn’t help pondering how different New York felt in their respective wakes.” After 9/11, “there was a sense that our tallest towers had been felled but that our foundation was more secure than ever.” After the 1977 blackout, “New York had felt shaken to its core, and America had been anything but sympathetic.”

1977 was a transformative year for the city, too. Disintegration was accompanied by rehabilitation. The book weaves the seemingly disparate stories of the mayoral race involving Bella Abzug, Abe Beame, Mario Cuomo and the ultimately victorious Ed Koch, the tabloid wars between the New York Daily News and the New York Post (plus Murdoch’s Murdoch-ization of the latter), the search for the serial killer Son of Sam, the blackout, and the infighting within the New York Yankees, who went on to win the World Series at the end of the year. Mahler originally intended the Yankees to be the subject of the book but the city soon took the foreground.

I was amused and not at all surprised to discover that while some neighborhoods were razed by looting during the blackout and Greenwich Village was the scene of candlelit dinners, on Weehawken Street in far-flung West Village a gay orgy took place. (Weehawken Street is where I lived on first moving to NYC). Mahler quotes the recollections of one participant, as told in the magazine Michael’s Thing: “The small one block was a beehive of made insane activity…Nudity was the rule; many guys were pushed against cars and performed upon with the full consent of everyone there.”

Bushwick in Brooklyn was the area worst hit by the looting. Instead of conveying the chaos and moving on, Mahler stops to trace the neighborhood’s trajectory over the preceding twenty years to look for the reasons why. And when it comes to describing the arson fires in Bushwick, which had begun in 1969, he explains why the design of the buildings made them prone to fire and the way the fire teams had to tackle them. The often wooden buildings, with air shafts over their stairwells, were connected by attic spaces that made is easy for the fire to spread from one building to the next. Fire fighters would poke holes in the roof of a burning building to try to lure the flames upwards. Either they climbed through smoke and flames to do that from the inside, or hung from a ladder outside, “right in the line of fire the instant the flames started licking toward the sky.”

Another nugget I’ll share here. It's a description of a typical New Yorker. During the police search for Son of Sam, Rupert Murdoch put one of his strongest reporters, fellow Australian Steve Dunleavy, on the story (he was determined not to be outdone by Jimmy Breslin at the Daily News, who at one point received a personal letter from the killer). The book mentions that Mario Cuomo described Dunleavy later in a profile as a real New Yorker (aside from his right-wing politics): “he’s feisty, he’s resilient, he’s self-made, he stands up for what he believes in, and he can even, on occasion, be charming.” That description fits so many New Yorkers, including Ed Koch.

The Bronx is Burning is such a great read not just because of Mahler’s meticulous reporting combined with pacy storytelling skills, though they are critical, but also because he hit upon such a rich and compelling subject. Disparate narrative subjects are linked effortlessly by a single theme, that of a city at a turning point. For me the book is a reminder that it is only by slowing down to that extent – for example by telling the story of one year in a life of a city in such meticulous detail – that you can ever begin to get to the heart of things.

***************************************

A story that should be told in that level of detail but I doubt ever will be is that of brothers Toor Jan, 11, and Andul Wodood, 12. In Feburary they were out collecting firewood with their donkeys in Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan, when they were killed by gunfire from a NATO helicopter. The donkeys were killed too. The new US commander in Afghanistan, General Dunford, said the killings were an accident and apologized. Which of course he should, but I doubt any apology could ever be enough for the parents of those boys.

***************************************

There’s something disconcerting about the endless flick between twitter accounts, hit of send and receive buttons or scrolls down Facebook pages. It is a search for affirmation. As if that flick or hit or scroll will turn up something wonderful, something that recognizes that you, yes you, are the best being on the planet but no, of course that ever happens, so we just set ourselves up for a series of disappointments by searching cyberspace that way, it’s all a bit ridiculous, but still we do it.

Fast-forward fifty years and most of us will have stopped looking at the physical world and at each other.

***************************************

Talking of things that we still do anyway, about once a week I get a coffee on my way to work from Stumptown Coffee in the Ace Hotel on the corner of 29th Street and Broadway. This article gives a great portrait of the two economies at work in the neighborhood. One is that of cheap wholesale goods. “Rhinestones and ribbons” one storefront reads, and another, “Tiger Accessories”, which when I passed the other morning triggered an entertaining procession of accessorized tigers through my mind. The other is the world of hip, rich, international technoscenti, drawn by the Ace Hotel that opened in 2009. Stumptown Coffee epitomizes the latter. The coffee is roasted in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The servers are clad in hipster-meets-nineteen-forties attire. They wear chic shades of brown, accompanied by thick rimmed glasses and wide brimmed hats. In the mornings there is always a queue out the door and into the hotel lobby. The coffee is great but also pricey, like $4.50 for a latte. And yet still I go.

New York missive no 102 - Second wedding anniversary

This time two years ago was C's and my wedding day. Like today it was a cold day with a bright, clear blue sky. Then, there was still snow on the ground from the previous week.

The pussy willows sold along 28th Street at this time of year always remind me of the wedding. Four big pots of them decorated the venue - a fabulous wedding contribution from sister P.

New York missive no 96 - Occupy Wall Street, the map of Taiwan, slavery in rural & urban areas

The man on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 28th Street comes and goes. When he’s gone he invariably leaves a trace, like this one.

*********************

My fascination with all things maps continues. I learned recently that Taiwan is sometimes referred to as a sweet potato because that’s what its shape looks like when viewed on a N-S map. And that when viewed W-E it looks like a whale.

*********************

Recently I finally read Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. One of the many things that struck me about it was his descriptions of the differences between how slaves were treated in the city and the countryside. Such as this one:

“I had resided but a short time in Baltimore before I observed a marked difference, in the treatment of slaves, from that which I had witnessed in the country. A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation. He is much better fed and clothed, and enjoys privileges altogether unknown to the slave on the plantation. There is a vestige of decency, a sense of shame, that does much to curb and check those outbreaks of atrocious cruelty so commonly enacted upon the plantation. He is a desperate slaveholder, who will shock the humanity of his nonslaveholding neighbors with the cries of his lacerated slave…”

It made me think about cruelty in urban and rural areas today. Can the same be said, that in an urban area people are more aware of what their neighbors are doing so they behave better? The density of housing is such that in many cases I’m sure that’s not the case anymore: abuses can be buried in the crowd, and even when they’re noticed often people won’t want to intervene, hardened as they are by it, or used as they are to not interfering with others’ business.

*********************

I think that ports and peripheries are where the heart of a city can be found. In Manhattan, not that it’s a city in and of itself, there is little port and periphery left. But there are remnants of them on the far West side of Midtown. A few Saturdays ago J and I arrived over there early for his swimming class. He was asleep so I passed the time walking in a loop down to the river and back, along streets in the 50s.

On the walk we passed symbols of how the city functions. Of how the basic dynamic is one of wealthy people living it up and poor people working to keep them doing so. We passed gleaming car garages. I had no idea there were so many out that way. The cars posed in their glass-walled showrooms like frozen zoo animals. We saw two massive docked cruise liners spewing out their passengers who emerged onto the city streets with an air of conquest, and spewing out their workers who crossed over the West Side Highway straight to a call center to speak with home. We got a glimpse into the stable where the horses who pull carriages for tourists in Central Park are kept. It was gloomy in there. And we saw a man cleaning out the stable, tipping horse poo into a steaming bin.

*********************

I’m glad that the Occupy Wall Street protests and related movements around the world are focused on national governments. That’s as opposed to past protests with more international targets, like the 1999 “Battle in Seattle” against the World Bank. Because ultimately it is the governments that individuals, in democracies, have voted into power, and so we should, if things were functioning ok, have some influence over how that power is used. The fact that we don’t is the heart of the matter.

I recently re-read the final chapter of Joel Bakan’s The Corporation and again was convinced by his argument: that given corporations in their current form are only legally accountable to their shareholders they cannot be expected to act in anyone’s interests but their own unless compelled to by the governments that created them (“incorporated”) them in the first place. “Many among the corporate elite and their defenders would likely sing ‘Hallelujah' the day activists against corporate abuse abandoned government,” he says.


(sign down in Zuccotti Park)

New York missive no 93 - The man on the corner of 28th Street and Sixth Avenue

New murals have sprung up all around the Western end of Astoria's 30th Ave, the second phase of the Welling Court Mural Project. This is one of them.

***********************************************************

One of the most creative people I have ever come across is a man who set up his home on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 28th Street in Manhattan. Some days I walk that way to work, some days not. Each time I passed his abode of boxes something new was going on with it. Once, there was a small pink stroller perched there with a “For sale” sign. Another time, one of the assorted collection of objects on display was a Beatles LP record with a note, “You don’t have to be English to love the Beatles.”

I rarely saw the man himself, an elderly white man. Sometimes a cardboard roof covered all the boxes and I presumed he was asleep inside. Other days, the whole home was exposed but its inhabitant was nowhere to be seen.

Then one day only fragments of the home were there, a few scattered boxes. The next, there was no sign of it at all. I felt like the space where he had been was a wound on the sidewalk. It may be over sentimental, but I really felt like the destruction, removal, whatever it was, of that man’s sidewalk home was a blow to New York and to spontaneity and other things.

Last Thursday on my way to work suddenly the home was there again. It was as if nothing had happened, except for a certain fingers-up bravado in its appearance. A large, closed umbrella stuck out from one corner. Elegant branches were propped along one wall suggesting a well-trimmed privet hedge in the suburbs. And the whole thing was festooned with American flags. There must have been ten of them.

On my way back to the subway station the man was there, standing up inside his home with a row of second hand books spread out in front of him along the sidewalk, and a bucket full of rose petals. “I’m glad to see you back,” I said. It was the first time I’d spoken to him.

“Come here, come here”, he said with startling enthusiasm. He beckoned and held out the bucket of rose petals and told me to take one. A plastic cup containing notes and coins was next to him. I took a rose petal and gave him 25 cents, in retrospect very stingy of me. What’s a fair price for a rose petal?

“Take more, take more.”

“One’s good,” I said. “Thank you.”

New York missive no 90 - Naming colours, and Astoria Park on a grey morning

One day I was getting on the downtown 1 train at 59th Street when a young Chinese girl asked if I could help her name a colour. She was clutching a large board. It had scraps of different coloured material and paper stuck onto it. Rather desperately, she said “excuse me, but what name do you give this colour?” I paused then offered “ivory".

“Good, ivory," she said, and wrote it on the board. We got on the train. She sat next to me, and for the next few stops we worked through the rest of her colours. Some were easier than others. There was “baby blue”, “mauve“ and "black”. We both got off at 28th Street: she was headed to the Fashion Institute of Technology where presumably her colour-naming would be put to the test.

**********************************************************

The day before JNH’s birthday I took him for an early morning stroll around Astoria Park (pre mum and baby music class). There was a slate sky and the East River was still. A black and white tugboat slid down it pulling a nondescript cargo. The arch of Hell Gate Bridge was reflected in the river to form an open mouth – leading to the winding throat of the Hudson if you were approaching (as I was) from the South, and to the clanging city and out to sea if you were approaching from the North.

It reminded me of a passage I’d just read in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The passage describes the city of “Despina," that can be reached by ship or by camel. When a camel driver approaches, he sees the shape of the city with its skyscrapers, radar antennae, wind-socks flapping and “chimneys belching smoke” as a ship. “…[H]e thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off…”

When the sailor approaches, he “knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wine-skins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea…”

The book pushes its idea a bit too far. It describes many, many incarnations of cities to drive home the point that cities have the same contents – it’s the angle they are viewed from that changes and changes them, like a kaleidoscope. But it has some gems, like this paragraph that I pounced on and tripled-lined in the margin. It captures what I’m trying to get at with my 30th Ave website:

“Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

‘But which is the stone that supports the bridge?’ Kublai Khan asks.

‘The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,’ Marco answers, ‘but by the line of the arch that they form.’

Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: ‘Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me’

Polo answers: ‘Without stones there is no arch.'"

New York missive no 89 - blossoms and lingerie

Walking down 28th Street to work I pass a little door sign to "A & J Lingerie", with in smaller font beneath it "and more".

The lingerie shop is tucked in among flower shops (this is 28th Street after all). So the sidewalk in front of it is festooned with blossoms. The blossoms are an appropriate preface to the lingerie, with their delicate petals in pastel colours.



******************************************

On a rather different note, last night Obama announced that US forces have killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. He was buried at sea. During the day I've had two competing scenes switching back and forth in my mind. The technicolor cheering and chatting on TV screens cuts to a dark underwater silence where Osama's body drifts among fish.

New York missive no 77 - down 28th Street to work

Last time I walked down 28th Street passed the flower sellers on my way to work I was pregnant and excited. Yesterday when I walked down 28th Street passed the flower sellers on my way to work I was tired and happy. Four months later. A bubble of time in which we reveled in the magic and messiness of a life beginning.

Posts on a piano, a meaty diet, and the New York City subway map to come when I have a minute.

New York missive no 66 - Pussy willow

The city and the wedding

Well there are so many things I want to put here but rather than wait till they’re all written and posting at once I’ll post bit by bit…

Flower market on 28th Street

Along 28th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues, P and I went in search of bunches of pussy willow and tall glass vases to hold them. That block is where all the flower shops are. It’s lined with wholesalers that brim with ferns, orchids, spring bulbs, and florists’ accessories like ribbons, coloured glass pebbles, and most recently, made-in-China gauze butterflies and feathered bird ornaments. And bunches of pussy willow. I’d passed them standing along the sidewalk like echoes of forest on my way to work in the morning. I hadn’t yet fixed any flower arrangements for the wedding other than primroses in blue pots on the dining tables and decided that big bunches of pussy willow in the chapel would be perfect.

We got there late in the day though, around 4pm. Some of the florists had already packed up for the day. Their dusty windows revealed bundled-up piles of branches or were enclosed behind metal shopfronts. We wandered into one that was bursting with perfect-looking blossoms to discover that all the flowers were made of silk. We found some boxes of pussy willow in one shop, but they seemed too tired and spindly. We tried a shop with orchids outside but they only sold hothouse plants. Then the orchid seller said the place we needed was just around the corner, on 6th Ave.

That too was closed but next door was International Garden Inc. On a high shelf there were tall slanted glasses, and in the back of the room, the pussy willow we’d been looking for. While next to us the finishing touches were put on a huge red funeral carriage bouquet with “I love you Dad” inscribed across the middle, we negotiated a price to hire four of the vases for the day, have them delivered to the venue full of pussy willow branches and picked up the next day.

That may sound like much ado about pussy willow but it became one of the most special features of the wedding. Its dark branches holding their catkins cast proud shadows against the wall at the back of the chapel. They were a subject of much interest to 2-year-old G before the ceremony began. After the ceremony they accompanied the guests upstairs and stood in strong, stretching clusters in the place where people put presents and poems. (We’d asked guests to bring poems, which were collected in a big china bowl and will be stuck into an eclectic wedding anthology of poets ranging from John Donne to Odgen Nash, Emily Dickinson to friends of C and I -particularly C’s English-teaching friends - who wrote their own for the occasion).

C and I returned home on the Sunday afternoon to find our bed had been turned by P and Al into a two-poster, with lettered balloons spelling “Just Married” laid out across the sheets. The pillars on either side of the bed were created by big bunches of pussy willow.