I spent a tranquil Sunday after Christmas wandering the quiet end-of-holiday streets of central Santiago, before getting a plane back to NYC that evening. In the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombiana I came across a magnificent quipu, a complicated mass of threads and knots used by the Incas to store information about the empire – census data, weather conditions, the location of villages etc. It was fanned out in a dramatic circle for the purpose of the exhibit. Here’s what they look like. The precise meanings of those knots has yet to be deciphered, their significance lost along with the Incas themselves.
That quipu, the multicoloured Inca cloths called cumbi, and the huge geometrically designed weavings that C and I saw today at a MOMA exhibition on Bahaus, reminded me how I’m intrigued by thread as a material. In weavings, in clothes, in tapestries in quipu, wherever. One of the labels at the Bauhaus exhibition mentioned that the “inherent quality of materials” was central to the movement. What are the inherent qualities of thread? Ancient and practical come to mind…but then compared with wood and stone it’s not ancient at all. Human. Story-telling. Strong.
*******************************************
Earlier that day in Santiago I’d seen two kids playing by a fountain outside La Moneda. Children give us hope…I thought momentarily…and then they become adults. But determined not to succumb to cynicism I carried the thought through. Ok they become adults. But as children, they enable adults to see through a child’s mind again, which is no bad thing. Probably the key to sanity. And concern for their children’s future makes adults act far better than they would otherwise.
*******************************************
Back in Lima again after 10 years away. Last time I was there as a free-wheeling inquisitive 22 year-old. This time I was walking down the same streets as a 32-year-old soon-to-be-mother, acutely aware of the passing of time, how things change and don’t change. I decided to see if the woman whose house I lived in back in 1999 was still there (A, the mother of the poet Antonio Cisneros). We had lost touch several years ago. I passed the small Amnesty office where I used to work, crossed over to the familiar street, not remembering the exact house number but knowing I’d recognize it. A couple of blocks along I saw a huge new housing development, one of hundreds that are springing up all over Miraflores…that’s it, oh well, I thought, the house has gone. Then there it was, teetering on the edge of the new development. I peered through the window and everything was exactly the same. Dark wooden polished floors. A gold-rimmed mirror on one wall. Carefully-placed photographs of family members in frames on old furniture. One of AC’s grandchildren answered the doorbell when I rang and she brought AC to the door. She was older, so much older. Her memory was hazy and she only partly remembered me. But the wonderful thing was that she was there. Another thing that I found was still there was a small plate that I’d given to my friend AL’s mum before leaving. “Mira,” she said, and showed me the plate propped up in a display cabinet. Both those mothers seem to emanate security and keeping things in place. Eeek, can I have that in me?!
*******************************************
I was spoilt over Christmas, joining M and D on a boat around Cape Horn. On board we watched a feature documentary on Shackleton's second mission to the Antarctic. The mission failed in that he never accomplished his goal of crossing the continent. It succeeded in that he achieved his revised goal of keeping all his men alive. That was after the most staggering feats of endurance(which ironically is the name of the ship they’d had to abandon when it got trapped in the ice). Aside from wondering whether the equivalent group of people today could have survived what those men did, it made me think that human resilience to the cruelty of nature is so much stronger than our resilience to the cruelty of humans. What a strange, self-destructive species we are. What other species would conceive of things like concentration camps, gulags and torture?
*******************************************
What was going to be a very simple wedding – a quick trip to City Hall – has somewhat grown. We still want to keep it smallish and personal though. The first couple of evenings I was back C and I went hunting for a venue. There was the Foundry – a converted metal foundry that I’d thought could be a cool, wow-factor industrial space. It was dingy and disappointing. It felt like somewhere that is presented as a cool, wow-factor industrial space and has the prices to match but falls far short of actually being it. There was the Waters Edge, a restaurant on East River. It has impressive views of Manhattan but felt a bit like a wedding-factory and too tackily glitzy. And then there was the fabulous Seaman’s Church Institute near South Street Seaport, with its calm modern chapel, its gallery full of model ships and the “top deck” space for the party with glass walls overlooking Brooklyn Bridge. Venue found. Six weeks or so to fix everything else…nothing like a deadline.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Saturday, November 28, 2009
New York missive no 62 - New life
The stone lions outside New York public library are rather refined compared to the thick-set ones in Trafalgar Square. Their haunches stick up high and their faces have poise. They look as if at any moment they could spring off their pedestals and go for a stroll down Fifth Ave.
***************************************************
In the middle of the ice rink at Rockefeller Plaza was a plump woman wearing purple leggings and a tight-fitting orange sweater. She didn’t look like an ice skater. But there she was, gliding, twirling, slicing, so graceful in her element.
***************************************************
A fabulous poem from WS craft class, by Robinson Jeffers
Cremation
It nearly cancels my fear of death, my dearest said,
When I think of cremation. To rot in the earth
Is a loathsome end, but to roar up in flame – besides, I
am used to it.
I have flamed with love or fury so often in my life,
No wonder my body is tired, no wonder it is dying.
We had great joy of my body. Scatter the ashes.
***************************************************
I shouldn’t have poems about death on my mind at the moment though, as I’m four months pregnant. It’s funny how this is such a common experience but still such an utterly magical one. Things that I felt I was juggling and not focusing on before have in a bizarre way become easier, like everything has settled into a calmer place. Come mid-May that calm will of course be disrupted by small-hours baby cries but that’s ok. And while I say some things have become easier to get done, that’s not to say extreme absent-mindedness isn’t one of my side effects. The other day I found a dish-cloth that I’d left, for some reason, in the fridge door. And I keep wandering around our apartment looking for things I put down just a minute ago. I say “our apartment” – C and I moved to Astoria a couple of weeks ago having found after a couple of day’s hunting a rare thing: SPACE near the city that we can afford, just about.
I’ve had amusing moments like standing in the elevator at work with two other people, thinking to myself “little do you know there are actually four of us in here” (kind of). And speaking to a monosyllabic woman at the health insurance company in order to “authorize” my pregnancy. Wasn’t it a bit late for any kind of authorization? And who was the health company to be authorizing it or not? “Name?”, she asked, “Date of birth?”, “Place of delivery?” (as if talking about a Fedex package), then, “normal pregnancy?”, “normal birth?” (as if I could know that yet).
I've also had a bizarrely intense fascination with living things, especially in the early stages through a haze of queasiness. Like watching squirrels in Union Square, or flocks of tiny birds on the High Line. I intend not to overload Ewiny with yumsy-mumsy things though, instead just bring this new experience into the mix. Nor do I intend to post any sonogram images, which seems to be the new fad on Facebook.
C and I are wondering how many other Dominican-American-British kids there are. However many, there’s a high chance they’re in New York.
***************************************************
My other bit of life-changing news is that C and I are now engaged, after a highly romantic proposal in a little hut, by a lake, in Central Park surrounded by Autumn leaves.
***************************************************
In the middle of the ice rink at Rockefeller Plaza was a plump woman wearing purple leggings and a tight-fitting orange sweater. She didn’t look like an ice skater. But there she was, gliding, twirling, slicing, so graceful in her element.
***************************************************
A fabulous poem from WS craft class, by Robinson Jeffers
Cremation
It nearly cancels my fear of death, my dearest said,
When I think of cremation. To rot in the earth
Is a loathsome end, but to roar up in flame – besides, I
am used to it.
I have flamed with love or fury so often in my life,
No wonder my body is tired, no wonder it is dying.
We had great joy of my body. Scatter the ashes.
***************************************************
I shouldn’t have poems about death on my mind at the moment though, as I’m four months pregnant. It’s funny how this is such a common experience but still such an utterly magical one. Things that I felt I was juggling and not focusing on before have in a bizarre way become easier, like everything has settled into a calmer place. Come mid-May that calm will of course be disrupted by small-hours baby cries but that’s ok. And while I say some things have become easier to get done, that’s not to say extreme absent-mindedness isn’t one of my side effects. The other day I found a dish-cloth that I’d left, for some reason, in the fridge door. And I keep wandering around our apartment looking for things I put down just a minute ago. I say “our apartment” – C and I moved to Astoria a couple of weeks ago having found after a couple of day’s hunting a rare thing: SPACE near the city that we can afford, just about.
I’ve had amusing moments like standing in the elevator at work with two other people, thinking to myself “little do you know there are actually four of us in here” (kind of). And speaking to a monosyllabic woman at the health insurance company in order to “authorize” my pregnancy. Wasn’t it a bit late for any kind of authorization? And who was the health company to be authorizing it or not? “Name?”, she asked, “Date of birth?”, “Place of delivery?” (as if talking about a Fedex package), then, “normal pregnancy?”, “normal birth?” (as if I could know that yet).
I've also had a bizarrely intense fascination with living things, especially in the early stages through a haze of queasiness. Like watching squirrels in Union Square, or flocks of tiny birds on the High Line. I intend not to overload Ewiny with yumsy-mumsy things though, instead just bring this new experience into the mix. Nor do I intend to post any sonogram images, which seems to be the new fad on Facebook.
C and I are wondering how many other Dominican-American-British kids there are. However many, there’s a high chance they’re in New York.
***************************************************
My other bit of life-changing news is that C and I are now engaged, after a highly romantic proposal in a little hut, by a lake, in Central Park surrounded by Autumn leaves.
Friday, October 16, 2009
New York missive no 61 - Taking Amartya Sen's seat
New York is the man on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 50th Street saying his evening prayers on a little rug laid out by the food cart where he sells kebabs, a torrent of workers and shoppers passing him by.
*****************************************
At a discussion on human rights and detention last week at Columbia University with Sir Nigel Rodley, Scott Horton, Peter Rosenblum and others, David Fathi of Human Rights Watch began his talk with some statistics. In the US, 2.4 million people are in prison on a given day. That’s 762 people per 100,000. By comparison, in the UK 152 people per 100,000 are in prison, in Canada 116, and in Japan, 63.
During the questions I asked about the implications of the increasing privatization of the prison system. Rodley first emphasized that any level of privatization does not absolve the state of its responsibilities. Then he added that “all my instincts tell me that outsourcing of this fundamental role of government is to be avoided.”
Fathi concisely summarized the main problems with prison privatization. The profit-motive means private centers will always be looking for ways to minimize costs, including by reducing staff and training – hence it’s not surprising that a higher number of abuses take place in private than in state-run facilities. There is a serious lack of transparency around private prison firms – for example they are not usually subject to federal and state freedom of information legislation. And the “consumer choice” argument – that private systems improve standards because customers can reject products or services for better ones – doesn’t exactly apply to prisoners.
*************************************************
On a rather lighter, or at least more entertaining note than the detention discussion, I heard Pedro Almodóvar holding forth for a couple of hours last Saturday at the Lincoln Center. He was talking about his “history of cinema” with the New York Film Festival Director Richard Peña, interspersing the conversation with clips from his and his mentors’ films.
The audience was in fits of laughter half the time but cruelty did still crop up. “Legitimate cruelty is unfortunately part of our work” (as directors), he said. The first he clip he showed was from Cassavetes’ Opening Night, when Gena Rowlands, playing an actress called Myrtle, is blind-drunk before the curtain raises on the opening night of the play she’s starring in, Second Woman. She’s stumbling along the backstage corridors, collapsing from time to time on the floor. The camera sways and crashes with her. The play’s Director, acted by Ben Gazzara, walks slowly behind her, watching. He does not lift a finger to help and gets angry when another character tries to. That scene epitomized, Almodóvar said, the way in which directors, despite being “everything” to their actors – father, shrink, teacher, confidante, lover etc. – ultimately have to leave the actors to work through their challenges and problems alone. And I’ve worked with plenty of actresses whose problems are much bigger than their talent, he added.
**************************************************
That was quite a weekend of New York it’s-all-at-your-fingertips culture. The previous night L and I saw the Peruvian criollo / música negra singer Eva Ayllón at Queens Theater in the park (right out in Flushing, in the park next to the eerie huge steel globe donated by US Steel for the World Fair).
Ayllón’s compatriot, the singer Zambo Cavero, had died earlier that day and she was clearly emotionally distraught by it. Her singing was beautiful but at one point she staggered offstage leaving the cajón and guitar players to their own improvised devices until she remerged. She’s getting on in years and god knows how she held out through the second two-hour concert that was starting soon after ours ended.
The concert made me more excited than I already am about going back to Lima in December, ten years after I lived there. Seems I’m susceptible to falling in love with cities.
***************************************************
Well I never. I’m so often looking for adventure “elsewhere”, restlessly wondering what lies just round the corner, or in another part of town, or on the other side of the planet. And a miraculous adventure turns up right here, close to me as it can be. To be continued...
***************************************************
I embarrassed myself at the Carnegie Council the other day. Amartya Sen was giving a breakfast talk on his new book The Idea of Justice. I arrived a bit late, so the room was already full of people sitting at round white-clothed tables laden with orange juice and croissants, and Sen was in full flow. The woman who showed me in to the room whispered, “there’s one spare chair you can sit in, over there by the podium”. Right under Sen’s nose. I had no choice but to stride out through the room to the table next to him. Once there I spotted another vacant chair, less directly in front of him. So as subtly as possible I sat in it, started listening attentively, and attempted to ignore the (mostly elderly) disapproving faces staring at me.
Then I realized that I was sitting in Sen’s chair. Cheeky upstart with the guts to sit in the Nobel prize-winning economist’s seat, I could feel those faces thinking. Oh well, I was stuck. Luckily the event closed with a Q&A and Sen didn’t need to reclaim his seat. And at least I was in a good position to apologise to him afterwards – he was most gracious.
In his talk, Sen mentioned that the Idea of Justice draws on Adam Smith’s book the Theory of Moral Sentiments, written 17 years before Wealth of Nations and marking its 250th anniversary this year. Smith talked about the dangers that parochialism poses to justice. In other words the fact that confining discussion of a particular issue within a small society can lead to dangerous parochialism, and in turn, to injustice. Instead what is needed is scrutiny from a distance. Or to quote Smith, "The eyes of the rest of mankind must be invoked to understand whether a punishment appears equitable." This scrutiny said Sen, “may be useful for practices as different as the stoning of adulterous women in Taliban Afghanistan; selective abortion of female fetuses in China, Korea, and parts of India; and plentiful use of capital punishment in China, or for that matter the United States….”
He continued:
"It is important, however, to recognize that to listen to distant voices, which is part of Adam Smith’s exercise of invoking the 'impartial spectator' in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, does not require us to be respectful of every argument that may come from abroad. That would be absurd. We may reject a great many of the proposed arguments, sometimes even all of them, and yet there would remain particular cases of reasoning that could make us reconsider our own understandings and views linked with the experiences and conventions entrenched in a given country or culture.
The interdependence of reasoning is part of the ground on which Martin Luther King Jr. said in 'The Letter from Birmingham Jail' in April 1963: 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'"
***************************************************
I’ve had a rarely, for me, un-exploratory week off work – a combination of working in cafés on my book proposal (so work of sorts) and pottering around the city. What bliss to be out and about in the city on weekdays. Especially in West Village, which can be heaving at the weekends yet is remarkably tranquil during the week. And elsewhere: on Wednesday I went up to the top North East corner of Central Park and walked down to Columbus Circle – the whole top section of the park was an oasis of calm.
The café-sitting has meant eavesdropping some interesting conversations. For example the guy this morning, talking on his phone: “How many bones do you get for that?...And how big are the bones? Two inches, three inches across? Ok, well get one of the big ones and one of the small ones. Oh ok. Well get a mixed bag of…ah, how much are those? How much? Nah…just get the bones…And like, a pumpkin to put them in.”
The pumpkin bit broke the spell somewhat…implying the whole thing had something to do with Halloween.
***************************************************
Just before and after paying avid attention to that conversation I was reading an opinion piece in the New York Times article on conceptual art, by Dennis Dutton of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. It made a lot of sense, I thought. “Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why…” he said. The point being that conceptual art – Damien Hirst’s preserved sharks or his new medicine cabinets for example – depends “not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist.” So it’s unlikely to withstand the test of time: future generations are unlikely to “get” it and if they do, it will no doubt seem rather dated, more a “historical curiosity” than a work of art.
*****************************************
At a discussion on human rights and detention last week at Columbia University with Sir Nigel Rodley, Scott Horton, Peter Rosenblum and others, David Fathi of Human Rights Watch began his talk with some statistics. In the US, 2.4 million people are in prison on a given day. That’s 762 people per 100,000. By comparison, in the UK 152 people per 100,000 are in prison, in Canada 116, and in Japan, 63.
During the questions I asked about the implications of the increasing privatization of the prison system. Rodley first emphasized that any level of privatization does not absolve the state of its responsibilities. Then he added that “all my instincts tell me that outsourcing of this fundamental role of government is to be avoided.”
Fathi concisely summarized the main problems with prison privatization. The profit-motive means private centers will always be looking for ways to minimize costs, including by reducing staff and training – hence it’s not surprising that a higher number of abuses take place in private than in state-run facilities. There is a serious lack of transparency around private prison firms – for example they are not usually subject to federal and state freedom of information legislation. And the “consumer choice” argument – that private systems improve standards because customers can reject products or services for better ones – doesn’t exactly apply to prisoners.
*************************************************
On a rather lighter, or at least more entertaining note than the detention discussion, I heard Pedro Almodóvar holding forth for a couple of hours last Saturday at the Lincoln Center. He was talking about his “history of cinema” with the New York Film Festival Director Richard Peña, interspersing the conversation with clips from his and his mentors’ films.
The audience was in fits of laughter half the time but cruelty did still crop up. “Legitimate cruelty is unfortunately part of our work” (as directors), he said. The first he clip he showed was from Cassavetes’ Opening Night, when Gena Rowlands, playing an actress called Myrtle, is blind-drunk before the curtain raises on the opening night of the play she’s starring in, Second Woman. She’s stumbling along the backstage corridors, collapsing from time to time on the floor. The camera sways and crashes with her. The play’s Director, acted by Ben Gazzara, walks slowly behind her, watching. He does not lift a finger to help and gets angry when another character tries to. That scene epitomized, Almodóvar said, the way in which directors, despite being “everything” to their actors – father, shrink, teacher, confidante, lover etc. – ultimately have to leave the actors to work through their challenges and problems alone. And I’ve worked with plenty of actresses whose problems are much bigger than their talent, he added.
**************************************************
That was quite a weekend of New York it’s-all-at-your-fingertips culture. The previous night L and I saw the Peruvian criollo / música negra singer Eva Ayllón at Queens Theater in the park (right out in Flushing, in the park next to the eerie huge steel globe donated by US Steel for the World Fair).
Ayllón’s compatriot, the singer Zambo Cavero, had died earlier that day and she was clearly emotionally distraught by it. Her singing was beautiful but at one point she staggered offstage leaving the cajón and guitar players to their own improvised devices until she remerged. She’s getting on in years and god knows how she held out through the second two-hour concert that was starting soon after ours ended.
The concert made me more excited than I already am about going back to Lima in December, ten years after I lived there. Seems I’m susceptible to falling in love with cities.
***************************************************
Well I never. I’m so often looking for adventure “elsewhere”, restlessly wondering what lies just round the corner, or in another part of town, or on the other side of the planet. And a miraculous adventure turns up right here, close to me as it can be. To be continued...
***************************************************
I embarrassed myself at the Carnegie Council the other day. Amartya Sen was giving a breakfast talk on his new book The Idea of Justice. I arrived a bit late, so the room was already full of people sitting at round white-clothed tables laden with orange juice and croissants, and Sen was in full flow. The woman who showed me in to the room whispered, “there’s one spare chair you can sit in, over there by the podium”. Right under Sen’s nose. I had no choice but to stride out through the room to the table next to him. Once there I spotted another vacant chair, less directly in front of him. So as subtly as possible I sat in it, started listening attentively, and attempted to ignore the (mostly elderly) disapproving faces staring at me.
Then I realized that I was sitting in Sen’s chair. Cheeky upstart with the guts to sit in the Nobel prize-winning economist’s seat, I could feel those faces thinking. Oh well, I was stuck. Luckily the event closed with a Q&A and Sen didn’t need to reclaim his seat. And at least I was in a good position to apologise to him afterwards – he was most gracious.
In his talk, Sen mentioned that the Idea of Justice draws on Adam Smith’s book the Theory of Moral Sentiments, written 17 years before Wealth of Nations and marking its 250th anniversary this year. Smith talked about the dangers that parochialism poses to justice. In other words the fact that confining discussion of a particular issue within a small society can lead to dangerous parochialism, and in turn, to injustice. Instead what is needed is scrutiny from a distance. Or to quote Smith, "The eyes of the rest of mankind must be invoked to understand whether a punishment appears equitable." This scrutiny said Sen, “may be useful for practices as different as the stoning of adulterous women in Taliban Afghanistan; selective abortion of female fetuses in China, Korea, and parts of India; and plentiful use of capital punishment in China, or for that matter the United States….”
He continued:
"It is important, however, to recognize that to listen to distant voices, which is part of Adam Smith’s exercise of invoking the 'impartial spectator' in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, does not require us to be respectful of every argument that may come from abroad. That would be absurd. We may reject a great many of the proposed arguments, sometimes even all of them, and yet there would remain particular cases of reasoning that could make us reconsider our own understandings and views linked with the experiences and conventions entrenched in a given country or culture.
The interdependence of reasoning is part of the ground on which Martin Luther King Jr. said in 'The Letter from Birmingham Jail' in April 1963: 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'"
***************************************************
I’ve had a rarely, for me, un-exploratory week off work – a combination of working in cafés on my book proposal (so work of sorts) and pottering around the city. What bliss to be out and about in the city on weekdays. Especially in West Village, which can be heaving at the weekends yet is remarkably tranquil during the week. And elsewhere: on Wednesday I went up to the top North East corner of Central Park and walked down to Columbus Circle – the whole top section of the park was an oasis of calm.
The café-sitting has meant eavesdropping some interesting conversations. For example the guy this morning, talking on his phone: “How many bones do you get for that?...And how big are the bones? Two inches, three inches across? Ok, well get one of the big ones and one of the small ones. Oh ok. Well get a mixed bag of…ah, how much are those? How much? Nah…just get the bones…And like, a pumpkin to put them in.”
The pumpkin bit broke the spell somewhat…implying the whole thing had something to do with Halloween.
***************************************************
Just before and after paying avid attention to that conversation I was reading an opinion piece in the New York Times article on conceptual art, by Dennis Dutton of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. It made a lot of sense, I thought. “Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why…” he said. The point being that conceptual art – Damien Hirst’s preserved sharks or his new medicine cabinets for example – depends “not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist.” So it’s unlikely to withstand the test of time: future generations are unlikely to “get” it and if they do, it will no doubt seem rather dated, more a “historical curiosity” than a work of art.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
New York missive no 60 - City limits
The end of episode 5 of Ric Burns’ epic “New York” documentary is about the skyscraper wars during the early 20th Century. The goal, it seemed, was to prove the "sky is not the limit". Higher and higher they built – the Woolworth Building, the Chrysler which sneakily outdid the Woolworth by erecting a tall spike on top at the last minute, and then the towering Empire State whose plans were approved just before Black Tuesday and whose construction continued regardless.
The documentary includes awe-inspiring footage of the steel-workers, welders and carpenters building the skyscraper, their overalled figures silhouetted against clouds. The 102-storey construction took 14 months to build. When finished it was a monument in spite of the depression – "hey, look, New York can still build the tallest building in the world". It was also a monument to the depression, as the majority of its office space proved impossible to fill and most of its revenue came from tourists climbing to see the view.
What struck me about the sweeping views of the city during these scenes were not its buildings, but its rivers. There they are always. Changeless while the city they embrace transforms. The Hudson and East River flow continuously but they are the most solid part of the city. They hold its shape while people pile the land high with roads, rails and buildings, leaving what they think are significant marks.
The end of the episode echoed my thoughts, with this quote from Scott FitzGerald’s "My Lost City" in which he describes his reactions to the view from the top of the Empire State Building:
"Then I understood – everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora's box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits – from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground."
Not such an awful realization. Without its limits the city couldn’t be lovable.
The documentary includes awe-inspiring footage of the steel-workers, welders and carpenters building the skyscraper, their overalled figures silhouetted against clouds. The 102-storey construction took 14 months to build. When finished it was a monument in spite of the depression – "hey, look, New York can still build the tallest building in the world". It was also a monument to the depression, as the majority of its office space proved impossible to fill and most of its revenue came from tourists climbing to see the view.
What struck me about the sweeping views of the city during these scenes were not its buildings, but its rivers. There they are always. Changeless while the city they embrace transforms. The Hudson and East River flow continuously but they are the most solid part of the city. They hold its shape while people pile the land high with roads, rails and buildings, leaving what they think are significant marks.
The end of the episode echoed my thoughts, with this quote from Scott FitzGerald’s "My Lost City" in which he describes his reactions to the view from the top of the Empire State Building:
"Then I understood – everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora's box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits – from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground."
Not such an awful realization. Without its limits the city couldn’t be lovable.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
New York missive no 59 - Teddy Kennedy, leadership, Diane Wilson, dragon boats
On a Friday evening, after dark, C and I found ourselves overlooking East River straight at the abandoned smallpox hospital on Roosevelt island. It looked back at us with its black, hollow eyes set in a ghostly rectangular face of pale bricks.
*********************************************************
In death, compassion is recognized as heroic. If only that was the case in life.
The press and commentaries on Teddy Kennedy’s death were quick to praise his championing of the underdog. They described the ways in which he steadfastly supported workers, the uninsured, the sick, the immigrant, and how he saw his privilege as a responsibility to help others.
The one time I ever saw him in person was at a congressional hearing held by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, about the working conditions of Florida’s mainly-immigrant tomato-pickers.
Yet I cannot help feeling that in life those qualities of compassion and a steadfast commitment to justice are not given the credit they deserve. Despite the shift in tone here in the US that has followed Obama’s election (currently soured anyway by divisive, smeary debates on health care reform), they are sidelined as idealistic, rather than recognized as the qualities of leadership that can bring about real “progress”.
******************************************
A few years back, JN walked into the office and asked, in her enthusiastic school-teachery way, “Can you name an inspiring global leader? One who’s alive today?” Ummmm…there was an awkward pause. "Mandela?" ventured some. And that was about it.
Now, many would say Obama as well. A global leader in the sense that (among other things), he can navigate the complexities of globalization, resist seeing things in black and white however much pressure there is to do so, while at the same time never losing a sense of direction. He keeps sight of the bigger picture that underlies every decision, one that has fairness at its core. I was surprised that Michael Moore, in a recent Rolling Stone interview about Obama’s first six months, was still overwhelmingly supportive – his theory being that any perceived over-compromises he has made are part of a broader strategy to keep things moving in the right direction.
But more than ever, leadership is as much about pushing up from the bottom as it is inspiring from the top. I recently read "An Unreasonable Woman" the autobiography of Diane Wilson about her persistent, painstaking campaign to combat pollution by Formosa’s plastic factory and other industrial projects by Seadrift in Texas, where she had worked for years as a shrimper. She new nothing, at first, about environmental campaign strategies, litigation, the regulation of toxic pollutants and the dirty tactics business would employ to evade that regulation. But that didn’t matter. She did know that the damage being done to her bay, her sea – in her eyes a physical creature who "still talks even though she's got a mercury Superfund on her left breast and vinyl chloride and phthalates on her right breast” – was wrong. She knew that however many people called her crazy, she wasn’t going to rest until she stopped it.
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Apparently in the UK – and I guess elsewhere as well – companies perceive criticism printed in a newspaper as more libelous than criticism that only appears on the internet, even though defamation laws apply equally to both. Something about the fact of printing and producing a paper gives the impression the words have more weight, are harder to remove and can do more damage. That’s a little illogical. Words online can reach a far wider audience than printed words, and they have a tendency to self-propagate, appearing on two, four, twenty, a hundred different websites and blogs making them all but impossible to erase.
That attitude implies electronic words have less ‘value’ than printed words. So what does that mean for the shift from printed books to e-books – for the rise of Kindle? Of course, the phasing out of printed books is inevitable, though I’ll lamenting along with others the loss of the smell of pages, of pen-scribbles in margins, of sagging bookshelves. But will words really mean less when they appear on screens from which they can come and go, be uploaded and downloaded? Burning books is seen as sacrilege. Wiping an electronic book off your hard drive isn’t.
*********************************************************
Kykuit, the Rockfellers' estate up the Hudson River at Sleepy Hollow is staggeringly beautiful. It inspires conflicting emotions of delight, envy and queasiness at the sight of so much wealth concentrated in one family. Wealth built on the back of Standard Oil –via large-scale exploitation, or wealth-generation for others, or both, whichever way you want to look at it.
“Money can buy you anything” is epitomized there. You like Picasso? Then commission a series of gigantic tapestries of his paintings to hang in your basement art gallery. How about the sculptors Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, David Smith? Fill your landscaped gardens with their work. And want to protect the view of rolling forested hills from your living room window? Get the government to designate it a national park (and thank god they did otherwise that stretch of the Hudson would no doubt by now be smothered in identikit condo blocks).
C and I went up there by train a few weekends ago. The train tracks run alongside the river, which inspired me to get kayaking (one day!). And despite the crazy opulence of Kykuit itself our day was characterized by magical moments that money could never buy. We sat under a tree eating tomatoes and strong cheese on a hunk of bread (actually money did have to buy us that – from a pricey Tarrytown farmers’ market). We encountered two inquisitive deer when we set out on a walk down the Croton aqueduct. We snuck through back gardens when the aqueduct path disappeared on us. I got the giggles at something C said and spat the water I’d just sipped all over the place. From a river wall in Irvington we glimpsed the shadowy forms of the Manhattan skyline, way downstream. We felt sleepy and content on the train on the way home, me gazing at sunsetted scenery flicking past the window, C scribbling bits of a poem on yellow postit notes.
*********************************************************
Labour-day weekend involved jumping in and out of a swimming pool at a big house in the middle of nowhere in Rhode island with a bunch of C’s university friends.
One morning, while I was lying on my belly reading Frank Norris’ "Octopus - A California Story", a small rust-coloured butterfly settled just in front of my nose. It opened and closed its wings, like it was hesitantly applauding the day’s performance.
*********************************************************
We took a break from the dragon boat festival at Flushing in Queens to go and see the "Panorama of the City of New York", the scale architectural model of the city built by Robert Moses for the 1964 World's Fair. The one I’d seen on my Queens exploration very soon after I moved to the city, almost two years ago. How wonderful to walk around the map again and for it to feel so much more familiar, alive. It had sprouted memories.
I’m giving my love of the city an extra stoke by watching Ric Burn’s mammoth documentary series “New York” – in bits, taken out of an old-school DVD shop on Greenwich Avenue.
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In death, compassion is recognized as heroic. If only that was the case in life.
The press and commentaries on Teddy Kennedy’s death were quick to praise his championing of the underdog. They described the ways in which he steadfastly supported workers, the uninsured, the sick, the immigrant, and how he saw his privilege as a responsibility to help others.
The one time I ever saw him in person was at a congressional hearing held by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, about the working conditions of Florida’s mainly-immigrant tomato-pickers.
Yet I cannot help feeling that in life those qualities of compassion and a steadfast commitment to justice are not given the credit they deserve. Despite the shift in tone here in the US that has followed Obama’s election (currently soured anyway by divisive, smeary debates on health care reform), they are sidelined as idealistic, rather than recognized as the qualities of leadership that can bring about real “progress”.
******************************************
A few years back, JN walked into the office and asked, in her enthusiastic school-teachery way, “Can you name an inspiring global leader? One who’s alive today?” Ummmm…there was an awkward pause. "Mandela?" ventured some. And that was about it.
Now, many would say Obama as well. A global leader in the sense that (among other things), he can navigate the complexities of globalization, resist seeing things in black and white however much pressure there is to do so, while at the same time never losing a sense of direction. He keeps sight of the bigger picture that underlies every decision, one that has fairness at its core. I was surprised that Michael Moore, in a recent Rolling Stone interview about Obama’s first six months, was still overwhelmingly supportive – his theory being that any perceived over-compromises he has made are part of a broader strategy to keep things moving in the right direction.
But more than ever, leadership is as much about pushing up from the bottom as it is inspiring from the top. I recently read "An Unreasonable Woman" the autobiography of Diane Wilson about her persistent, painstaking campaign to combat pollution by Formosa’s plastic factory and other industrial projects by Seadrift in Texas, where she had worked for years as a shrimper. She new nothing, at first, about environmental campaign strategies, litigation, the regulation of toxic pollutants and the dirty tactics business would employ to evade that regulation. But that didn’t matter. She did know that the damage being done to her bay, her sea – in her eyes a physical creature who "still talks even though she's got a mercury Superfund on her left breast and vinyl chloride and phthalates on her right breast” – was wrong. She knew that however many people called her crazy, she wasn’t going to rest until she stopped it.
*********************************************************
Apparently in the UK – and I guess elsewhere as well – companies perceive criticism printed in a newspaper as more libelous than criticism that only appears on the internet, even though defamation laws apply equally to both. Something about the fact of printing and producing a paper gives the impression the words have more weight, are harder to remove and can do more damage. That’s a little illogical. Words online can reach a far wider audience than printed words, and they have a tendency to self-propagate, appearing on two, four, twenty, a hundred different websites and blogs making them all but impossible to erase.
That attitude implies electronic words have less ‘value’ than printed words. So what does that mean for the shift from printed books to e-books – for the rise of Kindle? Of course, the phasing out of printed books is inevitable, though I’ll lamenting along with others the loss of the smell of pages, of pen-scribbles in margins, of sagging bookshelves. But will words really mean less when they appear on screens from which they can come and go, be uploaded and downloaded? Burning books is seen as sacrilege. Wiping an electronic book off your hard drive isn’t.
*********************************************************
Kykuit, the Rockfellers' estate up the Hudson River at Sleepy Hollow is staggeringly beautiful. It inspires conflicting emotions of delight, envy and queasiness at the sight of so much wealth concentrated in one family. Wealth built on the back of Standard Oil –via large-scale exploitation, or wealth-generation for others, or both, whichever way you want to look at it.
“Money can buy you anything” is epitomized there. You like Picasso? Then commission a series of gigantic tapestries of his paintings to hang in your basement art gallery. How about the sculptors Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, David Smith? Fill your landscaped gardens with their work. And want to protect the view of rolling forested hills from your living room window? Get the government to designate it a national park (and thank god they did otherwise that stretch of the Hudson would no doubt by now be smothered in identikit condo blocks).
C and I went up there by train a few weekends ago. The train tracks run alongside the river, which inspired me to get kayaking (one day!). And despite the crazy opulence of Kykuit itself our day was characterized by magical moments that money could never buy. We sat under a tree eating tomatoes and strong cheese on a hunk of bread (actually money did have to buy us that – from a pricey Tarrytown farmers’ market). We encountered two inquisitive deer when we set out on a walk down the Croton aqueduct. We snuck through back gardens when the aqueduct path disappeared on us. I got the giggles at something C said and spat the water I’d just sipped all over the place. From a river wall in Irvington we glimpsed the shadowy forms of the Manhattan skyline, way downstream. We felt sleepy and content on the train on the way home, me gazing at sunsetted scenery flicking past the window, C scribbling bits of a poem on yellow postit notes.
*********************************************************
Labour-day weekend involved jumping in and out of a swimming pool at a big house in the middle of nowhere in Rhode island with a bunch of C’s university friends.
One morning, while I was lying on my belly reading Frank Norris’ "Octopus - A California Story", a small rust-coloured butterfly settled just in front of my nose. It opened and closed its wings, like it was hesitantly applauding the day’s performance.
*********************************************************
We took a break from the dragon boat festival at Flushing in Queens to go and see the "Panorama of the City of New York", the scale architectural model of the city built by Robert Moses for the 1964 World's Fair. The one I’d seen on my Queens exploration very soon after I moved to the city, almost two years ago. How wonderful to walk around the map again and for it to feel so much more familiar, alive. It had sprouted memories.
I’m giving my love of the city an extra stoke by watching Ric Burn’s mammoth documentary series “New York” – in bits, taken out of an old-school DVD shop on Greenwich Avenue.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
New York missive no 59 - Blackberries
A blackberry. What’s the first thing that comes into your mind? An electronic hand-held device for receiving, reading, sending emails? Or a succulent piece of fruit composed of juicy purple beads? A fruit that grows on brambles at the back of gardens and tangled in hedgerows.
I had just eaten blackberries – huge ones – in my Mojo café yoghurt and fruit (a regular and now so familiar indulgence). I had a moment of blackberry appreciation, so I wrote the word down, “Blackberry”, ready to be turned into more words at a later date.
Then I looked back at the page, saw "blackberry" written there, and the first thing that came into my head was the electronic variety.
I had just eaten blackberries – huge ones – in my Mojo café yoghurt and fruit (a regular and now so familiar indulgence). I had a moment of blackberry appreciation, so I wrote the word down, “Blackberry”, ready to be turned into more words at a later date.
Then I looked back at the page, saw "blackberry" written there, and the first thing that came into my head was the electronic variety.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
New York missive no 58
Woman walking in a very short skirt through West Village with your dog, do you know that your legs don’t look that good from behind? I wonder...maybe so, and you don’t care. That’s cool.
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The yellow dress that Michelle Obama wore to her husband’s inauguration in January is on display at Fashion Institute of Technology, just over the road from my work. So I went to check it out one lunchtime. It’s there along with lots of other outfits by its Cuban designer Isabel Toledo, who, I felt (being as far from a fashion expert as possible hence not really in a position to comment), designs fabulous shapes but often misfires on the material. Michelle’s inauguration suit, for example, is an elegantly dramatic shape and a striking colour but up close the fabric looks a bit like a sofa cover, heavy and floral.
The exhibition is called "Fashion from the Inside Out," because, Toledo says, that’s the way that she sees her work. "I never thought of myself as a designer. I’m a seamstress. I really love the technique of sewing more than anything else. The seamstress is the one who views fashion from the inside! That’s the art form, really – the technique of how it’s done." The dresses on display were technical masterpieces (again - says I, the absolute novice). Ah, and of naming, which appealed to me of course. There were Origami dresses, folded to create sail-like collars and backs, the Double Tier Pagoda dress, Blossom Sleeve Bolero and Balloon dress, a Butterfly Wingspan jacket, a jersey dress called Tequila Sunrise, and the Cage dress, made of little black bars hung over the shoulders. Lots of descriptions and pictures here.
The week after seeing that exhibition, dramatic dresses caught my eye. There was the woman on the corner of Greenwich Ave and West 13th wearing a fluorescent green one, and the woman with pink hair and a whispy orange floaty dress at a Lincoln Centre Out of Doors concert (where I had a brightish blue sundress on). The concert involved 200 electric guitars. It would have been more dramatic had we got there in time to be in the centre of things rather than tucked away under the trees, but was relaxing in a zenny-summer evening way.
******************************************
The yellow dress that Michelle Obama wore to her husband’s inauguration in January is on display at Fashion Institute of Technology, just over the road from my work. So I went to check it out one lunchtime. It’s there along with lots of other outfits by its Cuban designer Isabel Toledo, who, I felt (being as far from a fashion expert as possible hence not really in a position to comment), designs fabulous shapes but often misfires on the material. Michelle’s inauguration suit, for example, is an elegantly dramatic shape and a striking colour but up close the fabric looks a bit like a sofa cover, heavy and floral.
The exhibition is called "Fashion from the Inside Out," because, Toledo says, that’s the way that she sees her work. "I never thought of myself as a designer. I’m a seamstress. I really love the technique of sewing more than anything else. The seamstress is the one who views fashion from the inside! That’s the art form, really – the technique of how it’s done." The dresses on display were technical masterpieces (again - says I, the absolute novice). Ah, and of naming, which appealed to me of course. There were Origami dresses, folded to create sail-like collars and backs, the Double Tier Pagoda dress, Blossom Sleeve Bolero and Balloon dress, a Butterfly Wingspan jacket, a jersey dress called Tequila Sunrise, and the Cage dress, made of little black bars hung over the shoulders. Lots of descriptions and pictures here.
The week after seeing that exhibition, dramatic dresses caught my eye. There was the woman on the corner of Greenwich Ave and West 13th wearing a fluorescent green one, and the woman with pink hair and a whispy orange floaty dress at a Lincoln Centre Out of Doors concert (where I had a brightish blue sundress on). The concert involved 200 electric guitars. It would have been more dramatic had we got there in time to be in the centre of things rather than tucked away under the trees, but was relaxing in a zenny-summer evening way.
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