SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

September 11, 2009. Today I am reminded about my concern and worry about the men who ran the coffee carts around our office on 9/11. If I remember right, their carts were swept away in the confusion and horror. But Kasim came back, whole and smiling, when we returned to our offices in April 2002. He didn’t want to move forward to the window, but that’s ok. This is how I know him. He’s proud of his enterprise.

Sharif on Park Place

September 10, 2009. I see faces. Everyday, from the time I wake up, until I go to bed, I am surrounded by faces of infinite variety and form. I like them. I have portraits in my home, I watch faces in profile and frontal on the subway and at my job. I see noses, eyes, ears and mouths. Every working day I see this face, Sharif, and he sells me coffee and a bagel. If I don’t come to his cart, he asks me where I’ve been. He is concerned that I go to work and that I arrive on time. He knows my routine, so if it is too close to 9, I’ve been out walking. If it is close to 8, someone called in sick and I am coming in to open the office. And I know his routine – and he knows it. I’d miss him if he wasn’t there.

B, D, F & V UNDERPASS

September 8, 2009. I went back to my acupuncturist after a 5 year hiatus. It was a beautiful afternoon in NYC, so I decided to walk a bit, but when I saw the entrance to the subway by the Public Library, I took it. Once under ground, I lamented my decision, the passage was dreary. And then it happened – a mosaic of green and brown along the lower wall of the underpass. Then I saw a milky white iridescent wall of tile and before I knew it I saw golden roots shooting down from the ceiling. Further along there was a burrow – rabbit, gopher, snake – I don’t know. Then blue. It became a glorious walk to my station.

Art Around the Park at Tompkins Square

September 6, 2009. On Saturday and Sunday of Labor Day weekend, you can move your feet in the direction of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. There you will find Art Around the Park. Surrounding some of the park’s north, west and south sides is a sheath of canvas, and at work are scores of painters working side by side in whatever style suits them. The artists have two days to work on their canvas and at the end of the day on Sunday, there are gaping holes, maybe where a work has been sold, or maybe where the creator took it home.

My friend Rael liked this work by Steve Cox. The texture of the lines leaping and covering in alternating patterns was inviting. The grey lines were soothing, but ominous, asking how to decipher what contained them in this densely moving mass like a school of mackerel being herded by unknown hunters.


I like this work by Lora Morgenstern. She creates this patchwork community, the strollers by, and the onlookers. History – who has been here again, before, and never again because they have left us. She engages you as you stop to look. She talks, she looks, she sketches - some more, some less - but she wants you on this quilt. She will remember you in this way.

And then I like this work. And am still thinking about it. You can’t help thinking of all the religious themes playing out here in a global view. But I want to know about the individuals. Who is the dark skinned person, back to us? What is that relationship to the figure with the outstretched arms. Who is the man standing next to him, facing us, arms down, plaintive, staring? What has happened in the pietà scene at the bottom. What tragedy befell them, and can we still help them? Maybe it is the End of Days.

Jewels in Midtown.

September 5, 2009. Street fairs are a summer staple in NYC. You can find anything or nothing. Food, bed sheets, rugs, jewels, sun glasses. There is a profusion of sights, sounds, smells and people. I had just finished my Saturday morning swim, and I had to go the fair, before going off on the rest of my day, which would end in a full moon stroll on the Highline. These stone bracelets were jumbled on a table, a kaleidoscope of color and texture, waiting to be picked up, looked at and slid on your wrist. They could be the pebbly beach in some wonderland world …. and here they were, on a table towered over by midtown Manhattan hotels and office buildings.

Corn and Girls

September 3, 2009. I’m missing home just now. Girls and Corn 2009. The black earth farmed by my sister and her family, beneath the feet of her sandled granddaughters, reminds me of barefoot summers, running through the yard and pastures. The green of the corn, higher than the 4th of July, against the brilliant blue of a Minnesota sky (you don’t see it here). Their eyes focused out to the woman behind the camera, as ours would have been, to the one we love.

96th Street Sage

September 2, 2009. On my way to work. What a surprise to find these words, which I find important in approaching life. I might be, I often am, and sometimes I am not – I’m spot on. But I’m ready to hear what you have to say, see your point of view and consider that what I think might be wrong. I am open to so much more experience that way. But what a struggle! It’s a lot of work to try to stay open and available to new information as it arrives. Was the tag to the side the name of the sage, or an admirer who wanted to say ‘I second that.’?

Cooper Union mosaic

September 1, 2009. Anyone who moves through the East Village has seen these installations on lampposts, street corners, store fronts and many other sites. The texture, color and patterns can be wildly exotic, and I love them as an inspired addition to the streetscape. It looks like someone doing street maintenance, or marking the area for some rehab, added their own red paint, as if the glaze of the pottery, and splashes of color weren’t enough. When I took this picture I didn’t notice, what is to me, a grinning face in the middle of the composition. Large white teeth grinning out of a swirl of shards.

Dykeman Excavation too

August 29, 2009. More. The tearing away was more complete on this panel at Dykeman Street. The posters were torn away to the black glue, cement and flat white surface underneath. The blue was vivid and part of an ad that was built up from the base. Like an ancient passerby, someone left their mark on the upper left corner – just to let us know he had been there. I wish I had investigated these closer, and recorded in my mind the minutest details, because these are sure to vanish.

Dykeman Excavation

August 29, 2009. Take the A train to Dykeman Street, said Philip. You’ll see these marvelous billboards. I did. Paper ads are torn away, excavated, to reveal what is beneath, but not in neat layers. Rather in subsequent layers, overlays, color upon color, words shapes forms, bits and pieces. A view from above if I was in space – 10 snapshots in time – but none of them wholly in charge of the final work. I especially like the bits of green outlining the borders of the white space. The peace sign seems appropriate to the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love.

Gates to Heaven

August 28, 2009. Behind these blue gates once stood a rectory to St. Peter’s Church, the oldest Roman Catholic parish in NYC and NY State. Now there stands this giant luxury apartment building. During construction, this gate was erected, and I watched from my office window as a construction worker carefully constructed and affixed the cross at the top. It remained unadorned, in stark contrast to the bright blue, and the faded prints of the Jesus and the mother Mary on either side of the locked entrance. It isn’t the Gates of Paradise, but someone thought about how to construct it, to give it some dignity relative to its meaning to the church building. To whom does the Danger sign speak? The weak of heart, the pious, the converted, or the believers?

Tree Root Rub

August 26, 2009. I’m still learning how to focus my camera phone, so some of these don’t quite do justice to what my eye sees, but I hope you get the idea. On the street outside a school in Chelsea is a tree, and the roots bubble around the trunk and fill the square left open by the sidewalk. I took my last civil service exam there. As children tumble out of the school, they scrape and rub their soles across the nodules on the roots. It has created a pattern of textures, punctuated with deep green moss, that reminds me of ceramic work that I saw in Red Hook.

Dutch Street School

August 25. Dutch Street is a dark forgotten alley in lower Manhattan, and home to a place called the Downtown Little School. At the entrance to the school, someone painted these barriers a multitude of colors to brighten the entrance and perhaps engage the children coming to the school, or maybe some unknown passerby. It is there, on the way to my dentist, that I found it.

Kickity Kick

August 24. I was first drawn to this because it was on the side of a Verizon service trailer. It could have been created anywhere in the 5 boroughs and gets a new venue every time it is hitched up and towed around. Then kickity kick reminded me of a time when I was wearing cowboy boots and descending into the subway. Some kid, coming out of the subway with his pals, commented on me wearing hilly billy boots in Manhattan. Tonight I am drawn to the assertiveness of the lines – the first and the last marks especially – solid, assured, no hesitation in the sweep of the marker.

No Idling

August 23. I am enchanted when I find something like this. A solitary figure waiting to march forward to an ancient war. A helmet that recalls a Hessian warrior. Or is it the hat of the local vicar coming out to conquer the dragon. It exists as a temporary installation, exposed to the elements that reshape it from its creator’s original intent. Pieces have worn off, or maybe the owners of the building will move to clean the surface to restore the brick. I wish it would stay this way forever.

Mushroom on 96

August 22. Some part of us drives us to take risks in order to leave a picture for those who come after us that says “I was here.” That we braved some challenge that others did not. Whether we were ancient hunters, loomed over by mastadons, or modern urbanites, as in this case, facing a live third rail and oncoming locomotives that could knock us into the next county. Does he like mushrooms or was she growing them? Any surface becomes a canvas.

Black Locust Grove

August 21, 2009. My morning walking path takes me past a stand of trees for which I have no name. Every day I ask as I pass, “What are you?” and I receive no response, just the quiet calm of a small grove. I am attracted to the deep fissures in the bark and how it merges and separates to form shapes like waves running up and down the trunk. Half of these trees are now destroyed, a casualty of Tuesday’s storm. This beauty, now lying on the ground, will disappear into a pile of wood chips, its singular glory lost to all of us.

Downed Tree

August 20, 2009. Tuesday night there was a tremendous storm. 100 trees were downed. Maybe 200 more were damaged beyond saving. The park that is my backyard, from 86th Street north, has been rent asunder. I slept in Wednesday morning, but today I had to go out, drawn by the questions from my brothers about the havoc visited on Tuesday. The rain was so heavy, the downpour so fueled by a furious wind, that I couldn’t see out my windows and I was driven from them by the pounding of the rain against the glass. Was it hail? I was almost giddy with the fury of the elements – lightening and thunder – wondering if they would crash through my glass and invade my home and lash at my art stashed under the windows. I moved the art. There was a smell amidst all of this splintered wood, an unpleasant smell, something I didn’t want to be around. I worried. But the giant London Plane that I greet on my walks was intact, even the fungus growing out of an ancient wound where a limb once grew looked untouched. Tonight people wandered among the fallen trees, nearly crying, gaping at the tragedy of these giant providers of shade and comfort that had succumbed to 40 minutes of turbulence.

9th & A

August 18, 2009. Today would have been my parent’s 67th wedding anniversary. I thought about it as the day started on my walk through Central Park. That was it, just thought about it. That thought had nothing whatsoever to do with the art that is pictured here I thought this photo was interesting in the context of the narrative with it. Is the man under the car, or has he fallen out of the car? Is it fatigue over all of that art sitting in the closet, is it an accident, is it a murder. The mystery just sits there. And then someone added a sketch of glasses to the grouping. They’re looking, watching, but out at the viewer, not in at the photo.

88 at 96th

August 19, 2009. I’m on my way to work. The MTA tells me where I am. Someone unknown tells me where I should be. Is it a favorite restaurant, a rendezvous, a street? A yellow plastic number magnet. A child’s toy in the hands of a conspirator, teaming with an unknown designation from the MTA – 8. Maybe it is the eternal twice, no beginning and no end. I have been engaged.