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September 25, 2007

Cold Comfort Charm

The nicest furnishings in my flat belong to the dogs, and I don’t mean Shearling beds or ergonomic water-stands. I refer to the fancy tresses above the pasterns and at the rear, which, I’m told, are called exactly that: furnishings.
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In general, I do not like furnishings. I think couches, armchairs, rugs and the like belong in fictional murder mysteries. I’ve felt this way since childhood, though I grew up in lovely suburban Miami, in an elegant home of Danish Modern, teak and cherry wood, Steuban glass, and Jensen flatware. My own little room was ascetic, deliberately spare as a ship. As such, there is hardly anything about it to describe.
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I moved to New York in 1974, to a studio apartment on E. 79th St. that I actually used as a painting studio. Besides the stretchers, canvas, paints and brushes, and the jars of turps, it contained only a sleeping bag, a wooden stool, and 2 cooking pots. Instead of having a table, which would take up too much room, I balanced my plate at night on the windowsill, looking east. The two cats perched with me, luckily never defenestrating. We were a bit cramped, because the windowsill also held a spider plant, a sansavaria, and a miniature India rubber tree. (The notion of indoor plants still seems odd, because there didn’t seem to be any in Miami when I was growing up. When I was 18, we visited New York friends of my parents, the Dreylings. Their uptown hi-rise was the first apartment I can remember [except for the one in the Bronx where we lived until I was five]. I was shocked that people actually lived in such small, traffic-noisy, dark cubicles, had to use elevators to get home, and grew “houseplants” in their windows.)
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In Feb. 1976, I moved downtown to an illegal (i.e., nonresidential) loft on Hudson Street. I shared the floor with a working printing factory. The rent was $250/month. My half (1,200 sq. ft.) came with four full-size (but desiccated) trees in huge plastic tubs, a rickety bed cobbled from odd planks, a dozen dried up oil-paint tubes. Until I found someone to jerry-rig a private bath, I used the men’s room in the hallway and showered at the Y. The ceilings were so tall that eventually I built a bedroom on stilts. I cooked on a hot plate, and balanced my well-balanced dinner of soup on a window ledge--as I’d done uptown--but instead of eyeing the ice-tray cubicles of fellow hi-risers and a smidge of the East River, I now gazed over majestic, unpopulated, industrial spans and sunsets over the Hudson. Often I climbed out one of the enormous windows to dangle my feet on the adjacent rooftop. No one around, except the wolf-like dog that patrolled up there. I met him after my first trepidatious night in this new, dead-quiet, pre-gentrified, desolate neighborhood. Awaking at sunup (no curtains, no shades), I was aghast to see the wolf-dog, staring in at me with feral blue eyes.
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I had to leave the loft in 1982, when the building was sold to a harassing, unlawful yet litigious reprobate. (The usual story.) I moved a few blocks to a four-story walkup with a bar beneath, on Harrison. My four-room railroad flat had reptilian green walls, seven cracked, boarded up windows, and no kitchen to speak of, or bathroom–just a toilet at the end of a long dim hallway. The previous tenants had been there for 60 years and had paid $60/month. (Mine started at around $325.) The two useless wall outlets probably dated from Thomas Edison days. The gas jets in the narrow stairway had been plugged. Each room had an iron bed and a heavy armoire filled with Miss Havisham-type items. Since I wouldn’t dream of taking up valuable square footage with furniture, I happily got rid of everything. Now rattling about in four empty rooms, I dug up literally ten layers of linoleum, under which were newspapers from the Korean War, and beneath them, papers from World War II, and beneath them, wide-plank 19th-century floors.
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I maintain little in the way of furniture, except for a number of desks. I prefer that housewares be necessary and that they do not match, an aesthetic I picked up from my friend Miriam, a weaver now in her 90s who lives in Bennington, Vermont, in a one-room-schoolhouse that she made into a kind of arts and crafts cottage. Up in the loft, which sleeps about 20 at once, and whose rail is an old hayloft ladder, the mattresses lie directly on the floor, made up with thin cotton sheets and pillow cases in divers florals and plaids, no two matched.
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My proclivity for oddment dishes is an aesthetic I acquired a little later, in the mid-70s, when my friend Lil told me about a remarkable brunch she went to, in a genuinely bohemian Greenwich Village apartment. The host and hostess, both artists who will remain unnamed because of their fame, used mismatched, chipped plates and mugs in an unaffected flea-market style. In fact, I'll bet they invented shabby chic.
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Besides eschewing furniture and home accessories, I also abstain from using heat. When I moved in, the radiator at one end of the flat was broken and the other, which probably had stood near the blocked-up fireplace, was missing. I disconnected the gas line. Of course, it was midsummer, and I was unperturbed. In December I taped plastic dropcloths on the windows (a custom I still practice, 25 years later). This solution worked fine, except that the wind off the river blew in through fissures in the ancient walls. Only when it gets below freezing out is it a mite chilly indoors; but there are always hot baths, fingerless gloves and the animals, equipped with furnishings enough for all.

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Posted by Jane on 5:10 PM | Comments (0)

September 9, 2007

Insomniac Scribbles

Descriptions that revolve during wee hours of unbidden wakefulness:

1. Cherchez la Pen
In the middle of the night, thinking of a possible way to start his memoir, he got out of bed and rooted around for a pen among the many odd ones (biros, disposable fountains, razor points, felt-tips, those with erasable green ink, bank-ad freebies, etc.) which had accumulated in a collection of disused coffee mugs carefully lined up on a shelf. There was a yellow mug with Chinese characters [for good luck? For caution hot beverage?]; a mug with his college logo (appropriately, it was Penn); one personalized with his mother’s name and a lugubrious owl on the obverse. There was a plain blue one with two white chips in the lip resembling a Nepalese mountain range; and a mug from Starbuck’s (the older style); and a mug on which was embossed an image of his former favorite dog breed, the Pekinese, before he switched allegiance to the Nova Scotia Duck-Tolling Retriever (and was even now awaiting via UPS the arrival of a mug bearing the mug of that dog from the NSDTR Enthusiasts Association). Every one of these cast-off cups, now crammed with pens, having been relegated to the superannuated rank of pen catch-alls, had been used at first to drink from. He was particular about both pens and coffee mugs, quickly tiring of the latter and replacing them one by one like so many quasi-discarded relationships that he was loathe to end definitively. This was as good a solution as any, to retain and discard simultaneously, since he kept them but in another guise. It was from the chipped blue that he finally chose a suitable instrument (a black-ink ballpoint) with which to begin his procrastinatory, minatory memoir.
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2. Misery is a clogged ear producing temporary deafness and precluding the ear plugs you normally (or not-so-normally) carry with you at all times. Every few hours you must cock your head at a right angle to the neck, like a heavy bloom bent upon a broken stalk, and apply an unctuous wax-softener unappealingly called “Debrox” by pinching the little plastic dispenser and having an awful ooze trickle ghoulishly into the ear canal. All the time you exist among maddeningly muffled sounds you regret every complaint against noise you’ve ever made and pray for the return of your normally hypersensitive, super-sharp hearing. You avoid the temptation to go spelunking with Q-tips because your otologist father had often scared you in childhood with horror stories of how they puncture (and permanently ruin) eardrums though unaccountably you store them by the hundreds (the Q-tips, not eardrums), always stocking up on the super kingsize family pak) despite the fact that, mainly for the sake of enjoying peace and quiet, you live alone.
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3. Misery also is a mosquito whose monstrous and implacable near-and-far whining bears an uncanny resemblance to the Doppler effect. In the middle of the night the insect grows into a monster like the human-eating alien tripods from The War of the Worlds, which you unwisely watched (disobeying your Still Small Voice) only hours ago and which, unfortunately, has you wide-eyed and mosquito-battling, and alien to sleep. Each time the invisible pillaging mosquito (is there more than one?) attacks (knuckles, ankles, wrist bones), you plunge a deep X with your thumbnail in each growing red hummock of the bites, an operation which, according to every summer-camp kid, is supposed to assuage the burning itch. That doesn’t work very well so you hope the self-inflicted X's will at least distract you from your lingering movie-terror. After a couple of hours of this losing battle you get up and run a scalding bath heavily laced with baking soda. Afterwards, to expunge the special horror effects, you switch on the TV looking for something soporific like reruns of This Old House. But what you tune in to and can’t turn off is Psycho.

Posted by Jane on 1:45 PM | Comments (0)

September 3, 2007

The Artificial End of Summer

A blank azure hammock above the empty city marks the end
of this manmade end-of-summer day. Among the surprises, this
holiday: crepitating crickets sound bushes into countryside;
and countless little infant-stares of floral eyes; and stalking herds
of geese, touring vacant fields. A mid-distance clutch of yellow-
lashed Van Goghs says: Look into any deep brown sworling lens
and smile! while just beyond, a black-and-yellow tug chugs
a beeline for the giant blooms, and disappears in nectar.

Below sits someone on a bench in fading light, half-hidden
in pine and yarrow. Head bent, still as bronze, absorbed in lore
or sorrow, she fails to note those spoils. And yet one more, afar:
a sudden shining sail blade slowly slices through the old facades
of newsprint-dingy factories, the ragged coast of Hoboken
and Jersey City's shore of erstwhile industry.

Posted by Jane on 6:00 PM | Comments (0)