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December 24, 2007

Full Circle

It is Christmas Eve. The landscape is quite empty; its colors are orchestral: henna-brown, a touch of brass, ample silver, ivory, ebony. Faint clouds smudge the oyster-pearly sky like fingerprints.
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The north meadow is now covered with widespread tarps as protection from frost. They resemble sails drying out on a pier. They're a luminous sea-glass-gray and luff ominously, mimicking in color and shimmer the scopic Hudson River beyond. Earlier, the tarps were dotted with hundreds of seagulls, skating to a muted duet of mournful foghorn and caterwauling train. And then the birds, keening mightily, rose in unison, their whelken whiteness merging with the oyster sky.
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Each branch and twig stands out in folk-art clarity, painted with a tiny brush. In one tree clings a passel of sparrows, like remnant brown leaves. At the tree's roots grumbles a flock of puffed pigeons. Some Canada geese bask on the lawn like a fleet of freighters. The koi in the pond have taken refuge under a plywood shelter disguised with stones, where they’ll stay hidden 'til spring.
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My mind is still on Moby-Dick. This week I built two miniatures of the Spouter Inn. One is the rain-damp façade:

Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of out-hanging light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath--"The Spouter-Inn:--Peter Coffin."

The other is a replica of the clammy room where Ishmael and Queequeg stayed, before setting sail from New Bedford, on Christmas Day.
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These and other small-scale constructions, plus paintings inspired by M-D, will be at Art 101 Gallery, 101 Grand Street, in Williamsburg, Jan. 25 - Feb. 17. I'll be at the opening on Jan. 27 (Mozart’s birthday), 4 to 7pm. To get to the gallery from Manhattan, take the L to the first stop in Brooklyn -- called, amazingly, "Bedford Ave." Walk on Bedford to Grand through that quiet, low-built, 19th-century neighborhood. The gallery is near the East River.
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Tribeca has just given birth to its first bookstore. My first purchase was a pop-up Moby-Dick by Sam Ita. As I was examining the real rope rigging in the pop-up book, I glanced up to the undulant mural of literary giants spanning the cafe. Next to Whitman, Melville sits close to a pipe-smoking Queequeg. A figment of fiction may not be an author per se, but Queequeg did scribe one oeuvre when he copied his glyphic tattoos onto his coffin. Was this act the creation of a new literary genre, i.e., autonecrology? In any case, I hope he's enjoying his Starbuck's, for tomorrow he and Ishmael set sail.

Posted by Jane on 5:21 PM | Comments (0)

December 9, 2007

The Koi in Winter; and, Freeman Meets Treemen

I. The Koi in Winter
After the first snow, a few weeks back, I took the dogs out really early, and no one was about. We began in Staple Street, an alley, and I let them romp off-leash. Then we headed to the river, which that day was soft as smoke. It’s rare to find untrodden snow in the city, but delightfully, all the tracks we saw were made by us. In the North Meadow, a pair of isolated pines, shaped roughly like arrowheads, stood out in isolate splendor against the sallow lawn. The lotus pond was solid ice, except for a plentiful scattering of spidery black stars through which you could see the inky water. Yellow remnants of tall pond grass stood like wattles and thatch, and were topped by dollops of new snow that looked exactly like cotton bolls. The surface of the pond was glazed and pebbly, impressed with leaves like textured leaf-and-petal stationery from India. Later the stars filled in. Still, beneath the impervious glaze you could see orange koi drift eerily, as if through mercury, perhaps asleep.
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II. Freeman Meets Treemen
There’s a thick phalanx of Christmas trees stacked all the way down the block, some encroaching against our building and, in an adjacent “neck of the woods,” plenty more hemmed in behind the fence of the sidewalk café. This temporary forestation is both sweet and nettlesome, beautiful and unseemly. Walking the last flight down, I see a square (Christmas card?) of pines through the peep-window in the front door. That’s the beautiful part. The sweet part is the prevalent aromatherapy.
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The nettlesome part is that it’s hard to get in and out of the house or down the block because of all the trees and people shopping for them and the commotion of a 24-hour presence of tree-sellers, who have brought the trees from Canada. They work in shifts around the clock and appear to sleep in their van. . . .The unseemly part stems from my awareness that these beautiful trees are already dead. They’ve been usurped from the earth to be bought, bedizened, and dumped. I never liked the idea of hacking down vital trees to indulge brief human caprice. I wish people cultivated live trees to dress up at Christmastime.
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There are many such transient tree farms all around the city. ‘Tis the season, after all. A few weeks ago, the traffic triangle on Sixth Avenue near Spring St. was dominated by a large tent full of Christmas lights and ornaments, boxes of tinsel, etc., and guarded by a great blow-up Santa who jumped about as Christmas music blared scratchily from an undisclosed source. The half acre or so of cut trees, mostly bundled in nylon netting, was manned by a burly guy in his forties who looked, appropriately enough, like a lumberjack. As I walked through the lot, he stopped me to pet the dogs. Loquacious and country-friendly, he extended his hand and introduced himself as Billy. I noticed that both labial-nasal creases sparkled with what I thought was “bling”; but his diamonds turned out to be wreath glitter. Billy identified all the different tree types and had me feel the Douglas firs for their suppleness. Since I’d never felt any needles before, supple or otherwise, I didn’t know how to appraise his commodity. He confided that his trees had a bigger-than-usual “gift base.” I guess I looked blank, so he explained that the more trunk exposed at the bottom, the more gifts could be piled there. Looking around, I could see that more was definitely better.
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Curious about why people do what they do, I asked about his background. Turned out he had a Masters in cellular biology. Even more interesting, he’d spent many years working on large cruise ships. This I wanted to know about, so I asked him to elaborate. He gave it serious thought, then with a conclusive nod, said slowly: “Being aboard cruise ships means a lot of heavy-duty introspection time.”

Posted by Jane on 1:35 PM | Comments (0)