Category Archives: Culture

August 3, 2013 · 12:12 pm

Day 1-In Which I Learn to Hobble

It was a success, the surgery, though I awoke from the anesthesia blubbering like a baby. It’s normal, said the orthopedic surgeon, come to check on me. A lot of people cry. Then it was hip, hop, on to the wheelchair, on to the crutches, off to my new full-time lair, my living room, my foot on pillows above the couch.

My snouted nursemaid wedged beside me.

My other nursemaids scurry to my orders. My computer, please! My muffin! My book! Put it close, I’ve got to get an NPR review done this week. Could you please turn that light off? Or on?

I have a good view of Maud’s metallic blue fighter fish, Brussels, making his small way around the bowl.

Somehow, thinking about the immediate future, though I never had much patience for that fish, I now feel kindly toward it. Brussels reminds me of myself in my own little living room bowl. Except I hobble, can’t float at all, when I want to go brush my teeth.

Trying to stretch myself outside this world, adventuring via pictures of the past to the motor adventure taken in 1918 by John Burroughs, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone.

This brilliant crew took a 12-day car camping trip in Burroughs’ automobile when he was 81.

John Burroughs, less well known today than the others, was ragingly popular by that time in his life. Gil and I used to visit his country retreat, a tiny cabin called Slabsides that stood beside a celery marsh in West Park, New York.

Burroughs’ fans have kept it intact, so you can see it as he did. Being there always made me want to inhabit a cabin, and now mine is virtually like his.

… I was offered a tract of wild land, barely a mile from home, that contained a secluded nook and a few acres of level, fertile land shut off from the vain and noisy world by a wooded precipitous mountain… and built me a rustic house there, which I call ‘Slabsides’, because its outer walls are covered with slabs. I might have given it a prettier name, but not one more fit, of more in keeping with the mood that brought me thither … Life has a different flavor here. It is reduced to simpler terms; its complex equations all disappear.

Young college women used to travel in hordes by train to Slabsides to pay homage to the great man, a pioneer of nature writing who published some 25 volumes, of which a million and a half volumes were sold during his lifetime.

In 1918, a convoy of eight vehicles accompanying the brainy colleagues toured Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Virginia, stopping to camp on farms, examine old industrial sites, take hikes along rivers, and measure farming implements for fun, documenting as they went.

Some shooting entertained Ford and Firestone.

At night around the campfire the two industrialists, the naturalist and the inventor wound down by chewing over Shakespeare, Thoreau, chemistry. Don’t you wish you could have been there? In a way, you can, because photos from the trip are stored at Harvard’s Widener Library, with a smaller portfolio at my favorite website, Slate’s The Vault.

Closer to home yet exotic in its own way, the wool I am sending away for to keep my hands busy during this nonambulatory period.

What is mohair, anyway, I wonder, as I fawn over the silk and mohair skein available from the chicest yarn store I know, Purl in Soho, New York City.

It’s from a line called Haiku made by a company called Alchemy. The shade is called Teardrop. Is that not irrisistable?

The yarn comes not from a sheep but a goat, the Angora, which emigrated from Tibet to Turkey in the 16^th century, and it’s one of the oldest textile materials in use. It’s made of keratin, like hair, wool, horns and skin. Mohair is warm in winter, while remaining cool in summer. It is flame resistant, crease resistant, and does not felt. The goats are mainly bred in South Africa now.

And it is of course beautifully luxurious. Makes your fingers sing. Should I choose this color instead? It’s for a slip of an elegant bandana, not the kind you’d wear around a Slabsides campfire. Evening Pink.

If Firestone and Ford and Edison were on their way over to roast weenies, maybe a scarf in this hue would be more refined: Blue Jay Way.

So many choices when your leg is up and all you’ve got to do is dream.

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Filed under Art, Culture, Dogs, Fashion, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Knitting, Nature, Photography, Publishing, Writers, Writing

August 2, 2013 · 6:19 am

Of Leeches and Fiberglass

Five hundred years ago I would be having leeches applied to my leg today. Now it’s just a thigh-high fiberglass cast. And I know my foot will get better. (Even with all those leeches, a person would probably never get out there again in the millet fields.)

Just so you know, I may not be posting as regularly in the next month or so, as I drift in a medicinal haze. We’ll see what adventures are to be had in my living room, aside from gorging on episodic tv and Poptarts. And guest bloggers are welcome, those with adventures to share, just leave me a comment and we’ll discuss.

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Filed under Culture, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature

July 31, 2013 · 5:28 pm

Life’s a Beach

Visiting Jones Beach today was like being on a public strand circa the 1950s, the bright beach bags, chairs, umbrellas, suits (except the suits were skimpier, even on the less than skimpy subathers).

Families with their chairs drawn around in big circles. Teenagers jumping around, full of beans. Grandpas dozed. Mothers and daughters plunked themselves down just like me and Maud, who immediately tugged her towel into the perfect rectangle, the perfect protected zone for her to sun her bod.

The middleaged couple next to us seemed to be mooning over each other for the first hour we were there, then disappeared into a dome tent whose sides wobbled along to their muted boom box: I’ve Had the Time of My Life, sung by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes, the finale song from Dirty Dancing.

The hardest working man on Jones Beach came around in his Ray Bans and sweaty tee shirt, hoisting his cooler.

Ice cream, Chipwich, frozen fruit bar! he called out. “Is this a picture for the winter?” he asked me as I captured his likeness for my personal magazine. The strawberry FrozFruit was like a rock, like a sweet Antarctica iceberg, until it melted all at once in sticky swirls around my mother-daughter friendship rings.

The whoosh of the waves rolling in and out. Hypnotic. The sun that penetrated even under my floppy hat brim. Snooooooze. Flip through a magazine. Is anything really worth reading?

Music. Manna for a twenty-one year old.

I am beginning to wonder what effect Taylor Swift has had on her generation, a group of closet romantics.

Stay stay stay

I’ve been loving you for quite some time…

You took the time to memorize me my fears my hopes and dreams

I just like hanging out with you all the time

All those times that you didn’t leave it’s been occuring to me

I would like to hang out with you for my whole life

The cool soft grit of the sand as I paddle through it with my contented toes.

The waves? Too cold, except for an ankle bath. I like my fruit bar chilly, not my Atlantic Ocean. As long as the air is pure. As long as I come home with salt caked in my hair and sand dusting my ankles. Do you know what I like about Jones Beach? You lean back and close your eyes and listen to people laugh.

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Filed under Culture, Fashion, Jean Zimmerman, Music, Nature

July 30, 2013 · 4:00 pm

Feets Too Big

All the places I won’t walk.

I said I’m sorry to an earthworm. Out loud.

It was cut in half, lying on the asphalt. Commiserating with a worm is not something I would ordinarily do, but I could in some ways relate to the creature. I’ll be able to move, but slowly, on crutches, after my foot surgery in three days. My right foot is eventually going to be good as new.

My left foot will have to wait to get its imperfections mended. I didn’t know that a tailor’s bunion, the aberrant bump on the outside of the foot — the one that will no longer allow me to get into anything besides flip flops — was named for the way tailors traditionally sat. Cross-legged.

I guess it cramped the style of their little toe. Too bad they didn’t have Dr. Voellmicke, my orthopedic surgeon, to fix them up. I’ll be in a hard cast for six weeks. That little bone that leads up to your toe, the one you never think about, is virtually marrowless, which means it has very little of the good stuff inside it needs to heal properly. Then, while Dr. Voellmicke is at it, he’s going to fix the golf ball size knot of a bone spur that has decided it likes to surf my big toe knuckle. (That’s a mix of about five metaphors, if you’re counting.)

No real walking, no driving, a lot of hurry up and wait. “You can rent one of those little scooters at the drug store,” said the nurse. I don’t think so.

Today, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun popped into my mind. Maybe because my friend Jennifer and I were talking about the dark novels we read when we were adolescents that were probably too old for us, not to mention already a bit dated — Margerie Morningstar and The Group among them. Johnny, which Trumbo published in 1939, told the story of a soldier who has lost all his limbs in a war as well as all of his face (including his eyes, ears, teeth, and tongue).

I remember how incredibly disturbing was the point of view of the novel, from inside the cave of this tortured guy’s mind. He wasn’t a lump, as he appeared to those around him. Trumbo went on to become one of Hollywood’s best-paid screenwriters, and won two Oscars under pseudonyms even while being blacklisted. I never knew about any of that when I was growing up, just that Johnny Got His Gun was a great tour de force. (And that I was a little bit cool to be reading it.)

But as for me, feel sorry for my self as I might, I will hardly be a lump after Friday. I’ll just be a tiny bit inconvenienced, incommoded, and rendered relatively adventureless, by an elective surgery that’s going to fix a minor imperfection so I will be able to go hiking in the woods again, or dawdling down the street in New York City, or swimming in my cardio class… I should be thinking not of Trumbo but humming to Your Feet’s Too Big by Fats Waller.

Say up in Harlem at a table for two
There were four of us
Me, your big feet and you
From your ankles up, I’d say you sure are sweet
From there down; there’s just too much feet
Yes, your feets too big
Don’t want ya, ’cause ya feets too big
Can’t use ya, ’cause ya feets too big
I really hate ya, ’cause ya feets too big

What I am doing, aside from humming, until the day of my surgery… simple things. The things you don’t ordinarily think about. Simple pleasures. Ones I need two feet for.

Pogo-ing. Check.

Fixing up a coffee station in my new living room/bedroom — no stairs for me anytime soon.

Harvesting the garden.

Weeding the garden, with help from Maud.

Walking down the stairs to the kitchen, the steps I usually complain about, to make herbal iced tea with chamomile, mint and lavender from my garden.

Going to Jones Beach tomorrow, getting some sand between my soon to be fiber-glassed toes.

Hopefully Maud and I will relish it as Gil and I did last year.

Nails, both fingers and toes. Gossip included, with my good friend Betsy.

Make a reading list. Reread the Trumbo? A movie list. A music playlist. Seriously think about a knitting project.

Drive. I so take it for granted ordinarily. But when we walk by the Hudson at dusk, then drive with the windows down through the warm dark night, Bruce on the radio — It’s midnight in Manhattan, this is no time to get cute, it’s a mad dog’s promenade — an ice cream dripping, I already feel nostalgic about having two feet in hand.

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Filed under Cooking, Culture, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Writers

July 29, 2013 · 5:46 pm

Pogo Schtick NYC

By the time we arrived, the Big Air finals had ended. Pogopalooza 10 was barreling towards its final couple of hours. None of the participants, it seemed, were tired. They were hardly breaking a sweat. It was as if the 10^th Annual World Championships of Extreme Pogo, held in venues around New York City over the past day and a half, had just barely begun.

The crowd surged around the cordoned-off performance area in Union Square Park, on Broadway between 14^th and 17^th Streets. Because it was New York, where everything happens, twin ferrets made an appearance in the bustling audience, a distraction that was pretty much overlooked.

The real attraction was the lineup of Xpogo stars, the ones hoping to break Guinness Records or at least achieve their personal best. This was the largest pogo stick event world wide, and all the pro athletes were here.

First came a practice period, with a break in the middle for one brave pogoer to take the mike and propose marriage to his pogo-fan girlfriend. He dropped to one knee and spoke of his happiness, and the crowd applauded. A guy in an orange helmet jumped by the couple: “Hey, congrats,” he said with a grin. (The two betrothed are pictured in the middle.)

Then a yellow-hatted, yellow-tied, yellow-suspendered master of ceremonies out of a Wizard of Oz remake introduced a contestant who had pogoed 23.22 miles, and broken a Guinness record with 70,271 bounces (seven straight hours). The athlete made a pitch for his charity, Bounce to a Cure.

Next came the the Best Trick competition. The dozen or so contestants ranged in age from 16 to28 and in looks from movie-star handsome to pretty darn cute. Fluorescent garb seemed somewhat de rigeur, as were sturdy helmets.

When I was about 10, I ruled on the pogo stick, setting records on my driveway with 100 jumps at a time. I didn’t put a lot of air between my stick and the blacktop, it just felt good to go boing-a-boing-a-boing. To keep that balance for so long. To hold on when it looked like I might crash down.

The athletes now acquiescing to pre-Tricks interviews had bigger plans. Some of them, after all, could take themselve fully nine feet in the air, just for a start. There was Wacky Chad from Syracuse, the one in the fluorescent orange helmet and kicks.

Also, a qualifier known as Manchild, who jumps his pogo backwards but had no name as of yet for his move. There was Michael Mena, who called his move the “Manchild” out of respect for his colleague. The other contestants gave previews of their tricks: the under the leg bar spin, the infinity wrap, the double 180 wrap, the grisly whip. “You’ll just have to wait and see,” said one fellow who had stripped to the waist, with a mischievous expression.

The Ramones song Judy is a Punk blared from the speakers as the action began.

“None of these tricks have been landed before!” announced the mc.

And I noticed that this sport looked fun and all, but was anything but safe. You could injure your body, yes, but you could even more easily bruise your ego. One after the other, the jumpers broke the line and came out into the center, boing-a, boing-a, going through their moves. And invariably, each one wiped out. Dusted himself off. Rejoined the line.

Beck’s Loser was now in the air, a fitting soundtrack for these redblooded competitors who seemed immune to failture.

A guy in sunglasses came out and tripped himself up almost before he began – every single time. “It’s a very technical move,” said the mc, “Give him a hand.”

A duo on a double pogo tried over and over again to achieve a back flip—and they did manage to nail it, only they landed with their feet on the ground rather than the stick’s pedals.

Manchild came so close, so many times.

Dan Mahoney, from Nova Scotia, the bare-chested athlete with the wry smile, at 20 is a veteran jumper.

He held the world record for highest jump on a pogo stick (9’6”). He went high, high, high, with his trick at Union Square, he flew, and the figure he cut was so complex that a second after he’d done it I couldn’t even figure out what he did. Still, he failed.

Until he made it. Yes! Glory. The crowd erupted. Yet the competition continued, as the judges would assess the overall performances at the end of the period and make a cumulative judgment.

The Black Keys Howling for You, their big stadium hit, pounded from the amplifiers now as a backdrop for a sport in a smaller stadium, a struggling extreme sport whose people have performed in Beijing, Rome, London, Japan. Can pogoing ever achieve the respect given snowboarding or skateboarding?

Another champion, Biff Hutchinson of Burley, Idaho, jumped into the fray, accomplishing a back flip, then another, then another. Earlier he had taken first in the Big Air contest.

No one wanted to stop. Even Wacky Chad had to come out for one more ride.

Finally, the end. I watched Mahoney remove his sneaks and socks and carefully examine his feet. He had developed a small limp in the course of the contest. Now he went forward to collect his prize. Do his interview. “When I think of a trick,” the athlete told the audience, “I can see it in my head.” He’s won this prize for four years now. “I love you all,” he said.

Fail and try again. Fail, and win. That was the spirit of the day. But did I dare?

I approached the open pogo area, where brash little pink skirted toddlers and perplexed looking middle agers tried to develop some confidence on the stick.

I was the last in line for the day.

I’d done it before. Yes, several decades before. But give me a moment to collect myself, we’d see who still had the chops.

I left my fluorescents at home. I still had my boing-a attitude, though. I asked to use one of the big bazookas but was told by a helper, “That’s what they use,” pointing to the professional pogo pit. That was okay. I mounted my steed and managed not one, not two, but eight jumps. I fell off, then I got up. I dusted myself off.

Eight good bounces. Only 92 more to go.

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July 27, 2013 · 9:13 pm

Captive Audience

Millbrook, New York is a quiet town, a town of well-behaved dogs on leashes and potted flowers.

A town of rice pudding with cinnamon at a cute bakery called Babette’s Kitchen.

The last notable murder in Millbrook took place a century ago – a nanny named Sarah Brymer was strangled when her employers, of the Barnes Compton clan, left their estate for a New York City visit during a January snowstorm. The coachman, Frank Schermerhorn, did it – though he first tried to pin the blame on the Japanese butler – then cut his own throat with a straight razor when he was apprehended.

That was a long time back and everybody’s forgotten about it.

So it was interesting to be invited to Millbrook’s warm and comfortable Merritt Bookstore for a discussion/book signing today where attendees could “discover the art of mystery.” I was joined by another novelist, Koethi Zan, whose book The Never List was published earlier this month.

Koethi is a former entertainment industry lawyer who makes her debut with this riveting book. She knows everything there is to know on the subject of girls and women taken captive by craven men, then tortured and imprisoned for years. She is also an authority on the subject of the women who eventually escape these men. And she has worked this knowledge into a thriller which has received strong acclaim from people like Jeffery Deaver and Tess Gerritsen.

It was great to meet Koethi.

She brought her husband, Stephen Metcalf, a critic-at-large at Slate who has a nonfiction book on the 1980s in the works. I brought Gil – yes, Gil Reavill, whose speciality is also crime and whose recent book is Mafia Summit.

All the great minds were present. The only thing lacking was an audience.

It happens sometimes. When you make appearances as an author, you don’t know whether to expect 120 people or three. When it’s three, you still have to be mentally present, be on your game, because these wonderful people made the effort to come out and see you, after all. Amazing!

In this case, nada. So, with two of the book store’s staff, we sat around in the cozy garrett upstairs and had a very stimulating talk about writing books.

We talked about creating a bad guy. How do you get inside his head? Koethi said that for The Never List it was more about her characters trying to ascertain how her bad guy ticked. For me, with The Orphanmaster, I said it was partly about figuring out what he would think and do that was completely the opposite of what I would think and do.

How do you discipline yourself when you don’t feel like working? Five hundred words a day, said Koethi. That is my minimum.

We talked about fact-based prose. About research. (One of my favorite subjects.) I told them about how I had based my protagonist in The Orphanmaster on a real person I had written about for an earlier work, The Women of the House, and how I had all my research practically done when I started my novel. Stephen talked about the book he is working on, about the plenitude of letters regarding the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of his central figures. Koethi, as I said, has absorbed everything on captive females.

She told us about some of the recent high-profile cases, and said that while it seems some of these young women are coming back to a semblance of mental health it’s not always what it seems.

We talked about captivity narratives, about the classic John Wayne film The Searchers, about an article that has recently been published in The New York Review of Books on the subject, about Ride the Wind, a historical novel based on the Cynthia Parker story. The subject interests me historically because in Savage Girl, the central figure spends some time with the Plains Indians.

A lot to chew on. All of this and a full cheese platter too.

We meandered home on the back roads, through soccer fields and corn fields and gently curving horse meadows.

There was only one exception to the bucolic charm of the open road: the ruin of an abandoned complex that was Wingdale, a mental hospital which operated upstate from 1924-1994 and is said to be haunted by ghosts. With its crumbling brick and busted windows, it looks like the perfect set for a horror film.

No visitors allowed.

There’s always something behind the happy façade.

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Filed under Culture, Fiction, History, Jean Zimmerman, Savage Girl, The Orphanmaster, Writers, Writing

July 25, 2013 · 11:16 am

NPR: Great Historical Fiction for Summer 2013

I liked digging into recent historical fiction for my summer round-up on NPR, which is hot off the presses. I knew some of the authors’ work already, and some novels I discovered for this assignment. I tried for a balance of time periods and styles when I selected the books to review. What I was really going for, though, was fiction that took off from specific fact, historical personae or events that grounded the work.

So these were the books I reviewed.

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline.

The Black Country by Alex Grecian.

The Blood of Heaven by Kent Wascom.

Fever by Mary Beth Keane.

The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan.

I hope you enjoy your summer reading, whether it takes place in a lawn chair, on a beach towel, or on the couch in front of the air conditioner!

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Filed under Culture, Fiction, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Writers, Writing

July 23, 2013 · 3:32 pm

Portals Into Other Worlds

I’m thinking about how you can visit other times and places on the web, peeking through portals the way you peer through a cutout in the plywood surrounding a construction site. Here are fifteen visits I’ve made lately that I’d recommend.

It was a mistake for Rolling Stone to make a rock star out of a creep.

That doesn’t mean the article that goes with the picture is not good journalism. And don’t we want to know, don’t we have to know, what makes terrorists tick, in order to know how to combat the evil they do? If you don’t feel like patronizing Rolling Stone at the moment to read the piece, if you’re interested in long-form reportage on all kinds of subjects, from a history of the famous indie rock club Maxwell’s to a star 16-year-old pitcher in Japan, go to Longform.org, which reprints new and classic nonfiction from around the web.

Admit it, you want to know the inside story of the Kindle. What brainiacs came up with this gizmo that might mean the end of books as we know and love them? (I actually have a Kindle Fire and don’t find it hasn’t stifled my desire to read print on paper, just saying.)

It sounds almost banal, but I guarantee that when you hook into The Evolution of Love Songs (1904-2007) you will not be able to quit. I’m waiting for part 2, 2008-2013.

Up my alley, and I hope yours, a view of how the lives of American women changed over the 19th century through the art of the time. In particular, life on the farm, complete with Winslow Homerian milkmaids.

There are so many food blogs. I like npr’s the salt.

A view into a different world would include the minds of people who make Lego their personal idiom. They do things like make plastic sushi and other amazing Lego food creations.

I’m interested in the alternate lives of feral children, especially since my next novel Savage Girl describes all the trouble one can get into in Gilded Age New York. Like how do you participate in a refined dinner party when you’re accustomed to tearing meat apart with your fingers? Every now and then a contemporary wild child surfaces with an interesting story. You can read about Marina Chapman, a British housewife who claims she was raised by monkeys in Colombia.

Want to know about neolithic cooking? The Rambling Epicure tells you, and it starts with “one bucket wild spinach leaves.” The excellent food site gives you a recipe from Jane Le Besque’s cookbook, Un Soufflé de Pollen: Livre de Cuisine et de Peinture. A painter, Le Besque lives in the Pays de Gex in the foothills of the Jura mountains, and this is her “artistic vision” of primitive cuisine.

See how other people connect — passionately — with the past. Reenactors get their due with 36 photos from around the world.

Here, actors and actresses from Iere Theatre Productions play the roles of indentured East Indian laborers and British constabulary police during a reenactment of the first arrival of East Indians to Trinidad and Tobago, on Nelson Island in the Gulf of Paria off the west coast of Trinidad.

It’s not all about Gettsyburg, clearly.

These children are taking part in a mock military parade at an amusement park in Pyongyang to mark International Children’s Day, in this photo taken on June 1, 2013.

Okay, the squeamish should not tune in to “7 Bio-Artists Who Are Transforming the Fabric of Life Itself” at the site io9.

It’s about how some provocative artists today deal with biotechnology. Working with scientists and engineers, these geniuses transform living tissue and even their own bodies into works of art. For example, Brazilian-American “transgenic artist” Eduardo Kac took a rabbit and implanted it with a Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) found in jellyfish. When placed under a blue light, the rabbit glows an otherworldly hue.

On the lighter side, see the longest domino chain in the world made of books: 2,131 of them.

My dog is named a very modern Oliver. He looks exactly like his name.

Medievalists.net has a well-researched piece on ancient pet names, such as dogs called Sturdy, Whitefoot, Hardy, Jakke, Bo and Terri, and a cat in England named Gyb – the short form of of Gilbert – or one named Mite, who prowled around Beaulieu Abbey in the 13th century, or Belaud, a grey cat belonging to Joachim du Bellay in the 16th century. Isabella d’Este owned a cat named Martino. I bet nobody died their animals green.

Buzzfeed has 16 noble photos of women writers at work, including a great one of Anne Sexton immersed in her craft.

From MessyNessyChic.com, the story of an artist whose work was discovered in the trash 50 years after his death.

This grouchy butcher by trade, an immigrant named Charles Dellschau, had secretly been busy assembling thousands of intricate drawings of flying machines, sewn together in homemade notebooks with shoelaces.

And for anyone who didn’t catch this when it went big on the web, Dustin Hoffman showed us his softer side in reminiscing about Tootsie and what playing a woman meant to him. The interview is a window into the psyche of someone whose brilliant work opened a window into a psyche we were lucky to see.

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July 22, 2013 · 6:16 pm

Dirty Disney

I expected the Paul McCarthy show at New York’s Park Avenue Armory to be raunchy, demented, transgressive. What I didn’t anticipate was that it would be hilarious.

If you follow the contemporary art world you know that McCarthy excels at tweaking the public’s nose. Not long ago there was the giant inflatable “Complex Pile” he contributed to ultra-civilized monumental art shows.

The fifty-one-foot dog poop went pop in a downpour one recent day in Hong Kong, but not before it had made its comment on our expectations for the public sculpture we’re used to admiring. Plastic dolls, masks and ketchup have also figured in the 68-year-old McCarthy’s oeuvre over the years.

In W/S, the largest installation the artist has ever created, we have a multimedia reimagining of the tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, its Disney iconography mashed up with elements of horror and porn and probably a few other elements I missed. In the films that are the bulwark of the show, McCarthy plays an ersatz Walt Disney, here called Walt Paul, nose prosthetiicized to the max.

Neither Maud nor I said much as we went around the Armory’s cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall, one of the largest public spaces in Manhattan. The last time I visited the Armory it was for the prim and proper Winter Antiques Show, and I remember marvelling at the fancily gorgeous reception rooms designed by people like Louis Comfort Tiffany.

This time we heard the exhibit before we saw anything, a raucous moaning and groaning like a bloated x-rated soundtrack. The noise emanated from two gigantic screens, each as big as a drive in theater’s. On the screens, dwarves cavorted with White Snow – McCarthy’s version of the Disney heroine — in a hectic, squalid party.

Under the blast of sound we couldn’t hear each other anyway. In front of us stood a large, Wonderland-proportioned forest of painted styrofoam trees and garish monster flowers.

Its lavish 8,800 square feet formed the centerpiece of the show and had served as the soundstage of the production, before it was carted to New York from Los Angeles in dozens of tractor-trailers.

A house, or “cottage,” stood in front of us, or anyway a film set version of one. The back was punctuated with a series of square peepholes like the ones you see at some major construction sites. I’ve always liked peering into those. Here there was the same suggestion of a secret view.

There were disturbing glimpses of the aftermath of something gone terribly wrong, a woman and a man collapsed in a tacky living room. But the squirt bottle of Hershey’s was the tipoff as to the display’s tomfoolery. You do know that in Hollywood, Hershey’s often substitutes for blood, don’t you?

In W/S, McCarthy exhumes Walt Disney and has him trot around getting into trouble before really getting into trouble at the hands of Grumpy, Sneezy, et al. All I could think of was a guy I knew who landed a good job working at Disney in the ‘60s before Walt personally had him fired for sporting a beard.

Now here was one of the most famous men in the world surrounded by beards and noses and genitalia and a lot of chocolate syrup, making love to a wench of a White Snow, all of them doing everything that no one would ever do in a Disney film (or theme park or corporation). It’s an upside down, inside out world, as crude and scary as the other was clean and safe. I imagine the Disney barracudas preparing their legal briefs.

Randy Kennedy of The New York Times did a piece on the artist recently that said, “His work can – and does – provoke physical revulsion. But it is not mere provocation; it’s intended as an all-out assault, a ‘program of resistance,’ as he calls it. And the older he gets, the more explicit he has become that his target is the American entertainment-consumer economy.”

Spectators weren’t allowed in the forest, but in a smaller film arcade along the side we could observe chapters of the story. An unclothed Prince Charming wandered through its glades. Shocking events transpired. We could also visit another house in a retro ranch style that is actually a three-quarter-scale replica of McCarthy’s Salt Lake City childhood home. Alex Poots, Artistic Director of the Armory, has had a lot of explaining to do about the piece, and at one point he said, “it explores the vast and at times distressingly dark corners of the human psyche.” And the dark corners of some pretty sad vintage rooms, I would say.

Walt Paul is not Paul McCarthy – the latter lives in Pasadena with his wife of 46 years, surrounded by kids, grandkids and pets. His grown son partnered with him in putting on W/S.

McCarthy told an interviewer that the show “may have something to do with how we see reality and desire. And art. This is a kind of hyper-reality of desire. A Disneyesque landscape that does not exist. A dreamscape.” All of this styrofoam and soundstage equipment comes at a cost, of course, and the project required millions of dollars. I like to think of Walt Paul in his lumpy nose approaching potential benefactors: Well, there’s this plastic forest, see, and this Hershey’s syrup…

I read a review that said the show “put the grim back into the classic Brothers Grimm fairytale.” I saw it as a series of extravagant what-ifs. What if Snow White had a split (or triple) personality? What if there was a handsome prince who didn’t rescue her but treated her more like a centerfold than a princess? What if Walt actually appeared in his own movies alongside Bambi, say, or Cinderella? What if those beloved childhood movies were more like stag films? What if the dwarves weren’t wholesome and helpful and cute but more like your twisted Uncle Charlie?

The Grimm tales have always been dark. The great children’s author Philip Pullman recently came out with a new version, just in time for the 200^th anniversary of their first publication.

McCarthy’s show is also unabashedly commercial, with plentiful Snow White artifacts available in the gift shop.

Pullman’s Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm are punchy and elegant but also violent and raw. In his translation of Snow White, a huntsman cuts out the heart and liver of a wild boar and takes them back to the evil queen as evidence of the girl’s death. “The cook was ordered to season them well, fry them, and the wicked queen ate them all up.”

Do you recall the conversation parents have had from time to time about whether these ancient fairy tales offer an appropriate reading experience for their innocent youngsters? The answer is No, if you’re doing it right. And this version is done to a turn.

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Filed under Art, Culture, Fiction, Film, History, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Writers, Writing

July 21, 2013 · 8:50 pm

The Real Stuff of the Past

Ice. Bricks. Wrecks.

I discovered three potential novels today in a small museum in Kingston, New York. Anyway, there were artifacts that could be the seeds of novels, historical subject matter so robust and potent that some writer’s sure to climb on board. One day soon, I hope.

I was there for a festival celebrating the Hudson River, but it didn’t take place, so I was left to wander without a plan. The Hudson River Maritime Museum houses itself in a weathered brick building on Rondout Creek in Kingston, where it keeps alive the history of the area. It teems with artifacts from the D and H canal, which brought anthracite coal from the innards of the country to the Hudson between 1828 and 1898, from the steamboats that brought nineteenth-century travellers from New York City north, the tugboats which dominated this place when so much freight went by ship, and the various industries that sprang up around here in the nineteenth century.

The dock area bustled. You could see the Half Moon, the working replica of the ship Henry Hudson drove up this very river, complete down to the most persnickety detail.

Costumed interpreters introduced jaded suburbanites to a living space smaller than the smallest New York City apartment.You could also see a new topmast being planed for the boat, by a gentleman foregoing period tools for more efficient electric sanders.

There was a yellow submarine.

The Seahorse can hold two crew members and has been used for archaeological dives in Lake George.

Mammoth propellers studded the grounds.

But what I loved, going inside the chock full precincts of the museum, was the ice. Here was talk, detailed talk, of an industry that had basically vanished by mi-century but was incredibly important before.

The Kingson area was a hub for ice harvesting. And since ice was crucial for warm weather food preservation (not to mention ice cream making), it was big business.

Over one hundred ice houses dotted the shores of the Hudson in 1900. Manhattan and Brooklyn consumed 1.3 million tons in 1879. Everything about the industry was big, especially the ice saws and other tools.

One detail that especially excited me is that the same horses employed to drag huge blocks of ice off of the river during the winter would be brought down to New York City to pull the ice wagons in the summer. I’d like to follow one of those ice horses, alternate between life in two such different port cities.

One of my heroines out of history, English traveller and diarist Fanny Trollope, made the comment, in the 1830s, “I do not imagine there is a home without the luxury of a piece of ice to cool the water and harden the butter.” I’d love to read more and write more about the sweat that went into that cold work.

Bricks.

The Dutch in New Amsterdam imported small, hard yellow bricks from Holland. Then someone realized the magnificence of the natural clay deposits in America. Along the Hudson River men molded “green brick” in wood frames, and it had to be carefully turned when drying.

Imprinted names came either from the brickyard owner or could be commissioned.

Such beautiful, beefy stuff, this brick, and the story behind it.

Then, the wrecks. Some of the steamboat capsizings on the Hudson in the middle of the 1800s were doozies. People were so excited about the new toy, a boat without sails, that they raced passenger steamers up and down the Hudson seemingly without a thought in their heads. The boats offered their genteel riders swellegant accommodations and a chance to see the breathtaking views along the way.

The Swallow, built in 1836 in Brooklyn, raced the Rochester between New York and Albany in a snow squall in 1843. Well, it stuck on a rock, ultimately breaking in two, and 15 of the 200 passengers died. In the total darkness of night, they couldn’t see that they were close enough to get easily to shore.

The Henry Clay disaster occurred when the boat left Albany in 1852 and began racing the Amenia, with a fire erupting at Yonkers and the craft beaching at Riverdale. Seventy men and women died, including the famous landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing. It was, as you can imagine, a nightmare and a scandal and terrific news copy all combined.

There was the Thomas Cornell (ran aground), the Daniel Drew (burned), the Trojan (burned), John H. Cordts (burned). A piece of panelling from the Cordts has been preserved. These were magnificent creatures, these vessels, costly, exciting. And doomed.

In the silt of the Hudson lie small boats, barges, sunken bricks, barnacled anchors. All mysterious pieces of the past, hidden from us.

Those steamboat races, though. They are fact. But they are the stuff of great fiction.

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July 19, 2013 · 10:25 pm

A Manhattan Birthday Boat

Today was my birthday. I decided to take the two adventurers closest to me and go on the high seas. An oceanographic architectural tour of Manhattan launches most days from Pier 62, on the island’s west side, and the fact that it was the hottest day of the year made a liquid frolic all the more appealing.

Pier 62, part of the Chelsea Piers sports complex, has some offerings for while you’re waiting for your boat to launch. You can watch hundreds of elementary-age gymnasts and soccer buffs perform in the air-conditioned splendor of a huge indoor gym. Watch deckhands spiff up the many yachts tied to the dock. Check out the picturesque marine ropes stashed at the end of the pier.

Wonder about a Marcel du Champs-style composition of dining fork and some kind of bulbous ship hitch.

Note the gallery of oversize photographs celebrating Chelsea Piers, including one of the Lusitania sailing out on its final, doomed voyage, with horse carriages stacked up watching it depart.

Our boat was Manhattan, built in 2006 to resemble a 1920s riverboat, all light and gleaming wood panelling.

The cruise traveled south on the Hudson River to the Upper Bay, curtseyed to the Statue of Liberty, continued down around the Battery, up the East River, then retraced its steps, west again, all the way up to 125^th Street, where it circled back to the starting point.

Austin, the captain, introduced the incredibly savvy architects Arthur Platt and Scott Cook, who would be narrating our journey. We wouldn’t be able to tour the very top of the island, said Austin, because of the heat: the steel of the swing bridge at Spuyten Duyvil had reached 95 degrees. If they swung it open, its expansion would make it impossible to close. On a brighter note, Hannah and Heather would be manning the bar, serving up ice-cold beverages for the next three hours, even champagne.

Maud, please, will you have some champagne for my birthday, I implored my daughter, since I myself refrain from alcohol and someone should raise a toast.

No, Mom, she said, the breeze ruffling her hair as we pulled out past Battered Bull of Georgetown, motoring into the channel. Water, she said. I want water.

Good thought. You could sit inside on this trip, in the climate-controlled saloon, and see the sights through glass. Or you could sit at the bow, on a bench outside in the red-hot sun, the New York harbor wind whipping your face. Where do you think we sat?

I learned. I learned so much. And then I forgot so much. The architects knew everything in the world about New York. And something about New Jersey too.

Like that the Erie Lackawanna rail terminal in Hoboken, for example, was built in 1909, and its dull brown color represents the hue of copper before it oxidizes – like the color of the Statue of Liberty originally. I never knew that.

That was a refrain that ran through my sunburned skull all day: I never knew that.

Or the fact that Ellis Island sits on the site of one of the harbor’s four original “oyster islands,” barely visible at high tide, and that Ellis Island, where so many American immigrants were “processed” was built first of wood and burned in 1897.

That the Statue of Liberty’s skin is two pennies thin, and the torch is covered in 24 carat gold. Her sandals are upturned because Liberty is “always on the move.”

I never knew that either.

Or the following interesting things, absorbed between cooling draughts of water.

On Governor’s Island – we talked a lot about the future of New York, not only the past — the biggest demolition project ever planned in New York, of old Coast Guard buildings, will create hills eighty feet high from which to view the Statue and Manhattan.

On the Brooklyn Waterfront, the site of Wallabout Bay, you can now take a bike tour of the Navy Yard.

We passed Williamsburg, Greenpoint – it’s “your last opportunity to look at this industrial waterfront,” said the architectural commentary. Brooklyn is developing so fast. “Bloomberg’s administration has upzoned more acreage in the history of New York than any other.” But even Bloomberg might be stymied by what was described as the “black mayonnaise” sediment of the oil-contaminated Newtown Creek.

On Roosevelt Island stands a monument, a shrine to FDR, designed by the architect Louis Kahn, who passed away in Pennsylvania Station and “it took a while to identify him.” I certainly never knew that about Louis Kahn. In fact, I could barely believe it.

In Harlem you find the concept of “the tower in the park”, when public housing units stand solo, without a connection to the larger community.

It was 1790 when Archibald Gracie built a house in what was then the countryside outside of New York City, never dreaming that his domicile would one day be the home of mayors (current mayor excluded, as he already has eleven homes).

And it was at this point that I put aside some of my adventuring spirit and stumbled inside to an air-conditioned seat. I was having fun — yet I wondered if the seasickness that has plagued me throughout my life had come back to haunt me. Then the music of fact revived me. That and the fizz of a diet Coke.

In 1909 the Metropolitan Life building with its elegant cupola was the highest in the world.

One difference between public and private high rises is that the private ones have balconies.

The Woolworth Building is just now having its centennial.

Gulp. Water. Is this boat rocking or is it me?

There is a very famous, ultra-cool architectural firm called SHoP. Never knew it.

One of the newer fancy buildings, of the many, many fancy buildings in New York, features an indoor dog walking court and built in nanny-cams.

Goldman Sachs employees take a private ferry every day from Manhattan to the firm’s offices in Jersey City.

The “exploded Malibu Barbie house” of artist Julian Schnabel was built on top of a stable.

Fireboat 343, docked at Pier 40, was named for the 343 firefighters killed on 9/11.

Maybe if I were to go outside, get a breeze? Another Coke? Would my queasiness subside?

Frank Gehry’s sumptuous IAC building of smoky glass was made by “cold warping” the panels on site.

There is now such a thing as a permanent window washing crane stationed atop several skyscrapers. It’s controversial, if that matters to you.

We passed a trio of kayakers at Pier 76, bobbing, no doubt very hot, but feeling very chill there in the waters of Manhattan.

And finally what the architect Scott called his favorite structure – his favorite, after all these hundreds? – the Lehigh Building. The “architects held back vertical elements at the façade,” he said, praising its “no nonsense” lines, its wraparound windows.

We stumbled off the gangplank, our brains sunstruck, saturated and several pounds heavier. We collapsed.

Even youth faded in the heat.

But we revived with some time in a restaurant in an old boat called the Frying Pan.

And taking the place of birthday cake, an ice cream sandwich with red velvet wafers and cream cheese ice cream.

Home to dry land and cool, fragrant birthday flowers, from Maud.

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July 18, 2013 · 5:54 pm

Something to Cry Over

I like to go adventuring. Small adventures or large, I’m happy if I see something new and arresting. If I have a frisson of … something… delight, wonder, whatever you want to call it. With a companion, adventuring’s the best.

So today I was a little down. Finished my work for the day, marking up an ancient, earnest screed of colonial history with a dull Sharpie, no adventure in sight. No companion either, with Gil bearing down on his writing, Maud gallivanting with a friend, other people at jobs or vacations. Only me and Oliver, and I’m not customarily invited on his adventures.

There were always the onions. I had already withdrawn to my cool underground kitchen lair to make a batch of pesto for dinner.

But now, no adventures to the fore, the onions presented themselves as a project.

I’d never grown onions before. This summer, they grew incredibly fast. I put them out to harden on a plastic tarp under the brutal sun because I thought that’s what you do with them.

Now to pickle them.

I had a recipe, from The Savory Way by veggie-genius Deborah Madison, that I’d made before, calling for red onions, but mine are white and from my taste test much tarter and tangier than the recipe’s onions, which turn a delicate ballet-worthy shade of pink.

Much more of a crying-over onion.

I trimmed them up, brushed the dirt from their whiskered bottoms. Sliced them in crisp rounds. Listened to Alejandro Escovado’s Castanets on the radio, a song so good it could make you cry.

The recipe calls for boiling water splashed over the onions in a colander, after which you pack the rings in jars and douse them in a vinegar solution.

Who is not filled with a sense of well being upon viewing a fresh gallon jug of Heinz white vinegar?

Of course the success of the enterprise lies largely in the containers — all preserving being an opportunity to show off your beautiful canning jars. I picked up these pint-size blue Mason beauties in Wisconsin this summer, together with their matte zinc lids.

Reviewed the recipe thus far with Oliver. Placed the onions on the brick floor, just under his snout. He has been known to sample vegetables.

I think impassive is the word for his expression.

When I politely suggested he take another look, his reaction was subtle but firm. Ears now aloft. Are you kidding me?

The recipe includes accoutrements that it seems have nothing to do with flavor and everything with appearance. The perfect bay leaves.

The thyme I rescued from my garden, burning my bare feet to get there, wading through the weeds and getting dive bombed by a purple dragonfly. An adventure of sorts.

Traces of onions have been found in Bronze Age archaeological sites alongside date stones and the remains of figs. Workers who built the pyramids may have been fed radishes along with onions, a bitter repast for bitter work. Roman gladiators got onion juice rubdowns. In the Middle Ages wise men prescribed onions to facilitate both bowel movements and erections — one stop shopping.

But I’ve got to get back to my kitchen adventure and pour the vinegar elixir over the slices.

Not the adventure I’d hoped for today, but perfect nonetheless.

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July 15, 2013 · 4:51 pm

Ramen in Harlem

Outside on this July afternoon it’s hot, hot, hot, but you feel as if you’re in a cool womb within Jin, the ramen bar on upper Broadway at 125th Street.

This is Harlem, a Harlem of changes. Every neighborhood in New York experiences flux, of course, but this one is currently in crisis mode as Columbia University expands its holdings, spending $6.3 billion dollars to cut a gigantic swath across 17 acres of streets and buildings. It all takes place under the shadow of the IRT Broadway-Seventh Avenue viaduct, now over a century old.

The goal is positive: a series of buildings that will enhance the university’s offerings in science, business and the arts. Unfortunately, the development will cause the destruction of many locally owned warehouses, factories and auto repair shops. And tenements. The old buildings are getting boarded up. There were huge protests over this.

I’ve always liked the old-fashioned structures of the neighborhood, crumbling as they may be. Some still stand, their paint weathered, looking as though we’ve let them down. That’s why they call it New York, because nothing is allowed to grow old here, said a spectator quoted by The New York Times as he watched the demolition of the glorious old Pennsylvania Station.

Some buildings have already disappeared, even before this latest chapter, like the diner I used to go to at the terminal point of 125^th Street when I was a student here.

Wedged under the West Side Highway, it was a great, funky place to look out over the Hudson and dream. It was already ancient when I drank my coffee there.

Now when you look uptown from 125^th, Columbia’s mammoth cranes hover over the landscape like the skeletons of some futuristic, predatory beasts.

But not to worry, Jin is here to soothe us, just short of where the redevelopment starts, at the base of the steps that lead up to the subway platform. Convenient. The train can drop you off into a puddle of steaming, flavorsome, broth.

New York has a lot of ramen parlors just at the moment. Jin is one of the finest. It’s always crowded, with students and families (babies holding soup spoons as big as their faces), young couples, singles intent upon a book and a slurp at the same time. If I were a student now, with no diner on the Hudson, I know where I’d be.

At the counter we have an up close and personal view of the process in this particular ramen kitchen.

The chef. His name is Joseph. The broth pot, the size of a small boulder. At Jin, they cook the broth to make tonkotsu ramen for hours, pork bones at a high boil, resulting in a creamy texture that’s sort of like a savory gravy. They spoon it into each bowl with a giant’s ladle, then Joseph applies the fixings. The sliced pork belly.

Called chashu, roasted for two and a half hours, it’s smoky, fatty and succulent. They can’t leave it in the heat any longer, Joseph says, or it will fall apart. And the idea is to have intact disks of the meat in each serving. Along with a soft-boiled egg, bamboo shoots, fresh scallion and of course the ramen itself. When you enter Jin, everyone is leaning over their bowls, chopsticks flailing, sucking in the long strands of noodle, which are firm, very thin, straight and white. They are unrisen, and are made with sodium bicarbonate water, of all things. If a diner has broth left over and is still not full they can order extra servings of noodles at a nominal cost. This has never happened to anyone as far as I know.

Now, not because I’m contrary – I don’t usually order the ramen at Jin. You see, the restaurant also offers the rice bowl known as char siu-don, which is one of the more delicious dishes I’ve tasted. It too has slices of pork belly, draped across a mound of perfectly sticky rice, along with a quivering sunny-side-up egg, shreds of bright red pickled ginger, shreds of sliced scallion, sesame seeds and cut nori. I order a side of the spicy garlic paste called mayu to slather all over everything. And then I am excluded from polite company for the next 48 hours.

Jin, if you ask the owners of the restaurant, means “benevolence” and finds its root in Confucianism. The character that makes up the word consists of two elements, with the left side representing a human being and the right side symbolizing the numeral two. Jin is said to depict the way two people should treat one another.

Perhaps enough tonkatsu ramen can help heal the redevelopment wounds under Harlem’s rumbling IRT bridge.

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July 14, 2013 · 7:55 pm

Rapid Cycling

You’ve heard about the Citi Bikes that now throng Manhattan. There are thousands of them parked in solar-powered docks from Battery Park to Central Park. Anybody with a bank card can rent one for half an hour. (There are some bikes in the outer boroughs, too.) They’re making New York into Minneapolis or Melbourne or any of the other healthy bike-sharing cities around the world. Everybody in New York is taking a set of wheels out for a spin, tourists and natives alike.

I said, when asked, I wouldn’t do it.

I did it.

My logic: there are a lot of things on my reverse bucket list, my fuck-it list, things I pledge never to do. Anything involving getting lofted high above the ground. No skydiving for my 60th birthday. No bungee jumping any time at all. The list goes on.

Then there are things I will probably never do even though it’s my dream. Leaping over a fence, say, while gracefully swinging my legs out to the side. It’s not a question of being young enough — I never could do it. Too difficult.

But riding a soft-saddled steed on a Manhattan summer afternoon? This I could probably accomplish without undue shock to the system.

Gil agreed.

It would only be 30 minutes, after all.

We started at luxury car alley, that stretch of Eleventh Avenue in Midtown where drivers with a fat wallet can take away a Lexus, an Audi or a Mini. Glossy, glassy buildings on every side. But as in so many corners of New York, shreds of a past neighborhood identity can be found if you look, like old signage for a supermarket over the Lexus dealership.

Someone was watching us.

We’d better behave. Across the avenue from the bike rack, at 59th Street, stands a grand monument to both the subway system and steam, a full-block-square Stanford White designed industrial temple that was originally the Interborough Rapid Transit Powerhouse.

Built in 1904, it has bold Rennaissance Revival details. When it outlasted its usefulness to the subway system in the 1950s, Con Edison took is over to supply the New York City steam system.

Under the shadow of its grand façade we pedaled to the Hudson, wobbling ever so slightly and nearly getting sideswiped by several taxis. Then we joined the stream of cyclists on the pavement along the river under the West Side Highway.

Biking is hardly a new fashion in New York City, especially for women. In the 1890s, female cyclists crowded the urban streets, and their exploits were enthusiastically described by gossip columnists. Pictures of glamorous women, the wind in their upswept hair, graced the covers of Puck, Life, Scribner’s.

A slight hitch in their pursuit of the sport lay in their mode of dress – the yardage of their ankle-length skirts had a tendency to get snagged in the wheels of the so-called “safety bicycle.” But that was okay, split skirts – bloomers – were coming in. Just ignore the consternation of cycling advocate Mrs. Mary Hopkins of Boston on the subject: “It has made wheeling just another way for a woman to make a fool of herself,” she told the New York Times. “She has made a half-way sort of creature of herself. She can’t be a man, and she is a disgrace as a woman.”

Susan B. Anthony thought differently. She said: “I think cycling has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance.” Feminism before feminism, all on the mean streets of Riverside Drive.

“The moment she takes her seat she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.” I don’t know if Susan B. Anthony rode a bike herself.

I don’t see how I could come to any harm if I got off my bike in one of New York’s new, pristine waterfront parks, aside from getting a headache from looking up at one of the oversized sculptures looking out over New Jersey.

The sculpture by Benat Iglesias Lopez is one of a group installed this year called The Bathers.

I somehow prefer the art of the decrepit pilings that march along the coastline, vestiges of a different age.

They’ve been there so long, and they’ve seen so much.

I’ve also always loved this landmarked historic ruin, the control tower of the 69th Street Transfer Bridge, which at one time belonged to the West Side Line of the NY Central Railroad. The bridge was built in 1911 and enabled the transfer of train cars from rail to boat, to be floated across the river to the rail yards of Weehawken, New Jersey.

I often get a view of this spooky structure from the West Side Highway that runs alongside it at just about its level. Something else, too, that I can usually spot from the highway but now get a better view from my bike, the proud classical gateway to the Sanitation Pier at 58^th Street.

We checked our watches and found it was the moment to return, but promised ourselves this wouldn’t be the last time we risked our necks for a half hour of the Manhattan wind in our hair. As we picked up to go, I felt a certain proud resemblance to another female cyclist of the past.

Only her cycling get-up’s a little more elegant than mine.

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July 13, 2013 · 11:23 pm

Phriends of Phragmites

Today I befriended my inner phragmite.

You’ve probably seen the reeds that form the backdrop for these merry tulips hundreds of times without knowing their Latin name. Marsh grass, aka phragmites. I’ve been thinking about the reeds for a while now, since a landscape-architect friend of mine came to the Cabin and explained that they characteristically grow in “degraded” environments. It hurt a little to know that my beautiful grassy friends have some kind of noxious, invasive taint.

So I was glad to attend a class today that was set up to make art with phragmites and their more distinguished relative, the cattail.

An airy display greeted my eyes upon entering the classroom, at the Teatown Lake Reservation just down the road from the Cabin. Paper and pens and brushes of all different sorts lay ready and waiting.

Laurie Seeman and Joanna Dickey were there from Strawtown Art & Garden Studio, ready to explain the differences between and the politics surrounding the different marsh grasses. Yes, there are politics surrounding marsh grasses. The two women are good at teaching about wetlands, that’s what they do at Strawtown for kids and community groups.

While phragmites are used around the world to weave mats and roof thatch, Laurie told me, she didn’t see a use for them in the art studio until she recognized them as “painting partners.” They’d been “demonized,” she said, “by the science people, but as artists we try to look upon them with the most open mind possible.”

What’ s the beef with the phrags? Laurie: “They’re pollution tolerant whereas cattails need cleaner water to thrive. Certain species need the cattails, and when the phragmites take over there’s no room for them.” Said Joanna, “The phragmites grow closer together and it’s the understory that doesn’t allow the shorter plants to grow.”

The artist-teachers discovered that for their purposes, the phragmites has a hollow stem like a traditional quill pen whereas the cattail has a spongy interior “much like a magic marker,” as Laurie said. Both work for painting.

Some say the phrags came over from China in ship holds long ago, but have proliferated in the last few decades. Some say they clean metals out of sediments — a good thing, maybe. Don’t get Laurie going about research scientists, conservation scientists, corporate scientists, biological scientists, plant scientists, marine scientists. “It’s old-school thinking that phragmites are all bad,” she said. “They have a relationship with places that have been invaded.”

Today we’re going to appreciate them, stems and plumes alike. Gerard Manley Hopkins says, Long live the weeds, and I say, Long live the phragmites.

We dipped the reeds in ink.

We made our own brushes if we wanted. (I wanted.) We took our time, something Joanna advocated.

Now, cattails are indigenous, and have a plump appeal. They make “comforting places for a bird to sit,” said Joanna.

Their roots are tubers. They’re amazing. Yes, yes, everyone loves a cattail, I know that. It would be un-American not to. But let’s not leave the phrags in the lurch.

People of all ages were pressing them into service today for art.

In the meantime, there are well-meaning authorities who are trying to destroy parts of venerable Piermont Marsh, just across the Hudson River, with what they’re calling an “enhancement project.” I’ve canoed there many times, and know it as a mystical place with its towering grasses. Good bye, 200 plus acres of phragmites, which have been a stable presence there for 2,500 years. The reeds protected the riverbank during Sandy.

But let’s digress for a discussion of ink. In Japan, the soot that accumulates in the eaves from a pine wood fire makes good calligraphy ink, while whale fat smoke is better for imagery. I’ve left politics behind, lost in my painting, shaking loose drops of ink from my phragmite feather like a marsh-y Jackson Pollack. Laurie introduced something she’d brought along, water in a dark bowl, what she called “water as first mirror.” She said that in ancient times dark liquid was the only source for a person’s reflection.

Laurie and Joanna had gathered branches to make frames, and as I was twisting sinew around sticks I noticed someone I knew, Marguerite, coming over to create her own frame. She was positioning four graceful, delicate boughs before even beginning on the painting it will contain.