Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Fading Iguana Memories



John Huston's "Night of the Iguana" turned sleepy Puerto Vallarta into a go-go tourist boom town. When he died nearly a quarter century later, they put this statue near the entrance to the municipal cultural center, not far from the Le Bistro bar and restaurant, a lush tropical riverside watering hole and night spot where Huston had eulogized Humphrey Bogart 30 years earlier.

But if any Hollywood ghost haunts Vallarta, it's Elizabeth Taylor, and she wasn't even in the movie, or any other filmed here as far as I know.

Liz was here when Iguana was shot, however, supposedly to make sure her new boyfriend Richard Burton, for whom she had just dumped Eddie Fisher, didn't strike any off-screen sparks with his co-star Ava Gardner.

The whole cast and crew were enchanted with Vallarta. After the wrap, Huston bought a house on an island near Mismaloya south of here, where much of the movie was made. Burton bought his new girlfriend a love nest in Vallarta on a hillside overlooking the spot where Huston's statue now sits. 

The house was known as Casa Kimberly. Boyfriends had the custom here of naming such places after their paramours, and Ms. Taylor tried hard to rechristen hers Casa Elizabeth. But the neighbors wouldn't have it, so the story goes, and Casa Kimberly it remained.

Liz and Dick visited their Mexico home many times for several years afterward. They hung out in local bars and restaurants, made friends, got drunk, had many of their famous fights and generally did everything expected of notorious celebrities with bad tempers and too much time on their hands.
In gratitude, admirers commissioned this statue depicting the couple in a moment of harmony and installed it at a restaurant called Fuente en la Puente, just down the hill from Casa Kimberly, about midway between the house and Huston's monument. Burton bought at least two other houses I know of in Vallarta. One was just across the street from Casa Kimberly and was really just a pool and cabana. They built a footbridge over the street between the two, and Burton is said to have retreated across it when things got too hot for him in the main house. The other house was just around the corner. Burton bought that one for Susan Hunt, whom he married when he and Liz went down for the last time.
Ms. Hunt eventually sold it to a woman named Janice Chatterton, who turned it into a gorgeous boutique hotel that never really traded on the Burton connection. Casa Kimberly, on the other hand, remained Elizabeth Taylor's house even after she sold it, furniture and all. It was run for years as a bed and breakfast, and for a few pesos you could also get a tour of the place.

But the house and its succeeding owners grew ever seedier. Casa Kimberly was finally foreclosed on a few years ago for back taxes, and Liz's faded and threadbare former possessions were piled ignominiously at the curb. New investors stripped the structure down to pads and pillars and began construction of a luxury inn, now interrupted thanks to lawsuits by well-heeled neighbors who want to preserve their views.

About all that's left of the house Liz and Dick proudly posed in for photos when they first moved in is the entrance and the bridge to Burton's old doghouse.





Sunday, December 18, 2011

Another Child's Christmas in Wales


This is a woman named Jane Alabaster, reading some of her work at last Saturday's weekly meeting of the Puerto Vallarta Writers Group. She called her piece "The First Lights of Christmas," but it wasn't as twinkly as it sounds.

Ms. Alabaster makes her living as a doctor now in Mexico, but she was born in Swansea, Wales. Her dad was Welsh and her mother was German, and the family lived in a farmhouse just outside the city.

Her story was actually a memoir, a series of vignettes recalled from her childhood Christmases. She told us in the post-reading discussion that it was meant to be warm and life affirming, an ambitious goal, inasmuch as she chose to begin with an account of her sister's death by drowning in a river near their home during a long-ago holiday season when both girls were toddlers.

"I don't recall a Christmas afterward when my parents didn't weep," she wrote. The narrative never regained altitude, which does credit to the author's honesty.

Predictably, little Jane Alabaster took on herself the burden of making her parents as happy as two living daughters might have done. But melancholy was the subtext of most of her other Christmas recollections.

In one, she was to sing a solo in Welsh at her school Christmas pageant but unaccountably forgot all the words and had to make up phrases to keep the music going. Most of the audience were English speakers and thought she was wonderful, but her classmates knew she was singing nonsense, and she was humiliated.

In another, she recalled the pain of realizing that she and her family would never be fully accepted in their community because anti-German feeling left over from World War II remained strong in Swansea.

In another, she recorded her shock at the public spanking of a classmate who had misbehaved, an incident that clearly still appalled her. "Discipline at my school was strict," she wrote, "but it wasn't usually barbaric."

The "first lights of Christmas" made their appearance in the last tale of the series, but they didn't shine nearly bright enough to clear away the shadows.

Much of the writing was lovely, and a couple of group members rightly suggested that she might make longer stories out of individual segments. But I think she knew from the comments that she'd missed the mark she'd set for herself.

It's a trope of the season that being merry isn't as easy for everyone as it looks in the Christmas specials. Trying anyway and being brave about it is even harder. Writing about just how hard it can be, and then reading aloud to strangers what you've written, takes an extra measure of grit.

Feliz Navidad, Jane.

Friday, December 16, 2011

Physics Takes a Holiday


My family made a lot of cross-country trips when I was growing up, either to visit relatives or to move. When we came across roadside attractions -- rattlesnake farms, caged bears, crocodile pools etc. -- my brother and I longed to stop but knew it was hopeless.

My parents were generally fun to travel with, but they were pretty frugal and considered such diversions a waste of time and money. And since time was money, they figured they saved double by sailing past the lurid signs, usually with disparagement on their lips.

Particularly disfavored were the sites marked with huge question mark signs that promised a supernatural experience in which the laws of gravity would be bent or broken, and objects or even people might be larger or smaller than they appeared. "Gyp joints," said my mom, nobody's fool.

Now I'm a big boy and occasionally stop the car at such places, including the ones with sideways gravity. I'm never disappointed, maybe because mom taught me to expect so little.

But it's a special treat to have learned that in vacation destinations like Puerto Vallarta, the kinds of places I never got to as a kid, you often find people who are willing to dispense you your amazement up front and hope you'll be kind enough to pay afterward.

This rock stacker is a perfect example. The vast Bahia de Banderas (Bay of Flags) has coughed up millions of stones. The streets here are paved with them, and there were plenty left over.

This man's genius appears to be that he can see at least one axis of equilibrium running through each of them, and the exact spots on top and bottom where the stone can rest on a companion below or support one above.

His wife watches the tip box, into which I slid a 20 peso note before I took my pictures. We watched for a while, and it looked like hard work. There's no sleight of hand involved. But even if there were, the stacks would be eye-catching. Each one seems to have required a different set of skills, and they're as unique as snowflakes.

I think mom and dad were wrong not to let us have a look at a few of those ? places. Questioning laws of nature is good for our brains, even if most of us aren't Einstein and won't ever understand the fine print.

And anyone who thinks it's silly to believe there might be such a thing as sideways gravity is forgetting that the gravity that pulls straight down as we all take for granted was an unplumbed mystery to Einstein and, unless I missed a headline, remains so to this day.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Passion


This is the first year we've gotten to Puerto Vallarta in time to catch the last few days of the annual December pilgrimages to the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe. We'll try to take in more of it next year, but even if I never see it again, I'll never forget it.

The banner above, roughly translated, says that "to make our pilgrimage is to show publicly and through the streets our love of God, Our Lord, and the Holy Virgin Mary. We make our pilgrimage with love, devotion and respect." Understatement if ever there was.

The church overlooks Puerto Vallarta's small municipal square. Throngs of the faithful from all over the region descend on it by the tens of thousands each December, so many that it takes 12 days and nights to give each group the chance to make its processional through the cordoned streets of downtown and under the banner to greet the object of their veneration.

The people don't come with their parish congregations as you might expect. They come with the people they spend their work days beside. The groups are the staffs of hotels, stores, rural communities and associations. They are waiters, cashiers, housekeepers, farmers, sales people and all manner of other ordinary folks.

Some are costumed and stage little pageants as they walk along. Others ride on floats or carry elaborate icons. But many come only as themselves in their everyday clothes. The group in this photo represent the Puerto Vallarta "ejido."

An ejido holds a grant to occupy and use government land originally expropriated from vast private holdings nearly a century ago during Mexico's revolution. Signs these people carried described them as a united community of farm workers. Their faces declared that they were modest, self-reliant and familiar with disappointment and hardship, practical people who nevertheless sacrificed a work day to help celebrate an occurrence nearly 500 years ago whose authenticity and meaning are far from clear.

You can read about it in Wikipedia like I did, but in a nutshell, Our Lady of Guadalupe was a vision of the Virgin Mary said to have appeared in 1531 to a converted Aztec with the adopted name of Juan Diego. When his archbishop demanded proof, Juan Diego returned to the snowy hillside near what is now Mexico City where he had the vision and returned with a bouquet of Castillian roses that had miraculously bloomed at the site. He had wrapped them in his tunic, which was found to have been imprinted with the Virgin's likeness.

The priests who partnered up with the conquistadores to save the souls, if not the bodies, of the people of New Spain were notorious for selling Christianity by cutting and pasting bits of gospel onto accepted indigenous story lines. The Juan Diego narrative supposedly bears traces of an Aztec legend or two.

The story and the tunic have been closely scrutinized for centuries, but the people in the streets here and all over Mexico couldn't care less. Juan Diego's vision became so deeply woven into the cultural and historical fabric of the country that Mexicans don't think about it; they feel it as part of themselves. In fact, the priests were almost certainly right when they foresaw that the vision would owe much of its power to its pre-Columbian roots.

We could feel that power ourselves before we'd read a word about what we were witnessing. Day and night, street fairs and concerts surrounded our neighborhood non-stop. Amplified music clamored from every direction -- hymns, salsa, oompa bands, military ensembles -- and every few minutes the church's enormous bells pealed over all. It was pretty overwhelming, and after more than 36 hours of pilgrimage by proxy, our nerves were frayed.

But when we ventured down to the church early Monday, there was a lull in the noise and then the campesinos of the ejido passed slowly by. Something about them brought a lump to both our throats, and we had to wipe our eyes.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Best Practices


On our last walk through Central Park before we blew town for the holidays, there wasn't much late autumn color left on the trees. This willow giving up the last of its 2011 glory was about the last of it, but it got me thinking about the park and how much it means to the city and also to a nation of people who are New Yorkers by visit, aspiration, adventurous past, proxy through a friend or family member, favorite movie or whatever.

Breathes there the New Yorker with soul so dead who never to himself has said, "Thank God for the Central Park Conservancy, because we remember what the park was like before the Conservancy came along."

Even a city bureaucracy fat with drones and political hacks could never kill a place as perfect as Central Park, but they laid it very low in the 1970s and 80s. When we moved here in 1988, the park was like nobility on hard times and bad habits. It was dirty, dysfunctional and dangerous. The landscapes were bedraggled, the fountains didn't work, public concessions and bathrooms were sparse at best, and graffiti announced everywhere that anything could happen here and nobody would care.

The other unmistakable message was that while public authorities may once have believed and invested in the importance of lovely open spaces that all city dwellers could enjoy, that was in a bygone era when public authorities thought big thoughts about the needs of ordinary city dwellers. In latter day New York, you were welcome to be a voter, an employee, a consumer and a sucker, but if you also wanted to be a human being, you could do it on your own time.

I don't know who first imagined that we all deserved better and envisioned the way to make that happen. I've made a New Year's resolution to look into it and also to send a check. Not only has the Convervancy returned the park to its former grandeur, they've demonstrated in scores of ways how a well-run enterprise can accomplish the seemingly impossible.

That they do it for the public good and not a private one is challenging and inspiring in too many ways to count.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Blowin' Smoke


The weather outside is frightful. Time for the nicotine addicted to brace themselves.

I always feel compassion for the forlorn clusters of coffee break smokers who huddle outside the entrances of commercial buildings, heedless as mailmen or hard core golfers of rain, sleet and snow, one arm wrapped tight around midriff and the other hand free to administer the soothing dosage.

Cigar smokers like me can't indulge ourselves for five minutes and then duck back inside. It takes nearly an hour to finish one of my robustos, and that would mean hypothermia if I tried to do it on the sidewalk. Ordinarily I smoke on our terrace at home and read, but that's over for the season.

Fortunately, there are two havens within walking distance of home, smoke shops that maintain lounge space for consumption of cigars purchased on the premises. Unfortunately, neither is entirely satisfactory.

The closest, a few blocks south of us on Lexington, is close to a JP Morgan Chase office. The smoking lounge is small, and most days it's packed with investment bankers. I'm sure they are nice people underneath it all, but what's on display as they puff their stogies is loud, opinionated, egocentric and self-assured. It's like being in a roomfull of talking dogs.

My other choice is a couple of blocks east on 2nd Avenue. The lounge there is a lot bigger, and it even includes a gaslight era barber's chair where for months I got my hair cut. It was cheaper than my previous hair place by enough to pay for my cigar, with the incredible bonus that I could smoke it while I was getting clipped! I asked once for a hot towel to be wrapped around my face with the cigar sticking out like in those old gangster cartoons, but it wasn't as much fun as it looked like.

Then the young woman who did the barbering went home to Michigan, and no replacement has been found. She claimed she actually enjoyed second-hand cigar smoke. There can't be many like her.

So I was thrown back into the general population. The rest of the lounge was a sort of sports bar, where etiquette called for buying at least one drink. The conversation all revolved around favored team performance, recent vacations, and drinking escapades. Not that any of those topics is so terrible, and smoking really is a sociable habit. I think even the coffee break types outside are enjoying themselves together, as pitiful and miserable as they look. But I've lost the knack and prefer my book.

Consequently, here's how my winter will play out, just like it does every year. I will go to Mexico for the holidays and have a cigar wherever and whenever I want in the Pacific breeze without bothering anyone. Then I will come back in January and see if I can stand smoking with the Masters of the Universe. It won't work, so I'll move back to the sports bar. That won't work either, and I'll begin thinking that maybe it's time to give up the habit like I know I should.

Then the weather will start to turn a bit warmer. At about the same time, the spring catalogue will arrive from J&R Cigars, because they know me so well. Cigars look so enticing in glossy four-color photographs.

You know the rest.

Monday, December 5, 2011

Pulaski Yacht Club


For people whose only glimpses of the city are passing through on the Cross Bronx Expressway, the outer boroughs look like a vast, impenetrable mass of masonry and asphalt, indifferent at best, predatory at worst, the kind of place where you pray never to make a wrong turn or flatten a tire. Think Bonfire of the Vanities. God knows how people live in such hard surroundings.

So when you actually move here, it's a slowly unfolding surprise to find out that many of the kinder and gentler aspects of life as the greater United States knows it can actually thrive all over NYC too, sometimes where you'd least expect to come across them.

I took the picture above last weekend from the Pulaski Bridge over Newtown Creek, which separates Queens from Brooklyn. Carefully moored along the Queens bank behind warehouses, weeds and barbed wire were this handful of neat little sloops. I wouldn't recommend swimming in that water, but otherwise this seems like a pretty good place to start a weekend sailing trip, minutes from the East River. Turn right for Long Island Sound or left for the harbor and the deep blue sea.

We lived for years in Riverdale in the northwest Bronx, not far from heavily wooded Van Cortlandt Park. I realized one day I was a 15 minute walk from a good city golf course, and even closer to a riding stable where you could rent a horse and trot quickly into forest so dense you could convince yourself you were on the Appalachian Trail. Personally, I don't golf or ride, but I'm just saying.

You can canoe the Bronx River, and I think I read somewhere you can even fly fish parts of it, with the added bonus that you might spot a rare orchid or a zebra, since the stream goes right by the zoo and the botanical gardens.

Thinking again about Riverdale, looking across the Hudson from our living room, the entire view was the New Jersey palisades, lofty stone cliffs, festooned with woods that were easily accessible across the George Washington Bridge. In the fall I never understood why New Yorkers drive five hours to Vermont or even take ship for Nova Scotia to look at leaves.

I had a sailboat in South Carolina and felt lucky, but it took me nearly an hour to drive to the lake where I kept it. If I had it now, I could keep it on Newtown Creek and get there on my bike in 15 minutes. All I'd need would be a pork chop for the Rottweiler that guards those warehouses.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

The Story of News



Like anybody who worked for AP at 50 Rockefeller Plaza during the 65-plus years our company lived there, I get a twinge every time I walk by the Noguchi bas relief that still graces the building's facade and presumably always will. We passed daily beneath it thinking it was ours. Or even more, that it was us.

But of course when we decamped in 2004 for better rent in Hudson Yards, we learned the ugly truth. It was a fixture of the building, added as an extravagant courtesy to a charter tenant. It was somebody else's property, and by the time we left, it had long since become part of a national landmark and couldn't have gone with us even if we'd wanted to buy it and the landlord had been willing to sell.

Bank of America now occupies our old space, using it to do the things big banks do nowadays, which presumably does not include investing in the struggling news industry. BA. How I loathe them, until I remember they are too big to fail and really even too big to hate.

When I look up at the icon created to pay homage to a free press, without irony as far as I know, in the style of Socialist Peoples Art, what I feel instead is a smaller sense of personal loss, very much like what I felt when I went home after college and found my old bedroom turned into guest quarters. But at least my parents weren't renting it out to strangers.

The same can't be said of The Story of News, which is now reduced entirely to an ornament at a prestige address.

If anybody doubts that AP's once proud standard now makes its separate way in the world as a commercial asset, he has only to walk caddycorner across Rockefeller Plaza to the Lego store, where you can see it -- maybe even buy it -- skillfully executed in bits of blow-molded plastic. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Graffiti Benediction



Queens-bound cyclists on the 59th Street Bridge bike path see this message as they reach the first tower of the span. It says "Welcome to Peace."

Even allowing for the haphazard nature of spray paint and the people who use it to share their thoughts, somebody went to some trouble to reach this fairly remote spot and put those words up. They even pimped them out by turning the "o" of "To" into a peace symbol.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't the Long Island City chamber of commerce. So who, and why here, and most of all what's it supposed to mean?

Were they saying Queens is more peaceful than Manhattan? Is the bridge more peaceful than either one? Or were they inviting us to give peace a chance, incorporate peaceful intentions in our own lives, open our hearts to inner peace?

Probably it's just another random act of petty vandalism. But defacing a public structure is a pretty aggressive act. In this case the conduct doesn't seem to match up with the content.

Hard to picture somebody lugging paint and a stepladder up a steel bridge path in the dark to do some mischief, then remembering that their mother always told them, "If you can't spray something nice, don't spray anything at all."


Saturday, November 26, 2011

Occupy Herald Square

When it comes to the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade, people think first of the elites -- the Matt Lauers and Al Rokers who "anchor" the event. Well, I belong to the 99 percent, the people without whom Lauer and the other flightless gasbags sitting in cozy splendor in their broadcast booth would have had nothing to talk about.

We rose in our multitudes at 5 a.m. and joined the interminable line along 35th Street next to the loading docks, service entrances and dumpsters behind the New Yorker Hotel where the parade is staged every year.

We shivered and drank lukewarm coffee waiting for our turn to undergo a humiliating ID check by Macys functionaries, then hurried off to don our coveralls in a drab space so cramped there was no room to sit down and we balanced first on one leg, then the other, to get our feet into the pants. Some of us fell over.

After that, it was off to the buses that took us uptown to the staging area alongside the Natural History Museum. Pirates, clowns, fairy godmothers, pilgrims and elves wedged into these cattle cars with people dressed up as turkeys, ears of corn, billiard balls, snowmen and so forth. We looked like extras in one of those old Fellini movies.

As a lowly balloon handler, I was dressed like a sanitation worker, but we were told to look cheerful and upbeat, as I am attempting to do in this picture, even though I am standing 
next to the balloon "pilot," a smallish man named Elias who chastised and corrected me nonstop from 81st Street to 34th Street. "Let out more rope." "Pull in more rope." "You're supposed to be lined up with that guy." "I told you to walk slightly behind that guy." "Pay attention, hey, look at me".  "Pick up the pace." "I said slow down." "Hey, don't start until my signal." None of these infractions was my fault. We were in a holiday parade, and every single thing within my field of vision was more interesting to look at than Elias with his hand signals and his whistle. It also annoyed me that every time he publicly identified one of my alleged shortcomings, he patronized me by adding, "I'm not picking on you, but hey, I'm just saying, okay?" I wished I had brought one of those cans of pepper spray that Walmart shoppers carry.
But I now understand that Elias is just as oppressed as I am. At Times Square, a cop told him to lower our balloon and he had to do it even though we all could tell he didn't want to. Then when we were getting ready to approach the reviewing stand, some guy with an earphone mike -- who Elias told us sotto voce was "the big boss" -- micromanaged the careful adjustments Elias had already made to get us camera-ready. I almost felt sorry for him. He was suffering too.

But finally it was all over, and the moment arrived that made the whole thing worthwhile for some of us -- the air rippling release of industrial quantities of helium where we could inhale till we were dizzy and then talk through our adenoids. Quack-a-licious! But then I realized this is just another trick The Man uses to keep us down.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

To the Dogs



This was my first look at the big AKC "Meet the Breeds" dog show at the Javits Center last weekend. The floor was so thick with people, I couldn't see a single pooch.

What was more conspicuously on display than the dogs themselves was passion for dogs, starting with the throngs who paid the $15 admission, jammed the aisles of the show floor, and clustered three or four deep around the most popular breeds.

But naturally it was the owners and breeders who were really wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Many wore their enthusiasm all over their bodies. These folks are devoted, sometimes to a fault. The day this post went up the Times was fronting a story about how bulldog fanciers have bred the object of their affection into flat-faced asphyxiation. But they surely didn't mean any harm. At "Meet the Breeds," it was all in innocent fun.

The lady  at left was building excitement for Corgis, said to be the dog of choice at Windsor Castle and other places where Queen Elizabeth hangs her hat.

She was doing a carefully rehearsed princess wave when I snapped this, turning her wrist the way you do when you're putting in a lightbulb. If you have to put in your own lightbulbs.

Anglophiles had other choices. The man in charge of the English Foxhound booth dressed himself up for a cross-country hunt and reclined on some haystacks.

I always thought it was beagles they sicked on the foxes, but these dogs were tall and deep chested, with legs like tree trunks. I'm not surprised some people think that as sports go, fox hunting isn't very sporting.

Not all the breeds had this kind of parade float support, but plenty did. The Newfoundlanders had what may have been the most eye-catching, a bunch of breeders in bright yellow foul weather gear.  Their act was one of the biggest crowd pleasers.

But my favorite was the Samoyed booth, where I learned you can make clothing out of dog fur and still keep the dog.  Dog hair from some breeds spins up nicely into yarn. This is Peggy Gaffney, whose website is at kanineknits.com.

The piece she was working on was lovely, but it was a letdown to learn she was wearing a sweater made of ordinary lamb's wool.

"Samoyed is eight times warmer than regular wool," told me. "If I was wearing it now, I'd be sweating."

I didn't try very hard to fact check that claim, but Wikipedia says Samoyeds shed their warmest undercoats twice a year. No sheering; all you have to do is collect it and go to work on your wearable sweat lodge.

Man's best friend for sure.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

"The Marriage of Money and Real Estate"














One of the great things about New York is that you've got a good chance of running into an installation of what they call "public art" almost anywhere. This one sticks up out of the East River, a few yards off the Manhattan side of Roosevent Island. It's called "The Marriage of Money and Real Estate."

I put the "public art" in quotes because I don't think there's much about art that's really public, whether the art is cloistered behind a ticket kiosk in a gallery or sitting out where anybody can inspect it for free. Why people make art, buy it, open public spaces to it, and admire it is an everlasting mystery to me, even though I'm an admirer and occasional buyer, and don't object at all to the use of my tax money on it.

Here's another example, currently on display at the southeast corner of Central Park at 5th Ave. and 60th Street.

It's an angled concrete pedestal supporting scores of semi-inflated truck tires suspended in bundles from steel armitures. The artist who dreamed this up, a German named Michael Sailstorfer, must have had a lot of skilled help figuring out how to make it happen. But now that it's there, the question for the rest of us is why.

According to a nearby sign, Sailstorfer intended his 30-foot tower of rubber and steel to evoke "a tornado, which is violently powerful but also literally made of air," and provide "a visceral experience of sculptural form and materials in tension, massive but also vulnerable."

Well, okay, if you say so. But I am sure I'm not alone in finding earnest curatorial word salads of this kind unsatisfying. They don't really explain physical manifestations of artistic vision that may be as modest as a picture on a wall but can sometimes be far bigger and more puzzling than this one.

I have heard artists say their work is an expression of things that can't be expressed any other way. Fair enough. But if we don't happen to understand that language, what motivation of our own are we responding to when we accept the presence of these things as a normal part of urban life, pause to look at them, and scratch our heads? Mere curiosity, or something deeper?

One answer artists sometimes give to questions like these is that once they're done with a work, it takes on a life of its own whose meaning lies in the perception of anyone who looks at it. That seems like nonsense to me, and I also think it sells real artists short. Works of art are deeply personal tokens of the inner lives of their creators. We can make inferences about an artist from his work, and conversely our appreciation of the work will change as we know more about the artist.

That's certainly been the experience of Tom Otterness, the guy who gave us "The Marriage of Money and Real Estate." Back in the '70s, he made a movie called "Shot Dog Film" in which he adopted a shelter dog and killed it on camera. He has since deplored and disavowed his snuff film as the product of "profound emotional turmoil and despair" in his youth. But he's been excoriated for it, and as recently as a few months ago the mayor of San Francisco wanted to rescind a transit commission Otterness had won.

 The mature Otterness is known for his cute, whimsical figures, but he's definitely a guy with a hard, sharp edge. Look here, the "marriage of money and real estate" ends badly. Money is now a murderous lobster dragging poor little real estate under, and in the third figure, which I didn't get but you can see at http://www.tomostudio.com/exhibitions_roosevelt.html,
 things get even crazier.
What's this alarming three-panel strip about? Otterness wasn't just "exploring the relationship between real estate and money," as the Roosevelt Island tourist brochures palm it off. He certainly knew that anyone looking at these pieces would see them against the backdrop of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where money and real estate have been having a steamy honeymoon for more than a century.

Is this an editorial? A critique? An insult? A prophesy? Did Otterness actually see the mortgage crisis coming in 1996? Or does he think there's something fundamentally evil and deadly about New Yorkers' lust for location?

If so, who asked him?

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

A Different Approach


Pam snapped this picture for me as we stood on the corner of Madison and 59th, looking up at the second floor of the GM building. It wasn't quite 8 a.m., but the guy you can dimly see under all those big notes was bouncing rhythmically up and down, gliding back and forth. I asked myself who dances alone in an office building before breakfast?

Then I realized that if you go around the block to the opposite corner of that building, you're at the entrance to F.A.O. Schwartz, the toy fantasia. It was closed of course, but if we could have gotten in, gone up the escalator to the second floor and worked our way back to the far corner, we'd have gotten a much better photo of our dancer.

He was in the room where they keep the Big Piano that Tom Hanks made famous in the movie "Big." The black and white keys are laid out on the floor, and you play the instrument by stepping on it. If you want to play it well, you have to dance.

Mystery solved, but it wasn't much of a mystery. We were in that room a couple of weeks ago with our granddaughter and stood in line for a short turn on the big keys ourselves. We couldn't even manage chopsticks, but we saw a demonstration by a pair of F.A.O. Schwartzers who played several dazzling duets without missing a note or running into each other. Maybe the guy above was auditioning for one of those jobs.

But whatever he was doing, I enjoyed spotting him because it reminded me that one of the unique pleasures the city offers is the sensation you get from stumbling on a familiar place from an unfamiliar direction.

I return a rental car on East 43rd and realize I'm outside the office of a lawyer I usually traveled to from work. I ride my bike up Hudson Street and find myself sailing past the Cowgirl Museum, which I walked to a couple of times from the 1 train. I come off the East River bike trail heading west toward 1st Avenue, and I'm outside our pediatrician's office which I normally approach heading east.

For a nanosecond, it feels like these places must have moved, maybe by magic, or a tectonic shift, or special relativity. I think to myself how I love this town. Then somebody behind me honks their horn, because it doesn't love me back.

Monday, November 14, 2011

The Trip to Beautiful


Roosevelt Island is an anchovy-shaped strip of land in the East River next to midtown Manhattan. You can go there with tourists on an overhead cable tramway, and the F Train stops there now too. But this vertical lift bridge from Queens is the only way to drive onto the island. Or ride a bicycle, which is what I was doing when I took this picture.

I only snapped it because I was bored. They're painting the bridge, which means they raise it every half hour or so to daub hard-to-reach surfaces while the traffic stacks up. The bridge always struck me as just another example of the ugly infrastructure every rust-belt city depends on but ignores unless it fails to work or goes down for maintenance. Girders, gears and grime, not worth a first look, let alone a second.

That just shows what I know. Before I could make my return trip, the painters stopped me again on the other side. Bored again, I read the oxidized dedication plaque and learned that when this bridge was built in 1955, a national society of steel engineers named it the "most beautiful" in its class.

I had to ride another bridge from Manhattan just to get to this one, the Queensboro, a.k.a. the 59th Street Bridge. Everybody who ever watched a movie in which somebody leaves the city for LaGuardia has seen that bridge. I think it's even uglier than the Roosevelt Island bridge, but Paul Simon wrote a song about it, so I lose that argument too. And anyway why would I disrespect any bridge that has a bike path.

Roosevelt Island has a bike path too. It goes all the way around the island from the lighthouse on the north end to the remains of the Civil War era hospital at the south.

The lighthouse overlooks Hell's Gate, where the East and Harlem rivers meet the waters of Long Island Sound. The water heaves and bulges as if it were seething. Years ago, we were returning with friends from a sailing cruise and lost power right in the grip of these currents. A reeking garbage barge was bearing down on us with no time to stop or turn. Our friend put out a panicky distress call on his radio. Out of nowhere, two guys in an inflatable dinghy with a big Evenrude and a hand-held radio roared up, tossed us a line and towed us to safety. I have no idea who they were or why they were loitering there, but we never got to ask. The Coast Guard showed up a quarter hour later to tow us the rest of the way to the 23rd Street Marina and give my friend a summons for not having enough fire extinguishers and personal flotation devices aboard. Only time I ever went home from a yachting excursion on a subway.

Here's what you see at the other end of the island:


It's part of the old hospital, an amazing pile of masonry from different eras, some brick, some stone and not much more than gravity holding it together. All of it is now braced with new steel girders inside, because it will be the centerpiece of a park dedicated in FDR's name to the suffering and courage of the disabled. The park opens in 2013, but it's open enough now to approach these ruins and marvel that they stayed vertical long enough to be saved.






Friday, November 11, 2011

Long Kiss Goodbye


This is the Little Red Lighthouse, made famous in the 1942 childrens' book The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Grey Bridge.

The lighthouse has been here, next to the Manhattan footing of the George Washington Bridge, since the 1920s, but it was a chore to visit until the city began creating its wonderful network of bike paths and lanes. One of the most spectacular routes follows the Hudson River almost the length of the island, from Battery Park at the southern tip to Dyckman Street just a few hundred hards short of the Henry Hudson Bridge which takes you off the north end of Manhattan into Riverdale.

I've started taking almost daily bike trips around town, as a way of saying goodbye to the city where we've lived now for nearly a quarter century. On my first one, I rode from home on East 56th Street to Central Park, headed north and then west around the oval drive, exiting on West 100th and then riding west on 97th Street to Broadway where I picked up a sandwich to carry along, then to the river.

Usually I ride south for breakfast at a greasy spoon I like in Tribeca called the Square Diner. But on this day I went north for the first time in years. I stopped at the bridge to eat the sandwich and take this picture. The Coast Guard wanted to take the lighthouse away in the 1950s because its old job of alerting boats to the outcropping of the river bank at Jeffreys Hook was eliminated by the bridge. But toddlers who had read the book began an orchestrated wailing and sent in their pennies to save it.

After lunch I continued on to Dyckman and crossed the island east to the Harlem River side for the trip home. For a few miles there's a nice paved path along the water, but it runs afoul of the Harlem River Drive, and cyclists are forced to join city traffic at around 155th Street. From there you plunge south into Harlem, but it wasn't the Harlem I remembered from our early days in the city.

We used to ride a commuter bus from Riverdale that took us through Harlem when the neighborhoods were an alarming wasteland of empty storefronts, abandoned houses, scrap fires in oil drums, derelict commercial buildings and forlorn, debris strewn sidewalks. Feeling vulnerable behind our windows, we avoided eye contact with anybody on those streets.

Today, the same streets are tidied up nicely, and many of the empty storefronts are occupied by new businesses. The people on the sidewalks look like they have somewhere to go. There are new office and condo buildings here and there. Cars respected the well-marked bike path, and I rode pleasantly south into the uptown end of Central Park, then around the west side of the oval to home.

This Isn't My First Time

I published my first blog post yesterday on tumblr. But tumblr was weird, and I couldn't get it to send notices of my new posts to my facebook newsfeed. Also, the URL for my blog was unreachable by anybody without a tumblr account.

Trying to understand and fix these problems, I accidentally deleted my post, which I had worked very hard on. I felt despair and deleted my account. Before letting me go, tumblr offered me a link to tell them how I thought they had messed up. I hit the link and it took me to a page for creating a new account. Q-E-D.

I have a fairly low level of confidence that Google will be any better, but there seem to be plenty of free blog hosts, so I'll just keep trying them until I find one for which the design and instructions have not been written for people who already know how to do it.