Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Footsore in Seattle
From old blog "Mother Huldra"
This is what home looks like.
Home looks like hurt and healing out in the open.
There was never time and air for my feet to heal in Jerusalem. I have blood blisters layered on blood blisters, but the greatest pain came from the, er, leaking between my toes.
There was just never any questions of what to do, besides pull on the same shoes for another's days walking and learning adventure.
New York City gave me silver-dollar water-balloon blisters on top of the blood blisters on top of the cracks and callouses. My father suspects it was the cycle of my feet swelling from lack of movement on the plane, then being subjected to heavy walking, then swelling again.
Whatever the explanation, the upshot was the after six weeks of walking the WORLD, I came home and couldn't put on shoes or creep off carpet!
Which means I left under a mutual cloud of fear over *this* guy not being able to take care of himself,
and came home to spend a week with my feet up and him spoiling me!
This is what home looks like.
Home looks like hurt and healing out in the open.
There was never time and air for my feet to heal in Jerusalem. I have blood blisters layered on blood blisters, but the greatest pain came from the, er, leaking between my toes.
There was just never any questions of what to do, besides pull on the same shoes for another's days walking and learning adventure.
New York City gave me silver-dollar water-balloon blisters on top of the blood blisters on top of the cracks and callouses. My father suspects it was the cycle of my feet swelling from lack of movement on the plane, then being subjected to heavy walking, then swelling again.
Whatever the explanation, the upshot was the after six weeks of walking the WORLD, I came home and couldn't put on shoes or creep off carpet!
Which means I left under a mutual cloud of fear over *this* guy not being able to take care of himself,
and came home to spend a week with my feet up and him spoiling me!
Friday, August 13, 2010
My One Day in New York
From old blog "Mother Huldra"
Days before I was to leave, I took a good look at the far end of my itinerary and finally fully realized that I was looking at a 15-hour layover in New York City!
Well, fifteen hours, minus two hours for getting through customs on arriving and minus two hours for check-in and security before departing and minus double the two to two and a half hours Google told me it would take for me to get pretty much anywhere from JFK by public transit.
Leaving a jet-lagged six hours in which to "Do" New York City.
Immediately I began asking my laid-back Seattle resources what One Thing I should do with a few hours in New York City. I got laid-back Seattle answers. "Have a real bagel." "Look around Times Square." Seattle does this to people. I began my own investigations. Bronx Zoo? Second only to the one in San Diego... that I grew up with. Jewish Theological Seminary? Closes down in August. Chabad's historical tour of Lubavitcher Brooklyn? Might not have its intended impact after six weeks breathing Jerusalem, ya think?
Time progressed; New York plans did not. I had great hopes of meeting with Maggid Yitzhak Buxbaum, the master Jewish story-teller, but our final emails just missed one another. Brain-storming with Israelis proved invaluable for the insights into Israelis, not so much for the insights into New York City, despite the fact that every other household knows someone there.
But I had no fear.
I had a hidden lynch pin.
And on my last day in Jerusalem, I turned to that lynch pin:
I asked a New Yorker.
Who just happened to be my chavrutah and the mortal soul who knew me best in all Jerusalem.
Actually, come to think of it, I didn't have to ask her.
What I said was, "Tomorrow I have a long layover in New York City."
"And what do you want to do with your one day in Manhattan?"
"I-- well, apparently I want to spend the day in Manhattan."
"Yes, yes, you do. When, exactly, is your plane arriving? Hang on, I'm going to need some paper."
So I arrived in New York City with EXPLICIT INSTRUCTIONS:
And before you ask, no, my chavrutah is not a professional teacher.
When a teacher gives inadequate directions, odds are good that the next teacher will have to straighten things out, so each teacher learns best how to correct the mistakes of the teacher ahead of them rather than how to correct their own mistakes.
My chavrutah is a professional LIBRARIAN.
A librarian stays stuck in one place with the same fools coming back with the same questions until that librarian masters the art of giving fool-proof directions to get rid of them for a few hours and get some work done.
Librarians are not to be consulted when in doubt, librarians are to be consulted whenever there is opportunity.
Now, in order to get on to the topic at hand, it's best that I turn aside for the moment from the things that should be said about the public transit obstacle course and psychological stress test known as "busing to Ben Gurion Airport".
For the moment, we shall also pass by the idiosyncrasies of transversing the date-line at night while wedged in between an ingénue clutching a three-foot stuffed animal elephant to her bronchitis-wracked chest and a writhing fourteen year old Israeli girl dealing with her plane seat about as well as a cat deals with being wrapped in a towel on an eleven hour flight on which half the passengers are in families, half of the families are Chassidic, and each of the Chassidic families averages two anxious toddlers and one crying baby, you do the math.
This brings me up to stumbling along towards customs trying to swallow the concept that I had left Jerusalem. Immediately I discovered I was having a terrible time transitioning back to the idea of a world around me that spoke my language. Living somewhere and speaking very little of the language is like having a chastity belt on your tongue: full range of imagination but you learn real fast what not to try with strangers-- and those patterns of what not to try, like lessons learned in muscle memory, do not wear off very quickly. I was highly conscious that I was still struggling to think in Hebrew, and I could not turn it off. I was holding my breath waiting for an immersive English environment to break the spell and free me.
New York City was not that environment.
Helene Hanff (a New Yorker, and even better, a New York Jew) wrote that London presents itself as whatever London you have in your heart before you arrive.
New York City, The City of the modern world, is not so malleable.
I could not have expected that my first vision of New York City as an adult would be the immaculate grace of a shining white egret pulling itself from the mud to fly with lazy majesty under the high tracks of my train.
My parents are lucky that I settled for The Emerald City before getting time with The Big Apple.
I rode the A Train with a black woman whose face matched the form of the green African goddess my grandfather brought home from his travels the year after my grandmother died. She slept with a midnight shawl wrapped around her, and I watched over her sleeping like that goddess watched over my nights curled on the couch in my grandfather's home. I watched a rosary come out of a pocket and move through fingers bead by bead, trusted plastic more beautiful than its polished olive wood brothers hanging for sale in the Christian quarter of the Old City. I watched men and women who did not know one another sitting down in seats side by side without fear or alarm.
Up to 79th and Broadway, up one block, look out for Zabars--
-- and now look across the street to find H & H Bagels.
Join the line as it passes in front of the fridge and grab something if you want it; there's no toast-and-schmear service here, no house-recipe blends of toppings, just the goods from a grocery store dairy and at the front of the line hot just-baked bagels tossed fast into a paper bag and go. Go try to find an empty park bench on Broadway at 7:30am in the morning. I walked around the block for the sake of the dignity of the helpful young madman who assured me there were wild animals in the direction I was headed and that I needed to go the other way unless I was carrying a gun. I wasn't carrying a gun, I was carrying a)the most precious part of Jerusalem, a photo print picked up in the Old City in honor of my father's recent birthday (I'd kept that print flat and protected through manic Israeli bus drivers and flailing teen feet on the plane, and one look into the crowded shelves of baggage storage convinced me, in my infinite experience as a traveler, that it would be safer staying in my hands through my virgin solo encounter with New York's subways, streets, weather, and populace), and b) my first Real Bagels, cooling by the moment.
This is how I ended up eating breakfast in New York sitting on the bottom steps of some unknown brownstone with a furtive eye out for passing cops and my hunched back turned to the business-people periodically popping out of their secured door and half-hurdling over me.
The Bagels were so worth it.
A Real Bagel pops like a grape when you bite into it.
A Real Bagel has a crust as thin and taut as the skin of a grape, and flesh as firmly packed as steak.
A Real Bagel is a totally textural nourishing experience, as profoundly its own thing as sinking your toes into sun-warmed mud.
Bagels are Good.
New York City has a capacity altogether previously unknown to me to be hot and cold at the same time. H & H Bagels was throbbing, open-oven heat. The street had a heat that made it tight to breathe. At the same time, a breeze cut through like a dervish spinning by with knives of ice. Acclimated to keeping early morning company with Jerusalem's cisterns and sprinklers, I received the first random drop, the second, and a handful more, and would never have realized this hesitant precipitation was falling from the sky had it not been for a passer-by muttering the once-familiar word "rain."
That word sent me scrambling through a much-abbreviated Birkat HaMazon on the hoof with a thin millimeter of plastic bag folded over the top of the precious print.
This trip I had learned that I don't follow directions well, so despite the effort I'd gone through to procure a knowledgeable itinerary for New York City, my deep gratitude for the careful detail of that itinerary, and my pains to memorize the itinerary in addition to taking it out to double-check it about every ten minutes, this is where I went off to do my own thing. See, the next step was to get on a bus, and from what I could divine with my poor map-reading skills that main purpose of that bus was to save me from walking across Central Park, an intention as well-meaning and ill-starred as any effort to save a pig from dirt.
So I found Central Park.
I found endless huge rocks stretched out like children of time itself taking in the sun and ignoring the city.
I found an Irish Wolfhound and half a hundred other dogs as distinct in their breeds as roses labeled in a collectors garden.
I saw the fantasy form of a castle rising from the tall green at the edge of a playing field.
And in no time at all I was walking along the side of the Met, curling around the entrance of the Met half an hour early, taking my place among-- what was this?! A tour group that had missed its timing? The convocation for some special pre-opening reception?
No, there were no buses, no media vans, no coherence within the humanity.
There were simply dozens on dozens of people lining up from the doors to cascade down the stairs to split like the Reed Sea at Sgt. David Gonzales USMC Hot Dog Stand and stream in long rivers down either direction of the sidewalk, people vibrating with excitement, chattering with strangers and fidgeting and crying out at each hopeful sign of movement from within, people lined up three thick and once, twice, three times a hundred long waiting as if the Met were a soup kitchen for the soul, waiting...
to see Art.
Nothing I have read could give me such hope for humanity.
We came in, and paying my student donation felt like an honor. In my only other visit to New York, tucked under the wing of my father's older brother. I was taken inside the Met in what may have been a spare hour, time to be ambushed by the Temple of Dendur and then rushed along a single wall of tiny Egyptian antiquities, trying desperately to memorize that particular shade of bluer than blue, before our time was up and we were out without even a moment for the glories of the painted picture or the treasures of my beloved Medieval Europe. Until that day, I had not understood that the Cloisters were not part of the Met proper, not even in New York proper, and I was in such agony at having come so close to the Unicorn Tapestries without seeing them that I've never since been able to look at Egyptian art without feeling the edge of a sulk, the more beautiful the art, the keener the sulk.
So the last thing I expected of the Met was to find myself sucked straight back to the one place I had been before: the gallery of Egyptian art. Within moments of clipping the donor button to the collar of my shirt, I found myself alone in a little room of a reconstructed tomb, peering through a narrow window at a small squat statue who returned my look of wistful irony, neither of us quite where we expected to be or doing what we should have been doing.
I saw a figurine I'd seen a picture of in a book at the Bible Lands Museum, and loved at once, of one woman tending to another's hair while the other woman tends to her child, a rare concrete evocation of non-sexual tenderness so not-quite-like anything else that its possible age spans half a millennium.
[this and other art photos primarily taken from the Met's Collection Database]
I took the long way through, carrying my weeks in Jerusalem with me, my path an echo of my time among the Egyptian antiquities of the Israel Museum and the Bible Lands Museum even as the painted and carved rock around me echoed the ochre to white Jerusalem stone that had gilded my mornings. I paused especially at the indigo headscarf, narrowly dated to 1336-1327 B.C.E., whose careful mends indicate its great value, and I thought of the value of blue in the making of the mishkan and the long rabbinic debate rejecting indigo as a source of tekhelet, the holy blue. I looked at the miniatures with their scenes of daily life with the special love I have for such things, and wondered if these straight-horned cattle, black and spotted and sometimes red, were the same strain as the cattle driven through the wilderness with the wandering children of Israel.
The Temple of Dendur remains as breath-taking as when I was girl.
I watched a young man, smiling in bashful self-consciousness, set up his camera on a timer and then scramble to stand in front of the temple with his hands pressed palm to palm, still blushing.
I made my own escape from Egypt to flounder up the stairs crash about the glories of European art, arrested here and there to scribble down a frantic note in the hope of not only seeing, but remembering-
Viller's "Young Woman Drawing"
I plowed my way through the huge, multi-room special exhibit on Picasso that captures, painting by painting, his transformative shift in seeing.
I was particularly stunned by this self-portrait --
-- because I have one almost identical, sketched out after a vision in which Raven plucked out my eye. While I do not have Picasso's technical skill and Picasso did not end up with a tiny tree-frog riding around in the empty socket, the similarities are so startling that I was left staring around the room at the sharp transition where Picasso field of "real" came completely apart, opus by opus, year by year, then back together to a new whole. Conventional wisdom is that Picasso left the Western way of seeing through his study of Oceanic art, but I was seeing not an external imitation but an internal shift, and I could not avoid the obvious-to-me thought, what if he simply had a vision? What if he left off depicting reality through a Western lens because he had an experience of reality outside a Western lens?
To my delight, they had "The Dreamer":
Then they had the special exhibition gift shop, where they had The Dreamer as a square silk scarf.
And I had too much taste and not enough money to buy The Dreamer as a married woman's modest head-covering.
(They also had a long, rectangular silk scarf of La Joie de Vivre, even though this most glorious of all Picasso's works was not part of the exhibit itself.
I did succeed in convincing myself that La Joie de Vivre would NOT Be Appropriate as a tallit, but I'm going to admit, it was a uphill battle.)
I saw -
- Quentin Massys 1520 "Portrait of a Woman", far out of its time for the sheer power of personality captured:
- Beloved Bruegel's "The Harvesters", which seem to come in a kind of call and response dialogue across the ages with Van Gogh's "Corn Harvest in Provence" so fresh in my memory.
- Arcimboldo's "The Four Seasons"
- Moroni's "Abbess Lucrezia Agliardi Vertova", a woman I would trust with my life just from her face-- did she know she was dying?
- Velazquez's noble rendering of "Juan de Pareja", painted at the time of his slavery and in and of itself an argument for the liberty and dignity of all humans.
- and Portail's "The Benediction"
I saw the work of El Greco for the first time, three paintings of El Greco, and understood immediately why the art books had all referred to him but neglected to show him, his approach so impossibly alien to anything happening anywhere else in the sixteenth century.
There was the "View of Toledo",
the "Adoration of the Shepherds",
and the "Vision of St. John"...
...which is so impossibly modern that my memory still refuses to retain it.
Around this time the jetlag, the lack of a watch, the state of my feet, and art-overload began to seep through, and I became seriously concerned about needing to leave before scratching the surface of the Met's Impressionists
This urgency led to the rare opportunity to walk up and ask, "Excuse me, where is the Nineteenth Century?" and receive a cogent and useful answer.
The directions I received sent me straight into two rooms-- two rooms!-- full of Degas's dancers.
With the professional tutus of Paris all about me, I had eyes only for the one I'd never seen before, the charcoal "Russian Dancer" of 1899.
Old friends and new surprises continued to mix.
I was touched by the moment in time caught by Tissot's "Tea" 1872 -
- drawn in by Carriere's searching "Self-Portrait" of 1893
- and chilled by the confidence of Reghault's "Salome", 1870
But there are no true celebrities but familiar works of art, works of art that are seen and seen again through the decades, talked about, written about, loved from afar and known from afar, works of art to which one comes with a whole relationship, a whole history, all on one's own side. The art stands innocent, belonging to its own self alone; it has never seen you, never imagined you, yet been part of you from the moment you learned of it, and you realize that the art has made you, it is you who belong to the art. You realize that every work of art you have ever studied but never seen is a moment of your life that has been waiting to happen, a completion of your being that has been waiting to come true.
And here in living canvas before your eyes is Cot's "The Storm"
- and "Springtime"
- and Friedrich's "Two Men Contemplating the Moon"
and Bonheur's extravagance "The Horse Fair", sweeping you away as it did a horse-crazy girl twenty, twenty-five years ago.
Then, past sweet Renoir, childhood friend and lifelong inspiration ("tie the brush into my hand"), there is Van Gogh. You had never really seen a painting until you saw a painting by Van Gogh, long ago, your fifteenth year when you were visiting the Smithsonian at the same time that "Starry Night" was visiting the Smithsonian, and you stood before it and knew you did not know this painting, had never known this painting, everything you had ever been taught about Art in general and Impressionism in particular was absolutely wrong, and you understood something you had never understood before.
Next year Miss Caine will make you read Camus's "The Stranger", which you'd already read twice before coming to her class, Camus, like Van Gogh, familiar without being a friend, and she will make you read it again, and again, and again, forcing you to strain to see something in the nothingness of that book, something to write about, until you see it, you see the Nothingness of that book, and you see that you have never read a book before in your life, and you read it again for the sheer joy of reading.
Fourteen years after that there will be a man who will touch you so deeply that you will realize why they call it "knowing".
You will live the life you were set on as a grasping, frustrated child, the life of seeking the light of understanding. It will be life in which, when you make time, you work hard, and you get lucky, doors open in your mind. You live, more than for love, for those moments when a beam of light comes in.
Three times alone, the roof flew off.
Of those three times, Van Gogh was the first.
There was a Van Vogh, the greatest Van Gogh, at the Smithsonian that year.
There was a notable Van Gogh at the Israel Museum this summer.
There are half a dozen Van Goghs at the Met. They leap from the walls into your brain. The paintings around them are not the same genre, not the same medium; it is as if there is Art, and then there is Van Gogh. And you realize, with a little wistfulness for the creeping conventional nostalgia of your tastes, that your whole life put in words could be simmered down to the simple description "a slow process of learning to appreciate Van Gogh".
There is "Wheat Fields With Cypresses", which you stand and stare at, and the college girl sitting on the bench stares at right through the other visitors who are pulled by it to stand in front of her, and the museum guard who sees these paintings every day for hours each day stands and stares at. You can taste the smell of the green leaves on the breeze that crosses the fields to you.
There is "Cypresses", painted in the same year.
There is the "Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat",
- and the paintings of olive trees, made more dear in my eyes by my time sharing that same red earth with those same twisted trunks, the same quality of sunlight that makes olives prosper and eyes squint and people brown.
There was somehow room for me to take in two more disparate beauties--
Breton's "The Weeders", 1868,
and Cross's "The Return of the Fisherman", whose subtlety I found a much more compelling use of pointillism than any Seurat I've seen (but as I confessed through the creeping conventionalism above, I know I'm a plebe).
After that I literally fled the paintings section on my limping feet with a sense of such overdone gluttony as not to bear another bite. I am the sort of person who will willingly, joyfully, spend an hour in careful contemplation of a half dozen canvases. I've complained before about Seattle's poor excuses for museums, but let's face the truth: the world-class ones could kill me through sheer unaccustomed overexposure.
So I went for something completely different and paid my respects to a photography exhibit I only wish I had either the historical or aesthetic ability to properly appreciate, and then wandered with low expectations into the Special Exhibit: American Woman - Fashioning a National Identity.
Because fashion is so very my "thing".
And oh what joy I take in the triumph of the modern American figure as a standard of beauty over the classic curvy French type.
And do you happen to have any salt I could pour on this cut to complete the experience?
I forget that what modern marketing calls "fashion" is what in college we called "costume history", which is of exquisite interest to me as an amateur sewer, amateur historian, and women's studies maven, because literally year by year the possibilities and limitations of being a woman are directly reflected by the-
Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Fire! Am I actually standing in the presence of House of Worth gowns?!?
-ahem, manipulations of acceptable women's dress. The tremendous physical and financial restrictions imposed by House of Worth gowns being a key example. (Worth Gowns! Wow!)
For my fellow costume geeks, the Metropolitan has graciously provided us with a photo-stream of the whole exhibit on Flickr, here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/metmuseum/4581970781/in/set-72157624000343850
What the photos cannot convey is the power of the large video presentation in the final room, the one dedicated to "Screen Sirens", in which we piled up by the dozen and stared with our mouths open like turkeys drowning in the rain as five-minute scenes with Anna May Wong, Katherine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, and other classic greats turned our brains to goo. As one reporter quoted, "They don't make them like that anymore."
I walk through the world and timespan of musical instruments. I walk past American utilitarian art from the colonial period onward, proud silver and ceramic, glowing glass. I walk into the art of ancient Iran, and am felled by a civilization that was sophisticated when my ancestors were still figuring out how to turn cream into butter.
This antelope [my own photo] predates the art of Egypt,
as does its companion, this anthropomorphic bull likewise from 3000 BCE
The perfection of these pieces, the balance, the musculature, the character, the expressions-- are such that it would hardly be more miraculous if they started moving.
But if they started moving...
then, just around the corner, THEY might start moving.
[my photo]
That would be... bad.
Perspective:
[my photo]
That impression of size is not an optical illusion.
[from a stranger's private blog, thank you jcsparks.com]
One is leonine.
The other is bovine.
Technical information: They are the guardians of the palace at Nimrud, of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II, who reigned from 883–859 BCE. To the misery of archeologists and linguists, despite the survival of individual names from different periods in the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Assyrian tongues, today they all get called "lamassu".
Which doesn't make a lot of difference from the Jewish perspective because I KNOW the Hebrew word for them.
So do you.
Think Rilke:
Jeder Engel ist schrecklich.
Every Angel is terror.
[Duino Elegies, 1912]
These, are Cherubim.
I'm not speaking metaphorically: the Hebrew word Cherub (keruv) is a derivative from one of the Assyrian names for these beings.
This IS the biblical Cherub; when you encounter that word in translation, this is the image, of impassive, awesome power, that the authors are invoking.
Jeder Engel ist schrecklich.
My chavrutah doesn't "do" angels. She's very particular on that point.
At the moment I envy her that stance, because honestly, after this experience, rereading Prophets is going to use up a lot of antacid.
Let's look at some works from Tiffany Studios, shall we?
Here's the "Garden Fountain". It is pretty.
Here's the "Autumn Landscape". It has trees. Trees are pretty.
Here is the "View of Oyster Bay". It is sublime.
I knew a man who had in his home a paraphrase from Mayakovski:
"Art is not a mirror. Art is a hammer."
(I believe he had it scrawled across a mirror. If not, that's where it should have been, and I choose to remember it that way.)
It was an important concept for me.
But sometimes--
Art is a little fish pond.
This was the point where, in the interests of sanity, I began looking for the way out of the Met.
Since I don't find sanity very interesting, I did not go about this with great efficiency, or let this search interfere with lingering in front of -
- Severini's "Dancer-Airplane Propeller-Sea", 1915
[my photo]
- Leger's "Woman with a Cat", 1921
- "The Lovers", my first Chagall in person after all these years (no, I don't want to think about the irony of spending six weeks in Israel and seeing my first Chagall my first day stateside, thank you)
and then I found the O'Keeffes.
Because I hadn't induced an adequate aesthetic concussion by this point in the day, I had to go fall into the O'Keeffes.
O'Keefe is one of those artists, like Van Gogh, that I was very happy to flip through in books with sophomoric nonchalance right up until the moment of actually having my psyche pillaged by real life encounter with their work.
Here's "Pelvis II", 1944
Here's "From the Faraway, Nearby" 1938
There was one flower. From across the room I could tell it was something I have no business studying before the traditional age of forty. I scraped up my sense of self-preservation and limped out the door.
Good-bye, Met.
Good-bye, William Hippo Herd.
Good-bye, William-Shaped Backpack.
I will remember you. Fondly. With indecent speed if I ever have the opportunity to compose a new-baby wishlist.
(When I was five years old I tried to recreate William the Hippo with my first block of real clay.
I did a really good job.
I did such a good job that one of the other kids stole it after it came back from the kiln.
Elul is the month of forgiveness.
And as soon as they call me and express repentance, they're scot-free.)
It is time to walk outside.
It is time to bow in recognition to the fact that at this point in my travels, the pain in my feet has actually become physiologically disorienting at multiple points of the day, and finding some way to elevate my feet has become a priority.
Obviously, the best way to accomplish this is to walk down the length of Central Park and then take a ride on the famous Carousal.
Hello, Central Park.
Hello, closed-up and shut-down Carousal House.
I expected New York to be a hotbed of tzedakha opportunities. I failed to realize I'd entered the busking and street-performer capitol of the world.
I would love to tell you that what I remember most about this man was the iridescent beauty he was giving to the world, but what I actually remember most is the schadenfreude with which I'm still wrestling. You see, there were a crowd of visitors to the park gathered to enjoy the ballons, several of us trying to take pictures, and one very small boy standing directly in front of the bubble-performer waiting to punch each bubble to make it pop at the moment of its release, to the repeated disappointment of all. Street performers who yell at small children in public parks do not tend to make a lot of money and the voluminous censure of the crowd had no effect on the child but gave the child's parent considerable incentive to remain anonymous, motionless, and silent. This lasted until Small Boy punched a bubble *directly* over his head.
I know what bubbles are made of.
Do you know what bubble are made of?
That's right.
Bubbles are made of SOAP.
Thus, the small boy who pops an enormous bubble directly over his own face, has just effectively poured soap in his eyes, and will next run right to his embarrassed parent, ending the anonymity, provoking a brisk decampment, and leaving a summer crowd free to enjoy iridescent schadenfreude.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have a saxophone serenade for a young lady in a stroller. This musician was brilliantly blending the end of each short piece into the beginning of the next, as the toddler squealed with recognition and delight time after time and the mother laughed aloud at her own unwillingness to pull away mid-piece.
He was playing a certain melody by Mancini when I snapped this shot...
Now leaving Central Park.
(On film, the conflation of the marble perfection slouching shirtless and the ordinary mortal slouching shirtless is less, well, disturbing than it was in real life. New York City-- disturb the comfortable, comfort th- hey! look at that!)
At this point, I was off the map as far as my careful instructions were concerned, but of some things I was sure.
I was sure I did not want to rent a bicycle, which is an essential thing to be sure of while leaving Central Park because a *lot* of people will try to convince you of the contrary.
Also, I was fairly sure that on the East Coast as on the West, the number two follows the number one, and that on the East Coast as on the West and as distinct from Jerusalem, knowing that the number two follows the number one can actually assist in finding a particular intersection. This little coincidence is surprising rare in international urban navigation.
Limp or no limp, I was past ready to glory in vast indulgence of a city built of streets that run by grid.
It would be some time before I was to find my immersive English environment, but my cultural transition out of Israel happened over the fourteen blocks between Central Park and the best kosher shwarma joint in the city and final destination on my list of instructions.
In Jerusalem, infinite small neighborhood stores cater to each separated aspect of life like the drawers of a kosher kitchen: the candy corner, the pharmacy, house-cleaning supplies, locks and hardware.
In New York, infinite small neighborhood stores sell whatever the market will bear-- like the ice cream shop advertising cell phones.
In Jerusalem, pedestrians fear crazy drivers.
In New York, drivers fear crazy pedestrians. (They can't get up enough speed to be sure of getting away from us.)
In Jerusalem, while the walk light is green you still check for oncoming cars in the turn lane and then cross.
In New York, while the traffic light is green you walk out to the edge of the farthest double-parked car and watch for the traffic light to turn yellow, at which point you step boldly (farther) into the street to show you mean business. (There *are* walk lights in New York City. I presume they represent budgetary surplus spending.)
In Jerusalem, the schwarma guy is a human super-speed food assembly machine who has no time to show feelings on the job.
In New York, the schwarma guy is an Israeli, who is so happy you have come here straight from Jerusalem try my falafel.
This is The Place to buy good-as-Jerusalem kosher schwarma in New York City.
This is the building across the street from the schwarma place.
It's rather imposing.
I'm pretty sure Times Square might be somewhere that way.
I did not depart from the directions again to go find out.
I crawled down into the transit-station-cum-mall at 42nd and 8th Ave and found the subway.
I wish I could have caught a picture of the triune beautiful young men with dreadlock manes who leapt on to the train each with a long conga drum that they proceeded to play in concert.
I wish I had a picture of the tall and crooked headstones of the old, old graveyard on the last leg to Howard Beach Station.
I wish I could have caught the sunset spreading across the airport as we turned.
But I was content to find myself back in JFK, picking up my bags with three and a half hours before flight, just barely enough time to be tortured by unmoving lines for unlabeled purposes, to be claimed for a seventy-five person long pied-piper journey led by a Delta representative along the backdoors of the terminal, and to pay for the privilege of a double-drubbing over by security (characterized at the midpoint by the necessity of explaining to multiple members of a security team that I had been awake for over twenty-four hours and was not arguing but simply needed someone to think for me, please, and at the endpoint by a backpack containing several halakhically sacred texts together with one very large jar of honey and coated entirely with four by four inch stickers wailing "Fragile".)
Until we meet again, New York. My breath's been taken away each time I see something so simple as a comic strip and immediately recognize a place I've been in our short time together. You are truly the mapland of stories.
And, JFK? I'll be back in spite of you.
Days before I was to leave, I took a good look at the far end of my itinerary and finally fully realized that I was looking at a 15-hour layover in New York City!
Well, fifteen hours, minus two hours for getting through customs on arriving and minus two hours for check-in and security before departing and minus double the two to two and a half hours Google told me it would take for me to get pretty much anywhere from JFK by public transit.
Leaving a jet-lagged six hours in which to "Do" New York City.
Immediately I began asking my laid-back Seattle resources what One Thing I should do with a few hours in New York City. I got laid-back Seattle answers. "Have a real bagel." "Look around Times Square." Seattle does this to people. I began my own investigations. Bronx Zoo? Second only to the one in San Diego... that I grew up with. Jewish Theological Seminary? Closes down in August. Chabad's historical tour of Lubavitcher Brooklyn? Might not have its intended impact after six weeks breathing Jerusalem, ya think?
Time progressed; New York plans did not. I had great hopes of meeting with Maggid Yitzhak Buxbaum, the master Jewish story-teller, but our final emails just missed one another. Brain-storming with Israelis proved invaluable for the insights into Israelis, not so much for the insights into New York City, despite the fact that every other household knows someone there.
But I had no fear.
I had a hidden lynch pin.
And on my last day in Jerusalem, I turned to that lynch pin:
I asked a New Yorker.
Who just happened to be my chavrutah and the mortal soul who knew me best in all Jerusalem.
Actually, come to think of it, I didn't have to ask her.
What I said was, "Tomorrow I have a long layover in New York City."
"And what do you want to do with your one day in Manhattan?"
"I-- well, apparently I want to spend the day in Manhattan."
"Yes, yes, you do. When, exactly, is your plane arriving? Hang on, I'm going to need some paper."
So I arrived in New York City with EXPLICIT INSTRUCTIONS:
And before you ask, no, my chavrutah is not a professional teacher.
When a teacher gives inadequate directions, odds are good that the next teacher will have to straighten things out, so each teacher learns best how to correct the mistakes of the teacher ahead of them rather than how to correct their own mistakes.
My chavrutah is a professional LIBRARIAN.
A librarian stays stuck in one place with the same fools coming back with the same questions until that librarian masters the art of giving fool-proof directions to get rid of them for a few hours and get some work done.
Librarians are not to be consulted when in doubt, librarians are to be consulted whenever there is opportunity.
Now, in order to get on to the topic at hand, it's best that I turn aside for the moment from the things that should be said about the public transit obstacle course and psychological stress test known as "busing to Ben Gurion Airport".
For the moment, we shall also pass by the idiosyncrasies of transversing the date-line at night while wedged in between an ingénue clutching a three-foot stuffed animal elephant to her bronchitis-wracked chest and a writhing fourteen year old Israeli girl dealing with her plane seat about as well as a cat deals with being wrapped in a towel on an eleven hour flight on which half the passengers are in families, half of the families are Chassidic, and each of the Chassidic families averages two anxious toddlers and one crying baby, you do the math.
This brings me up to stumbling along towards customs trying to swallow the concept that I had left Jerusalem. Immediately I discovered I was having a terrible time transitioning back to the idea of a world around me that spoke my language. Living somewhere and speaking very little of the language is like having a chastity belt on your tongue: full range of imagination but you learn real fast what not to try with strangers-- and those patterns of what not to try, like lessons learned in muscle memory, do not wear off very quickly. I was highly conscious that I was still struggling to think in Hebrew, and I could not turn it off. I was holding my breath waiting for an immersive English environment to break the spell and free me.
New York City was not that environment.
Helene Hanff (a New Yorker, and even better, a New York Jew) wrote that London presents itself as whatever London you have in your heart before you arrive.
New York City, The City of the modern world, is not so malleable.
I could not have expected that my first vision of New York City as an adult would be the immaculate grace of a shining white egret pulling itself from the mud to fly with lazy majesty under the high tracks of my train.
My parents are lucky that I settled for The Emerald City before getting time with The Big Apple.
I rode the A Train with a black woman whose face matched the form of the green African goddess my grandfather brought home from his travels the year after my grandmother died. She slept with a midnight shawl wrapped around her, and I watched over her sleeping like that goddess watched over my nights curled on the couch in my grandfather's home. I watched a rosary come out of a pocket and move through fingers bead by bead, trusted plastic more beautiful than its polished olive wood brothers hanging for sale in the Christian quarter of the Old City. I watched men and women who did not know one another sitting down in seats side by side without fear or alarm.
Up to 79th and Broadway, up one block, look out for Zabars--
-- and now look across the street to find H & H Bagels.
Join the line as it passes in front of the fridge and grab something if you want it; there's no toast-and-schmear service here, no house-recipe blends of toppings, just the goods from a grocery store dairy and at the front of the line hot just-baked bagels tossed fast into a paper bag and go. Go try to find an empty park bench on Broadway at 7:30am in the morning. I walked around the block for the sake of the dignity of the helpful young madman who assured me there were wild animals in the direction I was headed and that I needed to go the other way unless I was carrying a gun. I wasn't carrying a gun, I was carrying a)the most precious part of Jerusalem, a photo print picked up in the Old City in honor of my father's recent birthday (I'd kept that print flat and protected through manic Israeli bus drivers and flailing teen feet on the plane, and one look into the crowded shelves of baggage storage convinced me, in my infinite experience as a traveler, that it would be safer staying in my hands through my virgin solo encounter with New York's subways, streets, weather, and populace), and b) my first Real Bagels, cooling by the moment.
This is how I ended up eating breakfast in New York sitting on the bottom steps of some unknown brownstone with a furtive eye out for passing cops and my hunched back turned to the business-people periodically popping out of their secured door and half-hurdling over me.
The Bagels were so worth it.
A Real Bagel pops like a grape when you bite into it.
A Real Bagel has a crust as thin and taut as the skin of a grape, and flesh as firmly packed as steak.
A Real Bagel is a totally textural nourishing experience, as profoundly its own thing as sinking your toes into sun-warmed mud.
Bagels are Good.
New York City has a capacity altogether previously unknown to me to be hot and cold at the same time. H & H Bagels was throbbing, open-oven heat. The street had a heat that made it tight to breathe. At the same time, a breeze cut through like a dervish spinning by with knives of ice. Acclimated to keeping early morning company with Jerusalem's cisterns and sprinklers, I received the first random drop, the second, and a handful more, and would never have realized this hesitant precipitation was falling from the sky had it not been for a passer-by muttering the once-familiar word "rain."
That word sent me scrambling through a much-abbreviated Birkat HaMazon on the hoof with a thin millimeter of plastic bag folded over the top of the precious print.
This trip I had learned that I don't follow directions well, so despite the effort I'd gone through to procure a knowledgeable itinerary for New York City, my deep gratitude for the careful detail of that itinerary, and my pains to memorize the itinerary in addition to taking it out to double-check it about every ten minutes, this is where I went off to do my own thing. See, the next step was to get on a bus, and from what I could divine with my poor map-reading skills that main purpose of that bus was to save me from walking across Central Park, an intention as well-meaning and ill-starred as any effort to save a pig from dirt.
So I found Central Park.
I found endless huge rocks stretched out like children of time itself taking in the sun and ignoring the city.
I found an Irish Wolfhound and half a hundred other dogs as distinct in their breeds as roses labeled in a collectors garden.
I saw the fantasy form of a castle rising from the tall green at the edge of a playing field.
And in no time at all I was walking along the side of the Met, curling around the entrance of the Met half an hour early, taking my place among-- what was this?! A tour group that had missed its timing? The convocation for some special pre-opening reception?
No, there were no buses, no media vans, no coherence within the humanity.
There were simply dozens on dozens of people lining up from the doors to cascade down the stairs to split like the Reed Sea at Sgt. David Gonzales USMC Hot Dog Stand and stream in long rivers down either direction of the sidewalk, people vibrating with excitement, chattering with strangers and fidgeting and crying out at each hopeful sign of movement from within, people lined up three thick and once, twice, three times a hundred long waiting as if the Met were a soup kitchen for the soul, waiting...
to see Art.
Nothing I have read could give me such hope for humanity.
We came in, and paying my student donation felt like an honor. In my only other visit to New York, tucked under the wing of my father's older brother. I was taken inside the Met in what may have been a spare hour, time to be ambushed by the Temple of Dendur and then rushed along a single wall of tiny Egyptian antiquities, trying desperately to memorize that particular shade of bluer than blue, before our time was up and we were out without even a moment for the glories of the painted picture or the treasures of my beloved Medieval Europe. Until that day, I had not understood that the Cloisters were not part of the Met proper, not even in New York proper, and I was in such agony at having come so close to the Unicorn Tapestries without seeing them that I've never since been able to look at Egyptian art without feeling the edge of a sulk, the more beautiful the art, the keener the sulk.
So the last thing I expected of the Met was to find myself sucked straight back to the one place I had been before: the gallery of Egyptian art. Within moments of clipping the donor button to the collar of my shirt, I found myself alone in a little room of a reconstructed tomb, peering through a narrow window at a small squat statue who returned my look of wistful irony, neither of us quite where we expected to be or doing what we should have been doing.
I saw a figurine I'd seen a picture of in a book at the Bible Lands Museum, and loved at once, of one woman tending to another's hair while the other woman tends to her child, a rare concrete evocation of non-sexual tenderness so not-quite-like anything else that its possible age spans half a millennium.
[this and other art photos primarily taken from the Met's Collection Database]
I took the long way through, carrying my weeks in Jerusalem with me, my path an echo of my time among the Egyptian antiquities of the Israel Museum and the Bible Lands Museum even as the painted and carved rock around me echoed the ochre to white Jerusalem stone that had gilded my mornings. I paused especially at the indigo headscarf, narrowly dated to 1336-1327 B.C.E., whose careful mends indicate its great value, and I thought of the value of blue in the making of the mishkan and the long rabbinic debate rejecting indigo as a source of tekhelet, the holy blue. I looked at the miniatures with their scenes of daily life with the special love I have for such things, and wondered if these straight-horned cattle, black and spotted and sometimes red, were the same strain as the cattle driven through the wilderness with the wandering children of Israel.
The Temple of Dendur remains as breath-taking as when I was girl.
I watched a young man, smiling in bashful self-consciousness, set up his camera on a timer and then scramble to stand in front of the temple with his hands pressed palm to palm, still blushing.
I made my own escape from Egypt to flounder up the stairs crash about the glories of European art, arrested here and there to scribble down a frantic note in the hope of not only seeing, but remembering-
Viller's "Young Woman Drawing"
I plowed my way through the huge, multi-room special exhibit on Picasso that captures, painting by painting, his transformative shift in seeing.
I was particularly stunned by this self-portrait --
-- because I have one almost identical, sketched out after a vision in which Raven plucked out my eye. While I do not have Picasso's technical skill and Picasso did not end up with a tiny tree-frog riding around in the empty socket, the similarities are so startling that I was left staring around the room at the sharp transition where Picasso field of "real" came completely apart, opus by opus, year by year, then back together to a new whole. Conventional wisdom is that Picasso left the Western way of seeing through his study of Oceanic art, but I was seeing not an external imitation but an internal shift, and I could not avoid the obvious-to-me thought, what if he simply had a vision? What if he left off depicting reality through a Western lens because he had an experience of reality outside a Western lens?
To my delight, they had "The Dreamer":
Then they had the special exhibition gift shop, where they had The Dreamer as a square silk scarf.
And I had too much taste and not enough money to buy The Dreamer as a married woman's modest head-covering.
(They also had a long, rectangular silk scarf of La Joie de Vivre, even though this most glorious of all Picasso's works was not part of the exhibit itself.
I did succeed in convincing myself that La Joie de Vivre would NOT Be Appropriate as a tallit, but I'm going to admit, it was a uphill battle.)
I saw -
- Quentin Massys 1520 "Portrait of a Woman", far out of its time for the sheer power of personality captured:
- Beloved Bruegel's "The Harvesters", which seem to come in a kind of call and response dialogue across the ages with Van Gogh's "Corn Harvest in Provence" so fresh in my memory.
- Arcimboldo's "The Four Seasons"
- Moroni's "Abbess Lucrezia Agliardi Vertova", a woman I would trust with my life just from her face-- did she know she was dying?
- Velazquez's noble rendering of "Juan de Pareja", painted at the time of his slavery and in and of itself an argument for the liberty and dignity of all humans.
- and Portail's "The Benediction"
I saw the work of El Greco for the first time, three paintings of El Greco, and understood immediately why the art books had all referred to him but neglected to show him, his approach so impossibly alien to anything happening anywhere else in the sixteenth century.
There was the "View of Toledo",
the "Adoration of the Shepherds",
and the "Vision of St. John"...
...which is so impossibly modern that my memory still refuses to retain it.
Around this time the jetlag, the lack of a watch, the state of my feet, and art-overload began to seep through, and I became seriously concerned about needing to leave before scratching the surface of the Met's Impressionists
This urgency led to the rare opportunity to walk up and ask, "Excuse me, where is the Nineteenth Century?" and receive a cogent and useful answer.
The directions I received sent me straight into two rooms-- two rooms!-- full of Degas's dancers.
With the professional tutus of Paris all about me, I had eyes only for the one I'd never seen before, the charcoal "Russian Dancer" of 1899.
Old friends and new surprises continued to mix.
I was touched by the moment in time caught by Tissot's "Tea" 1872 -
- drawn in by Carriere's searching "Self-Portrait" of 1893
- and chilled by the confidence of Reghault's "Salome", 1870
But there are no true celebrities but familiar works of art, works of art that are seen and seen again through the decades, talked about, written about, loved from afar and known from afar, works of art to which one comes with a whole relationship, a whole history, all on one's own side. The art stands innocent, belonging to its own self alone; it has never seen you, never imagined you, yet been part of you from the moment you learned of it, and you realize that the art has made you, it is you who belong to the art. You realize that every work of art you have ever studied but never seen is a moment of your life that has been waiting to happen, a completion of your being that has been waiting to come true.
And here in living canvas before your eyes is Cot's "The Storm"
- and "Springtime"
- and Friedrich's "Two Men Contemplating the Moon"
and Bonheur's extravagance "The Horse Fair", sweeping you away as it did a horse-crazy girl twenty, twenty-five years ago.
Then, past sweet Renoir, childhood friend and lifelong inspiration ("tie the brush into my hand"), there is Van Gogh. You had never really seen a painting until you saw a painting by Van Gogh, long ago, your fifteenth year when you were visiting the Smithsonian at the same time that "Starry Night" was visiting the Smithsonian, and you stood before it and knew you did not know this painting, had never known this painting, everything you had ever been taught about Art in general and Impressionism in particular was absolutely wrong, and you understood something you had never understood before.
Next year Miss Caine will make you read Camus's "The Stranger", which you'd already read twice before coming to her class, Camus, like Van Gogh, familiar without being a friend, and she will make you read it again, and again, and again, forcing you to strain to see something in the nothingness of that book, something to write about, until you see it, you see the Nothingness of that book, and you see that you have never read a book before in your life, and you read it again for the sheer joy of reading.
Fourteen years after that there will be a man who will touch you so deeply that you will realize why they call it "knowing".
You will live the life you were set on as a grasping, frustrated child, the life of seeking the light of understanding. It will be life in which, when you make time, you work hard, and you get lucky, doors open in your mind. You live, more than for love, for those moments when a beam of light comes in.
Three times alone, the roof flew off.
Of those three times, Van Gogh was the first.
There was a Van Vogh, the greatest Van Gogh, at the Smithsonian that year.
There was a notable Van Gogh at the Israel Museum this summer.
There are half a dozen Van Goghs at the Met. They leap from the walls into your brain. The paintings around them are not the same genre, not the same medium; it is as if there is Art, and then there is Van Gogh. And you realize, with a little wistfulness for the creeping conventional nostalgia of your tastes, that your whole life put in words could be simmered down to the simple description "a slow process of learning to appreciate Van Gogh".
There is "Wheat Fields With Cypresses", which you stand and stare at, and the college girl sitting on the bench stares at right through the other visitors who are pulled by it to stand in front of her, and the museum guard who sees these paintings every day for hours each day stands and stares at. You can taste the smell of the green leaves on the breeze that crosses the fields to you.
There is "Cypresses", painted in the same year.
There is the "Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat",
- and the paintings of olive trees, made more dear in my eyes by my time sharing that same red earth with those same twisted trunks, the same quality of sunlight that makes olives prosper and eyes squint and people brown.
There was somehow room for me to take in two more disparate beauties--
Breton's "The Weeders", 1868,
and Cross's "The Return of the Fisherman", whose subtlety I found a much more compelling use of pointillism than any Seurat I've seen (but as I confessed through the creeping conventionalism above, I know I'm a plebe).
After that I literally fled the paintings section on my limping feet with a sense of such overdone gluttony as not to bear another bite. I am the sort of person who will willingly, joyfully, spend an hour in careful contemplation of a half dozen canvases. I've complained before about Seattle's poor excuses for museums, but let's face the truth: the world-class ones could kill me through sheer unaccustomed overexposure.
So I went for something completely different and paid my respects to a photography exhibit I only wish I had either the historical or aesthetic ability to properly appreciate, and then wandered with low expectations into the Special Exhibit: American Woman - Fashioning a National Identity.
Because fashion is so very my "thing".
And oh what joy I take in the triumph of the modern American figure as a standard of beauty over the classic curvy French type.
And do you happen to have any salt I could pour on this cut to complete the experience?
I forget that what modern marketing calls "fashion" is what in college we called "costume history", which is of exquisite interest to me as an amateur sewer, amateur historian, and women's studies maven, because literally year by year the possibilities and limitations of being a woman are directly reflected by the-
Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Fire! Am I actually standing in the presence of House of Worth gowns?!?
-ahem, manipulations of acceptable women's dress. The tremendous physical and financial restrictions imposed by House of Worth gowns being a key example. (Worth Gowns! Wow!)
For my fellow costume geeks, the Metropolitan has graciously provided us with a photo-stream of the whole exhibit on Flickr, here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/metmuseum/4581970781/in/set-72157624000343850
What the photos cannot convey is the power of the large video presentation in the final room, the one dedicated to "Screen Sirens", in which we piled up by the dozen and stared with our mouths open like turkeys drowning in the rain as five-minute scenes with Anna May Wong, Katherine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, and other classic greats turned our brains to goo. As one reporter quoted, "They don't make them like that anymore."
I walk through the world and timespan of musical instruments. I walk past American utilitarian art from the colonial period onward, proud silver and ceramic, glowing glass. I walk into the art of ancient Iran, and am felled by a civilization that was sophisticated when my ancestors were still figuring out how to turn cream into butter.
This antelope [my own photo] predates the art of Egypt,
as does its companion, this anthropomorphic bull likewise from 3000 BCE
The perfection of these pieces, the balance, the musculature, the character, the expressions-- are such that it would hardly be more miraculous if they started moving.
But if they started moving...
then, just around the corner, THEY might start moving.
[my photo]
That would be... bad.
Perspective:
[my photo]
That impression of size is not an optical illusion.
[from a stranger's private blog, thank you jcsparks.com]
One is leonine.
The other is bovine.
Technical information: They are the guardians of the palace at Nimrud, of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II, who reigned from 883–859 BCE. To the misery of archeologists and linguists, despite the survival of individual names from different periods in the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Assyrian tongues, today they all get called "lamassu".
Which doesn't make a lot of difference from the Jewish perspective because I KNOW the Hebrew word for them.
So do you.
Think Rilke:
Jeder Engel ist schrecklich.
Every Angel is terror.
[Duino Elegies, 1912]
These, are Cherubim.
I'm not speaking metaphorically: the Hebrew word Cherub (keruv) is a derivative from one of the Assyrian names for these beings.
This IS the biblical Cherub; when you encounter that word in translation, this is the image, of impassive, awesome power, that the authors are invoking.
Jeder Engel ist schrecklich.
My chavrutah doesn't "do" angels. She's very particular on that point.
At the moment I envy her that stance, because honestly, after this experience, rereading Prophets is going to use up a lot of antacid.
Let's look at some works from Tiffany Studios, shall we?
Here's the "Garden Fountain". It is pretty.
Here's the "Autumn Landscape". It has trees. Trees are pretty.
Here is the "View of Oyster Bay". It is sublime.
I knew a man who had in his home a paraphrase from Mayakovski:
"Art is not a mirror. Art is a hammer."
(I believe he had it scrawled across a mirror. If not, that's where it should have been, and I choose to remember it that way.)
It was an important concept for me.
But sometimes--
Art is a little fish pond.
This was the point where, in the interests of sanity, I began looking for the way out of the Met.
Since I don't find sanity very interesting, I did not go about this with great efficiency, or let this search interfere with lingering in front of -
- Severini's "Dancer-Airplane Propeller-Sea", 1915
[my photo]
- Leger's "Woman with a Cat", 1921
- "The Lovers", my first Chagall in person after all these years (no, I don't want to think about the irony of spending six weeks in Israel and seeing my first Chagall my first day stateside, thank you)
and then I found the O'Keeffes.
Because I hadn't induced an adequate aesthetic concussion by this point in the day, I had to go fall into the O'Keeffes.
O'Keefe is one of those artists, like Van Gogh, that I was very happy to flip through in books with sophomoric nonchalance right up until the moment of actually having my psyche pillaged by real life encounter with their work.
Here's "Pelvis II", 1944
Here's "From the Faraway, Nearby" 1938
There was one flower. From across the room I could tell it was something I have no business studying before the traditional age of forty. I scraped up my sense of self-preservation and limped out the door.
Good-bye, Met.
Good-bye, William Hippo Herd.
Good-bye, William-Shaped Backpack.
I will remember you. Fondly. With indecent speed if I ever have the opportunity to compose a new-baby wishlist.
(When I was five years old I tried to recreate William the Hippo with my first block of real clay.
I did a really good job.
I did such a good job that one of the other kids stole it after it came back from the kiln.
Elul is the month of forgiveness.
And as soon as they call me and express repentance, they're scot-free.)
It is time to walk outside.
It is time to bow in recognition to the fact that at this point in my travels, the pain in my feet has actually become physiologically disorienting at multiple points of the day, and finding some way to elevate my feet has become a priority.
Obviously, the best way to accomplish this is to walk down the length of Central Park and then take a ride on the famous Carousal.
Hello, Central Park.
Hello, closed-up and shut-down Carousal House.
I expected New York to be a hotbed of tzedakha opportunities. I failed to realize I'd entered the busking and street-performer capitol of the world.
I would love to tell you that what I remember most about this man was the iridescent beauty he was giving to the world, but what I actually remember most is the schadenfreude with which I'm still wrestling. You see, there were a crowd of visitors to the park gathered to enjoy the ballons, several of us trying to take pictures, and one very small boy standing directly in front of the bubble-performer waiting to punch each bubble to make it pop at the moment of its release, to the repeated disappointment of all. Street performers who yell at small children in public parks do not tend to make a lot of money and the voluminous censure of the crowd had no effect on the child but gave the child's parent considerable incentive to remain anonymous, motionless, and silent. This lasted until Small Boy punched a bubble *directly* over his head.
I know what bubbles are made of.
Do you know what bubble are made of?
That's right.
Bubbles are made of SOAP.
Thus, the small boy who pops an enormous bubble directly over his own face, has just effectively poured soap in his eyes, and will next run right to his embarrassed parent, ending the anonymity, provoking a brisk decampment, and leaving a summer crowd free to enjoy iridescent schadenfreude.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have a saxophone serenade for a young lady in a stroller. This musician was brilliantly blending the end of each short piece into the beginning of the next, as the toddler squealed with recognition and delight time after time and the mother laughed aloud at her own unwillingness to pull away mid-piece.
He was playing a certain melody by Mancini when I snapped this shot...
Now leaving Central Park.
(On film, the conflation of the marble perfection slouching shirtless and the ordinary mortal slouching shirtless is less, well, disturbing than it was in real life. New York City-- disturb the comfortable, comfort th- hey! look at that!)
At this point, I was off the map as far as my careful instructions were concerned, but of some things I was sure.
I was sure I did not want to rent a bicycle, which is an essential thing to be sure of while leaving Central Park because a *lot* of people will try to convince you of the contrary.
Also, I was fairly sure that on the East Coast as on the West, the number two follows the number one, and that on the East Coast as on the West and as distinct from Jerusalem, knowing that the number two follows the number one can actually assist in finding a particular intersection. This little coincidence is surprising rare in international urban navigation.
Limp or no limp, I was past ready to glory in vast indulgence of a city built of streets that run by grid.
It would be some time before I was to find my immersive English environment, but my cultural transition out of Israel happened over the fourteen blocks between Central Park and the best kosher shwarma joint in the city and final destination on my list of instructions.
In Jerusalem, infinite small neighborhood stores cater to each separated aspect of life like the drawers of a kosher kitchen: the candy corner, the pharmacy, house-cleaning supplies, locks and hardware.
In New York, infinite small neighborhood stores sell whatever the market will bear-- like the ice cream shop advertising cell phones.
In Jerusalem, pedestrians fear crazy drivers.
In New York, drivers fear crazy pedestrians. (They can't get up enough speed to be sure of getting away from us.)
In Jerusalem, while the walk light is green you still check for oncoming cars in the turn lane and then cross.
In New York, while the traffic light is green you walk out to the edge of the farthest double-parked car and watch for the traffic light to turn yellow, at which point you step boldly (farther) into the street to show you mean business. (There *are* walk lights in New York City. I presume they represent budgetary surplus spending.)
In Jerusalem, the schwarma guy is a human super-speed food assembly machine who has no time to show feelings on the job.
In New York, the schwarma guy is an Israeli, who is so happy you have come here straight from Jerusalem try my falafel.
This is The Place to buy good-as-Jerusalem kosher schwarma in New York City.
This is the building across the street from the schwarma place.
It's rather imposing.
I'm pretty sure Times Square might be somewhere that way.
I did not depart from the directions again to go find out.
I crawled down into the transit-station-cum-mall at 42nd and 8th Ave and found the subway.
I wish I could have caught a picture of the triune beautiful young men with dreadlock manes who leapt on to the train each with a long conga drum that they proceeded to play in concert.
I wish I had a picture of the tall and crooked headstones of the old, old graveyard on the last leg to Howard Beach Station.
I wish I could have caught the sunset spreading across the airport as we turned.
But I was content to find myself back in JFK, picking up my bags with three and a half hours before flight, just barely enough time to be tortured by unmoving lines for unlabeled purposes, to be claimed for a seventy-five person long pied-piper journey led by a Delta representative along the backdoors of the terminal, and to pay for the privilege of a double-drubbing over by security (characterized at the midpoint by the necessity of explaining to multiple members of a security team that I had been awake for over twenty-four hours and was not arguing but simply needed someone to think for me, please, and at the endpoint by a backpack containing several halakhically sacred texts together with one very large jar of honey and coated entirely with four by four inch stickers wailing "Fragile".)
Until we meet again, New York. My breath's been taken away each time I see something so simple as a comic strip and immediately recognize a place I've been in our short time together. You are truly the mapland of stories.
And, JFK? I'll be back in spite of you.
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