Things fall together
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looks a bit like a conga player you used to know, but more resembles the sort of fellow – seen on a thousand TV newsfeeds – who would happily crash a plane into a building. It’s a face for Western Man to fear. Except that this bloke’s wearing a sweatshirt, with a big white BAR HARBOR printed across the chest, surmounting a pair of crossed oars whose blades, respectively, read: “Est.” and “1918.” And he’s chatting amiably with a half dozen of his intensely suburban-looking pals. One of whom, a young woman, has taken off her green felt floppy-brimmed leprechaun hat and holds it scrunched in her lap. That’s it, they’re a cell, the lot of ‘em! Who’s the sleeper, now?
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• • •
skin when a part of the body where the qi has stagnated is vigorously rubbed.
• • •
The raptor of global capitalism circles then swoops down. Beware the commerce claws.
Head downtown of a Saturday morning. At West 4th Street, what you hear the conductor say is: “Transfer to the up and downtown DNA trains.” Shake the dust out your ears, walk downstairs and catch the F one stop southeast.
You’ve come to this crossroads, Houston and Broadway, to witness the tableau that a fellow you know designed to premiere a new line of Stella McCartney workout clothes.
And it’s quite a piece of street theater. Running along the edge of the sidewalk, for the entire eighty-odd foot width of the Addidas store, stands a row of ten transparent plexiglass compartments, just wide and tall enough for the young women inside them to perform a coordinated series of yoga stretches. Which they do most precisely, each wearing a different combination of Stella’s more or less revealing duds. The woman at the head of the line initiates a posture, and the others follow suit. Reminds you of a stand of trees reacting in sequence to a gust of wind. It’s the same kind of kind of linear ripple effect except it feels choreographed, eroticized – a trick carried out by human dominoes.
As you walk up Broadway from the first booth toward the last, a woman passes in the opposite direction, speaking into a walkie-talkie – something about “the next girls in rotation.” Ah, of course. If this show is to continue till noon, there’d have to be more than one platoon of yogistas.
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downward dog. In response to which, a male passerby – gone before you can get a fix on him – caws “Yeah! I like my woman in a cage!” Yet these are not that. Though it’s not the first thing one notices, the booths are essentially three sided, there’s an open panel at the back of each one. The eye doesn’t read this because each booth is so close to the one behind it. Which makes the cage a construction of the viewer. But with a wind blowing south today, the woman in the box furthest north, with nothing to shield her from the gusts, must feel the chill in her bones. She seems fine with it though, has the same zoned-out look as her colleagues. Except for number seven. She’s blonde, very graceful and in control. Despite which, her expression is that of a person deeply pissed off.
Just north of the booths, parked next to the curb, a movie shoot-type trailer, the kind that’s always blocking the narrow streets of Chelsea. This one has BIG SHOT painted large on its flank. Must be Centcom. Perhaps the guy who invited you down is in there. Should you knock and find out? But what would you say? That in some small, but ineluctable way, he has managed to renew your capacity for horror?
• • •
What to fling into the machine but your tiny self? • • •
Up to All Souls for a wedding. A plaque on the north wall reads: WILLIAM LAURENCE SULLIVAN, DD ,
November 15, 1872 – October 5, 1935 Associate Minister 1913 – 1916 Minister 1916 – 1922 Scholar, Preacher, Friend of All in Distress He forsook the Shelter of Authority in the Perilous Search for Truth
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Back at the ranch you Google him and find that WLS was a fascinating guy. Among other things, he was openly gay in deeply unconducive times. His Letter to His Holiness, Pope Piux X, written in 1910, addressed the ubiquity of homosexuality in the Catholic Church, and had the distinction of becoming the last book officially prohibited by the Vatican.
In another lifetime, you’ll come back and research it all. Connect every dot to every other dot. Write the impossible history of all souls, lower case, across millennia – especially those who’ve forsaken the shelter of authority….
• • •
In every restaurant, Thai, Austrian, Italian, you can bet someone or everyone on the kitchen staff is Mexican. From what you can tell, half the male population of Puebla (among several other states) sends, every week, half its earnings back home.
• • •
At Dean & DeLuca, you order a coffee and get a sample of chocolate cake as a lagniappe. Give Gwen the last bite. It tastes sweeter.
• • •
If you were writing this in German, would its genre be Nein-Fiction?
And the little piggies cried: Wee wee wee the People! All the way home.
• • •
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 720
today after a work stint in LIC. Back to Maria and young Ana Luna, and seven-month- old son Nahuel in Germany. They plan, some time soon, to move to Buenos Aires where Juan was born. They’ve found a school there they like for Ana Luna. Time time time. Time to turn that map 180º around.
• • •
Ponte dei Pugni, one of two “fighting bridges” in Venice, where contenders won by knocking their opponents into the canal.
Dawn on the way to Ba Gua, a truck roars past: Eagle Global Logistics. You haven’t seen the SUV with the ME CRAZY license plates for a while now – in fact, you’ve missed it. But this morning, something draws your eye to a vehicle parked in front of the steel arch of the FIT entrance, a black Nissan Armada. Got to be the same owner – who knows, perhaps they work a night shift in the school – and this the new ride, even more massive than the former one. Different plates too, just slightly: SOY LOCO.
• • •
Stepping in Ba Gua circles, the constant turns remind you of walking the path of the labyrinth in Amiens cathedral. Whoever designed that path made it full of twists and switchbacks. But never a blind alley.
• • •
Yesterday’s morning clouds spread like fish scales against the severe clear. This a.m. you ask Dylan if he noticed and he widens his eyes, sits upright: “Yeah,” he says, “reptilian sky!” EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 721
E.B.: I can’t think of a happy ending. E.D.: I can’t think of an ending. Eights, crazy eights, crazy Yeats. Turning, turning…
From across the room Dylan, who must have supernatural hearing, calls out: “Crazy eights – I used to play that game when I was a kid!” He flashes a smile and a thumbs up.
• • •
Fishing, bait, trapping. All based on trickery. And why then shouldn’t we let the gods trick us? It’s a tradition!
• • •
Modern Medical Miracles: a catheter designed as a robotic dog. Disposable, of course.
• • •
“Dog handler,” Sergeant Santos A. Condona convicted by a military court of abusing a prisoner at Abu Ghraib. When sentenced Condona could be discharged, forfeit his pay and serve as much as three and a half years in prison. But the top dogs owe him something for taking the fall and distracting us from the question of what our army is doing in Iraq in the first place. Since Lynndie England’s already claimed the ribbon “Best of Breed,” why not award him “Best of Opposite Sex”? The “Best in Show” prize to be announced at some future competition.
• • •
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dark glass of the SUV parked outside. License number SFL 85B. Embossed on the plate, in the space between the first three letters and the alpha-numeric, a little black outline of the Garden State.
• • •
Crop circles and solar flares. One could spend a lifetime Googling. Some do.
• • •
Largely misspent day.
Woman pushes a stroller into Le G. Average-looking for what the neighborhood’s becoming. You hardly give a second glance but then notice her extraordinarily turned-down mouth, almost a commedia mask grimace. Surely this expression can’t be all mood-based – perhaps there’s some underlying, ill-fated configuration of muscle and bone. Almost a disfigurement, made all the worse when she tries to smile at Shannon at the register and the bow merely stretches, and the lips tighten to reveal her teeth. The woman sits down, then lifts the clear plastic canopy and you focus on the baby, dreading, even before you confirm visually, that which you know you will see. And there it is, an infant version of the maternal mouth.
• • •
Wheeling your bike into the elevator, you encounter Charlie. Tall, lanky, old enough to remember and recount Jim Crow days, he’s never lost his Mississippi accent. If you could, you’d keep him in conversation all day long just to listen to his upsweeps, dips and glissandos. By now you know what he’ll say and your ears prime for it – a slow wash of honey with the “I” sounded as “Ah”: I see you got yo’ Cadillac. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 723
• • •
I am the sister of catastrophe, brother of disaster – or the other way around, just as you wish!
• • •
From your aerie you look down on a tenement where the airshaft at the rear of the building appears as the socket of a dovetail joint. In this moment, you see the rooftops and walls differently, all the architecture takes on a toy-like form. That duct over there could be a tenon, and that window could serve as its mortise. The possibility opens up of all these structures fitted together into a great puzzle. What then would the whole represent?
• • •
The Playpen, one of the oldest and last surviving topless joints near Times Square still features an outline of the Manhattan skyline on its red neon marquee. At the right side, the Empire State Building. To the left, separated by a valley of indeterminate cityscape, the tower twins. Here at Eighth Avenue near 44th Street, an ancient and lesser vaudeville theater was once refitted for the swinging seventies. Now it’s a fixture, might as well be in amber, a guardian of the time before.
Zeitgeist-o-rama: the two main images on the cover of the Times. The central square in Minsk, cleared of protestors contesting Belarus’s stolen election. It’s a vast space, sparsely inhabited by pigeons, a Brezhnevian official building in the background. No San Marco.
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horizon line bloom up into roiling clouds of mauve smoke. In the foreground, several parked SUVs attend a row of identical suburban houses. A brushfire consumes Great Kills park on Staten Island.
Jenny Haniver, a ray or skate mutilated to look like a wing’d sea creature with a human head. Described by Paré in the late sixteenth century, Jenny Hanivers were created to look like angels, devils, dragons. Possible origin of the name in “Jeune de Antwerp” (called Anvers by the French) and subsequently “cockneyed” by English sailors. Linnaeus debunked one Jenny Haniver, promoted as the Hydra of Hamburg. Threatened with prosecution by the forgers, poor Carolus had to leave town.
At the café, Shannon, whom you’ve nicknamed ShineOn for her radiant presence, tells you about her twenty-one uncles and aunts. Says the family is full of “versatile” personalities.
• • •
Does nature itself have ADD? • • •
His epitaph: “He was anxious. Then he wasn’t.” • • •
Is it possible? Apparently so. Must’ve opened recently – a U.S. Army recruitment center on the second floor of a funky old building on the corner of Sixth EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 725
Avenue and 22nd Street. What caught your eye, behind the window, was a life-size cutout of a guy wearing a black beret and a dress uniform with sergeant stripes. Thought at first it was someone’s idea of a joke. But then you saw the sign beneath the fire escape. Modest, almost self-effacing, blending into the urban visual noise: white letters and a yellow star on an olive-green background. Official. For real.
Strange place to put a recruitment center – on the border between Chelsea and Flatiron – whose residents and office workers have got to be one of the least likely sources of cannon fodder imaginable. Still, in the surrounding blocks there are plenty of young men working the loading docks and freight elevators. Who knows? Maybe some of them might be persuaded to trade boredom, crappy pay and everyday disrespect for whatever bill of goods this two dimensional soldier is selling.
The weirdest steelwork ever, a building caught between teetering and catastrophic, torquing collapse. Frank Gehry’s latest, an office hive for some Barry Diller media nightmare on the West Side Highway and 18th. The building doesn’t seem so much designed as programmed – iterated out of algorithms set up to produce the maximally refracted form possible in a given envelope, shorn of any proportional ratios. Click OK and watch Topsy grow.
You take pictures of the skeleton just as workman begin to attach huge sheets of opaque white cladding. Milky. Glass or something glass-like. Yikes, it’s going to look like a gigantic Bizarro World cocoon. Or a fifties chapeau by a woman-hating milliner.
• • •
What’s needed is a new poetic form: the can-o. A more upbeat version of the canto. One could also sing an oh-good, just as well as an aubade. By evening, knock us hard enough and we turn.
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The
online Times avers that today’s total solar eclipse will be visible “across a wide swath of the world’s poorest countries” from Brazil to Mongolia. It cuts these words in the second iteration of the article, which is accompanied by a photo of two Beirut schoolgirls in khimars staring up in wonderment through protective solar shades that lend their faces, paradoxically, the look of Saint-Tropez starlets.
Not content with being the Paper of Record, the Times assumes the role of Paper of Reason, noting that “superstition accompanied [the eclipse’s] path, as it has for generations. One Indian paper advised pregnant women not to go outside… to avoid having a blind baby or one with a cleft lip. Food cooked before the eclipse should be thrown out afterward because it will be impure, and those who are holding a knife or ax… will cut themselves…. In Turkey’s earthquake-prone Tokat province, residents set up tents outside, despite assurances from scientists that there was no evidence of any link between eclipses and tremors…. In August, 1999, an earthquake in northwest Turkey killed some 17,000 people just 6 days after a solar eclipse.” Lastly, “the eclipse was expected to move on to Mongolia where it will fade out with the sunset.”
Ah, the language of it. Granted the eclipse, which is a phenomenon of perception – the creature of a particular set of vantage points – could be said to “move.” And doubtless those viewing it from Mongolia will perceive its fading. But, O Great and Wise Ones, could it truly happen that the sun will set?
• • •
The city’s life hangs on two evermore tenuous threads: Water Tunnels 1 & 2. Best keep our fingers crossed they finish #3 sooner than later.
• • •
Early afternoon at the 34th Street and Seventh Avenue IRT stop: a steel drum player hammers out a lilting, enharmonic version of Hava Nagila.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 727
• • •
Everywhere you ramble these days, no matter what part of town, you see the same truck. Party Supplies – the emblem, a giant pink cartoon hippo painted on the side. Kismet, or are you being stalked?
• • •
Darwin exhibition at the Museum of Natural History. “Ideally adapted” is how he described the Falkland Island Steamer Duck.
Can’t come here without a visit to the African People’s exhibit, a long-standing favorite of Gwen’s. Ituri Forest pygmies, and North African Berbers – she’d spent hours when she was little, drinking in every detail of these dioramas. Before you go, check to make sure the Leopard Man is still crouching on the branch near the ceiling, ready to pounce. Then swing through the Asian People’s hall, and some of your own touchstones: the amazing tableau of an Easter Siberian Yakut shaman performing a healing ceremony on a stricken woman, the delirium in her eyes heightened by the glow of simulated firelight. One might miss, if one did not look closely, a strange detail: the shaman has a chain looped round one ankle, the end of it held by an assistant who kneels off to the side in the shadows. This way the healer will stay grounded as he travels to the plane of the demons to drive them from the victim’s body.
A obligatory stop too among the costumes. To see, in particular, the jaw- dropping teal green purdah draped on a manikin set against the background of a street scene labeled “Kabul, 20th Century.” Every time it blows your mind – even more so now that you’ve a host of new associations for Kabul – the serenity of the pose, the ghostlike quality such absolute curtaining of the figure imparts, and not least, the extraordinary rigor of design and fineness of the tailoring. And this display long predates the Taliban.
On your way out, you spot a curious something you never noticed before among a case full of articles made by the Pathans of the Khyber Pass. It’s a tapered cylinder EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 728
piece of dark blue fabric, embroidered with distinctly Western ornamentation. Can’t decode what it is, so you read the display card. Ah. “Woman’s hair snood made from British officer’s sleeve.” Sure, makes all the sense in the world. A trophy, yes, but useful too. Waste not, want not.
• • •
Sixth Avenue north of 42nd Street. Durst’s National Debt Clock faces a dilemma. Currently it’s logged $8.3 someodd trillion. Within two years it will likely want to kick over to $10 trillion – a figure for which there are insufficient digits. Can’t add another column ‘cause, the sign has already maxed out the finite width of the wall its installed Download 7.05 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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