winter wonder wander

It was so painfully cold on Saturday I did not leave the apartment, not once, didn't even dream of going out, because the cold seemed of an oppressive nature. And I found, as the hours passed, and N was at work, that it is very easy to remain locked in one's apartment in New York and slip into the comfortable delusions evoked by wearing a pair of fancy satin pajamas all day. 
You can become so self-aware wearing the pajamas, as if this was an old movie, and suddenly, you are performing the chores around the house as if any moment the detective husband is about to storm in, having just got off duty (all day, hard business in cold hard weather)except he is still noticeably troubled by this case he had, can't get it off his mind and you don't want to inquire directly so you try to think of a good leading question but he is onto you, after all, he's a professional, and stops you before you finish and says, doggedly, 'darling, how about that drink and a nice steak dinner?,' and you laugh and say, 'yes, of course, dear, I was only worrying about you, as usual...' And the subject changes to something you don't have to pay attention to, so that while you're talking you wish he would unburden himself of these indelible, gruesome images and details, although, admittedly (and suddenly a little scandalized) the truth is you are fascinated by the crimes, but in a most removed and literary kind of sense.

lucky numbers

We are so honored to be included, as lucky number 11, in Francis Davis' Top Ten of 2011!

http://www.rhapsody.com/blog/2012/01/davis 

jaws and paws

There is a mountain lion in the canyon. 


Having just read John Vaillant's thriller (in the natural sense) The Tiger I am obsessed with big cats, especially tigers. This book described a peculiar incident of a tiger with a taste for men. Two men simply vanished into this tiger and my imagination, like the locals near Primorye, was reeling from the mythical power of the cat. Hunters told Vaillant that a tiger's stare is paralyzing, hypnotizing, entrancing. The tiger, though fatally dangerous, is considered a fair administer of justice in the wild, and will not attack unprovoked. All this insight made me feel as if I suddenly possessed an empathetic, intimate understanding of the tiger's world... 


But as soon as I learned there was a mountain lion in the canyon, all of these feelings or false sense of knowledge vanished and I am too scared to hike for fear of not knowing the proper language in case of an encounter. It's so conflicting [frustrating] to love being in the wild (compared to NYC, anyway) and be too afraid to enjoy it! 


Not of any help to mitigate my irrational fears was The Infamous Bengal Ming by Rajesh Parameswaran (from Granta 117)in which a tiger devours three souls (in Siberia they say the tiger literally ingests your soul when you're eaten). The Tiger tells the story, and the emotions (love, desire, hunger) seem absolutely accurate after I learned about the animal's behaviors. The tiger's life consists of hunting for food, usually failing several times, making and then eating a kill, then searching for prey again. The hunt will be interrupted with an intense, passionate mating period  when two lover tigers will make it up to twenty times a day...! 


And since my days have been filled lately with reading about these mystical cats, I want to quote my favorite poetic line about them, from Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock by Wallace Stevens:

Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

Happy New Year!

city at the edge of the world

This title is from Lyonel Feininger after his wooden metropolis, which I saw at the Whitney in the fall.

Now that I have begun running, at a jogging pace, I truly appreciate how much faster you can get to where you are going. It is a special thrill because I don't have a bicycle or a car, and the subway is... something else altogether...so getting somewhere fast is just oh-so exciting. 

And I have the most inspiring destination (see below):

 

This is the skyline as seen from Pier 6, the Brooklyn Bridge Park. Sometimes, if I am lucky, I am alone with the seagulls. Quelle view, isn't it? Doesn't it look like a cluster of precious metals? In Paris, it seemed everyone jogged and I think it gives you a very intimate relationship with the city -- I know because I am in love with this little trip to the edge of Brooklyn.

 

happy holidays

line's dead

In an age where an iPhone is considered to be an extension of the self (see NYTimes Out of Our Brains Dec. 2010) I wonder why the nature of the phone remains to be mystifying and often spooky. 

Like many, I don't even have a land line, but the early, now antiquated I guess, version of the telephone possesses a fantastical surrealism -- thousands of voice traveling through long, spidery wires across the most remote forests and arid deserts ... it's like tying a thread around the world. There is a movie I saw in Boston, I think it was Iranian, and a few men are pursuing a buried treasure and their desolate path follows an endless procession of telephone poles... Do you imagine in the near future the strings will be cut and coiled, the poles chopped, and tossed into a landfill?

Once I had a nightmare that someone close to me was dead, but I didn't realize because we lived apart from each other and we talked on the phone as if life was completely unchanged. Reality only happened when I visited an empty, silent room. In Ulysses, Bloom speculates that coffins ought to be furnished with telephones, in the case that you're buried alive, but suppose the dead could dial you from the box? Do you think the possibility for this occurrence is amplified with the invention of the wireless realm? 

It's unsettling in the most romantic sense.

DOLLSHOT + CPARK @ DOUGLASS STREET