back in AC

Those of you who regularly follow this blog (all three of you) know that I am back in France, painting. And this morning, I was also back in Auzay - one of my favorite endroits on this earth. It was early and I was running. But at the river I stopped and walked across the footbridge comme d'habitude. Two reasons for that. One - the bridge is a little rickety. Two - I wanted to linger and gaze at the lovely river, the little valley it is in, and the old pink house which seems to be under a much more graceful renovation than I feared the last time I was here (see blog posts some time in the fall of 2010). I was looking downstream when out from under the hanging tree branches came not one but two gloriously chubby swans. They swam right under where I stood on the footbridge but my camera was doing something peculiar so I couldn't get the shots I wanted, but above are those I managed to take. In general, it was really quite a red letter day in the fauna department. On the way down to the passerelle, I saw dozens of fat jack rabbits - so fat, in fact, that when they crossed the road in front of me, I thought they were small deer. Then, as I walked back home towards AC what should I see but three - count-em- three blue herons lifting off from a pond up on the hill! The only sad piece of news is that Fripon the donkey was not in his pasture. The last time he went missing it turned out that he was off seeing a lady donkey. So let's hope that is where he is right now!

No they can't take that away from me. . .or can they?

Despite it's lack of outward charm, I have always liked Tenth Avenue. I've liked it's empty sidewalks, it's tunnel entrances, car washes, and pockets of low brownstone tenements. I've liked knowing that in some of the warehouses on the side streets, painters like my friend Mary Beth McKenzie have lived and worked under the radar for years in vast, cheap, and sometimes heatless studios. But mostly what has always drawn me to choose 10th for my walk downtown as opposed to the more bustling streets to the east is that because of the low density of buildings, the vistas have been plentiful and interesting. I know that a lot of people love "the grid" of Manhattan, but I don't, particularly, and the thing about 10th and its ramshackle silhouette is that even though you are walking in a straight line, your eyes meander so you feel like you are in a city with a more idiosyncratic layout. But with the opening of the High Line and the coming of Hudson Yards, 10th is changing rapidly. All up and down the avenue the air reverberates with the sounds of construction and soon there will be high rise apartment buildings blocking the panoramic views. I am afraid that ultimately 10th Ave will become just another canyon.

I walked down 10th today from the UWS and when I got to 30th street, I climbed up on to the High Line which itself meanders wonderfully alongside of Chelsea. The High Line has the almost miraculous power of making the city look like a totally different place and along the way there are some things to see that I hope won't ever change: excellent water towers, the Empire State Building behind the rooftop of the curiously named London Towers, a wall that will always serve as canvas for great graffiti masters. But the vista that I love the most is the one out across the Hudson to the Erie Lakawanna Railroad station in Hoboken. The station with its beaux arts clock tower is landmarked, but alas the view of it from the High Line is not. See the construction site which was right at my feet? Soon there will be another building there and if I had to bet, I would bet on its being so tall that the view of the station will be gone. That, I think, is a pity.

photos from a strange winter

We have had an unusually warm winter in NYC and mostly people are pretty happy about it despite the fact that it portends something really scary about the state of the globe. But last week, we actually had snow. Not much and not really very pretty, but snow just the same. On a walk across the park, I took a few pictures - two of them weird, one just nice. The weird ones are the one of the Alice in Wonderland sculpture near the boat basin. If you look close, there is a splash of orange on the left of the statue. . .that was a buddhist or maybe a moonie - wearing an orange schmatta and not much else. Her bare arms looked very cold, but she was somehow understanding of the cold, Alice and the city around her. Then, there was the bagpipe. I heard it before I saw it - a girl, her bagpipes and the heart-breaking sound of Amazing Grace in the deep midwinter.

The umbrella ladies - not so strange, just picturesque.

Tonight - a very mild evening - I came out of the subway at 72nd and Broadway and honestly, my first thought was "they put spotlights on a few of the buildings uptown" . But you know what? It was the sun, coming in from the west in a spectacular beam. Quite lovely. Almost poetic.

wishful thinking

The question is, who is doing the wishful thinking? Is it the folks who put up the "thin ice" sign wishfully thinking that winter would actually arrive as usual and then thinking - wishfully - that people would pay attention and stay off the ice? Is it the hellebores and forsythia thinking, wishfully - or wistfully - that spring has already sprung when, in fact, it is only January. Or is it the guys in the trees thinking - as is their wont - that it is during the winter when trees need pruning so when spring arrives - months from now - the branches will be healed and ready to sprout at the proper time and not, as seems possible, right now. So is it wishful to think that our globe is not in big trouble? I think so. I wish I didn't.

End of the year

It was an absolutely gorgeous afternoon in Central Park today and the crowds were out in number! Apart from the nice days when runners pretty much line the reservoir, I don't think I have ever seen so many people on the track. Most of them were foreign - here for New Year's Eve, no doubt. ( Don't know why I felt the need to capitalize that, but I did.) Among the languages I heard were Japanese, Spanish, French, Russian, German and several dialects of the mother tongue. Something else I noticed was the ubiquity of the puffy coat. Maybe it has even replaced the sneaker or running shoe as the world's most popular garment and I am not exactly sure why. Yes, they are warm and light in weight and though good ones are costly, you can also buy them very cheaply - but by and large, they are anything but flattering. In fact, though I took a bunch of pictures of people wearing various lengths and colors of the jacket, I couldn't bring myself to include them because, apart from the three cute little teens I snapped near the pump house, nobody looked good wearing one of them. I loved the dogs and the beautiful sky, but my prize today goes to the girl in pink. No ski jacket for her, no way!

a small city with soul and a pulse

Louisville surprises. When you approach it on the highway, the most vivid sight - and the one you would remember if you simply drove right by - is the KFC (Yum!) Center, a new and flashy sports arena that could be in any city anywhere in the USA. But you would be making a mistake if you let "the Yum" as they call it be your only image of the city because if you were to exit into the downtown, you would find an interesting mix: a Victorian center where despite the fact that the buildings have been beautifully preserved, their street level stores are mostly empty - vacated by businesses which now prosper in malls on the outskirts of the city; a metropolis pretty much devoid of public transportation but with very cool and edgy sidewalk sculptures that serve as bike racks for the increasing number of cyclists; acres of desolate and empty urban landscape surrounding pockets of beautiful mansions and small village-like areas where indie bookstores fly rainbow flags and shotgun houses have been turned into restaurants and boutiques; and there are even two city parks in Louisville designed by Olmstead. Because our daughter is living here at the moment, working at the extraordinary Actor's Theater of Louisville, she is something of an insider. So in scouting for a hotel that would accept both us and our doggie for the Christmas weekend, she found 21C - a chic, modern and, let's face it, luxurious hotel whose rooftop is lined year round with red penguin sculptures. The lobby of 21C is a fantastic modern art museum and the mens room is something of a design legend involving a waterfall and a one way mirror!

Perhaps the essence of Louisville showed itself best last night when we went to the Garage Bar for Christmas Eve dinner. Having walked all afternoon, we decided to take a taxi to the restaurant which is, as its name suggests, an old gas station out on one of the highways that cuts across the city. The driver chatted with us of course (this is Louisville, afterall) and we discovered that we all shared the same last name, though no relation that we could discover. Then dinner at the bar - local ingredients, microbrews, a variety of bourbons - and late in the evening we asked our adorable young waiter if he could call a cab for us, since we were a long and desolate walk from our hotel. There were no cabs late on Christmas Eve, so our waiter said "my car's out front - I'll drive you back" and off we all went through the silent streets of a most appealing city.

Red for Yuletide?