Category: Happy

Mary Jo and John, calling home, somewhere near the Statue of Liberty

In fact it was a totally delightful visit with my niece and her young son that so distracted both of us this weekend. [Witness the lack of posts since Friday, other than the images which reflected some of our itinerary.]
Barry and I did manage to visit some pretty elemental tourist sites. And by the way, there’s a good reason for the popularity of those icons; most citizen New Yorkers don’t give themselves leave to enjoy them until they find themselves eagerly ushering their out-of-town guests around a great city. But actually the greater pleasures of these few days were the delights and intellectual stimulation, provided by both Mary Jo and, yeah, John.
On the Number 9 trip uptown from South Ferry on Saturday after his first full day in New York, John, who is still eight, asked me, “do people here think it makes sense?” Of course as a resident I was still feeling protective of the city I love, so I assumed he was asking why people would want to live here, when he was really only asking whether we thought our subway network was at all rational. John is a student and fan of the world’s urban rail transit systems and while memorizing the routes he had understandably found our own somewhat lacking in logic.
This morning he and his mother tried to visit the New York Stock Exchange. It was the last item on John’s list of must-do’s for his visit, but after a half dozen phone calls from their hotel they established definitively that not a single one of the New York stock or commodity exchanges now permitted the public to visit their premises, and the excuse was September 11. John was disappointed but also properly exasperated with the lack of ingenuity among the guardians of the sites of our financial wizardry. He told Mary Jo, “It’s been two years! You’d think they would have figured it out by now.”
Their fallback choice was the Museum of Natural History, where they have figured it out.
We’re both really looking forward to John’s next visit, and I think he is too.

the new, temporary WTC PATH terminus, still behind chain link fencing on November 13th, 2003

The path is about to be reopened.
On November 23rd a PATH train will be pulling up at the site of the World Trade Center, the first in over two years. It will be the very same train of eight cars which pulled out of the station on September 11, 2001, minutes after the Towers were hit, rescuing all of its passengers.
The image shows that the identifying sign is still being assembled.

I’m old enough to have been able easily to maintain, like most of my contemporaries, an indifference to the Victorian aesthetic at best, and usually a strong abhorence even of the charms and beauties fashion now allows most of us to accept so easily. One of my old prejudices was against what I thought of as fussy hothouse or parlor plants. They seemed entirely alien to clean modernism or even European classical art and architecture. They were thus to be automatically avoided, along with the gaudy glazed pots in which they were set, many of which are of course now virtually priceless.
The image above is a of a Rex Begonia, and it’s there because I’ve finally surrendered, in frustration and ultimately in affection.
The total shade of the environment on which the small roof garden outside our apartment windows must depend doesn’t seem to encourage most local plant species, so I have begun to depend instead upon the resourcefulness of generations of Victorian gardners.
One of this year’s summer guests, welcomed only reluctantly, was this gorgeous Begonia, which seems to have thrived while hanging from our high breakfast room air conditioner. Until a few days ago I had expected I’d have to discard it with the first frost. In a last minute reprieve I can’t really account for, the plant was removed from its hanging apparatus and set into an Art Déco porcelain cache pot. It now adorns our not-quite-Victorian parlor, where this intimate portrait was completed this afternoon.
Perhaps one of the arguments in the favor of its survival, if not of its acquisition in the first place (from the Union Square greenmarket, natch), was its subspecies name, “Rex”. I think of my fabulous friend Rex Wasserman every time I look at the exotic thing. Were he around today however, even Rex himself would admit that the plant is easier to live with.
But not such damn good company.

Public Theatre hallway, Monday afternoon

Nineteenth-century German ceramic doll

He made his own path.
John Darcy Noble, noted eccentric and expert on playthings of all ages, a leading museum curator, theorist and collector and creator of toys as amusements and as art, died in Vista, California, September 21 at the age of 80. He leaves his companion of 44 years, Robert M. Clement.
He was born the son of a blacksmith in Brockley, a town outside London which he captivatingly described as Dickensian in character. He studied art, he painted and he produced theater props and costumes. He collected and sold antiques. He was a lifelong friend of Quentin Crisp, whom he first met at Goldsmith’s College of Art.
In London during the 40’s and 50’s Noble cultivated friendships with the avant-garde, but his career only became defined fully when, during a long summer holiday on Fire Island in 1960 [This really is a fairy tale.], he made personal contacts which soon resulted in the creation of the totally new position of curator of toys at the Museum of the City of New York. [Barry just whispered something about “velvet mafia.”] He retired in 1985.
Noble made us realize toys are at least as important as they are fun. Historically, “toys weren’t bought by children,” he observed.

Mr. Noble more than doubled the museum’s toy and doll collection. He championed the emerging contemporary artists who were making dolls, with exhibitions called “Faerieland in New York” and “Flights of Fancy.”
Mr. Noble was consecrated a bishop in the Church of the Beloved Disciple in 1980, a Manhattan church created to reach out to the gay and lesbian community. He and Mr. Clement, who is also a bishop, were in the process of founding another branch of the church in Los Angeles.
Phyllis Magidson, curator of costumes and textiles at the City Museum, recalled Mr. Noble as “a pixilated man — as in whimsy and playfulness,” and chuckled at the memory of one of his favorite lecture topics. In it, he pooh-poohed the sanctity of the pristine preservation of dolls.
The lecture’s title: “Go Ahead and Re-dress It, Honey; No One Will Ever Know.”

[image from Mingei International Museum]

Stealth disco!
Via the newsletter from Mark Morford today, one of the most delightful links I’ve seen all year. Almost makes me wish I was back at work in an office. No, not my old office, but one more like this one:

It’s so refreshing to get a comment like the one at the bottom of this post which arrived today from “old Europe,” after a couple of weeks of being inundated with the endless automatic mailgrams of littlegreenfootballs nuts:

” . . . French peoples knew that Bush will be a mess before he was elected, and the bet ares already on how we will dress the paris streets when Howard Dean will meet Chirac in Paris next year!”

And I want to be there!

Boubacar Diallo came to New York three years ago, speaking only french and Fulani. Today he appears on Newsday‘s Profile page.

Second-year student in LaGuardia Community College’s computer science program; an officer in the college’s Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society, he has been on the dean’s list every semester and tutors fellow students as part of the Academic Peer Instruction Program.

Diallo was awarded a scholarship for academic achievement from CUNY in June. After graduating from LaGuardia next year he plans to go on to Stony Brook or City College to study computer information systems. The handsome Guinean hopes to stay in this country, which makes us very fortunate indeed.

“My philosophy is that whatever goes around comes around. Whatever you do to help others will come back to you. So it’s better to be good than bad to others. That’s why I enjoy tutoring. When you see other students happy it makes me happy, too. I have seen people struggling through some difficult classes and because I know the class, have done the work, I know that I can help them.”

[story alert thanks to Barry]

Not remarkable, probably not a statement, but interesting that these four sturdy guys were playing hackey sack in Union Square this afternoon almost in the midst of the inflammatory signs and very verbal tirades of a number of energetic supporters of the United States Constitution.

The signs and speakers seemed like the work of a separate group. The earnest, perky people distributing literature at the side represented the Bill of Rights Defense Campaign and The Loyal Nine, a group whose name evokes 1765 and Boston’s resistance to the Stamp Act.