Blue sky for a new year

Getting the hang of my new camera!  This is one of my favorite views in the whole city…the bell tower of the Riverside Church in Morningside Heights, as seen from the Great Hill in Central Park.

Autumn creeping

Just when you think you’ve seen it all…

Yes, that is a tomato plant growing out of an elm tree.

I love you, Central Park.

Incongruity

I was on my way to an event in Times Square last week when I smelled…what in my childhood memory is the smell of driving through southern Kansas….

Yep.  Oil.

The only thing weirder than walking past oil pumps in Times Square?…was watching the number of people who walked right past them without even blinking.

Spring’s Cathedral

From my first evening walk of spring, in the last week of winter….

Happy holidays…

…from my neighbors in Manhattan Valley…

 

 

I have mentioned that I love my neighborhood, right?

Nerd fun at the NYPL

I just got home from the New York Public Library, where I went to hear to Josh Ritter, Wesley Stace, and Steve Earle discuss the relationship between music and writing.  All three were lovely and marvelously intelligent, and though I went to hear Josh (of course), I think it was Steve Earle who said the most intriguing thing of the evening:

“What separates us from animals is not opposable thumbs; it’s that only humans make and consume art.  That’s what separates us from the beasts.”

And while I don’t want to denigrate the quality or value of animals’ emotional lives…I suspect he may be right.  I don’t tend to believe that humans are vastly superior to the rest of the animal kingdom in morals or capacity for empathy or emotional complexity…but I cannot think of another species that produces and consumes art for art’s sake.

Discuss?

Reality: Ur doin’ it wrong.

On Fantasy

 Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

-George R. R. Martin, author

**********

I feel much the same way as GRRM about fantasy—that it connects us to a deep internal knowledge and history of our own psyches, and recalls something huge and eternal in us.  Epic fantasy, when I was in middle and high school, assured me that there was so much more worth living for than my schools and community were trying to tell me.

But I’m not sure about his dim view of reality…as opposed to the disposable and shallow nature of much of what is sold to us as “reality,” and told we have to accept as the scope of our adult lives.

May I suggest, that if strip malls, plastic and plywood define your reality, and you don’t like it…you’re doing reality wrong.

Because reality is all that stuff, George, but reality is also—

The whistle and rumbling murmur of an early-morning train.

Reality is the first pale green shoots of peppermint pushing up through the dirt in March.

Reality is the guy who plays Simon and Garfunkel’s “El Condor Pasa” on Peruvian pan pipes in the Times Square subway station.

Reality is the stunning silence of a great blue heron taking flight.

Reality is the old Hispanic men in my neighborhood who sit outside in the summertime, playing an eternal sidewalk game of dominos with their boomboxes turned up loud.

Reality is sunset over the Hudson River.

Reality is moonlight, starlight, candle light, lantern light.

Reality is creaky old bookstores, and the thrill of reading a forbidden book hidden between the shelves.

Reality is the feel of sand as soft as cake flour under your feet.

Reality is the smell of wood smoke on the first cold night of fall.

Reality is stained glass, dark coffee, red wine, rosewood incense.  The brush of a fat cat around your ankles, the way evening light moves over the Brooklyn Bridge and tops of the sycamore trees, rooftop Fourth of July parties with the sky on fire around you, waking up on a foggy morning in the Catskill mountains, the sound of the concertmaster tuning an orchestra, tiny cemeteries behind old churches, hidden waterfalls, thunder in a snowstorm, the way deer’s eyes shine in the dark in a flashlight beam.

Nurture magic, wonder, and beauty wherever they occur in your life.  They are real—far more real than strip malls, suburban office parks, and Disneyland—whatever anyone tells you.

Sights that make me feel like a lucky human being

Sunset over the far west side of Manhattan, from our rehearsal studio last night.

Coffee shop cat

Trixie, guardian cat of the Hungarian Pastry Shop.