underwater

In the blizzard, Times Square looks as if it's underwater. Besides the whoa-I'm-in-Bladerunner feeling the place usually gives me, its air now glows dozens of stories into the air, asserting its palpability as it whooshes past radiant billboards. The limned currents sweeping around buildings are more visible than the currents of any river, seeming more rational for their visibility and more chaotic for their wildness.

On the walk home from the subway in LIC, every vicious needle of snow seems to pierce my skin. Cars whirr futilely on every corner, and I want to volunteer to push, but doubt that my 105 pounds of force would help. From the upper floors of my parents' apartment building, the blizzard looks like a pestilence of locusts, swarming and dissipating randomly, dimming the streetlights almost to darkness as thick clouds rush horizontally across the ground. The windows, not fully sealed against the outside, emit high-pitched whines. I wonder if snow is blasting horizontally past our window up some two dozen floors; there are no street lights to catch it in the act, but I see it billowing past another high rise some stories below.

Just for fun, I imagine that I'm in the great ancient city of Herzog's Lessons of Darkness, beset by an epochal sandstorm. But it's hard to believe it when the corners of the buildings haven't been worn down into curves by the slow but sure grinding wheel of flying sand. I have an easier time imagining the panorama of flickering streetlights as the flickering of celluloid. I'm glad to be a spectator inside, listening to the occasional creaking of the walls as air -- just thin air, but so powerful -- rages past.

I didn't leave the apartment at all today. Instead, I spent Christmas day lofted high into the Long Island City air over a squat, curlicued red sign that beamed "Drink Coca-Cola" brightly at the multitude of Manhattan skyscraper windows and passing cars along the East River. My parents, a smiling beanbag dolphin, and Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age kept me company.

When I recall Derek recommending the book to me in 2004 as A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, I feel the ironic urgency of my ever-increasing leisure reading list. Near the front door, the massive black first part of Taruskin's twentieth-century music history looms, ready as a brick to be wielded against intruders or to knock me out of my daydreams, should I for a moment think I can afford more than this one indulgence.

Tower iconography

Artist Ji Lee is photographing all the logo representations of the WTC around New York (storefront signs, truck logos, printed shopping bags, etc.) before they gradually disappear. What a tremendous project.

I've always thought it would be an endless project to collect all the things that depict the carillon towers I've played (just try searching in ebay on "Harkness Tower" over the course of a few weeks and you'll see it never ends), since towers tend to be a strong informal aspect of the graphic identity of universities. It's a luxury to be able to buy memorabilia for your instrument that you never had to commission. But what a peculiar link -- I always assumed that the carillon tower is different from other towers, but this semester in Steven Feld's class I've been realizing how conceptually related it is to all sorts of other towers. The semblance of the belfry to lighthouses particularly excited me while Andrew and I were at Point Reyes. Which leads me back to my fascination with ephemera... there are plenty of postcards on which all these tower typologies are depicted (did Walker Evans collect any?). Other collections of towers, such as those by Bernd + Hilla Becher, have had a significant cultural impact too. I can think of quite varied academic disciplines that could be interested in Ji Lee's archive of logos and Evans' massive postcard collection, from visual studies to geography. How does the carillon play into all of this? Feld mentioned that someone wrote a history of high buildings. Time to look it up.

A number of my seemingly unrelated curiosities have started to merge, albeit bumpily, into a convoluted train of thought. Perhaps some meanings will emerge from it soon.

Despite my frustrating status as an errant publicist, I have been offered the privilege of joining the recently established Society of Friends of Belgium in America for a tour of the spectacular Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor exhibition at the Met. My old BAEF cohort Ben Gateño will play guitar at the reception following at the Consul General's residence. I am curious to know what a Fifth Avenue residence looks like, as well as to meet the Friends in attendance. The Society's website has an excellent introduction to Belgium.