Central Park, January 2007

The latest sculpture to temporarily grace the outdoor gallery at the southeast corner of Central Park, near the Pierre Hotel, is this one. Called "2001," by Liz Larner, it has an irridescent finish worthy of the hottest sportscar. The plaque near the sculpture says that it's Larner's attempt to blend two familiar shapes, the sphere and the cube. But I think the most interesting thing about it is the way it reflects the surrounding buildings and trees in its automotive paint job.


I saw it on Saturday when my friend Rob and I went to the park. Rob, fortunately, is very patient with me when I whip out the camera and start walking circles around some object, or pacing and crouching in front of a wall, trying to figure out the best angles and crops. At least on Saturday he didn't have to wait in the cold!


Looks kind of like a big enameled paperwad, doesn't it? Larner carefully designed the sculpture around a central point, but it's interesting that a chaotic action like wadding up a piece of paper produces a superficially similar combination of forms: cubes and spheres.

W. 51st Street, October 2006

You can't really get a sense of the size of this big blank wall from this photo - it's about 12 stories tall. I liked the cityscape created by the shadow from nearby rooftops.

Yesterday was t-shirt weather here, if you can believe it. The high was 72 degrees. I was out walking in Central Park with my friend Rob, and it was beautiful, but also very weird. I had to keep reminding myself that it's early January, the deepest depth of winter! Supposedly this is the first year since 1878 that New York has gone this long without snow. The daffodils are coming up in the flower bed in front of my building.

I don't like it. Earth is confused.

On the bright side, my cold is much better. I feel pretty much normal, with just little twinges of sniffling. I even made it to the gym yesterday morning - a sure sign of recovery.

E. 30th Street, Sept. 2006

This wall is just a short walk from my apartment, but it's been painted over since I took this photo - all this graffiti is long gone. The poster with the bizarre, manic rabbits is by the street artist Branded. They're very common all over the city and come in many subtly different varieties.

I finally went to see "Babel" last night. What a great movie! It's been out for weeks and weeks, so I expected to be the only one in the theater - but no, the place was packed. I was eager to see it because much of it was filmed in Morocco, and I lived in Morocco for more than two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1990s. I wanted to see how the country was depicted and listen to the Berber language again.

I must admit I didn't really hear any Berber, though it was allegedly in the film. (My Berber language skills have grown incredibly rusty, and the dialects vary from place to place - it may have been a variety very different from the one I spoke, called Tashelhait.) Most of the characters in the Morocco sequences used Arabic, which I never spoke well. But it was still great to see the landscapes and the people, and the film was a provocative exploration of cultural divisions. The themes were very similar to those in "The Sheltering Sky," by Paul Bowles, one of my favorite books.

I'd really like to get out and take some photos this weekend, if I can overcome my cold and the somewhat drizzly weather. (I think it's supposed to clear up later today.)

Hell's Kitchen, December 2006

This narrow bit of light framing the even narrower tree trunk was, well, perfect!

I'm glad that Rep. Keith Ellison, a Muslim from Michigan, stuck to his convictions and was sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives using the Koran. It's a testament to this country's diversity and religious freedom. It was especially brilliant that he used a Koran owned by Thomas Jefferson, making it clear that our more reasonable forefathers were not afraid of other faiths.

I read an article contending that Jefferson owned this Koran only to better understand "his enemies," the Barbary pirates, and that its presence in Jefferson's library was otherwise insignificant. But that both sells Jefferson short and introduces a red herring: Keith Ellison is a Muslim, but he's hardly a pirate! By which I mean that whatever disagreements we have with the Muslim world, they are not with Islam, but with individuals - some of whom are extremists arguably deviating from the Muslim path.

I am fighting a cold. It started in my throat, moved to my nose and has now settled into my chest. As Queen Victoria would say, at least in mythology: "We are not amused."

Fashion District, October 2006

I think this art was cut from some kind of black plastic adhesive - hence the knife in the lower right. I've never seen anything quite like it. I found it on a door on Seventh Avenue, somewhere in the high 30s.

Times Square, October 2006

Fox & Fowle’s towering Conde Nast building opened on Times Square in 2000. Its glassy entrance reflects its older neighbor, the former Knickerbocker Hotel, across 42nd Street. The Knickerbocker, where Enrico Caruso and George M. Cohan once lived, was designed by Marvin & Davis and finished in 1905.

On my way to work yesterday, I noticed lingering traces of the New Year’s Eve festivities in Times Square. There was a sort of after-party desolation to it all. The utility trucks were still parked along Seventh Avenue, empty of promise, waiting to be rolled away. On the rooftops of the Broadway theaters, little cyclones of leftover confetti were swirling in the wind and collecting in puddles of rainwater.

Confetti leftovers were also lying dead on the subway tracks in the Times Square station. Some of those little squares, I noticed, bore the bull’s-eye trademark of Target stores. How ingenious is that marketing? Talk about finding value in clever places. (And see - it earned Target a mention in my blog!)

Got a funny piece of spam in my work e-mail. The subject line: “Don’t waste your time, have sex immediately.”

Well, OK then.

Litchfield, Conn., December 2006

Here we are in 2007. Yikes - how did this happen? Remember when “2001: A Space Odyssey” was set in a far-off time we had yet to reach? And now we're six years past that, already inhabiting our own distant future.

You may remember my plan to spend New Year’s Eve in Connecticut, on silent retreat with my Zen group. Well, I’m trying to figure out what to write about the experience that wouldn’t sound utterly banal. To say it was great, or calming or meaningful, or that it renewed my bonds with my fellow practitioners, just doesn’t measure up. All of those things are true, but they don’t even scratch the surface.

I never know what to expect when I practice. Sometimes I sit and all sorts of tension comes up, and that was happening when I got to the retreat on Saturday. I found myself wrestling with “shoulds” - I should sit more frequently and more effectively, I should participate more skillfully in services, I should know more about the intricacies of Zen than I do. “Shoulds” are a common plague for me. I forget to just let things be what they are, and forget the value of not knowing.

So, at a teacher’s suggestion, I just sat with that “should” feeling. Not pushing it away, but trying to breathe into it, trying to reach the deep internal part of me that holds the tightness of “should.” Siphoning it off, bit by bit.


By the next morning, after many periods of silent sitting, I felt I could literally breathe more deeply - like I’d long been filling my days with short, shallow breaths, and could finally, slowly, open myself to the air. It wasn’t just relaxation - it was an expansion, an awareness.

I brought that feeling to our New Year’s Eve celebration, which included an interesting outing, depicted in these photos. We lined up single file and silently walked to a field in a forest near our retreat center, where we held a little ceremony. We thought of things we’d like to leave behind with the turn of the year - an unskillful habit, a behavior or thought pattern lacking in mindfulness. We wrote them on slips of paper and burned them in an aluminum pan, releasing them to the air and the earth, to the past.

Then we walked back to the retreat center for some ceremonial bell-ringing and, once we could speak again, a small party. I didn’t even try to stay awake until midnight. I figured the New Year didn’t need me around to see it in - it would be there when I woke. And it was.