No Hitter

So it's done.  The Mets have their first no hitter, ever, and it only took, as you may have heard by now, 8,020 games.  And it was worth waiting for.  It couldn't have been written any better.  So many stories.  Santana coming off shoulder surgery, a surgery that's left many pitchers shadows of their former selves. Against the world champion Cardinals, and the best offense in the league. Thole's first game off the DL.  Mike from Whitestone Baxter with the reckless regard for his own body as he makes the catch of Yadier F*(&^N Molina's drive over his head.  The return of Carlos Beltran (one of the Best Mets Ever), now a teammate of Adam Wainwright.  The rain that threatened to delay the game.  Wainwright's stellar first few innings.  Clutch hitting.  CitiField's first BIG moment.  And there's other stuff I'm sure I've forgetting.

But what I want to get to is this: it was also one of the Mets' Little League Nights, where kids get discounted tickets and wear their jerseys and get to walk on the field before the game in a little parade.  My son was one of those kids.  So not only was he there on that special night, he was on the field beforehand.  He's only eight, and he knows it was something big, but I'm sure he doesn't really get it, yet.  I am absolutely thrilled that he was there, that he'll have this memory to share with his own kids, and that he'll have bragging rights about the no hitter for the rest of his life.  Amazing. 

I was not there.  It wasn't my weekend with him, and so, that's just one of those things about divorce.  But I'm so damn happy he was there with his mother and his teammates.  And I watched every pitch, partly because I was hoping that SNY would have a few shots of the kids on the field.  And then, of course, it started to roll along, and I was paying attention to the hits column like I always do, kind of hoping, but trying not to hope too hard, that maybe this was the night. 

So my girlfriend and I sat on the couch watching (and sometimes not watching, because sometimes watching was kind of excruciating), listening to the great call from Gary, Keith, and Ron, trying really hard to believe what we were seeing.  She's a passionate lifelong Met fan.  She loved Tom Terrific as a kid.  We tried to honor our superstitions as the night progressed.  We were nervous wrecks, like so many others, as Johan took the mound in the ninth.  And then we were shouting, laughing, hugging, like so many others in NYC that night, right around 9:50 pm.  Wow.  Let's go Mets. 

I guess this is kind of living vicariously through my son?  I know I'm not supposed to do that, right?  I'm kidding, of course.  I was at Shea in '06 when Endy made The Catch, when so many of these players were there, spoiling our run.  It was a tough night, but I'll always cherish that night for Endy's miraculous sno-cone, and for the way the upper deck rocked and shook under our feet. I'm just so happy that my son's now got his own little big piece of New York Metropolitan Baseball Magic.  Well, all of us Met fans do, now, where ever we were last Friday.

Voices

This is a short documentary with four stories about people who lost loved ones on 9/11 and how they have coped in the ten years since.  35 Candles is seen at about the 9:40 mark. 

And this is, I hope, my last post about the whole ten year thing.  It is always good to get to September 12th. 

Ten Years

  With ten years passed since 9/11, the memorial I painted and installed for the Alger company, who had offices in the North Tower and lost 35 people that day, has been featured in a few news articles about the company (see previous posts).   I feel a mix of pride and humility when I think about 35 Candles – it is only paint and wood in the face of that horrible day, but it is my own small contribution to honoring the memory of all those who were lost on 9/11, and those lost in the years since, because of their selfless work at the site. 

  I was approached by a couple friends involved with Alger in the late summer of 2002, and they wondered if I’d be interested in helping with some kind of memorial project for the company.  It was a formidable proposition, less than a year after the terrible day.  The company was rebuilding, and had moved to new offices a little further uptown.  They were unsure what they wanted, but they had felt it was time to do something in memory of their lost colleagues.   Feelings of New Yorkers everywhere were still very very raw as we approached the first anniversary of the attack, and we, understandably, weren’t given a lot of direction, but were told that they didn’t want anything too “in your face” or literal about the day. 

  I worked with an old friend in the initial stages, and we decided that a grid of small paintings made sense, alluding in the classic Modernist way to the grid of Manhattan streets and New York School painting.  There would be 35 panels, one for each life lost from Alger.  Following that, I came up with a few ideas and sketches to show Alger.  One idea was a grid of different blue paintings, as an allusion to the brilliant, clear blue sky of that morning, which has always been a potent memory of that day for me.  Another idea was a different bird on each panel, which was inspired by the beautiful little goldfinch painted by the Dutch painter Carel Fabritius in the Seventeenth Century.  A third idea was a small still life of a single flower for each panel, which was inspired by the last paintings of Manet.  I also prepared a sketch of candles, since it is such a traditional image of memorials, but I did not expect Alger to pick that one.  I thought perhaps it would be too much an image of mourning for them, too literal an image to use in their offices, with perhaps connotations that would be too intense.  There had been candles burning all over the city at makeshift memorials on the streets. 

  But Alger did want the candle idea.  I took some Polaroids of candles in my studio, and worked from them to do a half dozen or so oil sketches on paper to further develop an idea that I did not expect them to like, and after that I was given the green light to begin work.  From the beginning I had to think about materials and installation.  I had to work out those basic issues beforehand – I chose wood panels for their durability and stability, and I prepared the surfaces myself, sanding, sizing with an acrylic emulsion, and priming with a white acrylic emulsion ground.  I took many more photographs and chose the 35 I would work from.  I looked at Chardin, Richter, de la Tour, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Morandi, Velazquez, and others, looking at artists with strong visual connections to the subject or great spiritual power. 

  It was daunting to begin work.  This was my chance to respond to the horrors of 9/11 and of course I felt a great responsibility to do the work justice.  So, I started to paint.  Time was an issue so I could not waste it by thinking too much; I just needed to work.  So I didn't think about mucking it up--I simply resolved to make each panel as beautiful as I possibly could. 

  Fortunately, I was in a good place in my artistic development when this job came along.  I had worked through many different kinds of painting, spent several years in the nineties working at traditional observational painting through still life and landscape and some portraiture.  In the early nineties I’d spent two and a half years as a guard at the Met, looking at great art from all cultures and times.  In the late nineties I’d moved to a studio with no natural light and as a response to that, I’d begun, tentatively at first, to use photographic sources as models (as I still do today), which was both a sea change in my practice and a complete reconfiguration of my ideas and commitments about the nature and value of painting.  It had been, for lack of a better phrase, a crisis of faith in my work.  But by 2002, I had, in short, developed some pretty good chops in a range of techniques and with a solid understanding of my craft.

  The work went well.  Better than I’d hoped.  I saw it taking shape, panel by panel, and I believed in my heart that it was good.  I started each panel, then worked on them all together, rearranging them on the grid as they would hang at Alger, working all over as if it were one painting.  Somewhere along the line, I thought of changing from a 7x5 grid to a 6x6 grid that would leave one section empty as a sign of loss and incompleteness.

  It took two days to install in the Alger offices, a weekend in early February of 2003.  It took a lot of measuring to align the paintings, and each is hung solidly with two drywall screws.  Also, the wall is painted grey on the area directly behind the panels, to soften the light.  From start to finish, the work was conceived, executed and installed in what I think was a pretty quick time frame, but no short cuts were taken, and I am both proud of and humbled by this work. 

  It is, and always will be, very hard to think about 9/11 and the immediate months that followed.  I thought about writing about that here as well, but I don’t think I want to do that just yet.  The immense sorrow comes back unbidden all on its own, with the slightest of triggers, and the most unexpected times.  I do remember the work I was doing at the time of the attacks, photobased paintings taken from snapshots of pedestrians as I looked down from my second floor studio window in DUMBO, and when I finally came back to my studio, the stench still strong at my studio on Jay Street, a block from the water, my work on the walls looked alien to me, and I wondered about those blurred, faceless people in my paintings and photos, wondered which ones were still alive, and of those, who were mourning loved ones. 

  I hate when people say don’t forget.  We won’t forget.  I love New York.  

smattering

Went bowling this weekend. Channelled my inner Dude. Despite growing up in Toledo, Ohia, I was never a big bowler. But this weekend a friend had a birthday celebration that included rolling some balls at the lanes in the Port Authority. Lotsa fun. Our son had a blast, too, and my wife was rolling unconscious for a while, three straight strikes and a couple spares.

On our way from the lanes to dinner at a homey little Italian place, walking along the edges of Times Square, it snowed a little bit--big, wet, floppy flakes that glistened in the night air. Christmas lights and headlamps reflected in the slick black streets. Beautiful night. "God, I love this dirty town!"

Sunday we saw Fantastic Mr. Fox. I am a Wes Anderson fan, and I'd put this up there with my favorites of his. The whole stop motion world seems perfect for his stagelike, neoclassically balanced images. Really a fun, beautiful, touching film. We watched Up again on DVD this weekend, too, and that is even better than I remembered. It will be a tough call between those two come Oscar time [and don't forget Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which is also a really fine and funny animated film. but I think the Academy will overlook it because of the silly title].

Oh, and there should be a moratorium on the use of the old saw about second acts and American lives. Maybe, fifteen minutes of fame, too. Sick of 'em.

Holiday card, 1997

Treeseller. Woodcut with watercolor.

In 1997, I made the first of what would become an annual tradition: a handmade holiday greeting card. Before this year's Christmas comes, I hope to post all that have come along since then. The first was cut from a cheap piece of pine, and printed on Rives BFK [the last time I would use either wood or BFK paper]. For our Christmas-celebrating friends and family, I handcolored the guy's Santa cap in red and wrote "Merry Christmas" in blue ink with a reed pen. For our other-denominational friends, I left the cap uncolored and wrote "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings," I don't quite remember which. I think this proof may be the only copy of this one that I still have. I don't remember how many we printed, but in the years since, I've usually made editions in the 50-100 range, just to make sure we have plenty.

The Treeseller was an image I'd also played around with in drawings and paintings, because I've always liked the sight of trees lined up on NYC sidewalks in December. My father, who took his Christmas trees seriously, always felt there was some kind of Noellian evergreen conspiracy which sent all the best trees to this fair city. "They're all perfect!" he used to say. "You guys get all the best trees!" Produce, too, according to my mother, who once said she bought and sliced the perfect tomato right here in Brooklyn. Go figya.

I have a big painting based on the Treeseller image; I'll have to shoot and post it one of these Yules.

Autumn in New York

My son's day care was closed on Veteran's Day, so he and I had the day off together. It was the kind of brilliant Fall day, with richly colored leaves and crisp air and sharpedged sunshine, that reminds me why I live in this great, big, beautiful city. We went to Central Park, where the light really was knifelike, cutting at an Emily Dickinson slant through the trees. He ate a midmorning hot dog in front of the Met, and was a good sport for me when I wanted to go inside.

I wanted to make sure I saw the Morandi exhibition before it closes, and I figured that if at all possible, a weekday morning would be best for avoiding the crowds. Having a four year-old with you is not optimal for looking at Morandi's slow and exacting work, but it's better than missing the show entirely.

Like I said a couple months ago, I do wish they had hung the show in more spacious, better lit galleries. I remember the lower level of the Lehman Wing was one of the toughest places to stay awake when I was working as a guard there, although it's different now, trafficwise, because of the new public cafeteria down there as well.

I'd still like to go back alone and take more time with the show. It was my first time seeing the landscapes, which are dishraggy in color and tone, and not in a good way. So they were disappointing to me. (Although the landscape etchings are very fine.) But the still lifes, of which I've seen only a handful in person before, as there are not many Morandis on this side of the Atlantic, are great. The delicately muddy palette works on the intimate scale of still life, but it is only weak and dull in a landscape, where you expect the light to, well, do something. And every once in a while, there's a tone or color in a still life that rings like a bell, whether the brushwork is shaky and shimmery or tight and focussed.

Compositionally, I had never seen, even in reproduction, the odd still lifes that sit on one half of the canvas and run off the side. The more tightly composed pictures, with objects centered like family portraits in early photography, are more stately, the bottles and vessels and boxes gathered and crowded into even more intimate groups, as if you were looking into a full elevator with glass walls. It makes me think of de Kooning's quotation about all the space a painter needs, which goes something like, if you stretch your arms down along your sides, and wonder where your fingers are. Yes, I'm not sure how much sense it makes, but I will say that some days it makes more sense than others.

And the watercolors are strange and gorgeous, like shadow plays.

Ninotchka in New York

'Ninotchka' was on tv the other night. I first saw the Ernst Lubitsch film 'Ninotchka' during my first summer in New York, the summer of 1992. I was a student in Pratt Institute's MFA program, and as such, I enjoyed the benefits of membership to the Museum of Modern Art, the chief benefit being free admission whenever the museum was open.

So on hot summer days it was great, one of the cheapest ways to enjoy air conditioning -- the price of a couple subway tokens and a slice for lunch. Besides the Matisses, Pollocks, de Koonings, Cezannes, Seurats, Picassos, Mondrians, and the rest, The Modern also has movies. Free movies for money-challenged grad student. An even better way to escape the summer heat.

I found myself at the Modern one afternoon when 'Ninotchka' was playing. I knew nothing about it. I'd heard of Greta Garbo, at least, but had never seen one of her movies. The blurb in the museum guide said this was the one where 'Garbo laughs!' Good enough for me. I found a seat in the auditorium, which was filling with a mix of older movie fans and young students like me.

First things first, I loved the movie for the same reasons everybody does -- funny, sophisticated, satirical, elegant, sparkling. And then there's Garbo. What I really remember most clearly about watching it that first time, was not the movie, but the reaction of the moviegoers when Garbo came on screen for the first time. The three Soviet envoys are at the train station in Paris looking for the new emissary from the USSR. They expect a man. But it is Greta Garbo. She stands stiffly, in drab Soviet clothes, with a plain hat, but of course the camera holds on her for a couple beats, a shot of her stern but luminous face. And the New York crowd applauds. Long and hard, the crowd applauds. For an actress in a movie! An actress who's dead! (An actress, it must be said, who was a New Yorker herself.) And the crowd applauds as if this is the Zeigfeld Theatre and we have Garbo up on stage alive and in the flesh and doing a buck and wing. Well, I've never forgotten that moment to this day. New York is a lot of things, one of which is a pretty damn serious movie town.