Facebook Gallery is here.Everyone loves an amiable dragon.
This one lives just outside the central nave door of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue. It's by the loading dock, the top of a set of uncarved stone blocks, unfinished below, this set of fantastic figures above.
Unfinished blocks are all through the Cathedral - once you get an eye for them they pop up everywhere. They are waiting for stonemasons, perhaps yet unborn, waiting to have images of saints, sinners, stories, lessons, angels and grotesques teased out.
I've had a strange connection to CCSJD since I was very young - the author of my favorite book, "A Wrinkle In Time" was the librarian there for years, though, I suspect, "librarian" meant more "writer in residence" than "bookshelf police".
No matter. The last time I was there a giant stoneyard existed on the North side of the Cathedral close, filled with giant blocks of white marble. You could buy a stone and it would be fitted into the tower, you would be given a map to show where your stone was. Very old school way to fund a project.
Old school as in "the 1100's".
I took pics (refer to the gallery above) and sat in the rich echoes of the largest gothic cathedral in the world. People who had no idea of what the symbols carved in stone meant wandered through.
I phoned my dad while sitting on a bench in the Cathedral close, watching kids play a game with bolos made of tennis balls, the point being catching the connecting string on a frame by throwing. These were little kids and their peals of joy would fill the close, echoing off the walls of the church.
There is a remarkable peace to the place, I can see being caught up in it, appreciate having the space to think through what your life was about and what you needed to accomplish in order to better be yourself.
So Sunday was given over to exploring two centers of spiritual life - one in stone, the other in glass.
Specifically the Apple Store on 5th Avenue - ordinarily under a striking glass cube, on Sunday under a stricken scaffold of wood.
The bus ride was crowded. It seemed the entire city was out enjoying the park, the streets, the food, themselves.
The store was an unbelievable madhouse of people. The store has a simple layout, the cube houses a piston-driven elevator. This is surrounded by banks of tables for demonstrating products, setup, training, workshops - just like the store I work in but arranged in a square.
I tried to take space at an unused training station to write but was quickly evicted by a Creative with a client to teach. After introductions we had a quick chat about being in the City and crowded stores - then I got the hell out of Dodge (and I've been to Dodge).
The store vomited me out into a heaving sea of people on Fifth Avenue. The stores there have always been touted as the source of haute couture - today they just seemed like granite copies of stores in Freeport, all concerned with selling the experience of something, rather than the stuff itself.
The Abercromie store had two male models at the door, having their pics taken with stricken twenty-something women, stunned to be embraced by men of a physical perfection they knew they might never touch again if they lived to be ninety. Very strange.
The afternoon ended with me returning to the Standard - Jim C. was headed out to the SFWA after party, I was going to soak in a tub (for probably the last time) and then off to tango in Union Square, the last event in a very eventful weekend.
No comments:
Post a Comment