New York, 2001 |
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Winter |
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"You Call This Snow?" read the Post headline. After days of
anticipation, the Great Dump of 2001 ended anticlimatically with only a few sodden inches.
New Yorkers, accustomed to, no, relishing the insults of a hostile world, feel bilked of
their blizzard. The city exhausts me. The throngs of people, the brutal weather. The grinding of train wheels that, on the first day, I likened to John Cage in his harmonic period, became just another sonic irritant by the end. Then there’s the harsh, off-key BEEEEEK as I pass the Metrocard, only sometimes it doesn’t take and I bruise my thigh against an unyielding stile, and blue letters light—"Please Swipe Again." The sound of dropping tokens is now history and so, most startling, is the incessant honking. It used to be a constant backdrop, the unceasing contact calls of a disturbed herd of internal combustion beasts. There are signs now, actual injunctions, NO HONKING $350 FINE. Under Guilianni the proverbial trains all run on time. I may complain about the noise, but I’ve never heard the traffic in New York be so quiet. It was a difficult week for ambitions. I feel battered, ready to be shipped back to the provinces where I belong. A complete debacle was the event that drew me out, the Irish American Cultural Institute fundraiser, where I was purported to be the featured artist. Instead, I was peripheral and neglected, and now many hundreds of dollars poorer for the effort. At the galleries, where I dropped off work, I was duly ignored. At the designated hour I returned to pick up my slides at one. Not only had they not been looked at, but they were mislaid. At last someone found them and I asked, so, where’s the light box. Oh, we don’t have one anymore, so my work got a cursory glance against the flourescents, without a loupe. At another the owner never made it into town because of the storm (wimp!). The bright spots were the meetings at my stock agency, Photonica. After a period of drift, the place seems back on a good course, and it’s nice to be treated with respect again. I had a 2 hour lunch with the head guy, another long meeting with my editor, and a serendipitous meeting with another Photonica photographer who has a lot of book publishing experience. That encounter alone may go a long way to helping my Ireland project see the light of day. |
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