American Fez

The Dilemma

A quintessential, almost archetypal image of an "urban space": the grey, anonymous granite monotony etched with grids and straight lines; featureless steps receding downwards into subterranean concrete wilderness; the desperate echo of some landscaped tree; and the quavering, undecided figure who seems to know not which way to turn nor where to go. Another average day in the city of Boston.

I took this rather Hopperesque picture from the windswept terrace atop the Prudential parking garage, a flat and mostly forgotten expanse of paving stones providing depressing vistas of the junction at Exeter and Blagdon streets. Walk north, past the Boston Public Library which is now a rest home for the chronically inebriated, and you will encounter the string of tedious shops and unadventurous restaurants that flank Boylston Street. If, perchance, you were to wander south instead, your expedition will be impeded by that temple of consumerism known as the Copley Place Mall and obsequious hotel complex. Eastwards lies the stinking pit of malodorous food courts called Downtown Crossing, and in the opposite direction is Fenway Park, home of the processed meat snack and late night disco emporia.
If there is such a thing as urban blight, then when oh when will the famine come?

For Quicquid ... Whatever.

A view of the Charles River and skies at sundown looking west towards Boston University Bridge. I am the digital Turner: who will be my Ruskin? Did I not, after all, expend as much effort photoshopping pixels as Turner did grinding pigment and squinting?

“It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of all creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more, for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her. There are not many of her other works in which some more material or essential purpose than the mere pleasing of man is not answered by every part of their organization; but every essential purpose of the sky might, as far as we know, be answered, if once in three days, or thereabouts, a great, ugly black rain cloud were brought up over the blue, and everything well watered, and so all left blue again till next time, with perhaps a film of morning and evening mist for dew. And instead of this, there is not a moment of any day of our lives, when nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly… the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is not “too bright, nor good, for human nature’s daily food,” it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for the soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, it is surely meant for the chief teacher of what is immortal in us, as it is the chief minister of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal. And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a subject of thought…”

John Ruskin Modern Painters 1

Janet & the New Yorker

Janet Williams sent me a highly amusing cartoon drawn by herself that the New Yorker did not deign to publish: The deKoonings Get Dressed.
She drew it back when "MoMA was about to reopen at their renovated Manhattan site, and everyone was wondering where some of the more famous purchases were going to be hung, like Woman #1 by Willem deKooning."
And yet, as with all good jokes, the laughs still linger despite their topical reference points.
No doubt the editors at that illustrious publication felt that two or three dull and low brow efforts by Roz Chast strewn randomly across the pages of the magazine would be more suitable for their audience.
James Thurber may not be exactly rolling in his grave, but he certainly isn't quaking with mirth either. Anyway, Janet's cartoon:

The Fall

The midnight road is Mother Nature's mortuary slab; the curbside gutter, our grave: will you, grim pavement pathologist, perform my post mortem?

I am already tomorrow's fossil in the tire treads of passing traffic. An insignificant smudge on the wheel of existance. Listen, children, I am the little sparrow that couldn't. Look upon my corpse ye flighty and despair.

(For those of you that don't know, the last sentence is a paraphrase from Shelley's "Ozymandias." Since I am always being accused of being obtuse, I felt it important to point that out. Also, obviously, the title of this post is a pun.)

And on Friday, perhaps a cutesy picture for Quicquid will be posted.

Guest Blogger: The New Yorker

The Talk of the Town

Every Wednesday afternoon cartoonist Drew Crappe drives the two miles from his Frank Lode-Ovshite designed Long Island home to the post office in Inheritauk.
His latest unfunny cartoon is neatly wrapped in brown paper and stamped for immediate dispatch to Ben Asleepe, the New Yorker's cartoon editor.
"I realize that my cartoons are really bad." Drew says as he gazes across the blue souless expanse of Apathy Sound. "But nobody at the magazine cares and Ben is an old buddy of mine."
Drew and Ben were at Harvard together in the fifties. "Even the Harvard Lampoon rejected everything we did." Drew says. "So we started our own college weekly called the The Cambridge Lampoon. We weren't very clever, creative or original back then. Fifty years later and we've not changed at all!"
"Drew has basically been working with the same idea since high school." Ben Asleepe tells me as he delegates all his work to an unpaid intern. "It wasn't funny then and it's not funny now, but fortunately the readers of the New Yorker will accept any old trash. It's a pretty low-brow publication these days. People always cancel their subscriptions but we still send them magazines anyway"
He shifts some drawings around on his desk, points at them and sighs: "These are pretty damn good cartoons but I'm not related to any of the guys who did them. There's no nepotism involved so I can't use them. It's as simple as that. Drew is family and so I have to put one of his cartoons in every week otherwise my wife would kill me."
Back in Inheritauk, Drew Crappe is skimming stones across Apathy Sound. "I guess I ought to be ashamed of myself, eh?" he says. "But the New Yorker only costs $3.95 per issue so I'm not that bothered really. You get what you pay for in this world .... and, anyway, even my dreadfully drawn and totally unfunny cartoons are much, much better than the 'Shouts and Murmurs' garbage they print; now that's a truly terrible section of the magazine."

Heimlich Humbugger

Riparian Rambles

Post storm, autumn's agents arrive at the river in a gold rush on a blue morning. Three grey seagulls are navigating upstream, harrassing the stern of some full sail ghost ship invisible to me. The birds fall and rise in the air above the choppy water like the branches of windswept overhanging willows whose liberated leaves have been shaken to the ground, forming multi-colored mosaics that decorate the lapping waves.

Drifting amid the debris beside the bank, plastered with fallen petals, a plastic detergent bottle bobs up and down. Perhaps that old laundress of legend, the spectral bent-backed washer woman who scrubs the blood-stained clothes of murdered men has adopted more modern methods of completing her grisly chores?

(And this post brings to a conclusion our recent season of Riparian Rambles and illustrative photography .... you don't have to sigh with relief quite so audibly!)

Memento Mori

Memento mori: the skull beneath the umbrella grins his famous catchphrase at the sodden wayfarer, "Et in arcadia ego (and the skies were blue then)." Meanwhile, mocking raindrops funnel furiously through a flooded hourglass.
I came across this shattered contraption in the street last night outside L’Espalier, an expensive French restaurant. Flattened into the tarmac by passing traffic, it seemed more like the fossil of an umbrella rough hewn by Iron Age man rather than the functioning, rain repelling accessory it must have been but yesterday.

Just as I put my camera away, a parade of pink rubber-booted young girls came marching past me laughing and singing, arm in arm, their four umbrellas locked together like an upturned Saxon shield wall. After they had disappeared I glanced down again at the broken thing on the ground, deciding that it might also be the battered standard of some vanquished army. You’re getting old, I told my bedraggled self, old and strangely fanciful. Heigh-ho, the wind and the rain.

Neptune Travels Light

The mysterious case of the Cunard suitcase? Nothing to declare: this vinyl valise must be equipped with a false bottom stuffed with packing paper ballast enabling it to float.
Perhaps it’s luggage belonging to the Lady of Shallot: item: one water damaged white samite negligee suitable for suicide. Or, remaining in our Pre-Raphaelite river, maybe it contains scraps of Ophelia’s personal effects, slowly sailing downstream to that Consignment Shop near the sluice gates.

Actually, I photographed this sorry object just below the Salt and Pepper Bridge on Sunday afternoon. It was idly surfing the tide like driftwood beside the stony shoreline, probably tossed into the current by some itinerant who no longer required the contents, and consequently the case itself had become obsolete in terms of his immediate life strategy.

And readers, if you think my watery pictures are grim you should check out Lucy's.

A Faith Based Initiative

Of the moderns, it is really only the dancer Nijinsky and myself who still maintain that "Trial By Combat" is the best, fairest and most legitimate method of resolving any dispute. When furiously writing what I cherish as the greatest sentence ever committed to paper, Nijinsky brilliantly challenged Diagalev to a bullfight: an excellent idea and a contest that the arrogant Russian promoter would surely have lost. Personally, the full-bodied Anglo-Saxon blood that streams in scarlet torrents through my martial veins demands arms forged by Vulcan of iron and steel: namely, the battle-axe and the broadsword. A powerful blow to your enemy's throat or a single stab into their ribs and the argument is settled for good.
For example, as far as nominations to the Supreme Court are concerned, if Harriet Miers can vanquish me in the Field of Combat or force my courage to submit to her superior fighting technique while we lunge and parry around the Arena of Death, well, then I am quite prepared to agree that decisions from the bench based on Evangelical Christian doctrine are the way forward. But if she should be beheaded by my trusy blade instead it must be announced that someone of more moderate opinions will be elected Now that's what I call a judgement. Any takers?

Guest Blogger: Eptesicus Fuscus (RIP)

Greetings. I am a dead bat as you can see ... unless, of course, you are blind like me. My name is Vlad, obviously, and I dropped off the black branch of some riverside tree onto this busy bike path made of tarmac and dust. It may appear as if I am only sleeping as the old tombstones used to say, but I can absolutely assure you, gentle reader, that I am indeed one hundred percent deceased and departed. Is cold-blooded mammal Heaven echolocatable, I wonder. Does anybody know? Can anyone point me in the right direction at least.

One of the major disadvantages of laying in a shallow bike-path grave is the better than even chance I have of being run over and squashed by some be-goggled, knobbly-kneed racer who daydreams of competing in the Tour de France. Still, if I am flattened by the weight of rider and ten-geared machine, my crushed self will at least be provided with an amusing costume for Halloween since I can then go to parties as "The Monster Mash." That's just a little an example of what we in the nightfight trade call black humor.

Where the Wild Brains Grow

Here's One For the Kids

Following my map of vellum it was deep in Cerebellum Wood that I found the wild brain again. I knew I could because the wild brain said I should, for it is telepathic and all that that implies (although sometimes I surmise that its thought waves are merely telling lies.)
“Pick me up I’m bored,” the wild brain implored, “Take me home I’d like to live in the skull of a garden gnome.”
“Oh I can think of a much finer head in which you can reside instead.” I said. “A veritable cranial Club Med.”
But my oh my just then there came a rasping cry from a tuft nearby.
“No! Don’t go! Don’t leave.” Pleaded an acorn and a leaf.
“You should stay here and dwell among us because you are really just a bit of moldy fungus ... and no wild brain at all.”
On hearing that - oh drat! - my hobnailed boot went 'splat' and crushed the wild brain pancake flat - I don't like vegetation that talks out of its hat.
The end.

And so children, the moral of this story is: Nature is icky.

(Although there is no visible water in this photograph, readers can rest assured that it was taken on the footpath by the river.)

Sluice Fingers

Rather like the pale and shimmering hand of Nimue, the British Mnemosyne, rising from the mysterious misty depths of her Arthurian pool as she reclaims Excalibur, this mournful green glove drifts through waterlogged debris to catch some bewildered dog's saliva ravaged tennis ball. Perhaps the owner of this aquatic gauntlet will drag the ball down towards the murky river bed where flittering mermaids play their submarine games of pitch and toss. But most likely it will merely disintegrate into the relentless tide.

Once again, my mornings walk along the River Charles furnishes the artist with his flotsam model.

Poseidon's Desktop

And how, pray, are the preferences set on Poseidon's desktop?
Does this seahorse-drawn charioteer subscribe to the Mermen's forum?
Exchange online dating information with Calypso and Nereid?
Spam Zeus?

Leave pithy comments on Amphitrite's blog using the pseudonym "Neptune"?
Regurgitate himself from inside the stomach of Cronus with Stuffit Expander?
And just what in the name of Ennosigaios is Trident O/S III?

Actually I discovered this abandoned monitor this morning, half submerged in the river, splattered with river bed muck and covered with clinging flotsam. One fine day this will be the fate of all computers; rather like those fabulous futuristic paintings of New York City doomed to ruination and decay inside a drowned, neo-prehistoric world as saurian whales and giant squid float peacefully by: Amen to then.

The Nobel Party

Nobel prize? I won a prize for deportment once. They awarded me a fish dinner cooked by a Swedish dancing master with a limp. His name was Sven but it might have been Harry also.
(pause)
They told me he caught the pox off some tart from the Guardian and fled down Nigeria way ... You remember, Harold, don't you, there's a good boy, you remember. It was when I lived out near Hackney Marshes under the viaduct.
(pause)
Or was it Hendon Central?
Harold? ... Harold?
(pause)
Noble bloody prize. Stick it on the sideboard next to the ashes by that picture of his ex-wife he keeps at a deceptive angle. Lady Antonia? I knew her when she was licking envelopes at the Playwrights Arms for two shillings a go. There was an undertaker involved as well. Used to drive them both to the Royal Court is long black car. Him and that other one too.
(pause)
Harold? Harold? Your prize is here. Come here and collect your lovely prize.
(broken)
Harold?

Guest Blogger: A Slippery Eel (Deceased)

Hello there. And an especially slimy greeting to you. I'm a dead eel, obviously. But you can call me Jeremy: all my very best friends used to. When I was very young, just a wee wormy elver slithering around the Sargasso, I dreamed of becoming, you know, a fabulous sea serpent or something; hoped that I might grow up to be a powerful Conger eel or blossom, like the ugly duckling, into an impressive Moray eel.

But it was not to be and I remained merelyan average representative of Anguilla Rostrata: the common freshwater eel. And now I'm dead. Beached on the banks of the Charles river like a flabby, mis-directed whale. Not even rolled into sushi, no mashed into an eel pie, not devoured in jellied form by some ravenous Cockney in the markets of old London Town. No, just plain dead and left to decompose or be torn to pieces by gulls and water rats. Such is the inexorable will of Mother Nature - and that melancholy blogger Outer Life thinks he's got troubles!

Photo Credit: me.

Yggdrasil

Shattered tree: the result of an Irish ménage à trois? All passion spent, indeed. Can you see the face in the bottom corner? Is that a cry of ecstasy or are those wooden lips screaming a safe word? Frankly I’m no voyeur so I won’t linger, just click the shutter and shuffle off like a clumsy and embarrassed spy.

Actually, this headless trunk flanks the riverbank opposite MIT, a mere five minutes meandering stroll from my house. But I had never really noticed it when leafy and living, its arboreal achievements remaining a mystery to me no matter how many times I passed it by. Or perhaps I did, and no longer recognise its devastated form.

Troposphere

My parents own a functional and decorative barometer, and my grandparents owned one before them, as undoubtedly did all my ancestors from thatched dwelling cottagers to double-glazed Dutch colonials; and so, surely, of some description, did the Biblical Noah and his wife.
Alas I do not possess a barometer myself, and neither do any of my friends hang such a device in their homes. Frankly, I would have no clue where one might purchase a barometer. You never see them for sale in shopping circulars or advertised on television. I suppose it must be the polyester weatherman who has replaced this poetic form of forecasting and what a shoddy substitute he is: the poor man’s meteorologist, the obsequious almanac, last of the blue screen buccaneers, mustachioed Isadora Duncans dancing their interpretation of a low-pressure zone.
Meanwhile, the arrival of a bustling cold front here, dourly predicted and announced, has heralded several days of full blast hosepipe rain, a relentless downpour that gathers to its showering bosom all the debris of Autumnal foliage, and so the drainage system beside my house now resembles an abandoned Waldorf salad drowned in watery dressing. Very enjoyable conditions for those of us who are always very happy when it tips down. I can sit fascinated and watch rain like an awe struck child observing falling snow for the first time. Ah yes, the mountain may not come to Mohammed but the seas will certainly come to Stephenesque.

And in such a merry mood I snapped this picture from one of the arched bridges that span the lagoons of the Charles river: a confetti of yellow, brown, and gold leaves circumnavigating concentric circles, sailing towards their own personal Byzantium.

Belch and Belchability

(Posted after receiving the news that yet another Jane Austen movie is being released)

It was with great trepidation and anxious summoning of mental fortitude that I, Virginia Primme, a delicate and pale rose petal who is easily and completely crushed by the weight of social expectation, set forth across Alehouse Heath upon my journey to Gassington House one fine Friday morning in September, and in that austere place, guided by the expert and firm hand of Miss Fanny Adams, I was to learn the gentlewomanly arts of Wallflowery and Purse-lippedness. But even the prospect of Miss Adams’ Gassington tutorials filled me with a certain dread, for I had often heard my sister Anne speak of the Scissor Running Room with its endless games of 'Needle-In-Your-Eye', and how Gassington, unlike other great houses around the village of Rumble-Under-Buttocks, lacked the quiet sanctuary of a Whispering Gallery since the third Earl had preferred the construction of a Belching Gallery instead. What public horrors and embarrassments, I wondered, would befall such a introverted, simple daisy as I in such a place? Fortunately I had remembered to pack several cans of Olde Sphincter’s Blasting Red Cheeker Extra Strong Cider among the dresses in my trunk. Consumption of this beverage in swift and lively fashion, I felt certain, would compensate for any bashful feelings I may encounter in the social whirl of the many Autumnal evenings I would spend within the drafty confines of the Belching Gallery over the coming weeks ....

(story will continue after the authoress has attended to her morning's duties in the Life Drawing Room)

The Daily Grind

Returning to his dusty, cobwebbed office after an extended absence the weary vacationer slumps backwards in his cold tubular chair and surveys the devastation and neglect that over-run his desk likea scene from The Last Days of Pompeii. A long forgotten luncheon item left from before he went away still festers beside his in-tray as if auditioning for the role of Miss Haversham's wedding cake. In the corner, a computer blinks unknowingly. At some point he must track down his favorite and apparently purloined fountain pen with all the single-minded inscrutable gravitas of the most tenacious of Apache scouts. Here and there, dotted about the building, one or two asses must be severely kicked.
An empty water cooler gurgles and spits beneath the persistent buzz of fluorescent lighting. Fax, phone, copy, file, stamp, index: "I am not a number, etc ..."

Descendent of Smith

At the risk of boring everyone witless since what is to be said has already been written and re-written again and again, I should confess that it always takes my mind several weeks to topple the neuronic megaliths that are always erected there after a visit to Wiltshire's ancient sites. The ley lines converge in my frontal lobes and my dangly bits get all electrified like that impressively powerful phallus chalkily exposed by the hillside dwelling giant Rude Man of Cerne Abbas (of whose likeness I bought an irresistable souvenir tee shirt). One of my earliest and most vivid memories is of entering Wayland Smithy - a place of death - with my father. I must have been less than four years old but I can still recall the ancient, enshrouding darkness within the burial chambers as if it were only yesterday. It was here that I suddenly realized that I was me, an independent individual in a cosmic jigsaw of time and space and something else that would always be undefinable and ineffable, for the air within and around these henges and barrows is always heavy with soul, as if the people who built them still stand sentry alongside their solemn creations; and you can slip into easy empathy with those old wives who believed these great sarsens were enchanted wrongdoers turned to stone in a single second that lasts for an eternity.

Green Man

There is nothing like sauntering across England's sweepingly evocative Marlborough Downs to bend your thoughts towards bloody sacrifice of livestock to appease Lig or Bol or whomever or whatever foliage-faced, horned entity the Ancient Britons deified. But mysteriously erected megaliths were not the only upright objects of great value that I encountered in Wiltshire. The region's "petrol pumps" where thirsty automotives drink were often honored by my credit card as I drove around the many Stone, Iron, and Bronze Age sites. And considering the vast amount of money that filling a car's tank costs in England - almost twice the price of US gas - even Woden himself would have flashed me a wink when reviewing the sacrifice my bank balance offered up to his rain-weathered and crop-encircled monuments.

For the Hatemongers

I will make a fuller entry here on Monday. Needless to say, I am currently in London and have been to Trafalgar Square to see the statue of Alison Lapper Pregnant (a special trip after my usual swift pint at the Bricklayer's Arms).