Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 122

Better than a Robin

We interrupt our regularly-scheduled blogging to bring you this just-sighted (and tasted) messenger of spring:

Ahhhhh!

The Last From New York

Tomorrow...some reflections on how being in this favorite city affected me.

More from MOMA

 

 

 

Sketching at MOMA

We spent an afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art, and during a break for lunch and coffee at the café, I couldn't resist the sheets of white paper and the stubby black pencils in a cup on the table. So I did some fast sketches of other visitors, and gave them to the subjects. Sadly, the best ones were the first three, of a group of people together, including a buxom young woman with a gorgeous face, which I gave to them before it occurred to me to take photos first!

 

Heavy dark frames like this seem to be de rigeur in New York.

 

My hands, sketching, by T.C.

And a different kind of drawing...

More photos from MOMA tomorrow.

 

 

 

New York I: Times Square

We've just gotten back from several days in New York City, where we went to attend a reading by Teju Cole and a celebratory party for Open City, and to see other friends as well as some art. We also went to B&H Photo, where -- unexpectedly -- I got a new camera - a Canon S95. Over the next few days I'll be posting some photos and commentary from the trip but believe me, I am just scratching the diamond surface of knowledge about how to use this camera! It's a lot in a very small package. These first photos were all taken in or around Times Square.

Outside Starbucks, in the rain.

 

 

Newstand.

 

Tourists in the center of Times Square.

 

Our friend J. at Cafe Une Deux Trois.

 

At a breakfast joint inside Port Authority bus terminal

 

Hudson News kiosk, inside Port Authority.

 

Leaving Port Authority on the NJ Transit #158.

 

La Tulipe

This is an old theater on Papineau that's been renovated into a popular music venue. Everytime I go by it I tell myself I ought to take a picture, so today I finally did. This isn't the definitive one, but it's a start.

I also went into a nearby business that has always intrigued me - "The Octopus" - a tropical fish store. More about that on a later date. Iv'e got to go back though, I was so freaked out about the place that I didn't dare ask if it was Ok to take a picture inside, but I'll go back.

When I went home from the studio today -- I had taken this photo on a walk in the afternoon -- there was a huge line of kids waiting to buy tickets in front of La Tulipe, many of them pretty punked up, with lots of metal, piercings, torn clothing; it must have been for the White Chapel concert, tonight.

Waiting

This small, elderly woman was dwarfed by the oversized basketweave pot full of dried grasses. She had a very bad cough, and was reading Eckard Tolle.

Metro Stories

This is my contribution to the Language/Place Blog Carnival, hosted this month by Jean at tasting rhubarb.

I grew up in the homogeneous, English-speaking rural northeastern U.S., but where I live now, in Montreal, the languages of the world constantly swirl around me. In buses, on the streets, and in the metro I catch snatches of conversations; mainly in French but often not, and sometimes with the speakers switching easily back and forth between two or three languages.When I first moved here, with my thirty-years-rusty schoolgirl French, I found this fluency amazing and completely intimidating, especially among young people who seemed not only to be comfortable in many languages but to have traveled to all parts of the globe. It also made me a bit pissed off: how could they be so good at this and so young? "If I had grown up here..." I'd find myself saying in my head.

But once in a while, the tables are turned, and I overhear a conversation that shows some unexpected naivete (not often among the French or global immigrants, I must add.)

So: it's late one night on a crowded Green Line metro car running between McGill and Berri/UQAM. The first speaker is a tall Quebecer, anglophone, pale reddish complexion, sandy hair and beard, 20-ish; looks rather straight. His friend: same age, also Caucasian and anglophone but with dreadlocks and loose clothes, affecting a worldly hippie look.

Sandy hair -- So I'm going to meet her in Ottawa this weekend. She's Asian.

Dreads -- Really? From where?

--She's Chinese.

--No kidding! Did you know I'm studying Chinese?

--No...what's that like? (nervous laughter) Maybe you can teach me something to say to her.

--Right...well, it's interesting. Very complex. Umm, you could say "Ni hao!" to her. That means "hello."

--(more nervous laughter. He clears his throat and tries:) "Knee How."

--(laughs) A little more like this: "Ni-HOW." See, in Chinese you have all these inflections. That's where the voice has to go up, or down, or stay flat. (He demonstrates and explains that the word he's saying has four different meaning depending on the inflection.

--Wow, I never knew that about Chinese!

--Yeah. And then you have the characters to learn.

--What do you mean, 'characters'?

--(surprised pause, then stares at his feet before answering) Well, Chinese isn't written in letters like English or French. It has symbols that are made up of strokes, and they form, well, sort of pictures that represent words or things or ideas. It's hard to explain.

--Oh, kinda like the Inuit!

--The Inn-you -- Who are they?

--(astonished look, quickly wiped off the face so as to appear polite - these are Canadians, after all) They're our native northern people here in Quebec.

--(looks confused) Oh...

 

 

Rink

 Yesterday was cold, but bright enough to slice the eye. I left the studio around 4 and walked through the little neighborhood park, where the snow now reached half-way up the red-painted wrought iron fence around the play area. No one else was out. At the other end of the park I looked at the empty skating rink as I walked past, then stopped and climbed up on a bank of snow to examine it more closely. The ice, made by flooding an irreegular circle of piled-up snow, was smooth, with a light dusting of snow. Three dark trees, with snow left around the base as an optimistic cushion for flying bodies, stood in the center.

It all reminded me of the rink my father and grandfather made in the backyard of the big house in Sherburne several years when I was young. The ice, as I remember it, was always perfect. On the back side stood two tall spruce trees, and in the front, a huge sugar maple that dominates that street even now. My cousins and friends all skated there, staying out until we were blue with cold; we had wool sweaters and nylon snowpants but no fleece or down, and our feet inside our white figure skates would ache for an hour after we were finally ordered inside. We never played hockey; we just skated under the trees.

There were other places, too; the school rink on the playing field behind the shop and band room, or a town rink in the park downtown, and later on the lake where my parents built a house. Sometimes, in a very cold winter, we'd skate on the brook that ran through my cousins' farm, which gave the excitement of a journey rather than going round and round, as well as the fear of falling in. We knew the spots to avoid, around willow trunks and branches emerging from the ice or places where there were rocks and faster currents in summer, and so far as I know, no one ever fell through.

I took a few photographs from the far end of the park and then decided to go back to the northern side. The snow crunched under my feet with a specific sound, as accurate a gauge of the temperature as any thermometer. I looked up at the icicles hanging from the eaves of houses, knowing what sound they'd make when knocked off with a broom handle, or when shattered on the ice after being used as mock swords: a brittle glass harmonica.

In fourth grade, I remember there was a book about a little girl who had an accident while skating; something happened and she was cut badly with the blade of her skate and had to go to the hospital in an ambulance. It must have been written to teach children about the reality of hospitals. But somehow, I realized, it had become conflated in my mind with another book about a girl who had become a saint after dying in some unexpected and heroic way. Where did these books come from? They weren't the sort of thing my mother would have found in the town library, and the second one, it seemed to me, must have belonged to one of my Catholic friends who was taking catechism classes. Oddly, though, they had joined to create a memory of childhood injury, death, and saintliness, illustrated with vague mental images of white skates, blonde hair, ambulances, and a child in a field of flowers.

When I reached the north side of the rink again, there was a young woman sitting on a bench. She wore an off-white coat and was lacing up her figure skates. On the path in front of her was a wooden sled with a curved back, and on the sled, a swaddled baby. The mother wore headphones, and smiled at me. I wondered what she planned to do with the baby while she skated, all alone on the frozen rink under the trees, and was tempted to walk around the rink once again, to be able to see. But it was getting late and I needed to go home, so I continued down the street, imagining the tall dark trees with their white skirts, like dervishes frozen in mid-twirl, above the baby resting in its sled on the ice, next to a bank of snow -- an arctic version of Moses in the bulrushes -- listening to the rhythmic slash of its mother's skates cutting the ice.

 

Happy Valentine's Day

Neither iron nor ice

Can still my heart's red rhythm

When I think of you