Author Archives: Frank
Unlocking
Ghost of The Winter Garden
The Winter Garden (Atrium at the World Financial Center)
The Winter Garden –my personal talisman. A glass palace of gracious cylinders by the water, with palm trees taller than enormous houses, it arose one day in our desert of granite and whispered of a more elegant time, our own Crystal Palace, a place where multitudes could gather together and be alone. It was the longed for terminus of my walks and skating, the magical indoor playground for children and for workers in nearby buildings. At night, angels would sing there, and by day magicians perform. Images would appear from deserts and distant continents. Lights twinkled. Rare objects were presented for purchase. One could dine and stay there forever.A ghostly presence, heavenly and human, in the very shadow of enormous towers.
And when those towers fell, its crystal carapace cracked in the pain of Ilium burning, surrounded by pale ash and ghostly glass shards, its palm trees dying in the autumn sky, dreaming of forests long absent, gardens of mist and purifying water.
It arose again as a platform to gaze on a forgotten city, what had aspired to heaven was now a chasm, a hole in the body of a wounded entity, in which people and machines burrowed to no apparent purpose, a shadow destination for native and tourist. Long time I could not return to see Manhatta wounded.
Today, when I walk there, where people gather as if nothing has happened, around my stopped heart these memories gather, like forgotten loves, confusing the very purpose of time.
Winter – Soho
The trees sleep in winter, as we ourselves will sleep,
A cold white silence covers their limbs,
Although their pattern lingers in the streetscape ever varied.
No one sees the silence of bones that are sleeping.
High Modernism
You would think that having University Village in the neighborhood, with three towers designed by I M Pei, and a colossal statue designed by Picasso would be a treat, but it is a desert, an empty arid wasteland that I avoid walking through and photographing. Nothing happens on the street there, despite vast plazas, and people scurry away into the more vernacular parts of Greenwich Village as soon as they can escape.
This rationality is based on the belief that nature is inferior and needs to be conquered by introducing scientifically superior systems and mechanisms that are based on geometric order. High-modernism reduces nature from a multi-functional use to a single one in the name of efficiency. In the words of one of last century’s most relentless high-modernist, Le Corbusier,
“an infinity of combinations is possible when innumerable and diverse elements are brought together. But the human mind loses itself and becomes fatigued by such as labyrinth of possibilities. Control becomes impossible. The spiritual failure that must result is disheartening… Reason…is an unbroken straight line. Thus, in order to save himself from this chaos, in order to provide himself with a bearable, acceptable framework for his existence, one productive of human well-being and control, man has projected the laws of nature into a system that is a manifestation of the human spirit itself: geometry.” –Kathryn Scott
Dragonslayer
Washington Square in the snow (reprocessed)
Emphatic Stop
Theory and Practice
Two strays in winter
Standing like a potted plant
Wallet
Baarren harvest
Beautification
rare beauty in the North…
She’s the finest lady on earth
A glance from her, the city falls
A second glance leaves the whole nation in ruins
There is no city or nation that has been
More cherished than a beauty like this
From House of the Flying Daggers.
The author was Li Yannian, the royal musician in Han dynasty. And the beauty in this song was Madame Li, who was Li Yannian’s sister. He wrote this famous song to Hanwu Emperor in order to recommend his sister to the emperor.
In the bleak midwinter
Broadway, looking south
On Broadway
There’s something about Broadway that brings out the ham in everyone.
A sacrifice to Boreas
Boreas is the Greek deity of the cold north wind. When Boreas blows, the world freezes.
The bag here if from the hair salon down the street. The hair obviously styled. The nose bright red. A sacrifice to Boreas is about to be made by pulling the hood over the lovingly styled locks. Winter is pitiless in imposing his domain.
Scaffold in snowstorm
