It is my experience that there is no "dark of night" in NYC.  There's
ALWAYS light pollution.  Ruth, who hasn't been to the city for MANY moons,
and hasn't missed it a bit.



At 12:43 AM -0400 10/22/06, [log in to unmask] wrote:
...this sort of performance piece on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art by Cai Guo-Qiang.  Every day at noon a small aerial shell is set off,
and explodes in fromt of the assembled onlookers, perhaps 100 feet away,
producing a black cloud of smoke.  When I saw it for the first (and only)
time I missed half of it because I was looking away.  I regretted my
inattention, but then I realized that Cai's clouid is not really a one-shot
thing.  It is most powerful when seen (or simply imagined) as a work of
multiple episodes, each one different:  cloud hangs together, cloud is
whirlpooled, cloud is swept up, or down, or sideways.   Each day is
different.  You don't even need to see the various days - your imagination
can bring you there.

Tonight, walking up Broadway at 83rd, I passed an older apartment house,
with a tall stovepipe type boiler stack.   The boiler fired up, and blew a
very big cloud of black smoke out into the sunset rays.  It twisted and
turned in the newly-cold air of late October, writhing and twirling.

I wonder if it does that in the dark, at night.

Christopher
-- 
Ruth Barton
[log in to unmask]
Dummerston, VT

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