Changing Landscapes

Chris Burden's magnum opus arrives by flat rate priority mail. Returning from the post office I place it on the laundromat scale opposite the bike rack to see if it's really as heavy as it feels. And it is: weighing in at seven pounds, it's one pound less than the weight of a baby.

My camera is a lot lighter, though, clasped in my hands, following the movements of dancers, coming together from different points in Washington Square towards the fountain and dispersing in a contiunous flow of motion. Eight different sites and a change of location every ten minutes over a good portion of the park's ten acres means fast work for the camera too, climbing in and out of the fountain.

My neighbor alerted me to this work, Changing Landscapes: A Movement Choir. The choreographers are members of the Laban Institute of Movement Studies; the dancers, mostly from Drew University and responding to the Square's Ohmstedian rolling landscape for the first time.

Barcelona to New York

Couple in Snow, 2001. Photo Liza Béar

A friend and former neighbor who got a lot of trees planted and bike racks put up in Little Italy but now lives in Barcelona is in town. When we first met in the early days of Connecticut Muffin she was working as a casting agent.
Today we meet for tea at the McNally Robinson bookstore on Prince and Mulberry facing the cathedral and churchyard which I once overlooked from my perch in the building now housing the Mulberry Street Public Library.
The entrance to the library is on the narrow alley, Jersey Street, a location for many fictitious crimes in student films and unfortunately a dumping ground for a real crime Upside Down Parrots, San Gennaro Festival, 2002

committed in the basement of the Puck building. It's also where the original Ferris wheel for the San Gennaro Festival would be parked until 2001.
The site of the bookstore was still a Chinese live chicken outlet in the early 80s. Occasionally at dawn a rooster crowed. A murder of as many as 50 crows would congregate on the slate roof and play games jumping over each other; from behind the computer screen, I watched them through the tall arched windows
My friend turns her head to watch a tall man in a raincoat with a shock of grey hair; she recognizes him as Tom Stoppard (she has just seen his Broadway play, "Rock and Roll"). He crosses Prince Street, enters the bookstore and prowls amongst the new book displays; leaves, walks a few steps down the street, turns back and reenters the store.

Readings from Grace Paley at Cooper Union

Now that the bike is fixed and travel possible, a party for the soundtrack CD of Downtown 81 at the Tribeca Grand Hotel tonight is definitely an option. It would mean, though, detaching myself from Barack Obama's dance moves with Ellen de Generes, lacing boots and clattering down the stairs, uh, neighbors, so I'm holding out for the Grace Paley homage tomorrow, November 6, at Cooper Union's Great Hall on East 7th Street,7pm. See you there.

Obstinacy, Teenage Characters

For his first film as a director, Chris Menges directed Shawn Slovo's screenplay A World Apart, set in South Africa in 1963. The story is told from the point of view of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl trying to reconcile herself to her activist parents, a theme taken up more recently by Julie Costa-Gravas in Blame it on Fidel, though with more humor,less narrative drive and perhaps fewer dramatic peaks. The dilemma being that activism demands time and dedication that children feel belongs to them. A World Apart is particularly successful in foregrounding political situations while developing strong characters.
There are separate full-fledged interviews with both Slovo and Menges in the book done after the film was screened at the NYFF; in spite of huge critical acclaim for it as a political drama, the film was only kept in theatrical release for a month. At the time I had just started teaching at Columbia, or was about to, and once a year selecting films that especially moved me from the NYFF to write about. next on this topic: Why this one and not that...

"I want to ride my bicycle!"

Still frames from Protectors of the Bike Lane, bike clown protest filmed in
Washington Square for "Squaring Off", (c) copyright Liza Béar, 2005

Rushing to the cramped Soho post office on my bike to mail a late bill bursts an inner tube, so I head for Time's Up on Houston Street with some bread: two baguettes in exchange for tools and maybe mechanical help to fix the flat. The place is surprisingly devoid of fellow cyclists. At the center of the large storefront and former antique furniture store which serves as HQ for the environmental activist group, Steve, the owner, a man in a striped grey shirt with a mustache plays his guitar.

"I can't do anything without my bike," I say.

The bicycle clowns have been out on a demonstration to guard the bike lanes against incursions by motor vehicles. They have the tools.

"They'll be back any minute," he says."You can listen to a song."

Seated on what must be the cat's chair, the cat, claws out, jumps on my lap and claws through layers of clothing to reclaim territory.

Steve sings a ballad he wrote about the new police parade regulations limiting groups of cyclists to 50.

I'm number forty-nine
Please don't pull me out of line

On the very first Pink Floyd album one of Syd Barrett's more whimsical numbers was a bicycle song.

I've got a bicycle
It's got a bell and a basket
I'd loan it to you if I could
But I borrowed it ....

Shifting Gears

To work phone magic with the production crew compositing my book, I have to use up some precious author-interaction credit (limited by company policy). This is where their understandable budget/schedule constraints clash with my responsibilities to photographers, agencies, distributors who have supplied photos. Understandable, because the outsource crew has to prepare prepress materials for 54 other books at the same time. But just a bit of voice-to-voice interactive (long overdue) cuts through the fog of a dozen emails; a ruler and a specking wheel squash a dispute over the aspect ratio of a photograph; finally, the facts on the page dissolve dissent. Sort of in gratitude, I learn some Adobe electronic editing acrobatics to save them time entering corrections.

SATURDAY
Mottled clouds over Mott Street. Facing each other at the café's adjacent window tables, the foursome resume their tete a tete or cross talk, pick up the threads from the previous week. The first November chill brings out warm weather winter plans to swoop down on relatives in the Caribbean. A gaunt dark-eyed thirtyish Italian approaches Rachel on the bench, her back to the street, and shakes her hand. "Cadaques," he reminds her by way of introduction. "Oh yes." Cadaques, once a small fishing village perched on a rocky promontory on the Basque coast, beyond Figueroa and Barcelona, is Rachel's second home and a place in common for all the others. Because the Hotel Port Lligat, next to Salvador Dali's studio, was an early discovery of my mother's and a summer childhood haunt, Cadaques has become a conversational beachhead.

Halloween Fall-Out

During the night of Halloween,
a friend's bike gets bent out of
shape by a parking misfire, a kerb jumping vehicle. I don't, but almost do. Hitting the cc button in error can do it, launch a flurry of misunderstandings. Ouch! A virulent attack. Unfounded accusations lurk under cover of cyberspace. Another's hysteria creates a dark pool of apprehension.

At lunch a solicitous friend makes me trade the cup of soup for the bowl. Her daughter is getting interested in typography, typefaces, she says relieved, not just in Facebook. I tell my friend I'm at the center of a Bermuda Triangle. It's complicated. Someone wants me to drop the project. Now? she asks. But no, I say, I don't support the print equivalent to late-term abortion, which is what it would be. Don't worry. It's good about your daughter, though. She says, yes, but for them a larger font just means having to write less homework on the page. The school wasn't impressed. Their buttoned up traditionalist choice of typeface is strictly Times Roman.