7A (You-logy)

My upstairs neighbor passed away this morning. The backstory here is deep and the echo of her absence will resonate.  She was a great, strong woman who broke ground as an editor and a fashion executive. When I moved into my apartment she was about the age I am now; I was a young single mother and as the coop Board president, she took me under her political wing.  For over twenty-seven years I felt protected.  As she aged and became a widow, we were just two women sharing stories and inspiration.  I trusted her wisdom. Last week she turned 99-- a milestone for anyone, and for those who think they want to live past 100, well... it's not easy.  Trying to process this today, it is quite a life-- begun in the 1920's, conquering the city, managing a marriage, career and family, and hardest of all-- witnessing one's own decline and deterioration into old age.  I participated in the last quarter of her life; the rest was a narrative I treasured.  

This morning the courtyard pigeons were in a state.  A woman claimed there was a white dove on the roof,  as though escorting her spirit. I'm not sure of these things. For me this day was long and rough.  We dread the absence of certain people... and it comes for all of us, no matter how we resist. We interpret signs, we pray, but we are not certain.  She herself was not religious; in the end I'm not sure what remains of one's spirit aside from the memories we carry. Most of her accomplishments were achievements, not product. There are no grandchildren to take her legacy forward-- no judgment at this moment. 

For several years she handed me down various articles of clothing-- vintage Prada, iconic expired fashion symbols.  Some of them-- the black ones-- I wore onstage until they almost disintegrated.  It occurs I have a pair of her lace-up boots that barely fit; the discomfort of wearing them this week will feel like a hair shirt, like a slightly painful reminder of mourning. She was not sentimental.  

We shared a passion for literature, and of the New York School of painting which she'd witnessed first-hand.  She knew many of the artists whose work I admire and who passed on long before I got here. Recent years robbed her of her sight, and her hearing was challenging. She tried her best to keep up with news and museum developments. The current fashion world had forgotten her nearly entirely; her generation had mostly disappeared, but in her day she was on the A-list of events like the Met Gala. 

Processing the breadth of a life like this is overwhelming. Nearly thirty years behind her, I already sense that I have entered a kind of era of obsolescence. Despite the weight of what I've seen and done and read, my existence has little present impact.  We are daily fading into the past.  Some of us have our wrinkles injected and our skin renewed, and maybe delude ourselves with a kind of narcissism that we are still relevant. Not that simple.

I've had a recurring dream... set in the long corridors of a building like the Vatican... an empty museum or a kind of mausoleum. I wander these temporal hallways--  the abandoned niches in the wall stripped of monuments and medals. I can almost smell a kind of familial dust, as though the air is thick with cremated moments. Where are the people, I am wondering?  Where are the sculpted images and painted altarpieces? The emptiness is palpable; it is like an architectural enigma.

Demonstrations yesterday were comforting in Manhattan.  They were peaceful and the solidarity and diversity of the crowd was reassuring. I felt nostalgic and safe, despite the menacing presence of armed policemen everywhere.  The thousands of handmade signs and messages were creative and passionate and human. If something happened to one or many of us-- well, our lives had a momentary meaning, a mission. I felt lifted and hopeful.  

Back uptown I ran into a woman who confessed how lonely she was; she'd never found a partner, shunned online dating apps, and just felt passed over. I tried my hardest to encourage her-- to volunteer, enlist somehow, not to sit and wait for life to disappoint her.  My aging neighbor was a graphic reminder of how precious our moments can be, how difficult the latter part of one's life.  Rage, rage, I wanted to urge her. But the news of this one sole death seemed devastating today. For each of the plane crash victims-- the Iranian, Israeli and Gaza casualties-- there is a hole in a loved one's heart.  One day soon we will all become the hole in someone's heart... or at least a brief obituary, an alumni memoriam, a Facebook post. 

My neighbor lived in her apartment for over 60 years; she was married here... her children were born and grew here.  Inevitably the place will be stripped of the medical aids and the old books and vinyl-- the furniture, the charming improvements her husband crafted.  It will be emptied and renovated and a new family will move in. I was once a young family here; I've moved up the ranks to become one of the senior tenants. Time moves on, and as I commented in a piece long ago, New York is like a Grand Hotel-- people move in and out, and we can't hold onto our personal geographical souvenirs. 

I suppose the ultimate lesson of death is the value of life.  We get a huge grace, most of us... we waste time, we squabble and complain and pine.  Some of us are gone too soon; some of us linger too long and become the burden of others.  And some of us, like the man in 11A, are granted an epiphany-- a near-miracle. How to solve these things? To live and die more or less of 'old age' is another lucky variation of the plane-crash narrative; we all end up the same.  I know my neighbor loved life enough to hang in through the challenges of aging-- the aches and pains and indignities... I, too, love this life too much.  Just to sit in the park and watch people-- to see the sunset across the reservoir... yesterday's bagel and a home-made coffee-- a library book.  To sense the passage of time and its irreversible cruelties and kindnesses-- it's more than I deserve, I think sometimes, but I'm determined to earn the privilege of staying and not quite ready to leave, God willing.

Wildfire of the Vanities

The passing of Tom Wolfe is yet one more fallen leaf from the tree of my New York City.  Like Quentin Crisp, Truman Capote, Andy Warhol-- he walked among the ubiquitous social landmarks of the version of our eccentric and rich urban culture I inherited in the 1970's.  He'd occasionally show up at the gallery where I worked; you could find him daily lunching at his favorite table in the Isle of Capri on Third Avenue and 61st Street-- right in the windowed perimeter area as though he was willingly on display, in his signature white suit, impeccably groomed and accessorized.  His hair was perfect.  Like so many writers of the 20th century who lambasted and loved the city, there will be no one to fill the vacuum he leaves.

A year or so ago, I saw him on the street, looking frail and aged maybe beyond his years, and it occurred to me that his generational tide was receding in a sad way; my own peers have grown old, whether they fight this or not.  We prepare ourselves for these clockwork ravages of time-- the natural purges of decades... but unlike the seasonal rhythms of nature-- the human race is not deciduous.  We die off, and the replacements are quite unlike their parent foliage.  If our annual cherry trees lost their color we would notice; not as much with the changing of the cultural guard.

The Bonfire of the Vanities seems innocent now, compared with the widened gap in our economic architecture; the millionaires have ballooned into billionaires, crime is criming, institutional corruption is rampant and pungent-- Wall Street, politics-- the music business-- just about everything is tainted with the stench of greed and the manipulations of power brokers.  Our daily news brings us one falling man after another-- the ones who grab, who touch, who lie, cheat, hoard and dissemble.  We are a diseased culture all dressed up like queens and princesses-- like strippers and whores-- we are enhanced, coiffed, made-up, pumped up like nothing else.

Coming uptown last Monday I was re-routed by the massive security barricades surrounding the Met Gala.  The police presence rivaled the Pope's visit.  Pedestrians and traffic were forced to bypass a wide radius around the temporary palatial-scale tenting surrounding the museum like a Christo installation-- for what?  So that the rain or elements did not alter the finery of the attendees who are not the New York social stars, but the usual nouveau celebrities-- the Kardashians, Beyonce, Rihanna--- on and on...  my museum-- selling itself to Hollywood for money-- so that the crowd-drawers-- the Costume Institute-- the rock and roll culture-- can continue to put on show-stoppers that bring audience but dwarf the art for which the museum was built to house?

I grew up at the cultural knees of this place.  I wandered its vast rooms and explored everything from Greek amphora to Chinese porcelain.  I prayed to the virgins, wept over the Dead Christ images, held my breath at the exquisite painted life of these dedicated artists of the past-- dreamed their dreams,  absorbed their images of history and mythology like my own bloodline.  A library card was all it took to gain access to these halls...  even as a young girl I let my princess fantasies loose when I ascended the Grand staircases.  I often did my homework in the Temple of Dendur and walked my dog at night outside the windows so I could imagine myself alone by the great silent pool.  

I've been experiencing for years the pop-wash of the museums-- the DJ's and soundtracks in the auction houses, the clublike atmosphere they create to pull in the younger crowd-- to make art 'relevant'... but somehow the paparazzi and celebrity-pomp seemed misplaced at the Metropolitan Museum.

Of course, that is the point now.  The celebrity culture owns everything; even the British House of Windsor, come this Saturday.  I used to get my fashion sense through art-- studying the great costumes and creations of the past via these paintings.  Now art is fashion, fashion is art...  the museums take their inspiration from the culture rather than lifting us to some artistic epiphany.  My first Graduate School 'talk' at the museum was the Giovanni Bellini Madonna-- most of these artists worked on Church commissions-- religious subjects and altarpieces; the spiritual informed their work and they innovated as they observed life:  humanized saints and Christ himself-- fleshy angels and suffering martyrs.  So the themed Gala-- with Catholicism nothing more than a fashion statement-- seemed like true trashy irony.

Not that I'm a religious prude-- but for Christ's sake, the pretentious uber-spending on religious grounds was Vatican-esque.  And Katy Perry literally stopping traffic in her angel wings which seemed more Victoria's Secret than Catholic... Rihanna with her Papal helmet and Sara Jessica Parker-- from the side of a bus to a Nativity on her head--- it was a little ridiculous. And yes, offensive, especially in light of the events of the world, the religious suffering, the poverty and devastation elsewhere, where religion maybe has a different meaning.

Downtown the Rockefeller sale reminded that wealth used to go hand in hand with some reverence for culture.  The collection was staggering and amazing.  That 1905 Picasso was haunting and deep.  Who among the Gala attendees will leave behind anything of this stature-- something museum-worthy in the old sense?  I don't know.  Tom Wolfe was in the hospital with an infection.  I wonder if he'd even had an invitation; whatever, I'm sure the display of vanities on 82nd and Fifth Avenue did not escape him.

Among the objects in the upstairs rooms of Christie's were small furnishings and things which seemed personal and precious.  A huge sort of greenhouse was constructed, with birdsong piped via speakers, and real hedgerow foliage around the display, like real gardens.  Scads of young employees waltzed around with their catalogues, eagerly waiting to show and open things-- unable to answer 99% pf the questions because they haven't a clue about the subject matter-- the meaning.  A young Hispanic woman circled the large greenhouse perimeter sweeping stray leaves into one of those old-fashioned movie-theatre dustpans...  this was her job.  Sweep, sweep... around and around.  She wore a black maid's uniform with an apron, and her eyes were red as though she'd been crying.  I imagined this was her second job and she was glad to have it-- and then perhaps regretted having to lap around while all these gapers got a glimpse of the formerly treasured objects maybe lovingly selected by an American royal family.  She was looking down-- engrossed in her task.  Around her neck was a simple cross, which touched me-- so like a young saint she was-- pious and simple, bowed and lost in the crush of the pursuit of something like money, less like art...

RIP Tom Wolfe-- whatever you represented, you will be missed.