Lizkdc Dislocation

A February SOWA Night

From "I Make Things" melzeppelin.blogspot.com

There was so much I enjoyed about my Friday night.

It was a First Friday, Open Studio night in the art-land over in the far South End, what's now called Sowa (South of Washington). It's a neighborhood of brick warehouses, old power stations and the like, which once straggled empty between concrete tangle of the highway and the now-vanished elevated Orange Line train, and now have become artists galleries and lofts, candy boxes of creativity and whimsy and the enjoyable pretense and pose-iness of the art world.

Checked out a medley of paintings and photos and unclassifiable stuff, which was calming after my work week of anxiety and fuss.

Got to see my buddy Mel, and her Pete, show a selection of ornate creations. And meet up my friend Vasant, and then wander through this winter's unique mess of high icy snowbanks, passing white entombed bikes and cars and crazy massive icicles hanging threateningly from fire escapes.  I proved that I can bend someone's ear while clambering over a half mile of snow piles and icy brick sidewalks. Must be in my Boston genes.

When I first met Vasant, he was whining about the snow in Boston, and now he complains about the weak souls of his neighbors who fail to shovel well enough, which proves that he, too, is a proper Bostonian.

(Icicles...not the actual ones from Friday, but close enough).

Future, Past at MIT

PhotoMobMIT_0122_edited-1.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

This MIT Hall is like the echo of past futurism

This is an image from another of those geektastic Boston Photomob walks. I love how they make me re-see my own city.

That day, we went out on a Saturday of polar frigidity.  Everything was sharp, blue and white and cold. We wandered through the already deep and rigid snow banks, and shot the architecture of powerful, clever, techno-chic MIT.

This building, Simmons Hall, has an air of Asimovian melancholy to me. It's futuristic, but in a retro way, like the worn cover of a 1970s sci fi novel in a used bookstore bin.

At the very same time, I'm delving into the wonderful book Cityscapes of Boston, by Robert Campbell, which weaves the story of the city's built landscape going back to the 1600s, and its many layers.


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It has the effect of making me see buildings in terms of gestures and poses and pop cultural costumes, making a Georgian townhouse on Beacon Hill, and this lovely smartboy box, very much closer then they might appear.

February 2: Weight of Winter

PhotoMobMIT_0092_edited-1.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

There is a peace in the cycle of winter. Our knowledge that its very strangeness and intensity, burying and reshaping the world, will pass away again, provides us with a certain power.

Our ability to hold time in our heads, to know what the world was like before and what it can be again, is part of the magic of this season.

The plants on my windowsill react to the shift in light. With the snow well over waist high outside, they begin already to shoot forth new greens, with an unthinking chemical conviction that shifts in daylight ensure the coming of a spring in so many days, regardless of what the white walled world beyond the panes of glass say.

But we humans preview and prepare for spring in a different way, able to live over again in the midst of chilly dark February the past experience of what a bright April day is.

Not Snowed Out

Snowy Washington Square, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Won't it be a thing when we look back on this year, the crazy winter and how it went right over the top like a drunken winter that got drunk and climbed on a table and kept on snowing and throwing more snow and pulling down its pants and singing at the top of its lungs and snowing some more?

For months, I was working on a website that just came into fruition this month, and right upon the heels of that launch came a related live event at NYU.

And holes kept getting punched in each week by all the crazy weather, and everyone would adapt and use their phones and web access and keep going, and dig out and drive through the enormous looming snow banks and keep going, and all the flights would get canceled, and people kept getting on other other flights and kept going, and somehow it all worked out.

And it did NOT snow on the event, and we had speakers and an audience and food and a great space, and everything.

The next day, today, another giant storm fell, but yesterday, it was clear and sunny and slushy and everyone bustled about the sidewalks of the Village, unhampered. New York City is beautiful, even when things are (seemingly) teetering on the edge of impossible.