ashes and snow, sunshine and rain

a perfect day to me is one that starts with sunshine and ends in rain.

a joyful reveille, a somber taps. hmmmm....lovely. the whole spectrum in a day - a masterpiece between bookends.

so, this finds me very happily tip-tap-typing on my keyboard as the raindrops are drip-drap-dropping outside.

my friend a. is visiting from louisiana (more about her later), and she's an avid fan of photography, so we went to the ashes and snow exhibit at pier 54 in manhattan today.

being a new yorker, and a sad one at that, i don't pay much attention to the goings-on around town. shamefully, the only time i really take advantage of what is right smack-dab in front of me is when out-of-towners come to visit. i know, i know...there's so much cultural yumminess to indulge in, it's a shame that i don't do it more often, it's just that life gets in the way. i had a subscription to time out new york for a while, but i found the pile just grew and grew until it anthropomorphized into a chastising crotchety old biddie:

look at everything you're not doing. look at all of this you're not taking advantage of. tsk, tsk, tsk.

so, i cancelled the subscription and threw her, i mean them, out.

so, as for the exhibit, i had no idea what to expect, and thank heavens, because expectations can totally screw with your experience. it was amazing. i don't want to give too much away, because if you're in the area or if it's coming to a city near you, you should:

go.

it's not just an exhibit as it is an experience. truly. the structure that houses the exhibit itself is called the nomadic museum as it travels with the show. it's enormous - 45,000 square feet - constructed of used shipping containers for the walls and paper tubing for the columns and roof (they look like giant empty paper towel tubes. that's one helluva roll of Bounty - the quicker picker upper.) the structure is about the length of a football field with a cement pathway down the center that is flanked on each side by the photos. miraculous sepia-toned images of elephants, whales, manatees, and falcons interacting with humans, they're printed on handmade japanese paper, suspended in mid-air over beds of smooth grey stones, and warmly lit from above. if you're lucky, some of them will make you cry.

at the far end of the museum, a giant movie screen continuously plays a film version of the exhibit - bringing to life the still images you just passed. trance dancers whirl about with elephants in pools of water - their arms and the elephant's trunks becoming, almost, indistinguishable. (oh, the freedom with which those women enjoyed their bodies - i was envious. i'll bet they didn't think about the size of their thighs or how their hair looked once.)

and the music...oh, the music...gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous. simple, minimalistic strings, and plucks, and warbles. (i wanted the CD, but not available until december...wahhhh.)

it's a divine experience, holy almost. not quite like church exactly. less hermetically sealed. of course, the building itself is reminiscent of a cathedral - warm light and shadows, soft music, high ceilings, but it's all in contrast with the noises of everyday slipping in through the cracks - cars roaring past on the westside highway, a buzzing helicopter overhead, wailing babies...

it's so very real. like life. yin, yang. sweet, sour. fat, thin. sunshine, rain. beauty and miracles and divinity and warm light/ annoyance and noise and crowds and port-o-potties. ya can't extract one from the other.

it is what it is, and it is beautiful.

but, i really don't want to give to much away.

oops.

and if you're wondering how this is in keeping with the topic of my blog - food, body, culture - this is culture people.

go eat some.