We know this place

There is a dipping
and a rising tide

Light slides from the bricks outside
and four o’clock's
the gangplank
poised above deep black

The tipping of the pliable
a teasing bounce
the embarkation point, noon

A potted boxwood in terracotta
seems to keep the whole afloat
an object anchoring a body
whose last desire is to be cut loose

Cleave my chest open at sunset
And expose the architecture within

Diagnose this

A lusting for and leaning toward
light, of which we are deprived
deprived deprived

Fresh

Sometimes I need to crunch on things, a bit like...a bunny.

I ate strange things today and the antidote was a chopped salad of radishes, fennel, Belgian endive, and an orange, with terrace mint. A variation of Cafe Gitane's salad of orange, black oil-cured olives and chile, which is wonderful. I was lazy and didn't, er, French the oranges (no, really, it's a technique: cutting between the segments and removing the membranes...I just sliced it. It makes a difference to the texture and, obviously, appearance - hence, overall feel-good factor. I think that's what good cooking is - maximum sensory impact). I feel funny eating oranges now, though. I still am a bit of a purist, and this late summer is the time of total harvest overload: peppers, tomatoes, aubergines, corn, beans, and peaches. But not oranges.

Hmm, so how do I justify my abuse of lemons and limes. Problem.

The peaches below are local at least to the Northeast, so not trucked in from Gardnowswhere, as Estorbo would say. They are sweet and succulent and perfumed and have the smallest hint of bitterness to the aftertaste, which I like. Contrast that to the straightline sweet of the piece of Kit-Kat I ate earlier today, and instantly regretted, and you are just plain puzzled. There's no better desert to me than fruit - maybe a taste I inherit from my father, who is a fruitbat (hey, we once ate fruitbat, together, but that's another story). He always eats fruit after dinner, peeling it carefully with his penknife. Who else has a penknife??? Or a handkerchief??? Or a Jag that keeps blowing up on freeways? Or a Rolex at the bottom of Zeekoeivlei?

But I digress. He also always eats the most bruised fruit first. When I was little I would eat the spinach first, which I hated, and save the roast potatoes for last. Another digression.

So I had two delicious peaches for dessert, and watched some more of the Original Avengers, c. '66. The girl gets to do just as much fighting as the boy and still looks fabulous.

The High Life

Pool with a view...I looked at a new job for HWandV, on Broadway and East 4th. It's three floors, top of building, three garden spaces, plus this pool which is going to be resurfaced in...mother of pearl. I haven't met the client yet, just his agent, but this will be his East Coast pad - he's based in LA, and I suspect we're talking Movies. I look forward to it. I've actually been to this place before, for a party years ago, with Mr Tracey Ryans, legendary mover and shaker and transient friend. Now it's going to be gutted and redone, and I have to figure out what one earth to do with, for example, the built-in brick (eugh) planters on the second level (which is on the tenth floor), with massive, fullgrown trees, the fake lawn and the otherwise oddly suburban (read screamin' heebie jeebies) feel, and the completely abandoned roof, which does, though, have a very nice herringboned stone floor.

Below: see the above picture and skip over the lush garden on a roof in the middle of the view; in the faaaar left of the view is another roof garden, on the old Karl Fischer Building. That's ours, too. In fact the photo of me laying the little lawn on one of the previous posts, is in that garden, designed for the exclusive use of the two little Yorky terriers that share the house.

Now behind the Karl Fischer Building and just visible as blue glass way on the left of the second pool picture, is the Gwathmey Siegel-designed No. 1 Astor Place. Two years ago I was asked to do a freelance design for one of its two lower terraces for a young couple moving in. I gave them two designs, which they paid for, and then I was fired, during a 40 minute phonecall from the Missus, for forgetting twice in a row to cc her on an email. Hm.

This week, HWandV is contacted by a frustrated general contractor who says that the company hired to install the garden on this terrace in that building for this couple has been fired, that work has ground to a halt. And would we please fix it. I look at the design with Bill. Looks familiar! Funny. Anyway, I told Bill he'd better tell the GC the whole story and 'fess up that I am very much associated with HWandV (the couple knew this but may have forgotten). Apparently no one has a problem with it. Small, elevated world.

No, no, I'm staying well out of it. That would be a bit too weird, even for me.

Brooklyn Bridge

I didn't take my camera with me so have no pictures - I can't run and hold stuff. Two days in a row over the Brooklyn Bridge and with half an hour's difference in starting-time, the change in the light profound. I must have left home at about 6.30 this evening and would have arrived there around 6.45, with clouds beyond the southern tip of Manhattan, over Jersey, diffusing the striking light, pinkening it, so that the whole of Manhattan stretching northward, grounded by the Empire State Building and offset by the smaller Chrysler, appeared in staggered layers of colour-depth, sepia against bronze and against rose, against grey and silver, against highlights of orange, and southward against the slate green peculiar to the East River and the buildings fronting it in the Financial District, with Dumbo in Brooklyn still in transparent yellow, its blues deepened, its park defined to the blades of grass lying under picnic blankets and the water on the raked pebble beach throwing again and again a tiny clear, dark wave. Contrast this with the flat backdrop of humid summer days when the air is thick with moisture and heat and each particle adds to the flattening of the skyline, the oppressiveness of the city, making seem impossible the layers of dimension and possibility brought by the cooler weather.

I have seen this view so many times and wondered again at the nature of beauty, the foundations of land and water obscured by successive risings of brick, iron, metal, cable, painted, stripped, embossed, crossed by bridgespans, elevated by concrete, isolated by deep water, lightened by the wakes of the ferries and barges and tugs passing constantly beneath. On the horizon the prehistoric structures of the cranes that unload docked container ships, like dinosaurs come to the water to drink, in Brooklyn, in Jersey, in pink. The Statue of Liberty copper green and shining in the bay, speaking to the trees on Governor's Island, Brooklyn Heights and my own Cobble Hill standing opposite Wall Street, across water, in ranks of red brick against the glacial green glass. Beauty entirely manufactured.

The bridge a passage and destination, people constantly stopped in their tracks, on this their only visit, dodged by cyclists and ordinary pedestrians who pass this way every day, as they stand with cameras pointed at the massive arches, Gothic and cathedral-like with the cables soaring successively higher, the sun now catching the stone at the summit as it breaks free for moments before the cloud returns us again to this blessing of Western light.

Talks about Talks

Post the CBC interview on Friday I was contacted by one of the crew members whose production company has an Idea. Into which I would fit. Hint: it has to do with gardens. So I'm meeting with them tomorrow.

Tick, tick, tick.

Back to Life

Pictures from Marijke, from her weekend in Hermanus. Hmmm. Clever girl. I can almost hear the sea and smell the fynbos...



Ha! Ha! Little bugger. It wasn't just a missing screw but an uninvited guest. HALF a cherry pit! Again! I feexed eet, I feexed eet. I love my dishwasher.
Things are back on track.

We Know this Place

There is a dipping
dipping dipping
and a rising tide

Light slides from the bricks outside
and four o’clock
the gangplank
poised above deep black

The tipping of the pliable
a teasing bounce
The embarkation point, noon

A potted boxwood in terracotta
seems to keep the whole afloat
an object anchoring a body
whose last desire is to be cut loose

Cleave my chest open at sunset
expose the architecture within
and diagnose this:

A lusting for and leaning toward
light, of which we were deprived
deprived deprived