Blog Bottle Neck

There's so much going on that it's hard to know where to begin, or where to find the time to write it on the almighty blog...But until order is restored I cannot think.

There's Vince.

There are the pink roses on my terrace.

There is Estorbo's rat.

There's the exciting new project in SoHo.

There's the TV pilot that Magnetic Media will shoot in the next two weeks.

There's the BBC.

There's Will's rooftop and there's Molly's rooftop.

Ugh! I must pick a few.

Oh. And the three foot basil.

Grass Walls

[mea culpa: the picture above was scanned from one of my garden books, but I cannot remember which one - if anyone recognizes, please let me know!]

This is sort of, but not quite, what I'd like to do at a new project in SoHo...in fact we will be doing it, so now comes the fun part: figuring out how. Ours will be lower, wider and feature the kind of grasses you see all the way below, which are in another SoHo garden I did a couple of years ago...and of course the grass wall will be on a terrace, not the ground.

Once in a while a client comes along who is happy to play the games one dreams up*. And of course these are quite serious games because one can't do a hundred feet of this, five feet wide and high, for pennies. Or even a lot of pennies. And that's just one of five terraces and an indoor moss garden. Very, very exciting.

The raw space is an add-on to a landmarked building.

I don't like edges. This is the roof - an orchard and greenroof meadow will share space up here.

Future orchard.

I am seriously thinking of incorporating graffiti into part of the design - there's a wall begging for it. And no, I'm not kidding. This is a roof over the street. I love graffiti.

Grass and perennial mix for wall.

* Update: This garden never moved beyond paper. The paper phase was very exciting, and then it fizzled.

Roses...

The natural habit of the Abraham Derby rose is to to droop a little - maybe because their heads are so packed with petals, too. I love these roses so much, on a visceral level. They are utter beauty. Can't get enough of them. I hope for another flush...the weather is cooling, but these rebloomed within three weeks, so, maybe.

Hmmm - I should organize a farewell party for them.

Purple Basil

The meeting

Not too many people have been able to get me to:

a) stand more or less still near a camera, or b) actually like the pictures they take of me...

Me and the Canadian on the Brooklyn Bridge a mere...week and half ago


A beach! This was shortly before we were shooed off the precious sand (there were actual waves, too) on the East River between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, by a nice Park Ranger







The deal, sealed.

Lunch-figs

This is largely a repeat of Chris' blogpost today...but it's an example of how little things can make an experience approach or depart from, perfection. Of course we're being privileged, here. We are not in Darfur or quaking in Baghdad. Nor on the street outside waiting for our next fix. So...perspective, and the ridiculousness of life must be taken as a given.

Regardless, and donning the shell of apathy without which we'd be hanging from sheet in a mental institute:

We had lunch at Lucien. I like Lucien (the place, I mean. I'm less sure about the man, Lucien Bahaj, who treats his waitstaff with medieval contempt, with the exception of our waiter, FluffBomb, today, who was both inept and favoured, apparently. Hm, what's up with that??), despite seeing how...deliberate it all is. It's a small place, maybe 30 covers, and the owner is almost always there. Same as Al di La, in Brooklyn. He greets us as friends, gives us little gifts of wine, figs (today), kisses my hand when we leave and tells me I bring sunshine to the place. I simultaneously smile in pleasure and grit my teeth in, oh-this-is-so-obviously-a-ploy...

But it is nice. And it makes us go back. Though I argue the good food helps, too. Good, not extraordinary.

But his gift of figs today, at Monday lunch, really was sweet, and I adore figs. I also adore Chris' iPhone which took the picture. Sigh.

I Love Clustrmaps (again)

I admit that I was very rude recently and referred to Clustrmaps, in a comment on Christopher's blog, as Clustrf#**!'s...This after our maps consistently told us that NO ONE, NOWHERE had been reading our blogs for days. I wrote to them, and received a reply within hours. And today our counters are up and running again. It is sweet and nice to know that in the commercial ether of cyberworld real people do exist and fix things. It is a free service (at our level), after all.

From: Marie Viljoen
To: theteam@clustrmaps.com

Subject: Hate new Clustrmaps update for little blogs
Hi Team
I used to love my dots. No longer. So if the new experiment "as of late September" continues, I shall de-Clustr. I'm sure many smallbloggers like me feel the same. We all have big egos, after all.

Love
Marie

From: theteam@clustrmaps.com
To: Marie Viljoen

Hi... whoops, I'm wondering if we conveyed the wrong impression in our wording... what we meant is that "as of late September" we have actually LOWERED those thresholds so everyone is actually getting MORE FREQUENT updates! I would be extremely grateful if you could elaborate (just a sentence or two) on what you meant... in particular
a) did your dots 'miss a few days' (this is a possible for completely unrelated reasons... nothing to do with the 'late September' business...
b) did the wording in our little FAQ sound more 'ominous' than we intended? (if so, we can quickly edit this for clarification)
The notion of 'de-Clustr' is of course VERY bad for us: we were especially designed for 'smallbloggers' as you put it, and take enormous pride in listening to all of our users and trying our best to help in every way possible.
As you can see, you're getting a very personal reply directly from 'mission control' early on a Saturday morning, and we hope you'll help us to clarify the situation... we would hate smallbloggers to think that we have set things up the wrong way!!!
Many thanks!!! -CJ on behalf of the ClustrMaps Team

So I really don't know who CJ is and whether he/she is sitting in an airconned garage somewhere in Arizona or in a cubicle in Silicon Valley or at home on the plains of the Midwest or...? Not a clue.

But I feel a bond. And now I feel loved again.

It's pathetic, I know.