Homefront Roundup

This sure does seem to be Christian Week at AmbivaBlog. Maybe in honor of the beginning of Lent? In reaction to all the intense love-hate Judaism over at True Ancestor? (Hey T.A., I used to wonder why you sometimes signed yourself A.T. -- dyslexic southpaw? Spanish? -- until I almost signed myself "maba" today.)

I happened to walk through some of Christo's much-discussed Gates yesterday. I have to say I found them anticlimactic. (Admittedly, the circumstances were not ideal. I'd just pushed J's wheelchair all the way from 1st to 5th Avenue and we were frantically searching for a place to pee, which turned out to be the Central Park Zoo.) The fiery color, so like the saffron of Buddhist monks' robes, does look wonderful from a distance, winding around the paths and up and down the hills of Frederick Law Olmsted's landscaping, lighting up the ashy monochrome of February. But when I walked through and under them, the fabric looked heavy and inert, more like drapes than filmy wind-yielding robes. (There wasn't any wind, was part of the problem.) And there was something claustrophobic and oppressive about the way they hung straight across, like Christiane Amanpour's bangs; I felt like I was going to bump my head on lead weights in the hems, even though they weren't that low. They felt low. It felt like being a little kid lying on a hotel room floor, playing with the bottom of the heavy, dusty drapes. The kind of gates they really look like is the kind slalom skiers whack over, not the kind you walk under. (Oh! Keith Olbermann on "Countdown" just said "I know a shower curtain when I see one"!)

I shouldn't, and hopefully won't, be blogging too much these coming days. (What's too much? What's enough not to have friends go away mad, like I did when Andrew seemed to stop blogging?) I need to do some concentrated work for pay, in order not to go into a debt death spiral. The AmbivAbortion Rant, Part II, has momentarily bogged down. I was trying to say way too much (more than readers would put up with) and need to back off and see what to leave out. I bit off more there than I knew. So rather than finding something to blog about just to have an excuse to blog (you all know exactly what I'm talking about), I'm only going to blog if something really grabs me. That should be about the right amount.

- amba

Comments

[Tamar]

I shall miss you - boo hoo.

Thanks for the "comment."