Celebrations of Curious Characters

If you’ve been reading something disturbing, I can recommend Ricky Jay’s new collection Celebrations of Curious Characters as an antidote.

For years I’ve enjoyed Ricky Jay’s hooded gaze and gravelly voice on FlashForward, Deadwood, The X-Files, House of Games, and elsewhere, but he is also an entertaining author, with a predilection for the sort of twenty-dollar words you might hear from a 19th century pitchman. (This way to the egress!)

Based on a series of four-minute public radio features, these are tales of magicians, con men, astonishing calculators and linguists, and people who can dress rats in riding silks and jodhpurs and train them to ride on catback (and train the cats to put up with it). The stories are accompanied by vintage prints, engravings, and handbills from Ricky Jay’s own collection.

There are also some good jokes.

Some years ago I portrayed an Israeli Mossad agent in the film Homicide, and the director, David Mamet, asked me to speak a few lines in Hebrew. I studied assiduously and proudly played my part. The movie later screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival, and I asked David about the audience reaction to my part of the dialogue. “Oh they loved it,” he said. “They all wanted to know what language you were speaking.”

Creating the High Line

The first book I read this year was High Line by Joshua David and Robert Hammond, the two young men who founded Friends of the High Line and led the effort to save the elevated rail line and transform it into one of the city’s most popular parks.

I walk the High Line, in whole or or in part, nearly every weekday morning, when I share it with only a few joggers and some gardeners in their green Friends of the High Line jackets. Like many people—as the authors note—I imagined that all that really had to be done was to clean out the trash, put down the concrete-plank walkway and a few benches, and tidy up the shrubs and wildflowers that were already growing there.

Not at all. As the book reveals, to turn the High Line into a park, it first had to be scraped down to the concrete so that its drainage system could be repaired. The railroad tracks themselves were painted with yellow numbers, removed, and eventually reinstalled in their original positions.

It cost $16.4 million just to strip all the lead paint from the structure and repaint it. It was repainted in a color deliberately chosen to look as if it had been there forever: a shade of black with subtle tinge of green that you can buy from Sherwin-Williams using the code number SW6994.

And all this work and expense came after a long and hard-fought political battle to keep the High Line from being demolished. That two gay guys with no particular access to money or power accomplished this feat makes for an inspiring story that starts the year on the right note.

The joys of the sullen

Seeing this message every morning on the way to the High Line eventually made me curious enough to look up the Brooklyn-based artist Elbow-Toe and to follow his Twitter feed. 

Missing billboard

Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. This artwork is the perfect illustration of that. The billboard medium is there, but the message is absent.

The framework, which looks three-dimensional but is actually flat, can be seen from the High Line. I passed it many times before I realized it wasn’t the real thing.

River teeth in Nyack

Yesterday Jenn and I took a train up the Hudson to visit our friends Gail Hovey and Pat Hickman. On the way we stopped at the Tovin Studio Gallery in Nyack, where Pat’s work is on display.

The first thing I noticed was a wheel of what looked at first glance like arrowheads. Pat explained that these were river teeth, a name adopted by David James Duncan for his book and journal, which offers this explanation of the name.

There is in every log a series of cross-grained, pitch-hardened masses where branches once joined the tree’s trunk. “Knots,” they’re called in a piece of lumber. But in the bed of a river, where the rest of the tree has been stripped and washed away, these knots take on a very different appearance, and so deserve a different name. “River teeth,” we called them as kids, because that’s what they look like. Like enormous fangs, ending in cross-grained root that once tapped all the way into the tree’s very heartwood.

Most of the show consists of works created from sausage casings—or in other words, the intestinal linings of animals. The material dries to a light papery sheet like parchment, which Pat wraps around objects (including some of the river teeth), colors with rust and other natural materials, assembles into ancient-looking books, and into which she embeds rusty nails and the lively-looking dried bodies of geckos. (Pat assured us that no geckos were harmed to create her art. They died of natural causes or in screen-door accidents and other mishaps.)

As another visitor commented, the overall effect of the show is beautiful and creepy—an assessment that Pat didn’t seem to mind.