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the Cloisters
Sunday, July 28 2002
The other day Gretchen and I were talking about the Jewish Autonomous Region, a part of the former Soviet Union about which she was completely unaware. For a change it was I who had the information concerning an aspect of Jewish geopolitical history. Admittedly, my information about the Jewish Autonomous Region was scant; I'd merely noted its existence while poring over a National Geographic map of the Soviet Union from the 1980s. That was back before the Web, in the days when the unexplained existence of things still had a chance to puzzle me.
What was most puzzling of all about the Jewish Autonomous Region was that it was not located in a place with any history of Jewish settlement; instead it was hard along the northeast Chinese border near Korea. I figured it must have been some sort of glorified Indian reservation for Jews, perhaps borrowing heavily from the time-honored tradition of Soviet gulags. Looking up the Jewish Autonomous Region the other night on the Web, it seems my suspicions were pretty much correct, except there never really were that many Jews living there. Originally established as a Stalinist answer to "the Jewish question," it is now only about 2% Jewish. My graduating class at a Redneckistani high school was half that Jewish.
Today Gretchen decided we should go to the Cloisters, a museum of medieval art. It's located in northern tip of Manhattan, in Tryon Park, an unusually rugged landscape where the underlying schist protrudes high above the Hudson River. We'd misread "Tryon" as "Tyron" and, waiting for the A train in the Jay Street subway station, I was joking with Gretchen that "Tyron Park was named after my homie Tyyyyy--rone."
For whatever reason, the A train was making all local stops on its way up Manhattan. When we discovered this, somewhere around Canal Street, we were something just short of devastated. We didn't even want to imagine traveling 250 blocks on a local train. Happily though, we'd thought to bring along some reading material.
When we finally got off the subway at 190th Street, we found that the path out of the station lead down a gentle-graded tunnel to daylight. You know you must be inside a pretty strange landscape when you're underground and the way to the surface involves going further downhill. It turned out that we we'd been in a tunnel running down the center of the Fort Tryon Ridge, and the entrance to the subway station was in the eastern side of a cliff, a narrow block away from the northernmost section of Broadway. Though the topography was completely alien from my usual template of New York City, the scenery here still had a distinctly New York feel to it, with tall brick buildings crammed together at strange angles over the undulating ground. Nearly all of the people we passed on the street appeared to be Hispanic. Many of them were engaged in activities one doesn't normally see in the more diverse neighborhoods to the south: outdoor bingo and dominoes games, for example.
After a certain amount of frustration involving completely inaccurate signs, we'd climbed up to through the woods to the ridge top, looked at a few smallish buildings that clearly weren't the Cloisters, and then found our way to the Cloisters themselves.
At one point we made use of a crosswalk to cross a street, and there happened to be an NYPD cop car approaching just as we crossed. Believe it or not, the asshole cop actually yelled as us for not giving him due deference as an officer of the peace - as if we should have acted like there was no crosswalk the moment we saw him, the glorious policeman. The sense of entitlement one sees among cops (particularly since September 11th) isn't just disgusting, it's depressing. On the one extreme, in a free society, police should be apologetic for the power they wield. On the other, one would expect an increase in cop arrogance as the freedom of a society deteriorates.
The Cloisters consisted of a building built mostly in the Romanesque style using native stone, but with details such as columns, archways, and even whole apses pillaged from medieval sites in Europe. Inside, the Cloisters were chock full of statuary, paintings, illuminated manuscripts, altar pieces, tapestries, and various decorative kitchen artifacts from the medieval period. Nearly all of the art had a religious theme, with one glaring exception: a set of tapestries depicting the hunting and killing of a unicorn. I've always been a fan of the rawness and creepy angularity of medieval art, and it was good to be able to see it up close and in the flesh. One can't get a sense from reproductions, for example, how detailed the drawing can be in illuminated manuscripts. And the details in one painting I saw were so fine that I couldn't always distinguish between the cracks in paint that the artist had depicted and the real hairline fractures in the painting itself.
Unfortunately, my blood sugar was running low, though eventually I corrected this in the museum snackbar. Gretchen and I took a few opportunities to look out across the Hudson River at the woolly unsettled Palisades of New Jersey. Looking at some of the plants being grown in the Cloisters' courtyards, I noticed that they had the same raw, creepy medieval angularity as the art inside.
"Scratchiti" deface the windows of the F train on the way to Manhattan through Brooklyn.
A camel at the Cloisters Museum.
A creepy Compositæ flower in the Cloisters Courtyard.
The same creepy Compositæ flower in the Cloisters Courtyard.
A weird nightshade (possibly a Datura?) in the Cloisters Courtyard.
Some courtyard plants.
An altarpiece.
There were lots of mangled Christs depicted at the Cloisters.
Repetition makes us numb, but still it's amazing how little horror remains in this imagery.
Columns integrated into the brickwork.
One of the Cloister's towers.
A boat on the Hudson.
Gretchen is not a big fan of children, particularly those at this age.
This photo was taken moments before this child began tearing
Cloister courtyard plants out by the roots.
Along the outside of the Cloisters.
A tree straddles a stone wall in the woods below the Cloisters.
I sit on a narrow elfin staircase in Tryon Park.
The jumble of buildings in northernmost Manhattan.
The 190th Street A Station emerges from a cliff.
On the way home, Gretchen and I stopped for burritos at the 23rd Street Burritoville, the place I always used to go back when I had a job in Chelsea. As we were leaving, Gretchen ran across a couple unattractive lesbians on the street and, on noticing their New York Liberty shirts, engaged them in a spontaneous conversation about the the most recent game.
Back at our place, Gretchen found the cats toying with a live pigeon that had somehow made it into the house and had wedged itself into a tight space behind her desk. I picked it up and examined it thoroughly. Aside from a little dried blood under its wing, the pigeon looked okay, so I put it atop a light fixture in a neighbor's yard so the cats wouldn't bother it any more. It must have still been in a state of shock because it didn't fly away.
The neighbors, the couple with the wood-upholstered yard and two screaming kids, were having a little outdoor barbecue party tonight, and on seeing Gretchen and me, invited us over. Gretchen whispered, "Do you think we have to go?" "Sure, let's go!" I said. It helped that they said we could bring Sally.
So there we were, drinking the neighbors' Yellow Tail Shiraz and talking mostly about what we do (or don't do) for a living. At first my conversation consisted of valuable market research for my new computer repair business, but later I found myself talking to this one guy from Reuters who was telling me that he used to do technical due diligence research for investment firms back during the dotcom bubble. It's entirely possible that he was merely white washing his work history when he claimed that the only time he ever filed a report favorable to a dotcom was the time he investigated Paypal.
It turned out that most of the people at the party were from a rung or two higher up the socioeconomic ladder. Most of them were displaced Europeans working for Reuters, though the man of the household was a German expatriate who handled the import music accounts for Tower Records. There was also a young woman present who said she was an Astrophysicist working for the Museum of Natural History. Then of course there were the kids, three of them, mostly whining, screaming, and crying the whole time, particularly one little dark-haired boy from a family upstairs. Sally was a big hit with the other two once they realized she wouldn't attack them.
[REDACTED]
Eddie Edna clambered over the fence to hang out with us for awhile, evidently surprised to see Sally had somehow made it over. Then Noah looked over from our patio and meowed a few times but then decide he wasn't agile enough to attempt a visit.
Later on, back at our place, I cracked open a can of Colt 45 and kicked back to watch my Sunday program, the Wire on HBO.
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