ONE MORE TIME, SPRINGTIME

Find the Snow Baby in this Picture, Spring 2014
nan turpin photograph

Here’s how you know this was the last snow of the winter:  when it started after dark we didn’t dare hope it would stick.  And mostly it did not, except for an icy crust along the downtown parking lots.  But in Grant Park we had one last good dazzle.  For proof that this snow was most wished for, the paths were cleared but few walked on them.  We were in the snow and as early as one arrived the snow was already tracked by shoes, paws and the tiny hop-tracks of squirrels and pigeons.

This was a distinctive snow, made up of tiny beads, looking more manufactured, like a space age laundry detergent, than something crystalline  formed somewhere above our dreams and sifted over us as we slept.  This snow looked extruded, shipped in and sprayed over the park through a long hose hooked up to a tanker truck on Michigan Avenue.

Is this what the snow they ship to Brazil for wealthy children to frolic in looks like?  No matter, last night we even got a tiny Snow Toddler to greet train commuters at the morning rush hour.  It’s how we say Good Morning in a town not so tough if it gets just one more snow.

SNOW BIRDS ART BIRDS CHICAGO

nan turpin photograph

 

We’ve returned to Chicago for today’s image of the city in winter and one way the season itself makes a text over the town for us to read, before it melts.  Chicago and many other cities are substantially buried in snow this week.  The Art Institute has a pocket exhibit in its Asian wing of Hokusai’s prints of Edo/Tokyo under snow.  Inside the museum Chagall is well represented with paintings and a lush stained glass window set to take the east light from Lake Michigan.  Outside the museum, on Dearborn Street, a six-minute walk away, there’s a large slab of Chagall mosaic in a corporate plaza, mosaic set on all four sides.  It’s slightly off the path but you can see it from the sidewalk and with a 21st century powerful act of the will, pull yourself out of the stream of business, step down to this gallery level and walk around the effervescent streams of line and color the artist tiled onto the slab just for us to remember to look at on a busy day.  It’s here for us and for the unnumbered thousands of pigeons who hunker down near it for shelter and then begin to pick and peck in circles and crazy 8s and then around the entire installation, to follow the imaginings of a man who might have thought like a pigeon wanders or a butterfly flies.   But it’s winter in Chicago, no butterflies today, just pigeons and Chagall.  We have another winter city snow text up our sleeve for tomorrow, come back to see us.

YE OLDE MODERNE TIMES

nan turpin photograph
Medieval Moderne, Paris

Bonjour.  Glad you could make it.  In these last days of one calendar and first days of the next, we’re considering the ways old and new might co-exist.  We are looking for an image of peaceful coexistence with our own histories.  Here’s a well-loved famous entry into the old medieval student quarter of Paris, sacred ground of sacred drunkenness and public bonfires of those who spoke too freely when they were sober.  Noisy, itinerant, self-confessed lovers of life, unashamed, unabashed quaffers of all they could get, the Latin Quarter, its medieval building stock preserved, old stone, old timbers, fragrant coils of staircase, sans concierges, ground floor commerce, meat grilling, rats, key words of anachronism, beloved because bygone, world class zoo of things discarded, if you have to ask you can’t afford it upstairs, buy a slice of 6th floor walk-up here or buy a small country elsewhere.  Zinc roofs, maids rooms, laundry strung across the smallest windows flapping in a good breeze so as to dry and keep the pigeons out all at the same time.  This we teem in, flock to, cling to, this we love and this we hate, cobbles hurt our feet, slick with trash in a dousing rain, this we love and this we hate, past and present, it sells good, it smells like a raft of lamb grilling among the postcards and keychains.  It’s a zoo.  We can leave the gates unlocked and let our history live all around the town.  Come back tomorrow.  New Year’s Eve.  We’ve got a party picture for your New Year’s Eve.  It’s in another part of Paris.