Sock it to me

I mentioned yesterday that I was in Midtown buying socks. Specifically it was uniqlo and I was looking for red ones. Why? Because today is my birthday, and it's a bulky one. It's not just a "round" one (with a zero) but completes a 12-year Chinese zodiac cycle, and in China one wears red underwear during one's zodiac year, just in case. (It's not so much auspicious to do as it would be inauspicious not to.) But really, sixty?

Keeping with the Chinese theme, these 皮蛋 help me feel young.

Coming and going

Great New York day. I was in midtown to buy some socks (more about that tomorrow) and took the occasion to check out the new murals in the narthex of a light-spangled Saint Patrick's Cathedral. The first addition to St. Pat's in seventy-five years, Adam Cvijanovic’s luminous “What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding” celebrate immigrants, from the 19th-century Irish, who brought with them the Marian Apparition at Knock, to the global present, human figures in movement attended by saints, angels, the Holy Family and the Lamb. It's a knockout (sorry, I couldn't resist), the sincerity of its love for all God's children deeply moving.

 

How beautifully Mother Cabrini, patron saint of immigrants, is placed here, with Venerable Félix Varela y Morales (a Cuban-born abolitionist and advocate for the poor and immigrants, not a name I knew) behind her... but it's the walking shoes in the foreground that took my breath away, including those a weary walker has taken off to rest. It's a wonderful, and sadly all too timely, shrine to the kaleidoscopic wonder that is a nation of immigrants.

But there's another side to everything, and I experienced it this evening at the new(ish) Perelman Arts Center at the World Trade Center, where the Under the Radar Festival presented the stunning Aboriginal play, "The Visitors," Jane Harrison's witty and profound imagining of the conversations Aboriginal elders will have had about what to do when Captain Cook's ships sailed into Sydney Harbor in 1788. What are these people's intentions? Should we welcome them, as is our custom, or drive them away? What might we exchange with them, learn from them? They look unwell, surely we can heal them. Besides, they're visitors, and visitors leave - their own country must be calling them back - right?

There is much more humor and pathos in it. As the elders seek consensus, following fussy but effective protocols for discussion, hilariously updated into Aboriginal English, strange weather sends disturbing warnings. And a young man who had snuck up close enough to one of the big boats to be sprayed by someone's spittle, sickens. 

 

The performance was preceded by a land acknowledgment. We find ourselves in the unceded country (in the Aboriginal English meaning of that term) of Lenapehoking whose land and waters are, as they have always been, a place of exchange and encounter.

Buds

Our new semester begins today. (My class starts tomorrow.) In the midst of uncertainties large and small, the show somehow goes on, for now.

Constructed environments

While the Lang courtyard enjoyed its last day before the new semester, I was in a place new to me - the "Sky Room" atop the Parsons building at 2 West 13th, booked by a Faculty Senate co-chair who teaches in Parsons' School of Constructed Environments. These spectacular vistas are to the southwest and northwest. You can't see the original New School buildings, home to the Lang courtyard maples, from here. 

Not playing

This cartoon by Ruben Bolling is from a few days ago, but sadly no less relevant today. Generations of Americans have grown up with Richard Scarry's books, which show the vim and vigor of a society with all sorts of people (shown as all sorts of cute animals) busy playing many complementary roles to make our shared world hum.

The lawless siege of Minneapolis Bollen is describing represents a siege on the idea of such a society itself. Speaking of Minneapolis, I heard from my choir friend whose daughters teach in elementary schools there that at the public schools, parents are forming "human walls" at the entrances of schools to make safe corridors for children to be dropped off and picked up. I picture the whole Scarryian menagerie lined up there, warmed by their shared determination despite the icy cold.

Long may she wave

A little snow

This process of change

This cheerfully colored word-cloud synthesizes responses of faculty who participated in a day-long discussion on the future of the liberal arts last semester. The question to which they were responding: "How are you feeling about this process of change at The New School"? While not many of us actually in the liberal arts were able to be part of the discussion (it was announced on short notice and fell on a a teaching day), it is apparently the basis for work we're invited to participate in this semester, too, "re-imagining humanities + social sciences." Today we had a "kick-off" webinar laying out how the sausage will be made.

Until your light outlasts the night

A rather lovely prayer penned by the Episcopal bishop of Missouri, Deon K. Johnson. I'm tempted to post it on my office door.

The stones weep

Multifaith prayer vigil at Columbus Circle for Renee Nicole Good and thirty-nine others who have died in or fleeing ICE abuse in the past year. After some prayers (including one from the Episcopal Bishop of New York), Buddhist and Sikh chants and a mourner's Kaddish, each of the forty name was read, as the names and pictures of all were held aloft, with the person's age when known. When a soprano then sang "Ave Maria" I pictured those whose names we had heard sheltered and united beneath her cloak, as in that statue I so love in Vienna. The vigil ended with Good's widow's poignant tribute to the beloved whose murder she witnessed, a Hindu invocation of the rage at evil and cosmogonic love of dancing Mahakali, and a rendering of "Amazing Grace."

I sometimes think interfaith events dumb traditions down to an uninspiring lowest common denominator but these prayers didn't downplay the differences. Their fierce particularity heightened our shared grief at each of these senseless deaths, and our determination that hatred and cruelty shall not prevail.

What can we do but sing

So happy to be back singing with the choir this morning. Our anthems were some Haydn and Copland's setting of "Shall we gather at the river." 

For several us it was a return after a few weeks holidaying with family, and catching up we registered how frighteningly the world is changing around us. Our young tenor lead was in Colombia for his grandfather's funeral when the US attacked neighboring Venezuela. An alto told that her two daughters, school music teachers in Minneapolis, reported zoom classes as public schools, which had already instituted "ICE drills," had closed: students were too scared to show up. The soprano lead described herself as shattered by the realization that the government could just kill you and claim you were a terrorist. 

The choir director suggested we might, as a body, join a demonstration sometime, an idea we all welcomed. In such terrifying times, the tenor reflected with a wisdom beyond his years, "what can we do but sing?"