Whole words, whole sight

Published in Hudson Valley Magazine, September 2009

Twice a month each summer, a small walking tour comes to a halt on the dirt road outside the cabin where I live at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony in Woodstock. A dozen or so persons with little maps in their hands listen as the guide speaks, gesturing now and then in my direction. I can’t quite hear what she’s saying, but I’m sure she’s mentioning the name of my cabin, Quartette, and adding that like the rest of the colony, this low little building was built in 1903 or thereabouts and is therefore historic.

I am invisible behind my window, I know. And as I sit there, looking at all these people looking back at me but not seeing me, I find myself wondering about this veneration of an official past. I have lived at Byrdcliffe each summer for nine years, and it seems to me that not only myself but my neighbors, who like me have foolishly persisted in trying to be artists and writers, inhabit a reality undocumented by historians. It is a fragile reality, but alive — as beautifully ugly as a chicken-of-the-woods fungus growing on the bole of a tree. And you can’t press a fungus into a history book without killing it.

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Published in Hudson Valley Magazine, September 2008

Just before a stand of mountain trees is logged, the loggers mark those trees to be felled with strips of blue paint around their trunks. These trees are always the very best: loveliest to look at, and capable of producing the finest veneers when run through a sawmill. This is a story about hundreds of such trees crowding a remote Catskills mountainside. The trees were carefully shepherded by the owners of that mountainside for more than a century, up until just a year or so ago - only to be finally marked with blue paint.

That should have been the end, yet it wasn’t. Thanks to a highly unusual agreement between an old Catskills clan and an enterprising conservation program, the loggers have had to look elsewhere. The trees will stand tall on that mountainside for hundreds of years to come -in human terms, forever.

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Published in Hudson Valley Magazine, August 2007

One of the most beautiful, yet frightening, short stories I’ve ever read is just a few pages long. “House Taken Over,” by the Mexican writer Julio Cortázar, tells of a brother and sister living together peacefully in their home after their parents die - and then the house is taken over by unknown and angry spirits. We never see the spirits, but the brother evidently knows just how dangerous they are.

One by one, rooms are rendered off-limits as the spirits spread, until at the end, brother and sister flee altogether, with the brother locking the front door and throwing away the key - not to guard what’s no longer their property except in name only, but to protect any poor fool of a burglar from being tempted to enter a seemingly empty house.

I was thinking of the story the other day when I considered how thoroughly creatures other than us take over our cabin each summer, here on a wooded hillside in Woodstock.

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You can also listen to an MP3 audio recording of this article.

Published in Hudson Valley Magazine, March 2007

Last summer, I read an article in a local paper that described how, in March 2005, filmmakers had descended on a series of locales in Orange and Ulster counties and used them as stand-ins for rural Wisconsin.

These locations included the Sky Top Motel in Kingston, the Reservoir Dairy Deli in Shokan, and the Phoenicia Diner. This seemed both magical and bizarre to me. How, I wondered, could an ordinary diner, whose pancakes and sausages I was intimately familiar with, be transplanted to a Midwestern state I’ve never even visited? And why had the filmmakers picked the Valley for their sleight of hand? This demanded investigation.

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Published in The Woodstock Times, July 27, 2006

The first the American public heard of Dave Holland was when Miles Davis hired him at the age of 21 to play in his famous Quintet. “How about that Dave?” Miles said happily to jazz writer Leonard Feather shortly thereafter. “Ain’t he a bitch?” That was in 1968, nearly 40 years ago, and Holland has stayed aloft in the jazz stratosphere ever since. Local residents can hear why for themselves Saturday, July 29 when he plays a solo concert at 8 p.m. at Maverick Concert Hall.

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