UNDER THE RED SKY [400]

New York City, Wednesday 7th June 2023, 18:17 ET

Between Monday 5th and Friday 9th June, I took my first holiday outside of the United Kingdom, to New York City with my parents, since beginning this website in May 2016. This wasn’t intentional, but more because my last couple of holidays have been guided by museum exhibitions, resulting in my trip to Tate Liverpool in 2019 to see art by Keith Haring, and travelling to Milton Keynes in 2021 to see furniture by the Memphis collective. To this end, expect an American flavor, instead of flavour, to some upcoming subjects.

 

The main takeaway from this week in New York, however, is that I experienced its worst air quality in sixty years, and walking for miles in it will sting your eyes.

 

I did not watch the news on the morning of Tuesday 6th June, having chosen Looney Tunes cartoons instead, but I was told the main news was the ongoing effect of wildfires in Canada. They began in March, but by June had affected eleven million acres of forest, around fifteen times more than expected for this time of year, displacing 120,000 people in the progress. Two thirds of the over four hundred wildfires were categorised as “out of control”, and their smoke was being carried south towards the north-eastern United States.

 

New York City, Wednesday 7th June 2023, 18:12 ET

Fortunately, our plans that day took us to the Hudson River side of Manhattan and away from the skyscrapers – I am mindful enough of the tall buildings in London holding in exhaust fumes, so New York City was a perfect incubator for all the incoming particulates. All we experienced was a bit of rain, and the grey haze in the sky turning a bit yellow – otherwise, we were fine.

 

The air quality index used in the United States since 1968 usually puts New York into the yellow “moderate” category, with a value between 101 and 150, indicating a risk to people sensitive to air pollution, but otherwise acceptable. Overnight, and through Wednesday 7th June, this index reached 484 at 5pm local time – the maroon “hazardous” category begins at 301, described as “health warning of emergency conditions: everyone is more likely to be affected”. The highest level ever recorded on this index, New York City was briefly the most polluted city on Earth, the sky having turned orange.

 

On the ground, those who already wore masks from the COVID-19 pandemic continued to war them as normal, and everyone else did not. Fire stations began handing out N95 and KN95-standard masks, again left over from the pandemic, but this did not start until Thursday 8th June – by then, Mayor Eric Adams had appeared behind various lecterns telling people to curb their activity, to stay indoors, and that they could skip exercising their dog. 

 

New York City, Wednesday 7th June 2023, 18:17 ET

Meanwhile, my parents and me carried on as normal: the sky had become a sandy colour once we entered the Museum of Modern Art, becoming orange while we were inside. We took refuge in the toy shop FAO Schwarz, in the Rockefeller Center, and later at the Hard Rock Café on Broadway. We only heard from Mayor Adams in the early evening, having walked around more shops. We had reduced our activity, but this meant walking for eight miles instead of twelve. Despite wearing glasses, my eyes had begun to sting, but not enough for them to tear up. 

 

We took as many pictures of the sky as everyone else, both locals and tourists, and we had to be outside to do it. We were there for an experience, and this was the only one not planned. On Thursday 8th June, the sky was clearer, turning to blue through the day, as the wind blew the smoke further east, and we kept ourselves around the outside of Manhattan once again. Now back home, we have no side effects from the smog, but we were lucky, as we could leave. On Sunday 11th June, the air quality index registered at 109.

 

It is not a case that I believe in climate change, for we have experienced the effects of it. This may have been an extreme event, but it is one more likely to take place. Not modifying our behaviour all that much was unwise, but this will have been an event where the advice will now be anticipated for next time. That this event will be described as a one-off, or rare, belies the effect that, around the world, they are happening more often. If you thought you could do something to mitigate the damage caused, you would do it. If you thought you had a way to prevent it, you would do it. I only sound like I am babbling because I feel the need that someone really should be doing something.

AND OTHER FRIENDS OF MINE, TAKE YOUR TIME [122]

I would love to visit New York again. While my only trip so far, in 2011, confirmed I would rather not live there – London is a beehive, but New York is a wasp’s nest – saying I visited the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, Central Park Zoo and FAO Schwartz (before it closed) is not bad at all.

We also had two art galleries in our sights: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. However, the only photographs I have of the Metropolitan Museum of Art were all taken from their roof garden, and the three I have from MoMA were for reference purposes: a portrait transmitted by RCA Photoradiogram in 1926, a print of Sir Isambard Kingdom Brunel by those chains (from the SS Great Eastern), and Edward Hopper’s painting “House by the Railroad,” which inspired the Bates House in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”

The clearest picture of all from MoMA is one stuck in my mind, and like “House by the Railroad,” the painting was given anonymously: it was Salvador Dali’s 1931 painting “The Persistence of Memory,” presented to them in 1934. Apparently inspired by a Camembert melting in the sun, many examples of Dali’s surrealist imagery are present: melting watch faces representing the passage of time, ants representing death, a creature of some indiscernible type, a foreboding foreground shadow, the Catalan landscape, and so on. This artwork has been reproduced endlessly, and working melting clocks are now just something you can buy.

Regardless of the content of the picture, the memory that has persisted of “The Persistence of Memory” is just how SMALL it is: it is only 24 centimetres (9.5 inches) tall, and 33 cm (13 in) wide, making it a bit bigger than both A4 and Legal paper sizes. The oils are painted very finely, and having seen only photographs of the picture previously, I imagined the brush strokes would have been much larger. Dali must have had his eyes tested regularly.

I usually do not take pictures in art galleries – if I want to refer back to what I saw, I will buy a guidebook, or find the picture later online. However, what I will have taken from the visit is a sense of proportion, and a sense of colour: because so many pictures have been taken of it, “The Persistence of Memory” is available online in many different levels of quality, brightness and contrast, and even shape, depending on how the picture has been cropped. One of them must be right, because I cannot take an average of them.

I am not in favour of banning photography in art galleries, although you should consider flash photography and copyright before you walk in, but if you walk around a gallery with a camera permanently in front of you, taking snapshots of that time you saw an object, and it looked like “this” when you “saw” it, remember you were already there: you don’t need to look at the work later, you can look at it now. Just like a film is made to be shown in a cinema, art galleries provide the right conditions to contemplate ALL of an artwork, including its size.

There is only one legitimate copy of “The Persistence of Memory,” and it is a picture I did not realise existed until last week: Dali’s own “The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory” (1954), and on display at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. In this interpretation, the shadow has receded, and the landscape has been blown apart into straight-cut bricks, revealing a further surface underneath, and the unidentified creature has mutated. The painting is thought to mark the loss of Dali’s interest in surrealism, just at the point where other forms of art at the time, particularly Pop Art, become more about what is presented on the surface. As it happens, it is also about the same size as the first painting.

NEVER SPEND YOUR GUITAR OR YOUR PEN [70]

It is hard to confirm which single product has been manufactured the most in human history, but the ubiquitous Bic Cristal pen, with over ONE HUNDRED BILLION made since 1950, but be up there. After that, we may then be looking at food and drink items, and components of bigger pieces, like bolts, nuts and screws.

Like television, the ballpoint pen is the culmination of the work of many people. The wonderfully-named John J. Loud first patented such a pen in 1888, but that patent expired through lack of interest. However, the Hungarian inventor László Bíró. with his chemist brother György, are credited with inventing the “biro” because they overcame problems others found with keeping the writing ball in place. Instead of just trying to fix it in position, they coupled it with the viscosity of the ink – with the right consistency, the ink can continue to flow without drying around the ball, and without leaking. The Biros’ invention, and the Second World War, took them to Argentina in 1941, where the first “Birome” pens were made in 1943. 

However, of all the companies to make ballpoint pens under licence from the Biros, only one was successful enough to buy the patent from them, and that was Société Bic, based in the town of Chichy, just outside of Paris. Already makers of parts for writing instruments, and well before they started making disposable lighters and razors, the Bic Cristal pen, originally known as the “atomic” pen, appeared as deceptively simple as the original 1948 Citroën 2CV, while using the same thorough, forward thinking in its design.

Firstly, the hexagonal barrel of the pen makes it as easy to grip as a pencil. Making both the barrel and inkwell from see-through plastic made it cheap, while providing a rarely-seen, for the time, guide to how much ink is left. The hole found half-way down the barrel ensures the air pressure inside the barrel remains the same as the outside, while the stainless-steel writing ball, held within a tip made from a brass / nickel compound, was milled to a diameter of one millimetre, with an accuracy of one hundredth of a millimetre. This formula has only changed a couple of times – as of 1961, the writing ball was made of a harder-wearing tungsten carbide, used in Parker’s Jotter pens since 1954, and the top of the cap was cut off in 1991, in case anyone chewing the end of their pen accidentally swallowed it.

The success of the Cristal was sealed by the time it went on sale in the United States in 1959, with Bic having bought the Waterman pen company the year before. Bic were able to offer a pen for 29 cents, when Parker were offering their Jotter for two dollars - Jotter refills costed more than an entire Cristal. It was Bic that introduced the idea that pens could be disposable, with ends broken off, or chewed out of all recognition, or used to clean out people’s ears, or just thrown away. The joke that no Bic pen has ever been “finished” was used in a 2015 promotion, with Bic giving £10 to customers that could send an (untampered) empty pen. Mind you, no-one dares speak of the tone-deaf “Bic For Her” much now, but I can’t say anything that wasn’t said better by Bridget Christie.

The Bic Cristal pen became part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2001, and of the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2006, preserving it for ever more… but you can find them everywhere…