Teach me to sing and make it happy, because I'm sick of the sorrows of this world

[sovay]

There is a kind of late gold light on old brick that I love; I saw it a little after five as I came down the hill behind the public library, glowing on the stamped nineteenth-century façade of the Litchfield Block on Pearl Street. There was a window pushed up on the top floor, its glass reflecting like gilding and a flowered curtain blowing out of it. I looked at it for a while, hoping there was someone on the other side looking back at me, for symmetry. Nothing moved except the curtain and I was getting cold without a hat, so I walked down the concrete stairs with their street art of primary-colored cars (I can tell you the blue one is a Volkswagen Beetle and the yellow one is a Volkswagen Vanagon and I have no idea what the red one is, except I don't think it's a Volkswagen anything) and I went home. Sometimes this gold-leaf light looks to me like the nineteenth century, but this afternoon it was definitely Edward Hopper light. Specifically the kind of strong late sunlight you get in Room in Brooklyn (1932), which I make a point of visiting whenever I go to the MFA. Last time I checked, the placard alongside the painting was still considering it in terms of melancholy, but it has always looked peaceful to me: solitary, not lonely. I can't tell if the woman is reading or watching the street, but neither spells desolation to me. Just if it were my room, the sunlight on the carpet would contain a cat.



I've learned only recently that this area is formally known as Gilman Square; that the wheels and whistles I hear in the night belong to Pan Am freight trains, the Amtrak Downeaster, and the commuter trains of the Lowell Line; and that the view I looked out over this evening will vanish with the Green Line Extension. As with all forms of media lately, keeping up on local news is a balancing act. I want to know what will happen to the neighborhood I live in: I don't want to spike a coronary seeing it dismissed as a collection of "underutilized sites" and "gaps" in need of "infill buildings" in order to realize its destiny as a "hub of public life." I know there's nothing to do about it—the station has been going in since before I moved here—but I happen to like the rather open, zigzaggily brick-lined intersection at the end of my street; it's got a bunch of trees and I can even still see the sky over the tops of them, which is increasingly important to me in a city determined to high-rise every block it can. The lion-headed concrete art deco of the former Reid & Murdock warehouse and the green bronze pediment of the Knights of Malta Hall don't cry out to me for reconstruction so much as preservation. All the rhetoric surrounding this project has been commercially nostalgic, returning the square to the hustle and bustle of its days as the site of the Winter Hill station on the Boston & Lowell Railroad. That was in 1835. 1888, if we're being generous to the renovated station. It's picturesque to envision that again, but it sets my teeth on edge in the way that nostalgia does when it wants to be sympathetic magic. The B&L was subsumed into the Boston & Maine Railroad before that postcard station was even built; after the turn of the century, the railways were re-routed and streetcars took the majority of commuter traffic over the (now equally threatened by the GLX) Lechmere Viaduct and the station first went derelict, then was demolished during the Depression, a full half-century before the B&M finally went bankrupt in 1983. I am tremendously starry-eyed about trains and somewhat fanatically in favor of a working rail network in this country rather than wall-to-wall cars and I still know that you can't just shake two centuries off a neighborhood whether you tear out the more recent buildings or not. You can't make one branch of the MBTA substitute for the booming blue-collar industries of more than a hundred years ago. And even if you could strip off time like paint, I rather wonder what it means that you're casting back past two world wars to do it. Who lived here then? Who do you imagine did? I don't say that the GLX will or should fail—although I certainly won't be able to afford to live here when it succeeds—but I wish it weren't trying to paint gentrification as time travel, especially when it's so selective. Assembly Square is not Ford Motors' Somerville Assembly. I feel safe guessing that the "vibrant mix of businesses" to be encouraged by redevelopment will not include either of those nineteenth-century mainstays of Somerville employment, brickyards or meatpacking plants.

tl;dr I get weird when my community planning starts to sound like Miniver Cheevy. But what do I know? Edward Hopper looks restful to me.

Comments

[nineweaving]

That is a beautiful painting. And yes, it reminds me of you.

Nine

[sovay]

That is a beautiful painting.

I have loved it ever since I started seeing it in the MFA. There are still places in Boston where I could get almost that view, but not that I can afford.

And yes, it reminds me of you.

Thank you.

[poliphilo]

I reckon the Hopper means whatever you want it to mean. Museums shouldn't impose meaning on the work they exhibit.

[sovay]

I reckon the Hopper means whatever you want it to mean. Museums shouldn't impose meaning on the work they exhibit.

Dreamwidth ate the first version of this comment, so let me try to reconstruct:

Thank you. I find it useful when the museum tells me something about the meaning assigned by the artist, however much or little it chimes with my own feelings, or the circumstances of the work's creation, which I may not have known for myself. The further it goes into personal interpretation, the closer we get to the awkward placard in the MFA's otherwise sterling Escher exhibition, which insisted on reading Ascending and Descending (1960) as a bleak allegory for totalitarianism and the Holocaust and I'm pretty sure that's overthinking a joke.

[tree_and_leaf]

I love that Hopper, and yes, it looks restful to me, too.

[sovay]

I love that Hopper, and yes, it looks restful to me, too.

I understand he has a reputation for expressing the alienation of modern life and I don't disagree that some of his paintings work that way, but not all of them and definitely not this one. Not to mention all the pantings he did of coastal New England—Gloucester, Cape Elizabeth—which are just wonderful for sea and space and light. I spent my summers around the Portland Head Light. It still looks pretty much like that.

[isis]

That is absolutely a cat-intended spot right there.

[sovay]

That is absolutely a cat-intended spot right there.

Thank you!

I conclude the curator of this painting does not live with a cat, or the placard should have mentioned it.

[ethelmay]

Couldn't the cat be on her lap? If I have the slant of light correctly (admittedly I'm not very good at that sort of thing), her lap should be in the sun, too.

[sovay]

Couldn't the cat be on her lap? If I have the slant of light correctly (admittedly I'm not very good at that sort of thing), her lap should be in the sun, too.

Oh, good point. Absence of visible cat is not proof of absence of actual cat.

[ethelmay]

Heck, she could even be nursing a (quite small) baby. Those low-armed rockers were marketed for breastfeeding and needlework (not simultaneously). But quite likely she's only daydreaming or mending stockings or both.

[lemon_badgeress]

the only thing melancholic ABOUT that is the absence of a cat. what on earth. look at those colors. that image is light drenched. that person is surrounded by air and sky and SPACE and FREEDOM. i bet she's doing needlework, god, that light must be AMAZING, she could be working on forty count or higher. i am so jealous.

[genarti]

Right? I assumed reading a book, but either way, what a lovely restful way to spend some quiet time!

[sovay]

look at those colors. that image is light drenched. that person is surrounded by air and sky and SPACE and FREEDOM.

Yes! Thank you! That!

Space is not loneliness.

I hope you get light like that for your needlepoint sometime.

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for introducing me to that lovely painting. I think she's contemplating the implications of what she's just read. Perhaps some idiot is proposing to build a tall building opposite that would destroy the cat-shaped space.

It's picturesque to envision that again, but it sets my teeth on edge in the way that nostalgia does when it wants to be sympathetic magic.

Oh! You nailed that so well. I'm also a train nut and pedestrian advocate blah-blah but the economy has changed several times since then Bob.

[sovay]

Thanks for introducing me to that lovely painting.

You're very welcome. It's one of my favorite things at the MFA.

I think she's contemplating the implications of what she's just read. Perhaps some idiot is proposing to build a tall building opposite that would destroy the cat-shaped space.

Now I envision her, in a couple of decades, taking on Robert Moses. I bet she wins.

Oh! You nailed that so well. I'm also a train nut and pedestrian advocate blah-blah but the economy has changed several times since then Bob.

Thank you! Yes. And it's fine if you want to put the new line through, but don't make it sound like it's a restoration.

[ashlyme]

It's a happy room, whatever the sitter's doing. And there's nothing like sunlight on old brick. There should be a rose that colour.

I love hearing about your city. I'm just sorry people are dicking it about.

[sovay]

It's a happy room, whatever the sitter's doing.

I think so. All that sky. All that light. Contentment.

And there's nothing like sunlight on old brick. There should be a rose that colour.

Yes! Oh, please grow one in one of your brownfields. I'm sure Kate could pick it. (I don't know what kind of Tam Lin she'd get.)

I love hearing about your city. I'm just sorry people are dicking it about.

Thank you.

*hugs*

[ethelmay]

I have felt since I was very small that there are Real Bricks (like the ones in the painting) and Fake-Looking Bricks (much too uniform in color and texture, as well as often being the wrong shade of red) and Why the Hell Would Anyone Want That Color Bricks. The grayish tan ones made me especially upset. I once told my mother they looked like those awful pale stools I used to get after being ill (I don't think I was more than about ten). So, in addition to telling me that that was a vivid but horrible comparison, she told me a whole lot about liver function, which is what you get for having a doctor for a mother.

[sovay]

I have felt since I was very small that there are Real Bricks (like the ones in the painting) and Fake-Looking Bricks (much too uniform in color and texture, as well as often being the wrong shade of red) and Why the Hell Would Anyone Want That Color Bricks.

Yes! There are way too many fake bricks these days. Why would you not want real brick-color if you could get it?

So, in addition to telling me that that was a vivid but horrible comparison, she told me a whole lot about liver function, which is what you get for having a doctor for a mother.

That's wonderful.

[boxofdelights]

There is something so beautiful about strong horizontal sunlight. When it is overcast overhead, but clear to the west, so the sun lights up the orange-red rocks against the complementary blue-gray sky, like this: http://www.paulhanke.com/images/sunset-in-the-garden.jpg

I suppose it is melancholic that the sun is setting, and you never do get to say "O moment stay!" no matter how beautiful this moment right now is.

[sovay]

(This comment retyped after Autolycus enthusiastically erased it.)

When it is overcast overhead, but clear to the west, so the sun lights up the orange-red rocks against the complementary blue-gray sky, like this

Yes. That's lovely. And with clear skies you get that lambent swimming blue-gold, which I also love.

I suppose it is melancholic that the sun is setting, and you never do get to say "O moment stay!" no matter how beautiful this moment right now is.

But the painting lasts.

[shewhomust]

"Vibrant" is always bad news in planning-speak.

[sovay]

"Vibrant" is always bad news in planning-speak.

There's been a lot of developerese flying around this project and in all cases it makes me twitch. Those words do not mean what I mean by them.