Apologies, once again, to my worldwide fans, for the dearth of posts lately. I have been on the road for my day job, but hope to make up for it with some long-overdue information...
...starting with a "thanks" to Walt (of Crackskullbob) for his comment (under "And now for something completely different") giving the most inventive attribution for "April is the cruellest month" I've ever read, replete with riffs on the Kennedy assassination and other events of the 1950s and 1960s.
...and "thanks" to the anonymous commenter who corrected some of the misinformation I posted about the New York Public Library.
Now to return to the issue of naming rights. Here is a picture of Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital (apologies for the light standards and other urban detritus obscuring the view, and the fact that the pic is ever-so-slightly out of focus):
Or is it Mount Sinai Hospital? The sign says it is also the "Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Health Complex."
Or is it? On either side, we see that two wings are also named, for Isadore Sharp (left) and Lawrence S. Bloomberg (right). Close-ups here:
So whose building is it? What's the name of this place?
Lion sculpture pairs the world over — including those in front of the Art Institute of Chicago and inside the main entrance of the Boston Public Library — are staging a sympathy strike with their fellows at the New York Public Library. If they were lying down (couchant), they have risen up, and if they were standing, they are now reclining following the news that the flagship NYPL building on Fifth Avenue will be renamed for an admittedly generous benefactor.
The story is almost a month old, but in all the shock and indignation and whatnot over the Eliot Spitzer scandal, I failed to find a single letter to the editor of the New York Times about this.
The story is that Wall Street financier Stephen A. Schwarzman, who is also a library trustee, has donated $100 million to the library, toward a projected $1 billion expansion of the library system.
So the iconic Fifth Avenue building — currently officially known as the Humanities and Social Sciences Library but referred to as the “main branch” by locals — will be called the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building when construction is completed in around 2014, the Times reported. The building is protected by landmark status, and so his name will not appear on its facade.
But still…
$100 million is a lot of dough, but if they guy loves the library that much, why not leave the name as is? I suppose it’s hard to blame Schwarzman who told the Times that the NYPL proposed renaming the building — but he said he replied, “That sounds pretty good.”
I bet no one calls the building by its new name, but still…
The Times story went on to say that the library isn’t the first cultural building to bear a donor’s name, but I bet it’s the first civic building that effectively sold naming rights.
About the lions: they’ve been renamed a couple of times in the nearly 100 years they’ve been guarding the building. They were modeled by sculptor Edward Clark Potter on the recommendation of August Saint-Gaudens, one of the foremost sculptors in the U.S. at the time.
According to NYPL PR, they were first called Leo Astor and Leo Lenox, after NYPL founders John Jacob Astor and James Lenox. Later, they were known as Lady Astor and Lord Lenox (even though they’re both male lions). In the 1930s, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia named them Patience and Fortitude, for the qualities he felt New Yorkers would need to survive the economic depression.
But in this day of slapping a benefactor’s name on just about everything that doesn’t move (watch for a forthcoming post, with Toronto example of how ludicrous this practice can be), I’ll bet “Patience” and “Fortitude” don’t last much longer.
(Photo of NYPL lion is a freely licensed media file from the Wikimedia Commons.)
April is a lot of things - tax time; showery in order that May will be flowery; the cruellest month (for other reasons). Speaking of April being the cruellest month, that's from a T.S. Eliot poem. All of you who know which one, raise your hands! (Better yet, post a comment.) Which brings me to today's post. April is national poetry month, and in the U.S., the 17th of April is Poem in Your Pocket Day. Poem in Your Pocket Day started out in New York City (of course) in 2002, and now the Academy of American Poets has declared the 17th to be national PIYPD. National = U.S., but it sounds like a good idea, so why not join in? The idea is to select a poem you love, and carry it with you to share with family, friends, co-workers, strangers and anyone else that day. On the PIYPD Web site, the Academy has PDFs of some little, portable poems, but unless you choose the Iliad or the Odyssey or some other epic poem (which you could do - you'd just need a pocket that would fit a book), almost any poem will do. I mean, you can print it on both sides of a piece of paper if it runs long, and just fold it up. Or I suppose you could do what a woman I know is doing to exercise her brain and stave off dementia: memorize a poem. She's memorizing a couple a month. You need just one for the 17th. But put a copy in your pocket so you can share.
What a difference three weeks makes! I predict that these houses will be finished by May, occupied in June and resold in July, demolished in August and construction of FIVE new houses on this very site will begin in January 2009.
To my many fans around the world (most are courtesy of Sparky Donatello at crackskullbob.squarespace.com ), I am sorry for the quietude on this blog for the last 10 days or more. I have been away, covering a conference in Phillydelphia for my day job. I promise, however, to bring you, in the coming days, an update on the house at the end of the street, thoughts on the renaming of the New York Public Library and, best of all, pictures of some of the disappearing gargoyles of Philadelphia.
Just not tonight. But this weekend. I shit you not.
I haven't seen it for a while, so it may be gone — to which I say, "Good riddance!" It's the TV commercial for Kleenex, in which viewers (and various apparently willing participants in said commercial) are urged to "let it out" — their feelings, that is — to a "good listener" who has carted a blue couch and a box of Kleenex around the U.S. (to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, Nashville and Las Vegas — even Salt Lake City!) to get people to release their bottled-up sadness and snuffle into a Kleenex. They've even trademarked the phrase "let it out." You can read all about it at the Let It Out Web site. I probably wouldn't have noticed the commercial, except for two things: 1. I'm disinclined to sit on an upholstered couch outdoors, even if it's covered in 12 layers of Kleenex. 2. I'm not sure it's always appropriate to offer someone a Kleenex when they're teary.
I wrote an article about this for my day job, citing a passage from a novel I'd read. I wrote thusly:
"In Internal Affairs, a novel by the late British journalist Jill Tweedie, a client begins to cry during a session with Charlotte, a family planning counsellor. "Charlotte, Tweedie wrote, 'suppressed the usual urge to offer the box of tissues.' "Sounds almost cruel, doesn't it? This is a work of fiction, but let's hear Charlotte/Tweedie out: 'At her two weeks of training in counselling techniques the teacher had dwelt at some length on the dynamics of the tissue box, emphasizing that to give tissues to distressed clients amounted to an unspoken command from the counsellor to cease crying and would be interpreted by said client to mean that tears were unacceptable, that emotion itself was unacceptable.' "
I then consulted various experts on empathic etiquette and the "dynamics of the tissue box."
The corker is, when I approached Kimberly-Clark, the makers of Kleenex, for a comment, their spokeswoman declined! I shit you not! Of course, I wrote this piece back in the Dark Ages - in April of 2000, to be precise - so either Kimberly-Clark has come around to having a position or it's just found another way to flog Kleenex.
It's one that caught the attention of Greenpeace which infiltrated some of the commercial tapings, accusing the Kimberly-Clark of using depleting old growth forests to make its products.
Somehow, in this very cold, very snowy winter, the foundations have been laid and the framing has begun in earnest for the three houses that are going to replace what used to be a single, large house on the corner of Woburn and Jedburgh here in North Toronto. Here's the framing from the Jedburgh side: I guess the framers got a little peeved with me shooting so much, so one of them pulled out his cell phone and started taking pictures of me. I smiled and waved.
