Lunch?

You all know the photo - "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper," the one by Charles Ebbets of 11 construction workers sitting on a girder, high above Manhattan, having lunch.

Well, New York sculptor Sergio Furnari has rendered them in 3D, and they caught the eye of Les Abro, president and CEO of billboard company Abcon Media. And now a version on Furnari's sculpture is in my neighbourhood.



At first, I thought this was sort of cool. But as I thought and read about the installation, I realized it wasn't done so much in the name of art as for advertising.

As you can see, the lunching construction workers are no longer seated, but standing - standing so they'll be visible behind billboards.

There is some advertising that functions as art, but not in this case. It turns out that Les Abro has been trying to get these sculptures on top of an uptown Toronto building since 2007. His initial target was Yonge and Eglinton, where they would have supported three billboards:



The Yonge and Eglinton area has plenty of tall buildings so this would have fit in - or at least, fit in better than it does in the Yonge and Lawrence area where it is now. But the city councillor for Yonge/Eg nixed the plan.

Abro managed to get a variance in the zoning bylaw from our councillor, and in June, the sculptures went up in the relatively low-rise neighbourhood, at the corner of Yonge and Deloraine:



In fact, Spacing Toronto published an interesting article detailing the whole story.

I want to like these sculptures. I really do.







But they really don't fit in the Yonge/Lawrence neighbourhood, and the 17 figures are mostly hidden by the billboards. I disagree with Edward Brown, writing on the Torontoist website, that the Furnari sculptures represent "art tinged by artful marketing."

It's art obscured by advertising - and advertising that debases public spaces.

Bunch of bloggers

Last weekend (starting on Thursday the 23rd) a bunch of bloggers descended on Washington, D.C. The bunch was not, alas, as numerous as initially planned but we carried on. I was there, principally to cover a major infectious disease conference for the Day Job, and consequently did not get to hobnob with the other bloggers (largely sketch-bloggers) as much as I would have liked. Still, it was a treat to meet Sparky Donatello himself (he goes by a variety of other names including Wally Torta and Walt Taylor, but he'll always be Sparky to me), as well as Amanda of Craftmonkeys, her 16-month-old daughter Oonagh (who doesn't have a blog yet; slow learner, I guess), her sister Lydia who used to blog at Cootie Garage, and Sam of problemchildbride. In fact, you can see sketches, photos and tales of the weekend on their blogs.

I took my reportorial responsibilities so seriously I didn't even get out to hunt any new Washington gargoyles - although on the shuttle bus to and from the convention centre, I spotted this lion. At first, I thought he had buck teeth but that's a downspout. He graces the front of a former fire station on U Street.

Rumour has it that the bloggers (known, for reasons too detailed to go into here, as "Hosses") will meet again next year in New York, which has a gargoyle or two.

Making book on the Booker

Congratulations to Joseph O’Neill whose new novel, Netherland, has been long-listed for the Man Booker prize. It was published in May to exuberant reviews (“rave” doesn’t begin to cover it) in the daily New York Times (by Michiko Kakutani) as well as snagging the front-page of the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere.
In the Review, senior editor Dwight Garner called it “the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.”
He went on to say: “On a micro level, it’s about a couple and their young son living in Lower Manhattan when the planes hit, and about the event’s rippling emotional aftermath in their lives. On a macro level, it’s about nearly everything: family, politics, identity. I devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn’t know I had.”
Just after the long-list of 13 titles (known as the Booker Dozen) was announced yesterday (29 July), bookmakers William Hill opened the betting with Netherland their 3/1 favourite. Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence was second with odds of 4/1.

In a news release listing the opening odds on the list, William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe said, "Although Salman Rushdie is the man in form having won the Booker of Bookers, that book is now over 20 years old and his recent work has not been winning literary awards. However, Joseph O'Neill's novel, Netherland has been creating a real buzz and is also being suggested as the first novel to become a serious contender for the Bookie Prize - the William Hill Sports Book of the Year and for that reason we believe it is a worthy favourite.”
(Cricket among Commonwealth expats living in New York is one of the principal settings for the novel.)
I first encountered Joe O’Neill when I read a laudatory review of his second novel, The Breezes, in the Guardian Weekly. In those pre-Amazon days, I called a bookshop in central London and ordered a copy over the phone.

That novel—about a fortnight in the life of a family (the Breezes) who endure “misfortune of absurd but tragic proportions” (Amazon.co.uk)—was funny and poignant, and I felt compelled to write a fan letter.
At the time (the late 1990s), Joe—an Irishman, largely raised in the Netherlands, working as a barrister in London, but latterly living in New York City—was completing Blood-Dark Track, his investigation into secrets in the lives of his grandfathers—one Turkish, the other Irish. I read the book, and interviewed him about it by phone for an article I wrote for Spotlight, an English-language magazine published in Munich.
I met him for dinner when I was in New York on business in early 2002, at which time he said he was working on something to do with cricket. But since then, he has also been a regular contributor to The Atlantic and New York magazines.
Even if it weren’t for the personal connection, I’d be rooting for Joe to win the prize—for the £50,000, sure, but also because he’s a good writer, and Netherland (said she, having just started reading it) is terrific.
The short-list will be announced on 9 September, and the winner on 14 October.