Mallory's Camera

Such a fabulous yesterday.

Flavia invited me to accompany her to the Yayoi Kusama installation at the NYC Botanical Gardens in the Bronx.

I had no idea who Yayoi Kusama was but unusual travel suggestions, dancing lessons from God, right?

And yesterday was also the day the Bot Gardens’ daffodils, cherry blossoms and lilac bushes were at peak bloom:



So, you know. Just a staggering amount of physical beauty. I felt absolutely porous.



Yayoi Kusama turns out to be this very famous Japanese artist. I found her work absolutely compelling, though you may not because photos cannot do justice:







For this installation, she put 1,400 steel balls in a marsh pond where they drift in the wind, a kinetic sculpture that follows the pond’s natural currents. I have no idea how one makes steel balls light enough to float on water:





Apparently, she is obsessed with pumpkins:






And also, with strange Cthulu/Disney plant hybrids:



Her most interesting installation was something called an Infinity Mirror Room, a kind of walk-in kaleidoscope in which her signature, iconic pumpkin is reflected ad infinitum through strategically placed reflecting surfaces. This exactly duplicates a longtime fixation of my own, of course, on the eerie, transcendent nature of department store mirrors.

“No photographs!” the guard checking tickets told us.

Although I did see people taking photographs. And I wanted to. But Flavia is a pretty straightforward, stand-up kind of person, so I figured it was best to keep my sociopathic tendencies in check.

###

When I got home, I read up on Yayoi Kusama. Apparently, she is quite mad, has been having vivid hallucinations of a polka-dotted universe and talking pumpkins since her earliest girlhood. But unlike a lot of mad people, she is quite accepting of the fact that she’s mad and has been living comfortably in a Tokyo hospital for the mentally ill since 1977. She has a studio nearby.

All I can say is that her artwork had a tremendous, visceral impact on me. I felt like some protective layer had been flayed from my perception.

I was very amped up when I got home.

“Did you get caught in the thunder storm?” asked Sam, the very nice Cambodian girl who now occupies the downstairs flat at the casa.

No, I’d missed it. And the tornado that turned the sky green and touched down in nearby Hopewell Junction, inflicting beaucoup damage on the trees though sparing the trailer courts.

Impossible not to notice that temps were 20° lower than they had been when I’d set out that morning, though.

It’s just 10° above freezing now.

Which probably means temps sank below freezing last night.

All the baby peppers, tomatoes and basil I planted in my garden over the last few warm days have probably died.

Oh, well.

Shortly, I will totter off to the garden to perform their last rites.

I was so amped up last night, in fact, that I had to drink tequila to get myself to sleep. Consequently, I am feeling very logy this morning. Incipient headache! Tendrils of faint nausea. I keep forgetting what I want to be writing and staring off into space.

I’m either hungover, or I contracted IT overnight.

I’m double vaccinated, so more likely the former.

I’ve drunk so little alcohol over the past year that my tolerance is now zero.



Fascinating things you learn at the NYC Botanical Garden:

Apparently it was all the rage for 19th century industrialists to become botanists after they’d spent 50 years or so compiling fortunes and making the lives of everyone who worked for them miserable.

Thus, the NYC Bot Garden’s extensive lilac collection is actually a bequest from some rich capitalist who spent his declining years breeding exotic lilac cultivars.

You’d be able to see all five colors of his lilac cultivars if only I’d Photoshopped this picture better:



I’m not sure how much clemency lilac breeding bought him at the celestial sentencing hearing, though.