Reach the Beach
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Originally uploaded by hslorenz In addition to not blogging for all these months, I have also not been running all that regularly, which is why it was clearly insane to go and run a 200 mile relay race across New Hampshire. Except that is indeed how I spent my weekend, with all these amazing runners and triathletes. I managed to only fall down and splatter on the road once (7 minutes into my 70-minute 7-mile 2:00am run on dark small-town and country roads with only a headlamp for light) and so basically met my goal of running all my legs and not getting injured (a skinned knee doesn't really disqualify that achievement, although I did have blood dripping down my leg when I arrived at the transition area to hand off to my teammate).
In other news, Denise and I moved to the Bronx in August, into our first apartment of our own! Here is an article about one of our neighbors:
CITYWIDE; Captured in Time (and Plaster) and Reborn as Art
By DAVID GONZALEZ
Published: July 30, 2007
Inside a rock-solid Bronx warehouse, John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres walk quickly through a darkened maze of rooms crammed with file boxes, wooden crates and plastic-wrapped furniture that was last called modern 40 years ago. They stop at a partly hidden door, turn the key and push it open with an appropriately spooky creak.
The room is filled with bodies.
They are not dead. Nor are they alive -- though they live in vivid memory. They are life-size sculptures of real people from a Bronx that is long gone.
More than 25 years ago, Mr. Ahearn and Mr. Torres began an artistic partnership, settling into several South Bronx neighborhoods to do life casts of regular folks on streets where most of the buildings had been reduced to rubble. Many of those casts are now in museums or collections; some are in this warehouse, stacked on shelves or propped against walls.
But their most famous works -- of girls skipping rope, of an elderly woman seated on a chair -- hang several stories up on Bronx buildings that managed to escape the wrecking ball.
''This is not only our work,'' said Mr. Ahearn, who is 56, talkative, scruffy and intensely earnest. ''This is not a symbol of a person. Every one of these is a real person at a real time. The relationships run deep.''
He and Mr. Torres have been learning just how deep in recent weeks, as they set out to restore some of their public works on Longwood and Intervale Avenues in the South Bronx.
It took a lot of persuasion to earn their subjects' trust those many years ago. It took even more talking to learn the essence of their lives, whether the mechanic with a tire or the mother and child playing patty-cake. But when those people agreed to be wrapped in gauze and cast in plaster, the sessions were often joyfully loud block parties.
Surprisingly, many subjects toughed it out when this part of the Bronx lay abandoned to decay and crime and have witnessed the area's rebirth. Others have moved back. And throughout it all, their plaster stand-ins presided over the transformation.
Mr. Ahearn said he and his partner decided a few months ago to touch up their Bronx pieces to match the area's upturned fortunes. Their own fortunes as artists have been a little mixed. A recent show at a Chelsea gallery failed to generate much in sales or reviews.
Mr. Ahearn was disappointed, but not for long.
''I'll go looking for love in other places,'' he said. ''What do you think we're doing here?''
He and his colleague were in their Bronx studio at Third Avenue and 161st Street, inside what had been law offices decades ago. More recently, the space had been a church. They recently hung several pieces there from their Chelsea show, figures they had done of samba musicians in Brazil. Some of the Bronx pieces they were about to restore also hung on the walls.
Mr. Ahearn moved his studio to the space in January, going two years without one after the rent on his East Harlem work space went up. The Bronx has always beckoned to him, ever since he came to the borough in the late 1970s to do face casts at Fashion Moda, a groundbreaking gallery in the South Bronx that brought together hipsters and homeboys. It was there that he met Mr. Torres, who had grown up working at his uncle's religious-statue factory.
The two won grants to do some big pieces for the sides of buildings in the South Bronx. In time, their statues would gaze out over blocks along Intervale that had been reduced to rubble.
Peter Serrano, a community activist, soon invited them to install a piece on the side of 911 Longwood Avenue, a building that he was trying to save. He figured art would be a totem against all the latter-day plagues that had descended upon the area.
He proved to be right. The building is still there. So, too, are the plaster figures on the wall -- Pedro, Mr. Serrano's tire-fixing brother; Pat and Selena; Barbara and Thomas.
Just last Tuesday, Mr. Ahearn and Mr. Torres were surprised to run into Pedro in the neighborhood. Pedro, slimmer and grayer, said he had just moved back to the building after spending 14 disappointing years in Puerto Rico.
The mother and daughter in the mural, Pat Murchison and Selena Panasik, visited the studio last week.
''I look at their work and say I'll be young forever,'' said Ms. Murchison, now 60. ''I'll never see that size again.''
Her daughter reminded her how the mural was once published in a men's magazine.
''I didn't have to take my clothes off to get into Penthouse!'' Ms. Murchison said.
The women grew pensive as they talked about that era, one where city officials seemed to have written off their neighborhood, where children played in vacant lots or abandoned buildings while elderly residents like Miss Kate, whose cast is up on nearby wall, spent the day outside because her apartment had no electricity. Yet in some ways, they said, it was an easier time.
''I am so proud of that piece up on the wall,'' said Ms. Panasik, 33. ''It was a fun, loving, secure time in my life. It's not every day a young lady can say there is something immortalized about her childhood. That is me up there.''
The recollections run just as deep for Mr. Torres, in ways he never imagined. In 1993, he suffered an asthma attack so severe that his brain went without oxygen for minutes. It wiped out his memory, he said. Suddenly, catalogs of past shows and visits to the warehouse became therapeutic.
''My psychiatrist would say to me, 'You did this. This is your family. This is your career,' '' Mr. Torres said during a visit to the storage room. ''Imagine, losing your memory and walking into this room. Who are these people? That was the best therapy I ever had.''
He and Mr. Ahearn had gone to the warehouse on Jerome Avenue to look over some life casts that had been part of a mural called ''Back to School'' a few blocks away at 170th Street and Walton Avenue. Those figures had survived a fire along an adjoining row of stores and narrowly escaped being obliterated by the subsequent reconstruction nine years ago. They now wait in silent exile for their triumphant return to the street: Mr. Ahearn and Mr. Torres have already scoped out a wall on 170th and Teller Avenue, a majestic spot that is visible for blocks.
Mr. Ahearn looked at the figures, their patina seared off, leaving gray skin tones, flaked surfaces and rough finishes.
''I think it says something of the experience of the people in the neighborhood,'' Mr. Ahearn said. ''Nature and the circumstance of life are reflected in this.''
The mural represents another ending, that of the artists' relationship with the art world. When they completed ''Back to School'' in 1985, it was dismissed by critics as overly sentimental community art without an edge.
''Now look at it,'' Mr. Ahearn said. ''It's been burned. Birds messed it up. Everything has happened to this. Is it still too sweet for you?''
He stopped and thought about keeping it just as it is. He wondered how the subjects would react if they saw it now, never mind if it was up on a wall, visible from the Grand Concourse. When memory becomes monumental, the choice is clear.
''If it goes up again, I'll have to redo it,'' Mr. Ahearn admitted. ''It's got to be fresh.''
Our landlord is also incredibly nice, and let us use his van to move (a green flame-decorated hit with teenage boys back in Bushwick as we were loading it up). And it only took us 18.5 hours of solid carrying, loading, driving, and unloading to do that! Since then, we've gone to Athens for the Popfest and adopted two cats, and I've started taking non-matriculated classes at Hunter in preparation for finally applying to Master's programs in the next year or two (not that I have any more idea than I ever have of exactly which degree I should get. And I just took the online career test that everyone's taking now and apparently I should be an ecologist or an engineer, neither of which are among the multiple career paths I'm debating, so who knows where I'll eventually end up (as my position 40 ideal career of taxidermist, perhaps?)
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Originally uploaded by hslorenz Other plans in the near future include running regularly again so I can have slightly less agonizing soreness after 14 miles over 24 hours, bicycling and exploring more of our new borough, learning to play the violin again and joining an orchestra and perhaps Denise's new band, painting the apartment (although this picture will give you some idea of my extremely limited artistic ability - it's a cat holding a teacup, even though even that basic premise may not be clear):
And that's the 9-month update.