Metal Ribbon at Nite

The wet pavement reflects glare and exaggerates the briteness of the liting in this view. But I was there when the street was wet, so that's what you get. It still indicates how faint the liting of the sculpture is, as does not draw attention from afar.

I showed here September 20th some fotos of a ribbon sculpture along 250 feet of the Ambulatory Care Center at UMDNJ. I then alerted the sculptor, Mac Adams, to that blog entry and asked for more information, such as the gauge of the metal and whether the description of it as powder-coated metal meant like a car, whose paint is baked on.

He liked the pix, and asked:

Do you have one at night I don't think I have seen it at night. Its designed in 10ft sections and half inch thick . yes powder coating is like baking as in car bodies. I can tell you a little story the day I started installing it July 12, 2005 my wife's birthday and the day she was taken to UMDNJ with a very serious spinal cord injury. [I (LCS) am happy to report that she is better now.] It was a very bad day. However lucky for me my crew was very good, Between running in and out of the hospital they did a great job. It has not good memories for me. Its ironic the sculpture is a narrative about a journey through illness. One has to walk the length and observe it on the side of ones vision. Its a meditative walk. The ribbon works a little like a stripe of film reflecting real time in it.

It does have an anonymous quality. The way you found it is the way it should be found, by chance.

Maybe more people will see it after your blog.

I certainly hope so. I replied that I did not have any fotos at nite but would take some. So I did. In the middle of the nite tonite, after the worst of the rain (a thunderstorm shortly after midnite) had stopped, I drove to that area, and parked in the Bergen Street Pathmark parking lot (I also had to get some things from the store), and the lines in the middle of the nite are generally very short, if indeed there are any). Before I made the turn into the parking lot, I looked for floodliting at the base of the Ambulatory Care Center but saw none. Was it turned off already? I know that the floodlites on the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart used to go out at around 2am, tho I have seen them on later, recently. So maybe the lites on the sculpture are set on a timer and go out in the middle of the nite. But when I looked more carefully, I noticed that there were indeed patches of lite on that wall, but blue, not white. Ah. That's why I hadn't noticed floodliting, because it's blue-lite special liting, not your typical floodliting.

I crossed the street and took pix of the sculpture from some of the same places I had shown in the daytime. The intermittent liting, which hilites only parts of the sculpture in brite lite, produce a discontinuity in the sculpture that daylite does not.

But it also adds another layer of lines to brite-daylite's two, the sculpture itself and the shadow it throws. At nite, there is a faint blue line of reflected lite against the wall as well.

The sculpture is reflective not just of the lite thrown up by the blue spotlites but also of street lites around.

I experimented with the Nite Scene setting, and the regular Landscape + Portrait setting, and resting the camera on the fence, using the self-timer so my finger wouldn't move the camera in poor lite. But when I changed scene, the camera set itself to the Auto exposure setting and triggered the flash (more than once; silly me for not thinking of that each time I set a new mode). I kept those pix, tho, because they show a different aspect of the sculpture in its place. Note that in the flash fotos, there aren't any shadows in the central focus area, just the ribbon. So that's already different from what you would see on a sunny day. I don't know about a cloudy day. Can you tell that I just love this thing, in every type of liting I have yet encountered? Go see for yourself, then tell me what you think of it. I'll publish here the most insightful remarks (let me know, at ResurgenceCity@aol.com) if I can use your name and location). Some people don't "get" abstract art like this, and regard as a humungous waste of money and prominence displays of something like a metal ribbon. Others think them sublime. Count me on the side of the "sublime" vote in the case of this extraordinary (Newark) sculpture.

The dark areas of the wall are merely wet spots from tonite's rain.

Paper, Not Plastic. After I took these pix, I went into the Pathmark to get a bunch of things, working from a list but walking thru much of the store to see if the indexes at the aisles reminded me of anything, checking specials on display, etc. When I got to the (single) line for the register, I discovered that something was wrong with Pathmark's connection to the service centers for debit and credit cards. Not even the ATM's in the corner were working, so some people couldn't get anything like what they intended to. I checked my cash, did a ruf tally of what was in my cart, then headed back thru the store to put back things I didn't have enuf for. Fortunately, I had enuf cash on hand to get most of what I had put in the cart, but not enuf to keep me from having to go back sooner than I had intended. Maybe I'll do so on a cloudy day and see if the ribbon throws a shadow or stands alone against the wall.

I remarked to the cashier, a slender, mature black woman ("mature" means someone around my age, as distinct from "elderly", anyone older than I am), that paper (green paper) worked even if plastic did not. She said she had to tell people about the problem as they arrived at the register, and she was plainly flustered. I reminded her that she could make an announcement over the public-address system, and a lite went off (picture the lite bulb in a thought bubble in a cartoon). She had been so beset and upset that she had completely forgotten that. So she picked up the phone and made an announcement. And then all she had to do was make another announcement when new people arrived. The people then there were not happy, since we have come to rely upon the supermarket not just for groceries but also for "cash back", a sort of 24-hour bank branch without ATM fees. This problem would have been inconceivable when I was born. You'd have had a hard time even explaining to people what it is.

What Is Wrong with Shoelaces? Before I stood up in getting out of my car to take pix, I had to retie the shoelace on my left shoe. By the time I got back into the car, it had come undone again. This happens time and time again every day. What have they done to shoelaces? I think they must be made of some kind of unyielding synthetic fiber that doesn't compress and then bounce back as would create a tite knot. We didn't have this problem in The Olden Days (when I was a child). Aren't things supposed to get better over time? I have knee problems. I can't bend down easily to retie shoes I have already tied ten times today. Do I have to get dress shoes with Velcro closures? Is there even any such thing as Velcro Dressports?

'From Wall Street to Main Street'. You have doubtless heard this expression many times in recent days. I thought, "Hm. I don't know of a Main Street in Newark. I know there's one in East Orange, but I don't know of one in Irvington or Harrison. I'll have to check that on Mapquest." I did. Did you know that there IS a Main Street in Newark, a north-south street in the Ironbound. Only three blocks long, it lies between Magazine Street on the west and St. Francis Street on the east. It starts at Ferry Street on the north, and ends at Kossuth Street on the south. Why on Earth is such an inconsequential nothing little street called "Main"?

Note the shadow of the elegant fence on the wall.

Irvington, near me, has no Main Street. Harrison has none either. By the way, how many major cities have a major street called "Market"? I think Philly's equivalent of Newark's Four Corners is Market Street and something or other. I see from Wikipedia that Philly actually does have a Broad Street that would intersect with Market except that City Hall, on a superblock, stands at that point.

The High Street was the familiar name of the principal street in nearly every English town at the time Philadelphia was founded. But if Philadelphia was indebted to England for the name of High Street, nearly every American town is, in turn, indebted to Philadelphia for its Market Street.

The other Market Street I have noticed in my travels is that of San Fran, the main drag of downtown. I, of course, a Vailsburger (no one says that, do they? Why not?), regard Market Street as an eastward extension of South Orange Avenue, western Newark's main drag. By the way, if ever you need to travel SOA west around sunset, put on your sunglasses first, because the sun is almost exactly dead ahead.