Openings and openings of another mind.

I went to an opening last night. CB and several others had redecorated, no that’s the wrong word, reformed their hotel rooms on 25th Street. It’s the Carlton Arms and it’s as close to being a work of art as a building can get. Not the outside, the inside. Every wall, no, every square inch of the walls, hallways, doors, ceilings, light fixtures has been transformed in some way. Giant portraits of whowasthat flow down the staircases while the halls have landscapes from New York City and maybe Uranus, or the back of someone’s haircut. Arrows indicate some direction. Some signs ask for assistance in keeping the cats in the lobby. There is color everywhere. It is the backroom of the every stagebar of the sixties dragged whole into the present, still kicking.
C was showing her use of shades and lights to cut pieces out of a room, but the group was speaking Danish and I quickly lost interest. Though she was right about how the light glowed in the shower. I wandered up to S’s place overlooking the Hairy Monk Bar. He has made a forest of the walls. Trees grow up to the plaster rail and then sprout out their branches into the room. A leaf-covered lamp shimmers overhead. He says he likes to meditate here and I can see that happening.
I headed uptown via Madison Square park passing a chic restaurant where the patrons were sitting outside smoking, eating their $22.00 pasta while across the street at the Armory, a couple of the local homeless were sitting outside smoking eating something out of a can. I walked towards Fifth.
When was the last time you thought about angels? I saw one in a window and thought that it had been some time now since I’d given them much thought and when I turned the corner the windows were suddenly full of them. Sleek angels, tall ones, angels with their arms around each other, wings spread on some, wings hidden on others. A tourist bus roared by with the guide urging the folks to look ahead to see the Flatiron Building when it was gone my eyes were left on a fourth floor window. There was a women standing there talking on a phone. She was explaining something to someone, her left hand pumped and waved and fluttered as she made her point or listened.
I like this area. In the space of five blocks you can go from the Bank of China and the CT WAN Import Shop (for rent), past Svennigans and the Museum of Sex ‘entrance around the corner’ sign to the Marble Church that once heard the voice of Norman Vincent Peale. The tourists were huddled in little groups by the Empire State Building, worn out from the day’s walking and seeing and smelling. The barricades that keep anyone from parking weren’t stopping the cabs from stopping. I turned again and was refreshed by the air conditioning blasting out from the sneakers shops and H/M along 34th street. Someone set off the bleeper at the door of one of the stores as they went in, the guard who was talking on his cell phone didn’t even look up.