There is that damned red cube.

I wish to escape it. To move in some direction that is 'away' from it. There is none. It is a 'red hole' with its event horizon always a little outside the perimeter of the observer. One is ever in danger of colliding with its points. But the points never end. They go on in all directions. It doesn't matter that there are only 8 corners and the thing is 12 feet high. They are no more well-behaved than their wu-master. They dance in every crazy direction, just as they please. Their thin lines extend across the plaza. I have to duck for one, step over another. No matter how far away I am, I am ducking and stepping as if I'd been struck once to often by a cupboard door. Once I get the hang of it I suppose it will be ok. Like learning to climb on one of those up&down merry-go-round horses after the carousel starts turning. Dance! cube. Dance!

I've tried turning my back to the cube, but it is too precariously balanced. Good thing it floats. When it falls, perhaps whatever levitates it will also cushion its fall? I hope Noguchi thought of that. It can't possibly stay that way forever. The minute I'm not watching I know it will fall over and all those extended radial lines, the corner 'poles', will collapse with it, like a Bucky Fuller vortex suddenly crashing to the ground, striking the pavement with great clanging sounds as clowns pour out of the surrounding buildings tossing hoops and day-glow triangles into the air, making crazy shapes fly about in a carnival of four dimensions. For now, its all corners and it makes me dizzy. If only it would lie down like a well-behaved box, then I could fold up the ends like a cardboard carton, crawl inside and listen to the snarl of tilted worlds going on around me. Maybe then, I could stop watching it. Perhaps someone will hand me a sandwich through the hole once in awhile.

New Yorkers,

New Yorkers, as you know, don't notice much of anything unless its an immediate threat or about to pay off. But this they notice. It's a constant reminder that all the surrounding buildings are oriented in the wrong direction -- the platoon on the parade field that marched off in one direction and the cross-eyed private who went in another. The private, of course, got it right. Every friggin' building in New York is tilted. I can see that now. No wonder my ankles are so sore trying to support me leaning at some cockeyed angle all the time. While we're on the subject, they could also use a dash of color, too, the buildings that is. Though I'm not so sure I'd like to see them all in red. Perhaps half a dozen pastels and a few 'mixes'. Maybe some whole blocks or even neighborhoods could rally to a theme, be a Rauschenberg or a Warhol community. Come to think of it, there are a few neighborhoods that already look like Rauschenbergs. Perhaps that isn't such a good idea after all. Things happen when something stumbles upon you that wasn't quite what you were expecting. One day you're exploring new worlds, going where no one's been before then, all of a sudden, something so dense and different appears that space itself turns into a giant twisty slide with no opinion on which way you'll go or where you're likely to end up. An 'event horizon' around a singularity of festival. Red cubes seem to have that uncanny ability - conceptually, anyway. And the sucker's only twelve-feet high!

Now, about that hole.

Well, its not really a hole. It would be if it were straight up, or down. One could then look 'into' it. But this way, the way it is, its more of a cylinder I suppose. Why that should be, why up&down creates a hole but slantwise turns it into a cylinder, is anybody's guess. I was going to mention that I can feel it pulling on me, some kind of tugging like a vacuum cleaner with enormous appeal. I can see the people starting to spiral inwards towards it. Most of them are being cool, just pretending they are curious, drawing closer. Some are panicked and attempting to escape. A few are completely uninhibited and making directly for the void. Hell, I must be a hundred feet away and I'm hanging onto a lamp post that leans like the tower in Pisa. Its a good thing when public spaces invite giddiness. Giddiness, after all, is just laughter in uncommon orientation - standing on an unexpected corner, perhaps in red.

Brain swirl? I got just the tonic. . .
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