Paine in Snow

The Litchfield Villa would make a handsome old style Natural History Museum, but I guess the Parks Department needs offices somewhere, and most people I know have had enough taxidermy. Don't tell the authorities, but I do plan to take it by charm if not by siege for a weekend at least. I'm very hard at work on my plan of attack, which is why dinner will probably taste like dish towels.

The work by Roxy Paine entitled "Erratic" lays like a mercury walrus at the villa's base, reflecting the recent snowfall and imitating the nature of ice, rock and water. Last year you might have seen Paine's towering metallic trees in Madison Square Park, which he assembled from large prefabricated sections. They were beautiful and thrilling, but you wouldn't have found me anywhere close to them in an electrical storm. Now the metallic trees have been taken down and the actual ones host tree houses. I find it hard to walk by the installation without thinking of Calvino's The Baron in the Trees, and comparing the shelters in their high perches to the offices granting a view of them from every side of the square.

We found a snowman in the Third Street playground after viewing the Paine, which the kids lost interest in once they realized they couldn't climb it. Russell insisted on kicking the ice man, Nora insisted on giving it eyes, so before long he stared at us from 2 copper Lincolns. She's fascinated with snowmen, and later she commented that the snowman had ice and snow for skin. While picking up Sophie, we'd heard talk on the radio of the how the white phosphorus that might have been used in Gaza sears the skin, and Nora asked me to turn the radio off.