hothouse

The weather cooled off dramatically here on Thursday around noon as a brisk wind blew through the parking garage and threatened to scatter the last remnants of crackers and chess. Sometimes shifts feel that simple. We walked to the symphony hall last night and remarked how cold things felt. My window is cold tonight. But the season speaks clearly. Autumn arrived begins to strip the trees bare and encourage us to find out gloves.

In contrast to the weather, the idea of the cultural hothouse comes into plain view every Sunday reading the NY Times. Mixed in with the national and international news and analysis, opinion and advertising, trends and fashion happenings are the pieces about New York the city. New York seems to be hanging on in this lean time as a hothouse for creativity. Hanging on as it always had, or perhaps the lean time serves as a motivator to get down to the basic elements of creating. Getting to the basic elements, doing the hard work practicing and learning with time must be really cool in an environment with so many people doing the same types of creative things…dance, music, writing, architecture, film, poetry, performance, drama, composing.

The hothouse concept…the fact that all of this happens as a collective. Maybe not a formal collective as in an ensemble or a company, but an informal collective. Cities foster that collection. In this smallish city that looks apparent every day in quiet subtle ways, less crowded ways, but still the world of the here is right outside the door.

It’s nice to dream of going to New York, or Paris to marinate in that collective hothouse and mingle while creating, listen to a bit more street noise and be in a place of larger scale and cultural consequence. Consequence sounds critical of here…things happen here, for sure. By consequence, being in a proximity of the marketplace for art…in this case considering the publishing houses, the publishing marketplace.

Writing is the thing now and it’s great t be a part of this downtown small scale art farmers-type market, able to experiment. But it’s good to be honest and have a circle drawn around the artistic hothouse this country, this part of the world, for some maybe the world but that may be presumptuous…New York.