Law & Order Treatment

The latest Law & Order treatment, as reported by the Daily News:

A blood-curdling scream pierced a dark Brooklyn subway tunnel early yesterday when two transit workers found a bloody trash bag packed with an arm and two legs.

It works something like this:

FADE IN:

INT. SUBWAY TUNNEL

We HEAR a BLOOD-CURDLING SCREAM. We SEE two TRANSIT WORKERS uncover a BLOODY TRASH BAG packed with an arm and two legs.

Back to the article:

The transit workers were setting up lights for a cleaning crew when they spotted a bare foot sticking out of the bag. The sight was so sickening that the first worker who saw it started to scream hysterically.

“We didn’t understand what he was saying,” the other worker told The News.

“He was blurting, ‘There’s a leg! There’s a leg!’ At first, I thought someone was under a train.”

“At first when you looked at it, it didn’t look real . . . But then under the bag you could see a trail of blood,” the worker added.

“People can be vicious.”

Peering inside the bag, cops saw an arm and two legs. The legs had been cut off below the hips.

The blue recycling bags were found shoved between the tracks and the tunnel wall, near an emergency exit that leads to the street above.

The bag with the body parts was split on both sides along the seams because of its heavy load. There were no signs that it had been dragged along the trackbed, the worker said.

Cops later found the bloody tools and drill bits a few feet away, near the northbound tracks.

. . .

Joelle Washington, 20, could barely speak about the friend she’s known since kindergarten.

“I just hope they find all of him so he can rest in peace,” she said sadly.

Yuck.

We Are Happy to Serve You

Coffee cups advertising strip clubs:

A Manhattan strip club has turned the humble cardboard cup into a billboard for its topless show girls, giving java drinkers another kind of morning eyeopener.

Cups advertising Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club are being sold out of more than 30 midtown and Wall Street coffee carts, but turning off some customers and vendors.

“I hate these cups,” said Oleg Morosov after his order from a Lexington Ave. vendor arrived in a Hustler Club cup. “I think I’m starting to develop a reputation at work because of these cups.”

When asked about whether children should be subjected to such PG-13 containers, one vendor noted that children shouldn’t drink coffee. “It stunts their growth,” he said.

OK, since the article didn’t feature anyone defending the cups, that actually wasn’t in there — but it should have been!

Pied à Terre to the World

New York City has filed an application to trademark the phrase “The World’s Second Home.” For real:

Lest there be any doubt, the Bloomberg administration wants to make official what generations of immigrants in New York have long known: the city is the world’s second home.

In application No. 78484751 at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the city is seeking to trademark the phrase, “The World’s Second Home.” It wants exclusive rights to use it to promote business, tourism and economic development in the city, and hopes to slap it on everything from mouse pads and money clips to baby bibs and beanbag chairs.

If New York is successful, other cities that might fancy themselves the world’s second home could not legally apply that phrase to any of the 200-odd products and services enumerated in New York’s application. Among them are film and theatrical productions, parades, chair pads, sunglasses, temporary tattoos, postcards, beach sandals, and “electric light switch plates.”

“For all of those things, if the city got its trademark registration, nobody could come out with sunglasses and use the phrase, ‘The world’s second home,'” said William M. Borchard, an intellectual-property lawyer at Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman in New York. “To do that, they would have to obtain a license from the city.”

The Times further explains how this would work in practice:

Of course, there are plenty of things not on the city’s list. Boston could conceivably license a line of canned beans under the label, “Bean Town – the world’s second home,” without running afoul of New York’s trademark. (“Bean Town” is actually the registered trademark of an Illinois company that sells dried beans.)

New York could eventually try to enforce an American trademark internationally to prevent, say, Paris from laying claim to the same title. In fact, it is New York’s contest with Paris and three other foreign cities to play host to the 2012 Summer Olympics that is driving its quest for this silver medal of geopolitical names. (Presumably, the gold would go to “the world’s home,” but no one has sought that title, according to a search of trademark records.)

The trademark application is one of several the city has filed since September as part of an ambitious plan to secure the rights to catchphrases, abbreviations and logos that it wants to license to makers of consumer products and clothing. Among them: a line drawing of the city’s official seal, which includes a sailor, an Indian and a beaver; the phrase “Made in NY”; and a Taxi and Limousine Commission badge, intended primarily for use on toy cars.

So if New York is the World’s Second Home, are, say, the Hamptons New York’s Second Home? And would that make the Hamptons the World’s Third Home? And as the Times notes, which city is audacious enough to call itself the World’s Home?

A $1200 Cardboard Tube

The dissemination of Gates-related memorabilia on EBay has begun:

Sometimes a cardboard tube is just a cardboard tube. But sometimes, as a New York teenager discovered this week, a cardboard tube might be an objet d’art worth $1,200 – to the right buyer.

Last Saturday, Dane Kolomatsky, 15, accompanied his mother and a friend of hers to Central Park to view “The Gates,” the public artwork created by Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, and composed of 7,500 saffron-colored nylon curtains hanging from rectangular frames along the pathways of the park.

Walking by the Loeb Boathouse near 72nd Street, Dane said, he saw a pile of cardboard tubes on the ground. The tubes had served to spool the curtains at the top of the gates. With the curtains unfurled, the tubes were destined to be transported out of the park and recycled.

“I picked out the smallest one, which was seven feet long, and I asked a volunteer if I could have it,” Dane said. “And he said, ‘Yes, but only one.’ ”

It was not until he decided to sell the cardboard tube on eBay, the popular auction Web site, that Mr. Kolomatsky become embroiled in an impassioned debate over New York’s latest artistic extravaganza.

The tube is one of many pieces of Gates detritus to show up on EBay. Other examples include, somewhat ominously, one of the bolts used to hold the gates together.

In the end, the tube owner decided to retain the keepsake.

Gilding the Lily With a Bunch of Drapes

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates Project opened yesterday in Central Park:

So that is what 1.089 million yards of orange-yellow fabric looks like, floating and fluttering and flapping in Central Park.

The giant $21 million art project “The Gates,” which had already filled the park’s 23 miles of pathways with thousands of saffron-colored portals, blossomed yesterday at 8:31 a.m., just as the artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, had planned.

They watched as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg raised a long metal pole to release fabric from the top of a gate in the Sheep Meadow. Also watching was a crowd that chanted a countdown like the one heard each New Year’s Eve in Times Square – “Five! Four! Three! Two! One!”- before the mayor unfurled the fabric on the first gate.

The Times was on hand to gauge the crowd’s impressions:

By midmorning, the park’s circulatory system had taken on the bright color of veins twisting and twirling against the gray-and-brown backdrop of midwinter. The pleated nylon fabric pulsed and swayed at the whim of a 12-mile-an-hour wind – not strong enough to make it snap like a spinnaker on an America’s Cup challenger. The color was almost as fiery and fierce as the sun that had risen a couple of hours earlier.

“Look at the light,” Christo said. “Look, look.”

In the crowd, people tried to do exactly that. People who had tried to imagine what the completed project would look like finally had a glimpse.

Some described them as too-short window shades dangling in the breeze. Some mentioned squarish out-of-season butterflies. Some were intrigued by the play of light on the fabric: as the peekaboo sun came and went, the nylon had a touchable texture one minute and a one-dimensional look the next. Some echoed what Christo and Jeanne-Claude had said about a river of bright color against twigs and leafless branches. Some talked about exhilaration and exuberance. Some were more literal.

“A pleated skirt,” said Kathleen Catapano of Brooklyn. She looked again, and another idea came to mind: “I think it looks like Jeanne-Claude’s hair.”

We were there so Jed Perl didn’t have to be, and speaking of Jed, The Times’ Michael Kimmelman weighs in, giving a more positive appraisal after having actually seen the Gates:

Thousands of swaths of pleated nylon were unfurled to bob and billow in the breeze. In the winter light, the bright fabric seemed to warm the fields, flickering like a flame against the barren trees. Even at first blush, it was clear that “The Gates” is a work of pure joy, a vast populist spectacle of good will and simple eloquence, the first great public art event of the 21st century. It remains on view for just 16 days. Consider yourself forewarned. Time is fleeting.

On a partly sunny, chilly morning, with helicopters buzzing overhead and mobs of well-wishers on hand, an army of paid helpers gradually released the panels of colored fabric from atop the 16-foot-tall gates, all 7,500 of them. The shifting light couldn’t have been better to show off the effects of the cloth. Sometimes the fabric looked deep orange; at other times it was shiny, like gold leaf, or silvery or almost tan. In the breeze, the skirted gates also appeared to shimmy like dancers in a conga line, the cloth buckling and swaying.

. . .

I hadn’t been quite sure when I first saw the project going up last week. From outside the park, the gates looked like endless rows of inert orange dominoes overwhelming Frederick Law Olmsted’s and Calvert Vaux’s masterpiece.

But as the artists have insisted, the gates aren’t made to be seen from above or from outside. I stopped in at a friend’s office high above Central Park South yesterday and ogled the panorama, which was lovely. But it was beside the point. It’s the difference between sitting in a skybox at Giants Stadium and playing the game on the field. The gates need to be – they are conceived to be – experienced on the ground, at eye level, where, as you move through the park, they crisscross and double up, rising over hills, blocking your view of everything except sky, then passing underfoot, through an underpass, or suddenly appearing through a copse of trees, their fabric fluttering in the corner of your eye.

There are no bad locales for seeing them. But there are some spots at which the work looks best: around the Heckscher ball fields, where the gates are dense and lines of them swarm in many directions at once; at the base of Strawberry Fields, where two parallel rows march in tight syncopation; at Harlem Meer, where they cluster up to the shore and then clamber, helter-skelter, up the rocks. Also at Great Hill, near West 106th Street, where they encircle the crescent field, then descend a flight of steep steps.

And at North Meadow, a wide-open vista, where the gates wander off toward the horizon, separating earth and sky with an undulating saffron band.

And in the end, Kimmelman helps express what Christo and Jeanne-Claude either didn’t want to or couldn’t:

Some purists will complain that the art spoils a sanctuary, that the park is perfect as it is, which it is. But the work, I think, pays gracious homage to Olmsted’s and Vaux’s abiding pastoral vision: like immense Magic Marker lines, the gates highlight the ingenious and whimsical curves, dips and loops that Olmsted and Vaux devised as antidotes to the rigid grid plan of the surrounding city streets and, by extension, to the general hardships of urban life.

The gates, themselves a cure for psychic hardship, remind us how much those paths vary, in width, and height, like the crowds of people who walk along them. More than that, being so sensitive to nature, they make us more sensitive to its effects.

We didn’t need the gates to make us sensitive, obviously. Art is never necessary. It is merely indispensable.

At its best, it leads us toward places we might not have thought to visit. Victor Hugo once said, “There is nothing more interesting than a wall behind which something is happening.” This also applies to gates, which beckon people to discover what is beyond them.

With their endless self-promotion, and followers trailing them like Deadheads from one global gig to another, it’s no wonder that Christo and Jeanne-Claude have made a few skeptics of people who often have not seen their art at first hand. New Yorkers are a notoriously tough crowd. But I was struck by what I overheard a stranger say. She was a doubter won over yesterday. “It will be fascinating when they’re gone,” she mused.

It took me a second to realize what she meant: that the gates, by ravishing the eye, have already impressed an image of the park on the memories of everyone who has seen them. And like all vivid memories, that image can take a place in the imagination, like a smell or some notes of music or a breeze, waiting to be rekindled.

Once upon a time there were “The Gates.” The time is now.

I’d like to go back and see some of the spots Kimmelman suggested — parts of the project look great, especially from the vantage point of one of the park’s rock outcroppings. And the bright orange (sorry, saffron) looks stunning against a clear blue sky. When there’s a wind, as there was yesterday, the effect of the fabric twisting in the wind is beautiful, but I have to agree with one of the people the Times quoted that when they hang there they sort of look like big drapes. In all, I liked it, though I can see what curmudgeons dislike about the whole enterprise.

One small quibble: the path we took — from 59th and Fifth to Belvedere Castle via the Mall and the Ramble — was, if memory serves, the way Olmsted and Vaux intended the parkgoer to move through, back through nature, as it were. I think Christo and Jeanne-Claude could have done a little more with that idea, though like I said, parts of the project are stunning as they are.

The Post’s coverage highlights a near calamity (“Adding a bit of chaos to the process, as the fabric was unfurled, the cardboard tube it was wrapped around crashed to the ground, sending spectators running and causing a few minor injuries. Bloomberg got bonked on the head by a falling tube. He wasn’t hurt, but elsewhere a man had his glasses shattered and a woman suffered a bloody nose.”) and also features another one of those crabby elderly people — do they actually exist? — who object to everything:

Not everyone was taken by the project’s siren song.

“They deface the park. Why gild the lily? This is the most beautiful park in the entire world,” one elderly man screamed at a woman as she described how much she liked the work.

“You know, art is supposed to provoke controversy, so I’d say that it worked,” the woman, Barbara Peabody, shot back, sending the man storming off.

See also: Daily News coverage; Newsday coverage.