Mosaic Man - Excerpt

Dawn over money. The sun is coming up over Wall Street. It comes up over time and over space, it comes up over history. The Egyptian pyramids, the Greek acropolis, the gothic spires, the Roman portals, the Rosicrucian temples, the Florentine stonework, the scalloped towers, the immense mirrors glass and silver, the somber metal boxes, the Mayan pent houses, the deco decorations, the bauhaus grids, the moderne geometrics, the pomo parodies, the corbusier concretions, the copper green Napoleonic roof palaces, the crenellated sky castles, the streamlined futurescape facades, the Babylonian terracing, the Ionic columns, the Corinthian cornices, the Colonial cupolas, the Victorian fretwork, the heavy arches, the brutal brick shafts, the water towers, cooling units, skylights, ventilators, the block and girder of new construction go livid at the edges, casting pale shades and ghostly shadows, steeping the narrow streets below in permanent gloom. The graph-like walls of the World Financial Center buildings multiply one another with reflections of wealth and power, Luxor on the Hudson. And looming over all, the two silver louvred vertical grids of the World Trade Center thrusting up off the chart.

What we have here is the ongoing urban mosaic. Of histories and geographies. That was call real time.

In our thirty-sixth floor apartment in Battery Park City, a.k.a. the Space Bubble, one curved wall all windows, even this pallid morning is a luminous eye opener.

Sliding our thick royal cherry terrycloth robe on, we peer out the window at the eastern sky as the curtained sun seeps through the towering cityscape to the glassy Hudson. The light in our room is amplified by the mirrors, it's a small apartment so there are lots of mirrors, floor to ceiling.

We activate Mr. Coffee and shave our face, micronuke a frozen bagel and throw it in the toaster oven, break out the cream cheese and run an orange through the electric squeezer. As you read this you too might want to whip out a little snack to keep by your side, some low cholesterol dry roasted peanuts, why not nuke some popcorn?

We turn to the work-in-progress on our desk. Great Expectorations, a mythological detective story. Simultaneously a segment for a TV serial. Though the tube is a problem for us because we're allergic to mimetic images. We begin to sweat and our forehead breaks out in rashes, often alphabetical in configuration. But the written word is a mental antihistamine, and with it you can reconnect the visible with the invisible and reclaim the superficial. All wrapped up in one neat package. Though as with all serials Great Expectorations is ongoing, no beginning, no end, just an endless middle of shticks, bits, gags, and routines. Like the media environment. Just tune in where ever, tune out whenever. In media res.