Poking my head in here briefly to relay some highlights from the day’s mail:
– Lynn Becker, whose photos of “Cloud Gate” I linked to here over the weekend, has kindly written to clarify what the “armature” around the trees in Millennium Park is doing. “There was a symposium at the Art Institute at the time the park opened,” she writes, “and the landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson explained the caged trees–‘the hedge’–as protecting the garden from the rampaging hordes making their way after a concert in Gehry’s Pritzker Pavllion to the garage entrances on Monroe, and also as creating an outside/insider for her ‘secret garden.'” So it’s for their own good! And she quotes Gustafson saying more about “pre-figuration”: “The armature is basically a pruning guide for the shoulder hedge. It is also based on a theory by Andre LeNotre, which is called prefiguration, in Versailles. He prefigured all the hedges with wood, so you had to wait for, Louis IV had to wait to see what his garden was going to look like. He could imagine it through the prefiguration. The armature is a prefiguration of what the hedge one day will be its shape, and when its pruned, at the every end, the armature will disappear”
Ah. This is helpful to me but not, I think, to the trees, which I persist in wanting to anthropomorphize. I felt the same way about all the tulips when it snowed in Chicago two weekends ago–although, sitting in the Wrigley Field bleachers in that same snow for four hours, I was at least as pitiable as they were. (For those of you who watched that game on WGN, I was the one in the Canadiens toque–apparently such a novelty in post-NHL America that it got me thirty whole seconds of air time.) In any case, raise your hand if you spent your 30th birthday wandering around Versailles, followed by a rousing performance of Carmen at the Bastille Opera House. I may be in a minority here.
My thanks to Lynn.
– I also received some interesting responses to my post about Jenna Elfman and Lauren Graham’s d