The blimpish Mr. Pinfold is besieged and bombarded in his cabin by auditory hallucinations: dogs, jazz, church services, malign engineers from the BBC.
It was hard not to think about how far the country has come from the time of the 1960's, when the news was filled with footage of sit-ins, fire hoses unleashed against black citizens, Bull Connor and his attack dogs, and church burnings.
The bagels have the most cream cheese, the panhandlers have the best stories, you can take your dog to church, you can pray to Mecca (or Wiccan) in the street, sell lobster bisque from a hot-dog stand and no one will bat an eyelid.
Half-demolished houses, a few hungry stray dogs, dilapidated churches: this is Mavropigi, the most recently abandoned village ready to be demolished for coal extraction.
During the Super Bowl, Dodge released a commercial that featured a collection of various Americans doing various American things rescuing dogs, transporting churches, doing pushups all to one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermons.
Once in the exam room, a nurse took my history and gave me a list of eight words--house, bread, blender, dog, milk, church, spinach, lawn--that she told me to try to remember for the duration of my appointment.
"WILLIAM WEGMAN: CANES ECCLESIORUM," (canes is Latin for church dogs), is an exhibiton of the photographer's famous pooches doing amazing humanlike things, created especially for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 112th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, Morningside Heights, through Oct. 22.
"WILLIAM WEGMAN: CANES ECCLESIORUM" (that's Latin for church dogs) is an exhibition of the photographer's famous pooches doing amazing humanlike things, created especially for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Avenue, at 112th Street, Morningside Heights, through Sunday.
"WILLIAM WEGMAN: CANES ECCLESIORUM" (that's Latin for church dogs), is an exhibition of the photographer's famous pooches doing amazing humanlike things, created especially for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Avenue, at 112th Street, Morningside Heights, through Oct. 22.
Then there are portents, enough of them to fill a tarot deck: a pack of stray dogs, an abandoned church, a fresco of saints with the faces rubbed off, a young married couple romping ostentatiously on a backlit balcony, a professional funeral weeper who treats the narrator to a private performance of exquisitely manufactured grief.
