Sparkles

New Year's Eve, disco balls and the mica under New York

“Disco balls do not merely reflect light; by now they have become the source of a peculiarly collective special effect. Indeed, disco balls have catalyzed an entirely new notion of the social sphere, creating a flux of heterogeneous people, shaping them into tightly knit and mobile masses that dissipate and reemerge with quixotic regularity. Disco balls describe neither a public nor a mob but a provisional social ecology.” Sylvia Lavin, Kissing Architecture

INKTEST: copper scraps, shellac, grape vine ash, water, rare salts, light.

Anyone else doing nothing for New Years Eve? Okay so instead of a party I offer you a memory.

Overnight Flight

A couple of years back in the beforetimes, I took a Xanax I got from my friend who works with Apple and knows a thing or two about how to relax when you are working hard. I’d never taken one before but I needed to sleep through the SFO to JFK redeye after running an inkmaking workshop on a garbage dump that forms a peninsula in the San Francisco Bay. I woke up in New York where I’d promised to provide inks made out of obscure squashes and peas and potatoes engineered to save the world by an MIT scientist and a famous chef for my friend Leanne who was doing overhead projections for a banquet in Red hook for the radical farmers and the well-known chef. At the dinner I met an Italian couple who were about to open a new restaurant based on plants and flowers, and they made me promise to call them when I got back to Toronto. I sent them a few cartons full of bottles of inks in the mail which sold well enough at the front of their restaurant that they bought me a ticket to New York to run a workshop on inkmaking with flowers a few months later. The restaurant is called Il Fiorista and the couple that own it were totally welcoming and they took me down to the basement which was still being renovated and in the corner of the basement was a hole in the cement floor where the foundation had been dug up for plumbing and in the hole I saw a pile of dirt that intrigued me. The dirt sparkled.

Manhattan Mica in filtered Hudson River water

Below the Surface

Alessandra and Mario (the Italians) offered me a scoop of their basement dirt and we talked about the crystals and minerals that underlie Manhattan and they talked about a woman they’d met who claimed that it was the psychic vibrations of the minerals of New York that give all of its inhabitants their special collective energy. I took a few crumbly rocks home with me and separated out the flakes of mica and started experimenting with them as nature’s natural glitter. The mica flakes were a brownish grey colour but I loved the way they hung in the ink like a little cloud and could add sparkle to any colour. I started finding this glitter everywhere: a midtown construction site that exposed the rock under the sidewalk; a chunky pebble on a path at the edge of a golf course at the northern tip of the island glinted with it and the biggest boulder in central park known as rat rock, is made of it. Manhattan Schist. This 450-million-year-old metamorphic bedrock underpins the skyscrapers and subways of New York and occasionally pokes up above the surface as a grey rock that sparkles with quartz, mica, and feldspar.

Studio 54 with sparkles

Sparkle Motion

Whatever the science, I have thought, since learning of the mica, that New York sits on top of a big natural sparking disco ball that fractures people-images and light into a million pieces, creating a kind of otherworldly energized community and makes you want to dance.

I was thinking of disco balls last summer when I found a few pieces of this special rock in a community garden in Alphabet City near where my friend Yuri Shimojo and her magical dog Rudy do their work. I talked a bit about my love of mica with Yuri, why I found it so special, and she also had thoughts about it. Mica, she told me, is "unmo" in Japanese.  It's written as 雲母 - cloud mother. This of course made me wish that english had a way to put together characters to form little pictures-poems to explain things that need more than just a series of letters. It also made me think about the silvery grey of clouds and that maybe they do have a kind of silver lining that, like a dull rock with pieces of mica, glint when the sun hits them just right.

After the Party

My friend Ani has a theory about disco balls and the many facets of humans which maybe we talked about in my living room full of glitter and a rented disco mirror ball under which kids of all ages were dancing to Grace Jones at our New Year’s Eve Party back in the times when you could have them. A few months back in the midst of a pandemic I interviewed Ani about this theory because I knew I wanted to write about disco balls for this newsletter but she is a writer and an artist and I feel like she is going to write an essay or start a cult about her theory one day, and maybe it needs to remain secret for a little while longer. Needless to say it feels good to dance, it feels good to sparkle and be with people in a little room in the dark breathing the same air, and I miss the parties I used to throw in my house and even miss the cleanup afterwards with its between-the-floorboards glitter and empty champagne bottles and the glass with the sticky golden dregs of some fancy Italian drink. And I hope that you, dear reader, have New Year full of colour and maybe a dusting of the sort of glitter that was never lost, that is still somewhere, glinting just below the surface.

JL

Can’t remember where I found this image but disco balls were around before disco.

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