An EV Grieve reader sent me a note the other day, telling me to check out the base of the street lamp at the northeast corner of Seventh Street and Avenue A... where one of Jim Power's colorful, jagged-edged mosaics lives... or once lived. As the reader notes, "
Time and thoughtless bureaucracy really fucked this particular piece over. Chunks of it are gone, and someone -- I'm guessing the NYC DoT -- covered it in gray paint ...
a travesty. With the arrival of spring I got fed up with seeing it looking so ugly, so I
Zip Stripped it ... I ran out of stripper before all the gray paint was off, so it's a work in progress."
So far...
Perhaps Jim Power himself will revisit it soon.
At Neighborhoodr, Matt Rosen recently caught up with the Mosaic Man ... As Rosen reports: "Since the weather’s turned, Jim Power ... with dog Jesse Jane in tow, of course, has been spending a few days a week back in the East Village doing some repairs to his trail of light posts."
He has more on Power
here.
how good of the reader to undo the DOT's missteps. hats off!
ReplyDeleteI am so conflicted about Jim. I really want to support him, I think he has done the neighborhood a wonderful service with his creativity.
ReplyDeleteBut whenever I see his mosaic's these days, I can't get the image out of my head of him on Sept 12th 2001 standing in front of the east village Islamic Center, shouting racist hateful comments, accusing them of being complicit in the events that took place the day before.
I remember Jim right after 9/11 wrapped in the flag, helmut on, his limp degenerated into a full-blown injury - he was shouting all kinds of shit and meanwhile i was seeing 'fake homeless people' (really!) that i swore were planted in the EVill to - well I don't know what they were supposed to be doing but in my PTSD disassociated state i saw Jim was going through some similar weird, uncontrolled trauma return. my fault line was a rape (12 years before!), thought i was long ago healed from but really fucked me up at the time, 9/11 opened up that wound and i didn't even know it, took me months again to get my body back - i imagine Jim is carrying around some heavy sad horrible stuff in his cells - personally I have a tender spot for him from his first enthusiastic moments to his crazier moments. The first time I met him it was some march in the neighborhood and i found myself in the front of the marchers with Jim - I was not comfortable being in the lead, not my style and Jim said to me - "Hey, keep up - it's important when you lead that you set a good example" - I believe he has always tried to do that, maybe not always succeeded - but those words stuck with me - an unexpected gift from a stranger - kind of like his mosaics turned out to be...
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