Across from Billini plaza is a well to do man’s home of the nineteen hundreds.
His home, which I am shown through, is several hundred years older than the Alcazar de Don Colon and several hundred years behind homes you find now in the Zona Colonia with modern refrigerated air, jacuzzi’s, fancy kitchens and garages. In another two hundred years, the homes of our future will be with us and who knows what rich people will demand that might filter down to the rest of us.
This home, luxurious in it’s day, doesn’t even meet the required building codes in most American middle class neighborhoods in these times.
What is more worth weighing is whether this man and family of the eighteenth century, compared with another man and family of our twenty first century, flourished and lived a happy life.
A house doesn’t need to be new and fancy to be a happy home.
What is more important than square footage and stainless steel appliances is whether the man of this house was happy to go home, and the people in his home were happy to see him when he hung up his hat and came inside the front door.
I’m walking, minding my own business, not a cloud in the sky.
Water pours down like someone is pouring a bucket of water on me.
In the Zona Colonia, water used to mop, or spilled when watering plants, leaves the upstairs balcony through a piece of PVC pipe and falls to the street below.
If I had a plug and a ladder, I’d climb up and fix my problem and give these careless people a well deserved back up of their plumbing.
All they have to do is look down and make sure no one is below before they empty their buckets.
That’s common courtesy, but you don’t have to have courtesy when you live on the top floor.
When you live upstairs, it gets easy to forget those below you.
Next time, I’m bringing an umbrella.
You can never count on people to do the right thing.
The materials employed to make these mobile constructions are exquisitely simple – wire, fishing line, paper mache, paint.
One touch of one hummingbird and all of them are flying, fearless in space, reminding me of hummingbirds in the Costa Rican Monteverde Rain Forest, reminding me of a hummingbird in South Fork, Colorado, reminding me of hummingbird’s gravitating to a feeder on brother Alan’s back porch overlooking the Palo Duro Canyon in Texas.
These hand made hummingbird’s in a Santo Domingo art gallery, all dance in front of me, in an orbiting circle, set in motion by a little tap by my right hand forefinger.
Setting things in motion is what us humans do, instinctively, all the time.
My right forefinger, on my laptop mouse, starts this post’s video in motion too, with a slight gentle left click..
There is art everywhere on Calle Conti, leaning against walls in pedestrian walkways, stacked deep in little shops along with Dominican Republic baseball caps and knick knacks. The canvases are small, medium, and large, but all seem to have been painted by the same pair of hands.
Bolo’s, on a different street,catches my eye. Outside, by the gallery’s front door are three colorful masks and browsers can see quickly that there is space inside the gallery to stand back and look at the arts and crafts sold inside.
The galleries featured artist this month, Almanzar from Haiti, has displayed a series of self portraits done in a pointillist like style, with subtle girl colors.
The black sales woman has music on, a glowing smile, and is gracious enough to let me take my time and just browse on a quiet afternoon in the middle of the week.
I do wonder about an artist that does a show of self portraits.
Why would someone you don’t know want to buy your self portrait?
Wouldn’t they really just want to buy one of themselves?
The front and back metal gates to the massive Cathedral, in the center of the Zona Colonia, are not four hundred years old. They look that old, however, and the faces sculpted unto them look eternal and primordial.
There are the faces of Luke, Mark, Matthew and John from the Bible. There are faces that show basic human emotions that continue, regardless of time and place. There are insignia of the Spanish Crown, familial and political dynasties. The weathered corroded faces remind me of Gothic figures peering down from old churches in Europe telling us we are not perfect and will be rewarded for our sins in terrible ways I cannot imagine, even in my most harrowing of dreams.
Each art form tries to convey human emotions with its own materials and methods.
Music uses sound to suggest romantic interludes, fierce battles, fear invoking scenes. Art uses color and line to show the three dimensional world on two dimensional surfaces. Sculpture, as done by old masters, uses clay, bronze, marble or stone to show us who we are and who we should be. These weathered faces on the gates convey anger, remorse, pain, love, tenderness, regret, hope, betrayal.
These faces draw me closer instead of pushing me away.
I would like them much better if one of these guys was laughing.
Even back then, people working on this Cathedral liked a good joke, even if it’s telling sometimes got them locked up in the dungeon for a few nights with a hundred lashes and not even a pot to pee in.
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