This was something of an ode to a series of parks in the city of Boston: the Emerald Necklace. …as indicated by placing segments of an emerald necklace on this pulp figure. The kaiju-esque look was coincidentally curated via my ham-fisted narrative.
There are a few references within the name of this piece and for the sake of content generation, I’m to break it down. Lily by way of the Shakespearean idiom “gild the lily”, a process I can’t seem to get away from and enjoy quite a bit. More is more, less is a bore. I don’t know who said that. Me. it was me. I said it. I say it all the time.
Olmstead is, yes, as in that BAMF Landscape Architecture Big Man: Frederick Law. Whomst, over 20 years of planning and managing, crafted the thoughtform of Boston’s Emerald Necklace. It has thankfully been expanded and grown, and is something of a potent soft-power symbol, at least in my heart, for the metropole of Boston.
Sometimes I really enjoy imagining personifications of the city of Boston; maybe one of their manifestations might be a Lily Olmstead. But there would be many other, many more interesting avatars that looked very different from a saucily wrap-clad Fox News clone. However, the problematic dialectics contained within white feminist Marxism I leave entirely to the Anthro department at Umass Amherst. Washed my hands clean of that a long time ago.
Hennyway… ‘folly‘ brings a little bit of Chicopee back into all this. I just can’t seem to get that stain out, might as well leverage it. My use of this word goes back to memories of a steadily crumbling, color changing fountain at Szot Park, directly adjacent to a massive tank-husk, thick and calloused with paint. This charming duo sat next to a pair of scum-slick ponds that were initially meant to be a fishing, swimming, and recreation area in the summer and in winter months a centralized ice source for primitive 20th century refrigeration methods. Also hockey. Though renewed by the WPA in the 30’s the area failed spectacularly in both intentions over the decades due to municipal neglect. My own preferred high school reflecting pool it had always been a rank crater infested with Canada Goose. The ponds were named after the Bemis family who sold the land to the city of Chicopee, and they unfortunately bore the brunt of dishonor. According to my Grandmother, she had always called this spot Bemis’ Folly.
To even attempt to sketch some sort of comparison between Chicopee and Boston would be fool hardy at best, and disingenuous at worst. So I won’t.
But I will do us all a favor and punctuate this Kafka-Seinfeld Artworld Fanfic chapter.
Goddess forgive me.