lightheaded, I stumble, and there's something in the air and this brooklyn sky is so dark after twenty three minutes of gordon matta-clark that's strangely moving, I smell the gasoline exhaust from a chainsaw, dust motes drizzling up and down in the sunlight.

I can't believe that I forgot this, but two years ago my friend J and I, walking around at 3am in the morning, stumble across this guy at the car-less intersection of 102nd and West End, standing in the middle of the street. He's in his late fifties, early sixties, with a stick in his right hand and a large bucket on the ground, and he has the air of someone so determined that he has tunnel vision, absentmindedly focused, directed. As we approach he swings his arm in a graceful swoop, something shimmers in the cool fall night air and instantly the three of us lift our heads to look up at a soap bubble that appears, all of a sudden, larger than anything I had seen, the size of a car, a bus, floating in mid-air, hovering and lit red and green by the color of traffic lights everywhere. And then it is gone.

He explains to us that he is practicing his bubble-blowing technique so that he could regain his Guinness record, that among the world he had many rivals, and while he had recently held the record he had lost it to a guy in Australia. One day this guy gets a VHS tape in the mail, nothing else, pops it in his player, and without an introduction, an image abruptly pops up on the TV of an enormous soap bubble, house-sized, building-sized, hovering still in the blue sky above a crisp green field. And below it: a gaggle of kids, running underneath it and chasing each other in delight, falling over each other. Meanwhile this bubble's calm, flexing, hovering, rotating slowly, shimmering gently, undulating silently.

I bite my lip. strains of mazzy star.