Midnight Chimes

I’m proud to say I was a major factor in getting this old clock back in working order. A product of the New Haven Clock Co., it’s about 100 years old and deserves to be displayed prominently on a mantel and doing its job; which is twofold: telling the time and chiming its little heart out every quarter hour.

I’m also, with relief, proud to report that it is not sitting on my personal mantel because I think it would drive me crazy. The sound it makes is charming and, in its own way, beautifully delicate. But, here’s the rub—it chimes, as stated above, every quarter hour. My grandmother had one of these clocks and, invariably, it would have to be silenced whenever she had houseguests because no one could sleep through it, including me.

The tune is the famous one you hear from Big Ben in the tower of the Parliament building in London, the volume of which is just a tad louder than this one. Now I understand why the British are so antsy most of the time. Of course the question came up about the origin of the melody and here’s the WikiLeak on that:

This melody is traditionally, though without substantiation, believed to be a set of variations on the four notes that make up the fifth and sixth measures of Handel’s Messiah. It was written in 1793 for a new clock in St. Mary the Great Church, the University Church in Cambridge and is attributed to any one of the following people, depending on your source. The Rev. Dr. Joseph Jowett, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge, was given the job, but he was probably assisted by either John Randall, who was the Professor of Music, Cambridge University, or his brilliant undergraduate pupil, William Crotch.

Being the type of irreverent person I am and if I had to vote I would, naturally, tend to lay the accolade (or the blame) on Crotch.

The notional words of the chime, again derived from Great St Mary's and in turn an allusion to Psalm 37:23–24, are: "All through this hour/Lord be my guide/And by Thy power/No foot shall slide". Not nearly as good as a limerick but, hey, one man’s doggerel is another man’s poetry. The words are written on a plaque on the wall of the clock room of the Big Ben tower. Earplugs optional.

Want fries with that?

As an antidote to the strong feelings provoked by Koenig’s Sphere (see below), here’s some public art you can really get your teeth into.

“Daddies Ketchup,” which is a 30-foot-tall inflatable ketchup bottle, is on display at City Hall Park and is obviously the star of an exhibition of ten works installed by the Public Art Fund called “Common Ground.” It was created by artist Paul McCarthy.

It’s really funny and, although it doesn’t make me crave ketchup in any way, I could certainly savor an order of inflatable French fries right now.

I thought the word “Daddies” was just part of the joke but it turns out there really is such a brand in Britain. Somehow that makes the joke even better.

Influential Sphere

Koenig’s Sphere was always a stop on the itinerary whenever I was tooling around downtown Manhattan for whatever reason, houseguest tourism included. It was in the plaza between the twin towers and it was a perfect choice for that space. Although it was bent and battered during the disaster of 9/11 it somehow survived intact. It was put in storage for a while and then was reinstalled in Liberty Park, a site about four blocks south of the World Trade Center and, in the interim, it has become a tourist (and homeboy) landmark and destination in and of itself. Despite a public outcry to include it within the new WTC memorial the powers-that-be rejected its inclusion for, to me, weird and obscure reasons. The Sept. 11 memorial/museum President Joe Daniels says it “infringes upon the integrity of the memorial design” although how that’s possible is beyond my understanding. But, yet again, the public-be-damned. Perhaps an effigy of Mr. Daniels could be burned in its place.

Whatever the reasoning, Koenig’s Sphere should be on display, if not as part of the official memorial, but as close to its original location as possible. But even that is not to be. Because of renovations to Liberty Park it is now scheduled to go back into storage for who knows how long and there seems to be no plans to return it to the Park or anywhere else. This decision totally sucks.