Walk the walk

We are getting a tightrope walker in downtown Buffalo according to a story by my friend Colin in The Buffalo News. The tightrope walker has a wonderful tightrope walker name. It is Didier Pasquette!

Didier Pasquette studied with -- I love that phrase in the story -- another wonderfully named tightrope walker, Philippe Petit. All of us in Buffalo are experts now in tightrope walking history. Here is a picture of Philippe Petit.

But no longer is tightrope walking tightrope walking.

A quote I love, from John Massier of the Buffalo gallery Hallwalls: "It’s a metaphorical, figurative act. It’s very much about inhabiting the moment. To me, this is what the wire walker exemplifies. It’s the great impulse of all artists to fully inhabit the moment so acutely that you can do something that magnificent, that you can do something that sublime.”

The story continues:

During a recent visit to Buffalo to scout possible locations, Massier noted, Pasquette stressed that he was not a stunt man out to break any world records. He wanted, as Massier recalled, simply to “draw a line in space and walk on that line.”

Ahem.

I would go out and watch the tightrope walker, to use a phrase the article does not favor.

I am not so sure about the big giant owl sculpture they are going to have sit on a handsome building on Main Street. But there is money for this kind of thing and we are getting it.

We are also getting a car drilled full of holes sitting in front of the old Asbury Methodist Church downtown.

If I believed in reincarnation, which I do not, I would hope that in my next life I would not be writing a book about Leonard Pennario.

I would like to come back as a visual artist!