Rainy day rumination
Full disclosure: I have a thing for gloomy weather. Since most of the places I’ve called home — save for Canada — have been sufficiently warm and perky, I’ve somehow developed a fetish for those with grayer climes, ones that are not perfumed by chlorine, sunblock and other standby smells of my childhood. It may be an unpopular opinion, but my idea of paradise does not consist of blue skies and swaying palms, but of light thunderstorms and falling leaves. As Jesse Eisenberg once said, “Every silver lining has a cloud.” That, conveniently, is me.
Whenever it pours, my mind instinctively jogs back to a work of art I first saw as a wide-eyed 15-year-old: Golconda, an oil painting by Belgian surrealist René Magritte. Completed in 1953, it features identical men in bowlers and overcoats, all floating in mid-air like a shower of faceless doppelgängers. Back then I associated it, naïvely, with England and Mary Poppins — maybe the buildings in the background had something to do with it. Now, however, I see Golconda as a statement about the generic nature of corporate culture. Magritte’s use of repetition, of similar images spaced in hexagonal grids, was ahead of its time, and he would’ve probably made a killing during the allover-print hoodie craze of 2006.
It’s raining (business)men: Completed in 1953 by Belgian surrealist René Magritte, Golconda is an oil painting that features identical figures in bowler hats and overcoats. Like ‘The Day After Tomorrow’
Speaking of prints, I came across a rather whimsical weapon with which to face the elements. The Zebras umbrella by Scalamandré, which I saw in one of the design magazines I usually read, reintroduces the company’s iconic wallpaper pattern to a wider audience. The tomato-red hunting scene — Wes Anderson fans should recognize this from a scene in The Royal Tenenbaums — was originally commissioned in the 1940s by Gino’s, an Italian restaurant on Lexington Avenue in New York, not too far from Bloomingdale’s. This umbrella, with its preppy-hippie intellectual vibe, has a demeanor more suited to the indoors, but what the heck.
In one of my favorite episodes of The OC, “The Rainy Day Women,” Seth Cohen tells Ryan Atwood, “Have you looked out the window? It’s like the opening sequence from The Day After Tomorrow!” I don’t mean to drag this down to nerdy depths, but the scene to which Seth refers takes place in a snow-covered region, and the rain doesn’t come until much later.
Real Wet-Weather Encounters
That said, the huge thunderstorm that lashed Newport Beach for more than 24 hours, though fictional, reminded me of my own very real wet-weather encounters. There was the time my friends and I got drenched by cold winter rain on our way back to the railway station in Brighton, on the southern tip of England. Then, just a few weeks ago, I got caught in a downpour in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, while watching the country’s annual tourism parade at Merdeka Square.
But the most eye-popping deluge I’ve ever seen was in Barranquilla, Colombia. The Caribbean city may be known as the birthplace of pop star Shakira and Modern Family’s Sofia Vergara, but it is also infamous for its “arroyos,” or urban flash floods. Brought about by nature as well as questionable engineering, this phenomenon turns asphalt canyons into raging creeks, dragging cars along for a different kind of ride.
I was walking home from school one day when I decided to take cover in a corner bookstore as it started coming down in buckets. I had never witnessed anything quite like it before – imagine a surfing competition crossed with a disaster movie – so I did what any young person would do: I whipped out my phone and took a video. Like I said, I do find inclement conditions such as this bizarrely fascinating, but only when no one gets hurt, when damage is at a minimum, and most of all, when I am somewhere safe and dry.
There’s a track by Calvin Harris, aptly called “The Rain,” that sums up my stormy day playlist: “These are the good times in your life / so put on a smile and it’ll be alright.” It’s a pretty accurate forecast.
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