Wednesday, Apr. 07, 2010

Out of place in so many ways

She looks smart, sexy, dangerous and irresistible - a pouty-mouthed starlet flaunting a who-cares cigarette. And for some reason, she's spray-painted 5 feet high on a cinderblock wall, casting her heavy-lidded gaze into a drainage pipe.

Raleigh's portrait of Edie Sedgwick, the doomed and drug-woozy actress most famous for her glittery years as Andy Warhol's muse, hides in a manmade lagoon where the bugs are already biting.

To find it, you've first got to locate Edna Metz Wells Park, the sliver of oak trees and ivy sandwiched between Peace Street and Park Drive - just down the hill from Cameron Village.

Then you've got to clamber down a steep bank, hopscotch your way across stenchy water to the man-size culvert where Pigeon House Branch Creek comes trickling under Clark Avenue.

With cars and joggers passing 10 feet overhead, Edie shines inside a murky chamber that smells like the by-product of a thousand dog walks. Fingers in her ears, hair chopped and white in the late-'60s fashion, she looks as if she stumbled out of a SoHo discotheque.

Nothing explains her presence in this watery place, not even an artist's signature. In a thought bubble, Edie speaks a single syllable: "DE," which stands for inner power in Taoist Chinese and also is an acceptable abbreviation for Delaware.

I wouldn't have guessed this spray-paint likenessexisted had it not been for John Morris and his splendid blog goodnightraleigh.com, which this month features photos of Edie by moonlight.

It also explains that neighbors worry that the mural will disappear once the city finishes work on the park, where the creek's banks are eroding and the water is foul-smelling. But another splendid Raleigh blogger, John Dancy-Jones of raleighrambles.wordpress.com , assures me Edie will stay comfortably above-water once the park rehab is finished. The only other danger might come from Raleigh's crew of graffiti-scrubbers, but that crew of do-gooders is already on notice that the city's budget ax is soon to fall.

Meanwhile, I can find nobody who knows where Edie came from, or why anyone would take the considerable time required to paint her alongside a hard-to-find storm drain.

She has no ties to Raleigh that I know of, having split life between her family's Santa Barbara, Calif., ranch and hipster New York, turning up on Bob Dylan albums and in the pages of Vogue before her terrible overdose death at 28.

But maybe that's the fate of falling stars, to land extinguished in some cheerless swamp, waiting to be remembered.