Art Culture Politics
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Nature Morte
Check out Zane York’s Nature Morte at The Arsenal Gallery, The Arsenal, Central Park, NY NY, through April 27. We can chortle all we want to at the French, a la Groening’s Law — if I remember my graduate school days correctly — the French are funny, sex is funny, and comedy, obviously, is funny,…
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Thoreau Thursday
Yesterday in Prospect, the rites of spring were springing. An astonishing twenty-six Wood Ducks were to be found on the Pools. Chipmunks and turtles were out and about in the unseasonable warmth. Behold, two European Goldfinches, far from home. The first Mourning Cloak of the year, velvet over the sere leaves. A pair of male…
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Naturalia
Still a few days left to catch Naturalia at Paul Yasmin Gallery here in NYC. Exhibit ends on March 4th. It’s a thought-provoking mixture of old and new representations of nature in collaboration with Sotheby’s Old Masters division. The juxtaposition may leave you with a confirmation of what you already knew you liked to begin…
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Breaking the Lock
Rebecca Solnit’s “Tyranny of the Minority” in the March Harper’s nails it: “Republicans’ furious and nasty war against full [democratic] participation has taken many forms: gerrymandering, limiting early voting, reducing the number of polling places, restricting third-party voter registration, and otherwise disenfranchising significant portions of the electorate. Subtler yet no less effective have been their…
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Thoreau Thursday
The purple, duck-billed buds of Liriodendron tulipifera. These are just over 2cm long and were taken from some recent windfall branches. Thoreau seems to have become acquainted with “tulip trees” on Staten Island, where he lived from May-December of 1843, having gone there to tutor Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brother’s children. I read in one source…
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Earth in Mind
David W. Orr’s Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment & the Human Prospect has been turning my mind over and fertilizing it with good compost. “My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an…
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Thoreau Thursday
All biographies end. And, of course, the ending is always the same. Nearing the literal and figurative end of Laura Dassow Walls’s magisterial life of Henry David Thoreau, I suddenly found myself not wanting to go on. I didn’t want him to die. Not right now. Not during our political upheaval. I started reading “Wild Apples” to…
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Sabots for Bartleby
The essential Frances Fox Piven on throwing sand into the gears of everything in the fight against Trumpism. Most Americans are unused to this kind of resistance, but we need to get up to speed fast. Our nominal representatives, the corporate Democrats, are only showing backbone because we are demanding that they do so. Marches…
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A Week of Raptors
How about some raptors? Let’s start with this mosaic in the 81st St. subway station, one of a large series illustrating some of the breadth of the American Museum of Natural History. (You can actually enter the museum from underground there.) It’s very much worth a MetroCard swipe to explore both platforms, which are stacked…
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We Are Petroleum Junkies
Hydrocarbons are a dog-damned miracle. The things we get out of crude oil, from fuel to explosives, from fertilizers to clothing, from pharmaceuticals to candle wax, from pesticides to plastics, from asphalt to inks… it’s just mind-boggling. Mostly we think of gasoline, but that’s not the half of it. The stuff both powers and rules…
Backyard and Beyond 