Art Culture Politics
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Murals
In Fort Green. This reminds me that I need to check out the Audubon Mural Project up in Hamilton Heights, near JJA’s old home and burial sites. John Berger has passed away at the age of 90. “Nothing in the nature around us is evil,” he wrote in one of his many essays. “This needs…
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A New Year
Built on the past. Awaiting the future. Full of promise. And danger. Aux armes, citoyens, Formez vos bataillons, Marchons, marchons! Qu’un sang impur Abreuve nos sillons! Casablanca has been playing at Film Forum here in NYC on it’s 75th year. This is so wonderfully cheesy and inspiring at the same time: You may recall that,…
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Hmm
There are some interesting bird figures carved around the Bethesda Terrace in Central Park. Jacob Wrey Mould, an English architect (and linguistic and musician), who worked closely with Olmsted and Vaux, is responsible for these rather exotic creatures.What would you call them? As with the Falconer, they’ve seen some serious damage, and the repair work…
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Super-sizing the Bird List
How many species of birds are there in the world? It has generally been considered that there are between 9,000-10,000. This new study upends that, suggesting that the number should be double the earlier estimate. (Here’s the actual paper.) Well, wow! We have defined species as animals that can breed together. But if you pay…
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The spiders were hung by the chimney with care
A detail from Audubon’s Birds of America that caught my aging eyes recently in a 1965 coffee table version, not nearly the elephant folio in the room.
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Gotham Unwatered
Ted Steinberg’s Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York is a history of the de-watering of the region. From the Dutch on, but particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, we have have pushed out the borders of the archipelago with landfill. The interior wet places have been drained, filled in, and covered…
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One Way, or Another
Northern Mockingbird defending its territory. Trump’s choice to dismember the Department of Education and feed off its corpse is another of these cultish, right-wing, plutocratic nutbags this country produces far too many of, but of course even most Democrats have been fine with undermining public education. Yet privatization of education, as other public goods, only…
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Meandering
To meander, wandering this way and that, like the ancient Greek river Maiandros, by way of the Latin Maeander. The word itself has meandered down to us. There was no guarantee it would ever arrive here after its strange journey. That river was in Phrygia, Anatolia, now Turkey. The province also bequeathed us the the…
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For the love of moth snowstorms
A public service announcement: I wrote about Michael McCarthy’s necessary book The Moth Snowstorm for Humans and Nature. I hope you’ll pop over and read it. Biophilia must be political.
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The Chat of the Town
For more than two weeks now, a Yellow-breasted Chat has been haunting the northern side of Trinity Church graveyard in lower Manhattan, the side opposite musical-comedy star Alexander Hamilton’s grave. Chats are small, distinctive songbirds, their creamy yellow breasts contrasting sharply with their olive green tops. Bold white spectacle-like markings about the eyes jump out…
Backyard and Beyond 