Art Culture Politics
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Gowanus Dragon
The anti-freeze color of the water is just about right here.
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A Preview
In October, there’s going to be an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum called Birds of a Feather: Avian Imagery in Contemporary Art. I was digging around the scheduled artists and found this (which may not be on exhibit, btw): Rachel Berwick, which is a good name for a bird artist, has trained parrots…
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Stung!
Is it too early for a couple of quick ones? Non-Russian vodka, with Bloody Mary camouflage, if you please. This book is unrelievedly depressing and despairing. It makes you want to jump in the ocean and drown… but you’ll probably be stung dead by jellies before that happens. Should your grandchildren ever get ahold of…
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Eating Crow
I’ve been hearing and/or seeing crows most days lately in my Brooklyn neighborhood. There seems to be a family of three — as highly social birds, they will maintain multi-generational family units — in the area. The other day I saw one with nesting material in bill. Meanwhile, in other counties of New York (outside…
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Unreal Nature
On a recent trip to Croton Point, a friend noted how much he has been conditioned by television nature shows to expect spectacular close-ups, stunning cinematography and photography, and dramatic incidents in the wild. The real world is something quite different. Missing in those shows are the hours of footage, sometimes the days and even…
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What Is To Be Done?
Here at the Thoreau Meeting, Sunday’s as good as any other day for a sermon. We have no one to blame but ourselves when it comes to the corruption of our public institutions, as well as our private ones and everything in between. Our consent and complicity have been given entirely too freely. I’ve been…
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The light in your eyes
I wonder who it was who painted the first portrait with that little bit of white in the eyes signifying reflection? You can wander a museum for hours fixated on these daubs of paint, geometries suggestive of where the subject posed — rectangular for natural light through a window, for instance — which suddenly give…
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More Blackbirds
Right inside the “wellness center” at LIU Brooklyn’s campus. I assume it used to be a “gym,” short of gymnasium, which was where ancient Greeks played naked (Putin would plotz); gymnós meaning naked. Moving right along: those are pretty good corvid forms, if massively oversized. But what the hell is this on the corner of…
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To every thing there is a season
In memory of Pete Seeger, some photographs of the great Hudson River, which he campaigned to clean up, rather quixotically when he started in 1969, after more than a century of its being used as an industrial toilet. And some reflections. In Ullapool, Scotland, some years ago I went to a pub late in the…
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Meanwhile, in the Wedding Venue Garden
In the last week, two employees of what many are still calling, for sentimental reasons, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, confided in me about the low level of morale there since the purge of its research program in August. In September, the Garden’s Board of Trustees approved a new mission statement; the old one had proved…
Backyard and Beyond 