Art Culture Politics
-
Lepidopteramania
The American Museum of Natural History is thick with lepidoptera right now. Running through May, there is a live Butterfly Conservatory.Some of the butterflies in this steamy tube are enormous.Chances are very good that a butterfly or two will land on you, so this is a great place to bring the kids (the butterflies, after…
-
Winter Baby
They say that the long and winding road leads to your door.Or, should you be going the other way, which is generally the way to start a walk, walking out that door, say, on a fine evening between four and six, one step after another, the road goes ever on and on, across the river…
-
Microbiome Valentine
Once we were thought to be the mirror of perfection, created in God’s image, made to rule the planet, separate and unequal from all the other critters. (I speak of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the one I know best.) This was before we discovered how hybridized we are, how interconnected, how evolutionary. Instead of created in…
-
First Horseshoe?
We approach the first anniversary of my now constant companion, the distinguishing identifiable feature of my corpus, my horseshoe crab tattoo. So I was most pleased to notice this detail in the book, Natural Histories, I reviewed in my last post. In 1590, Theodor de Bry’s opus America presented some of the first images of…
-
Wunderkammer
The Grolier Club‘s fine exhibition closes in a week. As a wunderkammermensch whose apartment, if not this very blog, is very cabinet-of-curiosity oriented, I must urge you to go see it while you can. Rarely is an exhibition of books, many of them catalogues of private collections, so intriguing. (For a bibliophile, no inducement is…
-
18th Avenue Eye Candy
The D train line is one I rarely find myself on, but the elevated stations on its southern, Brooklyn end, have some intriguing glass art. Recently, I got off the train at the 18th Avenue station take a closer look. This is Bensonhurst Gardens, by Francesco Simeti. These are made of laminated glass.Stay tuned for…
-
Nigh, as always
Is this the day the world is supposed to end? Or is it tomorrow? Or was it yesterday? In fact, all our yesterdays are the end of the world, at least as it was then. Now, I’m not so up on my Mayan calendars, Sumerian planets, Aztec forecasters, Shang Dynasty bone-tossers, or other aspects of…
-
Feedback is Hell
“The undiscovered polar regions are the home of men.” Henry David Thoreau, December 16, 1850. One day in the not-so-distant future, the imaginative hold of the Polar regions will be largely history, melted away into dreams. Zones of purity and terror, the once mysterious Poles obsessed peoples for centuries. Emily Dickinson, for one. She called…
-
Owls Real and Artistic
Brooklyn’s owls aren’t just wheat-paste works, but this piece of art is certainly easier to see. On Hall St. in Clinton Hill. Anybody know the artist? An injured Saw-whet was found in Sea Gate last month and taken to the bird hospital. And this fledgling Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus), one of two known to…
-
Backyard and Beyond 