Art Culture Politics
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Limulus Polyphemus
For my birthday, I was given the gift of a tattoo. The work was done by Robert Bonhomme when he was still at Brooklyn Tattoo. Robert told me that when he was a kid, his siblings would run around local beaches searching for shells, while he was always on the lookout for horseshoe crabs. That…
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Spot: A Contemporary Retelling
See Spot running around the Ravine without a leash. All dogs are supposed to be on a leash in the Ravine. Where is Spot’s leash? Can anybody find Spot’s leash? The three people in charge of Spot didn’t seem to have a leash among them. Oh, well. Spot has found a way through the fence.…
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The Listening Tour
Tomorrow morning at 6 a.m. at Grand Army Plaza, Prospect Park, I will be leading a Listening Tour for Proteus Gowanus, the interdisciplinary gallery and reading room. Join us. This is part of Proteus’s year-long series of events, exhibits, and performances centered around the theme of Migration. The birds do it, some of the butterflies…
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Guying Detail for Arbor Day
The site engineering firm’s detailed drawing really does call out for Joyce Kilmer’s famous poem, as hackneyed as it is. It’s Arbor Day, people, so remember the trees. Thinking thusly, yesterday I pointed out the fence surrounding the tree pit a dog was crouching in to the man holding the dog’s leash. I see tree…
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Earth Day
Here at Backyard and Beyond, we celebrate our planet and its life, and its life-giving life, every day.So consider the exhortation on the bridge of the Torm Thames, a chemical tanker tied up at the end of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn last month, right around the corner from the Back 40. Sure, it’s a piece…
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Listening and Seeing Tours
I will be leading two Listening Tours this spring: The first is Sunday, April 29th for Proteus Gowanus. The second is Saturday, May 12, for NYC Wildflower Week/Nature Block Party. (Register here.) Both tours start at 6 a.m. at the Grand Army Plaza entrance to Prospect Park. Yes, you read that right: 6:00 a.m. sharp.…
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Wicked Network
I don’t own a TV, so I don’t see very much of it. It’s a stupefying medium, even beyond its commercial imperative to attarct eyeballs with whatever it takes, but of course it’s hard to avoid. So, not so long ago, I saw an ad for the National Geographic Channel’s new “reality” series Wicked Tuna.…
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Ouroboros
Every twenty years or so, my dander gets up and I write a letter to the New York Times. In the mid-1980s, I did it to spank Edward Teller, who poo-pooed the concept of nuclear winter in an Op-Ed, with a reminder of the global climate effects of “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.” That…
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Winter: What is it good for?
Tomorrow is the last day of winter, a measure now more astronomical than seasonal. What did we miss this year? Snow, and the recharging of our water supplies with the spring thaw. Gateway NRA spent the last couple of months sending out warnings about the fire hazard created by zero snow cover, strong coastal winds,…
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