Art Culture Politics
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Raptor Wednesday: Justice Edition
For the last two weeks I’ve been serving on a jury in a murder trial. This was the view from the jury room: downtown Brooklyn, with the dwarfed tower of Borough Hall just visible to the left of the long Supreme Court building in the foreground. The row of buildings from the center to the…
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Blue Dragonfly
Detail of a cyanotype ca. 1910 by Bertha Jacques (1863-1941), on exhibit at NYPL. Photographed through glass, so a poor reproduction of the blue.
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Slicing Up the Sky
On a clear day, we can see New Jersey. Straight across is Newark, over New York Bay and Bayonne and Newark Bay. Newark International is there too. Glancing northwards, as above, the twin cities of Jersey City and Manhattan finger the sky. This particularly clear morning was all sliced by condensation trails, better known as…
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On Heredity
Carl Zimmer’s She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity is an essential read in our present moment. Genetic essentialism and ignorance; fundamentalism and fascism; the revival of eugenic racist thought and strategy by the Republicans; all these combine in the vital necessity of a history and understanding of biological and…
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Leviathan?
“What is to be done?” asked Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky in the title of his 1863 novel about the situation of Russian. Chernyshevsky wrote, from prison, something of a “handbook of radicalism,” postulating a sort of utopian peasant/commune/industrial socialism. Perhaps, though, the most important thing about the book was the burning titular question, which fired debate…
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The Tigers of Wrath?
True, they look more like lionesses. I stumbled on this in Green-Wood recently. It’s on the backside of the tombstone for Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, twentieth century artists. I just happened to be passing. Green-Wood has more real animals than artistic representations of them. This is one of the most notable:This bear marks the…
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Raptor Wednesday
It was a crazy day. Raptors filled the air. An exaggeration, yes, but not by much. At one moment, there nine different raptors overhead, mostly Buteos and Accipiters. I’ve never seen so much activity above Brooklyn before. One of the birds was this juvenile Northern Harrier. The long tail, angled wings, buffy red breast, and…
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Tanka
Crabapple blossoms, What do you think you’re doing, Out in November?Spring is irrepressible, A life-blooming metaphor.
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Frankenstein’s Planet
I re-read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, recently. The book is 200 years old this year (see the exhibit at the Morgan). If you have not read it, it is profoundly different from the Frankenstein created by the commercial media over the years. The strangest transference may be the naming thing: “Frankenstein” has…
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Brooklyn Botanic Axes Arborist
Two Monday’s ago, the management of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden cut down a quirky and beloved tree. Staff and community opposed the arborcide. The garden’s own staff didn’t think the gloriously stumpy “BBG Treehouse” needed to come down, so, like some capo di tutti capi, the institution got outside contractors to do the killing. Then,…
Backyard and Beyond 