untitled (silver fish) 2008
I pass this and the many other rich, Chinese open-market landscapes of dried meat, fish and vegetables to be found on Chrystie Street virtually every time I’m in the area. I snapped this shot very quickly last Saturday, while trying trying not to get out of step, because of the crowds of serious shoppers.
Author: jameswagner
size matters in New York
curb cut Smart
yellow line Smart
I spotted these two Smarts on the same block of West 21st Street this past Tuesday. They were both parked on the north side of the street, the front end of each safely (although barely) behind lines across which they legally cannot venture, back bumpers only a hair away from much larger vehicles parked to the rear.
These shots show that here in New York, and in Europe for ten years now, size really does matter.
Mary Heilmann at WACK!
Mary Heilmann The First Vent 1972 acrylic with bronze powder on canvas 20″ x 32″
I found a lot of treasures in the “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” show when it made its stop at at PS1 last spring. Maybe I’m stuck on her aesthetic, but Mary Heilmann‘s work, not surprisingly, looked to me like some of the freshest and most beautiful things to be found on the two large floors of galleries.
Besides, it really lightened up my week as I going back over some of the images I had wanted to post much earlier, and after my last few entries it looked like I needed some light. This acrylic was done back in 1972, when all we had to worry about was Nam and the bomb.
After another look at Heilmann’s painting and its title, while finishing the two paragraphs above I realized that the idea of the representation of ventilator screens of any kind started to possess me, as it had more than once before. I remembered Doug Wada, who has used quite plain vents as the subject of a number of his trompe d’oeil paintings, in addition to this somewhat-less-generic A/C screen, but I know there are many others out there. Who can’t use more ventilation, even if only imagined? This thing probably started with the Romans, where the tradition continues.
Volksgerichtshof in Guantanamo
Roland Freisler presided over the show trials of another regime
I’ve been buried among memoirs and histories of Nazi Germany lately so the news of today’s verdict by an illegitimate, burlesque* court operating inside a room of an abandoned airport control tower within our remote, bargain-rental military base at Guantanamo Bay brings to my mind the Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court) established by the Nazi regime after the Reichstag fire. That court continued operating (eventually without Freisler, who was killed in an Allied bombing raid February 3, 1945) until the end of its creators’ own gruesome unjustifiable war, initiated several years later.
No, in spite of our government’s attempt to maintain the contrary, including commissioning a special film, this is no Nuremberg trial. Interesting fact: Roland Freisler may have been a screamer and a monster, but at least the Nazis had the courage of their convictions: their show trials were open to the public – and filmed exhaustively.
One more thought: Does it mean anything that after all this time we still don’t even know the name of this dangerous terrorist, the little man from the other side of the world whom the full power of our state condemned today? It’s not in any headline I’ve seen, and you’ll find you have to go well into the first or second paragraph of a news story to find it.
I’m ashamed of my country’s government, and don’t talk to me about our mute Democrats, the frightening-loyal “opposition”. At this moment I see no reason to hope for an end to our fundamentally stupid or simply abominable policies at home or abroad. The patriots of the German Resistance eventually came to understand that only a German defeat could save their country, Europe and the world. It would be good to be able to believe we haven’t gone that far ourselves, but I’m not willing to bet on it right now.
*
The prosecution has announced that even if a defendant ends up acquitted, he (so far they are all men – or boys, at the time they were rounded up) can be thrown right back into a Guantanamo cell or imprisoned in some other rathole which would be equally or even more isolated.
Can we pinpoint the moment when a nation sold its soul?
[image from a currently-inactive site, germanika]
dog days
but I’m not looking for this kind of excitement
I know there have been few postings here lately, but there’s no particular reason other than the lethargy or discomfort of a warm and humid urban summer, what the Greeks and Romans, when they wanted to speak English, called the “dog days“. There was a best-seller some 200 years back, apparently considered extremely entertaining on a number of levels, called “Clavis Calendaria; or, A Compendious Analysis of the Calendar; Illustrated with Ecclesiastical, Historical and Classical Anecdotes”*. In it the author, the Englishman John Brady, described the ancient seasonal phenomenon as:
. . . an evil time when the seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies.
In spite of such fearful obstacles, I really am going to try to do better soon. At the moment however, while it’s probably just coincidence, I actually seem to have come down with a cold, so I might finally almost have an excuse for not putting stuff up, even if I wasn’t asking for one. I just want to nap. Ach, there’s probably no one out there looking this way right now anyway.
Hey, tomorrow’s our 16th anniversary! I hope old Brady was wrong about the wine thing.
*
currently being offered by someone here on ebay for especially serious enthusiasts. This is a particularly timely move, because bidding is to stop one day after August 11: That is the traditional end of Dog Days, since that date (according to the Wikipedia entry) marks the ancient helical rising of Sirius, “the Dog Star”.
[image of Al Pacino/Sonny Wortzik in “Dog Day Afternoon” from lucidscreening]
the NYPD’s unlawful war on New York cyclists
another uniformed thug, saving our streets for cars
Around 9:30 on Friday night, a bicyclist pedaling down Seventh Avenue veered to the left, trying to avoid hitting a police officer who was in the middle of the street.
But the officer, Patrick Pogan, took a few quick steps toward the biker, Christopher Long, braced himself and drove his upper body into Mr. Long.
Officer Pogan, an all-star football player in high school, hit Mr. Long as if he were a halfback running along the sidelines, and sent him flying.
As of Tuesday evening, a videotape of the encounter had been viewed about 400,000 times on YouTube. “I can’t explain why it happened,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said on Tuesday. “I have no understanding as to why that would happen.”
These are the first short paragraphs of a longer Jim Dwyer piece, “When Official Truth Collides With Cheap Digital Technology”, published on line by the NYTimes a few hours ago. The site conveniently supplies a side box, a history capsule of some recent arrests in New York City. It focuses on the dramatic discrepancies between police accounts and what was captured by cameras, and there are also links to texts and videos.
New York’s bicyclists have seen the future of the city, and they are already a part of it. Unfortunately the NYPD is operating somewhere in the early twentieth century: They may be our “[girls and] boys in blue”, but when there’s a bicycle in sight they act like Brownshirts.
See video evidence from this past Friday of the latest violent assault in the NYPD’s continuing illegal campaign against bikes here, and for more history, see this video report.
[bystander’s video stills from the New York Post]
loan from Mass Transit account urged for Highway Fund
Are we going to be taken for another ride?
This NYTimes headline and story is of a kind once available only inside The Onion, “America’s finest news source”, but my benighted countrymen have been honing their skills as jokesters lately:
Drop in Miles Driven Is Depleting Highway Fund; Loan From Mass Transit Is Urged
WASHINGTON – Gasoline tax revenue is falling so fast that the federal government may not be able to meet its commitments to states for road projects already under way, the secretary of transportation said Monday.The secretary, Mary E. Peters, said the short-term solution would be for the Highway Trust Fund’s highway account to borrow money from the fund’s mass transit account, a step that would balance the accounts as highway travel declines and use of mass transit increases. Both trends are being driven by the high price of gasoline and diesel fuel.
Money collected by the federal gas tax goes to the Highway Trust Fund. Most of it goes to highway construction and repair, but a very small percentage goes to help fund what we continue to flatter ourselves in calling our “system of public transportation”.
Silly me, that I should have ever thought the Republicans really believed in the beauties of the free market.
[image from ronin691]
NADA’s County Affair
artists and curators, barkers and rubes hanging out on 27th Street yesterday afternoon
the purgatory section of Jacques Louis Ramon Vidal‘s sideshow/funhouse “The Gamble of Life”,
Color Wheel performs in front of the Museum of Miniature Art‘s table
“Bobo’s on 27th“, installed inside Foxy Production, linked seamlessly to the street outside the door [image includes artist/co-curator Nick Payne, center, via iChat from Bobo’s on 9th in Philadelphia]
Jade Townsend and William Powhida sold their own “lemonade n’ shit” all afternoon
Little Cakes had an extremely focused bake sale benefit for the medical expenses of two abandoned and rescued turtles; these stand-in beauties were very, very tasty
I captured a few, too few, scenes yesterday at “NADA’s County Affair“. The good old hot time available on West 27th Street wasn’t just the work of the weather: If every art fair exhibited the kind of creativity, energy and fun at large (and small) on those ancient paving stones yesterday, the organizers would have to ration the public’s access with prepaid time slots.
Mulberry time in Bushwick
It’s Mulberry time, but it seems that today mostly only birds know about the delights available for the taking on these beautiful trees native to the Northeast. My first delicious Mulberry experience was in Rhode Island, where I spotted one many years ago on the street with the fitting name Benefit. It was planted directly in front of my favorite library, The Providence Athenaeum. I think it’s still there.
The branch shown above is part of a tree in Bushwick, where it dominates the little garden behind Pocket Utopia.
four heirlooms
waiting for dinner
The larger of these four heirloom tomatoes were just too weird to pass up at the Norwich Meadows Farm stand at the Union Square Greenmarket yesterday. At least half of them will be giving their all tonight.