The World Examining Works

The New Normal

 

 

Since I haven't posted on this blog for five years, there may be lots of posting errors.

Anyway, as you will understand only too well, I won't really be examining the world - just my teeny tiny corner of it. I like documenting things. Here are some very dead tulips that Margaret bought me two weeks ago. Here are some kale flowers from the roof. A very empty calendar where I plan to write down who is due to provide dinner for an overworked doctor.

This is 9th Avenue this morning pretty early - about 8am.  I thought it would be a safe time to take a walk - and it was.

I find I have to write things down because one can't dash out to buy things; they have to be ordered and hoped for.

The photos from my study are how it actually looks; tidying up would not reflect how jumbled things actually are.

Such a patina on the little silver jug! Money unused and irrelevant. What can be on the flash drive?

How exciting to have two pears delivered yesterday.

Melancholy

 

 "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness..."

 Creeper aglow on the seminary wall

and more of the same

 and more and more.

A last rose photographed on Veterans' Day.

 The seminary itself looking spooky...

not to mention the contents of a garbage pail spotted this morning.

On a cheerier note a still life at home.

 

 

 

Early Fall

 

A Sunday walk round the neighbothood with rather a romantic filter  -but 21st street is very pretty.

Everything rather overgrown near my favorite house.

Foliage - as usual.

Windows...

Pee-gee hydrangea - good to dry - then it bits drop all over the place.

Yesterday morning and looking forward to getting away for a week - see the little aeroplane over London Terrace.

Still reading Arctic Summer and loving it,

Posted at 07:20 AM in Gardening, Nature, New York | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Idle

 

Yesterday was Labor Day, the sort of unofficial end of summer and the beginning of school and back to work and the end of summer beach shares and so on.

We were in the city expecting thunderstorms. In fact, my iphone woke me up from a pleasant nap to warn of flash floods. So I went up to the roof to look for storm clouds. (In the morning I had paid 99c to add to my collection of Hipsamatic filters....)

So things did look wonderfully dramatic. Look past the Google Building to the Freedom Tower.

Looking up was turbulent and celestial.

I'm playing around with antique tintype effects. Robert thinks these very silly and distracting but I think rather fun since I'm never going to be a real photgrapher. Anyway what bliss it is to have leisure to fiddle and experiment.

Claudia just wrote from Montpellier that the French think working is for chumps. Not to go into a long disquisition, I do think lots of  Americans work way too hard and  feel they need to be busy all the time. They make one feel positively immoral if one is not engaged in some improving pursuit. Hate feeling guilty.

Just finished reading "The Warden" by Anthony Trollope. Wonderful moral questions.

At the movies - "Blue Jasmine": Madoff scandal meets "Streetcar". Wonderful stuff.

I took the last picture in September 2012 at Rockaway Beach about a month before Hurricane Sandy.

It really does seem to have an odd and ominous feel which is why I kept it.

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Art

 

People looking at art....

 There are all sorts of stances that suggest attention -- like the weight on one foot

seen here too.

And the head slightly back rapt attention....or puzzlement ....or leaving it neutral for now.

We went to the Outsider Art Fair on 22nd Street in the old DIA building and though there were some reliably quirky things (see above) much of the work seemed oddly faux naive and there were lots of swanky art galleries and price tags in the hundreds of thousands. Very different from when the show was in the Puck Building years ago.

However, it was very well attended and offered much to discuss.

I thought Jean Betancourt was a more authentic art work than most of the stuff on the walls. (Went up to her and asked if I might take her photo.....you can't look like that and not expect people to notice you.)

She makes funky jewellry and regrets that no gallery wants to represent her. THe business side of art never ceases to puzzle me. Will not discuss this here.

Anyway, off to the David Zwirner Gallery  where the work is reliably engaging (like the current Francis Alys Reel-Unreel)

and the crowd rather chic.

 

A New Lens and Experiments

 

Despite the title of this blog, I really haven't been examining much lately as there seems to have been a great deal to do. A friend finally managed to discover how I could buy the Tinto app for Instagram......herewith some experiments in looking at things differently.

The subway  -- a place to lose oneself in cell-phone world. With violent crime way down in New York, thefts of Apple products are way up..... 

This is the gloomy lens.....

And this is Spring Street in Soho looking ancient.

The nice girl who sold me cheesecake in Dean and Delucca. (I pretend to be a foreigner/tourist when I ask to take photos. I suppose I could just say I was a blogger....)

Then I got bored of all the gloom and changed over to a brighter film.....

and looked out of the window at the suddenly bright white wall on 8th Avenue

and at my positively transcendental pencil mug.

A different day on 5th Aveue the sky was astoundingly blue (well, it always is blue but this lens makes it extra bright.)

The church on 20th Street that pretends to be English....

and a bike outside the laundry.

 

All this makes me think of the old saw about 'rose-tinted glasses', and the effects of exciting music in films and all the things we do to alter mood (gosh!-- booze, drugs...poetry, words, effects of light!)

Happy New Year.

 

 

 

Boring Post about Wet Day

 

I like documenting things (you probably guessed!) anyway, it was astoundingly wet yesterday. Water was gurgling and swilling and pushing garbage along the gutter.

Lots of water for my magnificent garden!

An umbrella, wellyboot day. The dog, lower right, loves it. Loves being dried too.

I like being indoors looking out --west

and east

Wet leaves when the rain had stopped in the afternoon.

 

 

A Week

 

Signs of the season: the first leaves fall into the paddling pool at the dog park.

A stormy sky reflected in the concrete down by Chelsea Piers

and a study of the gutter on 22nd Street.

Roses dry quite well so they can last and have their photos taken for weeks. 

 

Flowers from the planters on the roof --a very tiny arrangement.

Tis the season for the pee-wee (or is it pee-gee?) hydrangea?

A rather restful looking porch on Long Island.

Back home lemons getting their portraits done

as well as the bounty of yesterday's green market.

Waiting for the bus......

From my study window --making concrete for the scaffold which will surround the building for ages and ages while they do complicated things repointing brick.

About Nothing in Particular/Domestic

Nice billowy clouds after a night of storms. 

Two kinds of salvia and some oregano snipped on the roof where the tubs are running rampant. Beach basket awaiting an outing. It came from Essouira by the seaside in Morocco.

Breakfast and a jug from where we used to go to the beach when I was six.

Absurd yellow breakfast from the other day (on top of a drawing block).

Lemons for iced tea --the ideal summer drink -- on a napkin again from Maroc.

Same lemons before in a bowl......

which sits near the desk and the chair..... and so it all circles around: the past and the present and the idea of home. And the TV blares something silly about aging skin  -- then shows us people in Syria whose homes are blown up -- so the trivial seems sweeter than ever.

 

 

Rus in Urbs

 

Snipped on the roof. When mint flowers, it pretty much stops growing.

A nosegay of basil, dried up lavender and the same old mint.

The planters on the roof seem to thrive amidst builders' debris -- too much sun, too much wind -- but growing things in the middle of the city is especially sweet.

Looking downtown

and across the road.

On street level the plants survive too -- after daily removal of cigarette butts, soda cans etc. The orange cosmos looking a bit ratty.

The middle tree pit is in almost complete shade under a big tree -rather an effort to force it to bloom.....