The World Examining Works

Flowers and Things

 

The usual foray up to the green market at Union Square.

The bliss of nasturtiums and the similarly colored micro mesclun.

Ate it for supper and it tasted like spicy hedge clippings. 

Really can't tell if these are anemones or poppies of some sort. Julia, where are you?

It was sunny yesterday. Almost warm enough to sit outside at a cafe.

 Then it rained. This photo was taken squinting through the chainlink fence of the PennSouth Community garden. I am a complete sucker for Hipstamatic 99cent  lenses. This one is called Monti. It makes things look misty and mildly historical.

How ridiculous to be wearing such garments in May.

I hear they have early roses in England!

 

 

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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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.

 

 

 

Sfumato

 

Earlier this week the weather was misty and English --quite unlike the clear piercing light we usually get.

On Monday morning the tall buildings were shrouded in fog. (Shrouded always sounds a bit melancholy and romantic.)

Even the tree by the Midtown Tunnel managed to look picturesque.

Billowing something or other between the buildings of Penn South.

Dusk looking towards 23rd Street.

All these bare trees remind me of photos I took several Decembers ago on the beach in Morocco

where magic forests were created by the tide pulling dark sand over light sand or viceversa. I have always kept these pictures when much else has been lost.

Such trees, or coral, or roots of teeth 

Here trees reflected in water on 24th Street.

But back to the old misty business --Cold Spring Harbor on LI on misty Monday with the Hipstamatic filter

and the plain version.

Lastly Miss Gretchen -- like Diddle Diddle Dumpling my son John/One shoe off and one shoe on.

 

And the winner of the Novica gift code was commenter #6 DCW. I will send the code via email so you can buy someone a present from their  new gift finder.

 

 

Snapshots from the Green Market

 

Delphiniums, hydrangeas and lilies  --very suitable wedding flowers

and fancy sunflowers

zinnias zing

I liked this woman's hat

and everything about this dog.

Knitting season approaches

but now it's red fruit and veg time.

Swis chard is very photogenic

as are the fancy mixed bouquets.

 

Happy Weekend!

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.

 

 

New York Wedding

 

Fathers' Day. Sunday afternoon in Rockerfeller Center

The reception room so pure and white.

The outdoor space overlooking St. Patrick's Cathedral and one of the grooms.

A marvellous photo op.

And the clothes! Note the tarbush (often called Fez) from Morocco and the green shoes

I think the photographer has sprung from the 20's of the last century

Not to mention the clothes....

and the table after dinner

and the view from the window.....

 

Wishing Robert and David a long and happy life together.

June 17th 2012

 

Painterly

 

On Thursday I was walking past the old Alcamo Marble place which went out of business last year. I imagine it is about to be turned into a new swanky gallery. Meanwhile it somehow manages to remind me of a Dutch genre painting...

You know all --  that red brickwork and a maid sweeping

we even have the requisite bird --with little footprints

and the still life on top of the oil can. None of the colors above have been tweaked.

Now the Instagram version. How filters alter everything.

Later in the day at the Neue Galerie it pelted with rain, and it was good to be inside. Sepia tends to make things look a bit distant and sweet. I remember Edmund de Waal saying he didn't want to write a 'sepia saga' --where the past is oddly sanitized.

How the rain came down! Anyhow, in spite of all the excitement about the Klimt exhibition, my day was made by the discovery of the work of Heinrich Kuhn.

I had never heard of him before and am now utterly and completely smitten. He is the most painterly of photographers. Wonderful.

 

What I Take Photos Of.....

 

The short answer is everything.

I don't go in cars very often, so crossing the 59th Street Bridge was something of an adventure. All that metal and odd angles....

and the fun of a rear view mirror

and ending up in Queens -- pretty much terra incognita except around Deniz's house.

This light up bill-board for a church seems much more what one would expect from a 1940's movie theater. The Grecian urns add a classical note.

Back in home teritory, such a symphony of wheels on 23rd Street. The star is the Moto Guzzi.

On 22nd Street a mysteriously ecclesiastical door almost invites you in and then doesn't. I like the colors.

The gardens below my window are greening up  -- note the deciduous pine tree behind the oregano.

This is my best picture from yesterday. The single flower got broken off the orchid I bought at Trader Joe's. The background is a piece of scrap paper from Robert's art table.

Things I never take pictures of:

the homeless

mad people

children (except my own family)

sports cars

 

Apparently Amazon thinks my poem book  is a 'hot new release'!

I'm astounded.

 

 

Subway Series

 

 

The iPhone is the ideal toy for entertaining yourself on the subway.

For one thing, it renders it oddly painterly.

It gives you something to do while hanging about on the platform...

If you look very carefully you can see that this is an E train arriving....

and a patriotic one at that.

This is people getting on the train I just got off at Penn Station.

The exit

and heading up towards Macy's, where, you will be thrilled to know, I bought the Egyptian cotton bed sheets I could not buy last Wednesday (see previous post!)