Images Courtesy of Beth Botshon
Brooklyn
Culminant: Greenwood Cemetary, Brooklyn
For the most part, culminant is a root word meaning the highest point, though some older dictionaries allow this little, mono-syllabic word to stand all by herself. I like the sound of culminant and have invested an enormous amount of weight for the word in the rubric of Abecedarium:NYC. We are going to photograph the highest natural point in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island and the highest human-made point in Mahhatten (Of course with the Twin Towers gone, it’s the Empire State Building).
The highest point in Brooklyn is Greenwood Cemetary. Today, I realize that our decision to make the shooting of culm a five-Burrough wide project has become absolutely daunting! I used to be almost deathly scared of cemeteries. When my girl scout troop offered to sweep autumn leaves from the grounds of the Memorial Gardens in Memphis, where I grew up, I begged to be excused from this odious good deed. I take my trembling nine-year-old daughter Noa to photograph the Revolutionary War statues in the cemetery. As we wind our way up the only real hill I have ever seen in our burrough, we realize that from this vantage point near 8th Avenue and 27th Street we are looking straight across the sky at the tops of buildings in downtown Manhattan.
Diglot: Spanish (Argentine), Brooklyn
Another morning with a diglot, a Latin-rooted word that sounds more like a rare flying animal than a multi-lingual human being. Today I follow Paula Felix Didier, an Argentinean film archivist, as she organizes a collection of 16mm films. I am appreciating the international quality of life here in New York, how easy it is to find a diglots who sometimes move with great effort and sometimes with astounding ease between the different worlds in which they work each and every day.
Diglot: Chinese, Brooklyn
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Categories Brooklyn, Diglot, Selenography
I spend the morning videotaping a Chinese accountant who finds it absolutely hilarious that I have any interest whatsoever in her daily meanderings between Cantonese, Mandarin and English. When I tell her she is a diglot, a person who speaks two languages, and that this is something very special, worthy of documentary attention, she seems both dismissive and charmed.