Places

New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Faces Eviction

BY Author Lynne Sachs | Posted on | FILED UNDER Categories Foudroyant, Information, Manhattan, Vaticinate

Sometimes the sweep of technology can be overwhelming.  Even FOUDROYANT.  The almost 50 year old New York based Film-makers’ Cooperative is facing some major problems . We need the city of New York to stand up for alternative modes of expression.  To VATICINATE  is to see into the future, and here we can do this with both film and the internet hand in hand.  Go to a great New York Times article to understand the situation more clearly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/movies/11coop.html?_r=3&ref=movies

Umbel of Umbels: Coney Island Parachute Jump

BY Author Erik Schurink | Posted on | FILED UNDER Categories Brooklyn, Umbel

The structure of the Coney Island Parachute Jump—planted in Queens in 1939, and repotted in Brooklyn 2 years later—has caught my eye with curiosity many a time. Yes, it evokes to some extend the Eiffel Tower, more for its metal rete than shape.
I could imagine this elongated mushroom be created by Buckminster Fuller as the beginnings of a geodesic weeping willow, designed to build the dome from within. Construction was halted at the discovery of this umbel extraordinaire. “Flowers!” begged the World’s Fair world, “Give it flowers for crying out loud!” And so they crafted flowers: humans in gondolas as peduncles growing the rachides holding the parachute as an inflorescence. Twelve inflorescent flowers pulled from Brooklyn’s soil in a 21-second journey to complete the Jump’s own inflorescence for mere moments prior to being wilted down in a 9-second drop of blossoming thrill… How I wish I’d lived here before 1968, the year the Jump flowered last. Yet, what foudroyant joy that Leni Schwendinger almost 40 years later pumped new life into the culminant carrot crown of Brooklyn, with her incandescent artistry. Gustave and Bucky would approve.

Forgotten NY: From Street Necrology to Subway History

BY Author Susan Agliata | Posted on | FILED UNDER Categories Bronx, Brooklyn, history, Information, Manhattan, Places, Queens, Staten Island

Forgotten NY Logo For anyone interested in above, or below ground NYC history, Forgotten NY is an absolute treasure. Curious what your neighborhood looked like 100 years ago? Find detailed street necrology and photo galleries for neighborhoods from Greenwich Village to Astoria. Whether you live in Bushwick or Jamaica, St.George or the Lower East Side, this trove of original source documents will keep you occupied for hours.  Want to get even closer to NYC history? Take a Forgotten NY walking tour anywhere from Prospect Park to Hell’s Kitchen.

Happy exploring!

Audiles unite unsilently

BY Author Erik Schurink | Posted on | FILED UNDER Categories Audile, Culminant, Manhattan, Typhlology

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERQejtpld-Y

A few hundred audiles braved the cold to unite at the Washington Square arch in the early evening of December 15, 2008 to help create Unsilent Night. In Phil Kline’s annual non-sectarian holiday happening, a cloud of people carries the recorded sounds of bells, thumb pianos and gamelan like audio in boomboxes on their shoulders, under their arms, into a moving soundplay.

I particularly experienced this audio walk from Washington Square to Tompkins Square, as a lesson in seeing space with ears. In the openness of park one hears the auditory beauty for what it is, becoming instantly aware that the movement of people within the cloud will add a texture not conceivable at the Met or most any other sound venue. Once this urban highland band of MP3s and cassettes enters the canyon of Washington Place the spatial awareness lesson #2 announces itself: the block had become boombox. We heard what we heard before with reverb. How I wish my clone could have walked on Waverly crossing Greene and Mercer. How I wonder if he’d heard Washington Place in stereo.

Broadway came, and added its honks and squeaks, St. Mark’s Place its vaudeville rumble, and all along there was the chatter of participants, punctuated by the silent awe of people just coming upon us.

The chatter stopped when Tompkins Square Park summoned to form a huddle for a culminant Grand Finale. And if cell phones were still used, it was to expand the audience.

After the crowd dissolved, the night was cold again, but I had received new eyes. At next year’s Unsilent Night, I may come blindfolded.   

Lapidary: The Sphere by Fritz Koenig

BY Author In Choi | Posted on | FILED UNDER Categories Lapidary, Manhattan, Vaticinate

The Sphere by Fritz Koenig The Sphere by Fritz  Koenig

This bullet is an old one.

In 1897, it was fired at the president of Uruguay by a young man from Montevideo, Avelino Arredondo, who had spent long weeks without seeing anyone so that the world might know that he acted alone. Thirty years earlier, Lincoln had been murdered by that same ball, by the criminal or magical hand of an actor transformed by the words of Shakespeare into Marcus Crutus, Caesar’s murderer. In the mid-seventeenth century, vengeance had employed it for the assassination of Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus, in the midst of the public hecatomb of a battle.

In earlier times, the bullet had been other things, because Pythagorean metempsychosis is not reserved for humankind alone. It was the silken cord given to viziers in the East, the rifles and bayonets that cut down the defenders of the Alamo, the triangular blade that slit a queen’s throat, the wood of the Cross and the dark nails that pierced the flesh of the Redeemer, the poison kept by the Carthaginian chief in an iron ring on his finger, the serene goblet that Socrates drank down one evening.

In the dawn of time it was the stone that Cain hurled at Abel, and in the future it shall be many things that we cannot even imagine today, but that will be able to put an end to men and their wondrous, fragile life.

– In Memoriam, J.F.K. by J.L. Borges

typhlology: inverse blinking

BY Author clareburson | Posted on | FILED UNDER Categories Brooklyn, Places, Typhlology

imagine a world in which your eyes are so sensitive to light that blinking refers to the moments during which your eyes actually open – sporadically and involuntarily. this inverse blinking offers just enough visual information for you to orient yourself before being plunged back into darkness.

this isn’t a world devoid of light.

and it isn’t blindness.

it is neither a place nor a condition with the calm and predictability to allow for adaptation.

for that, it is too interrupted, too jarring.

this world is a tease, offering you treasures only to withdraw them as you reach out your hand.  repeatedly.  thousands of times each day.

you are left, then, living out your life with a looming sense of uncertainty, instability and of things beyond your grasp and outside of your control.

in a disorienting world of inverse blinking, some of us respond by essentially blocking out all glimpses of what lies beyond our eyelids.  we take in only what we need to keep our balance, to avoid tripping over chairs or burning our hands on an open flame.

others of us fill in the blanks, connect the dots.  we take what we see in those momentary slivers of sight and build upon it. we extend a line or color in a corner of fabric.  we assemble our own narrative, hoping and sometimes believing that it actually corresponds to that which we cannot fully see.