Yankee and Bag, by Hendrik Kerstens, on view at the Museum of the City of New York through September 13, 2009.
Xenogenesis
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Categories Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, Xenogenesis
Words
Inquilines rebuild Rome in NYC… and raze it… in one day
In an age in which corrugated cardboard is the material of choice to build temporary housing for goods on their way to consumers, often to be reused by those who lost their way, to build a home, it was used on April 6 and 7th, 2009 A.D., to rebuild old Rome anew within the confines of Mannahatta, island of many hills. The rebuilding of Rome evolved in the second box of the seven that make the New Museum of Contemporary Art on the new Bowery, the foudroyantly new cultural capital of NYC.
Immigrants, and ancestors of immigrants and various diasporas joined hands to reenact old Rome’s architectural development. The builders crammed the time span from Romulus’ and Remus’ days to the destruction of the city, several centuries later, into 24 hours, and half a gallery. Tape, hot glue, various scales and levels of accuracy were applied by Gabriel, Seung, Lisa, Steven, Katherine, Dylan, Matt, Nayeema, Sam, Mariechen, myself, and several others, under the soft-spoken guidance of LA artist Liz Glynn.
Timed to coincide with the opening of the “The Generational: Younger than Jesus” exhibit, a Katrina of self-appointed Visigoths, Christians and pagan Godzillas gleefully razed this recreation in two minutes flat… Gone again were the Forum, the Coliseum, the Temple of Saturn and those dedicated to other gods of Roman lore, and the arches honoring dead emperors as idols. Gone again was old St. Peter.
Gone again… to be rebuilt, again? To be rebuilt elsewhere? Again, by inquilines?
Mofette: Subway grrr id
Foudroyant: A Coney Island of the Mind
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Categories Brooklyn, Foudroyant
In homage to the poem of Lawrence Ferlenghetti …. From the first moment that I heard about the imminent closing of Brooklyn’s Coney Island, I knew that this dinosaur of amusement parks would have to become a part of our artistic exploration of New York City. With my husband, filmmaker Mark Street, I take my two daughters for an evening of old-fashioned spinning, twisting and topsy-turvy merry-making Coney Island style. With the notion of capturing a foudroyant sensation with my camera, I point my lens at the explosive visual activity happening around me. I think about the desire we all have to share in this other-worldly, anti-gravity sense of being absolutely out of control.
America’s welkin over Union Street
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpQ1hQ_DVoc
At the closing party of the gallery’s theme-of-the-year ‘MEND’, flag artist David Mahfouda unfurled his longer-than-a-flagpole-is-tall flag from the roof of the 5-story high building that houses Proteus Gowanus. The flag had been torn in exuberant waving and joyous dancing on Union Square, the night Obama was elected president. For seven months, Proteus Gowanus had been the “Mending HQ” for volunteers helping David restore the flag, and nurturing its spirit. Together they stitched the stripes back together, and sewed new stars onto the flag’s sky panel.
The flag was created in the year leading up to the election, as a bridge to a new beginning, by reclaiming the stars-and-stripes from millions of lapel pins, born(e) in the aftermath of 9/11, by resizing it millionfold into one flag to be held, moved, and cared for by many.
The night the flag became the people’s was the night the rips appeared, the need for mending, and the awareness that mending indeed can be done—that mending is needed to clear the skies, for the skies to celebrate the flag free-flowingly, for anyone to hold hands with that new sky, to take it into one’s circle, the circle of people, the circle of nations.
The night of June 28th, this flag was rolled from the rooftop to be carried by the wind—and torn again by the courtyard’s 19th century brick and mortar—into the hands of those who help mend it, for them to look up that 13-lane highway of red & white to see the big blue with stars, some clear, some still dimmed, and to feel comfort that even in this dire economy, there is a new normal worthy of dancing a jig, even if it’s sponsored by a major credit card.
Who needs a flagpole.
Yashmak: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ij5_xl-vs0At this year’s Poetry Walk, Galway Kinnell read Walt Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry for the fourteenth time at the Fulton Ferry Landing, the poem that veiled and unveiled Whitman’s sexual orientation. His poem as yashmak—offering those sensitive to his femininity to look in through the slit he widened with his words, a poem he suspected and hoped might find a larger, more open crowd among the men and women generations after him, seeing mast-hemm’d Manhattan and sea-gulls oscillating their bodies much like he did in his time of thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats. “Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta!” he says, “Stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn! Throb, baffled and curious brain! Throw out questions and answers…”
Bibliomancy: A Little Flip Book About Love and Sex
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Categories Bibliomancy, Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island
(and Masturbation)…
The passion of sex has become intertwined within our modern notions of love. Sharing loving moments with another person is the most primal human desire. And SEX is the most intrinsic physical expression of that love.
BUT if you’re home alone on Saturday night, without the tender touch of another, how could you possibly fulfill your desire? Read a book of course!
Each turning page contains a poem of loving tenderness. Skim the pages one at a time OR watch as passion explodes!
As infamous New Yorker Woody Allen says,
“Don’t knock masturbation, it’s sex with someone I love.”
Enjoy!
The Penitent City
All the hoping and praying
all this city
ever did was
crawl
like a tot to a tit
trying to squeeze milk, milk
and more milk
from her blemished breast.
The harbors’ mother
tarnished to reptilian green
slowly bows to the burden
shows her chameleon skin
and crawls slow
into deeper waters
leaving her pedestal, cloak
and pointed coronet.
Foudroyant – “Rapture” (35mm)
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Categories Foudroyant, Manhattan
The sheer amount of unseen preparation for the “look” of a live performance. Raye 6 performing at 92Y TriBeCa in January 2009. The spectacle of entertaining a crowd.
Photograph by Ryan Nethery.
“Rapture” (35mm)
Holus-Bolus
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Categories Holus Bolus, Queens
Holus-Bolus
The bus driver keeps telling us, “Move back to the rear.”
But no one is listening, people plugged in
with their white earphones, their bluetooth headsets
singing and talking to no one, but loudly.
The driver’s not going to move unless we retreat further into the bus.
I can’t go anywhere, pressed against a heavyset man wearing a backpack.
I’d rather walk, but it’s 30 degrees out and windy. No one wants to move,
did I already say? We finally go and at Calamus Street, I almost crack up,
literally, like Van Gogh, my head almost splits in two. Forty people
cramming to get on and we’re already 10 over quota. Everyone’s a critic.
I’m a critic at 7am when I just want to get on the subway, get a seat,
go to work to make my money and pay my bill. ‘It boils down to bills,’
my dad used to say. Boiling bills, we work to pay and we pay
to work, but not really in that order always, though it seems so.
Oh the subway, we finally make it and people are pushing and shoving
and It’s no goddamn race someone yells. People come to blows at 7am,
did you know? Have you ever witnessed two elderly women having a slapping
fight? A homophobic man reapetedly yelling FAGGOT FAGGOT at the top of his lungs
because another man bumped him? It’s not too pleasant
traveling among strangers, among that energy. No wonder we plug in,
pretend we’re alone, horse blinders protecting us from the universe.
Melanie Daly