Nathan Kensinger explores New York

Dead Horse Bay. Coney Island Creek. The Bronx Swamp. The South Edgemere Wasteland. Names like these have a strange fascination for me, and apparently so they do for the photographer Nathan Kensinger, whose website features “The Abandoned & Industrial Edges of New York City.”

I went to Red Hook recently for the first time, and while poking around the old brick warehouses by the waterfront, I noticed I was on the corner of Beard Street. Odd name, I thought. A few days later I came across Kensinger’s essay on Beard Street, which he calls “my favorite street in Brooklyn.” I was sorry not to have seen it before the Todd Shipyard was dismantled to make room for the new Ikea superstore.

John Berger burns his book

John Berger is one of my mother’s favorite authors, so a while ago I borrowed a few of his books from her so I could check him out for myself. The first one I read was Keeping a Rendezvous, a collection of essays on art and other topics.

I knew that Berger had lived in France for a number of years—“a small peasant village in the French Alps” according to the bio in this collection—but I didn’t expect how much his critical writing would read as if were translated from French. It is abstract, political, and sometimes convoluted in way that brings back memories of reading Merleau-Ponty in college. There are sweeping pronouncements that leave you breathless, like this one: “Watteau’s recurrent theme was mortality; Rodin’s submission, Van Gogh’s work, Toulouse-Lautrec’s the breaking point between laughter and pity.”

The occasional anecdotes were my favorite parts of the book, which makes me think I may like Berger’s fiction better than I do his essays. Here is one:

Recently, a new book of mine came out. I received the first copy from the publishers. It was so badly designed, so grubbily laid-out, and so carelessly produced that the sight of it, instead of affording a small pleasure was sad and discouraging—like dirty clothes can sometimes be. My son Jacob was with me and we decided to burn it.

We dropped the book into the wood stove which was heating the kitchen. Outside, it was snowing. A few minutes later, far from discouraged, we were watching it burn. The lines of print, the black words turned white, whiter than the paper. Then an entire page became uniformly incandescent, and radiant with energy. The pages burning were like ideal pages being written.

I wonder how his publishers felt when they saw that. The essay is dated 1988, so the book he’s referring to might be The White Bird, published in England in 1985 and reprinted in the US as The Sense of Sight.

Year of Meteors

Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day features an unusual painting by the Hudson River painter Frederic Church, picturing an “earth-grazing meteor procession.” The meteor was the inspiration for a poem by Walt Whitman, ”Year of Meteors.”

YEAR of meteors! brooding year! 
I would bind in words retrospective, some of your deeds and signs;

I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad;
I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia;

(I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I watch’d;

I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your unheal’d wounds, you mounted the scaffold;) ...

The old man on the scaffold was, of course, John Brown, who was hanged in December 1859 for treason after the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

Researchers at Texas State have tracked down the details of the meteor.

A large Earth-grazing meteor broke apart on the evening of July 20, 1860, creating a spectacular procession of multiple fireballs visible from the Great Lakes to New York State as it burned through the atmosphere and continued out over the Atlantic Ocean.

“Any town that had a newspaper within all those states is going have a story on this,” Olson said. “We have hundreds of eyewitness accounts, but there are probably hundreds more we don’t even have.

“From all the observations in towns up and down the Hudson River Valley, we’re able to determine the meteor’s appearance down to the hour and minute,” Olson said. “Church observed it at 9:49 p.m. when the meteor passed overhead, and Walt Whitman would’ve seen it at the same time, give or take one minute.”

A tourist in Queens

Last weekend, while Jenn was in Ireland, I took the 7 train to Queens to check out the panorama of New York City at the Queens Museum of Art. (Photo is by Scott Gordon Bleicher. Here’s a bigger version.)

The panorama fills a room the size of a high-school auditorium, and you view it by going up a gradually sloping walkway that takes you from Inwood down to Battery Park, past the Statue of Liberty, over part of Staten Island (which you view through a glass floor), then around Coney Island and into the farthest reaches of Queens and the Bronx.

If you’re a tourist I imagine this must be overwhelming, but even if you’ve lived here for a few years the model reinforces the epic scale of the place, your own insignificance, and how little of it you’ve probably managed to see. There are all kinds of trivia to know, but the ones I remember are that the Empire State Building is 15 inches high, and that the major bridges are the most accurate element, each one painstakingly cast in bronze (then apparently painted white—why?).

While I was in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, I took in the other major sites: the Unisphere, the New York Hall of Science with the real rockets outside it, and the modest but pleasant Queens Zoo, featuring the animals of the Americas. My favorite animal was one I hadn’t heard of: a miniature deer called the pudu.

Monet at the Gagosian

The exhibit of late paintings by Monet at the Gagosian gallery is currently one of the best things you can do for free in New York City. (At 522 West 21st Street in Chelsea, the gallery is only half a block away from the High Line park—another of the best things you can do for free.)

The four rooms of paintings begin with the classic images of waterlilies floating in an indefinite, shimmering blue-gray-violet mist, then move on to waterlilies done with bolder colors and brushstrokes. The water in the picture above (the photo doesn’t do it justice) has a streak of cobalt blue you could get lost in.

The last room is devoted to paintings of Japanese bridges and arched trellises of roses. If some of these last works seem heavy, overworked, or even muddy, they underline the achievement of the seemingly airy and effortless paintings that came before.