Doing it with a pro

A couple of weeks ago my friend Dottie suggested I stop into a storefront on 8th Street, the Village Alliance.  They were going to do Village walks and it sounded like something I would be interested in.  Every Saturday  from 5/28/11 to 9/24/11 one of three different guides will be taking people on a walking tour of 8th Street.  Not throughout the village just 8th Street.  Today it was Michael Morrows' turn.  Each tour guide takes a different point of view.  Michael describes his tour as dry and factual.  He recommended Jane Marx's tour to me.  He described her as a very funny Rosalind Russell type, who focuses on the women who lived in the area.
Mr. Morrows is quite good.  He had a "cheat sheet" with him which he referenced every once in a while but for the most part he talked extemporaneously.  He seemed to know all about the Architects, politicians, artists, and all the dates and places they lived and hung out.  Two new pieces of info for me.  Among the Georgian red brick buildings on St. Mark's Place between 2nd. Ave. and the Bowery is the last home of Alexander Hamilton's widow, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton.

Today it's a unique clothing store very popular with Lady Gaga, according to Mr. Morrows.  Who has actually turned out to be very accurate.  I try to vet my sources.  I love that expression, vet.  Especially when it's being done to politicians.
The second thing I learned on my tour:  "I heard it through the grapevine" is a saying that originated in the Village at a bar called "the Grapevine".  It was located at Sixth Avenue and 11th Street, directly across from the old courthouse. In the early to mid 19th Century it was the hangout for artists, politicians, lawyers, judges, union officers and southern spies.  After a couple of drinks there would be some loose lips and so the tavern was the source for a lot of juicy info.

Galleries

Yesterday was one of those great NYC days, bright, cool and breezy.  The perfect day to look at some bright, cool and breezy art.  First to see is the show that Frank has curated at the Interchurch Center, 475 Riverside Drive.  It's near The Riverside Church, on the upper west side.
The exhibit is Frank Mann's "Oculus".  He "explores the act of seeing and depicts the circularity of life."
The "loose circular orb-like structures depict life's flow"
"The inner processes of the eye is externalized so that what the artist presents is open ended.  Starting with the light of the eyes, the images are transformed in the back of the retina and then interpreted in the visual cortex in the back of the brain."

I picked up the NYC gallery guide at the Interchurch Center and checked out some Galleries to see in Chelsea.  Top of my list was the Gagosian.  Sunday Morning on CBS did a piece on their installation: "Picasso and Marie-Therese: L'amour fou."   Picasso's M.- T. was his lover and is considered "the primary inspiration for Picasso's most daring aesthetic experiments in the decade to come."  The most striking thing in the exhibition for me is how the most "aesthetic experiments" of Picasso so truly capture what we see of Marie-Therese in the photos at the exhibition.
But there are others I can show you.

Then to 530 West 25th street, Viridian Artists exhibit of Robert Mielenhausen's "Rome"

I love it when an artist makes me smile.  I thought he was real at first.

Candidates for Hare's Test

"Basta Bunga Bunga", a letter from Italy by Ariel Levy in the current New Yorker.  It is about Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and whether Italians have had enough of him and the culture he embodies.  Is it just an Italian billionaire's culture or endemic to our world?  Berlusconi has a number of TV shows and a number of young, buxom, inexperienced women from his TV shows are given important government posts.  The author describes some Berlusconi shows. This is one of  them: "Scherzi a Parte," a woman in her underpants hangs from a meat hook alongside hundreds of hams as a man in a butchers costume stamps a sell-by date on her behind."
When the author suggests that she meet with the Prime Minister for an interview, Berlusconi's close friend advises her that she would first need plastic surgery to roughen up her looks so then the Prime minister would keep his hands to himself.   
Again in the article: "Until 1981, 'a crime of honor' that is killing your wife for being unfaithful or your sister for having premarital sex could be treated as a lesser offense than other murders; as late as 2007 a man in Palermo was sentenced to just 2 days in jail for murdering his wife after his children testified that she had been disrespectful to him". 
In a related news, NYC Hotel Maids in two hotels that have recently been in the news will now be allowed to wear an intercom buzzer in case while visiting a guest, especially French billionaires, in their room they need "back-up".
From the Tao:

Success is as dangerous as failure.
Hope is as hollow as fear.

What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure?
Whether you go up the ladder or down it,
your position is shaky.
When you stand with your two feet on the ground,
you will always keep your balance.

What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?
Hope and fear are both phantoms
that arise from thinking of the self.
When we don't see the self as self,
what do we have to fear?

See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self;
then you can care for all things.   

Ghost Bike

On highways around the country you will see crucifixes on the side of the road to mark the death of a loved one in a motoring accident.  Around the city we have these bicycles, ghost bikes, usually painted white and decked out with flowers to mark the spot where someone lost their life while cycling in the city.  I haven't seen anything yet to mark the spot for someone who lost their life while walking around the city, but when I was working at Bellevue Hospital I did see some people who were hit by cars, taxis and even buses while trying to cross the street.  There is this notorious street on Queens Boulevard where many people have been injured and some lost their lives trying to get to the other side.

Painting Urbanism

I came upon some interesting chairs just parked on the sidewalk at Delancey and Mulberry Streets in Nolita.  They were in front of Haas&Hahn's Painting Urbanism installation: "Learning from Rio".  So I went in and took a look
The first image I saw looked like a view of Manhattan from Queens with buildings that have been painted.  So I went in and visited the storefront of Art and Architecture "a nonprofit organization committed to the advancement of innovative positions in architecture, art and design".

The installation was by Haas & Hahn @ www.favelapainting.com    They are the artistic duo of Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn who conceived Favela painting in 2005.  Favelas are the name of Brazil's shanty towns.  They began in the late 18th century as the home of freed black slaves.  Favelas have become infamous as one of the worlds most dangerous slums.  They have been the setting of a number of Brazilian movies, most notably "City of God".  That's the movie about teenagers living in favelas where the only character that gets out alive is the pet chicken.
Now what do an artist and an architect do to create change?
They gave them tools to create something of their own.  Something to be proud of.

The young men of the favela took a staircase and added some fish.

They kept doing more and more

They painted the town.

From the brochure of the Storefront for Art and Architecture:
"Haas&Hahn have been able to generate a body of work that grows from the formal intricacies, legal conditions and social dynamics inherent to slums and produce a method of action that would hardly be able to be envisioned within the normative spaces of western models of urbanization."

Sara Delano Roosevelt Park

 It is located south of Houston, north of Canal, east of Forsyth and west of Chrystie, and runs for 7 blocks.

I never thought that one day I would be able to walk through this park.  Now, I can spend a beautiful holiday weekend sitting in a lush garden after watching a soccer game.  Years age it was not the place you would ever think of taking the kids or even Fido.  But like a great many places in this city it has changed for the better and keeps changing.  It was named after FDR's mother, and was built in 1934.  It has a Senior Center, turf Soccer field, roller skating rink, basketball, handball, and bocce courts.  It also has a garden with a rooster that cock-a-doodles all day.

The bocce court is inside the M'Finda Kalunga Garden, which translated means "the garden at the edge of the other side of the world".  It is named after the African-American burial ground that was located on Chrystie  between Rivington and Stanton Streets.  The first African slaves were brought to NY by the Dutch in the early 1500s.  By 1748 African-Americans were 20% of the city's population and so this land was given to them for a burial ground in 1794.  As the city grew the graves were moved.

 a book of poems a jug of wine and me!

The garden was founded in 1983 as a "beachhead against the overwhelming drug problem in the park"  Thank you to the Community Coalition that created the park and to the 20 volunteers who maintain it.

House of Worship

Our Lady Of Pompeii Church was built in 1926 by the Italian American community of the South Village and is located at the intersection of Carmine and Bleecker Streets.  This is the third site for the church founded in 1892 by Rev Pietro Bandini of the Missionaries of St. Charles, or Scalabrinians.  The Missionaries were founded by Bishop Scalabrini of Piacenza, Italy in 1887 to care for the Italian Immigrants who were migrating to the "New World".  Along with the missionaries he sent Mother Cabrini who worked at the church for awhile.  Because the Italians in New York were outnumbered by the Irish within the Catholic church their communities built their own houses of worship.  Besides Our Lady Of Pompeii they also built St. Anthony of Padua in the south village.  Well known in the area is Father Demo who worked at the church for 35 years and was pastor at the time of the "shirtwaist factory fire".  Many of his parishioners perished in the fire and so he worked to change the conditions in the city's factories.

And from today's Times a different Sunday sermon; the political take on the Golden Rule.
In an article about the unlikely power duo of Mayor Bloomberg and former President Clinton joining forces for a greener planet it is reported that Bloomberg's financing of an organization that Clinton founded has gotten him chairmanship of the organization.  One of Clinton's staffers said "'What are we going to do, fight him?  They have the money; the golden rule applies.'  As in, he who has the gold, rules."