One of my favorite places to pass by in my old neighborhood, Alphabet City, was the community garden with the big wooden tower with toys hanging here and there within it. Now it seems the tower will be dismantled. What a loss for the neighborhood and the garden, which were both the more interesting for it.
Here’s a picture from farther uptown:
Cameraphone pix are my new postcards. People don’t seem able to receive them, though. I miss my little Canon, which is still in the shop. Fix it quickly, camera doctors! Then again, my regular camera can’t email them… I went to the gym on the east side today, ran a crazy speed interval workout - I am getting faster already! (but an hour later I get a massive stomachache) - then walked across the park by the reservoir and saw the cherry trees, the ground beneath them blanketed with pink petals, and watched the sun setting silver-gold across the water, and listened to this song on repeat:
Here Comes the Sun Again (M. Ward) Kingdoms and queens they all bow down to you, Branches and ranch hands are bowin' too And I've taken off my straw hat for you, singing Here comes the sun again The leaves on the trees they all call out your name, Chrome on the freight line shines the same And the stars in their cars roll their tops down for you singing, Here comes the sun again Oh but if you're gonna stay show some mercy today Blow a little breeze on my face Snow banks drift down the hillside for you, Slides inside sandy river before the day is through, And before evenin' falls I may find myself there too, singing Here comes the sun again
Forget presidential politics and go vote for your favorite education weblog over at Ed in ‘08. There are a LOT of candidates.
The Whitney Biennial is one of my favorite things about living in New York. I make my plans to see it with a sense of anticipation. Honestly, I’ve never seen a show at that museum - Biennial or not - that I haven’t found interesting. Lots of people have a hard time with contemporary art, and there’s plenty of it that I find ugly (but not in an enlightening way), meaningless, trying too hard to be meaningful, or just weird. I have little patience for sculpture or video installation, but I go and look at it all anyway, because next to the 10 foot brick of rainbow colored snot you might see something that startles. I still remember my favorite pieces from past shows like they are old friends - except I only met them once, for a few minutes.
This year’s show wasn’t my favorite. I don’t know if it’s the times or just my particular context for seeing right now, but it felt a little darker than previous years. There were fewer pieces that made me laugh or think, wow, that artist really had fun making that. There was a lot of deconstruction, a lot of odd materials used in ways a mile shy of beautiful - though, of course, beauty is not always the point. There were a lot of explorations of physical space, but they felt more damaged and painful than previous installation pieces that I recall.
Still, a few pieces stood out for me. My hands-down favorites were two photographs by Melanie Schiff, Reflecting Pool (which looks nice on her website but was arresting in real life) and Water Birth, which you can see on the Biennial’s artist page. My photographer friend Alex likes to poke fun at me for my conservative tastes in art, and I guess she’s right: I like photography and painting best, and probably fairly formal stuff within those media, and yes, I do like things that are beautiful. Schiff commented about her art that she tries to make photographs that resonate the way a sad song does: it’s not about your experience, but you feel it’s about you all the same. It’s a nice image and these two photographs, in particular, I think succeed in that.
Roe Etheridge’s photographs also caught my eye. Each was quite different from the next - I recognized the boats from Mumbai harbor from my own travels, a photograph of the sun setting behind trees, all aglow and orange, was strikingly beautiful, but it was the erotic photograph of a young woman in a captain’s hat that got us talking. My friend felt it was exploitative, the oversized captain’s hat combined with the hearts on the bikini, the waiflike model. I’m not so sure. I see what she means, but to me this woman is not necessarily submitting to someone else’s fantasy. The camera’s gaze still feels gentle to me, fond of this young woman.
Briefly: Pheobe Washburn clearly has fun making her pieces, room-sized sculptures that are half-machine, half-ecosystem, half…. well, they have many halves. Similarly, Alice Konitz made us laugh with her multi-piece imaginary auction of a trip to an undeveloped strip of LA freeway. James Welling’s chromogenic prints of mesh arranged in the contours of the human body are simple and sensual. Finally, we spent several minutes reading the pixelated letters in one of Shannon Ebner’s pieces, which seemed to be fragments of reflection or poetry about war and power, which were, upon further reading, palindromic, which were, upon closer examination of the photographs, spelled out using concrete blocks.
Tomorrow: Tribeca Film Festival. It’s good to live in New York in spring.
My camera’s in the shop, hence the lack of visuals lately. The cake is chocolate butter cake, with lightly mint-flavored buttercream frosting, for the last day of LEGO robotics tomorrow. I couldn’t stay true to the NXT colors, no one wants to eat grey! Yuck.
I have agreed to organize a talent show, a.k.a., “M.S. 999X Idol / So You Think You Can Dance?” This was on my never list pretty much since I started teaching. Maybe it’s because there’s no possible way I can ever be asked to do it again that I suddenly feel liberated to give it a try. Maybe it’s because the kids want it and I want something fun for them, since this year’s been kinda rough on everyone. Maybe it’s because if I have to watch the darn thing, I want to make sure it’s watch-able (control freak: yes). Auditions in two weeks, kiddies.
I can’t go - I have to run from the last session of robotics down to my writing class - but that doesn’t mean YOU can’t. Sure, the economy’s not doing so hot, but to spend trazillions of dollars on data-management systems that barely function, near-monthly assessments, and reorganization after reorganization - and then to demand that schools find the money to cut out of our budgets for things like supplies, enrichment programs, custodial services (the very nice man who sweeps my floors is looking at losing his job), you name it… well. This is not okay. Get out there and show ‘em.
Thursday, May 1, 2008 - 4 pm - Bronx Courthouse Steps (161st St., near Yankee Stadium)
called Ed in ‘08, which sounds like it would be interesting, at a minimum an opportunity for networking and debate, and I went right ahead and sent out an email to a couple of folks I thought might agree (turns out one of them is not only going, he’s speaking) but then, luckily, before passing it along to another half-dozen NYC education bloggers whom I know, I stopped and took a closer look. Most of the people I know who blog about education also happen to be teachers… and this summit is on a Wednesday-Thursday. It makes me a little sad & irritated that a summit intended to be about education reform would occur at a time that is virtually impossible for any actual working educators to attend. We have an obligation to our kids to be present pretty much every weekday between now and the end of June. That doesn’t mean we don’t have opinions or experience relevant to education policy - on the contrary, what is policy without the voices of practitioners? We’ve put our voices out there through our blogs - some more overtly political, some more personal, but each trying to share stories because we think someone can learn something from them. Don’t carelessly exclude us from the conversation!
First day back. I tried to wrap up part of a unit before the break but didn’t make it, so I left the kids with an article to read and questions to answer, mostly to keep their heads in the game because I only wanted to do one day of review, then a quiz, then onwards to density and convection. The pouring rain didn’t help attendance today, and many kids had not done the homework. It was a sluggish and disjointed way to start the week back, but we made it through. Quiz tomorrow and then some fun stuff involving liquids of different densities.
Mistress of the off-the-cuff-analogy, I found myself describing to the kids those sleep-over-camp chains where one person lies with her head on her friend’s belly, and someone else’s head on her belly, and so on. Someone laughs and pretty soon the laugh takes off down the chain. It’s not even a very good analogy for conduction. The kids just stared at me and made goofy noises as I trailed off. Win some, lose some. I think a few of them were trying to figure out if I’d told them about something inappropriate.
Third run today in my 10K training plan. I walked for an hour twice last week in addition to my two runs. Today, miraculously, felt a lot easier, my legs loose, breathing smoother, much less desire to back off on the speed or just walk right off the treadmill. Watched some awful MTV dating show called NeXt, gave it up when the caveman costumes came out; where is DanceCrew when I need it?
Where do you get off listing “possible related posts” at the bottom of my posts without so much as my say-so? Can I turn this OFF? Sheesh.
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