A phone call to Canon revealed that they don’t accept personal checks, therefore they hadn’t even started processing my camera for repairs. I paid by credit card over the phone, so now there’s hope. Oh, how I miss it. I will never take non-blurry photos for granted again.
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:
Filed under New York, photos, randomness
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
Filed under 1, New York, photos, randomness
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.
Filed under New York, randomness
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)
1. Some kids are beyond reach. Discuss.
2. No kid is beyond reach, but schools can’t do it alone and our society isn’t committed to doing everything it would take to truly help these kids, so for all intents and purposes, from the point of view of the school, they are beyond reach. Discuss.
3. All kids are within reach. Failure to reach these students is failure of the imagination and commitment of the school administration, staff, and classroom teachers. Discuss.
4. We’re rattling around in a box of our own making. How to get out? Time to blast this thing wide open with some new ideas. What’s old is working so-so but not well. Where can I get a paradigm shift? Discuss.
5. Don’t worry about what you can’t control. School culture is bigger than one classroom or hallway. Children have baggage. Discuss.
6. When you stop rattling and look at the box, you see the cracks in the walls. Investment. What have we done to invest the 65-75% of kids who don’t stand out in any major way, behaviorally or academically? The swing voters, so to speak. Is there a place in our school for more than behaviorism? What about a little of this? Do we have goals that speak to children? Do they have goals? Yeah, sure, we set goals, but do they have any power?
7. Looking at the cracks in the box, again: Everyone talks a good game about “teaching kids to be good people” but what does it all add up to? What does that teaching look like? Is it happening in advisory? I basically told my advisees today that they are hypocrites, who set nice-sounding little goals and talk about why it’s important not to be bullies, but then on the way out, trip someone intentionally. (I’m not feeling very nice this week). They didn’t disagree. When does the touchy-feely become real? Cross that fuzzy boundary and start to mean something? And why is it that when someone suggested to someone more important than me that we get some professional development on this stuff, on peer mediation, on running really meaningful advisories, the response was: no one should have to teach you how to care. Oh. Well then. But just because you can keep a classroom of kids more-or-less safe and on-task doesn’t mean you know how to do the longer-term work that reduces rather than just suppresses the violence. What does it mean, teaching kids to be better people? Show me that. Show me that when you’re on a mean block with kids whose parents occasionally say things like, I can’t help him anymore, I’m just waiting for them to take him away from me. He’s ELEVEN. He’s the sweetest child on Earth. What a thing to hear from your mother.
8. My grades are due. I have to work on that instead of this. Anyway, I’m a little stuck. It feels like a puzzle, something to be unraveled. If you crack this code, if you figure out how to break through to the kids, all of them, or most of them all the time and the others most of the time, the world is yours. Anything can happen. But I’m stuck on this side of the code, I can’t see my way through it, resources are scarce, support is there but only for certain kinds of solutions which are a piece of the puzzle but not, in my mind, the solution. I’m supposed to be a leader: what next?
Pretty much all the teaching staff with the same sore throat and headache. Three or four people out every day. One boy jumps another after school at the start of the week, one of those things where you cannot imagine what
anyone had to prove as the aggressor is taller than most teachers and older than most of the other sixth graders, and the victim is a regular-sized, 11-year-old, hardworking, sweet-natured, intelligent kid. No kidding, you can beat up *****??? C’mon. Later in the week, another jumping, two of our girls attacking a third after school, with the instigation of half my grade. I’m sure they had their reasons but again we are left slightly dumbfounded. The girl picked on has a reputation for once having been a fighter, but this year in our school she hasn’t been in a single violent incident (right up until now). That’s something, don’t you think? The next day the girls’ mothers all come in and there’s almost a fight between the adults. One mother storms out with her daughter and the other mother calls the police to file a report. Friday, the girls are back in school, and the aggressors discover that they have been suspended while their victim has not, all evidence pointing to the fact that she didn’t do anything. The two aggressors flip out. School safety is called when one of them becomes uncontrollable, and they refuse to come. Call 911, they tell my principal. So 911 is called, the EMTs come, the girl is taken to the hospital. What happens next, I don’t know. All of this while we are teaching, unsuspecting until a school aide comes around and asks that we keep our doors closed and locked for the duration.
What is the long-term plan? Our kids need something that we aren’t giving them. What is it? How do we find it and give it to them?
Okay… there should be a real post here, blah blah blah about my history with writing classes, but I have a nasty sore throat and my enthusiasm for any sort of effort whatsoever is at a bare minimum, so let me cut to the chase: I just registered for an 8 week class at MediaBistro: Personal Essay Boot Camp. My first assignment is a short first-person piece on a time I felt like an outsider. Grown-up learning. Sweet.
Filed under New York, randomness
ms. frizzle 