St. John's Church Cemetery

After over a week away from home and this blog, I'm back with camera full of photos that includes cemeteries, views from an Amtrak train speeding south to Virginia and back to New York City, as well as views of Brooklyn shot from an elevated subway line. Although the trip was nice, it's always a relief to get back to New York City. For those of you who don't appreciate urban living, it might be hard to understand the appeal of Manhattan as a permanent resident. But having grown to enjoy the city after a decade in Greenwich Village, I can take pleasure in its vibrancy and diversity - as well as the convenience of walking to whatever I need.

These photos are from one of my favorite destinations near my parents' home - St. John's Episcopal Church, which I've previously featured on the blog. Although the parish was founded in 1643, this building, the second on the site, was constructed in 1755 and is now on the National Register.

I had glanced at the headstones before but hadn't really taken note of their inscriptions, having usually been in a hurry to photograph the building itself while anxious kids waited in the car. Look closely at the second photo below and you'll see the reference to a Confederate "patriot" who died in the Civil War "to save his country's honour." The third and fourth photos tell a different story. With three members of the same family, including a five-month-old son, dying over an eight-day span in 1836, one suspects they were victims of some sort of illness, in a scenario so typical of the period. (The top left photo I selected because of its Masonic symbol, not something often seen on local stones from this period. If you click on this image and view the larger version, notice the detail in the carving, as well as the small spots of lichen starting to grow on the stone. The second photo (above right) stands out because it's the marker for a three-year-old, a detail my younger son noticed while marching through the rows of stones. He's now accustomed to seeing the graves of small children in our cemetery travels and I've tried to explain that childhood mortality was a common thing in previous centuries. One has to wonder if this child's death was caused by illness - or was a result of the war.)

Monty Python's "Travel Agent Sketch" and the West Village

This is one of my favorites of the classic Monty Python sketches. I've included it here because Eric Idle's lengthy monologue reflects the way I'm starting to feel about my neighborhood - the West Village - during tourist-crowded weekends. Between the fashionista wannabes and the "middle America" tourists on "Sex and the City" tours, disgorged from diesel-puffing buses, the sidewalks are overrun. Many of them will wait for an hour in the line at Magnolia Bakery just for cupcakes. Cupcakes (which are that great)! But, they're part of that "Sex and the City" mystique which draws people from all over the world to gawk at spots in the neighborhood. Sure, they pump money into the local economy - as well as the hotels and bus companies that run the tours - but they also leave mountains of trash in Bleecker Park, and, by shopping at the high-end boutiques of Ralph Lauren and Marc Jacobs, further erode the historic character of the West Village.

Staten Island Ferry

This year we bought a ticket package to seven Staten Island Yankees games. They're much cheaper than regular Mets or Yankees tickets, and the A-level minor league teams deliver fun baseball. The players are also young, without the inflated egos and salaries of major league stars, and are thus happy to talk with the kids and sign autographs. Although I love the games, my favorite part of these trips has been the ferry rides to and from Staten Island. First, it's free - one of the best tourist attractions in the city. Plus one gets a view of the harbor, the Manhattan skyline, the Brooklyn Bridge, Governor's Island, Ellis Island, and the Statue of Liberty. After a night game, the late-evening return trip is even better, with the spectacle of Manhattan lit up like a Christmas tree. When I ride the ferry I get a sense of an older New York, like the one I encountered as a teen reading The Stories of John Cheever:

“These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with river light, when you heard Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like ‘the Cleveland Chicken,’ sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are.”

This was the first New York I encountered - the postwar city with Cheever's fictionalized grittiness and nostalgia for a vanishing way of life. Sitting on one of the older ferries, chugging through the dark, oily waters of the harbor, one gets a sense of Cheever's "river light" - even if much of the city has now been "sanitized for your protection."

Ball Mason Jar

Here's my latest watercolor, finished just yesterday. Although I'm happy with the result - since glass is always a special challenge - I'm even more disappointed than usual in the quality of the scan. The scanner's light always seems to wash out the images, while color and saturation correction in photoshop doesn't do an acceptable job of compensation. So this is the best of three attempts. Does anyone have recommendations? (Even photographing it didn't prove acceptable!)

As for the subject, I think most people look at these old Ball Mason jars with a touch of nostalgia. I recall seeing them at both sets of grandparents' homes, while my mother would receive gifts of jams, jellies - and even green beans - from older family members who still used the jars for storing fruits and vegetables. I also remember my great-grandmother's house in which there were shelves lined with an assortment of fuit and veg. In fact, my maternal grandparents would "can" figs and fig preserves in these jars. (The fig tree still grows in my grandmother's back yard and usually yields a healthy crop which she and my mother sometimes harvest.) Unfortunately I also remember numerous "country"-themed restaurants like "The Black-Eyed Pea" that tried to enhance the "down home" atmosphere by serving their drinks - always iced tea for me! - in Mason jars.

As usual I took a different perspective on this image, not wanting simply to present it in its entirety, static, resting on a table or shelf. Here it's closely cropped, turned slightly, with light from rear left highlighting the raised lettering and imperfections in the glass. (Aren't the blue jars rarer and considered more collectible?) 9" x 12" on Fabriano paper

Four from the Weekend

The gargoyle stands guard outside a costume and "Goth" fashion store on Fourth Ave. in the East Village. If you're in the market for spiked leather clothing and equally scary accessories just to see that Black Sabbath tribute band you've been pining over, look no further. Teen vampires would feel right at home.

Another Shop Cat

This friendly feline lives at "Aphrodisia" on Bleecker Street. She's usually asleep in the window or perched on a pillow-covered stool farther back in the shop.

Last Weekend

This past weekend was go, go, go from Saturday morning to Sunday evening. From time at the pool in Soho to a movie in Union Square on Sunday night, we barely stopped to rest. And we went to a Staten Island Yankees game last night! I'm ready for school to begin so we can return to a more predictable schedule with easier hours. But I know it's just going to get more hectic as the boys get older. (The first photo shows an old "Interborough Subway" sign outside the New York Life building near my office. I took the other images in Soho.)

How Not to Dress

What makes a man (of any age) dress like this? Didn't he get the memo about dress socks and shoes with shorts? He's lucky the hand rail protected his identity. My wife has orders to smother me while I sleep if I'm ever guilty of this fashion mistake.

Calico

Found this sweet little calico cat in a convenience store on Hudson St. over the weekend.

Throwing My Hat in the Ring - Crowson '08

I've finally had enough of both McCain and Obama, so I'm throwing my hat in the ring for the presidency. I figure I can't do any worse than Bush, since the only place to go is UP from here. You can see the first news coverage of my stealth campaign here. Vote early and often!

Dog Days of Summer

I saw this soulful guy (see below) near Union Square yesterday. Guarding the truck of a sidewalk vendor peddling clothing and handbags, this dog no doubt looked intimidating to the average passerby. However, I could tell he was a sweetheart because he started wagging his tail as soon as I got close. He even gave me some appreciative licks in the face after I pet on him for a few minutes. I especially like the spot around his left eye. He almost looks like a larger version of "Petey" from the old "Our Gang" shorts of the 1930s. (I saw this sweet German Shepherd waiting for his owner this morning outside K-Mart at Astor Place. Very friendly.)

"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."

Does it get any more vain or vacuous than this - a story in the New York Times about a new trend in the already over-the-top wedding business? In "It’s Botox for You, Dear Bridesmaids" the Times reveals that the hot accessory for brides and their bridesmaids is botox treatments. And it doesn't end there. Plastic surgeons report that many brides-to-be (as well as mothers of the bride and groom) invest in everything from chemical peels and laser treatments to liposuction and botox injections before marching down the aisle. Even more astonishing is the report that these "bridezillas" often request that their bridesmaids do the same. Sure, many of these women pick up the tab for the treatments as a "gift" to their wedding party. As one bride explained, botox or a face-lift represents a more tangible and permanent token of appreciation than an engraved pill box or piece of jewelry. Nevertheless, not all bridesmaids are amused or amenable to such requests. One potential bridesmaid, for example, refused to follow a bride's request for all of her bridesmaids to have breast augmentation surgery performed by a California doctor who offered to operate on four women for the price of two!

Although a day at a spa or salon seems pretty standard pre-wedding fare these days, cosmetic surgery and botox are symptomatic of the wedding industry having lost its way in the desire to increase profits. Are we really that shallow? Have we elevated the wedding ceremony itself to the level of a Broadway musical or Hollywood movie requiring a director, producer, lighting crew, and set director? And couldn't that money be better spent - perhaps on a down payment for a home? Moreover, in a period of economic crisis, this kind of spending on wedding frippery just seems irresponsible, like a Gilded Age soiree. What's next - tummy tucks and botox for the grooms and groomsmen?

Max Beckmann at the Neue Galerie

Walking by a news stand yesterday I noticed the cover of The New York Sun with German painter Max Beckmann staring out from his 1938 work, "Self-Portrait with Horn." Beckmann, one of the most important Weimar artists - along with Otto Dix and other contemporaries among German Expressionist painters - will be featured in a new show at the Neue Galerie. As I read the article about the show and Beckmann's career,I realized that there were some apparent parallels between the experiences of these German painters and the anti-intellectualism described in Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason.

First, understand that Beckmann, like most avant-garde artists in Weimar Germany, faced persecution after the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. In fact, by 1937 Hitler had declared all modern art as "degenerate." The Nazis even created a special Munich show of what they called "Degenerate Art" (Entartete Kunst) in 1937 - an exhibit that included six Max Beckmann paintings. In terms of the cultural expressions of German nationalism, Hitler and the Nazis hated all aspects of modernity and abstraction, preferring a romanticized heroic realism that often resembled the Socialist Realism of the Soviet Union during the same period. Artists were jailed, their works seized and destroyed, or they fled the country like Beckmann, who went to Holland in 1937 and moved to the U.S. after the war.

I mention Susan Jacoby's recent book because her description of the anti-intellectualism of evangelical conservatives and their rejection of modernity and its cultural expressions - as well as nostalgia for an idealized past - reminds me of the Nazis. Although the religious right has had only limited success with more overt forms of censorship, their considerable influence in the Republican party agenda has contributed to conservatives' efforts to effectively cripple the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment of the Humanities since the 1990s. Of course, their assault on reason and modernity goes beyond art, as demonstrated in their attempts to stifle the teaching of evolution in public schools and their rejection of the science behind concerns about global warming and climate change. But in the arts, from painting to music and film, the religious right mirrors the suspicion and scorn exhibited by the fascists of the 1930s. Artistic modernism, according to the "religious right," is identified as a product of liberalism and moral lassitude, in much the same way it heralded Weimar defeatism and Jewish degeneracy to the Nazis.

Weekend

Just a few photos from the weekend, with more to follow during the week. Seemed as if we were non-stop from Friday evening until Sunday evening, with a trip to Staten Island on the ferry for a Staten Island Yankees game, an all-day playdate in Soho on Saturday, a softball game on Sunday morning, playground time in the afternoon, and a cookout in the evening. By the time I finished in the gym last night at 11:00, I was soooo ready for bed - and more than happy to come to a quiet office this morning.

Lower Lexington Ave.

I walked down the lower portion of Lexington Avenue yesterday, from 30th St. to its terminus at Gramercy Park, and encountered some beautiful old buildings (and an incredible selection of Indian restaurants). The frieze in the first picture below wraps around this incredible building with Ionic columns (also shown at left) - and it looks vacant, which seems amazing for such a grand structure. Still, it is a little "off the beaten path" as far as prime commercial space goes. If it were situated one block west, on Park Avenue, I'm guessing it would prove a prime space. The armory for the Sixty-ninth Regiment was imposing, and typical of the several armories scattered around the city. In the third picture, I found this little detail, with bull's skull and snake motif, a bit puzzling. Why these creatures? It almost appears almost Central American in style - but not quite - so I'm not sure what to call it! Finally, there's the view looking through the gate of Gramercy Park. Since 1831 Gramercy Park has been a private park, open only to residents of the buildings facing it. According to a recent New York Times article, access to the park is rigidly controlled with keys available only to authorized visitors; non-authorized persons are quickly escorted to the gate. The statue in the center is of the 19th century actor Edwin Booth, brother of Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Edwin Booth's 1847 mansion at 16 Gramercy Park is home to the Player's Club (founded by Booth) and is a National Historic Landmark.