whispers from the yew

Merry Christmas

2011-12-20T21:15:00.002-05:00

A Christmas cheer from a story I shot for Martha Stewart Living.

I heart Brooklyn

2011-12-01T16:16:00.001-05:00

I've been spending a lot of time walking around the city, and I am heartened by all the ceaseless life going on around me. On my way home from the print lab yesterday, I saw a sky right out of a Turner painting, a man aloft on a crane painting a massive mural of flying birds on the side of a building, and a young man singing soulfully on the subway platform. Nothing but unexpected beauties.

Love letter to Brooklyn

2011-11-28T14:12:00.001-05:00

In a dreary corner of Brooklyn, the artist Stephen Powers, also known by his tag name ESPO, painted fragments of poetic phrases in graphic letters that demand to be read. The work is entitled "Love Letter to Brooklyn" and took 13 days to paint. I love seeing this every time I take the subway to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, its cheery message splashed extravagantly across a dull parking garage.

Getaway Dream

2011-11-24T12:08:00.001-05:00

Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

I used to live in California and still dream of the West Coast sometimes. This wonderful video captures my getaway dream so perfectly. Amazing work.

A liquid morning

2011-11-23T16:56:00.001-05:00

After days of brilliant sunshine comes a soft and liquid morning, where droplets of rain cling precariously to arching branches and damp fallen leaves carpet the ground. I wish there more autumn days like this before winter sets in.

The Dutch photo collector, Erik Kessels, whose installation at the Foam photography gallery in Amsterdam makes an overwhelming point about the mind-numbing age of infinite Flickr uploads in which we live, points out rightfully that we are "drowning in pictures of the experiences of others." And I am guilty of adding to the deluge with these photos of my walk around the Brooklyn Botanic Garden today.

Autumn Light

2011-11-11T13:21:00.001-05:00

We've had the most brilliant autumn days this week. Mornings come with the light slanting on the wall, moving slowly through the day until an abrupt darkness falls in the late afternoon. The streets in my neighborhood are aflame with every shade of crimson and gold. I love this time of year in all its melancholic tone.

Bringing Nature Home

2011-10-15T18:03:00.002-04:00

This is the reason for my lack of posts in the last couple of months. I've been hard at work putting my book together. Bringing Home Nature will be published by Rizzoli next April. I just went over the first proofs with the book designer, and everything looks great, with some minor adjustments. It's been a long haul, but the end is finally in sight. I'm looking forward to holding the actual book in my hands.

Meanwhile, here's an excerpt from the foreword written by Deborah Needleman, which sums up the idea of the book:

Ngoc’s book is a sonnet to the seasons. It rejoices in thebeauties particular to each, and to the immense joy to be had from payingwitness to those changes, and of bringing its fruits into the home. That is themessage of this book, made abundantly clear through Ngoc’s text and the effectof her poetic photographs. But underlying that, her pictures also reveal herexpansive appreciation for the variety of ways flowers have been used indifferent cultures and times in history.

Only Love and Then Oblivion

2011-09-10T10:45:00.001-04:00

World Trade Center & Lower Manhattan from Empire State, January 1973
Photo by Jonathan Barker

"There is only love, and then oblivion."
Ian McEwan, writing in the Guardian on September 15, 2001

The Necessity of Beauty

2011-07-20T17:15:00.003-04:00

"Beauty's dynamic is not perfect or ideal. It is subject to the same logos of death, decay and transformation as all creation. Who would Persephone, a lovely girl-goddess of spring be without her husband Hades, a silly maiden with flowers in her hair? Her real beauty, the necessity of the occasion of her beauty requires her to spend fall and winter in the underworld loving her husband and weaving the threads of destiny. Necessary beauty has character, gravitas, sorrow, comedy and joy. Beauty without gravity may be a decorous ruse. Beauty without shadow is probably an illusion, and beauty without vitality a trap. Beauty may be stark but never vain, and joy may emerge as sorrow's final cry."

"The Necessity of Beauty"

Tom Jay

A wonderful essay on beauty, a subject that is much on my mind these days as I finish my book.

Photograph of chrysanthemums taken for the book this morning.

Night Sky

2011-06-24T21:51:00.004-04:00

Milky Way viewed from Death Valley
Mikly Way viewed from Lava Beds National Monument

Photographs by the Night Sky Team

"We human beings lose something of ourselves when we can no longer look up and see our place in the universe."

David Crawford of the International Dark-Sky Association, from a must read article on light pollution and the efforts to keep the night sky unimpaired in our national parks.

A Dahlia

2011-06-23T15:10:00.004-04:00

Un Dahlia

Paul Verlaine

Courtisane au sein dur, à l'oeil opaque et brun

S'ouvrant avec lenteur comme celui d'un boeuf,

Ton grand torse reluit ainsi qu'un marbre neuf.

Fleur grasse et riche, autour de toi ne flotte aucun

Arôme, et la beauté séreine de ton corps

Déroule, mate, ses impeccables accords.

Tu ne sens même pas la chair, ce goût qu'au moins

Exhalent celles-là qui vont fanant les foins,

Et tu trônes, Idole insensible à l'encens.

Ainsi le Dahlia, roi vêtu du splendeur,

Elève sans orgueil, sa tête sans odeur,

Irritant au milieu des jasmins agaçants!

There is no satisfactory English translation of this poem (at least not that I know of), which reminds me of how impossibly difficult to translate from one language to another. Verlaine's description of a dahlia, the metaphoric flower-woman, is full of rancor. The poem reflects Verlaine's bitterness in the failure of his relationship with his first love, Elisa. His barely contained misogyny is projected into nature, into the guise of the dahlia, an opulent beauty without perfume.

I like the alternating tercets addressed to the courtisan/woman (1 and 3) and to the flower (2 and 4) an interesting structure, something that the two translations I read completely ignored.

The world is so vast

2011-06-08T10:26:00.012-04:00

Wild lupines, Norfolk, Connecticut
Frangipani tree, Key West
Palm Beach
Bay Bridge, San Francisco
São Paulo
Paraty, Brazil
Ipanema, Rio de Jainero
Paraty, Brazil
Paraty, Brazil

"I must leave the bonds that kept me confined, and move elsewhere. Move on, move on, move on. Move like the waterfall, like the ocean waves, like the birds at down, like the light at sunrise. That is why the world is so vast, the earth so extraordinary, the sky so infinite... That is why the call of death is nothing but the same call to change one's abode."

Rabindranath Tagore, "Travel"

This is how I used to feel when I was young. I lived in different countries, made my home in different continents, always moving on. Now that I am older, I want to attach myself to a small piece of the earth, to cultivate my garden, and to find what T. S. Eliot so eloquently calls "a still point of a turning world." But the life that I have carved out for myself keeps me moving. These are just some of the places I've been in the last couple of months.

The re-enchantment of flowers

2011-05-23T07:16:00.001-04:00

I've been too busy to post anything lately, but here is a blogpost about me on Martha Stewart Weddings website.

Paraty, Brazil

2011-05-03T19:44:00.010-04:00

Paraty viewed from the seaA small island in the bay off Paraty

Restaurant by the water
Swimming spot surrounded by islands that are kept as nature reserves

Horse- drawn carriage

The church Santa Rita at sunset

Paraty is a lovely colonial town on Brazil's southeastern coast, the Ilha Grande Bay. It's surrounded by mountains and the sea. Founded in 1531, the town was a busy port in the 18th century, when ships filled with gold sailed regularly from Paraty to Portugal. Today, the town is a national historic monument and the buildings strictly preserved.

The sea around Paraty is pristine and dotted with hundreds of small islands. The emerald green water is great for swimming, and the islands are lush with vegetation. Ferns, plants, and even fruit-bearing trees grow out of the rock outcroppings. It is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.

Nothing is so beautiful as spring

2011-04-21T14:42:00.007-04:00

At last a sunny day, which makes me think of the first line of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem, "Spring." I also like this from the same poem: "The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush the descending blue; that blue is all in a rush with richness."

Indeed, the descending blue.

Spring in California

2011-04-19T16:51:00.004-04:00

I just returned from having spent ten days in California. Every year since my father's passing away, I go back there in early April to be with my family on the anniversary of his death. I find myself in the same place, at the same time, where everything seems the same but nothing really is. The same flowers bloom - my father's lilacs and peonies, roses in the neighbor's front yard, the dogwood in my sister's garden - but I see everything through the prism of his absence. Every flower I marvel at is another flower that my father will never see.

The days hurried past and here I am back in my own home. The strongest memory I've carried back with me is an afternoon spent alone with my oldest brother. The two of us picked oranges and sat talking under the grapefruit tree. There is much that separates us, but we are bound, as if by an invisible thread, by the things that our father taught us. As I sat there with the warmth of the sun on my back and my brother's voice filling the space between us, I felt my father's absence and presence all at once, and it made me more happy than I had been in a long time.

Heralds of Spring

2011-04-01T18:13:00.002-04:00

It is said that no universally accepted event heralds the spring. Meteorologists marks the season's beginning on March 1. For astronomers and most of us, spring arrives on the vernal equinox, which falls somewhere around the 20th of March, depending on the year. Still others have a more personal marker for the start of the season: the first flush of the yellow daffodil, the return of birdsong in the early morning hour, or the first flower on the dogwood tree. In 1736, the English naturalist Robert Marsham started to document 27 "Indications of Spring." For 62 years, without interruption, he recorded the dates different trees came into leaf, flowers bloomed, frogs first croaked and butterflies appeared. He noted the first swallow of the year as they flew over Stratton Strawless in Norfolk at the end of their 6,000-mile journey from southern Africa. Marsham's observations became the basis of phenology, the study of the effects of the seasons on plants and animals.

We have passed the vernal equinox, and the day is now officially longer than the night, but I am still waiting for spring. The crocuses have come up, and the robins are back in town, but we've had a freezing rain for the last two days. The sun is now peeking out of the clouds, at the end of an unremittingly grey day, setting the brick buildings across the street aflame. I am heartened at the sight of my bleeding heart plants pushing through the ground and know that spring cannot be far away.

The Secret of Happiness

2011-03-26T16:09:00.003-04:00

"[Gardening] connects you with what is outside yourself like few other activities, and that is the secret of happiness."

Diana Athill, writer, in a wonderful article about the lure of gardening for various writers.

I came home last night after being away for most of the last two weeks on photo shoots. Today is a bright sunny day and I spent an hour working on a client's garden, mostly pruning and clearing dead branches to make way for spring planting. Spring can't come soon enough.

Japan

2011-03-21T12:01:00.005-04:00

Poster designed by James White and Signalnoise Studio

Japanese Red Cross Society

I spent the last week in Palm Beach and the Bahamas photographing sumptuous homes, filled with expensive art and luxurious possessions. Every night in my hotel room, I watched the footage of the destruction in Japan on the news and was reminded of the fragility of existence and the futility of the material world.

There is a centuries old tradition in Japan where Zen monks, samurai and others compose poems at moments of death. The monk Kozan Ichikyo, wrote these lines on the morning of February 12, 1360:

Empty-handed I entered the world

Barefoot I leave it.

My coming, my going --

Two simple happenings

That got entangled.

When he finished, he laid down his brush and died sitting upright.

Snowdrops

2011-03-12T14:41:00.004-05:00

Galanthus nivalis

From the Greek word gala, for milk, and anthos, for flower, are the roots of the snowdrop's Latin name. The species name, nivalis, means "of the snow," so Galanthus nivalis literally means "milk flower of the snow." It's a fittingly poetical name for this gem of a flower that braves the cold and shows itself even in the bleakest of winter days. In some countries, it's known as fair maids of February. In French, it's called perce-neige, which literally translates as snow-piercer.

Fear no more, thou timid Flower!

Fear no more the winter's might,

The whelming thaw, the ponderous shower,

The silence of the freezing night.

"The Snowdrop"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Visual Break

2011-03-04T11:00:00.003-05:00

Sam Taylor-Wood directed her fiance Aaron Johnson in a video for REM's song Uberlin. Great dancer.

Spring, almost

2011-03-03T14:45:00.010-05:00

March, from the Roman Martius, was the first month of the Roman calendar. The Anglo-Saxons called it "Hlyd monath," meaning Stormy month, or "Hraed monath," Rugged month. To me March is both a stormy and rugged month, but it is also "a month of expectation." The sun is bright but the chill still lingers in the air. In the garden, the dead hydrangea blooms are worn down almost to nothing but delicate filigrees that barely hang onto the branches. Any moment now, they will give way to new buds, like the ones filling up the magnolia trees. Hellebore blossoms, enveloped in glossy new foliage, are pushing out of the soil. Crocuses have burst into flowers. The witch hazels are fading fast, while tiny yellow winter aconites are making their cheery appearance on the ground. It is spring, almost.

Winter Break

2011-02-28T21:25:00.002-05:00

Some glimpses of our Mexican sojourn during Winter Break

Untitled from ngoc ngo on Vimeo.

Signs of Spring

2011-02-18T18:53:00.004-05:00

Hamamelis x intermedia 'Jelena'
Daffodils

After what seems like a very long winter, we've had two days of above freezing temperature. Suddenly, spring does not seem so far away. The daffodils are pushing out of the ground and witch hazel trees are blooming all over the city, unfurling their curly ribbons in shades of gold and copper.

St Valentine

2011-02-14T08:29:00.004-05:00

Mary and Robert Frank photographed by Elliot Erwitt

Valencia, Spain 1952

This is the most romantic photograph I know.

"Il fallait bien qu'un visage

Réponde à tous les noms du monde"

Paul Éluard, "XXIX", L'Amour, La Poésie

These are two of the most romantic lines I know, from a collection of poems that Paul Éluard wrote to his wife, Gala, who later left him for Dali.

About Alice

Calvin Trillin's celebration of his wife Alice, which he wrote after she died of cancer in 2001, is the most beautiful testament of love I've ever read.

Camellias

2011-02-08T08:43:00.004-05:00

I shot a video to accompany the Camellia story I did for Martha Stewart Living.

Happy New Year

2011-02-04T08:32:00.003-05:00

The Chinese Year of the Rabbit began yesterday with the new Full Moon. According to Chinese tradition, the Rabbit brings a year in which one should focus on home, family, security, diplomacy and relationships. It is also a time to focus on peace.

Compassion in the midst of violence

2011-01-29T14:08:00.002-05:00

Photograph by Lefteris Pitakaris/AP

An Egyptian anti-government activist kisses a riot police officer following clashes in Cairo, Egypt, Friday, January 28, 2011.

Portrait of a Lady

2011-01-25T21:23:00.004-05:00

Portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi by Platon, 2010

The fascinating story behind the photograph.

Winter Birds

2011-01-19T13:47:00.006-05:00

all photographs by Mario Giacomelli

It's been raining for two days. From Paris my friend Daniel sent me some beautiful music by Ray LaMontagne, which seems to fit the mood these last two days. I've been listening to one of the songs in particular, called "Winter Birds," with these lines:

The stream can't contain such the withering rain,

And from the pasture the fence it is leaning away

The clouds crack and growl

Like some great cat on the prowl

Crying out, "I am, I am" over and over again

The winter birds have gone back again

Here the sprightly chickadee, gone now is the willow wren

In passing greet each other as if old, old friends

And to the voiceless trees it is their own they will lend...

Though all these things will change the memories will remain

As green to gold and gold to brown

The leaves will fall to feed the ground

And in their falling make no sound

Oh my lady, lady, I am loving you now

All the verses in the song speak of changes and the transformation wrought by time, and the need to love the here and now. Just the song for a winter day such as today.

Let England Shake

2011-01-17T10:28:00.012-05:00

Screen shots from Seamus Murphy's The Last Living Rose, a series of 12 short films he directed to accompany PJ Harvey's songs on her new album, Let England Shake

PJ Harvey, photographed by Seamus Murphy

"England has a complicated relationship with the past, its island status, its relationship to the land, geography and tradition. Contemporary England springs from a history of colonial adventures, military ambitions and industrial prowess. It is also defined by its waning power and military role in modern politics. At times, it can be a very odd place.

To open myself up to a country I live in but rarely get to shoot, I went on a road journey during one of the worst winters in living memory. I approached England as I would a foreign country, travelling alone with little equipment. I documented my experience in reportage style, using available light and real-life situations – this time with sound and pictures. I normally have the still and silent image as my universe."

Seamus Murphy

I have always appreciated people's connection to the land in which they live. This connection has nothing to do with patriotism, but a profound and real understanding of the conditions that make up the land.

Winter in California

2011-01-04T22:32:00.003-05:00

It's hard to believe that it's winter here. The grapefruit and orange trees are laden with fruits and the camellias are flushed with flowers. Compared to New York, where everything is still buried under the snow, such abundance seems almost miraculous. I spent a blissful hour in the garden alone.

Full of Beauties

2010-12-30T16:44:00.005-05:00

Lily on the beach
Jet trails in the sky
Echeveria at Snug Harbor Farm
Stones on the beach

Maine, December 30, 2010

"If I have learnt anything, it is that life forms illogical patterns. It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by for who knows whether any of them will ever return?"

Margot Fonteyn, Autobiography

Blizzard

2010-12-28T17:10:00.006-05:00

We had a spectacular blizzard on Boxing Day. We watched the snow blowing across our windows with increasing ferocity as the day went on. In the morning, we woke up to a silent city buried under a blanket of snow. By midday, the whole neighborhood was outside shoveling snow. For almost the entire day, the streets were blissfully free of cars and filled with people instead. I love these unexpected moments where the routine is suspended, and we are suddenly free and life takes on another flavor.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-20T19:51:00.010-05:00

Vanessa and Simon hosted the most beautiful Christmas dinner party yesterday.

Good food + good friends = CELEBRATION

I can't think of a better way to start the holiday season

Winter

2010-12-15T20:42:00.006-05:00

The Cranford Rose Garden
Hydrangea paniculata
Patrick Dougherty's "Natural History"
The frozen pond with hanging cherry branches

The temperature has remained below freezing for the last three days. In the Brooklyn Botanic Garden today, dead hydrangea blooms looked spectacular, dusted with snow. Not long ago, as gardening fashion goes, these spent flowers would have been cut back, as nobody thought them worthy once they had lost their colors. With the work of such designers as Piet Oudolf, we have learned to appreciate the whole life cycle of plants. Each season has its beauty. I love the garden's winter landscape with its monochromatic hue. It's a quiet moment after the clamor of so many summer and autumn blooms. Shorn of their leaves, the trees become more sculptural. Their bare branches make lacy patterns against the sky. Their barks demand a second look, sometimes a touch. I read something beautiful today in a rather melancholy piece about the terrible things we have done to the landscape:

"Real land is never sad in its vastness, lost in its solitude. Left alone, cycles dress and undress it, chill-and-warm so it peaks, hardens, slides, swells. Real land hosts–voles, foxes, cicadas. Fires, moss, thunder. Rolls or gets steep. Sinks, sops, and sprouts."

Lia Purpura "There are Things Awry Here"

Ancient Light

2010-12-09T08:25:00.008-05:00

Photographs by David Malin, from the book Ancient Light: Portrait of the Universe

During my last semester at college, I took an Astronomy class to fill the required units for graduation. It turned out to be the course that I enjoyed the most in my college career. Recently, I discovered the work of David Malin, who is an astronomer as well as photographer. By attaching a camera to the telescope lens, scientists since the 19th century have been able to record things in the universe that were not visible to Galileo, the father of modern observational astronomy, among other things. "Since human beings evolved, we have been looking at the sky. When the telescope was invented, vision was expanded to see more of the universe and it changed our perspective of our place in it. In 1,000 years' time someone will come along with new technology and they will look at the same universe in a completely different light," says Malin.

For someone who spends most of her life looking at everything, I envy Malin's opportunity to look at the universe, not metaphorically but literally. What he captures in his sublime photographs is light that has travelled thousands of light years. I marvel at every one of these awe-inspiring photographs. There is something so infinitely beautiful in the idea of spending one's whole life looking at the dark empty sky to find the wonders of the universe. What's more impressive, over the course of his career, Malin has found two new galaxies: Malin Carter and Malin 1, which may possibly be larger than our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

The psychic landscape

2010-11-24T18:19:00.008-05:00

"...[H]umans are in a fundamental way place-making animals, revealing in this act their individual and collective dreams. The landscapes that we create are combinations of artifice and nature, and in designing them people of every period have revealed a great deal about their cultural values while demonstrating the perennial exigencies of life and our universal need for water, food, and shelter....As the 20th-century French philosopher Gaston Bachelard posited, when examine space in terms of psychology and phenomenology we find that we are still place-bound creatures, carrying in the recesses of our memories personal histories of spaces we have inhabited and imagined. Further, we carry "placeness" in our genes and in our sensory apparatus as human animals, and because biological nature is till the matrix of our existence we long to feel at one with the natural world."

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History

"The landscape is alive, it is a text in itself, it is a living text... There is a dialogue between one's internal being, one's psyche, and the nature of place, the landscape. There has to be some connection, some sort of bridge, which allows one to sense all sorts of relationships which one tends to eclipse, which one tends not to see at all."

Wilson Harris, quoted by Michael Gilkes, "The Landscape of Dreams"

I have always been one of those place-bound creatures described by Bachelard, carrying within me all past and present landscapes, real and imagined. I think that I might be a different person if I were to live in a different landscape. Recently, I was introduced to a beautiful corner of Connecticut that is only 2 hours away from New York City, where one's view is of infinite hills and trees under an immense sky. I can imagine myself living here, being in this landscape, happy to watch the fog roll over the hills in the morning. There is silence, open space, and solitude, all of which I often crave.

Kent, Connecticut, November 16, 2010

But in reality, this is where I live. The landscape I know is ultra urban, with its own brand of beauty that never ceases to amaze me. I love the mix of natural wildness and urban architecture jostling for space on the High Line. On a sunny autumn morning like today, there are few better places to be in the city.

The High Line, November 24, 2010

The last of Autumn

2010-11-15T21:24:00.008-05:00

The days are getting shorter and colder. This weekend we had what might well be the last warm weather for months to come. It seemed that everyone in the whole city was outside enjoying the sunshine. We had a lovely stroll through Central Park after lunch on the Upper East Side. Andrew Jackson Downing, considered by many to be the father of American Landscape Architecture, had been the first to argue for a large park in New York, a space in the middle of the city with "a real feeling of the breadth and beauty of the green fields, the perfume and freshness of nature... lovely lakes of limpid water, covering many acres, and heightening the charm of the sylvan accessories by the finest natural contrast." In such a park, "pedestrians would find quiet and secluded walks when they wished to be solitary and broad alleys filled with thousands of happy faces when they would be gay." Thanks to Frederick Olmstead and Calvert Vaux's brilliant design, Central Park remains faithful to Downing's vision of sylvan pleasures in our city. But most of all, it was Olmstead's foresight that made Central Park such a welcome reprieve to the city's relentless grid. As he wrote in one of his reports:

"The time will come when New York will be built up, when all the grading and filling will done, and when the picturesquely-varied, rocky formations of the Island, will have been converted into foundations for rows of monotonous straight streets, and piles of erect, angular buildings. There will be no suggestion left of its present varied surface, with the single exception of the Park. The priceless value of the present picturesque outlines of the round will be more distinctly perceived, and its adaptability for its purpose more fully recognized. It therefore seems desirable to interfere with its easy, undulating outlines, and picturesque, rocky scenery as little as possible, and on the other hand, to endeavor rapidly and by every legitimate means, to increase and judiciously develop these particularly individual and characteristic sources of landscape effects."

Nearly a century and a half later, I encountered many solitary pedestrians enjoying moments of quiet and "thousands of happy faces" in the broad alleys of the park, all relishing the last of autumn in anticipation of the sterner season ahead.

Aung San Suu Kyi is free

2010-11-13T09:07:00.003-05:00

After having spent 15 of the last 21 years under house arrest, where she was not even allowed to go out into her garden, Aung San Suu Kyi has finally been released. It's the best news I've read in months, although she can just be re-arrested again, as happened in the past. But for the moment, many people around the world are jubilant. Former South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk, a Peace Nobel Prize Laureate, and Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba gave a joint toast in her honor at a meeting to campaign against nuclear weapons. Archbishop Desmond Tutu lauded her as "a global symbol of moral courage."

The personal cost of her moral courage is unfathomable. She was not allowed to see her husband before he died of cancer in 1999, and she has not seen her children in 10 years. Today, she finally spoke on the phone to her younger son, who is in Thailand trying to get a visa to Burma.

President Obama claims her as a hero of his. She is certainly my hero.

Olympia

2010-11-03T20:11:00.008-04:00

Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, 1510
Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538
Manet, Olympia, 1863

Bryan Ferry titled his latest album Olympia, after Edouard Manet's infamous painting. "Olympia was a kind of early pin-up picture and in a sense a forerunner of some 20th century pop art, which I feel strongly connected to," he explains, choosing the model Kate Moss to convey the "glamorous notoriety" of the original Olympia nude.

I find Ferry's art-school reference a poor excuse for a rather boring photograph of a glammed up Kate Moss lying in bed with the "finest linen." There is nothing here that we have not seen before. Manet's Olympia, when it was first exhibited in 1863, was something not ever seen before in the history of painting. Manet's composition referred back to Renaissance paintings of Venuses, notably Titian's Venus of Urbino, which in turn refers back to Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (Titian was Giorgione's student and most likely finished Sleeping Venus when the latter died of the plague in 1510). Unlike the Renaissance Venuses, Manet's nude is not an idealized and mythic goddess, but a flesh and blood courtesan, attended by a maid holding a large bouquet of flowers. Manet painted his courtesan wearing nothing but a pair of mules and jewels, just as Manet's friend Beaudelaire described his lover in these lines:

La très chère était nue, et, connaissant mon coeur,

Elle n'avait gardé que ses bijoux sonore,

Dont le riche attirait lui donnait l'air vainqueur

Qu'ont dans leurs jours heureux les esclaves des Mores.

With her frank expression of sexuality staring back at the viewer, Manet's Olympia was shocking. The painting caused an uproar when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1865. After Manet's death in 1883, Claude Monet organized a public subscription to purchase the painting for the nation of France.

Olympia has had a lasting influence on modern art. Jean-Michel Basquiat referenced it in his 1982 work Detail of maid from "Olympia".

The fashion house Yves Saint Laurent reinterpreted it for their advertising campaign in 1998, replacing the nude figure of Olympia with a fully dressed male model attended by a scantily clad female figure holding a bouquet.

Photograph by Mario Sorrenti, Yves Saint Laurent ad, 1998

Unlike both of these instances, Bryan Ferry's interpretation of Olympia offers nothing new on the original, to which it pales by comparison. Incidentally, in the album, Ferry does a cover version of Tim Buckley's beautiful Song to the Siren. Again, Ferry's interpretation is a slick production, but it misses the point of Buckley's haunting lyrics. I much prefer the version by Mortal Coil, with the lyrics rendered so unforgettable by Liz Fraser's ethereal voice.

Halloween in Carroll Gardens

2010-11-02T14:25:00.011-04:00

Lily trick or treating with the big kids
Pumpkins decoration
Severed head on a plate of hors d'oeuvres
Ann made this Don Quixote-like skeleton for Flavio
Ann, Sophie and Nick made this lovely horse out of cardboard boxes
Emilio as Michael Jackson
Edward as a matador
Lily as a hippie

I never liked Halloween until I moved to Carroll Gardens. The neighborhood really knows how to put on a great Halloween. The costumes are highly inventive and the community just comes together to put on the most festive party. Just another reason I heart Brooklyn.

Storm King Art Center

2010-10-23T20:16:00.007-04:00

Alexander Calder, The Arch, 1975
Andy Goldsworthy, Storm King Wall, 1997-98
Maya Lin, Storm King Wavefield, 2007-08

Storm King on October 22, 2010

Storm King Art Center, located on the Hudson Valley just 60 miles from New York City, is a magnificent museum set in 500 acres of fields, meadows, and woodlands. The museum holds a large collection of sculptures set against the expansive landscape that changes with the seasons, celebrating the relationship between art and nature. The ever changing earth and sky define the background for these large scale pieces, allowing visitors to view them differently each time. Among the most popular site-specific installations are Andy Goldsworthy's Wall and Maya Lin's Wavefield. I particularly love Storm King in the autumn, when the foliage on the site and the surrounding hills explodes in fiery colors.

Fragments of Loss

2010-10-18T12:21:00.008-04:00

Roland Barthes at 9 with his mother

Roland Barthes' diary entries chronicling his grief for his mother, with whom he lived most of his life. The entries are published in Mourning Diaries.

Here is Barthes at his most lucid and moving:

November 5th

Sad afternoon. Shopping. Purchase (frivolity) of a tea cake at the bakery. Taking care of the customer ahead of me, the girl behind the counter says Voilà. The expression I used when I brought maman something, when I was taking care of her. Once, toward the end, half-conscious, she repeated, faintly, Voilà ("I'm here," a word we used with each other all our lives).

The word spoken by the girl at the bakery brought tears to my eyes. I kept on crying quite a while back in the silent apartment.

That's how I can grasp my mourning. Not directly in solitude, empirically, etc.; I seem to have a kind of ease, of control that makes people think I'm suffering less than they would have imagined. But it comes over me when our love for each other is torn apart once again. The most painful point at the most abstract moment...

Translated from the French by Richard Howard

October

2010-10-11T11:42:00.005-04:00

We've been having resplendent October days with a seamless blue sky and brilliant sunshine. The plantings on the High Line are looking achingly beautiful in their autumnal hues, turning into shades of gold, red and brown. Kinglets are back in town. Everyday I listen to unfamiliar birdsongs signaling the presence of migrating birds stopping on their way south. Mornings at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden are my favorite time; just a few moment of solitary wandering around its ground will fill my heart for days.

October 10

Now constantly there is the sound,

quieter than air,

of the leaves falling

Under their loosening bright

gold, the sycamore limbs

bleach whiter.

Now the only flowers

are beeweed and asters spray

of their white and lavender

over the brown leaves.

The calling of a crow sounds

loud - a landmark - now

that the life of summer falls

silent, and the night grows.

Wendell Berry

MoMA

2010-10-02T22:25:00.008-04:00

After days of heavy rain, we woke up to a brilliantly cloudless sky. We spent most of this magnificent day at MoMA, where there is an abundance of amazing exhibitions at the moment. Just to name a few: New Photography 2010, Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront, and Dinh Q. Lê's installation entitled The Farmers and The Helicopters, all of which were interesting, thought-provoking and visually arresting. In the new photography, Alex Prager's work was the most engaging. There are so many great photos in the Pictures by Women show, which runs the gamut of works from Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman. The models of New York with the rising sea level projected in 50 years are amazing to behold and contemplate. Dinh Q. Lê's work is an insightful exploration of the complex relationships between the Vietnamese people and helicopters, and their struggle to reshape this symbol of terror and destruction into one of peace and pride. The large three-channel video, weaving together the Vietnamese personal recollections of the war and clips depicting the war from Western films, was both moving and unsettling at the same time.

Outside, the Philip Johnson-designed sculpture garden, looking impeccably beautiful, is the site of a lovely piece by Yoko Ono, The Wish Tree. In the tradition of the Buddhist wish tree, visitors are invited to write their wish onto a tag, which they can tie to a tree. At the end of the day, the tags are collected into a large glass ball that is exhibited inside. Lily wrote a lovely wish list. Another Yoko Ono piece which she also enjoyed was called Voice Piece for Soprano in the museum grand Marron Atrium, where a microphone was set up with a pair of loudspeakers and visitors are invited to scream 1. against the wind, 2. against the wall, 3. against the sky. After much hesitation, Lily went up to the microphone and did an impressive bit of screaming. I wonder in which other museum can one do such a thing?

Indian Summer

2010-09-26T19:54:00.008-04:00

We had an Indian summer day on Saturday. The heat returned, and everyone put on their summer clothes again. The crowd at the Brooklyn Bridge Park was happy to catch what could be the last hot day of the year, cooling their heels by the river. The Marble Ice Cream stand was doing a roaring trade. Everyone wanted their organic ice cream made from grass-fed cows' milk. We watched the sun set over the Statue of Liberty and wandered around DUMBO just as night fell. The Arts Festival was in full swing and we found ourselves marveling over various art installations that were set off so spectacularly against the historic architecture. People spilled all over the streets, happy to be out on such a beautiful night, partaking in the festive atmosphere. It was one of those times that New York City seems to offer just the right mix of nature and culture.

Autumn Equinox

2010-09-23T18:06:00.007-04:00

Today, the autumn equinox, began with a soft, orange-tinted sky. The rain from the night before left a mist lingering over the garden, enveloping me in my solitude. I want to measure out my life in mornings like this.

In the mood for Autumn

2010-09-13T22:57:00.006-04:00

The weather changed overnight, and suddenly, the Keatsian "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" is upon us. The temperature dipped, and we've put on our sweaters. In the garden the flowers have turned into seed pods. I have always loved the beginning of fall, where everything seems to change before your eyes. These are some of my favorite images from some of my recent work. I am lucky that I get to work with friends who allow me to do lovely things.

First Day of School

2010-09-08T21:17:00.002-04:00

Today was Lily's first day of fourth grade.
It seems not long ago that she started pre-K.

The end of summer

2010-09-06T21:49:00.013-04:00

Colorful memories of this summer to keep me through the sterner seasons ahead.

The Sea

2010-09-03T00:20:00.007-04:00

"The edge of the sea has many voices, as I think of them, some booming, some frantic, some crashing. But the voice I respond most deeply to, listen most closely to, is one that whispers: a sussuration of water riffling across clacking stone, mingled with breezes catching in the high grass of the dunes. After years of first finding and then finally hearing and understanding what that voice can teach me, I have just begun to accept the relentless flux that is the condition of my life, of all our lives. Not young, not old; not betrothed, not alone; thinking back, looking forward; not broken, not quite whole anymore either. But present."

Dominique Browning, Slow Love

RIP Corinne Day

2010-09-01T00:06:00.004-04:00

all photos by Corinne Day

The English fashion and documentary photographer Corinne Day passed away over the weekend at the age of 48. I loved her fresh take on fashion, especially her celebrated photographs of a young Kate Moss for The Face. Of her own fashion work with other supermodels, she once said, "They're stale, just about sex and glamour, when there are other elements of beauty." She turned to documentary photography, capturing the messy lives of her friends with an unflinching intimacy that was at times unbearably sad.

Patrick Dougherty

2010-08-13T21:15:00.007-04:00

Patrick Dougherty combines his carpentry skills with his love of nature to make fantastical, massive sculptures out of willow saplings and branches. He is currently working on an installation at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden as part of the institution's centennial celebration. I have been watching the work in progress over the last week. The first section of the installation is done today, and there are a few more to follow. I love the beautiful curving lines of the bent willows, so intricately woven and slightly out-of-this-world looking. Perhaps it is this Alice-in-Wonderland aspect of his work that I find most appealing.

A soft muted morning

2010-08-12T21:24:00.014-04:00

Patrick Dougherty's work in progress
Calycanthus floridus
Euphorbia marginata
Agastache rupestris and Gomphrena globosa

Lagerstroemia indica

The Cranford Rose Garden

Rose Abraham Darby
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden at 7:15 AM

I spent a soft muted morning at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden wandering around among the trees and flowers all by myself. These stolen moments of just looking at flora and greenery have always made me very happy. I thought about the primordial need we all have for some contact with nature, which led me to think about James Hitchmough's work in developing new planting designs for the urban environment based on ecological science. As a professor of Horticultural Ecology at the University of Sheffield, Hitchmough makes the overarching connections between horticulture, ecology, and culture. As he states on his website, "until the late c.19th beautiful examples of semi-natural meadows, steppe and prairie were relatively common in many parts of the temperate world, but have mostly now been eliminated by agricultural intensification and urban development...Most urban people have no actual or even cultural memory of this vegetation other than as a photographic image in 'nature' calendars." Using his horticultural knowledge of plant communities from all around the world and combining it with sociological and psychological research, Hitchmough aims to create new and sustainable plant communities for the urban environment. He's done some amazing urban meadows in the industrial city of Sheffield. What distinguishes his work from most ecologists is his commitment to the human context. "I am interested in the human culture I live in, where context is important." I think the landscape of our cities are changing, and thanks to people like Hitchmough, the future looks bright.

Luminous Colors

2010-08-11T15:19:00.013-04:00

Jacques Henri Lartigue, Me and my friends in the Auvergne, 1913

Kiyoshi Sakamoto, Swimming Lessons, Japan, 1927
Franklin Prince Knott, Woman outside the South Pueblo, Taos, New Mexico, ca. 1914
Jules Gervais-Courtellemont, Portrait of Young Spanish Woman, ca 1914

I have always loved the colors of autochromes, the first color process developed in 1903 by the Lumière brothers. Potato starch mixed with color dyes was used on glass plates to yield grainy, positive color images that resemble exquisite pointilist paintings. It was a difficult process. Sensitized plates had to be used within weeks. The emulsion was slow, necessitating long exposures. Yet it was championed by the most prominent photographers of the day. Alvin Langdon Coburn claimed "It's the greatest thing that ever happened to photography."

Edward Steichen's beautiful portrait of Rodin remains one of the most celebrated autochromes. In 1900, Rodin's reputation was already entrenched when a young Steichen paid him a visit with his portfolio to convince the famous sculptor to be photographed. The results in the ensuing years were some of the best photographic records of Rodin.

Edward Steichen, Rodin-The Eve, 1907

New York, New York

2010-08-10T22:25:00.003-04:00

It was a real dog day of August, and I had a long and tiring shoot, but the view of the city from the roof deck of a hi-rise building in midtown just about made up for everything.

Welcome to Our Dollhouse, Part II

2010-08-09T23:40:00.011-04:00

Lily and I have added another floor to our dollhouse. We made everything except the bathroom fixtures, which are real porcelain. In the living room, I've added my fantasy art wall, with some of my favorite photographs by Adam Fuss, August Sander, and Sally Mann, along with paintings by Klimt and Van Gogh.

I heart New York

2010-08-07T23:46:00.011-04:00

Reflection of Cherry tree at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Painting on a construction site

The Brooklyn Bridge at night

The Cranford Rose Garden at 7AM

Sunset at Battery Park

A wedding at the Brooklyn Bridge Park

Sunset at the Brooklyn Bridge Park

The Statue of Liberty

Once in a while I think about the possibility of living somewhere else and I am reminded of how much I love this city, despite everything. As Le Corbusier wrote in 1936, "A hundred times I have thought New York a catastrophe, and fifty times, it is a beautiful catastrophe." Or, in the words of E.B. White in his gem of a book from 1949, This is New York, "A poem compresses much in a small space and add music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive."

I love this city for the freedom it gives me to be who I am.

Heavy Roses

2010-08-03T21:31:00.006-04:00

Edward Steichen, Heavy Roses, Voulangis, 1914

Years ago, when I first became interested in photography, I fell in love with Steichen's beautiful photograph of dying roses, which I discovered at MoMa. I would go back to the museum periodically just to look at it again and again. Steichen took the photo in France shortly before World War I, and the sensual blooms dying so spectacularly were a metaphor for the state of world as he saw it on the eve of one of the most destructive wars in history.

Ever since, I am always touched by the sight of roses that are past their prime, their beauty extinguished petal by petal. Yet I have always shied away from trying to photograph anything similar to the Steichen image. Today I happened to have a shoot in a house that had several rose bushes in the garden. We used the blooms as props, and at the end of the day, I just had to take this picture for myself.

Garden Roses, Watermill, August 3, 2010

Days of Being Wild

2010-08-01T23:03:00.013-04:00

Fire Island
Night swim
Endless days
Early morning walks

Sand under our feet
The sound of the ocean
The full moon on the sea
Lily running barefeet all day long

Freshkills Park

2010-07-20T22:25:00.011-04:00

Once the world's largest landfill, Freshkills will be the largest park developed in New York in over 100 years. At 2,200 acres, the site is almost three times the size of Central Park. The full development is phased out over the next 30 years, and the 70 acres currently under construction are slated to open in 2013. The park will provide a wide range of recreational opportunities, including mountain biking and horseback riding trails, both of which are uncommon in the city. There are plans to restore wetlands and create native habitats, as well as establishing a native trees nursery.

I had a tour of Freshkills on early Sunday morning. It was mind-blowing to think that less than a decade ago, the site was the garbage dump for New York City. The Sanitation Department estimates that the average New Yorker generates 4 lbs of garbage a day. To put it in more graphic terms, the entire city generates enough garbage to fill the Empire State Building every single day. All that garbage has to go somewhere. We used to put it in the ocean until the Supreme Court put a stop to it in 1934. The park plan is therefore mission driven, a symbolic expression of our newfound ecological consciousness and renewal. All this comes with a hefty price tag of $1 million per acre, most of the expense invested in a highly engineered system to prevent waste and landfill gas from permeating the environment.

I like Freshkills' present iteration. It is a landscape in transition. There are sloping meadows with views of the Manhattan skyline. Natural wetlands and stormwater basins provide fertile habitats for wildlife. Ospreys, ring-necked pheasants, and red-tailed hawks are some of the birds that currently populate the site. Northern snapping turtles have been spotted. I wonder what it would be like if simply left to develop on its own. But we don't seem to have the luxury of letting the land be, at least not in the city. I am reminded of Gilles Clément's work and his dictum to leave the land alone, to relegate ourselves to the role of observing, something we don't do enough of. Seeing the site also reminds me to try to generate less garbage somehow.

I almost wish we were butterflies

2010-07-16T09:27:00.011-04:00

"I almost wish we were butterflies who live but three summer days"
John Keats

I heart Martha's Vineyard

2010-07-15T08:47:00.006-04:00

Days spent out of doors. Hours spent looking at the sky, the sea, and trees. Swimming, kayaking, reading, talking, cooking.

Wondrous clouds. Glimmering water. Luminous phosphorescence in the velvety water at night.

Welcome to our Dollhouse

2010-07-08T23:21:00.005-04:00

Lily and I have been making a dollhouse out of a wine crate the last few days. This is as close as I'll get to realizing my dream of mastering carpentry–by making miniature furniture.

Heat Wave

2010-07-06T22:18:00.005-04:00

Water, attributed to Jean-Pierre Defrance (1694-1768)

Brooklyn Bridge on July 4th

The Statue of Liberty at Sunset

It's been scorching hot here. Impossible to do anything but sit in an air-conditioned room most of the day. Lily's read nearly the entire series of Lemony Snicket and Harry Potter, the latter for the umpteenth time. I am re-reading bits of Amos Oz, one of my favorite writers.

Summer in the City

2010-07-02T22:09:00.012-04:00

Central Park Reservoir
Clouds
The amazing architecture of the Guggenheim Museum
View from the rooftop at the Metropolitan Museum
Doug & Mike Starn's Big Bambú
One of the Starn twins working on the installation
Lily made up a game going through the bamboo poles
Looking up Big Bambú
My hosta bloom that smells like gardenia, the perfect close to a summer day.

W. S. Merwin

2010-07-02T10:05:00.004-04:00

Merwin photographed at his home, a former pineapple plantation in Hawaii, by Tom Sewell

Our new Poet Laureate, W. S. Merwin

I love everything about this photograph. It says everything I know about Merwin and his work: the contemplation of nature, the sense of light and quiet, and the unshowy, slightly guarded pose. Photographically, I love that it was shot on film and printed with the negative carrier altered by hand to show the full frame of negative. It's been a long time since I have printed a black and white negative, and to think that I used to spend my life in the darkroom.

Bright Star

2010-06-30T21:14:00.006-04:00

I finally saw Bright Star last night, only a bit more than a year after it came out. Jane Campion is one of the most intelligent and visual directors, and I am always more than happy to see her films. In Bright Star, the depiction of the seasons unfolding on the English country side, while beautiful in a way that such scenes have been offered in countless period films, still manages to avoid being clichéd. Perhaps it is because there is an element of wildness in the nature depicted, not overly perfect nor manicured. In the same way, the clothes look hand-stitched, just as they would be at the time. It is in such minute details that Campion's films differ from others.

But the best thing in the film comes at the end: as the credit rolls on a black screen, Ben Whishaw, who played John Keats in the film, gives the most moving recitation of Ode to a Nightingale. Whishaw reads the poem as if he had written it himself. He has said that reading poems such as Ode to A Nightingale led him to discover a toughness and honesty in Keats that he had not expected. "It flies but is also connected to the earth." Well said.

I just want to sit in the evening darkness and listen to this.

City

2010-06-29T20:58:00.010-04:00

Free piano at Pier 1
Echinacea flowers in my garden
The Brooklyn Bridge
Jell-O Competition
Jell-O Competition
Gowanus Canal
The BQE and the metal scrap yard

Country

2010-06-29T19:54:00.008-04:00

all photographs by Andrew Montgomery

The weather has been sweltering hot these last couple of days, and Jasper Conran's sumptuous book Country is the perfect escape. Looking at these evocative images of life in rural England stirs up all my yearning for the country. Conran celebrates the part of the English country that he knows, conjuring up the magnificence of the landscape as well as the eccentricity of its people and their traditions. It makes me think about my own life and where I live. Being a deracinated refugee, home has always been where I happen to be. Unlike someone who has lived all their life in one place, I have no entangled memories in the landscape that makes up my home. There is nothing that keeps me rooted to this place. But I have come to love this city that's been my home for most of the last two decades. There is no shortage of eccentricity as well as traditions, in a New York kind of way. There is also creativity, conviviality, and community. And there is so much unexpected and uncommon beauty. Yet every once in a while, I get a hankering to sit silently still in a flowering meadow or to trample across a green field.

Another Brooklyn band

2010-06-27T15:35:00.010-04:00

My favorite band at the moment is The National, whose latest album High Violet came out in May. Made up of two pairs of brothers and the lead singer Matt Berninger, who also writes all the lyrics, the band is part of a vital music scene happening in Brooklyn. In a NYT Magazine profile, Nicholas Dawidoff wrote: "Each National song is a microbatch creation integrating their obsessive, often-diverging feelings about rock 'n' roll."

Matt Berninger's notebook

I find their brooding, dirgey songs compellingly addictive. They draw you in slowly, and they get better with repeated listening. Matt Berninger's baritone, with its melancholic timbre, delivers his elliptical lyrics above a highly textured sound. There is an urgency in their music, which reminds me of Joy Division, whose memorable songs also transcended their dark undertones to be somehow strangely uplifting. Berninger, whom the band members nickname The Dark Lord, writes his songs in a notebook filled with fragments like these:

"It takes an ocean not to break"

"Sorrow's my body on the waves"

"I was swallowing the shine of the sun"

He claims that their songs have always concerned the "the unmagnificent lives of adults," which is somewhat misleading. They are just very well crafted and beautiful songs, not as lugubrious as Berninger implies.

My favorite song is Sorrow, which is not included on the video below, but their rendition of Terrible Love here is utterly riveting.

Mid-Summer Night

2010-06-26T08:18:00.003-04:00

It was the Swedish Mid-Summer celebration in Battery Park last night. We opted for a quiet picnic in our favorite spot, with a view of the awe-inspiring sky above New Jersey and a lovely sweetbay Magnolia (Magnolia virginiana) tree. It's one of my favorite trees, not only for its lemon-scented creamy-white flowers that bloom from June to September, but also for the fact that the trees seem to glimmer in the wind from the silvery underside of the leaves.

Street Pianos NYC

2010-06-22T19:34:00.005-04:00

"Play me, I'm yours: New York City 2010" is an artwork by British artist Luke Jerram, who has installed 60 pianos around New York City. Yesterday I played the one at Pier 1, Brooklyn Bridge Park. It was the most amazing place I've ever played in, even if the acoustic is not the best.

Jose de Sousa Saramago

2010-06-18T13:35:00.004-04:00

Just last week I picked up Jose Saramago's The Notebook from the library. I am only half way through the book, which is a collection of the blog entries he wrote from September 2008 to August 2009. His voice is sometimes ponderous, even somewhat cantankerous–especially on the subject of Palestinian independence–but above all, vivaciously humane. The sense of the man one gets from The Notebook is one who is fully engaged in the world, who is committed to pointing out to an indifferent world the injustices he sees around him, but who remains nonetheless sensitive to the small beauties of that same world. As he wrote, "beauty doesn't merely belong to the category of what we call aesthetic, it can equally be found in moral undertakings." So the news that Saramago had died today came as a complete shock to me. I was just getting to know him, to learn so much about him and his singular take on life, and suddenly, he is no longer in life. In the words of the Nobel committee which awarded Saramago literature's highest prize, he was one "who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality."

The High Line

2010-06-16T23:00:00.011-04:00

Almost a year since its opening, the High Line has proven to be ever more popular. I have found that the best time to visit the place is early in the morning. Unlike Central Park, which Olmstead designed to shut out the city, the High Line's greatest appeal is its engagement with the city. It is said that cultural landscapes are our unwitting autobiography, "reflecting our tastes, our values, our aspirations, and even our fears, in tangible, visible form." So reading the High Line would tell us that we've moved away from the 19th century romantic idea of nature as something precious and separate from the industrialized cities. It's not that we yearn for nature any less, but we have come to enfold it into our urban space as a necessary part of our landscape. There is no more separation between culture and nature. In fact, both nature and culture are enhanced by their proximity to each other. From its elevated spot, the High Line opens up new vistas to the city below, and its wildness makes a forceful juxtaposition to the architecture around it. For all its high-concept design–and I have yet to see anything more meticulously designed, down to the elegant expansion joints on the paving– what I love best about the park is the way people have made it their own, improvising picnic tables from the long benches and turning the 10th Avenue Square into an outdoor classroom–a watercolor painting class was taking place as I walked it past this morning. And credit must be given to Piet Oudolf's planting design, which does a wonderful job of retaining the some of the wild and rambling atmosphere inherent in park's former iteration as an abandoned railway. Seeing the wondrous plantings–the mounds of grass waving gently in the wind, the bright patches of flowers blooming in between the rail tracks, and groves of amelanchiers laden with deliciously ripe berries–just makes me happy.

A Pattern of Marks Entering My Own Stillness

2010-06-14T23:22:00.005-04:00

"I too liked to sit unfettered in a room of my own, emptied of all the past, nothing inside, nothing around, nothing but a voice bundled in paper, a pattern of marks entering my own stillness."

Romesh Gunesekera, Reef

This is just about all I want right now. Flowers and words. And time to decipher them, to listen to all these voices "bundled in paper."

Karlsruher Tulpenbuch

2010-06-13T20:26:00.008-04:00

The Karlsruher Tulpenbuch (Karlsruhe Book of Tulips) is a collection of 72 plant portraits, all that remain of 6,000 watercolors commissioned by the Margrave Carl Wilhelm of Baden-Durlach (1679-1738). The paintings were intended to become part of a cycle of botanical copperplate engravings which the Margrave wanted to have produced and they depict the fashionable tulips as well as other botanical treasures of the palace garden.

It breaks my heart that only 72 of these watercolors have been preserved. They are so exquisitely painted. Each page is beautifully composed, and the botanical details, while meticulously exact, are thrillingly splendid. I can hardly tear my eyes away.

Coming thro' the dews

2010-06-12T23:17:00.007-04:00

My garden, at 6AM today.

"And I meet, coming thro' the dews

Another summer's Day!"

Emily Dickenson

I love these early summer mornings. The streets are empty and I am left alone in silence with the plants under an immense sky.

Tonight I saw the first firefly of the season.

Where the Wild Things Are

2010-06-11T15:25:00.006-04:00

My story on Nicolette in Elle Decoration UK

iPhone Diary

2010-06-10T23:25:00.006-04:00

Gowanus Canal in the rain

Manhattan Bridge

East River between the Brooklyn and Manhattan skylines

I got a new camera for my iPhone. It's almost as good as having a Polaroid camera.

Williamsburg

2010-06-10T23:19:00.008-04:00

It was Lily's day off from school and we ventured over to Williamsburg for fun.

The Solitude of Ravens

2010-06-05T14:45:00.007-04:00

Noboribetsu, 1979
Kanazawa, 1977
Nayoro, 1977
Wakkanai, 1975

Masahisa Fukase, The Solitude of Ravens

A panel of photographers and writers was recently invited by the British Journal of Photography to select their favorite photo book in the last 25 years, and the winner is a little known work from 1986 by the Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase, entitled Karasu (Ravens). Published in the west under the title The Solitude of Ravens, the book is a testament of mourning, a 10-year obsession that began when his wife of 13 years decided to leave Fukase, after a life which she described as moments of "suffocating dullness interspersed by violent and near suicidal flashes of excitement." She had also been the focus of his camera lens, and the loss was intolerable. "I work and photograph while hoping to stop everything," he once said. Suffering bouts of depression, Fukase was never able to dispel the darkness that he made so evident in his work. Tragically, five years after the publication of the book, Fukase fell down a flight of stairs in a bar and has been in a coma ever since. The Solitude of Ravens brings to my mind what Rainier Maria Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet, "Works of art are an infinite loneliness... Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them." Today, as he lies insensate to all signs of life and the honor bestowed upon his work, his former wife, who has since remarried, still visits him twice a month.

A Heaven of Blackred Roses

2010-06-05T14:22:00.006-04:00

Cranford Rose Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, June 4

The stifling heat came early this year, forcing all the roses to bloom all at once, a month before their usual designated season. I am happy to be back in the rose garden early in the morning, standing among the blowsy blooms, relishing a moment of coolness before the heat of the day comes stealing in. This will always be my rose garden, my retreat in the last few years, and my heaven.

if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have

one. It will not be a pansy heaven or

a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but

it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be (deep like a rose

tall like a rose)

standing near my

(swaying over her

silent)

with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which

is a flower and not a face with

hands

which whisper

This is my beloved my

(suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

and the whole garden will bow)

e e cummings

"i & my parents"

six non lectures

Blurry Beauty

2010-06-03T12:20:00.003-04:00

Gowanus Canal

"There's industrial buildings, there's open space, there's blurry beauty everywhere. There's kind of the feeling that you can still discover something special, that you're using your own aesthetic to interpret," David Belt, architect quoted in the New York Times talking about the Gowanus Canal. This is what I love about living where I do.

Summer

2010-05-30T23:01:00.010-04:00

Norfolk, Connecticut.

The start (I hope) to a beautiful summer.

Pleasures

2010-05-25T20:57:00.011-04:00

For the first time in months, I was able to spend the morning wandering around the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It was pure bliss. All my worries and cares fell away, and I was left with the sky, the light, the flowers, and the laughter of children.

Pleasures

A few verses.

A few lines about poetry.

A few sips down the throat

Of something thick and bitter.

The evening lowers its weary bones.

Memory. Silence.

The barely audible tick-tack.

If only there was a summer shower.

My head on someone's navel. Yes!

Radmilla Lazic

(translated by Charles Simic)

The shaggiest garden

2010-05-23T08:52:00.007-04:00

Monet photographed on the Japanese bridge at Giverny, 1922

Derek Jarman, photographed by Howard Sooley, on the Japanese bridge at Giverny, 1993

Monet's garden at Giverny is the ultimate artist's garden. Covering almost two hectares, more like a park than a garden, it was used by Monet as an extension of his studio. He was fascinated by botany – he swapped plants with artist friends such as Caillebottte and was on good terms with the chief gardener of the Jardin des Plantes, with whom he had a regular exchange on garden subjects and new species. In the last decades of his life, the garden became the primary subject of his paintings. Writing to Gustave Geffroy in June 1912, Monet stated modestly, "I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature."

Derek Jarman, whose small but no less magical garden at Dungeness is a world away from the watery, lush, and expansive composition of Giverny, was a great admirer of Monet's garden. His final holiday before his death from complications of Aids was to Giverny, a pilgrimage of sort to another artist's creation. In the last book he ever wrote, a moving record of the improbably beautiful garden he had created in the inhospitable landscape of Dungeness–a desolate expanse of shingle facing a nuclear power station–Derek pronounced Monet's garden "the shaggiest garden in the world, only possible to describe in the flecks and dabs of colour in his paintings." This is the highest compliment Derek could bestow on any garden, since in his estimation, "If a garden isn't shaggy, forget it."

Looking at the sky, water and flowers

2010-05-16T22:32:00.009-04:00

Monet in his first studio at Giverny

"Nymphéas" (1907)

"Nymphéas" (1908)

"Les Bassins aux nymphéas" (1917-1919)

"The Water Lily Pond" (1918)

"I have spent nearly eight lazy days looking at the sky, water, and flowers."

Claude Monet, in a letter dated May 14, 1908

Over a hundred years to the day after these words were written in Giverny, I stood in the Larry Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea looking at some of the beautifully complex paintings that Monet produced in the last two decades of his life from his singular way of looking at the sky, water and flowers in his monumental garden. The show reunites for the first time in 101 years the 7 paintings that were part of Monet's 1909 show at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris, one of the last 3 three shows that he staged before his death at 86 in 1926. In the last decades of his life, Monet devoted himself to the making his elaborate garden, which became his muse and model for his paintings. From the collection of 27 paintings gathered in the show, the garden appears in various moods and colors, at times all shimmering and blue, and at other times dark and gnarly, the paint thickened in a turbulence of motion and color. These paintings reinforced Monet's thrust toward abstraction and point at his influence on such Abstractionist as Joan Mitchell and Jackson Pollock. It's one of the most beautiful shows I have seen in a long time. I left the gallery yearning for my own small patch of nature so I can spend my time looking at the sky, water and flowers for the rest of my days.

Bleeding hearts

2010-04-28T10:49:00.001-04:00

Home 6:45 AM

The sun came back this morning, if only for a brief moment.

Rain

2010-04-26T23:41:00.009-04:00

RAIN
by Don Paterson

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;

one long thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
or the dress lies ruined on the grass
or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source
along their fatal watercourse.
However bad or overlong
such a film can do no wrong,

so when his native twang shows through
or when the boom dips into view
or when her speech starts to betray
its adaptation from the play,

I think to when we opened cold
on a rain-dark gutter, running gold
with the neon of a drugstore sign,
and I’d read into its blazing line:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood—
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.

Lately I've found myself drawn to poetry. The rain these last two days led me to this poem by the Scottish poet Don Paterson. The evocative imagery of the first part of the poem leaves you somewhat unprepared for the shattering last line, "and none of this, none of this matters." It is certainly true in the face of the immeasurable loss of someone you love. My sisters and I are still bereaved over the death of our father. My younger sister broke down and wept during our last telephone conversation. Our grief is unconsolable, and at my darkest moment, I rage wordlessly against the order of the universe. Everything is useless because nothing will restore him. So why poetry? Because only through words and music can I come close to any semblance of understanding the situation. Or failing that, poetry at least lends me the words to express my grief. I cling to the line in Shakespeare's King Lear where the old king raged at the death of his daughter Cordelia,
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'll come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
The writer Jeanette Winterson once wrote that she was not sure "death could be done without poetry," meaning that "an intense experience need an intense language."
Yet even Winterson concedes that death is "lost to language. When death approaches, when death happens, that event falls outside the scope of what can be said. To write about it is a kind of magic – an evocation, an invocation, a re-membering of what has been dis-membered. The scattered life, now returned to so many atoms, becomes what atoms are – empty space and points of light."
I want to find a way into that empty space and points of light, to write an invocation to remember my father by. All I can do is remember.

Red Hook Brooklyn

2010-04-20T16:40:00.005-04:00

Every once in a while, I get to do a shoot where everything comes together seamlessly. I spend a lovely day in the company of friends and we make something modest but beautiful together. I had such a shoot yesterday in Red Hook, where I took these photos for Layla.

Red Hook is an amazing, seemingly forgotten corner of New York. In the 1990s, Life magazine named it one of the worst neighborhoods in the United States and as the "crack capital of America." A friend of mine, Harriet, lived there at the time, and it was known as "Bloody Hook." Now there is a mix of artists and industries thriving in the neighborhood and the place has the feel of a frontier town. Red Hook still boasts one of the largest housing projects in the city, and the area is not served by any subway line. But it is on the water, with views of the Statue of Liberty, and it is home to the thriving Red Hook Community Farm, on the site of an old asphalt playing field. The farm operates all year round and employs local youths from the low-income neighborhood. Red Hook also has some of the best food trucks, serving the incomparable Salvadoran specialty pupusa in the summer months.

Eternal return of Spring

2010-04-14T10:51:00.006-04:00

Bleeding hearts

Grape hyacinths

Violet

Hellebores

Flowers blooming in my garden this morning. It is bittersweet to see so many of my plants coming back after a long barren winter. At the same time, I am also reminded of the people who will never come back again and the void they've left in the landscape of my life.

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in a hour."

William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence"

Inscriptions on the landscape

2010-04-04T11:53:00.003-04:00

Photographs by Richard Mosse, from the series "Breach"

"I'm interested in the idea that history is something in a constant state of being written and rewritten–and the way that we write history is often plain to see in how we affect the world around us, in the inscriptions we make on our landscape, and in what stays and what goes... I began to see architecture as something that can reveal the ways in which we alter the past in order to construct a new future, as a site in which past, present, and future come together to be reformed."

Richard Mosse is an Irish photographer whose wonderful and thoughtful work I just recently discovered. I like what he says about the "inscriptions we make on our landscape," and the link between architecture and history, something that occupies much of my thoughts these last two years. The series "Breach"–images of Saddam Hussein's palaces occupied by US troops–is a meditation on the decision by the US Army to occupy the very edifices that symbolize the tyranny of the regime they had deposed. As Mosse stated in an interview,"If you're trying to convince a population that you have liberated them from a terrible dictator, why would you then sit in his throne? A savvier place to station the garrison would have been a place free from associations with Saddam, and the terror and injustices that the occupying forces were convinced they'd done away with. Instead, they made the mistake of repeating history."

Mosse works with a large format 8x 10 camera, something that I often wish to do, for there is nothing comparable to its formal quality. The cumbersome nature of the camera, with its anachronistic dark cloth under which the photographer takes cover, demands a more deliberate and measured approach to the process of photographing. It is diametrically opposed to the quick digital snapshot that is the province of commercial photography.

Central Park Coyote

2010-03-23T14:46:00.008-04:00

Jean-Philippe Delhomme, Central Park Coyote

My friend Jean-Philippe had an encounter with the coyote in Central Park late one night last week. It was just like the scene in The Fantastic Mr. Fox when he spotted the coyote, like a vision out of a dream. Jean-Philippe made this beautiful painting afterwards and wrote a memorably funny blog post about it. I particularly love the painting, the lonesome figure of the coyote against the glittering skyline–the improbable compression of a wild New York (think Mannahatta) and everything that has been done to that landscape in the last 400 years.

Empire State of Mind

2010-03-20T17:40:00.014-04:00

Screen shots of Jay-Z's video for Empire State of Mind

I am not a big Jay-Z fan, but this video, directed by Hype Williams, just captures the timelessly seductiveness of New York, with its intricate layers of architecture and life in myriad configurations. The history of celluloid is filled with intoxicating footage of this concrete jungle, and I never seem to tire of looking at it. I am reminded of what LeCorbusier once wrote upon seeing the New York skyline at night:

"The night was dark, the air dry and cold. The whole city was lighted up. If you have not seen it, you cannot imagine what it is like. You must have it sweep over you... The sky is decked out. It is a Milky Way come down to earth; you are in it. Each window, each person, is a light in the sky. At the same time a perspective is established by the arrangement of the thousand lights of each skyscraper; it forms itself more in your mind than in the darkness perforated by illimitable fires. The stars are part of it also–the real stars–but sparkling quietly in the distance. Splendor, scintillation, promise, proof, act of faith, etc. Feeling comes into play; legs strengthened, chests expanded, eager for action, we are filled with confidence."

The Fairy Catastrophe, 1936

I heart New York, in all of its complicated, mythical, and endlessly photogenic iterations.

three days until Spring

2010-03-18T20:00:00.009-04:00

Blooming hellebores at Tear Drop Park

A field of purple crocus

Fragrant witch hazel

Afternoon light in Lily's room

iPhone diary

In Anticipation of Spring Flowers

2010-03-17T20:34:00.007-04:00

Adolphe Braun, Apple Blossoms

Anna Watkins, Sargassum plumosum

Charles Renne Mackintosh, 1915

Charles Renne Mackintosh, 1909

A gorgeous sunlit day. I just wanted to look at some of my favorite botanical photographs and illustrations in anticipation of all the blossoms to come.

Spring

2010-03-16T17:03:00.005-04:00

Vincent van Gogh, Branch of an Almond Tree in Blossom, February 1890

Van Gogh painted this beautiful canvas, just months before his death in July 1890, as a present to celebrate the birth of his brother Theo's son. It's an extraordinary image bursting with life, borne out of turmoil and pain.

Spring is here. Soon the trees around the city will be exploding with blossoms too.

Dust to dust

2010-03-11T08:43:00.005-05:00

David Maisel, Library of Dust 387, 2005

The Infrared Small Magellanic Cloud, taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

"From 1913 to 1971 five thousand one hundred and twenty one mentally ill patients were cremated on the grounds of the Oregon State Hospital. Their remains were sealed in copper canisters. The canisters were stored in the hospital's basement until the 1970s when they were moved to a memorial vault underground. The vault was subjected to periodic floods. In 2000 they were removed from their institutional crypt, placed on plain pine shelves in a storeroom, and were left virtually forgotten until David Maisel heard of their existence and photographed them."

The second image shows the main body of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a nearby satellite galaxy to our Milky Way galaxy. It is "comprised of a 'bar' on the left and a 'wing' extending to the right. The bar contains both old stars (in blue) and young stars lighting up their natal dust (green/red). The wing mainly contains young stars. In addition, the image contains a galactic globular cluster in the lower left (blue cluster of stars) and emission from dust in our own galaxy (green in the upper right and lower right corners)."

In a beautiful essay, Adam Harrison Levy reflects on the wondrous chemical and alchemical efflorescence of the canisters whose content, ashes of the long forgotten dead, seems to assert itself in bursts of colors, not unlike the colors of the stars and dust in the cosmic universe. As he wrote, "If all this seems grim, take a look at the canisters again. Their swirl and surge of color reminds me of nothing less than the spectacular images taken through NASA's Spitzer telescope: the visual identity of the canisters miraculously mirrors that of the universe itself. And yet each rivulet and blossom of color are as distinctive and as personal as the human remains held within. It's as if the mysterious something that leaves the body at the moment of death, often called the soul, is trying to escape. What's left is evidence of extraordinary beauty."