East River Ice Bridges

In 1888, the NY Times reported that, “For the first time in many years people yesterday crossed the East River on the ice” which filled the river “from Wall Street to the bridge on the New York side and from Fulton Street to Hamilton Avenue on the Brooklyn side. The ice was fully six inches thick and covered with two inches of hard snow” and “was solid from shore to shore.” That day, New Yorkers tested the strength of the ice and “paid a boy his two-cent fee for the use of his ladder” to get on the ice on the Brooklyn side… when they reached Manhattan, they found a young employee of the fish market with a thriving side business, charging 5 cents to use the ladder he secured to help people up to land.

At least it’s not this cold.
Yet.

.

Original story here / Gothamist / by Jen Carlson / Arts & Entertainment / Published: January 24, 2013

Truck Farm

THE FARM:
When Fayette Plumb gave his grandson the keys to the old pickup, he wasn’t expecting the half-ton to drive back home––as a farm. But last spring, using green-roof technology, lightweight soil and heirloom seeds, filmmakers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis transformed granddad’s ’86 Dodge into a traveling 20-member CSA. They planted between the wheel wells with arugula and tomatoes, parked the truck on a Brooklyn street, and waited for sun and rain to work their charms. When the first sprouts came up, Truck Farm was born. Subscribers received deliveries of produce, arriving via the mobile farm itself.

Finger Painting

Jorge Colombo drew this week’s cover using Brushes, an application for the iPhone, while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.

“I got a phone in the beginning of February, and I immediately got the program so I could entertain myself,” says Colombo, who first published his drawings in The New Yorker in 1994. Colombo has been drawing since he was seven, but he discovered an advantage of digital drawing on a nighttime drive to Vermont. “Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner’s hat, I could not draw in the dark.” (When the sun is up, it’s a bit harder, “because of the glare on the phone,” he says.) It also allows him to draw without being noticed; most pedestrians assume he’s checking his e-mail.

There’s a companion application, Brushes Viewer, that makes a video recapitulating each step of how Colombo composed the picture. (Watch how he drew this week’s cover below.) Colombo leans heavily on the Undo feature: “It looks like I draw everything with supernatural assurance and very fast—it gets rid of all the hesitations.”

Colombo’s phone drawing is very much in the tradition of a certain kind of New Yorker cover, and he doesn’t see the fact that it’s a virtual finger painting as such a big deal. “Imagine twenty years ago, writing about these people who are sending these letters on their computer.” But watching the video playback has made him aware that how he draws a picture can tell a story, and he’s hoping to build suspense as he builds up layers of color and shape.

And so are we: look for a new drawing by Colombo each week on newyorker.com.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

The New Yorker / Cover Story / Published: May 25, 2009

Avedon Fashion

Richard Avedon (1923–2004) revolutionized fashion photography starting in the post-World War II era and redefined the role of the fashion photographer. Anticipating many of the cultural cross-fertilizations that have occurred between high art, commercial art, fashion, advertising, and pop culture in the last twenty years, he created spirited, imaginative photographs that showed fashion and the modern woman in a new light. He shook up the chilly, static formulas of the fashion photograph and by 1950 was the most imitated American editorial photographer. Injecting a forthright, American energy into a business that had been dominated by Europeans, Avedon’s stylistic innovations continue to influence photographers around the world.

This exhibition will be the most comprehensive exploration to date of Avedon’s fashion photography during his long career at Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, The New Yorker, and beyond. The exhibition will feature more than 200 works by Richard Avedon, spanning his entire career, and will include vintage prints, contact sheets, magazine layouts, and archival material.

International Center of Photography / Avedon Fashion / May 15th – September 6th

Hear the curators in the New York Times audio slideshow: Through the Eyes of Richard Avedon.

Photos from The New Yorker / Portfolio / Published: May 18, 2009

Brooklyn Botanical Garden

At the best time of the year.

In The Air

The first celebration of Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, was a raucously exuberant affair. In New York, Fifth Avenue was closed to traffic. People picnicked on the sidewalk; dead fish were dragged through midtown; and Governor Nelson Rockefeller rode a bicycle across Prospect Park. Students in Richmond, Virginia, handed out bags of dirt (to represent the “good earth”); demonstrators in Washington poured oil onto the sidewalk in front of the Interior Department (to protest recent oil spills); and in Bloomington, Indiana, women dressed as witches threw birth-control pills into the crowd (no one was quite sure why). All told, some twenty million Americans took part—far more than the man who thought up the occasion, Senator Gaylord Nelson, Democrat of Wisconsin, had expected. “That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day,” Nelson later said. “It organized itself.”

I LEGO N.Y.

It’s amazing what comes of a creative mind, random resources, and a slight nostalgia for the world’s greatest city.

[click on any image for the whole story]

The New York Times / Abstract City / Published: February 2, 2009

NYC Streets

Why New Yorkers need insurance.

New York City

I’m so grateful for reliable public transportation, street food, outdoor art, and rooftop soirées, for free entertainment, farmers markets, and summers full of music and movies.