Amazon.com: Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City: Anne Matthews: Books
“Anyone who doubts that American civilization is industrial has only to take a train from New York to Philadelphia or, better yet, get lost driving in the Newark-Jersey City area, underneath the Pulaski,” wrote a shaken John Gunther in 1947. “Here the fangs of industry really bite. There is not a blade of grass, if one may exaggerate slightly, in a dozen square miles. In a small car, at dusk, as the giant trucks and trailers grind their way through loops in smeary roads, one feels like a grasshopper caught in a stampede of iron elephants. The whole area is a kind of demonic metal shambles.” Anne Matthews. Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City. Page 126
Brooklyn Botanic Garden: Woody Plants of Hudson County
What grows around us, beneath our feet in these cities of ours?
Spy Vs.Spy: Jersey City-Beijing
Inspired by the Mad magazine comic strip “SPY vs. SPY”, this piece explores how artists respond to their environment/s. Two cities: Jersey City and Beijing, White Spy vs Black Spy, two musical treatments. The Spy/s both White and Black exist in a singular form, and in a doubled form.
The musicians composed to only their city without knowledge of the other city or the musical strategy of the other composer. Throughout the piece elements fall in and out of synchronicity.The traditional expectation for conflict and contact are played out between the moments of the synchronic and the asynchronic.
White Spy/s performs Okinawan Bassai kata. This is translated by some to mean “Penetrate the fortress”. Jersey City’s landscape is shaped by New York City and the port of Newark. The piece opens with White Spy on the Morris Canal: a rocky shoreline, the Hudson River and then the mass of imposing towers that is lower Manhattan. Later White Spy is surrounded by the iconic Pulaski Skyway. This bridge now too fragile in design to allow modern trucks to traverse its expanse was once the nation’s first “super highway”. White Spy is shadowed by another. She begins to double, and her double as Black Spy makes her way to Beijing via Newark airport.
Sou Jia Cun, Beijing was an artist community that the Chinese government demolished as part of their overall land development plans to accommodate the arrival of the 2008 Olympics. The artists in response staged a show on the destroyed site. Black Spy/s performs amid both wreckage and new construction the Wu-Su QiGong breathing form which is said to give the practitioner greater inner strength.
Beijing an ancient capital now in a new ascendency, and Jersey City which historically functioned as a gateway and conduit for a 20th century empire’s premier city are places either in flux or accommodate movement. Contemporary artists are especially tuned to the interstice between homogenized spaces, and sometimes the border is between what something was to what it will become. A good way to see that future, now, is to see how it is made and remade around us: in the vista of our present landscape.
Andrew’s photo of Squirrel at Pavonia-Newport PATH station stop. The squirrel climbed out of the garbage can with a french fry between his forepaws. After he finished the french fry I gave him another one from the discarded McDonald’s bag.
MoMA | Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront
Waterfront future?
exhibition at MOMA-NYC from March 24–October 11, 2010
Aerial view of Palisade Bay. Courtesy Palisade Bay Team: Guy Nordenson and Associates, Catherine Seavitt Studio, Architecture Research Office
Murray the Ground Hog - Travels with Tonoose
I saw a groundhog sitting up along the 10th street enbankment.
Andrew saw a dead groundhog on 10th street a few days later. The groundhog looked like it had been “brained.”
I wonder how many are out there: alive and well, and the fluctuation of their population.
Liberty State Park. Liberty National boardwalk on the way to Port Liberte and back.
5 second interval.
Bicycle paths not found on Google Maps street views. Repeated trips, seasonal changes…offering possibilities other than finding in advance where one might go.
