Walking in New York.

One of the things about New York that I missed the most while I was down South was walking.  And I did a lot of it since I've returned to the city.
I took my camera with me on a couple of walks that I did over the past few days.
Pardon the schmutz on the lens in some of the pictures.  That's all on the inner lenses and has to be cleaned at the shop; another trade off for a cheap functioning digital camera that I've had now for almost 10 years.  It also doesn't do very well in the dark.  Despite that, I got a few good night time shots below.

All these are my photos and are freely available.

Walking Home at Night Across the Williamsburg Bridge 

October 13, 2018.

The Delancey Street entrance to the pedestrian and bike path across the bridge.

Downtown Brooklyn from the bridge.

Looking north from the bridge to the Queensborough Bridge.

The Empire State Building and Midtown from the bridge.

A light on the bridge amid the cables and girders.

The Manhattan tower of the Williamsburg Bridge.

The moon over Brooklyn.

A view back across the bridge from the Brooklyn side.

The Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges.

The Financial District in Manhattan; the bright area on the left is traffic on the FDR Drive.

The World Trade Center

A building on the Brooklyn side of the bridge.  I'm not sure what it is or was.

The J train rushes past to Brooklyn.

After the train passes, a beautiful view of Midtown Manhattan.

The old Williamsburg Savings Bank from 1876, now a posh nightclub.

A locust tree at night on Driggs street in Brooklyn

Morning glories blooming at night.

Anubis in a junk store window.

The BQE, almost home.

Walking Through Downtown with 

Andreas and Andrea Hellgermann.

Ms. Liberty and Staten Island

The new World Trade Center from the Manhattan ventilation tower of the Holland Tunnel. 

Weiben Wang, Andrea and Andreas Hellgermann visiting from Münster in Germany.  I tour-guided both of their sons in previous years, and now I get to give the parents a tour.  We are standing on a walkway going out to the Manhattan side ventilation tower of the Holland Tunnel.

Contemplating Michael Arad's memorial on the site of the South Tower of the old WTC.

The great glass and steel obelisk of the new 1 World Trade Center.

The west entrance to the new Calatrava designed train station; more a very high end shopping mall than a functioning train hub for the subways and PATH trains.

It may be a $4 billion boondoggle, but it is spectacular.  This was my first visit inside the thing.

The Hellgermanns contemplate the grandeur.

A downright Baroque staircase on the east end.

Weiben, Andreas, and Andrea standing on polished marble floors.

A familiar building seen through the skylight.

Coming out the east end.

Weiben calls it a giant dinosaur skeleton.

The east entrance to Saint Paul's Chapel

Inside the chapel.   All the old September 11th stuff is gone.  The place is clean and polished.  The old Easter egg colors are now gone as are the old pews including the traditional President's pew.

The oldest surviving painting of the Great Seal of the United States, hanging about where the Presidential pew once stood.

Pulpit and altar

The organ

The very Protestant altar.

A memorial to the Chapel's most famous regular parishoner.

The tomb of General Richard Montgomery who tried and failed to take Quebec during the Revolutionary War on the east portico of the Chapel behind the altar.

The Municipal Building and the top of the Federal Courthouse from Park Row.

The Fuller Building, the last of the newspaper palaces that once lined Park Row.

The Woolworth Building.

The Brooklyn Bridge crowded with tourists from end to end on a Sunday evening.

The old Brooklyn docks at sunset from the bridge.

The Financial District.

Midtown

Looking back up the East River to the Manhattan Bridge with a huge new building locally known as "The Cheese Grater."

And Finally, the View Back Toward Manhattan from the 

Burnside Avenue Station on the Subway 

Where I Get Off to Go to Work.  

October 19, 2018

Manhattan looks more and more like the back of a porcupine these days with all the slender new buildings going up.  The big one on the left is 432 Park Avenue locally known as "The Cigarette."
It is the tallest residential building in the world and officially the second tallest building in town.  Unofficially, it's the tallest.  It sits on higher ground than the WTC, and if you get rid of the broadcasting mast on 1 WTC, then this would definitely be the tallest building in the city.  You can see 1 WTC just to the right of the Empire State Building and behind Rockefeller Center.  To the right of that are the 4 new slender towers going up along 57th Street.  The biggest one to the right is the new Nordstrom Tower which may top out 432 Park Avenue when it is finished.  I have a lot to say about these buildings, but I'll save it for a future post.

The Woodlawn bound 4 train coming into the station.



EXTRA:

Visiting Rockefeller Center with Jan Hellgermann Last Year.

And here he is, on Top of the Rock in 2017.

 Looking north and east to 432 Park Avenue, "The Cigarette."

 Probably the best view of the Empire State Building.

 The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island

 The Williamsburg Bridge and Brooklyn with the Atlantic beyond.

 Brooklyn out toward Prospect Park, Coney Island, and the Atlantic with Sandy Hook, NJ in the far distance on the right.

 Midtown below 30 Rock.

 A splendid view of Manhattan downtown.

 The very top of Rockefeller Center

 Raymond Hood's masterpiece, and centerpiece of Rockefeller Center, 30 Rock.

 Jan contemplates Jose Maria Sert's murals on the walls and ceiling of the entrance lobby to 30 Rock. 
Diego Rivera's lost mural was on this wall.

 Paintings on the ceiling by Jose Maria Sert.

Ravel

Daphnis et Chloe

Set design by Leon Bakst for the original 1912 production

Choreographer for the premier production Michel Fokine as Daphnis

Maurice Ravel in 1912

Robert Grant, "Prince of Clouds," His Paintings

Robert Grant who died last May shared a studio with me for 15 years down on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.   His aunt, Alice Grant who worked for many years as a dancer for Pearl Bailey, was the muse who inspired so much of Robert's painting.  He painted a lot of his work, especially the dress paintings, in homage to her.  Aunt Alice served as Robert's inspiration and guide into theater and fine art since his early childhood.

The dress paintings are much more than simple costume pieces.  They become personas taking on something of the lives and characters of the many roles his aunt performed on stage, in life, and in Robert's imagination.  These dress paintings are exuberantly joyful and even brassy at times, characters that could be wondrous and larger than life.  Sometimes fear, grief, and loss come through in these paintings.   Robert used the stuff of theater costumes in almost all of his work; glitter, feathers, sequins, fabric, and very bright high keyed color.  Robert created very rich and evocative effects with these materials and colors turning the dress paintings into powerful presences.

Toward the end of his life, Robert painted with a much more subdued palette dominated by basic black and white.  His artist father in law who worked a lot in black and white inspired Robert's last paintings.  They are more serious in tone and in ambition than his earlier dress paintings.  These paintings express Robert's experiences as an African American artist, his spirituality, and his relationship to the legacy of modern painting, especially Cubism and Abstract Expressionism.  Something of the exuberance of his earlier dress paintings remains in these later paintings.  Sprinkled in the black and white paint is a lot or a little colored glitter, an effect that is hard to photograph.  While the technique in these last painting/ collages could be very rough, it is never crude and always precise.

Robert was an accomplished musician especially on guitar.  He was a lifelong fan of Django Reinhardt and King Crimson.  His musical interests appear frequently in his art and influence its form.

Robert spent much of his childhood on stage.  He worked as an actor when he was a child appearing on television as part of the original cast of The Electric Company and with frequent guest appearances on Good Times.  He also worked on stage as in The Me Nobody Knows and Maggie Flynn.

Robert studied painting and earned a MFA from the Tyler School of Art.  He also studied in Rome under David Hammons and Enzo Cucchi as part of a scholarship program.

Robert exhibited his work in New York and internationally including the World Financial Center, PS122 Gallery, De Paul University Gallery, and in the Tomb of Augustus in Rome.

Below is a generous sample of Robert's work from a memorial show currently on exhibit in the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center where we shared a studio.

The title of this post comes from a solo show he had in 2011 at Bronx Community College.

These are all my photos.  The photo above of Robert is by Mark Power.

Alas, I do not have any titles or dates for these paintings.  My memory is too poor and unreliable to speculate on some of the ones that I remember seeing him paint.
Robert's work has yet to be catalogued.

Robert was such a great colorist, especially in this dress painting, among others.

The largest of the dress paintings

One of the smallest of the dress paintings, barely seven inches.

I look at this detail and I think, "Hans Hoffmann, eat your heart out."

I've always loved Robert's work.  And yes, it's very different from mine.  He had a masterly feel for the intricate relation between the brush, the texture of the paint, the color, and the form, and how all of those things must work together.  There are all kinds of painterly effects in his work from transparent glazes and scumbles to broad thick opaque brushwork. A lot of artists used glitter, but few used it as well as he did.  I always admired Robert's skill with brilliant colors, his ability to combine them without ever diminishing the colors or making brown mud out of them.  His colors sing off of each other like musical chords.  He had a great sense of form his entire life from the most brilliantly colored dress pictures to his black and white paintings.

Robert lived a wonderful life even though it was too short.  And now his wonderful work belongs to us all and to the ages.

Robert's studio shortly after his death.

Congratulations Senator Mitch McConnell!

Congratulations Senator Mitch McConnell on so great and hard fought a victory. The process that you started by blocking all of President Obama’s judicial nominations -- including his last Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland who you refused to even consider -- has been accomplished with Justice Brett Kavanaugh. That process included ending the long-standing Senate rule that Supreme Court nominations must pass with 60 out of 100 Senate votes so you could put Neil Gorsuch, and now Brett Kavanaugh on the Court with a simple majority (in the case of Kavanaugh by a margin of only 2 votes). That process ends in triumph. You successfully purloined a Supreme Court seat to install a permanent 5 to 4 right wing majority on the Court. This will be the most partisan right wing Court since the Taney Court sent Dred Scott back into slavery. The new Court will have the power to undo legislation, policy, and even elections for decades to come despite whatever the voters may wish.

You won a great victory for the long far right wing campaign to radically remake the United States. The struggle over just who is to be included in the opening three words of the Constitution “We the People…” is central to American history. To you and the extreme right wing, the answer to that question was always clear and unambiguous. You and the rest of the far right want to reassert the historic hierarchies of race, class, religion, and gender. Congratulations on a major victory in the generations long effort to undo all the political and social transformations of the USA since the Civil War, to roll back over 150 years of change. This is a major landmark in the struggle to return the USA to its original state as you see it, as a republic of, by, and for wealthy white Christian men.

To the victor go the spoils.

Chief Justice Roger Taney

If you can imagine it, he would be smiling today.