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Monthly Archives: March 2007
Culminant: Greenwood Cemetary, Brooklyn
For the most part, culminant is a root word meaning the highest point, though some older dictionaries allow this little, mono-syllabic word to stand all by herself. Susan and I like the sound of culminant and have invested an enormous amount of weight for the word in the rubric of Abecedarium:NYC. We are going to photograph the highest natural point in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island and the highest human-made point in Mahhatten (Of course with the Twin Towers gone, it’s the Empire State Building).
The highest point in Brooklyn is Greenwood Cemetary. Today, I realize that our decision to make the shooting of culm a five-Burrough wide project has become absolutely daunting! I used to be almost deathly scared of cemeteries. When my girl scout troop offered to sweep autumn leaves from the grounds of the Memorial Gardens in Memphis, where I grew up, I begged to be excused from this odious good deed. I take my trembling nine-year-old daughter Noa to photograph the Revolutionary War statues in the cemetery. As we wind our way up the only real hill I have ever seen in our burrough, we realize that from this vantage point near 8th Avenue and 27th Street we are looking straight across the sky at the tops of buildings in downtown Manhattan.
See the map of this post from 500 25th St.
Foudroyant: Defintion
FILED UNDER Definition, Foudroyant
Foudroyant (adj.):
- Dazzling or stunning in effect.
- Medicine Occurring suddenly and severely. Used of a disease.
[French, from present participle of foudroyer, to strike with lightning, from foudre, lightning, from Old French fouldre, from Latin fulgur, from fulg
re, to flash; see bhel-1 in Indo-European roots.]
- The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. S.v. “foudroyant.” Retrieved June 26 2007 from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/foudroyant.
Segment producer: Lynne Sachs
Diglot: Spanish (Argentine), Brooklyn
Another morning with a diglot, a Latin-rooted word that sounds more like a rare flying animal than a multi-lingual human being. Today I follow an Argentinean film archivist as she organizes a collection of 16mm films. I am appreciating the international quality of life here in New York, how easy it is to find a diglots who sometimes move with great effort and sometimes with astounding ease between the different worlds in which they work each and every day.
Bibliomancy: Brooklyn
FILED UNDER Bibliomancy, Brooklyn
By choosing the word bibliomancy, I have forced myself to think long and hard about the investment we as humans have in the written word. Twenty years ago, I made a filmed entitled “Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning”, so I guess I’ve been fascinated with the power of the thing for a long time. With bibliomancy, the thing is the book and the book, in most cases, is holy. But, for those of us secular folks, committed to the magic and the mystery of telecommunications, the holy book has become the telephone book. It offers us access to the identities and locations of millions of other people – people we might marry, people we might meet on a bus, people who are rich, people who are brilliant, people who are almost destitute, people who are no longer people but whose names still remain in the book. Faith in the book implies a belief in its ability to lead us to divine awareness, maybe even to see into the future. The shooting of a film for this word takes us to a basement where Susan Agliata and I photograph the flipping of a Manhattan telephone book while my daughters fan a feint breath across the pages. Later through Flash animation, a hundred names will tumble from the page.
Diglot: Chinese, Brooklyn
FILED UNDER Brooklyn, Diglot, Selenography
I spend the morning videotaping a Chinese accountant who finds it absolutely hilarious that I have any interest whatsoever in her daily meanderings between Cantonese, Mandarin and English. When I tell her she is a diglot, a person who speaks two languages, and that this is something very special, worthy of “documentary� attention, she seems both dismissive and charmed.
Audile: Steinway Piano Factory, Queens
I love factories, so I feel lucky to spend three hours in the world famous Steinway Piano Factory. It is almost impossible to believe that such an old world institution, producing some of the most sublime musical instruments on earth, is flourishing in the middle of Queens. Here hundreds of craftsmen hammer, bend, glue and tinker with the wood slats and the keys that comprise one Steinway piano. During our three-hour tour, we witness the meticulous step-by-step process. We record the musical cacophony created by the creation of these renowned musical instruments. These sounds will become our second sound addition to the audile archive of New York City noises to remember.