While listening to “All Things Considered” this afternoon on WNYC a brief but fascinating segment came on about Hua Mei birds in Chinatown. With a little further research it seems that it has been an ongoing activity for owners of these songbirds to bring them to Sara Delano Roosevelt Park most every morning.

It is now at the top of my list to make a stop downtown this week to record the chirping for audile.

• Listen to segment on NPR.org >>
• Link to The Villager article >>
• Sara Delano Roosevelt Park >>

When I was invited to contribute to this project, I was given perhaps a dozen words to choose from. This word was the most inspiring. Since most of my work is very literal, I really appreciated an opportunity to make something abstract and impressionistic. A short film whose starting point is “the study of blindness” was an inspiring springboard.

Walking along 23rd street and noticing the services and schools for the blind, I felt that I had found my . At the intersection of 6th avenue, an audio signal box beeps an alert tied into the streetlights; I knew I wanted to include this metronome.

The first idea that came to mind was to make a “video flipbook” composed of stills. When I started gathering the stills, I felt they were too clear, too legible. I wanted to recreate a sightless/partially sighted experience by making the stills unfocussed and blurred. As I began stringing the stills together I experimented with interrupting the image flow with dark sections– leading me to what became the motivator for the rest of my image gathering and editing: the overwhelming, unfocussable assault of visual stimulation that a 5-avenue stretch of Manhattan can become, and how moments of darkness can offer some respite. What if you could only see in bits and pieces? What if your eyes and mind weren’t fast enough to make logical connections between the racing images flying past?

I ultimately used nearly 700 stills. I walked across 23rd street several times, shaking my camera, looking like a tourist going home with the world’s worst collection of travel memories. I was looking for softness, color and dynamism. Some images I froze to allow a moment of closer study, only to be whisked away and replaced with a dozen more images.

I recorded the audio the same way, walking slowly and pausing near any interesting voices or words. I eventually used 4 different pieces of audio overlapped and mixed up and down to try to give an impression of conversations speeding by. The film is bookended with the sound of the signal from the 6th avenue crosswalk box.

When I watch it I like that the images move just fast enough that I always feel a step behind, trying to process the image that just passed while also registering the new one coming at me; the way the darkness allows me a moment to breathe and absorb just the sounds for a moment.

Locations:

33rd Street @ Ditmars Blvd (visual)
Hellgate Bridge (visual)
24th Street @ Ditmars Blvd (visual)
ConEd Plant @ 19th Ave (visual)
Immaculate Conception Church, 29th St @ Ditmars Blvd (audio)

There is surprisingly little to be found on google about the term welkin. It is an archaic word meaning “the sky” and is rarely used in modern language except for in the phrase “to make the welkin ring,” meaning to cause a loud noise. It is also the name of a death metal band and a computer systems corporation based in North Virginia. Susan pointed out that the origin of the word comes from the Old Enlgish “Wolcen” and directed me to a wolcen-themed blog, which you readers may enjoy

http://www.wolcen.blogspot.com/

Back to welkin. The bare-basic concept of my entry for welkin is to introduce my neighborhood through a series of tranquil shots, panning across the area skyline as viewed from my old balcony and my current apartment. At the moment we transfer to video, I hope to illustrate the act of making the welkin ring, disrupting the serene mood with the abrasive intrusion of bells and lightning, symbolizing the pace of (not necessarily welcome) change in this city.

Getting the audio cut to my liking proved to be a bit of a challenge. I wanted to record the bells of the Immaculate Conception Church- a goal I’ve had in the back of mind for three years and have only now found an excuse to try. I really hate being seen doing my creative work, so I wasn’t about to go all-out dragging a microphone over to the church, I didn’t even go in to the church, rather I took my handheld dv camera, found a spot on the back stoop, and hit “record.” Consequently, I had every person I turned to for audio design assistance gripe about the poor quality of my recording. I can’t argue that fact, but there was something important to me about capturing an honest depiction of things as I hear them which is why I like my results. You never hear just one sound at one time in this city. You have to master the art of tuning out the static and hearing what’s soothing. If you do this here you will find that, despite the background chatter and traffic, there is beautiful music being played.

This piece is in many ways symbolic of my current relationship with New York. In considering leaving I’ve also been forced to consider what I will miss if I leave. I know that as long as I live within the five burroughs, I’ll want to live in Astoria. It’s been a source of serenity for me in the years that I’ve lived here and I find it very aesthetically pleasing. The problem I’m having lately is that I find my serenity being disrupted more and more lately by the sight of walking attitudes with bad haircuts, wide-eyed recent graduates from the Midwest, and yuppie couples hogging the sidewalk. It’s not overwhelming yet, but it’s a noticeable evolution that’s really been getting under my skin. I’m the first to admit that my misanthropic aversion to my own demographic is somewhat odd, but I stand by my love of old people and families and my desire to live quietly amongst them. When the panoramic view of my neighborhood skyline is disrupted by the electrical storm it is representative of what I have considered an unwelcome intrusion into my peace of mind.

This morning I took the first ferry from the Battery Maritime Building to Governors Island, arriving at 10: 15 am.

View photo albums here >> and here >>

This has definitely been a very difficult word to explore. While we are committed to using the Y version of this word yashmak for a face-covering veil, the more common words are niqab or burka. It’s a religious concept really, one that takes the sartorial gesture — much life the turban, the yarmulke, or the habit — to its most spiritual dimension. And yet, the political atmosphere of the day has transformed this simple expression of devotion into a highly charged issue of global magnitude. Post September 11, for a woman to wear a full face veil in an American city is a fearless act.

I make a date to go to a Yemenite video store to talk with a young, very hip woman in traditional Muslim dress who knows an immense amount about music and movies. We film together for an entire afternoon as I interview her about wearing a veil in New York and the challenges of being different on the street. It’s a wonderful conversation, and I feel great about the material. But, as I am heading out the door, she whispers, “Please don’t put my face on the internet.” Drat. Double drat. More work.

A few days later, I walk with my daughters from shop to shop along Atlantic Avenue’s famous block between 3rd and 4th Avenues, stopping into the mosque, various essential oil stores and then finally to a Halal butcher. When I ask if they know where I can find a shop that sells a yashmak, I am sent up the hidden stairway behind the cash register. Here? Really, here? I wonder. In a windowless room I never could have imagined before, I am allowed to run my fingers through one yashmak after another, as I listen to the friendly, hijab-dressed saleswoman explain the various forms of dress and their nuanced meanings. For the next several days, I return to the shop with my camera and am told a whole range of stories about why she is not there. On the third day, one of the butchers announces that she no longer works in the dress shop upstairs and that the owner, who was scheduled to meet me that day at 5 PM, is in Egypt.

In a case like this, I have now learned, it is never a good idea to call first. Just appear and start talking about your project and hopefully someone with power will become intrigued. At long last, I find an Islamic dress shop where I am allowed to film and ask a few questions. I speak French to the Moroccan saleswomen. They are, for the most part, quite shy about being on camera, but they are proud of their fabulous inventory and happy to allow me to photograph. I am still wondering whether a full-face veil is a symbol of oppression or liberation from the onus of making oneself beautiful in front of a far too critical public eye. When I look up the definition for the NIQAB or yashmak, I discover, for the first time, a definition on Wikipedia.com in which THE NEUTRALITY OF THIS ARTICLE IS DISPUTED.

Reading the dictionary. Everyone wants to do this one day, don’t they? Like the Bible, or James Joyce’s Ulysseus, isn’t this task something we all will get around to accomplishing eventually in our lives? It’s been my role in this project to find words that resonate, surprise, and provoke the imagination. From the seemingly obscure and irrelevant to the profound and surprisingly forgotten, I have chosen words that send the imagination spinning. Umbel is probably our most botanical word, one that at first did not jump out at me, as it seemed so plant-specific, removed from any other realm of daily existence. But, simply put, I adored the sound of the word. Umbel. Umbel. Umbel. It just plain feels good on the tongue to say. Newly educated, I began to see umbrella-shaped flora all over town! Upon a bit deeper level of research, I discovered this is also the root word for umbrella? and so a lovely visual poem came to mind. I found a thriving carrot (yes, an umbel) plant one sunny day in the vegetable section of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and then patiently awaited a rainstorm in downtown Brooklyn. The sky and the earth below determined the direction and timing of my production.

What a strange and deeply inspiring summer I am having. I have been living in New York City for just about ten years, and I think it is finally becoming the kind of muse that sends my creative spirit flying. Tonight I drove to Flushing to shoot xenogenesis. Little did I know that a drive to this marvelous Asian community would lead to one of the most unusual epicurean experiences I have ever had — eating authentic Szechuan food. This region of China includes the highly pungent taste of Mala. Eating this invisible, peppery powder in our appetizers was like diving into a pool of ocean water with an electrical socket plugged into the taste buds of your tongue. What a charge!

So back to filmmaking, though in many ways such taste-defined sensations are very tied into the witnessing and thinking that comes with collecting images for our words. It’s all new and all extremely sensory. Tonight I shot in the Sago Bubble Tea Cafe because it seemed like a great place to study the radical shift in life style between generations in the Asian community in this city. Here I was able to see tables of young people gathering to drink a particularly new dessert drink, to eat French fries, to participate in a sense of community that is, to my eye, so different from that of their parents.