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Monthly Archives: March 2008
List of D words from the Dictionary.
FILED UNDER Diglot, Information, Uncategorized, Words
Here is a list of words beginning with D that seemed both mysterious and inspiring enough to use in the Abecedarium: NYC project. We chose diglot and began a year long production of shooting New Yorkers who speak two languages in their daily lives.
What would you choose?
Culminant: Watercolor of C words
FILED UNDER Culminant, Information
This is a list of C words I found while reading a 1968 American College Dictionary at the MacDowell Colony.
Bibliomancy: Watercolor of B words from the dictionary
FILED UNDER Bibliomancy, Information, Words
Here is a list of the B words I found during a residency at the MacDowell Colony when I was looking for words for Abecedarium:NYC.
Audile: List of intriguing A words found in dictionary
FILED UNDER Audile, Information, Words
Here is a list of A words I painted during an artist residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire in 2006. I spent two amazing, exhausting weeks reading the dictionary, searching for words that intrigued me and that I thought would inspire interesting visual responses. Susan and I chose audile from this list for the Abecedarium:NYC project because it seemed to speak to our auditory sensibilities which at times get ignored in the world of the visual artist.
Vaticinate: Charlotte Street, the Bronx
FILED UNDER Bronx, Vaticinate
In 1976, Charlotte Street epitomized the decay and destruction of the South Bronx. President Jimmy Carter witnessed cement rubble on the devastated street and pronounced the need for grand changes that would transform the lives of poor people in the neighborhood and beyond. Rather than living in large, public housing, families needed homes of their own. Carter, along with other earnest city planners, were trying to vaticinate somehow, to imagine city life that would take on the pleasures that would come with a sense of ownership in a single family home.
More than thirty years later, Susan Agliata and I seek out this architectural anomaly in the heart of the Bronx. Charlotte Street is a street of modest but well-cared-for single and double story homes. Each home is surrounded by a six foot high fence and every window is barred. Unlike the rest of the borough which is bustling and croweded on a lovely fall afternoon, Charlotte feels simultaneously inhabited and desolate.
Welkin: The Sky Opens Up on a Brooklyn Street
As I turn the corner from Smith Street onto my short block in Brooklyn on a late winter afternoon just a few months after moving to the neighborhood, I notice that the sky somehow seems very different here. To my left and right the buildings take a few steps backwards, like cancan dancers on a stage, kicking their legs with lifted arms. After discovering the almost obsolete welkin, I know there is a single word I can use to describe this celestial beckoning.
Pelagic in a Junot Diaz short story
Pelagic took on new, transcendent meaning for me today when I read “Alma” a short story by Junot Diaz. The narrator of the story is in love with a girl but can’t resist the seductions of her best friend. When his girlfriend confirms her suspicions by peaking into his journal and then quietly confronts him, his “heart plunges, … and he is overwhelmed by a pelagic sadness.”
Selenography: Staten Island and Brooklyn
FILED UNDER Brooklyn, Selenography, Staten Island
The moon is not a stargazer’s friend, and neither are all of the city lights of New York City. Still, with the help of the Amateur Astronomers of New York City, I’ve been able to gaze at the bumpy crevices of our moon like I have never seen it before — from the pitch black expanse of Staten Island’s Great Kills National Park, the darkest spot in the metropolitan area, to the busy center of Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. One cool summer evening in August, I drove to the farthest reaches of Staten Island with my partner, filmmaker Mark Street, and our two daughters. Having lived in New York for almost a decade, I’ve been trained to avoid murky places where a human being a mere six feet away is impossible to see. It was truly scary to drive into a completely unlit network of winding roads full of other cars without their lights on all searching for a few hidden telescopes perched to watch the sky. In Brooklyn, we stood with two breathtakingly knowledgeable astronomers in the subdued light of the borough’s government center. My fellow selenograpahers seemed bewildered by the fact that I was shooting video in the darkness. Surrounded by office buildings and courthouses, I listened to their scientific explanations and personal anecdotes on the narrative of the cosmos. Knowing very little in the realm of astronomy, I felt confident that the reflection of light on the surface of the moon would be just enough to awaken the screen.
Pelagic: FreshKills, Staten Island
FILED UNDER Pelagic, Staten Island
On Staten Island in search of pelagic experiences, Susan and I drive along Arthur Kill Road, a meandering marineside motor access leading to the Outerbridge Crossing to New Jersey. We had heard aboout a mysterious ship graveyard in the area and were intent to find it. We ask three bewildered Staten Island natives – on the street, in a diner, at a marina – where we might find this seemingly fascinating urban archeological wonder. Eventually, we find the rusty, decomposing, dinosaurs in the water next to a very active scrap metal depository, across the street from a hot pink tourist motel. These enormous, industrial carcasses jut forcefully up from the serene, yet polluted waterway of the Arthur Kill. We both stand in awe with our cameras poised and are immediately thrown off the grounds of the scrap metal yard. We are threatened with arrest and finally agree to leave the premises. Just a normal day in the production of Abecedarium NYC. 
PELAGIC: City Island, Bronx
There is a French word I dearly relish for its ability to express the sensation one has when feeling outside your home, your country, yourself. The word is “depayser” and literally speaking it translates as “to be outside one’s country”, experiencing a new state of mind and body, which has certainly been a part of my year of discovery here in New York City. I am constantly reminded of my often parochial attitude toward unfamiliar territory when I allow myself to discover a new place or community here in my own town.
So once again, I am in a position of awe, this time as I stand surrounded by a giddy flock of seagulls on the City Island Waterfront at the north –eastern most tip of the Bronx. The air is, sadly enough, unseasonably warm (an expression I have come to fear). Bronx native and Abecedarium media artist George Kuchar encouraged Susan and I to drive to this far most finger of the metropolitan area in pursuit of the quintessential pelagic experience. I stare long and hard at the horizon, at the waters of the Pelham Bay, the Long Island Sound and the Eastchester Bay, utterly transported by a sensation of openness. I am here and there all at once. One of my favorite scenes in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn occurs when Francie, the 11 year old heroine, is taken by her father to the shore to ride in a small fishing boat, smell the salt, gaze at the gulls. For the first time in her life, she has a pelagic sensation of the sea.
See the map of this post from City Island, Bronx, New York.