Positive Identification by Mikhail Iliatov

Darkness, amplified by polluted waters and urban hubbub, formed the backdrop in which thirteen Brooklyn artists embarked on counting crickets and katydids. In five canoes, they paddled down Gowanus Canal and into its shallow arms. Armed with MP3 players holding reference recordings of the seven prevalent species found in the five boroughs, they kept their ears peaked. Expectations of an auditory experience were quickly overwhelmed and enriched by the urbanity of the environs. How come crickets and katydids keep calling, if they are outscreamed by cars, trucks, elevated trains, and plant machinery easily filling 99% of the air dome circumscribed by invisible horizons? How come crickets and katydids keep calling in the stench of petrol punctuated by whiffs of sulfur more potent than those Woody Allen alluded to in Deconstructing Harry, if wind in its purest form, silences them?

But yes, in this landscape of silhouetted industrial and traffic structures, against a cloudy night sky of drizzle, and a syncopation of clearly audible sewer spouts, they did hear populations of field crickets, jumping bush crickets and angel-winged katydids, in rhythms breaking the roar of Brooklyn, like the lit windows of the F train periodically sends a floating ribbon of light into the clutter of stationary light specks, to disappear into the dusk of the Smith and Ninth Streets’ tunnels until a next population comes down the line.

The members of the Gowanus Expedition, guided by Tammy Pittman, co-director of Proteus Gowanus, and Bill Duke, captain of the Gowanus Dredgers, called in the GPS position, time, and identity of the species heard, to the AMNH head quarters to be added to the findings of others participating in the Cricket Crawl.

http://pick14.pick.uga.edu/cricket/expeditions.

An hour’s worth of canoe travel below street level, looking down at reflections and up out of the dismal olfactory, their ears made them see their hometown differently. Their ears informed their bitten nostrils that even in the grime of our local Styx there are the sounds of nature they were looking for, extended with an illusion of country, by way of the swishes of the soft waves created by their paddles that helped them glide over Lowe’s blue sign, shimmering upside down in the undulating rainbow stains split by the bows of canoes.

 

Yankee and Bag, by Hendrik Kerstens, on view at the Museum of the City of New York through September 13, 2009.

In homage to the poem of Lawrence Ferlenghetti….

At the closing party of the gallery’s theme-of-the-year ‘MEND’, flag artist David Mahfouda unfurled his longer-than-a-flagpole-is-tall flag from the roof of the 5-story high building that houses Proteus Gowanus. The flag had been torn in exuberant waving and joyous dancing on Union Square, the night Obama was elected president. For seven months, Proteus Gowanus had been the “Mending HQ” for volunteers helping David restore the flag, and nurturing its spirit. Together they stitched the stripes back together, and sewed new stars onto the flag’s sky panel.

The flag was created in the year leading up to the election, as a bridge to a new beginning, by reclaiming the stars-and-stripes from millions of lapel pins, born(e) in the aftermath of 9/11, by resizing it millionfold into one flag to be held, moved, and cared for by many.

The night the flag became the people’s was the night the rips appeared, the need for mending, and the awareness that mending indeed can be done—that mending is needed to clear the skies, for the skies to celebrate the flag free-flowingly, for anyone to hold hands with that new sky, to take it into one’s circle, the circle of people, the circle of nations.

The night of June 28th, this flag was rolled from the rooftop to be carried by the wind—and torn again by the courtyard’s 19th century brick and mortar—into the hands of those who help mend it, for them to look up that 13-lane highway of red & white to see the big blue with stars, some clear, some still dimmed, and to feel comfort that even in this dire economy, there is a new normal worthy of dancing a jig, even if it’s sponsored by a major credit card.

Who needs a flagpole.

At this year’s Poetry Walk, Galway Kinnell read Walt Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry for the fourteenth time at the Fulton Ferry Landing, the poem that veiled and unveiled Whitman’s sexual orientation. His poem as yashmak—offering those sensitive to his femininity to look in through the slit he widened with his words, a poem he suspected and hoped might find a larger, more open crowd among the men and women generations after him, seeing mast-hemm’d Manhattan and sea-gulls oscillating their bodies much like he did in his time of thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats. “Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta!” he says, “Stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn! Throb, baffled and curious brain! Throw out questions and answers…”