Art and science

The great photographer Berenice Abbott, known for her pictures of New York cityscapes, was also a fan of science. Indeed she believed that photography had a special role to play in promoting science: itself at once science and art, it's the perfect intermediary. I reckon she's right. The photo at right confirms what I know but find I still intuitively refuse to believe - that gravity pulls no more strongly on a large object than on a small one. The witty picture below of a ball shot straight up from a moving toy train shows that the arc of its movement is composed in part of the vectors of an uninterrupted horizontal movement parallel to the train. The other photos - most taken in the lte 1950s at MIT, though she started the science project while directing the photography program at the New School in the 1930s - are less didactic but no less beautiful.

From Berenice Abbott, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Seidl, 2008)
1:247, 253, 237, 243, 223, 221 and (below) 209

Tran 84

This is the kind of story I love. It turns out that Sriracha, the sweet-hot sauce with all the Southeast Asian lettering on the bottle, is American as apple pie. Well, I dunno about apple pie, but as American as fortune cookies, chow mein, California rolls or Tabasco. According to an article in - where else? - the Times, David Tran (a Vietnamese refugee of Chinese extraction) extended a family tradition on arriving in America:

“I knew, after the Vietnamese resettled here, that they would want their hot sauce for their pho,” a beef broth and noodle soup that is a de facto national dish of Vietnam. “But I wanted something that I could sell to more than just the Vietnamese,” he continued.

“After I came to America, after I came to Los Angeles, I remember seeing Heinz 57 ketchup and thinking: ‘The 1984 Olympics are coming. How about I come up with a Tran 84, something I can sell to everyone?’ ”

He succeeded, and the article cites everything from fancy restaurants and national chains to kimchi carts and facebook fan pages as proof. The highest form of praise is imitation, of course, and through it Sriracha-like sauce now is being made in Asia:

Over the last decade, a number of imitators have entered the sriracha category. A recent visit to grocery stores in the San Gabriel Valley, near the Huy Fong headquarters, yielded Cock brand sriracha from Thailand, Shark brand from China, Phoenix brand from Vietnam and Unicorn brand, also from Vietnam.

Plus ça change

Got an e-mail today from someone I haven't seen or heard from in about twenty-two years. We were at uni together - read PPE at Worcester College, Oxford (iconic view below) - and shared a suite in our second year on the fifth floor of a residence hall which has since been trimmed to four stories to harmonize with a new quad. I remember a shared anxiety about the temptations to social climbing, and vowing not to be changed by Oxford in ways we would not otherwise have been changed. (Those were wordy years, made worse by the manic precision demanded by our philosophy tutors.)

He now evidently teaches economics and marketing at a private school in Bangkok but sounds unchanged: Having come across your name on the web, I am reassured that you continue to grapple with the problems of good and evil. Nothing so lofty for me I’m afraid. I attempt to justify my educating the children of a financial elite on the grounds that I do so sufficiently badly that they are less privileged than they otherwise would be.

Classes end!

Today was the last day of classes for this academic year. We spilled into a Monday to make up for the Presidents' Day Monday a few months ago, but the school already seemed to have entered its sleepy summer state.

Rhizome

Something amazing's happening on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum. It's called "Maelstrom" and by an artist named Roxy Paine, whose stainless steel trees you may have seen in other parks - but nothing like this, which is simply transcendent. Well worth a visit to the Museum!

Closings

Foreclosures are spreading across the country - disproportionally to poorer and minority communities. Our place in Prospect Heights is on the border - the map below (both are from the Times) shows a foreclosure a block east of us, and many more beyond that and to the north. You can be sure that some of the same people who were targeted by predatory lenders with subprime mortgages they didn't need are now not getting help refinancing mortgages which could yet be salvaged.

Our local ginkgo is flush with new green.

Reading New York City

The exhibit is up, and it looks terrific! It brings together student work from seven first year "Reading New York City" courses (Natural History of NYC, Nueva York, Photographic New York, Poet in New York, Psychology in a City of Immigrants, Scenes of Recognition: Philosophy in the City, and my own Religious Geography of New York), and three of us faculty assembled (curated!) it pretty much from scratch over 5 hours today. It came together beautifully, capturing the variety and interplay not only of courses and of the aspects of New York City explored in them, but of student perspectives - which, in a seminar college, is what it's all about. The most compelling piece in the exhibit is the table below - made wholly of material salvaged from the Meadowlands Park in New Jersey, whose hills are composed almost entirely of NYC garbage. The student, Zackary Lauth, wanted to find a way to capture the spirit of that place - its reeds had sustained a wicker furniture industry and its clay produced bricks in the 19th century - and so decided to carpenter a piece of furniture using only what he found there as raw materials. But he was struck also by the beauty of insouciant nature making a home in our waste (he showed the class a photo of a wild bird's eggs in a nest furnished of old plastic bags!), and so filled his table with a miniature Meadowlands, with bits of broken brick and marble (perhaps from the old Penn Station, whose rubble was dumped there?), oyster shells and worn glass - and seeds of grass and oregano.

He dropped the table off in my office last week waterlogged from recent rain and smelling like freshly turned soil. Over the weekend, the grass sprouted. And just today tiny little leaves of oregano appeared.
Don't you want to come explore this city with students like these?

Notes from our penultimate discussion in Exploring Religious Ethics.

Ghosts

As shops close, the ghostly names of long-defunct businesses sometimes emerge... Who knew the 99¢ store on 14th Street used to be a clothier! And yes, the Balducci's next to my old apartment has closed. (The NEW YORK SAVINGS BANK was visible before, when Central Carpets closed.)

3-D!

Remember the Thomas Hart Benton murals which used to grace a conference room at The New School? Well, I've just learned how to use aprogram called Google Sketch-Up, and with it have managed to recreate - in barest outline - the room with the mural wrapped around it. I need to do some more research to find out just where each individual painting was placed, and to be able to estimate the space between the floor and where the mural started, and what the windows looked like... but you already get a sense of it, no? (In Sketch-It the pics are much clearer and you can circle around, go up and down, closer and farther away... Pretty exciting, huh!

Morality as religious practice

Our last reading in Exploring Religious Ethics is one of the wisest. Have a taste:

The emphasis in Buddhist morality is on the cultivation of a personality that cannot but be moral, rather than focusing upon the morality of particular choices and acts. But it is not the will that can create such a personality, no more than I can pick myself up by my own collar. It is to the training that the will must be applied, from which virtue will naturally flow. "Hit the horse, not the cart," as the Zen saying puts it. The exercise of the will is, of course, needed by all of us from time to time in order to avoid doing harm to others or ourselves; the impulse to act wrongly is blocked short of action, but, if possible, there should be an open, nonjudgmental awareness of the feeling that has flared. This requires much practice... Willing virtue into one's life is a notoriously unsatisfactory way to bring about changes in behavior. Whether we fail or succeed, either way we lose. The ego and the superego live in fear of one another; when ego is indulged there is guilt; when ego is repressed, there is a nagging feeling of self-deception arising from knowing that one's "saintliness" wan not genuinely obtained. The saintliness achieved by willpower alone is obsessed by evil and depends for its existence on evil. ...
The authentic moral personality emerges through the ripening of wisdom/compassion. This ripening takes place through a system of spiritual training that includes the practice of morality as a part of the practice of mindful awareness. Through trying to conform to the moral precepts, we incite an emotional revolt. Without either suppressing that revolt or being possessed and carried away by it, we open ourselves in full awareness to containment of that upsurge.

Ken Jones, The New Social Face of Buddhism: A Call to Action
(Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003), 128-9

A great many of the themes we've discussed in the class are touched on here, and in a way which many of our Christian ethics texts could harmonize with.

Nearly summer

Look out the window towards the Empire State Building - all the Spring flowers gone! And out my office window - the red tips have given wayto lush green! (Compare with the same views less than a month ago.)

Coin of the realm

The Mannahatta Project may be raising money by helping ambivalent urbanites give their overdeveloped island home back to nature, if only in cyberspace, but the Dutch government (using information from the Mannahatta Project) has reclaimed it for themselves, stamping their queen's face on it!

Behold their new 5 Euro commemorative coin with almost 3-D maps of the tip of Manhattan then and now (including Ground Zero as a construction site). The first one was struck April 6th, the day Hudson landed; a copy was given to President Obama on his recent trip to Europe. (Source.)

Islands of green

Here's something a trifle disturbing. The Mannahatta Project, which is trying to determine just what the island of Manhattan looked like when Henry Hudson arrived here 400 years ago, has figured out an ingenious way of raising money. For a mere $25, you can restore any city block to its presumed pre-urban pristineness - all that's left, if someone clicks on it, is your name. Above is the region east of Madison Square Garden - the green rectangles are blocks leveled by donors. The website's already done the same for Manhattan within the larger NY/New Jersey area. (The coastlines of the Hudson and East Rivers have been scrubbed, too.)

Summer plans

My summer plans have finally taken shape. I'll be flying to Istanbul on May 29th (for my first visit to Turkey), from Istanbul to Zurich June 9th (for a few days in the university library, a week hiking in Flims with my parents and an old family friend, and a stage adaptation of Joseph Roth's Hiob), back to NYC June 21st, onward almost immediately (the 23rd) to Melbourne (my sister's having a round birthday), from whence I return July 9th, to spend most of the balance of the summer in San Diego. There's a good reason for every part of it, but it does add up to rather a dusey of a summer! (I welcome recommendations for places to go and people to see, especially in Istanbul and Zurich.)

The map is from Native Energy's travel calculator, which tells me the nearly 29,000 miles of flying will produce over 11 tons of CO2. Which I'm paying to offset, of course. Travel gives me a guilty conscience now - though not guilty enough to give it up altogether, I guess! (I considered going from Europe on directly to Australia - that would have shaved nearly 10,000 miles off the trip - but the price proved prohibitive; I'm punishing myself with extra offset for those 10,000 miles.)

Local color

For a reader of texts by people who've passed through the New School which we're assembling for the Fall's incoming class, I've been looking at Anatole Broyard's Kafka was the rage: A Greenwich Village memoir, recommended by our dean. Broyard, who went on to become a book reviewer for the New York Times, attended the New School in the immediate postwar years on the GI Bill, and had a rollicking time. It's great fun to read his description of the school:

Like the Village itself, the New School was at its best in 1946. After a war, civilization feels like a luxury, and people went to the New School the way you go to a party, almost like going abroad. Education was chic and sexy in those days. ...
The people in the lobby of the New School were excited, expectant, dressed to the teeth. They struck poses, examined one another with approval. They had a blind date with culture, and anything could happen. Young, attractive, hip, they were the best Americans. For local color, there was a sprinkling of bohemians and young men just out of the service who were still wearing their khakis and fatigues... (14-15)

The professoriate he describes was defined by the Germans, Jewish and non-Jewish, whom the University in Exile had saved from Nazism:

Because they were displaced themselves, or angry with us for failing to understand history, the professors did their best to make us feel like exiles in our own country. ...
All the courses I took were about what's wrong: what's wrong with our government, with the family, with interpersonal relations and intrapersonal relations - what's wrong with our dreams, our loves, our jobs, our perceptions and conceptions, our esthetics, the human condition itself.
They were furious, the professors, at the ugly turn the world had taken ... The building resounded with gutteral cries: kunstwissenschaft, zeitgeist and weltanschauung, gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, schadenfreude, schwarmerei. Their accents were so impenetrable that some of them seemed to speak in tongues and the students understood hardly a word. (15)

Broyard describes himself as the complete opposite to these exiles, internal and external.

The tragedy - and the comedy - of my story was that I took American life to heart with a kind of strenuous and ardent sincerity that young men usually bring to love affairs. While some of my contemporaries made a great show of political commitment, it seems to me that their politicizing of experience abstracted them from the ordinary, from the texture of things. They saw only a Platonic idea of American life. To use one of their favorite words, they were alienated. I was not. In fact, one of my problems was that I was alienated from alienation, an insider among outsiders. (viii)

This read well in 1989, when he wrote it (he died in 1990 and the book was published in 1993), but the words with which he ends the "Prefatory Remarks" where they appear seem to point to something else: There is a sociology concealed in the book, just as a body is concealed in its clothes. (ix)

Well, since Henry Louis Gates' 1996 New Yorker article, "The Passing of Anatole Broyard," we know about that sociology, and the "depoliticization" and the "alienation from alienation" have a monstrous and painful aftertaste. It turns out that Broyard was a light-skinned African American who passed for most of his life as white - even his children did not find out until after his death. Reading this book with that in mind is a disturbing experience. "Examined with approval"? "Blind date"? "Local color"? Without the "sociology concealed," the sentence "I was not" seems not merely to be saying "I was not [alienated]" but also just what the three words say: "I was not."

The immediate question: do we include some of Kafka was the Rage in our reader? And do we include at least a reference to Gates' discovery?

In love

I got to explain the four cardinal virtues today - prudence (practical wisdom), justice, fortitude (courage) and temperance (moderation). In our text Josef Pieper (expounding Thomas Aquinas, who's following Aristotle), argued you couldn't have any of the cardinal virtues without having them all - but also (with Aquinas going beyond Aristotle) asserted that you need to receive the theological virtues (faith, hope and charity/love) to really have the cardinal virtues.

I'd forgotten how I love this material - it's my first time teaching it in five years. By golly, I find I actually think it's true. (You can even be a religious naturalist about the theological virtues, I think, at least up to a point: you can't make yourself have hope or faith or love, but they evidently happen. Something makes them possible, something mysterious, bigger than us but of which we are a part.)

Crowding the airwaves

Just a quick head's up: tomorrow early evening on WNYC Radio (6pm I think, or perhaps 7) there will be a live performance of a historic radio play by Archibald MacLeish called "The Fall of the City" - part of the opening festival for WNYC's new semi-public recording studio The Greene Space. Originally aired in 1937 (and recorded in the Park Avenue Armory), it was evidently the piece which established radio plays as serious culture in this country. As a review in Time Magazine put it:

Aside from the beauty of its speech and the power of its story, The Fall of the City proved to most listeners that the radio, which conveys only sound, is science's gift to poetry and poetic drama, that 30 minutes is an ideal time for a verse play, that artistically radio is ready to come of age, for in the hands of a master a $10 receiving set can become a living theatre, its loudspeaker a national proscenium.

I mention it also because some folks from my college have small speaking parts, and several others are part of the noisy crowd - including yours truly. It's a weird thing to enact a crowd on the radio, especially a crowd restive and hopeful and fearful and relieved and panicked and ultimately seduced - and as other characters are trying to speak over it. After just two runthroughs I'm finding myself unsettled by the volatile energy of this behavior... Check it out if you can - it's powerful stuff.

PS Here's a picture of the rehearsal from a website about the show.

It all started in the southwest!

Source. An interesting map, too - the outlines of the continents stylized on a triangular grid, but the trends depicted rounded.

America Today

These two murals, City Activities, were among nine Thomas Hart Benton painted for the board room of the New School's 12th St. building in 1930-31. Today they live in the lobby of the AXA Equitable Center at Sixth Ave. between 51st and 52nd Street (New School sold them in the 80s), but it's hard there to get a sense of what it was like to be surrounded by these bold murals. From what I understand, as you came in the room through a central door, you faced a wall filled with Instruments of Power (above) between two windows - indeed it must have felt like practically being run over by that train! Continuing the celebration of industry, on the left wall: Steel, Coal, City Building.On the right wall: Changing West, Midwest, and Deep South.
City Activities (Dance Hall and Subway) were on either side of the door. A quite overwhelming ensemble - and very different in feeling than the other room of murals painted at the same time a few stories up, by Orozco and still on site.

Images are from Emily Braun, Thomas Hart Benton:
The America Today Murals (Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art, 1985)

RIP Catholic Center at NYU

Walking to Bobst Library along West 3rd this morning I caught an unexpected view of Washington Square Arch. This site has only been cleared in the last few days . The bit of it facing the Park used to be the site of the Catholic Center at NYU, which is to be replaced by another big NYU tower (including, I understand, more space for the Catholic Chaplaincy than they had before, though I've also heard that the chaplaincy has moved to St. Joseph's on Sixth Ave.). I'm not sure anyone really regrets the passing of this building - the inside (my pics are from August '06) was like what a chapel on Battlestar Galactica might have felt like.

On February 19th, earlier in the destruction, I noticed the door open and peeked in, to find a space entirely dark - the windows had been removed and boarded up (see pic). I assume the furnishings have not been destroyed but moved to one of the huge warehouses where no longer needed Catholic church parapher-
nalia live. But has the CC vanished without a trace? Maybe not... A strange ghost of the Catholic Center and its big trapezoidal Jesus occupied a parallel street today, part of the NYU Strawberry Festival!