Filtered

A view of the skyline through one of the "instascapes" on Governors Island. (Read more about these cool pieces here.)

Handily done

A few other pictures from Figment on Governors Island: give the artwork a hand! I didn't catch the name of the piece at the top, or its artist, but the piece at bottom is from The Palm Authority Project by Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos.

Revisiting Joseph Mitchell

Joseph Mitchell is one of my favorite New York writers; I find myself pressing his essay collections into the hands of my friends when they come to the city. "You'll love it! And maybe you'll start your own Oral History!" The Oral History is a reference to the project at hand in Joe Gould's Secret, which you could start with if you want a quick taste of Mitchell's work, or Up in the Old Hotel offers a good survey of his pieces from the New Yorker; The Bottom of the Harbor is also stellar (though its essays, I believe, are all included in Old Hotel). 

I'm revisiting My Ears Are Bent, a collection of his pieces for the World-Telegram and the Herald Tribune -- work that came before his New Yorker period. The essays are a little rougher, less polished, but no less enchanting. It's the way he captures people that really stands out; and it's no wonder. Mitchell writes:

I believe the most interesting human beings, so far as talk is concerned, are anthropologists, farmers...and an occasional bartender. The best talk is artless, the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves, women in the sun, grouped around baby carriages, talking about their weeks in the hospital or the way meat has gone up, or men in salooons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels.

Front yard, back yard

We've been in our apartment for three years, but we've never seen the apricot tree out front bear fruit. Today, I plucked one off the branch and took a bite. Very sour, but fresh-picked apricots in Astoria? Magical.

In our little backyard garden, the hydrangeas are beginning to bloom. The overbearing heat will set in soon, so we're enjoying it while we can!

Take a chair

On Sunday, we walked to Greenpoint and then took the East River Ferry to Governors Island for Figment. Romy Scheroder's "No Place to Sit," above, can be seen all summer at the season-long sculpture garden (also not to be missed: Zaq Landsberg's "Face of Liberty" and Marc Lafia's "Instascapes.)"

Neighborhood garden

Flux Factory's latest show, Bionic Garden, asks visitors to reimagine urban spaces both public and private. The art space incorporates a rooftop garden, a seed-sharing station, and plants rigged with wireless sensors that trigger an LED when they need to be watered. I found the seed-heads by Daupo, above, fanciful and functional.

We may have a hard time getting much of anything to grow in our backyard, but I suppose we'll try planting the tulsi seeds we picked up and hope for a little more luck with it than we've had with our ill-fated flowers.

Flux Factory, 39-31 29th Street, Long Island City, New York, 11101; exhibit closes June 24; open weekends, noon to 6 p.m.

Locks of love

They're commonplace in Paris (on, say, the Pont de l'Archevêché and the Pont des Artes) and they show up even farther afield -- in Cologne, Florence, Uruguay, Taiwan. But I haven't before seen any "love locks" in New York.

Is this single lonely lock -- painted purple, pink, and white, and signed with the initials J and G -- affixed midway across Pulaski Bridge the start of a trend? 

Tentacular

Took a long (LONG! Ten or twelve miles total) walk yesterday, winding my way from Astoria to Long Island City and then to Bushwick, all before looping back to Queens by passing through Greenpoint. A lot of rubber was burned.

I happened upon two artful octopi. The pasted-up drawing above was on a  hoarding in LIC; the vibrant painted fellow below was in Bushwick.

The calm before

A view from the 36th Avenue N/Q station in Astoria, just before the rain began tonight.

A house party

Browsing Google Books (searching, originally, for old reviews of Bertha Runkle's work, I think?), I stumbled upon a volume from 1901: A House Party: An Account of the Stories Told at a Gathering of Famous American Authors.

I haven't read the book entire, but the premise is intriguing -- invite a number of authors to a party, require them to submit a piece of fiction before the party, redact their names, then distribute the "anonymous" pieces to guests and have them try to guess who wrote what. Now, if only I were friends with people like Sarah Orne Jewett: what a party it would be.