Sunday, March 27, 2005

Birding

Easter is early and winter late. Nevertheless robins and crocuses have duly appeared. This morning, armed with binoculars and bird book, I observed hooded mergansers swimming in Silver Lake here on Staten Island.

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Photography

Over the past months I’ve ordered up fancy prints of old snapshots of Warhol, Corso,and Ginsberg, and am bringing a different eye, for me, to black-and-white photography. I had thought Photography in Germany and Austria, 1900-1938 at the Neue Galerie would feature Nazis or creepy porn. Nope. The petit musee which brought New York Klimt and Schiele chose as its photographers the usual: Sanders and Moholy-Nagy and Jacobi and Feininger. Not even a telephoto of Hitler by Leni Riefenstahl. Ah jeez and I so prefer photos to forms.
Photography should be true as a court deposition and dry as scientific theory. Henry Fielding observed that the eyes melt indistinguishably at the sights of a well-powdered buttock and a well-cooked and nicely seasoned chop. Pornography evokes a creepy hunger. It may all be good, as D.H. Lawrence might say; but then Lawrence had that creepy German wife. The great photography show currently in NYC is Diane Arbus at the Met. I’ve published Arbus photos in Unmuzzled OX and contributed a mite to the original San Francisco show. Arbus was Sylvia Plath with a camera.