SUMMER STREETS AUGUST 15, 2009

August has been glorious for New Yorkers who've had a rough summer.  It hasnt been warm enough to head for Coney Island a couple of times a week by now.  Finally the heat is heating the macadam and it is nearing the end of summer.  But Summer Streets has lightened the city's spirits.  New York is on its feet: with new reasons to invent imaginative bicycles and pedicabs.  This weekend saw a variety of creative and arresting bicycle designs on Park Avenue.  People have planned on this event as a special experience, staying back in the city just to bike up Park Avenue and down to the Brooklyn Bridge without car traffic.

The Department of Transportation is proving that policy can be creative and transformative.  The symbiotic relationships between different bicycle organizations, local transportation organizations and the DOT is producing a new New York City, one that is finally taking Jane Jacob's invitation to explore a human scale development on a scale never realised before in New York City.  The reclamation of Broadway and Grand Street along with 9th Avenue, 8th Avenue and Bleeker Street is changing the logic of commuting in a critical way- it is impacting a new conversation about how people traverse distances in New York, and what we need to do to make this happen more.

PLANES ON THE HUDSON RIVER

Watching yet another plane crash on the Hudson River this year is a nerve wracking experience.  On August 8, as the Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, Tugboats and NYPD helicopters cordonned off the West Side Highway south of Fourteenth Street, many of us watching yet another disaster scenario of salvage efforts were disconcerted by the frequency of planes falling around us.  Planes falling out of the sky seems to be one ecological hazard of living in New York City.  However, this time, there is no happy story with a Hollywood ending and a physical aircraft docked at Battery Park.  Instead: it is a grim call to radically revamp Federal Aviation requirements for aircraft flying below 1, 100 feet.

The 2006 plane crash on the East Side of Manhattan alerted the FAA to the dangers of low flying small aircraft over the East River.  It is time New York and New Jersey took a closer look at the heavily trafficked and unmonitored flight corridor over the Hudson River that is shared by both states.  According to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, over 25, 000 helicopter trips are made a year without oversight of air space regulations.  For a resident of Manhattan and the Jersey shoreline, this should be a chilling piece of information.  We are in a shared air space and waterway system that requires rigorous overhauling as air traffic increases, the airline industry is deregulated, air traffic controllers are scaled back even further, and more leisure flyers take to the skies.

What New York City has learned from this terrible tragedy is that the shores of New Jersey facing Manhattan is our sixth borough.  We need to think about the other side of our beloved Hudson River as part of our lifeline, a critical aspect of our ecosystem and our imagined future.  To that effect, a more engaged conversation with the other side of the Hudson River's magisterial shoreline needs to be incorporated into a more sustained and local conversation regarding air and water safety measures, water rights, pollution and industrial run off.  The January 15, 2009 U.S. Airways forced landing highlighted this interdependency when early reports about the extraordinary landing mentioned survivors possibly landing on either the Jersey side or the Manhattan side of the shoreline.  Saturday's catastrophe was a literal collision between the Manhattan and New Jersey air spaces.  Both Manhattan and Hoboken transportation, waterway and commuter networks were disrupted by this travesty.  We must take away important lessons to be implemented immediately with an eye to the safety of neighborhoods and cities, and remedy the unconscionable laxity geared towards the interests of big business and the after effects of de-regulation in the aviation and helicopter industries.

SUMMER STREETS, TRANSPORTATION ALTERNATIVES

Today was the first weekend of the three consecutive August 2009 weekends when Summer Streets is in effect in Manhattan.  This is the second year of the Department of Transportation initiative to experiment with different ways of managing density and traffic.  The experiment last year was a surprise- it felt strange,  a memorable gift.  Cycling up Park Avenue South towards Grand Central Station amidst a million cyclists, pedestrians, strollers, skaters, wheelchairs, runners, segueways and human scale movement, the idea seems like a natural right, a logical way to enjoy the city as part of a city wide mandate.  The city cannot take this away now that it has made New Yorkers taste the pleasures of the upper concourse at Grand Central Station terminal vehicular bridge.  New York City has opened up its arteries in new ways.  Even if New York hasnt found the right calibration for congestion pricing, the suspension of traffic all the way up to Central Park presents arguements for continuing certain healthful habits created as a result of the suspension of vehicular traffic.  If New York is growing to swell beyond its 8 million people within the near future, it is going to have to look to other ways of transportation and commuting.  Along with serious considerations of energy consumption and health management.  Cycling as a means of moving around cities opens up that possibility in a serious way and New York City is cautiously experimenting with that alternative opportunity.

FRANCIS BACON RETROSPECTIVE, MET, PART I

Flayed torsos.  Crouching forms.  Screaming Popes.  These are some of the searing images that impact the viewer of the Centenary Retrospective of Francis Bacon's difficult work at the MET.  This exhibit is rivetting for its breadth of materials brought under one roof- torn photographs, faded newspaper clippings, images that Bacon drew on again and again to create the deeply interrogative interface between physiological sensations and the visual field.  One sees the impact of the Soviet Revolution, Nazism and the Algerian Revolution in the formation of Bacon's aesthetic of violence. Bacon 's chilling excursions into the underside of animality is disconcerting and ravishing to behold.  A disemboweled inverted torso in a triptych on the theme of crucification demands the viewer pause to contemplate its luscious vibrancy of color and bleeding organs.  Bacon's work forces one to have a theory to continue viewing as one becomes complicitous with his immersion in the darker side of human consciousness.  The grimacing mouths, bared teeth, eyeless heads, and defined contours of flesh open up that which one dares not acknowledge, sensations beyond the visual frames of rational knowing, of enlightenment discourse.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: NEW YORK ICON

The passing of Merce Cunningham within a month of the demise of Pina Bausch is a great blow for dance. Around Westbeth, straightbacked in his wheelchair with a green blanket draped around him in a grundgy elevator, the great choreographer seemed lighter than those who have two feet, yet slouch. Cunningham broke open the bounds of movement not only for those in dance, but for all who work in theater, movement and dance. What Cunningham innovated was a radical break with the very idea of narrative and characterization in dance. His choreography demanded a new way of seeing bodies move in space, a kinetic vernacular for the Twentieth century. Through Cunningham's work, dance became a barometer for our times, a proposal for what is to become, not a citation of the past. Cunningham opened up the spaces of New York City as a tool for breaking up the expectations of movement, and brought the everyday movement of the street, and Judson Church, into the dance studio in ways that were startling, disconcerting, even heretical to traditions of classical form. In his collaborations with John Cage, and the Black Mountain College group, Cunningham offered a model for creating new work, fresh modalities, across disciplines and art forms that forever changed the way we produce work now. Merce Cunningham was the quintessential New Yorker, irreverent, passionate, and till the end, immersed in a creative life.

WATER ECOLOGY at 125th Street

A strange white metal construct of a geodesic dome out on the pier of 125th St. in Harlem accosts the biker. The object is on a wooden boat filled with strange looking objects: tall wooden structures that look like Pacific Island carvings. At first glance, one is reminded of both chinese junks and futuristic seafaring contraptions. On closer investigation, the boat is an experimental environment called the Waterpod Project. It is a utopian collaborative undertaking by a group of artists exploring the future and edges of viable sustainable water survival. The boat has its own eco system, vegetable garden, power source and research manifesto. It takes James Joyce's Ulysses as its departure point for its investigation into the junctures between technology, water science, climate change, enviromental sustainability and art. Outfitted as an self sustaining environment, the Waterpod Projects moors at each of the five boroughs of New York City, collecting information about the local water ecology along its path. The boat is open to the public on designated days.

PETER STUYVESCENT and ADRIAEN VAN DER DONCK

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art this week are rare gems of New York history. A document signed by Peter Stuyvescent in an impressive flourish hangs on the second floor in a non-descript corridor near the elevators.  In the same exhibit is a beautiful Dutch manuscript by Adriaen Van der Donck with one of the earliest known representations of this fair island of Mannahatta. The tiny line drawing is spectacular in its simplicity. A small clump of settlement at the edge of a rock mass. Other jewels include a nineteenth century painting of Trinity Church, a drawing of Federal Hall, a sweeping birds eye view of Manhattan, and a pastoral view from a Breucklyn hilltop. Views up Broadway from the eighteenth century and a spectacular drawing looking downtown towards Trinity Church with farmland all the way down toward the distant steeple of the church make this little corridor a feast for a historian's eyes.