Sunday, August 9, 2009

Fiasco in Vlissingen

















After this weekend I never have to go see the Dragon Boats race in Corona Park again. Naively I thought it was some sort of Chinese cultural festival but found out it was in fact a festival of corporate underwriting with really diminutive dragons. Or maybe these days the corporations are the dragons. Tent after tent bore no trace of anything but the brash logos of every bank and insurance company you ever hear about with people lined up to get some sort of corporate goody bag, trash overflowing the cans, plastic cup after cup tossed in after people made it through the long line to taste various flavors of something called "lifewater." Drink the corporate Cool Aid? Blocks away, the fountains around the Unisphere don't seem to work anymore. Though I walk through the valley of shadow of death...

Recovery today in Red Hook, where we saw amazing, thriving tomatoes at the Liberty Sunset Garden Center in what we've come to know as the Tomato House, rode a Canoe around the Valentino Pier for free with the aid of Roger and the other volunteers who've been providing this opportuniy on Sundays and Thursday evening for three years now, watched the crowd-pleasing dog Othello plunge off the embankment over and over in chase of a tennis ball, and saw this boat swiftly and magically emerge from the Buttermilk channel, especially milky today, making up for the trouble in Flushing.


3 comments:

Nicola Masciandaro said...

Ha! I led myself and family into the same fraud a few years ago, based on a seductive blurb. Nice recovery.

And thank you for this blog. Your eyes Brooklynize the doctrine of paradise discussed by Agamben under "Halos" in the Coming Community: "Everything will be as it is now, just a little different."

amarilla said...

I had no idea we were in such good company in our folly.

Thanks for the kind words, I think that's the first, last and best blurb Brooklynometry is likely to get.

As for your own blog and writings, I can't believe my luck to have come across them. I'm completely fascinated by your treatment of the relations of body, hand, head, self, mind, and world and what you are able to say about these relations that so often remain unexplored.

Nicola Masciandaro said...

;-> (that represents a wink).