by the lake

loaded

well dressed

Came across this astonishingly gentle creature while trudging across the ball field in Prospect Park, which was really difficult.

dress shirt

Prêt-à-Porter

Anthem and Brownies

Maybe the shamelessness is good timing, we seemed to need a graphic example of the kind of greed that is a violence to our nation. So perhaps we can thank Anthem/Wellcare/BCBS for the heinous display of raising CA health care premiums 39% (on top of a double digit hike last year) even while the company president, Angela Baly makes 1.1 million a year plus 8.7 in stock options. I look forward to decency becoming more fashionable than wealth in America. Based on the warmth and generosity of most everyone I know, it's not too hard to imagine. What kind of monsters are these people?

Meanwhile in NYC...the city hopes to reduce childhood obesity by banning things like homemade brownies at school bake sales, while offering products such as Frito Lay's Doritos. What's happening here? A belief that brownies are really at the root of our health problems? Look deeper, NYC. It's a much, much bigger beast. To the system's credit, I'd say the ballroom dancing programs offered in some NYC schools have more to offer children's health and well being than this cookie cutter hysteria/ superficial control freak over-regulation.

How does a nation find a balance between appropriate and excessive regulation?

loggy stone

Reading about sandstone, the rock composed of aggregated desert sand, rock in evidence everywhere in the Grand Canyon and in Sedona's red rock towers as well as in Brooklyn's brownstones, I learned that these rocks become aquifers because of their porousness. I imagine Brooklyn's sandstone walls are getting pretty soggy about now. It's interesting to think that the walls are, at this point, as much water as conglomerates of Triassic sand.

As far as I can tell, the Brooklyn brownstones are not chunks of Arizona however, because obviously then they'd be redstones. I believe what we have here are chunks of Connecticut, and maybe New Jersey.

agave

Came across this and many other agave while climbing Sugarloaf in Sedona with the horde. It was raining, we wrapped ourselves in plastic panchos, watched the red rocks turn reflective and pale, saw the red dirt turn to red mud. Walked past pack rat nests, they are large piles of debris, viewed prickly pears eaten by Javelinas, watched tiny blue green plants soak in the rain and practically come to life before my eyes.

Our guide had had a run-in with the tip of an agave leaf, smooth woody spears that indigenous people have used as sewing needles. While climbing a cliff his companion somehow disturbed the vegetation so that an agave leaf skewered his finger. He found it fascinating and took a photo before he pulled it out and continued his climb. That's the not so sweet aspect of agave, but I hear it's plenty sweet although I've never tried the syrup, which seems to have become very popular, they even sell it at our local grocery store here in Brooklyn. As for the original sugarloaves, I don't think anyone has seen any of those around here for quite a long time.

sprawl at night

Someone viewing the earth from the air at night might try to read significance in the embroidery of the embers of silver and gold beads that wheel into view as you pass thousands of feet over the land. Some lines look like mysterious glyphs, a development looks like a jumping hare, small towns emerging from the darkness resemble illuminations of intercellular structures.

But the city was no glyph, no microbe. From close range, it was an animal, its connective tissues highways 6 lanes thick, its muscles packed with the long, rectangular blocks, its good and bad ideas rising stories above bedrock. I didn't know I was over Brooklyn until I saw lower Manhattan, I was disoriented thinking we'd approach from the North West. I had no idea that the coastal neighborhoods we flew over were the Staten Island beaches. And Prospect Park, I thought it was a strange lake, lit along the edges so I could see the ecology of the shallows.

cold canyon

volumes

A dispatch from the Grand Canyon. The stacks in this stone library are 7,000 feet deep, too deep to let me sleep peacefully, so I woke throughout the night seeing myself on the edge of the precipice. My daughter, brave soul, shares none of my vertigo, and with her father trekked an hour or so down from the Kaibab trailhead on the South rim of the canyon (which, incidentally, is not a hoax).

The process of elimination currently called the Colorado River has taken the past 3 million years to dissect the Colorado plateau, layer by layer, revealing 1.7 billion years of geologic history. Raven clans, sun-drunk in pitch black, patrol the rim's edges, their calls deep croaking caws. Here, none of the cicada-sized Broad-Tailed Hummingbirds that were always popping up in Phoenix. For trees, the fire-proof Ponderosa Pines, Pinyon Pines, and abundant Juniper.

mourning dove

As elegant as ever, morning doves are plentiful in Sedona. This 1911 article, advocating protection for the turtle doves that cleaned cotton fields of the seeds of competing plants, must really have been about morning doves, since there's no turtle doves in America. The present day European doves are running out of the Fumitory plants they depend on as European farmers eliminate it with herbicides. But America's mourning doves are flexible eaters; corn, millet, safflower, sunflowers, pine nuts, sweetgum, pokeberry, amaranth, canary grass, sesame and wheat. If not these, buckwheat, goosegrass and smartweed. No doubt this adaptation allows them to survive the onslaught of game hunting; 70 million birds are shot annually for sport. Not in Brooklyn, though.

desert plants, forced marches

Not so long ago...
The Yavapai-Apache tribe were forcefully removed from the Verde Valley in 1876, to the San Carlos Indian Reservation, 180 miles southeast. 1500 people were marched, in midwinter, to San Carlos. Several hundred lost their lives. The survivors were interned for 25 years. About 200 Yavapai-Apache people returned to the Verde Valley in 1900. (Wikipedia)

pipe organs

Courthouse Butte, Oak Creek, Arizona, and a cliff we passed while heading North on Route 17.

striking characters

More details from the Arizona. The Biltmore sprites by Frank Lloyd Wright and Alfonso Ianelli, driven from Chicago's Midway Gardens by prohibition, found kindred spirits among the palms.

geometry

Some details of the Arizona Biltmore, the Jewel of the Desert, designed by Albert McArthur and Frank Lloyd Wright (but more so by McArthur.) Emry Kopta's abstracted palm frond motif is repeated everywhere here in various forms, and although Wright had issues with the way this design was used decoratively among the resort's buildings I think it does a good job in making concrete seem to vibrate sonically. That's what I'm thinking now, anyway. For the first day I was here I kept thinking I was revisiting Riis Park, transformed and misplaced, ocean dried up.

On Wright's considerations of architecture in Arizona, "Arizona character seems to cry out for a space-loving architecture of its own. The straight line and flat plane, sun-lit, must come here-of all places-but they should become the dotted line, the broad, low, extended plane textured because in all this astounding desert there is not one hard undotted line to be seen." and "Here all is sculptured by wind and water, patterned in color and texture. Rocks and reptiles no less so than cacti. A desert building should be nobly simple in outline as the region itself is sculptured, should have learned from the cactus many secrets of straight-line patterns for its forms, playing with the light and softening the building into its proper place among the organic desert creations..." From Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona by Lawrence W. Cheek.

All lines, dotted. An infinity of points. Artifacts of a beautiful mind.

not in brooklyn anymore

It's eerie how plastic citrus fruits look while hanging on the tree, like they could last for an eternity, which in the case of the etrog is practically true. But anyway, happy Lunar New Year and Valentine's Day from Phoenix, Arizona, where we've been eating kumquats straight off the bush. Happy lion dances!

strange little cloud

Sky krill, solitary punctuation in a otherwise barren sky.

Everthing is Fuzzy

Walking into the Ladybird Bakery this week I overheard the two behind the counter discussing Jonathem Safran Foer's Eating Animals. one was testifying that after reading this book 95% of her relatives had become vegetarian. I didn't want to broach the vegan question, too sad a topic in a landscape filled with butter cream, so we spoke about the reading group in which she democratically mentors the unknowns as well as the celebrated. That's refreshing; giving voice to the obscure strikes a strong chord with me, as when Jung advised people to "listen to all the little voices" within themselves, which makes a beautiful pattern of light-filled cracks in the elitism of cultural and academic hegemonies, both internal and external. She gave me contact info about the group, which sadly I have lost. D'oh!

Later I started to put things together. About a month ago my husband all the sudden declared he wanted to become a vegetarian. Sure enough, the change of heart had come after reading a few chapters of Eating Animals. Everthing was illuminated.

By the way, congratulations to Ladybird for winning the Red Velvet Cake contest at the Brooklyn Historical Society.

temporary landmark

This snow wall constructed between two massive ash trees echoes and distorts the dymanic of the Prospect Park's 15th Street entrance, flanked by two gorgeously carved marble columns by Stanford White. We passed by this snow defined abscence in Prospect Park yesterday on the way home from school. I wonder what its makers call it? Many posed for a photo in front of it.

cataract

cinder toffee

I asked about the Violet Crumble candy bars they now sell at Dub Pies in Windsor Terrace the other day. I was told that no, they aren't violent, they are honeycomb. Then someone in the back started chanting hokey pokey, hokey pokey with wide eyes, and I realized she was giving another description of the candy. I'd never heard of a candy called hokey pokey before, only the dance, so I asked what it was, and I was told it was honeycomb. So I asked what honeycomb was, assuming this wasn't what you find in a beehive, and was told it was hokey pokey. And on it went, this circular defining, until I got a little dizzy. So I found out what honeycomb/hokey pokey is, and now I think I'll have to taste it. Because it turns out it is also called cinder toffee for some reason, and that's a pretty irresistible name. BTW, the exotic Bachelor's Mushy Peas also on the Dub shelves seem rather intriguing.

conditions

Snow piled along the sidewalk and the roads looked very much like clotted cream last night, but held up under the feet of the three who traversed the ridge, enjoying the rare height, testing each step for its solidity. The act of walking was far more sonic than usual. We passed piles of snow into which children had scraped small dens, exercising dormant instincts, we passed a duo of smiley gentlemen shovelers. So it wasn't so bad that the B75 didn't come.

snowy ash

Snowy rose. Double stops laid on thick.

hypertrophic confecvolutionary crescendablette

As the dough rose and the snow fell, I expanded my vocabulary.

the pink snow

Love Store Mix

I think there's a chance that Bollywood music will turn me into the dancing maniac I was meant to be. I hope so because I'm not going to the gym. I hate the gym. Ricky at Krupa, a deli known by locals as the Love Store because of the kindness of the proprietors and abundant multi-denominational religious iconography, has agreed to make a custom dance CD for me. It will cost 5 dollars and hopefully it will give me eternal life, tighten all the lady cushioning that seems so fond of me these days, or let me Krupa myself into the next dimension. I used to wonder why the store was called Krupa, assuming the Indian family that runs it bought it from a Polish or Russian family. Little did I know, Krupa means bliss and is some kind of Hindu holy water. More about Krupa...

Heart Work

I suppose a boy jumping over dynamite works out to be fairly resonant though not so sweet Valentine's imagery. Go boy go! (boy by my older daughter)

stratigraphy

The Sunday breakfast strata...a little warm up for the Grand Canyon. Stale bread reconstituted among layers of sauteed onions, mushrooms, cheddar cheese, eggs and milk. Fun to assemble the night before, amazing to smell while baking the next morning, scandalously puffed and golden when removed from the oven, but best of all to share with excellent and extremely rodent-friendly company, in this case my blog pal from up North, the Brooklyn Bachelor, and the charming and amusing OHS, who told a surprising tale of pedicures aided by toe-nibbling fish. Maybe in Sedona?