Art, Film, Photography, City and Country, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Art and the Garden

If you are in New York City and looking for a outing here’s a suggestion: Wave Hill Garden in the Bronx. We were there on a bright morning this week and it was glorious. It really is one of the world’s great outdoor works of art with 28 acres of gardens, and woodlands. And with the view out over the…

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City and Country, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Making Change

On a daily neighborhood soodle a while back I saw this single golden sandal on a stoop on W112th Street. I wondered about the backstory. Was it lost or abandoned and was it missed? And I took a photograph. Sue did the same. Sometime later that child’s shoe was transformed. You can check out Sue’s additional transformations at Prufrock’sDilemma and …

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City and Country, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Summer in the City: Parks, Pocket Parks and Patches

Summer in the City Hot town, summer in the city Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty Been down, isn’t it a pity? Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city All around, people looking half dead Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head                        …

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City and Country, Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Simple Pleasures and Stickybeaking

Stickybeak  NOUN: an intrusive, meddlesome, busybody, nosy parker who sticks their nose (beak) into other people’s business. The act of stickybeaking. VERB: to snoop or pry into other’s people’s business. This was a delightful new word for me this week although it’s clearly common currency in Australia and New Zealand. I came across it first in one of a series…

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City and Country, Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Anarchy in New York: The Mayhem Continues

As we know the tRump misadministration has – for reasons of its own – declared New York City to be a jurisdiction of anarchy, violence and property destruction. This is Part Two. Part One is here. The Justice Department declared New York City A place of Anarchy, violence and Property losses. Live from New York City where folks Continue Their…

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City and Country, Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Anarchy in New York City

The US Department of ‘Justice’ declared this week that New York City — along with Portland and Seattle — to be a “jurisdiction permitting violence and destruction property.”  Allegedly our state and local government are permitting anarchy, violence, and destruction So of course I had to take a look. So far, this is what I can report: Weather: Warm, sunny,…

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Art, Film, Photography, City and Country, Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

New York City Through the Window: Poetry

In 1975 the poet Allen Ginsberg was in hospital. At a later poetry reading he explained the causes in an introduction to a poem that he had written from his hospital bed.:  I got real angry and wound up sick in a hospital, for various karmic reasons, and woke up looking out the window, and started taking notes on what…

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Art, Film, Photography, City and Country, RattleBag and Rhubarb

New York City Through the Window: Art

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban nights are like the night there. I have looked down across the city from high windows. It is then that the great buildings lose reality and take on their magical powers. They are immaterial; that is to say, one sees but…

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Art, Film, Photography, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Saul Steinberg and Philip Guston Together

I mostly associate the artist Saul Steinberg with the work he did for The New Yorker and the last time I saw an exhibit of his it was the traveling retrospective that came to the Frances Lehman Loeb Gallery at Vassar College in 2007-8. It was a full-scale survey of his work and quite amazing. And the last time I…

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