flora at Termes

a peculiar organ

aged in the midst of green

Earth: an aerial view after. . . .

Petro Chemicals in Water in Tenafly?

Photographed on November 2, 2012 at 1:39am. The junction of the stream that connects the pond in the Tenafly Commons that flows into Tenakill Brook and then flows to United Water which is the source of Tenafly's tap water.  Is this dangerous to our health? We chased the geese from the pond to the Tenakill farther downstream adjacent to the High school's playing field. What good has the damage to the Commons' pond done?

 

 

where I would rather be

December 7, 1941: my birthday

Pearl Harbor Attacked by Japanese bombers; Roosevelt speaks to the United States; The USA engages directly in World War II; the day that would live on in infamy has been long forgotten and the US in 2012 has eyes and ears only for September 11. How times have changed. Who remembers. For sake of international relation even The New York Times did not note the significance of December 7, 1941.

 

 

Skies : a prelude

The day began with blue skies and white clouds swirling through space, but then the sky darkened as ominous clouds moved in, obscuring  the blue and challenging the sun's primacy.  

Two Sides to New York City or one: Real Estate

  

Razor Wire and Graffitti, West Side Highway, 135th Street 

 

Park Avenue , Office Tower, 50s


Although the office tower clearly denotes wealth, oddly enough, the graffitti and razor wire do too. Columbia University is building a satellite campus on the west side of Manhattan, in an area beneath the viaduct and between Broadway and The Hudson River. In addition to  two shining residential towers,  an arts center and perhaps a science center will be located on this tract as well. This was a commercial area, a meat market for many years, just as the area of the Trade Towers and the HiLine were. Now butchering is done elsewhere; it has been moved out of Manhattan where every inch of land has become a major investment opportunity. Columbia University began to purchase all the buildings around its campus on 116th Street and Broadway in the last century, expanding farther and farther in all directions. Housing for poor and lower middle class people became increasingly expensive marginalizing them in the Social Darwinian movement instigated by Reagan and carried out by his successors. Many lost housing and services. Broadway has witnessed a resurgence of the homeless, the despised poor. But what does that have to do with razor wire and graffitti? Are these unwelcome or welcome? They appeal to some who consider these manifestations of distress as cutting edge -no pun intended, as chic, as gritty, and thus desirable for the fantasists. More graffitti has appeared on the walls of Riverside Drive Park then in preceding years. It is bolder, colorful, hip. Undesirable or desirable? Does its efflorescence signal a new assertiveness, a resistance to marginalization or is it encouraged by  Columbia University to give the new campus a certain art flavor? It reminds me of the Hi Line where the stroller cannot step onto the grassy areas and get close to a flower -pretty as a picture, but don't pick my daisy, yet beneath this boardwalk are vestiges of its recent past. And these remain in place. Is intentionality present here by the haves or the have nots. Can it be argued that it  enhances the value of the area and communicate an allure of transgression. I  wonder.
 

 

 

Graffitti returns to New York City

as seen from the West Side Highway at 136th Street

December 1: the first day of the last month of 2012

the maenad dances on

yet surely winter is now upon us

November 30, 2012: so ends this month

Locomotion: curious to the human eye

Adam and Eve: after the storm

Icarus approaches the Sun

peace

to reach the golden apple: triumphing over pain

the here and now, magnified; the future, darkness

it isn't what it seems to be

the odor of the plant tells all

testicles or ovaries: seeds sleeping in their cribs

strange love

forbidden fruit and intimacy

glories of nature

Shades in Hades: lovers once: vital and amorous

now floaters who at best utter a pitiful "squeak" as they noiselessly pass through the darkness and drear and fear of the underworld

the Beginning

The Milk Weed Pod Insect: most interesting

The Hospital for Special Surgery: directions

grief

abandoned by cult practice but the image remains as an embodiment of sorrow, all sorrows

Rose Rosen: in memorian, died 1982, 82 years old

my dear grandmother Rose was a woman who was jolly and happy and who brought joy when we were with her. Her marriage to Morris Rosen was a union few today experience. Two sons, George and Jack, were her pride; the first became a physician the second a lawyer. Jack's death at 39 was a terrible shock and she never recovered from his loss. In time, her large family diminished and in the end she stoutly insisted on living alone in The Bronx where she had been so happy. She died in 1968 in the year that my son Julian was born. A stroke felled her. So sorry I am that I never asked questions about where she came from -she immigrated from the Ukraine, I believe, but I never learned more. Now I look at a mute memorial stone and cannot find the answers to my questions. As she aged she became increasingly silent and surely her memories of happier times preoccupied her. I am posting a picture of Rose and Morris in The Bronx-but where? And then my father's junior high "autograph book."

Eve discovers

The Tree of Knowledge: the juice entices

The Tree of Knowledge: Adam and Eve

The Fruits of the Tree of Knowledge

The Tree of Knowledge

and she wept

Two Chairs: two views, divergent , even in heaven

Paul Peter Rosen, MD: Happy Birthday, August 16th,

even if the post is late, the birthday congratulations are no less real. Travel and disease slowed me down, but I often think about you ; older sibling where are you, I wonder. I went to Aude in Languedoc, in southwestern France. Why not live there, I ask myself? It is off the beaten track and few Americans have found there way there. It is wild and ancient, with some of the great Upper Paleaolithic Caves and no less than Tautavel's Man's fossils. In the Middle Ages , a vile campaign, a blood-letting crusade occurred against the Cathars. Today it is peaceful, but the terrain has stories to tell. Now known for the vignoble, it was a kind of Arcadia where shepherds herded their flocks not many decades ago. Rough limestone and fields and fig trees growing wild; it is edenic, except in winter when the wild winds swirl down the precipitous slopes of the Pyrenees.
picture 1. Paul Peter , "Peter," my brother with our mother and father, Beate Caspari Rosen and George Rosen, both MDs and my our father with more degrees
Picture 2. a field in the Aude approaching the Pyrenees
3. Susan Joan Rosen and her brother Paul Peter. He became a physician I became an art historian. His specialty, pathology. required visual expertise not unlike the expertise  of an art historian, which in fact he began to seriously specialize in when he began to collect Arfrican art. We are photographed here at 285 Riverside Drive, with our nature wonders, plants and animals. The creatures we are studying snapping turtles, which we captured as they were hatching from their eggs -so long ago at Garnet Lake in the Adirondacks, NY.