caring for veterans shouldn’t be a partisan issue.
it should an american one.
– jennifer granholm
( a reminder on veterans day and every day)
Nov11
Nov10
reclusive rebel’s ‘sinister magic. ‘
‘City Street in Moonlight’ – Lewis Eilshemius, 1908
Born into wealth and privilege on a New Jersey estate in 1864, Louis Eilshemius wasn’t your typical New York City painter. The income his father made from an importing business gave him the means to travel through Europe, study at the Art Students League, and ultimately settle down and spend the bulk of his reclusive life in his family’s brownstone at 118 East 57th Street.
Inside this gaslit anachronism of a house, Eilshemius raged at an art establishment that mostly ignored him and wrote endless letters to New York City newspapers attesting to his genius.
He also painted. Shunning the artistic trends of the era, he created darkly romantic, almost surrealistic nudes and landscapes that reflected a “sinister magic,” according to one critic covering a retrospective of his work in 1977.
One luminous example is the nocturne above, from 1908, plainly titled “City Street in Moonlight.”
Where is this scene? It’s almost impossible to know for sure, as Eilshemius wasn’t a documentarian but an artist who reshaped reality with his own idiosyncratic vision and imagination.
But if I had to guess, I’d say Times Square.
Broadway had streetcars in 1908, and the streetlamp and billboard on top of a tall structure in the distance would have been characteristic of Times Square’s early 20th century emergence as a center of entertainment and nightlife.
Though his work continues to be largely unknown, by the end of his life in 1941, Eilshemius had earned the appreciation of critics he’d previously eschewed.
“A feisty rebel and a tireless iconoclast, he never painted to satisfy the fashions of his day, but only to please his own strange and sometimes nightmarish vision,” stated his New York Times obituary.
That long and detailed obituary also described him after his death from pneumonia in a Bellevue psych ward as “penniless, bitter, and famous.”
—
Source credit: Ephemeral New York, Esther Crain
‘Chronicling an ever-changing city through faded and forgotten artifacts.’
Notes: This is a repost of from one of the most fascinating blogs I read. I never fail to be amazed by native New Yorker, Esther’s detailed histories and backstories behind the nooks and crannies, signs, treasured buildings, people and places in New York. Her site has given rise to two books, 2014’s New York City in 3D in the Gilded Age and The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910.
Nov9
the pale blue dot of earth.
Taken on February 14, 1990, by Voyager 1 from about 6.4 billion kilometers away at Sagan’s request,
the photograph shows Earth as a tiny speck of light suspended in a sunbeam.
—
‘Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
—
on Carl Sagan Day, which honors the birthday and scientific legacy of Carl Sagan.
Carl Sagan was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, and author famous for popularizing science and the cosmos(1934-1996)
Nov8
beauty everywhere.
a rainy day walk in the woods, ann arbor
—
‘if you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.’
*laura ingalls wilder
*Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder (1867 – 1957) was an American writer, teacher, and journalist. She is best known as the author of the children’s book series Little House on the Prairie, published between 1932 and 1943, which was based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family.
Nov7
”colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.’ – pablo picasso
after a weekend adventure on the water
some of my photos
turned out
as patches of solid shades of color
each a bit different
all shades of autumn, my favorite season
nothing i saw looked like these
wondering where this lovely series of shades came from and how they got there.
—
“everything that you can see in the world around you
presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.”
– john ruskin
*John Ruskin ( 1819–1900) was an English polymath– a writer, lecturer, art historian and critic, draughtsman and philanthropist of the Victorian era.
Nov6
still waiting for the tote of the vote.
be like Frog and Toad waiting together
it’s so worth it.
—
image credit: Story Network Foundation
Nov5
front page.
—
source: Ambassador Ken Fairfax, retired U.S. State Department diplomat,
who has been posted to and served in many diplomatic and advisory roles around the world.
Nov4
gluckselgkeit.
– means: extreme bliss or supreme happiness.
very, very good day yesterday
no notes.
—
image credit: p.d. eastman, ‘go, dog, go’ (one of my favorite books)
e
Nov3
stand up and vote.
‘let the children know the truth.’
-bob marley
–
—
image credit: courier news
Nov2
a day late and an hour short. (or long?)
yesterday was our annual change
from daylight saving time to not daylight saving time
—
‘time is like a river. it flows one direction,
but with a little force you can go back.
but like a river, everything you do has a ripple.’
-kevin r. hutson
—
-Kevin R. Hutson, is a Professor of Mathematics at Furman University
—
image credit: gwynne, pinterest
