Published at August 26, 2007
in blog.
Tags: friends, school
Tomorrow is my first day of school in 10 years. I woke up on a farm in Goshen, New York with a whole bunch of friends. Then, I drove up to Germantown New York to meet up with more friends. We took the goats to pasture, pulled weeds in the fields, shook apples out of the trees for cider, and swam in the Hudson River at sunset, and ate food together. This might be the best ‘last day of summer’ ever.
Ivory the goat.
Sascha weeding in the fields (while on the cell phone)
Pressing cider.
Ashley pouring cider.
Moonrise over the barn.
Published at August 19, 2007
in history.
Tag: family history
i found this picture today. it’s of my grandmother on her wedding day. this morning i was at my aunt’s house in massachusetts. i was helping her move boxes out of her attic because she’s selling the house and moving into an apartment. my sister was there, so was my grandmother, who recently turned 93. many of the boxes were filled with slides, old 8mm and super 8 film, photo albums, and letters. there was too much stuff to go through, but we did sift through some of it. in one of the big boxes was large roll of paper, yellowed with age. it was the family tree mapped out by my great uncle joe, my grandfather’s younger brother. the photo below is just a section of it.
joe lives in maine and is the person on my father’s side of the family who holds the most knowledge about our history. i interviewed him a few years ago and have a couple hours of footage of him telling stories about our family’s history. i have a fragmented digital version of the family tree, but, i had no idea of the amount of work he’d put into unearthing our family’s lineage until i unrolled the tree he’d painstakingly written out (in carbon copy duplicate) by hand.
looking at the tree, it’s immediately clear that joe put a lot of time and love into this project. the story of his research alone is something i’d like to hear more about. the tree is wide, spanning far beyond our immediate family. given it’s width, though, the tree is not quite as deep as it should be. it extends all the way back to the 1500’s, but scanning across the paper, most of the lines are truncated a few generations before the current one. looking more closely, you can see that a lot of them end in the 1940’s with: “killed by nazis.”
(click to view detail)
all my grandparents were born in this country, so the holocaust has always been somewhat of an abstraction to me: films, books, music, what i learned in school, and the occasional conversation with elderly jews usually opened with a disapproving comment about my tattoos. today i had this moment in my aunt’s living room, standing there by myself with ice running through my veins. it was the first time that i felt my own history moving inside of me and it felt uncomfortable and disorienting and like getting kicked in the stomach. more later.
Published at August 15, 2007
in blog.
Published at August 10, 2007
in work.
Tags: insane, work
In July I worked at the Live Earth Concert at Giant Stadium. This was our trailer’s air conditioning system.
Published at August 10, 2007
in new york.
Published at August 6, 2007
in projects.
Tags: art, development, projects, public space, redhookThere’s so much to write about. Traveling to the midwest. Visiting the Miss Rockaway Armada. Playing a square dance upstate with folks from the Germantown Community Farm…but I’m sleepy and busy learning Spanish, sewing, mulling over the decision to move to Troy, NY for the next two years, and thinking about doors. Yes. Doors.
Yesterday after a nice afternoon with some friends, the light in my neighborhood was as it usually is around 6pm in the summertime: golden, shimmery, and kind of magical really. As I’m feeling particularly attached to Red Hook right now– partly because it seems like the sale of our block (to someone other than us) is imminent and partly because I may be here rather infrequently if I move to Troy– it seemed like a nice thing to ride around and take some pictures.
I took some photos of the lovely Ikea construction site. Some weeds. Some nice old buildings. And then I saw this door. The one up above. Then I thought that I should take photos of ALL the doors in my neighborhood, block by block. I don’t know how far I’ll get with it, but there’s something about the doors– beautiful ivy covered, rusty chained abandoned doors; newly constructed gawdy condo doors; and old beaten doors that still get a lot of use from the same people who’ve been using them for decades– that says a lot about the changing character of the neighborhood.
Here’s the first batch covering the two block stretch of Van Dyke Street between Otsego and Richards (it’s missing 2 doors right now…soon to come). CLICK.
