Impressions of New York City

Posted on August 30, 2013 by billnichols99

I grew up in Massapequa Park, Long Island, 30 miles from the great city and came to consider its size and energy the norm for urban centers, only to learn, slowly, it is more unique than typical. I now live in San Francisco and hadn’t been back in 10 years, although it’s seemed as if I’ve been to just above every other major city on the planet. In 2013 it was time to make up for lost time.

I’ve made a separate post on the differences between the cold, crowded, dull MOMA and the warm, inviting, innovative Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was a total surprise since MOMA had been ground zero for my discovery of art as an expressive medium in the 1960s. I don’t know if it can ever recover from the disastrous architectural monstrosity of its grandiose but repellent addition.

At the Met I discovered the photography of Julie Margaret Cameron, an early 19th C photographer who captured likenesses with amazing insight. She used the camera not for its crisp focus and generous depth of field but as a foggy mirror in which she saw the inner spirit of those she photographed. The images are haunting. A lengthy, quite sensitive discuss of them is in a recent (August 2013) New Yorker by Anthony Lane. He manages to reflect on her work without any of the wit (clever but basically diminishing of him and his subjects) that is a sad staple of his film reviews; it was like reading a different Anthony Lane. Although the show is tucked into just a couple of rooms and could easily be missed, it alone makes a visit worth while. She saw with a distinct, against-the-grain eye that remains both stunning and intriguing today.

The same could be said for the more highly publicized exhibition on art and photography related to the Civil War. Found in three different locations, without the cross-referencing that there might be, it is an awesome survey of what photographers and painters saw and captured of that fearsome war. Like the paintings, the photos are almost always after the battles have ended and the photographers can enter the killing fields with time to set up their bulky cameras and wait out their length exposure times but the results are harrowing and precise, unvarnished with the rhetoric of victory and defeat. That the Met draped canvas over the walls of the galleries housing the photographs is a stroke of genius: it effectively transports us back in time and acts as a modest iconic reminder of the rough and tumble world from which these photos arose.

Then there is Times Square, a spectacle or inferno, depending on your point of view, but not the tawdry and beloved place of old. Now it swarms with visitors (New Yorkers avoid it like the plague) who can even seat in bleachers to absorb the billboards and crowds that stretch from 45th to 42nd Street. Run-down movie theaters and men in raincoats have long since disappeared.

Central Park remains a vital place of green, a haven of calm, a summer’s delight. More roads are now devoted to cyclists and pedestrians. A stroll from the west to the east side remains one of the simple pleasures of city life, especially when it takes you from the Museum of Natural History to the Met in less than 15 minutes.

Cars stop at stop signs and yield, patiently for pedestrians, far more so than in edgy, gotta get where I’m going and get out of my way San Francisco or slow me up and I’ll honk you into oblivion Lost Angeles (sic). The number of bikes is surprising, as if Beijing of 20 years ago had arranged a trade with New York.

Four African-American enter the C train subway I’m on from 86th St back down to 59th on the west side. The car is fairly full and they huddle at one end. Then they burst into song–a barber shop quartet–and slowly make their way through the car. My hands are full of packages and an umbrella and by the time I can dig into my pocket they’ve passed.

The World Trade Center memorial is still little more than a giant construction site but the towers that have been completed truly tower, soaring into the sky with majestic reach. This will be an awesome thing when it’s finally completed but now it is a busy, congested, crowded melange of commuters and tourists.

Phillip William’s poster shop is just a short walk away. A cigar style store (much longer than wide), it’s crammed with 1000s and 1000s of posters of all kinds from all countries as well as photographs, publicity stills, postcards and other memorabilia, including some impressive pieces of outsider and African art. It’s one of the little treasures that make cities what they are.

The Neue Gallerie and its amazing collection of secessionist furniture, paintings by Kokoschka, Schiele and Klimt, and interior design artifacts is another gem. The cafe prepares classic Austrian cuisine and some of the patrons even manage to find art nouveau and secessionist style clothing for their visit. Small but sharply focused it is a jewel of a museum. I almost don’t mind paying $6 for a cup of coffee to go with my apfelstrudel.

It’s a day later and the same four men get on the subway again! This time I move more quickly and have some money to give them as they pass. I wonder if all the others giving money are visitors like myself, on the one hand, and if I gave enough for their lively, engaging music, on the other.

A man comes alongside on the street. I’ve left MOMA and he’s just waved at a man selling gyros and falafels from a street cart. “He’s from Pakistan and he’s playing reggae from Jamaica,” he remarks. We start a conversation. He’s worked nearby for 45 years and points to building site after site, recounting how the street has changed. Up ahead is a large office building. “There,” he points, ” they tore down an old apartment building. 1949. But the safety wasn’t good. Scaffolding collapsed and the entire crew,over 20 men, died, right there.” I ask if there’s any memorial and he says “No, there’s nothing, just my memory.”

Memories keep people, places and things alive. These are some of mine from a visit to New York in August, 2013.

MOMA meet the Met: Reversals of Fortune

Posted on August 24, 2013 by billnichols99

I may be the last person to compare the new MOMA and the expanded Metropolitan Museum of Art. Much ballyhoo attended MOMA’s big expansion while the Met was adding here and there over the years and now, in 2013, the difference is spectacular: what was once a crusty, dingy, rather dark and dreary place, the Met, is the place to be and what was once the cutting edge of the provocative and new is now a disaster. A strong word for a great musuem but, in this case, deserving.

Ironically, my belated visit to MOMA coincided with a show on the work of Le Corbusier, one of the major pioneers of the modernist style of stripped down, no nonsense architecture. Watching a video of him presenting his vision of a city of pencil like high rises separated by little more than lawns, I thought how sad it is that this notion has taken root so often: big, anonymous buildings with no distinctive character, access or amenties at ground level surrounded by a vast green desert of barren space. His vision seemed demonic and one that came to fruition more from his own charismatic persuasiveness than the human scale and emotional appeal of his designs. He must have mesmerized, if not intimidated, his clients into submission.

But did that happen to MOMA with Yoshio Taniguchi, the architect of the new monstrosity of its massive expansion? The space is grey, cheap in the small touches like flooring and signage, lifeless, vastly overcrowded with both vistors and objects, and without respite. It is modernism architecture that has not learned from the postmodern upheavals that have, with playful and inventive turns, revitalized the field and given us buildings of grace, wit and elegance. Taniguchi’s space has a monotonous, propulsive energy, sending the visitor onward in search of a moment of unhurried calm that never arrives. And where it is expansive, as in the passages that look down on the great atrium or the windows that look out on the sculpture garden and original MOMA buildings, it is entirely solipsistic: it looks at only itself. The rest of the city stands outside the gates.

And outside the gates but nestled securely in Central Park, stands the Metropolitan Museum of New York. It has expanded mightily in the last decade or more but always with taste and subtlety. The enormous glass enclosed addition housing the remains of the Temple of Dendur is worth the price of admission alone (which is whatever one wishes to pay, above or below the recommended amounts!) and yet it is but one of the enormous number of special exhibitions and spectacular spaces we’re invited to take in. Despite a crush at the entrance no less daunting than at MOMA’s, once inside the museum absorbs its guests into a calm serenity. Even the best attended exhibitions such as the current “Photography and the American Civil War” and the complementary “The Civil War and American Art” lack the propulsive move-along, don’t-linger, get-out-of-here energy of MOMA. And the standard gallery shows, such as the fabulous atelier-like space devoted to contemporary art, take the breath away with their hospitality, audacity and beauty. The image at the top of the Post is of Ellsworth Kelly’s Spectrum V, fills the entire wall of gallery 925. And it is obvious from the photo that the energy is habitational, contemplative and serene compared to the frenzied pace of MOMA. It’s possible to linger, ponder and absorb the magic of this simple but subtle work that simply could not be shown without a space of the kind the Met has created.

Enough said. I’m late to the show but it’s worth keeping thought, dialogue and recommendations of where to go and what to see, alive.

Ironic Documentaries

Posted on July 10, 2013 by billnichols99

I just had an opportunity to teach a summer course to a large group of professors and filmmakers, mainly from Eastern Europe, at the Central European University in Budapest. You may heard of CEU as the product of George Soros’s investment in promoting democracy in the former Soviet Union after the Berlin Wall fell. CEU had its origins in that gesture and is a very successful graduate level university focused not on technology and science, as so many are, but on the humanities and social sciences as tools that assist in the understanding of others.

The course was on what the impact of documentaries is, how our belief in an underlying reality caught, in some measure, on film has much to do with the impact of most documentaries ,and how mockumentaries that pretend to have such an underpinning pull us up short. The result can be amusement or anger depending on many factors but what these films have in common is their irony. They don’t say what the mean or entirely mean what they say: they wink. And if we have familiarity with the form, we eventually get the wink, understand the irony, and process its effect. I wanted to stress how conventions often frame the meaning of a message so that the belief in an underlying reality caught on film stems as much from the use of voice-over, interviews, reference to experts, B-roll editing that illustrates claims as if to prove them, and so on, as it does in any absolute form of reliability. That being so, it is then fairly easy to mimic these conventions to produce irony. it is less easy to do so skillfully but over the course of our meetings, we were able to explore the implications in a rich and rewarding way. There’s more to say and that will probably become an article in the near future.

A New Stadium for the Golden State Warriors

Posted on June 18, 2013 by billnichols99

A slightly modified version of this post appeared as a Letter to the Editor in the 9/4/2013 edition of the Bay Guardian.

Co-owner of the Golden State Warriors Peter Guber, wrote a best-selling book, Tell to Win. In it he insists, rightly, that story trumps data every time. The story of “Let’s give the Golden State Warriors a beautiful new home in San Francisco, right on the water front,” sold our city leaders. But they forgot the facts: no parking, limited public transit, blocked views of the bay, and a loss of proportionality along this priceless stretch of shore.

Let’s try another story line: “Elevate before you celebrate. Don’t crowd the sea, nest the stadium in the air: put it right above the CalTrans station, just as Madison Square Garden perches above Penn Station in New York. Presto: available parking and unused rail yard space just a block to the south for more; the 280 freeway empties onto surface streets just a few blocks away, BART and Muni have stations within easy walking distance, and CalTrans riders can easily pop upstairs to see a game; sightlines to the bay remain possible, and proximity to AT&T park creates the potential for an extraordinary sports mecca. The stadium will rise several stories into the air but above that there’s an opportunity to build offices, condominiums and a hotel/restaurant complex that would form the perfect complement.

The exiting story ihas serious flaws in it but the enthusiasm to bring the Warriors to the city made them seem inconsequential, at first. They are hardly that. Once we’ve heard the story, the facts slowly creep back into view and give very serious pause. Let’s welcome the Warriors by all means but do we want a Titanic on the waterfront when we can have an eagle in the air? I hope Mr. Guber and his partners bring their pogo sticks with them and take a good look at what awaits them as the ideal b-ball site.

Rebels with a Cause or How to Create the World’s Most Amazing Green Belt

Posted on June 7, 2013 by billnichols99

Cities sprawl and drag their inhabitants into the ticky tacky world of suburbia. The core decays and banality ensues. Then prices draw the young and restless back to the core and a new cycle of gentrification begins. A familiar tale but not the one told by this astounding film. Rebels is about the creation of vast stretches of preserved shoreline, meadows, fields, and hills in the land to the north of San Francisco, Marin County, and around the perimeter of San Francisco itself. Many now come to the city and marvel at the splendor of the Presidio and Crissy Field with its spectacular views of the bay and the Golden Gate bridge from ground level. They come and revel in the beauty of Mt. Tamalpais to the north and the vast stretches of farms and untouched lands surrounding Tamales Bay. Few realize that this was not the result of enlightened politicians acting to serve the common good but of an intrepid band of ordinary citizens who, over more than 20 years, fought corporations, developers and politicians to save what would have otherwise turned into vast stretches of houses, hotels, conference centers and shopping malls.

Nancy Kelly’s film lets the surviving rebels tell their own story but accompanies it with a treasure trove of archival footage, including Richard Nixon being convinced that there’s more political gain in backing conservation than opposing it. One of the biggest battles was with ranchers near Tomales Bay who feared government regulation and meddling if their land were turned into a park, not the mention the loss of a way of life. They favored development that would at least let them cash out at a handsome price. But a brilliant maneuver saved the day: incorporate the ranches into the area to be preserved but allow the ranchers to continue to use the land for agricultural purposes. By also forestalling the rise of concessions and hotels, attractions and stores at the periphery of the preserved land, the rebels were able to maintain the fundamentally rural quality of the area and allow farmer, ranchers and visitors to coexist successfully.

A second major challenge was a proposal for the huge city of Marincello, right in the thick of Marin County and just north of the Golden Gate Bridge where breath taking hills and valleys great the modern visitor. Such a development carried such an aura of inevitiablity in the pro-growth, pro-development oriented 1960s that the corporate giant Gulf + Western bought a major stake in the project. The rebels went to work, arousing wide spread support from the residents of Marin and from key politicians. After several years G + W threw in the towel and offered to sell the land to the nature conservancy that had been formed for just that sort of purpose. A similar tale unfolded in the city where citizen leaders fought to establish a string of parks from beaches and former forts along miles of ocean and bay frontage. With great political support from key figures, they succeeded.

Rebels with a Cause offers a great model of citizen activism. These rebels clearly relied on vital political allies who took serious risks to back a movement that opposed growth, new businesses and jobs, rural development, and heigthened economic prospertiy at a time when such notions were a virtual mantra for many. Nancy Kelly captures this effort with clarity and passion. It stands as a greta model for those who are now rebels in the making.

Bill Nichols

San Francisco

Category Archives: In My Opinion: The World Around Us