A Visit to New York City and Other News - Part II

Well, considering my last entry did not mention New York (save for a brief mention of the Times), I will now speak of it.

As readers may already be aware, this trip was partially mandatory for students in my art program.  I say partially because I did the mandatory part but then I did some extra things that my fellows did not do.  We attended art museums in New York City, namely the Museum of Modern Art (often called MOMA, of which my primary interest was thev architecture, actually).  This had been my first visit to New York, and my thoughts were more on the sheer scale of the city.

We entered through the Lincoln Tunnel into what looked like an old district of the city, around Central Park.  Which, honestly, is not so central, I found out - given the size of the city and us entering on the outskirts of it.  My first impression was that it looked a lot like Baltimore, just bigger.  This impression held with me until I left the rest of my group in SOHO and went on to seek out the diamond district and the location of my possible future, the Gemological Institute of America on 5th Avenue.  It took us (my family and I) some time to get there, in no small part due to the amount of walking we had to do just to get back to our vehicle, and then once we did traffic funneled us across the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, where we had to turn around and go back.  It was a much warmer-looking section of the city, all of red brick, and I initially liked it more because of the warm colour - but on closer inspection I found that it looked very akin to certain areas in Baltimore.  The good news is I got to see the Statue of Liberty from afar, and I am glad to have done that.

Going through the maze of the city, we passed by the Empire State Building and finally came to Times Square, where we luckily found some parking just off of it.  We walked back through Times Square to reach the diamond area, and it was getting late.  My initial reaction to Times Square was one of wonder; it was enormous, huge, brilliantly bright, full of lights and colour and people, and buildings tall beyond measure.  I felt like the archetypical back-woods fellow who comes to the big city for the first time in his life and is amazed.

I was able to see the Diamond District, and witness the many wondrous things the jewelers there sell.  It was dazzingly bright, so many diamons, plenty of gold and silver; it was all very exciting.  I visited GIA, and when done, we finally set our sets towards heading home.  We browsed Times Square briefly before heading home, and the more we browsed, the more the city's night life came alive.  And that is when it all really started to grate on me.

New York City is huge and impressive.  It was nice to visit, and I was glad to see many of its important sites, if only from afar.  But it felt stark; the city's night life in particularly, rowdy as it may be, was not particularly nice to be around.  It is not my kind of place.  And it took a long time to get out of; the city is truly massive.  And truly, can  I really call Baltimore a city after that?  Is any city I have been in comparable to New York?  It went on for what seemed like miles - even crossing into New Jersey, the city still continued on in another form: Newark, New Jersey.  And nary a tree to be seen.  So much conrete and metal, and so little green.  I was glad to have seen it, and just as glad to have left it.  There may be those who love New York City, but from what I have seen, I am not one of those people.

It has been a long weekend, and I am very tired because of it, so now is the time for resting.

A Visit to New York City and Other News

We all have times when one becomes so busy with everything that the more superfluous details fall by the wayside.  So it is with this journal, as I prefer to think of it; but regardless it is time to share recent news.

First and foremost, something that came to my attention:  we are in general supposed to be reacting to articles from the New York Times, but news has reached me that I believe is far more important than anything the Times has written today (unless they too have written something about it).  The issue concerns food.  Apparently, the FDA is planning to approve genetically engineered and cloned organisms as foodstuffs (right now the issue on the table is genetically altered fish), and they will not even require labels to be put on these foodstuffs warning the public of their potential poison.

Yes, poison.  I am an artist/artisan, it is true; I am in an art program.  But what many people do not realize is that I am also a scientist.  I have a fascination with biology in particular.  It is not official, but the interest is there, and I can tell you that I know enough about biology to know that no human being, however brilliant, is a match for nature.  We have no business genetically altering anything, be it flower, fish, tomato, or tree.  It is one thing to breed one animal (or pea plant) with another to bring out the desired traits - it is quite another to tear into an organism's genetic code amd violate it by forcibly inserting the genes of, say, a jellyfish, into a chimpanzee!  Or a more important issue is, currently, the creation of 'natural' pesticides.  Natural, that is, by taking the genes that make a tomato plant's leaves and shoots toxic and inserting them into other plants.  Food plants,  Only one animal can eat a tomato plant and not die - the tomato horn-worm.  Human beings can be killed by the poison.  Indeed, it is only recently that humans realized that we could eat the tomato fruit without dying.  Genetic engineering is a very serious issue, partially because there is no way we can predict the results (as much as scientists boast, we really have no idea how genes work and how interconnected they are), and what is more, those who perform this kind of alteration often think only of the supposed beneifts, and rarely (if ever) of the negatives.

So what shall we do about the FDA's decision to allow this?  Stop them in their tracks, I say.  At least we must make the attempt.  They are obligated to listen to us, for we are the country's citizens.  If they, once again, ignore what we as a people desire, then that is a whole other issue.  But at the least we can make the attempt.

Here is how to do your part: write to your representatives and tell them to block these fish from our markets.  Perhaps the easiest way to go about this is by following this link.
http://cfs.convio.net/site/Advocacy?s_oo=trNsbK4-VJ0Gosr6PxW99Q..&id=365

New York Times; Thursday February 10, 2011; The Arts; Innovation Far Removed From the Lab, Particia Cohen

In this article Cohen sounds awfully surprised that consumers can innovate just as readily as producers; the revelation comes as a result of a Mr. Daniel Reetz (who works at Disney Research) built a scanner that could scan a 400-page book in 20 minutes without breaking the book's spine.  To quote a well-paraphrased movie line (from the recent movie Iron Man), Mr. Reetz built his scanner "In his garage, with scraps!"  Now, he might not have built it in his garage (he might not even have one), but the point remians the same: using junk he found in dumpsters he built his scanner.  Following this industrial-grade scanner build, he posted a 79-step guide online and now roughly a mille of people has joined his forum, and 50 of them have followed in his footsteps.  The cost of building it himself?  Accordingly, $300, versus the $10,000 he would have to spend to buy one from a company.
   Frankly, the whole article exudes an air of surprise that any person, no matter how humble, can innovate.  I do not know if I can express in words just how ridiculous a notion this is (that only paid professionals can innovate).  Yet apparently, (according to Cohen, mind you), the whole economic-legal-business district of life operates under this very assumption.
    For goodness's sake we are human beings!  What sets us apart from the rest of the natural world is our ability to make tools and connect the dots!  Why is that so surprising?

Lines - Other

Lines - Pavement

Lines - Plant Life

Into the Fiery Forge (or the Great Unknown, if you prefer)

Now that I have a bit of free time on my hands, I can finally make a contextual post, if you take the meaning of the word as a literal sum of its roots (con = with, so context is literally "with text", or writing).  Note that I do this often - study the origins of things, the evolutions of things, and the reasons why something is the way we see it, or feel it, or think it today.  Words are a particular favorite of mine, and culture as well.  Indeed, our culture reaches far back into history, through many paths and many forms; whether you take it as the Judeo-Christian link all the way back to the Middle-East (specificically Ur in Mesopotamia, the Land between the Rivers), or even our physical roots as a European-descended society.  Caucasians, for instance, are named after the Caucasus Mountains in the Near East (a bit northwest of India, at the far eastern end of the Himalayas; there is a valley between them), from whence the Caucasian race is supposed to have originated, before spreading into Europe, the Middle-East, North Africa, and India.  And where did they come from?  Well, Africa, of course, somewhere in a once-forested Kenya, to hear the tale scientists assert (which is the best we have so far.  For all we know, modern humanity could have originated anywhere in the world, because pre- homo sapiens sapiens hominids have been found all over the world.  Yet as a strange coincidence, it seems humanity began in Kenya (whence all hominids originate), and I do not dispute this.  I merely like to dissect things.

But fast-forward nearly two hundred thousand years, and we begin to see humanity coalescing in several key areas, termed Cultural Hearths by the historians.  Coalescing in the sense that these are the beginnings of societies and civilizations as we know them.  Two such hearths that have been very important to Europeans, specifically, are the hearths of the Nile River Valley and the land of Mesopotamia, both of which were equally important to the Judeo-Christian faiths, especially the Bibilical accounts.

Speaking of the Bible, the history of the Hebrews, and later the Christians, can be used as one origin of modern European ways of thinking, and this path can be traced.  It starts in Ur before heading into Palestine, then into Egypt, then back into Palestine, then into both Assyria and Babylon (as these two nations conquered Israel and Judah, respectively).  Then Persia conquered Babylon, and some Israelites returned to Judah, but some stayed in Babylon.  Those who returned conquered Galilee and influenced the culture of the people living there, until eventually Greece and then Rome conquered the Middle East (including Persia and Egypt).  And most people should know the influence Rome has had on European civilization, even so many years after its fall.

What this means is that all human culture is inexorably bound, and though some might not see it, the society of today is bound to the societies of days gone by.  We are just as tied to places like these as we were back in the day; the rope is merely longer.

Persepolis in modern-day Iran was once the capital of Persia, its greatest city.  "Persepolis" as a name is actually a Hellenization (Greek-ification, if you will) of the Persians' name for it, Parsa, which means "the City of the Persians".  In the same way, "Zoroaster" is the Hellenization of the Persian prophet Zarathustra, who preached a proto-monotheistic religion of the struggle between a good god of light and his evil brother roughly 3,000 B.C.  Zoroastrianism, as it is called, was the dominant religion of the Persians at the time of the Jewish exile; interestingly enough, the Persian king was lenient towards the Jewish religion, and he even funded the rebuilding of the temple that Babylon had destroyed.

But that is enough of that.  A brief history lesson as a means of setting the scene for what this body of work is all about - my work is done in the light of what has gone before me.  I am was never much for 'blogs', and I have never done one before, as I would be more interested in writing a story or some such thing.  But I am pleasantly surprised at my ability to simply ramble on about words and history.  You might ask me why I have done so; partly it was an accident born out of explaining the word "Context", but it easily serves a deeper purpose.  Ancient cultures fascinate me, be they the Persians, the Hebrews, the Egyptians, the tribal peoples of northern Europe (including the Norse), the Romans, the Greeks, the natives of North America, and so on.  To see what these people could do with only their hands and the natural materials around them is fascinating, and I think every artist, architect, and artisan can learn a thing or ten from these people.  They did not need fancy power tools and mass-produced plastics to make beautiful art and architecture; their tools and products did not damage the environment the way ours do today.  The made things out of stone and iron, of wood and cloth and hide, of bone and precious metal.  And yet, though their materials were not as resistant as the average plastic, the greatest of their work still exists today, five to seven to ten thousand years later.  Most of what we do gets thrown in the trash in a matter of a few months.

So what is my aim as an artist?  I would posit that I am more of an artisan than an artist.  The reason I say I am more of an artisan than an artist is because I am equally artist and scientist.  It is in my nature; both of my parents are scientists.  Biology in particular fascinates me, as far as sciences go.  I am analytical; I dissect things.  I want to know the whys, and the hows, in equal measure.  But I also want to see the big picture: I want to see the forest, and the trees.

Textures - Metal

Textures - Brick

Textures - Ground