Monday Night in the Village: Master Photographers James and Karla Murray discuss Store Front II - A History Preserved: The Disappearing Face of New York

(Video courtesy Strand Bookstore)

Tuesday Evening in Chelsea: William Vázquez at The School of VIsual Arts

(Video courtesy School of Visual Arts)

Sunday Afternoon in Williamsburg: Stephen Mallon's "Next Stop Atlantic" at the Front Room Gallery

On a bright blue, somewhat chilly afternoon we walked down Metropolitan Avenue over to the Front Room Gallery on Roebling Street to catch the last day of Next Stop Atlantic, the exhibition by the brilliant photographer Stephen Mallon that we'd heard a lot of good things about.

The photographs of the process of turning discarded New York City subway cars into artificial reefs, in order to create a refuge for thefish and crustaceans which would colonize the structures, were absolutely stunning.

Mallon, a Clinton Hill resident, got a lot of wonderful notices for his striking "Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549," a series of photographs documenting the salvaging of the US Airway flight that, amazingly, airline captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger had managed to safely emergency-land in the Hudson River in on January 15, 2009.

We don't have the vocabulary or expertise to comment intelligently on these hauntingly surreal photos -- at the fabulous School of Visual Arts, we do teach classes of photography majors, but we teach them Shakespeare, Dante, Voltaire, Kafka and Beckett -- but this review by Benjamin Sutton of the exhibit at The L Magazine we clipped out last month drew us here to see it before it closed:

The industrial photographer followed the MTA's involvement in a project to build artificial reefs along the East Coast, committing stripped subway cars to the sea floor to provide shelter for marine life. That process, documented in the exhibition's 15 medium- to large-format color photographs, opens with the decontaminated cars stacked on a dock like shipping containers, gathering snow in bleak winter sunlight.

Lifted onto barges, the iconic cars are a puzzling sight, suddenly slowed from their clanging subterranean velocity to a few swaying naughts per hour. In Mallon's crisply focused photographs, the awkward barges piled high with the tinny shells look downright biblical, the last surviving members of some extinct species of slithering underground monster crowded aboard a madman's ark.

There's an incredibly gentle rhythm to Mallon's series, too, with stage in the journey following at a plodding, measured speed befitting the huge forms in play. The pace only quickens at the end, when a massive forklift tips and knocks cars into the ocean. In "Virginia Placement" (2008), an 18-ton car flies off the barge; shot suspended in mid-air, the clunky hull has all the grace of a Hummer limousine rattling along Meatpacking District cobblestones.

Nonetheless, the momentary impression of weightlessness, the anticipation of impact evoke Henri Cartier-Bresson's famous "Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris" (1932), the inevitable splash tantalizingly withheld. A few feet away, Mallon unleashes the full force of impact in "Bellagio" (2010), with a nearly symmetrical wall of water sent shooting up as a car belly-flops into the ocean. As the reefs-to-be slip beneath the surface, shots of cars half-filled with water are the series' strangest.

In "Settling" (2008) a car sits oddly upright at the top of the frame, with water like sluggish Bedford stop commuters pouring into its wide open doorways. En route to their very last stops, these elaborately (and expensively) manufactured objects double as time capsules, tokens from a culture trying fitfully to repair environmental damage it's done in even the most bizarre and oddly poetic ways.

Yes, it's really poetic, almost dreamlike and definitely filled with a weird majesty: after all, these are the subways that we get crammed into in rush hour, and here they are, stripped and decontaminated (from us!) and becoming part of nature. You can see Stephen Mallon's photographs in their glory on his website.

We're grateful to him and to the Front Street Gallery for this show and glad we got to experience it before it closed.

Thursday Night in Chelsea: Shirin Neshat and "Women Without Men" Screening and Discussion at SVA Theatre

Tonight, at the SVA Theatre on West 23rd Street,

we had the privilege of seeing an artist whose photographs and video installations have astonished us for years, the very talented Shirin Neshat, and we got to hear the Iranian-born artist discuss her work

and show clips from her feature-length film, Women Without Men, for which she received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director of the 2009 Venice Film Festival.

Neshat was given an eloquent introduction by David Levi Strauss, the director of the School of Visual Arts MFA program in Art Criticism and Writing. (Full disclosure: we’ve been happily teaching in SVA’s Humanities and Sciences Department for the past four years and before that, in 1979-80)

Neshat, a very impressive speaker, talked about many things, but most moving to us was her discussion about the artist as activist, and how in a country like Iran, artists and writers don’t have the luxury not to be involved, in some leevel, in politics. Quite a number of Neshat’s friends, including some colleagues she introduced later in the evening, have served time in Iran’s prisons for being critics of the Islamic Republic. But Neshat rightfully said that we need activism right outside the theater, in Chelsea, in New York, and in the U.S. where repression is not unknown. (Our own latest obsession is the hateful Arizona immigration bill, which Gov. Jan Brewer will probably sign soon.)

But mostly, Neshat talked about her journey from working with photography to video installations to her first full-length film. A constant through the change in media – as pretty much all of us who have appreciated her work could see – is that she sees things through the prism of personal experience and worldview and that her work always seems akin to poetry.

A recurring motif in all her works is a combination, or fusing, of her deep knowledge of Western art and her being steeped in Persian visual and literary traditions. When we first saw Neshat’s “Women of Allah” photographs, we realized that she was a storyteller, an impulse that deepened as she moved from still images to her video installations like Turbulent, Rapture and Fervor.

Neshat talked about her need and desire to reach out beyond the art world and to risk accessibility, about pacing in the development and presenting of moving images, about the years of work and collaboration with (and a certain dependence upon) others in the making of Women Without Men – based on the fantastic “novel of modern Iran” by Shahrnush Parsipur that came out just after the Revolution –

and how the magic realism and sensuous feminism of the novel manages to play itself out in the larger picture of the events in Iran in 1953 during the political and social turmoil of the coup overthrowing Mossadegh (whom we, as an old-timer, do remember, if not firsthand, but as someone we read about as a kid in the 50s and 60s, finding out about him first when we discovered he’d been Time’s Man of the Year the year we were born).

Neshat showed still photos and clips of the video installations as she recounted her journey to her most recent role as filmmaker. The long, luscious excerpts of Women Without Men shown were breathtaking and revealed someone who already seems amazingly in control of her material and her medium.
Here’s a good summary of the film in a review by by Sheana Ochoa:

The year is 1953, when democratically-elected Iranian president Mohammed Mossadegh is usurped by a British-American led coup that restores the Shah to power. Unlike most history, which is told by men, Women Without Men is conveyed through the personal stories of four women whose struggle in a male-dominated society merge to reveal the larger canvas of the downfall of their country.

And who better to tell this story but the very women whose oppression mirrors that of Iran? Dedicated to those who fought and died for Iran's freedom— from the 1906 Constitutional Revolution through the Green Movement of 2009—the film appropriately measures the universal devastation of patriarchy with the triumph of the matriarchal spirit.

Beginning and ending with the suicide of Munis (Shabnam Tolouel) in Tehran—her character represents a democratic and free Iran—the film redefines suicide from a cowardly act into one of transcendence. Then, through magic realism, Munis is resurrected to realize she is not meant to be her brother's captive woman, but a patriot who acts for the freedom of her country and herself.

Meanwhile, Fakhri (Arita Shahrzad, in her debut film performance) leaves her oppressive marriage and reinvents herself away from the civil unrest in the capital, purchasing an old mansion in the countryside, surrounded by an orchard and forest that recalls the centuries-old trope of an allegorical garden where the laws of men do not apply.

In this paradise, two other women take refuge with Fakhri: Faezeh (Pegah Ferydoni), a conservative girl whose rape awakens her to the reality of women's subjugation, and Zarin (Orsi Toth), a prostitute and living personification of Iran. However, when Fakhri decides to throw a party and invites the bourgeoisie to the orchard, Zarin falls ill. In one of the film's most beautifully tragic scenes, Zarin lies dying in a room upstairs as the military enters the house looking for traitors, planting themselves at the dinner table while a party guest wails a foreboding dirge. Like Iran, Zarin cannot abide the literal and metaphorical penetration of a patriarchy intent on oppressing the people. Zarin's inevitable death is the direct result of Iran's contamination.

After the screening, Neshat called up her collaborator, the visual artist and writer Shoja Azari, responsible for much of the work on the film, as well as Arita Shahrzad, who's not only an actor in the film but a visual artist herself; and an Iranian artist who'd just flown in from Germany, whose name unfortunately we couldn't catch.

Neshat answered a number of interesting questions (our SVA students are really on the ball) and we found the evening exhilarating and can't wait to see all of Women Without Men when its American commercial release begins next month.

Thursday Afternoon in Brooklyn Heights: Dave Frieder and "100 Years of the Manhattan Bridge" at the Brooklyn Historical Society

After having a great lunch at a Korean restaurant near Ground Zero with our friend Ken, an attorney who we met forty years ago in a Men's Health Ed class at Brooklyn College, we took the 5 train one stop from Bowling Green to Borough Hall to go to a 2 p.m. lecture and slide show, "One Hundred Years of the Manhattan Bridge" with Dave Frieder, bridge historian and master photographer, at the Brooklyn Historical Society.

Before an audience of about 40 or 45, mostly seniors, "Dave the Bridge Guy" spoke for about an hour while he showed slides of Manhattan Bridge history and his own breathtaking photographs (on sale at his website) which will make a handsome coffee-table book one day. Here is Dave at the top of the bridge by one of the purely decorative spheres:

Obviously, as he said, he has no fear of heights and is an expert climber. Dave had eight years of unlimited access to the bridges until 9/11, with the total cooperation of the Port Authority as well as great help from the Department of Transportation, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, and Amtrak.

Dave began by speaking about the history of the Manhattan Bridge, the somewhat unappreciated sister to the celebrated Brooklyn Bridge, but our own personal favorite East River crossing, probably because it's the one we used the most for a trip from our neighborhood in Flatlands/Old Mill Basin straight up Flatbush Avenue into lower Manhattna.

Recent rehabilitation of the Manhattan Bridge seems to be completed, with just a few more small projects, but of course the 1909 bridge is under constant repairs. We can recall as a sophomore at the Franklin School in 1965-66, we'd drive in every morning with our dad (he took us as far as his workplace near 14th Street and we took the M10 bus the rest of the way to 89th and Central Park West). Even back then the lower roadway was closed for most of the year.

Dave noted that a common mistake, as in the Wikipedia entry on the Manhattan Bridge, is that Ralph Modjeski was involved in its design; he wasn't. The Manhattan Bridge was designed by Leon Moisseiff, who unfortunately is known best as the designer of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, whose swaying destruction into Puget Sound we've all seen:

Dave explained that there were two possible designs for the bridge, an eye-bar like the Queensboro Bridge and the parallel wire cabled suspension bridge we have today.

Both upper roadways of the bridge originally had four tracks for trolleys, later removed to convert the roadways for vehicular traffic as cars proliferated. The
Manhattan Bridge was the first suspension bridge to use flexible steel towers, unlike the Williamsburg and the George Washington, which used braced steel towers. The Manhattan bridge was the first modern steel suspension bridge to use a Warren type stiffening truss and to use two suspender ropes straddled over the main cables to attach to the floor beams.


As Dave writes on his website:
"My work on this long-term project has been exhilarating and fascinating as I began to study bridges and began to realize they are engineering marvels. It came to my attention that in order to be able to capture a subject on film, paper, or canvas, one must understand your subject fully. For me, being able to 'Feel The Steel' was a way of understanding how and why bridges work and function. My vision of the great structures was getting better every year! For most of my images I take on the Bridges, I use a Hasselblad Camera in conjunction with a 'Gyro' stabilizer."

He showed us old cable wire and rivets from the bridge which were replaced in recent years and discussed his experiences as well as the history of the Manhattan Bridge, whose main design flaw seems to be that the four subway tracks on the lower level were placed on the outside rather than the center of the bridge.

Some of the engineering stuff Dave talked about frankly was as much above our head as is the bridge itself when we are strolling down DUMBO's streets, but he spoke about the deflection and resistance of the bridge and how the train tracks were really built when both people and trains were smaller and less heavy.

He showed all kinds of great photos he's taken - all with film, nothing digital - of the Manhattan Bridge, from the anchorage to what seemed like every conceivable spot and angle going up to the top.

He discussed the bridge's roadways, its construction, its color (we love the blue, but it was once gray) as well as his work habits and how he came to his love of bridges as a childhood devotee of Gilbert erector sets (the best).

We were enthralled by his photographs and amazed at Dave the Bridge Guy's knowledge, not just of the Manhattan Bridge, but of every bridge in the city. He's a real living resource for New York history as well as a supremely talented artist. We're grateful to the Brooklyn Historical Society for giving us the opportunity to see Dave Frieder and his work and to listen to his engaging talk.

Thursday Night in DUMBO: The Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival Photo Exhibit at Galapagos Art Space

The Fifth Annual Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival is this weekend. Saturday at Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park between noon and 8 p.m., there'll be a great show with some really big names: Pharoahe Monch, DJ Premier, Styles P, dead prez, Smif N Wessun, Grand Puba, J Period, Torae and Marco Polo, Tiye Phoenix, Keys N Krates, Brown Bag All Stars, DJ Parler, DJ Misbehaviour, Metermaids and lots more. For the full event schedule, go to the Brooklyn Bodega website.

Tonight there was a photo exhibit retrospective of the first four years of the festival at the wonderful Galapagos Art Space, which we don't get to enough since it located out of its smaller, older quarters which were near us in Williamsburg and moved to its postmodern, nicer digs in DUMBO.

We had a dinner appointment on Montague Street in the Heights and were pressed for time, but we dropped in to the photo exhibit at Galapagos, making a detour from the High Street station to represent our destination as the oldest, least cool-looking person in the poster for BHF, top (the befuddled presbyopic guy on the lower right).

Yep, we were the oldest, least cool person there, either in Galapagos or certainly in the photos of the 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Hip-Hop Festivals all around. But even at speed-through pace (at least as speed-through as a 58yo with orthotics can manage), the pics were worth the $10 donation. We hope to get to hear the music on Saturday, but for now here are some of the images from the festival's last couple of years we got from Brooklyn Bodega's Facebook albums.

Here's 2008, looking great:





And 2007, starting with the amazing Ghostface Killah:






And here's the poster for the second annual BHF, held at the current location, by the Tobacco Warehouse:

Their posters are so excellent. Here's the one for the first festival in June 2005:

And here's the set times for this Saturday:

12-1:30 DJ Misbehaviour
1:30-1:55 DJ Brina Payne
2:00-2:10 COTN
2:14-2:25 Eagle Nebula
2:30-2:40 Brokn.Englsh
2:40-2:50 Nyle
2:55-3:10 Donny Goines
3:15-3:25 Meter Maids
3:25-3:30 Kel Spencer
3:30-3:45 Brown Bag All Stars
3:50-4:00 Keys N Krates/DJ Parler
4:00-4:10 Tiye Phoenix
4:15-4:20 Chip Fu
4:25-4:35 Keys N Krates/DJ Parler
4:35-4:45 Marco Polo & Torae
4:45-4:55 Tanya Morgan
4:55-5:00 Homeboy Sandman and Shawn J Period
5:005:20 Smif-n-Wessun
5:25-5:55 J Period with Grand Puba
6:00-6:30 DJ Premier
6:30-7:00 Dead Prez
7:00-7:30 Styles
7:30-8:00 Monch

Again, for the full event schedule, go to the Brooklyn Bodega website. Up to six or seven thousand are expected. This borough is thorough!