Turkestanica

Tulipa turkestanica at the High Line

Over at the High Line, the Turkestanica is blooming again, featured as the plant of the week on the High Line's Blog. The photo above captures the exact moment I fell in love with this tulip in the last sunlight of the day, its petals apparently closing up for the evening. I was at the High Line. It was a few springs back, and at that time I wasn't quite sure exactly what I was looking at.

Tulipa turkestanica at the lot

Susan, Anne and I planted this really sweet species tulip in the stalled construction lot around the corner when trying to squeeze in a guerilla experiment in learning about growing flowers for market in much less than ideal conditions. I was wondering how this tulip would look and last in a small vase. And we were planting things on the sly that we thought might thrive under the conditions of the lot-- the poor soil and lack of irrigation being primary factors.

These bulbs are now buried beneath the 5 story building that has risen since, the construction nearing completion this spring. But in that singular spring a couple years back, seeing those blooms was more than all right.

The Rockaway Pipeline Follies (also a musical!!)

Scenes from a cantastoria. The Story of the Rockaway Pipeline as told by puppeteers & outside activists. (Ultimately the result of a pretty long misinformation campaign by a small number of people called the Coalition Against the Rockaway Pipeline/Sane Energy Project/Occupy the Pipeline getting by with a little help from their friends at United for Action.)

Recently the Coalition Against the Rockaway Pipeline began advertising for a faux fundraiser very aptly titled the Pipeline Follies.  Unfortunately the "Pipeline Follies" as a title pretty accurately describes not just this one event but a very long campaign of misinformation, mostly via facebook and internet postings, by these "activists", as they like to call themselves.

I wish this was all some elaborate prank.

But unfortunately, the reality is that it is very difficult to find a news story on the Rockaway Project that does not feature some form of folly put forth by extremely misinformed people pretending to be experts and educators. And if they cannot get news reporters to cover the story themselves, well they just up and write the story themselves. I'm not even sure the term spectacle would do all the performances justice at this point. I've often felt for the last year and half like I am actually living full time in an ongoing Christopher Guest mockumentary.

Today's charactor: Kim Fraczek. (of Occupy the Pipeline, Sane Energy, the emerging faux coalition Food not Fracking.) It's probably not her fault that the sungstory she has concocted is revisionist history. That's what she's been told.