Unidentified, unique, unexpected . . . flying, floating, found . . . objects, opportunities, and more. Sci-fi and UFOs have meant a lot to me. Uniformed floating officers…
… or unidentified floating object here that moved quickly up the East River last summer and known only (to me) as Peggy. What’s the home port? Is Peggy a converted sardiner?
Or yesterday I went to the National Museum of the American Indian in Lower Manhattan and saw ItuKiagatta, fantastic Inuit sculpture in stone, bone, and ivory show on only until Feb 3. My photos can’t capture the beauty, so just go. But the unexpected found objects were the Reginald Marsh murals, huge examples of WPA harbor-inspired art on the underside of the rotunda dome. Curved is hard to shoot.
Check it out: Marsh even got the Statue to swivel 45 degrees to the north to follow this inbound liner. More Marsh later. More UFOs too.
All photos by Will Van Dorp.
tugster: a waterblog 
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August 9, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Cold is the Sea
Marsh is one of my new favorites. A reader on my blog (a native Brooklynite and former professional mariner) hipped me to the vast wealth of his work. He was a 2nd generation Ashcan school social realist and a lot of his work is taken from his observations of 20’s, 30’s NYC social and sexual mores (http://www.flickr.com/photos/americanartmuseum/3301954091/).
He also did a lot of work about the 6th Boro! (http://keithsheridan.com/images/Marsh%20-%20TugsBrooklynBridgeBig.jpg)
What I’d give to see those Custom House murals in person (and sit outside and have lunch with Herman Melville’s Ghost…even if its just a dirty-water dog) …Some day…
August 9, 2010 at 2:26 pm
tugster
come to nyc, and i’ll arrange cocktails with the apparition of melville and marsh. now what do you suppose they’d take as libations?
August 10, 2010 at 10:43 am
Cold is the Sea
Melville is easy- he probably carried around a flask of Grog to jog his mind back to his carefree days as a sailor.
Marsh…I don’t know enough about him…He came from an upper crust family and was a prep-school-boy Ivy Leaguer…so I’m guessing a couple of mugs McSorely’s Dark when he was slumming (I am probably projecting though…).